A Canadian story

There is something quintessentially Canadian about this:

A Regina bylaw is being misused by police as a tool to curb street begging and should be repealed, city administrators are recommending.. . . the Tag Day Bylaw was originally intended to regulate fundraising by charitable organizations.
"The bylaw was not intended to regulate the solicitation of funds for personal gain," the report noted. Police in Regina, however, have been applying the law to discourage street begging.

The line forms to the right, babe!

So today the CRTC joins the Wheat Board, Atomic Energy of Canada, Elections Canada, the Canada Food Inspection Agency, the RCMP Complaints Commission, the Military Police Complaints Commission, and the Marquee Tourism Events Program as another federal agency which is apparently being run by ignoramuses who aren't doing their jobs very well.
Isn't it wonderful that we have the Prime Minister and his Conservative cabinet ministers to overturn the decisions made by all these know-nothings?
But unlike many of these other agencies, the telcom decision is worth millions of dollars. So by next week I expect the goodies will start to flow -- every company that was ever turned down by a Canadian bureaucrat will start lobbying for a do-over, while every company which has been following the rules will be lobbying even harder to maintain the status quo.
And a good time will be had by all!

Get with the program

This is a beautiful moment


This is not:

The anti-Olympics industry in Vancouver is getting tiresome and old.
It's perfectly possible to object to sexist decisions against women ski-jumpers, and its quite legitimate to demand that Vancouver's homeless are treated with humanity during the games, and its absolutely appropriate to make sure nobody is stealing the money.
But after two decades of stagnation, Vancouver is going to be showcased as a world city by these Olympics, and Canadians should take pride in that.

Great line of the day

Josh Marshall asks Hard Questions:

Who to believe on climate change mystery: scientists or conservative pundits? Any thoughts?

Rescue

Muhei waited below, his arms outstretched. Liza turned to him, shaking with joy as she was passed to her owner.
Muhei whispered into her ear as he stepped over broken bricks, then put Liza down. Her tail never stopped wagging as Muhei rubbed her neck and ears as she lapped water from a muddy puddle.

One good news story from Baghdad today.

Obama's theme song

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.

Be careful what you wish for

Hoist on his own petard!
So Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor tried to put down the Liberals by posting this graph showing how many so called "fossil of the day awards" the Chretien/Martin Liberals "won" for blocking progress at the United Nations Climate Change negotations:



In reply, Steve V gives us this graph showing how the Harper Conservatives managed to surpass both the Saudis and the US to lead the world in fossil awards at the last round of climate talks at Bali:



So I guess we can conclude that the Liberal "achievement" over five years doesn't compare to what Harper managed in just 10 days!
Seems like we're on pace at Copenhagen, too, tying with the Saudis for third place on day one. Go, team, go!

Legacy

I think this is sad:

"[The long gun registry] was the centrepiece of their legacy, the biggest thing we did over the last 20 years," said Sylvie Haviernick, who lost her sister, Maud, to Marc Lépine's killing spree. "We can't in all decency let it go."

So apparently we've given up on achieving a society where men don't resent women for entering "male" professions like engineering. And we're not focusing on improving our capacity to identify and treat psychotics before they explode. Can it be true that all we have done in two decades for the Montreal massacre victims is spend millions of dollars to make it more bureaucratic for hunters to own rifles?
Seems to me that the only real accomplishment of the long gun registry has been to make it almost impossible for Liberals to get elected west of the Lakehead.
That's not the memorial these women deserved.

Shorter

Shorter Maureen Dowd

How dare those dusky people act like us?

Sick and tired

Sore throat and cough (yes, I had the shot last week so its not that) but I've had to miss going to some things I wanted to go to, and now I'm just sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Here's about all the complexity I can handle right now:


And this one:

Is there something wrong with me?

I could care less about Tiger Woods and the Salahis I guess that makes me some kind of weird, eh?

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Dawg sums up the Harper government's tortuous torture story with this "unfortunate analogy":>

An unfortunate analogy occurs to me. The Harper government is behaving very much like a stubborn prisoner reluctant to confess. Electric cables and beatings are obviously not ours to deploy, even if by now we were to have the unpleasant urge to use such devices. Nevertheless, we--blogospherians, frustrated parliamentary committee members, bloodhound journos, various fed-up officials, human rights activists, maybe even The Hague--have ways of making you talk.
It's just a matter of time. And there's no point screaming--because we don't give a damn about your pain.

Drip, drip, drip... the revelations keep coming day by day.
Here's the latest one in which we hear the most convoluted scenario I have ever read, all about how our military says they don't want to be policemen but they have been arresting people without evidence that justifies the arrest and then the Afghan authorities are releasing those people without, apparently, torturing them for confessions, so our soldiers are supposed to be all discouraged and disheartened.
More discouraging, I would think, is how nobody seems to be able to say why these people were being arrested in the first place, if they weren't committing a crime.
But at least Obama, for all the criticism of his speech, has finally laid out a rationale for why the Afghanistan war is continuing -- its not about nation building

he made explicitly clear that we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests (as he perceives them), not to build a better nation for Afghans. Nation-building, he said, goes "beyond ... what we need to achieve to secure our interests" and "go beyond our responsibility."

They're not making the world safe for democracy; they're making it safe for the United States.
So now, finally, Canada can decide whether that is a goal we can share.

Being a parent

Jim Griffieon writes about being a parent in a post titled Gratitude. It starts

Several friends and acquaintances have recently announced their first pregnancies, and I find myself offering the usual pithy niceties and dull truisms, an aloof veteran patting the backs of the new recruits just before they hoist themselves over the top into the maelstrom of shrapnel and armament. Welcome to the trenches. I hope you don't mind the smell of human excrement.
But there's more to it than just that....

Thanks to Nancy Nall for linking to this piece.

Broken record

Shorter Peter MacKay:

You've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.

Actually, I don't know why we would be the least bit surprised that our Conservative government didn't care about what was being done to Afghan prisoners -- they don't think it's their job to help Canadians who get into trouble abroad either.

Disconnect

Dawg finds the smoking gun -- the Corrections Canada official who testified today that she saw no signs of torture when she was in Afghanistan is the same person who complained three years ago about needing new boots because she was walking through too much blood and shit in the Afghanistan jail cells.
So was she lying then? Or now?