Merry Christmas

"





And one more:

Playing politics while Toronto freezes in the dark

Toronto mayor-in-name-only Rob Ford is refusing to call what is happening in Toronto "an emergency":

Officials played down questions about why Toronto hadn’t declared a state of emergency. Mr. Ford said the damage didn’t warrant it. He has had some of his powers stripped after recent revelations about drug use, and some councillors questioned whether politics played a role in refusing to declare a state of emergency.

Almost 200,000 people are freezing in the dark, and Rob Ford won't call it an emergency because if he did, then he couldn't host any more press conferences.

Happy Festivus

Great line of the day

Dan Savage on the War on Christmas pity party:

Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly and Fox News and the Family Research Council and the woman who allegedly punched another woman outside Walmart earlier this week for saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" managed to break me of the "merry Christmas" habit. I suspect I'm not alone. This constant bitching from the right about "happy holidays"—a perfectly lovely expression that embraces Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Pancha Ganapati, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Hanukkah, the Epiphany, Saint Nicholas's Day, Hogmanay, Twelfth Night, and Kwanzaa—has made one thing clear. Not that there is now, or ever was, a war on Christmas. But that saying "merry Christmas" is an asshole move. Just as conservatives made patriotism toxic during the Vietnam War by conflating it with blind obedience to authority ("My country, right or wrong!"), modern conservatives have made "merry Christmas" toxic by associating it with Christian fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and the politics of imagined persecution.

Oh, so its for my own good, is it? How thoughtful of you!

Canada Post CEO Chopra thinks I'll be a happier, better person if I have to pick up my own mail.

“The seniors are telling me, ‘I want to be healthy. I want to be active in my life,’” Mr. Chopra told MPs. “They want to be living fuller lives.”

So that's what I've been missing to live a fuller, happier life -- a two block (at least) daily walk to pick up my mail.
Who knew?
And while we're at it, maybe the city can dig a community well at the mailboxes too, so it won't have to raise our taxes anymore to fix any deteriorating water lines.
Because after all, it's not a government's job to provide Canadians with actual services we need, like mail delivery. (Or to feed hungry children either.)  No, its the government's job to keep its services from becoming a burden on taxpayers.  And the easiest way to do that is to stop providing the services!
Simplicity itself.
And then I can get even healthier if I have to use my little red wagon to pick up our water every day while I'm getting the mail -- that's whole body exercise right there.
And firewood, don't forget firewood. Maybe we could pick that up, too.
Who needs natural gas heating at home when we can warm up by trudging through the rain or sleet or hail or snow to pick up everything we need, just like the pioneers did.
Maybe my husband and I can dig an outhouse in the back, and we could raise some chickens in the shed, too.
Thanks so much, Canada Post and Mr. Chopra, for giving Canadians the opportunity to experience the 18th century all over again.

.@mayzee01 @JohnOCAP Uber-bourgeois Chopra: Cuts are for the seniors' (and no doubt disabled people's) own good. Overfed, overpaid wretch.
— Dr.Dawg (@DrDawg) December 19, 2013

Great line of the day

No More Mister Nice Blog is writing about the NSA scandal, and this is pretty much how I feel now too:

At first I was an Edward Snowden skeptic. But I learned to separate my feelings about Snowden and (especially) Glenn Greenwald from my feelings about what they've exposed -- NSA surveillance violates constitutional principles so blatantly that I've stopped caring about Snowden's motives or Greenwald's journalistic practices. There's too much here, as has been confirmed by journalists who've written about it and aren't named Greenwald.

Yes, exactly. The secret surveillance story has transcended its scribes. Which is why the right-wing attacks on Greenwald and the CBC over the G20 spy story fell so flat.

Trending tonight on twitter

Twitter / Carolyn_Bennett: We love this photo ... Ditto ...:

Another great dog rescue from Eldad Hagar

A homeless dog living in a trash pile gets rescued, and then does something amazing! :

I have such admiration for the Hope for Paws organization and for the Hagars.

The difference between Canada and the United States

So we were watching the "fall finale" of Almost Human tonight.
 Now, I like this new show. But I realized part-way through this episode that even though it is filmed in Vancouver, it is totally "American" at its core.
The gee whiz its-the-future part of tonight's show was about how a corporation has invented a perfect artificial heart that works beautifully for people who need heart transplants.
But the basis of the plot was about how people were forced to buy the new hearts as recycled black-market transplants (from dead people!) because their health insurance was too crappy to pay for a real transplant.  The admin assistant in the corporate department that denied their insurance was the dastardly villain who had set up the black-market heart scheme.
And nobody thinks anything of it!
Nowhere in the episode does a single person complain or criticize or even question why people who need these beautiful new hearts are being sentenced to death due to inadequate insurance.
For a Canadian, this doesn't make any sense at all.

Peter O'Toole

Peter O'Toole has died.  He should have won the oscar for Lawrence of Arabia, except for his competition -- in retrospect, how could the Oscar for 1962 not have gone to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird.  At least Lawrence of Arabia won best picture.  Here's one of the best scenes:

"

Great line of the day

Andrew Sullivan writes about The Pope And The American Right and provides the best summary I have read lately about what has gone wrong with capitalism, American-style:

... the way in which market capitalism has become a good in itself on the American right is, well, perniciously wrong. As soon as a system ceases to be a means to a human good, and becomes an end in itself, it has become a false idol. Perhaps the apotheosis of that idol worship was the belief – brandished on the degenerate right in the past decade or two – that markets are self-regulating. Of course they’re not, as Adam Smith would have been the first to inform you. Another assumption embedded on the American right is that more wealth is always a good thing. The Church must say no. This is a lie. Wealth is a neutral thing above a certain basic level of non-drudgery. Above that, it can be an absolutely evil, deceptive thing, distorting human souls, warping their dignity, vulgarizing their character. An American right that worships at the altar of both free markets and material wealth, and that takes these two idols as their primary goods, is not just non-Catholic. It is anathema to Catholicism and to the Gospels.

This is, I think, what Occupy Wall Street was also trying to say, though not so clearly and so well.

Quid quo pro

Even the Star Phoenix finds the timing of the Canada Post announcement more than a little suspicious:

The Conservatives, after all, are leaving Ottawa with their ears still burning from the daily interrogation over the involvement of the Prime Minister's Office in the Senate scandal, and the humiliating and inept defence put up by their champion, Paul Calandra, parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister.
In spite of the Conservatives' repeated efforts to change the channel, nothing seemed to stick. Having the armslength Canada Post using its busiest season to announce a massive cut in service at least takes the heat off the government during the holidays when Canadians gather, and MPs don't have to field questions in Parliament.

Maybe they worked out a deal -- if Canada Post succeeds in distracting Canadians and parliament from the Senate scandal, then Treasury Board will let everybody keep their pensions.  Win-win.

I love flash mobs

▶ The USAF Band Holiday Flash Mob at the National Air and Space Museum 2013 - YouTube: ""

'via Blog this'

Solidarity forever

My reaction to the news that Conrad Black says he might endorse Rob Ford for mayor is:

It takes one to know one.

Honestly, Toronto, haven't you reached your gag reflex with both of them?

The creature that would not die!

The Senate expenses scandal is the Energizer bunny -- it keeps going and going.  Its Parliament Hill rock 'n roll -- it will never die.  Its a Canadian T-Bird -- we'll have fun, fun, fun until, well, until whenever.  And for the Harper Cons, its the Creature from the Black Lagoon -- it just won't go away!
Today, we find out that the Senate's pledge to give RCMP e-mails widens paper trail in expenses probe and that Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen apparently lied to the RCMP last June
Its all basically meaningless in the larger scheme of things, of course, but its very meaninglessness seems to be the reason why this story just won't quit.
When we've got a scandalous news story that isn't about anything that affects our daily lives -- like the economy, health care, or real estate -- then its just so much fun for the reporters to cover and for the people to read about, that nothing will stop it.