Dirty Harry meets Rain Man

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Democrats on parade

I can't tell you how pissed off I am at the gutless congessional democrats who are scurrying away from health care reform as fast as their little feet can scamper.
Here's their plan for the nine months, until the midterm elections:
1. Do nothing controversial anymore
2. Blame Republicans for nothing getting done.
They don't have a plan for the nine months after that, because these lucky duckies might well lose their majority in the House, and they won't have to worry about governing anymore.
Then the Republicans will get to spend the next two years holding hearings on Obama's birth certificate.
I can hardly wait.
So right now we're still reading about all sorts of magic pony 11-dimensional chess scenarios from the progressive blogs as they frantically try to save the democrats from themselves.
The latest is to get 51 Senators to pass a reconciliation bill to revise the worst features of the health care reform plan that very same Senate voted to support a month ago, and then the House is supposed to vote in favour of both the Senate bill and the bill that guts it. And thusly, health care reform will be achieved!!
Yeah, that'll happen.

Pathetic

This is laughable -- Jane Taber reports on the list of Conservative activities today which supposedly demonstrate just how darned busy the Cons are, working for Canadians.
And just about all of the 30 or so events listed are variations on ministerial press conferences, the type of event which could easily have been scheduled anytime in the last week or the next -- and would have been, if the Commons had actually been open as scheduled.
How dumb do they think we are?

"No to perogie" protest

25,000.
That's the estimate of how many Canadians gathered on a cold and snowy Saturday to protest Harper's prorogue of Parliament. Here are some photos from today's protest across Canada

Vancouver


Toronto




Ottawa


Edmonton - home of the "no to perogie" sign


Saskatoon

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"