The new normal

When you see what is going on now in the United States -- another debt ceiling fiasco, the Obamacare implementation, and the Republicans going insane and taking the country with them -- it makes Canadian politics seem just so normal.
All we have going on now are the usual craziness -- election scandals, cheques to mobsters and deliberately subverting the FOIA -- while Dear Leader makes empty threats to the United States and writes a book about hockey instead of actually, you know, running the country.
Just business as usual, really ....

And you thought the drivers were crazy

Here's some idiotic (Russian) pedestrians

Do you think alcohol might have been a factor?
But here's some others, too:

No joy in Mudville

Last-second field goal gives Lions victory over Roughriders
That makes three losses in a row for our boys. Ouch!
And two of our field goal attempts hit the post.
Two!

The Pope says something sensible and kind

Yeah, I couldn't believe it either, but its true, he did:

Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic church on Thursday with the publication of his remarks that the church had grown “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics
.... “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
The pope’s interview did not change church doctrine or policies, but it instantly changed its tone.

Wow.
 And what are the chances he will withstand the absolute shitstorm about to rain down from the pearl clutchers and moral scolds?

Giving

▶ ทรูมูฟ เอช " การให้ คือการสื่อสารที่ดีที่สุด " Giving - YouTube:

Saturday morning cartoon

There's a new Simon's Cat posted: Mirror Mirror - Simon's Cat - YouTube: ""

And an oldie but a goodie:

I'm shocked, SHOCKED!

"Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like 'em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail."

So now the media finds out that teenagers at UBC are using the exact same Frosh Week chant as the St. Mary's students on the other side of the country.  Maybe they're all doing it.
What?  Teenagers saying stuff that is offensive to grown-ups?  And not just saying it, but shouting it at the top of their lungs?  
Maybe the media should stop clutching its pearls and we should all remember being 18 and how much fun it was to say something shocking.
Kids today have it harder because there's not much these days that will shock adults.
When I was 18, all I had to do was tell my parents I wanted to take a class at Berkley.

Sending a message

Daily Kos: And away we go:


I wonder if Obama backed off a unilateral strike against Syria at least partly because the usual gang of idiots jumped out of the blocks to support it?
So now he's taking the problem to Congress, and the right-wing is in a tizzy -- they don't want to support Obama but they don't want to say no to John McCain and Bill Kristol, either.
Oh well, they just found a photo of Kerry having dinner with Assad four years ago, so they can chatter about that for a while.
Juan Cole sums it up:

...by Friday, Obama had painted himself into a box with repeated statements that he had to attack Syria because of the gas attack. But as he looked behind him, the troops he was leading had thinned out faster than Custer’s at the Little Bighorn....
Obama made a clever political calculation. The Tea Party and the GOP in general had been demanding that he submit the Syria file to them. So he obliged them. If they say ‘no,’ as the British parliament did, then Obama is off the hook. If they say ‘yes,’ then they are full partners in any failures that result. Either way, the issue is taken off the agenda of the 2016 election and Democrats are held harmless....
It is remarkable how important the Iraq experience has been in the debates on Syria, and how decisive. Even if the US goes ahead with the strike, it is likely to attempt to keep the action narrow and symbolic, and to avoid troops on the ground, and indeed, generally to stay out of the conflict thereafter as long as no more chemical attacks are launched. Whether it is possible to bomb Syria and then walk away like that isn’t clear; but it is the maximal Obama plan. The minimal one is to be able to blame the Tea Party for isolationism and cold disregard of the regime’s violation of international law.

I'm not sure whether you could call such a result "win-win", but perhaps its not "lose-lose" either.

He's baaaak!

So first I read this headline:
Ottawa looking ‘very carefully’ at marijuana-ticket proposal, PM says
and I thought, WHAAT? Our Stevie? Actually considering doing something that everybody except his base wants the government to do? I must be living in Bizarro World!
Then I read this headline:
Stephen Harper says Justin Trudeau encouraging drug use
and the world snapped back into focus. There's the ridiculous hyperbolic smear of the Harper we all know and love.

Breaking Bad Canada-style

Breaking Bad is a Different Story With Universal Healthcare - Cheezburger:

Using sarin gas to show rebels who is the boss

Whenever I wonder about what has been going on in the middle east, I check Juan Cole for the definitive word, and today is no exception:
Rush to Western Strike on Syria slows, but does not Stall | Informed Comment

US intelligence agencies released an intercept on Wednesday showing that after the attack, a ministry of defense official made outraged inquiries from a local commander as to what in the world he had done.
The intercept would be consistent with local Baath chem warfare units routinely mixing a little deadly sarin gas into crowd control gas, killing small numbers of rebels with each deployment, but in this case making an error and getting the mix wrong. Thus, around a thousand were killed instead of dozens. British intelligence seems to have come to a similar conclusion
Apparently there are new, Jordanian-trained, guerrilla forces in Rif Dimashq near the capital that account for the local commanders’ panic and desire to forcefully push them back.
The intercept does not prove that Bashar al-Assad knew about or ordered the chemical weapons attack. It does not, however, disprove that the Baath regime has a systematic policy of low level use of chemical weapons.
It does put paid to the crackpot conspiracy theory, advanced by the regime and the Russians, that the rebels gassed themselves.

So if Syria has been using Sarin gas routinely on its rebels, and then inadvertently used too much, then this is behaviour which the world needs to condemn.
Exactly how is still the question, of course, but the rationale is clearer now.
Oh, and Juan also says that there is not yet international support for missile strikes.   But it was news to me that Syria has been "routinely mixing a little deadline sarin gas into crowd control gas" -- and that's a war crime that demands some response
Or else everyone will start doing this.

Round up the usual suspects

At LGM, Scott Lemieux points out that the list of people who want to start a war against Syria are the usual gang of idiots -- Joe Lieberman, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, Dan Senor, Paul Bremer,, Gary Bauer, Norm Coleman and a bunch of other people who thought war with Iraq and Iran were great ideas, too.
As Lemieux puts it:

I’m not 100% sure that military intervention in Syria is wrong.
But it is true that
    1. al-Assad is terrible
    2. ?????
    3. Bomb lots of stuff!
is a terrible argument

At Daily Kos, Meteor Blades summarizes the problem:

People high and low across the political spectrum in the United States keep saying there are no good options in Syria. When that is the case, how is it that bombing gets moved to the head of the queue as one of those options?

A decade ago, Gary Kamiya wrote in Salon about the upcoming war in Iraq:

. . . we have gone from being in a political moment to a historical one.
I use the words somewhat eccentrically, to distinguish between events that are simple enough to be fully explicable ("political") and those that are too complex to be defined ("historical").
The war against Afghanistan took place in what I am calling the political realm: It had a clear, limited and achievable goal, one understood by all -- and widely supported around the world. The impending war against Iraq, on the other hand, is a historical event. It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable.
The distinction also has a moral dimension. To exist in history is to have passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic: politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal.
. . . The lesson every government should have learned from the bloody 20th century, one written in blood across the tortured soil of old, very old Europe, is very simple: Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too abstract, too dangerous. Avoid men with Big Ideas -- especially stupid men with Big Ideas. Take care of politics: let history take care of itself. In a word, don't play God.

Why are you persecuting me?

Amazing, isn't it?
We found out today that the Privy Council Office has been persecuted with 23 FOIA requests from journalists for its paperwork on the Duffy-Wallin scandal but not a word was committed to paper in the PCO about it!
Even though we also found out today that Duffy had to be jollied and threatened into paying back the money by Senator David Tkachuk (formerly chair of the Senate internal economy committee) and Senator Carolyn Stewart Olson:

Tkachuk allegedly told Duffy that if he went along with Wright’s bailout offer, the Senate committee would throw out the residency issue and go easy on him in the audit of his expenses.

But wait, there's more.
Another former member of Harper's office also got into the act.

Harper’s former director of communications, Angelo Persichilli, was also putting pressure on Duffy amid the growing Senate spending scandal.
While Persichilli was awaiting his appointment as a citizenship judge in Toronto, he called Duffy to tell him that the Conservative Party would turn against him if he didn’t repay the money.
Persichilli insisted he acted alone and as a friend when he made that call.
“I was urging him to give the money back, but as a friend,” he told CTV News. “Never, never was I told by anyone from the PMO that I had to talk to Mike Duffy.”

Admittedly, Persichilli had been a journalist and, unlike Wright, likely had been friendly with Duffy over the years.
So perish the thought that he was just following orders!

The press gallery should be embarassed

Dr. Dawg discusses all the pearl-clutching and tut-tutting about the Li Xue Jiang incident at Harper's press conference and also links to David Hill's lengthy piece which explains how the Harper press gallery works.
It's actually sort of embarrassing that grown men and women are acting this way:

...now, the PM’s aides will tell us ahead of time how many questions he intends to take. If the number is four, the journalists who are present — be it outside Rideau Hall or at G8 Summit in Mexico or in a barn at a mine in Northern Quebec — will gather out of earshot of the PM’s aides and decide amongst themselves what topics we wish to quiz the PM about and then figure out who will do the quizzing.... most of the time, the press secretary calls on the names on the list. That did not happen on Friday in northern Quebec. Though the Chinese journalist’s name was on the list, the moderator, Julie Vaux, the deputy director of communications, did not call on that journalist. That was wrong of Vaux and not in keeping with the practice negotiated between journalists and the PMO over the last few years. But the reaction of the journalist – shoving Vaux or pushing any staff around — is also way out-of-bounds. As I mentioned, the tradition is, if you’re getting shut down by the PMO, just start hollering your questions. The PM will almost never answer anyway to a hollered-out question but you will have put your question on the record.

So the press gallery thinks that China People's Daily bureau chief should just have shouted out his question about Canada's policy on foreign investment?  And been ignored.
And that would have done what, exactly?  
As Dawg concludes:

Now the Canadian media are all about telling power to truth—and Li Xue Jiang found this out the hard way. It must have made him a little homesick.

Making prejudice into a Canadian "value"

  
The PQ "values charter" would enshrine religion as a justifiable reason to discriminate against people in Quebec:

it would promote religious segregation by stigmatizing the devoutly religious, explicitly exclude them from employment in the public sector and implicitly encourage discrimination against them in the private sector.
In the particular case of women from minority religious communities, it would promote not the integration into the workforce that would expose them to other values, but their isolation and impoverishment.

The Globe and Mail describes this as "Putinesque". Don MacPherson at the Montreal Gazette calls it as "sinister, ridiculous and pathetic." A Quebec mayor doesn't want the PQ government to "play petty politics on the backs of citizens".
Though in practice it would be virtually unenforceable -- and ultimately the Canadian Supreme Court would throw it out -- the whole country will be tainted by this idiotic charter, just like we were by the Quebec soccer turban ban mess last spring.
Merci beaucoup, Pauline.