Let me be perfectly clear

A few commenters and correspondents have accused me of supporting or at least giving aid and comfort to the Black Bloc Anarchist protesters who grabbed so much attention in Toronto during the G20 summit. Such accusations are, to use the mot juste "crap."  My parents raised me much better than that.

I am most certainly NOT defending the brain-dead attention whores in the so-called Black Bloc, I think they are childish tantrum-throwing clowns. I am criticizing the ham-fisted police response to them, which is not the same thing.
As far as I can see the police played right into the hands of this tiny group of dingbats in Toronto by letting them run wild on Saturday smashing windows and giving them patrol cars to burn and then turned around let the frustrated riot cops off the leash to arrest and even beat innocent peaceful protesters. Entire blocks were surrounded by the police in a strategy called "kettling" in which they seal off an area and arrest everyone in it, protesters, reporters, residents - anyone and everyone on the street. This is a violation of the constitution. Add to that the Ontario government passing last minute laws of dubious constitutionality, in secret no less, and the Toronto police chief adding his own illegal addendums and lying about what the law allowed his officers to do and you a have the results of the G20 on Canada. Previous use of agent provocateurs by the police, such at the Montebello summit two summers ago, have lead to a situation where anytime the there is violence of this nature at a major event, there will always be some question of whether the police were involved. Public trust in the police has been drastically eroded, and not without cause. And THAT is what the anarchists really want.
In that sense, the Black Bloc were very successful. The police - who bragged they had infiltrated the group prior to the summit - did nothing to stop them, but fueled their antics by giving them free rein on Saturday and then used the damage they could have and should have stopped to justify an unconstitutional, heavy-handed response the rest of the weekend and as an object lesson to defend the ridiculous amount of money spent on security.
For the most part the television media lapped it up--pictures of burning police cars were all over the news and no one initially questioned any statement the police made.
One of your favorite journalists, Christie Blatchford, has been pushing this emotional story from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair about how the black bloc protesters disrupted the repatriation ceremony in Toronto for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Except that video taken at the event shows absolutely no indication of any kind of disruption occurring. This further erodes the credibilty of both the police and the mainstream press -- another win for the forces of stupid black bloc anarchist wannabe revolutionaries.
I am not a fan of the black bloc hooligans by any means at all. I think they are dangerous, have no agenda except breaking the system and offer no alternatives. Mostly, I think they are bunch of self-important grandstanding assholes and petty vandals. They consider themselves revolutionaries and the job of a revolutionary is to provoke a response by the state, to get them to crack down on the population and thereby provoke antigovernment sentiment and expand support for the revolution. This only works if the state panics and gives the revolutionaries what the want by cracking down and pissing people off -- and that is what happened in Toronto this weekend.

If the cops had just done their job instead of playing PR and political games to serve their own ends, there would be about 50 of the Black Bloc  in jail for variations on the charge of aggravated jackassery, most of them with scrapes and bruises, the rest of the weekend would have gone smoothly and we'd be talking about how badly the government overspent on the summits. Instead, the police and government have sowed the seeds of increasing public distrust in authority and undermined the foundations of civil society--which is just what the Block Bloc wants.

Men in black - Maple Syrup Revolution podcast

Dave of the Galloping Beaver guest stars with me on the Maple Syrup Revolution as we spend a full hour discussing what the heck happened in Toronto and why. Then I go and get all sentimental about my homeland.

This week the Maple Syrup Revolution is having a Two-for-One sale in honor of Canada Day, so get over there and download all the punditry you can stand.

Like this?

 Canada spent about a billion dollars on the G8/G20 summits and had an army of 20,000 cops on call with sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, clubs, shields, body armour, horses, firehoses and everything else short of frickin' laser beams and yet couldn't stop 100 skinny little punks in black bandanas and hoodies -- a group they claimed to have infiltrated prior to the summits. (some might argue they had infiltrated them during the summit too)  Not only did they have the gear and manpower, they were even willing to completely make up imaginary laws to allow them to violate the rights of anyone they wanted to. Now it comes out that the cops were told to stand down on Saturday when the black bloc douchebags were having their little tantrum on Younge Street.

The conservative take on this whole thing has been to tar all the protesters with the same brush and blame the thousands of non-violent demonstrators who were exercising their rights as citizen for not doing the police force's job for them and physically confronting and stopping the terrifying masked anarchists on their own.

Like this guy did.

 

More here

Black Bloc in action!

Look! There's a guy in a black shirt and black hat shouting! OMG! He's asking angry questions about a large corporation! And who  knows what he has in that plastic bag or in that shoulder bag -- probably bombs! Quick, get the riot cops to the Eaton Center and start clubbing bystanders!

Jail Bill Blair

The Toronto police chief apparently thinks it is a cute idea to play silly buggers with the law. 
Ha ha fucking ha.
This moral cretin has destroyed what was left of public trust in law enforcement in Canada's largest city, if not across the entire nation, for the foreseeable future.
Livid doesn't begin to describe how I feel about this completely wanton abuse of authority.
Dismissal in disgrace? 
Fuck that, I want the sonofabitch in jail.
Yesterday. 
Of all the crimes that can be committed, short of murder or child molestation I can't offhand think of any that are worse than a POLICE CHIEF making up his own laws. Call it breach of promise, breach of the peace, dereliction of duty, fraud, criminal negligence -- I don't care what charge they come up with, but this man - by his own smug admission - absolutely betrayed the trust placed in him as a peace officer and in doing so violated the civil rights of thousands of citizens. He should be in the Don Jail pending trial and if there is a single crown prosecutor in Toronto with any testicular fortitude at all, he will be in front of a judge by morning -- but I'm not holding my breath.

Toronto the good

Cripes, you leave the country for a dozen years or so and it turns into a fascist police state. Maybe my family should reconsider our plans and relocate to somewhere more agreeable. Like Iran.
Now, admittedly the cops here are restrained--in the United States, this guy would have simply been tasered after using the word "bullshit" and arrested for "public obscenity" or some other bullshit charge, but charging an apparently peaceful crowd like this? Not to get all teabaggy or anything, but I want my country back! Stephen Harper said we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was through with it, and he was right. This is the kind of thing that used to happen in Burma or Cuba, not Canada. I am ashamed of my homeland and at a bit of a loss as to how I'll explain to my kids that this is where we are going to live - a country where police beat up journalists like their father.
And fuck you, Dalton McGuinty.

"Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all– the policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, 1968

Update: My fellow inkstained wretch from the Galloping Beaver, Alison has some telling videos posted on the nature of the Black Bloc rampage, the widespread use of plainclothes cops in "snatch squads," many of whom, interestingly,  are dressed much like their Black Bloc counterparts.

More updating: The objections of my good friend and former tag-team wrestling partner Sanganjaya Boy in the comments respectfully acknowledged -- and yes, Japan has a reprehensible "guilty until proven innocent" system when it comes to policing, but we aren't talking about Japan here, we are talking about Canada -- if this isn't the action of a police state, or at the very least an appalling abuse of power by the police, then what is?

I smell a stainless steel rat

That $1.1 billion had to be going somewhere and now we know where a chunk of it is going -- to a security firm that isn't even licenced in Ontario and is offering about double the going rate for its glorified bouncers. I'm sure the firm in question - Contemporary Security Canada - has absolutely no ties to the Conservative Party of Canada and that everything was strictly on the up and up in granting them the massive contract for providing about 1,000 security screeners, many of whom were hired last month so I'm sure they will be trained to a razor's edge.

“We’ve had some intense discussions about this at APSA in the last few days,” says Ross McLeod, president of the Association of Professional Security Agencies based in Toronto. “I’ve been doing RFPs and tenders for 30 years in this business, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.”

(snip)

On May 31, Contemporary Security set up a hiring office at Humber College in Toronto and was taking applications up until today.

Contemporary held the $97-million security contract for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. On its website Contemporary says they will be "Supervised by the RCMP and Integrated Security Unit" and will be responsible for providing "airport-type pedestrian security screening, including inspection of persons and items at  the G8 and G20 sites."

According to its own website, CSC has received its licence to operate in Ontario and since I can't determine the exact publication date of the article quoted above except to narrow it down to sometime this month, I suppose it is possible CSC has been licenced in Ontario for as long a two whole weeks.

(With apologies to Slippery Jim DiGriz for this post's title)

The return of the son of the bride of Friday Ukulele blogging

The original


by  Bob Dylan and some guy on guitar






The covers

the lovely and talented Sophie Madeline


the winsome and witty Molly Lewis




Bonus track: Not ukulele, but this kid could go places with the right management

That woman is a crooked idiot

She still thinks she's presidential material, but the snowbilly grifter can't even manage to set up a legal defense fund for herself without breaking the law.

My inspiration as a clergyman

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Prophet Glenn Beck - Father Guido Sarducci
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

the dog daze of bloggerdom

It is hot and wet in Tokyo and I have almost nothing to say about anything except to note that setting the air conditioner to 25+ degrees Celcius is not only inappropriate, it could be considered grounds for divorce and/or justifiable homicide. Screw the enviroment, damn the expenses, I want it cold enough in the living room that the ice in my glass doesn't completely melt before I add the gin -- It was 33 degrees here the other day with a humidity level of holyfreakingshityougottabekidding and a yellow sand & smog level that required an aqualung -- and this is only June. Thank Jebus, Mohammed and Buddha we are leaving before it get really hot in August.

In the meantime - go amuse and enlighten yourself.

Fox anchorblonde's job "just like the being president"

Fox fans on Facebook

Driftglass does the usual up-one-side-and-down-the-other-with-a-pickax-handle on the babbling Babbitt  of the bourgoisie and brings to mind what we talk about when we talk about snark

This just in, 40% of poll respondents certifiably goofy

I'd love to see God prove he exists by doing some smiting. I'd also love to see the pretzel logic used to admit Karl Rove to the country while trying to keep so many others out.

A great photo of the courageous G20 security forces in action

Finally, if you read nothing else all week, go and have a look at this excellent piece by Skipper Dave - a man who knows the complexities of command -  on why Stanley McCrystal is lucky just to have been fired for his insubordination and not put against a wall and offered a cigarette -- and he doesn't even mention that the man is a war criminal .

It could be worse

Every time I get frustrated and think that Canadian politics are completely screwy and the country is doomed by ignorance, stupidity and apathy, all I have to do is look south and remember that it could be worse, a lot worse. I could live in this dingbat's district.




I'm not sure if he's running for Congress or promoting an armed insurrection to stop poor people from seeing a doctor. The scary part is that this is a professionally done television spot, so he obviously has some money behind him.

(hat tip to Enormous Thriving Plants)

Because it's done such great things for American politics

It is unavoidable. Soon there will be a Fox News North based around the Sun newspaper chain. Goodbye reasonable discourse, nice knowing you.
Let be clear here - this is not going to be a channel dedicated to reasoned, objective journalism from a conservative perspective, this is going to be the television version of the Blogging Tories. The former press flak for the sitting PM will be running the network --- anyone care to place bets on how long it is before Michael Coren has a show? Or whether such august personages as Kathy Shaide are regular commentators?
It isn't as if Canada didn't already have a couple of conservative networks - how about CTV or Global? Hell even the eeeeevil liburl CBC gives regular airtime to Rex Murphy and Kory Teneycke. And this isn't a matter of people being able to pick and choose what channels they get at home -- they are applying for a "must carry" licence. Imagine the screeching that would ensue if the Playboy channel or some other kind of  porn network applied for a "must carry" licence that meant it would be seen in most Canadian homes. And make no mistake, this is going to be ideological porn, and it will have the same kind of effect that all porn has: It will arouse and excite by pandering to base instincts, while at the same time desensitizing viewers to non-mainstream content, pushing them to crave more extreme content to get their jollies.
Five years from now, when you wonder how in the hell the network that is screening "Alberta Uber Alles with Ralph Klein" or "Honky Night in Canada with Ezra Levant" ever got a licence, remember the  "freedom of speech" arguments that are being made now, and shed a tear for those well-meaning bloggers as Canada's Lowest Common Dominatrix Kate McMillan reads out their addresses on the air and urges her hordes of flying monkeys into action.

"don't tease the panther"

Oh dear Ghod, Glenn Beck has committed fiction. Destined to become a masterpiece of accidental comedy.

the other shoe

This is bound to work out well for the people of Afghanistan.

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.