I'm back!

"I''m here! I'm here! Let the bells ring out and the banners fly. Feast your eyes upon me. I know it's too good to be true, but I'm here! I'm here!"
I'm back and we had a great time. Thanks for all your good wishes - more tomorrow...

On holidays

We're off tomorrow morning to Nova Scota and PEI -- we've never been there before so we're looking forward to it.
Posting for the next two weeks will depend on whether I can find an internet cafe. I'll try to check in every day or two, and I plan to post photos when we are back.

Today's Nelson Moment

Ha ha!

On this weekend's Meet the Press, Bill Bennett ominously warned the panel of journalists that Americans were growing extremely angry over the disclosures of classified information by The New York Times and other newspapers. Riding this wave of massive public rage towards the NYT, a protest was organized for yesterday by Cliff Kinkaid of Accuracy in Media along with FreeRepublic.com. The protest was heavily promoted by Michelle Malkin (who announced that she would personally attend) and other pro-Bush bloggers, who urged all patriotic Americans to attend and make their anger at the NYT heard loudly and clearly
. . . 16 protestors actually showed up.

Ooohhh, feel the anger!

Great line of the day

NYT's Nicholas Kristof:

When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.

Emphasis mine.

I always knew it!

Today, some unsurprising news.
I am a descendent of royalty!
Of course, I share my royal ancestors with just about everyone else on the planet. But I'm not selfish, not a bit - noblesse oblige, you know, and all that. Royal is as royal does, as those of us born to the thone always say:

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another. 'Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,' said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. 'The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.'

Makes you realize that democracy came along just in time. Why, without it, we'd be having wars of succession all over the place.

Forest fire situation

I think this is one of the worst fire years we have had in northern Saskatchewan -- here's the latest news:

At least 1,800 people have fled heavy smoke and encroaching flames from a growing number of out-of-control fires in northern Saskatchewan.
It's "a serious fire situation pretty much across the province at this time," Steve Roberts, executive director of Saskatchewan Environment's fire management branch, said Monday.
He said 14 of the 109 fires burning across the province are more than 100 square kilometres in size, and three of those are over 1,000 square kilometres in size . . . The 1,800 people have registered at the government checkpoint in La Ronge, Sask., about 330 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon. They've fled at least five communities north of La Ronge - Stanley Mission, Grandmother's Bay, Waddin Bay, Englishman's Bay and Sucker River - and abandoned campgrounds and cottages. . .

Here, for reference, is a summer view of Stanley Mission:


Here is Grandmother's Bay:


And here is Sucker River:


And here is a map showing all three communities, which are north of LaRonge:

If I can find some fire photos I will post them.

Today's pop quiz

Time Magazine's article on How to Fix Gitmo suggests five steps that Bush can take: work with Congress, release the small fry, process the habeas cases, live by the Geneva rules, and lift the veil of secrecy.
1.Can you list the things which the Bush administration will actually do to fix Gitmo?
2. And is Gitmo capable of being fixed anyway?

Krazy Konservatives

As we were watching Olbermann the other night, my husband said, Am I wrong or have more conservatives gone crazy lately?
I was reminded that a couple of months ago Digby wrote a post exactly about this -- that as the Bush poll numbers kept falling and as more and more Americans turned away from conservative political ideas, they would get shriller and wilder and more out-of-control -- ie, crazy.
So I'm thinking I'll start a bit of a series, just to help keep track of the nuttiness.
Here is today's contribution:
Culminating a week of yelling at the New York Times for treason, when the Wall Street Journal AND the LA Times also published the financial surveillance story, the wingnuts have now decided the Times should not have published a travel item about some island retreat where Cheney and Rumsfeld and hundreds of other wealthy people have summer homes, as summarized by Glenn Greenwald:

. . . America is currently at war and its enemies are domestic liberals and The New York Times. This war was started by Al Gore and Jimmy Carter when they opposed the invasion of Iraq. The New York Times is allied with Al Qaeda and their latest plot against America is to provide their terrorist friends with a roadmap to the vacation homes of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld so that they can be assassinated. That is what is being reported today by three of the largest 'conservative' blogs on the Internet, along with Horowitz. . .

Rogue State

Reading Sy Hersch's new article about the coming war with Iran, one thought struck me -- how wrong we were to think that the risk of war decreased when the Soviet Union fell.
As it has turned out, the risk of a hot war actually increased -- because there was no one to hold the United States in check anymore, except for the civilized restraint of its political leader.
Then they go and elect cowardly, unprincipled leaders like Bush and Cheney. So all bets are off.
If Russia was still a world power, there is no way, today, that the United States would be planning a war with Iran -- the old Russia would just have announced that it would not tolerate any such attack, and that would be it. No attack.
Today, don't expect such rational and reasonable behaviour -- Bush and Cheney are mad, and Rumsfeld too.
In a paragraph dripping with incredulity, Hersh reports they think of themselves as great historical figures:

The President and others in the Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill “seemed like a Texan to me. He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”

Gad, they take themselves soooo seriously, don't they.
I am a great admirer of Churchill who, in my opinion, singlehandedly saved the western world from the Third Reich. He was a courageous man, but he was often wrong on his political judgments, from Gandhi and Indian home rule to Edward VIII, primarily because he saw the world in black and white. (Besides, it wasn't Churchill who declared war on Germany, it was that appeaser, Chamberlain.)
Actually, the more we read of American atrocities in Iraq, the more the WWII analogy is starting to fit better the other way round, isn't it, as the occupation of Iraq starts to resemble the German occupation of France.
Arthur Silber writes the plain truth about the upcoming war:

Any military attack by the United States on Iran within the foreseeable future -- even an attack using only conventional weapons -- would be profoundly immoral, and eternally unforgivable.
Remember the critical facts: all experts agree that Iran is approximately five to ten years away from having a nuclear weapon. Moreover, Iran is fully entitled to take the actions it does at present, including the enrichment of uranium . . . under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory . . . The position of the United States is an entirely unprincipled one, and one which devolves into incoherence. These central facts lead to only one conclusion: an attack on Iran would represent a blatant, naked act of aggression against a country that does not threaten us. It would not be an act of self-defense, if that term has any meaning at all: there is nothing at present or in the immediate future to defend ourselves against.

And thus, too, the recent attacks on the New York Times and on the Democratic party as "traitors" starts to make more sense now, too -- so that their likely opposition to war with Iran can be brushed aside as just more cowardly treason.

Oh, Canada

Canadians celebrate and here are some photos.

The Snowbirds fly past Parliament Hill:


Special ceremonies were held for the first time at the National War Memorial, to mark the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel , at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme -- 700 men in the 1st Newfoundland Regiment were killed or wounded in the first minutes of the offensive as it began on July 1, 1916:


Governor General Michaelle Jean:


Canadian farmers protest the usual government inaction:

And here is why Michaelle Jean is a great Governor General. Instead of trying to ignore the tractor protest, she welcomed the protestors to Parliament Hill and paid tribute to them in her speech:

As protesters lined tractors and farm machinery along the street in front of the Hill, Governor General Michaelle Jean took note of Canada's prosperity, including in her remarks a thank-you to the people who toil to provide the country with a safe and plentiful food supply. "Ours is a country of great wealth from its plains, forests and mountains that nourish us to the crystal clear waters of our abundant lakes and rivers," she said. "And I was reminded of our bountifulness just yesterday when I received a basket of wonderful fresh farm produce from the farmers of Canada, for which I am very grateful."

A gracious and unifying thing to say.

Great lines of the day

d r i f t g l a s s has a message for American conservatives. Canadian conservatives should also take a gander:

Remember?
Remember when it was all gonna be so cool once the Liberals were out of the way and you could liquidate the hated Federal Government. When the Government is the source of all evil in the Universe? When you could hang every problem in the world on welfare queens?
Remember the glory days of "We won. You lost. Now shut up."?
. . . You wanted this, and now it's yours. All yours.
History is watching you. The future is watching you. The massed billions yet unborn are watching you, and they see a pathetic huddle children who are throwing the world's most expensive tantrum because they don’t want to fix what they destroyed.
They see a no-neck ocean of cowards and fools and bigots, led by liars and crooks. They see you taking your hour in the sun -- the one you traded your ideals, your conscience and your soul to acquire – and pissing it away. Deliberately picking fights over trivia in the hopes that no one notices that you have destroyed a great nation,
They see you failing, in more ways and with worse consequences than any generation in American history. And doing it while giggling and jerking off to Ann Coulter.
Your children and grandchildren see all that you have done and all that you have failed to do and they are ashamed of you, so govern, you weak, stupid, frightened little men. You ARE the government, so quit bellowing and blaming everyone from Michael Moore to Cindy Sheehan for your sins.
Actually step up like men and govern and we’ll spend the next 20 years debating anything else you’d like. Flags and queers and all the rest of the fiddling nonsense.
Govern, or admit that you are uniquely incompetent to actually lead a great nation.
Govern…or shut the fuck up.

I couldn't really pick a single line to highlight. It's all worth reading.

Lumber "deal"

The Globe story is entitled Drive for softwood deal hits snag.
Well, one snag would be that there is no "deal", apparently.
The Globe calls is "a draft text of a final deal" and a "proposed final draft".
The BC Lumber Trade Council calls it "the current working draft" and says "more talks are needed to achieve a final agreement".
Ontario Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay seems to call it "a final draft", particularly when he found out that the whole whatever-it-is could be revoked in just two years.
And to Canadian ambassador Michael Wilson its not a deal or a draft at all, its just "a file", as in:

“This file has been really under intense work over the last few weeks, particularly the last few days. We're consulting with the provinces, with the industry,” Mr. Wilson said. “We want to get it resolved quickly. There's a lot of money at stake here that we want to return as quickly as we can to the producers. And it's very definitely a priority for the Prime Minister and the government,” . . . “I've watched this file evolve over the last three months and we've had our ups and downs on it. We think that a particular matter is resolved and someone comes up with a little glitch and we're back to the drawing board so I don't want to be precise. I can tell you that we're working very hard to get it resolved.”

And then, finally, we'll know just what to call it!

Last gift

Maybe I was feeling particularly dark-humoured this morning, but reading this started me laughing:

Dear Miss Manners: I was invited to a Celebration of Life for a friend who had passed a few months ago. What is the proper etiquette to attending a party like this? Do we bring a gift?
Congratulations on finding the only social event left that the guest of honor has not turned into a free shopping bonanza for himself.
If you can't handle that, you could send flowers. But as the nomenclature for the event de-emphasizes death, funeral flowers may seem out of place. It is also late to send flowers and food to the bereaved, as is customary in the first weeks of mourning, and Miss Manners trusts that you have long since sent your letter of condolence.
So just go and celebrate. If Miss Manners was mistaken and your friend left a list of places he registered for the event, you may ignore it. He'll never know.

"Iraq is not Viet Nam. It's drier and hotter"

Dave over at the Beaver has produced a chilling post about a painful topic: the rape of women by occupying soldiers. The specific reference is today's report on the accusation that five US soldiers raped an Iraqi woman and then killed her family.
Dave notes that the frequency of rape during the Vietnam war was also unreported, due to the myth that rape is the result of sexual desire. Dave describes the real dynamics:

. . . when soldiers start raping the female civilian population of a militarily occupied but politically unstable country it demonstrates a callous disregard for the indiginous population. Far from being there to help them and win them over, the occupied population has been reduced, in the minds of the occupiers, to sub-human, powerless and subject to intimidation.
In a situation where the "enemy" is no longer a clearly defined, uniformed combatant and has the ability to hide amongst the general population, the entire population becomes the enemy . . . This latest case in Beiji, Iraq, if the allegations are true, is a symptom of a greater condition. It is a sign that Iraq is lost . . . Gook? Hadji? What's the difference? The level of indifference to their survival is the same.

Curiouser and curiouser

Ah ha!
So this is how the Conservatives expected to get around the political contribution limits in their own Accountability Act -- they would just declare that their party wasn't making a profit, and keep on pulling the dollars in.
The more Harper insists he is right about the convention registration fee issue, the more it appears that this wasn't an accidental error:

The Conservative party's legal counsel, Paul Lepsoe, said that since "time immemorial" delegate fees have only been considered donations when a convention turns a profit. "If there is a portion that is a contribution, in other words that exceeds the cost of the event, that portion constitutes a political contribution for which a receipt should be issued," he told The Canadian Press earlier this week. "That's longstanding practice that everyone follows, including the Conservative party."

Well, first of all, he is just wrong. As CP points out:

it wasn't a longstanding practice for the NDP, Liberals or the predecessors of the Conservative party . . . the common practice they followed was to disclose convention fees paid by their members as political donations. "I'm absolutely positive we always gave out political receipts, minus the amount paid for meals, but everything else was always treated as a political donation," said Bruck Easton, former president of the Progressive Conservative party who later ran unsuccessfully as a Liberal. "That was quite frankly an important part of getting people to our convention."

And second, profitability has nothing to do with it -- or, at least, it never did before:

. . . the Conservative argument that they didn't need to disclose the fees because the convention didn't make a profit doesn't hold water. "If you carried that logic forward, you could argue that if you made a contribution to a political party and the party was in the hole for the year in question, it wouldn't necessarily need to report all the donations that were the difference from being in the hole and not in the hole," said Seidle. "The important thing is there is money in, and a service out . . . it's a kind of income and expense issue."

The ineptitude of the hastily-written, partisan-based Accountability Actis also coming into focus:

. . . University of Windsor Professor Heather MacIvor said she was stunned to hear the party's explanation on failing to disclose the fees. MacIvor recently wrote a critique of the government's new financing laws, part of its much vaunted Federal Accountability Act.
'Wait a minute folks, you're trying to say you're cleaning up politics and you brought in this seriously draconian tightening of the contribution rules, and now we find out you didn't disclose a few million dollars of contributions, which every other political party in this country has treated as a contribution for the purpose of the contribution rules?' MacIvor said. 'That's not on.'

Well, darn it -- so much for that plan, eh?