First Nations answers to #OscarsSoWhite

Indian Country media network has a post up listing First Nations actors or films that should have been awarded an Oscar, or at least a nomination. Its a great piece, noting in particular the great performances in Smoke Signals, which is one of my favorite movies ever:



And of course Will Sampson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:

Hillary's best speech yet

After winning South Carolina in a landslide:

Brer Barak

So the Republicans are saying they're not even going to talk to any proposed Supreme Court Justice nominee named by Obama.
And in response, Obama is pleading with them: Please, Mr. Republican Senator, please vote on my Supreme Court nominee!

The GOP-controlled Senate has said loudly and repeatedly that they’re going to refuse to hold a hearing for any Supreme Court nominee President Obama might pick. In response, he wrote a blog post appealing to the Senate’s sense of fairness, law, and Constitutional responsibility. Hmm.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he’ll refuse to even meet privately with any Obama SCOTUS nominee, and there’ll definitely be no confirmation hearings: “I’ve said repeatedly and I’m now confident that my conference agrees that this decision ought to be made by the next president, whoever is elected.”
In response, the president wrote a guest post for SCOTUS Blog, the heavily-read, well-respected outlet that tracks Supreme Court news and opinions. In it, Obama pretends like everything is normal here and he’s not hostage on a speeding legislative train with shoddy brakes and a bunch of screaming maniacs setting the engine room on fire out of spite.

Because heaven forbid that the Senate not even call a vote on an Obama nominee.  Why, this could become a major election issue, which Hillary to use to get herself elected AND to flip the Senate! Heaven forbid!

Letting the drunk poors freeze

You can recognize when the Sask Party government is doing something based on ideology rather than common sense.
First, they won't announce it or admit to doing it.
Second, when finally called on it, they can't explain it in a way that makes any sense.
And third, its always about money. Added bonus: when it grinds a few more bucks from the poors, just to show them they have no right to exist in The New Saskatchewan.
The latest is that Saskatchewan social services apparently decided IN NOVEMBER that it would refuse to pay anymore for emergency beds for drunks. Yes, just as Saskatchewan was heading into its coldest time of year, our Social Services agency apparently decided it doesn't care if drunk people freeze in the streets.
After all, drunk poors -- why should our government waste its beautiful mind worrying about what happens to them anyway?
As a result, the Lighthouse in North Battleford, which annoyingly persists in providing emergency beds for drunk people, is no longer getting enough funding from Social Services to stay open.  And the Saskatoon Lighthouse is in financial trouble too.
We're presently at the denial and obfuscation stage in this story -- Social Services denies funding rule change at North Battleford shelter . Here's the nut graph:

In a Dec. 16, 2015 message from a ministry employee, Glencross ...was told, “Social Services mandate is to provide emergency shelter for the homeless who have no other means to meet their immediate need of shelter. Our mandate is not to fund the lodging of publicly intoxicated individuals.
A more inclusive community response including police and health services may be required for the latter.”

These people need emergency help  because the Sally Ann won't admit people who have been drinking.  And the police have been trying not to spend their limited time and resources arresting harmless drunks just to get them off the streets when it is cold.
Last winter, the social services ministry apparently stepped up. This winter, not.
The rest of the news story quoted above is a sorry mess of disingenuous bafflegab:

When asked if liability for refusing services to intoxicated people is a concern for the Ministry, Redekop said he wasn’t familiar with where the statement came from, that he isn’t qualified to provide a legal response and that he is “not specifically” aware of any discussions about liability for refusing intoxicated people.
“I didn’t say if I’m aware of the issue or not,” he said.
“We would need to have more information about what the question means. Liability is obviously a very big issue and there’s a lot of elements to it that are beyond my ability to discuss without maybe a legal opinion.
“I want to make sure I’m giving you good information rather than getting into something I don’t have specific information about,” he said.
Redekop stressed the ministry provides shelter in the short term and in the daytime staff work to find the right solution.
“They may be eligible for other programs,” he said.
When asked if the programs are adequate, he said, “Adequate is a very subjective word.”

And we're not exactly talking luxury accommodation -- here's the room in the North Battleford Lightouse where the men sleep:



Its a few bucks a night, folks.  But its enough to prevent people from freezing to death.
Social Services minister Donna Hapnauer is still denying there has been any change in policy or else its all the auditor's fault or else its Lighthouse's own fault, or something:

Harpauer said they have a mandate from the provincial auditor to scrutinize the organizations managing shelters to ensure they aren't doubling paying for someone.
"The other community based partners that we work with for emergency shelter provisions have not had this issue. "When (Lighthouse) expanded their services with the stabilization unit, their intake rose significantly which brought them under a bit more scrutiny," said Harpauer, adding the stabilization unit was launched without their input or funding to sustain it.

Yeah, right --how dare Lighthouse develop a program for the poorest of the poor?

“This particular shelter is aimed at individuals who are the most chronically homeless and who often have been kicked out of every other waiting room and 24-hour coffee shop. So there's not a lot of places for them to go,” DeeAnn Mercier, communications director with the Lighthouse, said.

The Star Phoenix ran an editorial about this today, calling out the Social Services ministry for what they are doing (not posted yet so no link).
So I expect we'll be at stage two next week.

This is why the Harper Cons lost the election

So the Harper Cons figured out a complicated legalistic way to screw a few thousand poor First Nations people out of a few thousand dollars in long-overdue residential school reparations.
Now the Liberals have put a stop to it.
And that's why the Harper Cons lost the election -- too cheap, too mean, too incompetent.

The awfulness of the Ghomeshi trial

Did ALL of the women that Ghomeshi supposedly abused so badly later sleep with him again and send him bikini photos and love letters? Or only the three who have testified so far at his trial?
And here I was thinking that police and prosecutors only bring charges against someone when they think they have a winnable court case. With Ghomeshi, they apparently scurried to court with charges that are proving so far to be ludicrous.  Was their goal not to protect women but actually just to display their contempt for the CBC and for Ghomeshi's egotistic celebrity?
I know things have reached a truly awful state when I find myself agreeing with Margaret Wente: The Ghomeshi trial turns into a fiasco:

Everybody knew a guilty verdict was far from sure. The bar for a criminal conviction is, as it should be, high. But nobody, not even the most experienced court-watchers, could have predicted how this trial would go. It has turned into a fiasco . . . .
I know the dynamics of abuse can be complex. I know that women can both love and fear their abusers. But these women were not battered wives. They were not in relationships with Mr. Ghomeshi. They barely knew him. They had no reason to fear him, and he had no power over them at all – except the power of his charm and celebrity. They could have walked away. They didn’t.
And all that’s left is their word about unpleasant encounters that may or may not rise to the standard of criminal assault.

Get on with it!

This is ridiculous:

Liberal MP Bill Blair wants to make it clear the growth and sale of legal marijuana in Canada will not be a free-for-all.

Bill, its already a free-for-all -- anyone can already get anything they want,any time they want.
So the only question is who will be selling it, the provincial Liquor Board Store or that gang guy on the corner.
And Trudeau could not have picked a worse "point person" to develop a legalization strategy for Canada than Bill Blair -- the guy who couldn't manage his own police force.

I though Conservatives were against government interference?

UPDATE:  A commenter points out that McKenna is a Liberal, not a Conservative -- sorry, I had mis-read a website.  So I have updated my post accordingly, but I didn't withdraw it because I think the overall point is still valid.

Conservative politician Frank McKenna thinks immigrants should be required to live in the Maritimes when they first come to Canada.
Now let me say first that living in the Annapolis Valley in the spring could be pretty nice, really, especially compared to Whitehorse in the winter.
But I always thought it was Conservatives Liberals who believed that governments shouldn't be telling people what to do -- like with owning rifles and selling wheat.
I guess that was then and this is now.
Apparently Nova Scotia and New Brunswick think maybe McKenna has a good idea. And it starts out sounding sort of innocuous really:

He said the federal government should create a special program for Atlantic Canada that would require immigrants to live three to five years in the region before they are granted citizenship... He said forcing a Canadian citizen to live in a particular province would violate their mobility rights under the Constitution, but he said Constitutional scholars believe it would be a reasonable requirement for people seeking citizenship.

But my question is, just how, exactly, do they think this "special program" should be enforced?
Will we have to set up an "immigrant location" board, just like we have a parole board, to keep track of where people are living and whether they have completed their sentence -- um, location term?  Would they have to show up with their families in tow every two weeks or every month to "check in"?  And if they missed a check-in, then would we send out the IMLOs -- immigrant location officers -- who would raid the neighbours to search out where the family had moved to. And there would be "underground railways" to Toronto and Vancouver, so that immigrants could be shuffled around the country.
And then when we find them, we would have to move them back to the Maritimes so they could finish their sentence -- um, "location term".  But likely they couldn't be trusted not to run away again so then would be have to set up special "camps" for them to live in -- you know, with big signs at the entrance about how work will make you free...


Oh dear, we've gone Godwin already.

What a cruel, mean and ignorant thing for Brad Wall to say

“If you really don’t like the prison food, there’s one way to avoid it, and that’s don’t go to prison."

This is what Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall said in response to complaints about poor jail food quality and quantity after the government's decision to contract out prison food to a for-profit company, Compass Group -- which is also in the news today for sexual favours.
Stay classy, Brad!

Retirement dreams

New year resolutions

The Christmas gift anyone can give -- saying "thanks!"

I usually enjoy reading the various advice columnists around the web, and particularly at this time of year, a lot of the columns are about how difficult it is to buy Christmas presents for their ungrateful, greedy relatives and how awful are the gifts they receive in return -- like this one from Captain Awkward #809: Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh, and Judgement and this one from Carolyn Hax I Hate Christmas.
I have come to the conclusion that there is really just one “gift” we can all give to our nearest and dearest this Christmas and it is this: Be visibly pleased and vocally happy with any present that we receive from them; no matter how awful or inappropriate or ill-fitting it is -- just smile and say “how good of you to think of this” or “it's just what I wanted” or “what a clever idea” or even just “thanks so much for thinking of me”.
 Even if its one of Dr. Grumpy's giant shrimp pillows:

Donald Trump, coward

What the cowardly Donald Trump and his idiot supporters are now saying about Muslims is no different than what the Nazis were saying about Jews just 80 years ago.
Even Dick Cheney thinks Trump is going too far, but Trump won't care.  Trump has seized on the deaths of 14 Americans to make this horrible incident into America's version of the Reichstag fire, an excuse for violent and racist rhetoric.  At its core, of course, is his own profound cowardice, a deep-seated fear of anyone who isn't white.
Rachel Maddow thinks Trump is really just trying to get himself disowned by the Republican party.
No, I don't think he is either that smart or that devious.
He's just gone crazy and he wants to take America with him.
UPDATE:  Yes, they went there:

Great line of the day

Iraq War Do-Over: Lance Mannion writes about how the media really really want to cheerlead for another war in the Middle East:

It's not just the neo-cons who want a do-over on Iraq.
By and large, the American press wanted that war as much as the Bush Leaguers did.
The media cheerled for the invasion. They reported the war as a rolling victory even after it was clear it was far from that.
They propped up the Bush Administration. Tried to sell us on the idea that W. was a great leader. And they'v never really admitted any of it.
Let alone apologized.
And rather than admit they were played for fools and suckers and certainly rather than admit they were glad to play along...
...they're itching for another war. Wars sell newspapers and advertising. Covering wars boosts careers.
It makes desk bound editors and pundits feel like heroes.
And this time out, they think, they'll get it right.
Not that they think they didn’t get it right the first time.

And, like with Iraq, the media has no idea at all exactly where the war should be or who exactly it should be fought against or what the goal should be or how to decide who has won.
They just think Obama should somehow fix in six days what Bush spent six years breaking.

Oh Gawd, here comes "Nannygate"!

I expect any minute now some Canadian media will start using the term "Nannygate". The stupid, it burns!

As the Globe and Mail editorial rather grudgingly admitted, nobody expects the Trudeaus to pay for the gardeners or the cleaners or the housekeepers who look after their official residence. But now I guess the media expects us taxpayers to get all huffy about paying for their child care.

So does Canada want to elect politicians who have children? Well, somebody needs to care for those children, and its fine with me if the taxpayers cover the costs while mom and dad are busy doing the public's business.

I had no problem with Alison Redford taking her daughter with her on trips and doubtless the Harper family also hired nannies for child care when their children were young.  So I see no problem with the Trudeaus taking their children with them when they travel, and a nanny too.  Because no, they're not going to just hire babysitters for the evening through the hotel concierge.

Now we have to listen to the Harper Cons whining about Trudeau's child caregivers --  remember, this is the same bunch saw no problem in billing the public for Harper's haircuts.