Potpourri For $1000, Alex

Because I'm heading off for the long weekend and won't be posting for a few days, I wanted to take my parting shots on a few items in the news.

It turns out that the "mystery disease" in a Toronto nursing home is probably Legionnaires' disease. Now that the mystery is over, I hope that we don't suffer the same overreaction from tourists that we had after the SARS episode. No, we've never walked around with masks here. (Nor do we live in igloos.)

Karl Rove is going to testify before the grand jury in the Plame leak case. I can't imagine him doing that unless he and the administration know that there is some high-profile hide on the line here, maybe his own. Does it say Libby-Libby-Libby on the indictment-dictment-dictment?

The Habs are now 2-0! Has Michael Ryder sewn up that MVP award yet? At this pace, he'll finish the season with 82 game winning goals. All that matters now is that the beat the Leafs into submission on Saturday. Leafs fans are just so annoying.

And President Bush gave a major speech to re-iterate the rationale for the war in Iraq. He did make some excellent points about the importance of keeping up the overall war on terror, but his analogies between terrorism and communism were tired and weak. Indeed, a lot of his speech (I read the transcript) was what would be referred to in a court of law as prejudicial rather than probative. He was very short on details, and long on recycled rhetoric. Maybe it played better verbally than in writing (knowing what a skilled orator the president is), but to me it read like a glorified cut-and-paste job. Most importantly, he has still left me unsatisfied with three aspects of the whole Iraq invasion: 1. He still talks about Iraq from the point of view of a revisionist, rather than in the same terms he used before the war started. Many of the reasons for needing to fight there now were not there in the beginning. 2. Even if you accept every reason for going into that war, he has not talked about the apparent lack of competence in the civilian leadership's execution of it, and 3. While he talks of sacrifice, there is still nobody making sacrifices for this war other than the members of the military and their families, and maybe some poor hurricane victims. The wealthiest people and corporations (with the most assets for the military to protect) have had their taxes cut and contributed nothing to the war effort. Finally, I found some irony in his description of Osama bin Laden as a "man who grew up in wealth and privilege" who says, "his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, 'what is good for them and what is not.'" (And I think some people might also find irony in his statement, "Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.")

I'm off to Montreal for Thanksgiving weekend, and likely won't post again until Monday. I wish everyone a happy turkey day in Canada, and a happy Columbus Day south of the 49th.