The History of the Blogosphere

The latest installment of The Maple Syrup Revolution - In which RossK and I discuss the history of blogging  - is now available for your listening pleasure.

RossK provides an exhaustive, annotated,  blow-by-blow Cliffs Notes summary.

Every time the opposition talks about a coalition...

...a Tory wets his pants. Given that, I'm guessing the latest stories about a merger between the Liberals and the New Democrats must have had the backers of the Stephen Harper Party of Canada bricking in their Stanfields this week.
Polling shows support for the idea of some kind of cooperation between the two parties and I don't doubt that it is a possibility that the two parties could merger, despite the various protestations and gnashing of teeth from the old lefties still in the NDP and the business-friendly right wing of the Liberals. After all, everyone said a merger of the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform/Alliance parties would never happen either.
Whether the Liberal Democrats would be a good idea or not bears some thinking about.
While old school lefties in the NDP and labour stalwarts might hate the idea of getting into bed with "The Establishment", especially a party that is likely to led by Bob Rae -- who they still bear a grudge against for "Rae Days"-- and consider the whole merger idea a sell-out of the party's ideals, I think those people are in the minority in the NDP these days, though they still make up a significant segment of the party's support. There are a lot of pissed-off pragmatic progressives out there fighting the agenda of the current government who don't really give a rat's ass which party banner they line up behind, just so long as it leads them to battle, achieves a change of regime and rights (or more accurately "lefts") the ship of state, takes us off the express track to Rightist Corporatist GOP/Teabagger-style Americanization and, if at all possible, makes Stephen Harper cry in public and boots John Baird in the plums for good measure.
On the other end of the equation, the business/conservative wing of the Liberal party may flee for the Tories, which, to be honest, is where many of them came from in first place, back when Brian Mulroney became the most unpopular man in the country and left Kim Campbell holding the electoral bag. They were fiscally conservative and, to a degree socially conservative too, but being from Ontario and Quebec they weren't about to throw their lot in with the Alberta separatists in the Reform Party so they migrated to the Liberals under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. Both the influx of Red Tories and the combined leadership of those two men dragged the Liberals far to the right of where it was in the days of Pierre Trudeau and Mike Pearson. At the same time, the pendulum swing to the right during the Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney years had also dragged the Overton window further right and what was "centerist" in the '60s and '70s was considered "left of center" by the end of the '80s, "liberal" by the mid-90's and is currently referred to as "godless anarcho-socialist islamofascism" by teabaggers and blogging tories today. In the last 30 years the pivot of the political pendulum has moved steadily to the right and the Liberal Party of Canada has moved with it. Merging with the NDP will definitely drive some people away from the party and into the arms of the Harper Conservatives.
However, what a merger would do is drag the center of Canadian politics back to the left - maybe not back to where it was in the '60s and '70s, but at least it would stop the steady march toward the right and maybe by providing us with a more liberal Liberal Party and a group of New Democrats actually in power, drag the Overton Window a smidgen back toward where it used to be, back when the NDP wanted to nationalize the banks and before "liberal" became a epithet in public discourse.
Those NDPers prepared to jump ship to maintain their ideological and ethical purity rather than sell out to the corrupt, power-hungry Liberals, would likely flee to the Greens, finally providing the Green Party with the numbers it needs to put some people in the House of Commons and become a real force in Canadian politics rather than being seen as a bunch of well-meaning hippie environmentalists who are unelectable. Those Liberals fleeing the merged parties out of a distaste for dealing with those union-loving pinko welfare bum radicals from the NDP, will hold their nose and rejoin the Conservative Party of Canada, probably pulling that party back from the brink of becoming the GOP North. If enough of them change sides to keep the Conservatives in power, there will once again be a sufficient number of Red Tories to deny the  crazies their red meat, and since Konservative Krazies  gotta eat, it might even be enough to drive them out of the Conservative party and back into the Reform/Alliance/Bund party wilderness.
These would all be good things.
The likely result then, would be a Liberal Democrat government with either a narrow majority based on the combined Liberal-NDP vote in Ontario and BC,  or a the Conservative hang on to more seats in Ontario, a minority government in which they hold 40% of the seats with the Bloc and Conservatives neck and neck in the race to form the official opposition and a respectable Green Party presence in the House of Commons.
In other words, win-win.
Now, having said all that, I think it is far more likely for the Liberals and the New Democrats to put any merger plans on the back burner due to possible internal and conservative-driven media backlash and instead work toward the idea of a coalition that would announce its intention to form a government following the next election if the Conservatives fail to win a majority. The coalition could effectively cooperate on a national basis to get behind the most like candidate to succeed - "putting partisan and ideological differences aside for the good of the country in this time of terrible crisis brought on by the current Stephen Harper government's mishandling of so many grave issues of importance to all Canadians."
The Conservatives would scream bloody murder, look like a bunch of crybabies and either hand the Liberals a straight-up majority, or, assuming some bait-cutting and horse-trading can be done in good faith by the Liberals and NDP, a solid 65% of the House of Commons and most of the seats outside of Quebec and Alberta.
If a Liberal majority ensues because of dealmaking on the part of the New Democrats, the NDP better have a blood oath signed by the Liberal leadership to include them in the Cabinet  -- and the Liberals better live up to it or they will be known as welshers and cynical opportunists, considered even bigger liars than the Conservatives and never get another left-of-center vote for the next 20 years. Which some in the Liberal Party might consider a valid trade-off for five years of an unfettered majority, but most of them would be the ones most likely to jump to the Conservatives in the first place. I doubt very much that such a betrayal could be spun to the satisfaction of the public. More likely is that even in the event of winning a slim majority, the Liberals would have to dance with them that brung them and, depending on the polls, call a snap election within a couple of years with no coalition deal or carry on and merge with an eye to maintaining power and regaining the mantle of the "natural governing party" under the Liberal Democrat banner.
Now, where is my Warren Kinsella-sized strategic consulting cheque?

A modest proposal

I don't want to beat this whole "Summit costs run amok" thing into the ground (Ha! who am I kidding? This whole thing is blogging gold!) but earlier Dave expressed some concerns over the fact that the captive press corps that will be warehoused by the fake lake in some Toronto warehouse will be getting fed free beer and wine during the G8 and G20 summits. As a reporter, I can assure you it is not unusual for there to be "hospitality suites" set up at such events - though the fake lake is a new, ridiculously expensive and completely idiotic twist on the idea. And those hospitality suites are usually set up by the various marketing boards and trade promotion organizations who exist to promote Canadian products like wine, cheese, beer and other essentials.
Reporters who cover these kinds of huge events sort of expect to be fed and watered to some degree. And if you take journalists who have travelled halfway around the world to cover the summit and herd them into a warehouse 200 km from the actual event and feed them the usual pablum that come out of these kind of events, you better get them liquored up or you're going to need all that security apparatus.
Mind you, they could cancel the whole waste of time and spend all the money on beer as far I'm concerned. At $37 a case (Ontario Beer Store wholesales prices) $1.1 billion would buy 29,729,729 cases of Molson's Canadian. Given that the total population of the country is roughly 34 million give or take 500,000 or so and given that a portion of that total population are underage or abstainers or just plain don't care for beer, we could keep the beer budget to a billion dollars and give every hoser in the Great White North a 24 of chilly wobbypops and still have $100 million left over to put a back bacon sandwich on every plate for Canada Day.
I know these guys would vote for it. After all, it is a lot easier than trying to feed a baby mouse inside the beer bottle.

The party of fiscal responsibility --seriously?

A fake lake? Yeah, because that is so much cheaper than just bussing the press to Huntsville and giving the business to local lodges.

Hooray for Prescott, Az!

It is heartening to see a community respond to racism in this way, and especially to see the school board and principal realize and publicly admit they made a mistake in bowing to racist bullies in the first place. Good for them!


And I hope Steve "racist douche bag" Blair gets the old-fashioned Amish-style shunning by the community that he deserves. If ever anyone deserved the liberal, secular equivalent of a cross burning (would that be an involuntary subscription to Mother Jones and The Nation?), it would be him.
Hat tip to Driftglass for the catching the epilogue after we left the theatre during the credits

Update: Roger Ebert's meditation on racisim is one of the best thing I've read in a while.

Prescient? Yes!

All hail Paddy Chayefsky!

Is there something in the water supply in Arizona?

Or are people there just being taught to be racist dingbats?
Apparently an elementary school in Prescott, Az., allowed the students to vote on what kind of mural they would like to decorate the school with and the kids chose a painting of themselves. Professional artists were called in and worked with the kids to create a mural on the exterior of the school that portrayed the students attending the institution. The problem, apparently, is that some of the students have the temerity to not be white! And so local knuckledraggers, encouraged by (surprise, surprise, surprise!) a local radio talk show host and city councilman, took to driving by and shouting racist epithets at the school and the kids working on the mural.
So in response the principal organized groups of kids to shower the cars of the racist fuckknuckles with bricks and molotov cocktails as they drove by ordered the skin tones of the African American and Latino kids in the mural to be lightened. Nice example to set, Captain Courageous.

On the plus side, now that this story has hit the national press, the radio host, city councilman Steve Blair, has been fired from the radio station. However, he is still a member of the city council and a giant racist douche bag.

Just listen to him in this brief interview in which he is given every chance to backpeddle or reconsider being a racist douche bag and yet, still insists on there is nothing wrong with his actions and that his encouraging people to terrorize a bunch of third graders is all about "freedom."




Big tip of the hat to Cliff at Rusty Idols

RIP Jeanne Robinson

The wife and co-author of one of my favorite writers, hell - favorite people in the world, Spider Robinson died last Sunday. Godspeed, traveller.
If anybody needs me, I'll be under that bottle of Bushmills over in the corner with my copy of Stardance.

Contempt

That's what I feel for Dimitri Soudas and apparently what he feels for the Canadian Parliament and the centuries-old rules of the Westminster Parliamentary system in which it has long been established that the supreme authority rests with Parliament and not with the Prime Minister. Since he has now dodged a formal summons to appear before a Parliamentary committee and insulted Parliament, I cannot see a single good reason for the House of Commons not to proceed with a charge of Contempt of Parliament against this arrogant little shit and have him tossed in jail. And perhaps his boss and a few of his henchmen while they are at it. This is a bluff that the opposition must call -- for the sake of the future of the parliamentary democracy in Canada, they cannot afford to do otherwise.

We've been working on the (BC) railroad

RossK of the Gazetteer joins me on the Maple Syrup Revolution to explain the intricacies of the BC Rail scandal and explore the world of the BC media and blogosphere. You might want to take notes.

Boys and their toys

As mentioned below, the Canadian government is spending over a billion dollars on security for the upcoming Group of Eight and Group of Twenty summit dog-and-pony shows. This is more than five times the original estimate and dwarfs the amounts spent on similar summits in London (April 2009 $30 million) and Pittsburgh (Sept. 2009 -$18 million) both of which dealt with more protesters than can probably be expected in "Toronto the Good"
Some of the money has gone on shiny new toys for the RCMP, OPP and Toronto Police riot squads, crowd control units and motorcade cops as well as the usual close protection bodyguard types, though naturally all the world leaders will be bringing their own sizable security details. About a million dollars has been spent to buy the Toronto Police four "sound notifiers" aka sonic cannons capable of producing sound pressure/ decibel levels about the same as standing behind a 747 when it revs its jets. This isn't just a loud public address system, it is a weapon that causes extreme pain and permanent hearing damage.
Of course that leaves about another $1,099,000,000 for police y, new horses and motorcycles, riot gear, pepper spray, tasers, and lots and lots of "consulting fees" for "security experts" and plenty of contracts for private security firms. I bet this guy doesn't get any of it.
In fact, it is so much money that they could have simply paid every man, woman and child in the entire province of Ontario about $95 just to stay home for those two weekends and still have had enough to provide a similar level of security to the Pittsburgh summit. Or they could have paid everyone in the Greater Toronto Area about $200 to spend the weekend out of town. If that seems like overkill, we could strictly limit it to Metro Toronto, give all 2.48 million residents $400 and still have more than three times as much as they spent on the London summit to buy coffee and donuts for the Toronto cops.
In addition to the gratuitous skimming and graft bookkeeping problems, my real worry is that you can't give the boys their toys and not expect them to play with them. As we've seen numerous times since the needless pepper-spraying of demonstrators at the 1997 APEC summit to the over-reaction of police at Queen's Park in Toronto in 2000, in New York at the 2004 Republican Convention and at the Minnesota 2008 Republican Convention, if you bring in enough riot cops, you are going to have a riot.
Even if the cops have to try to start it themselves.

Sound familiar?

Any resemblance between this list and any comments by the Harper government, Bush Administration or BP management are strictly coincidental I'm sure.

hat tip to Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money

"Please your honour, have pity on a poor orphan"

One of the advantages of being a conservative seems to be a willingness to engage in the most shameless of behaviours without the faintest scintilla of embarrassment or self-consciousness.


Exhibit A

"The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers, hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should serve their sentences by contributing honest work to government-insured employers."

Imagine my amazement, Conrad "the sweetheart of cell block C" Black now thinks prisons are terrible places and that people convicted of fraud should not be incarcerated. How very, very convenient. I betcha Ted Bundy was opposed to capital punishment, too. Surprisingly, other than the aforementioned free ride for non-violent crimes, I mostly agree with Black's piece in the National Toast - somebody mark the day on calendar and check whether there is some kind of strange planetary alignment.


This, from the preceding paragraph, made me laugh out loud:

"The Canada I remember and look forward to returning to ..."

Oh, Lord Tubby of Fleet, how very droll of you -- how soon we forget.

Exhibit B

TORONTO, June 2 /CNW/ - Maclean's magazine in association with the Historica-Dominion Institute, L'actualité and Presenting Sponsor TD, celebrated the fourth annual Parliamentarians of the Year awards this evening on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Attended by members of Parliament, some of the country's most prominent journalists and other Canadians of note, the event honours Canada's top MPs, as voted by their peers in the House of Commons.

Almost 70 per cent of all members of Parliament from across all parties voted for this year's Parliamentarians of the Year. Winners and runners-up cross all political lines as well.

The award winners will be featured in a special issue of Maclean's hitting newsstands tomorrow, Thursday, June 3, and in L'actualité, on newsstands Friday, June 4. Full award results, photos, runners-up and methodology can also be found at macleans.ca/parliamentarians.

Parliamentarian of the Year

This year's Parliamentarian of the Year is the Hon. John Baird (Conservative), minister of transport, infrastructure and communities and MP for Ottawa West-Nepean. Mr. Baird was elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2008, the same year he was sworn in as minister of transport, infrastructure and communities.

Seriously. That would be this John Baird.  Yeah, this one, this stonewalling obstructionist douchbag. I can only guess that this award is a reaction to the snark shortage resulting from this. I won't even get into the matter of CTV getting Tom Flangan -Stephen Harper's former chief of staff - to come on and "analyze" Baird's behavior with a series of false equivalencies and outright apologetics. I'll just say that Walter Cronkite would not have invited Pat Buchanan or G. Gordon Liddy onto his newscast to analyze the Watergate hearings.

Brave warriors fighting for freedom -- maybe, maybe not

History professor and former soldier Andrew Bacevich, a self-declared "conservative Catholic" who served in Vietnam and the Gulf War, discusses the American Memorial Day holiday in light of the death of  death of his son three years ago in Iraq and the United States' history of imperialistic military adventures. As pointed out by Thers, Bacevich says things one no longer expects to see in the mainstream media:

The fallen gave their lives so we might enjoy freedom: However comforting, this commonplace assertion qualifies at best as a half-truth. Who can doubt that the soldier killed in battle at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach died while advancing the cause of liberty? Whether one can say the same about the Americans who lost their lives assaulting Mexico City in 1847, suppressing Filipino demands for independence after 1898 or chasing rebels in 1920s Nicaragua is less clear, however.

In recent decades especially, the connection between American military intervention and American freedom has become ever more tenuous. Meanwhile, competence has proved notably hard to come by. Rather than being a one-off event, Vietnam inaugurated an era in which the United States has routinely misunderstood and repeatedly misused military power. Even as political authorities sent U. S. forces into action with ever greater frequency, decisive results — what we used to call victory — became more elusive. From Beirut and Bosnia to Iraq and Somalia, the troops served and sacrificed while expending huge sums of taxpayer money. How their exertions were helping to keep Americans free became increasingly difficult to discern.

As a non-American and non-veteran, I speak from considerably less authority, but I will tap-dance a little further into the minefield of our current western culture of military fetishization and beatification of anyone in a uniform. Not only are U.S. (and Canadian and British and other assorted Western soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan) not fighting for our--or anyone else's--freedom, I don't think they are necessarily any braver or more virtuous than anyone else. 

Even if you ascribe the best, most virtuous, most noble of motivations to the average U.S. Marine rifleman in Afghanistan -- that is, you assume he enlisted to "fight for freedom" not because he needed money for college or enlisted in a fit of jingoistic enthusiasm or because his father was in the service or just because he thought that "Full Metal Jacket" was a kick-ass film when he was 18 years old - consider his situation. He has been carefully, methodically, expertly trained. He is clad in ballistic armor, equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and nearly unlimited ammunition, hot chow, top-level battlefield medical care, satellite communications, on-call air support, a massive logistics and intelligence infrastructure supporting him with every thing from hot showers to aerial photographic reconaissance. He is likely transported to the battlefield by armored vehicle or helicopter and knows that if he can stay alive, he can go home from the war when his tour of duty is over.

Consider his opponent - the mujahedeen, the Iraqi insurgent or the Taliban. He has a 20-year old Kalishnakov and a spare magazine - maybe even a grenade or two. If he is extremely fortunate, he might even have a decent pair of boots. He eats what he can scrounge, forage or steal in an impoverished countryside. He knows the terrain and local language because he has been fighting a war here for most of his adult life and will continue to do so until he dies, surrenders or wins -- just keeping his head down and running out the clock is not an option for him. Even if you attribute the most heinous of motives to him -- that he is fighting because he "hates freedom" or just "wants to murder Americans" - and presume that he is not trying to repel a foreign invader, defend his religion and way of life from "decadent and corrupt infidels"  or simply following his father (and probably grandfather) into the what has become the family business -- what make him any less brave than his opponent?

I don't mean this as criticism of those serving in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else the powers-that-be have sent those who volunteered to serve their country, I mean it as a criticism of the blind acceptance that our warriors are somehow morally superior to theirs, that we are better than them simply by virtue of being us or that picking up a rifle somehow makes you a better person than anyone else, that being a soldier is somehow morally superior to being a doctor or a teacher or a farmer.

Is a suicide bombing of a police station in Baghdad really more heinous than an air strike on a wedding party? If you consider the matter of intention, yes, it is - but that makes very little difference to the people on the receiving end. And in the end, how does either the air strike or the terrorist response make any of us more free? And does anyone doubt that in the unlikely event the tables were turned -- if the wingnut fantasy nightmare scenario of a gigantic Islamic Caliphate superpower somehow came to pass and the Western world was somehow invaded and occupied -- that our tactics would be any less desperate? The history of Israel, of Ireland and of the French and Czech resistance in World War Two suggest otherwise.

Why are we so sure we are the good guys?


Update: Cathie from Canada, in response to this post raises the question "so how do we decide whose side God is on?"  Allow me to let Joan Baez answer that question with a lengthy quote from Bob Dylan.

i think i may have a new favorite movie

Nominated for best picture in 1965 and beaten by the Sound of Music.

"Nick in a moment, you're going to see a horrible thing"
        "What's that?"
"People going to work"


for those with shorter attention spans -- the music

I may be the first to say this in about 75 years, but Lee Morse -- hubba hubba!

Getting our money's worth

I mentioned in an earlier post that for the amount of money being spent on the G8/G20 meetings just for security, the government could build a money wall around the main venue for the G8 summit. I ran a few more numbers.
$1.1 billion dollars would allow the government to pay 150,000 security officers $100 per hour for the entire 72 hours and still have $20 million left to buy crullers and large double-doubles from Tim Horton's for the massive security detail.
It would take a better mathematician than I am to figure out the all the numbers, but I'm also confident that for $1.1 billion they could hold both conferences in a giant hollow sphere made of 18 carat gold floating off shore in Lake Ontario. $1.1 billion dollars would buy you nearly 36,000 kilograms of 18k gold. Maybe we could just have Stephen Harper and his Cabinet covered in gold leaf -- that would be sure to impress the visiting dignitaries!

This money is getting spent somewhere, and I suspect that a lot of it is going for fat "consulting fees" and no-bid contracts to Conservative Party of Canada backers. I expect the eventual auditor's report will have more pages discussing pork than the annual report of the Canadian Hog Farmers Association.

Leave your suggestions on how the money could be spent in the comments.

vive la revolution de sirop d'erable!

The latest edition of the Maple Syrup Revolution - in which Canadian Cynic's Lindsay Stewart returns to discuss copyright, lying Conservative Party of Canada MPs, the Harper government's fear of open government and the insane amount of money being spent on security for the G8 and G20 summits -- is ready for your listening pleasure.

Just for fun, I ran some numbers and the 1.1 billion dollars the Canadian government is spending on security for the G8 and G20 summits would build a wall of $10 bills about 3 meters high, 10 centimeters thick and 767 meters long--probably long enough to surround the Deerhurst resort--with enough left over to buy everyone within 100 km of Huntsville, Ontario, a beer.

Jason Kenney: Liar or just absentminded?

I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt. We all forget things we've said or done once in a while, and hey, maybe Jason Kenney has suffered some sort of head injury that has left him unable to remember anything that happened more than a few minutes ago, like that guy in that movie. Or maybe he's been brainwashed into remembering things differently from the way they really happened, like that guy in that other movie. Or maybe, just maybe, he's a dishonest hack who suffers from incendiary trouser syndrome.  Given the frequency with which the Conservative Party of Canada likes to quote chapter and verse from the Adscam scandal, I'm guessing Kenney needs a fireproof chair. From now on we ought to call him "Lilac" Kenney, because he can lie like nobody else.
"But Rev. P," you say, "You can't just go around accusing members of Parliament of being liars! That's terrible! It's libelous!"
Yes, it is true that calling someone a liar, especially a politician, especially one as notoriously thin-skinned as Jason Kenney, is a risky business. One could very well be sued for libel. But you know what buckaroos? This ain't my first rodeo.
The best, indeed just about the only defence to a charge of libel is that the allegedly libelous comment is the truth and can be proved to be so. The truth really will set you free.



Jason "Lilac" Kenny, while being--as this clip shows--a lying douche bag, is correct about one thing: It is the Cabinet member who is ultimately responsible to Parliament for what happens in his ministry and therefore it is essential that his underlings never ever get a chance to tell Parliament just how badly the ministry and by extension the minister, has screwed up a particular issue. Twentysomething senior aides just can't be counted on to lie as effectively as a Cabinet minister and therefore must be kept away from testifying before Parliamentary committees where the Conservative Party can't control the questions they could be asked.
Imagine the disaster that could ensue if one of these young "inexperienced" aides who are paid about 100 grand a year to essentially run the ministries for their elected bosses were ever put in a position by a Parliamentary committee where they would have to tell the truth about the shit their boss was trying to pull in order to salvage whatever future career they might have. Cabinet ministers on the other hand, in addition to generally being accomplished bullshit artists, have already peaked careerwise and have the added option of blaming their staff for doing things the minister -- who is far too busy to deal with the day to day details dotcha know -- could not possibly have known about!
Just what is it that the Stephen Harper Conservatives are so desperate to hide?

(hat tip to Stageleft for the video)

Questions are a burden to others, answers are a burden to oneself.

For years, we've known that Stephen Harper is a control freak who insists that every utterance of everyone speaking for the government be vetted through the PMO, but methinks he has now gone a bit too far. 
 First, it was gagging backbenchers so that the ignorant, knuckledragging rednecks let's be kind and say the "less sophisticated, less media-savy" among his Reform Alliance colleagues didn't start ranting about racial minorities and commies under the bed "get off message" and embarass  the "New Government of Canada." Then, after he realized he a had a few of these loose cannons in the Cabinet, ministers were told to zip it, that anything that had to be said would be said by the PMO. After all the press were hostile and prone to asking "gotcha" questions and-- let's face it-- your average Parliament Hill journalist engaging a Reform-Tory Cabinet Minister in a battle of wits is pretty much attacking an unarmed target.
Having shut out the press to the degree possible, Harper then decided that even Parliamentary committees should be served a nice big mug of STFU, and the party put out a manual for Conservative members that explained how to block committee business, even completely shut things down by being obstructionist arseholes if things weren't going their way. When that didn't work well enough to keep 
a committee from demanding information about the way Afghan detainees were being dealt with and whether Canadian troops could face accusations of war crimes for the negligent way their superiors had decided to organize things, Harper shut down Parliament and hoped the whole thing would blow over.
It didn't.
Next he tried the classic American conservative argument -- that everything was a matter of national security and  tippy-top secret to protect our wonderful troops and if you wanted to violate that sacred trust and find out what the elected government had ordered the troops to do on the nation's behalf,  well clearly you were a troop-hating pinko bastard who hated freedom -- Wolverines!!!
Then the Speaker of the House stuck a pin in that particular trial balloon.
Now, Harper has decided that ministerial aides and other senior staff answer to no one but the PMO and the Minister and couldn't possibly be called upon to answer questions by Parliamentary committees. The spin he is trying to put on this is both hilarious and ironically true. The justification for this notion that just because they draw a government salary, civil servants shouldn't ever have to explain their actions to Parliament is that the Ministers are ultimately responsible for what is done in their ministry. This is true -- and just you wait and see how responsible some of these schmucks are going to be held if their underlings are ever made to testify under oath about the crap that goes on at the behest of their bosses.

So if Dmitiri Soudas is able enough to command a handsome taxpayer-funded salary as the director of communications for the Prime Minister of Canada, he can damn well answer a few questions about his job from the House of Commons Ethics Committee. Parliament is supreme and if it summons him, he better show up, otherwise he will be guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And if Michael Ignatieff , Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton won't  go to the mat on this, then they won't go to the mat on anything and we might just as well let Harper appoint himself dictator-for-life and be done with it.

Also, what Dave said -- that goes double for me.

sad, but true

It is tragic that we have fallen so far.