Wednesday, December 31, 2008

HNY


Pulled a Harper and prorogued the blog for December. After the coalition drama was put on hiatus, December offered little except the departure of Stephane Dion. I couldn't bring myself to watch his address to the nation, apparently with a hand-held camera in some basement, explaining the coalition. At least his departure speeds up the succession process in the Liberal party, and someone who projects a little more gravitas is in place to act as a check on Harper, who can't be trusted not to pull a stunt at the first opportunity. Look for another election in 09. Little Stevie can't help himself.

A Conservative MP announces he leads a secret caucus of anti-abortion MPs, whose identities he declines to reveal.  Apparently this secret group plans to pass a law outlawing abortion without anybody knowing. Good luck with that.

Look for Conrad Black to remain in prison, and raise a glass to Patrick Fitzgerald.

Bristol Palin had a kid, named Tripp. I had no idea it was tripping season, but there you go. Supposedly she will  score somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 Gs for the baby pix.

Obama thought it would be a good idea to have homophobe bible thumper Rick Warren read the invocation to his inauguration. Swing and a miss. Like all episodes involving gas, this too shall pass, but it shows Obama continuing to have a tin ear on sexual orientation, around which I sense a profound discomfort on his part. 

Buh-bye 08. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.


Saturday, November 29, 2008

A Consummation Devoutly to be Wish'd


So Stephen Harper, only 6 weeks after being denied his majority, finds himself on the cusp of being thrown out of a job by a feckless and fractured opposition. Quite a demonstration of leadership, wouldn't you say? He joins that other Tory with a minority who, to prove his manliness, decided that the people were wrong to deny him a majority and would proceed as if he had one: Joe Clark. To share this distinction with Clark must turn Harper's spit to vinegar. And all because he couldn't resist the temptation to try to destroy his political opponents, something that looks like he is more interested in than in doing anything about the economy, which the last three years have shown he had sadly mismanaged, burning through more than $60 billion in tax cuts for his well-heeled friends.

Thomas Walkom of the Star called it right. While the world is plunging ahead with massive stimulus initiatives, Harper chooses to do essentially nothing. That is actually a defensible enough strategy, given that much of what needs to be done must wait til after Obama takes over. So what do Harper and his Harrisite Flaherty do? Give in to the yahoo howlings of their base and go for predictable red-meat targets. Target public service pay and their right to strike (the public service in Ottawa has been running at a record profit clip over the last 10 years, delivering gigantic surpluses), pay equity, and while they're at it, destroy their political opponents.

Having got used to daring the opposition to kiss his posterior and seeing them dutifully pucker up, Harperbot figured he could cow them into going out of business, daring them to plunge the country into another unnecessary election. Having already run one unnecessary election himself, forcing another one was something Harper figured the opposition parties could not afford to be seen doing, let alone afford, period. The opposition, dispirited as they settled into their seats for a long winter in the political wilderness, were instantly galvanized by this gratuitous bit of pissery and in the blink of an eye, a unite-the-left movement had formed, lured by the heady prospect of instant governing. They may just find they like it. Welcome to a new era of coalition governments, brought to you by your unfriendly Conservative party.

This is another classic example of the Reform-party nastiness that curdles in the Tory soul. Like the neo-cons he idolizes, Harper and his hyenas prefer to campaign rather than govern and simply cannot keep themselves from waving their dicks in front of people when they think they can get away with it. In the current crisis, the proposal to essentially kneecap the other parties bespeaks an adolescent, video-gamer opportunism.  

Today, Little Stevie has gone into his sweater drawer with a vengeance and said he won't try to eliminate the funding for the other parties under the current arrangement after all. Old Milky Eyes, however, may find that everyone has moved on and decided that he cannot be trusted to be a leader, and that he will be asked to spend Christmas in Stornaway. Given his predilection to sulkiness, though, he may just decide to take his ball and go home. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd. 

So here we are at the end of 08, Harper has failed to get his majority against a fractured and poorly led opposition, and is looking at being tossed out on his ample keister by them. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Now Jim Flaherty will be free to pursue his dream of becoming Premier of Ontario and doing what really wanks his crank—jailing the homeless.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Shocked Disbelief


Still awash in the sea of endorphins unleashed by the accession of Obama, and waiting for the Big Shoe to drop on the economy. Part of the giddy hope that grips us is no doubt a reflection of the passing of Oedipus Tex from the scene. George Wanker Bush grows paler and more insignificant every day, filling his days issuing regulations and orders to ruin as many things as he can in his final 60 days, jetting around warning all those A students that regulating the markets is bad, this while we were treated to the  spectacle of Alan Greedspan admitting to Congress and the world that one of the linchpins of his economic philosophy was, how to put this? W-R-O-N-G.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Greenspan has been a life-long disciple of nutjob pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand, a favourite of adolescents desperate to show their worldliness and to find deep meaning in an all-encompassing philosophy. That he would continue to cleave to Rand's undercooked gumbo of ersatz libertarianism in his later life does not recommend him.

We have, with the great help of Randers like Greenspan, been told that of all the fields of human endeavour—making cars, building houses, tending to the sick, representing parties in court, farming—tending to others' money should, alone among them all, be unencumbered by rules and regulations meant to curb abuses by mere mortals. Working in finance bestows infallibility, it seems. Markets are self-regulating, they take care of themselves, their self-interest (paging Ayn Rand) provides the necessary corrective.

Except, of course, when it doesn't. And then there is a state of shocked disbelief.

Although Daniel Gross in Slate tells us that analogies to the Great Depression are over the top, Nobel winner Paul Krugman on Friday wrote: "nothing is happening on the policy front that is remotely commensurate with the scale of the economic crisis. And it’s scary to think how much more can go wrong before Inauguration Day."


Sunday, October 26, 2008

Turn Out the Lights


Time for the Repugnicans to break out the fine beach-size 400-thread-per-inch Egyptian cotton crying towels, because it's over, baby. Reports have the McCain team jockeying for a post-blowout take-down of Sarah Palin, who they claim has gone rogue on them. When Peggy and Cotton Hill finally sat down for their interview with Brian Williams of NBC, their body language spoke volumes. McCain suppressed the twitches, sighs, snorts and harrumphs that he featured to such edifying effect in his last debate appearance, but clearly these running mates were not feeling the love. Palin, for her part, has reportedly become fed up with her McCain handlers and, with 2012 in mind, gone off-message, publicly questioning the decision to abandon campaigning in Michigan and to not talk about Jeremiah Wright. 

And then there is Ashley Todd, 20-year-old Texan college student and McCain volunteer who previously worked with that model of rectitude, the College Republicans (of Jack Abramoff infamy). On Wednesday she called police in Pittsburgh to report that she had been attacked by what she described as a tall black man who, realizing she was a McCain supporter, carved a B (for Barack, you see) into her cheek with a blunt knife, but such was the assailant's finely modulated rage, he didn't manage to break her skin. She showed up with a black eye and sure enough, the red welty B was there, only it was backwards, exactly the way it would be if someone had carved it into her cheek while looking in the mirror. Oops. It didn't take the cops long to get Ashley to fess up that she made the whole thing up. A more pathetic end note for the McCain campaign can hardly be imagined: raving about what awful things that black man has done to  them, clutching their little Obama monkey dolls. We can finally retire all the old myths about McCain the reforming maverick, the man of honour, of sound judgment. He'll go down as running the dirtiest campaign in recent memory, and that's saying something. As for the Grotesque Old Party, it threatens to turn into a lunatic rump, powered only by paranoia and bigotry. Even Colin Powell—having permanently sullied his reputation by his disgraceful performance at the UN when he knew the evidence was, as he was reported to have said at the time, "bullshit"—couldn't take any more.

Palin of the Day: Zamboni


Wednesday, October 22, 2008

While I was away...


To put it tritely, since I last posted, some 62 trillion (that's 62 million million) chickens have come home to roost, and we face a future of diminished opportunities and cancelled retirements while we find a way to clean up the mess left by the wizards on Wall Street, which doled out $62 billion to itself in bonuses alone in 06. The meltdown has exposed the US as a clapped-out shell of its former self, creating wealth through the financial equivalent of musical chairs, passing ticking Financial Explosive Devices from one to another, pocketing fees and bonuses in the billions along the way. Millions of Americans are headed for ruin, and they are taking the world down with them.

I regret my amateur fascination with particle and astro-physics. I am now haunted by the likelihood that we may have already passed an "event horizon" and are now plunging into a black hole, our momentum now too much for us to overcome until all the wealth we have accumulated is squeezed into a forlorn single dollar. Or maybe the analogy of the boat headed toward the precipice of a great falls is more apt; past a certain point, all the back-paddling in the world results in diddly. At least in this scenario, we can hear the "roar" of our fall before we go over. Or maybe that "sound" is the flush as we vortex down, down, down into the bowl. 

Into a black hole. Off a cliff. Down the crapper. Take your pick.

There are, however, things to be grateful for. In two weeks, Obama will be elected president, and Conrad Black rots in a cell.

Of course, here we did finally have our election, to the tune of a quarter billion, which ended up changing nothing. An increased minority, but a minority just the same. Harper will have until next May to throw his weight around, at which point the Liberals will choose a new leader, and we'll essentially have a do-over of the last Parliament.

It came down to what I spoke of earlier: a tin ear on Québec. Trashing artists is always good to pump up the Tory yahoo base, but Quebecers actually like their artists. Québec has its own home-grown culture, with its own stars, and doesn't quite guzzle American pop culture like English Canada does. It also, quite unlike the rest of Canada, thinks highly of its record in keeping young people out of jail, and has the stats to show that it works. So it was manna from heaven for the Bloc, who came storming back to deny the Harperites a majority.

I agree with Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail that we are likely to see Harper leave before the next election (assuming he doesn't have one foisted on him). With everything in his favour this time around, he still couldn't get a majority. Next time out, he can't count on a Liberal leader as easy to defeat as Dion. And by that time, we all stand to be considerably worse off than we are now, which won't bode well for the Tories. So I think Steve will take a look at the landscape and pull a Mike Harris, get out of town while the getting is good.

Since my last post, the US election has taken what looks like will be its final shape, with Obama finally pulling away from Cotton McCain and Peggy Palin. McCain is now just a jittery old poot, reduced to flailing and mugging and Palin seems to be more interested in burnishing her far-right cred for '12. Is a chair on The View in her future?

Palin of the Day: Mutt

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Cotton & Peggy


The brilliant Chris Kelly at the Huffington Post has nailed the McCain thing:

John McCain doesn't actually believe anything. He's just belligerent. And he's not a conservative, or a liberal, or a maverick, or a Hutterite, or anything much, philosophically, one way or the other. He's just the 2000 Year Old Prick.

And this was before McCain picked Palin.

It finally occurred to me what we have in this odd couple: war hero-cum-prick Cotton Hill and his daughter-in-law Peggy, from King of the Hill.

Palin of the Day: Gold Wing



Saturday, September 20, 2008

Ritz Cracker


"Please stay and enjoy yourselves, but I have to warn you, the 10 o'clock show can get pretty blue. Oh, and try the veal."


Just when I think that Canadians might be wary of giving a majority to Harper, along comes the Canada's latest stand-up comedy sensation, Llyodminster's own Gerry Ritz, Minister of Food Humour. This listeriosis thing at the Maple Leaf plant that's killed a dozen or so people? Well, when you really think about it, it really is very funny, isn't it? Ritz riffed that the failure in the food safety system was causing the government a death of a thousand cuts "or should I say the death of a thousand cold cuts."

After the guffaws died down, when told that one death was in Prince Edward Island, the Ritzster hit it out of the park: “please tell me it's [Liberal agriculture critic] Wayne Easter" (who represents one of the ridings in Canada's toy province).

Ba-dum!

Last week, Harper moved swiftly to bring the hammer down on the guanofacient puffin and the wise-ass tiny Tory who dissed the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. With Ritz, he's decided to let it pass, saying that the remarks were part of a private conversation. But since when is a conference call with members of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency deemed private?

What this shows is exactly why Harper has garnered such a reputation as a controlling tightass. It has occurred to more than one person that he needs to be Minister of Everything because his caucus, generally speaking, lives in the shallow end of the talent pool. In one sense, this is not surprising. Just as Americans are awakening to the realization that if you elect people who tell you that government is useless, you end up with useless people in government, so too the Tories are short on people who actually want government to work. Thus we get a cabinet with such noteworthy lightweights as Gordon O'Connor, Bev Oda, Gary Lunn, Rona Ambrose, and of course, matinee meat puppet Maxime "my gal's rack is bigger than yours" Bernier. Even the unlucky-in-love Peter MacKay looks positively Prime Ministerial compared to these mopes. (MacKay enjoys the unique distinction of being one of the only men to have been dumped by his girlfriend not for another man, but for another political party.) Even jet-skier and rollerblader extraordinaire Stockwell Day, who thought the Niagara River runs from north to south and (to steal a line from Warren Kinsella) that the Flintstones was a documentary, has become a model of gravitas in comparison. So threadbare is the Team Tory bench that the only person Harper could find to replace Bernier as foreign affairs minister was David Emerson, who won his seat in the last election running as a Liberal, and is, sensibly, not running again. As for Gerry Ritz, here's a poli sci pop quiz for you. Until he made a name for himself in comedy yesterday, how many of you could say you knew who Gerry Ritz was? Enough said.

The Bernier mess illustrated one of Harper's big challenges: to find enough Quebec names to add to his cabinet. Hence the concerted effort by Harper to make nice with Quebec's soft and hard nationalists. To hear Harper speak now to them, you'd think that an Alberta firewaller and a Pequiste from the Saguenay were two peas in a pod. Unfortunately, this is, as it was when Joe Clark and then Brian Mulroney pursued it as a strategy, a marriage of political convenience rather than any real sharing of core values, a classic case of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend.

I am old enough to remember back to a time when Conservatives were widely regarded in Quebec as largely unsympathetic to French Canada, if not outright anti-French. When the Liberals dominated Quebec federally under Trudeau, there was little room for a federal conservative party in Quebec. Small-c conservative opinion in French Canada did not gravitate to the Tories, and was largely consigned to rural Quebec and largely represented by the Union Nationale provincially (or should I say "nationally"?) and the Creditistes federally. It was only after these parties disappeared that the Tories were able to make inroads in Quebec, culminating in Mulroney's strong showing in Quebec in the 80s, when the PCs (as they were then) had the help of sovereignist PQ pavement pounders and door knockers. Then there was the Meech Lake fiasco, followed not long afterward by the splintering of the Tories. The Quebec-Alberta marriage under Mulroney ended in bitter divorce.

One of the animating impulses for the Reform party was outrage at what was seen as catering to the whining of Quebec for special status. Think back to the referendum campaign when Preston Manning persistently pressed Chretien to accept that a 50%+1 vote for sovereignty was enough of a threshold to permit Quebec to leave Canada. If one didn't know any better, one might have thought that Manning was just as happy to see the back of Quebec, and that if a yes vote in the referendum came along, well, then, sunrise, sunset. Quebec's more statist model and less-than-fundamentalist social tolerance were always anathema to the likes of Manning and Harper. If, as Harper once said, "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term," Quebec would certainly have seemed even more so.

So it was amusing to see Harper taking advantage of every opportunity to kiss Quebec's wet spot, reminding them that it was he who stood up in the Commons and passed a resolution that recognizes them as a "nation," something mistakenly thought by a lot of nervous federalists to be the third rail of politics involving Quebec. Given the vitriolic response that the phrase "distinct society" evoked in the Rest of Canada in the time of Meech, this must make Conservative hair stand on end in certain quarters of Not-Quebec. However, as Chantal Hebert of the Star notes, Harper has come to realize that by simply uttering the sentiment that Quebec is a nation (a far more loaded term than distinct society, imho), he has sucked most of the oxygen out of the sovereignist project. Support for PQ-style sovereignty-association or independence in Quebec is at its lowest in recent memory, which means that the Bloc Quebecois stands increasingly exposed as clapped out. Bloc head Gilles Duceppe, I suspect, has nightmares starring Stephen Harper speaking in French and drawing cheers. It must gall him to see an Albertan come into town and pick off disaffected nationalists. Maybe he should try something bold, like propose that Canada is a nation. After all, he has a tidy Canadian MP's pension to worry about.

Some indication of how eager Harper is to stroke Quebec is his recent bizarre announcement that he will enshrine the practice of alternating French and English-speaking chairs of the CRTC. However, since the creation of the CRTC, the chairs have alternated between English and French speakers with one exception, when Konrad von Finkelstein (I'm betting he's not a francophone) succeeded English-speaking Charles Dalfen. Who was the nefarious PM who snubbed French Canada when its turn came? Hint: His name rhymes with Bleeven Darker.

Interesting political appeal: "Elect me: it's the only way to stop me from screwing you again."


Sunday, September 14, 2008

Harper Valley SFA


Although the American election is the more fascinating and consequential, we also have an election here in Canada. The once sulky doughboy of Canadian politics, Stephen Harper has transformed himself, if you believe the laughable ads showing him in a blue sweater, into Mr. Rogers.

[Stephen Harper has dropped in for a visit with Mr. and Mrs. Sensible Shoes in Potemkin, Alberta. Sitting on the edge of the settee, diabetic music dripping in the background, and forcing a gluey rictus, he intones: "I think families are just about the keenest things there can be. I have a family, you know. Sometimes we sit around and play cards." Shit-eating voice comes over: "Stephen Harper. Not a resentful block of wood. A leader."]

When I saw the first fuzzy Harper ad in the pre-election days, what immediately flashed to mind was the image of Boris Yeltsin boogalooing his way to re-election in the mid-90s, with the help of hired hands from the U.S. There he was, in shirtsleeves, up on stage with some pop tart, shaking his booty and all eight of his fingers, sweating, letting his inner lumpkin out, doing his version of Clinton-plays-the-sax. Not surprisingly, he won (as did Bill). Both saw how merging politics and showbiz could work to change the channel and divert the electorate. Of course, Boris didn't need to change channels; he controlled all of them in the shiny new Russian plutocracy.

We have, in Canada, the mirror image of the political situation as it stood in the 90s. This time, instead of the right being fractured, it is the centre-left. One sure sign that the Conservatives are thriving is the spectacle of the NDP leader going around saying he should be seriously considered for the post of Prime Minister, something that looks like a bit of a long shot for Jack Layton. This situation is made possible only because Stephane Dion has been unable to connect with enough Canadians, if recent polls are any indication.

This is a pity in a way. Dion is much loved by anglophone federalists in the Liberal party for his part in challenging Lucien Bouchard in the years following the referendum, keeping Bouchard and his successor Bernard "Red Rag" Landry, on the defensive. In the process, though, he cemented a reputation in much of Quebec as a vendu, and to this day, he is widely loathed in his home province. It certainly says something about his courage that he has persisted in the face of so much ill will in Quebec, never bowing. Nevertheless, he has not, over the two years he has had to prepare the Liberals for an election, connected with Quebec enough to stave off the likelihood of a big harvest of seats for Harper in Quebec ["J'ai une famille. C'est vrai."] If this happens, we are into a Tory majority. Only the spectacle of spittle-flecked Reform Party hyenas being let out of their cages to howl about abortion and the triple-E Senate, and accuse people of supporting child porn, as happened in the 2004 election, will be enough to forestall a Tory majority.

The events of the last week have not done much to dampen such fears. The puffin taking a crap on Dion was straight out of the dying days of the Ontario Tories' Common Sense Devolution in 03. Harper had to step in and apologize for both the crapping puffin and for the sleazy imputation by one of his zeal-bots that criticism from the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan was to be taken with a grain of salt because the dad was a Liberal supporter, so what does he know? Anyway, the perverse effect of these "gaffes" is to burnish Harper's self-styled reputation as a decisive leader. In fact, it is certainly easy to imagine this crop of Tories staging examples of Harper riding herd on his collection of mouth breathers, reassuring voters in the centre that he has banished the fanatics. Having a reputation as a control freak works for him here.

The meltdown of the American financial system will also help Harper appeal to nervous voters, who are not likely to migrate to Stephane Dion's Green Shift, let alone to Jack Layton. However, that could easily change if there are any more serious reverses in the economy and Harper looks as powerless as any of the other party leaders to do anything about them.

All in all, a bad news week if you think a Harper majority is bad news.

As for the American contest, the ongoing self-inflicted soiling of John McCain's name is, if nothing else, grist for many a playwright or novelist. Oliver Stone would be a fool not to do a McCain picture, say, in eighteen months. By that time, he will have been in the political wilderness for a while, or he is President. As it stands now, there is a frisson of fear among many nervous Democrats that McCain will repeat what Poppy Bush did to Dukakis, create fake controversies over hot-button social issues to distract from larger issues.

It is chilling to reflect on the Repugnicans' propensity to nominate tickets with one quite apparently capable person and one complete loon, and if I were the producer of the Andy Griffiths Show, I'd sue the bastards for ripping off the Andy/Barney Fife dynamic. W's daddy did it with Dan I-Can't-Spell-Potato Quayle. In W's case, the genius idea was to put the "genius" in the Naval Observatory and the idiot in the White House. With the McCain-Palin ticket, it is truly hard to decide who is supposed to be the leader, and who the clown. Is it the guy who vetted her for all of fifteen minutes, or the woman who, until she is reprogrammed by Dr. McCain-enstein, will go on saying the same patently false things? Instead of the intrepid leader of the Alaskan National Guard being with her troops in Iraq, we get Sarah being able to step over the Iraq-Kuwaiti border so that she could say she was in Iraq. That would be as far as she got.

The Obama campaign, to its credit, is fighting back in the ad war, but every time they have to respond to McCain, instead of making McCain respond to them, they let McCain define the campaign. The question then becomes, if McCain sets the agenda of the campaign, do you let McCain continue to act like the snivelling sell-out he has become, and let the American people judge what they see, and hope they will be as revolted as you are? It's a big risk.

In any event, one hopes that come election day, all Americans will look around them and see what has happened to them over the last eight years of extremist Repugs running the store.

Palins of the Day: I know I have fallen behind, so I will make up for it with a few:

Suvie, Wiper, Flit.


Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Never Did No Wanderin'


Via Harry Shearer's Le Show, we find that the Times (the UK one, not the NY one) reported that Track Palin is so named because he was born during, you guessed it, track season. Had he been born during basketball season, he was to have been named Hoop. Sister Piper Palin, whose middle name is Indy, was named after a snowmobile. I am not making this up. 


Earlier today the Washington Post reported:


Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.


Palin of the Day for today, then? Mooch.


Palin of the Day


Perhaps you were as taken as I was by the arrival of Sarah Palin, pistol-packin', moose-dressin', bear-guttin', snowmobilin' hockey mama from Alaska, and her bizarrely named brood:

• Track, (named presumably after her favourite sport in high school. Presumably he is grateful that mom didn't excel in Tiddly-Winks.)
• Piper
• Willow
• Bristol
• Trig (named after her favourite subject in school? I'm betting not.)

The alliterative pair Track and Trig are the boys. Track, we are told, enlisted in the army last September 11, and he is shipping out to Eye-Raq on September 11 this year. What an incredible coincidence. Trig is still a baby, born in April this year, and has Down Syndrome. He (along with the rest of his sibs) featured prominently as a prop throughout the Republican convention, clasped up against a baby blanket held throughout by 17-year-old sister Bristol.

Bristol, of course, made her own news when it was announced that she took time out from her busy high school life last spring, perhaps to celebrate the arrival of Trig, to get impregnated by boyfriend and hockey yahoo Levi Johnston, who was then duly packed off to St. Paul for display at the convention, like livestock at the state fair. Johnston thus goes down in history as the first human ape ever to be brought to a Republican convention expressly because of his proficiency in underage insemination. Like I say, kind of like the Royal Winter Fair we have up here. Anyway, if Bristol is to follow in Mom’s snowmobile bootsteps and name the child after her favourite high school sport, can we look forward to a bouncing baby Boink? Just askin'. (update on baby-naming rationale in next post)

Bristol, we are informed, made the choice to marry Levi and have little Boink, something that Mom Sarah, should she ascend to the presidency, would try to deny every other family (choice, that is).

Sarah, according to Wikipedia, "eloped" with her high school sweetheart Todd at the tender age of 24. Frankly, I suspect a typo. How one "elopes" at 24 is a mystery that will have to be deferred to a later meditation. For now, look for a new feature, to be posted daily or nearly so, called Palin of the Day, in which we feature the names of the rest of the mythological Palin clan.

Today’s Palin of the Day: Strep.