Category Archives: News and politics

From the Dave Barry blog, is a great example of American Tax dollars at work.  The White House 2007 State Easter Egg Collection. 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/easter/2007/eggsbystate/# is the link.  Since it is technically a day off for many of us to reflect on the crucifixion of Jesus and load up on as much chocolate as we can tolerate until we drop into a sugar-induced coma, (He would have wanted it that way, I know it) I’ve looked this site up and toured the offerings. 

All fifty states have submitted colored Easter Eggs, some highly decorated in the tradition of the Ukrainian psyanky with shell cutouts and examples of the highest decorative arts.  The American Egg Board is kindly managing the collection for the White House.  Awfully nice of them.  The level of craft is very high, with a few exceptions, and each submission is earnest and done with a pure heart.  For that, the craftspersons should be thanked for their time. 

Of the dozen or so images of each State Egg that I viewed, perhaps the most joyous is Rhode Island.  Imagine a David Lee Roth hairstyle, with a gilded proscenium, featuring a red rooster mounted in the niche to call to mind the Rhode Island Red rooster, the Official Poultry of Rhode Island. 

California presented a hinged egg in the Faberge style, featuring a miniature glittered redwood with what looks suspiciously like a spotted owl in one of the trees.  Illinois offered a stirring portrait of Abraham Lincoln rendered in beige, while Vermont offered a blue, beige and black tribal motif.  If your tribe is the LSD-Eating Ken Kesey tribe, this tribal coloration recalls the fondest days of hallucinating at the the aquarium store.

The same tribal motif holds true for Indiana, part Gwi’chan Coast Indian, interbred with an Amish quilt-maker, while swapping big hits off the bong.  Wyoming, home state of Shotgun Dick Cheney, offered something that was done on the bus ride to the While House with a blue Sharpie marker, some green crayon and a line drawing of a potato with skis.

New Jersey, the home state of Tony Soprano, offered a wonderfully illuminated Easter Egg of pumpkins and garden motifs, with an illustration of Tony shooting Big Pussy within the elaborately carved niche. 

Neighboring state New York, offered a gilt Lady Liberty emerging Botticelli-like from an egg covered in either real pearls and 24 karat gold leaf, or silver cake decorations (the ubiquitous ‘jimmies’) and gold cigarette foil burnished on by someone with hooks for hands and late stage Parkinson’s.

Louisiana presented a diorama of Emeril Lagasse, with miniature red fish, a Tabasco bottle and Zatarains Creole Seasoning, outlined with gold mountings and amber and turquoise stones.  I suspect the whole thing was funded by FEMA who overruled the original design of a family of nine living in a trailer in a muddy field.

Tennessee wins however, with a Faberge style egg, crowned and limned with gold and rhinestones, featuring a portrait of Elvis, circa 1965.  No Tennessee Walking Horses, or circular references to being the Volunteer State, just a glammed out Young Elvis.

We looked so you don’t have to.  Have a reasonable Easter.

There is a story from The Independent today that purports to explain the reason Iran put the snatch on fifteen British marines.  Short form, the US sent a team in January to grab two senior Iranian security folks, specifically Mohammed Jafari, head of the Iranian National Security Council and Minojahar Fouzanda, chief intelligence officer of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.  The two guys were in Kurdistan at a long-established Iranian liaison office in Arbil.

The US team flew in and tried to put the grab on big ones failed so they grabbed five junior Iranian officers instead.  The whereabouts of the five captured Iranians is unknown, at least according to the article.  The supposition is that ten weeks later, in retaliation, the Iranian government puts the hook on fifteen British marines offshore of Iran.

If true, it puts a whole new complexion on the Iran hostage story.  Based on the article, then deducting 50% for spin and the endemic Middle East bull factor, it means the US was doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.  It means the US government is behaving like cowboys again, ignoring such niceties as borders, diplomacy, international relations, treaties and talking. 

The whole situation could be a chess game to ‘justify’ attacks on Iran by Britain and the US.  The US doesn’t want any more scrutiny of how badly they’re doing in Iraq.  John McCain’s stage show of the safety of the Green Zone, is so much manure to be laughable if he weren’t so earnest. 

A new war, with different players, on three fronts (Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan) is a distraction that works, especially if you add the Iran Has Nukes overlay.  Add a dash of Israel freelancing against Iran, with military air traffic controllers looking the other way, as Israeli jets bomb the snot out of the Iranian nuclear facilities.  Would President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy use something like that?  No, but Shotgun Dick and Kousin Karl would. 

There has been some whispers that the various insurgent groups are waiting for an important date to kick off a new round of madness.  Good Friday is a big date on the Christian calendar and it is in keeping with things like the Tet Offensive or the Yom Kippur war.  With the religious overtone that Iraq and Afghanistan both have, Good Friday is an appealing occasion to say "Screw You And Jesus Too!"  Good Friday is also about halfway through Passover this year. 

There are too many dangling threads that might tie up in a very violent way.

The lottery industry up here is under scrutiny. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s investigative program, the fifth estate, has been peeking under the scratchoff tickets and following the money like good little journalists should.  Here’s the link if you want to read more:

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/luckofthedraw/index.html

the fifth estate found that the number of lottery sellers winning jackpots was significantly higher than the math said it should be.  Canada has had government run legal lotteries since 1975 or so, when the first Canada Olympic Lottery was stood up.  Designed to fund the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, governments across the country saw that there was a huge wad of money out there to be plucked.

We have the usual lottery games, pick 6 numbers out of 49, or pick 7 out of 49 and win even more.  Plus four hundred and ninety seven different kinds of scratch-off type tickets.  Each province runs their own versions, with various payouts from a free ticket to a zillion dollars a week for the rest of your life.

Since the lottery retailers were winning significantly more than the statistics would suggest, it pointed to a hole in the security somewhere.  When Bob Edmonds of Fenelon Falls presented a winning lottery ticket to a retailer in July 2001 and was told it didn’t win, he knew something was curious.  Even more curious, the retailers cashed the winning ticket as their own and scored $250,000.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, OLG, undertook an investigation, which was, at best rudimentary.  Eventually it came out that the OLG security people knew something was fishy, but the senior folks didn’t want to look too closely, as the retailers are the front line in a Crown Corporation that grossed $5,854,055,000 in 2005.  (That would be nearly $6 Billion for those you who can’t remember how many zeros are in a million)

If the retailers were examining the scratch and win tickets and figuring out which ones were the big winners, or jiggering the lottery terminals to not play the ‘winner’ music, then the happiness of the retailers was paramount and the security of the game becomes secondary.  After all, we got us a $6 Billion dollar machine to feed!

Needless to say, the CEO of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has resigned, with his golden parachute intact.  The Atlantic Lottery Corporation is investigating why so many of their retailers seem to have winning tickets.  The other provincial lottery groups are starting to look inwards too.  There is much trembling in the board rooms.

Some factoids here:  The likelihood of winning a big prize in a 6/49 type of lottery is approximately 1 in 13,983,816.  In a 7/49 type game, according to the OLG’s own stats is 1 in 20,963,833.  You are more likely to have Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet show up unannounced at your front door with a bottle of Viagra, a case a Mazola oil and welcoming smiles, than win at any lottery.

There’s nothing wrong with the ‘dollar and a dream’ bit of recreation, once in a while, if you can afford it.  Notice the qualifiers there, once in a while, if you can afford it.  Unfortunately, lotteries have become a tax on stupidity and those who play the most, tend to be those who can’t afford to play.  I’ve seen too many people of modest means, plunking down anywhere from $20 to $100 twice a week to play ‘their numbers’, hoping to hit it big. 

Of course the lottery corporations have taken all kinds of stern voiced stances regarding problem gambling, but their actual efforts, aside from signing a high-toned Code of Conduct consists of, well, signing a high-toned Code of Conduct.  OLG also says they have poured $113 million into "Problem Gambling"  As best I can see, those efforts consist of signing a high-toned Code of Conduct and issuing media releases.

It will eventually out that the government-run lotteries are nothing more than voluntary taxation of the dumb and broke, while the proceeds are dumped into General Revenue and frittered away on studies about high-toned Codes of Conduct. 

Spend your $2 and dream of telling the boss to pound sand, if you choose to and can afford to, but remember that you are willingly giving the government your after-tax money to piss it away on more studies of nothing, plus marketing more lotteries to more people.

Perhaps Sigourney and Kate will knock on the door first.  I can always rent a trampoline.

Databases are wonderful things, when the data is consistent.  I’ve talked about databases before, but in the weekend Washington Post, a fine article by Karen DeYoung highlights the problems the US Department of Homeland Paranoia is having in keeping their waste products linear.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) is the storehouse of individuals that the various American intelligence agencies have considered to be potential risks.  Data comes from several hundred sources of varying degrees of accuracy.  The database in 2003 was about 100,000 files:  Now it is 435,000 files.  It isn’t the number of files that is the problem, as things like SQL can handle databases much larger than that. 

The problem is the veracity of the data.  Remember the Old Skool Computer Acronym GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out.  The TIDE database gets some of the data from the FBI, some from the TSA, some from Consular Lookout and Support System and some from state and local cops.  Parts come from the National Crime Information Center database, other parts are Secret.  It all piles into one big monkey vat of data lovin’. 

Knowing that, you must also understand how a database works.  Databases are nothing more than a big collection of electronic files, put away by keywords. so you can find them again. 

In the distant past, if you wanted to find something in "The Joy of Cooking" and all you had in the kitchen was a dead possum, flour and garlic, you could turn to the index, look up opossum and it would have a list for recipes that featured possum.  The index would list page 454 as the page that has the specific recipes for possum. Eventually you would narrow your search down to that one recipe that has possum, flour and garlic as ingredients.

That is the simplest and most common type of database search there is.  Computers can do that searching much faster than humans, searching on several dozen terms at the same time, as well as the relationships between keywords, as long as the data is consistent.  Please underscore that last line. 

For example, from the WaPo article, let us consider Cat Stevens.  Cat Stevens is the former name of the singer now known as Yusuf Islam.  Yusuf Islam is on the TSA No-Fly list for "secret" reasons. 

I’m guessing here, but odds are some CIA pud found a piece of paper in London with the name Yusuf Islam written on it, in the same time zone as a rocket propelled grenade.  Therefore anyone named Yusuf Islam has been near or associated with explosives, is obviously a Jihazi, dangerous, crazy and shouldn’t be allowed into the US. 

This is the same logic as Googling David Smith and assuming I am a mathematician who died in 1944 or I work at NASA Ames Research.  I am not dead and I don’t work at NASA Ames, let me be clear on that.

However, if your name is Catherine Stevens, you might be stopped at the airline, or the border, as Cat is a common enough contraction of Catherine and the last name matches, so you must be Yusuf Islam, a "bad" guy and writer/performer of "Peace Train"  Or, you could be the wife of US Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), trying to get to Washington. 

Again, obviously a bad guy intent on transvestite sex with a Federal politician and destroying the Wal-Mart in Cookville, Tennessee with explosives hidden in a can of Alaskan crab legs.  I am kidding; it is a waste of good crab.   

Perhaps the worst part of TIDE is that it is a data warehouse without anything beyond rudimentary vetting based on the assessments of 80 data analysts.  I suspect that Chester Field, Heywood J. Ablome and Suk Mi Ohf are also somewhere in the TIDE database, as that seems to be the level of sophistication and accuracy that the various intelligence agencies can muster on a good day.

The most telling sentence however, is this one, "(Rick)Kopel (TIDE Acting Director) insisted that private information on Americans, such as credit-card records, never makes it into the screening center database and that "we rely 100 percent on government-owned information."  

DCS 1000 (formerly Carnivore), the data, email, phone call and chat domestic spying tool is run by the FBI.  The FBI is government-owned.  Therefore, Rick Kopel is telling the truth, but overlooking the pervasive no-warrant/no-oversight/no-review powers that DCS 1000 and Echelon have under the Patriot Act. 

The Department of Homeland Paranoia, renown for their transparent and forthright communications with Congress, Justice and the citizens of the United States of America, is the owner and operator of the Patriot Act.  Which also explains why there is no mechanism to get yourself off the watch list.

To put the fine point on it, TIDE has access to and from all the data you could possibly want.  The value of the data, based on the output that crops up in the TSA, is garbage.  It isn’t even funny garbage.  

Even more frightening, is that there will be a file somewhere in TIDE database tomorrow that links the keyword term Heywood J. Ablome to David Smith to the keyword Jihazi to the keyword TSA.  What kind of assumption could you make of that linkage?  The wrong one, to be sure.     

Yesterday, President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy told the Congress and Senate to piss up a rope regarding sworn testimony from Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales,  The mouthpiece who delivered the message was Fred F. Fielding.  Fred is the 32nd White House Counsel, who replaced Harriet Miers.

Fred has a great background in politics, aside from being the 19th White House Counsel under The Almost Lifelike Ronald Regan, from 1981 to 1986.  The most fascinating part of his resume was as his gig as Associate Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1972.  Fred’s boss was John Dean.  Yes, that John Dean.  The one who blew Nixon out of the water with revelations of all the insanity that was going on in the White House.

Now, am I saying that the current White House, under President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, Shotgun Dick and Kousin Karl is the same as the Nixon Monstrosity?  Not at all. 

The current incumbents learned from Watergate.  If there is anything written down, it has already been shredded.  If there are taping systems in Shotgun Dick’s office, they’ve already made the tapes invisible via the Patriot Act and National Security.  If someone broke into the Democratic HQ back in the day, you would be assured the perps did not have any pieces of paper with Karl Rove’s phone number on it.  Remember, getting caught is the ultimate crime. 

The fudges the Republican Party have pulled, like winning Florida from Gore by controlling the whole counting and appeals process, are small beer compared to Nixon and the Committee to Re Elect the President. 

The new boys are much tougher than Nixon’s punks.  There is no Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers and break-ins at a psychiatrists office.  The CIA has improved their tradecraft and taught the FBI the rudimentary tools too, so that side is covered off. 

As for firing eight Federal Attorneys, well, it stinks, but is legal.  Karl’s fingerprints are all over that one, but there have been no laws broken, so it is a non-starter.  However, Shotgun Dick’s Chief of Staff being a lying scumbag and bullshitting the FBI under oath, was actionable and Irving will be spending time in the Crowbar Hotel.

As for Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, his comment is, "We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. … I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse."  It sounds like it was cribbed from the Richard Nixon quote book that, "Today, in one of the most difficult decisions of my presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest associates in the White House — Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman — two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know."

Even yesterday, the Nixonian term "Executive Privilege" has been dusted off by Jo Jo’s handlers.  A reminder here, the only executive privilege the President gets is Marine One, Air Force One, the keys to Camp David and a fleet of armored limousines.  America isn’t a monarchy, if I remember my civics class correctly.   

Until somebody decides to actually open their mouth and lay out the real data on how much Karl and Shotgun Dick have run roughshod over the Legislative, Judicial and Executive branches of government in the name of National Security, we’ll never know.

Actually, we can find out.  To quote David Hobbs, the media needs a "Large Set of Attachments" 

It is time for a return to legitimate reporting, which means digging into the relationship between Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, Dubya and the American Enterprise Institute, with the oil, security and arms industries.  Add Wolfowitz, Feith and the Carlyle Group into the mix to find out more.

There is an expression in Latin that sums it up:  Qui Bono?  Who Profits?  The money can’t disappear, no matter how hard they try.  It will only take a couple of dedicated reporters and editors, with some media resources, to start the hard, unglamorous slog through the paper trail.  We need a return to the Cronkite/Woodward/Bernstein/Bradley level of digging for the story that is in there.

Qui Bono?  Answer that and President Jo Jo the Idiot Boy and his cronies don’t get to wipe their feet on the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution. 

A CNN feature report by John Roberts has detailed the utter breakdown of the Iraqi Security Forces.  The short form of the story is that Shiite groups are now embedded in the Iraq Interior Ministry with the tacit approval of then Minister of the Interior, Bayan Jabir and funded by the American dollars that prop up the government. 

Iraq, theoretically now self-governing, is turning its hatred inwards, going off on a Shiite-Sunni fight to the death, encouraged by various clerics and politicians. The situation has devolved to the point of injured bystanders of the wrong religious persuasion are being denied treatment at Iraqi hospitals, if not actively taken to a room just off the ER and shot.  The phrase Death Squads slips easily off the tongue.

Iraq is so far down the slippery slope of religious warfare that the US has little or no hope of keeping the two sides apart, aside from partitioning the country by force.  Partitions would almost have to be neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad, as Shia and Sunni live in enclaves next door to each other, taking time out of their busy day to bomb each others’ mosques, weddings and funerals. 

About the only times that partitioning has vaguely worked has been Lebanon, Cyprus and Berlin, post WWII.  In each situation the partitions were maintained by mammoth force of arms on all sides.  Even so, in the case of Lebanon and Cyprus, the fighting merely settled down to a dull roar, instead of a blazing hot war zone. 

Making one big partition has precedence.  Yugoslavia was a made-up country post WWI.  The only way it held together for so long was the strong-arm King Alexander I, then a Communist regime under Tito and later the Soviet Union. 

We all know what happened when the ‘police’ broke up and Yugoslavia ceased to exist:  Factional fighting between Bosnians, Herzegovenes, Serbs, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Croats, Albanians, Muslims and Christians, as well as some ethnic cleansing just to add to the confusion, settling old scores from 1914 or even further back into the mists of the 17th century.

Which leaves what for Iraq if partitioning can’t work?  There are options and none of them are pretty. 

Option 1:  The US could up their presence by a factor of ten or fifteen, putting more than 750,000 pairs of boots on the ground, armed to the teeth and willing to shoot the hell out of anything that moves on any side.  A police force to do the job the Iraqi Police Force can’t and won’t do.

Downside?  A 10 year commitment and cranking up Selective Service to find enough bodies to stand a post.  It would bankrupt the US fiscally.  It would bleed the US white as the occupation would be, at very best, a human Cuisinart.  We’ve seen how well the US Military supports its’ returning veterans, especially those who are injured.  It would mean the loss of an entire generation to fight a barely understood war in a distant nation to help people who hate us.

Option 2: Finding a suitable dictator to grab power in such a way that he’s still Oil-Company friendly and will act as a puppet for the US.  However, this does mean choosing sides in the Shiite-Sunni battles and watching as one side or the other is eradicated from the face of the Earth. 

Downside?  Genocide on a scale that will make Sudan and Darfur look like a playground tussle over a game of marbles.  All the suitable dictators were killed off by Saddam Hussein during his reign.     

Option 3:  Pack it up and go home, letting the Shia and Sunni groups kill each other.  Iran and Saudi Arabia would have to take sides, as neither regime can afford to have that kind of unstable madness in their back yards.  It would rapidly evolve into a low-fidelity version of an Pan-Arabic Cold War, using violent proxies to fight on their behalf.

The US would naturally choose the Saudi side and funnel arms and ‘advisors’ into the mix.  With any luck the newly resurgent Russian Federation would hook up with Iran, as long as the money was paid up front in oil and gold. 

Downside?  Another Cold War, this time over oil, with a side order of theology.  Again, genocide on a heretofore unimagined scale.  Just for hilarity, Israel might get so scared they blow the whole Middle East to pieces, resulting in an Arab world versus Israel battle to the death. 

The US would be trapped in a three-way battle of supporting Israel, Saudi Arabia and anyone not siding with Russia.  Does the phrase global catastrophe come to mind?

Option 4:  Do nothing except what is being done now:  Let the status quo of troop strength and insurgent warfare thrash on, hoping the insurgents run out of guns before the US runs out of troops. 

Downside?  It hasn’t worked for five years and won’t work until the Iraqi people decide that prosperity and getting along with each other is better than blowing up mosques and killing as many people as possible.  Settling scores from 632 AD is not really the way to get along.  This is the ‘bleed to death, slowly’ option.

Option 5: Pull back and become an armed state.  If the US packs up the tents and tanks, then the borders of the US, in every way imaginable, will become the new front line.  The list of armed and crazy revenge seekers will be longer than the No-Fly List at the TSA. 

The US will be forced to become a closed, armed camp with near-continuous surveillance of all the citizens to prevent attacks.  The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, circa 1970 comes to mind.  For those too lazy to look up the real name of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, I’ll tell you the informal name that was given to it in East Germany:  The Stasi.

Considering how far the Department of Homeland Paranoia has four unlubricated fingers up the ass of America today under the Patriot Act, a homegrown Stasi isn’t that far a leap.  All it would take is one terrorist attack on home soil. 

Actually, just the spectre of four or five cement-heads blowing up a school bus full of kids with a chlorine tanker in downtown Anywhere, USA would push the government over the edge, demanding round-the-clock surveillance on everyone.  Groupthink will become the new normal. 

To police a nation of 300 million, you need a mammoth standing security force.  Expect a return to Selective Service and the whole security apparatus farmed out to various friends of Cheney who would only be too happy to opeate it on behalf of the government on a cost-plus basis.

Without going fully nuclear and making the ashes of the Middle East bounce, the US has only Option 1 and Option 5 available.  Options 2,3 and 4 revolve around massive religious genocide on an unprecedented scale as well as a new Cold War via proxies, this time over oil, not politics.

Th
ese are all very bleak scenarios.  They all track back directly to March 20th 2003 when President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy and Shotgun Dick invaded Iraq without a plan for anything beyond a press conference on May 1st 2003 on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

We’ve been down this road before.

I love aircraft. I have since the first time my Father took me to Uplands Airport 14,000 years ago. I got to fly on a tour of Ottawa in the grips of the fall foliage, on a short Air Canada hop around the Capital. The aircraft was a Vickers Vanguard turboprop.

At the time, around 1965, you could stand on the outdoor observation deck at Uplands and watch the planes, hearing the almighty whine as the Rolls-Royce turboprops spun up. You felt the turbine screech then a thump as the combustion chambers lit off. You were bathed in hot, humid, kerosene air as the aircraft taxied, turning its sooted exhaust can towards you as it lumbered off towards 32 or 07, carrying the glamorous and wealthy to their exotic destinations of Winnipeg or Halifax.. On special days there would be a DC-8 or a 707 at the airport. It was pure jet wonderment for a young child.

Since then, I have had a love affair with aviation, despite deregulation, security and the commoditisation of air transport.

My maternal grandmother, Frances Preece, lived fifty yards from the CN/CP Rail yards in Smiths’Falls, legitimately on the wrong side of the tracks. Since the age of 6, at least that I can remember, I’ve been playing near trains. I know the difference between a switch engine and a mainline motive unit. I can read the signal lights and know how to spin the brakes on a four car shunt. Gondola, reefer, bulk, coal, phosphate, boxcar, oilcan and pressure tank are known commodities to me.

I can jump on and off a moving train. I can hook up air lines and have gone from Smiths Falls to Brockville in a caboose. Even to this day, I can tell the difference between a Westinghouse deuce and a Nathan Airchime five throat.

I’m not going to mention trucking and how to shift a transmission without using the clutch, or how to make rude noises with a Jake. Then there is the whole cars, motorsport and racing shenanigans.

Some days I have Jet-A in the veins, other days, Diesel, other days Sunoco 260. Occasionally, I’ll admit to having blood in the veins, but for most of my life, it has been some kind of fuel.

The first legitimate train trip I took was to Montreal for Expo67 and I fell in love with passenger trains. In those days the toilet emptied on the tracks. I kid you not. You flushed the head and could look down the hole to see sleepers and rail.

Over the years I have taken the train, be it CP or CN on Red, White and Blue days, or later, the VIA red-headed stepchild several dozen times. There was an occasion whereby I joined the 70 mph Adultery club on an overnight train from Ottawa to Toronto. There were also two acts of oral intimacy on the return trip, one of which got my ears wet, but I digress.

Today, I am in VIA 1, hurtling to Montreal. The server has just brought me a hot, lemon-scented actual terrycloth towel with which I have refreshed myself. Shortly I will be brought a beef tenderloin, steamed vegetables and a nice dessert. There will be coffee, liqueurs if I so choose and copious amounts of wine.

I will be treated like a grown up and allowed to work, or gaze distractedly out the window of the car, as I so see fit. In this particular car, five people wanted to sit at the four place seat towards the back. It is easier to work there, as there is a table, much like a travel trailer table, so you can spread out. Between the five of us, we worked it out, without booking in advance, demanding accommodation, whining about membership in the frequent traveler program or being pissy, spoiled brats. Grownups handled it, without intervention by the train staff. In other words it was civilized.

Currently, the engine is moving air out of the way in the neighborhood of 160 kph (or about 100 mph) in the Toronto -Belleville-Kingston section.  I have been brought an appetizer of hummus and pita with olives and marinated red peppers with a slice of cold, grilled zucchini.

Nobody has asked to see my ticket to determine if I am eligible for a free soft drink, or bag of pretzels. No corporate drone has insisted that I sit up straight and not move, in the interests of safety. There are no crying babies, although there are young children in the car.

Outside, I can see Lake Ontario on one side, then into the backyards and farm lanes of Cobourg on the other side. The snow has been light this year. Brown stubble is everywhere, the light skiff of snow collecting the in the rows where the harrow disks have piled up the soil for the winter sleep.

A sudden roar and startle, as a unit train muscles the other way, a whooshing parade of empty well cars lugging west, then the parade of pines and fields resumes out the window. Occasionally you see into someone’s back yard, where a discarded 1966 Chevy pickup lies preserved, bushes growing out of the cab.

Then in a furious zoetrope, a glimpse of a partially melted snowman in a side yard, facing the tracks, a stick arm waving at the trains. It was built by a youngster who knew, exactly and precisely, when I would look out between the passing freight cars roaring in the other direction to see his or her handiwork waving at my seat on this train. It is a symbol of hope and love and happiness, as if a melted snowman waving at me would change the arc of my day.

Thank you, young person somewhere between Quinte West and Belleville East. You reminded me that sometimes you do things because someone else might enjoy them.

There might be much civilization and gentility on the train, but the best part of all, is the unexpected greetings from a snowman who knows you are passing by and wants to wish you well on your journey. There, in a short couple of paragraphs, is the joy of travel by train. You should take the train some time, if only to find your own snowman.

In an appeals court Monday, the mighty AT&T said that they can’t defend themselves in a suit against illegal wiretapping, because they cannot defend themselves without disclosing secret information that would then incriminate itself again.  If you’re confused, don’t worry, we’ll sort it out for you.

AT&T has been involved in wiretapping for the US Federal Government.  The Department of Homeland Paranoia has most likely used provisions of the Patriot Act to order AT&T to set up the wiretaps.  By definition, a Homeland Paranoia order is a secret order that a corporation can’t talk about without endangering National Security, which is also illegal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the original suit to stop AT&T from wiretapping on behalf of the Government.  The boffins at Homeland Paranoia do not respond to suits brought in civil court, because the Patriot Act says they are immune from prosecution for reasons of National Security.  Essentially the EFF sued the people actually doing the wiretapping, rather than the Government department that ordered the wiretapping. 

Understandably, the judges involved are deeply confused as to which laws, district, state or federal, have precedence.  At the core are the allegations that AT&T intercepted domestic calls, Internet traffic and phone records, without a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.  The Department of Homeland Paranoia has never admitted that they have spied locally without warrants and will not admit to it, as that would violate National Security.

I’ll simplify here:  There is a Secret program. 

Participation is Secret. 

Data obtained from it is Secret.

Things done with the data are Secret. 

If the programs exists, it may or may not be run by the Government, but that’s Secret. 

AT&T may or may not be involved in the program, but that’s Secret. 

If the program existed, it may or may not be wiretapping millions of calls, emails and chats, but that’s Secret. 

We can’t tell you when it may or may not have started, as that’s Secret. 

We can’t tell you how broad or narrow the program is, as that’s Secret.

We can’t tell you what information they have about you, after all the program may or may not exist and that’s Secret, including the information they may or may not have, which would also be Secret.

We can’t tell you about any FISA warrants the existing or non-existing program may or may not have applied for, or not, as that’s Secret.

We can’t even tell you the name of the program, as that is Secret.

We can, conclusively state that today is March 13th, 2007.  The rest of the stuff, you’re not entitled to know, or even know that it might be known.  Don’t ask again, as we might do something Secret to you.

And, since it would be Secret, you can’t tell anyone why you’re going to jail.  After all, we must protect the Secrets.

The Beeb (news.bbc.co.uk) is reporting the Israeli Ambassador to El Salvador, Tzuriel Refael, is being recalled from his posting.  This is not actually news, except that he was tied up in bondage gear, had a ball-gag in his mouth and was found in the courtyard of the embassy, drunk and naked.

Considering that the Israeli Government has been doing that to its’ citizens for years, it seems only fair that someone has returned the favour.  If only we could do that here to adjust the attitudes of some of our elected representatives. 

(You’re going to have to use your brains on this one.  I’ll even give you the link now to http://www.wikipedia.org so you can do some fact-checking.)

Republicans, by definition, are American political party members.  The Republican party has been around in various incarnations since 1854 as a coalition of Northern Democrats, Whigs and Anti-slavery Free-Soilers.  Abraham Lincoln was the first big Republican President, who did a few nice things, like the Emancipation Proclamation and a couple of ugly things, the US Civil War, as an example.

Essentially, the Republican Party has been in favour of business and free trade with a dash of keeping the government the hell out of the way.  Some of this attitude led to Herbert Hoover being tossed out of office by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal during the Depression.  The America-First wing of the Republican party would have kept the US out of WWII, even if Britain fell, as Europe wasn’t on their maps. 

Post-war?  There was Eisenhower and Nixon in the 50’s, where Ike pushed the containment of Communism with a side order of Internationalism, while Tricky Dick ran the national agenda.  The Interstate Highway system is a result of the Ike and Dick show. The admission of Hawaii and Alaska as states is also an Eisenhower-era accomplishment.  Ike coined the term "military-industrial complex" in reference to the mammoth business interests cloaked in secrecy who wanted more, bigger and more violent wars that they would supply the guns for.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the 1957 era segregation riots.  Ike called out the troops to insist that the Little Rock Central High School become integrated.

Then there was Richard Nixon.  The phrase "Lying Sack of Shit Who Would Do Anything To Stay In Power" comes to mind, but I’ve promised myself not to say such things about Henry Kissinger anymore.  Nixon was a vile, vicious punk and cheap-jack hustler who got elected to the highest office in the US.  Twice. 

The next Republican of note was Ronald Regan:  A walking logo for America.  More correctly the walking logo for a Hoover-esque America where assistance from the government was cut through the bone.  Remember PATCO?  In one day Regan fired all the air traffic controllers in the US because they had the temerity to belong to a union and ask for a raise?  Remember airline deregulation?  Remember Iran-Contra?  Remember the economic meltdown of the late 70’s?  Remember the Gordon Gecko-Greed-Is-Good-Bonfire-Of-The-Vanities mentality of the 80’s?  Trickle-down Economics?  James Watt as Secretary of the Interior?  Alexander Haig?  Ed Meese?  James Baker?  If those names seem familiar, go look at the meatsacks that were also in Daddy Bush’s Cabinet and inner circle. 

After that, you got George Bush I who melted down in one term with Gulf War I, then Slick Willie who was roped and saddled by bottom feeders like Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America.  Say what you will about Clinton, but at least he was getting some from a female who could consent and had reached the age of majority.   

Then there is President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy.

Where Jo Jo The Idiot Boy went off the rails was in the selection of the swine he surrounded himself with.  Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Shotgun Dick Cheney, Donnie Rumsfeld, Irving Scooter Libby, John Bolton, John Ashcroft, Richard Perle and Alberto Gonzalez.  Ideologues all, who wanted to fight someone, anyone, anywhere, but preferably someone big enough that the war could be a long-term earning proposition.  Unlike Dutch Regan who only attacked Grenada and that was over in an afternoon.

The greed and power fueled rapacity of that group of Regan and Nixon era remainder bin cutouts makes one almost long for a return to Jimmy Carter.  At least you knew Carter screwed up with good intentions, if nothing else.  

Democrats, if the truth be known were not a lot better.  FDR did what needed to be done to end the Depression, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it.  LBJ was handed a wounded nation and gave up when he found that he couldn’t win in Viet Nam.  Carter meant well.  Clinton meant well, but only talked a good game. 

JFK was caught between a military-industrial complex that wanted to nuke Cuba and a CIA that was styling reality as vigorously as they do now.  Had JFK not had his migraine headaches cured on November 22, 1963, things might have turned out differently, but we’ll never know.

Viewed in the totality, no, Republicans are not Evil.  Republicans are sensible when it comes to Taxes (Less is Good) and Government (Less is Good).  When it comes to Social issues, they suck about the same as the Democrats. 

Internationally, the Republicans are so inept as to be funny, if they weren’t so damn dangerous to global peace.  Which is the real issue:  Have the Republicans made the US a pariah on the international stage?  Emphatically, regrettably, yes.