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:

Common Ground

The messy balance between protecting free expression and prohibiting incitement, villification and threat in Canada is a valid subject for debate, but I think we can all come together and find common ground in the sincere belief that the Koran burning pastor 'Reverend' Terry Jones is an asshole.

My country's border control having a 'no assholes' rule is something I'm reasonably comfortable with.

Holy Writ Rant

I know its been a while since my last post.  As an antidote for the time of universal dishonesty we live in, here's the entire masterpiece Rant in E Minor by the irreplaceable Bill Hicks. The greatest comedy album ever recorded.  Dennis Leary stole 90% of his act from Bill Hicks and this album will make you realize just how weak and pathetic mainstream so called comedians are. Listen and weep. With laughter AND sorrow that Bill Hicks was taken from us the same year this was released.

NSFW as fuck.