When Pelicans Come Begging

I'm getting bloody tired of climate change denialists, particuarly those shit for brains Tar Sanders. It's here, it's happening and, with the mountains of science that just keep growing, it's effectively proven. Sure there have been a couple of glitches and gaffes along the way but that's like pointing to two suspect trees in a forest. You've got two trees, the rest of us have the entire forest so, for the denialists, it's "put up or shut up" time. You've got an entire multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry backing you up so start producing some convincing research to disprove the global warming theory. When the best you can do is claim this is a hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy of middle-class science geeks, then it's time you shut the hell up.

Want to see the ravages of climate change? Come out to Beautiful British Columbia. Take a leisurely drive through our expansive mountain valleys and marvel at the endless stands of forests with their rust-coloured foliage. Aren't they supposed to be green? Well, only if they're living. Once they've been killed off by the pine beetle they turn that rust colour. What's that got to do with climate change? Everything. Cold winters - the sort we used to have, always - kill off the pine beetle infestations, allowing the trees to live and, well, be green. We don't get those winters much any more and so the pine beetles spread and multiply and kill the forests. The only good part about this is that they've now crossed the mountains into Alberta, the last place on the planet where the inhabitants have any right to bitch about climate change.

Earlier this week we heard about Canada's wolverine and how their numbers are plummeting, again the suspected culprit being global warming. But this isn't about wolverine or pine forests or massive stocks of salmon that simply vanish without a trace or invasive species migrating into our coastal waters. This is about the jolly pelican (jolly, that is, unless you have to walk the same dock they use as their latrine).

The Pacific brown pelican is a magnificent bird. They're something to see when they fly in perfect formation, skimming the ocean surface in search of food. I've watched them plunge, headfirst, like giant hailstones into a placid boat harbour, feasting on a school of small fish. They've co-existed with humans on a live and let live basis. They don't seem to mind us at all when we're at a moderate distance.

Something is going on with the brown pelican. A lot of them have stopped migrating and even those that still do are showing signs of starvation. From the Los Angeles Times:

All along the Oregon coast over the last month, hundreds of brown pelicans have turned up dead, starving or begging for food.As many as 3,000 of the gangly seabirds failed to make their annual fall migration to California, many instead winding up at Oregon's rehabilitation centers.

Those that did head south, leaving the Pacific Northwest winter behind, were battered by California's recent storms. Shelters in San Pedro and the San Francisco Bay Area are also full of emaciated pelicans.

Researchers, at a loss to explain the casualties, are looking at unusual ocean currents and the depletion of fish stocks -- as well as warmer temperatures, toxic runoff and algae blooms -- as possible causes.Meanwhile, pelicans are sitting listlessly on beaches and scavenging outside restaurants and canneries.

...This is the second straight year that a large number of pelicans have remained in Oregon rather than trek to the warmer, quieter waters of California and Baja. From 1918 to 2002, the Audubon Society tallied fewer than 100 pelicans in Oregon every winter. Then the number shot up to 554 birds. In 2008, 3,647 stayed.

Three to four thousand pelicans doesn't sound like all that many but nature tends to give us huge numbers of small birds and only small numbers of really big birds.

I'm starting to think the Pacific coast ecosystem has become North America's miners' canary. Change seems to be overtaking the speed at which flora and fauna can evolve to adapt. Of course that's the real danger of global warming isn't it - not so much change itself but the speed at which change is occurring. We can't outrun it and there's your problem. With the exception of some very nasty things like viruses and noxious weeds, we haven't evolved the ability to evolve quickly or at least not quickly enough to stay a safe distance ahead of ourselves.

Don't Take Canadian Democracy for Granted

Some notable Americans are waking up to the fact that their nation's vaunted democracy is in serious and immediate peril. Canadians would do well to heed their alarm.

Corruption has become endemic in the United States, particularly within America's "bought and paid for" Congress. Whether it's Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Agra, corporatism has ruthlessly and relentlessly subverted American democracy. When Republican House leader John Boehner blissfully strolls the floor of the House of Representatives distributing envelopes bearing "contributions" from the tobacco industry just moments before a vote critical to Big Tobacco - and gets away with it - the writing is on the wall and it is indeed as plain as day.

When a nation runs two wars, both fought with a corporate (mercenary) presence hitherto unseen in the West and all funded with foreign borrowings and at the very same time funds tax cuts for the very rich, also paid for with foreign borrowings, this is not a government of the people, by the people, for the people. This is a government beholden to a few very powerful interest groups, the servant of an oligarchy.

Even the US Supreme Court is in on this democracy death dance. It's uber-right wing majority decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission recognizing corporations as "persons" under the First Amendment was far more anti-democratic than most people, particularly Americans, can grasp. There should have been mobs running the streets of Washington with pitchforks and torches but there was barely a whimper of protest. Indeed, after the 48-hour news cycle, the case has been all but forgotten.

Corporations can't vote but that doesn't matter much if they can use their financial muscle to swing elections their way. From here on in, reformers or even those simply trying to restore American democracy, will be swept out to sea by a tsunami of corporate influence peddling. With a voting public conditioned to always look at the "shiny thing", to believe in spectacle and rank delusion, to be driven by fear, anger and hatred powerful enough even to overwhelm self-interest, reality doesn't stand a chance.

In a nation as divided and confused as the United States the forces of corporatism don't have to win over the American people, merely a modest segment of them sufficient to swing elections. Once they've reached that modest goal, a corrupt legislature and a radicalized, ideological judiciary will do the rest. Robert Reich, UC Berkley professor, labour secretary under Clinton and author of several books including "Supercapitalism" has an interesting post entitled "Our Incredible Shrinking Democracy." Even more compelling is Chris Hedges new book, "Empire of Illusion, the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

I received Empire for Christmas and immediately set to devouring its small, 215-pages. Like Hedges' earlier works, "War" and "American Fascists", it's a diminutive book, something of a lovechild between a tome and a pamphlet. Like all of his works, it's jam packed with insight.

Empire is organized into five chapters: "The Illusion of Literacy; the Illusion of Love; the Illusion of Wisdom; the Illusion of Happiness; and the Illusion of America." On this skeleton he hangs the meat and offal of delusion, distraction and deceit that have become the standard fare of the American people and their ultimate undoing. Here are a few passages excerpted from Hedges' final chapter, "The Illusion of America."

"The words 'consent of the governed' have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.

...The government, stripped of any real sovereignty, provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good. America has become a facade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions. It represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not possess.

...The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an 'empire of production' to an 'empire of consumption.'...We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford..

...[Columbia University professor, Seymour] Mellman coined the term 'permanent war economy' to describe the American economy. Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.

Hedges quotes Einstein explaining why he was a socialist: "Private capital tends to become concentrated in a few hands partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. ...The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. ...Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed inmost cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.'"

Hedges points out that the alarm has been ringing since the era of FDR: "...Our political and economic decline took place because of a corporate drive for massive deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the country's radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to an economy of consumption. Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized this danger. He sent a message to congress on April 29, 1938. [in which] he wrote: '...the first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.'"

Canada is plainly not in the same boat as the United States. Our parliamentary democracy appears at least somewhat more resiliant than America's congressional system. For the moment at least we have some safeguards on corporate inducements and electoral meddling although they too could be dismantled quite simply on the floor of the House of Commons. Yet there are reasons for concern and these need to be addressed forcefully and rather quickly.

Harper came to power on promises of transparency and accountability and then wasted no time sacking both. We must carefully scrutinize how that happened, how that continues and what needs doing to put an end to it in all future Canadian governments. That has to end for it is a direct threat to our democracy.

Successive governments have sat by and allowed the wealth gap between rich and poor to turn cavernous. They have allowed our manufacturing base to atrophy. They have fed us nonsense about the "new economy" and outright lies about the information age even as they have failed to fund the educational system that sort of transformation requires. They fiercely cling to Industrial Revolution-era capitalism where growth is the elixir to solve all problems even as we have propelled ourselves into a world that already operates well beyond its carrying capacity. They too freely wield the power to wage wars they are powerless to end much less win.

Worst of all, they capitalize on the enormity of their failures by blaming everything on "big government" when the problem isn't size but quality. We're living with the consequences not of big government but of bad governance and those consequences are poised to grow much larger and much more dangerous very, very soon.

My fellow Liberals squander their resources and efforts on the diversion of partisanship, sniping at the Harper regime to little effect, when they ought to be focusing instead on the core failures of their own party, its lack of vision and lapsed courage. They would rather waste time we cannot afford to wait while Harper stumbles and weakens instead of making their own party stronger and more directed to the serious problems besetting our nation. They too cling to the disastrous fantasy of Canada as a petro-superpower at a time when the future of our species and our ecosystem hinge on decarbonizing our economies and our societies. Perhaps afraid of angering the Wild Rose/Big Oil cabal, we don't even press for a renewal of our manufacturing sector on alternative energy generation. That we leave to the Chinese who are now the world leader in wind turbine development and production and are positioned to also dominate the solar energy sector.

We need to recall that government, Parliament is the place of the people. It is there to serve us and our fellow Canadians first and foremost. Parliament also exists to assist industry and commerce but not in their own right, only as best befits the interests, short and long-term, of the Canadian people. Parliament doesn't exist to accommodate industry and commerce as our fellow constituents.

Like the Americans, Canadians are being harmed by a corporatized mass media that operates in thrall to the emerging oligarchs. The media, as any other institution in Canada, owes its troth to the people for, without that faithfulness, it is transformed into a instrument of manipulation. We see this in rank partisan propagandists rewarded with senate appointments. That was Canada's John Boehner moment. We urgently need to dismember the media cartel, strip newspapers of their television stations and radio frequencies, severely restrict both concentration and cross-ownership in all forms. We need to remember that the frequencies of our television and radio networks are public property, merely licensed out for a term of years to the networks. We need to hold them accountable to the public, recognizing that they have abused the remarkable freedoms we have given them.

I believe the times that are upon us and the challenges Canadians will have to meet during the 21st Century require our own "New Deal." We have to break the bonds that lash us to Industrial Revolution capitalism and move to a new, more responsive form of capitalism that is subordinate to the interests of our citizens. For the Liberal Party, now being steered to the centre-right by Ignatieff, this necessitates a move back to the centre/centre-left. The Liberal Party has to serve Canada again, not the interests of its own ruling elite. That is the only path back to not only power but genuinely good governance of the kind our country and our people so badly need.

We need to do this now if only because we may be unable to do it in twenty or thirty years from now. Our world is undergoing a grand transformation - economic, political, military and environmental - to which we're going to have to respond and adapt. These are challenges not of our choosing and no longer under our control. How well we respond to them, how ably we adapt, will depend in great measure on the strength of our governance, the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. This is no time to take our democracy for granted. It is no time to tolerate that which subverts it.

Just Because

This is seriously cool and it's Saturday night

What's That Awful Noise? It's the CanWest Death Rattle!

The long-suffering creditors of CanWest Global have pried the would-be media giant's newspapers from its control and thrown them on the block. Such is the fate of barrel-bottom, hack journalism.

The publishing garage sale features such less-than-august publications as The National Post and The Calgary Herald, the Vancouver Province, the phantom ghost Windsor Star, and the somewhat more reputable Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette.

The creditors are hoping the lot may possibly fetch half the sum originally paid by the late Izzy Asper.

According to the rarely credible National Post, Canwest CEO Lenny Asper memoed employees telling them that the loss of the newspaper business, "...furthers a plan that will, over time, see the broadcasting and publishing groups become more independent of one another." Lenny left out the part about "the plan" being the creditors' plan to salvage what they can, not his own.

As for the other arm of the CanWest media empire, the broadcasting side, held by CanWest Media Inc., it too shelters under bankruptcy protection sought in October after defaulting on a US$30-million interest payment in March.

Unfortunately a lot of good people and their families are thrown into financial insecurity thanks to the lack of business acumen in CanWest boardrooms and journalistic integrity in CanWest newsrooms. Asper Jr. chose to make his lead papers a veritable house organ for the far right in Canada. He chose to chase a niche readership that simply could not and would not return the revenue stream he needed to keep his Ship of Fools afloat.

Throughout North America, it's tough enough these days to keep quality newspapers in business. You simply cannot build a viable media empire on third-rate rags, at least not in Canada. Take the Post for example. Reality is not always predictable. Yet as reality unfolded in its day to day chaos, the way the Post covered it was always predictable. Like any propaganda service it became infected with its own numbing consistency. It might have been at times infuriating but the real problem was that it became boring.

Maybe that should be CanWest's epitaph - "It Bored Itself to Death."

Harper's Rotten Collaborator - Michaelle Jean

From Left to Right, domestic and international, it's the same verdict - Stephen Harper is perverting Canadian democracy.

It's easy to blame Harper. He deserves all the scathing criticism he's getting - and more. But we've always known he was a bully, an opportunist and a cheap fixer - an unprincipled hustler who will do anything he can get away with.

The person we should be taking a closer look at is the one person without whose support Harper would not have been able to undermine Canadian democracy and Canada's Parliament - the Governor General, Michaelle Jean.

It's not Stephen Harper who is padlocking Parliament, it's Michaelle Jean. She holds the keys to the locks. It's her call. Harper can't get away with this without her prior consent. To the extent he is perverting Canadian democracy, it's with Michaelle Jean's collaboration.

The Governor-General's power to prorogue Parliament is discretionary. She has to decide that it's warranted. Even if she does agree to prorogue, the Governor-General is empowered to impose conditions. Little things such as no stacking the Senate while the heat is off.

When Harper decided to prorogue Parliament in 2008, his Rideau Hall henchman saved his sorry Tory ass from certain defeat. No matter how you cut it, that was Michaelle Jean playing Tory partisan politics.

If you doubt her Excellency's partisanship, look to her New Year's gift to Canadians this year. This time Stephen Harper didn't even have to drive the few blocks over to Rideau Hall to plead his case. He simply phoned it in and she signed off as directed.

A lot of people gave Michaelle Jean an awful lot of slack the first time. Call it the benefit of the doubt times, oh, infinity. I know - she's a woman, she's black, she's an immigrant, she's from Quebec. So what? There's no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt this time. She has abused and sullied her office and she has betrayed our nation, our people and our Parliament.

Even the right-wing British magazine, The Economist, understands and denounces Stephen Harper's undemocratic machinations. If there is any lingering reason to have a Governor General, surely it's to prevent people like Stephen Harper undermining Canadian democracy.

If Michaelle Jean had a shred of decency left, she would resign in her well-earned disgrace. She doesn't and she won't and Stephen Harper must be deleriously grateful to know that his Rideau Hall stooge will soldier on, ever complacent to his will.

Good Enough for Liberals

Michael Ignatieff. He's been the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada for a year and a couple of weeks as tonight ushers in 2010 and what a year it has been for the Liberal Party.


Look at it this way. When the Liberal party faithful anointed Mr. Ignatieff at the Vancouver convention in May, did any of them imagine the party and its leader would be where they stand today? Leaving aside the fact that there was no one else running, did the 97% who voted for the current leader really anticipate this awful mess?


As far as I can recall, Mr. Ignatieff held himself out as ready to lead the Liberal Party when he sought the leadership. I found it curious when, during his year-ender interviews in Toronto, he skirted around the abject shambles he's made by saying he's still 'learning the ropes.' Correct me if I'm wrong but did this fellow ever tell anyone he was running for "apprentice leader" of the LPC?


Why has Mr. Ignatieff fared so poorly? I suspect a main reason is that, like his followers, he somehow thought himself qualified for the job based on his record outside of politics. After all, he's a Harvard PhD with an first-rate academic history. That's all true and it is impressive but, then again, I've had some truly brilliant professors I wouldn't trust to walk my dog. The hallowed halls of Academia are full of brilliant people utterly ill-suited to the world outside where survival sometimes means having to mix it up.


I think Mr. Ignatieff's fatal flaw is that, like his predecessor and fellow academic, he suffers a serious deficiency in political instinct. He doesn't get it. His opponent isn't nearly as well educated as Mr. Ignatieff. Mr. Harper isn't remotely as accomplished, nor as well travelled, nor as highly regarded. But, and here's the truly big BUT, Mr. Harper has keenly honed political instincts. He's quick to take the measure of his opponents, to understand their strengths and their weaknesses. Then, carefully biding his time until the moment is right, Mr. Harper exploits opportunities to match his strength against his opponents' vulnerabilities.


Look at the Harper/Dion election. Battered by scandals, Harper waited until the public memory faded over a long, dull summer. The Dion Libs believed the end of summer would bring the return of Parliament and prepared to pick up where they left off. Mr. Harper, after all, had legislated fixed election dates. The Liberals were dozing off. But then, like a Panzer army bursting through the Ardennes, Harper struck, calling a snap election. Why? No reason. Over what? Nothing really. It wasn't so much an election as a blitzkrieg campaign to overwhelm the Liberal leader, to make the public fearful of his horribly bungled "Green Shift" policy. Harper didn't even introduce any Conservative policy at all until the very last week of the campaign - and he didn't have to - and he knew it. Dion and the Liberals went down in flames.


Anyone who ever underestimated Harper's political instincts after Dion's trashing had no business in opposition politics.


Harper was genuinely cautious about Mr. Ignatieff at the start, even to the point of acting collegial at times. That didn't last long. At first, Harper was worried about his government falling to a coalition. He was so worried about it he furiously lied to a gullible/ignorant Canadian public about plots to illegally topple a democratically-elected government. It worked. The opposition was unable to fight back with the truth. It couldn't even beat Harper over the head with his own lies. Ignatieff got cold feet. Harper called on the Governor-General and got her to prorogue Parliament (which as Madam Jean has recently shown is about as tough as a first-grader getting permission to go down the hall to the bathroom because he has to pee).


Now Mr. Ignatieff, if he had a shred of the political acumen he purported to have in seeking the Liberal leadership, ought to have known the recess marked the commencement of a war and a very limited window to prepare for it. The economy was faltering, Canada was dreading a meltdown and Parliament was locked out. It would return only when the Harper Cons were ready to unveil their idea of a "stimulus" budget. This practically was an engraved invitation for the Libs to roll up their sleeves, toil through the night and be prepared, on the return of Parliament, with an alternative stimulus budget of their own to lay before the Canadian public.


What happened? Nothing. The Liberal leader took the opportunity to focus, not on Canada, but on himself. He used the extended, paid leave to finish writing a book about his mother's family. WTF? When Parliament returned, Mr. Ignatieff arrived rested and empty-handed. He made the Liberal Party of Canada a joke.


Having chosen to return to Parliament utterly unprepared, Ignatieff had little choice but to fall into line and sign on to Harper's "Pinata Budget" while mumbling sophomoric threats about putting the Harper government "on probation." Canadians watched - and giggled - and came to their own conclusions about Mr. Ignatieff.

Then followed 50-some votes in which the Libs propped up the Cons even as they uttered threats to bring down the government. By summer the IgLibs finally mustered the guts to seriously threaten Harper only to be undercut by the NDP until they finally discovered what they should have known - that the Canadian public would kick the Libs to the curb if they forced another election. Yet another black eye for the Liberal Party.

Canada's government is terrible. It's almost as bad as Canada's Official Opposition. Being in opposition is supposed to be much easier than being in government. It's where you have the freedom to begin showing the electorate that you're actually ready to govern. The Ignatieff Liberals, so sadly, haven't shown the public they're ready to be Official Opposition never mind an actual government.

Now Parliament is again prorogued with the Liberal opposition left to whimper and whine. Some suspect Harper will strike again when Parliament returns in March, calling yet another snap election (after he has further stacked the Senate). But wait a second. The Liberals are already booked for March, aren't they? Isn't that when Mr. Ignatieff has scheduled his "Thinkers' Conference" to toss around Liberal policy ideas? Well maybe they'll "think" of something but I'm not betting on it.

We know that Harper can't win a majority on his own and his record doesn't warrant that outcome in any case. However he can and may just win that cherished majority in the next election and, if he does, he'll be deeply indebted to the Liberal leadership current and past. They haven't figured out that, if you want to beat Stephen Harper, you have to think like Stephen Harper.

Maybe, just maybe, if the Canadian voting public gets another chance to press the Liberal's "reset" button, this time they'll listen.

And with that, I take my leave - for the next month or two or three. Things change so quickly these days. Much can happen in barely a season. I will keep my fingers crossed for the Liberal Party and will continue to hope that it will find its way back out of the desert. Bonne Courage!

Countdown to 2010

New Year's Eve will mark many things, among them the demise of this blog.

I'm tired, I'm done. There's a discernable masturbatory element to this blogging business that has always creeped me out, just a bit. Name your favourites, it's the same. The bigs and the smalls, it's all a bit of a Hunter Thompson moment.

Back to the desert.

I experienced two, three decades of professional acclaim and two trips to the cardiac ICU. And for what? We have these celebrities, - right and left -, and why? I have lunched with heads of state and dined with one of the first six men to walk on the moon. I had a private interview with Trudeau and Lalone and James Richardson and David Lewis and so many others.

I have seen great men and small men and all I see today are small men. Liberal, NDP, Conservative - discards, seconds.

Shouldn't matter much to me. I'm heading back to the desert. That is where I find peace.

So anyway, just saying "goodbye."

Does It Really Matter Who Screwed Copenhagen?

Some want to blame China. Others blame China and India. Others still blame the United States. But, when you look at the list of accused, does it matter all that much who is actually to blame?

There are plausible enough arguments to charge and convict the lot - the US, China and India. The fact remains that it doesn't matter. Each of them might be the culprit. They all might be culprits, each in its own measure. That's irrelevant.

What is relevant, what matters, is that not one of these Big Three can stand absolved of responsibility for the failure at Copenhagen. When you have the Big Three emitters and the best you can do is loosely apportion fault among them, you have a very serious problem. How do you move forward from there?

At the end of the day isn't it like identifying a malignancy in the brain and one in the lymphatic system and one in the liver and blaming each for the ills beset on the others?

You see, what's telling isn't who you can actually pin the blame upon but which of these three you can acquit. And, if you cannot absolve any of them, we are truly f__cked. I don't know who is 'most' to blame and I'm not sure that even matters much anymore. In fact, I think maybe it's time I got back on my favourite motorcycle and headed back into the desert where life is so much less complicated.

Michelle Bachman's Christmas Letter?

Simply too good to pass up. In October, 2008, CityPages.com published excerpts from Michelle Bachman's 2003 Christmas letter. Breathtaking:

"...Lucas is a pre-med school “chick magnet” at the University of Minnesota who has an affinity for Mexican dancing. “Areebah!” Bachmann proclaims at mention of this, suggesting that the Congresswoman's only knowledge of Mexican culture has been learned through Speedy Gonzalez cartoons. As soon as he gets into medical school his mom plans to “crank up the heat” in finding him a good wife to clean up after him. She even has a classified ad in mind: "Chick magnate (sic) needs wife to put him through med school, clean house, pay bills and run his life. Must be willing to gamble against onslaught of socialized medicine diminishing return on investment."

"Sixteen-year-old Harrison has all the makings to be a good a husband, Bachmann explains, referring to him as "utter perfection" (a term that becomes a proper noun later in the letter, i.e. "Utter Perfection"). He is also, rather creepily, referred to as a "female fantasy treasure."

But Bachmann doesn't stop there. Her other daughter, Elisa, was well into wifehood training in 2003, when she was 13. Elisa is "ORGANIZED!" Bachmann proclaims, which means she was "born to be the perfect wife and mother." But Elisa comes with a disclaimer: "Future mates will have to apply as she does not advertise herself. Thank God for her modesty; she tries desperately to set an example for her mother." Judging from the Hardball appearance, it was a losing effort.

Bachmann introduces her next daughter with an odd reference to plural marriage: "King Henry had his 6 wives, and if our Caroline had been one of them I think she would have been called Caroline the Vibrant." Mom offers little explanation for this designation, but goes on to reveal Caroline's waist size, saying that she "pulls jeans over her 14" hips," which sounds like a line from a mail-order wife catalog.

Read more here. City Pages has the original posted there.

Another Great Christmas Letter Filched Off the Web

Dear Friends,

For years now, we have enjoyed our many fine friends' Christmas letters. And what fine friends we do have; we are blessed. We so enjoy reading, for example, about the blinding whiteness of their children's perfectly straight teeth. And so many of our friends (and their offspring), continue, year after year, to win MAJOR AWARDS. We have welcomed the news of the "Biggest SUV in the Neighborhood" award, and the esteemed, "I Gave More Money to Charity this Year than Oprah Made" award. Most of our friends' major awards, pardon us, MAJOR AWARDS, do revolve around the beauty and brilliance of their children, however there are also awards for the taste, beauty, and yes, CO$T of their home(s), as well as the level of long-term, sustained passion, devotion, etc., of their marriages.

And we have realized how very selfish we have been in enjoying the most intimate details of others' lives, while year after year, withholding any information about our own equally fascinating, equally envy-inspiring lives. Well this year, in the spirit of the season, we want to share:

Susie has cut WAY back on her drinking. LG and Jif are so happy to report that she comes home now more nights than not! We are finally looking forward to a year in which we meet no "nice officers" bringing her home after a . . . well, an "incident" . . .

LG and Biscuit have suffered terribly this holiday season with earmites. It just about breaks your heart to see them shaking their little heads and rubbing their ears against any rough surface in sight. That's why the photo with our letter is not of our own little ones -- we put halos and angel wings on them and tried to snap a good one, but they just kept on with the scratching and the gnawing . . .

The presidential election was a confusing time for LG. She was quite annoyed with people like her mother, who claimed to be voting for "nader." LG said, "No! You can't say 'nader,' you have to pick one or the other!" We do have much for which to be thankful. Turns out the voices in Jif's head are almost always RIGHT, so how bad is that, really? They even gave him some good investment tips. (The mole rat breeding thing didn't work out, but who could have guessed that the Neighborhood Association has tenets specifically prohibiting that particular enterprise? And those children just shouldn't have gotten so close . . . )

A bit of seasonal advice, and we don't want to say how we know this: it is proper etiquette to buy a separate gift for EACH of the personalities if a loved one is, um, challenged in that way . . . just didn't want you to commit the holiday faux pas that we did last year! Speaking of gift-giving, one of Susie's clients gave her the Christmas gift of two SELF-HELP books: "Why You Act the Way You Do," and "God Has a Plan B for You!" Is someone trying to tell her something? You know, some gifts should just come with a big ol' label stuck right on 'em: Excellent for Re-Gifting! These helpful volumes will definitely be seeing some action in that arena.

Dear friends, if you have received this letter, then you are not one of those from whom we have received the treasured annual Christmas letter -- OR -- and this could be you -- you did send us a letter, but your kids just aren't winning enough MAJOR AWARDS. Your life is just a little too ordinary, and/or we think you're . . . you know . . . FUNNY.

Wishing you every happiness of the season, and a 2005 with AWARDS, REWARDS, etc.,

The Fairchild FamilyJif, Susie, LG*, and Biscuit the Unruly Beast

http://uhohnowlook.blogspot.com/2005/07/merry-christmas.html

Blame Obama for Disaster in Copenhagen

"Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet,

and I am afraid that if we don't then the process will begin to slip,

and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met,

and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic."

That, according to The Guardian's environment writer, George Monbiot, is how Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change, a year ago described the need for a breakthrough agreement at the Copenhagen climate change summit. That agreement, of course, didn't happen. Nothing close to an agreement of any substance was achieved.

As they stepped away from the wreckage of Copenhagen, world leaders tried to put a brave face on this disaster. Some such as Canada's EnviroFraud Jim Prentice were positively gushing at the abject failure which was, after all, exactly what the Harper government wanted. Again, from The Guardian:

Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.

A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places which can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4C. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.

...As people are displaced from their homes by drought and rising sea levels, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts – in the form of sudden droughts and storm surges.

Monbiot claims that, despite the attempts to blame China for the Copenhagen fiasco, the real culprit was Barack Obama who sabotaged any meaningful deal out of fear of having to fight America's "bought and paid for " Congress:

...Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

...Why would he do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

Cheney's Folly - Iraq's Black Gold Falls to Foreigners

It wasn't supposed to be this way. America was supposed to topple Saddam and, within 60-days, have a proxy Iraqi government in place and ready to start signing long-term oil leases with American petro-giants.


That was so 2003, this is the dawn of 2010 and those oil leases are finally signed, just not with American companies having the leg up Cheney had in mind. Pepe Escobar, writing for Asia Times Online details where Cheney's plan went sideways and predicts Maliki may soon be seen by America's far right as the new Saddam.

Klueless On Kandahar

When you hear Canada's political and military leadership wax eloquently on Afghanistan, it's like listening to kids telling Santa what they want for Christmas. They know what they want and when they want it and they just want it to come down the chimney.

Do you want to really know what's in play in Kabul and what the future of that region might just look like? If so, read this.

But, but, but... wasn't this supposed to be about a war against Islamists, you know, the Taliban? In your dreams. No, it's a geo-political rivalry among India and Pakistan and China that may just see the entire region reshaped, re-aligned. No matter how many fine young soldiers we feed into that gaping maw, we're not going to resolve any of that.

Ho, ho, ho and Merry Christmas

Canada's Copenhagen Clown Car

Harper EnviroFraud Jim Prentice is a scream. He'll decide how not to do his job and says everybody else should fall in line with his rank dereliction of duty.

Literally bursting with glee at the nonexistant Copenhagen Accord the EnviroScammer paused to take a swipe at provincial leaders who he claimed were "working against their own country" by dissing the feds at the climate summit.

“I think when we are on the international stage, Canadians need to bear in mind that we are there as a country, speaking as a country.”

Excuse me? Say that again? You and Harper were there and that makes you Canada, speaking for Canadians? That's simply not true. You and your boss are deviants. The Canadian people have said time and again they want action on climate change. You and Harp deviate from what Canadians want, from their clearly stated view and that makes you deviants. Don't bitch at Jean Charest. He's not a deviant, you are. Just because you're trying your hardest to dodge your job, don't complain if Charest doesn't follow suit.

Good for Charest because, unlike you two deviants, he's standing up for Quebec and for Canada. Best of all, the Quebec premier is standing up to you. This is how he put it, "In Copenhagen, the federal government has the power to sign treaties, but it doesn't have the power to bind provincial governments to them."

Besides Jimbo, it's not like you've got a signed treaty. You didn't even come back from Copenhagen with anything you could sign. You came back with precisely what you were hoping to get - nothing.

EnviroFraud Prentice and the Non-Existant Copenhagen Accord

Harper EnviroMin Jimbo Prentice has got to lay off the pills. After he and Harper were sidelined into irrelevance at Copenhagen, Prentice returned to announce that he's pleased with the "Accord."

What Accord Jim? Where is this Accord? Who signed it? What are the short term (2020) and medium term (2050) emission cuts in this Accord? Why did China demand that Europe actually scale back the emission reductions they wanted to implement by 2050?

When you hear of a cheap huckster, a fixer and a shill like Jim Prentice beaming over a supposed climate change "accord" you can bank on the fact that there is no accord and Jimbo is just dandy with that.

A Fair & Equitable Approach to Carbon Reduction

Nations that are disingenuous about cutting greenhouse gas emissions are those that play with percentages and baselines. That, unfortunately, is the approach most in vogue today. What's wrong with it? Plenty.

Beside the fact shown at Copenhagen that the "percentage and baseline" approach, or PB, leads to endless squabbling, suffocation by negotiation, it also preserves the status quo on per capita emissions. In the industrialized West, our per capita emissions tend to run about twice to three times that of developing nations and upwards of ten times that of Third World states. In other words, we're hogging far more than our fair share of the atmospheric carrying capacity when taken on a strictly per capita basis. If we start talking about reductions that don't address that per capita disparity, then we're simply locking in our unfair share.

Germany and the G77 Third World nations want a strictly per capita approach, worldwide. Work out the planet's remaining carbon carrying capacity, annualize that, count all the people, and then award each nation an emissions budget calculated according to its population. That sounds fair, but is it? I don't think so, at least not entirely.

What's unfair about the strictly per capita approach is that it "rewards" countries that have become dangerously overpopulated - China and India for example with several countries in Africa hell bent on catching up. Overpopulation is its own form of environmental scourge that extends into realms beyond global warming. With our planet's population already beyond Earth's resources carrying capacity, we're rapidly exhausting our natural ability to feed and fuel overpopulated societies. This manifests itself in soil exhaustion (desertification), water and air pollution, freshwater depletion - any number of intractable problems. Rewarding overpopulation by per capita allocations is no answer to anything.

So, if PB doesn't work and PC isn't really workable either, how do we find an equitable balance? I think I have a solution, one that I've not yet raised. A modified per capita approach. Here's how it would work.

We know the carbon targets man has to reach. Let's take the total population of the world, X, and the total landmass of the world, Y, and reach an average, landmass per person, or Z. Divide your overall carbon budget by Z to reach a final number which would be the carbon budget per man/hectare. You then work out each nation's landmass and multiply that with the carbon budget per man/hectare to fix that nation's carbon budget.

What's fair about that? It doesn't reward overpopulation nor should it. We've all come to realize the environmental value of landmass preserved in its natural state, particularly forests. They're enormous carbon sinks and we desperately want to arrest deforestation. It seems to me that the nations with the greatest remaining forestlands are, if anything, underpopulated and that deserves recognition.

Take Canada, for example. We have a per capita carbon footprint nearly identical to America's but - and this is a huge "but" - we also have vast tracts of boreal forest and tundra, enormous carbon sinks. Our population density is well less than one-tenth that of America's. There is no equitable way to treat the two countries identically.

Canada is the second-largest nation in the world by landmass. China, which is smaller in territory, has one-thousand, three-hundred million people compared to our paltry thirty-six million. (Think of it this way. The have Thirteen Dollars, we have Thirty Six cents) Their per capita emissions may still be just one-third or ours but, by hectare, they're vastly higher than ours.

A simple landmass calculation wouldn't be fair but a global population divided by global landmass factor strikes a fair balance that roughly redresses disparities in both per capita emissions and population density. It also provides a handy yardstick that we're going to need to address looming problems such as how to allocate dwindling open ocean fish stocks.

What I'm saying is that China and India both have to depopulate and African nations heading in that same direction have to stop. As I've written several times, when I was born the earth's population had just reached an all-time record of two-billion. Today we're at nearly seven-billion. We're already well beyond our planet's carrying capacity and we have to learn to live within the finite limits that Earth provides. We have to grow - smaller, smaller and cleaner. At the end of the day, that's the bottom line. And we all know it.

Ignatieff, You Idiot! That's Not How You Respond to Harper on Climate Change

The ever feckless Michael Ignatieff has spoken, revealing yet again why he's not up to the job of leading the Liberal Party of Canada. Igs should have been prepared for the failure of Copenhagen and he should have been ready to come out charging against Harper.

Harper, quite predictably, slimed his way out of the Copenhagen climate change summit by blowing Big Oil with this line: “What will be most critical for Canada in terms of filling out the details of our regulatory framework will be the regulatory framework of the United States. If the Americans don't act, it will severely limit our ability to act. But if the Americans do act, it is essential that we act in concert with them.”

In case you haven't figured that out, what Harper said was code for, "I'm off the hook, I can scam this for years to come and that's exactly what I'm fixing to do." Harper can say that because he can get away with it. No one has the guts to stand up to him and call him a fraud.

So, after having been invited to shred Harper's blustering, what does the Liberal Party's Michael Ignatieff have to say? He responds with this: “We cannot allow Canadian environmental policy to be entirely dependent on American politics. We need an aggressive, made in Canada climate-change plan now. And we're willing to work with Mr. Harper on this if his government brings forward a serious plan that treats our provinces fairly and includes pollution reductions for all sectors.”

That's it? That's what we get for letting Iggy put Dion down? That's leadership? Does this guy not know how to go on the attack? Is he running scared of Harper? Shouldn't he be off somewhere writing a book or something?

Why doesn't he attack Harper when the scoundrel is vulnerable? Why let the guy off the hook with vague arguments over emission reductions that will never materialize while Harper has the key to 24 Sussex Drive anyway? Why not turn to this Tory jerk's abject refusal to recognize the change that's already happening and already enroute, his refusal to institute adaptation policies the far north and both coasts will need in the near future? Harper won't do that. He can't, because that would acknowledge the gravity of the threat and leave him having to explain why he's doing Sweet Fanny Adams about it.

If Iggy can't grasp how to kick Harper straight to the curb on this issue then he's worse than useless as leader of the Liberal Party. Don't give us bullshit about "working with Harper on a serious plan" when, unless you're brain dead, you have to realize Harper has no intention of doing anything remotely like that. Harper will eat Ignatieff's lunch if he goes that route. Look how he played the Liberal leader for a sucker on the Pinata Budget.

I'm sorry but Michael Ignatieff is but a meandering political disaster. You don't get moments like this all that often and, entirely true to course, he blew it. If the roles were reversed, Harper would never have passed up this opportunity.

For god's sake Mike, you'll never land a punch if you can't figure out how to throw one. Unless, of course, you're on Harper's side on climate change. Maybe that you chose this week to issue another ringing endorsement of the Athabasca Tar Sands I shouldn't bother positing the question.

Is The Copenhagen Glass 90% Empty or 10% Full?

With all due respect to the optimistic take at DeSmogBlog, I'm siding with The Guardian in viewing the supposed agreement reached in the dwindling hours of the Copenhagen summit a failure.

With 192 countries finally massed for two weeks of deliberations they needed to sink a basket, at least one, and they didn't.

Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, was scathing: "This deal will definitely result in massive devastation in Africa and small island states. It has the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It's nothing short of climate change scepticism in action.

"It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush."

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: "The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Ed Miliband [UK climate change secretary] is among the very few that come out of this summit with any credit. It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen."

Lydia Baker, Save the Children's policy adviser said: "By signing a sub-standard deal, world leaders have effectively signed a death warrant for many of the world's poorest children. Up to 250,000 children from poor communities could die before the next major meeting in Mexico at the end of next year."

There was indeed some progress but this summit needed to produce more than "some" progress. It very much needed to generate something concrete, something to keep the momentum going. That simply didn't happen.

The Most Useless Christmas Present of 2009

Here it is, ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, the Card Game. Yeah, that's right. Rock, paper, scissors - the game kids have played since my Dad's youth and probably well before that. The difference between our game and this game? Ours was free. Ours involved trying to guess what the other player was likely to do. And ours usually involved a slap to the loser's hand or wrist.

Today's version comes with a box and everything. When I spotted this at the mall I first guessed that it must be for kids who don't have hands. It didn't take long to figure out you needed hands to hold cards. So, what's the deal? It looks like they've come up with a brilliant way to take all the fun out of the original version and soak parents for the privilege to boot.

What's the most useless, dumbest gift you've noticed this year? This should be good.

A Climate Deal at Copenhagen?

Word is out of a climate change agreement of sorts reached at Copenhagen by five countries, including China and the US. Details haven't been released but it is being reported that the emissions cuts are well short of what the United States and Europe have been proposing.

If there is a breakthrough it might be in China's reluctant agreement to a system of independent monitoring of each country's emissions reductions.

Given that a study released this week showed that even a binding deal that met the emissions cut targets prior to Copenhagen would still result in warming in excess of 3 degrees Celsius and that the 'agreement' being touted today suggests a weakening of those initial targets, the cuts envisioned likely won't be effective at avoiding runaway global warming. What seems to be unfolding is precisely the scenario James Hansen feared most from COP15 - a pact that doesn't go far enough but will at the same time thwart further effective emissions cuts.

A Climate Deal at Copenhagen?

Just What Canada Needs - A "Pro-Democracy Movement"

Lawrence Martin fired a shot across Harper's bow. Then Jim Travers did the same. Now it's the Ottawa Citizen's veteran pundit, Sue Riley, proclaiming that Canada needs our own "Pro-Democracy Movement."

One by one they're finally finding the courage to stand up and denounce Stephen Harper as a tyrant, a despot, a dictator who has corrupted the decency of Parliament and quite deliberately gored Canadian democracy in the process.

From the Stalinist way he reorganized the PMO, to the way he has treated the public service - civil and armed - as institutions he doesn't just administer but things he owns, tools to advance his interests, not Canada's - Harper has soiled parliamentary democracy. Aided to no end by an incompetent opposition, Harper has dragged our country dangerously to the far right - that place where unaccountability, deception, secrecy, duplicity and betrayal thrive. He has surrounded himself with a coterie of minions, suited and uniformed, who serve him as Boss. They're not as adept at it as their Boss which is why they so often say such stupid things and so clumsily trip over their transparent lies.

Sue's right, we do need a Pro-Democracy Movement because neither the NDP nor the Liberals are doing the job. We need new leadership, not a college professor but a shipyard worker, someone with the cojones to stand up to that schoolyard bully and clock him right between the eyes.

The Landmine Iraq Can't Defuse

There is one unresolved issue that is as potentially lethal to the future of Iraq today as it was long before Saddam was toppled. It's the fate of Kirkuk and its surrounding oil fields that account for about 25% of Iraq's known oil reserves.

Kirkuk was a Kurdish city before Saddam instituted a policy of cleansing it of Kurds and settling Arabs in their place. When Saddam fell there was a bit of reverse ethnic-engineering that saw Arabs vacate the city and Kurds returned.

The Kurds occupy the northern part of Iraq under what's known as the Kurdish Autonomous Region. Call it a form of "sovereignty association" if you like. They've always been adamant that Kirkuk was theirs and, after restoring the Arab/Kurd balance to their liking, have been calling for a referendum to settle the question. It's a referendum that kept being postponed to avoid tearing Iraq into pieces. That would look something like an Arab Iraq and a Kurdistan in the north but some feel the south would itself break along religious lines leaving a Shiite Arab south, a Sunni Arab central state and Kurdistan in the north.

The Kurds still want their referendum and they want those Kirkuk oil fields and they're getting impatient. Ever since Desert Storm the Kurds have been under the protection of the Americans. In the early years after Saddam was removed, the Kurdish north was America's only safe haven within Iraq. The Kurds have good reason to expect the Americans will side with them now over Kirkuk.

But, it's not that easy. It's never that simple. America made a bucketful of costly blunders when it occupied and administered Iraq. One was to take the Kurds for granted. Bremer assumed they would go along with whatever he wanted and they didn't. Instead they forced the new Iraqi constitution to incorporate their own Kurdish constitution. That was tantamount to screwing the fuze into the grenade.

The Kurdish constitution, drafted with the guidance of controversial American foreign service staffer Peter Galbraith, sets out the groundwork for the whole Kirkuk business and for Kurdish independence. With the advent of a post-Saddam Iraqi government the Kurds realized they had more to gain by remaining within Iraq provided the Kirkuk issue went their way. If they separate they face the prospect of a very hostile, very well armed Turkey on their border.

But, but, but - this is politics. The Americans have cooled to the Kurds and their dreams of independence and the last thing they want is anybody - Kurd or Arab - to pull the pin on Kirkuk and blow Iraq all to hell. The neighbourhood is just too dangerous for that with the Shia south drawn into Iran's orbit, the Sunni centre aligning with Syria and the Kurdish north at war with their Arab countrymen to the south as well as Turkey.

So intractable has the problem become that there's talk of a United Nations mandate to administer Kirkuk. There are equally vexing problems concerning how Iraq's oil wealth is to be apportioned and whether, as the Kurdish constitution insists, undeveloped oil fields within the Kurdish Autonomous Region (including Kirkuk) belong to the Kurds alone. Finally, there's the thorny problem of remilitarization of Iraq so that it can defend itself against its neighbours if need be. Again, the problem is how to arm the Iraqi Arabs without allowing them to become a threat to the northern Kurds.

For all the hoopla about the "Surge" and how Iraq has been pacified, none of these key issues has been resolved. Not one. And they're not going away. If anything they're worsening. One thing is clear. America has a lot to do before it can leave Iraq.

Monstrous!

What kind of animal would deface this monument to man's barbarism and human suffering by stealing this sign? The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign was stolen from the gate of the Auschwitz death camp sometime between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m. today. Museum staff are quite properly calling it a "desecration."

Polish authorities have offered a paltry 5,000 zloty reward (roughly $2000).

That Sure Doesn't Look Like Yoko To Me

Apparently some church in NZ has sparked a wave of fury for putting this on a billboard. Yawn.

It's Not Just Harper & Company, It's the Media Too

Have you ever thought how the collapse of the Canadian mainstream media played an instrumental role in today's Afghan detainee torture scandal? The parliamentary press corps appears to have Harper and Hillier under a microscope at this moment but who are they to interpret what happened and what went wrong and who is to blame?

Colvin's 16-page brief on the mistreatment, including torture and unexplained disappearance, of Afghan detainees unleashed a Tsunami of controversy. We're all going tsk, tsk, this and tsk, tsk, that. We should be asking why is this so controversial now, as 2009 draws to an end? The answer to that question explains a great deal about how these events came to pass at all.

As many of you have read by now, The Globe's Lawrence Martin has just this day written a nice piece encapsulating how Stephen Harper has subverted Canadian democracy. It's a good column but there's precious little detail that's new to be found in it, few insights beyond the obvious. About the most remarkable thing about Martin's article is that he's the first one to draw these painful links in the four years Harper has been abusing power. Let's hope Martin's is not the last.

But this item is about Afghanistan and about the torture of detainees and the role Canada's media played in enabling that to happen. One of the fantasies that Harper's minions have been spinning is that they had no idea about this until they read about it in The Globe & Mail in 2007. What, really? What kind of preposterous bullshit is that?

Most of what we've read about the Afghan mission from Canadian papers has come in the form of jingoistic journo-snot from third-raters like Christie Blatchford and the Star's Rosie DiManno, two complete duds in a field littered with unexploded reportage. They went out and got embedded with the troops and they talked to Captain this and Sergeant that and they came back and preached their Gospel to the Gullible, angrily reproaching informed, intelligent perspective as a rank betrayal of the troops. They did it, again and again and again, which proves that their editors were all for it.

These people weren't journalists, they certainly weren't war correspondents. They were like concert reviewers treating Canada's Afghan mission as though it was some sort of "gig." It's hard to fault them for that, at least initially, because Canada's involvement in America's Af/Pak war began in a way that sort of resembled a rock concert. We showed up over there as the roadies, providing rear echelon security in Kabul. Then their guitar section split to play in Iraq and we got invited to put in a cameo appearance with the band. We signed on to play one set, in Kandahar, that was clocked to end in 2007. Then we agreed to stay for another set, to end in 2009. Finally we got ourselves into a quasi-open ended committment notionally supposed to end in 2011- wink, wink. With wilfully blind journos like Blatchford and DiManno, the media lost the significance of the transition in Canada's role in Afghanistan and that suited Harper's and Hillier's purposes perfectly.

Colvin's 16-page blockbuster is replete with corroborative sources to verify his claims. Most of those sources - the UN, the US, the NGO stuff - were readily accessible to any Canadian reporter who could be bothered to enquire. And there were almost none of those, Graeme Smith perhaps being one exception.

The Canadian media couldn't see the war for the battle, they couldn't see the forest for the trees. They never really grasped the nature of an insurgency. They never understood the distinction between a political and a military war. They never delved deep enough to realize that the war we were fighting in Afghanistan was a myriad of political, military and criminal battles all being played out simultaneously. Instead they presented us a GI Joe war that never really existed.

Remember Operation Medusa a few years back, Canada's glorious battle to destroy the Taliban in Panjwai? Our generals boasted that they had thousands of Taliban trapped, surrounded. Our cordon was so airtight there was no rush to close with the insurgents. Our top general bragged that the Taliban were trapped and were left to chose whether to surrender or die.

While that battle was underway, I corresponded with Jonathon Landay of McClatchey Newspapers, a guy who has been in Afghanistan since he ran those hills with the Mujads fighting the Soviets. I asked Landay what he thought of this ridiculous claim that we had these guys trapped. He responded noting that this region was laced with vineyards and orchards all of which featured deep irrigation ditches. Landay predicted that the Taliban would just wait until dark, grab their weapons and anything else of value, and simply walk through our lines, undetected, through those ditches. He said it was what they've always done. He was right.

When Canadian units did finally move in there was no fighting. The bad guys were gone. So, since they weren't there to be killed or captured, the narrative changed. We'd already killed them all. Oh, who knows? Maybe Allah Raptures his people up too.

The point I'm trying to make is that the Canadian media were out of their league in covering the Afghan war from the start and they still are. Worse, instead of playing catchup and taking the time to learn what was really going on and what that really meant, they sent hack reporters over to cover battles and not the war, reporters who understood as much about war as Roxanne Pulitzer knew about playing the trumpet. And so they missed the war and, through them, we missed it too. And so Colvin's revelations caught us by surprise. And so Harper and his minions, civilian and military, thought we were so damned ignorant all they had to do was deny and viciously attack this man's credibility.

Had the media done their job, little if anything in Colvin's report ought to have taken us by surprise. Then again, had the media done their job and covered the Af/Pak war properly, Harper and his gang would have known that this issue was potentially explosive. They ignored it because our media led them to believe they could get away with it and that was not an unreasonable assumption.

And what does this say of the opposition? Nothing flattering. They could easily have made good the media's failure. They could have brought this issue out in public, if not in 2006, in 2007 in any case. They didn't have to wait until Mr. Colvin appeared in 2009.

This isn't criticizing from hindsight. This information was out there in 2006. People were chronicling it, people were talking about it, people were analyzing it and what it all meant when put together. People were taking the time to inform themselves about the Dostums and Fahims, the Hekmatyars and Haqqanis, the Karzais and the Gul Agha Shirzais, all that scum - on our side and on theirs.

The whole business is just a goddamned travesty. There are no clean hands from this filth.

The Druggies In Afghanstan are Our Guys, Not the Taliban

Asia Times Online has scrutinized the UN Drugs and Crime Office's latest report, "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," to discover that it blatantly distorts just who is feeding off Afghanistan's opium trade. Hint, it's not the Taliban.

The Taliban does get opium money, about 4% of the total, around $125-million. That's a healthy piece of change but the UN officials found it's still only 10-15% of the insurgents' overall funding. 85% of their money comes from non-opium sources.

Afghan farmers pocket 21% of the opium haul but the remaining 75%, "is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers - in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade."

That ties in neatly with the recent story in Harper's about the Canadian military's buddy, the Afghan Border Police commandant in Spin Boldak, the same guy we know is one of the biggest drug traffickers in the Kandahar/Helmand/Pakistan border region.

Shouldn't we at least be getting a cut of the action? It seems to me that a lot of people are getting awfully rich due in no small part to our efforts at keeping the insurgency from blowing up into a business-disrupting civil war.

So, cutting out the farmers, that would make it 75% to our side, the good guys, and a paltry 4% to the Taliban, the bad guys. And who says Karzai & Company don't have a good thing going for them - thanks to us.

Obama's Silent Surge

The 30,000 additional troops Barack Obama has ordered to Afghanistan could be dwarfed by another surge of up to 56,000 more civilian "contractors."

America's contractors have been the hidden Afghan army for years just as they were/are in Iraq. When added in to the total of US forces, the Pentagon actually fielded a considerably larger force in Afghanistan than the Soviets had there at their peak. Now with a reinforcement upwards of 86,000 military/civilian personnel, the combined US contingent will eclipse the Soviet effort.

There was a remarkable story on CTV National News this evening. Afghan Generalissimo Stan McChrystal was in Ottawa where, according to the rarely-reliable, marginally-intelligible Conservative Television Network, he vowed to "defeat" the Taliban by this time next year. That's defeat as in D-E-F-E-A-T, as in "game over-we win"! Wait a second, I've got it. McChrystal is simply going to send them personnel carriers full of greenbacks and relabel them "contractors." Brilliant.

Meanwhile Lloyd himself barely stifled a yawn as he launched into the obligatory Afghan torture/Richard Colvin clip. In the highest Conservative Television Network standard it was craftfully edited to have Colvin appear first followed by a re-run of old video of Hillier denying claims Colvin made the first time. Cheese and grease, all in the same story.

Returning to McChrystal, he did mention that he'll defeat the Taliban within the next twelve months but there's a catch. He'll do it by next Christmas provided the Afghan government is purged of corruption by then and Pakistan relocates to some other shitty corner of the world.

Shit, oh dear.

China Says No Copenhagen Climate Accord

The news service Reuters is reporting that China has told UN climate change delegates that there'll be no deal coming out of the Copenhagen summit. Instead the Chinese have recommended the attending nations issue, "a short political declaration of some sort."

The collapse of COP15 has seemed inevitable since the developing nations and G77 countries turned angry and suspicious of the motives and agenda of the industrialized West. Failure at Copenhagen could leave in its wake a legacy of distrust that would make it much more difficult to get an effective, global agreement in the future.

Opponents of climate change action - the Denialists, the fossil fuel industry and their bought and paid for political helpers - won't pass up the opportunities to build on their perceived success in a Copenhagen failure.

The Ball Is In Your Court Harper, Even a Conservative Can See That.

Even loyal Conservatives who can claim any sense of self-respect and decency must be troubled at the manner in which they have been persistently and outrageously deceived by their prime minister and his political and military underlings on the Afghan detainee torture affair.

We heard what Richard Colvin said and then we heard just the opposite, outright denials and dismissals from a coterie of Con artists including Harper cabinet ministers and top generals. Then, today, Colvin releases a 16-page indictment laying out the blatant lies and coverups these blackguards invoked as their smokescreen. Their response? Nothing to see here, move on.

Safely retired ex-general Michel Gauthier says there's "no substantive new information" in Colvin's retort. That hardly sounds like a denial. Besides, says Gauthier, the accountable cabinet ministers should have been those who, in December, 2005 created the policy. Not the cabinet ministers and generals who, in 2006, 2007 and afterward knew or ought to have known what was happening and did nothing or, worse, even rallied to support one of the torturers.

If the extensive detail furnished by Mr. Colvin in this letter wasn't new information to Gauthier, he must have known it all along. He must've known it when he and his cronies dummied up before the Commons committee.

MacKay's greaseball secretary Laurie Hawn took the most despicable low road, throwing up allegations that the government's critics were accusing Canadian soldiers of war crimes. What manner of cowardly filth is that man?

The nice thing is that Colvin's rebuttal is long and packed with rich detail. Even a reporter of the calibre of today's Canadian media can see where it leads, where to look and how to quickly verify just who is telling the truth and, better yet, who is lying and why.

What's most telling is that Colvin has made such a substantive reply; he has furnished meaningful corroboration and probative sources for his claims. What do we get from the other side; from Harper, O'Connor, Hillier, Gauthier and MacKay? They're the guys with all the documents. They have all the advantages when it comes to proving what they say. Yet they still stand there like a bunch of thugish goons and say "we didn't know anything about it" so go away.

Even if you're a really gullible Conservative, it's obvious that Colvin has presented a case that Harper, O'Connor, MacKay, Hillier and Gauthier have to meet. But they're in too deep and they know it and now all that's left to them is to run for cover.

Just In Time for Christmas

Can't figure out what to get for your Dad, your Brother, your Son? Here it is, just in time for Christmas



Available at Tory Toys'R Us at a strip mall near you.

The Opposition's First Real Blunder

I was as angry as anyone when Harper, aided and abetted by the GG, prorogued parliament last year. But, I thought, well at least it presented the new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, an invaluable opportunity to come up with a Liberal stimulus budget, a genuine alternative to place before the Canadian public when Parliament returned.

So what did the Leader (as so many of you chose to call him) make of this rare opportunity? Well he saw it as the perfect opportunity to finish his book about his mother's family. Just what Canada needed when we were facing a global economic meltdown that had the Harper regime totally off-balance and looking very wobbly.

When the schoolyard bell rang signalling the end of recess, the Leader came back empty-handed (except for the book of course). There being no passable alternative to Harper's utterly pathetic "throw a deck on the cottage" stimulus budget, the Leader had no choice but to support it, to make it his own too. And that was the birth of the "Pinata Budget".

Dismayed as I was with Harper, I was even more disappointed that the Liberal leader had blundered so badly in his neglect of the recession issue. Chantal Hebert makes the same point in today's TorStar:

Take the handling of the recession: It could be argued that it is hard to make enemies by doling out billions of public dollars. But producing an economic plan to which the Liberals could not come up with a comprehensive alternative really made a political difference this year.

Despite the recession, the economy never really emerged as a wedge issue this past year, even after the Liberals tired of supporting the government.

I don't raise this bit of recent history to flog Iggy again for screwing up a golden opportunity. I raise it because I don't want a repeat of Igsomnia on climate change. He can't blunder again. He can't let this one also slip through his fingers. Harper's like the schoolyard bully. You'll always be his bitch until you stand up and clock him straight between the eyes. If Iggy's prepared to just keep handing over the Liberals' lunch money, you need a new leader.

No Wonder Hillier Has Dummied Up on Torture

Safely retired former general Rick Hillier recently said he hasn't been following the Afghan torture scandal. Yes, sure, and the sun isn't going to rise in the morning. There might be another reason for the Big Cod's laryngitis on Afghan torture and just what top Canadians knew about it. It might have something to do with the fact that the guy they've tried so furiously to discredit has decided to fight back and he's willing to name names and offer up documents we've only seen blacked out.

In a 16-page letter intended to rebut his critics' claims, Richard Colvin - who used to be Canada's second top civilian staffer in Afghanistan - has laid it out, chapter and verse. Yes they knew, at the top echelons of DND and as far up as the PMO, and they did nothing about it. Worse yet, he contends, when Afghanistan-based bureaucrats sounded warnings about the oh-so bent governor of Kandahar province, DND pushed back to defend the animal. He was their guy. From TorStar:

The new allegation is contained in a two-year-old report by Richard Colvin, the whistleblower foreign service officer. Colvin's disgust that Canada would support a "known human-rights abuser" was palpable and formed the most incendiary paragraphs of the report. References to Khalid were entirely blacked out in the version of the report publicly released to the Military Police Complaints Commission.

But an uncensored version of the end-of-mission report was shown for the first time to The Canadian Press on a confidential basis.

"As far as I know, Canada has never suggested to (President Hamid) Karzai that Asadullah be replaced," says the memo, dated Oct. 24, 2007.

"In the one meeting where the subject was discussed, in July 2006, it was the president [Karzai] who raised the issue; Canada defended the governor, thereby ensuring his continued tenure."

The uncensored report sheds further light on Colvin's testimony last month before a special House of Commons committee, where he stated the governor was considered a "bad actor" on human rights.

It also makes clear the division between the Canadian military, which supported Khalid, and diplomats, who became increasingly vocal about allegations of corruption, drug-running and prisoner abuse.

...The warnings about Khalid – whose brazen decision to display the battered dead body of a revered Taliban leader to local Afghan media, before refusing to return it for a proper burial, triggered a massive bombing campaign in Kandahar city in the spring of 2007 – were heard loud and clear in Ottawa.

Concerns were serious enough to be raised at the highest levels of the federal government, foreign affairs and defence sources said.

A meeting was called in December 2006 in Ottawa to discuss the matter. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's national security adviser, Margaret Bloodworth, attended the session, sources have said.

...throughout 2007 the warnings kept getting louder.

A foreign affairs source said a memo sent by Colvin in the winter of 2007 was searing in its criticism and indicated the governor was corrupt, dangerous, self-serving and deeply unpopular with Afghans.

One Afghan government official apparently pleaded with Canadian diplomats and police officers for Khalid's removal during a meeting in February 2007, said the source, who has seen a document outlining the meeting. The official made a direct request to Canada to intervene with the president, the source said.

It's no wonder Harper's MPs are boycotting the Commons hearings into this business. They must know the guys who sit at their head table have a lot to hide and even more to lose unless these hearings are derailed. It's too bad Hillier had to go all the way to Afghanistan to deal with scumbags when there were so many just a short walk away from his office right in Ottawa.

One thing seems pretty clear. If Colvin's allegations are true, and a steadily increasing number of officials are speaking to to say they are, then our prime minister is a lying piece of dirt and so are a number of his key deputies.

What's It Going to Take To Make Iggy a Liberal Leader?

This man's political instincts are - abysmal. With the Copenhagen summit underway, Iggy managed to come out with another ringing endorsement of the Athabasca Tar Sands.

If there was ever a Liberal Party leader on the wrong side of an issue, this is it. Perhaps a Liberal Party leader who recklessly plunged Canada into the Iraq War would've been a bad - oh wait a minute.

The Conservative carbon plan leaked to the CBC reveals that whatever emissions reduction plan Harper comes up with, his Athabasca Tar Sands are in for big, possibly huge exemptions. Harper EnviroStooge Jim Prentice pretty much admitted that to a CBC reporter today.

So, here's the deal. The Filthy Energy Superpower plan is still on. The Tories want the Tar Sands expanded threefold by 2020. The CBC has crunched the numbers from Harper's backroom plan and has figured out that Canada probably won't achieve any emissions cuts at all if Harper pulls this off.

Ontario and Quebec smell a rat and so they should. Those exemptions are going to have to be made up by other provinces and that isn't going to be Manitoba or Prince Edward Island. If Ignatieff is looking for an issue on which he can actually stand up for Canada, this is it. The country needs just that, now and in a big way. It needs a real Liberal leader. This is Michael Ignatieff's big chance to show he's up to the job.

Look Alberta, It's Your Oil But It's Not Your Atmosphere!

Even before the cramped, shaking hand of Stephen Harper inks the next climate change agreement his EnviroStooge Jim Prentice has let the cat out of the bag. When Harper does get around to announcing this country's GHG emissions reductions targets, the Tar Sands are going to be let off the hook.

The CBC got its hands on a Tory cabinet policy paper or proposal that would largely exempt Athabasca from emissions cuts:

The Conservative government has not ruled out giving special breaks to oilsands companies when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, Environment Minister Jim Prentice acknowledged Tuesday.

...The draft proposal suggests that the oil and gas industry would have to cut 15 megatonnes of emissions, rather than the 48 megatonnes proposed in the Turning the Corner plan.
It also says projected growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands in northern Alberta will be 165 per cent by 2020 and proposes to cut that growth — not emissions — by 10 per cent.

The proposal raises questions about how the Tories could cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 — a target they insist they can reach — while weakening the targets in the oil and gas sector.

The CBC story posted on their website brought the predictable "angry man" outrage from Albertans. How dare anyone meddle in Alberta's affairs? Why the province should separate. The rest of us are all a bunch of gullible dupes trying to hold Alberta down.

Here's the problem. The tar is Alberta's, no argument. But the greenhouse gas emission from the Tar Sands project are Alberta's too. The atmosphere into which Alberta currently emits those greenhouse gases isn't Alberta's. That atmosphere belongs to no one and to everyone - around the world. Alberta has no greater right to foul that atmosphere than anyone else.

Just as soon as Alberta comes up with a way to keep all those emissions safely in Alberta, great. All of those emissions. If they think they can pump all that CO2 into the ground, be my guest. If they're bound and determine to poison their groundwater, I suppose that's not my business.

This idea that Alberta has some unfettered right to foul the atmosphere is, well that's trailer trash thinking.

When Your Friends Bet Against You

When you're in a drawn out fight with no end in sight and even your friends start betting on the other side, it's time to consider your options.

That pretty much describes our predicament in Afghanistan. We're fighting a fight we cannot win. The rules are not in our favour. We win when, and only when, we destroy our opponent, the rebel/insurgents. They win by nothing more than not being utterly destroyed, by surviving, by simply running out the clock. That's the war we're fighting in a nutshell.

Eight years on we don't have much, if anything, to show for our efforts. Our enemy, on the ropes in the first round, has bounced back and has grown and spread its control over many parts of the countryside. Our enemy has become such a threat that we're mustering our forces and falling back in defence of the cities - "defence" being the operative word.

We demand things of the guy we placed into power that he has no intention of delivering. From time to time he angrily ridicules us even as he plays us for all he can get. The worst of the gang of warlords who once made themselves scarce are back, confident they're safe from even being tried for their own wanton cruelty and butchery. These guys aren't sticking their necks out to help us help them. They're laying low, watching from the sidelines, planning their own next moves.

But the guys who are really betting against us are our very best allies in the War on Terror, the government and military leadership of Pakistan. They're not even pretending any more. From The New York Times:

The Obama administration wants Pakistan to turn on Mr. Haqqani, a longtime asset of Pakistan’s spy agency who uses the tribal area of North Waziristan as his sanctuary. But, the officials said, Pakistan views the entreaties as contrary to its interests in Afghanistan beyond the timetable of President Obama’s surge, which envisions reducing American forces beginning in mid-2011.

...the Pakistani leadership has greeted the refrain with public silence and private anger, according to Pakistani officials and diplomats familiar with the conversations, illustrating the widening gulf between the allies over the Afghan war.

Former Pakistani military officers voice irritation with the Americans daily on television, part of a mounting grievance in Pakistan that the alliance with the United States is too costly to bear.

The core reason for Pakistan’s imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama troop surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave.

It considers Mr. Haqqani and his control of large areas of Afghan territory vital to Pakistan in the jostling for influence that will pit Pakistan, India, Russia, China and Iran against one another in the post-American Afghan arena, the Pakistani officials said.

Unless Washington can somehow get Islamabad to reverse course and do what it has never done, truly join the fight against the Taliban, our Af/Pak war is over. We lost. The only question remaining is how long it will take for us to realize it. But rest assured. We can go on bombing and shelling and machine gunning vast tracts of Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas for years yet. And we probably will.