Good, bad, ugly

Good.
Bad.
Ugly.

First in the West!

The Riders do it -- go Green! Tonight they played like the champions they are.

Speaking of stupid...

Firedoglake ranted all summer and fall about how absolutely crucially important it was that US heatlh care reform include a public option.
So tonight the US Congress passed a health care reform bill which includes the public option.
Is Firedoglake happy?
Of course not.

Stupidest headline ever

The Globe and Mail asserts

As the Forces spend money and sacrifice lives in Afghanistan, Canadians have warmed to the country's new role as a warrior nation.

No, we haven't.

What the hell's that singing

Long gun registry isn't worth the trouble

The gun registry was a classic example of a well-meaning government program brought in with such unsympathetic, ignorant, arrogant, high-handedness that it became a symbol for everything western Canada dislikes about eastern Canada. And on top of that, somebody in Ottawa also had the bright idea that they could use the registry to test run for a whole lot of expensive, complicated, poorly-understood new technology.
So the Liberals ended up wasting millions of dollars to piss off millions of Canadians.
Finally, the long gun registry is on its way to being abolished and I can hardly wait. I am not opposed to a gun registry as such, but I continue to be amazed at how many people, particularly in western Canada, are.
And at the top of their lungs.
And for all the trouble it has caused, the registry seems to have accomplished very little of value for Canadians. Good riddance.

There's a lesson in this

Why did an upstate New York congressional district election matter so much? Because it pitted Sarah Palin against Newt Gingrich for the soul of the Republican party.
And guess who won?
Neither of them.
Obama took it, for the first time since the Civil War.

Another freak-out is on the way

Well, we can expect another freak-out over the latest flap on health care reform -- the "opt-in" public option instead of the "opt-out" public option.
Did you know that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the pharmaceutical companies were manoeuvering all along to pass a horrible health care bill? Did you know that the White House secretly plotting to screw America? Did you know that the only truly patriotic thing for the Democrats to do now is join the Republicans in voting down the health care bill? I expect to be reading all this and more next week in the Comment threads at Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Daily Kos, Americablog . . .
Its just a funny coincidence that voting down the health care bill is exactly what Republicans and the health insurance industry want to happen, isn't it?
I just posted this comment over at Digby's place and I'm repeating it here:

I hope Americans will soon realize there is no perfect health care plan -- single-payer, opt-out, opt-in, public-private mix, whatever, they all have problems and none are going to be effective in all circumstances.
In pushing for a reform bill to be approved, what Obama is actually doing here is shifting the momentum toward health care reform. But you will find that health care reform is not an event, its a process.
Canada approved medicare in the 1960s and we have spent the last 40 years fighting about it. As it turned out, it wasn't so important exactly what we passed, as that we passed SOMETHING that gave everyone a place to start.

Silver lining

Looking on the bright side, Saskatoon doesn't have to worry about closing H1N1 vaccination clinics because of a vaccine shortage.
Ours weren't open yet.

Honey, I can make anything look good

OK, ya got me.
But here's my favorite Muppet bit:

Throwdown!

I'll see your Buddy Rich, POGGE, and raise you some Gene Krupa:

Still Harry James on trumpet, though.
And here is Jeff Beck playing A Day In The Life:

Why is Saskatchewan so slow with the vaccine?

Does anyone understand why Saskatoon and Regina are not even starting to inoculate children and pregnant women against swine flu until next week or the week after?
Sure, I know the health workers have put themselves first in line this week, but couldn't the high risk groups like pregnant women and little children have been started at the same time?
I don't get it.

Great line of the day

Athenae on Ian Robinson's dumb sexist Calgary Sun column:

It's like Carrie Bradshaw and Cal Thomas had a stupid, stupid baby.

The Anti-Obama Phenomenon

Progressive blogs have demanded for years that right-wingers apologize for supporting George Bush. I wonder whether some progressive bloggers themselves will ever apologize for not supporting Barak Obama.?
There seems to be a knee-jerk anti-Obama reaction going on in some circles, progressive as well as right-wing.
The anti-Obama progressives try to justify their attitude by saying how they would still like him if it wasn't for this, that or the other, but it actually doesn't matter what he does, its never good enough -- Andrew Sullivan slams Obama for what he didn't say when he signed into law an historic hate crime bill, Jane Hamsher thinks Obama is just pretending to support health care reform while secretly plotting with Joe Lieberman to sabotage it.
As John Cole writes:

I seriously am to the point that every time I open memeorandum or check the progressive blogs, I’m beginning to see the same kind of batshit crazy I see on right wing blogs. Has every one just lost their damned minds? Did everyone go insane?

There are two things at the root of it, I think.
First, when it comes to their internal picture of a president, too many Americans want a President who they can think of as “Daddy” or “Grandpa” or “General” -- older and hefty and white -- and they are angry at Obama because none of these labels fits him. How dare he be president when he doesn't look like one? Clinton and Kennedy endured the same reaction.
But second, add to this that Obama is African-American.
In the unexamined, even unconscious, worldview of some Americans, a young slim black man is certainly not someone to be respected or listened to or deferred to. Their inner Pat Buchanan is scared of black people. Obama even plays basketball just like those juvenile delinquent gang banger inner city black kids. How dare he be president when he's so scary?
Americans who secretly feel this way will continue to figure out some way to blame Obama for their feelings, because its just too uncomfortable and difficult to examine and discard their own prejudices.

Back to the future

When I graduated from university in the 70s, we were in a recession, there were no jobs, we had inflation, nobody was building stuff, the stock market was poor, the economy was sort of limping along, yadda yadda.
So here I am approaching retirement and in a Globe and Mail article about what's next for the economy, I read this:

“Investors must recognize that if assets appreciate with nominal gross domestic product, a 4-5 per cent return is about all they can expect even with abnormally low policy rates,” [bond fund manager Bill Gross] said. “Rage, rage against this conclusion if you wish, but the six-month rally in risk assets … is likely at its pinnacle.”
Mr. Gross and his Pimco colleagues dismiss the prospects for a traditional V-shaped recovery and warn that the U.S. is facing a “new normal” of tight credit, higher inflation, slow growth and elevated unemployment levels.

Seems to me this is where I came in.