Canada as sanctuary

I am one of the many thousands of Canadians who can trace their roots to the United Empire Loyalists who moved to Ontario after the American revolution. I support Gerard Kennedy's war resister sanctuary bill:

Gerard Kennedy's bill would allow foreign military deserters — or those who refuse mandatory military service — to stay in Canada if their action is based on “sincere moral, political or religious objection.”
MPs have already voted twice to support war resisters, but that was through motions that are not binding on the government.
Mr. Kennedy's bill would be binding because it would amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Wikipedia quotes a 2004 BBC documentary, which described Canada's tradition as a refuge for Americans:

"Americans in trouble have been running to Canada for centuries... in the wake of the American Revolution ... [in the] Underground Railroad that spirited escaped American slaves to freedom... and in the 1960s, [when] as many as 60,000 young American men dodged the draft..."

The new sherrif is a n.....

I think this is just going to keep on happening every six months or so -- the US media will go through these periodic paroxysms of hysteria as they simultaneously try to call out racism toward Obama while also wanting to deny that racism is actually a factor in how Americans are feeling about him.
But I must say, I am impressed with some of the people who I had considered hopeless wingnuts, who have taken a brave stand against the racism they are seeing on their own side -- Little Green Footballs for one.

Word salad

Racist organizer of the teabagger march calls Obama:

Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief

WTF does that mean? They don't know, or care. The only thing that matters is that it;s vivid and catchy and suitably scary. They're all sounding like Sarah Palin -- string a bunch of adjectives together and keep babbling.

Oh, sure

Funniest headline so far this week:

'We're not cutting any deals,' Tories say

Revising Employment Insurance along the lines wanted by the NDP is just an extraordinarily well-timed coincidence.

On the side of King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham

Amanda Marcotte has an interesting post about some of the basic assumptions of the anti-Obama /teabag /wingnut movement and their little march on Saturday.
One of the highlights is her discussion about this photo:

. . . whoever made this sign seemed to think that using Robin Hood as a stand-in for the villain was a good idea. Most of us understand that Robin Hood is the hero of the stories about Robin Hood. But wingnuts tend to reflectively see Robin Hood as a villain. This isn’t the first time I’ve been puzzled by this. In Texas, opponents of laws that would create more equal spending between school districts have deemed such laws “Robin Hood Laws”. Again, they don’t see a problem with trotting out a traditional hero as a villain and expecting everyone else to play along.

I guess robbing the rich to give to the poor isn't OK if you're one of the rich -- or if you'd like to be. Or if you think that King John actually was better than the rest of us. Glenn Greenwald explores this theme some more, saying that the basic anger is about spending money on the "undeserving":

...the poor minorities and other undeserving deadbeats who, in right-wing lore, somehow (despite their sorry state) exert immensely powerful influence over the U.S. Government and are thus the beneficiaries of endless, undeserved largesse: people too lazy to work, illegal immigrants, those living below the poverty line. That's why Joe Wilson's outburst resonated so forcefully among the Right and why he became an immediate folk hero: he was voicing the core right-wing fear that their money was being stolen from them by Obama in order to lavish the Undeserving and the Others -- in this case illegal immigrants -- with ill-gotten gains

Matt Tabbi described this in April as a peasant mentality:

. . . when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. . . . actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. . . . A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger.

Yes, like believing Robin Hood had it wrong.

'Nuff said

From Crooks and Liars:

Seeing

I read this and I'll never take eyesight for granted again.

The new "Progressive Conservatives"

Maybe its just snark on my part, but I was amused that the participants in yesterday's rally in Washington apparently couldn't tell the difference between 70 thousand and 2 million -- no wonder these folks didn't notice the US deficit until Jan 21, 2009.
Anyway, Matthew Yglesias was there and posts some photos and reports on the overall incoherence of their message. Here are some of his comments:

. . . there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.. . .
Echoing a problem familiar to any liberal who ever tried to go to a rally to protest the occupation of Iraq only to find a bunch of guys with Free Mumia signs or Trotskyite sandwich boards extolling the virtues of the DPRK, an awful lot of today’s tea parties seemed to want to talk about obscure fringe causes that have nothing to do with health care or 9/11 or anything. . .
Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. . . . Jonah Goldberg, it seems to me, was the real pioneer in this brand of hypocrisy-driven hysteria—holding captives in secret where they’re hung by shackles from the ceiling and occasionally beaten to death is fine by him, but efforts to curb smoking are “liberal fascism.” And now this line of thinking seems to have completely taken over the right.

And don't read the next part if you're drinking anything -- over at Malkin's blog, the commenters are all excited and they were talking about how if the Republicans don't listen to them, then they're going to start a new party -- a "Progressive Conservative party".
Well, the name's available, isn't it?
Bhwa-ha-ha-ha-ha....

Proud to be a member of that 'left-wing fringe group' called 'women'

Alison has followed up brilliantly on Antonia Zerbisias' suggestion about a new t-shirt slogan: "Proud to be a member of that 'left-wing fringe group' called 'women'".
This follows from Harper's derisive smear against the Court Challenges program, which the Conservatives shut down because they didn't want their legislation to be challenged by what Harper is now calling "left-wing fringe groups." Yeah, like "women". After all, we wouldn't want any more cases like these:

. . . landmark cases, many fought by LEAF, the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund – a group clearly overrun by rabid fringe feminists.
They intervened in "left-wing fringe" court cases such as Torres v. Minto Management (2002), which prevented a landlord from increasing a single mother's rent by 41 per cent just because her husband had left the building.
Then there was the "left-wing fringe" case The Queen v. Keegstra (1990), which kept a Holocaust denier from teaching his anti- Semitic ideas to Alberta schoolchildren.
Or how about that "left-wing fringe" case Brooks v. Safeway (1989), which forced employers not to discriminate against pregnant staffers.

There is now a facebook page, too.

Tech support cheat sheet

What actually happens when you call tech support, as found at Bouquets of Gray:

Turning myths upside down

The Toronto Star punctures four election myths which the Conservatives are promoting.
But I'd like to see Ignatieff and the Liberals do more -- they should be turning these myths on their head. Here are the responses I would make --
Myth one:

An election would imperil economic recovery.

The response I'd like to see:

Bay Street is laughing at that one. An election would improve economic recovery by putting in charge a government which knows what to do with the economy, rather than the fumbling Jim Flaherty and the ideological Harper cabinet.

Myth two:

The Liberals will wrest power from the Conservatives by joining in a coalition with the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.

The response I'd like to see:

Canadians never did elect a Harper majority because they did NOT want Harper to be given free reign. And thank heavens for that -- when every other government in the world was helping its industries to survive the recession, Harper wouldn't do it until Parliament forced him to. Without the Coalition threat last winter, the Harper government would never have done the right thing for the Canadian economy; they would have sat on their hands and watched our auto industry just disappear, along with millions of jobs in other industries all across the country. Canadians deserve a better government that that.

Myth three:

A Liberal proposal to make it easier for laid-off workers to obtain Employment Insurance would be irresponsibly costly.

The response I'd like to see:

EI reform would pump a billion dollars into the Canadian economy, getting this money out of government bank accounts and putting it directly into the pockets of millions of people -- people who have already paid it into the EI system in the first place.

Myth four:

An election will cheat Canadians out of their home renovation tax credit.

The response I'd like to see:

So what kind of incompetent bumblers would announce a program but never get around to making it legal? Was it some kind of bait-and-switch where they were going to change it at the last minute? Or is this just another one of the blizzard of Harper press releases which announce laws they never get around to implementing? Of course the Liberals would implement this tax credit immediately, unlike the untrustworthy Conservatives.

There, that oughta do it!

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald:

I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly "hijacked" by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks . . . Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right -- and that's been true for a very long time now. It didn't just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don't really believe in the country's core founding values and don't merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren't part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn't any truer then than it is now.

Emphasis mine.
The difference between the Clinton Presidency and the Obama Presidency is Keith Olbermann and Daily Kos, Rahm Emmanuel and Rachel Maddow, Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald.
I hope it will be enough.

Watching the speech

From the Charlotte Observer, some photos of people watching Obama's health care speech:











I also include this photo of Hillary and Obama together, because I've been wondering what she thinks about Obama's handling of health care reform this summer.



Myself, I don't know whether Hillary could have done a better job in getting health care reform through without such divisiveness or not, but I do know that Republican congressmen would also have yelled at her and walked out -- they wouldn't have accepted or respected a woman as president any more than they accept or respect an African-American.

Why America is doomed

Hallelujah brother!
John Cole provides the latest from that Phoenix pastor who prays for Obama to die -- he's talking about why real men of God need to take a stance, so to speak:

That’s where we’re headed in this country, my friend. We’ve got a bunch of pastors who pee sitting down.

I blame homeschooling for all this craziness, I really do....

Camelot update

I'm seeing more and more comments like this one on the progressive side of the blogosphere.
I divide these into three types:
The drama queens expected Obama to ride into Washington like some kind of cross between Yul Brynner in the Magnificent Seven and Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, kicking ass and taking names and shooting up the joint.
The snide bitter ones never really got over Hillary, and they're faster than Fox News in seeing betrayal and incompetence in every phrase and nuance.
The sincere but naive purists can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that Obama isn't going to try to return to Camelot, that he would be happy enough just to get back to the way things were under Clinton.
Mistakes, sure, Obama has made them and he'll make more. But Bush and Cheney had run the country over a cliff, and ror the last eight months, Barak Obama has been putting the country together again. He's been putting good people in the right places throughout government, he's been writing some OK legislation, then shaking hands and talking to people and persuading them to see it his way.
That's what Barak Obama does. He's good at it.