The torch relay is almost here

The Olympic torch is coming to light up Saskatoon as well as Moosimin, Yorkton, Melville, Fort Qu"Appelle, Regina, Moose Jaw, CFB Moose Jaw, Caronport, Mortlach, Morse, Herbert, Swift Current, Kyle, Elrose, Rosetown, Delisle, Vanscoy, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Warman, Osler, Hague, Rosthern, Duck Lake, Prince Albert, North Battleford, Battleford, Saulteaux First Nation, Cochin, Maidstone, Lashburn, Marshall and Lloydminster.
Part of the celebration in Saskatoon will be a local show:

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) requested 50 minutes of local entertainment, and organizers have worked for 11 months to provide it, commissioning a new work by Dance Saskatchewan to weave it together . . .Dance Saskatchewan worked with different cultural groups to create a narrative incorporating Saskatoon's culture and history and pay tribute to the province's athletes

If I can find a video of the performance next week I will post it.

Skipping the lines

I was checking out some air flight costs the other day and found that the airlines have increased their nickle-and-dimeing for seat selection, extra bags, special lounges, meals and all that.
So here comes this story about Halle Berry jumping the security line at the Montreal airport and it contained this interesting nugget:

Sometimes celebrities are charged a fee to be escorted.

Really? You mean if I paid an extra fee, I could jump to the head of the security line at the airport? Now that might be worth paying extra for!

Double whammy

It's starting to heat up now: Majority condemn Harper move, poll finds and Influential British magazine slams Harper's suspension of Parliament.
Here's the money quote from the Economist:

Harper may in fact be correct that "Canadians care more about the luge than the legislature, but that is surely true only while their decent system of government is in good hands. They may soon conclude that it isn't."

And by the way, in the last three days, membership in the Facebook group Canadians Against Proroging Parliament has increased to 100,000.

Lunching with the losers

So Stephen Harper paid former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer close to $50,000 and one of the things Ari did was to arrange salon-type events last spring where Harper met with Washington Post and Wall Street Journal columnists Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Anne Applebaum, senior editors Fred Barnes and William Kristol, talk-radio host Laura Ingraham, as well as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch.
Boris sums up what Canadians got for their money:

. . . the PMO paid Ari a whack of tax payer dollars so Harper could hang-out with the propaganda-mongers of the side that LOST the last US election?

Great line of the day

Nancy Nall writes about positive thinking:

Opti­mism has its place in the world. But it’s one of those things it’s prob­a­bly best to keep to your­self some­times, too. Espe­cially when you’re not the one hav­ing chemo.

Do your duty

This is pure speculation on my part -- doing actual research would ruin my amateur standing, after all -- but I think in the secret heart of this Canada of ours, deep down where people really live, we are getting mad at Stephen Harper.
He isn't doing his job.
And Canadians don't like it when people don't do their job.
Sure, the syncopates in the press gallery can bow and scrape about how "devilishly clever" Harper was prorogue Parliament last week, but Canadians are not impressed with tricky word games. We will tolerate a lot from our politicians in Ottawa -- late lunches and long weekends and summer-time junkets -- but there is a limit. Canadians won't tolerate politicians who think it should be routine to pay themselves for not working.
Sure, we are distracted by hockey and the Olympics, sure we're digging out from snowstorms and thinking about house prices and jobs. That's why the reaction is taking a little time to build up.
But I do believe it is building now.
Now we're wondering why we have to line up along highways to watch more bodies come home while cabinet ministers refuse to answer questions about Afghan prisoners.
We're wondering why the Harper Conservatives kept telling us how damned important their crime bills are and then blithely ditch them because they're trying to save themselves a little embarrassment.
We're wondering why the Harper Conservatives pontificated last spring about how damned necessary it was for Canada to have a steady hand managing the economy, but they don't seem to be capable of getting things done and then they blithely throw the government into chaos by another prorogue.
Newspapers across the country have published editorials and more editorials and letters to the editor about Harper's contempt for democracy. I've been reading some great posts on the progressive blogs, too -- here and here, and here, and here, and everything here . The Facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament now has more than 53,000 members -- I think about 30,000 joined just today. Rallies across the country are being organized for Saturday, Jan 23.
The Liberals are now trying to catch the wave -- Scott reports tonight that Liberal MPs will be coming back to Ottawa on January 25 to demonstrate to Canadians that at least some politicians are working.
Rick Mercer sums up why Canadians are getting angry:

...This prime minister has gone from the promise of an open, accessible and accountable government to a government that is simply closed.
It is too bad that prorogation isn't something that our soldiers have in their arsenal. When faced with the order to head out on a foot patrol in the Panjwaii district of southern Afghanistan, to risk their lives to bring democracy to that place, wouldn't it be nice if they could simply prorogue and roll over and go back to sleep. Soldiers don't get that luxury. That is afforded only to the people who ultimately order them to walk down those dangerous dusty roads in the first place.

HT to Alison.

Next year country

Great game



except for the last three seconds.

US housing market

Sounds like the US housing market is still awful, at least in some places -- Las Vegas prices are down 54 Per cent from the peak, though Dallas prices are down only about 5 per cent from their highest.
Needless to say, this is not good news for Canada's forest industry.
Here's a New York Times story about recent events in the Florida community of Cape Coral, where a third of the 65,000 homes are affected by foreclosures.

. . . the fable [was] that waterfront living beyond winter’s reach exerts such a powerful pull that it justifies almost any price for housing [which] propelled the orgy of borrowing, investing and flipping that dominated life here and in other places where January doesn’t include a snow blower.
. . . speculators had simply been selling to other speculators, making the real estate market look like a Ponzi scheme. The ensuing crash was breathtaking. By the winter of 2007, median housing prices in Cape Coral and the rest of Lee County had fallen to about $215,000, down from a high of $278,000 in 2005. By October 2009, they had fallen to near $92,000.
Somewhere on that long, steep downhill path, what was once portrayed here as a momentary if wrenching setback seeped into the community’s bones, embedding lowered expectations and fear.

Here's a cartoon that sums up the blame game now underway

Stand by me

Just a musical interlude, from Playing For Change | Peace Through Music

Answers

John Cole asks:

...will people a hundred years from now look back on the way we treat homosexuals ... the same way that you and I look back on women’s suffrage - sort of a stunned disbelief at the way women were treated

Yes.

Kung Fu Fighting

John Cole posts about Chris Matthew's latest Thing of Beauty:

MATTHEWS: And I think we have got to get serious about catching terrorists, not just catching weapons. I‘m waiting for the terrorist who knows kung fu or something that gets on an airplane without a weapon. God knows what that is going to be like.

Cole calls it a "Palinesque work of art" but it is the Comments that are really priceless:

We just need to put ninjas on planes and maybe some pirates for good measure but they may go after the ninjas.

Oh, come on! A ninja would totally kick a pirate’s ass.

Depends. Does the pirate have his trusty parrot with him?

Just put some motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking planes, and they’ll take care of the motherfucking ninja terrorists.

I guess Jackie Chan will be on the no-fly list now.
[And other commenters also suggested:
Jet Li
Chow-Yun Fat
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Neo
Hong Kong Fooey
Kung-fu Panda
Ralph Macchia
Inspector Clouseau
Carl Douglas
Friends of Eddie Kim

God dammit, Mathews. The first rule of Terrorist Fight Club is that you do not talk about Terrorist Fight Club!

Just last week on a nonstop from Pittsburgh to LAX I had to subdue a determined group of muslim kung fu fighters who were intent on hogging all the pillows and magazines. Let me tell you, those cats were fast as lightning. Fortunately, they had this weird habit of taking turns, one by one, to fight me, and, as was covered in a brief montage, I’d spent a few months brushing up my grab-beard-crack-skull skills.

Hey, at least you weren’t flying out of Mumbai. Then a big Bollywood dance number would have broken out, and you know how crowded those aisles can be back in coach.

Forget kung fu terrorists. I’m more worried about dogs with bees in their mouth so when they bark they shoot bees at me. Because if we’re going to worry about bullshit things, let’s at least go all-out Homer-style when we do it.

What I’m really worried about are the terrorists that can control magnetic fields or take the form of any other individual. If those guys get on a plane, we are so fucked.

What if the guys that stare at goats don’t really need to see the goats? What if they can just squeeze their eyes shut and imagine staring at goats? Now just take that one wee bit farther, and I’m sure we can all easily imagine that, those guys can stare at pilots in the cockpits while their eyes are closed. I must sent an email right away to the TSA to warn them that passengers with their eyes closed could easily be terrorists planning to kill the flight crew. And please, no damn goat fucking jokes, this is a serious threat to airline safety here.

Every time Tweety sneezes he’s in danger of blowing out his brains

Oh, and this too:

Great line of the day

Steve writes about the 2009 Prorogue:

This prorogue is the great test. If there is no recourse, then the Conservative view of Canadians is cemented, and really its success only perpetuates the future reality. There is no real rationale to prorogue Parliament, the Conservative justifications bordering on insult. There are many fundamental reasons why this prorogue should bring fury, it speaks to a host of intellectual democratic considerations. This decision should matter, and yet a learned calculation suggests it probably won't. It's actually a sad statement on how Harper has fundamentally altered our political landscape, the new "norm" represents a new low.
. . . Harper has trashed every single tenet that his old movement supposedly stood for, he has become the antithesis.

Emphasis mine.

Calling in Afghanistan

I thought Obama's December speech on Afghanistan was remarkable in finally defining what the United States intended to accomplish in this war.
Today, Matt Yglesias refers to the analysis from Middle Eastern expert Rory Stewart on the poker strategy Obama is using to end this war:

Obama has acquired leverage over the generals and some support from the public by making it clear that he will not increase troop strength further. He has gained leverage over Karzai by showing that he has options other than investing in Afghanistan. Now he needs to regain leverage over the Taliban by showing them that he is not about to abandon Afghanistan and that their best option is to negotiate. . . . With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.

Steward also discusses Obama's overall strategy for his foreign policy:

... Obama's broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States . . .
I began by saying that "calling" in poker was childish and that grownups raise or fold. But there is another category of people who raise or fold: those who are anxious to leave the table. They go all in to exit, hoping to get lucky but if not then at least to finish. They do not do this on the basis of their cards or the pot. They do it because they lack the patience, the interest, the focus, or the confidence to pace themselves carefully through the long and exhausting hours. They no longer care enough about the game. Obama is a famously keen poker player. He should never be in a hurry to leave the table.

Perhaps we should call this the Obama Doctrine.
With today's terrible news of five more Canadian deaths in Afghanistan, it is more important than ever that Canadians know whether we are accomplishing anything there.

Tis the season

Every now and then I check out the Not Always Right website for the latest in customer stupidity stories. Here's one from Newfoundland:

Me: “Hello, ma’am. Did you find everything you were looking for today?”
Customer: “Yes, yes. Sure is busy here.”
Me: “I guess that’s because of the season, ma’am. Everyone’s out getting last-minute holiday gifts.”
Customer: “Oh, I see, yes. I haven’t needed to buy any gifts for a while. Everyone I love is dead.”
Me: “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that!”
Customer: [stares at me intently] “Someday, everyone you love will be dead, too.”
Me: “Uh…”
Customer: “Merry Christmas, now!”

Sort of existential, isn't it?

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney

This sorta has the flavour of "Let's put on a show in the old barn!"