2009 – Are We Really Talking About Female Suffrage?!

This is disturbing.

Rachel Maddow on Obama’s Prize

I was pretty skeptical about Obama’s Nobel win, and I maintain that there’s still much more that Obama needs to do, nonetheless I think Maddow makes a good argument in favour of the prize. Good enough at least to post here:

Obama as Nobel Laureate

The Peace Prize? The man has done little to draw down troops in Iraq, he’s toying with increasing the troop commitment in Afghanistan, and he’s still moving very, very slowly to shut down Gitmo. Now this is not to say that it’s inconceivable that Obama will merit the Peace Prize at the end of four or eight years – the man moves slowly on everything it seems – but so far the evidence is just not there. It’s also not to say that I would support anything that the party of Beck and Palin would offer up in 2012. Obama is still probably the best choice from among the serious contenders in the 2008 election.

This award for Obama is akin to giving a promising freshman their university degree on account of their potential. Worse, I fear that this takes pressure off of Obama to get serious about shutting down the legal vacuum of Gitmo and deciding how best to extricate his country’s soldier’s from two nasty conflicts where there is little evidence that they can effect much change.

Conservatives Make Some Canadian Heritage

Apparently Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore is trying to bring the UFC to Vancouver. So important is this work that he’s posting Twitter updates on the matter. Wow, well, I guess this is what Canadian “heritage” is for the Cons. What will happen if they get a majority? All of our current cultural activities might have to go in favour of more Ultimate Fighting along with perhaps monster truck races, jello wrestling, and bounty-hunter olympics (okay I made that last one up, but seriously, aside from his murder conviction, I don’t see why it would be hard to get Dog Chapman up here).

Why Afghanistan?

This post caught my attention. The argument that Jeffrey Goldberg makes is that Afghanistan isn’t really a “central front” in any kind of war on terror. (An aside, once again, why are we fighting a tactic?Using current nomenclature we should call the Cold War the “War on Missiles, Tanks, and Submarines” or something.) Anyway, my quibbles with Goldberg’s wording aside, I think he raises a salient point: Afghanistan is a place where al Qaeda could train, but most of al Qaeda’s members come from elsewhere.

What this means is that NATO is caught in a place where there was little native impulse to attack NATO countries because the preceding regime had allowed al Qaeda to hide out there. NATO troops may be able to make some temporary improvements in the lives of women, but these seem not to withstand NATO’s withdrawal from any particular area. Reforms do not extend beyond the range of NATO arms.

It should now be readily apparent that all we are doing in Afghanistan is propping up a budding dictator in Hamid Karzai while creating native anger at the West by bombing weddings and destroying the poppy crop that provides a livelihood for many farmers.

Rock On

Beyonce gets the indie treatment from Pomplamoose:

Liberals: Get Your Act Together

I’ve been watching this internal Liberal struggle over what will happen with the Liberal nominations in the Quebec riding of Outremont and at this point I’m just baffled at the extent to which the Liberal party wants to fight and refight its various internal power struggles. I don’t mind a party that has a policy debate, but this isn’t about policy, it’s about ego and how much pull does the Quebec guy have relative the leader of the whole party.

Now, I’m not naive, I know that these things happen in politics, but the failure of the Liberals to deal with this quietly and quickly is frankly cringeworthy. One of the reasons I was okay with Iggy as the leader was that I felt that he might be able to impose some party discipline after Martin let his partisans fight an unrestrained civil war in the party against Chretien’s people and Dion just appeared to not be in control. Now it appears that the Liberals, even in the face of the worst election result in their party’s history, are still more concerned with infighting than anything else.

Given that the NDP is still not making the sort of breakthrough in popularity that they always appear to be almost able to make, we may be in for more years of Harper – perhaps with a minority, but able to have a free hand as long as no one gets their act together enough to challenge him.

Public Access TV?

Glenn Beck is on a major cable news network, but you wouldn’t know it from his props or his wardrobe:

Bleak Outlook for Afghan Mission

Today we have further confirmation of the longstanding suspicions of many progressives, namely that the NATO mission in Afghanistan is likely doomed to failure. The report leaked to WaPo indicates that US Gen. McChrystal has serious doubts about the ability of NATO to overcome the Taliban insurgency. The one caveat he does give is that success (however he is defining it) could be secured by adding troops.

More troops from where?

Most NATO countries, including Canada, are lukewarm to the idea of pouring more forces into Afghanistan and the US itself still has major commitments in Iraq. In the meantime the accusations of corruption inside Afghanistan likely do little to invigorate anyone in NATO with the idea that democracy or human rights are being defended. Karzai is looking more and more like your average Western-backed pseudo-democratic puppet dictator.

We need to seriously ask what, if anything, we can do for Afghanistan.

Santorum 2012?

Wow. Maybe he could pick Sarah Palin as his running mate. This is the sort of thing that is easy to joke about, but with the defeated, embittered GOP becoming ever more a self-parody, I would not count out either Santorum or Palin being on the 2012 presidential ticket for team pachyderm.