Gonzo bulls--t!

I hate this kind of gonzo reporting.
Sun media is trumpeting to a breathless public that "Federal justice department employees have played fast and loose with travel and hospitality rules and cost taxpayers a bundle, an internal audit reveals"
This isn't true at all. Its an inflated story manufactured to embarass the government and a bunch of civil servants who have done virtually nothing wrong.
Here's the actual report Travel and Hospitality - March 2005. The auditors reviewed 331 travel expense claims from a two year period, and found 4 (that's right, four) where the civil servants submitted incorrect claims for personal travel combined with business travel, and one or two where there was some kind of fraud -- the report notes that a civil servant has been fired. Oh, yeah, and there were a few instances where the travel permission form wasn't filled out in quite as much detail as Treasury Board requires, like sometimes it didn't specify the exact kind of air travel authorized, and sometimes the form didn't explain why a government-approved hotel had not been used. The report also notes in its Introduction, however, that the these travel claims are mostly small beer:

. . . a large percentage of the Department's travel transactions are small. For example, in the two fiscal years 2002–2003 and 2003–2004, on average, approximately 70 percent of travel that was classified as Travel–Public Servants was for claims of $500 or less. Similarly, over the same two fiscal years, approximately 85 percent of departmental hospitality claims were for $500 or less.

Its too bad nobody bothered to read the report before writing this story. At least the story admits, rather grudginly, that the department cut its travel expenses in half from 2002-03 to 2003-04, though apparently saving us taxpayers $6 million a year isn't deserving of any credit.

Accident update

Well, so for the last 18 months we've been planning this trip to Britain -- my first time ever overseas, going with my husband and sister and brother to see the Crufts dog show, spend St. Patricks day in Dublin, plus see London and Edinburgh. Trip of a lifetime and we were supposed to leave next Wednesday.
So today my doctor tells me that its not likely that I will be well enough to go -- I still have pain in my chest from the broken ribs, and in my neck from whiplash, I cannot sleep for more than about three hours at a time, I am still using Tylenol #3s, my knee is still bunged up so I cannot walk very well, and I still have enough problems with edema in my legs that I might not be able to tolerate the flight either.
But, but, but...
So my sister and brother are likely going to go anyway, but my husband and I will likely stay behind -- we have to use the airmiles by next August, so hopefully we'll go somewhere by then, maybe still to Britain if we can.
And yes, I'm happy to be alive and that it wasn't worse and all that, and as my husband said, England will still be there even if we cannot get to it until later. But damnit all anyway, I had PLANS...
When I broke my leg ten years ago, I remember lying there in the hospital, and I had this vision that somewhere my real life was still going on, and that even though I had taken this sudden detour sideways, somewhere there was another Me, the Real Me, who was going on with life as usual.
So I now see, next Wednesday, the Real Me getting on that plane and flying off to a wonderful holiday in England -- leaving me behind.

Ideas that kill people

Odd, isn't it -- when we look at history, the "idea" is frequently blamed for bloodshed and mayhem -- I'm thinking about the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, when catholics fought protestants, and various kinds of protestants fought each other, and it was pretty clear that the basic cause of the conflict was their differing ideas of God. And likewise in the 20th century, when fascism fought democracy, and when communism fought capitalism. Nobody had any problems with the concept that some ideas are proven to be right by history, while others are proven to be wrong.
So what is so different now about the loss of the war in Iraq? It was a bad idea in the first place and lots of people said it was a bad idea -- illegal, for one thing, because the US didn't even dare ask the Security Council to vote on the war for fear that not only would the war be vetoed, they wouldn't even get a majority in favour -- and immoral, a war which caused more people around the world to march against it than any other war in world history.
And even now, the pro-war neocons refuse to accept that their idea was wrong. Digby sums up the neocon narrative:

. . . neocon shills like Kristol will soothe the rubes with tales of how the Bush administration tied the military's hands. If they'd have let them go they could have gotten the job done in a couple of weeks. We could have bombed em back into the stone age if necessary. After all, everything turned out just great with Japan and Germany. But, no. They wouldn't let our brave men and women get the job done. (Of course you can't blame them too much. It was the dominant Democrat hippies who made them do it.)
It gives the Republicans a good excuse to run on 'restoring honor' to the country. The rubes eat it up and get all excited about proving ourselves in the next war. A war we must fight for freedom and democracy, of course. Because we're so good . . .

Darn it, yes, the United States is good. But this war was bad, and now its broken and no one knows how to fix it.

Revising history before its even written

It is both outrageous and ridiculous that American wingnuts are blaming the loss of the war in Iraq on Democrats and liberals -- who didn't want to go to war in the first place, and have been in charge of absolutely nothing since six months before the war even started.
But I guess the wingnuts will soon learn how it feels -- Iran is going to blame the Iraq civil war on America and Israel, instead of on Al Quaeda. And there is nothing that will change this perception among Muslims. From Iraq Dispatches: Who Benefits?:

"Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims, saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni. Any measure to contribute to that direction is helping the enemies of Islam and is forbidden by sharia." Instead, he blamed the intelligence services of the U.S. and Israel for being behind the bombs at the Golden Mosque.

Living deja vu

I'm living my life in reverse. When did someone hit the rewind switch?
Battles I had in my 20s an 30s, which I thought were settled, done-with, bought-the-tshirt OVER, I find myself fighting again.
Yesterday, it was abortion. Today, it's women's rights -- ie, this column about how society would be better off if women stayed home with their kids instead of running off to be lawyers or engineers or, I suppose, columnists. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Tomorrow, I suppose I'll be reading something about how women shouldn't complain about doing all the housework because, after all, its just so important that the family laundry be done really well.
Well, I was going to write some sort of brilliant reply to Cohen but then I ran out of energy -- have to wax the kitchen taps this afternoon, as well as crocheting my spring wardrobe, so I just don't have time...

Weekend open thread

And I just couldn't resist this photo.
By the way, I haven't done an accident update lately so here it is: slowly healing. It is taking a lot longer than I ever thought, but the ribs are healing now and the swelling in my legs is going down and the bruises are fading. The knee is still sore when I move it, particularly when I stand up, but the doctor says we'll see in a couple of months if that has improved because if not then I would need arthroscopic surgery for which there is a nine month waiting list anyway.

Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...

This story on the Libby request for intelligence briefing materials notes that

the judge . . . is concerned that Libby's request could 'sabotage' the case because President Bush probably will invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports. 'If the executive branch says, 'This is too important to the welfare of the nation and we're not going to comply,' the criminal prosecution goes away.'

Well, duhhh -- that's exactly the point.
Libby and the White House are engaged in a complicated little dance here -- trying to get the judge to agree that Libby needs some particular classifed document for his defense, which then the White House can refuse to turn over, so that the prosecution falls apart.
And then everybody says, Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...

Thank you so, so much

Women will be so thankful.
The Associated Press story about the South Dakota abortion ban quotes a woman named Leslee Unruh, president of a Sioux Falls pregnancy counseling agency, who said that most of the 800 abortions which are presently being performed annually in South Dakota were simply "conveniences", that most South Dakota women wanted the state to ban abortion, and many who have had abortions "wish someone would have stopped them."
You see, we women just don't know what's best for us -- it will be so wonderful when women in the United States show the way to the rest of us by losing the right to make their own decision on abortion. And we'll be ever so grateful -- yes, we will -- when we are stopped from making our own decisions and instead we have to go crawling into some hospital committee for permission to have an abortion if we can convince them that continuing the pregnancy will kill us -- before it actually does. And we'll all be so thankful that someone will control our bodies for us since obviously we cannot control ourselves and we have sex and all that evil stuff...

Great line of the day

From Hullabaloo, Tristero writes a letter:

Dear God,
Please deliver us from the hideous locust plague of conservative pseudo-intellectuals. Sinners we may be in Thine eyes, and unworthy of thy Divine Love, but Jesus Kee-rist! Cut us some friggin' slack, already! Fire and brimstone, eternal damnation, I ain't gonna argue with you. But, seriously, God, we really don't deserve any more Fukuyamas, y'know? So ease up.
Please.
Love,
Tristero

And that's what its all about

So I'm flipping through websites thinking about blogging about something, but its all just so damned depressing - civil war in Iraq and the Bush administration screwing up and the hockey team melting down and on and on, when I find this posted by susanhu at Booman:

. . . Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote 'The Hokey Pokey,' died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started . . .

Men just don't understand

Of course the BC finance minister spent $600 on a pair of shoes. If you want an economy, you have to pay for it.

What Canada is all about

This is what Canada is all about:

Canadian soldiers sent an Afghan boy with a massive tumour on his face to a cancer hospital in Pakistan early Thursday morning, where he will likely live out his final days in a little less pain . . Touched by the boy's cries of pain and knowing a modern cancer hospital exists in Pakistan, Cpl. Brian Sanders, an ambulance driver at the camp, contacted his church in Edmonton to see if it could help. The North Edmonton Christian Fellowship church raised $10,000 Sunday morning, with money still flowing in after news reports publicized Namatullah's case . . .

We can't save them all, but we still do what we can to save some.

Great line of the day

Here is Dibgy on The Trifecta: "If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three."

"When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!"

Seeing this story about people getting arrested for selling guerrilla t-shirts reminded me that my son said I should check out this website -- T-Shirt Hell, which sells shirts with slogans like "When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!" and "Dumbledore dies on page 596. I just saved you 4 hours and $30" and "I'm not getting jiggy, I have Parkinson's" and "You'll regret reading this shirt when the sketch artist asks you to describe my face", and a baby's t-shirt that reads "Now that I'm safe, I'm pro-choice" .

Grotesque Guantanamo nonsense

Here are some nonsesical quotes from a New York Times article describing the grotesque force-feeding at Guantnamo of hunger strikers:

Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false stories as propaganda . . . Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment." . . . General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes . . . Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try to break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and causing stress for the medical staff.

So its just a little bit stressful for the poor staff, is it, who have to strap prisoners into restraint chairs and repeatedly force those colour-coordinated feeding tubes down their throats while the prisoners are bleeding and vomiting and urinating and defecating all over the place? But of course, all those terrorists prisoners are just lying about how awful it all is, except for the hundreds who are innocent, I guess. But they don't think they're really force-feeding anyone, just "providing nutritional supplementation" and its all so "voluntary" that people are choosing the colour of their feeding tube -- which sort of begs the question of why the staff are finding it all so stressful.
Just how stupid does the American military think people are, that they would believe all this tripe?
Or how delusional are these military people themselves?