Try it

In order to carry tasers, most municipalities require police officers to experience being zapped with one themselves first.

The instinctive response one has when you hear this for the first time is 'yeah, that seems fair.' If it's so harmless and non-lethal a method of restraint, those using it should experience it first. To really be fair, it should perhaps be done after a five mile run or other extreme exercise to really match the likely condition of any suspect it would be used on in the line of duty.

By this logic then, any candidate for the US presidency not willing to commit to forbidding the practice of water-boarding, not willing to denounce it as torture and say unequivocally that it will not be used on his or her watch, should be strapped to a board and with wet towels or tanks of icy water repeatedly be brought to the point of drowning.

Seems only fair.

'Confess to something you didn't do or we'll have your family tortured in Egypt'

The Manhattan United States Court of Appeals forgets that the cover-up is always the bigger scandal.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on?

Blink!

No surprise. Special Ed remembered he's here for the energy companies not the people of Alberta and watered down the already timid recommendations of the Hunter report to little more than a bad joke.

The Report called for an immediate increase in the royalties take by $2B. Stelmach will wait through two more years of a royalty regime his own government's Auditor General has basically called a giveaway before taking only $1.4b more. Two of the largest oil sand companies Suncor and Syncrude have side deals they get to keep, against the panel's recommendations to avoid grandfathering, and back room negotiations out of the public eye to discuss their futures.

One of the members of the Hunter panel has flatly described the Stelmach government's response to the report as a 'snow job'.

Sure the energy execs will bawl like branded calves, maybe even engage in some completely political layoffs, spitefully playing with people's lives for PR purposes.

But where are they going to go? Venezuela? Nigeria? Our resources are worth more because we have a safe, stable political and social environment with a developed infrastructure to move them with. The energy companies know this, and so do the people of Alberta.

The word is that Stelmach plans to call an election for early December if it seems his dog and pony show has gone over well with the people of Alberta. We can only hope they haven't fallen for this shameful sellout.

UPDATE: 'Blatant deceit.'

The definition of hypocrisy

If a Democratic candidate for the Presidency ever hired a priest onto his or her campaign after the priest was accused of molesting multiple children, the right wing media and blogosphere would literally go stark raving mad with terrible slavering joy. It would be all the Malkins and Limbaughs and O'Reilly's would be able to talk about.

When Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani, who Jimmy Breslin perfectly described as "A small man in search of a balcony." Not only hires an accused child molester, he then all but calls his accusers liars...

Silence.

Moment of truth

Tonight and tomorrow Premier Ed Stelmach will finally be unveiling his response to the Hunter report on energy royalties. Since it was released more than a month ago, it's conclusions were reinforced by the Auditor General's report that Albertans weren't even getting the insufficient benefits of the existing royalty regime.

Stelmach's talk of 'balance' and hints of a pick and choose approach to the Hunter report suggest that we're about to be sold out. The complaints of oil patch executives, expensive PR firms and bussed in renta-crowds with matching hardhats notwithstanding, the Hunter report was a cautious thing with conclusions that don't really go far enough. Now its likely to be watered down even further.

Will Albertans stand for more of the same of the oil patch calling the shots with our wealth?

On the plus side, the word is that Stelmach will drive the final nail into Ralph Klein's war on public health care.

EDMONTON - In his first televised address, Premier Ed Stelmach will talk tonight about energy royalties, Alberta's future, and a commitment not to flirt with health-care privatization the way his predecessor Ralph Klein routinely did, government sources says.

Although Stelmach has long embraced a publicly funded health system and Health Minister Dave Hancock has essentially declared the great public-private debate to be over, the premier's election-style promise will have a key role in his 20-minute talk, designed to erase any perceptions Stelmach might return to one of Klein's most divisive stances.

Since Klein's attack on the public system played a bigger role in his downfall than anybody among the Tories is willing to admit, this is simply a formalization of Stelmach not wanting to throw his political career into the wood chipper that is any attempt to privatize health care.

Ezra Levant's vicious antisemitism

But...but... Levant is Jewish! How could he possibly be antisemitic?

Arabs are Semites too, and by now Ezra's hatred and fear for Arabs is unambiguous.

Exhibit A: Neither Ezra nor his thankfully defunct magazine have ever apologized for the months of drooling hatred directed against Maher Arar and his family, in fact their only response to the conclusion the government panel eventually reached, that Arar had been horrifically wronged, was to rail against the settlement he received.

Exhibit B: We just had a tragic school bus accident here in Calgary, a child died. To Ezra, the most important part of the story is that the driver might have been Muslim and might have been wearing a Muslim head scarf. Using a child's death to engage in shameless bigoted pandering is literally unforgivable.

Exhibit C: Levant is still proud of his decision to print hateful and bigoted anti-Muslim cartoons.

Exhibits D through Infinity: If anyone used the kind of vicious rhetoric and inflammatory language for the Jewish people that Ezra uses for Muslims he would quite rightly decry it as antisemitism. In fact, just engaging in even mild criticism of the state of Israel or the political philosophy of Zionism is antisemitism according to Ezra - so how can his much more hateful rhetoric for Muslims not be?

Call it Islamophobia or antisemitism - either way Levant's rhetoric about Muslims easily fits the definition of hate speech.

UPDATE: As noted below in comments, The Sun appears to have belatedly discovered basic human decency and pulled the Levant piece blaming the bus crash on Islam.

Irony isn't dead

I haven't bothered to respond to any of the Fraser Institutes PR efforts on behalf of the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries of late because there seems little point. Few aside from an ideological hard core even seem to pay attention to them any more and most of their wacky pronouncements on Canadian health care for example seem intended mostly to provide fodder for American right wingers fighting the increasingly desperate and hopeless battle against an increasingly inevitable universal system there.

Canadians, The National Post's dwindling subscriber base aside, simply aren't buying.

But the spat between Nadeem Esmail, who's in charge of the Fraser Institute's health care distortions and Health Minister Tony Clement calls for comment, if only because I really don't trust a Conservative Minister to defend public care, and because the National Pest appears to have made only Esmail's side of the fight available.

The right has jumped on wait times as their new health care bugaboo in their long war against the public system. Of course many of the wait time problems facing Canada stem from policy decisions by right wing politicians in the first place. Remember fifteen years ago when the big scare was that we would have too many doctors leading to policy steps being taken to reduce medical school class sizes? Seems like a lifetime ago, but we're still paying for these kind of panicky reactionary steps.

But trusting right wing numbers on wait times requires a certain amount of breathless naiveté. Esmail angrily defends the paltry 26% of ideologically self selecting responses from doctors to the Fraser Institutes's wait times study as 'not a small or unreliable sample'.

It is of course virtually the platonic ideal of a small and unreliable sample. Denying that fact in a loud clear voice doesn't change it. He also decries 'rhetoric and misleading information'. I know, hard to believe the ballsiness; rhetoric and misleading information are the Fraser Institutes bread and butter. Hence the title of this post.

Wait time lists are neither as large nor as wide spread as the right tries to paint them, were largely the result of right wing funding decisions to begin with and have been dropping over the last few years.

And it's public sector solutions that are making them drop while across the border, the US utopia of private care faces wait times just as high or higher, with the added 'benefit' of double the cost per capita for their health care non-system that leaves millions with no coverage at all. Wait times are as bad or worse in the US, so moving towards American style private care would make matters worse.

Once the wait times bugaboo loses it's power, wait for the free market ideologues at the Fraser Institute to find some other avenue to battle public health care. Just don't make the mistake of thinking they actually care.

Rowling outs Dumbledore

Not that the bonfire crowd needed another excuse but this should just add to the more fanatical of the fundamentalist crowd's distaste for the Harry Potter series.

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected -- that she "always thought Dumbledore was gay," reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was "terribly let down" and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore's "great tragedy."

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission -- then erupted into applause.

Deadly Deficit

This is what happens when you replace a fiscal deficit with an infrastructure deficit.

This is what happens when voters believe political snake oil salesman who tell them they can keep cutting their taxes forever with no ill effects.

Thanks Stéphane

For helping sustain a government your party has described as 'right wing', 'Republican', and 'radical'.

For assuming Canadians are too stupid to see through cheesy parliamentary tricks like bogus amendments and cowardly abstentions.

For demonstrating once and for all how little difference there is between the Conservatives and Liberals.

For giving Canadians a clear demonstration of how much value to put on Liberal claims of 'progressiveness.'

For putting the final nail in your leadership's coffin.

Oh, and thanks Elizabeth May, for demonstrating that you believe your most important role and that of the Green Party is unflinching obsequious support for the Liberal Party, not the environment.

Throne Speech: First reaction

Question: What does Canada need two* center right parties for?

Answer: We really don't.

*Three, if you include the Greens with the Conservatives and the Liberals.

Calgary Municipal Election: 'What are you spending your left over political donations on?'

Calgary has long been criticized for what some call its "Wild West" campaign finance rules. There are no limits on what an individual or group can donate, what a campaign can spend or what happens to any surplus donations once the election is over.

Barry Erskine, who retired before the election, and the three aldermen who lost their seats Monday -- Helene Larocque, Craig Burrows and Madeleine King -- are all free to spend anything left in their campaign kitties as they see fit.

Welcome to the Wild West of campaign finance. It isn't just the Stampede that has the cowboys.

Calgary Municipal Election: Aftermath

The results.

Looks like I was wrong, Madeline King wasn't as safe as I thought. On the down side, it looks like we're getting Conservative Party insider John Mar in Ward 8. On the plus side we aren't getting far right candidate Steve Chapman, who I snarled at quite churlishly when he visited my building yesterday (I was in a bad mood.) For Mayor, Bronco won by a commanding 60% as Alnoor's huge war chest gave him only a distant second place.

Craig 'unions should lose the right to go on strike' Burrows lost his seat in Ward 6, but Helen Larocque, the most union friendly councilor couldn't get past the narrative that she was unfriendly and unresponsive to her constituents and lost in Ward 3. How much of that was true and how much was the creation of the PGIB folks running some of the community associations is an open question.

Bob Hawkesworth retained the well deserved overwhelming support of his constituents in Ward 4 with no competition from the wild-eyed Internet troll running against him.

One of the most pleasant outcomes of the night was progressive candidate Brian Pincott's decisive win. We were part of the Calgary NDP class of '04's provincial election squad together. There's no doubt in my mind that the people of Ward 11 have elected one of the most serious, hard working and environmentally committed Councilors this city has ever seen.

So all in all, a night that could have been better, but sure as hell could have been worse.

Hit the Calgary label for the rest of my Calgary election posts.

Calgary Municipal Election: Polling Day arrives

The day has arrived. I'm working an evening shift tonight and I'll be getting out the door a little earlier today so that I can hit my polling station on the way to work. Find out where yours is by inputting your address here.

Ultimately decided to vote for Lindsey Luhnau in my ward as Mar and Chapman will probably split the conservative vote and hopefully neither are a risk of winning. Madeline King is vaguely progressive, barring a tendency to NIMBYism, but hard to get excited about.

For Mayor there's certainly worse options than Bronco but the word seems to have gotten out about Alnoor's shifty past and record as a gouging landlord so I don't think I'm risking him by picking somebody like Jeremy Zhao or Elizabeth Fielding both of whom certainly seem to have their hearts in the right place.

I miss Jimmy 'the con' Carleton. Former felon, father of dozens of children, perennial mayoral candidate and poverty advocate. There was somebody you could get enthusiastic about voting for. His last kick at the mayoral can he got more votes than some of the serious sitting council member candidates. Of course Jimmy was always serious about running, if not necessarily about winning.

Hit the Calgary label to see all my civic election posts.

Economic idiocy

Dion's promise to cut the corporations already low tax burden even further isn't just bad politics, it's bad economics. It's premise, like all Liberal Party efforts to cut Corporate Canada's responsibilities to civil society, is that big business will re-invest these savings in the economy, in new industry and new jobs.

Except that despite record profits due largely to past Liberal giveaways, Canadian corporations have a lousy productivity record.

Canadian corporations are riding a wave of record profits and sitting on an unprecedented pile of cash, according to a bank study released yesterday.

The TD Bank report, which comes amid outbursts of anger by corporate Canada over the minority Liberal government's shelving of their promised tax cuts, raises questions about whether, in fact, they need or would make productive use of further tax relief.

"Certainly that would be the conclusion, looking at their cash flow," said TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond, a co-author of the report.

Canadian Labour Congress economist Andrew Jackson said the TD report also reveals that the surge in profits, which are in part due to the tax cuts businesses have enjoyed over the past half decade, have not led to a matching increase in corporate investment.

That was two years ago. Their record hasn't improved.

So Dion's giveaway would probably help the bottom line of boardroom fat-cats and finance even more obscene executive compensation. That's about it. Given the anemic state of corporate investment this is rewarding low productivity. Hardly looking after the concerns of ordinary Canadians.

Only 40%?!?

I must be slipping.

Sunday Linkblast - Oct 14

• Ed about to blink?
  Neil Waugh asks if the steady stream of misinformation from the boardrooms is about to get the Royalty Review recommendations watered down to mush.
  
  
• Australians go to the polls next month
  Is Howard's long reign drawing to a close? Will Rudd be any different?
  
  
• Mr Dion goes to Bay Street
  Dion promises to bend over even further for corporations than Harper will.
  
  
• The State VS Lt. Ehren Watada - again
  Double jeopardy to become just another 'quaint' legal right mowed down by the Bush Administration?
  
  
• The liberal Century?
  The fury from right wingers over Gore's Nobel win is in direct proportion to their anticipation of their coming irrelevancy.
  
  
• Olbermann rules!
  Time to get over the myth of objectivity and start praising context.
  
  
• Chretein VS Martin redux
  As the Liberals squabble over their ever decreasing slice of pie, Jean Chretien revives the internecine war of the 90's.
  
  
• Slum War
  The Pentagon prepares for a century of urban combat.

Vive la Résistance!

Naomi Wolf on resistance:

Today the New York Times reports that the State Department is not cooperating with Iraqi or FBI investigators into the matter of the Blackwater massacre of seventeen Iraqi civilians.

Pay attention to this. Readers who know `the blueprint’ will be horrified but not surprised. `Step Two’ in the closing down of an open society is for the State to showcase to civilians the fact that a paramilitary force is outside the rule of law. When SA began — still illegally — beating citizens in Germany, National Socialist strategists made sure that photographers and reporters were present. We must consider: if the State showcases to Americans the fact that it is protecting its own cadre of violent criminals in Iraq — will Congress be courageous in confronting Blackwater violence when Blackwater manifests its well-documented plans to deploy more aggressively here at home? Or will this penumbra of unaccountable, State-defended violence be enough to intimidate lawmakers — and the rest of us? Remember that Mussolini directed Blackshirts to intimidate Parlimentarians even before Italy was a dictatorship and Hitler used the same tactic in lining the halls of the still-functioning German Parliament with Brownshirts — paramilitary forces that had established a reputation for brutality against civilians. And that was enough to cow lawmakers even as the trappings of democracy were still intact.

Remember that under current arrangements, the Department of Homeland Security can deploy Blackwater in your town tomorrow.

With this kind of messaging about the State’s protection for what is its own paramility force of torturers and murderers, if Blackwater massacres seventeen civilians in Times Square — or turns their guns on protesters at an antiwar rally — in spite of the trappings of democracy, will anyone be brave enough to hold them accountable?’

It is clear yet that violent retribution, torture or maybe worse, seems to go right up this chain of command? Is it clear yet that these people are capable of anything? Is it obvious yet that criminals are at the helm of the nation and need to be not only ousted but held accountable for their crimes?

Is it treason yet?

This is an open invitation to honorable patriots on the Right and in the center to join this movement to restore the rule of law and confront this horror: this is not conservatism, it is a series of crimes against the nation and against the very essence of America. Join us, we need you. This movement must transcend partisan lines. The power of individual conscience is profound when people start to wake up. TK Comey said No; history will look at this torture and disgrace the torturers. A judge today ruled that the US can’t just ship prisoners out of Guantanamo to be tortured at will — she said No. The Center for Constitutional Rights is about to file a civil lawsuit — against Blackwater: they are saying No.

In Germany, according to historian Richard Evans, in 1931-1932, if enough Germans of conscience had begun to say No — history would have had an entirely different outcome. If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be American tears.

The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin.

The Seed 2.0

The Roots
"Now about nine months ago..."

'Our charity means we own you.'

Digby has an excellent post about one of the lessons of the Graeme Frost hideousness: the right wingers really do believe that if you take any government money you have forfeited the right to privacy.

Digby goes on to connect the dots to why public support was brought in to supplant private charity in the first place:

Charity robs the recipient of the dignity and personal liberty to which all people have a claim, rich, poor or in the middle. Using government to act as the safety net instead of the good will (or good mood) of those of means allows that. Citizen pays in, and someday, god forbid, if he needs some help, he won't have to kiss the ass of some rich busybody or self-righteous hypocrite who thinks he or she has a right to dictate his behavior on the basis of a couple of bucks.

Krugman chimes in that Digby is more right than she knows, there was an explicit movement among 'charitable' organizations in the 19th century to use charity for social control:

The Bush administration has proved adept at what the British call “dog-whistle politics,” the art of sending out messages that only the intended audience can hear. A classic example is Bush’s description of himself as a “compassionate conservative,” which most people heard as a declaration that he wasn’t going to rip up the safety net. It was actually a reference to the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian right author whose 1995 book The Tragedy of American Compassion held up the welfare system of 19th century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together, as a model - and approvingly quoted Gilded Age authors who condemned “those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.”

The thousand points of light Bush Sr wanted to replace the public sector with are glinting off the shiny probing noses of the reactionary busybodies who want to dictate how their aid can be spent. When the right wingers decry the oppressive control of social welfare programs, the Stalinist totalitarian diktat of government health care or any kind of public safety net program, they are really revealing their own mindset. It's what they would do, so they assume it's the inevitable nature of any kind of government support.

I recently received an email from a family member - one of those 'forward this along the internets' samizdat things that can be jokes or rants or pleas to find missing children. This one was the modest proposal righteously demanded by a 'hard working oil rigger' that anyone on welfare should be forced to undergo urine checks in order to receive the checks 'I'm helping pay for.'

I'm sorry to say I flew into a fury, responded with a long, bitingly sarcastic response, suggesting that 'yeah, the poor should have to wear tracking anklets and have video cameras in their bathrooms too' and have been in the doghouse with that branch of the family ever since.