Mr. Brodie did not give any indication of what he is planning to do.
Fresh from running a war, Rick Hillier, who stepped down as chief of the defence staff this week, is temporarily joining Gowlings, a huge law firm in Ottawa, to consider a future “career in the private sector.” The general is not a lawyer and says he has not made any firm decisions about his future. Still, a statement provided by the firm said he “has indicated that when he assumes a new career in September, he is looking to provide strategic advice, leadership training and other consulting services.” And Gowlings can help him with all that. Does this spell lobbying? Certainly, Mr. Hillier's name and expertise in the defence world will add even more cachet to the national firm, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.
Wow! Listen to those crickets!
How fortuitous! The former PMO Chief of Staff, the former Chief of Defence Staff and the former PMO communications director escaped the force of Big Steve's cleaning up of the lobbyists by ONE. FUCKING. DAY.COMING INTO FORCE
13. These Regulations come into force on July 2, 2008.
Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.Perhaps, instead of CFRA radio in Ottawa sucking up every word of US ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, like a Loach in a scummy fish-tank, they should see if they can get an interview with Damon and Affleck.
"I think people are happy we have Emerson as a boss," said one Canadian diplomat. "He's a very seasoned individual." Another Canadian diplomat expressed relief that the department has finally gotten a capable minister after a string impressively underqualified ones. "There was nowhere to go but up," said the relieved DFAIT official. "This is a guy who, unlike any of his immediate predecessors, has experience as a leader, experience as the manager of a large organization and in making decisions in complex operating environments. "With his credentials, his background and his skill set, he's certainly looking better than anyone since [former Liberal foreign affairs minister Pierre] Pettigrew."And to underscore just how bad Emerson's predecessors actually were ...
"This place has been so beat up that just a steady hand on the tiller will be welcomed," said one.So, Harper, having made two astoundingly bad decisions and having treated one of the most important departments in government as little more than feet-on-the-desk plum-posting reward and a game of political optics, finally had to go into his largely incompetent caucus and pull out the only person with enough leadership, management and organizational ability to clean up the mess - a lapsed Liberal. (And one whose loyalty might well depend on how freely he can run his department without the PMO interfering.)
Gotta say, it's just sad to read such commentary. The Foreign Affairs department deserves much better than Harper's given them to date.Indeed. Imagine how different things might have been if Harper had chosen his Foreign Affairs minister on the basis of skill, knowledge and ability in the first place.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.And he found out something else. Once the actual torture has ended, the memory of it lingers.
Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass.Hopefully.
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. [...]1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.
2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.
3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.
4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.
The video is here and it is worth reading the whole of Hitchens' story in Vanity Fair.
Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver.
Where’s Dad? Not the “fathers” of these unfortunate pre-borns, but the fathers of these pregnant girls. Where, in other words, is the shotgun? Back in the day when birth control and abortion weren’t readily available to high-school kids, fathers were pretty good deterrents to pregnancy. Boys knew they’d have kneecap problems if they got daddy’s little girl pregnant. If they were lucky, they’d be married by the morning after. Girls, meanwhile, were less likely to risk pregnancy because alternatives to motherhood were few, adoption being the most likely. It wasn’t a foolproof system, clearly, but the specter of lifelong consequences, combined with societal and parental disapproval, helped keep the illegitimate birthrate down. Today, using the term “illegitimate” is more likely to spark disapproval than the activities contributing to the plague of unwed pregnancies. For sure there are far fewer fathers around to give young males The Eye.The Eye? Or, more to K-Lo's liking, the baseball bat.
It is a fair guess, though not possible to confirm at this point, that at least some of Gloucester’s pregnant daughters are from fatherless homes.Yoiks! She doesn't know, so she makes it up.
Today’s girls and boys daily marinate in a culture that offers little instruction in responsibility and self-control — or the importance of marriage as antecedent to procreation — but celebrates single motherhood and encourages sex without strings.Shorter K-Lo: Pre-marital sex is the result of the current culture. They're not being taught to repress their sexual urges the way their grandparents and parents did when they were adolescents. Why, look at the movies they see!
“Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports.That would be like, you know, a scientific study. I-wonder-what-it-says? (drum roll)
“This is reality-check research. Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,” says study author Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12–29-year-olds. It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.”Yup. Even some of the student body at Dominican Academy were probably... ahem... experimenting.
Boris Yeltsin's death on affected me in a way that was surely unique: He was my high-school crush.And if Boris Yeltsin, a man old enough to be my grandfather, had suddenly appeared at Dominican Academy, well... it's too painful to visualize. But it's very healthy... no?Yes, I am serious. If you opened my locker at Dominican Academy in New York City, you would have found a picture of Yeltsin torn from Time magazine, as if it were a Tiger Beat cover featuring Kirk Cameron.
But I digress... sort of.
K-Lo apparently hasn't bothered looking at the results of those "married by the morning after" shotgun weddings. Between 1960 and 1980 the US divorce rate tripled. At least 23 couples per thousand weren't terribly happy in their relationships and surprisingly, a lot of those couples were in longer term marriages. (Should we count the "premature births" that occurred among that number?)
Another thing she missed, (You can do that when you're rubbing a picture of Boris on your chest), was the data accumulated by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Oh, would you look at that! Since 1981 the teen pregnancy rate was actually declining in the US... until K-Lo's other hero expanded abstinence only sex education. By 2006 a sudden and sharp increase in teen pregnancy set back a steady 14 year decline.
And as to K-Lo's assertion that in the Leave It To Beaver days "Daddy's got a gun; we can't have no fun" resulted in fewer teen pregnancies, there is this real-live, honest-to-goodness analysis which says.... BS!
Unmarried Childbearing. The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000 (see chart). Birthrates fell steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s; they were fairly steady in the early 1980s and then rose sharply between 1988 and 1991 before decliningI know. Another conservative myth busted. But then, life isn't a Warner Bros cartoon. K-Lo on the other hand, is.
throughout the 1990s.
...Tory MP Ken Epp (Edmonton-Sherwood Park) said the pro-choice supporters have "gone too far."
"As far as I'm concerned it is indeed controversial," said Epp, who has a private member's bill before the House of Commons that would allow criminal charges to be laid in the death or injury of an unborn child when the child's mother is the victim of a crime.
Epp also questioned the objectivity of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as head of the Order of Canada advisory council. "Is she now totally out of impartiality because of the fact she has weighed into this? I am concerned about all of those things," he said.
I enjoy the melodious sound of right-wing teeth-gnashing as much as anyone, and there's quite a symphony going on today. Rock on! But if anyone still thinks that Epp's Bill has nothing to do with abortion, guess again. And if you guess wrong, I have a wonderful old bridge to sell you.
