Rusty Idols

Calling Out

2012-01-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

Had one of his critics gone on a radio show and compared Rob Ford to Hitler the Canadian right wing blogosphere would be exploding with fury right now.

That sound of crickets? Its their reaction to Ford comparing his opposition to Joseph Stalin.

He's back......

2012-01-22T19:04:00.001-07:00

Wow, two months. A longer time without blogging then I've had since I started Rusty Idols lo those many years ago. What can I say? Sometimes real life takes precedence.

So while I've been gone Huffington Post Canada has continued to be an embarrassment and a disappointment. Famously progressive in its home country the Canadian version has been a venue for far right felons like Conrad Black, reactionary media dinosaurs like Peter Worthington and PR releases from Big Oil treated as if they were some kind of column or opinion piece rather than an AstroTurf propaganda operation carefully coordinated with government figures.

But still pretending to be some kind of independent progressive media voice, it is to laugh, ruefully.

Stateside, the carnival geek show that is the Republican primary has been a grotesque display of drooling halfwits, bigoted maniacs, animal torturers and calculating servants and card carrying members of the 1%. At the moment they appear to be preparing to commit electoral harakari by picking serial adulterer and racial dog whistler Newt Gingrich. Democrats must by rubbing their eyes in disbelief that the GOP would want to give them such a gift.

I promise to try to update more often folks - particularly when the bastards and boneheads offer me so much to rant about.

The Man Behind the Mask

2011-11-27T14:32:00.003-07:00

The author of graphic novel masterpiece V for Vendetta reflects on the strange new life of his creation as a symbol of protest and resistance.

It all comes back to Moore – a private man with knotty greying hair and a magnificent beard, who prefers to live without an internet connection and who has not had a working telly for months "on an obscure point of principle" about the digital signal in his hometown of Northampton. He has never yet properly commented on the Vendetta mask phenomenon, and speaking on the phone from his home, Moore seems variously baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased that his creation has become such a prominent emblem of modern activism.

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

Mah Nà Mah Nà

2011-11-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

Doo dooo doodoodoo...

Afraid to call a Liar a Liar

2011-11-23T12:15:00.002-07:00

The Montreal Gazette headline is 'NDP accuses Tony Clement of doctoring Hansard'.

Wow, thinks the reader, that's a pretty serious allegation, accusing someone of deliberately distorting the public record of Parliament is a big deal. But look, the headline just says he's just accused of it, so if its just a case of he said, they said... what's that?

He unambiguously did it? The Gazette article itself confirms he did in fact request that two times he answered in the affirmative to a direct question and said 'Sure' when asked if he would release records about G-8 spending be removed leaving a blank space in the record?

So then, wouldn't a more accurate headline actually be 'Tony Clement doctored Hansard'?

In the US, Willard 'Mitt' Romney lies about his own name and also releases a campaign commercial featuring Obama quoting a Republican - without including the few words before the quote saying that it was a quote. That's unambiguously lying. 'Mitt' Romney is a liar. But don't bother looking for articles in the American mainstream media printing the simple fact that 'Mitt' Romney is a lying liar who tells lies.

Because, as an exasperated Washington reporter once said, the mainstream media now "believe that being "balanced" means giving the same weight to a lie as you give to the truth"

And if that's the case, what possible use are they?

Alison Redford owes me an apology

2011-11-18T09:32:00.001-07:00

Me and the millions of other Canadians and Albertans who care about the environment for suggesting that she has the right to go to Washington and lobby for the Keystone Pipeline but those who oppose the project shouldn't have the same right.

OTTAWA — Premier Alison Redford found herself Thursday embroiled in war of words with the federal NDP as she joined her federal Conservative counterparts slamming official Opposition MPs for travelling to Washington to speak to U.S. lawmakers against the Keystone XL pipeline.

In Ottawa, Redford made the comments the same day she sat down with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in their first official meeting to discuss federal-provincial relations.

The two Calgary politicians, who’ve known each other for almost three decades, spoke about issues such as health-care funding, immigration and a new Canadian energy strategy.

The premier, who arrived back in Alberta late Thursday night, had just returned from her own mission to New York and Washington earlier this week to promote Alberta and the province’s energy interests in the United States.

While the contentious issue of the proposed Keystone oil pipeline came up when she met with U.S. lawmakers, Redford said she did not actively lobby regarding it — unlike federal NDP environment critic Megan Leslie and natural resources critic Claude Gravelle.

“It is not appropriate for us to be providing advice to American decision-makers in that context and to be political activists,” Redford said about the NDP trip this week. “So I am not at all supportive of that and I’m disappointed about it.”

Redford maintained her role is clearly different from that of a federal MP, saying a provincial premier “has a certain set of economic interests, social interests and environmental interests.”

“Whereas what we see going on right now is members of Parliament who certainly represent their constituencies, but that’s the extent of their representation in terms of the Canadian perspective on this issue.”

Linda Duncan, the lone NDP member of Parliament from Alberta, said she was stunned the premier would say that elected officials travelling to Washington is inappropriate.

“I find that absolutely reprehensible,” Duncan said. “How dare they suggest that we don’t have a right to interact with officials from other trading nations. Absolutely appalling.”

How dare you Premier Redford? How dare you?

Arguing that Canadians who have science on their side - both the science of climate and the science of economics - don't have the right to have their point of view represented while making an insultingly specious and lamely hypocritical argument that the rules are somehow different for her is so contemptuously despicable its frankly breathtaking.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If Ezra Levant pushed his way into your house and wouldn't leave, wouldn't YOU call the cops?

2011-11-09T18:55:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA - When the CBC's Mary Walsh shows up unannounced with a camera crew at Toronto mayor Rob Ford's house, the state broadcaster considers it comedy.
When Sun News Network's Ezra Levant pops up in the lobby of the CBC's Toronto headquarters with a camera operator, it's a matter for police.

Access to information requests have revealed then-director of operations and contingency planning at the CBC, Julie McCambley, authorized a call to police on Aug. 19 to force Levant to leave the 13-floor tower.

"Mrs. McCambley approved the ejection of the group with police involvement if they continued to be disruptive," reads an internal security report obtained by QMI Agency.
Levant showed up demanding a meeting with Hubert Lacroix, Ottawa-based president and CEO, or Jeff Keay, head of media relations.

The CBC denied the fiery talk show host any meeting and told him to stop recording his encounter with security.

"This is a public building and I can record here if I like," responded Levant.

Note that the source of this story is Canoe, ie Quebecor, ie Sun Media.

Hence why an obnoxious, spoiled wannabe demagogue being told to get lost is treated as a major news story.

Punished for Overreach

2011-11-09T08:41:00.004-07:00

The number one crippling tactical flaw of the American Republican party is a tendency to drink their own kool-aid.

Over and over they make the same mistake, confusing what they believe with what the majority of Americans believe. They have managed through the enormous efforts of a right wing media to freight the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal' with enough rhetorical baggage that a slim majority of Americans identify themselves as conservatives but the media and political elite congratulating themselves over this repeatedly fail to drill down to specific positions on specific issues that make it clear that whether they realize it or not Americans are actually far more liberal then they think.

American Republicans blearily woke up today to the tragic revelation that last night was not a nightmare, they did in fact get their asses handed to them over and over the country last night. They gulped nervously, looked ahead to next years big election night and collectively went "Uh, oh."

The results were not entirely unexpected. But the margins and the uniformity of last night’s election results tell an important story going into 2012. Across the country, Republican overreach coming out of the 2010 election was decisively rejected by voters in multiple states.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich’s signature anti-union legislation was rejected by an almost 2-1 margin. That’s a big win for the labor movement and will put in place a deep anti-Republican undercurrent next November. Kasich will be an albatross around the neck of the Republican nominee and there’s organization on the ground that will be an important force too.

But it wasn’t just Ohio. An anti-choice, anti-birth control “personhood” initiative was rejected in Mississippi. Maine voters rejected limits on voter registration — part of the larger Republican push to limit voting rights in 2012. And the author of Arizona’s controversial and trend-setting anti-immigration law looks to have lost a recall election.

What is telling about these numbers was not simply the consistency by which right-wing initiatives and candidates went down but in many cases the margins.

The larger political context remains one in which virtually every political movement and party is unpopular, in the climate of seemingly immovable crisis-level unemployment. But 2012 is looking to be quite different from 2010.

One wonders if Stephen Harper will take any lesson about reactionary overreach from last night?

"just another bad thing that happened in downtown Vancouver

2011-11-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

Somebody overdoses decently out of sight in the east end and the response from the Vancouver government, the media and too much of public is a collective shrug. Have it happen 15 blocks to the west and suddenly its an urgent public health and safety crisis.

Ashlie Gough was happy and healthy the last time she visited her father's house on Vancouver Island.
She was 23. After high school she had drifted a little - she studied tattoo design and travelled the world with a new boyfriend who was a scuba diver.
"She zig-zagged back and forth a bit and led an interesting life, but she was really starting to grow up," her father, Tom Gough, said on Monday.
On the weekend she went to visit friends who were camping out as part of the Occupy Vancouver protest and on Saturday she was found inside a tent, unresponsive. The cause of her death isn't official yet, but it may have been a drug overdose.
During an interview at his Vancouver Island home on Monday, Tom Gough appeared sombre, if not in shock.
His partner Glenda Mercer's voice broke as she detailed how cheerful Ms. Gough had been the last time she saw her.
"She was just on top of the world," a teary-eyed Ms. Mercer recalled.
Mr. Gough said his daughter was not involved in the Occupy protest against corporate greed.
"We don't want her made into some kind of poster child for the occupation because Ashlie's death had nothing to do with that," he said. "This has nothing to do with the tent city or Occupy Vancouver. She just happened to be there. It's just another bad thing that happened in downtown Vancouver."

The Settler's Army

2011-11-08T07:18:00.002-07:00

A report six years ago showed the Israeli Army rapidly becoming an arm of the Settler movement as theocratic anti-Palestinian forces gain increasing control. Apparently its gotten even worse.

The 2005 Talia Sasson report on illegal outposts presented a clear picture of military forces renouncing their duty to impose law and order on West Bank settlers, not just Palestinians, which led to the growth of illegal outposts.
The report describes how soldiers turned a blind eye to illegal activity and even secretly cooperated with settlers and leaked them information; some officers lived in the outposts.
The army's clear preference for the settlements was bolstered by the identity of the soldiers deployed in the West Bank. The IDF units serving in the settlements were largely made up of settlers and other religious men, and the IDF also armed some of the local security teams protecting the settlements. Thus the social boundaries between the settlers and the IDF units were blurred.
Since the army has attempted to change the rules of the game and loosen the settlers' grip on military conduct, because of the government's political obligations, "price tag" revenge attacks on Palestinians have become the response of those who are unwilling to accept the new rules. That's what Alon was complaining about as his army career was coming to an end.
In fact, there is no better evidence of the undermining of the IDF's control over its forces in the West Bank than an order Alon had issued to restrict information about the army's plans to enforce order in the West Bank - out of a well-founded suspicion that the information was being leaked to the settlers to confound the orders of the top brass.
This is in addition to the soldiers' protests and threats to refuse to carry out their orders that already hinder the army.
The Simhat Torah incident, in which female soldiers were sent to an area about 50 meters away from the post-holiday hakafot shniyot dancing - even though they were already dancing separately from the men, in accordance with Orthodox practice - paints a similar picture.
In that case, the heads of the religious pre-military academies and the hesder yeshivas, which combine army service with Torah study, were making a concerted effort - in conjunction with the IDF rabbinate - to create a theocratic military culture.

The Price

2011-11-04T06:44:00.000-06:00

Republicans hate Keynesianism - unless its military Keynesianism sustaining southern and gunbelt constituencies with Military industrial complex jobs that require a constant state of fear mongering and international belligerence to sustain.

The rest of the American population subsidizes these jobs by forgoing the kind of basic social safety net every other industrialized nation takes for granted and the rest of the world subsidizes them by living with a constant state of war or threat of war.

We are constantly told that America 'keeps the peace'. In fact the USA may be the most profoundly destabilizing force on the planet, and this is why.

Wildrose Push Poll?

2011-10-28T07:01:00.003-06:00

I got an automated polling call last night and out of curiosity listened to it all the way through.

It very quickly became clear I was probably listening to a Wildrose Party push poll with lots of questions like "If you knew that PC leader Allison Redford supported the Liberal daycare plan of Paul Martin and opposed Stephen Harper's parental credit alternative and hired a campaign managr who didn't pay his debts would you be more or less likely to support her?"

They are going to harp on inneuendo and the vaguely moderate to liberal positions Redford has or had on a small number of issues and try to ride them into the legislature, but as I've said before, I think they over-estimate just how right wing Albertans really are.

Keep harping that she's basically a moderate conservative with some slightly progressive positions on childcare, healthcare and education and they may just cede the whole race to her.

First lets shoot all the ...nurses?

2011-10-26T07:32:00.001-06:00

There are thoughtful and important pieces to be said and written about the state of long term care in this country and the funding decisions by governments hostile to the public service that has brought it to the state it is. Christie Blatchford's moronic and vicious rant that ignores funding decisions she agrees with while trying to blame everything on health professionals working night and day trying to keep the system working isn't one of them.

By the time I and most of my Boomer cohorts are in need, publicity will have lost its shine entirely, and nothing will work. There will be no get-out-of-jail-card free, period.
I accept that completely. It’s why, where I used to think that before I got really old I’d get me a gun so I could shoot myself, I now wonder if I won’t instead turn the weapon on some officious hospital executive, wanker bureaucrat or brute of a nurse.

That's right, nurses. The men and mostly women who keep this strained system together, a profession that struggles with one of the highest rates of physical assault on its members of any in the medical field or out of it. The people who clean bedsores and human waste and perform essential medical care on everyone who needs it. Blatchford thinks the thanks nurses deserve is warmed over Nurse Ratched stereotypes and threats of physical violence.

Of course she's long established that she despises any public servant other than those in police uniforms, especially when pointy headed politicians are keeping them from administering the beatings some dark skinned scallywag really needs, but threatening violence against nurses?

Hope you don't need to use the healthcare system anytime soon Christie.

Huffington Post came to Canada (But they left the progressive politics at home.)

2011-10-24T13:57:00.002-06:00

Like a lot of Canadian progressives I had read and enjoyed Huffington Post as an alternative to the traditional American news sources. Sure they printed far too many credulous pieces about health fads, dubious diets and the appalling advocacy of certain idiot celebrities for the dangerous and discredited vaccine/autism link but like most of us I still cheered the news of a Canadian version.

Unfortuantely the new Canadian post AOL takeover version of Huffington Post is a very different creature. Featured bloggers include far right former media overlord and convicted felon Conrad Black, who is given regular pride of place positioning for his self interested rants about being mis-treated by the American Justice system and venomous attacks on his enemies list including Rupert Murdoch. He's also vigourously protected against any comments critical of his publishing and legal history as I can personally attest after watching my comments critical of Black get spiked after originally being posted read and 'liked; by multiple readers.

Cranky long time eminince of the Canadian right wing media Peter Worthington gets a column and David Frum gets a column too, a former Bush speech writer and avowed Republican who by American standards is actually a moderate, but cerainly not by Canadian ones. Lots of articles dismissing the fact that the NDP is Canada's official opposition and continuing the Canadian media's policy of pretending the only two parties that matter are the Tories and the Liberals.

Lots of articles and columns defending the Harper governent in general (certainly also critical ones) and for example a straightforward pr puff piece from an industry shill today promoting the latest PR rhetorical absurdity from the Oil Sands industry 'ethical oil'.

Canadian progressives can be forgiven for being disappointed in the mutant conservative leaning disappointment that Huffington Post Canada turned out to be.

The Occupied Agenda

2011-10-16T21:47:00.000-06:00

Ok MSM, you sneer that you can't get a coherant specific answer as to what the Occupy Wall Street crowds are protesting. Here you go guys:

Upset in Alberta

2011-10-02T11:11:00.006-06:00

The party elite was behind Mar. The other candidates, reluctantly, had decided the wind was blowing his direction and thrown their support to him - though not all their campaign managers could stomach it.

And then Alison Redford was announced winner on the second ballot.

Alberta Liberals want to kill themselves. Redford will mow whatever of their progressive grass the NDP aren't already. With both the Tory and Liberal party leaders coming out of the same Tory cabinet, if anything the Alberta Progressive Conservatives are now to the left of the Alberta Liberal Party.

The Wildrose folks are ecstatic and yeah, they might make a few pickups in the ex-urban borderland as a result of this leadership contest, but they over-estimate how conservative Alberta is. Give voters a fiscally rightish socially moderate option they will flock to it - and may even be getting a little jaundiced about the fiscal side of conservatism too.

What put the stake in Mar, riding a big wave of presumed inevitability? He was very obviously part of the same long standing old boy's network that has been running Alberta for years while the same urge leading to a surging Wildrose was to 'throw the bums out'. Redford's mother died with days to go in the campaign which she held up under with visible grace and class.

And Mar in mid-campaign, for reasons best known to himself, re-opened the simmering healthcare privatization debate coming out firmly in favour of further private sector intrusion and the rich being able to buy their way to the front of the healthcare line.

Its like political Tourette's for these people. Even when the public has consistently, year after year made it crystal clear that we want healthcare to stay publicly run and universal, even though by large margins we do not trust PCs with the healthcare file and will be suspicious of any meddling in it by them, even though Klein's dogged pursuit of the libertarian right holy goal of selling out Alberta's health to the insurance industry had more to do with his ouster than Tories admitted then or will admit now, Mar still decided to signal that he wanted to re-open the whole mess again.

Even far right candidate Ted Morton, unconvincingly trying to re-invent himself as a cuddly social moderate, condemned Mar's remarks and swore to keep his own grubby paws of healthcare given the chance to do so.

Redford did too, but quite a bit more convincingly.

The resurgence of the progressive strain in the Progressive Conservatives is actually a return to glory days under Lougheed, when the PCs were the progressive alternative to the far right and calcified Social Credit government. The Socreds had been ruling about as long as the PCs have now.

Alberta's PC's feel the rumblings that build up under any long standing government. In most provinces that discontent lets parties rule for just a few terms though the trend has been lengthening. In Alberta due to careful gerrymandering the rural ridings have an engineered electoral dominance over the majority of the population and governments usually last four or five decades.

We basically have one party rule like China or North Korea. Elections of the leader of the PC Party are far more important than provincial elections here. Politburo democracy.

Historically, the time is almost up for the Progressive Conservatives, if they had gone to the right they might have neutralized or at least minimized the damage of the Wild Rose Party, but the year long hell of the emergency room crisis culminating in a former Tory cabinet member becoming leader of the Liberal Party spooked them badly about the much larger if less noisy fiscal conservative/social moderate vote.

Redford was probably their best, most realistic chance at party renewal. Her comforting soft progressivism will prove much more illusory than it sounds and Alberta will continue sleepwalking though the years in its strange blue dream.

Freedom for capital, not people

2011-09-28T11:19:00.004-06:00

Neil Reynolds today demonstrates the traditional fondness of right wing libertarians for dictatorial authoritarian regimes with a column expressing almost unalloyed admiration for Singapore, a country even Reynolds is forced to admit is severely authoritarian.

Some may be surprised at how a self professed libertarian could seem so enthusiastic about a borderline totalitarian state with pervasive, constant surveillance, barbaric criminal law and a rigidly authoritarian state apparatus. Silly rabbit, right wing libertarians don't want liberty for people, people sometimes use liberty to band together against the depredations of capital, and capital is the only thing Reynolds and his ilk want liberty for. Capital and those who have it.

That's why right wing libertarians still profess misty eyed admiration for the murderous regime of General Pinochet in Chile, who came to power through a violent coup of an elected government and then used that power to decimate civil society ruthlessly suppressing unions, leftists and any and all opposition to his 'libertarian' economic agenda through torture, death squads and 'disappearences'.

So-called 'Free Markets' are the only freedom Reynolds gets passionate about, free people can become obstructive to that freedom through quaint concerns about the environment or workers rights or a decent social safety net and that's a freedom he seems to believe should be discouraged

"There is nobody who got rich on his own."

2011-09-21T18:43:00.000-06:00

Elizabeth Warren utterly shreds moronic 'class war' rhetoric:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Paul Krugman is 100% right

2011-09-12T11:40:00.000-06:00

The Right have gone mad with rage at Paul Krugman's 9/11 post. It's far too honest.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

The most specious complaint is the disrespect card, like Krugman I would argue its far more disrespectful to those who died that day and in the Neo-con wars of choice since to perpetuate the mythology that allowed them.

I have no time for the 9/11 'Truthers'. I believe 9/11 happened because 19 pissed off Muslims with x-acto knives made it happen, where we agree is that the Neo-con regime in the White House did leap on the terrible events of that day to perpetuate their own ideological agenda at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives since that day.

9/11 was used to perpetuate lies and death and torture and vanished freedoms. It baffles me that there can even be any argument about any of this.

Ted Morton's Email Cover-up

2011-09-08T12:15:00.002-06:00

Ted Morton, the candidate of the far right for leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives who has touted his 'open and honest' approach to governance used a pseudonym email address, seemingly to thwart public access to his official ministerial communications.

Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Ted Morton used a covert email for his internal communications while he was a government minister to evade potential public scrutiny, documents confirm.

Emails leaked to CBC News show Morton used the name Frederick Lee – his actual first and middle names – as an official government email address while he was minister of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD).

At a July 2007 meeting, the ministry’s communications director gave SRD staff an explanation as to why Morton used the email address.

“She informed us that if you see an email with the moniker Frederick Lee, not to worry about it, it was just the minister using that email when he didn’t want people to know it was him doing the writing,” former staff member Derrick Forsythe says.

Another ministry employee confirmed staff were told about Morton’s use of Frederick Lee for his internal communications.

Forsythe left the ministry several months later over what he characterized as ethical differences, including Morton’s use of an email alias, and the expectation that staff were to co-operate with this obfuscation.

“I thought it was wrong,” Forsythe says. “It never quite sat right with me … that he could use an email that wasn’t known to the public.”

"If you have a monopoly on God, you can get away with anything."

2011-09-08T06:51:00.000-06:00

Rolling Stone's lacerating piece on the clergy abuse scandal should be the final nail in the 'few bad apples' defense as it lays out in detail the highly organized long standing policy of protecting and enabling abusers.

The five co-defendants sit close enough to shake hands in the Philadelphia courtroom, but they never once acknowledge one another. Father James Brennan, a 47-year-old priest accused of raping a 14-year-old boy, looks sad and stooped in a navy sweater, unshaven and sniffling. Edward Avery, a defrocked priest in his sixties, wears an unsettlingly pleasant expression on his face, as though he's mentally very far away. He and two other defendants – the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, also in his sixties, and Bernard Shero, a former Catholic schoolteacher in his forties – are accused of passing around "Billy," a fifth-grade altar boy. According to the charges, the three men raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.

Heinous as the accusations are, the most shocking – and significant – are those against the fifth defendant, Monsignor William Lynn. At 60, Lynn is portly and dignified, his thin lips pressed together and his double chin held high. In a dramatic fashion statement, he alone has chosen to wear his black clerical garb today, a startling reminder that this is a priest on trial, a revered representative of the Catholic Church, not to mention a high-ranking official in Philadelphia's archdiocese. Lynn, who reported directly to the cardinal, was the trusted custodian of a trove of documents known in the church as the "Secret Archives files." The files prove what many have long suspected: that officials in the upper echelons of the church not only tolerated the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests but conspired to hide the crimes and silence the victims. Lynn is accused of having been the archdiocese's sex-abuse fixer, the man who covered up for its priests. Incredibly, after a scandal that has rocked the church for a generation, he is the first Catholic official ever criminally charged for the cover-up.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-02T13:48:00.001-06:00

As Britain's coalition government proceeds with an all out assault on the principles of universal healthcare Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wonders why:

"The only explanation is that the very existence of an exceptionally successful nationalised health service is such an affront to everything Conservatives believe in that it's worth the political risk of demolishing it once and for all.

The same motivation for every conservative attack on universality and duty of service made by our own right wingers.

What made Jack Layton a better leader than Barack Obama:

2011-08-22T14:33:00.000-06:00

“If you start with a compromise right at the beginning and no debate, you’re really only going with the status quo and buttering it up a little. No space is created for change to happen.” - Jack Layton

Mourning

2011-08-22T11:21:00.004-06:00

I met Jack Layton in 2005 when I was in Ottawa lobbying parliament on behalf of my then union. An infectious smile, boundless energy and deep sympathy for what my members were going through with an arrogant and intractable employer made me deeply glad he was the leader of my party. I confess I was more excited at the time to get a parliament visitor gallery pass from Ed Broadbent and shake the hand of the NDP's old lion, but I'm so glad now that I got to meet Jack and I'm so grateful that Canada had his optimism his determination and his dedication to a better country.

Thank you so much Jack, my sympathies to his family and to all feeling the same aching sorrow I do this black morning.

UPDATE: Jack's farewell letter. And now I'm crying again.

Police left rape victim tied up, naked and surrounded by officers for FIVE HOURS

2011-08-20T10:15:00.000-06:00

More evidence that many police officers extend their 'us and them' attitude to all of us not just criminals.

A woman who was bound and sexually assaulted by her then-neighbour, Col. Russell Williams says the police left her tied up for five hours after responding to her 911 call.

Laurie Massicotte says Ontario Provincial Police officers told her they had to leave her in the harness, fashioned by Williams, until an OPP photographer arrived to take pictures of her in the restraint.

"I was left for five hours, still in my harness, still tied up, naked, lying under a comforter," Massicotte, 47, told the Ottawa Citizen in a telephone interview Friday.

"Five hours, no medical attention. I was in total shock. I didn't know what the heck was going on."

The OPP, she said, treated her like a criminal in the early hours of the investigation.

Michael Coren: Repugnant Racist

2011-08-15T23:43:00.003-06:00

Dawg has the story about 'respected' Canadian political commentator Michael Coren and his idea of a clever quip about the London Riots "It's not blackberries, it's black thugs." Ignorant, racist and factually incorrect as extensive coverage of the multi-racial nature of the rioters clearly showed.

I must admit that I was sceptical when a reader reported this, but there is Michael Coren, in all his ugly racist glory, @3:22.
As “Canadian Patriot” (who has my apologies) says, we should all be submitting complaints to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, pronto.
Send a complaint to the CRTC as well, as reader Lorne suggests.
Just do it.
Let this latter-day Senator Bilbo handprint his messages of hate and try to pass them out on the streets of his native Tottenham. There is no place for this filth on Canadian airwaves. SunTV is a disgrace.

UPDATE: and for those who think this was a one off slip of the tongue he expanded on his theme in his Sun column:

"The overwhelming majority of the young punks who began the rioting, fighting, looting and burning were black. That is truth, not racism."

"They are the offspring of broken families, who cannot control their appetite for fathering children with numerous women, who shoot rivals and innocent people with indifference, and who define themselves by how much vulgar jewelry they wear and how much fearful “respect” they receive from law-abiding neighbours."

Again, important to be crystal clear; it's NOT the truth - extensive photographic and video evidence of multiracial and all white crowds of rioters make that clear - and it IS racism.

UPDATE 2: He's not too fond of 'teh gays' either.

Conservatives trying to silence an inconvenient widow again

2011-08-14T16:51:00.000-06:00

When Suzanne Trepanier tried to speak to parliament about the Conservatives ideological war on anyone they consider insufficiently supportive of Israel and how it resulted in her husband being driven to an early grave they fought tooth and nail to silence her.

Now once again another inconvenient grieving widow is making them uncomfortable so they are trying to threaten her into silence.

The federal Conservative party has sent a threatening email to the widow of an asbestos victim in the latest chapter of Canada's debate over the hazardous mineral.

A top Tory official is warning the woman to stop using the party logo in an online ad campaign against the controversial industry -- a campaign she started after her husband died of an asbestos-related cancer.

Michaela Keyserlingk, whose husband Robert died in 2009 of mesothelioma, has been running an online banner since the spring that reads, "Canada is the only western country that still exports deadly asbestos!"

Conservative party executive director Dan Hilton warned Keyserlingk to stop using the Tory symbol immediately.

"Failure to do so may result in further action," Hilton wrote in a July 29 email which carried the subject title, "Unauthorized use of trademark." The email, which The Canadian Press obtained from Keyserlingk, went on to advise her: "Please govern yourself accordingly."

The exchange comes as Canada faces intensifying international criticism over its asbestos exports and the Quebec government mulls whether to help revive one of the country's last-remaining mines -- a decision that could come as early as Monday.

Canada, which barely uses the hazardous material domestically, exports the bulk of its asbestos to poor countries.

Keyserlingk concedes she may not have the right to use the logo, I'm not so sure, I would think it falls under fair use for political speech. Regardless its another example of this government's standard response to criticism; bullying.

Lumpen but Organized

2011-08-10T13:54:00.001-06:00

Chilling reports from London suggest a highly organized and brisk efficiency and what can only be described as cold blooded professionalism among the organizing leadership of London's deadly riots this week.

Thick black choking smoke blew down Market Street, one of the main shopping thoroughfares in Manchester last night, as the city caught the contagion of rioting that is sweeping through Britain. The Miss Selfridge shop had been set alight, only one of around 100 shops smashed and burned as upwards of 2,000 rioters rampaged through the city centre streets.

Thugs wearing ski masks and hoods, armed with sticks and metal poles moved in six or seven groups, each several hundred strong. They ran from hundreds of riot police in full gear, occasionally stopping to confront them, but mainly dodging down side-streets and alleyways, wreaking havoc as they went. Windows were smashed at Marks & Spencer, Diesel clothing shop and a Bang & Olufsen store. Shop mannequins, which had been torn from the shattered windows, lay on the streets like bodies.

At one point 1,000 rioters confronted the police in the central Piccadilly Gardens, throwing stones, bricks and rocks they appeared to have brought with them. The rioters laughed and cheered as they went about their destruction. Police, on horses and in white tactical aid unit vans with protective black grids over the windscreen, pushed the rioters down Market Street but the thugs broke into smaller groups and slipped away to reform elsewhere.

...

There was evidence everywhere that the riot had been organised and was being directed. Earlier in the day police had arrested a man in Wigan who had been inciting violence on Facebook. Later seven others were arrested by Cheshire Police on similar charges.

But eyewitnesses on the street reported group leaders among the rioters issuing orders. Boys on fast BMX bikes were acting as spotters to report to the leaders where the police were moving. They appeared to be carrying messages between different groups.

One Arndale worker, Rayhan Rezi, 27, told a reporter from the Manchester Evening News: "A small minority would go in one direction to divert police officers and the remaining ones were smashing windows. It was a small minority who were hooded up wearing hats and sunglasses and doing the damage; most were just watching and had come for the loot." Large numbers of curious bystanders remained in the city all evening. Some just gawped; others teetered on the brink of joining in. "Everyone into Oldham Street," one riot leader shouted at one point – and the mob turned and acted on the instruction.

This isn't a new phenomenon in the UK. Bill Buford's masterful book about the English Soccer Hooligan culture Among the Thugs described similar organization among the hard old men leading thoughtless young thugs in battles with supporters of other teams and the police. The ones smashing windows may just be alienated youths with no stake in the UK's severely stratified society or the communities they are burning down, but the organizers display an unambiguous experience and skill in the ancient profession of riot for profit.

As Mick Jagger said, It's just a shot away, and its cold-eyed old men in the back of the crowds firing the starter pistols.

Educated to Hate?

2011-08-10T00:51:00.000-06:00

The Guardian has a bleak and disturbing piece about the education system of Israel.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism.
They are called Arabs. "The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don't pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don't want to develop," she says. "The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer."
Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.

One of the constant themes in attacks on Hamas and the Palestinian authority is fury over textbooks that tell the story of the creation Of Israel from the Palestinian point of view and for undeniable examples of anti-semitism. It appears dehumanizing propoganda as 'education' can be found on both sides of the seperation fence.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone of such radical views, Peled-Elhanan is deeply pessimistic about her country's future. Change, she says, will only come "when the Americans stop providing us with $1m a day to maintain this regime of occupation and racism and supremacy".
She said that within Israel, "I only see the path to fascism. You have 5.5 million Palestinians controlled by Israel who live in a horrible apartheid with no civil and no human rights. And you have the other half who are Jews who are also losing their rights by the minute," she says, in reference to a series of attempts to restrict Israelis' right to protest and criticise their government.
She dismisses the Israeli left as always small and timid, but especially now. "There has never been a real left in this country." She believes that the education system helps to perpetuate an unjust, undemocratic and unsustainable state.

American aviation inspectors asked to pay to do their job

2011-08-03T22:23:00.000-06:00

This is not something that should be happening in a mature and functioning democracy, and of course thats the point, it isn't.

The latest budget blockade in Congress is forcing inspectors responsible for maintaining safety at the nation’s airports to work for free, and charge work expenses to their personal credit cards, raising the possibility that soon many of America’s biggest airports will have no federal safety inspections at all.
“I’m at a loss for adjectives to describe how tragic, horrible and idiotic this is,” says Chris Oswald, vice president safety and technical operations for the Airports Council International.
About 40 inspectors are responsible for checking everything safety-related at the nation’s busiest airports. They inspect everything from cracks in the runway to whether safety lights are working and fire trucks are ready to go, says Dr. Mike Hynes founder and owner of Hynes Aviation Services, an aviation safety consulting company.
The inspectors are among the 4,000 F.A.A. employees furloughed by the budget impasse. But the agency’s leaders have asked the inspectors to continue working without pay.

Hat Tip to BoingBoing

Right Wing Christianist Terrorism

2011-07-30T15:28:00.004-06:00

My family heritage is Norwegian. I'm actually glad my grandfather, a gentle first generation immigrant farmer didn't live to see what happened this month, it would have broken his heart.

What happened was an act of right wing Christianist terrorism. An assault on pluralism, democracy and the political left. The despicable Glenn Beck went so far as to insinuate the Norwegian Labour Party run summer camp full of murdered children was akin to the 'Hitler Youth'. Bill O'Reilly and the rest of Fox News were quick out of the gate to insinuate that the massacres must have been perpetrated by Muslims, and just as quick to denounce any reference to the killers self pronounced Christian faith.

Remember its not terrorism unless its brown.

Another act of terrorism took place in the US this week, ignored utterly by the media and the political right. Because remember, When Christianist right wingers fire-bomb Planned Parenthood clinics that certainly isn't terrorism.

I'm tired of pretending. Tired of protecting their feelings. It's becoming increasingly clear that the conservative right wing impulse is fundamentally incompatible with pluralistic democracy.

Are all right wingers violent fanatics? Of course not. But how much self reflection and denouncing of the mentality behind Norway and the violent attacks on reproductive rights have you heard even from the moderates? How many times have you heard even moderate conservatives attack the principals of multi-culturalism with much the same terminology in the 'manifesto' of Anders Behring Breivik? They are quick to label all Muslims and the Islamic faith with the label of terrorism and equally quick to howl with outrage when the tables are turned.

The same impulse behind the absolute refusal to accept democracy if people vote the 'wrong' way behind the Tea Party's refusal to accept the election of a Democrat, the birthers refusal to accept a black President could possibly be a 'real' American, our own Conservatives labeling the basic rules of parliamentary democracy that allow coalitions as illegitimate - all evidence that to increasing swathes of the right wing Democracy only counts if it returns the 'right' result.

From now on the suspicion and stigma that the right insists Muslims and the Left be viewed with should be applied equally to the political right and fundamentalist Christianity. After Oklahoma, doctor shootings, Norway... how many times do they have to demonstrate how dangerous they are?

UPDATE: Sabina at News of the Restless lays out the roll call of dishonour

Like looking in a Mirror

2011-07-15T08:29:00.000-06:00

"Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism." - Conrad Black

NDP blasts Harper's Domestic Spying plans

2011-07-14T11:55:00.001-06:00

Its been so long since we had an opposition that actually opposes the government on principle rather than purely political expediency while sharing most of the same agenda, its still jaw dropping to see.

TIMMINS, ON – If the Conservatives get their way, police will be soon be able to track every e-mail sent, every website visited and every comment left on Facebook - all without warrants or judicial review.

“Canadians do all manner of business and personal pursuits on their cell phones and online,” said New Democrat Privacy and Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus. “These provisions would force local phone and internet providers to spy on Canadians.”

Conservatives have indicated that "lawful access" provisions will be included in their omnibus crime legislation this fall. Experts warn this would legalize widespread snooping on average citizens – all without a warrant. Telecom providers would also be forced to install surveillance software giving police the ability to track internet and mobile phone activity.

“The Conservatives' ‘lawful access’ proposal essentially means it’s open season on the privacy rights of Canadian citizens,” said Angus. “The real question here is why are the Conservatives pushing for such widespread changes and starting such a full out attack on personal privacy and liberty in Canada?”

Angus said New Democrats support modernizing policing powers to deal with digital issues, but pointed out that removing the requirement for warrants altogether opens the door to all manner of abuse by security officials.

“Without oversight or limits, the question isn’t if abuse will occur, it’s how extreme will the abuse be,” said Angus.

The so called 'Libertarian' Harper government has always been very concerned about the freedom of capital to move jobs, resources and money at will with no concern or consideration given to the best interests of Canadian workers or consumers because such considerations are intolerable restrictions on the freedoms of the rich and powerful. The freedom of people is less important and indeed can get in the way of the 'liberties' of the legal 'persons' that corporations have become.

The wholesale abandonment of the social contract by the rich and powerful has reached the limit of what can be achieved through the democratic process. The Canadian people can be conned into thinking that our taxes - that is to say the taxes of the rich and powerful - can keep getting cut forever with no ill effect but then when that blatant lie is exposed by the constant drum beat to abandon healthcare or the whole social safety net in general we dig in our heels.

Someday soon the elites will lose patience with that refusal and our 'immature and unserious' insistence on maintaining a basic level of publicly owned and administered care for all and that's where the spying powers Harper is trying to ram through and all those new prisons come in.

Rupert Murdoch's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

2011-07-13T08:41:00.001-06:00

Over the course of literally only a few days Billionaire, Media Baron and all around malign influence on the world ~~Voldemort~~ Rupert Murdoch lost the jewel in his British print crown when he was forced to shut down the 168 year old News of the World tabloid, irretrievably damaged and possibly crippled his enormous power over British politics and culture and now has been forced to abandon a gigantic TV deal worth billions that seemed like a certainty to be approved by government regulators only days ago.

Rupert Murdoch's media group News Corporation bowed to pressure from the public and parliament on Wednesday and withdrew its bid to take full control of pay-TV company BSkyB.

All three main political parties were poised to call on News Corp to abandon its offer in a vote in the House of Commons later on Wednesday.

The move leaves News Corp's key strategy for UK corporate growth in tatters. The proposed £8bn deal has been in train for more than a year, with the first offer tabled in June 2010.

It is the one of the biggest setbacks the 80-year-old media mogul has ever suffered and follows 10 days of revelations about the true scale of phone hacking at the News of the World, the paper Murdoch shut down last week.

With Conrad Black heading back to prison it doesn't seem like a good time to be a ruthless far right media baron.

But its a very good time for fans of schadenfreude.

Life by the drop

2011-07-07T11:35:00.002-06:00

Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who arranged for $50 million dollars in 'G8 infrastructure funds' to be funneled to his own Ontario riding, promises the Harper governments proposed $4 billion dollars in spending cuts 'will not endanger the health and safety of Canadians'.

OTTAWA — Treasury Board President Tony Clement has pledged the Harper government will not endanger the health and safety of Canadians once it decides where to slash $4 billion in annual spending from the federal budget.

In an interview Wednesday with Postmedia News, Clement spoke candidly about the approach he will take to the job as he leads a government wide review of 67 departments and agencies.

Of course an ideologically driven austerity budget that strangles the fragile economic recovery in its crib is rather the definition of endangering the health and safety of Canadians, and while spending is being cut in most areas there still seems to be billions to waste on expensive military hardware and unnecessary new prisons as crime rates continue to drop.

Like the $50 million available for his own riding (including border security funds for a riding that isn't on the border), Clement seems to be able to find the funding for Conservative ideological pet projects and constituencies if not for basic government services already slashed to the bone by both Conservative and Liberal past governments.

Canadians, If you believe already starved public services can absorb another $4 billion dollars in cuts with no ill effects I have an ideology driven right wing political party to sell you - oh wait, you already bought it.

Beyond Contempt

2011-07-06T12:59:00.002-06:00

A right wing tabloid newspaper, like Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch, hacked into a missing 13 year old girls cellphone, listened to and erased messages interfering in an investigation and misleading police and family into thinking she was still alive when in fact she had been the victim of a serial killer. Lets hear it for another example of conservative 'family values'

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron promised an inquiry on Wednesday into a "disgusting" phone hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News International that has outraged Britain and cast a shadow over the mogul's plans to buy control of broadcaster BSkyB.

Britons, he told parliament, had been "revolted" by the affair, in which tabloid journalists from the News of the World were said to have tapped into the mobile voicemails of crime victims, including an abducted schoolgirl later found murdered.

"We do need to have an inquiry, possibly inquiries, into what has happened," said Cameron. He faces questions on his own judgment, for hiring one former News of the World editor as his spokesman and for maintaining close relations with another, now a top executive and confidante of the international media baron.

UPDATE: "Hey, while we're being just completely disgusting, lets hack into the cellphones of the families of dead soldiers."

UPDATE 2: With a major TV deal worth billions potentially at risk due to public outrage Rupert Murdoch stunned his critics by announcing the tabloid accused of hacking the phones of crime victims and the families of dead soldiers would be shut down. A stunning reversal for a media mogul who has exercised unofficial veto power over British politics for years. Will this satiate or embolden the critics of his bloated empire that includes newspapers and TV channels worldwide? Could anything similar happen to Fox News for instance?

SUN Host complains about being bullied for bullying a guest

2011-06-29T13:49:00.002-06:00

In the 'willing to dish it out but not willing to take it' department we have Sun Host Krista Erickson who's revolting 'interview' with dancer Margie Gillis included belligerent and abusive behaviour including shouting Gillis down, refusing to let her answer - the frankly inane - questions Erickson asked and the juvenile mockery of Gillis's artistic career exemplified by her bizarre arm flapping gyrations would be an utter embarrassment for a real journalist. Erickson is probably proud of her performance.

It has however, sparked the most complaints in the history of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, over 2000 at the time of writing. The council is plaintively begging people to stop sending them in as they're overwhelmed.

Now I hate to call any woman a vacuous tart, even one who is actively promoted as such, The Sun chain's idea of how to promote her as the journalistic face of ~~Fox News North~~ SunTV was to make her one of their Sunshine Girls.

I feel the need to stress that I'm not kidding about that.

She's been whining about being 'bullied' by the many artists and ordinary Canadians who have robustly expressed how utterly she embarrassed herself by her moronic performance.

She's also very indignant on behalf of the poor harassed conservative politicians 'bullied' into supporting art projects they don't believe in by the aggressive hordes of scary artists

Once again the right wing tendency to paint anyone pushing back against their bullying as the aggressor. Always an amusing display of cowardice, whining and hypocrisy.

Toronto Police Swear off Kettling

2011-06-25T10:28:00.002-06:00

Toronto police will never again use the controversial crowd control technique known as kettling, which was employed for the first and last time in the city’s history during last year’s G20 summit.

The decision was revealed to the Star in a police statement Tuesday, along with the information that two Toronto police superintendents were “responsible” for commanding and controlling G20 policing in the city outside the security fence.

On June 27, the final day of the G20 summit, some 300 protesters and bystanders were boxed in, or kettled, by riot police at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. for about four hours.
Not long after the enclosure, rain began to fall in torrents as some stood shivering in summer dresses and tank tops.

“The crowd control technique implemented at Queen & Spadina on June 27 will not be used again by the Toronto Police Service,” spokeswoman Meaghan Gray said in the statement, a response to a list of G20-related questions sent by the Star.

They won't concede it was a mistake to use it at the G20 - being the subject of numerous legal actions that's hardly surprising - but they claim they never plan to use the tactic again,

On the one hand, good that public pressure has made the police bend on a widely condemned policing tactic, but it also just seems like they're throwing the public a bone to try to evade responsibility for the police riot that victimized so many.

And what about other police forces? Will the RCMP and the major city forces across Canada also disavow the tactic?

UPDATE: Another thought, as the tactic was literally found illegal by British courts and the British police now face potentially millions in court costs from lawsuits from those it was used against before being outlawed, perhaps the police simply want to avoid the tactics legality being considered by a court.

Guilty of Bribery

2011-06-24T13:50:00.000-06:00

Not just bribery, but bribery with the goal of avoiding compensating poverty stricken villagers they had poisoned.

A Calgary energy company pleaded guilty on Friday to bribing a foreign government official six years ago.

Niko Resources Ltd. is an oil and gas producer with operations in Southeast Asia.

The firm was charged under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.

Company officials admitted in a Calgary court that the firm bribed a Bangladeshi government minister in 2005 following a blowout at one of its fields.

The company provided a vehicle and free trips to Canada and the U.S. to the government official who was in charge of how much nearby villagers would be compensated by Niko for the blowout.

Both the Crown and defence lawyers are recommending a fine and victim surcharge amounting to almost $9.5 million.

Their CEO was the highest paid executive in Canada last year. Someone should do a study on the linkages between executive compensation and corporate cultures of corruption.

Resolved: It's funny when bad things happen to bad people

2011-06-24T13:46:00.000-06:00

THE CANADIAN PRESS — Conrad Black's ailing wife collapsed in shock Friday as the disgraced former media baron, his impassioned plea for leniency falling on deaf ears, was ordered by a U.S. judge to serve several more months behind bars.

Barbara Amiel, who suffers from an autoimmune condition and arrived at the courthouse looking fragile and unwell, keeled over moments after Justice Amy St. Eve revised Black's sentence to a total of 42 months.

"I still scratch my head as to why you engaged in this conduct," St. Eve told Black as she delivered the news to stunned onlookers during a moment of high courtroom drama.

"Good luck to you."

Having already spent 29 months in jail, and with additional credit for good behaviour, Black is now expected to spend between eight and 13 more months behind bars.

"How did this happen?"

2011-06-24T07:06:00.001-06:00

The always classy Glenn Beck prepares to end his TV run with as much class and sensitivity as he's always shown.

Glenn Beck said Thursday that he will be visiting the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz in a visit to Poland, and he'll broadcast a special from a town outside of the camp because this will help him "figure out," he says, "how did this happen?

How did it happen? It happened because people listened to a blow hard, right wing demagogue promoting fear, resentment, eliminationism and conspiracy theories. Does that answer your question Glenn?

The Peanut Gallery

2011-06-18T22:29:00.001-06:00

The Conservative Heritage Minister Jason Moore and Liberal Party Leader Bob Rae apparently have nothing better to do but hang around the fringes of the NDP convention kvetching. They both have observer status and are using it to repeat stale old stereotypes.

VANCOUVER — The NDP’s proposal to drop the word socialism is only a cosmetic change and the party is as radical as ever, Conservative MP James Moore said Saturday.
Moore, who is also the heritage minister, was an observer at the NDP’s national convention in Vancouver where delegates plan to debate scrapping the word “socialism” from the party’s constitution on Sunday.
“It’s cosmetic, it doesn’t mean anything,” Moore said. “What matters are policies. . . . And the policies here clearly take the NDP further to the left on issues like employment insurance. Forty-five day work year? . . . Canadians know that these simplistic solutions to complicated policy items are the hallmark of the hard left and that is what the NDP is proposing here,” he said.

Bob Rae confined himself to pointing out the NDP should just do what Liberals do; talk about how great it would be to propose government make positive changes in Canadian's lives - but we can't be trusted because we actually mean it!

“What is happening here, many of these resolutions we may agree with . . . but it is the sum of these resolutions that is completely, completely, unrealistic if you consider the situation in which the world economy is and where Canada is, where we need a lot of fiscal discipline, which is something that we Liberals are able to provide but the NDP at the federal level, doesn’t have this sense of responsibility,” Dion said.

NDP leader Jack Layton told Postmedia News Friday that the party really needed to tackle the stereotype that it was a bad fiscal manager.
“Our opponents like to try to suggest that, for example, we would run up deficits and that sort of things, actually the biggest deficit ever run up was by Mr. Harper not by the NDP. And Second, the NDP, when we’ve had the opportunity to be the government in different parts of the country, we have the best record of any party in balancing the budgets,” Layton said, noting “there were a couple of exceptions.”
“Bob Rae was clearly an exception — he’s now leading the Liberal party,” Layton said.

Like Ghandi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Austerity for thee, but not for me

2011-06-10T08:30:00.001-06:00

Senior Conservative officials broke federal rules to shower $50-million on the riding of the minister now overseeing Ottawa’s austerity plan, according to the final audit of a G8 program that fuelled opposition charges of pork-barrel politics.

In her last report, Auditor-General Sheila Fraser said the funding for the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund was approved by Parliament under the guise of a border initiative. The money was then distributed to projects in the riding of Treasury Board President Tony Clement without any input from civil servants, in a clear breach of federal policies dealing with transparency and accountability.

Tories respond to Auditor-General's G8 findings “It is very unusual and troubling. There is no paper trail behind the selection of the 32 projects,” said John Wiersema, the interim Auditor-General who recently took over from a retired Ms. Fraser. “I, personally, in my career in auditing, have not encountered a situation like that.”

...

The report provides embarrassing ammunition to Mr. Clement’s critics, who noted that his main task at the moment is to find wasteful spending as part of efforts to bring down the annual federal budget by $4-billion.

“That’s rich,” said NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair. “When we see that he’s the most wasteful spender in the history of the Canadian government since the sponsorship scandal.”

NDP MP Charlie Angus called the program a “slush fund for pork-barrel projects” in Mr. Clement’s riding.

As the government started seeking approval for the fund in Parliament in 2009, it buried the initiative in a larger $83-million item identified as the “Border Infrastructure Fund.” As such, when Parliament approved the funding, “the request only indicated that money was to be used.

Albertans will be familiar with the brand of politics; billions spent on paving dirt roads in sparsely populated but reliably Conservative rural ridings. Giant state of the art hospitals for small town Alberta while in Calgary one of the few remaining hospitals left is blown up in a festive ceremonial atmosphere.

Get used to it folks, rewarding their supporters and punishing anyone with the temerity to vote against them is practically the Conservative raison d'être

Fetus Fetishist Abduction Fantasy

2011-06-08T11:07:00.002-06:00

Current Republican Senatorial candidate and former New Jersey judge (!) Kenneth Del Vecchio who runs a sideline as a maker of right wing, religious themed straight to video movies is releasing a pro-life suspense thriller where the 'hero' kidnaps three women planning to have abortions and holds them prisoner for months until their pregnancies are carried to term.

The movie, called "The Life Zone," was produced by Del Vecchio's "Justice For All Productions," and is premiering Saturday at the Hoboken Film Festival in Teaneck, N.J. A press release describes the festival as "one of the nation's largest film festivals, which Del Vecchio founded and chairs."

From the release:

The controversial premise of THE LIFE ZONE: three women have been kidnapped from abortion clinics and are being held for seven months--until they all give birth. The film, which appears to cut right down the middle, examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist.
The press release also invites pro-lifers specifically to come check out this "historic event."
In the spirit of right-wing genre films, the preview is rather hokey, opening with an old man in the shadows saying in a scary, scratchy voice: "You have all committed a terrible sin." He later tells the three kidnapped women via video conference ('cause what's scarier than that?): "I am your jailer."

It may seem a tad ill-advised to make a pro-life movie where the heroes are creepy kidnappers, but "The Life Zone" preview attempts to counter this with some dialogue gems like: "You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder ... Your babies will be given life just as God planned."

So like Saw, if the crazed serial killer was a religious fanatic presented as the 'hero'.

The pathology on display is quite revealing about the anti-choice mindset.

A convicted felon with delusions of grandeur

2011-06-06T09:40:00.000-06:00

That it was published in the paper that used to be his own personal Hearstian plaything and vanity project must add insult to the injury of this damning report:

Conrad Black was not the model prisoner depicted by his legal team, rather he “projected the attitude that he was better than others” and treated some of his fellow inmates “like servants,” according to documents filed by the U.S. government in court.

In two affidavits sworn by a unit manager and an education specialist at Coleman Federal Correctional prison in Florida, where Lord Black spent 29 months, the former media baron is depicted as a haughty inmate and an uninspired tutor.

“Black initially demanded special treatment, expecting counsellors to prioritize his requests over those of other inmates,” said Tammy Padgett, the unit manager of Lord Black’s prison ward.

“During the time that Black was at Coleman, I observed that he gathered a following of inmates who performed services for him, acting like servants,” she said in a two-page affidavit filed by U.S. prosecutors in advance of a June 24 re-sentencing hearing.

“These inmates cooked for Black, cleaned for him, mopped his floor, ironed his clothes and other similar tasks. This is not at all frequent at Coleman.”

“Based on my interactions with Black, he projected the attitude that he was better than the others in the class, both faculty and students,” Ms. De LaGarza said in her affidavit. “A lot of the inmates looked up to him, and there were some who saluted him each day in class.”
...

Lord Black’s lawyers have asked the trial judge to release Lord Black for time served.

According to Ms. Padgett, Lord Black’s case manager while in prison noted that on the day before the Canadian-born businessman was released on bail, he told her in “words to the effect of, ‘I believe I should be addressed as Lord Black from this point forward.’ ” Apparently, the case manager refused.

Like Al Capone in his furnished luxury cell stuffing bills into guards pockets when they delivered his cigars. Another petty, sleazy, grubby little criminal who thinks he still is owed the respect of the peons.

War of Words

2011-06-04T16:42:00.002-06:00

The Republican Party is trying to censor people who call the Republican plan to end Medicare a Republican plan to end Medicare.

Attention, people, this is important: The battle over whether it’s true that the Republican plan would “end Medicare” is about to play out in a critical way in New Hampshire.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.

The TV station has thankfully declined:

The liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee has won a round against the National Republican Congressional Committee -- with the liberal group turning back an effort to get an ad targeting Republican proposals on Medicare pulled from broadcast.

Replacing a program of direct government payments to senior's doctors with a voucher program to get seniors to buy their own - more expensive - private health insurance unambiguously ends the current Medicare program and replaces it with something that is neither THE Medicare program or even A Medicare program. That's a government market support program for the private insurance industry. An industry that coincidentally has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

If a political party ever gets to dictate what is allowed to be said based on whether it conflicts with their own deceptive rhetoric that means giving them control over defining consensus reality itself.

The World Turned Upside Down

2011-06-02T13:12:00.002-06:00

CANADA PRESS -- OTTAWA - A new poll suggests New Democrats appear to have consolidated their support as official Opposition to the Harper Conservatives, particularly among women and urban voters.

As a new Parliament opens following the May 2 election, the Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey suggests the majority Conservative government has the support of 37 per cent of respondents -- down from the Tories' 39.6 per cent of the popular vote on election day.

NDP support stood at 34 per cent in the poll, up from 30.6 per cent of the popular vote, while the third-place Liberals slipped to 15 per cent in the survey, a loss of almost four percentage points from their election day total.

In other words Canadian progressives have internalized the new reality and the traditional polling position between the Liberals and the NDP has been almost completely reversed.

A lot of progressive voters who voted Liberal because they believed the constant hype that they had no choice are now firm NDP supporters and if we can retain and expand on that support the NDP is now the opposition party with as legitimate a shot at forming government in the future as the Liberals ever had - more so because we haven't utterly burned our bridges in Quebec the way the Liberal Party has.

It's going to be very entertaining to watch all the smoking gears from rhetorical 180's as various Liberal supporters provide tortured or non-existent rationales for why it was always very, very wrong for the NDP to try to supplant the Liberals as official opposition and government in waiting but not for the third party Liberals to be spoilers in the future.

The international example is that once a centrist party loses its aura of inevitability that it will always be either the government or the opposition - it never comes back. If people want to vote for a right wing party they will vote for a real right wing party, if they want to vote for a progressive party they vote for a real one.

The fate of a centrist power brokerage party with no firm positions or philosophical underpinning once it drops to third party status the first time is to be squeezed out of existence going forward.

Stoking Fear

2011-06-01T15:37:00.001-06:00

Salon has an interesting piece about the strange obsession of Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report with tracking down and hyping stories of violence between whites and blacks:

In an era when urban white flight is reversing and violent crime is at record lows across the nation, this world of race riots and constant violent attacks on innocent Caucasians exists only in the imaginations of Matt Drudge and the paranoid suburban and exurban white people he wants to keep terrified. Stoking those racial fears goes beyond cynical political point-scoring. To devote so much energy to attempting to make whites terrified of blacks is just vile.

Speaking of Christie Blatchford...

Christie Blatchford's columns will soon be back in the pages of the National Post, parent company Postmedia news network announced on Wednesday.

Veteran journalist Christie Blatchford is joining Postmedia News, which will see her columns return to the National Post. Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press

The veteran journalist will begin her new job on June 13, as a national columnist for the newspaper she previously wrote for from 1998 to 2003. She will also file stories for other Postmedia outlets, such as The Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen.

The Quebec-born writer, who has worked for Toronto's four major daily newspapers, is "a game changer in the world of journalism," company president Paul Godfrey said in a statement.

"People who love her, and even those few who don't, always read her."

Good to know her hard hitting and long running series on all the Scary Violent Dark People who scorn the law and menace defenseless peace loving caucasians will have a venue...

Incoherence

2011-06-01T12:08:00.008-06:00

Former BC Liberal Party leader Gordon Gibson's column in the Mop and Pail today is an excellent example of the essential policy incoherence and inherent cognitive dissonance that are the core features of neo-liberalism's Canadian strain.

He correctly identifies the essential problems of the Canadian Liberal Party; the impression that they stand for nothing and the generation of squabbling internecine battles and jockeying for power and influence that have hollowed the party out. He suggests they need to stand for something again, for policies that will make them stand out from the other parties.

Where to find unique policies? The obvious places are the “third rails” of politics, the ones others fear to touch. These are things like our drug policy (insane), our prison policy (likewise), our immigration policy (revolutionizing Canada on an ongoing basis without debate), democratic reform, the importance of supporting Canadian culture, a leadership of ideas (not cash) in things that matter to ordinary people like health and education, a focus on the young (who are the future) instead of the old (who are the past, but have the votes), aboriginal policy (an ignored disgrace) and so on.

So these are the supposed policy areas where the Liberals can endeavour to stand out from the NDP who Gibson identifies as the target the Liberals should be focusing on, (Remember all the whining from Liberals over the years that the NDP was being mean to them instead of going after the Conservatives? - We're about to see how purely a projection that was based on how they play the game now that they're the third party.) they are without exception, areas where the NDP has consistently been out in front of the Liberals and seeking progressive change while the Liberals have dragged their feet at best and been openly obstructive at worst.

What distinction do they plan to draw? Making promises and critiques in direct variance from their own governing record is hardly a new and innovative Liberal approach.

"...a leadership of ideas (not cash) in things that matter to ordinary people like health and education"

Classic. The usual neoliberal implication that all it will take is 'new ideas' to fix these services and proposing new spending doesn't qualify. Of course the reality is that ideas about fixing programs like healthcare are all about funding decisions, the false economies of cutting or scrimping on costs now VS the long term fixes and savings that often involve large initial investments.

Healthcare waiting times for instance; we know that the silver bullet fix for wait times and ballooning acute care costs is to massively expand long term care space. We know that spending the money now to get elderly Canadians with long term medical needs out of hospital beds, and too often hospital hallways and into extended care spaces is how you solve waiting times and reduce acute care health costs in the long term because we have an excellent example of such a policy providing these benefits in the UK.

The Tony Blair Labour government did a lot of things wrong, from slavish support of the Bush administration's quagmires in the Middle East to a pandering and reactionary approach to criminal justice that demonized youth and turned the British people into one of the most surveiled populations on Earth to name just two examples. On healthcare however, they instituted long term fixes with long term benefits, and they did so by 'throwing money at the problem' and opening thousands of extended care spaces.

But neoliberals are still trapped in a stale 'Keep starving the state and scrambling for so-called innovative new ideas to compensate for it' paradigm. A failed model that has long since reached its limit for even minimal effectiveness. The real third rail, the real 'dangerous idea' that a political party can use to distinguish themselves from the others is to take the lumps for speaking an unwelcome truth about the unsustainable and irresponsible trickle down revenue collection policies inherent in years of tax giveaways to corporations and the ultrawealthy by both Conservatives and the Liberals.

That's the third rail Gibson and the Liberal Party show no interest in touching, dooming them to the roadkill in the middle of the road fate he warns of.

Whose Blackberries were they?

2011-05-29T22:07:00.004-06:00

Interesting. The Toronto Sun is still reporting it's Rookie PC candidate George Lepp's junk that was posted to his Twitter stream while every other media source is uncritically repeating Lepp's claim that the package in question must belong to whoever stole his Blackberry.

Is it just that the original version makes for a better story? Nobody's in the office to update the story?

Or is this another sign of the breach between the Sun chain and the Conservative movement that opened during the campaign when they accused the Conservatives of trying to plant a phony Ignatieff story with them?

UPDATE: Lepp's PR guy denies aver admitting they were Lepp's meat and two veg:

The Sun story says Alan Sakach, communications director for the Ontario Conservatives, told the paper the device was operating on camera mode in Lepp's front pant pocket when it went missing.

But Sakach quickly denied the report, telling the Toronto Star the image was not of Lepp and that he has no idea how it was taken. “This is crap journalism,” Sakach told the Star, accusing The Sun of misquoting him.

Clearly some kind of identity line up is called for here. Presumably there are ... distinguishing features.

Rolling in the Deep

2011-05-29T18:31:00.001-06:00

Canada's proud role sabotaging Mideast peace

2011-05-28T18:49:00.000-06:00

As part of Harper's longstanding policy of defining pro-Israel to mean pro-Likud he jumped to serve Netanyahu when the Israeli PM asked him to throw Obama under a bus.

At the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper thwarted an announcement Friday by the G-8 countries that would have supported U.S. President Barack Obama's statement that talks between the Palestinians and Israel should be based on the 1967 borders with exchanges of territory.

The grateful thanks of Israel's far right government were delivered by vicious racist and ethnic cleansing proponent Avigdor Lieberman:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman spoke over the weekend with Canada's foreign minister, John Baird, and thanked him for Canada's position during the G-8 deliberations. "Canada is a true friend of Israel and with a realistic and proper view of things, it understands that the 1967 borders do not conform to Israel's security needs and with the current demographic reality," Lieberman said.

'current demographic reality' being a polite euphemism for 'years of illegal settlement building on stolen land.'

Remember when Canada's role on the world stage was something to be proud of?

In case there was ever really any doubt...

2011-05-23T11:47:00.000-06:00

...That the BC Liberal Party is actually a far right party:

Former Treasury Board president and retired Conservative MP Stockwell Day says he's backing the provincial Liberals in British Columbia because any other choice would result in an NDP-led government.

In an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio's The House, Day said he will campaign for Premier Christy Clark's party, but also believes the party's name should be changed to reflect the reality of its support base.

"I know for people living outside of B.C., it sounds strange," Day said.

"'BC Liberals' really is, if I dare I use the word, a coalition of the non-socialist vote that took place a number of years ago … That particular coalition by-and-large worked."

It doesn't really sound that strange if you know that the BC Liberals are just the latest camouflage suit that the right wing chamber of commerce tendency has worn in BC like the Social Credit Party before them. They ride one of them until they are so tainted with extremism, dirty deeds and contempt for the public they become unelectable and then they change their names or abandon the husk for a new party shell like digger wasps animating a corpse. The BC Conservatives are probably next.

If things go well for the federal NDP opposition, if progressives break for them and they actually look like they may form a government in four years, watch the federal Liberal Party that's left merge with the Conservatives rather than let progressives form government.

There are blogs that get more viewers than Sun TV

2011-05-17T21:29:00.003-06:00

Not, you know, mine, but not by that much.

The so-called "Fox News North" specialty service initially struck estimated ratings of about 31,000 viewers on its evening launch of April 18, but has now dropped to as little as 4,000 and 5,000 viewers in the evening slots with hosts Brian Lilley and Charles Adler, CP reported.
CP said sources had provided it with overnight estimates from BBM Canada.
Ezra Levant’s program “The Source” received an estimated 31,000 viewers on launch day, but those numbers fell to 12,000 on Wednesday that week, and by the following Monday had reached an estimated 19,000.
CP reported that at 7 p.m. last Friday, Sun News Network journalist Theo Caldwell was drawing an estimated 11,000 viewers nationally while CBC News Network rated 263,000 and CNN 38,000 viewers in Canada.

We now rejoin the view from the couch in Ezra's mom's basement...

"Ezra's World! Party on! Excellent! The free market is bodacious and Muslims are bogus!" etc...etc...

I encourage Quebecor and the Sun Chain to double down. Pour money into this pit boys! Hold on by your fingernails until you've drained Quebecor dry the way the National Pest helped suck CanWest dry. Ideology demands it.

Pile-on Backlash

2011-05-17T10:53:00.001-06:00

Appended to an unrelated piece about Harper's clear intention to administer a deathblow to the Liberals by finally getting his way on killing the vote subsidy, Jane Taber notes that the media pile on Ruth Ellen Brosseau has resulted in backlash sympathy and support for the embattled fledgling NDP MP. Canadian women in particular watched the gleeful attacks on a working single mother who idealistically signed up as a candidate in a race she had no expectation of winning, and got angry.

What Ruth Ellen Brosseau brings to the House

After much negative publicity, skepticism and raised eyebrows over Vegas-vacationing New Democrat Ruth Ellen Brosseau, public opinion may be changing.

The pile-on over the young woman’s ability to serve in the Commons has turned off some Canadians – especially women – and there are many now who are rooting for her to succeed in a big way in the Commons.

Anecdotally, there are many women who believe that the 27-year-old former pub server and single mother’s presence in the Commons is refreshing. Finally there will be more than middle-aged blue-suited professionally-trained men in the House. With the addition of Ms. Brosseau, the Commons will take a small step toward reflecting real life.

Trouble in Mind

2011-05-10T08:28:00.003-06:00

Clearly

2011-05-06T23:11:00.000-06:00

You don't even have to live here to figure it out. Talking Points Memo's insights on our election:

Starting back in the 1960s, the traditionally centrist Liberals shifted leftward and co-opted many of the NDP's issues, first under Prime Minister Lester Pearson, and then especially so under the long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (who had previously been an activist with the NDP's radical socialist predecessor, the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, and had only been a member of the Liberals for three years when he was elevated to the top job). After a big defeat in 1984, the Liberals shifted back to the middle in the 1990s, with fiscal austerity and pro-business policies under Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
But then in the last few years, when it was again clearly necessary to shift leftward and impress progressive voters, the party instead picked the decidedly centrist Ignatieff as leader, sealing their fate to be squeezed out between the right and left.

There it is in a nutshell.

The scent of Debacle

2011-05-04T11:45:00.003-06:00

The new ~~Fox News North~~, I mean ~~SCTV~~, I mean the very professional and not at all amateurish looking Sun News TV operation has had a rough start. A massive drop off in viewers after its initial half hour, mockery for its cardboard sets and pretty but vacant personalities and of course, ~~Ranty McHatey~~ Ezra Levant's fevered ego and ongoing car crash of a show. Now they appear to have been evicted from their corner of the satellite TV bandwidth over a fee dispute.

Canada’s newest 24-hour news channel, Sun News Network, has been yanked off the air by Bell TV in a dispute about fees.

Quebecor Inc. (QBR-B), which owns the channel, sent a letter to BCE Inc. (BCE-T35.690.090.25%) on April 18, demanding the channel be removed from Bell’s satellite TV service if an agreement was not reached by May 3. Bell did just that at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Now, Quebecor plans to file a complaint with the federal broadcast regulator, charging that BCE is discriminating against channels that it does not own.

After Canadians rejected their last minute desperate smear against Jack Layton and their falling out with Harper's campaign team before that its hard to miss an aura of frantic impending catastrophe emanating from Quebecor 's headquarters. This should be the best of times for them - instead they seem to be circling the drain.

The coming Prison Industrial Complex

2011-05-04T11:06:00.001-06:00

For those still baffled by the Harper government's insistence on spending untold billions on new prisons with no big increase in crime to justify them, there are specific policy and political goals this pledge satisfies.

In the US the Prison Industrial Complex serves the very specific constituencies and interests of the Republican Party and its regional supporters. The phantom crime wave explanation by the Harperites is purely a cover for a massive subsidy to rural and exurban constituencies. One could almost applaud the Conservative embrace of a massive Kensyian public works program if it was only butter instead of bars.

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex -- a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the thinking: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons -- and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."

Of course justifying such a massive spending increase in cells requires an equally massive increase in incarceration - a 'tough on crime' agenda and large scale contraction of the social safety net to help pay for dungeon construction should start ramping up those numbers nicely.

What Erin Said

2011-05-03T21:16:00.000-06:00

Go. Read. Give yourself permission to celebrate.

Don't Blame the NDP

2011-05-03T07:10:00.000-06:00

It's not the NDP's fault that the Liberals finally alienated progressives completely by repeatedly campaigning from the left and governing from the right. It's not the NDP's fault that the Liberal Party finally alienated Quebecors completely by treating being in power as one big open milk bar where their friends, family and friendly advertising agencies could skim off all the cream. It's not the NDP's fault that the Liberals managed to alienate everybody else by picking an arrogant, George W Bush supporting neoconservative leader who openly sneered at anyone who disagreed with him about staying in Afghanistan and was responsible for pulling the Liberals out of a coalition arrangement we could still have been in today

It's not the NDP's fault that the Liberal Party has always opposed any move away from First Past the Post and towards Proportional Representation. I predict now that they've been on the receiving end of the downside of First Past the Post they are about to become born again Proportional Representation supporters.

It's not the NDP's fault that so many of the Liberal Party's supporters had no ideology greater than power and when the chips were down voted Conservative in huge numbers rather than support the NDP.

As someone else put it much more succinctly: It's not the NDP's fault that the Liberal Party sucks so much.

Many Liberals are approaching these results with class and dignity, others with frothing, hateful meltdowns. In the coming months and years the Liberal and New Democratic Parties are going to have a lot to talk about.

It will not be on the basis that the NDP should apologize for winning the support it did this election.

The Real Split

2011-05-02T20:51:00.000-06:00

The real story tonight is all the center right Liberals who voted Conservative. Blame the NDP all you want Libs. This likely Conservative majority is on your own heads.

CBC declares the NDP the Official Opposition

2011-05-02T20:15:00.000-06:00

It's a new dawn. Its a new day.

The Stitch Up

2011-04-30T12:46:00.005-06:00

From the brilliant British TV drama A Very British Coup.

"You show alarming signs of becoming a major statesman."
"And you can't allow that, can you?"

New Facebook group: Sanction the Toronto Sun for Electoral Dirty Tricks

2011-04-30T11:18:00.001-06:00

It was clearly a late election hail mary attempt to undercut Jack Layton and the NDP.

An anonymous police officer with an axe to grind against a troublesome anti-poverty activist now trending to become the leader of the official opposition comes forward 15 years later and the Sun laps it up. Jack Layton is a well known exercise enthusiast who went to a city licensed therapist for a massage and was surprised when it was raided by the police. No charges were filed, Now fifteen years later the Toronto Sun tries to use this innocuous incident to smear a popular leader of a party experiencing surging support with days to go in a tight election.

This kind of irresponsible scummy political manipulation and sleaze shouldn't be consequence free. Join the new facebook group Sanction the Toronto Sun for Electoral Dirty Tricks to show how you feel about this kind of partisan manipulation. And here's the link to the Ontario Press Council's complaint process.

But..but...Ontario!

2011-04-26T15:49:00.001-06:00

'Sure the NDP may be gaining some seats in Quebec and BC but it's Ontario that matters (Isn't it always?) and there those nasty NDP partisans are just getting in good Liberal candidates way!' - Or umpteen different variations of the same theme from the more reflexive and tribal of Liberal posters.

Not so fast.

Nationally, the EKOS poll has Stephen Harper’s Conservatives leading with 33.9-per-cent support. But the NDP are now clearly in second place – 27.9 per cent compared to 24 per cent for the Liberals. The Greens are 6.8 per cent, according to the poll of 2,532 people conducted between April 23 and April 25. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Mr. Graves, however, has detected something afoot in Ontario, which has been locked in a “seesaw battle between the Conservatives and the Liberals,” Mr. Graves said.

Now, he said, the two parties are hearing the “footsteps of the big orange wave (not to mix metaphors).”

The New Democrats are ahead, he said, of where they were in 2008, and “Ontario voters are flirting with the idea of jumping on the big orange bandwagon.”

al-Qaida bomber was working for CSIS

2011-04-26T07:08:00.003-06:00

An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence, according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US military's Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili, an Algerian citizen described as a "facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida", was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay.

But according to Hamlili's Guantánamo "assessment" file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the Guardian, US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence.

After his capture in June 2003 Hamlili was transferred to Bagram detention centre, north of Kabul, where he underwent numerous "custodial interviews" with CIA personnel.

They found him "to have withheld important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service and British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to US and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan".

Liberal, Tory, same old...?

2011-04-25T21:09:00.004-06:00

This is emphatically not directed at progressives who have greeted the sudden, self-reinforcing rise of the NDP with shocked but welcoming surprise, This isn't aimed at the people who've been pushing the strategic vote to save us from scary Stephen Harper and have publicly accepted that now means supporting the NDP in more places then they ever imagined.

This is directed to those who are Liberals because that's where the power is in their community. The people who'd be open Harpercon style right-wingers if they had grown up in Alberta instead of Ontario. There's been some grand mal hissy fit frothing tantrums over the NDP's meteoric rise, but few as over the top impossible to parody as this one.

Do I think most Liberals think like this? No, just some of the loudest ones.

UPDATE: Grasping at straws edition. It's all about the cane.

I will show you fear, in a shiny graphic.

2011-04-25T15:21:00.000-06:00

The problem I have with this minimum/average/maximum seat calculator that's become so popular is that the way the graphic lines up it seems to imply that the min/avg/max numbers all match up with every other parties min/avg/max - encouraging people to jump to the conclusion that a maximum seat count for one party coincides with the maximum of the other.

This interpretation has been used to bash the NDP for committing the horrific crime of appealing to Canadian voters. Of course the Cons and Libs have been throwing everything they can think of at the NDP all weekend in the desperate hopes that something will stick.

Of course they don't mean that, just the opposite in fact. One of these parties getting it's average polling result or its best case scenario means the other two don't. The drilled down regional numbers still strongly indicate Harper isn't getting his majority.

Don't fall for the hype. Vote for the candidate and party you believe in rather than fall for the same stale strategic voting prisoner's dilemma again.

60 Seats

2011-04-21T16:40:00.001-06:00

Jack Layton and his surging New Democrats are poised to see their representation in the Commons increased from 36 to 60 seats, denying the Harper Conservatives their coveted majority, according to a new EKOS Research poll.

The survey, released Thursday, has the NDP tied with the Liberals – 24.7 per cent – while the Tories are at 34.4 per cent nationally. The Bloc is at 6.5 per cent and the Green Party is at 7.8 per cent.

I await with bated breath for all the Liberal bloggers to continue piously arguing the important thing is to stop Harper getting a majority, so Canadians should avoid splitting the vote by voting for the party currently poised to keep him from getting it: the NDP.

Any time now.

The Other Shoe Drops

2011-04-19T15:19:00.003-06:00

Iggy comes clean and concedes that the path to him becoming Prime Minister lies with an 'arrangement' with the NDP.

Michael Ignatieff is saying clearly for the first time that he could defeat a minority Conservative government and make a case to the Governor-General that his party could govern with the support of others – and without another trip to the polls.

Until now, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has only said the party that wins the most seats on May 2 can “try” to win the confidence of the House of Commons. While the comment carried an obvious implication, he spelled it out for the first time Tuesday.

“Let’s run it right out so we’re all clear,” Mr. Ignatieff said in a live interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

“If [Conservative Leader Stephen] Harper wins the most seats and forms a government but does not secure the confidence of the House, and I’m assuming Parliament comes back, then it goes to the Governor-General. That’s what happens. That’s how the rules work.

“And then, if the Governor-General wants to call on other parties – or myself, for example – to try and form a government, then we try and form a government. That’s exactly how the rules work and what I’m trying to say to Canadians is I understand the rules, I respect the rules, I’ll follow them to the letter and I’m not going to form a coalition,” he said.

This comparatively simple declaration that the Liberals plan to follow the rules of parliamentary democracy tells us what to expect and makes it clearer than ever that progressives should be fighting for the most NDP seats possible to get the best possible terms for any such arrangement.

The New World

2011-04-19T13:31:00.002-06:00

"I think you know that there's no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. The three of us are all rich, so we're on the same side" - Deep Cover, 1992

No, YOU knock it off

2011-04-19T12:00:00.001-06:00

Now that several realistic drilled down looks at the polling numbers by regions makes it clear that all the majority talk was smoke and mirrors and Harper is headed for another minority and probably a smaller one at that, can we call a moratorium on the frankly hysterical fulminating by those who once again profess to be shocked and dismayed that the NDP is actually being so gauche as to fight to win?

Some bloggers whose posts I usually respect and enjoy have been posting some truly ridiculous and condescending nonsense displaying the perennial and familiar displeasure that the NDP doesn't do what they think we should... and put the best interests of the Liberal Party first.

Once again for those who haven't been paying attention: We aren't just liberals in a hurry, we don't actually believe that a Liberal minority would be a real and marked improvement over a Conservative one, yeah, we're going to try to win everywhere and no, we aren't going to apologize.

To the casual observer, or the observer deliberately avoiding the details - liberals and social democrats may seem to have more in common than liberals and conservatives - but have you noticed that in provinces where the NDP is a legitimate, even default governing option that the provincial 'liberals' and 'conservatives' have long since merged into default chamber of commerce conservative parties? Have you noticed that in the UK the two parties that felt their policies were most aligned to form a coalition were the 'liberals' and the 'conservatives'? You don't think the same thing would happen in Canada in a heartbeat if it ever looked like the NDP was becoming a viable governing option?

When we say 'Liberal/Tory, same old story' that isn't just a slogan, we New Democrats really do believe that on the really important issues particularly on economics and social spending there is no real daylight between Liberal and Tory policy books.

So pardon us if we look for an alternative to either the 'liberal' or 'conservative' wings of the single corporatist Bay Street Party presented to us as our only options. Pardon us if we fight for every seat where we have a chance - usually because the local progressives are tired of being wooed in an election and then pimped out as soon as the vaguely more progressive sounding corporatists who call themselves 'liberals' beat the vaguely 'conservative' sounding corporatists they agree more than disagree with. Or don't. fiercely resent every seat the NDP win with a repellent aura of thwarted entitlement and self righteous spleen if you prefer.

We aren't going to apologize for fighting to win.

You don't like that quote? There are plenty of others.

2011-04-18T11:01:00.002-06:00

Stephen Harper is very offended that the Liberals are attributing a quote to him that he claims he never said.

The Tories are demanding the Liberals pull their new health-care ad, arguing that the party misquoted Conservative Leader Stephen Harper. The television ad asks if voters can trust Harper to be in charge of health care and says he once argued the federal government should scrap the Canada Health Act.

But it wasn't Harper who spoke the words cited in the ad — it was his then-boss, National Citizens Coalition president David Somerville, a Conservative spokesman said Monday.

The ad cites an Aug. 26, 2010 Globe and Mail piece for the first statement, and runs it with a headline that says "It's Past Time the Feds Scrapped the Canada Health Act.

But while that line did indeed appear in the Globe and Mail last year, it was in a column by writer André Picard. Picard was citing Harper from a 1997 statement he made as vice-president of the NCC.

A Google search makes it clear the line is oft-cited but never with a link to a recording or speech text. It's usually sourced to a famous speech Harper made in Montreal to a conservative American group called the Council for National Policy (where he calls Canada a northern European welfare state).

Now it appears Harper didn't use the line at all.

Now of course, quotes should be attributed carefully - if Stephen Harper did not say those exact words the record should be corrected. But it should also include the context that this was and is the clear and unambiguous position of the National Citizens Coalition - an organization started by an insurance executive specifically to battle public healthcare - and was the ideological raison d'etre of the organization while Harper was Vice President of the organization.

There are more than enough easily verified quotes from Harper, specifically on the subject of how awful publicly administered and delivered healthcare is, to make his beliefs clear:

“Monopolies in the public sector are just as objectionable as monopolies in the private sector. It should not matter who delivers health care, whether it is private, for profit, not for profit or public institutions, as long as Canadians have access to it regardless of their financial means.” (Stephen Harper, Hansard, October 1, 2002)

“We also support the exploration of alternative ways to deliver health care. Moving toward alternatives, including those provided by the private sector, is a natural development of our health care system.” (Stephen Harper, Toronto Star, October 2002)

“Each province should raise its own revenue for health care – i.e., replace Canada Health and Social Transfer cash with tax points.” (Stephen Harper, ‘Firewall’ letter, January 24, 2001)

“What we clearly need is experimentation with market reforms and private delivery options [in health care].” (Stephen Harper, then President of the National Citizens Coalition, 2001)

The Conservatives may have miscalculated here, by screaming and yelling about the one quote that cannot be 100% verified as coming from him rather than specifically his boss at the time at the organization where it was clearly the institutional policy position. At the same speech:

"Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should... They were in favour of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand. Officially -- what else can I say about them? Officially for the entrenchment of our universal, collectivized, health-care system (emphasis added.) and multicultural policies in the constitution of the country."

- Conservative leader Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, in a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing American think tank.

Stephen Harper's own words have always been his greatest enemy. Now he has opened the door for all those words to become center stage again.

Voter Supression: Another page from the Republican playbook

2011-04-15T11:07:00.001-06:00

The ties between Stephen Harper's CRAP (Conservative, Reform, Alliance Party) and the American Republican Party are deep and intricate. A shared network of 'think tanks', action funds, pressure groups, 'student exchange' programs and a deeply shared set of ideological tropes, attitudes, assumptions and tactics. The days when the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party was still to the left of the American Democratic Party much less the Republicans are long since over. The current incarnation of Canadian Conservatives has more in common with the American Tea Partys than the PCs of Joe Clark and Brian Mulrooney.

Now they appear to be taking a very noxious page from the Republican voter suppression handbook and attacking the voting rights of students.

The Guelph students say the poll was organized correctly, with a Conservative scrutineer on hand. But Hamilton's letter suggests there was no scrutineer and that campaign material was present at the polling station, which is prohibited.

According to a published report, an attempt was actually made to end the vote as it was happening.

Citing several students who were there at the time, the Guelph Mercury reports that the communications director for the Guelph Conservative Party candidate turned up at the balloting site, claiming the process violated the Elections Canada Act. He reportedly tried to snatch the ballot box away, but left empty-handed.

These kind of tactics and the underlying hostility to the voting rights of students has a long ignoble history in the US, from both the Republicans AND the Democrats (The Clintons did enormous damage to their credibility during the bitter primary battle with Barack Obama when they attacked the rights of college students in Iowa to vote where they went to school.) but it's been an overwhelmingly Republican tactic, particularly in older white communities with young racially diverse or majority black schools in their borders.

How much of a backlash the Conservatives face from this thuggish attack on student voters will affect how much of this tactic we see in the future.

UPDATE: Elections Canada: The poll was valid and the votes WILL be counted.

'Kettling' Declared Illegal in UK

2011-04-14T08:57:00.003-06:00

Yes, the same controversial police tactic infamously used in Toronto during the G20. This precedent should be swiftly argued in Canadian courts.

Police are to appeal against today's High Court decision declaring unlawful controversial "kettling" tactics used against demonstrators during G20 protests in central London two years ago.

The judgment led to a call from human rights lawyers for an "immediate change to police attitudes and tactics".

But the Metropolitan Police expressed concern over the impact of the ruling on its ability "to prevent disorder within protests".

The judgment was a victory for Hannah McClure, a student, and Josh Moos, a campaigner for Plane Stupid, who had challenged the legality of the "violent" restraint methods used against them at the Camp for Climate Action in Bishopsgate on April 1 2009.

It was the day newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died after being struck by a police officer at a separate G20 protest at the nearby Royal Exchange.

UPDATE: Didn't take long for lawyers for victims of Toronto's kettling incidents to jump on this:

“This case is very important and will be used by us in the court,” said Murray Klippenstein, who has filed a $45 million class action lawsuit against the Toronto Police Services Board over the G20 in Toronto last June.

UPDATE 2: As a result of the High Court ruling, 'thousands' of people illegally detained may sue for false imprisonment. Maybe the only way to get the police to not do this kind of thing is to make it incredibally expensive when they do.

Multiculturalism's success

2011-04-12T11:30:00.002-06:00

PARIS — Canadians are the most tolerant people in the developed world, are terrific readers, enjoy more "positive experiences" than everyone but Icelanders, and don't produce many babies, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The conclusions were contained in the latest edition of Society at a Glance, a broad-brush analysis of social and economic indicators among the 34 member states of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
"At 84 per cent on average, Canadians report the highest community tolerance of minority groups — ethnic minorities, migrants, and gays and lesbians — in the OECD, where the average is 61 per cent," said a summary of Canada-specific findings.

Such widespread acceptance didn't happen automatically just because we are so much nicer - not completely anyway. It took deliberate and intentional public programs and initiatives. Social engineering in other words.

It's an unpopular contention, bringing up connotations of bloated bureaucracy and the discredited legislation of political correctness. But remember a lot of those connotations have been deliberately spawned and nourished by the same people trying to brand every progressive policy or program as 'Failed Big Government Run Amuck!' There, I just boiled down every Financial Post editorial headline ever.

But while Canada was welcoming and integrating newcomers into our society and crucially, our economy with an inclusive respect for cultural differences, Germany was openly renouncing multiculturalism and France was standing on the principal of 'secularism' another great, enlightened idea but used too often as a cudgel. At least that's how they've used it. They just outlawed veils that cover a woman's face and have started rounding up and arresting women who refuse to take them off. Short sighted, mean-spirited and counter-productive, but portrayed as high minded defense of feminism and liberty. This while the large French Muslim community remains disenfranchised, excluded, disproportionately underemployed and ghettoized.

We've had our own flare-ups, largely but by no means solely, in Quebec where a entrenched majority manages to transform isolated friction points into an argument that multiculturalism as a whole is a failed model and a sign that they are under siege from a small minority.

But in general I would argue that the huge success Canada has had integrating every Canadian into our society is the proof that multiculturalism is an unheralded success story.

'...not intended to be a factual statement'

2011-04-12T10:34:00.001-06:00

So a Republican Senator responds to being caught outright lying about Planned Parenthood spending 90% of their budget on abortions (the real number is about 3% the other 97% that Republicans want to strip away going to pap smears, cancer screenings and other basic healthcare for under served American women.) by saying that the claim 'wasn't intended to be a factual statement' and was supposed to merely illustrate that Planned Parenthood subsidizes abortions.

Does that mean I can call Senator John Kyl a habitual pig$#%^er, and my defense can be that it wasn't meant to be a factual statement that he literally has relations with farm animals, it was just intended to illustrate what a remarkable douchewaffle he is?

Literally Never

2011-04-12T10:04:00.002-06:00

The model of responding to economic downturn with austerity measures has a perfect record... of utter failure. It has literally NEVER worked. Freidmanites sneer at 'spending your way out of recession' but the countries that do it thrive and the countries that start slashing at spending end up like Ireland with their economies in tatters.

Even more spectacular than the failure of Ireland’s “efficient business regulations” and “competitive tax rates” is the failure of its austerity measures in what seems like record time. Not only did Ireland become the first Eurozone country to enter recession, it also became the first to test its status as a petri dish for conservative policy by becoming the first country to respond to the economic critics by enacting severe austerity measures.
The government’s 2008 emergency budget was the kind of economic medicine that even now conservatives are clamoring for here in the U.S. — a package of cuts in social programs from education to medical care, combined with a bailout of the country’s banks. The idea was that making such severe cuts would increase confidence and produce growth by assuring investors that Ireland was serious about it’s economic problems.
Ireland’s austerity measures were an “epic fail” on two fronts. The country was rewarded with shrinking economy, and a sharper downturn than if the government had spent more to keep people working. The suffering that austerity measures brought the Irish people sparked a series of public demonstrations in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
But austerity did not inspire confidence nor deliver the growth its proponents promised. Fiscal austerity failed to reassure the markets, and Ireland’s credit rating was lowered. Most recently, the country found itself in need of a bailout from the E.U. to make up for the economic grown not delivered by earlier austerity measures. The size of the bailout keeps growing, but recent reports said that it may amount to €85 billion ($145 billion).
The Irish people were left alone and unled, in a way that laid bare the cost of austerity in Ireland, exacted from the working and middle class taxpayers made to finance the bank bailout.

You'd think the media would report that when the wise 'serious' thinkers confidently state that the only option is to cut and cut and cut some more, that such a program HAS NEVER WORKED. That wherever it is tried it leads to short term misery for the poor (to pay for the wild unregulated parties of the rich) and long term stagnation for the economy as a whole.

But the mainstream media is marked by an almost unbroken consensus of pro-business neo-liberalism that believes deficits are morally wrong and making people suffer in the name of fiscal probity is morally right. From the elite point of view, making the public pay for your excesses resulting in a nice big recession that lets them bring the fear of unemployment to the negotiating table and slash away at wages and benefits is the only highlight of an economic downturn.

A challenge: Find one unalloyed, incontrovertible example of austerity measures doing anything but making the economy worse. Expect to be looking for a long time.

Exporting Terror

2011-04-05T07:11:00.000-06:00

We've all watched fascinated and repelled as America's political right shambled off a cliff in unison. A political movement captured and overwhelmed by its own lunatic fringe as the 'Foxification' of America's politics bears its bitter fruit.

Hitherto the ignorance, thinly veiled racism, drooling hatred, religious intolerance and quasi-fascist authority worship in service to economic elites has been traits we can only shake our heads at and be glad it doesn't affect us. But even without a Republican in the White House this is a malevolent influence on the whole world. Here in Canada, we know there are strong links between America's network of right wing politicians, 'think-tanks', lobbying groups and foundations and our own. This network of connections is duplicated to a greater or lesser extent in countries all over the world.

And that's just places where they're satisfied with only ~~undermining~~ working within democratic structures.

Exhibit One: When the legally elected President of Honduras was overthrown by an elite led military coup the whole world condemned it as an illegal abrogation of democracy. Republican Senator Jim DeMint, extremely influential on the far right wing of the American Republican Party on the other hand, supported the coup.

"The people of Honduras have struggled too long to have their hard-won democracy stolen from them by a Chavez-style dictator. The Honduran Congress, the Honduran Supreme Court, and the Honduran military have acted in accordance to the Honduran constitution and the rule of law."

Now another Republican senator shows his contempt for democracy by throwing his support to a President refusing to leave power after losing an election.

The west African nation of Ivory Coast has been in turmoil ever since incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after losing an internationally certified election in late November. As forces loyal to Gbagbo have killed civilians and been accused of crimes against humanity, and as the number of refugees from the country has ballooned to as many as 1 million, observers have described the situation as worse than the Libyan conflict.
While the crisis has gotten substantial press attention, one aspect of Gbagbo's past -- and present -- has flown under the radar: his longtime ties to the Christian right in the United States, a movement in which he still finds at least some support.
That includes a U.S. senator and acquaintance of Gbagbo who declined to intervene in the crisis when asked by the State Department earlier this year, a former congressman who was hired by Gbagbo as a lobbyist, and a Christian right TV network that ran a fawning profile of Gbagbo, even as violence engulfed Ivory Coast. The senator, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, today released a letter to Hillary Clinton calling for new elections in Ivory Coast, putting him in direct opposition to the view of the Obama administration, the United Nations and the African Union that Gbagbo lost a fair election.

In the case of Gbagbo, apparently long a pet project of the American Christian Right, the fact that his opponent is a Muslim appears to trump the fact that Gbagbo actually lost an election. Religion and ideology trump democracy.

If Stephen Harper somehow loses this election, will his network of American right wing supporters be calling for the military to step in to keep him in power? They seem to react badly when their preferred candidates lose power.

Warning to Other Bloggers

2011-04-03T10:01:00.000-06:00

If you get a Netflix free trial at the same time your girlfriend finally convinces you to join her in World of Warcraft you nuke your bandwidth caps and eventually discover you haven't blogged in three weeks.

Normal service will resume shortly. Just have to finish a Mad Men episode and grind out this next quest level....

Libya and Bahrain

2011-03-19T12:25:00.004-06:00

A vicious authoritarian regime responding to protestors with murderous repression, deadly snipers and bringing in foreign troops to crush dissent.

An equally apt description of both Libya and Bahrain, except one is a country that has been a thorn in the west's side and the other an important ally, sea port and military outpost. Hence explaining why one is being hit with UN sanctions, no-fly zones and a probable invasion while the other gets mild criticism and calls for restraint. Ah realpolitik...

The helpful thing, if you're overwhelmed by so much news going on at once, is that Bahrain is roughly the same story as Libya—only instead of pro-democracy protesters being murdered by a terrorist-sponsoring monster of a dictator who has been on America's enemies list for ages, the pro-democracy protesters are being murdered by a government that is America's very own dear ally. And where Qaddafi brought in foreign mercenaries for support, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain brought in troops from our even more vital ally, Saudi Arabia.
...

So basically, take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them. That's Bahrain.

Nicholas Kristof, in a column deploring the violence, wrote:
Today the United States is in a vise — caught between our allies and our values.
Are we? Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are the same rotten royalist dictatorships they've always been. And they've been on our side. The helicopters over the square were reportedly American-made Cobras, because the Royal Bahraini Air Force flies what we sell them; the rifles on the ground are American M16s. Freedom and democracy are what we talk about. Values are what we do.

UPDATE: And the Yanks come marching in, certainly the rebels can expect them to march right out again once Gaddafi is overthrown right? Right?

Doctor threatened for speaking out against leaving mentally ill children in basement

2011-03-18T12:39:00.002-06:00

And Premier Stelmach's claim that intimidation against doctors for speaking out on patient care has 'not been substantiated' suffers another blow.

The smoking gun proves to be a nasty letter threatening to demote a doctor. It might finally force the Tories to call the public health care inquiry they're so determined to duck.

As recently as Thursday afternoon, Premier Ed Stelmach said this specific case was not substantiated.
Now it is; and another of the premier's fallback positions collapses behind him.

Calgary psychiatrist Dr. Lloyd Maybaum spoke up vigorously in 2008 after he learned that the planned mental health unit at the new South Campus would be postponed.

He wrote an e-mail to other doctors that found its way into the Herald. This became a big story at the time. What we didn't know then, though, was that Maybaum subsequently received a letter from a senior health official.

It said, among many other things: "I am forced to make a clear statement that further communications of this nature without discussion and review with members of the Executive of Mental Health and Addictions will require . . . (asking) the Executive to formally review your role as physician leader for psychiatry to the South Campus project."

There's the threat. And it came because Maybaum wrote an impassioned e-mail about treatment for the mentally ill.

An earlier plan for mental health in the new Alberta Children's Hospital, Maybaum wrote, "was scuttled late in the design process, leaving no spot for mental health services except for the basement.

"Yes, in the basement. The new Children's Hospital, replete with fantastic vistas of the mountains, bright sunshine, striking colours -and children with mental health problems left in the dark -a forgotten afterthought -wedged into leftovers in the bowels of the site."

Maybaum said he wanted to be named to the South Campus project "to ensure mental health is not once again marginalized."

But then it happened all over. Maybaum learned the South Campus mental health pavilion would be cut from the first phase of the new hospital.

"Suddenly, all of the planning, all of the excellent designs, are on hold and very likely scuttled. Mental health (is) served another blow, marginalized -yet again."

Shower of Schmucks

2011-03-18T09:13:00.000-06:00

A tiny group of pathetic inadequates who can't find anything about their lives to be proud of but the melanin level in their skin cells plan a march in my town tomorrow. So far all they've accomplished is some cowardly attacks on the streets and internecine attempts to kill each other and now the probable end of one of their idiot's military career.

WINNIPEG—Military police are investigating a Canadian Forces reservist from Winnipeg who is alleged to have been planning to attend a white-pride demonstration this weekend in Calgary.

Capt. Karina Holder says the military can take action even if the reservist doesn’t attend the event, providing investigators find evidence.

“Having that attitude alone is completely incompatible with the military culture,” Holder said Thursday from Ottawa.

“It runs contrary to effective military service. You have to have that basic respect for your fellow human beings, otherwise you cannot function in this organization.”

She said they received a complaint from a member of the public but can’t confirm it was the same complaint that prompted the investigation.

Although she wouldn’t provide details, it has been reported that the 17-year-old reservist was planning to attend a white-pride demonstration planned for Saturday in Calgary and that he had expressed racist views in online postings.

Climate of Intimidation against Doctors speaking out for the public

2011-03-17T06:47:00.002-06:00

One doctor after another steps forward and makes the same allegations that Raj Sherman has, about doctors who complain about the decay of Alberta's healthcare system facing retaliation and whisper campaigns.

The Nunes rulings from the FOI commissioner and the Court of Queen's Bench were tabled in the Alberta legislature Wednesday by Independent MLA Raj Sherman, in support of his allegations that doctors who complain about patient care have forced out and legally barred from publicly criticizing the government.
Nunes said he had heard about the case of Dr. Ciaran McNamee, first reported on CBC last week. McNamee, Capital Health's former head of thoracic surgery, filed a lawsuit in which he alleged he had been forced out of the job and accused of incompetence and mental instability after he complained about lung-surgery waiting lists.
The lawsuit was settled out of court and the allegations were never proven. McNamee now teaches at Harvard and is a surgeon at one of Boston's top hospitals.
Another doctor told CBC this week that, like McNamee, she also had been demoted, fired and was the subject of a whisper campaign that questioned her sanity after she complained about health-care cuts putting patient safety at risk. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she is still bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
Nunes said he decided to go public after seeing the McNamee story and hearing Sherman's allegations.
"The reason I am speaking is out because I don't have a gag order, and secondly, I knew from the beginning what Dr. Raj Sherman was getting at because it happened to me as well and I know of other colleagues that this sort of intimidation has happened to as well. So I thought if I don't speak out, if I don't say something, then I am part of the problem."
Nunes, a physician for 31 years, said he has worked in South Africa, Britain and in several cities across Canada.
"I have never felt the sense of intimidation that I felt here," he said.
" What Dr. Raj Sherman and the opposition are pushing for in terms of having a public inquiry, I think that's the right thing. I think it's the only way of getting to the bottom of whether the government had a hand in this or if it was just poor administration."
On Wednesday, Premier Ed Stelmach again rejected calls for a public inquiry, saying he has seen no evidence to support Sherman's allegations.

Questioning the sanity of government critics is literally an old Stalinist favorite, while some of the loathsome tactics on display are uniquely Albertan.

Abuser with a badge charged with sexual assault

2011-03-15T21:32:00.002-06:00

Ottawa police officer Sgt. Steven Desjourdy was arrogantly confident that the terrified sobbing woman he helped hold down and assault had no recourse, no way to resist.

Stacy Bonds was arrested for daring to ask the police officers questioning her why she was stopped as she walked home one night in September of 2006. For having the temerity to in any way question the police's powers to stop and interrogate any dark skinned person in the street they wanted to she was thrown in the back of a police car, taken to an Ottawa police station and in an extended assault captured in sickening detail by jailhouse video cameras was swarmed by officers, kneed, beaten, slammed to the ground under a shield and her clothing cut off by Sgt Desjourdy.

Today Desjourdy found out that the law he has a history of using as a cover for his assaults on women applies to the police as well when he was charged with sexual assault, appropriately on the International Day Against Police Brutality.

The Ottawa Police Service said in a statement Tuesday that it had been informed by the SIU that its investigation, which began Nov. 19, 2010, had concluded there was reasonable grounds to believe Desjourdy had committed a criminal offence.
Desjourdy will remain assigned to administrative duties, the release said. He has been on desk duty since the investigation began.

Police said they referred this file to the Ontario Provincial Police for investigation and will not be making any further public comments because the matter is before the court. The SIU — an arm's-length agency that investigates reports involving police where there has been death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault — said it would make no further comments in consideration of a fair trial.
Desjourdy will appear before the Ontario Court of Justice in Ottawa on April 12.

Counterfit receipts aren't just a 'difference of interpretation of the rules'

2011-03-09T12:12:00.002-07:00

Spotted at A Creative Revolution:

In total, 65 Conservative candidates had submitted nearly identical invoices; only the dollar amounts were different.

The invoices were on the letterhead of the Conservative Party's advertising purchasing agency, Retail Media.

But an Elections Canada investigator later reported that Retail Media didn't seem to know anything about the documents, with a company spokesperson saying they didn’t even look remotely like the firm's standard invoices.

One executive of the ad company "speculated that this invoice must have been altered or created by someone."

So were the other 64 invoices, in total showing $1.3 million of local advertising expenses worth a federal rebate of more than $800,000.

Elections Canada discovered most Conservative candidates didn't seem to have a clue what they were claiming.

One is quoted in court documents as saying: "I think we contributed to TV national advertising. There was no way we could spend our limit so we were asked if we can help contribute."

The appeals court was blunt, saying the ads weren't local at all.

The level of criminality and contempt for the law displayed by the Harper Conservatives has long since reached Nixonian proportions. If they don't approve of a law they ignore it. If they are constrained by any independent oversight they co-opt it, corrupt it or crush it. If they see an opportunity to use their governing power to attack partisan enemies or counteract democratic opposition they take it.

At this point, bringing down this government is necessary to save this country from a criminal regime.

Ignatieff and his handlers were behind the last coalition crumbling, it is to be hoped that his poll numbers like the prospect of a hanging in the morning have focused their attention on reality.

Allergy to Science

2011-03-09T11:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing demonstrates better, how right wing ideology is based primarily on dogma and cant than the conservative distaste for science.

Oh they'll co-opt it if they can. If an oil company can get a bought and paid for hired geek in a lab coat to say global warming isn't happening they'll rush to embrace the idea that there is in fact some kind of scientific controversy on the subject so we shouldn't stop killing the Earth just yet. If a millionaire owner of a private medical clinic chain with a direct financial stake in the subject who also happens to be a doctor solemnly claims that public health care is unsustainable they rush to embrace the one 'doctor' out of hundreds saying just the opposite.

But in general they hate and fear the field for refusing to bend facts to right-wing prejudice. For being full of wooly headed irresponsible egg-heads who keep putting hippy-dippy concerns like the fate of life on this planet before corporate profits. And for insulting Jesus by insisting the Earth is much, much older than the bible says it is and the world and the life on it came together by explicable natural laws and processes rather than spurting out of sky daddy's magic wand.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) accused Republicans on Tuesday of having an "allergy to science and scientists" during a House hearing on a Republican-led proposal to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The New York Times reports that the meeting, which focused largely on the effect of the gases on climate change, was contentious and ultimately unproductive, as representatives on both sides of the aisle appeared to stubbornly reject claims that countered their own views.
Despite the impasse, however, the hearing didn't go over without its fair share of sparks.
"If Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein were testifying today," Inslee, an environmentalist with a knack for confrontation over green initiatives, posited, "the Republicans would not accept their views until all the Arctic ice has melted and hell has frozen over, whichever comes first."

Regime 'Alteration'

2011-03-06T13:02:00.001-07:00

America to Arab protestors: 'Your freedom would be incovenient to us and our allies. We'll push our client despots to throw you a few more crumbs, you just need to learn to expect less than full democracy.'

WASHINGTON—After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling "regime alteration."

Welcome to Wellington

2011-03-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

So a big welcome to The Wellington Street Post, the new Canadian politics blog aggregator on the block. Only in action for a few days and already prominently featured in my statcounter. Welcome to the scene folks.

Saved from Faux News

2011-03-01T07:09:00.001-07:00

Robert F. Kennedy congratulates Canada for avoiding the same mistake the US made when Reagan was allowed to gut the Fairness Doctrine:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators today announced they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1988. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."

Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of demagoguery; false patriotism, bigotry, fear, selfishness and belligerent religiosity.

Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public. In the Unites States, Fox News and talk radio, the sock puppets of billionaires and corporate robber barons have become the masters of propaganda and distortion on the public airwaves. Fox News's notoriously biased and dishonest coverage of the Wisconsin's protests is a prime example of the brand of news coverage Canada has smartly avoided.

Well perhaps a bit of an idealistic take on our home and native land. "Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves." is a slightly rosy view. I'd recommend Kennedy check out the writings and rantings of Ezra Levant or Lorne Gunter's disappointed snarl at the CRTC decision and he'd find we have our own homegrown ideologues, raving bigots, demagogues and fools with major media soap boxes.

The difference is that they don't have anywhere near the profile someone like Glenn Beck can get, with no restriction at all on blatant partisan dishonesty on the airwaves. Canada's false news law never stopped Mike Duffy from performing the kind of yeoman service to the Conservative Party that earned him his Senate seat, but it has resulted in the closest thing to a Glenn Beck in Canada being a loud mouthed Hockey announcer with horrible taste in suits almost universally considered to be little more than a rodeo clown.

Of course a law is useless unless it's enforced, so Canadians need to remember to hold our broadcasters to their legal obligations. Sun TV will be pushing against that boundary every day its on the air, lets make sure their legal department earns their money responding to CRTC complaints every time they do.

Pro-Life means Pro-Murder now?

2011-02-28T13:30:00.003-07:00

Pro-Lifers have always been a little caviler about any life that is more than a few inches long and not attached to a placental wall, dismissing the very real medical necessity of conditions like depression, toxemia and even ectopic pregnancy which can never result in anything but the death of mother and child and has to be terminated. Don't tell Bill O'Reilly though.

But now that casual dismissal of the health of real living women - so much harder to get broody and weird about, than a scrap of flesh that could potentially become a BAAAAABBBBYYYYY - has been revealed as a truly murderous attitude towards doctors, nurses and anybody who helps a woman exercise her right to get a legal medical procedure done.

First, it was South Dakota. Then Nebraska and Iowa. The similarly worded bills, which have quietly cropped up recently in state legislatures, share a common purpose: To expand justifiable homicide statutes to cover killings committed in the defense of an unborn child. Critics of the bills, including law enforcement officials, warn that these measures could invite violence against abortion providers and possibly provide legal cover to the perpetrators of such crimes.

That these measures have emerged simultaneously in a handful of states is no coincidence. It's part of a campaign orchestrated by a Washington-based anti-abortion group, which has lobbied state lawmakers to introduce legislation that it calls the "Pregnant Woman's Protection Act" [PDF]. Over the past two years, the group, Americans United for Life, has succeeded in passing versions of this bill in Missouri and Oklahoma. But there's a big difference between those bills and the measures floated recently in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa.

While the Oklahoma and Missouri laws specifically cover pregnant women, the latest measures are far more sweeping and would apply to third parties. The bills are so loosely worded, abortion-rights advocates say, that a pregnant woman could seek out an abortion and a boyfriend, husband—or, in some cases, just about anyone—could be justified in using deadly force to stop it.

A Planned Parenthood official testified last week at a hearing on Nebraska's LB 232 that such legislation "authorizes and protects vigilantes." And it isn't just abortion-rights advocates who fear the implications of the AUL-inspired legislation. "This could be used to incite violence against abortion providers," said Omaha's deputy chief of police, David Baker. The office of South Dakota's Republican governor—no defender of abortion-rights—has called the version of the bill introduced in the state's legislature a "very bad idea." (Following a national outcry, the South Dakota bill was shelved.)

Of course expect the pro forma denials. Shocked! Shocked they are, that anyone could interpret this legislation to imply legal protection for the murderous assassins these 'mainstream' totally not all extremist organizations keep producing. Just because they use language about 'murdering babies', 'genocide', 'death factories' and the like, or publish the names and addresses of the clinic staff they use such rhetoric about should in no way be considered the proximate cause for the murderous rampages their followers keep engaging in.

You know the Science Fiction novel I would have preferred stay fictional? The Handmaid's Tale. Too bad groups like these seem intent on some kind of large scale re-enactment.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

They never miss a chance to bring it up...

2011-02-21T13:00:00.002-07:00

Its hard to spin away that the government and police were monitoring and spying on an elected politician because of the positions he supported. The Sun is left with the old reliable refuge of the conservative Canadian media whenever the subject comes up, of shrieking 'eugenics!'

During his long public career Douglas held many views that would seem shocking today.
In his 1933 master’s thesis, titled The Problems of the Subnormal Family, Douglas advocated the “unfit” be placed on state work-farms and be sterilized to prevent them from having children.

Douglas also advocated anyone who wanted to marry be subject to government testing to obtain certificates of mental and physical fitness. He saw this as a way to keep “subnormal” humans from marrying.

"Because this class tend to intermarry... the second and third generations are nearly always worse than the first. The result is an ever increasing number of morons and imbeciles who continue to be a charge upon society,” Douglas wrote in defence of eugenics.

Don't look for the context, The Sun of course does not advise their readers that such views were common at the time, nor do they print the many available quotes from Tory and Liberal elected figures from the same era saying the same things.

They don't mention that after a visit to pre-war Germany Douglas abandoned his previous support for eugenics - all it took was seeing it in action.

But in Alberta, the right wing Social Credit government kept forcible sterilization laws on the books until 1972 after they were voted out of power in 1971.

One World. One People. One Struggle.

2011-02-20T12:14:00.002-07:00

He could just as easily be talking about Ezra Levant

2011-02-19T22:00:00.002-07:00

The Calgary Herald: In praise of the right to lie to the public

2011-02-19T16:48:00.003-07:00

The Herald's editorial board robustly defends the right of broadcasters, like the new 'Fox News North' Sun TV for example, to lie to the public.

A committee of Parliament is asking the CRTC to change an existing regulation that bans the broadcast of "any false or misleading news." The committee wants the wording changed to apply to broadcasters who "knowingly" broadcast news that is "false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health, or safety of the public."

The committee misses the point. This ridiculous regulation should not even exist.

Good rule of thumb:

2011-02-19T12:47:00.006-07:00

Anybody who refers to popularly elected union leaders as 'Bosses' is trying to con you.

"Sarah Palin also weighed in on the matter in a Facebook post on Friday, telling union members that they should break away from leaders.

"You don't have to kowtow to the union bosses who are not looking out for you, but instead are using you," wrote Palin.

"Wisconsin union bosses want union members out in the streets demanding that tax payers foot the bill for unsustainable benefits packages."

It's a transparent attempt to obfuscate that the real union bosses are the union members.

Union executives, Presidents, Council members, Business Agents right down to the level of Shop Stewards are elected by their fellow members, enact the policies their members tell them to and can be overthrown in these things called elections if those members feel they aren't following the will of the membership. I was a member of one where that happened.

Yes, like any democratic government including that of the United States itself, criminals or incompetents occasionally rise to positions of power. The strength of the whole system is reflected in how quickly such figures are identified and removed. I'd put union governance in general against the governance displayed by someone like Governor Walker coming to power. Any day.

I agree with Robert Creamer, that the radical right over-reached themselves in Wisconsin last week. They counted on a lightning fast blitzkrieg attack on their political enemies. Such a fundamental existential attack on the right of collective bargaining becomes far less likely to succeed thanks to Democratic Senators being willing to take the vital step of denying Walker a quorum to ram through his changes. With public pressure building and both sides exploring recalls against the opposition's state senators the pressure on Walker's caucus will start to have an effect. A lot of Republicans in the Wisconsin House are getting calls right now from former supporters telling them in no uncertain terms they weren't elected to gut worker's rights.

Best case scenario: This ends in Wisconsin with a fig leaf of some benefit cuts but the most contentious proposals limiting bargaining rights and other union busting poison pills like dues check off withdrawn. Governors all over the country look at the angry crowds filling the legislature in Madison and decide there's other fights they'd rather spend their time and energy on.

If Walker and the radical right in Wisconsin succeed though, the ongoing class war against workers in North America enters a new and very dangerous stage. Unions weren't granted the rights they have out of the goodness of the hearts of government and industry, they fought for them in the streets until government and industry decided organized labour was the safer route than an increasingly radicalized population in a world sliding into revolution on every horizon.

The grand compromise of the modern social contract was a peace treaty. Generally speaking, tearing up a peace treaty means war.

"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what? You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Quote of the Day

2011-02-18T18:55:00.003-07:00

Rising tensions in Madison and could presage the kind of labor unrest that hasn’t been seen in the US since the Great Depression, says Professor Bruno.
"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what?" he says. "You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Attention must be paid. Don't kid yourself that Conservative politicians in Canada aren't looking at Wisconsin with a mixture of calculation and longing. This is like the partisan attack our own loathsome right wingers tried with political financing; a deliberate act of war and an unambiguous existential threat to their political enemies and to civil society itself.

Alpha Flight 2011

2011-02-15T22:28:00.005-07:00

The 80's Marvel Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight reported to Pierre Trudeau and the worst their government ever asked them to do was to try to kidnap Wolverine for defecting from Canada (?) but in the new 21st century reboot, they learn what it means to live in Stephen Harper's Canada:

...there is a change in the government not unlike when you see a government go from democracy to a facist state." Alpha Flight will be seen by the new Canadian government as the country's greatest traitors.

Where's Captain Canuck when we need him?