Reversal of Fortunes

Rand Paul has a problem:  The American conservative movement KNOWS that 'Obamacare' is an expensive, repressive failure straight from the desk of Satan himself that is bringing a great darkness upon the land, slaughtering millions on the altar of government death panels, blighting the crops and turning good American kids gay. 

But Paul has the same problem as Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell; in their home sate of Kentucky the Democratic governor enthusiastically cooperated with Obamacare and KYnect (Stop that giggling!  It's NOT a funny name!)  the Kentucky state health care exchange has been one of the biggest success stories of the Affordable Care Act.   McConnell's method of dealing with this unfortunate political reality is to deny that KYnect and Obamacare are the same thing - a position that has resulted in scornful take downs within Kentucky and without.  Paul Just tries to dodge the question.

Thousands of people in Kentucky who would have died without the ban on refusal of coverage due to prior medical condition and the medicaid expansion consider the Kentucky KYnect application of Obamacare a lifesaver and attacking it directly is rapidly becoming political suicide in the state - deep in the heart of the firmly Republican south.

The time is rapidly approaching when Republicans will regret so firmly associating a President they hate with a program Americans are coming to love.  Which is probably why Republicans of yore were just smart enough not to call social security FDR-Security or Medicare LBJcare.

On the Value of Scorn

Of late we've been seeing a lot of bigots, kooks and reactionaries trying to adopt the language of victimization.

Gay rights advocates in the US are not being gracious in their victory over decent people who just wanted to go on treating a whole subset of humanity as second class citizens.  Now various laws designed in the last few years to attack, dehumanize and marginalize gay Americans  topple like dominos and they have the sads and gay rights supporters are being MEAN to them.

A conservative spokes clone accuses Bill Nye of being part of a vast conspiracy to bully people who believe that scientists must just be fibbing with this silly 99% of scientists believe global warming is real and human caused stuff. 

You big meanie!

Scorn is a useful social construct.  It exists for a reason.  In the marketplace of ideas scorn is the health department closure poster on a cafe door.

Some ideas and the people who promote them SHOULD be scorned.  Some positions should be career limiting and socially devastating. 

If you believe this nonsense you are wrong and you should feel bad.

That's how society evolves, less from the new ideas we adopt than from the ones we outgrow.

The Real Benghazi Scandal

For outside observers the spectacle of Republicans shrieking "Benghazi!" for the last few years has been so blatantly partisan propagandizing that you have to wonder how anyone falls for it.

There were more than a dozen attacks on US embassies and consulates under George W. Bush but despite that the Republican Party voted to slash $300 million from Embassy security over the strenuous objections of Obama and the Democrats.

Benghazi is a scandal. Its a Republican scandal.

Disassembled

Piece by piece Allison Redford's agenda of betrayal of the public service workers and progressive Albertans who elected her is rolled back, invalidated by the courts, abandoned and repudiated by the government. A premier who assumed all we Albertans were just inconveniently mouthy bit part players in her heroic story returns to the legislature to watch another major plank of her government shrivel and die.

Schadenfreude is the only appropriate response.

Former Alberta premier Alison Redford’s ill-conceived anti-union project is in shambles tonight, with an agreement to send two bills attacking public sector pensions to a legislative committee where they can die with dignity. 

With the car in the ditch, wheels spinning and headlights pointed skyward, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier pro tempore Dave Hancock agreed this afternoon to send the two controversial pension bills to the committee, which is supposed to report back in the fall. 

If sanity prevails within the PC caucus and the party remains mired at current levels of unpopularity, it seems likely this will lead to the eventual demise of both Bill 9, the Public Sector Pension Plans Amendment Act, 2014, and Bill 10, the Employment Pension (Private Sector) Plans Amendment Act, 2014. 

The agreement by Mr.Hancock’s PC government and all three Opposition parties also suggests the repudiation by Mr. Hancock personally of the radical program attacking public service unions and employees that emerged unexpectedly in the second year of the leadership of fired premier Redford, who finally reappeared in the Legislature today.

This is what a psychopath looks like

A Greenpeace representative tweeting a worried call for people to keep an eye out for a missing friend is an opportunity for this greasy specimen with a shit stained soul to mock him  and make political hay over a missing woman.

Being an unambiguous psychopath, he is doubtless incapable of shame,  but hopefully this display of complete lack of human feeling, concern and decency will follow him forever.

In the mean time everybody please keep an eye out for Louise Veillard, her friends and family are very worried about her.

So the state of Oklahoma tortured a man to death last night...

[Clayton] Lockett, 38, received the first dose of the three-drug cocktail at 6:23 p.m.The drugs were midazolam, which causes unconsciousness; vecuronium bromide, which stops respiration; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. They are administered in that order. The state has said the procedure is meant to involve three doctors with hand-held syringes, injecting the drugs into IV lines in both the inmate’s arms.At 6:33 p.m., 10 minutes after the execution began, a doctor said Lockett was unconscious. But three minutes later, Lockett began to nod and mumble and writhe, witnesses said. [...]A spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections [...] confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that Lockett did not die immediately after the lethal injection was administered.“The director did say that it appears that a vein [in Lockett's body] blew up or exploded, it collapsed, and the drugs were not getting into the system like they were supposed to,” spokesman Jerry Massie said.Massie said that after the new injection was administered, the condemned man “was obviously showing some movement.”“After several minutes, five minutes, he was not unconscious,” Massie said. “They made a decision to halt the execution, but at 7:06 he suffered a massive heart attack and expired.”

Anti-TFW But Pro-Immigration

It's important I think, in the mounting fervor against the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to remember that the workers in it are not the enemy.  These are people who are following the rules they were given in an effort to improve their families lives.  They have travelled thousands of miles to work hard and live frugally so they can send money home or save it up to someday bring their own families here.

It's all part of the same immigrant tradition as the family histories of most Canadians. 

I don't object in the slightest to competing for jobs against fellow citizens; workers who aren't afraid to stand up for themselves or change jobs or organize.  But migrant workers too afraid of being deported to do any of those things?  Workers who will put up with any abuse, tolerate any working conditions, be unwilling to even take sick days all because they are afraid of failing their families by being sent home?

Creating a class of workers that vulnerable and desperate and exploitable is bad for everybody.

Canada needs more people.  All the boomers will retire in waves and to afford the social safety net we want Canada will need more taxpayers than we will create with births alone.  We should increase immigration and make it faster and easier.

What we shouldn't do is create a permanently exploitable underclass.

"Yes, they are disenfranchised. Some of them don’t work for us anymore. But in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter." - McDonald's Canada CEO John Betts

Betts spends much of the conference call railing against the CBC's coverage of the controversy — but admits there is truth to the stories.
"Here’s the kicker. The kicker is there’s an element of truth in each of these stories," Betts said.

"What we’ve got to do is fix what we have in the restaurants concerning the temporary foreign workers.
"But what we’ve also learned is that we have other opportunities in the people area that we also need to take care of. Violations of labour law. And those are the kind of things that suddenly become compounded because we have another issue over here, that’s very emotional in Canada."
With regard to the company's decision to halt its Temporary Foreign Worker Program, Betts told concerned franchisees that, "In dealing with the government, the smartest move was to pre-empt their move in terms of suspending us."
"I think the relationship we build with the minister here is a politically astute one to be taking. Because they're feeling the heat big time before this story broke and now it's bigger and bigger," he went on.
"They need to see us as partners in this as a brand that can help them make some progress on this and at the same time give us an opportunity to clean ourselves up."
At no point during the recording does the CEO mention hiring Canadians instead of temporary foreign workers or go over the rules of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The plan is to wait till the heat dies down and get right back to business as usual. If the TFW doesn't get a stake in the heart from the Canadian public here and now it will come roaring back to life as soon as the public isn't looking. And suspending it just for the food sector doesn't help miners, IT staff, oil riggers. 

This government is Corporate Canada's eager servant and they are committed to wage suppression as an over-riding ideology before any other priority.

They are incapable of Governing

At what point does the fact that the Conservative government is just not competent enough at the process of government to produce laws that don't violate our guaranteed Charter rights and are therefore stuck down by the courts constitute political malpractice?

Are they just deliberately batting foul balls to have something to shout about judicial activism to their mouth breathing base over?

The Conservative government’s tough-on-crime agenda has suffered another major blow at the Supreme Court of Canada. The court blocked the government’s attempt to stop judges from routinely giving extra credit to offenders for time served in jail before sentencing.
The 7-0 ruling continues the losing streak of the Harper government in major cases at the Supreme Court over the past month.

The unanimous ruling is even written by one of Harper's own appointees! They were repeatedly warned this would happen and deliberately pissed away MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to pass a law that anyone with even a child's understanding of the charter and existing sentencing law could and did tell them would be overturned by the courts. This is incompetence and wastefulness on a truly breathtaking scale.

Frankly it disqualifies them for governance.

Downfall

A surging third party and 25% of voters still undecided makes the coming Quebec election still too close to call but with the Liberals leading and the PQ declining we can be hopeful that after running one of the most despicable and cynical campaigns in recent Canadian history that the PQ are about to pay for their display of pandering xenophobia, scapegoating and contempt for the intelligence of the voters.

With the 'Values' Charter and the nomination of far right strikebreaker and propagandist Pierre Karl Péladeau they abandoned both liberalism and social democracy and it would be a very, very good message to the political elite if such blatant amoral opportunism ended with massive electoral disaster.

And a very bad message if it paid off.

The evidence keeps piling up

The Sun chain has often attacked the patriotism of others, often in the crudest of terms. Meanwhile they are owned by a supporter of and promote the agenda of a party dedicated to the destruction of Canada.

For example promoting and defending the PQ's despicable, pandering 'Values' Charter.

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois says if the Parti Quebecois is elected, it would, if necessary, invoke the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian charter to protect its controversial Quebec values charter. 

It is debatable whether the PQ would do so out of conviction or as a wedge issue in Quebec politics. Nevertheless, it would be a legitimate use of the notwithstanding clause. It enables provincial legislatures to override “fundamental rights”, including freedom of religion, conscience, expression and association.

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.

If somebody who fought his way across Europe in 1944 wants to poke his finger into your chest you stand there and you take it

TORONTO - Turns out the public rage directed toward Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino was paid for by the union whose jobs are being cut.
The veterans' rage toward Fantino was put on display for the whole country to see. What wasn't told was their trip to Ottawa was paid for by the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
The whole show was orchestrated.
"The veterans were used by the union," Fantino said Thursday in his first interview since Tuesday's incident. "They were duped.

How condescending and disrespectful can you get? Its not his fault he was a rude self important pig, its the unions fault for 'duping' the apparently child-like and naive veterans. 

 Of course the Sun rushes to support even this feeble infantalizing claim like the loyal Tory PR firm that they are but check out the comments; its a bridge too far even for Sun readers and the scorn is withering.

Steyn by name, Stain by Nature

One of Canada's biggest blowhard exports south of the border may have plunged a stake into the heart of one of their premier right wing media operations.

The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the publication permanently. According to The Week, a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review Online (NRO). 

Scientist Michael Mann is suing the Review over statements made by Canadian right-wing polemicist and occasional radio stand-in for Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn. Steyn was writing on the topic of climate change when he accused Mann of falsifying data and perpetuating intellectual fraud through his research. 

Steyn went on to quote paid anti-climate science operative Rand Simberg — an employee of the right-wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute — who compared Mann to Penn State’s convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Though the National Review likes to style itself as the genteel intellectual voice of American conservatism they are in fact a hard right operation that supported segregation, Apartheid South Africa and some of the most retrograde and reactionary ideas in American politics.  More recently on the website side of their operation they suggested that President Obama's mother must have been a communist because only a communist white woman could have married a black man.

They've been losing money for years and far from depending on the all knowing unseen hand of the marketplace of ideas have depended on subsidization by various sources - they probably can't survive either losing the suit or having to settle it.  Funny how calling someone a cheat and a fraud and comparing them to a child molester might have consequences isn't it?

Sitting back and enjoying the show.

Give it a rest

New rule: if you pull out the old "What about (Al Gore's, David Suzuki's, Neil Young's) carbon footprint?" chestnut I'm honestly going to pretty much tune out everything else you say because its an incredibly puerile, content free and utterly disingenuous distraction question designed to block any and all critical discussion about our fossil fuel economy by ANYONE.

It not only contributes nothing to the discussion its solely about throwing up roadblocks against any discussion. 

They didn't have their papers so they weren't allowed to travel from their Bantustan

A Manitoba MP is crying discrimination after two aboriginal women were not allowed to board a plane with her, even though they had tickets.

Niki Ashton, who represents the Churchill riding for the NDP, said Gail and Joyce Nepinak were scheduled to fly to Ottawa from Winnipeg with her on Sunday evening.

The Nepinaks had been invited by the House of Commons to speak at the special committee on missing and murdered indigenous women on Monday.
It is the first time the committee will hear from families.

Gail and Joyce don't have driver's licences or any other government-issued ID, which is required by airlines for passengers to board.

 Air Canada would not accept the Nepinaks' health cards, bank cards, their electronic boarding passes, a House of Commons invitation, or even Ashton vouching for them.

I have flown with less ID than the Nepinaks carry.  I don't drive so I don't have a driver's license, but I have flown multiple times since 9/11 with no problem whatsoever.  The rules seem to be different depending on some unknown  *cough* racism *cough* factor.

This is what our country is now, this is what Canada has become, and we are letting it happen.

Judicial Kabuki

As anyone and everyone could have predicted, the Alberta Tories attempt to legislate George Orwell's most feverish nightmares into existence will be challenged in the courts.

And the Government knows that when the laws have finally wended their way through the court's system they will be struck down.  Not maybe.  Not probably.

Inevitably.

They know this and are transparently counting on the years-long time line of public workers and all Albertans having their freedom of speech expunged getting to a judicial remedy to allow them to distract from covering up foster-care deaths in the short term and shaft public workers in the medium term.

It is a blatantly, disgustingly cynical and irrefutably deliberate abuse of the system.

It's also directly out of the the long sordid history of past right wing legal Kabuki, laws to allow licensed marriage commissioners and pharmacists engage in religious discrimination in their government licensed roles.  Who cares if they will eventually be overturned and how much the legal costs will be if they give the radical base a tingle up the pant leg when you need to throw them some meat?

You don't get to call yourself fiscally responsible or morally upright if you willingly waste millions of taxpayer dollars undermining human rights for as long as you can get away with it to promote your own party's partisan gain.

You don't even get to call yourself a 'human rights lawyer' anymore.

When a crazy stalker goes after someone who see's her coming

Poor Rachel.  I almost feel sorry for her only not really.

"Rachel Marsden – Come on down.

So a couple weeks back I get followed by one @RachelMarsden - I briefly glanced at her profile and saw she appeared to be a National Security and Political commentator so I followed back. She almost instantaneously began to make aggressive sexual advances to me in Twitter Direct Messages while also insisting she knew my true identity."

Anon-blogger/Hacktivist Jester goes on to exhaustively detail clumsy manipulation, narcissistic, genuinely creepy courtship rituals and an extended grand mal one-sided conversational melt down as Marsden slowly begins to realize she has been exposed, her oh so clever attempts at blackmail and sexual conquest have failed and she's being ignored.



But she is For hundreds of increasingly deranged and threatening messages. 

If this wasn't someone with a long, unambiguous, documented history of glomming onto and then destroying men this would seem meaner than it does.  With Rachel Marsden, who followed through on her threat to attack him in print and reveal what she thought was his identity (Jester denies she found and exposed the real thing, judge for yourself, I'm agnostic.) it seems like a public, preemptive act of self defence.   Jester is no saint, basically this is the story of Rachel Marsden coming up against someone smarter than she is and even meaner.

How will she sustain her act now that anyone she sets her mind on getting and/or destroying can find all her moves with 30 seconds of googling?

Losing their religion

When even The Calgary Herald agrees that legislation has gone too far in attacking unions and free speech it means we are halfway to Orwell's 1984.

"The passing of Bills 45 and 46 on Wednesday night mark a dark chapter in Alberta history.

...

The contract the government wants to impose is zero per cent for the first two years and then one per cent in each of the next two years. The union and province reached an impasse and the union decided to wait for binding arbitration, where it believed its chances would be better. That right and historic arrangement has been shredded.
Even more disturbing however, is Bill 45. Under this bill, public sector workers, union leaders and even members of the general public can be fined thousands of dollars for just musing about or encouraging a strike. If this sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is.
The fundamental right to freedom of expression is being violated here and should concern all citizens who value our rights and freedoms.
This legislation will also impose $250,000 fines per day for any illegal strike and a $1-million fine per day that would go into a liability fund. Fines for illegal strikes are not unusual, though these ones are onerous.
Needless to say, making it illegal to just talk about striking is the kind of law one might expect in some banana republic or other oppressive totalitarian state.

...

That Premier Redford actually has the gall to claim that among unionized workers “there’s an appreciation for what we’re trying to do,” is laughable.
Nobody believes that and no one can believe that a so-called human rights lawyer would allow such an abomination to the most fundamental right of any free and democratic society — the right to speak and say things that the state might not agree with."

 And we must never forget that the other motive besides sticking it to public workers, is to distract Albertans from the scandal over covering up the deaths of scores of vulnerable, mostly aboriginal children in provincial foster care.  This government is so cartoonishly evil they should be twirling their moustaches as they tie children and workers to train rails!

Laws of Nature.

The sun will rise in the east. Winter will follow Autumn. Falling objects will obey the law of gravity. And Rob Anders will be a blithering, drooling, verbally incontinent half-wit.

It's comforting to know the world contains some certainties.

“I have previously provided my thoughts on Nelson Mandela.“I will let history be the judge.

Nice Day for it

When Conservatives get in trouble due to their scummy worst instincts, whether it be covering up the deaths of scores of foster children in Alberta or being caught being pigs in the trough in the Senate they look for an enemy to burn at the stake or hang from the tallest tree to distract their nutter base.

The Auto-da-fé target du jour both provincially and federally is working Canadians who commit the horrific sin of banding together to defend and promote their interests, those evil thugs who believe employers owe their employees the opportunity to have a decent middle class lifestyle. The barking mad Conservative base is never happier than when someone half-baked libertarianism and sheer seething hatred for anyone who thinks differently than they do is getting it in the neck and the politician's corporate honchos are happy with the ongoing plan to turn Canada into a low wage economy in a mad race to the bottom with the slave labour economies of the developing world.

Middle Class Canadians watch their middle class lifestyles recede in the rear view mirror but maybe enough will say 'fuck you Jack, at least I've got MINE' to give the Conservatives another one of those razor thin margins of 30% or 35% of the population they laughingly refer to as a mandate.

"Oh well its a nice day for it, bring the kiddies - Oooh look at his feet kick!"

Shhhh, don't actually talk about what he stood for!

I can certainly see why the political right wants to brand any comment about what Mandela really stood for and what he would have thought of the right wing politicians with kind but neutering words for his legacy now as 'inappropriate'. How convenient a blockade to any public commentary about what Mandela stood for in the context of today's policies. 

How helpful a taboo to block discussion of the long sordid history of the Canadian right wing and politicians alive and active today who defended Apartheid, demonized Mandela and the South African opposition and promote the kind of policies today that Mandela was imprisoned for opposing. To hell with your sensitivity to 'appropriateness'. Its just another con.

Alberta's Premier Alison Redford, in a breathtaking display of cynicism, opportunism and hypocrisy seeks now to wrap herself in Mandela's legacy, this just after she has savagely curtailed labour and free speech rights for Albertans with the despicable bills 45 and 46.  

Mandela was a proud and steadfast supporter of organized labour, free speech and the rights of workers.  Here's a speech in support of a General strike that today would get him arrested in the Orwellian new Alberta created by Alison Redford.

Stephen Harper joins nervous right wing politicians across the world offering anodyne and neutering compliments to Mandela the Statesman.  He certainly doesn't want to talk about Mandela the revolutionary, Mandela the freedom fighter - that would open the rancid can of worms that is the toxic history of Apartheid apologists in the Canadian right wing in general and Stephen Harper specifically.

They want to lull us into forgetting who and what they are.

Don't let them.

Double standards

New Conservative Party policy:

"Federal public service unions and those in federally-regulated industries should tell their members how much of their dues go to political donations, media organizations and other political activism. Union members should be allowed to “opt out” of the portion of their dues that go to such activities." 

Does that mean that corporations should also be required to reveal how much of their profits go to 'political donations, media organizations and other political activism' and their customers should be allowed to opt out of the percentage of the costs of their products that go to such activities?

In Celebration of Labour Day: Market Failure's Biggest Hits

What so many managerial class fiscal conservatives never seem to get, is that the health of the Labour Market affects the health of the Market in general - and even the health and well being of the people in it. 

EG: The people least likely to get paid sick days or be able to afford unpaid ones are the people who handle your food.  The impact in lost productivity is many times what paying service workers enough to be above the poverty line and provide sick days would cost.

EG: With the winding down of train service and the increasing price of gas for a huge chunk of the Canadian population a single company, Greyhound, is their sole and only way of traveling.  A Corporate Monopoly controls the travel of millions of Canadians visiting family, following work or fleeing disaster.  They have used this monopoly to let service quality slide to virtually Dickensian levels and threaten to withdraw service without extortionate payoffs from provincial governments. 

EG: A neighborhood acquires a reputation and a customer base because of its character, its unique and independent businesses providing goods and services people cant find elsewhere.  That success causes commercial rents to rise.  And to continue to rise until all the independent, character filled small businesses are forced out of the area and replaced with the soulless  big-box chains that can afford the rents.  The thing that added value to the neighborhood is killed in the process of squeezing every last penny out of that value..

Anybody else have any examples?

Kelly McParland resurrects a classic racist smear divorced from history and reality

"If the U.S. does go ahead with plans to intervene, it will be doing so despite overwhelming public weariness across the western world with problems in the Middle East and Arab countries, with limited support from other western governments, and with no real appetite from Americans themselves. The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, the ongoing crisis in Egypt, the apparent lack of any progress in a region addicted to violence, have all been effective in diluting the West’s innate sympathy for the people of the region.  How often can you try to help people who don’t seem to want it and respond largely with anger and even more violence?"

Ahistorical, racist nonsense that deliberately ignores how often the West has intentionally stamped out any stirrings of real democracy in the region.

The end of Inevitability?

We all know that helpless frustrating feeling.

We are allowed to debate all we want, the majority can express their view clearly and unambiguously objecting in the streets and the ballot box.

The the elites will do what they want anyway.  'Austerity economics are inevitable and unavoidable', throwing ourselves into the latest military quagmire is the only real option, the drug war will continue no matter how much the majority object. Lie back and enjoy it or shake your adorable little fists either way the 'grown ups' will make the real decisions.

But suddenly that aura of inevitability is wavering.  The UK parliament stuns observers by actually reflecting the will of the British people and deciding NOT to blindly sign on to raining death down on the Syrian people to object to the Syrian government possibly having rained death down on the Syrian people.  Harper and Mckay go back to the old filthy propaganda well to try to smear Trudeau as promoting drug use to children (won't SOMEONE think of the children?) but despite their smears the Liberal's popularity actually jumps as Canadians go, 'Yeah? So he's admitting publicly to what a huge percentage of Canadians do or have done privately? Good for him.'  In the US the drug war shows every sign of beginning to officially wind down as Obama's Justice Department signals it will not sabotage the will of individual states to stop treating Marijuana like Satan's leafy friend.

The discredited orthodoxy of austerity still dominates the discourse of mainstream politics worldwide, despite the will of the public but even there cracks are beginning to appear.

Could we finally be getting past the stale argument that there is no choice but what the elites tell us so we should just be grown ups and accept it?

Starvation Experiments

The story appeared yesterday and seems to have sunk beneath the surface with nary a ripple.

Beginning in 1942, and ending nobody seems to know when, Canadian government bureaucrats deliberately withheld food and nutritional supplements from native communities and native children to chart the progress of various kinds of malnutrition.

Some communities would get vitamins, others as the control groups would not.  Residency schools would get half their milk ration cut to observe the effect on the tiny bodies imprisoned within. Dental services would be deliberately withdrawn from groups of children to better see the progress of malnutrition related gum disease and tooth decay.  Adulterated food that could not be legally sold to white people would be provided to see its effects.

These horrific, Mengele reminiscent experiments with the hungry bodies of children weren't performed in Nazi death camps they were conducted in Canada only a few short decades ago.

Where is our outrage?

Underwater

Been a wet day here.

This is three blocks away from me.

I live in the downtown core of Calgary.  A relatively dry spot two blocks outside the evacuation zone.  I'm high and dry on the 26th floor of an apartment building but I'm not going anywhere.  We are completely surrounded by evac zones and all of the bridges in and out of downtown are closed.

On the plus side still have power and clean water and the river water appears to have crested.

 

New occupants of the courthouse jail-cells, evac'd from the zoo.

There's an eerie ghost town quality to the streets below.  I've lived in Calgary almost 25 years this is dramatically different in scope and severity to any flooding the city has experienced in the past (1994, 2005 - neither were anywhere close to as severe.)  the irony is inescapable: the major power center of the global warming industries of Canada is experiencing what is very likely the consequence of severe climate change.

And next week a political party more concerned with attacking trade unions than even acknowledging the existence of climate change is meeting here.

Class War at its most blatant

To the Tories this is win-win.  

Get a Judge venal enough to jump at a dangled Senate appointment and they get legislation designed to crush Canada's Labour movement past the courts.

 Get a Judge who actually respects Canada's constitution they get to rant about activist judges to their base when its over-turned.

Either way the Canadian people pay for the Conservative Party's ideological war with the concept of workers banding together to protect and promote their interests.

Critics of a controversial bill requiring unions to disclose in-depth financial details are calling on its supporters to produce a constitutional expert to testify the bill can pass legal muster — because they don’t believe that one exists. 

As Bill C-377 enters its second week of Senate committee hearings, several constitutional scholars are speaking out against the Conservative private member’s bill that would force labour organizations to disclose to the Canada Revenue Agency how they spend the dues they collect. 

Such experts — including the Canadian Bar Association and law professors who testified at last week’s Senate hearings — say it violates Charter guarantees to privacy and freedom of association, and encroaches on provincial jurisdiction.

Perspective

So Torontonians, the next time you are tempted to stereotype Calgarians as a bunch of redneck rubes, our Mayor is an urbane Muslim college teacher.

Your Mayor is Chris Farley with a crew-cut.

$90,000

It appears to be the magic right wing scandal number right now.  It's the amount Stepen Harper's chief of staff surreptitiously paid to a sitting Senator in order to stonewall an embarrassing audit.

And now its the amount the Alberta Wildrose Party has been charged by the CRTC for unsolicited and deceptive robo-calls during the the last provincial election.  Good luck finding out about it from Alberta's right wing cheer-leaders pretending to be unbiased media. Only Global Media tersely reports the story but declines to report the nature of the calls.

I received one of the calls personally and immediately recognized it as a Wildrose push-poll.

There were 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 manager who didn't pay his debts would you be more or less likely to support her?"

The call didn't identify itself as being from the Wildrose Party, didn't identify itself as campaign material, in fact deliberately presented itself as a poll with the implication of impartial information gathering and was a deliberate, sleazy attempt to damage Allison Redford by implying, horrors, that she was a squishy liberal.

Global's story twists itself into knots to avoid mentioning any of this.

$90,000.  A number that now represents the venality, arrogance and media granted impunity of Canada's political right.

Don't insult us

The most rigid control freak running the most hierarchical top down PMO, controlling the most micro-managed government in Canadian history and we're supposed to believe Harper's chief of staff short-circuited Puffy's embarrassing audit with a thick wad of cash WITHOUT Harper's knowledge? Pull the other one.

The BC voter:

Wait, what?

Am I the only one weirded out by the reaction of Americans to the shooting of 19 people at the New Orleans Mother's Day Parade? 

"OhGodOhGodOhGod!!!....wait it's just drug and gang related? Whew! We were worried for a second..."

What?

"Public Sector unions are a blight on society"

 ...says convicted felon and well known douchebag.

Region of Guatemala under Martial Law to Protect Canadian Business Interests

A Canadian silver mine.  Local residents afraid their home and way of life will be irretrievably poisoned frustrated that their protests are ignored and the mine is treated as inevitable.

Now military, police and Canadian paid private security forces hold sway and civil rights are on hold. 

Does this make you proud to be a Canadian?

[Posted from Guatemala City]
Residents of four towns east of Guatemala's capital woke up to news that their communities had been placed under a 30-day State of Siege by the administration of President Otto Perez Molina, following anti-mining protests that turned violent. One policeman was killed, six civilians were wounded by rubber bullets, and a number of police cars were burned and overturned on roadways. Here is the government's official public announcement. Public gatherings in the area are banned for 30 days.


According to Guatemalan Defense Minister Col. Ulises Giron Anzueto Noah (shown at right, photo today by Carlos Andrino), 3,500 total personnel participated in operations to bring the "estado de sitio" (state of siege) into effect. Some soldiers entered the areas in armored personnel vehicles and tanks. Hundreds of police officers were involved, as were private security officers for the Canadian-owned Escobal mine at the center of the controversy.

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?

25 Years Ago

Dedicated to all the Truthers, Birthers and Midnight Nerf Herders.

"The kooks are our future. The average fifth-grader these days doesn't know whether Japan is a state or a city; wonders what happens when you get to the "edge" of the United States on a map...and even believes that the government is there to protect him!

The years to come promise incredibly fertile fields for the sowing of superstition, cultism, and pseudoscience; they'll grow so fast we'll wonder if there had ever really been an Age of Reason.

Make no mistake, it shall be a rich harvest for industrious Skull Farmers of every creed; the brains of the all-too-willing are out there, ripening...millions of potential vegetables just waiting to be plucked, shucked, and hauled off to market."

-Introduction to High Weirdness by Mail by Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius, 1988

Keep Calm and Stay Strong

Muslims all over the world today woke up, read that the Marathon bombers had been tentatively identified as being from Chechnya, home of Russia's own simmering war with Islamist insurgents and thought some variation of 'aw, crap.'

Muslims are once going to be tarred with an ugly brush over this and an overwhelmingly loyal and law abiding American Muslim community is no doubt battening down the hatches and preparing themselves for a long national strip search.

 They will be accused of 'Not condemning terrorism' vociferously enough - were all white right wingers quizzed about their loyalty after Oklahoma City? Muslims from different regions, different ethnicities and different religious traditions will again find themselves conflated with the kind of extremists every faith produces and Jihad, a word with far ranging and subtly distinct definitions, primarily meaning to most Muslims a kind internal spiritual struggle to live up to the tenants of their faith will once again be bandied about as meaning nothing but terrorism and murder.

I'd like to believe Americans have been inoculated against the hate-mongers and divisive demagogues by the last decade - but I'm very much afraid that the terrorist goal of spreading division and fear and mistrust will be eagerly abetted by the same people who helped fan it last time.

 This week has kind of sucked.

The Personal and the Political

"Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?

they can polish their medals and sharpen their

smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for a while

boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead" 

Pink Floyd, The Fletcher Memorial Home

I've read some truly nauseating screeds in the last few days about individual acts of civility and grace by Margaret Thatcher that supposedly put the lie to her being heartless and cruel. I'm reminded of Sam Donaldson saying of Reagan that if you were down on your luck he would give you the shirt off his back - then sit down shirtless at his desk in the Oval office and with a stroke of his pen take your parent's social security away, your kid's school lunches away and the poor's welfare away. That kind of disconnect between the personal and political isn't evidence of a secret hidden heart, just a failure of imagination and empathy bordering on psychopathy.

Remember when Jack Layton was harshly attacked for pointing out that the social cuts that Paul Martin's liberals committed literally meant they had blood on their hands because of the deaths they would cause? Who's interests are served by the suggestion that pointing out the real human costs of policy is out of bounds?

Maggie Thatcher was hated and reviled for causing real human costs and suffering to thousands of real people. Suggesting that hatred is inappropriate is the real disrespect.

DING DONG

Margaret Thatcher, dead at 87.

For those about to whine about respect for the dead, showing respect for this monster would constitute disrespect for her victims.

She was a vicious autocratic demagogue who figured out how to scrape up a working majority of barely 30% of the population while viciously abusing the rest - sound familiar at all?  She engaged in active class warfare massively redistributing wealth upwards while slashing away at the social safety net at the same time and demonizing the poor.

She attempted to outlaw the very concept of homosexuality.  She engaged in a shameless military adventure to hold onto power before an election she was about to lose, instituted a poll tax to suppress the vote of those who opposed her, supported fascist dictatorships like that of Chile's Augusto Pinochet as if keeping autocrats holding power through torture and death squads in charge was a holy mission and supported the racist regime of Apartheid South Africa - and for those about to argue that was just Cold War anti-Communism her own values can be inferred by the fact her son was later convicted for plotting a Rhodesia style white military coup against an African government.

Good riddance, the world would have been better off without her.
.

The leeches at the top bleeding us dry

So private interests take over gigantic communications infrastructures built by the sweat and millions of the Canadian public for pennies on the dollar.  They then reduce quality of service to the bare minimum they can get away with, eliminate thousands of well paying jobs reducing the anemic Canadian middle class even further while exporting those jobs out of Canada to third world sweat shops and taking away all the rights and job security of those few employees left that they can. 

For this their soulless, piggy eyed CEO is feted as a corporate genius and paid 11 million a year.

Welcome to Canada.

Rape culture

A radical suggestion to Candy Crowley of CNN, who all but wept at the sentencing of the Steubenville rapists and the awful effect it will have on their bright futures:

If you rape and piss on an unconscious teenage girl your lives SHOULD be over!

The mask ripped off

So of course austerity is ordinary people stolen from to pay for the wild partys thrown by bankers and speculators.  Of course it is.  I know that and since you are reading a politics blog you  probably know that too.

But for everyday people who don't follow the news and whose lips curl at politics talk much less economics, who have been fed on an endless diet of lies about what we can afford and why and contempt for the poor as if they were the ones stealing from them - to them austerity has been sold as a correction to costly indulgences we can no longer afford, for them austerity doesn't currently feel like theft.

As if decades of giveaways to big business and the super-wealthy and the deliberate hollowing out of revenues had never happened.

Then Cyprus.

"It’s as if the Europeans are holding up a neon sign, written in Greek and Italian, saying “time to stage a run on your banks!”" 
- Paul Krugman
 
The elite are now openly and sanctimoneously planning to pay for the disaster they caused by directly looting the bank accounts of ordinary people.

First they came for welfare and I said nothing because I wasn't on welfare.  Then they came for education and I said nothing because l wasn't a student. Then they came for healthcare and I said nothing because l wasn't sick.

Then they came for my bank account.  By then it was too late.

Wake up!

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.

This is your wake up call

The God of Drums

Know them by their enemies

Hey Canadian media, since Idle No More's biggest critics are all publicly beshitting themselves and being exposed as rapists, batterers, petty fraudsters and supporters of the sacred liberty to view pictures of children being molested - is it maybe time for a reappraisal?

Songs for Justin

Two songs dedicated to the Liberal Party, once again picking dreamy school girl crush as their leadership criteria.

Some offense.

The Green Party is a Con-job

In Europe the various national Green Party's are real and valid progressive alternatives with a history of positive contribution to promoting progressive values and ideals.

In Canada the Green Party is a false flag operation.  A deliberate right wing stalking horse designed and promoted with the explicit goal of splintering the progressive vote.

When David Suzuki, quite reasonably, refused to appear at a venue with a Sun News 'reporter' in attendance after the contemptible attacks they regularly make upon him, Elizabeth May sided with Fox News North and gave their attending propagandist a big friendly hug.  The Sun News quisling then gushed about how much she 'respects' May.

So think about that.  Doctor Suzuki doesn't want to pander to a propaganda operation by treating them as if they were really journalists that is deliberately and repeatedly attacking him in the crudest and most contemptible terms precisely because he is such a credible opponent to the Conservative Party's slash and burn approach to the environment .  Elizabeth May gives Fox News North a big hug and the Sun News pod person takes pains to say how much she 'respects' her.

At this point anyone still supporting the Canadian Green Party is either a dupe or in on the con.

De Facto Two-Tier Healthcare

Alberta always a hotbed of innovation, has secretly developed a two tier parallel healthcare system for the elites, that Ralph Klein spent years trying to create in law.

But hey maybe that's a little harsh.  Just because elite private clinic  patients paying $10,000 a year (for better magazines in the waiting room?) were getting tests in weeks the general public was waiting months or years for doesn't mean anything unsavory was going on.

And if you believe that then I'm sure the Conservative Party appreciates your support because clearly you'll fall for anything.

Staff of a Calgary private medical clinic that is the focus of allegations of queue jumping told a provincial inquiry on Tuesday that its patients, who each paid up to $10,000 a year for care, were not buying special access to the public health system.

Witnesses have told the inquiry that patients from Helios Wellness Centre routinely got access within weeks to colonoscopies at Calgary’s publicly funded Forzani & MacPhail Colon Cancer Screening Centre while the general public waited years for the same tests. One witness testified that a Helios doctor told him during a tour of the private clinic that it was set up as a “reward” for well-heeled donors to the University of Calgary.

The next time one of your family or loved ones cant get the test they need to save their life, remember the elites avoid the pain they have inflicted through mismanagement and chronic underfunding of the Alberta public sector by breaking the rules designed to ensure fair access to the health system they are undermining.

Heard it too many times

Don't say it!

Ethnic cleansing, forced re-settlement, less political and social rights based on religion or skin colour, laws demanding fealty to the state religion, laws restricting marriage rights between Jews and Arabs - now coerced government sterilization of a minority even if only temporary - but there's one historical comparison with these things you are never ever allowed to make no matter what.

Israel has admitted that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth control injections, according to a report in Haaretz. An Israeli investigative journalist also found that a majority of the women given these shots say they were administered without their knowledge or consent.

"Wow that sounds just like..." Don't finish that sentence you filthy antisemite!

Pop Quiz

Identify the true statement:

1. Trip Hop pioneers Massive Attack are writing the soundtrack to a Broadway musical version of King Kong.
2. Wrangler are releasing a line of jeans that are infused with skin cream and moisturize your ass while you are wearing them.
3. Socialist welfare state Norway is so much better at managing oil resources than the free market utopia of Alberta that its version of the Heritage Fund is 41 times bigger, they have a fraction of Alberta's income inequality and huge surpluses to spend on infrastructure and social programs.

Answer: ˙ǝɹǝɥ puɐ ǝɹǝɥ 'ǝɹǝɥ ǝǝs  ˙ǝnɹʇ ןןɐ ǝɹɐ ʎǝɥʇ 'uoıʇsǝnb ʞɔıɹʇ ɐ s,ʇı  ¡ǝɥɔʎsd

Manufacturing Indifference

The Canadian mainstream media willfully participate in a smear campaign designed to undermine an attempt by a community's leader to bring their desperate plight to light and then are shocked that they aren't welcomed with open arms.

If an auditor flew in to your company or your town and giving you  limited time and resources to cooperate, conducted an audit/witch hunt that the courts later ruled was unnecessary and possibly illegal and found, in a two year span, approximately 30 missing invoices and receipts, would you conclude that your company or town was corrupt?  Or would you conclude that running a large community with huge social and economic problems with limited resources can easily result in a couple dozen receipts going missing in the span of a couple years?

Oh and by the way, this was during a period of co-management by the government (which the courts actually ruled was an unreasonable remedy), these problems occurred while the government appointed co-manager had signing authority.

Spence cleaned things up massively when she came in., The problems at the reserve were not caused by theft or mismanagement but lack of sufficiant resources and the reserve has been ASKING for a real forensic audit for years. The few examples brought up in the smear job can probably be cleared up by asking vendors for confirmation of purchases as the reserve themselves requested. 

The smear job by the government with the active complicity of the media has accomplished its goal: the message that  'corrupt, incompetent Indians are wasting or stealing all the generous support your tax dollars pay for so you can safely stop paying attention' has been delivered and gratefully swallowed. All the followups pointing out the truth will either be confined to alternative media and ignored, or actively suppressed as the Kinsella Sun piece was. The media did their job as the interests they are paid to defend see it.

UPDATES:  Sorting out the spin and counting the real money

Any Questions?

Seems legit.....

So let me get this straight: It would be wrong for the Canadian government to own and administer any of our resources like the Oil Sands for the good of the Canadian people because that would be socialism - but it's ok for the communist Chinese government to own our resources for the good of the Chinese people because that wouldn't be?

 Makes perfect sense.

Not just Un-Canadian. Inhumanly vicious and depraved

The pathologically sadistic and demented Harper government has now gone so far they managed to shock the conscience of Saskatchwan's right wing Premier Brad Wall.  Or maybe he just realized it would appall his constituents.

Premier Wall called Ottawa’s decision to deny chemotherapy to a refugee in Saskatoon "un-Canadian.” Now, the Province of Saskatchewan is stepping up to the plate.
The province will pick up the tab for chemotherapy for a man seeking asylum in Saskatoon. The man says he fled Pakistan when he was persecuted for his Christian faith.
Shortly after arriving however, he was diagnosed with cancer, and the federal government refused to pay for treatment.

Ottawa quietly introduced changes in the spring to the Federal Health Program, which cut drug, dental and vision care for refugee claimants.  These cuts were highlighted in a recent mail out by Saskatoon area MP Kelly Block. The mail outs triggered protests, saying the language was inappropriate and offensive.

The  display of small minded, xenophobic demagoguery by MP Kelly referred to was this:

Block lets her constituents know that she is working hard for them and "ending unfair benefits for refugee claimants." The mail-out goes on to say, "new arrivals to Canada have received dental and vision care paid for by your tax dollars. Not anymore."

The pamphlet then asks constituents to answer a questionnaire that provides two options. A respondent can agree either with the statement, "I agree with Kelly Block. Newcomers don't deserve more benefits than Canadians," or, "I disagree. Refugee claimants should get dental, vision and phar-macare even if I don't."

To say that the MP's mail-out to constituents is misleading is an understatement.

Actually, if you are a government-sponsored refugee, health benefits such as vision and dental care continue. But if you are a refugee sponsored by a church group, those benefits ended as of June 1. We now have two different classes of refugees in Canada as a result of the federal government's rule changes.

Block's reference to "newcomers" leaves the impression she is talking about all immigrants. For the record, most immigrants who land in Canada - particularly if they come under the immigrant nominee program - never have had dental, vision care or pharma-care benefits. In the past, all refugees did.

Unseating Stephen Harper and his merry band of repugnant toadies is now a moral necessity in order to save the soul of this country.

Just a thought

Critics of Israel's actions in the Gaza are once again being tarred with the pro-terrorist, anti-Israel even anti-Semitic brush. Yes, during a prison riot the guards and the people living outside the prison have a right to defend themselves. It doesn't mean the reasons for the prison riot and the methods of quelling the riot AND the justification for the prison's existence in the first place aren't legitimate topics of discussion.

 Also it was just a few decades ago that critics within and without Israel were saying that seeking to undermine Yasser Arrafat and the PLO by promoting and supporting the Islamist opposition to the PLO was an immoral, short-sighted idea that would be bad for Israel in the long term. Hamas was essentially the creation of care and feeding by the Israeli government and people who opposed that creation were accused of being soft on terrorism, being anti-Israel even anti-Semitic.  Please note that the source link for that statement is that well known purveyor of lefty conspiracy theories The Wall street Journal.

 At some point, based on track record alone, maybe critics of Israel should be listened to rather than slurred.

'Pro-Life' laws murder women

Savita Halappanavar, dead at 31

A sincere message to the Republican Party: