Bits and rants from Tony Emond
Dilbert creator Scott Adams: “Apparently Swedish laws are unique. Â If you have a penis, you’re half a rapist before you even get through customs. And if your condom breaks, that’s jail time. What I’m saying is that the Club Med in Sweden is a nervous place.”
Also Swedish condoms apparently break all the time, so I think I’m going to vacation somewhere else!
Here is why Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair has no credibility. Why do Canadians put up with such brazen dishonesty and lack of integrity in their public officials?
After spending the last couple of weeks twisting foreign and corporate arms (successfully) to take down Julian Assange, the United States takes a break in order to celebrate “World Press Freedom Day”. Clearly the US State Department would be unable to detect irony even if “irony” was a baseball bat that was used to repeatedly smash the limbs and skulls of whistleblowers.
Clearly this is double-plus-ungood. Really, Americans, do you think anyone’s taking you seriously on that one?
Daniel Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.” Ultimately things haven’t changed very much in American government in the past 40 years, and embarrassing the USG will lead to them leaning on their international partners (Sweden, the UK, Paypal, Visa, MC) to make your life hell. It’s a sorry spectacle, and exposes shortcomings in Obama’s so-called opposition to censorship and desire for an open and transparent society. Principles, it would seem, do not stand any sort of test, and should be abandoned the moment they become difficult to keep.
Obama also said he wouldn’t extend the Bush “top 2%” tax cuts, and he did. Frankly I can’t think of a politician who’s been more of a disappointment in recent memory, largely I suppose because the expectations were so low for everyone else (I always knew Harper would be an authoritarian right-winger, for example). But at this point I have to wonder where Obama thinks he’ll get votes in 2012. He’s been a huge disappointment to the left by being about the equivalent of a George W. Bush with a triple-digit IQ, and the right wing is always going to hate him. His strategy right now is probably to hope that the Republicans will nominate a lazy, attention-whoring, unqualified, monumental moron, which should bring a good cross-section of the population into the Democratic fold, but what if the GOP doesn’t nominate Sarah Palin? What then?