There but for the grace of God...

Emergency Blues analyzes the tragic, needless death of Anna Brown who died of in a St. Louis jail of a blood clot because doctors, nurses and police officers wouldn't believe she was sick:

I will let the public in on a little secret. We all do it. Each and every one of us. I don’t exclude myself. We all label patients. It is deeply embedded in the culture of health care to the point where it is an accepted practice. We all call patients drug seeking and crazy and frequent flyers and failures-to-die and failures-to-cope. We laugh at them. Hell, there are whole books devoted to the art of ridiculing patients we have already labelled. (Though when you think about it, there is nothing quite as charming as making fun of human beings who are powerless, is there?)

I wonder what, over the years, they have called me?

Its not you, its me

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last while -- its not you, its me.  I've been dealing with some stuff lately --
First, iliotibial band syndrome complicated by a torn meniscus has been taking its toll. I've been seeing the physio several times a week since the end of January and gradually it might be getting better but it seems to be two steps forward one step back.
This started in November -- following the surgery I had in October to take an old plate off my fibula -- so I basically ignored it for two months, thinking whatever was wrong would improve on its own as I healed from the surgery -- the incision didn't heal as quickly as I had expected. Anyway, I finally realized the pain in my knee wasn't just going to go away on its own, and I did something about it. But its been a lengthy and painful process and I may yet still have to have surgery for it.
Then, our dog Chillou tore his anterior cruciate ligament in February and needed to have surgery for that. He had the TTA surgery, but because we live in a four-level split, keeping him on the main level for two months requires baby gates around the house, plus some furniture rearrangement to make a place for him.  He seems to be recovering well now -- at first, he threw up all the time, probably because of the anesthetic and the antibiotic pills he had to take, and I was very worried about him.  He is 9 years old, and I was not sure about his ability to bounce back.  He never lost his spirit, but he was a sick dog for a while there.  At least this meant he lost some weight, but it took a while to find food he could tolerate and in the meantime I was making him rice and hamburger.  We also had to take a quick trip to the vet to get his stitches resewn when the swelling in his leg split the first ones open.   But the incision is better now, and he is starting to put weight on his leg again -- our son has been doing passive massage and my husband gets Chillou out of the house for drives so he isn't as bored as he was.  He is starting to be able to walk outside again now that the snow is gone.  For the time being we are feeding him canned food and we are gradually going to switch him back to the hard kibble food.  My own physio has a friend who does dog physio so maybe we will both be going to physio together!
This morning, for the first time, he wanted an apple after breakfast -- it was his favourite daily treat before but this was the first time since the surgery that he has wanted one.

Great line of the day

From Boris, talking about the Trudeau-Barazeau dustup:

Better watch that rematch Justin. Cons cheat when they can't win honestly.

Great line of the day

John Cole writes about Rick Santorum's plan to give a foreign policy speech at a jelly bean company as a tribute to Ronald Reagan:

Those weren’t firecrackers you heard...it was the entire staff of The Onion shooting themselves in despair.

Shared sacrifices

As the poorest people in Canada find themselves working at their lousy jobs for two extra years before they can qualify for $500 a month in Old Age Security, I am sure they will be comforted by the hardships that MPs will also be experiencing in the name of austerity:

Members of Parliament will be giving up their first-class tickets on short-haul flights like the popular Ottawa-Toronto leg. Now only flights over two hours will qualify for first-class privileges at taxpayers’ expense. The frequent flyers will also be forced to look for bargains. Except for long flights to their ridings, MPs will only be allowed to purchase flights at Air Canada’s “Tango Plus” fare class, which is the second cheapest of five available options.

Wow, what sacrifice!
The disgusting parsimony of the Harper Conservatives makes me sick and angry.

Starbugs

Crushed bugs in my coffee? Eyuwwee-yuck!

Earl Scruggs

Banjo legend Earl Scruggs dies at 88:

Snooze-fest

So sleepy MP Rob Anders has been booted off the Veterans Affairs Committee and is now a member of the joint Senate-House Scrutiny of Regulations Committee
Well, if he had trouble staying awake before.....

What film industry?

Film tax credit won't return:

Premier Brad Wall says his government will not reinstate the film employment tax credit cut in last week's budget, but it is willing to consider other ideas on how to support the industry.

What the Wall government doesn't seem to understand is this:  without the film tax credit, in a North American market where filmmakers can get such a credit just about anywhere else, Saskatchewan doesn't have a film industry anymore.
So nothing like this will ever be happening here again:

Can Mulcair fight the good fight?

As best I can, I have maintained my amateur status regarding the NDP leadership race by learning very little about any of the candidates.
But I have liked what I did hear about Thomas Mulcair. I gather he can be difficult to get along with sometimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NDP party organization needed some new blood and an "outsider" like Mulcair can provide that.
But actually, I don't really care what kind of NDP leader he is.
What I care about is whether he will be a good Leader of the Opposition.
Canadian opposition to Harper's ideological agenda is both widespread and deep. But its disorganized, waiting for a leader to coalesce around.
Will Mulcair take on the role of fighting Harper tooth and nail? Will he fire up Canadians to fight with him?
Will he be able to articulate a coherent anti-Harper strategy, and gather together enough support from across the country to save Old Age Security, keep us out of war with Iran, and prevent new abortion legislation?
Can he fight? That's my question.

New comments now

OK I deleted the Haloscan comments and enabled the Blogger comments, so I hope this now will work across all of the various blogger homes.
Let me know by email if it doesn't work -- cfornssler (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Great line of the day

From the Jurist responding to Christian Paradis refusing to resign and Harper refusing to make him:

as usual, the Cons think law, order and accountability are only for people they don't like.

Therefore, God?

My daughter was just telling me about the Singularity philosophy and others of the "I can't understand it, therefore God?" ilk -- and I was somehow reminded of The Philosophers' Song:

Comments update -- use "ncr" after my blog address

So I wrote to Echo about the comment problem and this is the response:

Your website URL which is associated with your Haloscan account and which is registered in your dashboard is:
"cathiefromcanada.blogspot.com". The "cathiefromcanada.blogspot.ca" domain is a separate domain, that's why you cannot see appropriate comments on that address.
Google has recently started a new thing with Blogger in which people from different regions are redirected to regional versions of the blog's address. For instance, an Canadian trying to get to
http://cathiefromcanada.blogspot.com is redirected to the address http://cathiefromcanada.blogspot.ca
Please check the changes in the Blogger made by Google recently:
http://bit.ly/AD6EPY

So I checked out this page, and yes, Blogger is redirecting some people to a version of my blog called ".ca" instead of ".com" --and which version the comments are on, who knows? I can't find them on either anymore.
But here is a fix I figured out -- if everyone changes the title of my blog in their bookmarks to "http://cathiefromcanada.blogspot.com/ncr" (for "no country redirect") then everyone will be seeing the same version of the page, and hopefully this will be the version where the comments are.
So let's all try that, and stay tuned...

What did 94 Conservative candidates know, and when did they know it?

Sixth Estate has a brilliant roundup post gathering together all 94 of the ridings where fraudulent or harassing phone calls have now been reported:

It’s become increasingly clear that there was not one effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election: there were several, some with robocalls, some with live callers, some with just plain idiots participating.

But there is one aspect of this scandal that hasn't yet received the attention it should have -- the cui bono question, who benefited?
The Conservative MPs who got elected due to these tactics -- or who lost but not for lack of trying -- need to be held to account.
Sixth Estate says later in a comment that

Given the scope of the operation, it’s almost inconceivable that local candidates would have been informed. In fact, whoever was responsible probably stayed away from sharing too much with individual candidates — less opportunity for leaks/objections that way.

Yes, that's true. But ultimately the individual candidates are responsible for EVERYTHING that was done in their ridings during a campaign.
The heart of the in-out scandal was how some Conservative candidates allowed their riding accounts to be used by the national campaign to launder national expenditures and get fraudulent reimbursements.  So its not as if local campaigns would not also be culpable in this scandal -- regardless of whose idea it was or where the phone call originated, local input would have been crucial to write those phoney redirection scripts.
When we hear during election campaigns about signs being defaced or removed, the media doesn't hesitate to phone up the offending campaign and go after the candidate for an explanation -- so why, in this scandal, have the MPs or Conservative candidates not been asked to explain what they knew and when?