Retirement dreams

New year resolutions

The Christmas gift anyone can give -- saying "thanks!"

I usually enjoy reading the various advice columnists around the web, and particularly at this time of year, a lot of the columns are about how difficult it is to buy Christmas presents for their ungrateful, greedy relatives and how awful are the gifts they receive in return -- like this one from Captain Awkward #809: Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh, and Judgement and this one from Carolyn Hax I Hate Christmas.
I have come to the conclusion that there is really just one “gift” we can all give to our nearest and dearest this Christmas and it is this: Be visibly pleased and vocally happy with any present that we receive from them; no matter how awful or inappropriate or ill-fitting it is -- just smile and say “how good of you to think of this” or “it's just what I wanted” or “what a clever idea” or even just “thanks so much for thinking of me”.
 Even if its one of Dr. Grumpy's giant shrimp pillows:

Donald Trump, coward

What the cowardly Donald Trump and his idiot supporters are now saying about Muslims is no different than what the Nazis were saying about Jews just 80 years ago.
Even Dick Cheney thinks Trump is going too far, but Trump won't care.  Trump has seized on the deaths of 14 Americans to make this horrible incident into America's version of the Reichstag fire, an excuse for violent and racist rhetoric.  At its core, of course, is his own profound cowardice, a deep-seated fear of anyone who isn't white.
Rachel Maddow thinks Trump is really just trying to get himself disowned by the Republican party.
No, I don't think he is either that smart or that devious.
He's just gone crazy and he wants to take America with him.
UPDATE:  Yes, they went there:

Great line of the day

Iraq War Do-Over: Lance Mannion writes about how the media really really want to cheerlead for another war in the Middle East:

It's not just the neo-cons who want a do-over on Iraq.
By and large, the American press wanted that war as much as the Bush Leaguers did.
The media cheerled for the invasion. They reported the war as a rolling victory even after it was clear it was far from that.
They propped up the Bush Administration. Tried to sell us on the idea that W. was a great leader. And they'v never really admitted any of it.
Let alone apologized.
And rather than admit they were played for fools and suckers and certainly rather than admit they were glad to play along...
...they're itching for another war. Wars sell newspapers and advertising. Covering wars boosts careers.
It makes desk bound editors and pundits feel like heroes.
And this time out, they think, they'll get it right.
Not that they think they didn’t get it right the first time.

And, like with Iraq, the media has no idea at all exactly where the war should be or who exactly it should be fought against or what the goal should be or how to decide who has won.
They just think Obama should somehow fix in six days what Bush spent six years breaking.

Oh Gawd, here comes "Nannygate"!

I expect any minute now some Canadian media will start using the term "Nannygate". The stupid, it burns!

As the Globe and Mail editorial rather grudgingly admitted, nobody expects the Trudeaus to pay for the gardeners or the cleaners or the housekeepers who look after their official residence. But now I guess the media expects us taxpayers to get all huffy about paying for their child care.

So does Canada want to elect politicians who have children? Well, somebody needs to care for those children, and its fine with me if the taxpayers cover the costs while mom and dad are busy doing the public's business.

I had no problem with Alison Redford taking her daughter with her on trips and doubtless the Harper family also hired nannies for child care when their children were young.  So I see no problem with the Trudeaus taking their children with them when they travel, and a nanny too.  Because no, they're not going to just hire babysitters for the evening through the hotel concierge.

Now we have to listen to the Harper Cons whining about Trudeau's child caregivers --  remember, this is the same bunch saw no problem in billing the public for Harper's haircuts.

Breaking News: Canadians are not stupid

It will be amazing news to our news pundits, but Canadians are not stupid knee-jerk war-mongering pearl-clutching conservatives.
After all the news stories of the last week about how the Paris attacks made Canadians question Trudeau's decision on withdrawal from air attacks in Syria, and after all the blithe assertions I heard that Canadians wouldn't have voted for Trudeau if the attacks had happened before the election, today we find out that Trudeau is more popular than ever.
As of Friday, a week after the Paris attacks, Trudeau is the preferred prime minister for 53 per cent of Canadians. This is his highest level ever, and an increase of three percent since before the attacks. He is way ahead of the other party leaders, and the gap is widening. We also found out today that almost three quarters of Canadians think Trudeau is a good leader, while only a third think this highly of the Harper Cons.

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't

I expect Trudeau realizes that all of the people who are criticizing him for moving too fast on the Syrian refugee promise would turn on a dime and howl in betrayal if he announced he was slowing down.
Damn the torpedos, sir -- full speed ahead!

Great line of the day

The Mound of Sound writes about The Moral War and our new wars of the 21st Century:

All I've garnered out of those studies has led me to formulate a precautionary rule. Don't get into wars that you're not willing to win and, even then, not without knowing how you will win, how long that will take, at what cost, how you will know if you've won and if you've lost, and how you will get out. Those preconditions all sound so reasonable and yet, if applied to our military adventures in the Muslim world since the turn of this century, we would have stayed home.
Forget this bullshit about moral wars for it's the most heinous, most barbaric side that sets that morality bar in these new wars. There's no moral consolation prize that doesn't leave mountains of suffering and dead in its wake.

Emphasis mine.
I hope Trudeau withstands the twin pressures he is under now to continue showing off in the middle east with meaningless Canadian air strikes, while simultaneously running away at home by not admitting as many Syrian refugees as he promised.

Forty years ago the Edmund Fitzgerald was wrecked

Doctor Grumpy in the House: November 10, 1975:

Great line of the day

The Mound of Sound writes about today's story on how the Harper Cons "politicized" the civil service:

The mandarins are running for cover. They failed to stand up to Harper. They chose not to defend the public service over which they presided. They allowed themselves to be intimidated into colluding with a corrupt government. They abandoned their responsibility to the nation and the Canadian people and they now, unforgivably and outrageously, depict themselves as victims.

Yeah -- after ten years of "the Harper government" taking over what used to be The Government of Canada, after years of outrageous firings and resignations, after everyone was so sick and tired of Harper that the country threw him out, NOW the deputy ministers decide to complain about politics affecting the civil service? Give me a break.

I gotta get my life some writers

Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip, October 29, 2015 on GoComics.com:

How shocking!

I'm shocked SHOCKED that Justin Trudeau hasn't yet developed a plan for dealing with the Senate -- several ex-Liberal Senators are apparently feeling a little miffed that, in the nine days since he was elected, Justin hasn't figured out yet exactly what their role will be in his government.

With only a week before Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is to be sworn in, independent Liberal senators say they are being kept in the dark and have no idea how the new government plans to get its legislation through the Senate.
“It’s a great big black hole,” said Senator Jim Munson.

Poor babies, their delicate fee-fees are hurt.
So of course they follow the grand Liberal tradition of running to the media to complain.
Though I would imagine that Trudeau has had just a few other little things on his mind during the last week, like developing a cabinet, building the PMO, moving, making a thousand appointments... oh, and crossing his fingers that his mother doesn't say anything stupid.

So what's our excuse?

Montreal Simon has a great column on The Battle to Liberate Canada and the Betrayal of the MSM where he notes a determined effort on the part of Canadian media to "move on" and just forget all about the Harper years:

This would also be my message to Andrew Coyne, and all the other casual collaborators in the MSM, who would have us move on and forget the Decade of Darkness as if it never happened.
We will NEVER stop writing about that nightmare, until the day the guilty are held accountable for their crimes against Canada.
Until the day we can determine whether Stephen Harper used government departments and the security services as political weapons against his own people.
And of course, until the day we can be sure that his foul legacy is finally buried...

The United States has seen a determined effort to wipe everyone's memory about what happened during the eight Bush years, to the point that the US media was shocked, SHOCKED, this week when Donald Trump reminded everyone that Bush was actually in charge of the American government when America experienced 9/11.
But at least America had 9/11 as an excuse for going mad.
What's Canada's excuse?
Our FPTP electoral system?  That a few people were mad at the Wheat Board, the CTRC, and the long-form census?
And what is the excuse for years and years of craven, cowardly behaviour on the part of dozens and dozens of elected MPs -- all those Con MPs who spent years forelock-tugging, knuckling under, kowtowing to everything that the Hitler Youth in Harper's office told them to do?
I don't know, but I agree with Simon that we'd better keep on talking about what happened.
So it won't ever happen again.

Great line of the day

Michael Harris at iPolitics reminds us of why Harper really lost:

Harper’s downfall, and that of the party he built, had nothing to do with Harper Derangement Syndrome. Nor was it about the machinations of war rooms, whore rooms, evil gurus or a burnt-out lieutenant screaming at her own deckhands as the ship went down — assuming Tory MP Ron Liepert has it right.

It comes down to this: you can’t have a dictatorial liar running a democracy for the benefit of his corporate buddies and expect a country like Canada to tolerate it forever. Canadians ultimately drop the gloves when they come face to face with tyrants — and kick the stuffing out of him. [Emphasis mine]

That is what really happened here. The country really did embrace the “better angels of our nature”, to borrow the phrase Trudeau borrowed from Lincoln. It was more disgusted by than afraid of Stephen Harper.
It didn’t appreciate his lies about what he was doing and why, his degradation of Canadian foreign policy for domestic political gain, his toxic manipulation of information that belonged to everyone, and his vicious mistreatment of anyone who dared to tell him that the sun didn’t orbit around … him.

How ironic is it that his kingdom of secrets, that bubble once hermetically sealed, is now leaking like an old rubber boot. Party brass like Jenni Byrne and Ray Novak at each other’s throats. Ex-PMO lawyer Benjamin Perrin saying the PM had lost the moral authority to govern. Tory Blue Bill Thorsell saying throw the rascals out. And now even pipsqueak MPs daring to unload on the autocrats at CPC headquarters who made their lives a living hell as long as Harper rode the back of the tiger — before he ended up inside.

What scares me? These people still won 99 seats. For some of them, it should have been 99 years.