"Pro-lifer" : Just another word for "terrorist"

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, responded to the gunning down of Dr. George Tiller in his church today by saying he "reaped what he sowed."

From Kos : "The alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, was an active member of Operation Rescue. On an Operation Rescue website called Charge Tiller (which in the last 30 minutes or so has been taken down), there's this comment, posted on Monday, September 3, 2007, by a Scott Roeder from Kansas, almost certainly the same Scott Roeder alleged to have assassinated Tiller:

"It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the "lawlessness" which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp "Mengele" of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation."

McClatchy : Suspect supported killing abortion providers, friends say

"I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist. Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.

"Pro-lifer" is just another word for "terrorist" .

Dear SUZANNE....

Read this. Read every fucking word of it.

You may view this as some form of internet heeling moment, but it is so much bigger than that.

You are involved, SUZANNE. You, yes, you enabled the sonofabitch. But, you knew that, didn't you?

And now you're trying to cover your ass.

I have a great fear. Having read the words of Randall Terry and watched you for the past few hours bob, weave and duck to defend your indefensible position, my fear is increasing.

You lot will stop at nothing. Assassinations... phaw... we condemn them... not our doing. But you certainly pumped the shooters with the stuff that made them do it. And your inability to acknowledge the responsibility of your involvement speaks volumes.

Terrorist. Conspirator. Enabler.

Pick one.

It's time the US Secret Service paid closer attention to you.

The sanctity of all human life?

Not fucking likely.

The shrieking anti-abortion crowd can deplore murder all they want. They either did it directly or they provoked some wingnut to do it for them.

Let's hear no more of the "sanctity of human life" from this pack of self-absorbed swine. It's time we started to get into the details of the lives of all these terrorists as much as they interfere with the lives of others. Let's start with the biggest assholes and work toward the lying scum who are telling us how much they condemn this assassination.

Inasmuch as the Army Of God (I won't link to them) was brought under federal investigation for aiding and abetting Clayton Waagner, every single loudmouth anti-abortionist should be scrutinized for their involvement, however small it may seem.

Bonus: Ah, the fetus fetishist fax machine has been burning up paper.

Yeah... as deBeauxOs points out, the "vulture culture" has a problem. As much as they would like to be cheering and claiming a victory at the moment, they are forced to swallow hard and put on the pretense of being civil.

Although... Randall Terry doesn't seem willing to hold back. If I were the FBI I'd be picking this wingnut prick off the street and tossing his conspiratorial ass into an interrogation room for the next 48 hours.

the high cost of poverty

An excellent article on the realities of poverty and why it is so hard for people to get back up once they fall down.

The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain. So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.
"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages.
They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

I don't want to scare you, but ask yourself how many paycheques you could miss before you couldn't pay your rent or your mortgage. For a large majority of the middle class, it might be three or four - tops- before you had to start selling things like one of your family's cars or raiding the retirement lockbox. Most working people in the bottom third of the income ladder are one missed paycheque away from eviction - and if they have a car, it isn't worth selling.

cross posted from the Woodshed

Torture counterproductive - who could have guessed?

You would think that the points made by this former counter-intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan would be self-evident. You would think that, but then if you are reading this blog you probably aren't a knuckle-dragging right-wing sadistic moron that thinks "24" is a documentary.

General Petraus apparently agrees - and its nice to see him admit that the United States has violated the Geneva Convention, rather than just arguing that such an international agreement is "quaint".

crossposted from the Woodshed

Chimpanzee develops automatic mango peeler while competing in belt sander races

OK. Not quite.

But chimpanzees certainly have capabilities we did not think possible because of a chauvinistic belief in a unique human primacy.

A team led by Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied chimps living in Loango National Park in Gabon. They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out. Various tools were often found near the same hive, suggesting that the chimps employ them in sequence (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.04.001).

A few tools even appeared to have two uses, with enlargers at one end and collectors at the other. This is the first example of a non-human species constructing multipurpose tools.

We already know that chimpanzees have a solid sense of self-recognition.

No one is even suggesting that humans are evolved from the great apes. But more and more it appears that we came from a common origin. And it is becoming clear that chimpanzees, in particular, pass on gained knowledge to their offspring further developing a culture.

Give them a few hundred thousand years and they'll be chiselling stone, stacking it up and making an edifice that will confuse their own centuries later.

Regrettably, they will likely go through a phase during which the only way they will be able to explain things to themselves will be to invent a mythical higher power. Hopefully, they will grow out of that faster than their bipedal cousins have.

As Harper tries to kill the CBC through starvation...

... the thug who calls himself a prime minister may be pissing off voters in a few tenuous ridings.

It seems Greater Victoria and Vancouver Island radio listeners prefer local CBC programming over the stuff being produced by the trailing private station (owned by CTVGlobemedia).

Update: As pointed out by SJ in comments, CBC also held the lead in Halifax, Ottawa-Gatineau (anglophone), Toronto and Vancouver (where it overtook CKNW). Check it out. (pdf warning.)

Cute fluffy bunnies of the sea or dinner?

Okay, this has gone on long enough. All this bullshit about the Governor General eating some seal meat that is. It is no better or worse than eating a big mac, roast chicken or a salmon steak.

Meat is meat and this is simply a matter of cultural differences. Different people in different parts of the world eat or avoid different kinds of animal protein for all kinds of cultural and religious reasons. Try getting a bacon sandwich in Islamabad or Tel Aviv, or stewed dog in Philadelphia or jugged moose in Timbuktu or Okinawa-style horse sashimi in Cincinatti, or whale meat in London. Try asking for rabbit in Tokyo or a nice sirloin in New Delhi.

Some societies have culinary cultural prejudices that are so strong that they don't eat any meat. Many individuals have adopted vegetarianism on health or ethical grounds and more power to them, but for a lot of people on this planet a vegetarian diet is not only impractical, but nigh impossible. You can't live on vegetables in a place that can't grow a sufficient quantity of them and so for people in the far North, vegetarianism isn't really an option. The Inuit and the Lapp have survived for millenia on meat - fish, caribou, reindeer, whale, seal, hare - you name it - if it swims or runs, its edible and there isn't much else edible in the far north.

People, historically, have eaten what was available to them in most societies. At the same time, our various societies have evolved certain prejudices about eating companion animals or those that we consider unclean for religious reasons often based on bronze age sanitary conditions, when a bad clam could mean life or death. Other religious restrictions require animals to be killed in certain ways on the argument that such a method is the most humane. As our culture has become more globalized, these prejudices have either faded and are kept alive strictly as religious traditions or have become more strictly localized and often clung to in the name of tradition. Many Jews and Muslims no longer keep strictly kosher or halal, and dog is not widely eaten outside Korea as far as I know. Most Japanese no longer eat whale except as a sort of delicacy, while it used to be part of the school lunch menu for a variety of economic reasons.

But a new kind of prejudice has emerged as people have gotten farther from first hand experience with the food they eat, especially in the developed world. We don't like to see where those hamburgers and chicken fingers come from. We don't like to acknowledge the realities of the factory farm, the feedlot and veal pen. We like the sausage just fine, but we don't want to see how its made. We like the steak, but we don't want to see the slaughterhouse.

And so many condemn hunting as barbaric. They see no need to for people to go out into the woods and shoot Peter Cottontail or Bambi's mom when one can go to the supermarket and get slices of Wilbur and Babe wrapped in cellophane on nice anticeptic styrofoam trays. We don't like to eat anything cute - rabbit, deer, squirrel and yes, seal - all fall into this category.

I'll agree that buying your feedlot fattened beef and factory farmed chicken at the supermarket is a more efficient way of getting animal protein than hunting deer. I'll even specify that the majority of hunters in North America don't need to hunt to put groceries on the table. I'll even put aside all the "wildlife management" models that are used to argue the need for culling animal populations to avoid animal starvation based on the notion of man replacing natural predators. I'll also put aside the issue of fur for the moment.

I won't put aside the simplistic "all meat is murder" argument beloved by some, because frankly it's complete bullshit. Mother Nature is red of tooth and claw, and we are part of nature. Man would not have survived the stone age, nor flourished as we have, without eating meat. Animals eat each other and for all our strivings and philosophy, we are part of the food chain. I'll admit we eat too much meat these days and treat animals badly on the whole, but anything that walks or swims or crawls is a meal for something else in the long run, circle of life, ashes to ashes etc etc.

Which bring us back to the seal hunt and Canada's Governor General Michaelle Jean. The objection seems to be that she ate a cute little seal, the ones with the faces like puppies and the big sad eyes, and she ate it's heart! raw! Oh noes! Icky! -- and those nasty Canadians go out and massacre poor helpless baby seals for fun and profit in the cruelest ways imaginable! It must be true, because I saw it in a PETA brochure. All that video footage you've seen of Newfies and Eskimos killing baby seals looks bad and is great for raising funds, but most of it is no worse than what goes on in any other abattoir.

Have a look around for the facts, not the PETA version of them. Most of what you hear from PETA on this subject is complete bullshit. In fact, most of what you hear from PETA on most subjects is complete bullshit. Their latest campaign, a boycott of maple syrup to convince the Canadian government to ban the seal hunt, is like boycotting American kiwi growers to convince the American government to end the Iraq War.

I don't always agree with Penn Jillette - in fact I think he's often guilty of selective use of the facts to prove points that conform with his own beliefs, but Penn and Teller raise some interesting questions about PETA here -- though I think they do a severe disservice to their own arguments by allowing Dennis Prager and Ted Nugent on camera.

The extremists of PETA who want to "free" pets and domestic animals don't do any favors for the cause of protecting animals who actually need protecting. I agree that there should be limits on testing things on animals, but I'd rather things like AIDS drugs were tested on rats than humans. If we are going to have chemical cosmetics, they have to be tested for safety and I'd rather they were tested on animals than humans. Animal experiments are a vital and necessary part of medical research and there are millions of people alive today who would be dead if it weren't for scientists sacrificing the lives of a lot of rats, rabbits, dogs and monkeys.

Whether Canada needs a commercial seal hunt is an open question, but the hunt wouldn't exist if people weren't buying sealskins. Whether the commercial hunt is any more or less humane than the poultry, beef or pork industries is not in question. There is virtually no difference. And Michaelle Jean was joining Inuit subsistence hunters for a meal. And there is no grounds I can see for criticism of the Inuit for hunting seal for food -- there aren't a lot of grocery stores up in the Arctic Circle

So if you want to go full PETA and eschew the use of animals in any way, be my guest. Stop wearing leather and eating meat and eggs and dairy - and stop using modern medicine and modern materials such as mylar that involve the use of animal products. You should also be aware that destruction of habitat is the real threat to most animal species, so stop using roads and living in cities or even wood or concrete structures and get yourself a nice unheated cave somewhere. You have the right to make that decision of conscience, but so do other people and our decision may not be the same as yours. Humans as a species have eaten meat and worn skins since the dawn of time, I don't expect we will stop anytime soon just because a few people get a bit squeamish. The outrage over Michaelle Jean sampling some seal is in large part misguided, misinformed, arrogant and hypocritical.

crossposted from the Woodshed

Just a day in the life at the PMO

The National Post is having another one of its "Iran Eyes Badges for Jews" moments

You remember that one, no?

This time round the headline goes : Toronto Pride organizers ban anti-Zionist group
By Joseph Brean, National Post (excerpted)

"Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), an anti-Zionist protest group that made corporate sponsors squirm by flying banners at last year’s Toronto Pride parade, has been banned this year, along with any other group that would advance a political agenda.

“We will be very much more careful this year. We will make sure that we have a presence to ensure that people don’t slip into the parade,” Pride Toronto executive director Tracey Sandilands said today.
Her announcement came with a warning to grand marshall El-Farouk Khaki not to use his ceremonial position as a pulpit to promote an anti-Israeli boycott.

Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, today called for disciplinary action against Mr. Khaki, a founder of the national support group Salaam: Queer Muslim Community, because he spoke to a QuAIA event on the weekend."

Yeah, whatever, Frank.

But what's this? In the comments section below the NaPo article, Pride Co-Chair Mark Singh shows up :

"In response to concerns about political messaging in the Pride Parade, Pride Toronto released a statement outlining its position on this issue. This article incorrectly claims that Pride Toronto has banned political messages from the Pride Parade."

followed a few comments further on by a letter copied from Pride director Tracey Sandilands, source of the quotes for NaPo mischief :

"WE WILL NOT BE TAKING SIDES IN ANY POLITICAL ISSUE AND WILL NOT BE BANNING ANY GROUP that participates within the boundaries of the laws of Canada and our anti-discrimination policy.
Also, at no time in our interview did I say anything about ‘warning' El Farouk.

I would appreciate it if you could amend this before final publication.
Regards
Tracey Sandilands,
Executive Director

Well that would seem clear enough.
However, undaunted by requests from both a Pride Co-Chair and the Pride director he interviewed that his bogus article be fixed - not to mention the picture gracing the front page of the Pride Toronto website clearing showing the "End Israeli Apartheid" banner - NaPo reporter Joseph Brean replies in his own comment section that he stands by his article :

"I am the author of this article. It was my decision, approved by editors, to use the term "ban" to mean that QuAIA, which marched in last year's parade, will not be permitted to do so this year. [snip]
Anonymous accusations that this article, which presents comment from people on all sides of this issue, is "false" and that I am "intentionally spreading lies" are silly and wrong."

So there you have it - accusations from the source of his article that said article is "false" are "silly and wrong".

Well done, NaPo. Some traditions die hard, don't they?
Bring on the Transparent Badges for Atheists !

h/t Rabble, Mycroft in comments at the NaPo article, and the divine Ms Z posting at BreadnRoses, who promises a column on this at The Star tomorrow..

Cross-posted at Creekside

Update : From Antonia Zerbisias column today, as promised.

"So it's pretty rich when the language of gay oppression is used against Toronto's Pride parade, to be held June 28, by another group that purports to champion human rights. Especially a group that is openly aligned with anti-gay rights Christian fundamentalists such as Charles McVety, Canada's most vocal lobbyist against same-sex marriage, and John Hagee, who claimed God sent Hurricane Katrina to stop "a homosexual parade."

This is what happened last week when B'nai Brith issued a news release asserting that the gay community's "agenda" was being "hijacked by anti-Israel agitators."

Napo appears to have got caught carrying some editorial water for Dimant. Somehow I suspect this is not over.

Dear Stephen Harper,

I've been reading the papers a lot over the past few years, and I have a burning question for you.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Are you some sort of mental and moral defective? Do you blink or flinch at all when you lie and slime? Have you had a psychiatric evaluation? I'm beginning to wonder if you're not suffering from some sort of mental illness. Maybe it's basic sociopathy, in which case you really ought to be committed. Or perhaps you were picked on too often for wearing sweater vests to gym class? Are you taking your shitty, lonely, youth out on the rest of us as some sort of vengeance on the entire society you blame for it? Because that's what it seems like. Your weaknesses are written all over you for the rest of us to see. You put on a stone face for your vulgar and cruel supporters: the great and certain leader with his "let me be clears." Really, for the rest of us, your certainty (no matter how many times it contradicts itself), when coupled with your actions makes for a thin and transparent mask covering a wounded child who cannot understand nor accept his life as it was and is. Instead you respond with spite and narcisism. I suspect expressions of kindness and love fill you with an irrational rage and a desire to strike out at those live for that ideal or remain in sore need of it (say a Canadian tortured and imprisoned abroad), because on some level you never got that yourself and you need to punish everyone for it.

This is what I see when I see you. This is what many of us see when we see you. We saw it in your reaction to the coalition proposal. The tears of vulnerability that you suddenly had to face the consequences of your own spite. That could have been a transformative moment for you. A loss that crushed your self-perception and forced you to rethink your worldview. But you sucked it up enough to bully your way out of it. Bully for you then.

We see it now in your threats and attack ads against your chief opponent. I don't like Iggy myself, and God help me I actually vote for a member of his party as long as he is leader, but there is no excuse for of the way you've carried on since you first found office. "Tapes"? Seriously man, you're a thug. And you're terrified because Iggy outclassess you by fathoms - yes we can see that as well. He's the geek who made further that you have. He probably wore sweater vests to gym class too. Red ones. Probably cried his tears too, but he shrugged them off, and played to his strengths. You? You nursed your grievances and rage and let them putrify and corrupt you like Annakin Skywalker.

Really, it must be hard to hang on to that kind of anger. It's the sort of rage that consumes you and rots your soul. On a certain level, I harbour a great deal of compassion for people in your shoes. That soul-destroying feeling is a manifestation of the suffering of a fellow human wounded on a very deep emotional level. There is much room for pity there. But not for tolerance. Oh no.

In the coming months you will lose your job and the house you live in. Learn from this. Step down as leader, and take a long holiday. Go for a walk (literally, walk!) across this land you love to hate some much. Write your book on hockey. Forgive yourself for what has happened to you. Let go of that driving anger. Leave it behind. Let peace and joy find you. If not, the remaining years will be lonely and dark. And that's no way to live, as you well know.

Regards.

I demand the freedom to pursue any opportunity, and should it fail....

.... I can just turn to the taxpayers and suck them dry.

General Motors Corp.'s last-ditch, Hail Mary bid to avoid bankruptcy fell with a thud Wednesday as its bondholders overwhelmingly rejected a deal to swap their debt for equity in the company.

That offer was a central element in the automaker's efforts -- guided by the federal government -- to restructure outside of court. Without it the company appears almost certain to file a Chapter 11 petition by Monday.

Let's face it. This is not a Keynesian approach. This is not even Orwellian. This is a clueless libertarian shoveling our money into gross failures of a system in which we unwillingly become the owners of poorly regulated, poorly managed enterprises. In short: We don't like Keynesian style control when we're making buckets of money, but when we fuck up.... well Keynes is way cool!

General Motors Corp.'s bid to have its bondholders exchange their holdings for company stock failed to attract enough support, the company said Wednesday, making a bankruptcy filing all the more likely.

[...]

The failure of the debt-for-equity plan means the U.S. government could wind up with more than the 50-per-cent stake that was originally envisioned. The U.S. government's stake could now grow to 69 per cent.

The government of Canada is also in line to get a small equity stake in GM in return for lending the company money.

And this... is a Harper sycophant desperately grasping at a falacy in defence of his Dear Leader.

"Profound ignorance of industrial economics"? Give us all another fucking lesson, Charlie.

I'm sure it will be just, like, totally awesome.

Hat tip CC.

GritGirl's latest

Britain's future: cold and dark

THE GUARDIAN believes the UK faces a cold, dark future. According to John Constable and Hugh Sharman, Decades of denial and underinvestment have left Britain in huge energy debt and at risk of powercuts and 20% bill hikes.

YIKES! Sure hope the price of photo-cells keeps dropping . . . .

Poking a bear with a stick

The next time Petey MacKay raps on about unwarranted and unprovoked incursions by Russian aircraft into the North American Air Defence Identification Zone he might want to keep this in mind:

Federal officials are confirming to The Canadian Press that Canada's Arctic mapping flights have ventured beyond the North Pole into areas claimed by Russia.

The flights are the first step towards building a case that Canada's Arctic sovereignty could reach past the Pole despite Russia's determination to extend its own northern footprint.

Arctic experts say the extended overflights are a sign that Canada has no intention of backing down in the face of Russian claims.

Scientists are now examining data from the flights to see if there's enough support for Canada's case to justify more detailed seafloor mapping on the other side of the Pole.

Other countries including the United States, Norway and Denmark have challenged Russia's claim to a section of the Arctic shelf believed to contain significant energy reserves.

And just to be clear here, I don't disagree with the exploration, although any claim made by Canada to extend territorial sovereignty beyond Geographic North is going to go exactly nowhere.

(I'm assuming it was Geographic North referred to in the article. There are, after all, three distinctly different North Poles.)

In the past few days I've had some conversations with people who have some interesting views on this. Hopefully I'll get the opportunity a little later to extract their main points and put them onto a page.

In the meantime, it looks like the warming of the Pole is moving along at about the same pace as the revival of the Cold War.

Perhaps Canada's best option is just to send a bunch of Canadians to an ice floe at the geographic North Pole with seal blood dripping from our chins. That seems to make everyone else squeamish and sends them running away, puking.

Hat tip reader Cat

Selling Canada one piece at a time

I always thought that when people said "count the silverware" when the government changed hands, that it was just an expression of general mistrust, not something to be taken literally.
Silly me, I forgot we were talking about Stephen Harper and Co.

crossposted from The Woodshed

The truth won't set Dick Cheney free

For Dick Cheney 9/11 means never having to say you're sorry. His speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute is a masterpiece of self-justification

Over on the left wing of the president's party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they're after would be heard before a so-called "Truth Commission." Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It's hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors

Now lets just break that paragraph down one bit at time and I'll see if I can translate it for you:

"Over on the left wing (those who oppose me are all communists) of the president's party (no real Republican would object to what we did) there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists (The ends justify the means and torture worked, it saved lives-- no really it did, nevermind all those people who argue otherwise--but our opponents don't care, they are just playing 'gotcha'). The kind of answers they're after (they don't care about the truth, they just want something that would make us look bad) would be heard before a so-called (it wouldn't be the truth) "Truth Commission." Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted (the reverse Nuremberg defense- I'm not responsible for what happened, I was only giving the orders), in effect treating political disagreements (ordering torture and other violations of the law and Constitution are merely partisan politics) as a punishable offense (they are being vicious and vindictive and want to hurt me, help!) , and political opponents (war criminals are merely people with whom the left disagree) as criminals. It's hard to imagine a worse precedent (oh noes! people will be held responsible for their actions), filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse (if we start prosecuting people for torture and war crimes, who knows where this whole 'punishing people for breaking the law' thing could go? My buddies at Haliburton could be next) , than to have an incoming administration criminalize (ordering people to be tortured, some of them to death, was not a crime, it wasn't! its only a crime because the Democrats say it is, despite 200 years of law that says otherwise ) the policy decisions (actual crimes) of its predecessors.

The real reason that the former vice president has been all over the TV and newspapers lately is not so much about securing his place in history as it is securing his place outside of the dock in the Hague.

Look, I don't think anyone will argue that the 9/11 attacks were not a horrible thing. Nearly 3,000 people died and that is pretty goddamn awful. But, rightwing pantspisser pronouncements to the contrary, it didn't change anything. The law is still the law. The worst crimes perpetrated do not allow us to ignore the law when it comes to catching and punishing the perpetrators. The Manson Family murders did not give the police the right to shoot suspected Beatles fans on sight.Just because you're scared shitless doesn't mean you can do anything you want. The notion that "the end does not justify the means" is not just some collegiate philosophy 101 bit of theory, it is pretty much the basis of western law, along with that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing and "habeas corpus" -- but then again, I suppose those were ignored or suspended too during the Cheney regime.

Maybe if Bwana Dick Cheney had thought of the possibility of going to jail a few years ago, the world would be a better place right now, but I suppose given his history in the Nixon and Ford administrations, one can't really expect him to understand that just because the President does it, doesn't mean its not illegal.

Crossposted from the Woodshed

Rachel Mari-Anna Dube (Richard). 1918 - 2009

The name probably means nothing to most people.

However, if you were in the Royal Canadian Navy (or its post 1968 permutations) any time after 1948, there is a very good chance you met Rachel at some point in your service.

Rachel lived in Halifax and ran a little operation just outside RCN barracks, HMCS Stadacona. And while most sailors in the RCN eventually passed through barracks at Stadacona, most of those sailors also ended up in Rachel's little restaurant, just two blocks away from the main gate.

You see, to us sailors, Rachel was better known as Momma Camille and she served the best fish & chips in Halifax. She was known as The woman who fed the fleet and many a Saturday night run ashore in in "Slackers" ended at Momma Camille's Fish & Chips.

Momma Camille retired in 1984 although the name of her fish & chip shop can be seen all over Nova Scotia.

She passed on at age 90 on 22 May this year. Many a retired and serving sailor will be hoisting a glass in thanks to Rachel for saving us from the fare of "A" Block in "Stad".

Fair winds and following seas, Momma Camille.

Blowback

The machismo that is the distinctive characteristic of Harper Party bluster is shattering. In the pissing contest that Harper and his hillbilly cabinet started in 2007 over the Chalk River nuclear reactor and the medical isotope shortage there has been a sudden shift in the wind.

The former head of the nuclear safety watchdog says the current shutdown of the nuclear reactor at Chalk River is worse than the prolonged closure a year and a half ago that led to her getting fired. [...] Keen today said the current shutdown is worse because in 2007, the CNSC and AECL knew the whole time what needed to be done and it would have only taken a week to do, whereas this time the length of the shutdown is still unknown.

If some nuclear engineers close to the situation are to be taken for their understanding, this is going to be a long shutdown.

In short, the Harper government did nothing from the time of the last shutdown to the present to recitfy a situation a high-school student could have predicted.

Under normal circumstances, where the regulator and the facility were working together to solve the problems with the reactor and its production, the government might be able to start kicking some asses and taking some names, but not now. From the point where Harper countermanded the requirements of then CNSC president Linda Keen and forced the Chalk River reactor back into operation through a parliamentary vote, (then fired Keen), the responsibility for that reactor's continued safe operation became the sole province of Harper and his Minister of Natural Resources.

In short, Harper himself is to blame for the state of the Chalk River reactor today and the current rationing of medical isotopes.

It will probably take more time, but eventually Harper and his mediocre collegues will figure out that the warm water hitting them in the face is not a late spring rain.

Now head on over to Impolitcal for more.

Indefinite detention

In the late great dystopian tv show Max Headroom, whenever a crime was committed, suspects were arrested, profiled, and then the most likely perp was sentenced via a big spinning wheel of "consequences" on the tv game show that had replaced the courts.

Canadian content : Hey, David Emerson, how's your "one security perimeter" Project North America coming along?

Give us your money...

... and we'll hold it until after you've died and been reincarnated. It's true.

The idea is that you start by believing in reincarnation and then put a bunch of money in the Reincarnation Bank. When you pop back into the world in your new life, you've got money in the bank.

Interestingly, this scam, designed for some of the stupidest people on the planet (Can you hear me down there in Montgomery County?) doesn't have a mechanism for actually withdrawing any money.

PZ Myers presents the "bank" with an even more delicious dilemma.

Smack. Down.

When the Ottawa Citizen does more than take a swipe at Harper, you know the Conservative-owned media has had their fill. (In all honesty, I always gave Randall Denley credit for calling 'em as he sees 'em, even if I felt he was a bit overboard in one direction or the other, so it's the fact that the OC let it go to print that's important):

Conservatives are the self-righteous law-and-order guys and they like to portray themselves as morally superior to their opponents. That will be a difficult card to play for a while. It was excruciating to watch tarnished Tory hero Brian Mulroney's attempts to justify taking cash from an arms dealer, and only paying taxes on it years later. And at a discount, too. Mulroney's misbehaviour has cost taxpayers millions of dollars for the inquiry into the matter and in legal fees for Mulroney, which we also pay. Mulroney was out of office, just, when he started taking envelopes of cash, but it was still wrong. This is what people in the business world refer to as damage to the brand.

Then there is our current Conservative government, which seems to be run by aging schoolboys with a penchant for calling names. The country is facing serious economic problems, but our Conservative leadership thinks the important thing to tell the public is that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has spent much of his life outside the country. Good for Ignatieff for getting out in the big world and making a success of himself. More Canadians should do the same.

Again, honestly, he had me at the opening paragraph, but then he fixed his bayonet.

The fact that Stephen Harper and his gang think success in the world is a weakness tells us a lot about them. These are the small thinkers who don't get the arts, don't get science and have no plan for our economy beyond building roads and bailing out failed automakers. Ignatieff's advice that the Conservatives should "grow up" and do their jobs properly was the smartest thing he could have said.

Welcome to our world. We've been saying that all along.

To Harper it's only the world stage if he's on it. The fact is, Ignatieff is being criticized by the hillbilly constituency for actually having lived on the world stage. Who knows more about where the loose planks are?

And would you like to know what really causes terror in the PMO? It's one simple fact. Ingnatieff was not a part of the Liberal party involved in payouts and kickbacks. He has a ready and verifiable argument against any such accusation. "I was a professor at one of the world's leading academic institutions when that happened. I'm clean."

Thus, the reason Harper and his knuckle-draggers have to portray education, international experience and global connections as negative. They have no real dirt. They have to make it up.

When you loose CanWest, Harper, you've lost the undecided. Would you like fries with that?

Jacked Up gets credit for this first post on this one. Do, please read that post and leave your comments there. Wingnuts can leave their comments here - the sewage treatment plant is used to it.

Prom night in Klan Kuntry...

It's just not what it used to be.

It's exactly the same as it always was.

The future looms large. But for the 54 students in the class of 2009 at Montgomery County High School, so, too, does the past. On May 1 — a balmy Friday evening — the white students held their senior prom. And the following night — a balmy Saturday — the black students had theirs.

The white students’ prom was held on May 1 at a community center in nearby Vidalia; the black students had theirs at the same place the following night.
Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change.

There have been efforts made to change all that.

When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom.

Ah yes... the white parents.

What's interesting, as you read through the whole article, is that the high-school kids, regardless of skin colour, don't like the arrangement. In fact, those kids will be coming of voting age shortly.

Ain't payback gonna be a bitch.

tip of the helmet to Jesus' General.

Major breakthrough in lithium battery technology reported

PHYSORG.COM has a report on an exciting breakthrough in lithium battery tech. It's a Canadian discovery: An NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council)-funded lab at the University Of Waterloo has laid the groundwork for a lithium battery that can store and deliver more than three times the power of conventional lithium ion batteries.

Why should you care? Increasing the energy storage density with low-cost materials makes electric cars more and more practical, with longer range between re-charging.

Just wait for Stevie to cut their funding. Then again, maybe this can give the RCMP a new ultra high-power Taser, to keep the gang amused.

The Conservative dilema...

Consume their time attacking their political opposition, (in an attempt to retain a flimsy grip on power), or actually provide good government and run the country.

Ah, what the hell! If you leave it alone, the country will run itself.

Two years after Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government approved $1.25 billion in funding for an office to support infrastructure projects, a newly-created crown corporation still finds itself in temporary headquarters with a skeleton crew of 12, several vacant positions on its board of directors, and little public visibility to fulfil its mandate.

But its chief executive officer, who has only been on the job for about 100 days, says that PPP Canada is working on a long-term plan to achieve its goals of encouraging and supporting partnerships between the public and private sectors for new infrastructure projects. Much of its early focus has been on meeting with stakeholders from provincial governments and the private sector to identify needs, priorities and potential infrastructure projects for analysis.

“When I was appointed, there was clearly no office, no anything, so I kind of got myself installed in some temporary accommodation,” said John McBride, a veteran federal bureaucrat who now heads the crown corporation. “We don't have any administrative infrastructure like computers and websites and communications material and the rest of that kind of stuff, so we've been figuring out how best to do that, and now we're starting to develop some kind of capacity.”

Two years. And the CEO was appointed just a little over three months ago.

Well done, Harper! At least one question has been answered.

Short people experience the world sooner

Robert Krulwich over at NPR delves into something intriguing: the possibility that a tall person's sensory reactions to the world are delayed because of the distance from some extremities to the brain.

In short, it may pay to be short.

Look through a glass, cheerfully

SCIENCE DAILY has a disturbing report, "BPA, Chemical Used To Make Plastics, Found To Leach From Polycarbonate Drinking Bottles Into Humans". This may be old hat to some, but it bears repeating because the stuff is so pervasive, like can linings, for example. This means it's easy to eschew plastic-bottled water, and still get contaminated. Canned beer sucks, anyway.

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles -- the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles -- showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA).

Exposure to BPA, used in the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans.

Post I never thought I'd write: Michael Ignatieff is my homeboy

The CBC has an excellent letter from an expat grad student in England about the Conservative Party of Canada's attacks on Michael Ignatieff for being a) a successful intellectual and b) living outside the country for many years before returning to enter politics. By all means read the letter, then have a quick scan of the comments and ask yourself why anyone with a top notch education and contacts abroad would want to return to a country that is so full of ignorant, provincial knuckledraggers. The woman is obviously a patriot, just don't tell her about the Blogging Tories and Small Dead Animals and she might still come back one day.

What I really want to talk about are the idiotic attack ads by the CPC, which attack Ignatieff on everything except substance. He must really scare them. And he should.

A quick look at Michael Ignatieff's bio shows him to be an academic and public intellectual of the highest caliber who has held posts at the most prestigious institutions in the English-speaking world. That those institutions happen to be located outside Alberta and mostly outside of Canada is hardly his fault, as in show business and sports, you go where the work is. Yes, one can be a highly respected public intellectual on the world stage while living in Canada, but there are only so many jobs for such people.

Crapping on Ignatieff for spending his career at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard instead of the University of British Columbia is like criticizing Phil Esposito for spending his hockey career with the Bruins and Rangers instead of staying with the Sault Greyhounds, or slamming Dan Ackroyd and John Candy for not sticking with Second City in Toronto.

One of the commenters on the CBC site criticized the author of the letter, described as a Rhodes scholar and Ph.D candidate at Oxford, calling her "a snob" and claiming the author "thinks she's better than us." As a Rhodes scholar, she is certainly demonstrably smarter then the cementheaded commenter. She is certainly more open minded, almost certainly more well-travelled, better-read and more cosmopolitan, and probably has "qualities of truthfulness, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship; exhibition of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in one’s contemporaries," but then to the audience of resentful, embittered, small minded, petty bourgeois, know-nothings that the Conservative attack ads are pandering to, none of those things are desirable.

I'm not a big fan of Ignatieff and his running for office in 2006 with his eyes firmly on the Liberal Party leadership was unquestionably a bit opportunistic. So was Stephen Harper's channelling of western Canadian resentment in helping form the Reform Party. So was his departure for the National Citizens Coalition when it became evident that Preston Manning wasn't going to turn the party over to him. While Ignatieff at least got himself elected to parliament before seeking the Liberal leadership in 2006, Harper decided to try for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party when Stockwell "Doris" Day looked weak in 2002 and after an ugly campaign won the leadership. Then he pushed Ezra Levant out of the way to run for Preston Manning old seat in Calgary.

Ignatieff is criticized for considering a return to Harvard is his bid for election in 2006 didn't work out. He got elected and stayed in the House, despite losing in his first campaign for party leader, and was re-elected again in 2008. If he had not won a seat in parliament in 2006, Ignatieff would have continued on at the University of Toronto for a least another year as visiting professor and senior fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies. After that, he might have run for parliament again, or he might have returned to his career as a scholar, living wherever the work took him as he pleased.

Harper, on the other hand, has a history of quitting when things don't go his way. He quit the Liberal party because he didn't like the National Energy Program (He was working in Alberta for Imperial Oil at the time). He quit the Progressive Conservatives a few years later after going to work for a Mulroney government backbencher because they didn't end the NEP fast enough to suit him. He quit the Reform Party when he couldn't get Preston Manning to step aside as leader and let him run things along more Straussian ideological lines. He quit the National Citizen Coalition a little less than four years later when he saw a chance to grab the leadership of the Canadian Alliance party after using the NCC to undermine Stockwell Day for a year. Once leader of the Alliance party, he devoted all his energy to co-opting and absorbing the Progressive Conservative Party to try to present a united right wing front.

If he fails to win a majority government next time around, will he quit Canadian politics? If some conservative think tank down south like the Heritage Foundation offers him some primo wingnut welfare job to push economic integration or some other neo-con pie in the sky, do you think he'll hang around Calgary scanning the want ads? I'm sure with his hard won Masters degree, Liberty University could find a job for him teaching remedial English or something, but he's not really qualified to do much else. Aside from the mail room at Imperial Oil nearly 30 years ago, he's never really done anything outside of politics and think tank work.

While Ignatieff was working outside of Canada, he made no secret of his Canadian-ness and we as a nation were happy to call him one of our own. He may have referred to Britain as his "adopted nation" a few times in the 20+ years he lived there or used the rhetorical flourish of "We Americans" when writing for an American audience, but unlike Conrad Black, Wayne Gretzky, Michael J. Fox and Pamela Anderson he never became an American or British citizen. He has been a Canadian all along. More importantly, he has not publically badmouthed his country to foreign audiences, (which as we know from conservatives' descriptions of Bill Clinton organizing anti-war protests in England while he was a student there during the Vietnam War is high treason or something) unlike Stephen Harper, who had this to say to a U.S. think tank less than a year after leaving parliament the first time:

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

"If you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians"

As I said, I'm not a big fan of Ignatieff, mostly for his original positions on the Iraq War and torture and for yanking the rug out from under the idea of an NDP-Liberal coalition government. He is a bit conservative for my tastes, but I think he'd make a much better prime minister than any of the other options on offer.

His job history and personal story are nothing if not enviable and his time abroad is a feature, not a bug. Ignatieff has done more than simply teach at the world's finest universities. He has been a broadcaster, a filmmaker, a journalist, a writer of non-fiction and fiction alike and travelled the world. Unlike Stephen Harper, who's last real job was in the Imperial Oil mailroom and who didn't even have a passport until he entered the House of Commons. Harper graduated high school in 1978 and went work for Conservative MP Jim Hawkes in 1985 and has been out of the job market ever since.

Before entering electoral politics, Ignatieff wrote prize-winning books on human rights and foreign policy, delivered the Massey Lectures and had a novel short-listed for the Booker Prize. Stephen Harper has supposedly been working on a book on hockey for longer than anyone can remember and wears sweater vests to try to make us think he's human.

Only the complete "morans" who make up the current electoral base of modern conservatism would consider being well-educated, widely-travelled and highly accomplished bad things. They get the leaders they deserve.

And as for the notion that spending time, even a long time, outside the country make one any less Canadian --I've been living in Japan for dozen years and, like Ignatieff, the place I miss most is Algonquin Park. If you think I'm somehow less Canadian because of where I live (and I'd move back tomorrow if the right job opportunity presented itself, but you go where the work is) or who I married or because I eat sushi more often than poutine these days, you are just plain wrong and can kiss my fat, maple-syrup loving, multicultural ass. I may be less engaged than I once was in the daily cut and thrust of Canadian politics, but I'd venture to guess that I still pay more attention than most in the Great White North. That must be true, because you sure as hell wouldn't catch me voting for Stephen Harper.

Crossposted at the Woodshed

British Columbia's ticking time bomb

Brought to you by Gordon Campbell and a failed forest protection policy. (Emphasis mine)

Many communities in the B.C. Interior are at significant risk of potentially catastrophic forest fires this summer, because critical prevention work promised by the government has not been done, a forestry expert said Friday.

It could make 2003, when the town of Louis Creek was wiped off the BC landscape, look tame.

Campbell and his Vancouver-centric government have been in possession of the facts for six years.

British Columbians can consider themselves fortunate that the disaster was not worse. Few communities in the province would have been immune from an interface fire, given the extreme danger ratings over the course of the summer. Without action, the danger remains.

And what came out of that report, now sitting on a shelf, gathering dust?

Oh yeah... that. And that. And that. And, not least of all, this.

The top 100 bureaucrats in the provincial government will receive salary increases as large as 43 per cent, all in a bid to attract and keep top executives...

Right. Heckuva job they're doing. I'm willing to bet there is not one of those "top bureaucrats", regardless of ministery, who doesn't have at least one priority file with the words 2010 Olympics in it distracting them from the job British Columbians are actually paying them to do.

Harper's Canada

From Montreal Simon...

About 200 blank pages

Scott Feschuck takes on Harper's mythical book on hockey. Great read! Scott... not Harper.

A different kind of cutback at Thunder Bay school

Criminal charges in Canada are laid at the discretion of the Crown Attorney, generally on the recommendation of, or in consultation with the police. If the Crown refuses to lay charges, a victim's options for seeking justice are severely limited. However, the Crown's main consideration in laying charges is the public interest. A criminal charge, trial and conviction is intended to serve not only to punish someone for breaking the law but also to provide an example that will deter others from breaking the law. On the simple grounds of deterrence alone I can see no reason at all not to charge this person with assault.

In April, the seven-year-old was picked up, put on a chair “and when he resisted, the scissors were placed against his forehead and he was told not to move,” said Falconer, who said 10 centimetres of hair was cut from the front.
According to other information obtained by The Chronicle-Journal that outlines the incident, the boy was in a computer lab reading when a teaching assistant saw him having difficulty seeing due to the length of his bangs.
The teaching assistant took the boy into the hall and trimmed his bangs with scissors, the information said, and when the employee admitted she had cut the student‘s bangs, she was suspended from her job.

You can be sure that if a teacher or some other student had snipped the ponytail off some blonde cheerleader, there would be seven kinds of hell to pay. I don't care if it was a case of not understanding the rules or having the best of intentions, school staff are not allowed to give the students involuntary haircuts.

Some might argue that "ruining" the teaching assistant's life by charging them with assault is unfair and would end their career and that the person in question doesn't deserve to go to jail for trimming a seven-year-old's bangs. I would argue that this person very much deserves to go to jail since this is someone who has been placed in a position of trust and authority over that child and has used that authority to violate their person, terrorize and traumatize a seven-year-old. They either know they had no right to interfere with this young boy the way they did and willingly broke the law or they are so completely ignorant of the rules that govern their profession that they should not be allowed within a mile of a classroom full of seven-year-olds.

If the child's parents were to drop by the teaching assistant's home with a pair of clippers and shave her head "to help her see better" I think it's safe to say they'd be in jail faster than you could knock "shave and a haircut".

I'm not sure whether the family's accusations of anti-Native discrimination are well founded or not - they may just be the racist icing on the layer cake of stupid - and frankly I don't think the discrimination angle even matters. For a teacher or any member of the school staff to take a pair of scissors to a seven-year-old's hair against the child's will is an incredible violation of trust.

And the first person to make a "scalping" joke is really going to wish they hadn't.

crossposted from the Woodshed, where the uke-fight has only just begun!

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Universities are supposed to places of ideas, centers of higher education and free marketplaces of ideas. Students are there to have their minds expanded and to learn about the world around them. Then there's Liberty University, whose directors really need to look up the word "Liberty" in a dictionary.

Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.

“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.

Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.

According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.

Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.

“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”

Imagine the screeching that would result if a liberal college refused to allow a "Young Republicans" chapter on campus, and rightfully so. I'm sure David Horowitz will get right on this.

A tip of the Fez to Dammit Janet, which has the story in greater detail.

Crossposted at the Woodshed

Donohue employs a violently deviated Clinton defence

Mr. Donohue, this is to you personally.

You have your own platform. Explain how any of this:

Regarding sexual abuse, “kissing,” and “non-contact including voyeurism” (e.g., what it labels as “inappropriate sexual talk”) make the grade as constituting sexual abuse. Moreover, one-third of the cases involved “inappropriate fondling and contact.” None of this is defensible, but none of it qualifies as rape. Rape, on the other hand, constituted 12 percent of the cases. As for the charge that “Irish Priests” were responsible, some of the abuse was carried out by lay persons, much of it was done by Brothers, and about 12 percent of the abusers were priests (most of whom were not rapists).

Qualifies as something acceptable from a person in a position of religious authority, regardless of their hierarchal status in your so-called Holy order.

Anyone!!!

You included, buckwheat!!!!!

Explain it, you sick sonofabitch!

In the name of the God you so claim to defend, (sorry, you only defend a "church"), you have just made the exploitation of children acceptable, priest or not, and you have ignored that it all happened in that same corrupt establishment you call a "church".

I hope Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan have the opportunity to watch your nuts fry on a barbeque.

The Banana Republic of Canada

In the wake of the O'Connor and Iacobucci public inquiries into the role CSIS played in the torture of Canadians overseas, a new government rulebook of guidelines was issued to CSIS and various blandishments were offered by the ministers in charge.

What's in the new rulebook?
Pogge blogged a couple of days ago about a copy obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act that is so heavily censored it is impossible to tell whether the new guidelines adequately address the recommendations laid out by O'Connor and Iacobucci to prevent future torture such as that visited upon Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin. As Pogge wrote :

"When representatives of government and its agencies assure us that they're playing by the rules, it's a little difficult to judge the accuracy of their claims when we're not allowed to know what those rules are."

This was also the position our elected representatives on the Committee on Public Safety and National Security found themselves in back in March during its Review of the Findings and Recommendations of the Iacobucci and O'Connor Reports. Despite persistent straightforward questions from the Liberals and Bloc members - Do we condone torture? Do we still use information derived from torture? - the dodging and weaving from CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O'Brian left these questions largely unanswered.
A brief media flurry resulted from his opening statement that there is no absolute ban on the use of information derived from torture when "lives are at stake", but this was immediately laid to rest the next day when the word "knowingly" was added by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan", as in "we don't knowingly use info extracted by torture". It's the new Don't ask, Don't tell Intel.

As O'Brian explained to the committee : "Three individuals are suing the government for several hundred million dollars, therefore we cannot discuss anything that would indicate that the government is in agreement with Iacobucci's findings."

He is aided in this avoidance of accountability by the six Con members on the committee running interference on tough questions from the Libs and the Bloc. From my notes of that session -not exact quotes :
Maria Mourani, Bloc : I'd like to ask about our questioning of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo ...
Dave MacKenzie, Con : Point of order : what's the relevance?
Mourani : Khadr was tortured and Canadians paid CSIS to contribute.
Chair Garry Breitkreuz, Con : I don't understand the relevance.
Mourani : I want to know did CSIS use information from Khadr obtained under torture?MacKenzie : Point of order - Mourani is on a fishing trip.

I'll just give you a moment to let that one sink in.

Mourani : I'll rephrase the question : Is information obtained under torture?
Chair, Breitkreuz : Witnesses cannot comment on individual cases.
Mark Holland, Lib : But the questiuon is central to this inquiry.
Rathgeber, Con : Point of order. Not relevant. Stick to Iacobucci and O'Connor reports.

Which, you will recall, O'Brian has already said cannot be commented on due to ongoing litigation.

Menard, Bloc : Mourani is right. This is central to the O'Connor and Iacobucci reports. What we want to know is: Is torture still endorsed?
Mourani : Answer my question.
O'Brian, eventually : "I reject the premise of the question"

And thus CSIS informs elected members of parliament - the peoples' representatives - sitting on a committee whose mandate is to provide public oversight on intelligence agencies - to stuff it.


A couple of years ago I was sitting in a bar in the States discussing politics with some university students. "How are things up there after the coup?" one of them asked.
Me : *blink* *blink*
"Perhaps you don't call it a coup," said another helpfully.
We not only don't call it a coup, we don't even ever refer to it.
In 2006 as Liberal PM Paul Martin seemed almost certain to be re-elected, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli went very public with a criminal investigation into rumoured Liberal government political malfeasance around Income Tax leaks and that was the end of the Libs. Nothing came of the investigation save one lone Finance civil servant pocketing some loot. No inquiry was ever launched into why the head of the national police force, himself later disgraced over Arar, in effect threw the outcome of a national election.

Can individual rogue members of that national police force be brought to justice? Apparently not.
And exactly which intelligence agencies are responsible for the continued incarceration of Omar Khadr and the ongoing banishment of Abousfian Abdelrazik? Well we don't really know.

What we do know is that we have lost public oversight over our police and intelligence agencies. Isn't this the kind of thing we used to sneer at "banana republics" for?

Cross-posted at Creekside

Chalk River may be dead

Not the story. The reactor itself.

A spokesman for the reactor's operator, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., conceded Wednesday that its declaration that the reactor would stop producing isotopes for "more than a month" beginning Saturday is optimistic but it can't provide any better timelines until it knows what is causing the leak.

"We've given them an optimistic schedule but it's going to be more than a month," said Dale Coffin, a spokesman for AECL.

The "them" would be both customers of AECL waiting for medical isotopes and the Harper government which made such a mess of things the last time Chalk River was shut down.

[T]wo engineers — one working at the Chalk River facility and one who spent years working there — said they doubt the repairs will be made even within eight months and, in fact, may never be complete.

"A month to repair is a dream," said the engineer who works at the facility, and who asked for anonymity for fears he would be dismissed.

"Sounds to me as if good ol' NRU is gone for good," said the other engineer, who, after working for AECL at several of its nuclear facilities including Chalk River, now works for the federal government.

Granted, that's just two engineers. If we wait long enough, Harper will consult a political scientist and, if it will help him survive longer, he will declare Chalk River safe.

"It's a reality of having older infrastructure and that's why the world is coming together to come up with a plan in order to deal with the global supply of medical isotopes," [Natural Resources Minister Lisa] Raitt said.

Wow! The world is coming together to come up with a plan? That's a little different than last time... or is it?

This time we aren't getting Steve Harper, nuclear genius and medical supply expert, (Hey! He calls himself an economist too!) flailing around blaming everyone but his government and then firing the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for doing her job.

In the meantime, the Ottawa River should start glowing in the dark.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - Rachel's on the Case . . . .

We love Rachel:

IF, (and that's a big "if") Mr. Obama puts an end to this ridiculous policy, it is Rachel Maddow's efforts that should be credited . . . .

(H/T "Olde Goat Patrick)

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

Who's the carpetbagger?

Given the latest batch of attack ads approved by the senior members of the Prime Minister's Office, one would wonder why, given the thrust of those ads, they allow one of their own, a born and raised American, to meander unfettered through the op-ed pages of Canadian newspapers depositing easily refutable bovine scat.

Tom Flanagan, Harper confidant, unrepentant aboriginal assimilationist and cheerleader of a free-market system from which he has remained insulated by lodging himself in academic institutions throughout his adult life comes out with another whopper of Reform Party bile.

Flanagan, the neo-human-rights activist*, suggests the solution to irrational prejudice and discrimination is to let the free-market sort it out. This, he opines, is much better than human rights commissions and tribunals which he describes as suffering from "blowback".

Both federal and provincial commissions are suffering blowback from their unsuccessful attempts to muzzle media gadflies Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

Excuse me, but that is not what happened. The federal and provincial human rights tribunals rejected the attempt to muzzle by claimants. For a much more accurate and truthful picture of things, you must go here.

And the free-market observer's solution to the falsehood he initially presents?

There is discrimination in the private sector, but it is self-liquidating over time because of the costs it imposes on discriminators. Governmental discrimination, in contrast, perpetuates itself because it is backed by state coercion.

Very cute. Except that the examples of private sector discrimination he provides took government intervention to eliminate. Normally, a larger government imposing rule over a smaller one and the greater whole (nation) exposing the regional discriminatory behaviour of a smaller constituency (state or province). The free market does little to sort itself out if it can get away with a discriminatory behaviour and still turn a profit. And Flanagan, in the examples he provides, fails to acknowledge that the free-marketeers' discriminatory behaviour of the past, (which had to be beaten out of them with legislation), was rooted in practices which, once made illegal, chewed into their bottom-line: African slavery in the U.S. and imported cheap oriental labour in Canada. Once the free-marketeers were denied access to those free and cheap pools of labour they treated those they could no longer indenture as a pestilence to be eradicated.

Flanagan knows this, lest he has forgotten some of his own written works.

The point here, however, is to shine a little light on the hypocrisy. As the frat boys in the PM's office bounce around like a bunch of primates at the San Diego Zoo flinging feces at anything that presents the slightest threat to their comfort and weak grip on power, they have among them a worse example than their current target, Michael Ignatieff.

They have Tom Flanagan and he can't seem to shut up.

Flanagan's public biography is short and lacking any substantial detail. Whether this is deliberate or not on Flanagan's part it fits with the model assumed by both Canadian reform-conservatives and US movement-conservatives. While Flanagan may have no particular reason, his fellow travellers do: they would have you believe they have always been great men destined for positions of power. They would like less of their past revealed because it would underscore parts of their lives which would ring negative in a world of valence politics.

The truth is, Flanagan's personal history weaves through a significant era of US and Canadian politics and his positioning in academic institutions on either side of the Canada-US border at particular times tells a story in itself.

Flanagan was raised in Illinois in a politically conservative upper-middle class family. As he was coming out of high-school the US was entering a phase of its existence which can only be described as tumultuous. Flanagan would have been subject to the US Selective Service System after his 18th birthday. Except that, like Dick Cheney, neither volunteering for US military service nor being available for conscripted duty was in Flanagan's cards.

As US involvement in Viet Nam expanded and the US Army started demanding more troops, the young men of the priviledged conservative white community found ways to avoid military service altogether. Educational deferments bought a minimum of 4 years of time - if one's parents could afford to keep their progeny in college, and Flanagan was a product of the social and economic caste that flocked to the universities as a means to avoid donning a uniform.

As the US draft cycled up and Viet Nam became the war of the less priviledged, Selective Service regulations were changing. As Flanagan's educational deferment would have expired his recent marriage would have made that deferment permanent, until Lyndon Johnson issued an Executive Order rescinding exemptions for married men.

And then, if the stories are to be believed, another American, E. Burke Inlow, recruited Flanagan to the University of Calgary. And then Flanagan, a year after the draft age in the US was expanded to include married males to age 35, was on the other side of the US border.

When Flanagan came to Canada he admits to knowing nothing of the place. Yet here he was, just as the Viet Nam war was at full heat, the same place US draft-dodgers and deserters found safe haven.

Coincidence?

It depends on whether you believe in coincidences.

And now he is manipulating our politics. An American conservative who imported his political beliefs and training.

And the shit-flinging primates in Harper's office have the unmitigated gall to call any other person a carpet-bagger.

* Sarcasm, for those who didn't catch it.

Describing the fanatical mind

You simply don't let a written line of this level of magnificence go unrecognized.

The expression “humanist theocracy” (or “atheocracy”, as SUZANNE so nitwittedly puts it) is a contradiction that would only make sense to someone whose logic circuits were rotten with syphilis or fried by religious fanaticism.

Well done, JJ!! Just before I snorted coffee out of my nose, I was thinking about how it's time I got a new keyboard.

Chalk River, medical isotope shortages and a government running on borrowed fumes

It should be interesting to see how this plays out... the second time around.

The first time it gave the Harperites an excuse to interfere with Canada's nuclear regulator, and not in a small way.

From Harper standing in Parliament announcing that the Chalk River reactor was "safe", simply because he said so, to the exposure of a manufactured crisis, the ultimate aim of the last very same event was to remove the regulatory requirements and, ultimately, reduce the level of safety in one of the world's oldest nuclear reactors.

In the six weeks it took the media to dig into the story and come up with facts not tainted by the Harper spin factory something else became obvious. The Harper government was hell-bent to serve their big-business buddies and fire Linda Keen.

Now they have their own hack in place, a cold reactor and the flow of molybdenum-99 (the medical isotope around which all of this is spinning) halted.

Let's see what the Harperites do now.

Kenguru

IMHO, for people in wheelchairs, this is a real boon.

For wheelchair users who would like to get about town without assistance, this could be exactly what you are looking for. You enter the Kenguru on an automatically lowering ramp, which comes down as the back door opens at the press of the key.

Made in Hungary, the Kenguru is a small vehicle that drivers can roll into without leaving their wheelchairs.

Designed by Zsolt Varga, Kenguru is small, stylish and cheerful vehicle whose contours are similar to those of a Smart car. But the resemblance stops there. Made to hold one passenger in a manual wheelchair, the Kenguru doesn't have doors or seats. To get in, the driver opens the extra large back hatch and rolls inside while remaining seated in his wheelchair, which automatically locks into place inside the car. A joystick instead of a steering wheel means that drivers with limited arm mobility can comfortably control the vehicle.

The Intelligence Olympics

From my cherished friend, Helmut, with thanks —

I heard it first from a Jordanian and spread it to the IDF DMI and the Egyptians. When I told it in Syria I said it was about the Mossad.

Long ago and Far Away ----

The Olympic Committee decided to hold a special series of games to know which was the world's best inelligence service.

A lot of countries sent teams often from both their military and "civilian" services. Each team was composed of a captain and two sergeants. They all assembled on the island of Cyprus (no idea why). There were various events and they eventually came to the ultimate and most heavily weighted event which was to be a kind of treasure hunt.

They all went up into the mountains in the western part of the island where there are a series of parallel ridges covered in pines and separated by deep terrain compartments. They assembled in front of a wood line. In front of the teams there were several UN referees in white coveralls with blue helmets and a stack of cages in each of which there was a white rabbit. The head UN boffin held up a rabbit and said that it would be released into the woods behind him and that after 15 minutes the first team chosen at random would go in after it. The team that came back with a live rabbit in the shortest time would win the event.

The rabbit went in. 15 minutes passed and the KGB team went in after it. They could be heard thrashing about and eventually emerged with the rabbit in 35 minutes.

The next team was the French DGSE. They came back with the rabbit in 10 minutes. (The rabbit looked strangely content).

Next was the turn of the Mossad. They were back in in 13 minutes loudly proclaiming that they were "the best."

The CIA never found the rabbit.

Finally, it was the turn of the Syrian Mukhabarat (the secret police). A half hour passed, 45 minutes, then an hour. The UN people went in to find them. They went down one steep slope into the valley bottom, then up another rugged incline to the top of the ridge. From the height, they could see the three Syrians who were at the bottom standing in a sandy road. They had captured a large animal. The UN men crept down, hiding the while in the bushes until they were close enough to see and hear.

The Syrians had found a Nazarene donkey. (The kind with a cross marked in the fur of its back). One of the Sergeants had a grip on the head while the other sergeant beat the beast's hindquarters with a stick.

The captain was whispering to it, "Confess, confess, we KNOW you are a rabbit..."

The Gay Agenda

Graphic pillaged from The Hand Mirror , where it was remarked that "Convincing people to mind their own business might be harder than taking over the world and making it fabulous."

Happy International Day Against Homophobia !

Onward Christian soldiers

Just when you think that what you know about the George W. Bush administration's depravity, rank hypocracy and sadististic bullying masquerading as patriotic piety has hit the bottom of the barrel, someone comes along and points out that there is a whole other barrel underneath this one. Apparently Donald Rumsfeld, not content to have things like prayer meetings going on at the Pentagon and a chief of Special Forces who make Gen. Jack T. Ripper look like the moderate wing of the GOP/military axis, took it upon himself to make special title pages for the regular top secret briefing he delivered to the president and handful of others. Pages with heroic, glamorous images of America's Heroic Glamorous Defenders of Heroic Freedom Heroically Defending Freedom in Glamorous ways, overlaid with stirring passages from, yep - you guessed it - the Bible.
(Image shamelessly lifted from Jesus' General)

See them all here

Keep in mind that this was not an attempt to play to the religious rubes out there in the hinterlands or a pose adopted to curry favor with the evangelistic electorate. These covers were for super-secret executive level only reports that were circulated only to the most senior people.
One wonders what the "Prince of Peace" would make of that. One also wonders why none of these pictures were included with suitable biblical quotes:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth

Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.

Suffer the little children to come unto me

If you are American, write your president, your congressman, your senator, your newspaper and demand that the people responsible for starting this hideous human meatgrinder on false pretenses for their own selfish reasons be brought to trial.

Gratitude to fellow Fez enthusiast Atta J. Turk, this is all crossposted from the Woodshed.

Bullies in Blue

Who will protect us from those that are supposed to "serve and protect" us? I suppose that the woman should be grateful she wasn't tasered. It is nice to see that there are a few honest people in the system willing to do the right thing. Too bad more of them aren't cops. I fear that the bad cops who abuse their authority are giving the job such a bad name it will soon start to drive out the good ones.

This a good example of the kind of "circle the wagons" mentality that seems to exist whenever anyone questions or criticizes the cops. In a story with an otherwise happy ending in which a community drew together to make a statement against racism and the authorities eventually did the right thing, the police union just can't admit that maybe, just maybe, a couple of their members might have acted a bit hastily.

Last week (York Regional Police Chief Armand) La Barge announced at a press conference that he was recommending to the Newmarket Crown attorney that charges be withdrawn, something only the crown can do.
La Barge went even further, criticizing the thoroughness of the initial investigation that resulted in the charges, saying it was "hasty."
This sparked an angry response from York Regional Police Association president John Miskiw, who called La Barge's comments a "slap in the face" to the two officers.
Additionally, Miskiw maintains the officers did the right thing in laying the charges and La Barge was wrong in recommending they be withdrawn.

Those would be these charges and as the Star story quoted above reveals they have been dropped. It's pretty clear officers involved didn't do much of an investigation, but simply took the school principal at his word and arrested the kid that won the fight. That would be the same school principal who wanted the student in question expelled from not only his school, but from every school in the York Region and who clearly either didn't do much investigating or is a major league dumbass.

Crossposted from The Woodshed

Spinning Caesar's murder

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT is a site worthy of your perusal. One bon-bon is "Spinning Caesar's murder", a book review by Mary Beard, who is a mavin on the era. The review is about the final book in a series on Republican Rome by T. P. Wiseman, "Remembering the Roman People Essays on Late-Republican politics and literature". Oxford University Press. £55 (US $110). 978 0 19 923976 4

This little chunk made me recall Dallas in November, for some reason:

The watching senators, several hundred of them, were at first stunned by the attack. But, as soon as Brutus turned away from the body to address them, they regained their wits and took to their heels. In their flight from the Senate house, they must have almost bumped into the thousands of people who were just at that moment pouring out of a gladiatorial show in a nearby theatre. Hearing rumours of the murder, this crowd too panicked and ran home, shouting “Bolt the doors, bolt the doors”. Meanwhile Lepidus, a leading Caesarian loyalist, left the Forum to rally the troops stationed in the city, just missing the blood-stained assassins who turned up there to proclaim their success – closely followed by three loyal slaves carrying Caesar’s body home on a litter, with such difficulty (you really need four people to carry a litter) that his wounded arms trailed over the sides. It was two days before the Senate dared to meet again, and perhaps another two before Caesar’s body was cremated on a bonfire in the Forum.

The Muldoon and the Oliphant

"The time has come," the Oliphant said,
"To talk of many things:
Of envelopes stuffed with wads of cash
And if they came with strings--
Perhaps you only beat the rap
Because the pigs were schwings*."

"But wait a bit," the Muldoon cried,
"Before we have our chat;
I have complaints to make," he said,
"Regarding Steve the Fat."
"No Hurry," said the Oliphant,
"There's always time for that...

But was that 'pasta' money used
To give Joe Clark the axe?
Is turning noodles into LAVs
A job for party hacks?
Did you stash that $300,000
To avoid a fulsome tax?"

"O weep for me," the Muldoon said:
"For all of it is lies."
With sobs and tears he socked away
His 2 million dollar prize,
And held his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

* "After years of investigating Mulroney, the RCMP never found out about his job with Schreiber or the now infamous cash payments. However, the Mounties did chauffeur Mulroney to the hotel at Mirabel Airport where he picked up the first batch of thousand dollar bills."
We still had to fork over $2.1-mil.

Kady is live-blogging the Oliphant Inquiry.

With apologies to Lewis Carroll from Creekside

The shine seems to be wearing off...

Who would say such a thing about the Stephen Harper party?

They are not good at reaching out. They are not good at broadening the tent. They are not good at getting beyond the bristling, mean way they view everyone who is an opponent. Even after their victories - they are in power, remember - the Conservatives of the Stephen Harper party, still radiate the sullenness of a party denied, a party - even though it is in power, is making the big calls, setting the agenda - nursing a sense of injury that they haven't been fully acknowledged, fully appreciated for the wonderful folks they are.

Can they not at least understand that it is precisely this attitude, more than any other factor, that has kept them frozen in the polls near the low 30s - that has denied them any measurable, sustained growth - from the moment of their first victory?

It comes mainly from the edgy, mean spirit that predominates in how they choose to present themselves. We saw it in the attempts to cut public financing for political parties last December. Any chance to kneecap their opponents and Mr. Harper's men start to salivate. It was surely present in the blitz of attack ads on Mr. Dion, which were unnecessary, and mean. Whatever those ads did to undermine the already weak Stéphane Dion is debatable. What is not debatable is how much they underlined the Conservatives', and Mr. Harper's, mean streak. There is some quality of the Conservative Party that gives the impression that they are always just about to have a temper tantrum.

Rex Murphy, that's who.

Funny... Murphy used to think Harper and his pack of rabid animals was the neatest thing since sliced bread.

But, like a kid who is completely enthralled by the bright, shiney, toy electric train when he first opened the box, Murphy has become tired and fed up with the fact that it's the same thing, going around in a circle, and he can't seem to find any track that will fit to make it bigger and better.

The Harper party will always be like the little toy train on a circular track: capable of very little and simply repeating its route.

Many of us had that figured out ages ago, Rex. We've known that Harper and his reformers were no different than the nasty southern US Republicans on which they modelled themselves. We knew it before they ever gained power.

What took you so long?

"Change is Good!" * . . . .

* To quote an old MickeyD's ad campaign.

That's why it's so exciting to see the "change" Mr. Obama has already instituted:

To play off of our friend Alison and Mike's blog posts, and per Glenn Greenwald in Salon today:

Can anyone deny what the NYT and Post are pointing out today? This is what happened this week alone in the realm of Obama's approach to "national security" and civil liberties:

Monday - Obama administration's letter to Britian threatening to cut off intelligence-sharing if British courts reveal the details of how we tortured British resident Binyam Mohamed;

Tuesday - Promoted to military commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChyrstal, who was deeply involved in some of the worst abuses of the Bush era;

Wednesday - Announced he was reversing himself and would try to conceal photographic evidence showing widespread detainee abuse -- despite the rulings from two separate courts (four federal judges unanimously) that the law compels their disclosure;

Friday - Unveiled his plan to preserve a modified system of military commissions for trying Guantanamo detainees, rather than using our extant-judicial processes for doing so.

It's not the fault of civil libertarians that Obama did all of those things, just in this week alone. These are the very policies -- along with things like the claimed power to abduct and imprison people indefinitely with no charges of any kind and the use of the "state secrets privilege" to deny torture and spying victims a day in court -- that caused such extreme anger and criticisms toward the Bush presidency.

Gee, isn't it great that we have this new President south of the 49th and everything is going to "change" for the better?

Sure it is . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

All new North American Competitiveness Council - now with "spiritual vision"

We have yet another new contender in David Emerson's "Project North America" sweepstakes.:

The Standing Commission on North American Prosperity or "N.A. 2050" for short :

"A united effort of distinguished individuals from Mexico, Canada and the USA to provide sound economic and social policy guidance to the political leaders of the three countries for the prosperity of all peoples of North America.

In the aftermath of NAFTA and the SSP initiatives, a vacuum presently exists in developing a vision for North American prosperity. The lack of such a vision jeopardizes previous achievements in building strong economic ties across North America made during the past 15 years.

The Commission will be composed of up to 200 members from the 3 countries. The Commission will be governed by a Board of Trustees of 10 members per country and an Executive Committee of 2 members per country.
The Commission will meet 3 times a year and will provide "A North American Prosperity" White paper to the leaders of the three countries upon conclusion of each session.
Membership on the Commission is by invitation only.

Gosh that sounds familiar.
Former President of Mexico Vicente Fox addressed the inaugural summit this week. A former Coca-Cola executive whose grandfather hails from Cincinatti, Fox was president of Mexico from 2000-2006 and signed the Security and Prosperity Partnership with Bush and Paul Martin in March 2005. From his May 12 keynote address to the N.A.2050 summit :

"If we are together‚ the U.S.‚ Mexico and Canada‚ no doubt we’ll be number one – the number one economy‚ the number one market‚ the number one consumer market – in the world. My dream is that we will not have a border."

This must be what got the Canadian deep integrationists all jacked up last week. Canada is falling behind, oh noes!
Canada was represented at the summit by World Bank financier Dr. Peter Appleton, a Canadian who has gone south to become president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of N.A. 2050 :

"If ever there was a match in theory that was made in heaven, it is North America. Canada and Mexico both have the oil supply and the United States needs resources. Why can't we work together? Ronald Regan took down the Berlin wall and we've spent the last 10 years putting one up. Where's the logic in that? How is that fair?"

Um, yeah.
Of course no deep integration project is complete without the guiding presence of Robert "I am a North American" Pastor to provide that vision thing :

"The European Union called on all people to unite. North America didn't do anything like that with NAFTA. We didn't have a spiritual vision past anything other than a business contract."

Yeah, bring on that "made in heaven" North American spiritual vision.
Inaugural dinner - $1000US a plate.
.
Cross-posted from Creekside

The more things change ...

Give it a moment...

It'll come to you.

h/t Mike

Welcome Aboard . . . .

TGB welcomes intrepid BC Rail investigator BC Mary to the blogroll.

Got a question on the intricacies of the Legislature Raids of late 2003? Go here.

"All Aboard," Mary . . . .

Heh!

Indeed.

And... what Cathie points out.

One tangible point: It does little to instill confidence in the workings of the Harper government when his people are able to get attack ads out faster than infrastructure money.

In 2012...

This little nugget, which will have passed into the conservative memory hole, and which will be forever maintained by our madame industrieaux at DAMMIT JANET! should be regurgitated just in time to put the boots to Alaska's Iditarod Barbie when she announces her run for the US presidency.

You know she's going to do it. She's too stupid not to.

By the way, Ms Palin, journalism is an arts degree. Oceanography is a science degree. And yes, there is a difference.

Just because

For some reason I just felt compelled to share this. No particular reason... just because. Perhaps though it's because some mindless Harper worshiper once wrote in the comments section of this blog the words, Art is a hobby.



And would point out to running man, who will be reminded here as often as I see fit, that the reason he is able to admire a Shelby Mustang and dismiss a Model T is soley because of art. Unless the stupid sonofabitch really believes that the modern internal combustion engine is really that much different from the original.

Someone's Happy 'Bout the Results in BC . . . .

Per The Tyee:

Campbell and cabinet win third term
By Monte Paulsen May 12, 2009 11:08 pm

VANCOUVER – Premier Gordon Campbell and his entire B.C. Liberal Party cabinet have been re-elected, giving the Vancouver native who led the centre-right party from opposition to government an historic third term in office.

The Liberals had won 45 seats to the NDP’s 32 as of 11 p.m., with an additional eight ridings remaining too close to call. Among those re-elected were John van Dongen, the solicitor general who resigned in the wake of several speeding tickets, John Les, the former solicitor general who resigned over suspicious land deal, and Attorney General Wally Oppal, who ducked questions about the BC Rail sale controversy throughout the campaign.

Campbell bound triumphantly up the stairs of the gleaming new Vancouver Convention Centre – itself a controversial legacy of his party’s profligate spending in advance of the 2010 Winter Games – and pressed through an adoring crowd waiting in a glass-walled conference room.

Well, I guess Iggy's happy . . . .


(Normally, photo images are included in my posts. I could not bring myself to post one of gordo. Sorry.)

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

Why is Dick Cheney on TV and not in prison?

It is interesting to see Cheney running to get in front of the cameras and claim that "torture worked". It doesn't. And even if it did, torture is immoral, illegal and uncivilized - whether it works or not is irrelevant. Arguing about whether or not torture works is like arguing about whether you can get rich making kiddie porn or whether eating live babies cures cancer (or helps wins majority governments).

It's about the villages, stupid

I've read a lot of missives and tomes on the war in Afghanistan. Far too many of them are protected with a celluloid wrap which limits their usefulness in determining what is really going on. Written by well meaning people, each one seemed to drive off the road just as it was coming out of the curve. The telling part was that everything was just rosy. Everything. And, with no apology to those scribes, that is impossible.

Finally, from a US Army captain, comes an assessment of the mission in Afghanistan that makes sense. I wanted to find the right highlight to entice you to read it, but the whole thing is so good, so straight to the point, that it's impossible to pull one paragraph as highlighting the entire paper. So, I'll give you the pdf link, and you can read the whole thing for yourself.

If you don't read it, you'll be that much the poorer for it.

Oh yes. It's an American paper written by an American soldier. If that generates some small repulsion in your gut, perhaps making you want to move on, then I would suggest you start at Flit, a blog written by a Canadian who has just returned from a deployment on an Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

BruceR takes the good Captain's words and adjusts them to put them in the context of his experience.

You need to read that too.

Edit: Link colours changed to blue bold. We believe even stokers and ERAs should be well informed.

I didn't...

...know her long enough or well enough to find out what her demons were. I even forgot her name until a few minutes ago, but I remember her well. When I knew her she ran a tiny café I inhabited for a few weeks on a small island on the far side side of the world, themed for two cultures not her own. We spoke a bit whilst she made the coffee and wiped the tables. There was a sadness about her, a melancholy of autumn skies that whispered of unbelonging and haunted thoughts. She carried a striking physical presence and wore a mask that like her little shop, seemed at odds with the local vernacular.

At that point in my life I felt I recognised a fellow traveller searching for their place, so perhaps this is why I find it so profoundly tragic to learn her demons finally caught her. So long JS, I hope your spirit has found its home.

G&M editors pull noses out of Harpers ass... and endorse a liar in BC

Toronto's "newspaper of record" the CTVglobmedia owned Globe and Mail has come out with a resounding endorsement of Gordon "I won't sell BC Rail" Campbell.

From W.A.C. Bennett and Dave Barrett to Bill Vander Zalm and Glen Clark, British Columbia was long known for its colourful and often dysfunctional politics. The greatest achievement of Gordon Campbell, who will seek his third term as premier on Tuesday, is to have brought a measure of calm and stability to his province. That is reason enough for British Columbians to resist any impulse to change government, at a time when economic tumult calls for a steady hand.

Coming from a newspaper that endorses the Harper party federally, that's something. Dysfunctional indeed. Look around your own newsroom Mr. Greenspon.

But to suggest that Gordon Campbell has brought "calm and stability" to British Columbia?! That goes beyond the pale.

Recessions always pose a risk to incumbent governments. But British Columbians could make matters considerably worse by forgoing Mr. Campbell's calm leadership in favour of a party that is mostly telling them what it thinks they want to hear. Now is not the time to risk a return to erratic governance.

Return?!!!
We have an erratic government in BC. From one minute to the next, one never knows what Campbell and his "Bought and paid for by big business" party are going to spring on unsuspecting British Columbians.

There's nothing calm or stable about it.

I personally dislike all other options available but that doesn't elevate Gordon Campbell to a position of favour. To suggest that Campbell is anything but a lying, arrogant elitist, out to give away everything he can to his big-business buddies, is a deviation from the truth.

For a list of Campbell's real accomplishments, go visit Creekside.

And for further adventures of how Campbell is in the pockets of big-media, follow the links at The Gazetteer.

In the meantime I have a suggestion for the G&M's Toronto-centric Greenspon and Geiger: Put your faces back where they're comfortable.

Science Dawg

Channelling Ulrich Beck...perhaps late modern society has become so complex and individually focused as to lose a critical mass of public awareness of the basic evidence-based problem-solving/question-producing logic that underpins general scientific inquiry and epistemological progress. Perhaps again, this entropic loss of public intellectual capacity facilitates the emergence of popular religious social movements which not only do not understand science, argument and knowledge, but also assault it like so many discursive termites. [I'm amazed that these people can feed themselves.]

Now, go read Dawg.

And then calm your nerves and restore your hope here. (Episode 13 with Dean Bavington on the cod fishery collapse is an excellent illustration of how science works even when it doesn't.) Maybe even send the link to one or two elected officials who seem to have missed something.


(h/t Dr. Dawg)

JapaneseMicroRetro

JALOPNIK is a car site that has a somewhat oblique perspective. Here's an article about some very serious Japanese creations. As reported by by Mark Arnold, the classic Detroit look is still the pinnacle . . . .  as the grille on the MicroDodge shows, these dudes went all the way.

If it looks like CanWest bought their way in the door...

We have the right to believe they bought their way in the door until they prove they didn't.

And that is going to be pretty tough to do after CanWest Media Inc. pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the BC Liberal Party for the 2005 election, at the exclusion of all others.

Then we get the Vancouver Sun endorsing Campbell and his "Liberals". The problem is that the endorsement is accompanied by the worst kind of biased bullshit. And by bullshit I mean fabrications, misrepresentations, statistical manipulation and outright falsehoods.

When challenged by the Georgia Straight's Charlie Smith on CanWest Media's 2005 $50,000 donation to the BC Liberals, Campbell insults every thinking British Columbian by suggesting that it has no influence... at all. Then he really screws the pooch by making the suggestion that government advertising revenue is spread around... "... the fact of the matter is that we have two major daily newspapers."

Huh?!

Let's assume for a minute that he's talking about the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province. Just for good measure, let's throw in the Victoria Times-Colonist. They are all owned by CanWest Media Inc.!!!

The Gazetteer has the video.

About that endorsement by the Vancouver Sun. My gawd, don't step in it! It'll stick to your shoe.

Now, go read Kootcoot, who tears the VSun's endorsement to shreds faster than a white-tip shark with mackerel in its gape.

Life imitates art in Ohio

Didn't all this play out in a Hollywood musical a long time ago?

A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.

Despite the warning, 17-year-old Tyler Frost, who has never been to a dance before, said he plans to attend Findlay High School's prom Saturday.

Right. Now I remember.

BC Election 2009 : Money is thicker than water

This last week, documents from the much-beleaguered BC Ministry of the Environment revealed that run-of-river power projects breach environmental regulations : cutting down old-growth forest, construction during bird breeding season, that sort of thing.
Unfortunately the government officials involved "say they can't discuss what they found until after next week's provincial election."
.
Now today we get this : Environment ministry faces 'substantial pressure' from power producers, documents say

"Ministry of Environment officials sometimes face "substantial pressure" from IPP [Independent Power Project] proponents to exempt them from wildlife and habitat protection regulations that apply to the forestry sector -- and ministry staff are recommending that requests for exemptions be passed along to politicians rather than dealt with by civil servants"

MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT DECISION NOTE

"Recommended Option : If a Regional Manager does not wish to issue the exemption, it would elevate to the Minister."

What?
You mean the same Liberal politicians who have received $800,000 in political donations from that IPP industry and its supporters over the past 8 years would be making the call on whether specific IPPs are exempt from environmental regulation?
Good lord.

Much ado about mustard

Does nobody actually get it?

Sean Hannity was testing for a job with The Onion.

Hannity floated his mustard fest in an attempt to get noticed by America's Finest News Source. Of course The Onion has standards. The ability to manufacture something witty while tackling the truly bizarre is a basic requirement. If you can do a story which others actually believe... well, here's your new desk.

The Onion has some other stipulating requirements for employment. One of the most stringent being that when you make a story out of nothing, the nothing can't really be a real-life nothing event. It has to be a big thing which can be turned on its head or absolutely impossible and turned into a story - which stupid people believe, gets blogged all over the place and goes viral. (Fox News fans are most accustomed to this... for some reason. Suspicion is that they are unable to differentiate between the veracity of a Fox News broadcast and an Onion headline. Go figure.)

I digress.

The Onion has rejected Hannity's test. It seems he suffers from inconsistency. While the mustard story looked like a good first step for a budding Onionista, it turns out he was unable to explain how he missed the fact that his White House hero also consumed stuff that was, ahem, fancy... and definitely not home-grown American.

Yup, George Bush liked his offshore delicacies too.

The Onion has suggested that Hannity keep trying. Perhaps we'll get something really bizarre, like a drunken vice-president mistaking his hunting partner for a duck and shooting him in the face. Wouldn't that be a hoot?!

The right-wing's "Hiroshima Defence" of torture...

... goes deeper than the level of thought most of those who spout this argument can manage.

First, let's look at the argument, as initially offered by conservative mouthpiece, Pat Buchanan.



Rush Limbaugh couldn't have skewed two unrelated concepts into one any better. The United States committed a heinous act in the nuclear bombing of Japan. Torturing one person is less heinous than killing 160,000 people. Therefore, torture is perfectly alright.

No context, no circumstances. Just compare apples and oranges and sit back... unchallenged.

We could go on all day over the moral aspect of blowing entire cities, and their populations, off the map in a few seconds, but that's actually another subject. Let's stick to torture and the right-wing "Hiroshima defence".

Buchanan and his shrinking legions need to go to the library. The book is War In The Pacific, Volume 1, by Jerome T. Hagen. The reader will go immediately to chapter 25, page 159 of the book.

The title of the chapter is: The Lie of Marcus McDilda.

On August 9th, 1945, the Japanese Imperial cabinet was still debating whether to accept the terms of surrender in the Potsdam Declaration. Neither side, (continue to fight vs surrender), dominated the table despite the fact that the US had now twice attacked Japanese cities with atomic bombs.

One of the arguments put forward by the "fight to extinction" faction was the feeling that the US had just shot their wad. The Japanese were aware of the enormous difficulty in producing atomic bombs and many believed the US had no reserve arsenal of such weapons.

The War Minister, Korechika Anami, in the "surrender immediately" faction, disagreed - and he had an ace to play.

Anami told the cabinet that a recently captured B-29 pilot, 1st Lieutenant Marcus McDilda, while undergoing torture, had told his tormentors that the US possessed 100 atomic bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto were next on the list of targets.

Except that it wasn't true. McDilda had indeed told his interrogators the story but, in fact, he knew nothing of the Manhatten Project, knew nothing about the US atomic bomb arsenal and knew nothing about any targetting plot. In an attempt to end his torture he had told the Japanese what they wanted to hear. McDilda was immediately classified a high-value prisoner - something which probably saved his life.

In truth, the US had no ready use arsenal of atomic bombs and would not have another bomb ready for almost two weeks. After that, a fourth bomb would not be ready for use until mid-September.

McDilda's information, obtained through torture, was completely false. Yet it solidified the position of one faction of the Japanese cabinet.

The Japanese played the right-wing's "ticking time bomb" scenario and proved it a useless tool.

Buchanan's comparison fails and the moral deficit of those who promote torture as a means of defending their country stands.

Florida "Out" Front Again . . . .

Once again our former home state of Florida is "out" front in the news.

Per AlterNet today:

Florida's GOP Governor to Be Outed in Explosive Documentary Released Today
By John Byrne, Raw Story | May 8, 2009

The Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, who is strongly considering a run for Senate, will be outed in a independent film being released today.

The film, Outrage, tracks the outings of prominent gay political figures, such as Crist and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. It's being produced by Magnolia Pictures and will appear in Landmark Theaters across the country.

"Using some firsthand accounts of former sexual partners, old campaign footage (to occasionally humorous effect) and commentary from gay political media watchdogs, the film makes the case for each man's homosexuality, and presents his lifetime gay rights voting record," according to one reviewer. "In each instance, the disconnect is staggering.

"The usual suspects are all there: Craig, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, former New York mayor Ed Koch, former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, former Rep. Ed Schrock, even dusty McCarthy relic Roy Cohn."

A top Republican leader signaled Wednesday that Crist will likely enter the Senate race for the seat being vacated by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who is quitting.






Hypocrisy thy name is repuglican . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

BC's Watershed Election

Abdelrazik vs the Government of Canada

Harper's quest to turn Canada into an outpost of apology for the worst crimes of the Bush administration continues today as the Government of Canada v. Abdelrazik shuffles into the Supreme Court - even as the UN states Canada is free to bring Abdelrazik home.

Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon in the House of Commons on Monday :

"Mr. Abdelrazik is on the list established by the United Nations Security Council as an individual with ties to al-Qaeda. Therefore, he is subject to a travel ban and an asset freeze. Our government is taking its obligations seriously and that is why we are not going to issue him a travel document to return home."

Richard Barrett, co-ordinator of the UN's Al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team, which oversees the various United Nations resolutions establishing the blacklist on which Mr. Abdelrazik was placed at the request of Washington in 2006 :

"Canada is free to bring Abousfian Abdelrazik home and doesn't need to ask for permission"

Addressing the Justice Department's argument that "it is geographically impossible for [Mr. Abdelrazik] to travel from Sudan to Canada by air, land or sea without transiting through the sovereign territories (land, airspace or territorial waters) of numerous UN member states which are bound at international law to prevent such transit, " Mr. Barrett stated :

"The overflight states don't come into it and they haven't ever come into it."

Well there goes legal bullshit argument#1 of the Government of Canada vs Abdelrazik, being argued today in the Supreme Court of Canada.
This just leaves Justice Department bullshit legal argument #2 : that Abdelrazik is :

"close to Abu Zubaydah, a former lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, involved in al-Qaeda training and recruitment."

That would be Abu Zubaydah, the half-wit waterboarded 83 times to coerce a false confession linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
.
For those able to attend, the hearing today is at Supreme Court, West courtroom, 301 Wellington Street, Ottawa at 9:30am.
Wear a suit, bring pitchforks.
.
And thank you, Paul Koring at the G&M, for your ongoing excellent coverage of Abdelrazik's plight.
Update : Dr. Dawg attended Thursday and will have another post up when he gets back Friday night.
.
Cross-posted at Creekside

Someday....

Somewhere, I just want to be sitting across a table and say, "Drifty, order your favorite drink. I'm buying."

Shhh! What's That Sound ? ? ? ?

That sound would be repuglican heads exploding all over the northeastern US.

"Shoot, Martha! Them damn homosexuals are a gittin' married all over the durn place!"

From NPR this am:

Maine Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

by The Associated Press

NPR.org, May 6, 2009 · Maine Gov. John Baldacci has signed legislation making the state the fifth in the nation to allow same-sex marriage.

Baldacci, a Democrat, signed the bill Wednesday shortly after the state Senate voted 21-13, with one absent, to approve the measure authorizing marriage between any two people rather than between one man and one woman, as state law had allowed. The House had passed the bill Tuesday.

New Hampshire legislators are also poised to send a gay marriage bill to their governor. He has not indicated whether he'll sign it.

If same-sex marriage becomes law in that state, Rhode Island would be the sole holdout in New England.

You may want to invest in some earplugs.

Those exploding head noises are apparently going to get quite annoying.

Snicker.

Chuckle.

Chortle . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

Start corrupt...

Stay corrupt.

The Harper party has a new way of counting ballots. (Emphasis mine)

Federal Conservative party president Don Plett rejects criticism that the new system used to determine whether sitting MPs should face a nomination challenge was undemocratic.

Plett said 94,000 ballots were mailed nationally to party members in ridings with an incumbent, asking them whether they wanted a nomination race in their constituency. The mail-out included Calgary West, where lawyer Donna Kennedy-Glans wanted to challenge longtime MP Rob Anders.

Two-thirds approval was required to trigger a battle, while an unreturned ballot was counted as a no under new rules adopted by the Conservative party's national council in March. In the past, if people wanted to challenge a nomination, they generally could after an interview, Plett said.

"I find it very, very strange that somebody would even suggest that that is not democratic," Plett said.

Of course Plett would find that strange, particularly since the two-thirds approval requirement is hoisted out of Robert's Rules of Order and then promptly corrupted to favour the incumbent.

A two-thirds vote means two-thirds of the votes cast, ignoring blanks which should never be counted.

A mail out ballot, not returned in time for the tellers to count it, is considered a blank.

Starting the process in a corrupted manner simply means they'll continue to try it further on up the line, when it has a more direct impact on more than card-carrying Harperites.

Update: Fairness dictates that I point out that the Liberals aren't better than the Harperites on this issue. From comments over at Canadian Cynic we get the word from a Liberal party member.

... we were told that Liberal incumbents would also be protected. Sure, they had to meet some minimal requirements as outlined here but it was anticipated that every incumbent could easily pass the test.

In the case of the Liberal Party it's not just sitting members who are protected, it's everyone who stood in the last election and still wants to be the party nominee.

Sure enough, the Hill Times has the details.

The difference, (and there is one), is that the Conservatives call themselves a "grassroots" party, and that is patently untrue. They're a party of "inners" - if you ain't one of the good ole boys, you ain't gettin' in.

What is more heinous however, is the attempt to demonstrate a democratic process which truly is no such thing. For Plett, or any other Conservative, to suggest that using a two-thirds majority rule and then assigning unreturned ballots (blanks) to any part of the question is not a corrupted process is demonstrably dishonest.

Why not just announce that incumbents would go unchallenged and be done with it? Going through a public exercise in corruption shows just how stupid they actually are.

H/T Accidental Deliberations

SPP : Manufacturing Content

Four collaborating alumni of the Task Force on the Future of North America are duking it out in the pages of the Globe and Mail over how best to hasten North American deep integration. At issue is the inclusion of Mexico, long considered by Team Canada to be a usurper of Canada's rightful pride of place in America's heart.

Team Canada, represented by John Manley and Gordon Giffin : Canada is more special to the US than Mexico.

Team Mexico/US, represented by Andrés Rozental and Robert Pastor : No, you aren't - try harder.

Good thing RevDave is here to guide us safely through the towering clichés and treacherous platitudes.

Incongruity part 2. "The Box"

How does one link the facade of Stephen Harper with an Italian ice cream advertisement?

Easy. Neither of them represent reality.

Inasmuch as the depiction of two people committing a "sin" against Catholic church policy is no more than an attempt grab your attention for another purpose, the public presentation of Harper is an attempt to shift your focus away from the real person.

Harper is depicted by his supporters and handlers as a confident, thoughtful, tough individual: A guy with some kind of beautiful mind who cuts through the crap with frank talk.

Except that, just like the ice cream ad, it's a purpose created illusion.

Leaders with confidence don't micro-manage. Leaders with confidence don't fill ante-rooms with pictures of themselves.

As the right-wing screech machine went into overdrive at the fact that Barack Obama used a teleprompter, they conveniently "forgot" that the hero who was sitting in the cab of their international train-wreck, at a leaders debate during the 2004 presidential election may have been nothing more than a sock-puppet mouthing the words provided by others to questions directed at him.

Teleprompters are nothing new. Most prominent politicians use them when making a speech in order to actually deliver as close to the copy which has been handed out to the audience. Obama, unlike many past politicians, is willing to wave off the copy in front of him and actually tell you what he's thinking.

Not so, Stephen Harper. Harper needs a teleprompter to "stay on message". Everything he does is scripted. The object is to make sure Harper says nothing and does nothing to reveal the true nature of the beast.

Harper is highly paranoid. Confident, thoughtful and tough? Not so much. When Harper lost the 2004 election he vanished - for months. When he finds himself trapped with a difficult question he demonstrates quite clearly that he cannot think on his feet; rather than outwit his opponents he engages in personal attacks and smears. When caught out in an interview, without scripted answers, he utters outrageous statements you could drive a frigate through. (Lest you haven't figured out that his advice on stock market bargains was more than a little out-to-lunch.)

And now we get the real story of Harper from one who was there when "the message" machine failed, via Dr. Dawg.

Have an ice cream cone and go read.

Incongruity part 1

At the risk of making Terry O'Reilly something of a personal hero, (OK... I think the man is brilliant, but that's beside the point), I see something here that may well be a deliberate attempt to create a controversy.

It's an advertisement for ice cream... but until you get past the picture, a rather metro-sexual depiction of a priest hoisting the bare leg of a woman portraying a nun across his naked abdomen, you probably don't care what product the ad is trying to sell. Your interest is in the picture and its unsubtle incongruities.

Priest, nun, sex.... perhaps shock, but to most of us, humour.

Terry O'Reilly would have a blast with this one, because if this plays out the way I think it's going to, the marketing agency that put it together has just taken this lesson, this one and this one, and pulled together either a horrible mistake or, something I suspect, a brilliant maneouvre to get people to focus on their brand.

What actually attracted my attention was the title of JJ's post. There has already been a complaint about the ad and at least one magazine refuses to run it (controversy building), and we all wait with bated breath to see if that screechy right-wing defender of rapist Catholic priests, Bill Donohue, reacts with his usual outrage at someone mocking the trappings of his sometimes religion (full-time political action "charity").

And, the marketer has caught Donohue, (and all those like him), in a trap.

If Donohue ignores the ad on the basis that the marketer is just trying to draw him in for the benefit of an advertising spectacle, he fails in his mission to defend the sanctity of Catholic church icons and symbols. (Portraying sex between a man of the cloth and a virginal nun? Face to face? Wearing their now askew churchy stuff? Blasphemy! When priests have sex it's done differently!!)

If he reacts with his usual hyperbolic eruption he'll have played right into the hands of the advertiser. Antonio Federici, a name one might associate with the fashion industry, will be spotlighted exactly the way the marketer wanted it to be.

You don't have to take my word for it. You simply have to read what the company itself has to say. (When you get there, click on "News".) Antonio Federici ice cream, recently introduced to Britain needs to get the word out:

It will be supported by what is described as a "guerilla opera" campaign, provocative advertising and sampling activity.

What better way to get the word out than have a bunch of howling religious wingnuts do it for them?

So far, it seems to be working. Ice cream anyone?

Failure to learn stereotypes endangers teen bigot

If this kid was any kind of really serious bigot, he'd have looked past the immediate stereotype of asian immigrants as studious bookworms and looked at the older "all those people know kung fu" stereotype or the even older "godless communists for whom human life has no value" stereotype or the even older "all those people are inscrutable opium-peddling crime lords" stereotypes and steered clear. What is our nation coming to when we can't we even educate our bigots in proper racial stereotyping? I blame multiCULTuralism and LIEbrals and OMIGOD there are ChiComs under the bed! It's Mao and Ho Chi Minh! I think Fu Manchu sent them! Run for your lives!AAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!


Huh? Wha...unhhhh..Where am I? What just happened?
Sorry, I think I was possessed by the spirit of Ezra Levant or Kathy Shaide or Miller Freeman or James Phelan or something for a moment there, I hope I didn't get any bile on you. Where was I? Oh yeah, the ignorant teen bigot who got pwned. I first learned of this story a few days ago and I can't say the subsequent release of further information has done much to change my opinion. The young Korean-Canadian boy should get some sort of medal for showing restraint and not hospitalizing the nitwit bully:

"He had heard his white classmate throw an angry racial slur in his direction after an argument during a gym class game of speedball, and now the student was shoving him backward, refusing to retract the smear.
The white student swung first, hitting the 15-year-old with a punch to the mouth.
The 15-year-old heard his father's voice running through his head: Fight only as a last resort, only in self-defence, only if given no choice, and only with the left hand.
His swing was short and compact, a left-handed dart that hit the white student square on the nose.
The nose broke under his fist, igniting a sequence of events - from arrest to suspension to possible expulsion - that has left the Asian student and his family wondering whether they are welcome in this small, rural and mostly white community north of Toronto, one that has been touched by anti-Asian attacks in the past."

And his schoolmates deserve the same for walking out in support when he was suspended over the incident.

On Monday, 400 of his fellow students, wearing black in solidarity and carrying signs of support, walked out of Keswick High School to rally in protest in front of their school.
Organizer Mathew Winch, a Grade 12 student, said the school has fewer than 10 Asian students, but everyone wanted to stand up against bullying and racism. The story even hit the front page of local newspapers.
After the public outcry, the York Regional Police hate crimes unit reopened the case. Although the other student has not been charged, further charges are possible, a spokesman said yesterday.

And grudging kudos to the York School Board for doing the right thing in the end, even if it took them awhile to get around to it and they were backed into a corner by the students of Keswick High School, their parents and the media. Let just hope the local crown prosecutor sees things the same way.

However, aside from the obvious appeal of the "bully-finds-out-the-hard-way-that-Clark-Kent-is-Superman" angle of the story, there was another aspect of it that caught my eye. This family of recent immigrants clearly understand Canada and the essentials of the Canadian ideal better than a few people around Keswick (and a lot of blogging tories).

The day after the fight, an older cousin of their son's antagonist approached him in the school cafeteria and uttered a similar slur, compounding their sense of despair.
"He said, 'You punched my cousin you Chinese fuck,' " the 15-year-old said. That student was overheard by a teacher and suspended.
His father explains that the easiest course would be to move somewhere else and get a fresh start for his son. But he can't do it.
"I don't want to run away. If another Asian kid comes to this school, what happens to him? Will he run into problems? Will they think they can just kick him out? I don't want to set that example," he said.
"Personally, for my kid, I should move. But as a Canadian I cannot move."

How's that for "Canadian" Raphael?

(quoted material taken from the Globe and Mail)

CSIS agents secretly interrogated Abdelrazik

in a Sudanese prison in October of 2003 after he was jailed "at the request of mysterious 'Canadian' authorities", newly released government documents show.

A February 2008 Foreign Affairs briefing note to Maxime Bernier confirms :

"We were not informed of his arrest until November 2003, when Sudanese authorities advised us he was detained at the request of the government of Canada (please see attached memo for more detail)."

Unfortunately we don't know which mysterious Canadian authority because that attached eight page memo obtained by NDP MP Paul Dewar has "every single word, including the page numbers, blacked out."

Not us, says CSIS, insisting CSIS "does not, and has not, arranged for the arrest of Canadian citizens overseas."

So how did you know he was there then? Paul Koring at the G&M reasonably asks - especially as Foreign Affairs claims not to have known he'd been arrested until a month later in November.

Later today Dewar will attempt to force a motion asking for Abdelrazik to be brought before the foreign affairs committee. The motion will fail because the Cons have shown they will go to extraordinary lengths to keep him from coming home, presumably at least in part to protect "mysterious Canadian authorities".

5pm Update : In comments, Skdadl and Frank point out that my link to Koring's G&M article is a rewrite from last night's original, which contained these two now missing additional paragraphs :

"Although the most recently obtained documents confirm another glaring discrepancy in the claims made by various government agencies involved with Mr. Abdelrazik, a review of thousands of pages of document in The Globe's possession shows that not everyone in the Foreign Affairs ministry was unaware of Mr. Abdelrazik's imprisonment.

In an Oct., 16, 2003, e-mail marked “secret,” officials of the intelligence unit of Foreign Affairs note that CSIS agents will pass on details of their then just-completed interrogation of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo and planned to “send two officers to Sudan next week to interview Abdelrazik.” "

Skdadl is reminded of Arar. Yes.

In 2002 at Bagram prison, a 15 year old Omar Khadr was shown photographs of Arar.

On January 2009 at a military commission hearing in Guantanamo Bay: "[FBI]special agent Robert Fuller told Khadr's war-crimes hearing that the young Canadian was not immediately able to name Arar, but did say he looked familiar."

He looked familiar. On such evidence hangs the lives of men.

This is not a drill...

This is operational.

In Spain.

This piece of work was making strategic decisions for the United States

Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

Former US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice
30 April, 2009

Which could be interpreted as another Rice lie or, as I believe, the response by someone whose depth of education is so lacking that she should never have been permitted through the front doors of the State Department.

Between December 16th and December 25th, 1941, Nazi Germany dispatched five type IX U-boats to the waters off the United States. They took up stations inside US territorial waters. In the months that followed they sat off the east coast of the United States, in places like New York Harbor; Cape May, New Jersey; right off Cape Hatteras and inside Rhode Island Sound.

On the night of January 14th, 1942, the German submarine U-123, inside US territorial waters and watching the headlights of cars on the Rhode Island shore, sank the Panamanian-registered tanker Norness. It was the second ship to have been sunk in what was officially known to the Nazi regime as Paukenschlag - a deliberate and directed attack on the United States intended to cut off their supply of vital oil.

This attack by Nazi Germany on the homeland of the United States resulted in 259 ships lost to German torpedoes. In the six months of Operation Drumroll, the German U-boats sank more tonnage within sight of the US east coast than the Japanese did from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the end of the Battle of Midway.

Rice needs to do some reading. Try Torpedo Junction by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

Every time the Bushies open their mouths....

Modern Times . . .

You have to see this. American business eats its own. It's a YouTube chunk, "Businessman has meltdown in hotel lobby". If it was BC, the dude would've been tasered medium-rare.

XKCD, again

XKCD proclaims itself to be a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language". IMHO, it's delightfully oblique.

"This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender"

Happy 90th birthday Pete Seeger!

I've had the privilege of seeing Pete Seeger perform twice and as I've often said, I'm glad he's on our side. Give him five minutes in front of a crowd and he can make them do just about anything he wants. Thankfully, he has always used this power for good. While Woody Guthrie was a rambling, gambling, hard-travelling, hard-drinking guy who collected a handful of wives in his time and whose guitar "killed fascists", his travelling partner, Pete Seeger was a teetotalling Quaker Unitarian pacifist who married a Japanese girl during World War Two and did time briefly for refusing to name names to Joe McCarthy. The insigna on his banjo said "this machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."
As I reckon these things, he's probably one of the greatest living Americans. Happy Birthday Pete!

For a few videos and other material, you can stop by the Woodshed. For more interviews go here,and knowing all his history, if this latest work of his doesn't bring a tear to your eye, then the problem is with you, not Seeger.

For more music tune into Radio Woodshed, where I'll be playing Pete Seeger stuff all day long.

The rule of law trumps Cheney's yapping

The Obama administration opens the manacles of the US criminal justice system and accomplishes something the Bush administration couldn't do by wiping its feet on the US constitution.

"Without a doubt, this case is a grim reminder of the seriousness of the threat we as a nation still face," Attorney-General Eric Holder said in a statement.

"But it also reflects what we can achieve when we have faith in our criminal justice system and are unwavering in our commitment to the values upon which the nation was founded, and the rule of law."

Ali al-Marri, who was the last remaining "enemy combatant" held on US soil, faces a maximum of 15 years in jail after admitting he conspired to provide material support to al-Qa'ida. He will be sentenced on July 30. It was not clear how much credit he would be given for time already served.

"He asked for his day in court, and he got his day in court with all the constitutional protections," Marri's lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, said. "It's all he wanted."

And then listen to Rachel Maddow as she underlines the most significant point of Ali al-Marri's criminal prosecution. (Once the obnoxious little ad is over slide forward to minute 7)

As Michael Isikoff points out, the guilty plea of Ali al-Marri opens the doors for other prosecutions, not through the Bush/Cheney manufactured military commissions, but within the criminal justice system; Not with dubious confessions obtained through torture, but from the testimony of eyewitnesses.

While the volume keeps getting cranked up in some quarters demanding that Obama prosecute members of the Bush administration for knowingly and intentionally engaging in illegal acts, (not to mention immoral at a hundred different levels), everyone needs to be aware that it's probably far too early to go wading in that pool.

Obama is no idiot. As the memos continue to be released and the facts continue to accumulate, Obama will continue to hold off until such a time as the evidence is overwhelming, any defence would be ineffective, and screeching remnants of the Bush cargo culture (Limbaugh, Malkin, et al) have so completely impeached themselves that the demand for prosecution of Bush administration principals will suit both the popular need for cleansing and occur in a favourable political climate.

There will be prosecutions. Just, not now. They will happen when the current cheerleaders of those who perpetrated crimes have no audience, and instead of energetically defending their Bush/Cheney heros they are forced to hang their heads and mutter in their own defence, "We didn't know."

One More Reason to Dislike iggy . . . .

If BC Voters need yet another reason to dislike/distrust iggy, check out this morning's "Early Edition" with Rick Cluff at the 2:11:30 mark.* (Requires Real Player, which I took pains to download, but that's a whole 'nuther story.)

If you don't want to bother, here's the verbatim transcript as per moi:

Pluffmaster: "Do you support the BC Liberal's carbon tax idea?"

iggy: "I'm not gonna wade into provincial politics. That's for the BC voter to decide."

Pluffmaster: "Aw, come on. It's just you and me." (chuckling)

iggy: "Look, I don't think it's any secret that a federal Liberal wants Gordon Campbell to win re-election. I think I can go that far, but I won't be drawn further."

'Nuff said, ya'll** ? ? ? ?


*Note to RossK: See, I wasn't listening to the Goodship Watercarrier and his "Illegible Boys" - were you?
**sorry, my Southern roots slipped out.

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

When Condi comes to Calgary

on May 13 to give the keynote speech at The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, or as they like to call it "The School", will anyone ask her about this quote she gave to students at Stanford :

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency. That they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did….

The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture."

Q has the video.

The real evidence we're doomed

(h/t anonymous email forwarder)

We're doomed

A tip of the hat to my old TESL foxhole buddy Ms. Mays - You're loud, crude and obnoxious and I love you a ton. We miss you over here.

crossposted from the Woodshed