Turning on a dime

If there is one thing the 21st century had learned already, its that things will change on a dime.
George Bush wasn't going to be a memorable president -- until 911.
The Irish economy was the Celtic Tiger -- except when it collapsed. And the American economy was never going to quit -- except when it did.
The NDP was never going to get elected in Quebec -- then they won 50 seats.
And in spite of the thousands of American lives lost in 911 and in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the United States will always support Israel....except that Americans are starting to get pissed off at being lectured to and taken for granted.
Josh Marshall writes:

Netanyahu believes that US power is forever and that the US political consensus to support Israel in almost any policy choice it makes will never change. So he can simply ignore the currents of history and international affairs and thumb his nose at every other country in the world. But neither is true.

Just watch him

Not even three weeks into his unfettered prime ministership, and Stephen Harper is already showing us what kind of prime minister he will be -- arrogant, unaccountable, partisan, and shortsighted.
And the media is already showing us what kind of press coverage we're going to get: arrogant, obedient, and obsessed with trivialities.
Warren Kinsella sums it up:

You get what you pay for, folks. You get the government you vote for. Suck it up.
On May 2, Canadians may have felt they were trooping to polling stations to bring to an end the seemingly interminable cycle of elections and minority governments, and return some stability for four years. They may have thought they were rewarding Stephen Harper for doing not badly through a global recession, and for not behaving like a Reform Party troglodyte following his first win in 2006. They may have thought they were doing their democratic duty.
In reality — and from Stephen Harper’s perspective — they were giving the Conservative Party a licence to do whatever the hell it wants to.
This is, I am now convinced, Stephen Harper’s last term as prime minister. By the time it’s over, he will have been in power for a decade.
And he plans to drop a few more bombs along the way.
Just watch him.

Just for laughs

Great line of the day

John Cole's brother:

I was talking to my brother (another atheist) a few moments ago, and I told him “You know tonight is the rapture?”
He looked at me and said “Really? Boy, I hope they take those people.”

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

The Toronto Star asks police to step up in the Dorian Barton beating case:

The silence surrounding this case makes a mockery of the appeals for information that police routinely issue to the public. Police regularly send out photos of suspects and ask civilians for help identifying them. They call on the public’s sense of civic responsibility and simple justice, and ask them to do the right thing. In the Barton case, police are showing they believe that basic expectation of citizenship does not apply to them . . . It’s up to the chief — or at least one courageous officer — to step up and answer the question: Who is the man in the photo?

An honourable person would come forward himself, without forcing any of his fellow officers to identify him... .oh, sorry, we're talking about the G20 police thugs here, I forgot.

Sheepdogs make it to the final two

Saskatoon rock band Sheepdogs have made it to the final two in the contest to get onto the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Go again! Vote again!

THE SHEEPDOGS - I Don't Get By from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

Shorter

Shorter Republican presidential candidates:

Pushing back creeping G20-ism

"Creeping G20-ism" is my term for the insidious attitude that says its OK for police to do whatever they want to whomever they want because any civilian who gets in their way must just be a thug anyway.
A couple of stories in today's Star Phoenix demonstrate some push back against creeping G20-ism.
Here's the first one:

Judge Barry Singer said officers had no authority to detain Kirkland Douglas Brown on Aug. 12, 2009, and their arrest and detention of him was unlawful.
"From my observations in court, the police in Saskatoon and the officers involved in this case, in particular, believe that section 209 of the Traffic Safety Act gives them the authority to stop any vehicle and determine the identity of the driver.
"This is not the law," Singer wrote.
Singer threw out police evidence and found Brown, 50, not guilty of obstructing a peace officer by disobeying a signal to stop, failing to produce a driver's licence and possessing a prohibited weapon.
Singer had already dismissed a charge of assaulting a police officer and heard evidence it was Brown who was injured during the arrest, not the officers.

And here's the other:

Saskatoon police officers are no longer able to charge people with assaulting peace officers without the approval of their superiors.
The policy was implemented two months ago, after the charge was thrown out in two cases involving men who said they were assaulted by arresting officers, not the other way around.. . . In March, a Crown prosecutor stayed three charges of assaulting a peace officer while attempting to resist arrest. The charges had been laid against Charles Vanneste, who alleges he was tackled by three uniformed officers, punched in the head and kneed in the back after making a comment to a uniformed sergeant.
Vanneste spent the night in a police cell and was charged with assaulting three peace officers and uttering a threat to cause death.
All of the charges were stayed the day his trial was set to begin.

And Joe Warmington at the Toronto Sun continues to fight the good fight. The tone of disgust in his latest column is palpable -- he is writing about a father whose son, Dorian Barton, was beaten during the G20 protests but whose police attackers are hiding behind a Blue Wall:

His purple bruises lasted all summer, his shoulder was fractured and he still does not have full use of it. The internal damage and suffering is hard to measure as he pursues legal action.
His father just wishes police would do the right thing and apologize to his son, whose charges of obstructing police and unlawful demonstrating were thrown out by the court. With or without criminal charges, the reality is Dorian was nothing more than a victim of an assault right in front of hundreds of police officers.
“You’d think one of these officers would be law abiding enough to recognize the one who inflicted this damage to my son,” said Ted.
Many are and may do exactly that. Some have told me they are offended at being ordered from above to condone unlawful and uncivilized incarcerations, false arrests, rubber bullet shootings, forced kettlings, the displaying of false evidence and illegal searches while letting the real criminals go on a rampage untouched.

Here's one of the photos of that beating:

Get back on the horse

It's stupid for Liberals to talk about delaying a leadership vote. The party is acting like a bunch of drama queens -- as though the recent election defeat was such a cataclysm, such a total and ultimate disaster, that no leader could possibly get his act together for years and years.
Do they think maybe somewhere there's a magical pony coming to save the party if they just wait long enough? If they wait too long, Canadians may discover they don't miss hearing what the Liberals have to say.
So, folks, the choice is clear: Bob Rae, Dominic LeBlanc, or Justin Trudeau. None are without flaws, but any one could do the job.
So pick one and get on with the real work of rebuilding this party before the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who did not vote Liberal can't remember why they ever did.

Another sanity test

Anyone who takes Newt Gingrich seriously as a candidate for President of the United States is also certifiably nuts.

Trivial

As usual, the media seem to be focusing on trivialities, like how young some of the new NDP members of parliament are:


Canada's problem for the next four years is not going to be the age of the people sitting on the opposition benches:

Haven't we all felt like this some days?

Shorter

Shorter Republican presidential debate:

Still crazy after all these years.

Our binary future

The Liberal party is going to get a lot of unsolicited advice over the next several months, but they could do much worse than listen to Jason Cherniak.
Jason tells the Liberal organization to clean out its Ottawa office, stop trying to pick "winners", and listen to the party membership.
One piece of his advice that I disagree with, however, is that the Liberals should "stay Liberal".
The future for progressives in Canada is to merge with the New Democrats.
As Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom says

Eventually, both parties will be forced to face the mathematics of the situation. Each wants to be the one to defeat the Harper Conservatives. Neither can do it alone.

As many other countries are discovering as well, the 21st Century political model is a binary one -- a yin yang toggle switch; the either-or language of the computer code. Politics is the forces of light vs the forces of darkness, and you're on our side or you're with the terrorists. No time for nuance or tolerance for compromise. The serpentine political slither between extremes is considered to be offensive, and labeled as unprincipled.
Myself, I actually liked the Liberals non-ideological approach, but I grew up in the last century.
Times have changed.

Gonna get my picture on the cover

Saskatoon rockers Sheepdogs are in the final four for the cover of the Rolling Stone.
Go! Vote!



And, of course...