Case in point.

So apparently a (female) Conservative senator said “We’ve got five weeks or whatever left until G-8 starts. Shut the fuck up on this issue.”

According to The Star, “Ruth’s remarks, intended more as friendly advice than a warning, were met with gasps of disbelief and even anger…” The article’s framing makes it seem as though it wasn’t a threat, but an attempt at help. The way a complicit mother might say to an abused child, “Please, just stay in the closet for tonight.”

Which is of course more disconcerting than if it were just some loony making threats. We’ve seen that before. In this case it seems much more indicative of vindictive policy decisions, which would seem to constitute something of a pattern.

It’s true that the leading party should have some discretion over where funds go. But a leading party in a minority government needs to tread more carefully. Or should need to.

I think we’ll get the hang of this minority thing eventually, once “coalition” stops being a bad word.

Apparently today he was trashing Mother’s Day. Right before reading out a Mother’s Day ad.

Either he doesn’t have any clue what he’s doing, in which case he’s completely insane and should be transferred to a tollbooth or the back of a KFC (along with everybody who takes seriously the words that leave his face), or he does know exactly what he’s doing, in which case he’s hilarious (and everybody who takes seriously the words that leave his face should be transferred to a tollbooth or the back of a KFC). I try so hard to think it’s option 2.

It was somewhat obvious that the right wing would suggest the oil spill was a left wing ploy. If left=right in all but ideology, we should start seeing high profile left wingers suggesting the possibility that the right wing planted this bomb, for whatever reason, to make elites realize they should hate immigrants and love the military or something. We know they know the East Coast needs some straightening out.

It not just a Canadian thing.

The thing is, it’s the people most likely to be prejudiced who are also the most likely to be unquestioningly misinformed about general events.

You have to resign. You have to say “Sorry, I was drunk when I wrote that, I’m not actually a horrible person, I apologize to anyone I’ve hurt, I have had stresses in my life and will spend some time trying to recalibrate with my family. I am retarded. Oh shit, I shouldn’t have used that word, I’d better go.” shed tear

Dan Gardner writes, “The essential problem advocates of the bilingualism-on-the-bench bill have is that the court functions just fine. It is internationally admired. It is respected at home. If the presence of unilingual Anglophones is a practical problem — not merely a symbolic one — it doesn’t show in the court’s decisions. And in the end, the decisions are all that matters.”

I’m not making a point here about whether Supreme Court judges should be bilingual or not. I’m just saying the above statement is patently ridiculous. If we banned [insert ethnic group here] from [insert profession here], that particular [insert occupation here] wouldn’t suffer at all. But it would still be racist. It would still be wrong.

What is this, grade four? Who writes this stuff is one thing, but who publishes this crap? What the fuck?

“Who mistook this crap for genius?”

As recommended, I watched the PBS documentary online.

Information sure did travel slower back then.

Also Booth came off to me as a sort of Ziggy Sobotka with a tweaked religious bent.

Well it’s apparently official. Parliament’s been prorogued until March 3, 2010. Two months (and a bit) without governing.

Throughout the day there was no shortage of good reactions to the possibility of prorogation and a few of the potential effects.

Given the notably scarce conservative reaction, it struck me that this whole prorogation thing was just an idea being floated, to see the response, to see how it would play politically. Would it hurt among supporters would be the main question, since the non-supporters aren’t likely to be brought over anyhow. It seems the answer to that would be negative, given the assbackwards conclusion-first reasoning of some of the popular party dullards.

And here we are.

Does this happen elsewhere? Is this a surprisingly common thing in parliamentary democracies? I’m asking seriously, because I don’t know. But what I do know is that wherever it happens, it’s completely fucking ridiculous and seems the kind of thing we should be taking to the Ottawa streets over, though of course those of us who feel that way are also (as I’m sure the Conservatives figured) the people who have a general sense that being governed by nobody at all might be better than being governed by Harper.

Well, mark your calendars, enjoy the Olympics, and remember on March 3rd that Harper has to stop ignoring parliament, stop making us look ridiculous on climate change, and create 265,000 jobs. And that he’s just had a two month vacation and is a douchebag.

I didn’t know we were still going through the “Seasons Greetings” vs “Merry Christmas” debate in Canada.

So of course she is and always has been and so theoretically will always be a complete moron who by any rights should be an embarrassment to anyone who knows her:

MARVEL AT THE ‘ARROGANCE’ AND ‘NAIVETE’…. CNN is telling me that Sarah Palin said something on Twitter.

…the former half-term governor believes it’s “arrogant and naive” to think human activity is responsible for climate change, which she describes as “man overpowering nature.”

I’m not sure what that phrase means, exactly. It’s winter, which makes it cold in my office. I’ve turned on the heat, so I’m comfortable. Have I “overpowered nature,” or is it possible that people can take steps that alter natural conditions?

Palin added that the climate has been changing “for ions” — one assumes she means “eons,” and wasn’t actually referring to electrically charged atoms — and will continue to change, regardless of the 90 million tons of carbon emissions we put into the air every day. We have a “responsibility,” Palin added, to “responsibly develop resources for humankind, not pollute and destroy,” but humans are incapable of “altering natural change.”

What CNN did not tell me is that Palin said the exact opposite just last year, repeatedly arguing that human activity contributes to global warming, right around the time she endorsed caps on carbon emissions, which she now rejects.

I suppose the moral of the story, then, is that Sarah Palin believes Sarah Palin is “arrogant and naive.”

Since the right is so cavalier with equating things to Hitler and the Holocaust, how about this: Going Rogue should concern us as much as Mein Kempf should have. Even if we assume the ideas in it are wrongheaded, we have a responsibility to know, to not repeat the mistakes, to make sure she never has a chance to derail the world.

As a Jew, I wish it weren’t Lieberman ruining everything. At least not in such a smug way.

Chris Rock has a bit about watching for skin colour in crime reports: “Everybody waits for the film to see what colour the guy was that did the crime?… Black people are like ‘Please don’t let it be a black guy, ok?’”

When there’s some jackass spewing shit everywhere, I have to think “Please don’t let it be a Jew, ok?” Lieberman, Morris, Pipes, Goldfarb, Wolfowitz, the list goes on I’m sure.

I don’t have Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold with me (it’s in storage, i.e. at my parents’ house), but how Gold feels towards Kissinger, that’s how any aware Jew of this generation will feel towards Lieberman. He’s the worst kind of human being.

UPDATE: I have to add Bill Kristol to the list. What a jackass moron.

Maurice Vellacott appears to be a generally horrible person.

New to the list is this:

Vellacott, who was not available for further comment Monday, said in the release “a growing body of research reveals significant health problems caused by abortion,” including breast cancer, cervical injury, uterine perforations, hemorrhaging and infections. The release does not include statistics from research studies.

Of course this isn’t the kind of thing people just forget about, at least not for a few days.

In the question period, the issue was raised (here is the actual audio, the full session is available here):

Yesterday the minister responsible for status of women refused denounce the unacceptable statements made by a conservative MP who implied that abortions contributed to the development of breast cancer. Besides being wrong medically, this assertion is meant to make women feel guilty. We would expect that the minister would defend women and the right to abortion with vigour, rather than saying things worthy of Sarah Palin.

That was Nicole Demers, of the Bloc.

This was the response, from Helena Guergis, Minister of State (Status of Women):

…this member is actually fully aware that there are elected members of this house who have said very similar things at different times. Members in this house represent their constituencies and they are free to have any opinion that they choose to. It does not mean it represents the government. Please let me highlight one of our most recent achievements to protect women across this country…

(In case you’re wondering, the recent achievement (there was only one) was that the citizenship guide now informs immigrants that female genital mutilation is not tolerated here.)

I feel the shared frustration of humanity past present and future a I explain this: a fact is not something you can disagree with. When the study says one thing, you can’t just say the opposite.

Shit on science, shit on women, it must be easy when you’re so full of it.

On the bright side, what I enjoy about all of this is the use of Sarah Palin as a bookend on the acceptable limits of political ridiculousness.

Maybe not in the States where Obama is Hitler and Palin is not immediately written off by everybody, but so far as the rest of the world is concerned it looks like in the area of political discourse Palin is the real Hitler replacement so far as Godwin’s law is concerned.

David Frum is a horrible, horrible person. This is the kind of stuff maybe you think about, and then think “Wow, I guess I’m racist, I’d better remember to keep that inside,” not the kind of stuff you put in a national newspaper.

Years of reading The Onion have conditioned me to assume articles like this are a joke, but I have a feeling that’s not the case here.

Anyhow, read the article if you want to see how to come off as a complete douchebag.

I guess it’s possible that immigrants aren’t needed as much in the US as they are here, since they have enough uneducated poor people to keep things growing.