Okay, can we call call them facists now?
Digby turns over a rock and shines a light on the brownshirts of the group Family Security Matters. As the blogosphere has started to notice their lunacy, a number articles from their site have popped down the memory hole according to Digby. But this one on how George W. Bush has a duty to the American People, God and Righteousness to declare himself President for Life and stage a military coup and how the right thing to do would have been to pre-emptively nuke Iraq in the first place. I kid you not. And this is not the Birchers or the Mayberry Militia, this is clearly a well organized group with some money behind it that is going to transmit this kind of stuff until it enters the mainstream to the point that someday soon you'll see Katie Couric asking on the nightly news "Would it be so wrong if George Bush declared himself President for Life and used the Army to round up the terrorists and dirty hippie dissenters and anarchists in America? He'd be just like the great Julius Caesar! Hail Dubya!"

British General says "Bring the boys back home"
When the commander of the army says it's time to pull the troops out, it's time to pull the troops out. And he's been saying so for nearly a year now:

General Dannatt, speaking on a visit to Afghanistan, did not repeat the statement he made in October last year that Britain should "get out [of Iraq] sometime soon", but the thrust of British military thinking is clear enough - the key campaign is now in Afghanistan, and anything that can reduce and even eliminate the British commitment in Iraq can help in that task.
"The army is certainly stretched. And when I say that we can't deploy any more battle groups at the present moment, that's because we're trying to get a reasonable balance of life for our people" he told the BBC.

Further down in the story is a choice anecdote that goes a long way to explaining why the British are leaving and the country is sliding further into the crapper:

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the senior British officer in Basra, General Jonathan Shaw, got short shift when he started lecturing American officers on counter-insurgency.
"It's insufferable, for Christ's sake," was the reported reaction of one senior figure closely involved in US military planning.
"He comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counter-insurgency. The guys were just rolling their eyeballs. The notorious Northern Ireland came up again."'

Ahh, yes Northern Ireland, where the British Army found out that torture is counter-productive to defeating an insurgency and that negotiation works in the long run. I can see why the American officers would roll their eyes, after all the British have decades of experience fighting insurgents in Kenya, Ireland, Malaysia, Oman, and other assorted corners of the globe over the years, while the U.S. Army's experience with counter insurgency since World War II has been limited to the howling success of Vietnam and training and arming death squads in Central America (and CIA assistance to their friends the Taliban, but let's not bring that up) What could Tommy possible have to teach GI Joe?
As we used to say back in the Sault, "You can always tell an American, but you can't tell him much."
The British are right to pull out and redirect their efforts to Afghanistan. The U.S. will be trapped in Iraq for as long as they think they can still have "peace with honor" when fighting a native insurgency and will be stuck in the middle of a sectarian civil war. There are ways to win before the end of the 2012 election cycle, but they are brutal and will ensure the "terrorists follow us home" -- There is no happy ending for Iraq at this point. Even if the U.S. forces could go out tomorrow and by noon unerringly and without any collateral damage, put a bullet between the eyes of every single person in Iraq who has engaged in violence against the U.S. forces or other Iraqis -- basically the neo-con wet dream -- the insurgency would not be over. Because every brother, father, son, cousin, brother-in-law and friend of those now dead insurgents would be looking for pay back.
That is what is happening now as the U.S. forces go around kicking in doors, roughing up or arresting innocent Iraqis out of frustration or in error, calling in airstrikes that kill civilians, being there to be the target of car bombs that kill Iraqis. They are creating a nation of "martyred heroes" for Al-Quaida to put on their recruiting posters.
Partitioning the country might be a long range solution, but is likely to be a bloody disaster. I'd love to see the U.S. clean up its mess in Iraq, I just don't know how they will ever do it. I don't think that bell can be unrung. And the British are well advised to get out while the getting is good.

Stranger than Fiction
This is just too bizarre to have been invented from scratch -- I'll be interested to see how much of it checks out, but it would explain the Turd Blossom's recent resignation. Besides, how often do you see a story headlined "I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove's father's solid gold cock ring"?

Spies and spirits haunt Gibson's 'Spook Country'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Spook Country

By William Gibson

G.P. Putnam's Sons

384 pp, 25.95 dollars

Both spies and the spirits of the dead are thick on the ground in William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. While the novel has no literal supernatural element, its protagonists spend much of their time chasing spooks of one sort or another.

Gibson, who made his bones as a science fiction writer in the 1980s and '90s--he virtually invented the cyberpunk subgenre and famously coined the term "cyberspace"--has moved away from the genre's focus on the future, but keeps technology in the forefront in this, his ninth novel, while also weaving in some subtle satirical commentary on the post-9/11 national security state and the U.S. "cold civil war."

Set in February 2006, the story follows an outline familiar to readers of Gibson's previous works such as Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer: A specialist is set on a quest to find some sort of mysterious technological grail unrelated to their area of expertise by shadowy, powerful figures while in a parallel plotline other shadowy figures set other specialists on a collision course.

In Spook Country, rock-singer-turned-journalist Hollis Henry has been hired by Node, a magazine touted as "a European version of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way." The magazine may or may not actually exist, though it apparently has big money behind it. Her assignment is to write a feature on the new field of locative art--virtual reality (VR) installations tied to particular locations via GPS coordinates.

After interviewing a locative artist in Los Angeles who specializes in celebrity death scenes--a VR rendering of River Phoenix dying outside the Viper Room, a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton at the scene of his fatal crash outside the Chateau Marmont--Henry is told to track down the artist's technical advisor, a slightly paranoid GPS whiz kid who refuses to sleep in the same place twice. The journalist is also told to pay special attention if anything involving global shipping or iPods comes up.

Unsurprisingly, both the artist and his technical adviser just happen to be big fans of Henry's old band. On an unannounced visit to the techie's workspace, she catches a glimpse of a VR rendering of a shipping container that the GPS expert definitely did not mean for her to see, and the chase is on.

Meanwhile, Gibson introduces us to Tito, a Chinese-Cuban from Havana whose entire family has relocated to United States where they have continued the family espionage business on a freelance basis. Tito has been delivering iPods full of data to an old man in New York's Washington Square and communicating with his extended family of spies in Volapuk, a Russian-based "universal language" that uses Western keyboard characters to mimic the cyrillic alphabet. He is being watched by Brown, another spy who may or may not work for the U.S. government. Brown has abducted Milgrim, a hapless Ativan junkie and Russian scholar, to translate intercepted text messages.

Clearly, those aforementioned collision courses are full of twists and turns. Spook Country has fewer straight lines than a spilled bowl of ramen. The plot tends to be a bit baffling for the first part of the book, but when the pieces start to fit together Spook Country draws the reader in like a black hole.

Gibson provides plenty of spooks of both sorts. In addition to the VR ghosts of the locative artists, Henry is haunted in her own mind by the memory of her former band's bassist, dead of a heroin overdose. Tito is consumed with questions about the death of his father and constantly influenced by the spirits that make up his deeply held belief in Santeria.

On the more corporeal side of the coin are Tito's clan of clandestine operatives; the clearly-connected-but-not-necessarily-legitimate Brown, who is occasionally cartoonishly right-wing and not quite as capable as he thinks he is; and the nameless old man from Washington Square, a former senior U.S. intelligence agent with a serious hate of the neo-conservatives and war profiteers who have taken over the U.S. government and its agencies. Somewhere between the two lies the unorthodox billionaire Belgian advertising genius Hubertus Bigend, and his minions, who first appeared in Pattern Recognition.

Gibson uses the various secret agents and operatives both to poke fun at America's obsession with security and to ask some pertinent questions about the country that has, as one character puts it, "developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11." After ratcheting up the tension as the competing factions seek out the mysterious shipping container, Gibson's climax turns out to be more of an elaborate practical joke than an epoch-making transformation, though it is hardly a letdown.

In addition to a familiar plot structure, Gibson also leans on some his favorite themes, including the notion of subcultures and smaller social groups serving as tribes and substitute families. Locative artists, Bigend and his employees, and fans of Henry's indie rock band are all discrete, self-sustaining phylums of humanity with their own social rules and goals. Henry never mentions her biological family, but her ex-bandmates behave like siblings despite their acrimonious break-up, willing to advise her, admonish her and bail her out of trouble with an axe handle as needed.

In his early work, one of Gibson's stylistic touchstones was the use of familiar brand names for futuristic, far-fetched or ironic products he invented for the sake of the story. The future has now caught up with the futurist and left him behind. What is the use of inventing ironic or iconic brand-name gadgets in world where magnetic levitation beds exist and Adidas really does make a boot named after a German antiterrorist squad?

As always, Gibson's greatest strengths as a writer remain his ability to conjure up realistic, gritty, urban settings and create an atmosphere from subtle changes in tone. His previously muted dry humor is more in evidence here, but his tight prose still sings like a high-tension wire and his characterization is as original and exact as ever.
(The Daily Yomiuri, Aug. 18, 2007)

"The mother, the father, the serpent, the priest. The foreman, the woman, the widow, the beast. "
One for Peter "Chainsaw" Hoffman, Mike Szombathy, and Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington
eventually technology and the internet catches up with what we do here




Not too sure about the foozeball, but he's right about the bass player



"smoking on a night train, chewing on a Jellyroll"
let's hear it for pasty-faced white boys like Mark McKinney and Danny Ackroyd

"I never heard anybody up on murder charge try to pin it on Pete Seeger"

I was thinking about a guy from my old stomping grounds in Port Dover named Doug Feaver aka the Grim City Cowboy. Those who know him that watch this will understand why.

Some like it hot

I don't.

I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, north of the Great Lakes, in a grassy subdivision where everyone had a lawn and most people didn't have or need air conditioning. A hot day meant it was 75 or 80 degrees F - though it did occasionally get hotter in late August. Later when we moved to southern Ontario, the slightly hotter, more humid weather was mitigated by the fact that we had a pool in the backyard and central air. Even so, a hot, sticky summer in the Golden Cresent was not always pleasant.

After ten years in Tokyo, I vow never to complain about summer heat in Canada ever again, not even if the earth moves closer to the sun and global warming turns the tundra into the tropics.

Have a look at today's weather in Tokyo here. It was 32C when I got up this morning at 7:30 with the humidity running at about 60%, which meant it felt like it was 39C - it was 36C by noon

and the humidity had dropped to about 50%, relatively dry for Tokyo in August, which meant it felt 41 C. It may go up to 40C over the weekend, with higher humidity making it feel like you've been dipped in kerosene and set alight in the shower room at the gym.

The weather forecast for the next few days is as follows:

Friday: Hot as a $3 pistol and swamplike

Saturday: Scorching and saunalike

Sunday: Sweet, sweaty Jesus, it's #$&*#ing hot.

Monday: Hot enough you'll want to die and go to Hell so you can cool off

Tuesday: "Kill me, kill me now, please" with scattered spontaneous human combustion in the business district.

and so on, and so on, until about the end of September.

And you can't really appreciate what that's like until you've ridden home on the rush hour train, packed in like pressurized sardines with a carriage-load of corpulent office drones who took a hot bath last night before they went to bed, got up and put on a three piece suit and long sleeved polyester dress shirt and tie, smoked until brown traces of nicotine started to ooze from their pores and ate fish and garlic for lunch, topped with a half a dozen doubtlessly much needed beers after work that, since they lack a particular bit of DNA that allows them to process alcohol, have caused them to turn the color of a ripe cherry and sweat like a frat boy whose girlfriend is week late. Fragrant doesn't even start to cover it.

I don't know how people lived here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago without air conditioning and artificial refrigeration. I know the heat island effect and all the concrete drive the temperature in Tokyo up a few degrees and on going global warming blah blah blah, but Tokyo's always been hot and probably used to be more humid, and have open sewers. And it was a city of million people by the 1600s. No wonder the samuri used to have licence to go around hacking the heads off of anyone from the lower classes who looked at them sideway. I'd have been in pissy mood too. Besides, if you were a manual labourer in old Edo in August and coolest thing around was stagnat well water, you'd probably think of violent beheading as sweet release.

While the dress code in our office doesn't require neckties, praise Allah, coming to work in a loincloth made of two bags of ice cubes and duct tape would probably be frowned upon.

I'm six feet tall, weigh in at 120 kilos and am somewhat hirstute. (I know, I know -- you're getting turn on just seeing that description on your computer monitor) I have a body like Sylvester Stallone--in Copland. I look like Schwartzenggar would look if he had quit pumping iron fifteen years ago, drank a dozen beer a day and developed a cheeseburger addiction. I generally keep my shirt on at the beach - some are born modest, some have modesty thrust upon them and some are issued with restraining orders against going shirtless by the United Nations' High Commissioner for Good Taste. Nobody needs to see me naked, but if this heat keeps up, before long I'll be going around in nothing but a tube sock with a five pound block of ice strapped on top of my head.

You want to talk about climate change -- I'm all for it. Screw Al Gore and the so-called scientists, screw spending money on AIDS in Africa or paving the Middle East from the air to kill the bad people or feeding and educating our own population -- I want Gates and Soros and Murdoch and the rest of the billionaires to concentrate on finding a way to control the weather. I'm not talking about getting rid of hurricanes or making it rain in the Sahara, just lower the freakin' thermostat a few notch, cantcha? They used to warn us that another ice age was going to come someday, lets see what we can do to make that happen ASAP. Bring on the glaciers! I'm happy to put on a sweater, throw an extra blanket on the bed, wrassle polar bears while snowshoeing to work -- whatever. Just stop with the heat already!

Update: Apparently my complaint is well founded- this day was the hottest day in Japan ever.

Steely Dan do it again for opening

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
To mark the opening of the their chain of clubs, the bookers for Billboard have scored something of a coup: a series of club dates by Steely Dan. The original hypercool jazzy rockers have already sold out their opening week at the Tokyo venue and tickets for their multinight stands in Osaka and Fukuoka are going fast as Daniacs rush to take advantage of the chance to revel in the smooth, sharp sounds of Steely Dan in such an intimate setting.
The 2007 Heavy Rollers tour--the band's most extensive ever--features Steely Dan's original creative locus of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen backed by a 10-piece band, including a full horn section. Set lists on the tour thus far have reportedly leaned on material from their best-known album, 1977's Aja, and its 1980 follow-up, Gaucho, with a smattering of earlier hits and songs from their most recent two albums.
Reports from the road have it that Fagen is in excellent voice and is performing early hits, such as "Chain Lighting" and "Bad Sneakers," with polish and verve. Becker has shouldered the bulk of the guitar duties, with the aid of the formidable Everything Must Go and Two Against Nature contributor Jon Hernington. Uncharacteristically, Becker also has been seen singing often on the tour.
In their original heyday in the 1970s, Steely Dan rarely played live. The technology available at the time simply could not do the band justice in a live setting and Becker and Fagen were more interested in practicing their studio wizardry than performing in front of an audience. Nor was Steely Dan a band in the traditional sense. The lineup of performers varied widely after the first few years, not only from album to album, but from song to song.
Keyboard player and later singer Fagen and bassist/guitarist Becker, the creative bright lights around which the original band clustered, had originally met in 1967 at Bard College in New York. United by their love of black humor and soul music, the two played in various pickup bands in New York before joining established mainstream pop band Jay and the Americans in 1970. Their brief tenure with the band, which had scored a few hits in the early '60s but were clearly on their way out, resulted in a job as contract songwriters for ABC records.
Becker and Fagen saved their best songs for themselves, rehearsing the original band in their office after working hours. Naming themselves after a sexual prosthesis from William Burroughs' controversial novel Naked Lunch, their 1972 debut Can't Buy A Thrill established the band's reputation for top-notch musicianship, subversive sardonic humor and intelligent jazz-tinged rock.
Breaking up the original group after 1974, Becker and Fagen parked themselves in the studio for the rest of the decade, earning a reputation for being incredibly choosy about sound and performances. They were notorious for trying out as many as 20 guitar players from among the cream of the crop of Los Angeles' studio jazz and rock aces for a single guitar solo and recording over 50 snare drum sounds before settling on one for a single track. They also pioneered the use of digital technology in recording.
Their discerning perseverance paid off with seven platinum albums between 1972 and 1980. After a 10-year hiatus in the '80s, sound technology had caught up, and Becker and Fagan assembled a touring company that circled the globe repeatedly in the '90s. Inspired and creatively reinvigorated by the the live experience, they returned to the studio late in the decade, eventually emerging with 2000's Two Against Nature, that year's Grammy winner for album of the year. Their 2003 follow up Everything Must Go also earned critical praise.
(Aug. 11, 2007)

Note - just found out today that there will be room for me on the guest list after all. It's a good thing I'm such a jaded, cynical old journalist now or I'd be jumping around the newsroom screaming like a schoolgirl.

Head rat to leave sinking ship
The man alternately known as Bush's Brain and Turd Blossom (and who says it wouldn't be the same thing) announces his resignation. This could make for an entertaining final year in office for Dubya, since he doesn't know how to wipe his own backside without advice from the man they named a really digusting sex act after. (don't click the link if you have ever been grossed out by a Kevin Smith movie or fecal matter) I hope they check to make sure the silverwear is all there after he leaves. Anyone want to offer me odds on how often his name comes up in the upcoming Gonzales impeachment?

Betcha didn't know he had his dirty little paws in the Watergate debacle too. Yep, he was head of the College Republicans at the time and something of an apprentice to convicted felon and professional dirty trickster Donald Segretti.


Hat tip to News Sophisticate for the video clip, and Dan Rather for the crackerjack reportage.

"A human asterisk"
Another tip from my dad, the Montreal Gazette's Jack Todd (our favorite sportswriter) hints that Barry Bonds home run achievements might not be all that and a bag of chips.

"Barry Bonds sits alone atop of the dunghill: The most arrogant, repellent,
selfish, dishonest, grotesque and chemically enhanced player to hit more home
runs than the great Hank Aaron. Bonds is a human asterisk; not the greatest
home-run hitter in the history of the game by any means, but beyond question its
biggest cheat."

War sucks
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible events which deserve to be mourned as a tragedy. However in this week of national veneration of victimhood in Japan, we would all do well to remember that such events did not happen in isolation or for no reason.
I do not wish for a moment to suggest that one act excuses another, as my mom always used to point out "Two wrongs don't make a right." Making war against civilians is always reprehensible, no matter what form it takes.

"What crime did these children commit?"
Holding up a picture of a boy horribly burned by the heat of the atomic bomb, Iccho Itoh made this impassioned plea before the International Court of Justice some 12 years ago, not long after he was elected mayor of Nagasaki.

I would ask what crime the people of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere committed. Or what crimes the "comfort women" and forced laborers committed. Or what crime the people of Nanjing committed. Or what crime they continue to commit that has caused the Japanese state to deny the wrongs done against them.

There have been plenty of official apologies by the Japanese government about the war crimes committed in the service of the state and in the name of the emperor. For the most part they have been a matter of tatemae (polite, expected, official, socially required, but not heartfelt). Some veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army have truly tried to make amends, to make a honne (private, personally real regardless of social convention) apology. As the the war fades from living memory, more and more revisionists are trying to paper over what happened with weaseling about specific numbers and the wording of treaties and bitching about how it is unfair that Japan gets flack for its "supposed" misdeeds while Germany doesn't. Germany has built monuments to those killed in the Holocaust, it has outlawed Nazism, it purged former Nazis from the government, it has paid restitution. One doesn't hear the German government or media quibbling about whether it was six million Jews or 5.8 million Jews that were killed and using the discrepancy to argue that if the numbers can't be agreed on it probably never happened. In fact, shitheads that do this can be jailed in Germany. In Japan, they get elected to high office.

I sympathize with the victims of the atomic bombings. I sympathize with their descendants and their pleas for peace, but I would sympathize a lot more if the former slave laborer and comfort women got a real apology and compensation. I would take the pleas for peace a lot more seriously if Japan wasn't the top spender on arms in Asia and seventh in the world.

If the three non-nuclear principles of not producing, possessing or allowing nuclear weapons into the country weren't convieniently forgotten everytime a U.S. nuclear sub or aircraft carrier docked here, then those principles might actually mean something, instead of amounting to so much happy talk.

I've lived in Tokyo for ten years and there is much to love about Japan and the Japanese. Theirs is an incredible culture, history and tradition. Saying sorry is common; meaning it is sometimes another matter.

If the victors in World War Two can admit that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki, the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the internment of American and Canadians of Japanese ancestory were all terrible things in a heartfelt and collective way and offer compensation for misdeeds of the state, is it wrong to expect any less from Japan?

The Party Party
My father, astute political observer that he is, pointed me to this vital development in Canadian party politics.
I can remember when their party platform included an anti-separatism proposal to crazy glue the provincial borders together.
In Britian they have the Monster Raving Loony Party formerly led by Screaming Lord Sutch. In Canada, we had the Rhinos. In the U.S. they have Ralph Nader, though I would argue the Republicans are the real monster raving loonies.

A sunny idyll and a black day for truthiness and journamalism
Having just returned from a few day at Kamakura beach with the cuddlesome and calipygian Mrs. Rev. Paperboy and the youngun's I am not really in the frame of mind to blog, but I feel I cannot the passing of the only real purveyor of truthiness in newspaper form in America pass unremarked. Where will we now find out about the whereabouts of batboy? Who will provide us with Elvis sightings or news about Hillary Clinton's impending marriage to a space alien? It is indeed a black, black day.
As to the beach, aside from the smart-asses from Greenpeace trying to push me back into the ocean whenever I laid down shirtless in the sand, we had a good time. The weather was perfect, the ocean warm and the bikinis plentiful. And since Japan is a civilized country, one is allowed to drink whatever one wants on the beach, openly and without fear of reprisal from officers of the law bent on upholding some old-fashioned temperance movement remnant.

"Try to keep up Mr. President"

The President jogs with U.S. Army Sgt. Neil Duncan, who lost both of his legs when an IED blew up his Humvee in Afghanistan in December 2005, and U.S. Army Spec. Max Ramsey, who lost one of his legs when an IED blew up his Humvee in Iraq in March 2006.

While I congratulate both soldiers on their recovery, I feel obliged to point out that in any sane society Bush would not be running with them, but away from them. Them and a pitchforks-and-torches tar-and-feathers mob of about 20,000 other wounded veterans he sent off to get shot and is now screwing by cutting their health care benefits so he can continue to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

(hat tip to the Rude Pundit for the photo and links)

Klassy with a Capital K
So nice to see Dubya is helping new British PM Gordon Brown sell the idea of maintaining the closest possible ties the United States to British voters by downplaying his reputation as an irresponsible cowboy leading a team of amateurs:

Britain's Brown kindles chemistry with Bush

Reuters

Tuesday, 31 July, 2007

Wearing a dark blue tie and an air of formality, Britain's Gordon Brown brought stiff protocol to his first US summit with President George W Bush, doing little to prove he will kindle the warm chemistry his predecessor shared with the US chief.

During two days of discussions at the Camp David retreat in Maryland, the British leader shared a roast beef dinner and a cheeseburger lunch with his new ally, but gave few signals they can strike the same bond Tony Blair built with Bush.

I'll go out on a limb here and bet that "Whuddy'all want on yer cheeseburger Mr. Prime Minister" was not a phrase Gordon Brown expected to hear after he finally rose to pinnacle of British politics

Aides said the leaders' four hours of talks Sunday and Monday were businesslike and, a few gentle news conference jokes aside, the men displayed little of the repartee that previously marked relations between Washington and London.

For Blair, it was casual clothes, broad grins and an instant spark amid the snowfall of his first Camp David talks with Bush in Feb. 2001. Blair, wearing a sweater, and Bush, in a bomber jacker, chatted and joked as they strolled with a dog through the Maryland woodland.

Not so for Brown, who smiled as he was greeted by Bush and a guard of honour Sunday, but scheduled no other photo calls with his counterpart. Only Bush's playful 360-degree manoeuvre as he whisked Brown to dinner in a golf cart lifted the mood.

Did Bush think maybe Brown, being in the British governmnet had run across "them Dukes of Hazzard fellers" in the House of Lords?

Brown, who later headed to New York for talks at the United Nations, even wore a shirt and tie to dinner at Camp David's Laurel cabin, British officials said.

But Bush heaped praise on his counterpart, telling reporters Brown was "a glass half full guy," and claiming not all world leaders shared the Briton's optimism, or desire to tackle international problems.
The men talked about Bush's childhood visit to Scotland and their shared passion for rugby – a sport both leaders played at school, officials said. Bush aides told the British chief how they searched Google to learn about his personal history, at one point confusing him for an ex-British sportsman also called Gordon Brown.

Google? They had to use Google to find out the background of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, their closest ally and BFF? How did they find out about the WMD in Iraq? By checking Wikipedia? Did they "ask Jeeves"?

Brown told reporters ties to the US were Britain's foreign policy priority and thanked Bush for his "very compassionate" tributes. But he gave little indication of his first impressions of Bush, who he referred to in a news conference as Mr President. Blair and Bush, in contrast, were instantly on first name terms.

"Yee-Haw, Brownie! Here, have one a these here jello shooters Laura made. After vittles, we're a gonna watch the rasslin' and maybe clear some brush or hunt varmints! If it gits hot after Bible study, we kin go swimmin' in the ceement pond!"

You're a good man, Charlie B.

This falls into the category of sheer evil genius.

The Gospel according to Dr. Seuss



Okay, no more You-Tube for a while, I promise.

Kanadian Korner #4
The voyageurs and the fur trade are a proud part of our national heritage.

It can't happen has happened here

We keep hearing people on left ask "how close is the United States coming to becoming a fascist dictatorship?" and people on the right saying "Don't be ridiculous, that would never happen! The president loves Jesus, America and freedom, he would never let that happen--he's just trying to protect us from the terrorists. Now give me your papers, you pinko freak, and get up against the car!"

Just consider the glorious confluence of executive orders, signing statements that exempt the White House from obeying laws, extra legal domestic surveillance, the PATRIOT Act, the banning of demonstration and making it illegal to photograph certain buildings (without telling you which ones) and now this latest bit of bullshit that gives the government the right to seize pretty much anything they want from anyone who opposes the war in Iraq and says anything about it.

Yep, freedom is on the march all right. Can't you hear the jackboots ring?

Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose




Believe it or not, this was performed in the Thatcher era, not last week in the Canadian Parliament