Memories of the Apocalyse

The thing about contemporary American crime and thriller cinema, cop shows, serial killer horror movies, every piece of pop culture that assumes a huge level of violence in the world that requires a violent armed hero, is that it is documenting a period in America when a huge percentage of its population was suffering from chemical brain damage.

The huge crime rate spike in the US that started in the early 60's and then dropped just as precipitously in the early 90's exactly parallels the introduction of leaded gasoline in the 1920's and its replacement with unleaded in the early 1970's.  A generation suffering from lead poisoning which lowers intellect and degrades impulse control came of age at once and the poorer the neighborhood the worse the poisoning was due to lead paint, leaded windows and proximity to industrial activity.

Then a new generation came of age born after the introduction of the catalytic converter and the mass switch to unleaded gasoline with just enough less lead in their environment to miss the tipping point that causes major IQ impairment and violent impulse control issues.  Suddenly a massive police state apparatus built when sky high violent crime stats were assumed to be the new normal is using tactics designed for a far more violent population than they are dealing with.

So law, policing policy and pop culture in the US assumes a vastly more violent society than currently exists due to everyone involved in its formation and maintenance coming of age during a mass violent brain damage epidemic that for the most part ended decades ago.

The Honest Pro-Lifer

An American right wing pro-life columnist named Kevin Williamson has done us  the good service of taking the pro-life 'Abortion is murder' rhetoric to it's logically consistent extreme:

Over the weekend, a presumably bored National Review writer, Kevin Williamson, became the subject of much derision and shock across the political Internets when he tweeted his argument that ”the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.” My colleague Elias Isquith highlighted Williamson’s clearest descent into pure trolling — responding to a question about whether women who have abortions should get life without parole with the line, “I have hanging more in mind.”

As the Salon piece points out, all Williamson has done is strip away any soft soap gloss from the extreme radicalism of the Pro-Life position.  He has openly articulated the end game of the Pro-Life movement in a way most Pro-Lifers get uncomfortable and mumbly about when pressed, as this video shows.

 Of course the real world expression of this viewpoint is already affecting women's lives as many US states have started criminalizing miscarriages and attacking personal bodily autonomy based on junk science about the effect of maternal drug use on fetuses.

The Sun: The official media chain of the campaign to destroy Canada

When you think about it, the Sun newspaper chain and Sun TV network being owned by an avowed separatist with the open and outspoken goal of destroying Canada is perhaps not that surprising; The Sun chain has always promoted discord, division, scapegoating and extreme ideology.  They have called for the abolition of things that bring us together as a country like the CBC, the Postal Service and the Canadian tradition of looking out for each other with a robust safety net, public healthcare and support for the weakest among us.  They have attacked workers and First Nations and immigrants and those demonstrating in the streets for a more responsive government.  They have imported a divisive and poisonous strain of political media from the US and the UK and appeared oblivious to the damage they inflict.

The owner of the Sun chain wants to break up Canada.  Is it perhaps time to wonder if he's been working towards that goal for YEARS?

The next time the Sun or one of their odious commentators attacks someone else's patriotism...

Lets just stop and enjoy the irony for the moment, of the owner of the rabidly right wing, aggressively 'patriotic' Sun newspaper chain and the even nuttier far right Sun TV network being a Separatist candidate in Quebec with the avowed goal of breaking up Canada.

Whining Corporate Welfare Bums

Quebecor, the owners of Sun News also own Videotron, a cable company serving almost two million subscribers in Quebec and Ontario.  They are before the CRTC right now demanding that Canadians subsidize their Sun News operation by being forced to have it added to all cable packages with an accompanying increase in cable bills.  They claim this is necessary because they aren't seen in enough households and they need this forced government subsidy to survive.

When asked why they don't automatically add Sun News to their own Videotron cable network with prominent channel placement as they have every right to do and are NOT doing now they had no answer.

Why should the Canadian people be forced to provide corporate welfare to a private TV channel that their own owner won't support and promote?

They picked a new Godfather

The Catholic Church, where the least controversial candidate for the top job is the guy accused of collaborating with a military dictatorship that murdered 30,000 people.


UPDATE: As Dawg points out, Bergoglio recently angrily denounced a plan by Agentina's current leftist government to legalize gay marriage as 'the work of the devil'.  He said NOTHING while a right wing government was murdering 30,000 people, operating torture chambers around the clock with the active participation of priests and kidnapping leftist women and giving their children to loyal right wing supporters of the regime.

In his defense that he helped smuggle people out of the country, interceded for kidnapped dissident priests and tried to recover kidnapped children during the dictatorship he has revealed that he was unambiguously lying when he said he didn't know about these crimes of the regime until years later.

So legalizing loving relationships between people of the same gender is a secular leftist government doing the work of the devil.  Torture, kidnapping and murder by a right wing government that publicly presented itself as the defender of the faith merited no such condemnation.

Republican outreach to Women:

Republicans debating their Social Welfare policy:

Should Canada start considering EVERY American woman eligible for Refugee status?

Government mandated rape with medical instruments, laws mandating that women be forced to explain to their boss why they are using birth control pills, laws mandating that even if pregnancy will KILL the mother she be forced to carry a pregnancy to term - even if the fetus itself is dead.

At what point should any American woman seeking refuge in Canada start being considered a political refugee?

This week the Georgia State Legislature debated a bill in the House, that would make it necessary for some women to carry stillborn or dying fetuses until they 'naturally' go into labor. In arguing for this bill Representative Terry England described his empathy for pregnant cows and pigs in the same situation.


I have a question for Terry England, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and too many others: I have three daughters, two of them twins. If one of my twins had been stillborn would you have made me carry her to term, thereby endangering both the other twin and me? Or, would you have insisted that the state order a mandatory fetal extraction of the living twin fetus from my womb so that I could continue to carry the stillborn one to term and possibly die myself? My family is curious and since you believe my uterus is your public property, I am, too.

Mr. England, unlike the calves and pigs for which you expressed so much empathy, I am not a beast of burden. I am a woman and I have these human rights:

The right to life.

The right to privacy.

The right to freedom.

The right to bodily integrity.

The right to decide when and how I reproduce.

Mr. England, you and your friends do not get to trade these rights, while "dog and hog hunting," in return for a young man's chickens.

My human rights outweigh any you or the state corruptly and cynically seek to assign to a mass of dividing cells that will eventually turn into a 'natural' person. Personhood-for-zygote based bills and related legislation, like Georgia's and hundreds of others, bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, violate my human rights.

Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean I cannot think clearly, ethically, morally, rationally about my body, human life or the consequences of my actions. Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean that I do not have rights when I am pregnant. I have responsibility but am powerless. You have power but are irresponsible with my rights.

By not trusting me, you force me to trust you. And YOU are not trustworthy.

I gestate humans, you do not. I know how it feels to be pregnant. You do not. I know what happens to a fetus in a womb. You do not. I have carried three fetuses to term. You have not. What I experience when I am pregnant is not empathy. It is permeability. The fetus is me. And the state is you, apparently. But, no matter what you say or do I have fundamental human rights. What makes you think that you, who cannot have this fully human experience, can tell me anything about gestation or how I experience it? Especially when you compare my existence and experience to that of brutish animals.

The rest of the civilized world thinks this country has lost its mind.

The Man Behind the Mask

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."

Afraid to call a Liar a Liar

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?

Paul Krugman is 100% right

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.

Fetus Fetishist Abduction Fantasy

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

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.

Saved from Faux News

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?

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.

My Mommies help me with my homework

Arbitrary school rankings designed by the Fraser Institute to promote an anti public school privatization agenda?  Absolutely worthless.

Having a school for cultist polygamist kids get a perfect score?  Absolutely priceless.

A school for children in the polygamous commune of Bountiful, B.C. is among the highest ranking on the 2011 Fraser Institute Report Card. 

Bountiful Elementary-Secondary scored a perfect 10 mark. 

It tied with 12 other schools, mostly private schools in the Vancouver area, that also achieved perfect 10s. 

The Fraser Institute rates 875 public and private elementary schools throughout B.C. based on 10 key indicators using data from province-wide testing, known as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) test. FSA tests are mandated by the B.C. Ministry of Education.
Fraser Institute spokesperson, Peter Cowley, said not much is known about what made Bountiful so successful on FSAs. 

“With regard to what techniques they may have used or how they taught in math, for instance, between kindergarten and grade 4, all those things may be interesting but we don’t have any long term record of success yet,” Cowley said. 

Jane Friesen, the director of Simon Fraser University's Centre for Education Research and Policy, said people should look at these rankings carefully. 

“It’s simply telling you how is a particular cohort of students in a school doing in a particular year. I think we have to be careful to not interpret those results as a measure of the effectiveness of the school and I think that’s where the real issue comes in,” she said

Preston Manning writes bad Science Fiction

It's 2018 and Canada has answered the call of the professional right wing's fondest wet dreams on healthcare:

It is December, 2018, and at long last Canadian health care has been reformed. Long waiting lines are a thing of the past. Universal coverage has been maintained and expanded. The numbers of doctors and treatment facilities available to serve Canadians has been significantly increased. Health care for the vast majority of Canadians has dramatically improved and at lower cost per capita.

How did they get to this heaven on Earth in Canada's green and pleasant land?  Let Preston guide you along through a future where Wikileaks exposes all the Canadian politicians and opinion makers who condemn private medicine but fly out of the country to use it when its their own health on the line.  On balance, trying to enlist Wikileaks in the cause of Canadian right wing politics is probably better than calling for the murder of it's founder like Manning's fellow Calgary school right wing insider Tom Flanagan - but also far less likely than some right wing western government actually following through on such threats and murdering Julian Assange the way Flanagan wants.

Then there's the finishing blow, after Manning conflates real and imagined courtroom victories against the public system and creates this condescending  final flight of fancy:

 Meanwhile, back in Ottawa, the Standing Committee on Health had invited Dr. Lars Aalborg, Nobel Prize-winner and a world-renowned expert on queuing theory, to propose means of reducing Canada’s health-care waiting lines. Dr. Aalborg said he would do so only on the condition that members of the House of Commons agreed to participate in a scientific experiment. Being near Christmas, the members were in a charitable mood and consented to this unusual request. When Dr. Aalborg arrived he closed all the doors to the House of Commons except one and then asked all 308 members to form a line outside that door. He then asked the members to enter the chamber through that door, one by one, while he timed the process. Approximately one hour and 15 minutes later, all the members had entered the chamber. Dr. Aalborg then opened two more doors to the chamber and divided the members into three uneven lines, one outside each door. Once again the members were instructed to enter while Dr. Aalborg timed the process. This time it took less than 45 minutes for all members to enter the chamber.

Leading members of the Liberal and NDP caucuses – those who could count, tell time, or both –  (This presumably is an example of the classy, gracious civility in politics that Preston Manning claims to support - Cliff ) immediately explained the meaning of the experiment to their bewildered brethren. By establishing three open doors to its health-care system – a public care door, a private not-for-profit door, and a private for-profit door – and with government responsible to ensure that the care available through each met acceptable standards, Quebec ensured that the average waiting time for getting into the health-care system and receiving quality care would be significantly lower than if everyone was forced to wait in a long line behind a single door.

Is it rude to point out the fairly glaring logical fallacy inherent in his snotty little fairytale, that whether entering the room through three doors or one there's still only one pool of doctors, nurses and hospital beds in the room serving all three doors?

In Australia and Sweden, the concrete evidence was that the two tier system created a 'perverse incentive' for doctors to cherry pick the easiest most lucrative patients into the profit door's line, while the more expensive and less lucrative public door's line got longer and longer because those who could afford to pay their way in front of them funneled through the profit door.

Of course to market ideologues like Manning, an inequity like this result isn't a bug in his preferred system it's a feature.

Adapted and expanded from a comment I made on Buckdog's quick out of the gate response to Preston's dribbling.

A Witch-Hunt Exposed

Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, privacy rights trampled, harassment by private investigators and a good man driven to his grave.  Now clearly shown to have been nothing but a vindictive witch-hunt, a clearly political attack by a government with an 'Israel right or wrong' obsession on an arms length agency.

A closed-door parliamentary hearing has been cancelled before MPs got a chance to hear senior board members of Rights and Democracy explain why they spent $400,000 trying to discredit the now-deceased former head of the federally funded agency. Gérard Latulippe, president of Rights and Democracy, laughs as prepares to start his testimony before the Commons foreign affairs committee on April 15. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)After months of ignoring promises to release the findings of a commissioned audit, the Montreal-based organization that promotes human rights has finally handed over the report to the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The agency's new president, Gérard Latulippe, and its chair, Aurel Braun, were to appear before MPs on the committee in an in camera session later Thursday. But the hearing was cancelled because the House of Commons is adjourning for its holiday break at 3 p.m. ET.
A spokesman for Latulippe said the president would not comment on the contents of the report or any in-camera discussions with MPs "as it would be inappropriate to do so."
But the spokesman said Latulippe would recommend to the committee that a redacted version of the report be made public "in the days following the hearing." MPs on the committee are sworn to secrecy about the report's contents, but NDP MP Paul Dewar, who has examined the findings, said there's "nothing there."
"In fact, they went on a witch hunt," Dewar told reporters. "They found nothing."

Nobody in the blogosphere has followed this whole sorry story more closely than Dawg's Blog.  I strongly recommend checking out his posts on the subject.

The Strange Case against Julian Assange

Julian Assange is in jail in UK facing deportation to Sweden on charges of rape.  Many people, otherwise sympathetic to Assange and Wikileaks find this troubling and understandably so.

But the details are even more troubling.

Assange is accused of rape by deceit.  Violence and coercion are not alleged, just that by sleeping with one woman only a few days after sleeping with another he was committing deceit, and therefore a sex crime.  Yes, really.  Some reports state that he has two accusers, in fact there is only one as the second accuser withdrew her initial accusation - seemingly because she began to get the impression she was being used.

Which brings us to the now sole accuser - normally it would be appalling to even consider discussing her, in this case an even more appalling injustice may arise from not examining her background.

Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden's Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

However, before we absolve the Swedish police as unwitting, if zealous, dupes, please note that Swedish law strictly forbids police and prosecutors to release to the media the details of any rape-connected complaint. The Expressen had all the details of the case, including the names of the accused and the complainant, within a matter of minutes. Please note further that the right-wing tabloid Expressen belongs to the Bonnier family, the biggest media owners in Sweden, who are not only pro-American but very much pro-Israel, too. As you know, the pro-Israeli lobby is warmly supportive of America’s Middle Eastern wars, while Assange and his WikiLeaks have the potential to undermine America’s weakening support for the war.

(Note Dec 8:  I will agree with Olberman in re: the above quote: "If the author of that article is a holocaust denier, I repudiate him and what he wrote, and apologize for retweeting the link."  There are enough reasons to be suspicious and critical of the Swedish prosecutions without the reinforcement of this one article.)

Then there's the disturbing reports that Ardin published a revenge how to guide on her blog in January, around the time of the alleged incident, specifically...:

...describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote.

All of this is disturbing enough, when you factor in her links to government and military including NATO otherwise rational cynical people might be reaching for a tinfoil hat.

The details of the accusation, the timing, the way Swedish confidentiality laws were almost instantly broken and a conservative western leaning news outlet was trumpeting them immediately and the highly disturbing writings of the accuser make the whole case against Assange deeply suspect.

UPDATE: Naomi Wolfe, who no one will ever accuse of being a pawn of the patriarchy pours scorn on the Interpol 'Dating police' - hat tip Le Daro

UPDATE 2: 'Sex by Surprise'  No allegations of force, one woman unhappy that a condom broke, another that he seemed to pay more attention to his computer than her on the trip to her apartment.  If EVERYTHING that can be legitimately verified to be part of the complaints actually happened -  he comes off as a bit of a jerk and a bit of a horndog - but by no stretch of the imagination a rapist.

Final Update, couldn't put it better myself category: