No fops allowed

The Daily Howler is getting set to explore the question of why conservatives outshine liberals in the US spin wars. Howler writes "Why do liberals fail in our nation's spin wars? Over the weekend, we thought about that problem as we watched Woody Allen's Interiors . . . As we watched, we were mainly struck by the self-involved foppishness of all the central characters . . . right to this day, liberal interests have often been fronted by these very same foppish folk, by the deracinated Manhattan types who thought Interiors showcased great tragedy—the tragedy of a “mediocre novelist” who is furious because his wife, “an embittered poet,” gets better reviews than he does. Why do conservatives often do better in the nation’s endless spin wars? In part, it’s because liberal interests are often promoted by a wide array of self-involved fops."
Reading this, it struck me that we simply do not have this problem in Canada -- here, everybody speaks up.
We frequently see Chantal Hebert and Alan Gregg and Andrew Coyne and Rex Murphy on The National, articulating leftish and rightish views; we watch Harper and Martin and Layton in Question Period. We read Rick Salutin and Jeffrey Simpson and Margaret Wente in the Globe. There is nary a shrinking violet in sight.
Maybe its because so many of our left wingers came out of the union movement while our right wingers came out of the oil patch, but here both sides are tough, and ready to give as good as they get.

I love it when this happens

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Miss Universe

Miss Canada is new Miss Universe
I am posting this because so many Canadian bloggers are men.
No, no! Not that.
Being enlightened men, they cannot post a picture of a beautiful woman or else everyone will think they are sexist pigs, etc.
So, here she is...

Miss Canada Natalie Glebova, who just won the Miss Universe contest. Congratulations.

Fiddling while Rome burns

Hmmm -- while I am fiddling along posting snarky posts about Martin and Harper and Bush and Iraq and all the usual suspects, Dem from CT posts some material at Daily Kos about the bird flu and the possibility of a world wide epidemic.
First, here is a collection of daily links where the epidemic is being tracked: The Coming Influenza Pandemic?
Second, here is an update entitled What is Really Going On in China:

Reports coming out of Qinghai suggest H5N1 infections in humans and birds are out of control, with birds distributing H5N1 to the north and west, while people are being cremated and told to keep quiet. Reports from Chinese language papers detail over 200 suspected infections in over two dozen locations in Qinghai Province. In the most affected 18 regions, there are 121 deaths, generating a case fatality rate above 60%.Even if only a small fraction of the deaths are H5N1 linked, the cases would move the bird flu pandemic stage from 5 to the final stage 6, representing sustained human-to-human transmission of H5N1. The high case fatality rate suggests the H5N1 in Qinghai has achieved efficient human transmission while retaining a high case fatality rate. If confirmed, these data would have major pandemic preparedness implications. These cases began almost a month ago and are now spreading via people who have previously entered the high risk area. The official media comments coming out of China appear to be carefully worded, describing "new cases" being brought under control, inability to "see" human cases, or lack of "pneumonia" cases. Several reports from Qinghai have cited limitations on discussing or reporting details. All nature reserves in China have been closed.

Third, here is a public health discussion site, Effect Measures, where preparedness issues are covered.
I think it's worth bookmarking some of these sites, and checking in occasionally to see what is new.

So, its all the Iraqis' own fault

Well, finally -- an explanation for why US troops were not greeted with flowers when they invaded Iraq to bring peace and democracy -- U.S. general defends Guantanamo procedures: "Myers said he did not think the United States should have used more troops in the Iraq invasion but acknowledged that progress has proved slower than Pentagon officials had hoped. "I don't think we understood that people had been suppressed, and their spirit had been suppressed to the point where it wasn't just going to naturally blossom once they had the opportunity," Myers said on CBS' Face the Nation." -- so, you see, the explanation is that it is the Iraqi's own fault. THEY were to blame because they had been so suppressed that they could not "blossom".
Well, I said it was an explanation.
I didn't say it was a GOOD explanation.

Remember "You're either with us or against us"?

Review May Shift Terror Policies
The article starts by saying that the US has basically declared victory in the global war on terror (cutsy nickname, GWOT) because Al Quaeda has mostly disintegrated.
So one would think that a kind of vigilant peace could now be declared and the US could move on to other things.
But not so fast, Kemo Sabe.
The Bush administration is now admitting what everyone has been saying for the last two years, that the war on Iraq has radicalized Muslims. The article notes that the Bush administration now "[has to] deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe."
Now, I think this is a little silly -- the people who came to Iraq to fight the US are either dead or are still there, fighting.
However, what concerns me most is this -- the Bush administration now may be using the radicalization they themselves caused as an excuse to begin a new war against an enemy even less clearly defined than "terrorism" was. Their new war would "target . . . broader support in the Muslim world for radical Islam."
In other words, it really will be the Christians vs the Muslims.
And in a paranoid moment, I now wonder how long with it be before they widen it again -- to define as 'radicals' anyone anywhere in the world who objects to the Bush administration itself, or who is trying to overthrow the dictators who are now allied with the Bush administration, or who elects governments which do not want to ally with Bush.
I guess we could call it the "You're either with us or against us" War.

Place the blame where it belongs

Slate has a new Torture Feature web page here
It summarizes everything that has happened since 9/11 to turn America from the world's leader into the world's tyrant.
The article does use the "C" word, war crimes, and notes that "There are few slopes more slippery than that the one from small war crimes to large ones; any wartime action, however heinous, can always be justified by some perceived necessity. Once discipline is lost, it is nearly impossible to restore."
But I fault the conclusion. Instead of laying the blame for torture where it belongs, it wimps out and adopts a "collective guilt" conclusion.
First, the article blames the torture on Congress, becuse they haven't stopped it. ". . . the elected branches of government have exercised almost a total lack of oversight . . . Lawmakers have not taken any steps to ensure, for example, that if extreme measures are to be taken, this step occurs only after the White House and the Pentagon have directly authorized it and Congress has been notified, as it is about other forms of clandestine activity. Nor has Congress asked for more transparency at the detention facilities . . . The story of extreme interrogation practices is a story of a Congress asleep at the switch . . ."
Then the article blames the American public, apparently because they haven't protested enough. " . . . a slow slide from coherent, consistent standards for interrogation and treatment of prisoners to a sometimes ad-hoc, occasionally brutal search for information at all costs — should warrant public outcry. That it has not suggests either that this shift doesn't interest us because it affects outsiders, or that we no longer consider torture or near-torture to be beyond the bounds of civil conduct. "
Sorry, Slate -- I think you are the cowardly ones for refusing to lay the blame directly where it belongs -- on America's bloody-minded leaders Rumsfeld, Cambone, Meyers, Gonzales, Rice, Cheney and Bush.

Conference? We don't need no stinking Conference!

Well, here's another example of a sensible reality-based analysis which doesn't make sense anymore in Bush's Bizarro World.
In Daily Kos: No progress made after month of nuclear talks a Kos blogger named Plutonium Page writes a sensible update on the recent nuclear treaty UN meeting, noting that not much progress was made because the US didn't take it seriously. The piece ends is a rather odd way: "Hopefully they will make more progress at the IAEA meeting in September."
PP, you must have been joking -- surely you cannot seriously expect that John Bolton and the Bush administration will actually want to make progress in any UN initiative to reduce nuclear proliferation?
What they want, with intense longing, is to go to war with Iran.
And the UN is acting all obstructionist. The Security Council is not going along with sanctions on Iran, the organization is not dumping Kofi Annan and the IAEA's ElBaradei was reconfirmed over US objections. Therefore, as a secondary goal, the US wants to discredit the UN as an effective decision-making organization.
So of course there will be no cooperation or progress made at any UN-related conference. Not ever.

Sticks and stones

will break my bones but names will never hurt me.
They are pretty funny, though.
I've seen some good ones lately for George Bush:
The Simpson's Commander Cuckoo Bananas
Frogsdong's Horse Fluffer
WTF's The Smirking Chimp, Presnit Privilege, Smirking Sockpuppet, Idiot in Chief, Smirking Moron, Squinting Numbskull and - wait for it - Bunnypants.
And POGGE is having just as much fun with Paul Martin, calling him (affectionately, of course) "Mr. Dithers" in many posts.

The Second Writing

From "The Poor Man" Poetry corner by Phoenican:
Turning and turning in the parking lot
The driver cannot steer the Lexus;
The Left falls apart; the Centre cannot hold;
Mere Rightism is loosed upon the wheel,
The brain-dimmed metaphor is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of intelligence is drowned;
The best lack all publication, while the worst
Are full of verbose columnisity.
Surely some deadline is at hand;
Surely the Great Comparison is at hand.
The Great Comparison! Hardly are those words thought
When a vast surge out of my gall and stomach
Troubles my gorge: somewhere on a computer screen,
A piece with a hollow body and the head of a dodo,
A jeremiad blank and witless as the moon,
Is plonking its slow phrases, while all about it
Reel shadows of the reality-based community.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of hard-won reason
Are vexed to nightmare by inane business-babble,
And what rough screed, its hour come round at last,
Witters towards Washington to be read?

(apologies to WB)

Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon

An AP photo from a Ballon competition in Hungary.
Once when we were driving west into Edmonton, on that long, straight stretch of divided highway which goes for miles and miles outside the city, we saw dozens of balloons floating above the highway -- it must have been some kind of competition too. This was at least 20 years ago, but I have never forgotten it.

Harper continues to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Frogsdong found this article in today's Globe and Mail: Christian activists capturing Tory races which says that "Christian activists have secured Conservative nominations in clusters of ridings from Vancouver to Halifax -- a political penetration that has occurred even as the party tries to distance itself from hard-line social conservatism. At least three riding associations in Nova Scotia, four in British Columbia, and one in suburban Toronto have nominated candidates with ties to groups like Focus on the Family . . . organizers say many more will be on the ballot during the next federal election, a feat achieved by persuading parishioners, particularly new Canadians, to join the party and vote for recommended candidates."
I thought the federal Conservative Party was smarter than this, to get so distracted by Ottawa events that it let its nomination process be hijacked by these people.
Now hear this -- the majority of Canadians WILL NOT VOTE for a federal party dominated by ideological activists, whether they are left-wing or right-wing. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt (the one that says "I Heart Broadbent" and "Eberhart for PM")
Even Tommy Douglas, the most beloved ideologue in the nation's history, the man who gave Canada Medicare, could not make the NDP a significant federal presence.
Why is this? Canadians have seen ideological activism in action, from Social Credit in BC to the separatists in Quebec. We will sometimes let them run a province, but not the country.
And why is this? Because ideologues DO NOT LISTEN. In fact, they pride themselves on not listening. They would think they were elected to do what THEY wanted to do, not what WE wanted them to do. When we send a federal politician way off to Ottawa, we want someone who won't forget who he is working for. In a federal politician, Canadians want to elect people like Chuck Cadman, who listens to his constituents regardless of what his party in Ottawa is telling him to do.

Cynical, what?

I guess my whole family is getting a little cynical these days. I just asked my husband where our son had gotten to, and he said, "He's upstairs watching the Decline And Fall Of The American Empire -- otherwise known as the news."

The problem with self-indulgent war

Daily Kos :: Army recruitment crisis.
In summing up the impact of the Iraq war as it relates to the US army recruitment crisis, one of the things Kos notes is this: "The perception of US invulnerability has been shattered. After the US and its Northern Alliance allies routed the Taliban, the world quivered in the face of US military might. Saddam caved on every demand presented him -- destroy his missiles, allow inspectors back in. The US could've used that perception to push for meaningful concessions in North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere. Instead, we're bogged down in an unecessary war in Iraq, our military spent and depleted, and with Americans unwilling to replenish the ranks. The diplomatic fallout is obvious, but our inability to use force as a tool is a bigger casualty."
Absolutely -- as I have said before, the world needs a strong United States to project a vision of civilization and democracy, and to deter rogue states from starting trouble. But the US elephant has to tiptoe, not stomp.
Previous presidents realized that the only way the United States could maintain an image of invulnerablility was by resisting the temptation to engage in self-indulgent wars of choice -- Kennedy didn't resist the Bay of Pigs, and the US looked pretty weak and foolish after that one. Korea and Vietnam could be portrayed as righteous proxy defensive wars against communist expansion -- the domino theory, don't you know. Afghanistan was defensive, too in the sense that it was a legitimate response to an attack.
Iraq was a war of choice. And the Bush administration is reaping what it sowed -- the US public will neither support a draft nor let their sons and daughters enlist. And if Bush tries to goose the nation to another war, the public won't believe him again. THEY know "fool me once", even if Bush does not.

Rest now, in peace

Fallen Canadian soldiers hailed as heroes:
"It's not a political gesture. This is coming from the men on the ground. This is coming from the heart." -- Lloyd Smith
"Marc fought with his brothers and now he's with his brothers. It means an awful lot to me to understand that." -- Richard Leger
"Our son fought side by side with the Americans and he was proud to do so. So for them to at least recognize that is really heart-warming. He was proud and I'm glad they are proud." -- Claire Leger.