If you love dogs, you'll love this movie

We went to see Marley and Me today -- what a great movie. One review said it was about a marriage as much as it is about a dog, and that's true. Its the best work I've ever seen Owen Wilson do, not to mention Jennifer Aniston.
But Marley is the star. Now I've bought the book to read too.
It didn't surprise me at all to read, in John Grogan's blog, that he had adopted one of the puppies in the movie, now called Woodson. And also not surprising, when they found out that Woodson had serious hip problems, they kept him anyway.

"Just bring him back," one of the breeders said, "and we'll swap him out for a new puppy, your pick of the next litter." I have to admit the offer was tempting, like turning in a lemon automobile for a gleaming new model. But dogs are not commodities to be discarded when they break, and I assumed that if Woodson were returned, he would be euthanized.
My wife and I thought about it overnight before realizing there was really nothing to consider. Woodson was part of our family now. I got on the floor with our special-needs dog and placed my lips against his snout. "You're not going anywhere, Woodsy," I whispered. "We're in this together."
And we are. With the help of an excellent orthopedic specialist at the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school, we have Woodson on a special diet and a regimen of cartilage builders and medicines. We lift him into the car for rides and up the stairs for bed. Surgery might be in his future, but for now he's comfortable and enjoys his life as a pampered house pooch.
Woodson will never go hunting or hiking or even on long walks, and that's OK. Some dogs are put on this Earth just to love you.

Shoe, meet the other foot

With Ignatieff, the Liberal party has clearly changed shoes. They're now kicking Harper where it hurts -- right in the 'not a leader' meme:

“The thing that frankly concerns me is that the autumn statement so failed the test of leadership that Canadians required of the situation, that I'm not optimistic that the government will come up with a budget that meets Canada's needs,” Mr. Ignatieff said.
“But I live in hope, as it were, that Mr. Harper will rise to the demands of the hour.”

Ouch!
Far and Wide sums up the difference between Dion and Ignatieff -- attitude.
Iggy's got one.
And Harper is scared.
I think it comes down to the excellent political judgment which Iggy is showing. He has drawn a line in the sand, and Harper will cross it at his peril. With Dion, Harper could get away with turning everything into a confidence vote because Dion was scared of an election. Iggy is making it clear that he is not scared at all.
But Harper is -- he has already shown that losing the prime ministership is his very worst nightmare, the thing that he will do anything to avoid.
So if he survives another near-death experience with the budget vote at the end of January, then watch how magically, presto change-o, absolutely NOTHING ELSE will be a "confidence" vote. The Conservative agenda will be toast. And the parliamentary committees should be very entertaining this spring!

Here we go again

Apparently there is now a "secretive pro-life caucus" in our Parliament which contains "members from every party" and which is now pledging to reopen the abortion debate, in Canadian Press's words.
But really, they don't want to just "reopen the debate" -- they're trying to criminalize abortion, and force women to continue unwanted pregnancies.
They're starting the same way they have done in the States, with criminalizing so-called "late term" or "partial-birth" abortions, because these are just too icky to defend.
Listen to this inflammatory, untruthful tripe:

"Very few Canadians appreciate the fact that essentially until a child takes its first breath, it has less value than a kidney," says Bruinooge [Winnipeg MP Rod Bruinooge, apparently the self-proclaimed "chair" of the "pro-life caucus"].
"In Canada you can't remove your kidney and put it on eBay and auction it off. That is illegal. Whereas you actually can end a beating heart of an unborn child the second before it's delivered. Most Canadians would agree that is truly a poor bioethical position for our country to be in."
Pro-choice advocates say Canadian doctors only perform such later-term procedures if there's a serious threat to the health of the mother or if it's virtually certain the baby wouldn't survive past birth.

Of course, its not just "pro-choice advocates" who say this, it is the doctors themselves and their patients. But using adversarial terminology implies there is actually some basis for an ethical debate, I guess.
And I wonder who in the Liberal caucus are members of this group? And which New Democrats and Bloc MPs are members, too?
Its time for any MP who wants to criminalize abortion to step forward and let us see who you are.

Great line of the day

At Daily Kos, diarist Jed L reports about how Rick Warren now accusing us of being "christophobes" -- as though anyone objecting to Warren is also somehow opposing Jesus Christ himself -- egotist, isn't he? Anyway, this is how Jed sums it up:

. . . the real division isn't between those who think he should speak at the inaugural and those who don't, it's between those who would deny gay citizens the same rights and privileges as everybody else, and those who believe gay citizens deserve the same rights and privileges as everybody else.
That's the real division, and Rick Warren is on the wrong side.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

One of the fun things about the end of the year are the Best-of-the-year/ Worst-of-the-year lists that everybody is making now.
Here is Rabble's Best of list -- Danny Williams! -- and Worst of list - Sarah Palin's "hyper-confident ignorance".
And here's another walk down memory lane from Huffington Post -- The 10 Worst Media Moments Of 2008. I particularly liked this one:

I'll tell you what set my teeth on edge: every time someone made mention of Hillary Clinton playing the 'gender card.'
Let me get this straight. It's okay for Barack Obama to put his racial background to advantageous use. It's okay for John McCain to put his war-hero past to advantageous use. It's okay for John Edwards to put his Son-of-a-mill-worker-hood to advantageous use. It's okay for Rudy Guiliani to put his proximity to the September 11th attacks to advantageous use. But if Hillary Clinton attempts to leverage her femininity to her advantage, suddenly everyone has to debate the relative fairness of it? Is American politics a milieu in which the participants often forego their natural advantages in competition, out of a spirit of fairness? No? Then suggesting Hillary Clinton be tied to a different set of standards is horseshit, the end.

Kaleidoscope

Remember the kaleidoscopes we played with when we were kids?



From Drawn.ca

Absolutely furious

If I were a true-blue Conservative, the appointment of mere journalists like Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin to the Senate would make me simply furious.
Well, at least he didn't appoint any separatists, like that damned Coalition would have...oh, wait...

For fun

Gilda Radner sings with a carrot:

We just loved The Muppet Show.

Thanks, Alison

Alison watches Dear Leader so you don't have to.

"Tysonic"

On Talking Points Memo we find a great new word:

Bill Simmons, a sportswriter for ESPN, coined the term "Tysonic". It refers to Mike Tyson, and applies to anyone who has entered a sphere of existence so bizarre, you will believe any news you hear about them, no matter how absurd. Aside from Mike Tyson, Britney Spears is Tysonic. After the turkey interview, I classify Sarah Palin as Tysonic.
As a native Chicagoan, I say Blogo is definitely Tysonic. If someone told me, "Hear about Blogo? He dressed himself up as Elvis, highjacked an Air Yugo flight from O'Hare to Belgrade, and is now living under the protection of Serbia... And he's formed an exploratory committee for 2016."
I'd pause for a moment and say, "Yeah, that sounds right."

Housing bubble

Atrios writes:

. . . all you had to do was look at home prices, look at incomes, and realize that not enough people actually made enough money to afford those mortgages. . .

It is the mantra of our generation that real estate always goes up -- except when it doesn't.
When we would watch those home flip shows over the last couple of years, and we would see somebody pay half a million dollars for a three-bedroom bungalow in Las Vegas or Atlanta or Pittsburg, then flip it for three-quarters of a million, my husband and I would wonder who in the world was buying these ordinary houses for that much money.
In other housing markets we had seen, there was outside buying pressure which raised prices, but this didn't seem to be the case in the States. So we thought maybe Americans must be somehow just so much richer than us Canadians.
Now, of course, we realize it was just people like us who were suckered into some bizarre mortgage scheme, blinded by the belief that they couldn't lose because house prices were going to keep going up forever.

Great post of the day

From Maxwell's House: Everyone give thanks to the coalition:

If you are Canadian you need to get down on a knee and give thanks to the coalition of opposition parties that saved your country . . . The coalition forced Harper and the Conservatives to stop and think about what they were doing. It made them choose between being ousted from power or admitting that the economy had failed on their watch . . . THANK YOU COALITION.

And Senator Elaine McCoy tells us why Harper's new economic stimulus package sounds so familiar.

Great cartoon

Stuart Carlson:

Maybe there's still time

Was this all that I needed to do?:

The government has been inundated with applications for the vacant seats, he said.
"People come up to me on the street and say they want to be a senator," said [Minister of State for Democratic Reform Steven] Fletcher.

I wonder if I still have time to put in my application...

Is this creativity?

This is worrisome. US federal reserve chair Ben Bernanke apparently thinks this economic crisis must be just like the last economic crisis because that's the one he studied. I don't get the sense that he actually knows what's happening in THIS crisis, rather that he is cutting interest rates because that's what he thought might have helped in Japan a decade ago.
And about the US Fed cutting interest rates to zero, Paul Krugman says:

Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

Don't hold your breath. If there is one thing that we can rely on with the Bush administration, it is ideological, rigid, incompetent decision-making.