Do the hustle

Awful week at work but I have been enjoying the tangled web that is The Man Called Petraeus [(c)Digby] and his grifter friends. Here's the latest -- The Wonderful World of Jill and Scott Kelley:

At the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Kelley was introduced to New York energy entrepreneur Adam Victor as "a very close friend of Gen. Petraeus," the Los Angeles Times reports. Victor eventually flew Kelley to Hawaii to discuss a coal project with South Korean executives. But then Kelley asked for 2 percent cut of the gross cost of the project -- which would have been $80 million. "It was such an astronomical figure that it suggested she had no experience in negotiating these types of deals," Victor told the Times. "Gen. Petraeus had a lapse in judgment in using his influence to put her in that position."
... in 2007, Kelley and her husband created the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation, which its tax forms said "shall be operated exclusively to conduct cancer research and to grant wishes to terminally ill adult cancer patients." The charity raised $157,284, and spent half of it on entertaining, meals, cars, phones, and office supplies, the Huffington Post reports. It was bankrupt by the end of 2007.

Sarah Palin must be green with envy.

Next year country

Sigh

Great line of the day

Liliana Segura on the Twitter::

I just hope whoever replaces Petraeus restores the CIA's reputation as a beacon of moral rectitude.

Shorter

Shorter Harper Cons to the Mennonites:

Nice little charity you've got here.
Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Great lines of the day

Booman:

conservatives should look on the bright side. They didn't like Mitt Romney anyway. No one does.

Steven D:

Is Birtherism finally all dead (I know, I know) or is it only Zombie dead?

Steve Benen:

If Senate Republicans had allowed Warren to receive a simple, up-or-down vote, she very likely would have spent 2012 at the CFPB, instead of on the campaign trail, and Democrats may have struggled to find a candidate who could have dispatched Brown so easily.

Cord Jefferson at Gawker:

if you'll allow me to take a step back and speak in blunter terms, what happened last night is this: The brown people and the black people and the women handed the white men's asses to them as unsentimentally as white men have bought and sold and manipulated America for centuries now. Welcome to the future.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It is slowly dawning on them: This isn't 1968. The hippies are punching back.

Montreal Simon:

The main lesson of this election seems clear.
Put together a mighty coalition of women, minorities, the old and the young, run it like an army, get out the vote, and you can crush the Cons like bugs any old day. And believe me we will.
The Cons are running out of history, the writing is on the wall and the future belongs to us.
Today it was Romney's turn.
Tomorrow it will be his...

Lance Mannion:

How I feel about Obama's reelection

Told ya so!

Remember last winter, when everyone freaked out on the Harper Cons about whether same-sex non-Canadian couples were really married, and Harper blamed the Liberals?
And I said at the time that the Harper Cons would never actually change any law to support same-sex marriage?

I am done with giving the Harper Cons the benefit of the doubt. I'll believe they'll actually amend the residency requirements law only when I see them bring it to the Commons and whip their caucus to support it.

Well, told ya so:

The bill ... was supposed to clarify the Civil Marriage Act to ensure thousands of gay couples from abroad who marry in Canada have their unions recognized and can get divorced under Canadian law, it has gone exactly nowhere since it was introduced in Parliament on February 17.
Ten months later the question is: why?

This time, they're blaming the NDP.
Amazing, isn't it, how much power the opposition parties have in a Harper government.  Makes me wonder what are they complaining about?
And here's what else I said last January:

And if they actually do bring in a piece of legislation to which their base is profoundly opposed, just because its the right thing for a government to do, maybe it would be a sign that the Harper Cons are starting to think of themselves as a government instead of a party.

No risk of that any time soon.

It's another Festivus miracle!

Barak Obama got Bruce Springsteen to talk to Chris Christie.

Four more years

"Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?"

New bill refines rules on masks in unlawful protests:

“In my experience when someone shows up at protest with mask, their intentions are violent,” [Canadian Police Association president Tom Stamatakis] said. “There is no good legitimate reason for someone to protest peacefully and show up wearing a mask.”

Nor is there any reason for police to remove their badges during a protest, either.  But this happened at the G20, and then they were protected by the cone of silence.
Irwin Colter seems to think the bill is just aimed at arresting violent protesters.  Actually, the idea is to stop people from attending a protest in the first place.  And a decade from now, chances are the Supreme Court will find pre-emptive arrest for how someone is dressed is unconstitutional.

*The title of this post is a quote from The Masque of the Red Death which somehow seems appropriate, I thought.

Asymmetric despair

"Asymmetric warfare" is guerilla war between weak and strong.
The terrible Ashley Smith video is asymmetric despair -- she was so weak, and her captors so strong. Maybe the only way to express her despair was to abuse her own body, to disassociate from herself.
No wonder Corrections Canada didn't want us to see this child's pathetic, doomed fight against riot-geared guards and cold-hearted medical staff. Dr. Dawg writes:

Something is rotten and festering in Canada’s prison system. God knows how many other young people are presently being brutalized and driven to suicide by incompetence and cruelty as I write this.
“Don’t let them get away with it,” said Julian Falconer, the Smith family’s lawyer, to the coroner. Amen to that.

Speaking of hobgoblins

If "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" then we shouldn't be expecting any consistency from the way the Harper Cons are handling gun licensing and registration these days:

Conservatives said the registry was ineffective because it targeted “law-abiding hunters, farmers and sport shooters” and missed the criminals who would never register anyway.
They also argued the registry information was so incomplete and out of date that it was useless for tracing guns.
Yet the same Conservative government that killed the registry recently brought in new regulations to ensure that as of December, all firearms have unique serial number markings.
A release from the Public Safety department earlier this month said serial numbers on guns “contribute to public safety, by facilitating law enforcement investigations when the markings can be linked to information on the last legal owner of the firearm.”
In short, a government that long complained over the cost of Liberal gun control laws has left the most expensive element in place, while stripping out a weapons database that — by its own logic — appears to have some use.

But Canada has learned that the last thing we can expect from the Harper Cons is logical decision-making.

Great line of the day

From Nancy Nall:

Maybe Dave Barry is right -- as we get older, our brains fill up with song lyrics and there’s no room for anything else.

These fans better watch it.

I think therefore I am

Just heard the news that a beluga whale can speak, or at least imitate a human voice.
Maybe Gary Larson wasn't so far wrong after all:

He's kidding, right?

Did the Onion start a Canadian edition?
Changes to parliamentary pension plan ‘cowardly,’ MP says:

Edmonton MP Peter Goldring, a former Conservative caucus member, said the hefty increase in contributions will dramatically reduce take-home pay for MPs who earn $157,731 in base salary, and ultimately make it far more difficult to attract top quality politicians.

Like him, I suppose.
Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out, Pete.