Better beware those Quakers!

So I finish my previous post and then I see this story, which exactly illustrates the increasing US hostility toward civil liberties.
Raw Story has an explosive scoop about how the National Secutiry Agency mounted a massive spy op on a Baltimore peace group Here's some of what they did:

. . . According to an NSA email dated July 4, 2004, the agency collected license numbers and descriptions and the number of people in each car and filed a report about them gathering in a church parking lot for the demonstration. NSA agents also logged their travel to the demonstration, including stopping as a gas station along the way. A canine dog unit was used to search a minivan when it was stopped on the way to the demonstration - nothing was found. NSA officials even reported on the balloons being inflated for the demonstration and the content of their signs . . . Extensive plans are described for the day of the Oct. 4, 2004 demonstration . . . NSA planned to have their Weapons of Mass Destruction Rapid Response Team on site, an officer with a shotgun, an increase in the number of officers, mobile units monitoring the highway and parking lot, roving patrols on bicycles in various areas, four K9 handlers, agents to provide counter-surveillance, aerial observations by the . .. police and photography/video surveillance of the activities. "The NSA Weapons of Mass Destruction Rapid Response Team will have a limited staffing on hand to support the event," Talbert's memo reads. "...County Police will be requested to provide aerial observations" . . . Allwine also discussed how the Pledge has been infiltrated. She described a March 20, 2003 demonstration in downtown Baltimore where "a provocateur (whom we had identified at our planning meeting the previous night) joined us. We'd never seen him before. . . during the die-in at the federal courthouse, he was taunting the police in a violent manner. We had to quiet him down, he then disappeared and we never saw him again - and, of course, he wasn't arrested with the other 49 of us." The monitoring is ongoing. Allwine says that at demonstrations the police "have had cookies and drinks set up for us (we don't partake!) and tell us they knew we were coming."

And all this organization and effort is for just one little group. Imagine how many thousands of law-enforcement hours are being spend doing this across the US.

Writing on the walls

Several bloggers, and commenters on this blog, aren't happy with Martin's promise to amend the constitution. Basically, their argument seems to be that the constitution was approved with the notwithstanding clause, perhaps even because of the notwithstanding clause, so it is just not right to change it.
But I believe times have changed.
Thanks to 9/11 and George Bush, rights and freedoms are much more at risk now from politicians than they were 30 years ago. When that clause was passed, it was believed that politicians would not abuse it. They wouldn't dare -- we thought then that any politician who tried to use the clause to roll back a minority's civil rights would be thrown out of office by an enraged electorate. But not anymore.
The writing is on the wall. The increasingly fascist society just south of us is promoting a hostile attitude toward civil rights of all kinds -- we see their 'enemy combatants', and Guantanamo, and wiretapping without warrants, and finding excuses for torture, and demonizing gay people through their anti-gay marriage amendments, and 'intelligent design' and targetting judges and university professors and 'liberals'. With at least three more years of the Bush administration, the attack on civil rights will be even worse than it is now.
Martin reads the writing on the wall, too.
These US attitudes are spreading across the border. The people who are against gay marriage in Canada are prejudiced fanatics who are inspired by people in the US like James Dobson and Pat Robertson to keep on fighting. And they're not even ashamed of it! These aren't people who wear sheets -- they are proud of their determination to legalize prejudice against gay people.
If the notwithstanding clause is available to people like this, they just might be successful someday in using it.
I know the notwithstanding clause was brought in because people didn't quite trust the Canadian Supreme Court not to be too radical.
But if I have to chose between trusting my civil rights to the Supreme Court or to Elsie Wayne and Stephen Harper, I'll chose the Court, thank you very much.

Swiftboating Martin

I checked out the Liberals attack ads at the Liberal website and they are pretty strong. But its worth making one point -- the Liberal ads attack political decisions that Harper has made since he became active in federal politics. As such, they raise legitimate questions about his political judgement and his political beliefs.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, are attacking Martin on personal grounds, for what his shipping company may or may not have done years ago.
So while the Liberals are doing political attacks, the Conservatives are doing personal attacks. I think there is a difference. The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth attacked John Kerry's character and personal integrity with lies and manufactured accusations -- is this a tactic the Conservatives here think is appropriate to use in Canadian politics? Rove of the North strikes again!
And by the way, Stephen, who DID you get money from for your leadership campaign?

I think Martin did it

It was a brilliant move, both strategic and meaningful.
Martin grabbed the headlines from tonight's debate by his announcement that he wanted to dump the "notwithstanding" clause. Here's the CBC headline:Martin says he would ban notwithstanding clause
And here's the CTV headline: Martin vows to end federal notwithstanding clause
And Canadian Press: Martin targets Harper in debate, vows to end federal notwithstanding clause.
Not only did he get the headlines, but he got them with an issue that truly represents the basic difference between Liberals and Conservatives.
Lets review: the most offensive thing Harper is doing in this campaign is playing politics with Canadian rights -- and sneering at Canadian gays -- by encouraging the wingnuts in his party to think they can repeal same-sex marriage. And he keeps lying to Canadians by saying that he wouldn't implement a repeal by using the notwithstanding clause, when in reality this is the ONLY say such a repeal could be done.
So for Martin, its the perfect issue for the last two weeks of the campaign. Ending the notwithstanding clause demonstrates to Canadians that Martin is totally serious about making sure our rights are protected -- while reminding people just how far apart he and Harper are on basic values.
As for the rest of the debate, I thought Martin generally did better than I expected. Harper did pretty well, too, though he lost it a couple of times. Duceppe had a complete meltdown -- about a third of the time, I couldn't understand what he was talking about when he was babbling about long-forgotten incidents or insults. Layton was overall good, too, though he got pretty preachy by the end.
And I liked the format -- it was spirited but controlled, no one was yelling or out-shouting the other, and I think just about everybody got their chance to state their case and reply to the other one's points. I thought the moderator did a very good job -- his questions didn't pull any punches and yet were asked in a respectful tone.
And sometimes, often for several tantilizing minutes in a row, we saw rational discouse break out -- four intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable men engaging in a vigorous discussion about the future of the country. Only in Canada, you say? Pity!

No sunshine

Gad -- what terrible news: Conservatives surge ahead of Liberals in new poll
Well, I suppose it is worth noting that this is a tracking poll -- according to what I read during the American election, tracking polls can indicate direction but daily polls shouldn't necessarily be relied on for absolute numbers. Therefore it may not turn out to be true that the Conservatives are actually that much more popular than the Liberals. But certainly the trend is Conservatives up, Liberals and NDP down.
Damn!
I think people don't anticipate how bad the Conservatives will be.
And I guess people don't appreciate how good the Liberals have been. We not only have balanced budgets, we have social programs and development programs which are the envy of the world. We have a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic society which cares for people. Today's Conservatives neither appreciate nor support the kind of Canada which the Liberals have created, and that I love.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.
Only darkness every day.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone and this house just ain't no home. Anytime she goes away.

No limits

I saw this Guardian story this morning about the Guantanamo prisoners being force fed in Iraq, and it was so appalling I couldn't write about it.

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.
They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer . . . It is painful, [Dr.] Edmonson admits. Although 'non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,' including opiates such as morphine, have had to be administered. Thick, 4.8mm diameter tubes tried previously to allow quicker feeding, so permitting guards to keep prisoners in their cells for more hours each day, have been abandoned, the affidavit says. The new 3mm tubes are 'soft and flexible' . . . a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees . . . Although some prisoners have had to be tied down while being force-fed, 'only one patient' has had to be immobilised with a six-point restraint, and 'only one' passed out. 'In less than 10 cases have trained medical personnel had to use four-point restraint in order to achieve insertion.' Edmondson claims the actual feeding is voluntary. During Ramadan, tube-feeding takes place before dawn. . . .
Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe through their membership of the American Medical Association, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances. Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth's hospital in Birmingham, is co-ordinating opposition to the Guantánamo doctors' actions from the international medical community. 'If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,' he said.

Now I have two points to make.
First, there is the aspect which Digby points out in his post called Sickness:

Someday, US Army grunts and innocent Americans with no operational information are going to be held captive by another country and that country is going to use the same rationale for imprisoning and tormenting them indefinitely. And the people who do it will eventually go to the ninth circle of hell and join George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they scream into the void for eternity about how they had to become sadistic monsters in order to prove they weren't afraid.

Second, there is this story. Robert X. Cringely wrote this just after Bush got reelected in 2004:

If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain't us.
Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.
I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.
Welcome to the New Morality.

And America thinks they will eventually break the will of these hunger-striking Guantanamo inmates by forcing tubes down their throats? I think the inmates are now in charge of the assylum.

Turning Iraq into the Ghetto

US troops in Iraq have found one technique that apparently reduces the number of hit-and-run attacks on US troops -- constructing guarded walls around towns so that insurgents cannot use them as bases.
Not surprisingly, the Iraqis don't like having to go through checkpoints whenever they leave or enter their home: "the imam at the village mosque compared the constant watch envisaged under the new plan to a concentration camp. "
You know, Bush always tries to draw the analogy that Iraq is like World War II (himself as Rooseveldt spreading democracy, ridding the world of evil, and all that). I always thought this was a dumb analogy, but now I wonder -- does anyone remember the Warsaw Ghetto?

Weekend update

So, to sum up the situation so far:
The Conservatives' loyal supporters are going to try to outlaw gay marriage, and make abortion illegal again (thanks to A BCer in Toronto for finding this one.) And in their first budget, they would raise our income taxes.
The Liberals support gay marriage, and they support letting a woman decide whether ot not to get an abortion. And they would maintain the income tax reduction.
Hmmm....for me, the choice is pretty clear. And its NOT Foreign minister Stockwell Day or Justice minister Vic Toews.
By the way, if Harper goes down in this election, here's the news story that will be marked as the beginning of the end: Harper plays his age card:

Stephen Harper says unlike his retirement-age chief rival, his relative youth means he can relate to the average Canadian and is in touch with the country's needs. Harper highlighted the age gap between himself [he is 46] and Prime Minister Paul Martin [67] yesterday while revisiting his day-care announcement . . . "Laureen and I, obviously we're from a middle-class background, and our experience with child care is fairly recent and it's in the modern era. Every leader brings different experiences to this job. I'm still considerably younger than any of the leaders competing in this campaign."

Great, Stephen -- you just insulted every Canadian over the age of 50 by implying that we are all old-fashioned, practically senile, while also reminding everybody about your own profound lack of experience running anything.

Airs above the ground

Beautiful.
Looking through Yahoo's photos this week, I found this one of a horse and trainer from the Spanish Alvaro Domecq Riding School (photo taken at Muscat, Oman, during their annual equestrian show for AFP by Mohammed Mahjoub). It reminded me that my sister and I went to see the the Lipizzaner stallions tour this summer and we enjoyed it very much. We had seats right at ringside so we got a sense of how powerful these horses are and how highly skilled their trainers must be to teach the horses the "airs above the ground". I was surprised at how much the horses seemed to appreciate the applause and cheers they got during their performances.

A word for our times -- truthiness

truthiness: the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

The American Dialect Society has selected "truthiness" to be its Word of the Year. First said by that noted Daily Show linguist Steven Colbert, the word is one for our times -- the news story announcing the award quotes North Carolina State professor Michael Adams defining truthiness as "truthy, not facty." He continues "The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts. Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going make much progress."
Here are some of the other new words I liked:

brown-out: the poor handling of an emergency.
disaster industrial complex: the array of businesses which make profit from by providing emergency services, especially those that result from no-bid government contracts.
lifehack: to make one’s day-to-day behaviors or activities more efficient.
whale tail: the appearance of thong or g-string underwear above the waistband of pants, shorts, or a skirt. Also known as a longhorn.
muffin top: the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans.
man date: when two heterosexual men engage in an activity together without romantic implications.
pope-squatting: registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it.
Ex-Lax option: immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
holistic practitioner: a prostitute.
VBIED: a car bomb. An acronym for Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. Sometimes pronounced vee-bid or vee-bidder.
jump the couch: to exhibit strange or frenetic behavior. Inspired by the couchbouncing antics of Tom Cruise on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show.
Cyber Monday: the Monday after Thanksgiving, purported to be the day that most online shopping takes place.
folksonomy: a taxonomy created by an ad hoc group of non-experts. From folk + ta(x)onomy.

Click here to see all the nominees(pdf).

This woman makes me gag

Elsie Wayne is back, and leading the fight against same-sex marriage. Here are a few choice quotes from this news story:

"Look at the future for our young people, for heaven's sake. What kind of message are we sending to them? It's no wonder George Bush doesn't want to do business with Canada anymore. I don't blame him. At least he has moral standards." . . . Wayne says she is convinced a national referendum on the marriage question would produce overwhelming support for the traditional definition. "We have a lot of people in this country who are for marriage being between a man and woman and nothing else," she says. "The fact of the matter is that Paul Martin just listened to a few loudmouths on this issue. He hasn't listened to Canadians."

What complete bullsh*t. Will anything other than a vote for the Liberals shut this woman up?

Harper: "Read my lips -- more new taxes!"

Martin knew if he waited long enough, Harper wouldn't be able to stop himself -- he just has to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

Late last year, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's staff told CBC Online the Conservatives would let the [Liberal] tax cuts stand if they win the election. But the Conservatives called CBC this week to say that while they would allow the Liberal tax cut to stand for last year . . . they intend to immediately raise personal income taxes if they are elected later this month. The Conservatives say a Stephen Harper government would raise the rate on the lowest tax bracket back from 15 per cent back to 16 per cent in their first budget, probably in April. As well, the basic exemption, income on which no tax is charged, would be dropped by $400 in the same budget. A Tory official acknowledged to CBC News that would likely mean taking back the money taxpayers are saving on their paycheques for the first four months of this year.

Oh, and here's the kicker:

The Tories refused to be interviewed on camera for the story.

Emphasis mine.

And if the Conservatives would backtrack on this promise, what about all the other Liberal/NDP spending programs of the last 18 months, for cities and infrastructure and Aboriginals and health care? Harper said at the time that he wouldn't pull the rug out from under these programs if he was elected (which, I must say, I did not believe at the time). But is he now going to change these promises retroactively?

So now Harper can play defense for a while.
And I note that even the press is now getting a little tired of seeing the RCMP apparently running against Martin -- the latest story is that the RCMP is now going around interviewing people on whether a portion of a $4 million grant given by Heritage Canada to a federalist group during the 1995 referundum campaign was properly accounted for, an issue which then-minister Sheila Copps told CBC had been looked at by the Auditor General ten years ago.
So, OK -- everybody into the pool!
Should we also see if we can't get the RCMP to re-open an investigation into Mulroney and Airbus or whatever that crock was all about? And why stop there? Lets rehash the NDP's Spudco scandal in Saskatchewan that cost us $34 million. . .

Think about it

Paul Wells writes:

. . . here's an ad I'd run this weekend, if I was a Grit and seriously worried I was about to lose big:
Blank black screen. Type appears across screen as deep, urgent voice reads text:
'Foreign Minister Stockwell Day'
Screen darkens: relights on Liberal logo; bright woman's voice reads:
'On January 23, Vote Liberal.'
I figure that would be good for about a five-point swing all by itself.

Ah, yes, what a concept.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Anyone who thinks "Darwinism" is "just a theory" can read this and weep.
This NYT article "DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution" uses that old "E" word - evolution -- without a blink or a demur.
And the story is such a fascinating one -- it would be a pretty dull story to attribute the cat to so-called "intelligent design", AKA "creationism", compared to what really happened:

About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska . . . Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.
This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species . . . Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness . . . [the research team]has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa. Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.
The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.
Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New . . .

Even the most deeply religious person should be able to see the hand of God in such a fascinating history.
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Thanks to Americablog for highlighting this story.)

Another great cat story

Meet "Miracle"

who clung under an SUV for 60 miles (100 KM) down the New Jersey Turnpike, until another driver spotted her and got the SUV stopped.