A nation shamed



Somewhere, Foster Hewitt is gnashing his teeth and wringing his hands.

I think the cell next to Lord Black is free...

Somewhere Hunter Thompson and H.L. Mecken are toasting Harold Meyerson's evisceration of Sam Zell:

"Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right. "

Arguments about counting column inches as a measure of quality of work aside (it is an assinine practice that rewards and thus guarantees bad writing) it has been under the Zell regime that Teh Pantload has been given a real column at a real newspaper. For that alone, Zell should be thrown in solitary, permanently.

Here come de Judge

"My life, the lives of my fellow passengers and crew, depends entirely on other people--invisible people--doing their jobs right. And who among us always does his job right?"

-Judge Alex Kozinski
Slate Magazine
July 19, 1996

More on His Honor from Slate this week:

"The problem with being a judge who loves to shock is that you're a flashy barracuda in a school of plain tuna, and you risk careening off into the high seas that are the province of public officials who are just too out there for their own good. Such is my thought after reading that Judge Alex Kozinksi posted porn on a web site he thought was private, but wasn't. The material included "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," we learn from the LA Times. We can't judge for ourselves anymore, because the site has been wiped clean, but if Judge Kozinski says that he found the porn funny, I bet he did--and it was probably offensive, too. Herein lies the Kozinski challenge. "

Glass houses, stones, yadda yadda yadda. Not surprisingly, this was a "conservative" Reagan appointee.

Taking the "Pal" out of "Principal"
Even here in conformity-and-decorum land, where teachers get fired for not singing the old militarist national anthem, even in the old Soviet Union, they would never dream of something like this: Cheer out loud at a graduation - get arrested. Clearly, some people really, really need to show they are in charge. Educators often complain that people like high-school principals are unfairly stereotyped as mean-spirited, petty tyrants -- I wonder where that stereotype comes from?

The Verdict is In

I try generally not to ascribe to conspiratorial evil-doing what can reasonably chalked up to stupidity, incompetence, arrogance and inertia. When New Orleans - a coastal city built largely below sea level - was hit by Hurricane Katrina, I was as horrified as the next person by the complete and utter failure of the U.S. federal government to respond in any meaningful way. But I just figured it was mostly a matter of a chain of dumb decisions - like putting a lawyer whose only other organizational experiece was running a club for horse breeders in charge of emergency management. Sure, there was evil involved - like the white deputies who opened fire on blacks fleeing the city to keep them from entering their parish, or even the pearl-clutching by shit-for-brains conservative bloggers and pundits who decried the "looting by savages" or the "lawlessness" by those trapped at the Superdome, though the two are hardly comparable in seriousness.
I tended to pooh-pooh or at least take with a grain of salt claims by some that the entire episode was some sort of monstrous pogrom against blacks or a cold-blooded, cynical attempt to wipe out a Democratic center in the South. No one could be that monstrous or cynical and cold-blooded, right? Not even as big a shit as Karl Rove could look at all those poor people drowning and think "How do I use this to partisan advantage?" right? I'll admit that, even after the invasion of Iraq, even given the torture scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I didn't think the Bush crowd were actually evil. I thought they were a bunch of violent, ignorant clowns, prone to lashing out at things they didn't understand, even occasionally vengeful agains their political enemies and driven by an ideology they didn't really even understand, but still the bottom line was that they were a bunch of red-nosed, floppy-shoed, horn-honking, Bozo-coiffed clowns.
I was right, they are clowns, but it turns out that they have patterned themselves on the clown from Stephen King's "It" that lives in the sewers and eats children. They are still hapless, clumsy, clowns prone to hitting each other with pies and seltzer bottles, but they are Evil (with a a capital E).

This is all you need to know about what plain rotten, filthy, lickers of Satan's taint these people are. The entire administration, past and present, should be locked in the darkest, dampest, most rat-and-roach-infested part of Angola Prison and left there.

"We landed at the 17th Street Canal," Landrieu says. "The story that day Karl Rove was feeding was: 'The president is on the job, the president has taken control, the president is going to rebuild, and despite the fact that the government and all these babbling fools down here can't do anything, the Corps of Engineers is on the job.' So we landed at the canal, five minutes from my house. I was so excited because they were finally doing something. The Corps of Engineers was there, and they had dump trucks and sandbags. All the cameras were there for the president, who was doing one of his famous press conferences about how he was going to do everything. So I thought, 'At least the guy is doing something, so show your manners and be good and smile.'"
...On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here.' He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, 'We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It's awful what's happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can't understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can't get into the Superdome to help. They can't get out. People are drowning in their homes.'
"So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it." There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.
"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life."

Hat tip to posse member Chet over at The Vanity Press, who has been burning up the blogosphere lately.

It was a rainy day...
Question: What do you get when you walk in the pouring rain with an umbrella next to a five-year-old girl with an umbrella who insists on holding your hand and reminding you that the goldfish found floating belly up in the tank that morning used to go "bubble, bubble, bubble!" but not no more."
Answer: A very wet sleeve, a very cold arm, a very warm heart and tendency to hum that Harry Nilsson tune to yourself all day.



"What's that...no, that's just some rain on my face. I know we're inside now, I just have an eyelash or something in my eye...look, just shut up okay?"
Mumble,mutter,muttersoullesscynicalbastardsmuttermutter

Blow up your TV

Hat tip to SeattleDan and SeattleTammy at Jackson Street Books

Take me out to the ball game

New Spiritual leader of the Moment - Paul Grewal

Unless you or your kids attend Carlton Village Public School in Toronto, you might never have heard of Paul Grewal. I heard about him on CBC radio's consistently excellent As It Happens program back in April, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find any supporting stories to link to for more information about him, so all of the following is drawn from his April 22 radio interview.

Mr. Grewal is a well regarded French teacher at the school of about 400 students. Last year, he took 77 students on an outing to a Toronto Blue Jays Game. A group of students from another school sang the national anthems at the game and Grewal thought this would a great thrill for the kids from his school, so this season he worked to make that happen. In order to give the kids the opportunity to sing out on the diamond, the Toronto Blues Jays front office asked for a group customer account of at least $7,000. So Grewal stepped up to the plate and plunked down his VISA card and paid for 300 $25 tickets.

Teachers were encouraged to get all their students to sign up for the April 21 trip to see Toronto Blue Jays take on the Detroit Tigers in an afternoon game. Buses were laid on and money was collected for the buses and tickets sold to the students. According to Grewal, the school choir sang well and the proverbial good time was had by all, even though the Jays lost 5-1 to the Tigers.

The Jays weren't the only ones to lose out. The total bill for the day was $8,500 - all of it paid for up front by Grewal out of his own pocket. Selling 300 tickets to 400 students didn't work out quite as well as Grewal had hoped, in fact he fell about $4,000 short of getting his money back. The Blue Jays organization was sympathetic and the following day arranged to give him 120 ticket vouchers he could sell or use, but even if he manages to sell all of them he is still left holding a $1,000 bag.

Asked if he would do it again, Grewal said he probably wouldn't do it next year, but possibly the following year. The school will be doing some fundraising activities and he will probabaly be paid back eventually.

Teachers in Toronto are paid between $37,440 for a rookie and $77,576 for a very well qualified veteran nearing retirement, so $8,500 is a pretty big chance to take to put a smile on some students' faces. Grewal and his friends may be going to a lot of Jays games this summer, but a $4,000 VISA bill on what I'm guessing is a junior teacher's salary is not chump change.

For actions above and beyond the call of duty, Paul "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" Grewal is the Woodshed's Spiritual Leader of the Moment.

"Don't touch my bags if you please Mr. Customs Man"

A lot of airlines run promotions to reward travellers for choosing them and a lot of countries do tourism promotions that offer freebies of various sorts, but this is exceptional:

from the BBC

Cannabis blunder at Tokyo airport

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan's Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.
A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.
Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.
Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials. .

Just so you know, "sources" tell me that 142 grams of marijuana (that's about five ounces or "lids" as the kids call them) would mean a lump about the size of your average dictionary. Imagine finding that when you get home and unpack from your business trip or vacation.

I can't believe the dog couldn't find it - Given the amount, if the stuff is any good at all, they could probably just grab the first couple of people they see in tiedye down in Harajuku and let them sniff around for baggage area for ten minutes.

No embed code for this one, but I'd like to dedicate it to Narita Customs chief Manpei Tanaka with my sympathy

UPDATE: The stash has apparently been returned by the passenger who found it in his suitcase

Reading list

I've been too busy with real life stuff both big (death in the family) and small (taking the kids to the movies) to blog this past week, but its not as if there isn't anything else going on out there.

There's an embarrasment of riches over at Alternet of late. John Dolan gives Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens both the figurative kick in the nuts they richly deserve while pointing out that the current neo-conservative movement in North America is simply the old British Tory traditional dish of "the wogs start at Calais" and mourning for lost empire served as fast food rather than pub grub. (Hat tip to Chet at the Vanity Press)

Not to be outdone, Matt Tabbi, in an except from his book The Great Derangement, rains all over the parade of the 9/11 conspiracy movement by suppying a hilarious script of the meeting where Cheney, Wolfwitz and the rest of the Mayberry mafia dream up the 9/11 attacks - with the added bonus of the 700+ comments that ooze paranoia, rage, gullibility, derangement and cheetos in equal parts, with a whiff of the "apartment in Mom and Dad's basement" thrown in for good measure. (Hat tip to Alison at Creekside)

And just look at some to of the stuff on the blogroll! Cowboys for Social Responsibility has the latest installment of the world's most entertaining small town police blotter. Over at Whiskeyfire, Molly Ivors wonders which movie is playing Maureen Dowd's theatre of the mind this week, while on the other side of the Hillary Clinton divide, Driftglass very entertaining wonders just which game the Democrats are playing and where the goalposts were last seen. Meanwhile, Dave Neiwert attempts to pour at least a little water on the burning stupidity being bandied about by the cable cretins on the issue of immigration


And if reading isn't your thing, there are a whole passle of new Asylum Street Spankers videos up on YouTube from their fantastic 10th anniversary concert DVD, which, if you had any sense, you'd have already bought several copies of by now.





And if the Spanker's aren't your cup of ocha, there is my friend Steve "The Ambassador of Magic" Marshal's new video clownery


TTFN - Bisy Bakson

Dave's not here, man!

for the proprieters of JimDandyGoodness and the Galloping Beaver:

Dumbass of the week -Michael Medved

Remember when Michael Medved was just another mediocre film critic? Well, he's still a mediocre film critic, the problem is that he writing about genetics and race and politics now. He's only a half-a-step away from arguing that Americas are the ubermenchen and God's chosen people. As poorly informed at it is, the latest piece of drivel isn't as bad as his "slavery wasn't so bad" column from a while back.

Supporting the troops?

I've written in passing about the uncounted costs for the United States and its allies, including Canada, that are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much has been made of the number of soldiers killed in action and there has been some coverage of the tens of thousands of seriously wounded. Earlier this year, I linked to the stories being told at the Winter Soldier conference about the U.S. Veterans Administration hospitals failure to diagnose and treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

It would seem there is a reason for this failure. Depending on the study you look at - and there are several - it is estimated at anywhere from 12% to 20%  of vets returning from Iraq suffer from PTSD to some degree. Add to that the uncounted number of "military contractors" working as everything from truck drivers to mercenaries security consultants and that is a lot of potential for very bad things to happen.

But not to worry. In war, we all must make sacrifices. After all the President is working hard and has given up golf for the duration, what more can we ask?

What not to say to a reporter

D'oh! Obama takes the .50 laser-sighted, night- scoped sniper's rifle of his eloquence and proceeds to blow off his own foot.

Jason Kenney: liar or moron?
The Toronto Star does it right and calls bullshit on Conservative Rottweiller Jason Kenney for using a widely discredited piece of propaganda as if it were the gospel truth.

"In a terse exchange, Kenney asked him if this meant he equated Canada's inaction with "Al Qaeda strapping up a 14-year-old girl with Down's syndrome and sending her into a pet market to be remotely detonated." Kenney was referring to an erroneous story about unwitting bombers in Iraq - which military officials later retracted when it was revealed the bombers were adults and did not have Down's syndrome."

Jason Kenney: Mendacious moron, prevaricating prick or just an ignorant, loudmothed jackass who doesn't know what he's talking about? We report, you decide.
What a novel concept - a politician talks out his ass and the media actually points out that he is talking out his ass. I could get used that.

The issue in question that Kenney is trying to distract from is Liberal Senator Romeo Dallaire's comment that Canada's Gnu Gummint should maybe be trying to do something about the plight of Omar Khadr, the 21-year-old who went to Guantanamo Bay intead of high school and college after he was shot and captured in Afghanistan at age 15 by U.S. Special Forces during a raid on Taliban encampment. He is alleged to have thrown a grenade that killed a US soldier, for which the US is charging him with a war crime.

Kady O'Malley was there for the subcommittee hearing in which Dallaire pointed out the obvious, that Khadr's case has become a political hot potato that has more to do with the US government not wanting to admit it is breaking the law than it does with Khadr's alleged war crime.

The National Post quotes the exhange at the parliamentary subcommitte on human rights:

"In panicking, [the United States] is doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists are doing. They don't want to play by the rules," testified Mr. Dallaire.

So naturally Jason "Fathead" Kenney, like many a factually-challenged blogging tory, grabs the wrong end of the false equivency stick and immediately jumps to the defence of the poor, helpless, U.S. military-industrial-national security apparatus and decides to bring Al-Quaida in the whole thing:

"Is it your testimony that al-Qaeda strapping up a 14-year-old girl with Down's syndrome and sending her into a pet market to be remotely detonated is the moral equivalent to Canada's not making extraordinary political efforts for a transfer of Omar Khadr to this country? Is that your position?" Mr. Kenney asked.
"If you want a black and white, absolutely," replied Mr. Dallaire. "You're either with the law or not with the law.
"My position is that the minute you start playing with human rights, with conventions, with civil liberties, in order to say that you're doing it to protect yourself and you are going against the fundamentals of those rights and conventions, you are no better than the guy who doesn't believe in them at all."

Interestingly, the hacks atthe National Post headline their story "Dallaire likens U. S., Canada to al-Qaeda" when it was Kenney that brought up Al-Qaeda, not Dallaire. Like you needed further proof that the National Post is lame.

Dallaire amplified his remarks further today (from the Toronto Star story)

"Suffice it to say that I in no way intended to equate Canadian or U.S. authorities with the terrorist organization Al Qaeda," Dallaire wrote today. "But we cannot avoid the point that if we violate international law in our pursuit of the war on terror, we risk reducing ourselves, collectively, to the same level as those we oppose.
"Our acquiescence with his continued incarceration and prosecution puts in question Canada's standing as a nation that respects global human rights and international law."

Absolutely goddamn 100 percent correct.

Pierre Pollivere also shows he's more interested in protecting George W. Bush's reputation than protecting the human rights of a Canadian child

I'm liking her less and less
I never got what the right hated so much about Hillary Clinton. From the time of her husband's presidential campaign right up to today, the right has villified, belittled and otherwise attacked Sen. Clinton. I always thought that, were I an American, I wouldn't have any problem voting for her for president. Lately, I'm not so sure. It's not just that fact that she voted to authorize the war, I'd be willing to give her that error, lots of people made the same one. But she swallowed the whole thing hook, line and sinker and now she denies that was the case.

In voting to hand George W. Bush the keys to the war machine, she said:

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.

Now this much is undisputed. The open questions are: what should we do about it? How, when, and with whom?

....This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make -- any vote that may lead to war should be hard -- but I cast it with conviction."

Furthermore, she went to Iraq in 2005 and stood next to John McCain and told the American people that everything was going well in Iraq when anyone with eyes could tell it was not.

That's stike one

Strike two would be her refusal to bow out for the good of the party once things became inevitable. By this I don't mean after she failed to sweep Super Tuesday or anything of that kind, but she has been more or less mathematically eliminated since she failed to sweep to a massive victory in Pennsylvania. She couldn't quite seal the deal on her comeback there and without doing so there, she was done, short of Obama being caught with a live boy or a dead girl. She was way behind him on fundraising, the superdelegates had started to shift away from her to Obama and yet she hung on, loaning the campaign another few million dollars of her own money in the hope of finding a magic bullet.

I don't think her pathetic attempt to get Florida and Michigan included in the totals after agreeing like everyone else that they would not count is grounds to deny her the nomination, though I do think it stinks.

I don't think her pandering to the right by talking about obliterating Iran or talking about how she learned to shoot from her grandpappy or pretending she's a beer and shot kinda blue-collar gal is reason to deny her the nomination. It's lame, but its something any politician would do.

I don't even mind the wounded tones and righteous indignation of her supporters when they complain about how the boys are ganging up on her and that the mass media is sexist. Surely as good feminists they already knew this, so throwing a fainting spell over it isn't gaining them any sympathy from me. Putting Hillary on Hardball and letting her call Chris Matthews on his horrible misogyny on air would have solved a lot of the problem - does anyone think she wouldn't have eaten his lunch? - but Clinton and her people were too afraid of another "I don't stay home and bake cookies" moment and decided to play victim instead.

I wouldn't even hold here poor choices in campaign staff against her - though why anyone would pick Mark Penn again is a bit of a mystery.

Nope, strike three, and this is really the dealbreaker, is her more or less naked appeals to racism.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

While racism has raised its ugly little cracker-assed head a few times in the campaign, this is the first time a candidate has simultaneously courted racists, displayed racism and told her supporter that they were uneducated bigots and that was fine with her.

She's lost, and now its just a matter of getting her out before she burns the house down.

Now, having said all that, if Obama were to be struck by lightning, a bus, or a crazed KKK member, would I advise voting for Hillary over McCain? You bet your ass I would.

Another home-skooked Conservative intellectchul heard from

Probably a relative of these guys. I guess dictionaries are only for ivory tower liberal islamofacist academic pinko anarchists.

Shameless stolen from Orcinus

Did you ever have one of those mornings?

You know, the kind where you wake up after not enough sleep, with a crick in your neck, to the sound of crows and seagulls fighting over the garbage outside. Your spouse is doing that one thing that really irritates you, the kids are sulky and dragging their feet to get ready for school, there's no hot water left, you're out of clean underwear and coffee and it looks like its going to rain?

You know, the kind where you feel like the only good reason to go to the office today would be to give a few people a well-deserved punch in the mouth just on general principles before setting the boss's tie on fire and taking an early lunch? The kind where you're seriously thinking of splashing some gasoline around the living room and kitchen and tossing a lit cigar butt on it, selling the kids to the nearest band of gypsies, sticking up a gas station, stealing a motorcycle and driving to the airport, flying to Patagonia and becoming a hermit who only comes into the village every few months to sell a few goats and buy cases of cheap wine and shotgun shells?

Did you?

No?.....um, me neither. I was just...uh... you know... checking.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Of couse, then the six year old pokes you in the belly and giggles and you find the coffee and all is right with the world. Besides, there's never a band of gypsies around when need them any more and you don't even speak Patagonian.

"But it's alright ma, it's life and life only"

For those without giggling six-year-olds or coffee, there is Fafblog.

"I'm a politician, step into my big black car"

Limousine Liberal Conservative Bev Oda to taxpayers: "Baby, you can drive my car"

Remember all the bitching and complaining by Steverino Harper when he was head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation National Citizen Coalition (Editor: what's the difference?) about how the Liberals were just a bunch of fat cats who were living high on the hog at taxpayers' expense? Now he only wants money when it can be billed elsewhere, but won't spend it where he should.

Remember all the outrage on the part of the Tories that the Liberals were using federal money for partisan purposes in a little affair known as "Adscam" and how they swore up and down they would be the party of openness and accountability?

Yeah, right.

and another thing:

"...the NDP found that (is) Oda (what)was doing in Toronto last March 17, when she billed $1,291.88 for a limo that took her from her home to a Conservative party candidate training session. She also made a government announcement later in the day.
In that particular case, the expense was proactively disclosed by Oda - but not the party function"

A $1,300 limo ride? I can fly round trip from Tokyo to Toronto during peak season for less than that.

(a hat tip and apology for my laziness in posting to Cat)

But how do they feel about apple pie?

From the "Just when you thought they couldn't sink any lower" department, we get this Mother's Day treat from the Republicans. We knew they had some major daddy issues, but apparently the Republicans are now anti-mom. Better yet, as has been pointed out, they have flipped-flopped on the issue, having voted for mothers before voting against them.