More surprising news!

 A Liberal party staffer has admitted to being behind the @Vikileaks30 campaign on Twitter. As observed at the time, apparently it is okay for Vic Toews to push a bill he hasn't read that would allow warrentless access to Canadians' internet usage and history, but repeating already published information about Vic Toews' love child, divorce and romance with his kids' babysitter or the fact that the former justice minister and current minister of public safety was convicted of breaking the campaign finance laws in 1999 is apparently worse than a thousand Hitlers squared because that is a personal attack on a politician.

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the buck stops where?

Illustration stolen from Alison at Creekside, an excellent place to start learning about Robocon or Suppressiongate or whatever we are calling the latest bit of epic malfeasance on the part of the Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada

The conduct of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada is now being described as Nixonian in some quarters and I would find it hard to disagree. They have certainly copied from the Nixon playbook in that they like to claim to represent the 'Silent Majority' and accuse their opponents of being elitists and radicals. They are profoundly anti-intellectual, to the extent that they mistrust science. They are hawkish on foreign policy and love to tout their support for the military.

But most of all, Harper will deny, deny, deny and throw on advisor after another under the bus. Nothing will ever be his fault and he will never acknowledge any error, any awareness of wrongdoing and will never admit to anything, no matter what the evidence.

It kind of reminds me of this song from the Watergate era.




I am willing to take Stephen Harper at his word that he knew nothing about the fraudulent phone campaign that helped him win a majority. But if he didn't know about that one, what else didn't he know?

No one voted for his advisors or campaign staff. He picked them himself, or picked the people who appointed them. He chose the people who decided that it was okay to for the CPC to lie, cheat and steal their way into power and he is the one who must take responsibility.
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how do you think they got rich in the first place?

I'm shocked - shocked I tell you!- to learn that a study has confirmed what we kind of always knew in our hearts.

 Rich people less ethical, more likely to cheat and lie, study says
MONTREAL - A new study says rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than their poorer counterparts — like cutting off motorists, lying in a negotiation and cheating to win a prize.
That's the finding from researchers at the University of California and the University of Toronto, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Now, I haven't seen the methodology used and I suspect that it would be a difficult thesis to prove experimentally and the researchers are careful to say that this doesn't mean all rich people are crooks, just that there is a 'tendency' there.

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Calling you

A little required reading for your Monday and the resumption of Parliament:

• More and more reports coming out about fraudulent telephone campaigns by the Conservative Party of Canada to undermine democracy and steal the election
• This campaign voter suppression robocall kerfuffel isn't a scandal that is just popping up now, some people have been on it for quite a while 
• And it is definitely part of a pattern of underhanded sabotage and infiltration that has been going on for some time and is well documented
• When the CPC has lost Post Media, it is clear that they have stepped over a line
• And it isn't just robo calls either, it is the use of phone banks to systematically mislead voters and suppress democracy
• CPC hack Dean DelMastro does his best to keep the vital "both sides do it" narrative alive, but given this admission his complaint is a bit rich
• I understand campaign cheats do their best to provide leaders and candidates with plausible deniability, but apparently the CPC and Canada are now being led by Sgt. Shultz

As an editorial aside to my learned colleagues in the media: Can we please stop referring to these incidents as crank calls? If you pick up the phone and someone asks to speak to Amanda Hugginkiss or wants to know if your refrigerator is running or you have Prince Albert in a can, that's a crank call. If someone claims to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada or a political party and lies to you about how or where to vote, that's a crime.
And let's not just write it off as political pranksterism or dirty tricks either. Putting a bag of flaming dogshit on somebody's porch, ringing the bell and running away is a dirty trick, a whoopee cushion is a prank - an orchestrated effort to suppress the vote by lying to people about how and where to vote is a crime.




Keep that soothing music going as you read these links, you're going to need it.


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