Now, THAT'S a protest!

In St. Petersburg, Russia, artists have drawn a 220-foot penis on a drawbridge to protest an upcoming International Economic Forum meeting.

Apparently, when the bridge is raised, it "glistens in the light".
Too bad Toronto doesn't have any drawbridges...

What's going on here?

So a year after his appointment, we are left with an uncomfortable speculation about exactly what kind of man Canada has chosen to be its CSIS chief.
Gordon Campbell says Richard Fadden's accusations that municipal and provincial politicians are Chinese agents are "unprecedented and completely unprofessional" The Toronto Star says Faddan was "bowing smoke, perhaps in order to reinforce his pitch for more funding". At the National Post, John Ivison calls the comments "extremely odd" and speculates that Fadden wants to quit his job --"If the CSIS director wanted to come in from the cold, there must be less dramatic ways of ending his career."
At Macleans, John Geddes says Fadden "made himself look ridiculous". At the Globe and Mail, Michael Posner says this isn't the first time Fadden has talked about boogeymen under the bed and Gary Mason says Fadden "got carried away trying to impress Mr. Mansbridge" The Globe editorial says the remarks are reckless, foolish and contradictory.

Mr. Fadden tried to backtrack yesterday. He issued a statement noting that foreign interference is a “common occurrence,” and saying he had not apprised the PCO of the cases, or deemed them to be of sufficient concern to alert provincial authorities.
If the cases aren't serious enough to share with his political masters, why mention them on national television? Why say he is talking to the PCO, only to later deny this?

Watch the interview and see if you can figure out what the heck Fadden thinks he is doing.
Creepiest part is when Mansbridge asks him how he knows Canadian politicians are foreign agents and he replies "Under the law we can monitor anything."
And I was wondering why I keep hearing this funny buzzing on the line when I call city hall these days...

McChrystal is a whiner

With all the flap over the insults slathered over everyone by the general who is supposedly in charge of the Afghanistan war, what I found most offensive was the constant, childish, egotistical whining.
Here, McCrystal has to go to a diplomatic dinner -- with the French!

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

And when he first met Obama, I guess the President didn't seem to know about his awesomeness:

Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

He has surrounded himself with drunks, yes-men and yahoos who keep telling each other how brilliant they all are:

Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks . . . The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. . . .By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced.

He seems to think he is the only person who does anything right:

In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. . . . At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.

I hope Obama fires this guy. Our Canadian troops deserve better company.

Shorter

Shorter CSIS director Richard Fadden:

So those beleaguered and unappreciated masochists who stand for municipal office so they can get phone calls at all hours of the day and night about snow clearing and sewer replacements are actually secretly working for mysterious foreign powers? Well, I'm glad SOMEBODY appreciates the work that aldermen do!

Cartoon of the day

From The Globe and Mail:

Shorter

Shorter RCMP non-apology apology to Robert Dziekanski’s mother:

We're sorry if you were offended . . .

Disgruntled Cow

Ranch Life - Miss Cellania -

Throwdown!

POGGE has posted Moreland & Arbuckle's John Henry rendition and of course I was reminded of this version -- see 1:16 below:

Great line of the day

Scott links to this Greg Weston column about the latest extravagant idiocy of the Harper government -- spending a million dollars on posters of Canadian scenes to put around the Summit meeting halls:

If the insatiable Foreign Affairs decorators wanted to capture the true essence of the summits, they would have backdrops depicting a billion-dollar sinkhole.

Yeah, well...whatever

Non Sequitur Comic Strip, June 09, 2010 on GoComics.com

Kentucky Vice

Does everybody else like the new show Justified as much as we do?
It reminds me of The Sopranos in its unexpectedness -- its filled with stock characters that we've all seen in police procedurals a thousand times before, but just when you think its going to get all trite and homespun and cliched, it turns around on you -- our hero lead character mouths off in a bar and gets beaten up. The stone killer who has maybe reformed, or has he, blows someone up by accident, or was it? The jerk prosecutor maybe had a heart of gold, or does he? The slut girlfriend might be moving on, or is she?
The Globe article about this show says it could be called "Kentucky Vice" It's all based on an Elmore Leonard short story, and the series maintains a true Leonard voice -- Canadian producer Graham Yost (grandson of Elwy Yost) handed out bracelets to the scripwriters marked WWED, or What Would Elmore Do? And its great theme has got everyone interested in a whole different kind of music, too -- bluegrass rap.

Jump

It's great news for women ski-jumpers

Gag reflex

Is there a point at which the cruelty and immorality of the Bush-Cheney regime is finally going to trigger Obama's gag reflex?
Maybe this will finally do it -- Digby reports

The PHR report indicates that there is evidence that health professionals engaged in research on detainees that violates the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other international and domestic prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. Declassified government documents indicate that:
• Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large- volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results. After medical monitoring and advice, the CIA experimentally added saline, in an attempt to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water. The report observes: “‘Waterboarding 2.0’ was the product of the CIA’s developing and field-testing an intentionally harmful practice, using systematic medical monitoring and the application of subsequent generalizable knowledge.”
• Health professionals monitored sleep deprivation on more than a dozen detainees in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. This research was apparently used to monitor and assess the effects of varying levels of sleep deprivation to support legal definitions of torture and to plan future sleep deprivation techniques.
• Health professionals appear to have analyzed data, based on their observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, to determine whether one type of application over another would increase the subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.” The alleged research appears to have been undertaken only to assess the legality of the “enhanced” interrogation tactics and to guide future application of the techniques.

Maybe its less disgusting in the original German.

Great post of the day

Bitch Ph.D. begins a post about Rand Paul with this great piece of writing -- which you could use to begin just about any post about Republicans, Conservatives, what have you:

Each time you think the GOP has finally perfected its stupidity, that it has reached the uppermost Everest of stupidity, that there is no summit of stupidity to overtop the height of stupidity it has currently attained, that it has ascended the last ridge of stupidity and now overlooks the broad plain of human ignorance and stupefaction, observing, with a certain smugness, the exhausted forms of the ideological sherpas and porters littering the wake of its traverse, it flings a grapple over a rocky spire rising up from the tower of stupidity above which you thought nothing could tower and begins, anew, to hoist itself to higher heights of cognitive austerity from which it may fling itself into the void of its own drooling dumb-ass-ness.

Good guys

The Rev Paperboy notes this Andrew Bacevich article about why America is fighting another pointless and immoral war in Afghanistan. The Rev asks:

Why are we so sure we are the good guys?

Good question. Is it because our hearts are pure? Because God is on our side?
There's a throw-away scene in the movie, The Longest Day, where an Allied commander is trying to deal with some battlefield problem and says to his aide "Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on." and a little later, a German commander is trying to figure out some battlefield problem and says to his aide "Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on."
So how do we decide whose side God is on?
Oh, I don't know if there's a perfect answer, really. But I think all we've got is the United Nations -- far from perfect, but at least it is something we can use to help us to determine which "side" is right.
One critical difference between Afghanistan and Iraq is that the UN sanctioned waging war in Afghanistan, and they wouldn't sanction Iraq. I know, I know, the UN is awful in many ways, but there is a kind of collective wisdom that is meaningful.
I think we can at least argue that if the UN will not sanction a war, it should not be fought. When Bush couldn't get even a substantial minority of the Security Council to agree to support the invasion of Iraq, I felt that decided it. When people talked about how difficult it was to decide whether the Iraq invasion was right or wrong, I always found it simple -- if the UN won't support it, then its wrong. And Chretien nailed that one, too.
In a case where the UN DOES support a war, like it did with Afghanistan,then we still have to look at the arguments pro and con, and make our own judgment.
Initially I could support the war in Afghanistan because it was supposed to capture Bin Laden. But like everything else Bush and Cheney did, it was basically a corrupt and incompetent enterprise that rapidly turned to shit and came back to bite us on the ass: three of the world's great democracies, the United States, Canada and Britain, used the so-called War on Terror as an excuse to abandon the constitutional protections and civil rights that we had fought for and cherished for hundreds of years. In almost half the world, we will never be the good guys again, and for what? So that we could torture some farmers and teenagers and cab drivers.
Jesus wept.