Black Tuesday

Bush, Bush, the musical fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot!

No, that's not quite strong enough.

How about ...

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

George W.

Fuck off George. I have zero interest in abetting your desperate effort to rehabilitate your reputation and shift blame for all the current crises to the Obama administration.

There, that better sums up my disgust at knowing that tomorrow George W. Bush (arguably the most inept and demonstrably evil president in U.S. history) is flying into Calgary to give a talk at some swank $4000 a ticket reception.

According to the Globe & Mail, activists are planning to protest, and the idea's even been floated that Bush should be arrested, charged with war crimes and shipped to the Hague for prosecution. Of course, the odds of that happening in Calgary are remote. Vancouver, maybe. Or Montreal. But not Calgary. (Stampede Foundation)

One Set Of Rules For CEOs, Another For Everyone Else

Here's a great article (Salon) by author, blogger, columnist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald on the double standard of giving bonuses to AIG CEOs while demanding concessions from union workers. To recap: AIG paid out $165 million in executive bonues to its economy-destroying executives that it would not have been able to pay out had the United States government not bailed their bankrupt asses out with the rapidly dimishing wealth of its citizens, who must wonder how their taxes get blown on this kind of shit. AIG's excuse? "we have to pay them, it's in their contracts, it's the law, wah wah wah." (New York Times)

Greenwald points out unionized autoworkers had legal contracts too, but the U.S. goverment demanded those get changed as a condition of the bailout. He also points out that the United States has once again been implicated in torture (as recently as today, in fact), which oh by the way is against international law. (Washington Post)

As Greenwald so elegently puts it:

"Apparently, this "we are a country of law" concept means that hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money must be transferred to the AIG executives who virtually destroyed the financial system, but it does not mean that something must be done when high government officials get caught plainly breaking the law. What an oddly selective application of the "rule of law" this is."

Good, anger-making, bullshit-cutting-through stuff. In case you missed it up top, the link's here.

Six In The Morning

Our Monday morning annotated list o' links to things newsworthy/awful/entertaining:


1 NOT WORTHY The net worth of Canadian families has fallen 4.4 per cent, which is apparently the biggest drop on record. (Globe Amd Mail)

2 PSYCHO RAPIST DAD PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO MURDER Anger is not healthy and retribution doesn't solve anything; still, the fact this despicable thug faces a maximum sentence of 15 years if he's found innocent of murder is bonkers. He already pleaded guilty to incest, rape, coercion and false imprisonment. Let's put that into English: this evil shitpile of an alleged human being admits to locking his daughter in a basement for 24 years, making her his rape-toy and fathering seven children by her, six of whom are still alive--and he should be in jail forever. Ideally in a basement. With no windows. Chained to the wall. Christ, what a monster. (Guardian)
3 NO RED TAPE REQUIRED I'm really, really glad cops are able to bust Internet child pornographers, but is it really too much to ask ISP providers require a warrent to release users' personal information? (Toronto Star)

4 WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HALIFAX BUS DRIVERS? Two recent incidents involving transit workers, one alarming (barring Muslim woman in veil from boarding a bus), one kind of funny (bus driver attacks seal hunt protestor's toy seal). (CBC Halifax)

5 I DO MY LITTLE TURN ON THE CATWALK Japanese robotmakers introduce a sorta-human-looking fashionbot that shuffles along on permanently bent knees and looks surprised when it's supposed to be smiling. It's stupid and it barely works but we all realize this is a stepping stone to the sexbot revolution, right? And people will probably be test-humping these things inside of five years if they aren't already? The CBC online article says these things could eventually work with humans and "care for the elderly and sick". Uh huh. Just checking, don't want anyone kidding themselves about inevitable our cyborg-sex future. (CBC)

6 SHAME, SHAME ON DOG BLOG This weekend we blogged about Dick Cheney, Denmark, Curling and Mars, yet we totally missed this local story about an escaped bull that ran amok in downtown Regina and attacked a pedestrian's prosthetic arm. Apologies to our legions dissappointed readers. We'll try to do better. (Leader-Post)

This Week at City Hall

Tuesday, March 17
Executive Committee (11:45 am): Big things on the housing front this week. City administration will propose a new housing incentive policy that, if approved, will substantially enhance tax-exemption incentives for rental developments. The proposed policy also recommends providing grants for secondary suites and capital grants of $10,000 per unit of new affordable housing. In light of its recommendations in this proposed policy, city administration is also recommending financial support be given to three affordable housing projects currently underway.
Works and Utilities Committee (4 pm): Considering the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant upgrade, a 30 vehicle purchase from the province, the special tax levy for alley maintenance, the 2009 traffic signal installation program and much more.
Development Appeals Board Hearing (5:30 pm)

Wednesday, March 18
Parks and Community Services Committee (4 pm): Reviewing city administration’s recommendation to provide funding for 16 groups under the Community Capital Partnership Program. Also considering the administration's funding recommendation for another 16 groups under the 2009 Festival Funding Program. Of particular note, New Dance Horizons is slated to receive a special, one-time grant of $12,500 to resurrect the Fire & Ice Carnival for 2010.

Thursday, March 19
Regina Arts Commission (7 pm): Considering their 2008 annual report.

You can attend and present at any of these meetings. Full agendas and the reports under consideration can be found on the city's website.

What a Dick

To paraphrase Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall in their award-winning biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau "He haunts us still." (CBC)

Hack Journalism

According to the official Dog Blog counter, this is the 200th post on this blog. That gives us one up--numberwise, anyway--on the Alberta curling rink skipped by Kevin Martin. All they've managed to do is ring up a 26-game winning streak at the Brier over the last two years. Tonight, they eviscerated Manitoba's Jeff Stoughton 10-4 to claim their second consecutive Brier title. (MSN) Now, it's off to Moncton for the Men's World Championship April 3-12. Jennifer Jones, (CBC) meanwhile, will represent Canada at the Women's World Championship in Gangneung, Korea March 21-29.

Buon Compleanno!

If you did any Googling today you likely noticed the graphic commemorating the birthday of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910). He was an interesting figure, best known for sparking a controversy with respect to Mars when, after extensive observation during Earth's close encounter with the Red Planet in 1877, he announced that he had detected the presence of "canali". "Canali", in Italian, translates as "channels". But Schiaparelli's discovery was mis-translated as "canals", with the associated implication that they were not naturally occuring, but had been purposely built by "Martians" (Alicia-Logic) at some point in the planet's history. Astronomers rushed to confirm Schiaparelli's (Wikipedia) find, and to gather more detail. American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) (PlutoPortal) devoted most of his career to proving the existence of the canals -- ultimately, to no available. Although an astronomer at an observatory he founded in Arizona (Clyde Tombaugh) did discover the now sort of ex-planet Pluto (Crystal Links) in 1930.

Six in the Morning

Need another reason to believe that conservatives -- whether large or small "c" -- are powerfully out of touch with what's actually going on in the world and how to cope with it? Here are six to see you through the weekend....

1. CANADA'S SECRET SUBPRIME CRISIS: According to recent Globe and Mail research, there has been a lot more subprime loaning going on in Canada than anyone has acknowledged so far. That means there are a lot more mortgages being defaulted on and house foreclosures than we've been led to believe. Is Harper just trying to paint a rosy picture for us when he says that Canadian banks were more careful than those in the States? Or is he just clueless about how bad things really are? (Globe and Mail)

2. HARPER'S FORKED TONGUE: Apparently, behind closed doors our prime minister has been ripping into the Liberals and President Obama. Because, of course, our woes should be laid at the feet of an opposition party and a head of state who's been in power for less than three months. (Buckdog Blog)

3. THE VIDEO CTV DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE: Senator Duffy's old bosses got this video pulled from YouTube claiming it unlawfully used a snippet from their newscast. Now it's been remade with non-CTV video. What is it? A short piece showing how Harper's got a few of the facts about this economic meltdown thingy a bit wrong. (A BCer in Toronto Blog)

4. CONSERVATIVES SCRAPPING ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS: In an effort to boost development, Environment Minister Jim Prentice plans to dramatically reduce the number of projects that require federal environmental assessments. (Globe and Mail)

5. JON STEWART STILL MY HERO: The host of the Daily Show took a verbal stick to the host of CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer. Here's the video. (Mike Watkins Dot CA)

6. THAT SINKING FEELING PART III: According to recent polling data, 41% of Americans now believe that concerns about global warming are exagerrated -- that's the highest rate of skepticism this decade. They believe this despite the fact that scientists are more convinced than ever that climate change is real, our emissions are the primary cause of it, and the impacts are going to be much worse than we even recently estimated. Now, who could be responsible for this widening gulf between the public's knowledge of the issue and the scientific consensus on it? I'm looking at you National Post. (DeSmogBlog)

Denmark?

Apparently, preliminary scientific results don't support Canada's claim to have sovereignty over the North Pole. (MSN) Sounds like a bit of a clusterf***. But it's better than fighting over it, I guess, because we all know who would win that battle. (Top News)

More on the CanWest Death March

Bill Stovin's blog posts what has been the gossip around the journalistic water cooler in Regina: the L-P (or at least CanWest Global, its owners) is too broke to bring in its usual seven student journalists at half-pay (the U of R pays the other half). They're not the only media outlet to suffer hard times, but after seeing the latest L-P TV Times that ran with only one ad (from Old Fashioned Foods, who should REALLY be advertising with prairie dog) in the whole thing, I just wonder how much longer the paper will go on. I still think that the paper is profitable -- at least for now, because it seems to me that Regina's business tendencies run about five years behind the rest of the world's -- but if it's going to survive in the long term, it's got to be run in a way that the management isn't beholden to a future shorter than the next business quarter, and believes that people read newspapers -- not just look at the ads.