John Roberts seemed to be waxing nostalgic when they started playing Billy Idol on American Morning today.

Could he be remembering his early days in Toronto?
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Money shot's at around 2:15, but well worth watching in its entirety.

Just when you thought the Bush Administration couldn't get sleazier, this delightful nugget.

Where this one becomes breathtaking in its appallingness is in its convergence of so many unthinkables. Well unthinkable if you have a Sept. 10 mindset, apparently. When you consider how many American Unthinkables are contained within this single story, all of it stemming from one amazingly terrible day.

It's fashionable to say we Canadians betray an irrational Anti-Americanism and like any lame stereotype, there's the grain of truth that comes from being a much smaller, much less-important country beside the world's only remaining superpower. That sort of knee-jerk reaction does exist here, but I'll let you in on a secret--deep down, despite all the resentment that's engendered to our bigger, richer, flashier neighbour Up Here, we always felt you were the good guys. America was the Statue of Liberty and Schoolhouse Rock animations of bills being passed into law. It was the other guys, the Soviets, who purged their own ranks of dissent, seized the levers of government by appointing 'loyalists' to positions of influence, detained people without charge, tortured them and locked them into gulags.

The Americans, on the other hand, had the Constitution, the Separation of Powers, a government of laws that may very well have been imperfect, but held out the possibility for citizen-initiated change.

How far we've come, America. How breathtakingly far. Let's recap:

1. An incoming Attorney General, the nation's top lawyer, basically fires a Justice Department lawyer for drafting a legal opinion declaring torture 'abhorrent'. Torture.

2. Because it's important to give a reach-around, the incoming AG offers the guy he's just canned a plum gig in Los Angeles, and

3. ... SNIP (from the ABC story)

...Just a few weeks before Levin was asked to leave, White House Advisor Karl Rove and Gonzales were involved in discussions over the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. Nine were dismissed the following year, and the matter erupted into a scandal, with critics alleging the administration saw the US attorney posts as patronage positions. UNSNIP

Levin told the committee this happened in 'early 2005,' according to the story. For the record, Carol Lam, U.S. Attorney for Southern California was one of the seven U.S. Attorneys dismissed on Dec. 7, 2006.

So just to be clear on this, the nation's top lawyer canned one of his top legal minds because the administration didn't think he would 'come out the right way' on fundamental matters of basic justice like, whether its okay to torture. Habeas corpus. Warrantless wiretapping (ie: the right for citizens to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to privacy). At the same time, he was working with Karl Rove, perhaps the most amoral political operative ever (and that's saying a lot) to purge the US Attorney ranks and replace the purged with political loyalists and hacks. I doubt these turkeys would have gotten as far as they did, had it not been for 9/11.

It's bad enough they took advantage of their citizens' collective fear and trauma to so dramatically pervert the American body politic, but what really makes the blood boil is their cockiness. You can see the arrogance in Bush's smirk, in Gonzalez' last appearance before Congress. It's the arrogance of people convinced they have all their bases covered.

'We don't torture,' Bush famously said as the horrors of Abu Ghraib unfolded to the world. We now know better, of course, but because they shoved out the people who might have acted as a check on them and replaced them with Loyal Bushies, they managed to craft legal justifications for what they did, created euphemisms so they could say perhaps, in the narrowest legal parsing possible, it wasn't exactly torture.

From the people who promised to 'restore dignity to the White House' indeed. If anything, it's practically an identical twin to Bill Clinton's famous "It depends on what your definitition of 'is,' is" remark during the Lewinsky scandal, only with thousands more dead people and the most fundamental of human freedoms trampled.

America is more than just a country. It's an idea, an experiment. Who or more accurately what, has lost the most since The War on Terror began?

h/t: Andrew Sullivan

Where a former First Lady married to a man referred to as 'America's first black President' would channel George Wallace to further her own ambitions.

But then there's that big, fat link on the front of the mainpage...

She's becoming a Dixiecrat, right before our very eyes.

What a difference a day makes.

The media psychology seems to have finally, grudgingly come to terms with Obama's presumptive nominee status. For the life of me, I can't fathom why Official Media (the papers, the networks, talk radio, etc.) never seemed to call out Clinton's bad math with respect to the delegate counts after the Potomac Primaries. There was just no way she could get ahead, even with Michigan and Florida seated at the convention, and no way she could seal the deal. The various spin on popular vote and delegate counts that came from Camp Clinton during the six weeks between Ohio and Pennsylvania were basically the political equivalent of the Chewbacca Defence -- 'No, don't look at that, look at the big Wookie over here! If I'm talkin' about Chewbacca, you must nominate Clinton!'' The blogs occasionally pushed back on the horse race narrative, but the train wreck of the past six weeks seemed to stoke the notion an Obama collapse might be in the offing. Really, the only thing that can turn the tide for Clinton now is a Gary Hart-esque moment, and from the looks of things, that's just not on.

Now, with Obama snagging a landslide in NC and Hillary just barely squeaking by in IN, and the voting preferences of a HUGE Democratic voting bloc (it ain't just the fact Obama carried such a huge margin of African-American voters, it's the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to cast ballots) clearly established, the delegate math just got even worse for Clinton.

Fear not, zombie film fans. The newest meme getting pushed out there is that Obama's not tough enough. I'm not familiar with her body of work, beyond her Wikipedia entry, but Kirsten Powers floated it out there on May 2 in a New York Post op-ed, and Howie Kurtz picked it up in his Washington Post column. That's how I came across it.

As with most lines of BS that get peddled, this one contains a grain of truth. Obama appeared rocked by the past six weeks. He and his campaign got rocked by one body blow after the next, and there were times, most notably during the debate debacle where he looked as though he was asking himself, 'do I really want this?'

But consider what had gone on. There was Wright, Ayers, the debate, then Wright flared up again. Much of it, particularly the debate, was exactly the kind of slime and garbage representative of the old Beltway crap Obama says he wants to get past. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a bit of wavering of will, especially when he had to disown his pastor.

Somehow, I think Obama's plenty tough, given yesterday's results. The question is whether some of his coalition are tough enough. When the shit was hitting Obama's fan, there was a palpable sense among the Obamans (full disclosure, if I were in the States, I'd be supporting Obama) that they might just walk away from the whole thing in a mixture of disgust and disappointment.

Judging from the blogs I follow (Sullivan, TPM, a dash of Kos and a pinch of Huff), the Obamans' psychology seems much improved, but as one wag whose name escapes me recently wrote, 'never underestimate how much slime a Clinton can secrete'.

My general sense is that even the Clintons now know it's game over, and a concession (more likely a 'suspension of campaign') is iminent. But moving forward, the slime is likely to ooze to epic proportions, and the Obamans may find their resolve tested.

I guess the operative question has to be: The brothers and sisters in Gary have Obama's back. Are the college kids and the people Paul Begala derided as eggheads gonna let  him (and them) down?

All the talk of a Clinton/Obama dream ticket (which I suspect is not terribly dreamy in the mind of Obama and probably the Clintons) got me to thinking...

Shouldn't their names be smooshed together like all the other fabulously and fabulously dysfunctional folk who provide us with so much tabloid fodder? C'mon, we've got TomKat, Brangelina, Romber (Rob and Amber from Survivor)

And so, without further ado, I offer up the following for your delectation:

Clobama, or perhaps Oblinton

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll revisit the pros and cons of each shortly.

Yesterday, Josh asked for some context regarding the Canadian political scene. Here's what I came up with. I hope it helps.

First off, it's important to first understand the context in which our polity found ourselves that year. And in order to understand that, you need a crash course in Canuckistani (to paraphrase Pat Buchanan) political history.

Secondly, always remember that our federal government is a straight parliamentary system, almost identical to the British House of Commons. Convention dictates that as long as the governing party can marshall a majority of the votes in the legislative chamber, it can run the show for up to five years. However, a government that can't cobble together enough votes falls.

Since the nation was officially founded in 1867, politics have been dominated by two parties: the Liberals and the Conservatives. Actually, the Liberals have done most of the dominating, governing for most of the 20th century. The Libs were so dominant they are still perceived and often referred to as the Natural Governing Party. You with me? Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are big-tents, much in the manner of your own Democrats and Republicans. The Libs dominated on their ability to hold together a stronger coalition of voting blocs.

The Conservatives occasionally cobbled together their coalition for a time, but they always seem to have trouble holding it together. This most recently (and most spectacularly) happened in the 80s when after nearly two decades of Liberal rule under Prime Ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, Conservative Brian Mulroney won two consecutive majorities before tanking under a totally toxic cloud of scandals, deficits, severe regional cleavages (it's a geographically big country and many Candians identify strongly as Albertans, Quebecers, Ontarians), opposition to the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA'S ugly older sibling), a recession, a hated new sales tax, massive deficits and so on. Long story short-Mulroney's coalition of Westerners, Quebec Nationalists, and assorted Atlantic and Ontario bluebloods and bagmen collapsed spectacularly.

In the 1993 election, the Liberals under Jean Chretien scored a massive victory. The Conservatives were reduced to two seats, and a Quebec nationalist party--the Bloc Quebecois (under the leadership of Mulroney's former Conservative Quebec Lieutenant Lucien Bouchard) and a newly-formed right-wing Western protest party called Reform had the second and third-most seats in the Commons.

(And just so noone accuses me of ignoring lefties, there's also a 'democratic socialist party called the NDP which generally has about 20 seats in the Commons, but they're mostly lame, and I'm a former NDP'er.)

Anyways, after many fits and starts, Reform twisted and contorted itself into several configurations, including for a brief period of time the party with the Lamest. Acronym. Ever. May I present the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party--CCRAP. The initial efforts were pretty lame, and Chretien's Liberals mostly ran roughshod over them. And despite the usual sleaze that attends governments with mostly-ineffectual oppositions, the Chretien era didn't suck. He got the deficit under control (actually, his successor, then-finance minister Paul Martin did the hard work), introduced vaguely progressive legislation, and IMHO most importantly of all, kept us out of Iraq.

But as the Chretien era wore on, the sleaze got sleazier, the government got arrogant, as many governments past their sell date are prone to get and Martin eventually became Prime Minister after a fair bit of intrigue and a lot of ugliness near the end. Martin never recovered from the perception he'd wanted to be Prime Minister just a little too much, and then a shitstorm erupted just as an election was underway. Martin wound up with a very tenuous minority government, and that is the context under which the Cadman story really begins. Cadman was one of the early members of the old Reform Party, and was a Reform, then Canadian Alliance (that was the second incarnation of Reform. The current incarnation is the third) MP until losing a nomination vote in his constituency in 2004. He ran as an indepent in that election and won. Martin's minority government was so shaky, the government could literally fall on one person's vote--Chuck Cadman's, since he was the only sitting Member of Parliament not affiliated with one of other parties in the Commons.

It was known in 2004 that Cadman had cancer, and not long after that, that he was terminal. The right had more or less finally gotten its shit together under Stephen Harper, and had cobbled together a pretty rickety coalition. The shitstorm scandal (in many ways, it was the Chretien Era's final sandbagging of the Martin Era) was fermenting and getting ready to blow, and the Conservatives were spoiling for an election.

Mind you, there's a long and ignominious history of Reform/Alliance/Conservatives trying to cut deals with incumbents to vacate their seats or secure their votes. For that matter, the Liberals are no pikers on that matter, either. But the one that comes to mind off the top of my head was a sweetheart deal cut between Jim Hart, former member of Okanagan-Coquihalla, and just-elected leader of the Canadian Alliance Stockwell Day.

...Anyways, I suppose there's an awful lot of material to digest there, but it sets the stage for how l'affaire Cadman came to pass. Josh, I hope this contextualizes things a little.

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