Cross Border Bombastic Weekend Disorder

TheNorth/SouthAdvantage
NationalHolidazeVille

Hey!

I just realized something pretty rare is about to begin.

Because for those of us, like me, who have one foot on each side of the 49th, a four day weekend is looming.

It's Bobby Gimby's Canada Day tomorrow, Friday July 1st.

And on Monday it's Ron Kovic's 4th of July.

Now, one of my favorite border straddlers is that old buzzard of a two-bit, tin-plated wordsmith who will sell his entire oeuvre of books from the trunk of his car if you let him, WP Kinsella.

Of course, one of Kinsella's favorite topics, amongst many other things including formerly weedy backlots in East Vancouver (see: The Alligator Report), is Baseball.

And not necessarily uncoincidentally it is also one of mine too (as is East Vancouver, because I live there now), although the stewman, Jerry Willard, and that carnival barker Stu Kehoe had a lot to do with it, what with their free tickets and endlessly inventive promotions in the late '80's back when I was still a starving gradual student.

Anyway, here's the kicker..... the here and now version of the Vancouver, almost professional, Canadians (ie. we are currently stuck with unbelievably craptacular, short-season, low 'A', barely-not-legion, junk baseball) are actually coming home from a road trip to kick-off a homestand with a 'Celebrate America' night on the 4th.

Guess I'll have to haul myself high into the bleachers atop Section 10 of Nat Bailey Stadium for that one.

Otherwise my (former) Editor will never forgive me.

But that's neither here nor there.

Guess what I'm really trying to say is......Regardless which side of the border you happen to be on at the moment......

Have a great weekend everybody!*

And if you must talk politics around the barbeque, well, look for a little common ground before, rather than after, you try to turn your idiot brother-in-law around.**

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*And if you happen to be down at Pt. Roberts you can be on any side of the line you want depending where you build your castle on the sandbar (or where you buy your ice cream cone).
**I can say that without getting in trouble because my brother-in-law is definitely not an idiot.
***And if you need material once you get rolling, go read this and this from sukabi and Sir Richard of Cranium of the AllSpinZone.
Update Sat am: That post from Sir Richard is getting a lot of plug and play, both because it is thought provoking and because Atrios fronted it this morning.

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Pourquoi?

The5thW
JustWonderingVille

And we're not talking about Larry Campbell.

After all, we are pretty darned sure we know very well why he called it quits.

And it had nothing to do with his health, Walmart, the RAV line, never ending somnolence-inducing 300 page staff reports, or even the infighting amongst the Classics and the Lights that he had to Cope with every darned day of the week.

Instead, word on the street, and the fantasy island version of Stephen Quinn's wildest dreams, has it that Mr. Campbell apparently just couldn't stand the thought of another three years of being interviewed by Rick Cluff.

****

But what we really want to know this morning is the following......

Why were the drug charges against David Basi stayed?

And why was this done in secret?

Last week.

The CBC has nothing. Mickleburg has nothing.

Heck, even Holman has nothing (yet).


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Update: OK, OK, OK - looks like that ink-stained wretch Mr. Holman took the day off from the Basi File so that he could do some real digging on into our Larry's big 'W'. And he's got good stuff here (especially the part about Campbell trying to enlist his 'friends' to support Mr. Green).

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Sometimes A Draft Is....

GobblingPituitaryGlandExtracts
LeftRight&CenterVille

....Just A Draft.

Then again, sometimes it is not.

South of 49th snarkoleptic sharpshooter Driftglass ducked into a Chicago bar last night to catch the 8:00pm speech from his fearless leader on one of the gazillion or so TV sets buzzing in the place. Unfortunately, he still hasn't found what he's looking for (warning: while he is no RudePundit, Driftglass is the former king of the komment threads over at Steve Gilliard's place so his language can be 'colourful' to say the least). Here's why:

"A lot of people were watching (at the beginning). This was, after all, a Major Prime Time Address on a matter of Great National Importance, in a room that looked to me to be loosely packed with 1-A, draft-age Bushite males. So my pal and I, we were just starting to relax into the rhythm of it, such as it was, when the signal cut off.......

Several of the teevees flickered, which was kind of weird and momentarily chilling, and then one of the barristas pulled down a HUGE white screen and fired up the projection box in the ceiling and I figured she was putting on the Major Prime Time Address of Great National Importance and I thought, “OK, well they may be kinda fascist-y here, but at least they take this seriously.”

Because it was, as I have said, a Major Prime Time blah blah blah.

Nah.

It was 8:15. And the NBA draft was on.

And every teevee, including the Very Big One, flickered a few more times, and all settled on it. And everyone just kept right on, and no one asked for any one of the 600,000 channels to be changed back to Bush and the Big Speech.......

We laughed, my friend and I, finished our beers, and left."


Now Driftglass took this to be evidence that everyone involved, Republicans included, were completely indifferent to the latest round of speechifying by the Twignoramous.

And he's probably right.

Further, it probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the Roving Halliburtonians messed up on this one re: scheduling.

But what if they didn't?

What if their real intent was to use the Twig as nothing more than a short lead-in to a very popular and glamorous draft where everyone involved hits the jackpot. In otherwords, a draft that every young kid in the country wishes they could be a part of.

A Draft.....

Popular.....

Glamorous.....

Profitable.....

Put me in coach!

I'm ready to play.........

Naw.

They wouldn't stoop to something like that.

Would they?

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Spontaneously Combustible Couplings - Not!

TheAntsGoMarching
Two-By-TwoVille

Re: Bill 38 and the morning after.

Rob Cottingham makes a very important point about the unchanged nature of his continuing relationship with his technoratically superior partner Alexandra*.

"Just checked. Defying predictions, our marriage certificate has failed to explode into a ball of flame and ash."

Now, if I could just find my marriage certificate.....If I'm not mistaken I think its hidden somewhere beneath a stack of old Bay Area Guardians underneath the sundeck.

I think.


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*Alexandra's place is here.

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Solipsistic Rumour Mongering

TheAsperSonsDoItDaily
SoWhyCan'tWeVille

While he will neither confirm nor deny that he is the investigative reporter who quit CannedWest (not even remotely)Global so that he can work unhindered as an independent on the upcoming LedgeGate Trial, Sean Holman of Public Eye has let on that he knows that it was himself that we were speculating about in that very vein very recently.

This almost, not-quite, maybe, could be I guess, non-denial denial was leaked to the Pacific Gazette earlier this morning. It has been re-posted on the comment thread attached herein.


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OK, OK, OK. So it wasn't actually 'leaked'. But what the heck, it makes for a better magical mystery tour this way. And besides, all those bc.ca-based hits that we've been garnering recently will like it better that way.

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Working For The Clampdown

WeWillTeachOurTwistedSpeech
Strummer/JonesVille

So much for Mr. Campbell's promise of cost certainty to the Trans(g)Nats:

"About 1,100 privatized B.C. health-care workers employed by Sodexho have voted 96 per cent in favour of strike action to back their contract demands.

The food service, cleaning staff and support workers are employed at hospitals and nursing homes in the Lower Mainland, Fraser Valley, Victoria and the Sunshine Coast."


You might remember these folks. They used to work for us and we used to pay them a decent wage for their labour. In turn, they used to do a decent job for all of us.

Then they were fired by Mr. Campbell and rehired by the private contractor Sudexho, headquartered in France, who makes a nice fat profit making sure that our hospitals are barely clean and the food barely edible.

The overwhelming majority of these workers now make somewhere in the neighbourhood of $10.15 per hour. That means that if they have a family their annual income is thousands of dollars below the poverty line.

Now they want $2.50 per hour more.

All of which has us wondering if Sodexho has an escape clause in its contract that lets it re-negotiate terms if the workers get organized and/or uppity?

After all, what good is Corporate Entrepreneurial Imperialism if it cant' lock in a little risk certainty right upfront anyway?

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Who Says Minorities Get Nothing Done

Canada
DoingTheRightThingVille

Bill 38 passes.

Rick Barnes explains why this truly is the right thing to do.

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Two Years Is Long Enough

RailwayRaidersRising
LedgeVille

Those raids on the BC Legislature took place in Dec of 2003. Looks like the trials will finally start just shy of two years later:

"VANCOUVER -- Nearly two years after police raided the legislative offices of two ministerial aides in Victoria, the case is going to trial.

Dismissing calls by defence lawyers for more delays yesterday, Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm of the B.C. Supreme Court set a Nov. 28 trial date for the case involving David Basi and Robert Virk."

Hmmm......

Just wildly speculating out loud here, but wonder if this looming walking, talking Blockbuster is one of the reasons a certain investigative reporter decided to walk away from the local monopoly and go independent once again?

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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Tax Freedom Day

ClearAsMud
TheMightyFraserVille

So I've been reading about the latest spat that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has been having with the Fraser Institute about the the latter's methodology in calculating 'Tax Freedom Day' (ie. that day when Canadians are supposedly free from tax for the rest of the year).

Turns out that the wayLeftCCPA has pointed out that the wayRightFI restricts its calculations to 'cash income' only.

In so doing the CCPA claims that the FI's calculations are 'prepostrously exaggerated' such that Tax Freedom Day actully comes in April, not late June as the the latter group has claimed.

The FI's rejoinder?

Well, they do not respond to the validity of the claim at all. Instead, they just fall back on an old saw that cash income (ie.working people's wages and pension) is a standard measure of income used by Statistic's Canada.

But in so doing, the FI actually made a very important admission by omission....

Specifically, it is an admission that if all that non-cash income stuff, stuff like capital gains (ie. rich people's wages), were taxed appropriately the date would be rolled back even farther.

So there you have it.

Straight from the smart boys at the Fraser Institute.

End the free ride for the rich and everything, and everybody, will be just fine.

Geez!

What a novel concept.

Wonder why nobody ever thought of it before........

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It's Better To Be Gone and Not Forgotten....

JackFarr'sFinalRevenge
WinnipegRising

.....Than Forgotten and Not Gone

Finkleman the Elder is done.

And the livingroom lazyboy is in for a good long ride, especially during the sure to be extended 'de-itemization' period.

Best story from the last show....

When he was about 12 Danny convinced his parents that he and his younger brother (who I have never heard him call by name on the radio show) needed a chess set.

So his Mom got them one. It came with a board and pieces that were kept in one of those little wooden boxes with the sliding lids.

Then his Mom went out, probably to the drycleaners or something.

When she came back the boys were playing.

Not chess though.

Instead, they were trying to see who could toss the greatest number of pawns into the open box from eight feet away.

Which, as Danny pointed out, is why he spent a good chunk of his 30 odd years at the CBC on Saturday nights spinning wax rather than on Ideas.

Which, of course, is a crock.

Because I'm pretty sure that Lister Sinclair and Finkleman would have made a helluva team if some mucky-muck at the Mother Corp had had the guts to force them together in, oh say, 1977.

This I do know for absolute sure however.

I'll miss him.

Especially in the summertime around the picnic table during that anticipatory twilight time between cleaning up the dishes and lighting the campfire.

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Here's the shocker though. There is a Finkleman fanclub. And, believe it or not he likes it. It's run by a lady named Alice Hinther whose email if you want details is: ahinther@hotmail.com
And who knew. His pal Al has a last name - Mendelson.

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Bubble, Bubble Toil & Trouble

SoftTortureTanking
MercVille


It's everywhere.

All this talk about 'The Bubble'.

The Economist, the Report on Business, The Vancouver Sun....

Heckfire, even Billmon has had his say about the thing.

But yesterday, at an event that was the antithesis of all things business, I found myself sitting beside a financial wizard-type guy that actually knows what he is talking about.

And this is what he said:

'It's not a bubble until it bursts.'

Which, of course, means less than nothing at all, at least in historical terms.

But as Goose Gossage, who deep down was always a pure numbers man, once said while sitting in the Oakland Airport Hilton Hotel Bar late on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1993:

'History is hard to know, what with all the hired crap out there.'

Which is neither here nor there.

Because the Goose is long gone and I have never been back to that bar again.

Which is just another way of saying that these days the future really is now.

And this very weekend people are still plunking down $700K for two bedroom bungalows with less than nothing down and a gossamer thin credit line that leads straight into the guts of a huge, collective hot air-filled balloon hidden in the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

****

But, unlike the North American real estate market, there is one bubble that has apparently well and truly burst already.

And that is the one labelled 'Torturers For Hire':

"CACI International Inc., one of the companies that provided interrogation services for US forces in Iraq, said yesterday that profit for fiscal 2006 will be slightly below Wall St's average estimate....

Shares of CACI, whose main business is creating secure networks for the US government, fell 7% yesterday.....

'Things have been a little bit slow,' said Jack London, CACI chief executive officer, when asked about contract awards on a conference call. 'Generally it's not a matter of losing (contracts), it's a matter of nothing happening.'.....

Multiple investigations into CACI employees' practice at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had slowed the company a little last year, Mr. London said, but had no material impact looking ahead.

'The silver lining was that we went through a number of investigations and reviews and came out from that wire-brushing as being an absolutely stellar performing organization, that was clean as a whistle in terms of its internals," he said.


Which is a crying shame, for the greedheads at least.

After all, what's the world coming to when you can't meet the street's expectations with clean-as-a-whistle electroshocks, waterboards, naked, excrement-smeared pyramids, and genital seeking attack dogs anymore?

And as for that Dick Durbin.....

He sure was full of crap, right?

Historically speaking that is.

Of course.


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And no, I am not making this stuff up. Although I am not entirely sure if the Goose actually said those exact words or if I just stuck an old HST rant into his mouth on that boozy afternoon oh so many years ago. I was invited into that bar, and fleetingly sat and drank just outside of Mr. Gossage's inner circle, by a guy who was at that precise moment in time a short-lived mop-up man for the Chicago White Sox.

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Gringos 'R' Us

HSTFridays
Mark IV

Ever ask yourself how Latin America is like Iraq?

We'll, even if you haven't, here are a couple of stories from a young Dr. Thompson and a slightly not so younger Billmon and his other side of the world sidekick Bernhard that are worth pondering if for no other reason than they say a heckuva lot about the white man's burden, especially when he finds himself banished, most often for monetary reasons, to his own of heart of darkness without a decent set of links anywhere nearby.


"One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club - a five-iron, if memory serves - driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Columbia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call 'a stylish pot' instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor anyone else on the terrrace that day had the vaguest idea.....Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling down on the roofs - golf balls, 'old practice duds,' so the Britisher told me, that were 'hardly worth driving away'.

It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But (it) is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.

The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rootop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the natiuon of 'arrogant gringo imperialists'.

Hunter S Thompson, The National Observer, August 1963
Reprinted in the Great Shark Hunt, Warner Books, 1979, pp404-05.

****

Bernhard, a Whiskey Bar reader in Germany, has made a spectacular catch - or cache, I should say, since it comes from the bowels of the Google data base.

What he stumbled across is the diary of one Joe Ryan, a frequent caller and on-air personality at station KSTP, a conservative talk radio station in Minneapolis. More recently, Joe has been serving as a military interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and KSTP has been posting his diary on their web site.

For some strange reason, though, the radio station recently removed Joe's diary from its site. Unfortunately for KSTP - and, I suspect, for Joe - the page has been cached by Google. A copy also now resides on my hard drive.

The diary is a fascinating read - not least because it documents the fact that as of last Sunday, one of the private contractors identified in the Army's own internal investigation of the torture scandal was still at Abu Ghraib, and may still have been supervising or conducting interrogations......

.....here's what Joe Ryan, our radio personality turned military interrogator, put in his diary entry for April 25:

'I got to take the rest of the day off after our long booth time. This gave us a nice evening after dinner to head to the roof and play a round of golf. Scott Norman, Jeff Mouton, Steve Hattabaugh, Steve Stefanowicz*, and I all took turns trying to hit balls over the back wall and onto the highway.'

Billmon, The Whiskey Bar, May 2004

So, why would all those poor, sick and hungry Venezuelans keep on voting for a crazy man like Chavez?

And why was it so important to neutralize Al Sadr before the Iraqi elections?

Is it because they both hate golf?

Maybe.

But my guess is that it might have more to with the fact that they both have convinced their people that the only way they are going to get out of those slums and away from the white hail that never melts is to send the Gringos and their Beastly Burdens packing - for good.



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*Turns out that Seymour Hersch had reported that Mr. Stefanowicz was actually a merc working for CACI International who had already been reprimanded, stripped of his security clearance, and recommended for firing by General Taguba before the golfball diary entry was written by Mr. Ryan.

Ten To The Third

TrippingTimeElastic
DystopiaRising

Recent posts from the AllSpinZone and the Canadian Cynic got us to thinking about something regarding the Roving Neandercons Excellent Adventure in Iraq.

First it was just going to be a really short ratings boosting week of Shock and Awe.

Then it was just a few months till it was Mission Accomplished.

Then it was a couple of years breaking the back of the insurgency while simultaneously setting up the fly paper effect.

Now, apparently it's a generational commitment.

Which has us wondering......how long before it becomes a Millenial Reign?

What's that?

Oh, ya forgot.

That the 1000 year thing beginning with 'rei' (not the co-op) has already been tried and it didn't turn out so well.



(Although it did end with two different consonants).

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Jack Goes Deep

OnAPostPattern
LotusLandia

A few weeks back the discussion was very vigorous, some might use another 'v' word*, about how it was political suicide for Jack Layton to make a deal with the Red Devils on a revised budget bill.

And I remember asking myself, and lots of commenters all over the bloggodome, how it could possibly be a bad thing that Mr. Layton was using his leverage to serve the constituency that elected him.

Now, out here on the Left Coast at least, it looks like Jack's 'Act'** has paid off because, as Rick Barnes brings to our attention, he is way out front:

"Stephen Harper has lost significant favour with British Columbians over the last few months. Harper's current approval rating of 38% is down 14-points from March and well below the approval ratings of his rivals Paul Martin (53%, down 5 points) and Jack Layton (63%, up 2 points)."

Now, if Big Jack can just manage to throw a bullet over the middle to connect with Green voters on a crossing pattern.......


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*vitriolic?
**a.k.a. doing the right thing

Where The Deer And The Antelope Play

Incredulous
Forest&Rangeville

Rich Coleman responsible for social housing?

Isn't that just a little bit like putting Evil Kneivel in charge of playground safety?

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