Friday night viewing

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Moose hunting season

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Another books post

Those of you who have been following my efforts to read 50 books this year, having not seen a post about what I've been reading lately, need not worry. ( I know, I know -- it has just been eating away at you, hasn't it?) I have been keeping up with my reading, I have merely fallen behind on my posting about reading. Here is what I've been plowing through over the last month:

13. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
As I've said to pretty much anyone who will listen for the last couple of years, this is the best book about modern politics I've ever read. It is a detailed history of Nixon's career up to the Watergate scandal and readily demonstrates where the current massive political divides of the present day got their start. I spent a couple of months picking away at this book in short chunks  and given its cinderblock proportions that is really the only way to go about it.   An absolutely fascinating read.

14.An Orgy of George by George Carlin
Another doorstop of a book, this is actually a collection of three of Carlin's books: Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty and When will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? This one has been sitting next to the toilet since New Year's day, the perfect place for it since it is funny, funny shit and you couldn't really sit and read more than a few pages at a time.

15. Stainless Steel Visions by Harry Harrison
A collection of short stories by SF author Harry Harrison. Read this in an afternoon. Several excellent little gems that read like Twilight Zone scripts, especially "Not Me, Not Amos Cabot" and a nifty little Stainless Steel Rat story. This and dinner with an old friend who is a SF/Fantasy buff got me off on a bit of a SF/Fantasy bender as subsequent entries will show.

16. Makers by Cory Doctorow
Another fascinating read. Doctorow has an ear and eye for the near future the way a good jazzman knows what the changes will be before they are played. This one looks at the impact that 3D printer technology coupled with venture capitalism and technojammers could have on society, all of which sound pretty far-fetched at first until you realize that almost all the technology (with the exception of the "Fatkins" bio-tech obesity treatments) already exists. Definitely worth a re-read and I'll be seeking out more of Doctorow's work.

Coming soon: more SF and Fantasy and then on to some stuff assigned for review at the paper.


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More ratfucking

Looks like Pierre Poutine has been at it again.
How long before we get to see Dean Del Mastro speculate about whether it was the Liberals who did this or the NDP executive in a false flag attack intended to gin up sympathy for the party or possibly the CBC trying to invent a story.
The good news is Elections Canada has the IP addresses. I hope somebody is getting their ass thrown in jail for this. Like the so-called robocalls vote suppression fraud, this is well beyond dirty tricks, this is criminal interference in the democratic process.

Update: The company that ran the electronic voting at NDP convention is now saying the vote was secure and accurate and that the denial of service attack was clearly the work of professionals.   The anti-democratic scum that did this will fail to completely cover their tracks or brag to someone or otherwise trip over their own dicks and get caught eventually.
And when that happens, I'm sure Stephen Harper will be shocked, just shocked to find out that there is gambling going on at Rick's Cafe American a dirty tricks department operating behind the scenes. More surprising still will be the stunning revelation that no one is responsible for it, that it has no connection at all to the CPC and that all its funding either materialized out of thin air or came from a stable full of unicorns that shit gold ingots. Dean Del Mastro will somehow explain that the Liberals are behind the whole thing.
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Imagine the screeching outrage...

If the Nicaraguan national assembly or Honduran national assembly sent a letter to a city in the United States and asked them not to erect a statue of Ronald Reagan?
hat tip to Doug Saunders
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If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention

Also this


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Muppetry

I know this story is kind of old news by now, but I can 't help wondering whether Dick Cheney - who sees this in the mirror:

ever actually had any intention at all of coming to Toronto. His last public appearance in Canada saw him get "trapped" in his hotel by protestors for seven hours. And by trapped I mean "decided not to leave the hotel because the crowd outside threatened to hurt his feelings" by calling him a war criminal to his face, something that doubtless would have been captured on camera and replayed endlessly in campaign commercials. The notion that Cheney's various assembled bodyguard and the sizeable police presence couldn't have protected him from the crowd outside is as ridiculous as the notion that Ann Coulter's speech was shut down due to actual threats rather than as a publicity stunt. 

Notice that none of the stories about the supposed cancellation of the speech actually quote Cheney or his Princess of Darkeness in training daughter Liz, who was also supposedly booked to speak. Notice too, that there is no mention of tickets having been sold, or refunds being offered. There is also some evidence to suggest that he was never actually booked to begin with.

Spectre Live's Ryan Ruppert, president of the company promoting Cheney's appearance, has apparently claimed the Cheneys, through their agent, said they felt the chance of violent demonstrations was too high in Toronto. There are also suggestions that death threats were received and that Cheney feared arrest by the ICC for war crimes.

This is all bullshit. If the Toronto Police can arrest 1,000 people and beat up hundreds more for little or no reason during the G20, I think they can manage to keep "anarchists" from burning down the city if Cheney comes to speak.  As far as death threats are concerned, I would think that Cheney probably gets death threats whenever he leaves his lair and he is probably at more risk visiting New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or even Dallas than he would be in Toronto. And given the way our present government venerates him, I hardly think he needs to worry about the mounties clapping him in irons.

No, I suspect what really happened is that there just weren't enough rich assholes willing to pay $60 to $250 a seat to see the oil industry's meat puppet dance around the fact that he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the United States embracing torture. Without lots of advance ticket sales, the very new promotion company would never have the money to pay Cheney's sizeable speaking fee, and you know Dick doesn't do any of this out of the goodness of his cyborg central blood pump. So what to do?

What do conservatives ever do? Play the martyr! "Big mean commie protesters have prevented Dick Cheney from speaking! Won't you please help fight the dirty hippies and defend freedom of speech by buying a ticket to see our brave free speech warriors speak?"

No, not Ezra Levant, he was busy. No, those dumb enough to get fleeced by this bait-and-switch will be getting the SUN-TV B team.

Now that Cheney has cancelled his speech in Toronto due to "safety concerns" he has been replaced by former theatre critic and current drama queen Mark Steyn and SUN-TV's resident overage racist skinhead Michael Coren.

In other words, instead of seeing this:

Blogging tories and other idiots will be forking over their money to see this:

Bonus added awfulness: Steyn deigns to speak to the socialist rabble at CBC Radio about how the mean, mean marxist thugs are violating Dick Cheney's right to brag about torturing and killing children.

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happy St. Patrick's Day

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Harper's Nixon moment

Well played, you baby-noshing election-stealing dead-eyed bastard, well played indeed.

I'm sometimes accused of being cynical about politics or seeing conspiracies where none exist and, up to a point, I will admit this is sometimes true. It is an occupational hazard for journalists and politics watchers. Sometime rather than reacting to the crisis or issue or outrage du jour, I like to take a broader view and look at how various events and actions interrelate and examine things on a purely tactical level.
And from a purely tactical point of view, I have to hand it to Stephen Harper and his communications brain trust this week for this.

PM: Duty of Canadians to remember Shafias

Harper has 'no plans' to discuss death penalty

By Giuseppe Valiante ,QMI Agency

MONTREAL - Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced funding for an education campaign against so-called honour killings on Friday but dismissed the idea of hanging honour killers.
Harper said the federal government will give $348,150 to the Shield of Athena Family Service, a Montreal-based women's organization.
Announcing the funding in Montreal is symbolic: The city was home to Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and son Hamed, who earlier this year were sentenced to life in prison for the 2009 drowning of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Mohammad Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir.

From a tactical point of view, this was a brilliant move. The government has been taking it on the chin over their voter suppression efforts and their usual rote repetition of "the Liberals did it first/too," "Scandal? What scandal?" and "We didn't do anything, nobody saw us and besides you can't prove anything" doesn't seem to be getting much traction, Michael Sona is refusing to stay under the bus and more dots are being connected and more damning information keeps coming out.
Harper and his  inner circles of advisors seem to realize they have tripped over their collective dicks and no amount of Dean Del Mastro haplessly obfuscating on Power and Politics is going to unfuck that particular goat.

In addition, the effort to appease their social conservative base via Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth's attempt to reopen the abortion debate without reopening the abortion debate is going over about as well as a fart in church. The pro-forced birth "abortion is the same as murdering babies" crowd don't want to pussyfoot around the topic and are getting annoyed that the CPC isn't delivering on what they want. A sizable majority of women (and the men who love them) - even those who don't think of themselves as feminists - already stirred up by the Rush Limbaugh "slut-gate" episode down south, have been treating Woodworth's whole premise as the pile of crap it is and are pulling no punches, taking to social media in droves to vent their outrage.
The knuckledragger base are tired of high-fiving over getting rid of the long-gun registry and the Shafia conviction and want fresh red meat. Even conservative loyalists are having a hard time defending the government on the voter suppression issue. When the CPC loses the sensible media conservatives like Andrew Coyne, you know the ship is taking on water.
And on Thursday, the government had to admit that maybe, just maybe, they might have made an error in committing to the F-35 since it is going to cost twice what they said it would if it ever gets airborne in the first place.

Clearly, action was needed, a distraction had to be found.

And so Stephen Harper emerged on Friday with a tactically perfect speech.
It lets the knuckledraggers and Good Germans in the base get back into a lather about evil swarthy Muslim foreigners and crime. It lets the PM flex his "tough on crime" muscles. It lets Harper pose as a defender of oppressed women. He even managed to throw in the "of course we wouldn't dream of reopening the debate on capital punishment" bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink.
Since he has delegated the public spinning and partisan House of Commons hackery in defense of voter suppression and election cheating to Del Mastro, giving this speech also allows Harper to try and show how Prime Ministerial and dignified he is, rising above partisanship and striding the high moral ground.

And woe betide any nay sayers - if you accuse the PM of simply trying to distract attention from the voter suppression scandal, you are comparing murdered young women to 'shiny objects' and are clearly a monster who hates women and loves terrorists, criminals and isn't a serious person concerned about a serious issue like philosopher-saint-poet-warrior-and-defender-of-civilization Stephen Harper.

Only a terrible, awful mean-spirited person like a Liberal would be so cynical as to think this speech was anything but the proud, brave wonderful Stephen Harper talking seriously about a serious issue of grave seriousness that is a terrible, terrible problem in her majesty's dominion. St. Stephen the Wise and Powerful would never ever politicize the deaths of these young women, that's the kind of thing horrible leftists would do.
If you commies can't even admit that honor killings are a terrible problem in Canada then you probably hate justice almost as much as you hate the troops, babies and kittens. Shame on you all and no, the Prime Minister will not be taking questions or reopening the debate on capital punishment, we are too busy not reopening the debate on abortion right now.

Nope, from a tactical point of view, that speech was brilliant and bulletproof.

With the voter suppression scandal snowballing, and curtain being pulled back on the CPC's fraud and sabotage, some are saying that this is Harper's Watergate. Some are comparing him to Richard Nixon. They are not wrong. I won't be surprised if a secret CPC memo (or clandestine tape recording) surfaces one day referring to the four Shafia women collectively as "Checkers."

Because to Stephen Harper  and the CPC brain trust politics is war by other means and winning is all that matters. This is all just tactics.
In the long run, they know that the so-called robo-call scandal will eventually play out to their benefit as long as they can make sure the mud gets sprayed around on their opponents, too. The more people who throw their hands up and turn their backs on politics in disgust, the better the CPC likes it. Now they don't even have to call them to tell them where their polling station has been shifted, because they don't want any part of voting anymore. As long as there is a solid, unstable mass of  hardcore knuckledraggers who will come to the polls for when the conservative throw them  a few hateful bones, Harper and his happy band of fascist wannabes are delighted if they can turn everyone else off of politics.
Morality, ethics, and respect for the dead? A sense of shame? Respect for democracy and the rule of law? Those are for losers, you silly dirty hippie. 

But then, I'm sometimes accused of being cynical.


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OMFG! SPACE NAZIS ON THE MOON!

Looks like Newt Gingrich got his moon colony after all



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Credit where credit is due

While I fundamentally disagree with Andrew Coyne on many, many things I think he may be the last sane small "c" conservative in the public marketplace of ideas. He is unquestionably a conservative who favours smaller government, lassiez faire economic policies and fiscal conservatism and no fan of the "dirty hippies." He is not a doctrinaire "my-party-right-or-wrong" movement conservative who toes the party line, but a reasonable, educated and generally sensible man, the kind who disappeared from the Conservative Party of Canada along with Joe Clark and Robert Stanfield.
Speaking on the weekend at the Manning Centre's conservapalooza, he took a horsewhip to the Conservative Party of Canada.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

(snip)

That party was against breaking election promises. That party was against patronage and pork-barreling. And that party was against corruption and political dirty tricks. I don't know whether you are still that party.

This isn't a question of incrementalism, but of going in entirely the wrong direction. It isn't just that you failed to do the things you should have. It is that you did things you should not have. And, what is worse, you did them, not reluctantly or shamefacedly, but enthusiastically. You didn't just sell out. You bought in.

How long before the CPC-SunNews wurlitzer starts calling him a Liberal stooge?

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At long last sir, have you left no sense of decency?

Senator Fatass steps waaaaay over the line.

Harper-appointee Percy Mockler told the Senate it had to stop the interference of foreign foundations who were "muddling" in the business of our country. "I believe they do abuse the laws of Revenue Canada," he said. Not all foundations, of course, were "evil," Mockler said. "Just some of them." The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did good work, as did The Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian Tire Foundation for Families. But others were "qualified bad, not to mention ugly, foundations," Mockler said, listing: The David Suzuki Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Greenpeace International Foundation, the Sierra Club Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Ecojustice Canada Bullitt Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Tides Canada and the MADD foundation. "They are all anti-Canadian," said Senator Mike Duffy, a former television personality and another Harper-appointed Tory.

Keep in mind that conservative shills such as the National Citizens Coalition, the Manning Centre for Teaching Conservatives How to Get and Keep Power Democracy and the Fraser Institute are all non-profit tax-exempt foundations.

It may well be that the Tory members of the chamber of sober second thought are throwing this bit of agit-prop in an attempt to deflect the attention of the media and their political opponents away from the ongoing scandal over Conservative voter-suppression efforts in the last election. We bloggers and media types have notoriously short attention spans and love us some shiny objects. And who among us doesn't love to hate Mike Puffy, especially when he purposely says outrageous and offensive things like this? 

The truth, though, is that we can be mad about more than one thing at a time and will not be distracted from the so-called "RoboCon" scandal over illegal voter suppression and electoral fraud by the Conservatives until some people - and I use the term loosely - from the upper ranks of the CPC get the jail time they so richly deserve.

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amazing video for 3/11

from Adrian Storey at Uchujin



Also, check out the new book from the gang behind Quakebook

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But...but...lefties use bad words on the internet

Dear people who like to claim "both sides do it"  and bemoan the use of strong or obscene language on the part of the lefty and progressive bloggers and claim that calling people "fascists" is hyperbolic vilification.
Go read what Dr. Dawg has brought back from the conservative swamp and then you can come back and apologize. And be sure you click all the "again" links.

addendum, with a hat-tip to Driftglass

"Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare--Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive."

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Killing time

Much is being made by folks on the left in the U.S. from Glenn Greenwald to the Rude Pundit about the speech this week by Attorney General Eric Holder on the legality of the President killing American citizens without any sort of trial or other judicial process. As Stephen Colbert described it, Holder's argument is that the U.S. constitution promises "due process" not judicial process - that as long as there is a standard process followed in every case, everything is nice and legal. And that due process at the moment is that the president and his advisers discuss matters and decide which American citizen they want to kill. And then they kill them.
Pretty nasty stuff, to be sure and I agree with Glennzilla and his Rudeness that Obama's dogged continuation of some of the worst excesses of the Bush regime is despicable.
But speaking as a not-American, welcome to our world U.S. citizens! Your government has been killing us clearly inferior not-Americans all over the globe for many many years now - sometimes by proxy, sometimes with drones, sometimes with airstrikes, sometimes with your military and espionage agencies, sometimes for commercial considerations, sometimes for revenge, sometime just for shits and giggles - with near total impunity. And most of the time, the vast majority of you have been okay with that.
I'm not saying that every instance of the United States government killing people is wrong. We were quite pleased you finally pitched in and helped defeat Hitler after a couple of years of watching from the sidelines. What I am saying is that it is tough for us not-Americans to get too upset about the U.S. Government deciding that it is going to level the playing field and start killing Americans just like it kills everybody else. 
I know this is upsetting for some of you what with that notion of American exceptionalism and all that, but I figure maybe, just maybe, if you know you are in the same boat as the rest of the world when it comes to the U.S. government being able to whack you at the drop of a hat for any reason at all, no questions asked, you might start to think that letting the government kill people, any people, isn't such a hot idea. You might even start to think that its a bad idea to threaten to bomb countries just because it's an election year and the yahoo contingent want a "strong" leader.



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I don't usually read the horoscopes, but this one is spot on

 Sagittarius It's true that no man is an island, but all bullshit humanistic hand-wringing aside, it's totally okay to be happy that malignant Breitbart asshole is gone forever.

 My sympathies to his wife and children. By all accounts he was a devoted family man and I'm sure they will miss him. It is always sad for friends and family when someone dies at such a  relatively young age.

It is also sad that this is the only nice thing I can think of to say about Andrew Breitbart.
Smart Patrol, who is considerably less sympathetic,  has much, much more to say over at A Drop of the Hard Stuff
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He's cheesy and he's greasy

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Dumb and Dumber

Who is a clumsier liar and stupider spin merchant - Dean Del Mastro or Maurice Vellacot?

 In this corner....IT WAS THE LIBERALS!

Conservative demand Liberals release phone records, but won't release their own
Dean Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, blamed the Liberals over and over again during question period Monday.
"When those records are made public the Liberal party will in fact have fingered itself for each and every one of those calls," he said.
However, when asked by reporters if the Conservatives would release their own records, Del Mastro said they didn't need to because they are not the guilty party.
"No, because obviously our party is not behind the calls. We know that. We believe the Liberal Party has in fact made these allegations and they've made these allegations knowing full well that they've paid these companies millions of dollars to makes calls to hundreds of thousands of households across the country," he said.
Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said his party has agreed to release all phone records, including scripts, from last May's election.
"We're hoping to release stuff as soon as possible," Rae said, following question period.


And in this corner...IT WAS ELECTIONS CANADA!

Tory backbencher lays blame for robocalls with Elections Canada

OTTAWA — A Conservative backbencher is suggesting Elections Canada may be to blame for the robocalls affair.
“I suspect that at the end of the day, if Elections Canada has the resources to do a proper investigation, they’ll find they’re themselves significantly responsible,” Saskatchewan MP Maurice Vellacott said in a statement.
“That tech issues with marrying (Elections Canada) lists to available, electronic phone lists is part of the problem, and in a few instances there may have been malfeasance by one party or the other.”
Vellacott says there have been numerous address errors by Elections Canada in each of the six federal elections he has contested.

 
Ahem

From the CBC May 2, 2011 story:

Susan Friend, an Elections Canada official, said the agency never calls voters directly to warn them that polling stations have moved.

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Why Stephen Harper really wanted those pandas

I fully expect to see these hairier versions of John Baird knocking on doors for the CPC in the next election

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Running the government like a business

“I'll simply say that our campaign was run with the same standards, the same structure, the same processes that any modern progressive company would use to ensure that its employees, and its agents operate ethically and in compliance with the law,” Mr. Giorno said. 

 Any company, like say Enron or Haliburton or Bre-X.
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