The Mound of Sound

Stephen Harper is a man of deep principles. You may not agree with them, and I hope you don’t, but he’s a believer in what he believes. That’s why his chameleonesque transformation from Mr. “So-Called Greenhouse Gases” to environmental champion has such a hollow ring to it.

In his bid for a majority, Harpo is throwing around all that cash the Liberals left him and he’s tossing it about in big numbers – a hundred million here, two hundred million there and there and there too. He doesn’t show his face anywhere these days without packing along a 9-figure cheque for the locals.

He’s made a lot of noise about the environment and he’s doled out a lot of cash but the question remains whether he really gets it or is he really trying to manage what he sees as the fallout of environmentalism. I think Harpo sees the global warming business as something he must appear to accept if he wants to survive. I suspect he’s also gambling that the public interest is a fad and that he can best serve his real constituency, the Tar Patch and the province of Alberta, by ensuring that Big Oil and Big Coal get off as lightly as possible.

Hell, the guy just used the Stemlach to fence $150-million tax dollars to the fossil fuel industry. The money went to the province but that was the best way to politically launder it. At the end of the day, it’s still a subsidy to the impoverished oil companies, using federal taxpayers’ money so that Big Tar doesn’t have to spend its own on cleaning up its mess. He fenced it, and it will be laundered but it’s still a giveaway to Big Tar.

Of course scores of millions of dollars is just the start of Harpo’s gift basket to Big Tar. The real present will be “intensity-based” limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That’s about as close to business as usual as our Furious Leader can get without getting lynched by the public. Besides, it’s the very same sham policy adopted by his American idol, the chimp in the White House.

This isn’t environmentalism. It’s damage control and it’s a scam.

The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, has been caught out – again. He may have just spun one tall tale too many about the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

All along he’s assured Congress that the firings weren’t politically driven, they were based on performance problems. New documents released show that it was two sides of the same coin. Yeah, they were canned because they didn’t perform politically as required.

“D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, came up with a checklist. He rated each of the prosecutors with criteria that appeared to value political allegiance as much as job performance.

“He recommended retaining ‘strong U.S. attorneys who have … exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general.’ He suggested ‘removing weak U.S. attorneys who have … chafed against administration initiatives.’

The corollary to this, of course, is that the other 87 must have been “strong” attorneys who very willingly accepted the administration’s initiatives. With an administration as morally reprehensible as this one, chances are that meant being willing to politicize their prosecutions. That might account for the grossly disproportionate ratio of proceedings against Democrats instead of Republicans and the stunning lack of action on profoundly blatant voter fraud cases in Florida and Ohio. Any way you cut it, that’s a perversion of justice for the purposes of partisan advantage, something you once saw in courts in dictatorships.

Maybe George Bush simply doesn’t care any more. Everything he’s put his hand to has pretty much failed – from Iraq to his Mid-East democracy initiative to his aborted Social Security reform. He’s so fouled the American presidency that it may take years for American stature to be rehabilitated. So, what’s one Gonzales, more or less in this compendium of incompetence and failure?

That’s not to say Congress will agree to leave it at that. They’ve got Bush bleeding in the water and that inevitably attracts sharks.

Excerpted from American Fascists by Chris Hedges:

God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are here and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith – faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love.

These small acts of compassion – for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate – have a power that lives after us. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.

Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know. Those who claim to know what life means play God. These false prophets – the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells and the James Dobsons – clutching the cross and Bible, offer, like Mephistopheles, to lead us back to a mythical paradise and an impossible, unachievable happiness and security, at once seductive and empowering. They ask us to hand over moral choice and responsibility to them. They will tell us they know what is right and wrong in the eyes of God. They tell us how to act, how to live, and in this process they elevate themselves above us. They remove the anxiety of moral choice, the fundamental anxiety of human existence. This is part of their attraction. The give us the rules by which we live. But once we hand over this anxiety and accept their authority, we become enslaved and they become our idols. And idols, as the Bible never cases to tell us, destroy us.

According to the Washington Post, today’s terrorist pretty much defies any sort of ethnic profiling. Take, for example, Bouchra El-Hor from Holland.

“She studied business in college, hung out at the pub with her friends and was known for her fashionable taste in clothes.

“So residents of this 900-year-old river town were thrown for a loop last year when Bouchra El-Hor, now 24, appeared in a British courtroom wearing handcuffs under an all-encompassing black veil. Prosecutors said she had covered up plans for a terrorist attack and wrote a letter offering to sacrifice herself and her infant son as martyrs.

“…terrorism suspects from atypical backgrounds are becoming increasingly common in Western Europe. With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people baptized as Christians — groups that in the past were considered among the least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.

“The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.”

Our slouch of a defence minister, Gordo O’Connor, has raced to Afghanistan after being caught asleep at the wheel (again), this time on the detainee issue.

Obviously not having a clue what he was talking about, O’Connor told the Commons that the detainees were fine because he would’ve heard from the Red Cross if they weren’t. This veteran military man, a retired brigadier no less, had no idea how the Red Cross works.

So Harpo told Gordo to get his camos pressed and get his sorry ass to Kandahar and to be sure to wipe next time before he flushes. Here’s what Galloping Gord told reporters when he arrived in Afghanistan. “I want to look the man in the eyes and I want to confirm that they are going to do what they say they’re going to do”

Hey Gord, while you’re at it, how about you take a few minutes to confirm that you’re going to do what you say you’re doing. It’d be a good start.

“We use the term detainee abuse but there’s no proof that there is any detainee abuse,” Mr. O’Connor said. “But it’s an important factor because we hold the Afghan government to a high standard.”

If he wants proof of detainee abuse, he should contact the US State Department which has issued its own proof of torture and disappearance of prisoners who fall into Afghan custody. As for the “high standard” bull crap, has this loser even figured out that control of this government has come into the hands of murderous warlords, drug barons and common thugs?

Salon.com reports that the US is ordering wounded troops unfit for duty back to Iraq to serve in George Bush’s surge.

“‘This is not right,’ said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. ‘This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers,’ he said angrily. ‘If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight.’

“As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

“On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division’s 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers’ profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.”

Salon claims many of these soldiers are being sent to Iraq for their third tours.

A Canadian soldier has been charged with manslaughter in the shooting death last August of Master Corporal Jeffrey Scott Walsh.

The Canadian Forces National Investigation Service has charged Master Cpl. Robbie Fisher, based in Shilo with 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry regiment, with one count of manslaughter and one count of negligent performance of duty.

Details of the indictments haven’t been released but the second charge, negligent performance of duty, suggests the shooting wasn’t deliberate.