Great line of the day

Mr. Sinister summarizes the Stephen Harper panic:

Realizing that prorogation was the worst political mistake since Pierre Trudeau handed John Turner a list of his friends to find jobs for, the PMO is starting to throw furniture out the windows, in a vain attempt to get the Langevin Block to levitate. You can almost hear them screaming "Hey Canadians, you don't like prorogation? What if we never take a break again? Would you like us better? Huh? Huh?" And still, the long, sad, decline in their fortunes continues.

Emphasis mine.

The day the music died

February 3 was the day the music died.
I miss the songs Buddy Holly would have written had he lived.
And John Lennon.
And Jim Croce.

Great news for bloggers

Jim Pankiw wants to make a comeback:

“I’m Back!” the 43-year-old announced in a news release distributed to media outlets Wednesday . . .
“After a brief (but very direct and explicit) statement, Dr. Pankiw will answer any questions provided that they are not of a personal or disingenuous nature,” the release states

And Saskatoon bloggers cheered -- its always more fun when Jim Pankiw is willing to be kicked around again, not to mention being an inexhaustible source of bloggage.
Like this one, from the same news story:

..."He said to me once, he goes, ‘Austin . . . sometimes reporters report the news in a different way because they’re always looking for a great headline.’ I mean, who isn’t, right? He said, ‘Here’s an example. . . . Let’s say that I went and rescued my dog and he was drowning or something. It wouldn’t be, Jim Pankiw Saves His Dog, it would be, Jim Pankiw’s Dog Can’t Swim.’ "

Oh, no, no, the great headline would be, "This dog don't hunt" -- a phrase which The Urban Dictionary defines as "An obviously faulty endeavor; ... predictive of failure."
Sorta writes itself, doesn't it?

Silly season

Why does anyone care about where Danny Williams has his heart surgery or what Rahm Emanuel says or how miserable the Edwards' marriage was or what Obama said about gambling in Vegas or finding out John Baird is gay?
I think we must all have a touch of cabin fever.

Worst airport in the world

From The Onion

He'll get high with a little help from his friends

We've see Harper the Kitten Whisperer, then Harper as Mr. Blue Sweater and the Piano Man. Now he's becoming the Great Humanitarian.
But using the world's poor as a photo backdrop to raise poll numbers at home has triggered everyone's gag reflex. And in fact, this might well backfire on Harper if his cabinet uses it to justify CIDA funding for pro-lifers.
Steve V. sums up the issue:

It actually makes you angry on one level, the way this Prime Minister is clearly manipulating genuine human plight for NAKED partisan advantage. That said, I do find it somewhat refreshing that Harper's new projection, the great international humanitarian, is basically going over like a lead balloon, the disconnect so striking to border on embarrassing.. . .
Here's my cynical take on the chronology, which I'd wager is BANG ON.
Serious political problems at home, plummeting support that has sent shock waves through the PMO, completely derailing their ENTIRE winter and spring strategy, which was supposed to set the stage for electoral bliss. In the midst of the hammering the Conservatives were taking, a natural disaster occurred. The government responded with opportunistic zeal (I'm sure there was a genuine component, but only a fool doesn't consider "the wheels turning" in the PMO), high profile photo ops, swamping the media, seeing this event as the channel changer they desperately wanted.
The PMO saw the positive press for their Haiti response, which SUDDENLY produced this epiphany- we can re brand this Prime Minister as a humanitarian, taking a lead on the world stage, an advocate for the disadvantaged. Never mind, that all policies to date either contradicted the new messaging and/or demonstrated COMPLETE AND UTTER INDIFFERENCE, the PMO plowed ahead with the notion, cobbling together new initiatives. It was all political calculus, but this PMO believe if you say it, they will come, any level of true historical inspection a temporary obstacle.

Curiouser and curiosier

Four wingnuts wearing phone company costumes were arrested the other day for trying to bug the offices of Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu.
Stupid, huh? When a Landrieu staffer asked for their ID, they said they left it in the truck.

The U.S. Marshal's Service apprehended all four men shortly thereafter.

Now they're saying they were actually just trying to investigate whether her phones were busy or not.
Well, this explanation makes even less sense.
I smell a barking fish here, or a smoking gun or something.
Initially, all the attention was focused on James O'Keefe, the guy who played a pimp to sting ACORN last year. And the news stories also mentioned Robert Flanagan, 24, who is the son of the acting US attorney for the Western District of Louisana.
Blogger Lindsay Beyerstein has pieced together some background on another of the gang that couldn't bug straight

One Stan Dai was listed as the Assistant Director of the The Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) at Trinity (Washington) University. . . . Stan Dai spoke about torture and terrorism last June at a "CIA day" organized by the Junior Statesmen Summer School at Georgetown. The program included a field trip to the CIA and lectures at Georgetown the next day, according this event program I found online. As we know, Dai served as the assistant director of a program dedicated to steering young people into careers in intelligence. Get this: according to the flier, Adam Brandon, the press secretary of FreedomWorks (Dick Armey's town hall mob outfit) was on the same program.
. . . Prior to that, he served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program.

And the plot sickens. A commenter at Emptywheel's post on this issue says:

Dai’s co-conspirator Flanagan was on a similar track.
Flanagan’s resume indicates he is enrolled at the Missouri State University’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. This curious institution is in Fairfax, VA (not in Missouri). It is headed by William Van Cleave, another neocon figure (a member of Wolfowitz’ Team B!). It graduates 15 people a year. And it is next door to NIPP (National Institute of Public Policy).

In a later post, Beyerstein digs into Flanagan's resume a little more -- turns out he has interned for two Republican politicians and claimed that he "briefed legislative staff on areas of national security and international relations."
So these guys have spent years thinking of themselves as intelligence operatives and national security experts.
This makes even more ridiculous the explanation of the incident as an investigation of busy phones.
Does anyone remember how low-level the Watergate burglars were, and how stupid the whole thing appeared to be at first?
I'm just sayin...

Give it back to Steve Fonyo

Rev. Paperboy calls bullshit to the decision to take away Steve Fonyo's Order of Canada and so do I:

I still think this is unfair, hypocritical and just plain mean-spirited. . . .Admittedly Fonyo has not led an exemplary life since he was awarded the Order at age 18, but he was not given the award for the life he was going to lead or for his ongoing contributions to Canada - he was given the award for finishing what Terry Fox started, running across the country on an artificial leg to raise awareness of and money for cancer research.

And if getting into legal trouble or behaving disreputably is grounds for rescinding this award, the Rev. asks, what about Conrad Black and Garth Drabinsky, not to mention the former Prime Minister who accepted envelopes of cash in hotel rooms?

UPDATE: And Guy Lafleur was convicted of perjury last year.

Just for fun

A peculiar but compelling countdown

Great line of the day

Andrew Sullivan writes a profound post about Obama's State of the Union speech and what it means for the future of the United States:

I've lived in Washington for twenty years. I saw in Obama the real hope that something constructive could emerge from the corruption and decline of the recent past. I saw last night the civil tone that marks a responsible politics, rather than the glib cynicism and mock heroism that has marked us in much of the new millennium . . .
Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it.

Emphasis mine.

"You're from the 60s!"

I've always regretted that they had to call the reclusive author in Field of Dreams "Terrence Mann" instead of J.D. Salinger, though having him played by James Earl Jones instead of, say, Dennis Hopper, was what made that movie.
Anyway, I love this scene in particular, and always thought this was likely what J.D. Salinger would have said, too -- "Oh my God, you're from the 60s! Out, back to the 60s, back!"



Who knows, maybe he did actually say this to W.P. Kinsella.

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