Santa brings a surprise for Olivia!

Paul Wells brings this gem to our attention: A gift for the Olivia Chow campaign of beer-and-popcorn dimensions.

Mike Klander, Liberal riding-association president for Trinity-Spadina compares NDP candidate Olivia Chow to, get this, oh so clever, wait for it...a Chow Chow.

He offends just about everybody else in this campaign, and single-handedly makes up for the lack of negative campaigning to date with three entires on his blog, since yanked, likely faster than it took his incisive and observant wit to come up with the dog-candidate comparisons.

The kicker is that Klander used the same template as the Mike and Dean Cross-Border Tagteam.

That hurts.

Just to be clear

http://www.slate.com/id/2133079/

We're not getting paid by anyone. Dammit.

Pundit Hair Watch

I once wrote Paul Wells to congratulate him on having better hair than Chantal Hebert. That not being a difficult task to achieve (much to his disagreement). However, based on her latest appearance on CBC The National's At Issue panel, Chantal appears to be using some sort of product, creating that bed-head look. It works quite nicely.

Fourth Circuit Smackdown

The Fourth Circuit today handed down a stunning rebuke of the Bush administration in the Padilla case. (Side note: his name doesn't rhyme with tortilla.)

For those who haven't been following, Padilla has been held by the Government with almost no access to lawyers on charges that we so super duper secret they couldn't even be revealed to the public, because he was such a terrible threat to national security.

Well, Dubya won in the Fourth Circuit, which held he did have authority to hold Padilla as an enemy combatant. Padilla obviously appealed to the Supreme Court, which was just about to decide whether to take the case. And then something funny happened. As Michael Lutting wrote:

The Government has held Padilla militarily for over three and a half years, steadfastly maintaining that it was imperative in the interests of national security that he be so held. However, a short time after our decision issued on the government's representation that Padilla's military custody was indeed necessary in the interest of national security, the government determined that it was no long necessary that Padilla be held militarily. Instead, it announced, Padilla would be transferred to the custody of federal civilian law enforcement authorities and criminally prosecuted . . . For alleged offenses considerably different from, and less serious than, those acts for which the government had militarily detained Padilla.

So, let's see. Padilla's about to get his day in the Supreme Court, and then the Government decides, oh, whoops, he's not so bad after all, let's just charge him criminally. The Fourth Circuit didn't like this much: "The government cannot be seen as conducting litigation with the enormous implications of this litigation - litigation imbued with significant public interest - in such a way as to select by which forum as between the Supreme Court of the United States and an inferior appellate court it wishes to be bound."

And then the kicker:

[The government's actions] have left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country . . . can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror - an impression we would have thought the government . . . could ill afford to leave extant. And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today. While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be.

But then, are we to be surprised that the facts can change for the Bush administration? Recall, these are the people who once derided those who lived in a reality-based world. For them, facts can change. For them, well, what does it matter if a man was held on baseless charges (or, as Luttig so delicately put it, "by mistake"), because, hey, we can always change the facts to suit our purposes. Bush liked the Fourth Circuit's result, and presumably would rather have the opinion of a three-judge panel of the conservative Fourth Circuit than face full review before the Supremes, where he might run into a problem in the form of Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, Stevens, and maybe even Kennedy.

If this is the society we live in - where the government can hold you on one charge, and then when forced to justify it, can change those charges - where does it end? What sort of mad Orwellian culture is it, where the past can be changed to suit the present?

Blowjobs bad, spying good

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at GW Law School recently said, in regard to secret wire tapping:

We have finally reached the constitutional Rubicon. If Congress cannot stand firm against the open violation of federal law by the president, then we have truly become an autocracy.

(Parenthetically, Turley testified before Congress in favour of Clinton's impeachment).

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 38 U.S.C. 1802 is very clear that such surveillance needs judicial authorization - which can be received retroactively

Of course, Bush says that the resolution by congress after September 11, authorizing him to use "all necessary force" to combat terrorists in Afghanistan, gives him permission to do that.

This is a staggering claim. They always taught me in law school that a statute overruling another statute does so to the narrowest extent possible - that if Congress is overruling a prior act, it has to be clear in doing so. I'd be shocked if the conservative trio on the Court - Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts - would disagree.

But if this is the case - if a Congressional resolution, not an Act, can sweep away the Constitutionally-mandated judicial oversight of wiretapping, without specifically stating it is doing so, then what have we arrived at?

And where are the Congressional hounds now? Clinton lying about sex with Lewinsky (and really, what self-respecting man would admit to getting a hummer from her) demanded impeachment, whereas Bush repeatedly breaking the law and admitting to it does not?

This much of course is obvious. But the greater problem is if we sit back and let Bush get away with saying that a Congressional resolution sweeps away all sorts of protections, then what is next? Does it authorize him to search your houses without a warrant? If the language of the Congressional resolution is so broad that it can annul a statute which it doesn't even reference, then it must annul many other statutes and protections as well.

So really, what we need is for someone to give Bush a blowjob.

I'll take one for the team.

I dream of Olivia

I had a vivid dream featuring Olivia Chow last night. Like all dreams, I have to get it down in print, or I'll forget it. And we can't have that, can we? Or perhaps, at the end of the story, we'll wish we can. Anyway, we were walking down Strachan Ave near my place (she is running in my riding). She had just announced her candidacy, but was upset that none of her campaign signs had arrived yet. I said "Don't worry Olivia, you don't really need them until the last three weeks of the campaign, when it will really matter". She was still annoyed though, so I told her "Look, I understand how you feel, it's sort of like a kid's first day of school, all excited and ready to go, but their parent say to them, 'wait a month and then we'll buy you new clothes and supplies". She was consoled by this, and thanked me. It was raining, I was wet, and I had to run across the street to get home. She called out as I ran "Wait, what is your name?"So I told her, and then said "I helped Jack with his leadership campaign, I'd love to work on yours. Who can I contact to help out?" and she gave me a card, with her name on it. She told me "I want you to be my campaign manager"and shocked, flattered, I thought "Oh my God!". But then I realized she had said "Pen manager". A little disappointed, but still flattered, I thought to myself "Wow, she wants me to pen her speeches!". We parted ways, and then I realized, once again that I was incorrect. She did not want me to manage her campaign, or pen her speeches. She wanted me to manage her campaign pens. What the hell? Finally, another realization struck me. I had misheard her again. What she wanted was for me to manage her PINS. Doh. But it was still cool. In from the rain, I found myself around a table with Paul Martin and his advisers, and I was pretending to care about their situation, and give them advice. And Stephen Harper came up and handed us his platform, and it stated that if the people elected them to government, they would only govern for a year, doing only what the people wanted them to act on, like democratic reform and accountability, national defence, and would leave healthcare and social issues alone. After getting this done, they would call an election and let the people judge them and see if they had been as scary as everybody had feared. I totally agreed with his strategy, and told him he was going to win the election with that proposal, all of this in front of Paul. I thought "Gee, this is really going to hurt Paul's feelings if I find Harper's proposal so reasonable and tell him so in front of his face". But then I woke up. Poor Paul. I hope he doesn't hold grudges.

Disclaimer

I have voted Liberal, Progressive Conservative and NDP. I have worked on NDP campaigns, shook hands with Liberal Prime Ministers, and on one humourous occasion, did to a rather attractive Conservative strategist what their party did to Ontario. I happen to think Jack Layton is great guy if only Canadians took the time to get to know him, think Paul Martin isn't such a great guy, if only Canadians took the time to get to know him, and really have no opinion on Stephen Harper either way (other than that he looks horrible in leather), but happen to think that the best thing for the country right now would be a Tory minority. I figure it's better to have a Tory minority now in order to clean things up and send the Liberals to the wilderness for rejuvenation, than to suffer another Liberal minority of fools, and then see a Conservative majority at the end of it. That would be truly disastrous.

So that's where I stand. If you can figure it out, let me know.