Your morning cute vitamin. . .

"Look, it's a baby A!" She had drawn something that looked like this: _/\ It was very small.

Our air conditioner upstairs is a big floor model that rolls around as needed. The one in the livingroom is a small window model.

"Look, it's a baby air conditioner! Aww! It's so cute!"

I agreed, but I wasn't talking about the air conditioner. I was too busy laughing.

Arar vs. Ashcroft, among others

The case is about a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained in the U.S. on his way back to Canada in 2002. He was denied any form of due process and was returned, not to Canada as he asked, but to Syria, where he was tortured for a year under suspicion of being a terrorist.

Now there's a court case happening in New York, in an attempt to get the American government to admit their complicity, or at least that they made a mistake.

The lawyers for the government seem to have as their main argument that when someone is deemed inadmissible to the U.S., they no longer have any rights there.

Wait a second. A Canadian citizen may not have the right to enter the U.S., and may not have the right to use their legal system, etc, etc. I can handle that. But no rights at all? Doesn't he have the right to ask that he be returned to the country of his citizenship rather than the country of his birth? All he wanted was to go home, to Canada. He even had a valid ticket to get him there, for a few days after he was detained.

The Canadian government fell through on that one, but the American government seems to be complicit in the torture of an innocent, Canadian civilian of middle-eastern origin.

Of course, the fact that the Canadian government fell through on it is another example of the Liberal government's policy of appeasing the Bush administration at all costs, even the cost of our own citizens' lives and livelihoods.

Well, I suppose we needed the rain.

I like watching thunderstorms. I like counting the time between the lightning and the thunder. I like the fact that our drought-ridden landscape is going to get some much-needed rain.

But I wish it wouldn't knock out my cable modem.

Well, that's enough for today.

I've written about four thousand words, which is a good day's work. The army is on the move and the defenders are mobilizing. My main characters are trapped with the wrong army at the moment, trying to sneak out and away to get home. I think I'll have to insert a scene where they find out that Amaia is at the head of the army. But that's a job for another day.

I think it has stopped raining, so i'm going to head over to my mother's for dinner. If it's nice enough, maybe I'll go for a swim. It's looking rather nasty at the moment, so that's iffy. Maybe I should stop at Curves instead. Hmm, I think I will.