Cranky

I try to avoid being a cranky old fart who goes around muttering about the good old days, but does everyone else hate Firedoglake's new format as much as I do?
The main page is chock-full of blue "read more" boxes and half the time I can hardly find the bylines of the authors I like and the beautiful photos that used to appear on the main page and draw you into the articles have mostly disappeared and please, please save me from any more website "communities" that I have to "join" and...
Oh, time for a coffee, I guess ...

Shop 'til you drop

Whew! Its not easy, singlehandedly keeping the Canadian economy going. But I keep trying...
Time to relax with three of my favorite Christmas videos -- enjoy!
First, the funniest version of We Three Kings ever done:


Next, the bells do Carol of the Bells


Finally, the oddest couple who ever sang together, from the oddest Christmas Special ever made:

Great line of the day

Digby on presidential candidate "character" issues -- first, she recalls Bush saying the CIA shouldn't give an accused terrorist any pain medication for a broken leg, then she continues:

...there is ample evidence that the Republican candidates for president this time, in different ways, have all shown a similar penchant for a nasty, simple-minded meanness or outright sadism. But the press is ignoring that once again in favor of predigested GOP spin which explores in detail such character revelations as Clinton's "brittleness" and Obama's "aloofness" and Edwards' "inauthenticity." Never mind the people who say they want to start deporting massive numbers of people because they are all diseased criminals or those who want to "double Gitmo." As far as the press is concerned, their biggest problem is figuring out which ones are the most Christian.

Emphasis mine.

The operative word is "control"

Chet at Vanity Press highlights this story about a deaf man who was tased by police because he couldn't hear their commands.
I noted one aspect of this story that I thought very significant -- the police explained their taser use by saying "The first few minutes getting control of the scene are very, very important."
And that's the key word - " control".
If you look at the recent stories about use and abuse of Tasers, it seems to me that they are not being used anymore just for safety or protection, or to deal with hysterical psychotics, or because police felt endangered. Nope, now they're just being used to control a scene -- the doctrine seems to be, if someone doesn't respond immediately to being yelled at, then tase 'em! That'll teach 'em!

Great line of the day

Joe Biden:

“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?” Biden said in a conference call with reporters.
“That’s not believable,” Biden added. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in … modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

Emphasis mine. Of course, its not necessarily an "either-or" situation -- could be that Bush WAS told AND that he is incompetent.
I liked this line of Biden's too:

Bush told reporters earlier Tuesday that he was made aware only last week of a National Intelligence Estimate that described the stop to the Iranian nuclear program.
“I love presidents who parse words,” Biden said in response. “The NIE didn’t get written until a week ago.”

The 'Shorter' version would be: Depends what the meaning of "lie" is.

Huh?

So now the US intelligence agencies think Iran shut down a nuclear weapons program four years ago. Well, sounds like that's that, doesn't it? Problem solved...
Not so fast -- here's the National Security Advisor's reaction:

Mr. Hadley said the latest intelligence estimate was ' positive news' and called for even tougher sanctions on Tehran. 'The international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran — with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure — and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution,' he said.

Why, exactly, would "even tougher sanctions" be warranted? What on-going problem are they supposed to be negotiating" a solution" to?

NFB animation for free

I guess this happened a year ago, but I just found out about it -- the National Film Board has 70 of its best animated short films posted on line -- so go enjoy Blackfly, The Big Snit, The Cat Came Back, The Sweater, Wind, etc. etc.

Do you recognize this?

Winter is here with a vengeance I guess.
I was just talking to my daughter who is spending her first winter in Toronto and they woke up to about 3 feet of snow, and some fellows on her block were complaining this afternoon that the city hadn't plowed their street yet.
Yes, you read that correctly -- within 12 hours of the snowfall, the expectation was that their residential street would be plowed.
And it was, later this afternoon.
Boy, things are sure different "down east", aren't they?

Great line of the day

Dave at The Galloping Beaver writes about the Ontario Deputy Coroner who is going around to conferences on Taser's dime to promote Tasers and the "excited delirium" myth:

Dr. Cairns might also want to tell his next TASER International hosted conference how many people who supposedly suffered from "Excited Delirium" actually survived.
Or is it only a condition found in dead people?

Emphasis mine.

"Surgical" strikes

It has happened again -- NATO has mistakenly killed another 14 civilians in Afghanistan:

The victims of the episode on Monday night were all Afghans who were working for $5 a day, Mr. Jalali said. His company has been contracted to build 273 miles of road in 10 Afghan provinces, and the major contracts are with the American military.
Mr. Jalali said he thought the accident happened because the foreign military either lacked information or had incorrect information.

I keep reading all this stuff about "surgical strikes", promoting the idea that technology makes it possible to target only "the enemy" and not the good guys -- but then we see hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians getting killed.
Do any doctors actually perform surgery with wild, broad, and bloody swipes of the scalpel?
Reminds me of the Doc in Logan's Run:

Henry Luce is rolling in his grave

Time magazine has flubbed it.
I remember how shocked I was when I found out that the United States government couldn't recognize communist China until Time magazine publisher Henry Luce died.
That's how powerful Time magazine once was.
Now, they can't even get a smear campaign started properly.
The idea, I think, was to tarnish the FISA legislation now being considered by the US Congress -- so that the telcom companies can avoid legal responsibility for tapping thousands of phone calls without warrants -- by promoting the libel that the legislation would "protect terrorists".
But a couple of bloggers, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Singel, have spotlighted this blatant, stupid lie and forced Time to disavow it, as well as hammering any other media outlet that picks it up -- the Chicago Tribune has also had to run a correction.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

"Politically Correct"

Chet writes about the post-modern and Politically Correct "movement" which actually wasn't much of anything, really -- just played one on TV, so to speak.

...the reality of the whole "PC" thing depends on where you were and when... There really were no common experiences of this stuff as far as I can tell, just scattered individual ones. What seems fairly certain to me, at any rate, is that while pomo and PC were not in and of themselves imaginary, the idea that there were actual movements based on these things was imaginary, and was used as a fear tactic by right-wing politicians and journalists for a surprising length of time.

That was my own experience, too -- of course, I went to university in the Stone Age, so this discussion brings to mind that old pre-modernist Shakespeare, who described "a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance" -- that seems to describe "Politically Correct" rather well.

Rider Nation

The boys won it! And its been a long time coming:

"We have a saying in Saskatchewan," said Roughriders offensive lineman Gene Makowsky. "Tough times don't last. Tough people do."

Kerry Joseph gives his mother the game ball.


Johnson stepped up --his three key interceptions won the game.


And Fantuz was fantastic.
We heard it was being called the Banjo Bowl, but I don't mind -- some banjo! some bowl!


Saskboy has The Night Before Grey Cup.

The new Star Chamber

At Harper's magazine, Scott Horton writes about how Bush is resurrecting the Star Chamber and he uses the Omar Khadr case as one of his examples.
The Star Chamber was a secret security court used by the Tudors and Stuarts, and its abuses were one of the main reasons why the Purtians created the United States 300 years ago. How quickly they forget!

The Bush Administration is slowly introducing the Court of Star Chamber to the process of American justice. We see its elements everywhere. In the farcical Combat Status Review Tribunals created in Guantánamo, now repeatedly denounced even by judges serving on them as a travesty. In the Military Commissions, crafted in conscious avoidance of the standards both of American military and civilian justice. And in the steady press to lower the standards of our federal courts to introduce practices that continually tip the scales of justice in favor of prosecutors. Reports have begun to circulate that the Administration has put together a group of scholars headed by a right-wing activist judge to craft legislation to introduce a new court of Star Chamber, perhaps to be floated in the coming year. . . . in the Bush view of justice, a failure to convict is unacceptable. And which is why the Bush view of justice is no justice at all.

Horton cites the Khadr case as an example of Star Chamber thinking:

Five news organizations, The AP, The New York Times Co., Dow Jones & Company Inc., The Hearst Corp. and The McClatchy Company have filed a complaint stating that they are being denied access to critical information that would allow them to report on the Guantánamo Military Commissions proceeding against Canadian Omar Khadr.

Various arguments in the case of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are apparently made via e-mail — a communications channel to which the public has no access — and issues apparently are being raised in closed sessions for which no transcripts or summaries are available, the news organizations, including The Associated Press, wrote in a filing. In addition, the filing stated, the public is not permitted access to motions and other documents submitted by the parties and “even the existence of a motion is not currently disclosed in any publicly accessible way.”

Khadr is now 21 years of age and has been in prison for five years, since he was 16. He is accused of having committed crimes as a minor. Radkhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, has registered strong complaints about the treatment of Khadr, as have other nations and human rights groups. “She raised her concerns about the creation of an international precedent where an individual is being tried for war crimes with regard to alleged acts committed when he was a child,” said a UN spokesman. There is a view in the international law community that the act of trying a minor as a war criminal is itself a war crime. Not that this would, of course, give the Bush Administration the slightest pause.
Specific charges against Khadr include having lobbed a grenade that killed an American medic in Afghanistan. The US strategy of closely guarding the proceedings and restricting media access to arguments and materials submitted is, however, highly selective. The Department of Defense leaked to CBS News’s “Sixty Minutes” program what prosecutors have long viewed as their “bombshell” evidence: film which they assert shows Khadr involved in insurgent activities in Afghanistan. The Government strategy is that the Government will exercise tight control over what the public learns about the trial and what transpires there. That, of course, was the very abuse against which “Freeborn” John Lilburne railed in his assault on the injustice of the Stuart courts, and the right to an open court is often cited in legal history books as having been established by him, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Which is why the Bush Administration is so much more at home with sixteenth century concept of judicial conduct. But the major issue that critics raise here is not Khadr’s guilt or innocence, but the procedural fairness and transparency of the process by which he is being tried.
As things stand now, whatever results from the trial of Omar Khadr, no serious observers are going to consider them to be fair. So what purpose is served by them? The answer to that question is fairly obvious: domestic political propaganda. This is a political trial, not an exercise in justice.

And successive Canadian governments have gone along with this travesty -- they have not fought for Khadr's rights any more than they originally fought for Mahar Arar.
Now Khadr, along with his family, have to be one of the least sympathetic defendants that Canadians have ever been asked to hold their noses and support.
But that, of course, is not the point
Its not about them, its about us -- are we the kind of people who will tolerate secret trials and endless imprisonment, or not?

Harper wins

And we lose.