And another great line

Here's another great line this week, in James Wolcott's Let the Recriminations Begin. Discussing Pat Buchanan's piece about how the US is pulling out of Iraq, Wolcott describes the piece this way: "Buchanan, hearing the bustle of mice scurrying at the Pentagon, [says] we're moonwalking to the exits."

Great line of the day

In describing why the dishonest neocon foreign policy approach is worse than the Realpolitik approach, Digby writes: "It makes me miss Kissinger. At least he didn't sing kumbaya while he was fucking over the wogs."

Compare and contrast

Are they talking about the same guy?
The Seattle Times AP story makes Mark Emery into a criminal master mind: "Prince of Pot" Canadian marijuana activist arrested on U.S. indictment:

A Canadian marijuana activist known as 'The Prince of Pot' was arrested today in Canada on a U.S. indictment targeting his alleged multimillion-dollar marijuana seed business. Marc Emery, 47, of Vancouver, B.C, is charged with conspiracy to launder money and distribute marijuana and marijuana seeds, the U.S. attorney's office said. Conviction on the charges would carry a sentence of at least 10 years in prison. Emery claims to make $3 million a year from selling marijuana seeds online and by mail, along with equipment for grow operations and instructions on raising pot plants, authorities said . . . Prosecutors say three-fourths of Emery's seeds are sent to the United States and have been linked to illegal cultivation operations in Indiana, Florida, California, Tennessee, Montana, Virginia, Michigan, New Jersey and North Dakota.

The Vancouver Sun story, on the other hand, emphasizes the Canadian perspective, and the unproven nature of the charges: Uncle Sam orchestrates Vancouver pot busts:

Pot advocate Marc Emery was arrested Friday in Halifax after his marijuana-seed shipping business on Hastings Street was shut down by police as part of a sweeping investigation instigated by U.S. authorities. Vancouver police raided Emery's multi-million-dollar business on a request from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), while angry protesters gathered outside chanting "Go home USA." Emery, 47, referred to as "The Prince of Pot" on the search warrant, was arrested by the RCMP and police in Halifax. He is charged in the U.S. with several drug-related charges, including conspiring to distribute marijuana seeds and launder money . . . about 25 chanting protesters banged on makeshift drums outside. Two American flags were hung upside-down on a nearby fence. "This is a place where people could pull out a joint and not have to fear being reported to the police, and that was okay with Canadians," said David Malmo-Levine, who was one of the four protesters later arrested. "It's really an attack on our sovereignty." The search was requested by the U.S. government through the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, a federal law administered by the Department of Justice. The warrant was authorized Thursday in B.C.'s Supreme Court, based on an affidavit provided by a Vancouver police officer. U.S. authorities say the warrant was the result of an 18-month investigation of Emery's international seed-selling business. The investigation involved about 38 DEA offices across the U.S. and allegedly linked marijuana seeds sold by Emery to indoor grow operations in several states, including New Jersey, Michigan and Florida. Jeff Sullivan, assistant U.S. attorney, alleged Friday during a news conference that more than 75 per cent of the seeds sold by Emery were sold to people in the U.S., and Emery was making about $3 million a year selling seeds and marijuana-growing equipment.

Note, in particular, how the US paper says it is Emery who claims to make $3 million a year, while the Canadian paper clarifies that this is just what the US Attorney alleges. The Sun notes the protests as well, which the Seattle paper, like other American papers, does not.

What would make Hans Island Canadian?

By Cam Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Gonzo in the silly season

Here's what passes for hard-hitting investigative journalism during the summer silly season - PM's travels paid for by taxpayers. The boondogle of Paul Martin's recent jaunt to Timmins is fearlessly exposed by the Globe and Mail. And reporter Gloria Galloway is shocked - SHOCKED! - that Paul Martin isn't even embarassed about such a horrendous and inappropriate waste. She writes "And he admits without hesitation that his travel was paid for by the taxpayers of Canada."
The story notes that Jack Layton and Stephen Harper have been travelling this summer too. Layton's tour "has been financed by his party and by using the limited travel points that are alloted [to MPs.] Other expenses have come out of MPs' office budgets" while Harper, says the article "has made extensive use of a party-funded minibus". So it sure sounds to me like taxpayers are funding at least a portion of their expenses too, though the article tries its best to bury this information through the use of obscure terminology for taxpayer's money ('travel points' and 'office budgets').
Basically, just another gonzo story.

AP connects Bolton to the Niger claim

This AP story - Rice Proposes State Department Shuffle - is very strange.
The first six paragraphs describe a announcement from Condi Rice to reorganize some unnamed State department offices into a Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
Then it veers off into a completely different track -- it lists things which Rice DID NOT mention during her announcement, and then it makes a surprising statement about John Bolton.
Not that I don't appreciate writer Anne Gearan's points -- she is titled as AP Diplomatic Writer, and apparently she knows her background.
But its very strange, none the less. After describing Rice's announcement about the office reorganization, the story continues:

Rice's brief address Friday said nothing about Saddam, al-Qaida or the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The insurgency in Iraq is a mix of Sunni Arab opponents of the overthrow of Saddam and foreign supporters of al-Qaida and other terror groups bent on ousting the United States. Rice was once of the chief architects of the Iraq war as President Bush's first-term national security adviser, and she was one of the most vocal advocates of the administration's claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the United States or Iraq's neighbors. 'The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,' Rice said in a September 2002 interview with CNN. 'But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' The State Department's existing Bureau of Arms Control and International Security was one of the arms of the U.S. government keeping track of Saddam's capabilities, and was a participant in the dealings surrounding the administration's false claim that Saddam tried to acquire uranium - a component of nuclear weapons - from the African nation of Niger. Until recently, that office was headed by John R. Bolton, now Bush's embattled nominee to be United Nations ambassador. The administration also contended Saddam had ties to al-Qaida terrorists, and hinted that he might provide them with WMD. That claim was rejected by the independent Sept. 11 Commission's report last summer.

And did you note this sentence (emphasis mine) : "The State Department's existing Bureau of Arms Control and International Security was . . . a participant in the dealings surrounding the administration's false claim that Saddam tried to acquire uranium . . . from the African nation of Niger. Until recently, that office was headed by John R. Bolton . . ."
Now, I haven't read every single thing about Plamegate or Rovegate or whatever it is now called, but I had not heard anything before that stated so firmly that Bolton was connected to the Niger claim.
Is this actually new news, buried in the 10th paragraph of an 11-paragraph story?
(Thanks to this Kos diary for the link.)

Its a natural

So Village Voice reporter Ron Pearlstein suggests that the Democrats should become the party which guarantees that Americans will never have to pay another bill for medical care, in this article Unfucking the Donkey.
Well, duhhhh!
Of course they should.
Why do they think the Liberals have now been in power in Canada for 12 years, with no end in sight? It was Martin's vigorous defense of the Canada Health Act and his promise to deal with waiting lists that likely gave him the thin margin of safety last June. Why do they think there is not a provincial premier anywhere in Canada, regardless of their party, who dares to talk about bringing back personally-funded health care -- except Ralph Klein, who is on his way out as premier.
If Social Security is the 'third rail' of American politics, medicare is Canada's third rail. We just will not do without it, regardless of how high a percentage of our income tax it consumes. It is perhaps the one government expenditure (other than, perhaps, highways) which everybody supports, everybody needs, and everybody uses.
Pearlstein writes "The most glorious thing about congressional Democrats is that they have drawn the line and said: No further. Don't. Touch. Social. Security. It is a heroic stand. What's more, it's been enormously politically effective. Now think about this: They are drawing on the capital of an entitlement passed 70 years ago. It is the duty of every generation of Democrats to produce new geese to lay 70 years of golden eggs. It is the only way our party has grown . . . Democratic congressmen can do that, for example, by making a credible collective pledge that if you vote Democrat enough you will never pay another medical bill as long as you live. You really think people wouldn't stop voting Republican then?"
If Hillary Clinton wants to run for President, she should promise to implement medicare. She is already associated with medicare in the public mind -- she was in charge of Clinton's health care effort 12 years ago. Her lack of success with this plan can now be blamed on the secret agenda of the Republicans who scuttled it not because medicare was a bad idea for Americans but because it was such a good idea -- the Republicans knew how effective it would be in it assuring a generation of middle-class votes for the democrats.
For Hillary, its her natural issue.

Four guys in a gym in Leeds

Juan Cole comments on the end of the GWOT:

. . . they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gym in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off . . . former CIA analyst Marc Sageman estimates the number of radical Muslims who can and would do significant harm to the US in the hundreds. That's right. The old "war on terror" was a war of the world's sole superpower on a few hundred people. (I exclude Iraq because it is not and never was part of any 'war on terror,' though the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration has contributed to the ability of terrorists to operate there.)

Cole also has an interesting summary of how a suicide bomber is created -- worth reading.

The Double CYA Rule

I defer to POGGE in postings about the Maher Arar inquiry because he had done so much research in this area. But today, I couldn't resist posting about this snippet of bureaucratic buck-passing: The Globe and Mail: Mountie's lawyer accuses RCMP of shirking responsibility for Arar.
Here is what happened at the inquiry: "a lawyer [Don Bayne] for leading RCMP investigator Michel Cabana accused senior Mounties of ducking responsibility for the Arar affair by shifting blame to front-line officers . . . in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, [then-Deputy RCMP Commissioner Gary]Leoppky issued an urgent directive to investigators to 'pull out all the stops' in giving the Americans whatever information they needed, as quickly as possible."
Now, however, Leoppky says that this directive didn't mean Cabana and other front-line RCMP officers were permitted to suspend the usual time-consuming restrictions on information-sharing with the US. So 'pulling out all the stops' actually just meant 'business as usual'. Who wouldda thunk it?
Its just another example of how people have to protect themselves in any bureaucracy. Call it the Double CYA (cover your ass) Rule -- if you think you have permission from a superior to ignore a policy, don't believe it. Before you actually do it, you must tell the superior in writing that you are going to do this, and get specific permission AGAIN. Sounds bureaucratic, I know -- but its a bureaucracy you're working in.

Yes, I've heard that, too

The main reason I subscribed to Salon several years ago was Garrison Keillor's Mr. Blue column. Then, he quit writing it.
But finally, he is back with a regular Salon column every Wednesday. And this week his column is about how many people in Washington have heard cool stuff about other people in Washington Thanks to All Spin Zone for the tip.

Another eeuuuu! story

Now here's a headline you don't see every day: Man gets amputated foot back after police seize it briefly.
People keep the darndest soveniers.
When the orthopods removed the 4"-long metal plate which had been used to fix my broken leg, they gave it to me at the hospital, telling me that most people wanted to keep these things. Well, not me. When I got home, out it went.

Has everyone signed on to GSAVE?

Slate's Fred Kaplan notes a NYT story that the Bush administration has decided to change the name of its counterterrorist campaign from "the global war on terror"(GWOT) to "the global struggle against violent extremism" (GSAVE) He asks

. . . Are these guys really this clueless? First, this is the administration's solution to the spike in terrorist incidents, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the politico-military deterioration in Iraq - to retool the slogan? Second, the White House and the Pentagon are just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military? This wasn't obvious, say, three or four years ago? . . . It took four years for the president of the United States to realize that fighting terrorism has a political component? It took six months for his senior advisers to retool a slogan? We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliché.
But the shallowness gets deeper still. The Times story doesn't notice what appears to be the driving force behind the new slogan—a desire for a happier acronym. Look at the first letters of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like a fight scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a garbled question (Gee what?). Then look at Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Its acronym is GSAVE—i.e., gee-save. We're out to save the world, see, not wage war on it. Or, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it in the Times piece, "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative." Does Hadley, and do all our other top officials, really believe this nonsense? Are they so enraptured with PR that they think a slogan and a strategy are the same thing and that retooling the one will transform the other? Have we lapsed into the banality of the mid-'70s, when President Gerald Ford tried to beat back 20-percent price hikes by urging Americans to wear gigantic lapel pins that read "WIN"—for Whip Inflation Now? The Times notes, midway into the story, that the "language shifts" come at a time when Karen Hughes, one of President Bush's most trusted advisers, is about to take over the State Department's office of "public diplomacy." If changing GWOT to GSAVE is a sign of campaigns to come, we are in sorrier shape than anyone might previously have imagined.

Three aspects Kaplan doesn't mention. First, as a number of bloggers have pointed out, Kerry said in October that the US should develop a criminal focus rather than a military forus to the GWOT, and the Republicans said this was ridiculous -- now, they also seem to be taking a criminal justice approach.
Second, this appears to be a change they are desperate to make quickly, so the Bush administration is rolling it out in mid-summer, instead of waiting until their preferred product-launch period in the fall.
And third, call me paranoid, but the Bush administration may see more substance to the change than just sloganeering.
"Terror" is rarer and more serious than "violent extremism". Terror is violence focused on civilians and innocent people which is designed to overthrow a government, while violent extremism can target infrastructure or economy or a specific cause. The goal of violent extremism can be much less radical, such as causing economic damage to an industry or challenging a country's justice system, or changing a particular law or policy. Acts of 'violent extremism' could include a large number of acts now seen as criminal, such as setting loose a computer virus or selling drugs to finance the purchase of weapons or being arrested for vandalism during a demonstration.
For example, one would not likely describe PETA as a terrorist group, though they are certainly violent extremists. Likewise one could define criminal organizations like the Mafia or the Hells Angels as violent extremists. Ultimately, the terminology could even apply to peace activists and groups. This NYT story from a week ago says "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups . . . [and have said that] any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations . . ."
Expanding the terminology means all of these groups can be more easily targetted, monitored and proscuted though the Patriot Act, which allows all manner of warrentless searches and secret wiretaps.
Under the new terminology, the definition of what constitutes 'peace' becomes a meaningless concept. While wars have a beginning and an end, struggles can go on forever.
So while the range of action has widened, the focus of action has softened, making a situation where a much larger number of groups can be targetted for a much broader number of crimes for a much longer time. No wonder Bush wants the Patriot Act to be permanent.
After 9/11, there was a great rush of support for the US and their Global War on Terror as nations responded seriously to the Bush call for support. I wonder how many other countries will sign on to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, especially as we come to understand its political and personal ramifications.
I wonder even how many Americans would sign on to this?

The Eeuuuu! story of the day

If you barbeque, read this story -- Barbecuers beware: Bristles can fall off wire brushes, be ingested in food
When one of our Labradors was a puppy, he kept trying to eat just about anything, from stones to paper towels. And our vet told us the cheery stories of all these Labs they had operated on to remove socks etc. One story was about the Lab who ate a barbeque brush -- they had to operate to get the plastic handle, but they couldn't get all the bristles - some had to move out on their own. The Lab was OK eventually, though of course the owners were thousands poorer.
Needless to say, we immediately tossed the brush.

CHEAP-TV

So, is the problem really that there are no 'visuals'? In The Supreme Challenge: Zero Visuals Times 9, Washington Post's Howard Kurtz writes "The amount of airtime devoted to untangling [Supreme] court decisions has been dwarfed by the cases involving Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, not to mention wife killer Scott Peterson, runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks and missing-in-Aruba Natalee Holloway. By contrast, major court rulings on medical marijuana, racially influenced jury selection and government seizure of private property tend to be one- or two-day stories at best."
He blames the lack of visuals. But what he doesn't mention, and maybe doesn't realize, is this -- covering a police investigation story or a courtroom story is EASY, and therefore CHEAP. It requires virtually no research, promotes the excitement of 'breaking news' and gets the reporters lots of camera time.
For a missing person case, its all just interviews -- "And how did you feel when you saw the kidnappers driving away with your daughter?" -- and repetitions of police press releases.
For a courtroom case, its even easier -- just attend the trial, or even get a junior staffer to do it, then do a wrap-up outside-the-courthouse standup up just repeating what was said inside. "In dramatic testimony today, defendant XX told the jury . . . "
Hey, what could be simpler? "CHEAP-TV is now broadcasting live from . . . "

How Democrats can shoot themselves in the foot

This article -- Valuing Patriotism by Will Marshall from the Democratic Leadership Council is being rightly creamed by Kos, Digby, Atrios, and Gilliard.
In Canada, I don't think anyone would ever see such an article about one of our parties by a supposed 'supporter'. Or, if such a silly, subversive and self-promoting article were written, the party would ignore it.
Will Marshall founded and made himself president of something called the Progressive Policy Institute. His article, published in the magazine he edits, bashes the Democratic party's own core membership every second sentence while promoting his personal hobbyhorses as 'solutions' for the party's supposed problem. Marshall says that Democrats are not sufficiently patriotic (a basic RNC talking point -- is this guy actually a stealth Republican?) Then, he says Democrats should demonstrate their patriotism by, first, somehow getting Ivy League campuses like Harvard and Yale to reinstate the ROTC; second, stopping the promotion of increases in government spending on veterans benefits, military health care, military housing, etc and instead just promoting "intangible" support of "being recognized and honored for the sacrifices they make to preserve our way of life"; third, promoting a major expansion of the military, by 100,000 troops, to be paid for by raising taxes; and fourth, reinstating "national service"! Yes, he actually says that Democrats should show their patriotism by renaming the Selective Service System as the "national service system" and linking university grants and loans to "whose who agree to serve."
It should be noted that according to Will Marshall's biography, he has never actually been elected to anything. No wonder.