man oh man.   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_ and_radio/4009821.stm" title="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_ and_radio/4009821.stm" target="_blank"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/en... 

Here is essay I wrote on Saving Private Ryan years ago.  http://www.tblog.com/templates/index.php?bid=koby&" title="http://www.tblog.com/templates/index.php?bid=koby&" target="_blank"http://www.tblog.com/template...;static=151368 Here is a smaller adjunct.  http://www.tblog.com/templates/index.php?bid=koby&" title="http://www.tblog.com/templates/index.php?bid=koby&" target="_blank"http://www.tblog.com/template...;static=153002

If you like Seattle, this is the place for you.  Only be for warned, if you do not like rain, or prefer a place with clearly marked seasons, you are not going to like Vancouver.  We have two seasons, rain and summer.  When the sun shines, though, Vancouver is one of the world’s most picturesque cities and it is literally possible, as the tourist pamphlets say, to go wind surfing and skiing in the same day in winter.  Actually, this is overstating it a bit; the skiing on the local mountains can be dodgy. Spend the extra money and go to Whistler.

Now, Vancouver is nicknamed Vansterdam for reason.  We like our BC bud, we are open about this and we are contemptuous of US drug czars who spin wild tales of reefer madness.  Let me put this into perspective for you down south.  Tommy Chong lives – lived – here and we would appreciate it if the US released him from prison for selling bongs over the internet from a well known store in downtown Vancouver.

Vancouverites live longer, smoke less, drink less, exercise more and are less obese than anyone else in Canada.  We like it that way. 

We do not believe in making a distinction between people who were born here and people that moved here.  No one was born here it seems; Vancouver is just a meeting place.  Vancouver makes the UN look homogenous by comparison.  (If I remember correctly, 55% of Vancouverites were born elsewhere. Add to that literally ten thousands of ESL students.) 

There is no such thing as Canadian food.  The closest thing is standard American fair, but you guys beat us to the punch.  Not to worry, the food selection reflects the ethnic makeup of the city.  There is little bit of everything.

Gay people in BC can marry.  Marriage here is doomed I tell you.  To make matters worse, Vancouver has a large gay community.  Such being the case, you can rest easy.  No one from “Jesus land” will be bothering you.  

    & nbsp;   

Will it be business at usual for Bush and company, or will Bush move to unit a divided country?  A Litmus test will be what happens with Rumsfeld.  There is general bi-partisan agreement that serious mistakes have made in Iraq and that the person most responsible for these mistakes is Donald Rumsfeld and the cadre of Neo-Cons at the DOD.     

The Slate’s Fred Kaplan lays out the case for such a test and the case against Rumsfailed and gang thus:

http://slate.com/id/2109132/" title="http://slate.com/id/2109132/" target="_blank"http://slate.com/id/2109132/    

"Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith—their fingerprints are all over every smudge of this mess:

• Two years ago, they set up their own intelligence operation, which pored over raw CIA data and "stove-piped" straight to the White House any tidbit that might remotely suggest that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or a link to al-Qaida, even when the professionals concluded otherwise.


• In the preparations for invading Iraq, Rumsfeld whittled down the military's war plans to the barest minimum necessary to win on the battlefield, leaving nothing for securing the country afterward. Not even after the 3^rd Infantry Division captured Baghdad International Airport did Rumsfeld fly in additional troops, military police, or materiel.


• When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, testified that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed for post-combat security and stabilization, Wolfowitz publicly upbraided him, telling the same congressional committee that it was "hard to imagine" we'd need more troops to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq than we'd needed to topple Saddam's army.


• All three (along with Vice President Dick Cheney, their abettor in the White House) torpedoed the State Department's elaborate plans for "postwar" operations, thinking they wouldn't be necessary because their man, Ahmad Chalabi, would be the exile on a white horse who would succeed Saddam on the throne, rally his millions of supporters, and lead Iraq toward Western-style democracy.


• Meanwhile, before, during, and after the war, Rumsfeld gratuitously antagonized America's traditional allies who had opposed the Iraqi venture, deriding them as "Old Europe"—irrelevant remnants of an earlier era—and thus hardened their opposition to help us later, when Bush began to realize that he needed them after all.


• Finally, Rumsfeld set in motion, covered up, and in the end did nothing to rectify the systems and procedures that led to the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, which probably inspired al-Qaida's single greatest recruitment drive of the year."

Humble pie is in the oven.  I am about ready to pronounce time of death.  The gulf between America and the rest of the Western world became that much greater.  We now turn our back on you America.  You have made your bed; now lie in it. The night could not have gone better for Bush.   

My prediction

Drum role please. 

Barring a terrorist attack, Kerry will win and it will not be as close as many people have been predicting. 

I do not know whether there is more or less to the Democratic claims about vote suppression, but this will emerge as the story.  There is no better cure for voter apathy among a particular group than to try to suppress the vote of that group.  Either way, what is clear is that Rove and company have done a very poor job handling the issue and that Democrats have done a masterful job of playing it up.            & nbsp;   &n bsp;

Ontario has banned Pit Bulls.  The dogs account for a disproportionately large number of dog bites and even greater number of serious dog bits.  Under the new ban, Ontario residents will be barred from having pit bulls as pets and are prohibited from breeding them.  Ontario residents, who already own pit bulls, must muzzle their dogs when out in public. 

As far as I am concerned, this is great.  Now, if only Canadians could get only get around to banning hand guns.