New links

So I have some new links on the blogroll - to the right, under (you guessed it) New Links.
Here's why I like Nancy Nall -- she begins one recent post with this immortal line:

My search for the ideal stim­u­lant con­tin­ues.

Ah, a woman after my own heart!

Great line of the day

Digby describes what differentiates the American right wingers:

...the Religious Right operates out of fear of sex, while the Populist Right operates out of fear of race.

Calling Firedoglake out

Firedoglake is off my blogroll.
Sadly, I have reached my limit of tolerance with the Obama-trashing commenters on this site.
Want examples? Commenters to this Jan Hamsher post say:

“eletist asshole who is really put out by having to get in the weeds about the peasants health care problems” and a “dispicable, lying, deplorable human being and …a “fraud” from day one” and “Obama NEVER intended to do one thing about healthcare for the American People going in. He’s the one responsible for this charade that’s happening now”

Today Hamsher herself says:

We were trying to think of how health care would be different if Mitt Romney had been elected, and really couldn’t think of how it would be.

Really? REALLY? You actually see no difference between Mitt Romney and Barak Obama?
Finally, these comments at this post

"Nearly everything Obama says these days pisses me off but his repeated smackdowns of progressives is too much to take. Go to Hell, Mr. President." and "stop it, Obama. Just stop it. We get it, you don’t like us much. Surprise! It’s mutual."

Well, I guess I agree with Obama, then -- I don't like these people much either.
Buh-bye.

Dis-harmony

In British Columbia, they're marching in the streets against the HST, the so-called "harmonized sales tax". In Ontario, the federal Liberals have lost 15 points to the Conservatives, and I think we can assign at least some of the blame to McGinty's intention to bring in the HST.
A few weeks ago, I heard John Gormley trying to get Premier Brad Wall to talk about the HST. Gormley has long been in favour of the HST and he tried mightly to get Wall to say, or even hint, that he would reconsider the HST for Saskatchewan. Wall was extremely smart -- he just kept saying over and over that he had not campaigned on it and would not think of it. I was surprised that he would be so definite, but seeing how deeply unpopular the HST is in BC and Ontario, I can understand why Wall wouldn't move an inch on it.

Making a difference

So often we think, I'm only one person so what can I do?
Well, Christopher Reeve broke his neck in 1995 and died in 2004, but research partly sponsored by his foundation has now figured out a procedure which helps paralyzed rats to walk again.

There but for the grace of god

When I read this tragic story I realized again that just being a teenager can be a death-defying act. Our kids did some pretty dumb things when they were teens, which we didn't know about at the time, and some of their friends did worse, but they were all lucky enough to survive.
Come to think of it, I did some fairly stupid stuff too, when I was a teenager.

Good, bad, ugly

Good - Trudeau, Tewksbury among first inductees into Queer Hall of Fame
Bad -- the latest from Afghanistan
Ugly - Brian Mulroney's long campaign of vindication

Mary's music

With the sad news that Mary Travers has died, her great music has been posted all over the internet. Here are two somewhat less well known pieces which I liked.

A Soalin', from 1981



Jane, Jane, from 1965

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald is in fine form writing about the group of former CIA Directors who think the President should tell the Attorney General not to investigate CIA murders:

In other breaking news, Erik Prince announces that he believes criminal prosecutions of Blackwater are unwarranted; Wall Street CEOs -- past and present -- conclude that an investigation of fraud and abuse among investment banks would serve no real purpose; Alberto Gonzales reveals his opposition to any proceedings against DOJ lawyers who acted in bad faith; police unions announce that the problem of brutality is overstated and there's no need for added oversight; medical doctors agree that malpractice lawsuits need to be limited; and a poll of felons currently in prison reveal that 99% of them believe that the country would have been better off if it had just let bygones be bygones and decided not to proceed with prosecutions in their particular case.

Emphasis mine.

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: