Saturday Morning Cartoon

And now for something completely different: A History of Evil by Norweigian animator Ole Magnus Saxegård


h/t Drawn.

Not a throwdown

Not a throwdown this week with POGGE -- just me chiming in with another Kate and Anna McGarrigle song, the Log Driver's Waltz

Saskatchewan anti-prorogue rallies on Saturday

Just checked and Google lists more than 2,000 news stories about Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, including lots about the protests tomorrow.
Regardless of how the Cons keep trying to spin this prorogue as routine and no big deal, my son points out that Harper himself changed the meaning of prorogation in Canada when he used it last December to save his government. Reap what you sow, hoist by his own petard, and all that.
Here's a neat map of all of the anti-prorogue rallies tomorrow -- there's even going to be one at Trafalgar Square in London.
Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament posts this information about Saskatchewan rallies on Saturday:

SASKATOON, SK RALLY
Date: Saturday, January 23
Time: 1:00 pm local time
Location: City Hall
RALLY PLANNING GROUP
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=264977381210

PRINCE ALBERT, SK
Date: Saturday, January 23
Time: 1:30 pm
Location: PA Union Centre, 107-8th St. E.
co-sponsored by the Prince Albert Chapter of The Council of Canadians and the PA and District Labour Council

REGINA, SK
RALLY
Date: Saturday, January 23
Time: 1:00 pm
Location: Scarth Street Mall
RALLY PLANNING GROUP
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=253266656648

By the way, the group now has more than 210,000 members. Considering how derisive some of the Cons were when the group first started, what occurs to me is "Some chicken. Some neck."
And in other news, the Liberals are giving grades to various damage control strategies being tried by Conservative MPs. Here's one that got an "A":

Conservative MP Ed Holder picked his constituents’ most frequent complaints for his “Holder’s Happenings” newsletter, including:
* “This is a dictatorial Prime Minister. MPs aren’t allowed to speak their mind. Why did he do this?”
* “What happens to Bills now before Parliament?”
* “You’ve shut down democracy. What’s not getting done in Ottawa?”
* “This just gives MPs more vacation!”
* “Won’t you be using this time to go to the Olympics?” and,
* “You don’t work if you’re not in Ottawa.”

Oh, I'll bet the Tory spin doctors are pretty pissed off about that.

Great line of the day

Jon Chait tells the democrats don't panic!

The difference between the parties is that Republicans ignore the establishment’s advice. After Obama’s election, conventional wisdom insisted that the GOP would have to move to the center. Instead the party moved further right. And whatever the policy merits, it has worked politically. If Republicans had cooperated more with Obama, it would have given him bipartisan accomplishments and made him even more popular.
The GOP’s ability to ignore establishment nostrums in the face of defeat is its great electoral strength. Democrats, by contrast, have a congenital tendency to panic. Abandoning health care reform after they’ve already paid whatever political cost that comes from voting for it in both houses would be suicide. Even if Coakley loses, the House could pass the Senate bill as is, avoiding the need to break a filibuster, and tinker with it in a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered. The only thing preventing the Democrats from following through would be sheer panic.

Emphasis mine.
However, as I predicted, House Democrats are already backing away from health care reform --- cowards! I just hope calmer heads will prevail.
Along those lines, Josh Marshall lays down the challenge for Obama:

This is the biggest testing time the president has yet faced. It could be a key turning point in his presidency. Over the next forty-eight hours the president is going to come under withering pressure to walk away from reform. It'll come from the left and the right, and in various different flavors. It will come from shocking directions. The president is going to have to find a way to say, No. We're doing this. He'll need to stand down a lot of cowardly and foolish people in his own party. He'll have to stand down the vast and formless force of establishment punditry and just say, No. We're going to do this. And he's going to have to make the case to the public, not necessarily convince all those who have doubts about health care reform but make clear that he thinks this is the right direction for the country and because he thinks it's the right thing to do that he's going to make it happen.

Dream on, FDL

Jon Walker at Firedoglake writes

If Coakley loses in Massachusetts, I don’t see how health care reform passes without reviving reconciliation, and, by default, the public option.

These people are really living in a dreamworld if they think a Democratic loss in Massacheusetts would lead to a positive result for health care reform in the United States.
If Coakley loses, then health care reform in the United States doesn't pass at all.
Thanks to the teaparty wingnuts last summer and the progressive push-back this winter, reform is already barely alive now. Reid and Pelosie stitched together a very small majority to pass what they have got now.
If Coakley loses, her loss will be blamed on HCR and the whole initiative will again be radioactive for your Democratic politicians. The talking heads would talk about nothing else for the next two weeks except for how foolish Democrats would be to continue with such a loser initiative, so bad that it will cause even the bluest of the blue states to vote against a Democrat. So then the Democrats in the House and in the Senate will be too scared to pass any health bill at all -- not the Senate bill, not reconciliation, nothing.
Bye-bye health care reform.

Another throwdown

In response to POGGE's Friday night
post, here's mine -- sort of the same words for different music.

1000 words

The Globe and Mail uses the photo to illustrate Gerald Caplan's article about Harper's ideological, incompetent government. It captures Caplan's message perfectly:

. . . Here is a government, from its head down, that practices ignorance-based public policy. Huge areas of the human condition go completely unrecognized – AIDS, global warming, Africa, to name only a few. . . . This is a prime minister who is single-handedly reversing Canada's stellar reputation (too often vastly overrated, I'm afraid) around the world. I've just come from Africa, and I promise you this is no exaggeration.
It's also bizarre in Harper's own terms. He's dying to have Canada elected a temporary member of the Security Council when a rotating seat opens later this year. (What Harper's Canada could possibly bring to the Council except deep-rooted ignorance and sophomoric prejudices is beyond understanding.) Yet he has actively alienated countries all over the world by his various vindictive acts – such as cutting off aid to African countries, refusing grants to widely respected Canadian NGOs, copping out on climate change.
This is a prime minister who knows little about many subjects and feels passionately about them all – the Middle East, international development, the entire Canadian criminal justice system. This is a prime minister who looks at a complex, nuanced, interconnected world and sees only simple black and white . . .

I love the Internets

Where else would you get a bunch of average-type non-academic people discussing the Black Death and its impact on world history on a Saturday afternoon?

Busking

In tribute to RossK and his girls who are starting the year of busking dangerously:

Saturday Morning Cartoon

I have probably posted this before but here it is again anyway inspired by the boss's assertion that bullfights aren't funny.

Photo opportunity

If Stephen Harper is just trying to use the Haiti tragegy to get his picture into the paper his staff aren't doing a particularly good job.
Here's three terrible photos now posted to the Yahoo news photo gallery:


"Canada's Governor General Michaelle Jean (L) and Prime Minister Stephen Harper attend a briefing session with senior officials regarding Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti, in Ottawa January 13, 2010. .... REUTERS/Blair Gable"


"Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper pauses while speaking to journalists after making a donation to the Canadian Red Cross as aid for the Haiti earthquake in Ottawa January 14, 2010. REUTERS/Chris Watti"


"Prime Minister Stephen Harper talks to reporters as his wife Laureen looks on after they made a donation to the Red Cross towards the earthquake disaster in Haiti, in Ottawa on Thursday, January 14, 2010.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand"

Shorter

Shorter Stephen Harper:

Whoops, I've done it again!

(HT for the cartoon.)

Haiti

This is a ray of hope: Canada rushes aid to Haiti

“It's an enormous disaster in a country that can't afford such a disaster, that already has terrible problems,” Mr. Harper said. “Our hearts are with all of them. I can assure you that we are acting as quickly and as comprehensively as we can.”

Watching the NBC coverage, Brian Williams was on the Haiti airport tarmac and he was talking about a Canadian airplane behind him -- it was great to see the Harper government moving so quickly to try to help.
And DART has already been mobilized. It was a week after the South Asia tsunami in 2004 before Martin decided to send DART to help, and I thought at the time we waited way too long.

Smokin' makes you feel good

My response to the story about how smoking helps people feel better is "D'uh!"
Of course it does. Why else would people smoke?
My sister, who never smoked, asked me once why I did, and she was surprised when I told her, because I like it. Theoretically, of course, she knew that nicotine is a drug, she had just never quite realized that the reason smoking is addictive is that it makes you feel good to smoke.
I finally quit four years ago, with help from Zyban -- I would never have made it without this drug. I know, I know, it was just substituting one drug for another, but I had quit before, for three months or six months, and always started again. In some weird way, I think, I needed to re-boot my brain so that I didn't need that smoking boost anymore to feel "normal". And I've been smoke-free ever since, even when I'm around smokers.
Knock on wood -- I make sure I always remember that I could get hooked again in a new york minute if I ever have another cigarette.

Torch relay

Here are some of the videos posted now on YouTube about the torch relay going through Saskatchewan.

A torch exchange in Regina:


Greeted by thousands at the riverbank in Saskatoon:


The torch enters Osler, Sask:


And gets to Prince Albert