Guantanamo nation

I was glad to hear Obama say he intends to close Guantanamo, but I just hope is isn't turning the United States into Guantanamo North:

Has the Obama administration really endorsed the reality of preventative detention -- an American gulag, indefinite imprisonment without trial . . . [and that] there exist human beings in this world who could be indefinitely held without trial under the authority of the president of the United States

Marc Ambinder describes the so-called "indefinite detention" plan as Obama's "rubicon" -- like when Julius Ceasar illegally crossed the Rubicon River, after which he was irrevocably committed to invading Rome.
But actually, this is an event horizon, the crossing point where it becomes impossible to escape falling into a black hole.
Because Obama doesn't want to do this illegally, like Bush and Cheney did. No, perhaps even worse, he wants it to be legal. He wants Congress to pass a law giving him the authority to arrest people and put them in jail forever, without ever having a civilian judge or a jury of ordinary people hear the evidence against them and find them guilty of anything.
Governments have tried this type of thing before. There's a name for it.
If Congress approves such a law because they're so pants-wetting terrified of a few dozen Muslim fanatics, they will undermine their own Constitution and the whole concept of a nation based on laws.
Because, after all, once this military commission structure is up and running, why should they stop with just a few Muslim traitors? The Cheney administration believed that Democrats were traitors too. And journalists. And judges. So why wouldn't this administration or the next also become convinced that Republicans were a danger to society? And maybe bankers, too. And aren't drug dealers and Mafia dons also threatening the nation? Not to mention murderers and thieves. Its just so much easier to throw them all in jail without bothering with that messy and expensive and unreliable trial stuff . . .

Justice League of America or whatever

Here's the latest news from Washington:

Seeking to quell fears of terrorists somehow breaking out of America's top-security prisons and wreaking havoc on the defenseless heartland, President Barack Obama moved quickly to announce an Anti-Terrorist Strike Force headed by veteran counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer and mutant superhero Wolverine. Already dubbed a 'dream team,' their appointment is seen by experts as a crucial step in reducing the mounting incidents of national conservatives and congressional Democrats crapping their pants.
'I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force,' explained President Obama. 'Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes.' Mr. Bauer said, 'We're quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn't dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we'll be there to stop them.'

Or, if it's Bigfoot, let's get Sgt. Preston on the case too, because he always gets his man. On, King! On, you huskies!

Audit fatigue

Oh, here we go again.
I have become increasingly tired and cynical about the self-aggrandizing crusades of Canada's auditors general, at the federal and provincial levels, always wanting more and more investigations of smaller and smaller amounts of money.
Too often, their reports demonize legitimate political spending decisions, terrorize the civil service, and always seems to conclude by demanding for themselves more staff and wider authority. Journalists love them, of course, because those juicy scandalous stories of mis-spent tax dollars practically write themselves.
But in the grander scheme of things, MPs expense accounts are actually pretty small beer. Especially compared to what Ottawa should be investigating -- those billions of extra dollars being collected for employment insurance premiums when EI is actually benefiting fewer and fewer unemployed people. Now THAT'S a scandal.

Mulroney's legacy

Christie Blatchford sums up Mulroney's responsibility for what has happened:

. . . no one forced him to go [to the meeting with Schreiber], to take the envelope, to put it in a safe at his home and keep it there.
Everything else may be someone else's fault, but this wasn't.
. . . In 1965, the magnificent British band The Kinks had a hit with a song called A Well Respected Man about a fellow who actually wasn't. Every time I saw the “Right Honourable” before Brian Mulroney's name on my TV screen yesterday, the song played in my head. That's his legacy, I'm afraid.

And here's the song:



Update: Allison channels The Walrus:

"O weep for me," the Muldoon said:
"For all of it is lies."
With sobs and tears he socked away
His 2 million dollar prize,
And held his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

Supreme news

With today's news that the US Supreme Court is going to review the conviction of Conrad Black, it was timely to read this Jeffrey Toobin article about US Chief Justice John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The word to describe this man is "toady".
This is a man who, as a district court judge, figured out a way to excuse the police for arresting a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on the subway.
As Obama himself observed when he voted against confirming Roberts as chief justice “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak”
I think Conrad Black can book his flight.

Get over yourselves

So now the police in Laval think they need to handcuff people who don't immediately obey their instructions.
Who elected them king?

Great line of the day

Dave at the Beav talks about Rex Murphy's realization that the Harper government is just going around in circles:

. . . like a kid who is completely enthralled by the bright, shiney, toy electric train when he first opened the box, Murphy has become tired and fed up with the fact that it's the same thing, going around in a circle, and he can't seem to find any track that will fit to make it bigger and better.
The Harper party will always be like the little toy train on a circular track: capable of very little and simply repeating its route.

Emphasis mine.

Watching his words

So Brian Mulroney says nobody asked him exactly the right question in exactly the right way a decade ago, so of course he didn't mention those hundreds of thousands in cash forced on him, just FORCED on him, by good old whatshisname, some guy he had coffee with a few times.
Don't you just hate it when that happens?
So what did Mulroney say today that we should all be parsing?

"I never asked him for a nickel in my life."

Nope -- it was a dollar, all 225,000 of them.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Odds my bodkins

What could be better?

Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Harry James do Sing, Sing, Sing

When Conservatives attack

The take-away from the new Tory attack ads seems to be the line that Tory times are tough times -- I wouldn't think this was what the Conservatives actually wanted us to remember.
It is interesting reading some of the comments to the Radwanski column in the Globe and Mail:

I'd rather be spared the sandbox gamesmanship and get on with managing the economy . . .
I think the Conservatives have to come to grips with that fact that most Canadians don't consider a person with Ivy league credentials a bad thing. Especially when it comes to running the country . . .
I am starting to wonder if I am acceptable as a Canadian. I was born elsewhere and have been a Canadian for many years. But my time outside the country could be construed as anti-Canadian . . .
As a former mentor and advisor for Stephen Harper, Mulroney is running the best attack ads anyone could on the Conservatives, showing Canadians what Conservatism is all about . . .
I think Canadians expect more from their Prime Minister and their government than small minded, mean spirited attacks against the opposition . . .
Harper spends money on attack ads while the unemployed wait for EI and Canada waits for infrastructure money . . .
On the plus side, it's exactly this kind of divisive, negative, and reactionary behaviour during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression that has helped reduce the Republicans south of the border to a marginal entity on the political scene. Let's hope that pattern continues with our bully conservatives.

What Digby says

About accepting torture as just another thing Americans do:

We are in big trouble when torture becomes just another political football. It's the kind of thing that turns powerful empires into pariah nations. Why anyone thinks it's good for America for the world to perceive us as violent, pants wetting, panic artists who could start WW III at the least sign of threat is beyond me. I certainly don't feel safer.

It is sad that the world will no longer have its shining city on the hill.

Add mustard-gate to the list

At the end of a lengthy CP story about how Obama's choice of mustard is "unAmerican", Lee-Anne Goodman quotes from a recent Bill Maher piece in the LA Times:

"Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law," Maher wrote.
"And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a TelePrompTer too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes."
Conservatives, Maher wrote, are now behaving like "the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him - obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will," he wrote.
"But ... your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy."

I don't think Republicans should still be confused about why Americans don't like them anymore, when they think people should care about whether Obama prefers yellow or dijon mustard.
Actually, of course, what they're really trying to do is to stop Obama from making any more of these popular forays out of the White House. The favourable press coverage for these trips is driving them crazy.
Or crazier.

Truth is no defense, I guess

The Guardian reports on this California lawsuit against a teacher by a student who stalked the teacher for 18 months to catch him saying that creationism is "superstitious nonsense".
Well, it is, of course.
But teachers apparently can't say so anymore because it might hurt someone's poor widdle feelings.

The devil made me do it

In the Comments section to this great Matt Taibbi post about religion, sportsblogger Graham Kates says:

The existence of this eternal bickering between God-people and no-God-people is proof that the Devil exists and is trying to bore everyone to death.