Pottery Barn Rule

Reading today's news about Iraq -- Obama warns of long-term strikes -- I conclude that the United States is now caught by the Pottery Barn rule -- you broke it, you bought it.

President Barack Obama justified the U.S. military’s return to fighting in Iraq Saturday by saying America must act now to prevent genocide, protect its diplomats and provide humanitarian aid to refugees trapped by Islamic State militants on a mountain ridge near the Syrian border.
“This is going to be a long-term project” that won’t end and can’t succeed unless Iraqis form an inclusive government in Baghdad capable of keeping the country from breaking apart, Obama said at the White House.

As much as they will want to, the United States basically can't just leave Iraq alone anymore -- this artificial construct of a nation with its corrupt central government and divergent, turbulent regions will never be able to withstand attacks from groups like the Islamic State -- and in the unlikely event that they ever do form an inclusive government in Baghdad, then there are still the Kurds and the Iranians and the Syrians and the Saudis all around who will be wanting to pick the bones clean.
I think they're stuck.

Really? Is that all you've got?

Really, Harper Cons? Is this the best you can do? Is this all you've got?

Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney used his parliamentary email account to circulate a Conservative attack on Liberal leader Justin Trudeau over the Liberal leader’s 2011 visit to a mosque in his Montreal riding....
Neither Kenney nor Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, nor Veterans Minister Julian Fantino nor, even, the Prime Minister’s Office or its boosters at Sun Media — who all pushed the same allegations — bothered to note that Trudeau’s visit to the Montreal mosque came in the month before the New York Times reported on the mosque’s alleged al-Qaida link.
Nor did they mention that the Defence Department document quoted by the Times was by then four years old, and based on reports of al-Qaida bad guys who wafted through the mosque in the late 1990s, more than a decade before the honourable member for Papineau popped in...
The Liberals maintain that if the Al-Sunnah Al-Nabawiah mosque really is a training ground for religious extremists, the minister of public safety should probably be doing something about it, rather than using it to score points on the leader of the third party.

Well, I guess the marijuana smears didn't work, and the ads showing Trudeau with his shirt off actually backfired -- no surprise there.
So now we're supposed to be all "oooh, terrorism!"? Ridiculous.

I have a tablet!

So because of my retirement I had to give up my office laptop so I bought one of my own, just another good old lenovo think pad which I'm used to using now.
And I also wanted a colour version of a kindle so I could use it for cookbooks -- I like my paperwhite kindle well enough for reading, but its really no good for cooking or for cooking websites, because its just black and white.
But then I wasn't sure about how flexible the kindle fire would be in Canada in terms of its operating system, so instead I bought a little Google Nexus 7 Tablet and do I ever like it!
We both miss the IT departments we used to have at work, so we are dealing with a small local company that basically does the same stuff as the IT department used to do for us -- buys the hardware, installs the software, and gets everything set up the way we want it, and answers any questions we have.
Next step is to figure out how to use my phone as a wireless hotspot for the tablet.  And I'm thinking about getting something that will connect us to Netflix, though there's already more stuff on TV than we have time to watch anyway.
I am appalled to realize that I have four -- count 'em, FOUR -- email addresses now.  And I had to buy an address book just to keep track of all my logins and passwords.
When us baby boomers start dying off, there will be millions and millions of lost webpages and email accounts that nobody will have the passwords to access.
Oh well, I won't care....

Memories

Dr. Grumpy has a post titled Memories... about the lessons he learned when his father helped a stranger one day.

It reminded me of one of my own most distinct memories of my mother:

She was at the bus stop downtown one day when a woman with a young child started to cry. The woman told Mom that she had left her purse on a bus and had no money to get home and she couldn't think of anything to do except to check on every bus that came to the bus stop to see if her purse had been found.

My Mom immediately gave her $20 for a cab home, and made sure she had a key to get into her house.

Later that day the woman and her husband came over to my Mom and Dad's house to return the $20 -- the husband was overcome with gratitude that a total stranger would help his family, and he gave my mom a "praying hands" figurine.

A year later, when my mom was dying of cancer, that figurine was one reminder for her that her life had been meaningful, that she had made a difference.

She died almost 40 years ago, and I still miss her.

Shorter

Shorter President Obama on why the United States "tortured some folks' after 911:

When the going gets tough, how could anyone expect America's leaders to respect its Constitution?

Of course, what Obama doesn't mention is that they had a President who was telling people to go shopping, and a Vice-President who gleefully set up his own CIA to run the country, and a National Security Adviser who never gave a second's thought to national security and a Secretary of Defense who was hellbent on starting wars. No wonder Americans were scared.

Saturday funnies

To start your Saturday, here's some goat balancing fun:

Chèvres en équilibre - goats balancing on a flexible steel ribbon - YouTube:

Whose job is it to play by the rules?

Here's one thing that I don't blame former Alberta Premier Alison Redford for doing -- taking her daughter with her on many of her government flights was the right thing to do.  This is kind of thing any parent SHOULD do, and we should expect it when we elect people with children to public office.
Now obviously, there was a serious attitude problem here, a inflated and egotistical sense of entitlement by Redford and her office staff which lead to deliberate and gleeful abuse of their access to government flights.
But here's the other thing -- a political studies professor also blames the civil service, and that goes too far:

Lightbody, the political scientist, said many people within Redford's office and various ministries would have known about the "blatant abuse" of government aircraft, yet no one spoke out publicly.
"These are people who work for the citizens of Alberta, and someone, sometime, somehow, should have said, 'No, this is wrong,'" Lightbody said."

Yes, these civil servants are paid by the public, but they don't work for them.
I've worked in the civil service, and I know.  It wasn't "the public" who were in charge of my workload and my paycheque -- it was the politicians who were elected by the public to be my boss, to tell me what to do.
Civil servants did not have any ability at all to stop Redford's abuse, just as none of the staff working for the Senate could have stopped Duffy, or Brazeau, or Wallin -- as taxpayers, we should not expect civil servants to be doing this.
The people we elect are the ones to blame here, for feeding their own sense of entitlement to the point that they didn't even recognize how unethical their behaviour had became.

Shorter

Shorter Mark Levin:

John Baird and Stephen Harper are my new BFFs!

Its nice to know our Canadian leaders are so popular abroad!
Who is Mark Levin? Well, here's how Media Matters describes him:

Levin is known for his inflammatory commentary, including the recent claim that the "key" to a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016 would be "her genitalia." He has also accused Obama of abusing children, compared marriage equality to incest, polygamy, and drug use, compared supporters of the Affordable Care Act to Nazi "brown shirts," and advocated for Obama to be impeached

Prince of a fellow!  He should fit right in with the Harper Cons.

My tweets about Duffy

Today's Duffy news about the personal trainer and the makeup artist etc is just a gift to Twitter. Here's my contribution:

I guess Duffy needed a fitness instructor because he wasn't fit to be in office! #duffyrimshot #cdnpoli
— Cathie from Canada (@CathieCanada) July 22, 2014

Being Duffy's fitness instructor is like being appointed to the Senate. You have a job for life! #duffyrimshot #cdnpoli
— Cathie from Canada (@CathieCanada) July 22, 2014

Laundering money for ineligible expenses through a phoney contract? SOP #duffyrimshot #cdnpoli
— Cathie from Canada (@CathieCanada) July 22, 2014

The catfight meme

Digby wants Elizabeth Warren to run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president because she wants to see:

two intelligent, accomplished women stand for president and debate the issues

Unfortunately, I think the rest of the Washington pundits want Warren to run just to so they can create a "catfight" meme to chatter about endlessley.
The thing is, they all seem to think that Clinton is a secret right-winger. In terms of foreign policy, maybe. But in terms of domestic policy, I think Clinton will prove to be more progressive than just about everybody.
When she ran for president seven years ago, Clinton knew she would have to fight Republicans tooth and nail to get anything progressive done, but she was committed to fighting them. It took Obama years to realize that Republicans were never going to let him be the kind of bipartisan president he had wanted to be.
Personally, I can hardly wait to see what Hillary will accomplish as president.

Putin will be the loser

Yesterday Josh Marshall called the Malaysia Airlines disaster a game changer for Vladimir Putin:

For months Putin has been playing with fire, making trouble and having it work mainly to his advantage. Certainly in the context of Russian history and nationalist aspiration reclaiming the Crimea is a vast accomplishment. But the whole thing blew up in his face today in a way, and with repercussions I don't think - even with all wall to wall coverage - we can quite grasp.
Find extremists and hot-heads of the lowest common denominator variety, seed them with weaponry only a few militaries in the world possess - and, well, just see what happens. What could go wrong?

Today the same gang of idiots are shooting at the investigators who are trying to reach the plane crash site.
Andrew Sullivan writes:

If Russia is directly involved in this way, it seems to me that Putin has now over-reached in such a way that all but destroys what’s left of his foreign policy.
And Josh Marshall’s right that the spectacle of Russian cluelessness, amateurism and recklessness could be the worst news of all for Putin. If there’s one thing a neofascist Tsar cannot afford it’s the appearance of incompetence and chaos.

Of course its political!

What's the point of being in power if you can't use government agencies to target and harass your enemies?
It's a time-honoured political tradition around the world, and now it's come to Canada.

The NDP is calling for an independent probe into the Canada Revenue Agency's targeting of some Canadian charities for their political activities.
In a letter Wednesday to Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay, the party says the alleged misuse of tax agency audits against political opponents of the government is muzzling charities and draining them financially.
...A Canadian Press investigation reported that the tax agency has stepped up its probes of charities for their political activities, well beyond a first wave of audits of key environment groups that challenge the government's energy policies.
International aid groups, anti-poverty organizations and human-rights agencies have also been swept up in the net, with some 52 political-activity audits now in progress.
An initial budget of $8 million set out in the 2012 budget has grown to $13 million, and political-activity audits are being made a permanent part of the Canada Revenue Agency's work.
Asked for comment on the NDP letter Wednesday, Findlay's office provided a week-old statement that itself repeated the minister's talking points in the House of Commons: "CRA audits occur at arm's length from the government and are conducted free of any political interference."
Some charities report that the audits are driving up their legal bills, to more than $100,000 in one case, as they consult lawyers to represent their case to the tax agency. Some audits have dragged on for more than two years with no end in sight.

Mere coincidence? Ha, ha, it is to laugh.
We all know that there's a long-standing conservative meme that environmental organizations, anti-poverty groups, social justice charities, international aid NGOs and welfare agencies are all just secret fronts for traitorous evil leftists -- being reality-based, of course these organizations have a liberal bias.
The Harper Cons already know how much of their own support at the polls is coming from conservative-aligned groups like the ethical oil, right-to-lifers and evangelical churches.  So it would also be an article of faith that the leftie organizations must be secretly abusing the nation's charity rules to shill for the Libs and the NDP and the Greens.
The Harper Cons would never believe that their opponents would play by the rules, because they don't themselves, as Carol Goar notes in the Toronto Star:

Many of the “political activity” audits launched by CRA since 2012 were triggered by complaints from Ethical Oil, a lobby group with strong ties to the Harper government and the petroleum sector. This is a departure for CRA. Unlike the random audits it has always conducted — approximately 900 a year — the new ones are susceptible to external direction, compromising the fairness and professionalism in which the tax department has always taken pride.

It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out the whole strategy of targeting left-wing charities and dragging out audits was just another sleazy political tactic from the Harper PMO.

Zombie Lies

Bill Maher SLAMS Republican & Fox News Zombie Lies About Obama - YouTube:



Via

Tweet of the day

she has a point pic.twitter.com/NKVAcIoxFo

— (@Dory) July 12, 2014

Today's cheap shots

Two cheap shots noted today:
The Harper Cons wouldn't approve a helicopter tour of the Manitoba flood zones by the Leader of the Opposition:

Brig. Gen. Christian Juneau, commander of the third Canadian Division, had agreed to the tour, subject to approval by Defence Minister Rob Nicholson.
But late Tuesday, Mulcair said he was informed by Nicholson's office that his tour had been vetoed.

And Toronto's buffoon-who-thinks-he-is-a-mayor Rob Ford refused to stand and applaud the Toronto citizens who organized the WorldPride event.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford refused to explain today why he remained seated while city council gave a standing ovation to organizers of the recent WorldPride festival.
He did not answer questions from reporters outside his office about why he didn't stand along with fellow councillors, but said he's not homophobic.

Yeah, sure.