More weekend music

Some recent discoveries I'm enjoying



Jake Thackray - the Bull





Roy Zimmerman - Defenders of Marriage



Billybob Neck - Canada: Evil Empire or Third World Country?

40 years ago

A little seasonal something for our friends south of the 49th parallel. And still relevant and just as funny after all these years. It's nice to see the family tradition continues too. And this is even more timely:

Canadian Blog Award

While the Woodshed has once again been tragically overlooked by the members of the academy (in other words I never got around to nominating myself or anyone else for that matter) The Galloping Beaver, where I make my small occasional contribution is nominated in several categories, as are a number of other blogs on the blogroll. There are two rounds of voting to narrow the lists in each category down to a more reasonable number. While none of us around here really care whether we win or not, I'd hate to see the gloating that will go on in certain quarters if the flying monkey hordes of the right manage to get certain blogs voted in as winners. GO VOTE NOW and keep the right-wingnuts from freeping the whole thing.

Live or Memorex?

Remember those ads with Ella Fitzgerald and the taped voice shattering the glass? The Onion has crossed into that same territory. Tell me this couldn't be a wingnut blog post. The only thing that would tip you off is the lack of excessive capitalization and prescence of proper punctuation.

Change we can believe in
Paging John Hinderaker, John Hinderaker to the white courtesy phone please....

Ending torture should be painless

I don't expect the Obama presidency to be an endless parade of magic sparkling ponies and cake for all and I never have, but there are certain minimum expectations that must be met and this does not bode well:

Obama advisers: No charges likely vs interrogators
Nov. 17,
7:32 PM (ET)By LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP)
- Barack Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges
against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations
of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has
criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars
and human rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush
administration. Two Obama advisers said there's little - if any - chance that
the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in
authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide
outrage.

The article goes on to say that even if the Obama administration wants to investigate and prosecute those responsible for torture, the whole question may be rendered moot by a stroke of the presidential pardon-signing pen by the Torturer in Chief, George W. Bush. I fully expect Bush will spend the last month of his term fighting writers cramp as he pardons just about everyone he's ever worked with. So, no, no one is likely to end up in jail, but that doesn't mean that the Obama administration shouldn't be trying to send them there.

Like I said, there are certain minimums expectation that must be met if Obama is going to have a successful presidency. By successful I don't just mean managing to get through four years without turning large portions of the planet into radioactive glass, having Texas secede from the Union, boiling the Great Lakes or having gas prices climb over $10 a gallon -- I mean delivering some of that change we can believe in. One of those expectations is that he live up to his promise of ending the use of torture by the United States.

Most political issues are not as black and white as politicians make them out to be on the campaign trail, that's one of the reasons politics is the art of compromise. Torture is not like farm subsidies or school vouchers or even abortion -- it is not something on which reasonable people can disagree, it is just plain wrong. Torture is what the bad guys do that makes them bad guys.

Leaving aside the clear and obvious moral argument, consider the practical aspects. The experts agree torture does not work because information gained through torture is unrealiable. People being tortured will tell their interrogators whatever they think the guy with the pliars and the blowtorch wants to hear. Enough waterboarding and you'd could make Dick Cheney say that not only did he plan 9/11, but that he flew all four of the planes himself. Leave a prisoner in a stress position long enough and he will eventually confess to killing not only the Kennedy brothers, but McKinley and Lincoln as well. And spare me the ticking bomb scenarios and Star Trek quotes about the "needs of the many outweighing the need of the few." Real life is not an adventure novel and "24" is not a documentary. Torture will make anyone talk, but it also makes anything they say all but useless.

The reprehensible actions of the United States at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and an unknown number of secret prisons around the world have done more damage to the nation's reputation and standing in the world than a dozen ill-conceived invasions.

It may well be that Bush will pardon anyone remotely connected with anything untoward that occurred in the last eight years, but history and the world court of public opinion will judge him for it. If Obama decides to let bygones be bygones and not seek to prosecute those involved to the fullest extent of the law, then he will be seen as complicit and the reputation of the United States as a violator of human rights, as a torturer and oppressor, will be cemented. Bush will go down in history as the first U.S. president to endorse torture, but Obama has a choice of going down in history either as the guy who put a stop to it or as a "good German."

Politically, Obama has nothing to lose and everything to gain by pursuing prosecutions. He gets to look good on the world stage for doing the right thing and at the same time stick it to his political opponents. All he has to do is announce that he will be pursuing the matter to the fullest extent of the law and then the ball is in Bush's court. Bush can either preemptively pardon everyone from Dick Cheney on down to the lowliest CIA contractor-- in which case he goes down in history as being on the side of torture--or he can leave his friends to twist in the wind, in which case we get to watch Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and a parade of lesser shitbirds get frogmarched off to prison and possibly even Dubya himself in the dock. My money is on the pardons, I'll even give 10 to 1.

There is no downside to this for Obama. He can use the bully pulpit he has to frame any discussion of the issue in terms of "You are either with us, or with the torturers." The only people who are going to oppose him are the 15 to 20 percent of the population who still think the sun shines out of Dubya's ass and consider Obama a muslim terrorist in the first place. Those people lost the election and deserve to be driven into the political wilderness pemanently.

Of course, the cynic in me says that if Dubya is delusional enough to think that the country is behind him and approves of what he did and he decides to take his chances and not pardon everyone, Obama will probably do it for him for the sake of "putting the past behind us" and "bridging the partisan divide" -- At which point the last of the lights in that "shining city on the hill" will go out and the Canadian immigration authorities will have to double their printing order for residency visa application forms.

This is not just about Obama's place in the polls or the history books, this is about the future of the office of the president. If Obama wants anyone any where in the world to ever believe anything the president of the United States says ever again, this is the one thing he has to keep his word on. Other promises, like ending the Iraq war or establishing universal health care or fixing the economy, might not be fulfilled due to circumstances beyond the president's control, but ending torture is something he can do January 21, 2009, -- before lunch. All it will take is an executive cease-and-desist order and a phone call to the Justice department telling them to throw the book at anyone who breaks the well established rules.

Progressive, liberals, lefties and sane people everywhere need to make a lot of noise about this and steer the Obama adminstration away from squandering its moral capital and authority for the sake of reaching across the aisle to appease a group that will stab them in the back the first chance it gets. Forgive the barrage of cliches, but we need to draw a line in the sand and hold Obama's feet to the fire and remind him to dance with the one that brought him. He and his people must be told that banning torture is not negotiable and that unless the administration is seen to make an effort to prosecute those responsible for such appalling deeds, such a ban will be seen as not only meaningless by hypocritcal by the international community.

This week in Blogtopia



While I've been spending much of my time since the U.S. election dining on the sweet schadenfreude of the wingnuts the funniest thing I've seen all week, and there have been some doozies, is what Brad over at Sadly No! is responding to here. I don't really have anything to add to his response except to note that there are more than a few people out there who have made careers or started successful businesses making large amounts of money marketing products built around the gaffes and misstatements of George W. Bush. I am beginning to wonder if Hindraker is a Swiftian parody and I am the last one to get the joke.

Speaking of douche bags, I give you Rep. Paul Broun who this week compared Barack Obama to Hitler and said the president-elected want to build his own Gestapo to establish a Marxist dictatorship and seize everyone's guns. Broun's previous claim to fame was introducing a bill to ban the sale of Playboy on military bases to protect soldiers, sailors and airmen from moral corruption.

And while we're on the subject of douche bags, I give you Raphel Alexander, who has long been an annoying sanctimonious prick and whose pretentious prosings read like a bad parody of William F. Buckley. Raph currently in a pissing match with Red Tory, who, not suffering douche bags gladly, called a spade a spade and Raph a racist. Raph, if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck and complain that Asian immigrants make you feel icky and claim "natives in Canada were a primitive and culturally stagnant people", don't be surprised when you get a metaphorical load of birdshot in your half-bright racist knucklehead ass during duck season.


You want Remembrance Day messages? None are better than these from PSA and and fellow ink-stained wretch Boris.

Oh, and do yourself a favor and go enjoy the world's most dangerous professor, he is in fine form of late.

Really, how dumb are they?

You know, for people who claim to hate marxism and communism so much, and think it is so vile, who consider it worse or at least on par with Nazism, it is amazing to me how readily the conservatives will slap the commie label on anyone who disagrees with them.

Don't they understand that every time they call a candidate who wants to raise taxes on the wealthy a few percent a communist, it denigrates all those who died at the hands of real communists like Stalin and Mao in jus the same way that calling the police raid on the Waco compound a holocaust denigrates the memories of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis?

Don't they get that having the government oversee a public medical insurance plan is not a precursor to Pol Pot's killing fields?

Are they so thick that they don't understand that a university or other large organization telling employees it is unacceptable behaviour to use racist epithets, fondle or ogle other employees or otherwise act like a jackass at work is not the same thing as sending people to labour camps because they wear eyeglasses or went to university?

Can they not understand that requiring multimillionaires to contribute a few more dollars to keeping people made jobless by their greed-driven wheeling and dealing from starving to death while they freeze in the street is not the same as the state seizing the means of production and sending the wealthy to labour camps?

Can they not understand the difference between requiring publicly funded facilities such as schools and courts to refrain from being seen to embrace or favor one religion above another, or to insisting that science be taught in science classes and myth, legend and philosophy be taught in other courses is not the same as burning churches?

And before anyone starts accusing me of attacking strawmen, go have a look at this, or this or this or some of the gems the Sadlynauts gathered election night (and they were only joking about sending Gary Ruppert to a labour camp, at least I think they were only joking). Or the dicussions in the comments over at Treason-in-Defense-Of-Slavery Yankee of which guns would be best used to defend one's home against the coming roving masses of swarthy anarchists and gulag press gangs they deem the inevitable result of the Obama victory.

If you have a strong enough stomache go wade through the toxic crazy at Atlas Shrugs, where Pam Gellar attempts to explain that Barack Obama is literally the actual secret love child of Malcom X.

Or look at some of John McCain's remarks to the effect that because Obama wants to increase the tax rate by 3 % on people with an income of more than $250,000 and freeze or cut the tax rate for the other 95% of American citizens he is engaged in a Marxist class war to redistribute the wealth just like Mao and Stalin.

Have they at long last no shame?

Obamarama!











Regular readers know I am a proud Canuck, but as the Flying Spagetti Monster is my witness, I swear that if Obama opens his inaugural address like this, I will move to a red state and take out citizenship.

It ain't over 'til it's over, but believe me, it's over

With 24 hours before the polls even open, I feel confident in predicting that Obama&Biden will stomp McCain&Palin by no fewer than 40 electoral votes. Even if you spot the Republicans all the states where the margin is less than five percent, they still lose by about 20 electoral votes. And they won't take all the so-called toss up states. Barring some kind of shenanigans, they will almost certainly lose Florida and probably Virginia and Ohio as well. But it won't matter, even if they win them, they will still lose unless they can take Pennsylvania or whole bunch of other states, and that is simply not gonna happen . I'll go further and guess that the Democrats add nine seats in the Senate too. 

Mon pays c'est ne pas un pays, c'est hiver

While the whole world holds its breath waiting for Nov. 5th and I ponder whether it is time to start wearing long sleeves to work yet, the lovely and talented Mudhooks takes the camera out in the Ottawa Valley's first snow of the season.

Go look. Trust me, it will lower your pulse rate and make you look forward to winter.

Eternal vigilance and all that you know...

Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye



Seen somewhere in the blogosphere:
"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so all our kids can soar"

Boo!

Fatal stupidity

Not that we needed further confirmation, but I think this story shows that gun nuts really are mentally deficient. The United States should slap a tax on ammunition to fund a study to see whether the smoke from cordite and gunpowder kills brain cells or alters brain chemistry that deals with cognitive functions.

"This accident was truly a mystery to me," said Bizilj, director of emergency medicine at Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford, Conn. "This is a horrible event, a horrible travesty, and I really don't know why it happened."

That comment, for those too lazy to click the link, comes from father of an eight-year-old boy who died on the weekend at a gun show after he lost control of a fully automatic Uzi submachinegun he was firing under the supervision of an instructor--and shot himself in the head. All while his father was reaching for his camera to record the little tyke's redneck right of passage.

Yes, you read that right. An eight-year-old firing a submachinegun. And his father who was there taking pictures and cheering the boy on doesn't understand how it could happen that his child could possibly have been hurt, let alone killed.

Would someone please go dig up Charleton Heston so I can kick him in the nuts?

I need a number of drinks.

A note for the irony impaired


Dear Americans,

Borat is a fictional character meant to be a joke. His rampant anti-Semetism is intended to lampoon bigots. I, myself, am a Jew and bear no ill will towards others who share my faith.

Just thought I better straighten that out for you.



Mazaltov,



Sacha Baron Cohen

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

John F. Kennedy had Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, but since then the presidential brother slot has been occupied by the likes of Billy Carter and Roger Clinton. Jeb Bush seems to be the exception, since he's clearly the smart one. John McCain, well, he has his brother Joe.
Obama is an only child.

So sad I nearly stopped laughing

By now you've probably heard of Ashley Todd, the College Republican operative who claimed she was mugged by a black man who carved a B for Barak in her face when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

Now, do I hear you say "Wow, what a dramatic commentary of how out of control partisan politics are in America, and what a bunch of violent criminals Obama supporters are!" No? Do I hear you say, "That sound like bullshit to me. By the way, why would the attacker lightly scratch the B in backward, you know, the way it would look if you were doing it in the mirror?"

Great story, but not even the likes of Michele Malkin believed it. I wonder why? I mean, it isn't like we've seen anything like this before, is it? But that didn't stop the McCain-Palin campaign from shouting it from the rooftops.

Apparently, after confessing to police she made the whole thing up, Ashley Todd is blamed the media for blowing the story up into a "political firestorm" according to the lead investigator in the case. The police are apparently worried about her mental condition, I guess in addition to being involved in the College Republicans, the McCain campaign and being a lying douchebag, she must have some other problems as well. Sad what so much cognitive dissonance will do to a young mind. Keep in mind, she's from Texas and Bush has been the president since she was 12 years old, she probably can't help it.

Meanwhile, the exodus continues, as the wingnuts seize the reins of the Republican party.

Warm bread

Others may consider the game over already, but I remember what happened in 2004 and could well happen again. I will not say they are toast just yet,( see my earlier prediction re:Newt Gingrich and 2012) but McCain seems to be planning his concession speech already while Obama is planning a massive victory celebration in Chicago in the very spot where 40 years ago the whole world was watching while uniformed thugs beat and gassed and killed young people for voicing an opinion and Mayor Richard Daley famously remarked: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder." This time around, despite the pants-pissing on the right, thing are going to be different. While some people are clearly nuts enough to keep voting for whomever they think Jesus would most like to have a beer with, people with more than a vestigial lizard brain will only eat so much shit before they get wise. Hell, even the GOP will only swallow so much crap before it just gets too embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Sadly, No reenacts great moments in geek cult cinema,

Jon Swift explains the real America and gathers all election crazy into a big pile

the General goes upriver in search of the heart of dorkness.

Block the vote

Despite the stench of death and failure that now creeps forth from the staggering McCain - Palin campaign as it lurches from one screw up to the next, the GOP machine is still lurking behind the curtain. As Palast and Kennedy point out: It ain't over 'til it's over.