Darryl Raymaker

WAKE UP CANADA! JAMES TRAVERS WANTS YOU TO IMAGINE A COUNTRY!

2010-06-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Travers: Changing Canada, one backward step at a time

Published On Sat Jun 19 2010

By James Travers National Affairs Columnist

Imagine a country where Parliament is padlocked twice in 13 months to frustrate the democratic will of the elected majority. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that slyly relaxes environmental regulations even as its neighbour reels from a catastrophic oil leak blamed on slack controls. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that boasts about prudent financial management while blowing through a $13-billion surplus on the way to a $47-billion deficit. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where a political operative puts fork-tongued words in a top general’s mouth. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that refuses to fund the same safe abortions to poor women abroad as it provides at home. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where the national police commissioner skews a federal election and is never forced to explain. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that writes a covert manual on sabotaging Commons committees. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country dragging its climate change feet as the true north melts. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that silences political debate on the sale of a publicly owned, crown jewel corporation. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that puts higher priority on building super-prisons than keeping people out of them. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where parties that win the most federal seats are dismissed as “losers”. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that twists its foreign policy around the interests of another nation. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that argues that barricading its largest city promotes tourism. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that promises Senate reform only to continue stuffing it with political hacks. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that avoids answers about a controversial war by accusing questioners of supporting the enemy. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where party apparatchiks decide who in a nominally free press is allowed to ask the Prime Minister questions. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where donut shop wisdom is more prized than expert analysis. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that builds a fake lake for a tough-times summit. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that preaches law and order while killing a long-gun registry police chiefs insist makes citizens safer. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where serving the Prime Minister as chief propagandist is job preparation for running a national news network. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country where charities mute constructive criticism of public policy for fear of losing federal funding. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that can spend $1.2 billion for summit security but can’t find the petty cash needed to invest in the status of women. That country is now this country.

Imagine a country that promises accountability only to impose secrecy. That country is now this country.

Every example is familiar, all are documented. Only the cumulative effect is surprising.

Conservatives came to power knowing reluctant Canadians could only be shifted to the political right incrementally. That movement is now advancing according to the plan Conservative thinker, strategist and Stephen Harper mentor Tom Flanagan infuriated the Prime Minister by making public.

Imagine that.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/stephenharper/article/825809--travers-changing-canada-one-backward-step-at-a-time

GRAHAM THOMSON STUMBLES. COLUMN SHOWS HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THE ALBERTA LIBERALS ARE DOING IS COMMON POLITICAL SENSE!!

2010-06-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

LEGENDARY EDMONTON JOURNAL COLUMNIST GRAHAM THOMSON:

FOR ONCE - HE GOT IT WRONG!!!!

On the whole I have always enjoyed the writings of Edmonton Journal columnist Graham Thomson. To me he has always been – dare I say - a fair and balanced observer of Alberta politics. When he graces the pages of the Calgary Herald I read him with great appreciation because for that one fleeting moment in time he gives the editorial page some class. Upon finishing reading his piece the paper then for days on end sinks to its usual low level diatribes from lunatic neocon think tanks and single-issue loud mouths.

So Thomson is different and the people of Edmonton are lucky to have him.

But even Thomson gets it wrong sometimes as he did in his column today entitled, ‘Alberta Liberals split by bid to co-operate.’ Read:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_print.html?id=3145335&sponsor=

He opens with a line surely to capture the affections of the Herald’s editorial page editor: “One of the truisms of Alberta politics: No matter how bad things get for the Liberal Party, they can always get worse.”

He then goes on to list he party’s recent woes as he sees them - the departure from the caucus of Dave Taylor and the decision of Kent Hehr to run for Mayor. Let me assure Thomson as well as others who may think along the same lines that I have talked to a host of Alberta Liberals about Taylor’s grumbling exit, and I have heard very little in the way of regrets or misgivings of any kind - even from people like me who supported Taylor in the leadership race. The consensus is simply that if Taylor was that unhappy, it is better that he left. For David Swann and the remaining caucus it was one less hassle to deal with.

As far as Hehr’s quest for the mayor’s chair is concerned the Grits that I speak to only wish him the best of luck and if he wins they would regard his victory as a feather in every Alberta Liberal’s hat. I mean, he is one of us and he is running for arguably one of the most exciting political offices in the country. How does that reflect badly on the Alberta Liberal Party?

Thomson then moves to the dust-up in Kevin Taft’s riding of Edmonton-Riverview. Three members of the riding association executive have resigned from their positions because of the passing of a resolution at the recent convention of the Alberta Liberal Party. The resolution in question reads:

“be it resolved that the Alberta Liberal Party supports making every reasonable effort to persuade other progressive parties in Alberta to work together during general elections.”

The resolution was controversial and the final tally on the vote was close. I confess that I had something more than a little to do with its content as I had moved it in the workshop as an amendment and spoke for it on the convention floor just before it was passed.

My take on the resolution is simply this. Alberta Liberals, like any political party that aspires to govern, must create a big tent and fill it up with diverse thinking individuals who can set aside some of their differences to support the greater cause. Otherwise, power will forever elude them.

This approach is not new. It has been followed by most progressive parties that have attained power in the Western democracies. The best example in my memory in Alberta is the Progressive Conservative party under Peter Lougheed. Lougheed brilliantly put together a diverse team that represented all elements of Alberta society - business, labour, progressive thinkers, even right-wingers, and so on - who worked together for good government and it delivered for Albertans the best government in the province’s history.

Thus, the resolution meant to me and most others at that convention that Alberta Liberals were extending an invitation to a diverse group of people, many of whom had not supported us before, to work together with them in order to bring about an era of good government for the people of Alberta.

Oh, the wording of the resolution could have been spiffed up somewhat, but the idea was there, and it was clear: All you NDs, Greens, frustrated Tories, Wild Rose Alliancers and anybody else out there who believe in progressive policies that help ordinary people and who are sick and tired of lousy leadership, marginal support, or narrow ideology, come and talk to us . . . or let us talk to you. We want as many of you as possible who believe in progressive policies to come inside of our big tent so we can throw the rascals out in the next election.

Thomson complains that the resolution didn’t explain what “work together” meant, that it didn’t mention parties by name, and that it couldn’t have been aimed at the Tories or the Wildrose Alliance. If Thomson doesn’t know what “work together” means in a political setting he should choose another profession. Just to be sure Thomson understands, “working together” means “working together” to win elections!

As to the party names, why should they be listed in the resolution? Why wouldn’t the Liberals want to welcome disaffected Tories or Wildrose Alliancers along with NDs and Greens who wish to join them in common cause to promote progressive policies on the environment, health care, education, and so on? Do disgruntled Tories and Wildrose Alliancers have some contagious disease?

Thomson says he and others are puzzled about what the Liberals will do with the resolution. C’mon. The resolution is nothing more than a codification and a reminder of what political parties should be doing at all times – generating support for their cause – particularly from others who have not supported them before. This is not rocket science.

So, from the standpoint of someone - namely me - who had as much to do with the resolution being passed as anyone, there is no mystery to it. There are no hidden agendas; there is no intent on weakening the Liberals resolve to win the next election. The resolution simply means that Alberta Liberals should get out there and work towards inviting voters who share our values and who have never voted for us before to give us their support.

HOT OFF THE PRESS: IRATE READER ACCUSES CORBELLA OF SHOWING 'ICY BLUE RIGHT WING COLOURS' IN HER RECENT UNFAIR ATTACK ON DAVID SWANN!

2010-06-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

DAVID SWANN LEADER OF THE ALBERTA LIBERAL PARTY (above)

attacked unfairly says reader

CORBELLA (above)

Irate reader accuses Herald

editor of showing"icy blue right wing colours"

in her recent mean-spirited attack on

David Swann

I have received a note from one of my many loyal and faithful readers who has asked me to post the following open letter to the editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, Ms Licia Corbella. Of course, I try to accomodate all such reasonable requests.

It reads as follows:

Dear Ms. Corbella:

Like Darryl Raymaker, I too thought you more than over-stepped the boundaries of good journalism in your recent political editorial-—you went beyond journalistic decency.

I’m trying to be as objective as possible here—am even willing to cut you a little slack in the objectivity call because none of us is totally impartial, even journalists who have specialized training in this regard.

But Licia, your icy blue right-wing colours are now glowing in the dark. You need a warm bath, with soft candlelight. Try soaking in a couple of these thoughts...How about covering a story or two right out there on the front lines of the poor, the starving, and the dying in Africa? Or, maybe you could do something to improve public health conditions in the Phillipines, or pen a few thoughts on the plight of babies who’ve been made pawns in a war game somewhere.

You could visit our own native people whose pleas with big oil and the government to clean the tailing ponds have largely been ignored.

I've got it Licia--a hunger strike! Please make it for something that matters more than a politician’s one mistake out of 72 speaking points.

Maybe you’d like to objectively cover two sides of a controversial story—one that could get you fired because it jangles a conscientious nerve or two (for pointers, see Swann and Kyoto story, 2002).

As Darryl Raymaker notes, David Swann has the “competence, experience, and courage” to lead the way on many fronts, including those just mentioned. He has worked the front lines in Africa, the Philippines, Iraq, Fort Chipewyan, in southern Alberta as the Public Health Officer for Palliser (the Conservatives fired Swann from this position for his public support of Kyoto—he hopes to return the favour).

Dr. Swann also went to Ottawa to pressure the feds to intervene in the genocide in Darfur.

David Swann is now working hard for the public's interest—today and well beyond tomorrow. We need to give him all the support we can.

Our democracy (that’d be yours too Ms. Corbella) is imperilled. And democracy and good journalism matter.

Keep writing Darryl! Onwards David!

Judy J. Johnson

DAVID SWANN: A LEADER OF COMPETENCE, EXPERIENCE AND COURAGE

2010-06-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

DAVID SWANN

A relevant and qualified leader of competence, experience and courage

CORBELLA

A pipsqueak

Yesterday on June 1 Licia Corbella, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, wrote a column about Premier Ed Stelmach’s new communications strategy of hiding from Alberta voters letting his ministers assume the task of getting out into the hinterland to talk to them. See: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/topic.html?t=Keyword&q=class+act+2010

In her column Corbella ridiculed Stelmach’s invisibility even when his government was able to wallow in the success of having finally come up with a satisfactory royalty program. Naturally, being the spear carrier for the extreme right that she is, Corbella attributed the new royalty program exclusively to the wisdom of the new darling of the lunatic fringe of the fractured Tory Party - Danielle Smith, the leader of the Palinesque Wildrose Alliance.

In the course of her nonsense, Corbella naturally takes a shot at the Alberta Liberal Party. I doubt that she could write a column about the bathroom habits of bumble bees without her obligatory false malignments against Liberals. She writes that Liberal leader David Swann and some of his caucus attended a Herald editorial board session a week or so ago, and that given Swann’s performance there she predicts “Liberals will remain largely irrelevant.”

She bases her conclusion on 18 simple handouts containing 72 Alberta Liberal Party policy points that the Grit contingent gave to the editorial board during the course of the meeting. Handing out condensed material on policy is standard practice for all political parties who visit editorial boards. As you might expect, this type of simplification is especially important when visiting the Herald editorial board who understand only the simplest of one syllable words.

One of the 72 points contained a reference to a name the significance of which none of the assembled Liberal visitors could remember. I repeat, 1 out of 72! That was enough for Corbella. As a result, her column accuses Swann of putting out policies that he does not know anything about, and that the party was suffering from a lack of professionalism. I repeat - one small mistake out of 72 points. A serious leader, she says, would know them all - 72 out of 72!

When one thinks of the bullshit and factual errors one reads in the Calgary Herald on a daily basis – particularly on the editorial pages over which Corbella presides – her condemnation of the Liberals is – to say the least - galling.

David Swann is a medical doctor, who has practiced family medicine, taught at universities for which he received teaching awards, worked in the public health system, consulted internationally, and has made major contributions towards the betterment of his community. His stature makes Corbella and her ink-stained right-wing pals look like pipsqueaks! For those interested in Dr. Swann’s impressive career see: http://www.albertaliberal.com/index.php/alp/caucus_member/swann_david/

Corbella concludes by writing that the Tories aren’t worried about the Liberals because, “They view the Liberals, under Swann, as irrelevant.” I have two observations about that statement. First of all, Corbella fails to remember the results of the by-election in Calgary Glenmore in September - which for an editorial page editor is far worse than missing one out of 72 points. The Tories came third - behind the Wild Rose and the Liberals.

Secondly, in referring to the Liberals under Swann as irrelevant twice in the same flimsy column she repeats a big lie - expressed recently by a publicity seeking, malcontented former Liberal. I am sure Corbella knows from her prior reading - meager as it may be - that if you repeat the ‘big lie’ often enough, people will believe it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

How indeed can the Alberta Liberals under Swann be ‘irrelevant?’ He is a qualified leader of competence, experience and courage who leads the strongest party in Alberta by far, that advances progressive policies and ideas. For a better look at some of the policies he is promoting see: http://alp.whitematter.ca/index.php/alp/policies_index.

In fact, the Alberta Liberal Party is arguably the most relevant party in the province because it is the only party which is not a conservative party of the right or far right that can come within striking distance of victory.

Is Corbella only interested in right wing parties being on the Alberta ballot, and if so, what does that say about her?

POCKLINGTON BLAMES EX-LAWYER, GRAND JURY SYSTEM, POOR IGNORANT BLOKES ON THE GRAND JURY, AND THE PRESS FOR HIS PLIGHT! SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

2010-05-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

POCKLINGTON: "MY LAWYER MADE ME DO IT."

I have had little sympathy for the plight of Peter Pocklington (known unaffectionately in these parts as Peter Puck) since his magnificent fall from grace. My opinion of this rogue can be readily gleaned by reading my following blogs:

Monday, October 27, 2008
PETER PUCK WELCHES ON A COMMITMENT TO KIDS
Thursday, March 12, 2009
HOT OFF THE PRESS: PETER PUCK IS IN THE SLAMMER, and
Saturday, June 27, 2009
PETER PUCK TAKES THE FIFTH

In recent days it has been revealed that among the many words that define this world class twit – words such as blowhard, snob, bullshit artiste, deadbeat, rogue (to put it benignly), liar, and so on - we can now by his own admission add one more - perjurer!

Read: http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/story.html?id=3080504&p=2

Last week the former Edmonton Oiler owner, Ford dealer, federal Tory leadership candidate, Fraser Institute director and renowned scam artist, copped out before a California Judge with a guilty plea to a charge of perjury, admitting that he had hid assets from creditors in his bankruptcy proceedings.

True to the scoundrel’s nature however, once he got outside of the courtroom after his guilty plea he tried to weasel out of his criminal responsibility by – surprise, surprise - blaming somebody else for his misdeed. In this case, he fingered his former lawyer. Pocklington said, “Obviously, I made the error,” but that he did it “with the prompting of my then bankruptcy lawyer. After I signed it I believe I erred in signing because I don’t believe it was correct.”

Calling it an “error” makes it sound as though what he did was a mere bagatelle, a romp, a lark - shurely not a crime for which he could go to the slammer for ten long years in the notorious prison system of the U.S.A. In fact, his “error” was to fail to disclose a couple of bank accounts and two storage lockers of valuable possessions.

After the proceedings were over and outside of the courtroom, Pocklington continued his shameful analysis of his situation to an Edmonton reporter, saying that he “was not guilty of anything” and again heaped blame on his lawyer saying “Unfortunately, the lawyer I hired to do the original case is what caused all the problems. He said, ‘Sign here,’ and I did, and unfortunately he left a multitude of things out. And I was certainly not trying to mislead anyone in that regard.” This was the explanation of a man who had a 50 year career in business during which he built up what was once one of the largest fortunes in Western Canada. It was all his lawyer’s fault!

But it wasn’t enough for the deadbeat to merely dump on his bankruptcy lawyer as the cause of his misfortune. He continued to try to duck responsibility for his criminal actions during the same interview by delivering a civics lecture. He said,

“I didn’t ask for the plea. (The U.S. Attorney’s office) did because they don’t have anything. Unfortunately, in this country they have a system that they use called the grand jury system. They go to a grand jury, which are basically 23 people off the street, and say, ‘Here’s what we have.’ And if they get 17 to vote and agree with the attorney, they say, ‘Sure, indict him.’ So all of a sudden you’re indicted. You have no input, no nothing.”

Not content to merely blame his lawyer and the grand jury system for his woes, he then turned his sights on other blameworthy subjects – the lowly grand jury itself and the mean spirited press. About them he said, “The jury pool is not a jury of your peers, it’s a jury where some of them are unemployed and some of them aren’t particularly bright. And of course with the press and so on in this country and Canada, they seem to hate anyone that has been successful.”

The blame game is something that Pocklington has indulged in before when caught doing something red-handed. In 1984 when the Edmonton Oilers won their first Stanley Cup, he included his father Basil Pocklington – who had nothing to do with the hockey club - on the list of people from the team who would have their names engraved on the Cup. After it had been so engraved it was noticed by NHL officials who then instructed the engraver to cover the wrongfully engraved name with a series of engraved Xs. When Pocklington was confronted about the error, guess what - he blamed the engraver. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pocklington

Pocklington gets to know his fate on August 9 when the judge decides what to do with him. So far predictions are that he will be under house arrest with an electronic bracelet for six months followed by a period of probation.

But it could get worse for him. If he continues to point his finger at others as being the real culprits for his misdeeds and not show any remorse, the judge may very well throw the book at him - which would be much to the delight of many Albertans and people with whom he has done business.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: CONRAD BLACK CONFIRMS THAT A LIBERAL IS A CONSERVATIVE WHO IS INCARCERATED!! ALSO SHOWS SIGNS OF BECOMING REHABILITATED!!!

2010-05-30T07:37:00.000-07:00

CONRAD BLACK (on the right) with LADY BLACK before his fall from grace

Canada's inhumane prison plan

Conrad Black, National Post Published: Saturday, May 29, 2010

In the past two years, as regular readers in this space would know, thanks to my gracious hosts in the U.S. government, I have had what could be called extensive hands-on experience of the American correctional system. I have been tutoring and teaching fellow prisoners in English, and in U.S. history. And some of them have taught me how to read music, play the piano, keep fit, diet sensibly and assimilate some local folkways, while I have been fighting my way through the courts toward a just disposition of the few remaining (unfounded) charges that bedevil me.

The fact that all my life any definition of Canada's virtue and distinctiveness has prominently included references to civility and decency explains my alarm and outrage at finally reading the three-year-old report on the Correctional Service of Canada, misleadingly titled "A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety."

As so often in other fields, this document seeks to import to Canada much of the worst of American practice, and none of the best, unless Canada now idealizes gratuitous official severity.
I have not succumbed to an inverse Stockholm Syndrome, and become an apologist for the convicted community. But I disbelieve even more fervently than I did before my sojourn among them, in the Manichaean process of baiting, dehumanization and stigmatization promoted by the Roadmap, and similarly inspired correctional nostrums.

In my present abode, I have met many rather dodgy people, but none whose ethics I consider inferior to some prosecutors and judges I have encountered in the last few years. And I have met many fine, as well as some mediocre and poor correctional officers, but few who rise above the level of benign non-skilled labour, profoundly under qualified to practise untrammeled social engineering on those entrusted to them.

I believe, civilly and theologically, in the confession and repentance of wrongdoing; in the prosecution and punishment of crime, and in a maximum reasonable effort by the state to protect the public, especially from threats to person and property. But I also believe that everyone has rights, including the unborn, demented, incurably ill, military adversaries and the criminal, and that the rights of those whose entitlements are for any reason circumscribed, are not inferior for being narrower, and should be as great as they practically can be, without violating the rights of others.

This Roadmap--which was released in 2007, and which the Harper government began officially responding to in its budget in 2008, setting out a five-year plan -- turns the humane traditions of Canada upside down. It implicitly assumes that all who are convicted are guilty and have no remaining claim to decency from the state, and that treating confinees accordingly is in the interest of the legally unexceptionable majority.

The Roadmap does not mention prisoners' rights, beyond basic food, shelter, clothing and medical care, and assumes that they are probably not recoverable for society and that the longer they are imprisoned, the better it is for society. Almost no distinction is made between violent and non-violent offenders.

Of course, great caution must be shown in the reintegration into society of violent criminals. But the objective of the penal system must be to return those capable of functioning licitly in society as quickly as practical, allowing also for straight punitive or retributive penalties, but not for mindless vengeance. The whole system must be guided by the fact that the treatment of the accused and confined has been recognized by ethicists and cultural historians for centuries as one of the hallmarks of civilized society.

The Roadmap holds that anything beyond the necessities for physical survival must be "earned." Traditionally, the punishment is supposed to be the imprisonment itself, not the additional oppressions of that regime, and the proverbial debt to society is paid when the sentence has been served; it does not continue as a permanent Sisyphean burden. In the interests of eliminating illegal drugs in prison, the authors of the Roadmap want all visits to be glass-segregated, no physical contact. This is just a pretext to assist in the destruction of families and friendships.

The importation of contraband by prisoners' visitors can be stopped by strip-searching the prisoners before they leave the visitors centre, as happens to us here, unless the prison staff, who have the unfathomable delight of inspecting us au naturel, are on the take, which is, of course, the problem, as correctional officers in many prisons are frequently caught smuggling, and aren't well enough trained to command higher salaries to make them more resistant to temptation. It is a problem, but it will not be solved by targeting unoffending relatives of inmates. The Roadmap also has naively exaggerated confidence in certain types of scanning devices.

It also recommends unspecified concentration on generating employment skills, which is sensible, except that it is specifically foreseen that they will shoulder aside other programs of more general education, substance abuse avoidance and behavioural adaptation.
I am no hemophiliac bleeding heart, but non-violent people can sometimes be helped to abandon illicit practices by some of these programs. No useful purposes will be served by cranking back into the world unreconstructed sociopaths who can fix an air conditioner or unclog a drain. The Roadmap even asks for research to be undertaken that will support this recommendation, an inversion of the usual sequence in the determination of policy.

There is a demand for investment of over $1-billion in new and larger prisons, (an insane extravagance), and for sharply longer sentences, mandatory minimum sentences, and "earned parole" in place of supervised release after two-thirds of the sentence, in the absence of misconduct that would militate against such comparative liberality. In practice, this means imprisonment at the pleasure of the carceral establishment for the maximum time possible. (Prisoners cost $40,000 per year to keep.) All of these draconian measures have been tried and have failed in the United States.

As Michael Jackson and Graham Stewart point out in their excellent essay in the current Literary Review of Canada, "Fear-Driven Policy," this plan would fall especially heavily on native people, who already comprise nearly seven times the percentage of imprisoned Canadians than they do of the whole population.

The Roadmap is the self-serving work of reactionary, authoritarian palookas, what we might have expected 40 years ago from a committee of southern U.S. police chiefs. It is counter-intuitive and contra-historical: The crime rate has been declining for years, and there is no evidence cited to support any of the repression that is requested. It appears to defy a number of Supreme Court decisions, and is an affront, at least to the spirit of the Charter of Rights.
The Canada I remember and look forward to returning to should do exactly the opposite. Prison is an antiquarian and absurd treatment of nonviolent law-breakers. It only continues because it has.

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.

Canada would save a billion dollars annually in prison costs and the employers of the penitent-workers would save $2-billion annually, a tremendous shot in the arm to national productivity. Many of the prisons could be recon-figured as assisted housing for the homeless and slum-dwellers. Canada would again be a model of the innovative public policy pursuit of institutionalized decency and social reform.

The principle that the rape of the rights of the least is an assault on the rights of all is attributed to Jesus Christ and is at the core of Judeo-Christian civilization and the rule of law in both common and civil law jurisdictions. And it is not just a tradition; there are several million Canadians in families that have bitter memories of personal or close relatives' encounters with the vagaries of justice. They aren't a visible bloc, but this is not a political free lunch.

It is painful for me to write that with this garrote of a blueprint, the government I generally support is flirting with moral and political catastrophe. My respect for the Prime Minister prevents me from being any more explicit here about the implications of failure to reconsider the government's course on this issue.

The Roadmap is a bad plan to take Canada to a destination it should not wish to reach.

National Post
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=3086246#ixzz0pQICf8eL

HOT OFF THE PRESS: RON WOOD TO TELL ALL IN NEW 'MANYBERRIES' SHOCKER!

2010-05-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

You will recall my blog on Ron Wood’s first literary endeavour ‘And God Created Manyberries,’ 2010 Frontenac House Ltd.

I spoke of Wood as being a civilized gentleman living in an age of incivility - a throwback to when this country was kinder and gentler and an ‘old school’ type of guy in the very best traditions of that term. Those qualities together with his charm, wit, and experience makes Ron the kind of guy that you enjoy sitting down with to share a bottle or two of oaky merlot (along with some good pasta) while engaging in weighty discussion of the world and its many problems. Wood is as much a Conservative as I am a Liberal - but no matter - he is a very easy man to connect with. Hell, it was such a great blog that I urge you to read it again: See
Thursday, February 12, 2009
RON WOOD AND HIS BELOVED 'MANYBERRIES'

But now for the really good news. My spies in the literary world tell me that Wood is about to have published his second book, appropriately titled ‘All Roads lead to Manyberries’ once again through the good offices of Frontenac House Ltd. I have also heard some literary scuttlebutt that – like his first book - it will deal with the exquisite delights and attractions of his beloved Manyberries and its colourful townfolk.

But there’s more. I am further advised by someone who should know – and in this regard I have been sworn to absolute secrecy - that Wood’s new work will not be on Premier Stelmach’s favourite recommended reading list. Furthermore, my impeccable sources have disclosed to me, that the Ottawa Press Gallery, indeed the news media throughout this great country, will be shocked to read what is on even the back cover of the book . . . and that it gets worse for them on the pages inside.

The release of Wood’s new tome is imminent. Of course, I have ordered my copy in advance which I would urge you to do as well. Just click on: http://www.frontenachouse.com/ and tell them you want a copy of Ron's new book!

HARPER'S CANADA: CANADIANS HAD BETTER WAKE UP

2010-05-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

First, we have the Guergis-Jaffer catastrophe in all of its many splendours. Helena Guergis while an MP and Harperite minister of the Crown tells everyone within earshot at the Charlottetown airport that the city is a hellhole (or, as has also been reported, a “shithole”). Her husband Rahim Jaffer, mercifully a defeated Conservative MP, thinks it’s alright to use her office from which to lobby for money from government coffers for his clients. Jaffer also does not believe laws that apply to ordinary Canadians, should apply to him - and so he goes about his lobbying without bothering to register. The same Jaffer, still flaunting the law, gives testimony before a parliamentary committee that can only be charitably described as a crock. Guergis finds nothing wrong with writing a letter to a Simcoe county pooh-bah – namely her cousin – promoting her husband’s company. Conservative ministers, upon being requested by Jaffer to consider handing out gazillions to his clients, fall all over themselves to give him a hearing . . . . yada, yada, yada.

Then we have another Harperite minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who berates security employees at the Ottawa airport for not allowing him to take a large bottle of tequila on the plane with him.

We also have the Prime Minister himself using every possible obstruction (including spending a million dollars of taxpayers’ money and using the services of 16 staffers to vet defence and foreign affairs department documents) to ensure that the Canadian public be kept in the dark about whether Canadian officials (including himself and his ministers) have been guilty of war crimes in allowing detainees to fall into the hands of Afghan security personnel by whom they were sure to be tortured. See: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/spent+vetting+detainee+documents/2982904/story.html

And yesterday, we heard from Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth (who received her appointment to the red chamber courtesy of Liberal PM Paul Martin, in one of his many bone-headed moves). Ruth, who carries the distinguished pedigree of the Ontario Jackman clan, while addressing a group of women who were critical of the Harper government’s decision not to fund abortion as part of the G8 initiative to reduce deaths of mothers and young children, told them to, “Shut the fuck up – on this issue.” See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/feminist-senator-nancy-ruth-tells-aid-groups-to-drop-abortion-fight/article1555609/

Quite apart from leading Canada incrementally down the road to perdition through legislative and regulatory changes, policy changes, and Order-in-Council and judicial appointments, all of which reflects a hard right change of direction, the government increasingly shows contempt for parliament and the Canadian people.

Canadians had better start paying attention to what is going on so that we soon salvage a country that still remains recognizable. If this is allowed to continue for much longer, when they do finally get around to turfing this gang, the task of turning it around may not be easy.

LEE RICHARDSON AND HIS 'COME FLY WITH ME' DESIGNATED TRAVELER

2010-03-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

LEE RICHARDSON MP

His fetching Designated Traveler

Lee Richardson MP for Calgary Center is in deep doo-doo. I feel sorry for the bloke because if there was a Conservative MP that I like it is Richardson. He is from that kinder and gentler ancestor of the Harperites, the now defunct federal Progressive Conservative Party. I’m sure you remember the old federal PCs. You know - the ones that gave us Dief, Joe Clark, Karlheinz Schreiber’s pal Brian Mulroney, and the asterisk Kim Campbell. The old federal PC party had a proud and noble history to be sure, and I still have respect for many of the old red Tories that ran it. They didn’t come any better than Alvin Hamilton, Flora Macdonald and Bob Stanfield. Because Richardson comes from that old red Tory strain and doesn’t hide his pedigree his chances of making the cabinet of Stephen Harper or even getting a decent sinecure for services rendered rate from zero to none.

Now, as a result of recently disclosed information Richardson’s bleak chances of a Harper-inspired reward have become much, much worse. And it’s all over an awe-inspiring blonde and one of the great babes on Canadian television these days – CBC-TV national political reporter Krista Erickson. See:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/9015821.html

Richardson, a widower and a warm and cuddly guy, has admitted to being linked to the delectable newshound for a couple of years, and it’s something about which he is justly proud. After all, although he is reasonably well preserved and not quite ready for the glue factory or the Royal Tyrell Museum (for those of you from outside of Alberta, the Royal Tyrell is one of the finest Dinosaur museums in the world), he is several generations older than the dazzling Miss Erickson.

Richardson’s trouble arises as a result of Erickson being registered as the designated traveler for Richardson in his capacity as an MP. This qualifies her to fly on Canada’s airlines courtesy of guess who? Richardson? Nope. The Canadian taxpayer? Yep.

As a result, the pesky Canadian Taxpayers Federation is mightily pissed with Richardson. Not only does it want to find out just how much of the $143,850 worth of travel expenses he charged up during 2008-2009 was for his ravishing gal pal, its spokesman is convinced that this will be a problem for everybody including the Tories. Not surprisingly, both Richardson and his exquisite designated traveler claim they have no knowledge of she being on any tax payer sponsored trip.

While the dashing and debonair Richardson has the sumptuous Erickson as his designated traveler, it should be noted that defence minister Peter McKay – he who was unceremoniously dumped by the equally resplendent Belinda Stronach – has named his mother as his designated traveler. No surprise there.

But if Richardson is in the soup over this one, his gorgeous fellow traveler is in even deeper. The Canadian Association of Journalists is pissed with both Erickson and the CBC. According to the Association’s president Mary Agnes Welch, the Association’s Code of Ethics [the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Code of Ethics, now there’s an oxymoron for you!] says that journalists should not have a personal relationship with the people they report on. What’s even worse, she says, is flying free because of the relationship. Welch puts it this way: “It is one thing to have a personal relationship. It’s another thing entirely to be benefiting from that relationship. Actually being able to fly for free because of that relationship kind of brings it to a new level. A reporter who covers national politics in any way who is in a relationship with an MP is clearly in conflict.”

This is the second time that the ravishing Erickson has been accused of running afoul of the code of ethics. In 2007 during the Commons committee hearings looking into the sordid Mulroney – Schreiber affair she planted a few written questions with some Liberals to ask Mulroney. The Harperites screamed blue murder about the affair to the CBC which resulted in her being banished to the boring gulag of Toronto for almost two years.

What will happen to Erickson next is anybody’s guess. However, if the CBC gives her the pink slip she can always seek employment with the Calgary Herald whose conflict of interest rules for journalists are applied with much less rigor and severity - that is, if they are applied at all. For example, Tom Olsen happily continued writing his Herald column and reporting on the government of Ralph Klein even though his brother Gordon (with whom Tom obviously had a relationship) at the same time held various positions in Klein’s office including executive director of the premier’s south office, executive assistant to the premier, and the premier’s caucus liaison.

So, for Erickson, even if worse comes to worse – hell, it’s not the end of the world.

STEPHEN HARPER: DONE IN BY HIMSELF - WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

2010-03-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Harper (above) seen here lying low during Prorogation

The fetching and kvetching Guergis (left) with her long-suffering Husband-of-the-Year Award winner Jaffer (on the right)

At the time of the spontaneous public outburst against Prime Minister Harper for proroguing parliament, I told anyone who would listen that he probably had only one more gaffe left before the people decided to give him the boot.

Since then, there have been four of them – his continued stonewalling of the detainee issue, his over-the-top pandering to the ladies by proposing to change the words of the National Anthem, the profane hissy fit of status of women minister Helena Guergis and his failure to do anything about it, and now the embarrassing kid gloves treatment given by a Tory appointed judge to the ideal husband of the fetching Ms. Guergis after he copped out to a careless driving charge.

Although Harper’s klutziness and ministerial incompetence is nothing new (See: STEPHEN HARPER AT THE G8: HOW TO MAKE A SOW'S EAR OUT OF A SILK PURSE; PRIME MINISTER HARPER: CANADA'S INSPECTOR CLOSEAU; KEVIN LYNCH RESIGNS AFTER A BELLY FULL OF CLOSEAU AND MAN SERVANT KATO), these events which follow so closely his sly and cowardly attempt to bury the detainee issue by proroguing parliament, will surely do him in.

On the detainee issue, his stonewalling shows that his education has been too directed towards the Milton Friedmans, William Kristols, and perhaps the collected works of Margaret Thatcher. He should have left some time for Woodward and Bernstein and Daniel Ellsberg. If he had he would have known that stonewalling and cover-ups are a mug’s game, something like paying off a blackmailer. The guy who covers up, just like the blackmailer’s victim who pays, almost always winds up on the short end of the stick. In politics, the cover-up usually leads to a leak, then another, and then another. With each leak the politician loses support and credibility – something like Chinese water torture does to one’s sanity. If the cover-up and leaks go on long enough, there is no support or credibility left. The detainee issue is starting to rain leaks and they are likely to continue given the popularity of Harper and his government within the Canadian bureaucracy. See: http://impolitical.blogspot.com/2010/02/big-leak-in-afghan-detainee-file.html

About the shortcomings of cover-ups Harper should have read a Nixon biography, or drew some lessons from Brian Mulroney’s excellent adventure with Karlheinz Schreiber. Alas, he didn’t. He was too busy studying his lecture notes from Tom Flanagan and Ted Morton and plotting how he was going to stab his former boss, ex-Tory MP Jim Hawkes, in the back.

The ‘O Canada’ lyric change proposal so that our Anthem would become gender neutral was Harper at his pandering worst. What made it so outrageous was that while he and most of his Conservative followers have always ranted against political correctness, here he was acting as a champion of the movement. Even his followers couldn’t swallow it, and forced him to quickly abandon his crazy idea to get the girls on side - after he had trashed their $ 5 billion child care program, closed a dozen status of women offices and reduced by half the number of women in cabinet.

The fetching and kvetching Ms. Guergis’ behaviour at the Charlottetown airport was not the fault of Harper. The former beauty queen was late for her flight and in a hurry to get home to her prize of a husband and former super-stud, Edmonton MP Rahim Jaffer so they could celebrate their birthday together. Arriving late for her flight, Guergis gave the security and airline staff hell for being slow and even called the very charming Charlottetown “a shit hole.” When asked by security to remove her boots she said, “Happy fucking birthday to me. I guess I’m stuck in this hell hole.” She continued her class act by chewing out an Air Canada employee who was trying to explain to her the rules, saying, “I don’t need to be lectured about flight time by you. I’ve been down here working my ass off for you people.” See: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/775222--goar-no-medal-for-guergis-s-performance-at-un

Although Guergis apologized for the outburst, her temperamental display of arrogance, pique and entitlement screamed for further disciplinary action from her boss. Sadly, none was forthcoming from tough-guy Harper. That was a big mistake. This incident will linger over Harper’s political world like the smell of rotting, dead fish - which when you come to think about it, is altogether appropriate given that the dust-up took place in the Maritimes, which Harper has insulted before. See: Culture of Defeatism http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2002/05/29/harper_atlntc020529.html

The Guergis event and Harper’s failure to act as well as his past Maritime sins spell big trouble for Harper in Atlantic Canada in the next election.

And just yesterday Guergis’ dashing husband Rahim Jaffer had his day in court in respect to drunk driving, possession of cocaine and careless driving charges he faced as a result of an earlier encounter with the gendarmes in rural Ontario. A Tory appointed judge fined him a measly 500 bucks for a cop-out guilty plea on a careless driving charge. The ugly stuff had been withdrawn by the crown. Whether or not anything was untoward in the proceedings is unknown. What is known is the revealing statement of the judge when he said to Jaffer after he pronounced sentence, "I'm sure you can recognize a break when you see one." Ouch!

Its not Harper’s fault that Jaffer retained good lawyers or that the prosecutors gave him a sweetheart deal, or that the judge was terribly indiscreet in his choice of words. But politics being what they are, Harper has already began to take shots from opposition politicians and the public at large who are up-in-arms over what they view as special treatment for a high profile ex-MP of the law and order party. See: http://www.calgaryherald.com/columnists/verdict+sweetheart+sentence/2664956/story.html

So from here on in, it will be all down hill for Steve Harper. And you can take that to the bank.

SHOCKER! STELMACH TORIES DIVORCE STANWAY AND OLSEN

2010-03-01T21:51:00.000-08:00

Graham’s Thomson’s piece in the Edmonton Journal (and Calgary Herald) of March 1st deals with the departure of Paul Stanway as director of communications for Special Ed Stelmach. See: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Gentleman+Stanway+bows+premier+office/2625768/story.html

In it, Thomson speculates as to whether Stanway was a rat leaving the seriously listing H.M.S. Dweeb, or told to walk the gang plank by Captain Dweeb himself. He poses the question, is Stanway the fall guy for the government’s lousy communications policy? Or is he actually taking the blame for it? Not that it matters anymore given that Dweeb is likely going down with the ship.

Thomson also observes that Stanway, and Stelmach’s press officer Tom Olsen, who are now leaving their employment at the same time, went to work for the Premier at the same time in 2007 and did so immediately upon leaving their posts as political columnists at their respective newspapers, Stanway at the Edmonton Sun, and Olsen at the Calgary Herald.

No doubt due to some misguided sense of professional courtesy Thomson fails to remind his readers that prior to the appointments of Stanway and Olsen to cushy government jobs both of them were shameless and consistent Tory propagandists who never wrote a word of even muted criticism of the inept and incompetent Alberta Tory administrations that they covered.
See: Darryl Raymaker blog Thursday, February 01, 2007 TORIES, STANWAY, 0LSEN: FINALLY CHURCHED

What Thomson finds interesting is not the pay-offs these political hookers received for the servicing of their Progressive Conservative johns, it is that there were two of them who came and left their well-paid, tax-payer funded jobs at the same time.

In fact Thomson even calls their hiring by Stelmach, “From watchdog to lapdog in a single bound.” Watchdog? Puleeeeze!!!! They were lapdogs, from beginning to end. He should have referred to the relationships as "From lapdog to lapdog via a thousand Tory kiss-ass columns."

Thomson says that their hiring by Stelmach rattled both reporters and PR types, who felt their professions had been insulted, and that they also added to public cynicism about ties between government and press. Well, it wasn’t so much their hiring that pissed off the discerning members of the public. It was because it was so obvious why they were hired. They were hired because they were Tory hacks!

Olsen’s case was even more flagrant. He was a young pup of a reporter who was present at the dawning of the bleak Conrad Black era of media dominance in Canada (which understandably coincided with the collapse of good and decent journalistic ethics). It has been said that Olsen was a Black favorite because he sided with management during the Herald’s infamous strike in 1999. The story makes some sense in that Olsen’s rise within the organization was inexorable from there on – from cub reporter, to legislature reporter, to bureau chief, to legislature columnist, and finally to senior columnist – all in a few short years with Olsen currying the favour of the Tory party all the way.

During Olsen’s tenure in the Klein years, as luck would have it, his brother Gordon served as a senior policy advisor to none other than Ralph Klein, as well as Executive Director of the Premier’s Southern Alberta office. The Herald concluded that such a comfy arrangement between brothers as they tended to their respective jobs - one protecting the subject and the other supposedly objectively commenting and reporting on the same subject - still passed the stink test!

For more on the careers of these two Tory mouthpieces read: http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=5577

Anyway, Thomson goes on to say that Stanway is a nice guy and a gentleman. He is silent on Olsen.

KLEIN INSIDERS SAY ALBERTA TORIES CONTINUE STAMPEDE TOWARDS WILDROSE ALLIANCE

2010-02-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

ALBERTA TORIES ARE STILL ABANDONING THIS. . .

. . .FOR THIS!

You will recall that on January 18, 2010 I raved about Special Ed's deft decision to appoint California-born and bred Ted Morton as Alberta Minister of Finance and Enterprise and thereby set him up as Ed's logical successor. See: REPORT FROM ALBERTA: TORIES AND WILD ROSE ALLIANCE SET FOR THE MOTHER OF ALL TORY CIVIL WARS

I predicted that Morton's pure right-wing pedigree along with his reputed oratorical skills could very well stop the hemorrhaging of Progressive Conservative support over to the upstart Wildrose Alliance party now headed by that enticing political goddess, Danielle Smith.

Much to my surprise I have discovered that my rosy view of Morton's potential is not shared by a great many Tories, whether they still hold their party memberships or whether they trashed them already to join the party of the alluring Ms. Smith.

This afternoon I happened to share a glass of wine with two men who can only be described as establishment Alberta Tories. They were in the innermost sanctum of the Ralph Klein organization throughout his whole sorry tenure during Alberta's dark ages between 1992 to 2006. Over those dreary and unimaginative years whenever anything of consequence was going on these affable and erudite gentlemen (remember, they bought me the glass of wine) were at the very apex of power. They kept both the keys to, and the secrets of, the kingdom. They were among the strongest voices in the Premier's cheering section, and advanced and strategized many of the thin gruel of ideas that found their way into the half-baked policies of his misguided regime. In other words, they were Tories of influence.

Alas, these former movers and shakers have concluded at the same time as countless other Albertans, that the Morton appointment is simply too little too late to save the Tories. They are underwhelmed and unimpressed with Morton. They say his oratorical skills are overblown and his leadership skills wholly absent during his whole three-year tenure as a Stelmach minister.

Most surprising of all, they are convinced that Stelmach has no intention of setting Morton nor anybody else up as his successor and still harbours the delusion that he will survive and lead the Tories to victory in the next provincial election! As to anybody else in the wings who can save the PCs from oblivion, forget it, they say. It ain't gonna happen. With Jim Dinning happily ensconced in the cozy comfort of oak-paneled walls and expensive scotch in the private sector, the cupboard is bare for leadership candidates. Empty. Kaput. Finito. One of my hosts (remember, they bought the wine) has even bought his Wildrose Alliance membership.

If these men are right - and their survival instincts have served them well after more than a generation in PC politics - this is bad news for the Tories. The party will have to fight tooth and nail to remain in contention, and with Stelmach at the helm and in la-la land about his own abilities and future, that will be like fighting with one hand tied behind one's back.

These are dark days indeed for the once proud party of Peter Lougheed.

HARPER'S SPEECHWRITERS AND HOW THEY GET THERE

2010-02-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

With Hannaford Gone. . .

Can Corbella be far behind ?

As the CanWest Global empire sinks into its well-earned sunset many of its employees –including writers and editors - must be scrambling for new jobs. Living on the edge of being out on the street isn’t fun and it’s much worse when you are actually out on the street.

Nigel Hannaford, a pedantic, boring, extreme right wing, politically conservative former editorial writer and columnist who began imparting his antiquated views on Calgary Herald readers in 1999 seemed to be ahead of the pack in testing the waters for more secure employment. Beginning in 2004 when the Harper government took office Hannaford consistently fawned over it, doted on it, and caressed it, while shouting loud huzzahs of approval at each and every of its pronouncements and actions – despite its screw-ups, meanness, lies, and deceits. Anybody reading his tiresome columns could be forgiven if they had concluded that Hannaford was looking to Harper for new and more secure work.

Indeed in October 2009, the zealous opponent of gay-rights and multiculturalism, climate change denier, and ardent Afghanistan war hawk, was hired as a Harper speech writer. One wonders whether or not an even more secure post in the public service awaits him before his pal is finally thrown out of Sussex Drive. For more of Hannaford’s off the charts views see: http://faisalkutty.com/editors-picks/the-man-who-writes-stephen-harper%E2%80%99s-speeches-nigel-hannaford/

Another who many have long suspected as being on the same career path as Hannaford is the Herald’s editorial page editor Licia Corbella. The most recent manifestation of what may be her career aspirations appeared yesterday on the Herald's editorial page – appropriately on Valentine’s Day - with her passionate defence of Harper’s decision to prorogue parliament. See: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Double+standard+prorogation+telling/2563069/story.html

In it Corbella whines that no one seems to be outraged with Dalton McGuinty in the wake of announcing his intention to prorogue the Ontario legislature. She rages that “those of us who live in the real world know the answer. Proroguing is only something those professors and protesters care about if it’s someone like Harper who does it.”

Well, I doubt that being in the real world is hanging out – as Corbella does - with the Greed is Good crowd at the Fraser Institute and the co-sponsors of the forthcoming Sarah Palin love-fest like Craig Chandler and the Progressive Group for Independent Business. But she is probably right thinking that it is Harper’s type that gets under people’s skin when he seeks prorogation. I’m speaking of the petty, mean-spirited type that indulges in the politics of personal destruction, assassinates the characters of people who get in their way, and who asks for prorogation twice in one year to keep the Canadian people in the dark and to save their own political skin. I mean, people like that have their detractors, non?

In her defence of Harper Corbella then opts for one of her well-worn diversionary tactics. She brings up the red (no pun intended) herring of Bob Rae as Premier of Ontario. This is a device she has used many times before. Bob, she says, prorogued the Ontario legislature three times in five years, and then goes on to castigate his administration for its various misdeeds. Poor Bob. Corbella seems to be fixated on him, even though it is almost a generation since he was in power. The government of Premier Bob Rae is old news and few people save for the Harper fawners and apologists even talk about it these days.

Corbella then reminds us that it was only in December of 2008 when the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc threatened forming a coalition that most Canadians first heard of prorogation. She calls Harper’s actions in seeking prorogation at that time as “righteous” in the circumstances because the forming of the coalition sought to “usurp democracy.” First of all, it is trite to say that forming a coalition in democratic, responsible government parliaments is entirely within the traditions of democracy. At times coalition governments have been essential to Canada’s survival and development. For anybody who is interested in the subject I invite them to read: http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/coalition-governments-canada#introduction. Furthermore she forgets that the coalition was a response to an assault on democracy by Harper himself. The coalition threat was an attempt to spurn Harper’s intention to cut off public funding of federal opposition parties. It was the opposition's response to Harper’s attempted ‘putsch.’ For a definition of this descriptive term made famous by an event involving, appropriately enough, Adolf Hitler, read: http://www.answers.com/topic/putsch

There may be quibblers as to my definition of ‘putsch’ in that some will say Harper did not attempt to overthrow a government. I say that if you choke off funding for opposition parties you are trying to overthrow government as Canadians have always known it.

Corbella does have a moment – as even the most partisan of people like her do from time to time – of honest reflection. She calls Harper’s announcement of prorogation on December 30 “a huge miscalculation,” “bordering on disgraceful,” and refers to “Harper’s Machiavellian machinations.” Alas like Dr. Strangelove, after a moment of lucidity she quickly slips back into her normal uber partisan Conservative mode – saying that Harper should come clean with all of the info on the Afghan detainee issue “and let the Liberals come to the defence of Taliban murderers who were having ‘troubles sleeping because of stress’ while in prison.” Sound familiar? It could have been written by Harper himself.

Her column then deteriorates into pure babble with a ridiculous feeble defence of Harper’s action arguing that prorogation saved taxpayers’ money because MPs did not have to fly back to Ottawa from their ridings and would not receive extra pay because the committees of which they were members were not sitting.

Her closing thoughts reflect the rah-rah highly partisan Harperite that she is as she advances the proposition that prorogation is not such a bad thing because question period is vulgar, and that the bitching about prorogation is because Liberals feel entitled to govern.

So what are we to make of all of that?

Surely, the cowtown has produced no greater Harper cheerleader than Corbella, unless it is Nigel Hannaford. From day one she and Hannaford have been devoted to the Harper cause. They have been loyal and faithful through thick and thin whether their hero was mean, petty, deceitful, incompetent or all of the foregoing at once. If there is a place for Hannaford amongst the flim-flam artistes who write prime ministerial bafflegab for the masses, surely there must be a place for Corbella. By God, she’s earned it!

SOME SPONSORS OF THE 'MAKE DITZY SARAH RICH' EVENT IN THE COWTOWN

2010-02-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

In case you are wondering just who are the sponsors of the forthcoming Palin-Wallin Calgary conservative gabfest, they are listed on a series of half page ads in the hapless Calgary Herald.

At the top of the list is Walton. Walton is a private Calgary-based land investment company estimated to be worth gazillions and with holdings in many corners of the world. The company has been a soft landing for several right-wing retired politicos who have joined its advisory board after the sun had set on their careers. Among the lucky ones who have landed this sought-after lucrative sinecure are Ernest Manning’s son Preston, conservative gadfly and political groupie Thompson MacDonald, and most recently, ex-Premier Ralph Klein.

The right-wing think tank, The Fraser Institute (surprise, surprise), is also on the list. Among its former directors are those great Canadian role models Conrad Black, David Radler, and Peter Pocklington. Oh yes, the Fraser Institute has also had among its ranks a noted plagiarist by the name of Dr. Owen Lippert. Dr. Lippert who served the institute as a senior fellow and policy analyst, you will recall, took the rap for Stephen Harper when it was disclosed that Harper had given a plagiarized speech in the House of Commons in defence of Canada entering the war in Iraq.

Enmax Corporation is also a sponsor. Enmax is a 2 billion dollar energy distribution company wholly owned by the City of Calgary. Among its directors are Cliff Fryers, a former pooh-bah of the Reform and Alliance parties and loyal and faithful man-servant to Preston Manning, ex-Ontario premier Mike ‘Duffer’ Harris famous for his ‘Common Sense’ nonsense revolution of years gone by, former Klein-era Tory cabinet minister Greg Melchin, and the ubiquitous Thompson MacDonald.

The Rogers Group is also on the list. Apart from the usual assortment of conservative Bay Street captains of industry and members of the Rogers family that grace its board, surprisingly there appears to be a token Liberal – none other than David Peterson, former Ontario Premier who was confined to the dust heap of history by Bob Rae when he led the Ontario NDP to power almost twenty years ago.

The Progressive Group for Independent Business is a sponsor. It’s advisory council is a Who’s Who of Calgary’s lunatic far right including failed Wild Rose Alliance leadership candidate Mark Dyrholm, and uber rabid anti-gay rights conservative motor mouth Craig Chandler. Chandler has had mostly controversial associations with the Social Credit, federal and provincial Progressive Conservative, and Canadian Alliance parties. He has openly apologized to the citizens of the United States for Canada’s unwillingness to invade Iraq, was rejected by Premier Stelmach as a Progressive Conservative candidate to contest a provincial election, and has had run ins with the Alberta Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. Among his more noteworthy public statements in 2007 the Ontario-born Chandler informed others who came to reside in Alberta:

"You came to here to enjoy our economy, our natural beauty and more. This is our home and if you wish to live here, you must adapt to our rules and our voting patterns or leave. Conservatism is our culture. Do not destroy what we have created."

For more on the distinguished career of the tolerant Mr. Chandler see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Chandler

And of course – you guessed it – the Calgary Herald is also a sponsor of this ‘Make Ditzy Sarah Rich’ event. The Herald’s participation was no doubt driven by its tiresome, ideological editors and scribes who have turned that once venerable publication into a second rate right wing pamphlet.

Bedford Biofuels, Oilsands Quest Inc. (which has Sarah’s stage prop Ms. Wallin on its board), the Jaymor Group, Land Rover Calgary, Business in Calgary, and It's Me, round out the list of advertised patrons.

All of this info is provided to you in case you are wondering what makes much of the cowtown tick. Dysfunctional? You think?

See: http://www.waltoninternational.com/
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/
http://www.enmax.com/
http://www.rogers.com/web/Rogers.portal?cm_mmc_o=mH4j7BBTkwCjC2By5jPyzEpjvivNi9jwECjCqBTwylCjCyBTwyl
http://www.pgib.ca/
http://www.calgaryherald.com/
http://www.bedfordbiofuels.com/
http://www.oilsandsquest.com/
http://www.landrovercalgary.com/index.htm?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CA4QFDAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.landrovercalgary.com%2F&rct=j&q=land+rover+calgary+ab&ei=uE9wS5LeEYHssgPFl72yDQ&usg=AFQjCNHrCSxD4cFnfL1cKCZeCgKp3VUp-Q
http://www.businessincalgary.com/
http://www.learningtolovecancer.com/

PALIN AND WALLIN: RIGHT WING DIVAS COMING TO COWTOWN

2010-02-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

PALIN (holding dead fish) Coming to Cowtown

WALLIN: Broadcasting Diva and political operator will moderate discussion

Once again trying to prove Phineas T. Barnum’s* truism that that there’s a sucker born every minute, a pair of Calgary promoters are bringing in Sarah Palin to impart her wit and wisdom to the residents of cowtown on March 6. See: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Sarah+Palin+sets+date+with+Calgary/2521080/story.html

In case you missed it, Calgary was the first Canadian city that hosted Karl Rove and George W. Bush in their Canadian pickpocket debuts after they had left office. See: http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2009/02/george-w-bush-is-coming-to-town-as.html and

http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2008/08/fraser-institute-invites-you-to-evening.html

I say ‘pickpocket’ because just as gullible Calgarians shelled out hundreds each to hear Bush and his henchman say nothing of consequence, 1000 of them are expected to pay 150 to 200 dollars for a ticket to receive the same from Palin - unless one considers seeing in the flesh a true celebrity from the dumb and dumber era of infotainment as something of value.

Ah, but I’m being churlish.

The star-studded event will be held at the Palomino Room at Stampede Park - yes, home of the Calgary Stampede and a favorite gathering place for the cowtown’s knuckle-dragging hard right. I say ‘star-studded’ because the event will include a question and answer session moderated by Senator Pamela Wallin, formerly a famous talking head on Canadian television news networks and now a formidable political operator in her own right.

Apart from her career in the media Wallin has displayed an amazing talent for getting governments of Canada of any political stripe to advance her career and resume. First of all the Chretien Liberals gave her the cushy appointment of Canada’s Consul General in the Big Apple where for a number of years she entertained the rich and powerful on behalf of Canada at her swanky Park Avenue digs. When she was done with that the Harper Conservatives put her on the laughable Manley panel to figure out what to do in Afghanistan. After having done such a bang-up job on that assignment – remember the panel said that 1000 extra troops and a little more equipment could do the job in Kandahar - the Harperites then appointed her to the Senate. Not bad for a kid from Wadena, Saskatchewan who once was a member of the far left Waffle group faction of the NDP: See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waffle; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Wallin

Just like Bush and Rove, Palin’s Calgary gig will be her Canadian speaking debut. Christian Darbyshire, one of the promoters of the boondoggle believes that Calgary is an ideal spot for Palin’s one and a half hour drivel because Calgary, like Alaska, is into oil and gas. He said, “She’s got some interesting insights and I think people in Calgary will be very interested in hearing what she has to say.” Probably so, given the thousands around town who share her red neck culture and believe that Barack Obama is about to initiate death panels for granny.

Darbyshire’s partner in the project Andy McCreath showed that he too knew his oats saying that the Palin-Calgary match-up was ideal because, “Calgary is a Republican town,” and that “There’s lots of Americans living in Calgary.” Dead on once again. Since the discovery of the Leduc elephant oil field way back in 1947 Calgary has been hands down the most American and Republican – some would say Texas Republican - of Canadian cities.

Indeed the boys do know their stuff when it comes to marketing big names in these parts. Among the has-beens with checkered pasts they have brought to town and whose pockets they have lined with cash from a gullible public are Tony Blair, Alan Greenspan, Rudy Giuliani, and Colin Powell. Although none of those today would likely win a popularity contest, they have also organized gabfests for the likes of Bill Clinton and Lance Armstrong.

No doubt the former governor and vice presidential candidate, Fox News political analyst, author, and university drop-out will toss enough red meat at what will be her largely hard right audience so that at the end of the day they will give her a rousing standing ovation. After which, of course, she’ll chortle all the way back to her bank in Wasila, Alaska to make the hundred thou or so deposit. A sucker born every minute? You betcha. There will be a thousand of them out at Stampede Park to hear the ditz.
* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There

HARPER APPOINTS CONSERVATIVE HACK TO POLICE THE POLICE

2010-01-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

OTHERS WHO DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR POLICING THE POLICE

Red meat* law and order Conservatives love the police. They believe they represent the very thin blue line that separates all of the true and honest of any society – namely, them - from the chaos created by the bad guy. Bad guys, they believe, are either born that way or coddled into being that way by liberals. That is their view of the relationship between society and the law.

They also believe that bad guys abound in society and everyone is at risk all of the time. Therefore they stand for unfettered police and state prosecution powers (unless it affects them, such as what happened to Conrad Black, who screamed blue murder when U.S. authorities threw the book at him for his crimes).

As far as punishment is concerned, red meat Conservatives have little time for the principle of rehabilitation but plenty of time for deterrence. The mercifully retired ex-cop Calgary MP Art Hangar was typical of that crowd. He once went to Singapore to see first hand the wondrous positive effects of flogging in its penal system. Another time he took the time to go to Texas and argue that Governor George W. Bush should put to death a former Alberta resident and Canadian citizen who was on death row there after being convicted of murder. He did this at the same time as the government of Canada was petitioning that his life be spared. Of course Bush made sure that the guy was executed.

Conservatives also believe that whatever cops want they should get. Thus, they give police all of the bells and whistles they ask for – shotguns, assault rifles, machine guns, hollow point bullets, robots, cannon-armed helicopters, pepper spray, tasers, and cell phones to complement the milder tools of their trade such as automatic pistols, handcuffs, billy clubs, and fast cars equipped with the latest of computer technology. Oh, yes, Conservatives also make sure there are generous budgets to buy all of the stuff. Because after all, it’s a jungle out there and these brave men and women are the thin blue line that protects us from all of that savagery.

Stephen Harper is a red meat Conservative who seems to have a dark view of human nature. He also appears to believe all of the stuff about the mean streets of Canada. And whether he believes it or not, he knows that it is good politics to be perceived to believe it. For years now, Canadian society has been bamboozled by local television news and the tabloid print media into believing that it really is a jungle out there, and that crime and mayhem are rampant, with large numbers of innocent people victimized daily by rapists, robbers, murderers, arsonists, drug-dealers and other low-lifes. Conservatives like Harper love to hear that stuff and they play it politically for all it’s worth.

Arming police to the teeth with the latest and most effective of fire power in what is largely a very peaceful society is bad enough. However, Harper’s most recent tactic of moving to abolish meaningful public oversight of oppressive police actions and behavior goes too far. That is just what he's done with his most recent bonehead move of appointing Toronto wills and estates lawyer Ian McPhail to head the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP. McPhail’s credentials for the job are that he is an estates lawyer and a Conservative Party apparatchik. Some people might call him a political hack. He admits that he has no experience or background for the job, policing, criminal law, or federal oversight agencies. Read: http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20100126.BCMASON26ART2226/TPStory//

Harper has appointed McPhail to preside over an administration of 90 public servants whose job it is to investigate public complaints against members of the RCMP for incidents such as excessive use of force, officers exceeding authority, and other deviant or criminal behaviour as it affects the public. They investigate incidents of the unnecessary use of tasers for example, or assaults that cause bodily harm.

The job of policing the police is a tough one that requires tough people because the thin blue line culture in Canada has allowed police institutions to establish their own stonewall culture as a defence against public scrutiny. For years now the RCMP complaints commission has been hamstrung in carrying out its duties by an RCMP administration that believes that it is none of the public’s damn business what their men do on the street, because it’s a jungle out there, and they protect people from the bad guys, and . . . yada, yada, yada. All of which Conservatives swallow hook, line and sinker, with Harper chief among them.

McPhail defends his appointment saying that having no police background is unimportant because he is merely a chairman, and that his main qualification is to understand how an administrative agency works. He prides himself in being ‘collegial.’ That kind of feeble weak-kneed statement is music to the ears of the stonewallers. It telegraphs to the RCMP they need not worry about their excesses because the commission is now led by some namby-pamby without the gonads to get tough with errant cops.

McPhail is replacing political independent Paul Kennedy as commission chair. Kennedy had 35 years of experience in federal security agencies before he took the job in 2005. His job performance was characterized by dogged diligence and tough reports while he tried to get to the bottom of what he was charged to investigate.

Harper has now come to the rescue of the thin blue line.

His decision reflects an approach that if left unchecked leads to a police state. Dictators like tough cops. It keeps the people in line. Franco, Stalin, and Hitler in Germany liked their cops tough and unimpeded.

It can be good politics to be sure. But it is not very good for the country.

*Dictionary definition of “throw red meat”
throw red meatv. to appease, satisfy, rally, or excite one’s (political) supporters.

DON MARTIN: CONSERVATIVE SCRIBE IN LA-LA LAND

2010-01-25T01:18:00.000-08:00

Columnist Don Martin (left) doing what he does best - schmoozing Conservatives (even the obscure ones)

Don Martin is not a bad columnist. He’s a lively writer, has some wit – unusual in the current CanWest Global organization - and, albeit rarely, takes a shot at the Prime Minister like maybe once a year.

He’s a conservative columnist to be sure. Federally, his political affections have drifted seamlessly from the old kinder and gentler PCs, to the hard-ass Reform, Alliance and now Conservative parties. He has hung out exclusively with conservative movers and shakers for at least a generation and then some, and has followed and supported their rightward twists and turns with the instinct of a loyal and faithful bloodhound following the scent of his master’s prey.

Martin swooned over Mulroney during his hey-day as Prime Minister, believed Ralph Klein was the funniest and smartest guy on the planet (he even guffawed at Klein’s dinosaur fart jokes) when he was Premier during Alberta’s dark ages, thought the rise of Preston Manning was akin to the second coming of Christ, viewed Stockwell Day’s charisma as right up there with Pierre Trudeau’s when Day was doing his thing in his wet suit,* and almost always speaks reverentially of Stephen Harper as being profound, deep, and a master strategist (tsk, tsk).

(*He did, I swear it! You can find it in one of his columns written when the hapless Day was coming to power as party leader)

Martin stays away from Grits and people of other political persuasions as though they carried some deadly communicable disease. In all my years of rubbing shoulders with Liberals in Alberta and elsewhere I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen Martin in their company. He is comfy with conservatives, and so he sticks to them and with them.

Naturally even if one belongs to some religious order, living that kind of a cloistered life can have negative consequences. One can lose touch with society, lose sight of reality, ignore history, draw baseless conclusions, and even become delusional – traits that frequently show up in Martin’s columns published in the various broadsheets that are part of the recently and mercifully defunct Asper press.

I was reminded of all of this when I read his recent column of January 21st, Recalibration Lost. See: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/21/don-martin-recalibration-lost.aspx#ixzz0dUqxYCMW

The column deals with the recent tightening polls between the Conservatives and Liberals as well as the negative public reaction to Harper’s second controversial prorogation of parliament within one year. Martin calls prorogation ‘a sleepy issue,’ believing it is of such little importance it can be blown off the front pages by some timely Harper generosity to the beleagured Haitians. He just doesn’t get it that Canadians have serious and distressing problems of their own that they want their government to solve – problems such as joblessness, soaring deficits, the continued sacrifice of lives and treasure in Afghanistan, and the detainee cover up. Canadians view prorogation as the government’s unnecessary and prolonged vacation from dealing with those festering problems. As a result, Canadians are angry and prorogation is no ‘sleepy issue.’

Martin really goes off the deep end with his next assertion about why the neck-and-neck polls are really of no concern to the Conservatives.

He writes that Conservatives know that three weeks from now there is “a firm end date to any real or rogue slide in their political fortunes.” Just what is happening three weeks from now that will save the Harperites? Why, its the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This is how Harper sees the Conservative universe unfolding:

“At the star-filled Feb. 12 spectacle in Vancouver, featuring the giddy hoopla of singers, dancers and athlete parades, the Olympic flame will fire up the sky and the word ‘prorogation’ will return to its natural domain in the vocabulary of parliamentary geeks.”

Apart from Martin’s staggeringly low and false opinion of the intelligence of the Canadian people and his failure to grasp their valid concerns or the dire straits many of them find themselves in, he has learned nothing from history during his professional lifetime as a Conservative scribe.

Twenty-two years ago next month Brian Mulroney had the chance to ride the coattails of Olympic ballyhoo into political popularity. The Calgary Olympics were held in February 1988 and the federal election followed November 21 later in the year. The result: Mulroney’s PCs lost 43 seats. Canada hosting the Olympics does not translate in support for the sitting government.

This is not the first time Martin has thrown logic and history to the winds in his exuberance while looking through rose colored glasses with his Conservative pals. He was so exhilarated by the last Harper victory at the polls that he was convinced Harper could get anything he wanted even though he had won only a minority of seats in parliament. With unrestrained confidence and joy at the Conservative victory he wrote on election night:

“The Conservatives have won a majority in political power if not in name” and that “. . . the Conservatives are now set to lead the an[sic] absolute-power minority, perhaps the strongest in history.”

Read: http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2008/10/harpers-minority-government-remember.html

Little more than two months later and about to be dethroned by a coalition as a result of his strategic excesses, Harper was on bended knee to the Governor General requesting a prorogation to save his skin.

REPORT FROM ALBERTA: TORIES AND WILD ROSE ALLIANCE SET FOR THE MOTHER OF ALL TORY CIVIL WARS

2010-01-18T14:32:00.000-08:00

DANIELLE SMITH
Heartthrob of the right seen here practicing her secret weapon

TED MORTON (Stelmach's chosen successor) taking target practice in preparation for 'The Mother of all Tory Civil Wars'

Premier Ed Stelmach and I started at the same time - me as a blogger and Ed as the much loftier premier - and I don’t think I’ve had a positive thing to say about him since. I’m sure there are those that think that I started the blog just to beat up on Ed. Well, that’s just not true. It was conservatives that I was after and unhappily for Ed he was one of them.

Today however, I want to say something nice about him and here goes. His choice of Ted Morton as President of the Treasury Board was an inspired one. Not because Morton will do a good job in the post, to be sure. But because by appointing Morton, Stelmach has set the stage for the Tories to begin neutralizing the irrational but growing support for the Wild Rose Alliance, and in addition for Morton to emerge as Stelmach’s only logical successor. See: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/14/dan-arnold-stelmach-protects-his-job-by-promoting-rival.aspx#ixzz0cpTZQqlm
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Dramatic+shifts+likely+Stelmach+cabinet+shuffle+Braid/2429737/story.html

I hasten to point out that neither potential result is particularly good for the people of Alberta. Any party that has botched governing a province for more than 17 years – like the Tories - deserves to belong in the trash heap of history. Furthermore, Morton’s record as a red-meat conservative and a consistent drumbeater for major spending cuts is not likely to improve the lives of Albertans who are sick, who want to properly educate their children, and who want a cleaner environment with some decent roads and bridges in their communities.

But the appointment is great for the beleaguered Tories. Morton’s vaunted skill as a communicator and record as an arch-conservative are no less impressive than those of the charming, motor-mouth Ms. Danielle Smith.

Besides, Morton’s emergence as a real player in the Tory future is likely to make many potential defectors and even some of those who have already bolted to the Wild Rose Alliance rethink their decision. They will remember that Morton has a loud and impeccable history of championing their cause and has worked shoulder-to -shoulder with other heroes in the conservative pantheon of lunacy – men such as Stephen Harper, Preston Manning, Tom Flanagan, and the rest of the sorry lot. This will make it hard for them to continue to support the Smith insurgency.

While having drinks at a decent bar a couple of days ago with one of those wild-eyed right wingers smitten by Smith’s undeniable charms into buying a membership in her party, I suggested to him that some of the new Wild Rose Alliance members might be heading back into the Tory fold now that Morton is in charge of the public purse and looks poised to replace Stelmach. He pooh-poohed the idea saying that it was too little too late and that the exodus into the new party was unstoppable. I replied that quite the contrary, given the track record for shaky loyalty and survival amongst Alberta conservatives, it was indeed likely that many of them would return to the fold, and that Smith’s future as the next Premier of Alberta was now very cloudy indeed. I don’t know if it was my words about Smith’s chances or if he preferred more conservative company – probably both - but he soon paid for his drink and stalked off into the night.

However, the light at the end of the tunnel may be the train for both Smith and the Wild Rose Alliance and Morton and the Tories. The inspired choice of Morton – probably the single most effective decision made by Stelmach during his underwhelming career as Premier - which is not exactly saying much – may result in one of those political bloodbaths that leaves old Tories still divided and their parties engaged in long-term trench warfare, able only to scrape up minority governments in a fractious legislature, and all the while being never far away from defeat.

THE KENT BROTHERS: ONE SEARCHES FOR THE TRUTH. THE OTHER WORKS FOR THE GUY WHO TRIES TO HIDE IT.

2010-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

ARTHUR KENT: THE SCUD STUD

AND NOBODY'S PATSY

PETER KENT (on the right), member of the Hijackers government seen here with DON MARTIN, Conservative wordsmith for the now-defunct CanWest Global organization, arch foe of brother Arthur, and cheerleader for Stephen Harper

Arthur Kent is an Alberta boy – born in Medicine Hat and raised in Calgary. Now in his mid-fifties he has had a remarkable career in journalism for more than thirty years. Newshounding runs in his family. His old man, Parker Kent, was a longtime print journalist who rose to become an Associate Editor for the now–bankrupt Calgary Herald back in the days when it was a real newspaper. Arthur also has an older brother who spent some years in the television news business.

Among Kent’s many accomplishments are a prize-winning television documentary about Afghanistan under the warlords produced months before 9/11, winning Emmys for his coverage of the tragedy in Tiananmen Square and the bloodshed in Bosnia, and covering the Rumanian revolution. In Iraq during Desert Storm he was the dashing ‘Scud Stud’ reporting the mayhem nightly on NBC television news, and in 2006 he produced another documentary on the troubles in Afghanistan. He’s covered Pakistan, Russia, China and all of the hot spots all over the world. NBC, CBC, CTV, the Observer are just a few of the news organizations that have given him a pay cheque over the years.

When he worked for NBC in the early nineties he had the guts to sue the corporation for allowing entertainment values to dominate the news. And he won big time. Towing the company line was not his strong suit and so for the past fifteen years or so he’s been a freelance filmmaker, writer, and reporter and has produced an impressive body of work. See: http://www.skyreporter.com/about/

Kent doesn’t take any guff from anybody. If one gets into a pissing contest with him and if he’s right he will let you know. If you persist and try to come at him he’ll sue you at the drop of a hat. Ask NBC or CanWest Global and Don Martin, and they’ll tell you. See: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:1xrpZJ6p9wIJ:www.news-cruncher.com/2009/09/arthur-kent-v-don-martin-canwest.html+Arthur+Kent+Ed+Stelmach&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

Kent also tells it like it is. During his ill-fated attempt as a provincial Tory candidate in a Calgary riding in the provincial election of 2008 while running under the hapless leadership of Special Ed Stelmach, Stelmach stood Kent up by not attending a fundraiser as promised. Kent quickly accused the Stelmach campaign of wanting “nothing but my name.”

His criticisms of the Stelmach organization at the time were eerily similar to what Heather Forsyth and Rob Anderson had to say the other day when they bolted to the Wild Rose Alliance. Kent said that people around Stelmach saw Kent and his team “as competitors . . . rather than as partners,” and that the Stelmach people should be more inclusive. He said that the Stelmach’s people “should be asking us what we’re hearing on the doorsteps and where the campaign should go,” and that they did not do that. “One-way communication,” he said, “is not the way to go,” and , “. . . we have to do things differently.” See: http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/columnists/story.html?id=43d6e93c-08b1-4180-8600-302926f66656

Kent lost the election and went back doing what he does best - being a globe trotting journalist.

Yesterday Kent was raising hell again, this time at Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Republican minority government. Kent said the proroguing of Parliament was a hijacking which enables the government to avoid coming clean on the bad news of the Afghan war and the abuse of the detainees. He called Harper’s action of muzzling discussion of Afghanstan the PM’s fatwa, described it as ‘control freakery,’ and accused the government of concealing the Karzai regime’s corruption so as to avoid having to do something about it.

And there was more. Kent also accused the Harper government of ‘smothering’ stories such as the continuing trafficking in heroin and dirty money at the Kabul Airport, the ‘violent crackdown’ on the Kabul press, the disappearance of gazillions of Canadian tax dollars to fake Afghan cops and crooked officials, and Karzai’s nomination as Counter-Narcotics Minister of a widely known corrupt election fixer with criminal associations. See: http://www.skyreporter.com/blog/page/1/20100109_01/

There’s a whole bunch of other juicy stuff you can read on Kent’s blog.

Ah, yes, did I mention that Arthur Kent has an older brother that used to be a journalist? That older brother is none other than Peter Kent, MP for Thornhill who holds the lofty title of Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the Americas while serving the hijackers that are hiding all of these sordid facts from the Canadian people. As a ‘journalist’ Peter of course is a different kettle of fish than his feisty younger brother. While Arthur was out there putting himself in harm’s way to inform his viewers and listeners of the truth, most of the time Peter distinguished himself as merely a talking head. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kent

Well, bravo to Arthur Kent. He has shown that he has big cojones and that he cares about informing the public.

I wonder if the brothers spend their Christmas Holidays together.

ALBERTA TORIES: THE RODENTS BEGIN TO LEAVE

2010-01-04T11:33:00.000-08:00

Not only are the Alberta Tory rodents scampering towards the nearest deck, today a couple of them even jumped over the side of the ship. Fish Creek MLA Heather Forsyth and Airdrie-Chestemere MLA Rob Anderson announced that they had finally given up on Special Ed and had become proud new members of the Wild Rose-Alliance caucus. With the defectors joining Calgary Glenmore MLA Paul Hinman, the new party now has three members in the legislature.

For Ed and the tired and bedraggled Tories the chickens are coming home to roost big time. Forsyth was one of the Calgary ministers Ed purged upon his takeover of the party. She had been both Solicitor General and Minister of Children’s Services in a high profile political career that began with her first electoral victory in 1993. The protection of children was a major interest for her and even Reader’s Digest recognized her contribution in the area by naming her a Canadian Hero in 2002. But it didn’t matter to Ed and the boys. Calgary had taken enough from the cookie jar. It was the yokels' turn.

Forsyth must have smarted from her fall from being a prominent and senior minister to being relegated to the chair of the moribund Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and positions on such lowly committees as Private Bills, Privileges and Elections, and Orders and Printing. How much lower can you get?

Anderson is a new kid on the block having been elected in the spring election of 2007. He is reported to be a very bright guy who worked as one of the suits for the same downtown Calgary blue-chip law firm that pays Ralph Klein a tidy sum to tell dinosaur fart jokes while yukking it up over scotch with their clients in oak-paneled board rooms.

Forsyth said that she became a turncoat because Alberta needs a stable economy and fiscal policies that will “bring back investors confidence, lower taxes, and once again the Alberta Advantage needs to be back on the agenda,” and that she had confidence that she and the Wild Rose Alliance “can work together to build the province that Albertans deserve.”

Anderson’s statement accused Stelmach and his pals of failing to address his constituents’ concerns and of muzzling him in speaking out about the issues. Thus, he said, he was going to speak more forcefully for the people who elected him and added, “I have no interest in investing any more of my life and taxpayer’s money defending poor public policy that has been developed by a small band of out-of-touch government appointees and insiders.” I presume he was talking about Special Ed and his band of yokels.

They are the first of what is likely to be a steady procession of Alberta Tories abandoning what was once the proud party of Peter Lougheed for more promising prospects. Conservatives, after all, have proven more than once that they believe that “if the guy that brung ya falters on the dance floor, well then, we’re outta here,” such as when Socreds bolted from the party of Harry Strom to the party of Peter Lougheed. The best recent example was the fate of the federal Progressive Conservative Party in the wake of the unpopularity of Brian Mulroney and the ineptitude of his successor Kim Campbell. In the West, PCs switched and voted en masse for Preston Manning and his Reform Party and the old federal PCs were kaput.

The Alberta PCs blew their only chance of survival by not having the courage to dump Stelmach at the leadership review convention in November. Now they are stuck with him until the next election. Is there a chance of Eddie leaving before then in favour of a new and more attractive leader? I don’t think so. There is no messiah on the horizon. And besides, he and his yokels still have the cookie jar, which was what it was all about in the first place.

See: http://www.calgarysun.com/news/alberta/2010/01/04/12341791.html

ALBERTA GRITS: A BUNCH OF HAPPY WARRIORS!

2009-12-31T09:01:00.000-08:00

As most of you who read my blog know, although I have little time for most of the editorial writers and columnists over at the hapless Calgary Herald, I do read and have respect for a few. One that I have for the most part admired is long-time political columnist Don Braid who I have known and read for thirty years.

But alas, Braid is not always right. His column in yesterday’s Herald “Victim mentality keeps Liberals in doghouse,” is one of his more dismal efforts. Read: http://www.calgaryherald.com/columnists/Braid+Victim+mentality+keeps+Liberals+doghouse/2391128/story.html

He starts off on the right note. He sees the Tories on the ropes and the Alberta right coming apart at the seams. He notes that Alberta Grits are paying down their debt, becoming a presence on the internet, and presenting sound policies. All of this, Braid correctly observes, shows that Liberals in Alberta now have a great chance to move forward, and perhaps even attain power.

From that point on Braid’s column goes all to hell. He predicts that despite those positive signs of potential success, the Grits will fail because of their collective victim mentality which causes them to blame others for their problems. Braid says that the first words one hears from senior Alberta Liberals these days are “Why is the Wildrose Alliance getting a free ride?” The evidence upon which he draws this sweeping conclusion is that he recently met “one top guy” [who , and what makes him a “top guy,” he doesn’t say] who “threw me that question at a party this week.”

Well first of all, “one top guy” doesn’t speak for the whole party. Secondly, you find individuals all the time who are out of sync with any group to which they may belong. For instance, I’m sure you will find one or two Calgarians who might say that Stelmach is a good Premier, but that doesn’t mean that all Calgarians believe he is a good Premier. You might even find a Calgarian who will say that the Calgary Herald is a good newspaper, God forbid, and that sure as hell does not mean that all Calgarians believe that!

Braid continues his diatribe by saying that when the Grits lose they blame the media and also they “blame the voters for being too stupid to see their virtues. And the voters, far from stupid, pick up on the condescension and reject the Liberals once again.”

Well, I have spent more time around Alberta Liberals than the whole of the Calgary Herald editorial and writing staff of the last ten years put together, and I can tell you that this is pure – to put it politely – bullshit. If Braid believes that then he is spending too much time on the Tory cocktail circuit helping them drink their own bathwater.

Almost all of the Liberals that I know – and I know and have known thousands of the critters in the more than 40 years of being an active Grit - don’t blame anybody for not being able to form a government except themselves. They may be disappointed at having not formed a government after an election, but they just get back to work and merrily try to create a winning combination. And always with an abiding respect for the people as well as a smile. They are truly happy warriors, who – as the song goes - pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again.

Alberta Grits are also resilient. The Alberta Liberal Party is the only provincial political party that has had a presence in every Alberta election since 1905 and thus holds the record of being the longest standing party in the history of the province. It has outlasted the United Farmers and Social Credit parties and was alive and well when the pre-Lougheed Tories were protected by game laws. Five will get you ten that the Liberals will survive the Tories once again and if anybody wants to bet money against that one, by all means, give me a call.

PRESTON MANNING GROVELS FOR SENATE APPOINTMENT . . . OR SOMETHING

2009-12-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

Like Father

Like Son

Preston Manning is after something. And what he is after, Steve Harper has got. Or at least he has control over it. And so what is young Manning to do? Well, just like his old man he’ll move heaven and earth to get it, and if it means having to stroke Steve Harper (a very distasteful exercise if you think about it), well, so be it.

How else can one explain the drivel of his column published in this morning’s edition of the Globe and Mail? See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/honesty-is-the-best-policy/article1413594/

Manning lauds Harper for his stands on China and the climate change talks in Copenhagen and says both were consistent with the desire of Canadians that Canada be “a moral beacon and . . to set an example on the global stage.”

He chalks up Harper’s tardiness in visiting China to the PM's concern about China’s human-rights violations (Wish it were that Harper would have the same concern for Canada’s violation of human rights abroad). He would have us believe that the four long years it took Harper to get through this little exercise of pique was fair and reasonable because the Chinese now know where we stand. He must believe that the Chinese are slow learners.

According to Manning, Canada's four-year long snubbing of China, is our message to the Chinese that Canadians have a different view of democracy and human rights than China, that we want more trade with China, and that we will not sacrifice one for the other.

As a further suck-up to Harper, he naturally lambastes previous Liberal governments as being hypocritical in their dealings with China – dealings which, by the way, were much happier and far more productive than anything Harper has done since he took power.

But has Harper's actions caused China to change its stand on democracy and human rights?

Not a whit.

Has Canada changed its stand on Canadian-Chinese relations? After four long years it has done a complete about-face. It is Canada that has changed its position and not China.

All of this Manning says shows that Harper has made the Chinese “realize they were dealing with . . . a leader who says what he means and means what he says on both human rights and trade.”

What a crock!

A better explanation for Harper's abrupt reversal of policy is that somebody (could that somebody be the only Conservative who knows anything about China, namely ex-Grit David Emerson?) convinced Harper that his ignorant policy of ignoring China and playing kissy-face with the Dalai Lama was leading nowhere in terms of economic benefit to Canada and that after four years it was bloody-well time it changed.

On Copenhagen, Manning again lauds Harper for being realistic in his commitments to greenhouse gas emissions – naturally condemning Chretien’s Kyoto position as being unrealistic and hypocritical. The point of Chretien taking a positive leadership role in Kyoto of course does not cross his mind.

Now don't laugh. Manning concludes that Harper’s “modesty, honesty and transparency . . . on these issues is preferable to policies tainted by hypocrisy if Canada truly aspires to be a ‘moral beacon’ on the global stage.”

Manning’s relationship with Harper has never been warm. In fact, the space between his shoulder blades still bears deep scars from Harper knives inserted while Manning was leader of the Reform Party and Harper one of his disloyal camp-followers.

See: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Av5ptUkqKrkJ:pushedleft.blogspot.com/2009/07/harpers-mean-streak-was-perfect-fit-for.html+Manning+Harper+expenses+conflict&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

HARPER'S FOREIGN POLICY: POLISHING THE FINE ART OF BEING INCOMPETENT

2009-12-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

Stephen Harper (above) is fifty years old. He’s been in politics since he was in his high school’s Young Liberal Club back when Trudeau was in his hey day. His grown up political career began back in 1985 when he was an aide to a prominent Calgary PC MP (who he later unceremoniously stabbed in the back).

His career has progressed from being a midwife to the birth of the Reform Party in 1987, a Reform MP from 1993 to 1997, a stint as head of the right wing lobby group the National Citizens Coalition, leader of the Canadian Alliance who presided over the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives which morphed into the Conservative Party, becoming leader of that Conservative Party in 2004 and Prime Minister in 2006 – almost 4 years ago. It is a career that has now spanned a quarter century.

But it took him that long to find out that his childish – indeed bizarre – treatment of modern China was not in the national interests of Canada and that indeed China was many times more important to Canada than the Dalai Lama and Tibet. He snubbed China (by not going to the Olympics in Beijing and waiting 4 years before he made his first visit), and repeatedly and gratuitously blasted them over human rights (as though Canada under his leadership had an impeccable record in that department).

I wonder what else he will change his mind about in foreign policy. What will he do when he realizes that Canadian companies have billions of dollars of investment – particularly in the oil and gas sector - in Arab countries? Will he wake up and realize that sending his foreign minister on missions to harangue Arab heads of state as they sit on the tarmac at Gander, Newfoundland waiting to refuel is not such a hot idea?

Is it too much to expect that he will ultimately see the folly of his policy of wholehearted and continual support for Israel to the complete exclusion of Arab interests or legitimate concerns just for the sake of domestic politics in Canada? Will he finally get it that his heavy-handed and one-sided support in that conflict has led to a deterioration of Canada’s over-all credibility in international affairs?

And what of Afghanistan? Will he ever understand the intractable and indomitable nature of the people of that country and how for almost 2000 years they have repeatedly detested and defeated invaders regardless of the power they were up against? Given his blind pursuit of shedding Canadian blood and spending billions of taxpayers' money in that godforsaken country, together with the lies and deceits he and his government have precipitated upon the Canadian people as to progress and success in the battlefield, will he finally come clean and do an about face and get the hell out? After how many years of conflict, lives lost, and billions spent?

The point of all of this is that the office of Prime Minister is no place for on the job training. There are columnists and other Harper apologists and drumbeaters in this country who give him credit for finally moving towards a normal relationship with China. But what credit should he receive for that? Why did he not know long before now what he seems just to have learned about China recently? Or why did he let ideology get in the way of a sensible policy? And if he was ignorant about China and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and dumb and deceitful about Afghanistan, what other costly screw-ups are taking place?

For Stephen Harper to be learning about these issues at the age of 50 after a quarter century in politics is absurd. To be cheered and complimented by some Canadians for having finally reversed a stupid four year track with our second largest trading partner is an acceptance of mediocrity that would be laughed at in any other western industrialized democracy – except perhaps for the dumb and dumber crowd that comprise much of the Congress of the United States.

Harper’s knowledge of foreign affairs is as abysmal as it is embarrassing for this country. That he should receive raves and kudos from many in the Canadian press for fumbling and bumbling his way through to some positive foreign policy change is surely the triumph of incompetence over competence. In fact, it says as much about the dismal state of Canada’s press as it does about Harper.

MURRAY DOBBIN: THANKS TO HARPER, "WE ARE IN GRAVE DANGER"

2009-11-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

I have read at least one book by Murray Dobbin namely 'Preston Manning and the Reform Party' and many of his writings. He is one of Canada's great progressive writers and one whose values I respect and share. This piece appeared in his blog yesterday. I thought the substance was so accurate and the emotion so compelling about the dangers posed by the Harper government that it was worth repeating on this blog.

The Republicanization of Canadian political culture
Posted: 25 Nov 2009 09:17 PM PST

Watching the sickening performances of the Harperites in the House of Commons this week – out right lying, bullying, slander, contempt for the public and parliament, and a stunning disregard for the public good – brings home a hard reality: we are witnessing the Republicanization of our political culture.

And it’s not just the torture issue – it’s the Conservative labeling of Liberals as anti-Semitic – a kind of shit-house rat politics virtually unknown in Canadian political history. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Karl Rove is on the PMO’s payroll; his disciples certainly are.

This is storm trooper politics and the most alarming and depressing part of it is that it actually works. In a poll done by the CBC (though on Afghanistan the CBC and its polls can’t be entirely trusted) only 50% of Canadians believed the testimony of Richard Colvin. The rest, presumably, believed a politician, Peter Mackay, who has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of character – most notably his self-serving lie to David Orchard about handing the Progressive Conservative Party to the barbarians of the Reform/Alliance.

Colvin – a man of extraordinary courage, knowing that his testimony would effectively end his career – told the truth simply because it was the right thing to do. But in the new Republican world of Canadian politics viciousness can win out – just as it did in the US with the Swift Boat attack ads going after decorated soldier/politician John Kerry. In a political universe where there are no rules of civilized behaviour, the most ruthless can win because the side that plays by the rules just isn’t mean enough.

There is no obvious way to deal with overt and unapologetic political thuggery. Fighting back in the same manner actually plays into the thugs’ hands because part of their broader objective is to poison the well of public discourse. The ferocious partisanship of the Harper Conservatives – who should really be called the Libertarian Party as there is nothing conservative about them – is designed to drive ordinary citizens away from politics. I can barely stand to watch and listen to the vitriol and lies and I have spent my whole life observing and analyzing politics.

I try to imagine what people who have very limited for it must think when they see this performance. But there is no question that it partly explains the fact that 42% of Canadians didn’t vote in 2008 – a huge advantage for the Libertarians.

Part of the explanation for the weakness of Obama’s administration is the simple fact that the Republicans, even though they are out of power, have so damaged the political culture, so scorched the political landscape, that rational discourse is simply no longer possible in the US.

Eight years of George Bush (building on eight years of Ronald Reagan) lives on and will do so for many years to come. Compassion was simply beaten out of US democracy – day after day, week after week, year after year reason was degraded, community destroyed, truth and genuine discourse ridiculed and crushed. It is impossible to predict whether or not these things are actually dead in the US – or whether the hints of fascism will grow into the real thing before reason and compassion can be rebuilt.

The election of Obama suggests that the fight isn’t over – there are millions of progressive Americans who share the best of civic values. But so far they are losing.We are not there yet in Canada but we are naïve if we think the same destruction can’t happen here. After four years of sociopathic governance by a man full of hate and contempt, Canada is already becoming unrecognizable.

We must stop this man before he literally destroys the country – that is, destroys the core of who and what we are and how we see ourselves. The first step is recognizing that we are in grave danger.

LAWRENCE MARTIN GETS IT RIGHT: IT'S TIME FOR THE GRITS TO COME OUT FIGHTING

2009-11-24T06:20:00.000-08:00

The following erudite column written by the brilliant columnist Lawrence Martin was published today. I hope everybody in the OLO has read it and memorized it.

Conservative record of smears tells the story
Lawrence Martin
24 November 2009 08:00

When in doubt, check the track record.

If that is done on the question of diplomat Richard Colvin’s testimony on the Afghan detainees, the Harper government’s side of the story doesn’t make it to the dance floor.

The Conservatives have a long history of trying to shield embarrassing truths from the public and of smearing anyone who challenges them. It’s one of the reasons critics were quick to pounce on Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s attempt to undermine Colvin last week.

In the same week, the Tories were distributing flyers to various ridings trying to paint the Liberals as anti-Jewish. The charge is ludicrous. Michael Ignatieff, one of the most right-wing leaders on foreign policy the Liberals have ever had, is decidedly pro-Israel. But that’s the way the Tories operate.

We recall how they went after Linda Keen, the former president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and how they slandered Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, calling her a “national disgrace.” They smeared NDP members as being pro Taliban.

As for their record of secrecy and concealment, they may well exceed any Canadian government before them. They’ve muzzled their own ministers, shut down a giant government information registry, and made a mockery of access to information regulations.

No one should be surprised, therefore, if in fact they tried to cover up the Afghan prisoner abuse and are now forced into trying to discredit the whistleblower.

The Conservatives keep using smear tactics for a good reason. They work. Take the personal attack ads they launched against Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Ignatieff. Those leaders, who came out of the soft ivory tower of academia, had no response. Dion didn’t have the money to run counterattack ads. The party was broke.

Iggy’s team had the money. But what did he do? After being belted by Conservative commercials labelling him a just-visiting, power-hungry, carpetbagger, he turned the other cheek. In a series of commercials he stood in front of a forest mouthing platitudes and bromides.
Looking on, Stephen Harper was probably laughing his butt off.

The Grits, hovering at historic low levels of 23 per cent in the polls, desperately need a new strategy. They’ve got to throw out the kid gloves and start responding to the Tories in kind. Ignatieff hasn’t wished to be front and centre on the Afghan allegations because of his past controversial remarks on the use of torture.

But the torture allegations are only one element of this story. There’s a bigger one. It’s the alleged cover-up. Iggy should smear the Conservatives with that. Unlike most Tory charges, it might even be true.
http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/comment/article/377456--conservative-record-of-smears-tells-the-story

Lawrence Martin is a journalist and author of 10 books who writes about national affairs from Ottawa.

HAVE CANADIANS BECOME NEOCON LEMMINGS? OR ARE THEY JUST PLAYING POSSUM?

2009-11-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

DOES THIS REPRESENT THE CANADIAN PEOPLE?

OR DOES THIS?

As I look at recent current polls the increasingly nagging question that keeps reverberating in my brain is, Has Harper already changed Canada in his almost four years of power?

There are many indications that perhaps he has. Canadians appear to have been sucked in by negative swiftboat tactics that destroy the reputations of good people. They have ignored Harper’s history as a far-right tub-thumper while he was head of the National Citizens Coalition, and that he had his nose so far up George W. Bush's ass he could see Tony Blair. Canadians seemed to pay little attention to Harper's fascistic attempted coup to destroy opposition parties by cutting off their funding last December, and they even seemed to fall for the canard that the evil was not the threat to democracy but the threat of a coalition.

Canadians gave Harper a pass during the last federal election when he tried to hoodwink the whole country into believing the big lie that there was little wrong with the economy. They seem to pooh-pooh his spending of gazillions of stimulus largesse only in Conservative ridings.

Neither do Canadians seem to recognize or care about Harper’s foreign policy gaffes and screwups that damage our international reputation and business relationships and put Canadian lives at risk. Canadians do not seem to have given a hoot about the confinement and torture of Islamic Canadian citizens abroad on trumped up charges brought by third world gestapoes, while Harper either does nothing, or worse yet, throws roadblocks in front of the efforts of those confined to extricate themselves.

Canadians seem to be ignoring or paying little heed to lies repeatedly fed to them by their government about Afghanistan – lies such as, that the allies are making headway, or that Karzai is an honest and decent man, or that we are bringing the Afghans the rule of law, or that we are making headway training Afghan police and soldiers. They have shown little concern for the Canadian lives lost and the cost to our national treasury in what most certainly is to become one of the West’s great lost causes.

Despite the Harper spear headed character assassinations, despite his government's dismal record in domestic and foreign policy or in protecting Canadian citizens abroad, and despite his government's lies and obfuscations, Canadians don’t seem to care. What the hell is going on? Has Harper already turned this country into a nation of sheeplike neocons like himself? Have we become a bunch of unthinking conservative lemmings?

Or are Canadians just playing possum? ‘Playing possum’ means to convincingly pretend you are dead so that others leave you alone. In boxing the definition is much more Machiavellian and lethal. It means pretending you were dead or asleep until your opponent gets careless and leaves an opening so you can deliver the knockout punch or move in for the kill. The famed middle-weight champ Jake La Motta (above, bloodied but unbowed) was good at playing possum. He won a lot of important fights that way.

Let us hope the Canadian people are just playing possum. Or perhaps just in the process of giving Harper enough rope as the saying goes for his lynching later on. Otherwise, this country is going to change, and not for the better.

THE SWIFTBOATING OF LIBERAL LEADERS: TIME TO FIGHT BACK!

2009-11-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia the definition of ‘Swiftboating’ is “American political jargon that is used as a strong pejorative description of some kind of attack that the speaker considers unfair or untrue – for example, an ad hominem attack or a smear campaign.”

The term comes from a smear campaign against Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry in the U.S. Presidential election of 2004 which was launched by a loud-mouthed, right wing group of ex-military personnel, who told the world that Kerry did not deserve the war medals that were awarded to him for his war service in Viet Nam, and that he was basically a fraud and a coward. The ‘swiftboat’ term relates to Kerry having been a swift boat commander in Viet Nam as well as to those who defamed him, some of which were comprised of rock-ribbed Republican swift boat veterans who called themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The whole sleazy operation – including television ads and a best selling book - was financed by wealthy and extremist, right-wing Republicans.

Kerry to his lasting regret took the high road gently dismissing the charges against him and mildly chiding his opponents for their low level politics. He went on to lose the election and swiftboating thus became a new favorite tactic of the right. For further examples of this odious ploy, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating, and for a further discussion of the term see: http://www.wisegeek.com/in-politics-what-is-swiftboating.htm

In the United States, politicians who have been ‘swiftboated’ have learned to fight back. For example, Sarah Palin made little headway on her ‘death panel’ allegations in connection with Obama’s health care reform initiative. Neither did the ‘birthers’ get much mileage in their efforts to convince Americans that Obama was born in Kenya and thus ineligible to become President. Much of the press in the U.S. – not being as monolithically conservative as it is in Canada – has figured out swiftboating as well, and is not as likely to roll over as it did in the Kerry episode.

Canadians have been slow to learn about swiftboating. The Conservatives used the technique with their attack ads against Stefane Dion. They knew what they were doing. They wanted to define him to the Canadian people as an inarticulate bumbler who was not a leader. To do so they peppered our television screens long before the last election with highly prejudicial film clips taken out of context which sought to portray him in a bad light. The Liberal Party of Canada –presumably in a Kerry-like misguided attempt to take the high road – pooh-poohed retaliation and did nothing. The Conservatives were allowed to smear Dion with their definition of him. They had swiftboated him. The Liberals had been fooled.

And now – quite unbelievably – the Conservatives have done it again to Michael Ignatieff. The swiftboating of Ignatieff, again in the form of television ads composed of out of context and highly prejudicial film clips, has portrayed him as a selfish dilettante with no attachment to the country. The polls seem to be showing that once again the swiftboating of a Liberal leader by the Conservatives is working. And once again the Liberals seem to be doing nothing to retaliate. Surely, they are not being fooled again. Even the immortal George W. Bush said, “Fool me once, shame on . . . you. . . . . You fooled me once, I can’t get fooled again.” See: http://video.google.ca/videosearch?hl=en&source=hp&q=george+w.+bush+fool+me+once+quote&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=pzj8SqrGMoe2swPj38mSAQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CA4QqwQwAA#
To the Liberals and Mr. Ignatieff I say, "Don’t be fooled again!" There is too much at stake. A Harper majority government will change this country so that none of us years hence will recognize it for the great country it once was.

It is time for Michael Ignatieff and his new chief of staff Peter Donolo, to take the gloves off. The country needs energetic engagement on the political battlefield. Politics is a tough and bloody sport with little place for a genteel Marquis of Queensbury rule book. This is particularly so when one’s opponent has no intention of engaging in the contest pursuant to any kind of a rule book.

Its time to fight and fight back – on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills,* not to mention the church basements, small town hockey arenas, barbecues, hockey tournaments, and anywhere else we do politics in this great country. It is time for some realpolitik! And there is not one moment to lose!
(*with all due credit and apologies to the great Winston S. Churchill)

THE ALBERTA ADVANTAGE: FLAMES GET VACCINATED BEFORE PREGNANT WOMEN AND BABIES

2009-11-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

KEN KING

TORY PAL AND FORMER EMPLOYEE

OF CONVICTED FELON CONRAD BLACK

Special Ed! I guess, Special Ed! Just when you thought you heard it all there’s more.

Everybody knows about the botch-up on the H1 N1 vaccination program in Alberta. Between Ed and his bully-boy health minister Ron Leipert (aided and abetted by his federal cousins who have not come through with enough vaccine), the program is presently shut down for four days and scheduled to reopen Thursday. Contrary to the original plan which was to ensure vaccination of the high risk people first - namely, pregnant women and babies aged six months to five years - Ed opened the flood gates to all. Come one, come all, Ed said, first come, first served. In doing so he followed the advice of his incompetent - and I do really mean INCOMPETENT IN CAPITAL LETTERS - health minister who said that to vaccinate people who were in the high risk category first would be what the Soviet Union would do because the authorities would have to ask for proof that they were in that category. According ot Leipert, that was no system for Alberta to follow. No siree.

So Stelmach encouraged all Albertans to get right down to those vaccination centers - sick or not sick, unhealthy or healthy, high-risk or low risk – everybody was welcome to get their shots. The result was bedlam. Thousands lined up for hours on end in bone-chilling cold. Many in those queues who were in the high risk category had the doors to the clinic slammed in their faces because it was closing time or there was no more vaccine. Understandably, the people became perplexed, impatient, and very angry. They were also scared. This swine flu, they realize, is not to be trifled with. Why else, would governments want to vaccinate everybody? See: http://www.albertalocalnews.com/reddeeradvocate/news/provincial/Stelmach_accused_of_misleading_Albertans_by_downplaying_flu_outbreak_67462447.html
But it gets worse. Today we heard the astonishing news that none other than the whole Calgary Flames Hockey Club jumped the queue the day before the government suspended the vaccination program. According to a Flames statement it was the Stelmach government’s Alberta Health Services that allowed the pampered stars to get their shots many days ahead of the great unwashed - which include the vast majority of the pregnant women and babies who are in the high risk category.

According to Flames President Ken King, 'Our players did not seek to avoid a lineup. They didn't ask for special attention. They followed the direction of our physicians.' Yes, yes, the stars didn’t do it. Somebody on their behalf must have asked the Stelmach government for special attention. Now who could that be? You might remember Ken King during his career as the neocon publisher of the Calgary Herald back when his then employer Conrad Black was learning how to loot companies and enter the House of Lords. Well, because of his outstanding service in advancing Black's ideology in those days King has impeccable Tory connections. As do all of the fat cat owners.
See: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/11/03/calgary-flames-h1n1-swine-flu-shot.html

Ladies and Gentlemen, this Flames fiasco is what the “Alberta Advantage’ has been all about from the time the term was first introduced by the dumb and dumber crowd of the Klein years. It has always been an advantage only for the privileged establishment. While their incomes and stock portfolios grew and as they built their 10,000 square foot palazzos, the little people had to put up with lousy roads, deteriorating health care, declining education opportunities, and salary levels that just kept their heads above water – barely. The Flames chapter in this sorry saga merely points to a continuing theme in the Klein-Stelmach Tory era – money and power trumps all else. The Flames represent money and power. They jump the queue. To the Tories, nothing gets in the way of money and power - even pregnant women and babies during a swine flu pandemic.

This has to be the last straw for Stelmach. If the Tories don’t dump him in Red Deer and try to salvage what’s left of what was once a proud and honorable party, they are doomed, gonzo, kaput!

By the way, Special Ed's health officials announced yesterday that the vaccination centers are starting up on Thursday. This time it will only be for kids from six months to five years of age, and by God - just like the Soviet Union - they are going to ask for age identification. And on Friday, a week or so after the coddled Flames got theirs, pregnant women will get their shots.

And the Oilers have not received their shots. “Go Oilers, go!!!”

FLU SHOT FIASCO VERDICT IS IN: CONSERVATIVES CAUSED IT

2009-11-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

HARPER CONSOLES SWINE FLU VICTIM

IN CALGARY HOSPITAL BED

FLU 'FIASCO' FAULT OF FEDS (The Kingston Whig-Standard, November 2, 2009)

HUGE VACCINE SHORTFALL LOOMS (The Province, November 2, 2009)

LES AUTORITÉS NE S'ATTENDAIENT PAS À UNE TELLE RUÉE VERS LES CLINIQUES (La Tribune, 2 Novembre 2009)

EPIDEMIC 'BREAKING OUT RAPIDLY'; STRESS INCREASING ON EMERGENCY ROOMS ACROSS COUNTRY AS VACCINE SHORTFALL LOOMS (Montreal Gazette, November 2, 2009)

ALBERTA SHUTS DOWN FLU CLINICS AS LONG LINES CONTINUE ACROSS CANADA (Calgary Herald, November 2, 2009)

LES ENFANTS DUREMENT TOUCHÉS; PRÈS DU QUART DES PATIENTS HOSPITALISÉS ONT MOINS DE CINQ ANS (Le Journal de Montréal, 1 novembre 2009)

CONFUSION REIGNS IN FLU-SHOT CLINICS (Toronto Star, November 1, 2009) OVERWHELMED (Edmonton Sun, November 1, 2009)

ALL FLU SHOTS ON HOLD (Edmonton Journal, November 1, 2009)

"Ce changement, les vaccins qui ne sont pas au rendez-vous, c'est à Ottawa que ça se passe." (Chantal Hébert, Les Coulisses du Pouvoir, 1 novembre 2009)

"It's very confusing, and I think it's an acid dripping on this government's key reputation of being good managers." (James Travers, CTV Question Period, November 1, 2009)"

La semaine qui s'en vient va être bien pire... il n'y aura probablement pas assez de vaccins, mais beaucoup moins que prévue, disponible dans les cliniques. C'est là que ça risque à brasser sérieusement pour le gouvernement fédéral." (Michel C. Auger, Les Coulisses du Pouvoir, 1 novembre 2009)

"The facts are that the federal government was responsible for making sure that there was enough vaccine for Canadians...[Prime Minister's] Chief of staff, Guy Giorno was sitting in for the planning meetings for the rollout of the vaccine." (Rob Russo, CBC News Now, November 1, 2009)

"Reaction to H1N1 seems like a horror movie." (Shannon McKinnon, Globe and Mail, November 2, 2009)

"This is the worst side of government as a lack of compassion." (Greg Weston, CTV Question Period, November 1, 2009)

"Chaque jour davantage, le dossier de la grippe H1N1 menace de tourner en fiasco de politique publique." (Chantal Hébert, Le Devoir, 2 novembre 2009)

"We spent something like $2 billion of taxpayers' money making sure that people are ready for this type of thing; and I think Canadians really can justifiably say... what have you been doing all that time?" (Greg Weston, CTV Question Period, November 1, 2009)

"Après avoir convaincu les gens que c'était essentiel d'aller vite, on leur dit: Ah bien, savez-vous, nous ne sommes pas capables de fournir ce qu'on devait fournir." (Chantal Hébert, Les Coulisses du Pouvoir, 1 novembre 2009)

"People are saying, how difficult could this be? Why aren't they doing immunization of the most vulnerable people, the children, in schools?...All those sorts of questions are being asked and not answered." (James Travers, CTV Question Period, November 1, 2009)

"Après s'être fait dire pendant trois mois il y a des vaccins pour tout le monde, on sait où on s'en va... on s'est depuis jeudi après-midi que c'est vraiment pas vrai." (Chantal Hébert, Les Coulisses du Pouvoir, 1 novembre 2009)

DEAR ED: MAYBE ITS TIME TO THINK OF WHAT THE JAPANESE DO AT A TIME LIKE THIS

2009-10-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Ed,

Since you became leader of the Tories in Alberta I’ve always liked you. I know, I know, I was rough on you often, calling you names like ‘Special Ed’ and all, but I want you to know that what I did was always in your interests. It was my way of spurring you on to do great things. I knew the mess you were left by Ralph’s dumb and dumber crowd. In fact, I’m sure you knew it too given that you took such a major part in it. See: http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2007/01/fast-eddie-ralphs-big-stick.html

And I knew it was going to take brains and ability to clean it up. So my motive was to inspire you to do great things. After all Ed, I live here. If you succeeded so would I.

I think part of your initial problem was that you and your pals like Danyluk and Snelgrove thought governing was easy. You knew that your mentor Ralph for the most part had an easy time of it, didn’t he? Almost until the end he had all of the usual Tory political, business, and media establishment kissing his ample backside – the big daily newspapers, the fawning columnists (two of which are now working for you), neocon media barons and think tanks like Conrad Black and the Fraser Institute, etc. It seemed to me that all you guys thought about when you knocked off Dinning was that it was now your turn to divide the spoils – Calgary had its turn and now it was Northern Alberta’s turn. Governing is far more complicated than that Ed, as I’m sure you have come to realize.

And so the first thing you did was screw Southern Alberta by tossing out most of its ministers. It was your first big mistake. Oh, I know, you tried to make amends. You put Ron Stevens in as your deputy premier, and added a couple of people in junior portfolios, but it wasn’t enough. You know the Calgary Tory establishment. They think they’re pretty good. They don’t like getting pushed around. This initial action, Ed, poisoned the well for you down here for sure.

Then there was the small matter of a lot of things going to pot in the province. I mean, we had deteriorating health care, education, infrastructure, and most everything else the provincial government is supposed to be taking care of. The problem was that people began to figure out that the Alberta Advantage that Ralph talked so often about was really no advantage at all. Oh sure, the oil companies were making big bucks. Developers, too. But the sick were being treated in hospital corridors. Some had to be flown to Saskatoon or Great Falls, Montana for treatment, for God’s sakes. Seniors’ care was understaffed, overcrowded, and generally a joke. Roads were an insult to the vaunted money generating capacity of big oil. There weren’t enough places or money available for our big universities to provide for all of the young people who wished to attend.*
[*On the matter of education perhaps when you are retired you will find time to read the following piece published on October 15 by the Herald’s premier columnist Deborah Yedlin: http://www.chtv.com/ch/chcanews/story.html?id=2104358]

Geez Ed, did you know that Alberta had the highest high school drop out rate in the country? Or that Alberta had the lowest participation rate in the crucial 18 to 25 age category in post secondary education in the country? Did you? How about Snelgrove? Danyluk, even? No? I didn’t think so.

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough you then goofed up on royalty policy. First of all, by ordering the task force study and then putting the study out for public debate just gave your opponents one big fat target to shoot at. Then when you decided on royalties you failed to provide for that dark day when oil and gas prices collapse (Did you know that it is an historical fact that they always do, sooner or later? Did you know that?). The whole royalty issue has won you legions of enemies and no friends whatsoever. Look at what oil companies put into the coffers of your party in the last year and a half. Hardly anything. Small gas producers are under the gun. It’s a helluva a mess.

I’m sure you will say that you couldn’t have been that bad because you won an election in the interim. Eddie – can I call you Eddie? – Eddie you won that election for two reasons. First of all, as Muhammed Ali used to say, the other guy didn’t ‘whup’ you, and secondly because the people wanted to give you a chance. It was not because the people thought you were competent, believe me.

While all of this is brewing, then we are hit by a financial crisis. That was something you and the Tories should have been prepared for. North America had been riding high for some time. There is a thing called the business cycle and it is more than a theory. Bubbles burst. Good governments prepare for that. The financial collapse forced your government to rocket into major deficit territory at a time when people were just figuring out that the Alberta Advantage for Martha and Henry was a crock. Bad timing for you, Ed. The result of all of that was the loss of Calgary Glenmore to the Wild Rose Alliance – even though you had a high profile candidate who ran a helluva good campaign.

Okay, okay, you might say much of this is bad luck. And you might be right in saying so. But Geez Ed, you have to try to help yourself. That statement you made the other day about reducing your pay by 15% makes you look like a weasel - even more than usual. You cut it by only 5.7% and everybody figured it out in about five minutes. And many are convinced you said it was 15% to mislead the people. See: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Braid+Premier+falls+short+mere/2109526/story.html
And you still haven’t learned how to give a decent speech where you do not look like a dweeb, for God's sakes!

And now on top of all of this, you’re confronted by the loquacious babe who just won the Wild Rose Alliance leadership. I hear old Tory stalwarts and ministers like Doug Main and Ernie Isley joined the party and voted for her. The story is that all kinds of old Tories are signing up for her. They’ve had it with you and the old Tory party. See: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/10/17/edmonton-wildrose-alliance-leader.html

Well, Ed, when I started this piece I thought I could still give you some constructive advice that might pull it out of the fire for you before your moment of truth coming up in Red Deer in three weeks. But after giving due consideration to everything, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do or say to help.

Perhaps you might think of going into your den, taking out your beretta, wrapping yourself in the Alberta flag, putting on maybe some of your favorite Hank Williams or Wilf Carter records, having a couple of slugs of chokecherry wine, locking the door and then do the honorable thing. Or perhaps do what the Japanese do when things are hopeless and they have run out of options. But, Ed, I think its over for you, and it’s probably over for the Tories.

PAROLE JUSTICE AND THE BALLAD OF MICHAEL RITTER: "I GET OUT WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS."

2009-10-12T13:56:00.001-07:00

Ritter

Ritter (L), stacks of cash, and Carter (R)

Michael Peter Ritter is a white collar criminal in his early fifties from Edmonton. He is a thief, a fraudster, and money launderer. Just how bad a guy he is can be gleaned from reading these pieces: http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/insight/story.html?id=8269fb3e-ca94-4f14-844f-fade85722942
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-man-who-could-make-money-disappear/article1319486/

Ritter was a wealth manager when the gendarmes finally caught on to him. Like many in the wealth management game he was intelligent, cool, and glib. As people were to discover he was also a nonpareil liar. He lied about having a law degree. He lied about finishing his studies at the London School of Economics. He lied about being admitted to Gray’s Inn for English barristers. He lied about being an intern in the House of Lords Legal division. He lied about attending the University of Geneva and he lied about having been an advisor to the Swiss Bankers Association. And all of that happened years before he got into his legal quagmire at which time he began to tell more lies.

Those early lies about his experience and education helped him wangle a job in the hapless Don Getty Progressive Conservative government in 1988. He conned Getty’s motley crew into making him chief parliamentary counsel to the speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly – one of the qualifications for which was that the applicant had to be a lawyer. The speaker in those days was the very pious appearing – and, as it turned out, fabulously naïve - Anglican man of the cloth by the name of David Carter, now happily retired and living somewhere in the Cypress Hills.

The job description for Ritter’s governmental post included advising the Alberta government on parliamentary procedure, constitutionality of legislation, conflicts of interest, and alleged improprieties of members. During his tenure, he took the position that the government and the speaker could do anything they wanted to do – even when it came to roughing up reporters. The Tories loved him. He was one of their true blue enforcers. He could do no wrong. In 1993 with his patron Carter’s retirement from government and politics Ritter followed suit, and soon began his sordid career as a wealth manager.

Law enforcement officials began looking into his affairs in the summer of 2002 and in October of 2003 he was indicted on several fraud related charges in Los Angeles that could have landed him in jail for life. He spent the next four years trying to fight off his tormenters by using every legal and illegal trick in the book – including arranging for a false passport under an erroneous name. Finally, on October 27, 2006 in an Edmonton courtroom he pleaded guilty to stealing 10.5 million bucks from one client, and of engaging in a Ponzi scheme that bilked 6500 investors out of 270 million dollars. He chose to cop out in Canada to avoid further prosecution in the U.S. where, had he been extradited and convicted there, he knew he would be spend a hell of a lot more jail time than in Canada. Once Canada got the guilty plea, the Americans folded their tent.

Much of the dough he made off with was the life savings of little people of modest means. He blew the money on lawyers, his pals, rich kids’ toys - like two private planes and a sky box for Edmonton Oilers games - and more of the good life. In other words he spent the money on himself. For a brief accounting of some of his expenditures and tastes read:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/insight/story.html?id=8269fb3e-ca94-4f14-844f-fade85722942

Surprisingly, some of his old government pals even tried to help him out by submitting character references to the court in an effort to get the Judge to go easy on him. Among them were Tory ex-minister Jim Horsman, ex-speaker Carter, and, oddly enough, even two former NDP leaders, Ray Martin and Pam Barrett. The judge that heard the case took the joint advice of the prosecutor and defence counsel, and sent the charlatan to the big house for ten years. So far so good.

However, about four months ago, the National Parole Board – now stacked with Tory and Conservative friends of Stephen – paroled Ritter. He had served a meager 18 months in a minimum-security prison for his dastardly deeds. Not only that, even though at his sentencing Ritter agreed to help track down the money he had filched so as there would be some restitution to his victims, not a dime has been forthcoming. Despite all of the aggravating circumstances the Board followed its policy of releasing non-violent offenders who have served only one-sixth of their time. After 18 months of jail time Ritter is free - free to wheel his Jaguar around town and live in baronial splendour in expensive three storey digs replete with a home theatre and cherry wood humidor, and plan his next move.

The case raises many issues and concerns. To say that the case is a sad reflection on the Canadian parole system under the Harper government is an understatement. The parole board gave him kid glove treatment for serious crimes that deserved real and prolonged punishment. Also, following in the tradition of Alan Eagleson, Conrad Black, David Radler and most recently Peter Pocklington, the prosecutions emerged not in Canada but in the United States once again for the reason that Canada lacks the resources to go after white collar criminals.

Then there is the curious case of David Carter. In most circles Carter was and is a well-respected Anglican clergyman. However as a speaker, his tenure was not applauded by the opposition. Too often he appeared to be pedantic, condescending and unduly critical of the opposition’s attempts at keeping the government honest. The fact that he worked with Ritter for so long without suspecting his mendacity is astonishing; that he would submit a character reference for the scoundrel after he more than others were lied to and misled by Ritter is even more strange.

But that’s not all. In 2001 Carter had his picture taken together with Ritter and a kitchen counter full of $20 bills. The money is thought to be all or part of $400,000 fraudulently scooped by one of Ritter’s clients and then given to Ritter for deposit into a Swiss bank account. Carter acknowledges that he helped Ritter take the money to Switzerland but was not suspicious about the trip because, “Wasn’t my business.” When he was asked what his reaction would be if he knew that the goal of the Swiss deposit was to evade taxes, the ordained Anglican priest said, “Hey, . . . that’s been going on for decades.”

That Carter exercised poor judgment in his dealings with Ritter is obvious. His blithe and reckless attitude towards what Ritter was doing with the money is either fabulously naïve, profoundly stupid, staggeringly arrogant, or stunningly and abominably amoral. Perhaps it is all of those things.

STELMACH'S OPPONENTS SHARPENING THEIR BLADES

2009-09-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

On Saturday September 19 I posted a tantalizing bit of gossip that Ralph Klein’s old comrades-in-arms, bankrolled by a well-known, publicity seeking, oil patch gazillionaire, were scheming to drive Premier Ed Stelmach out of the Tory leadership and out of office. The story goes that the Klein cabal is set to replace the hapless Stelmach beginning as early November 6th and 7th at the Tory Convention in Red Deer when it would engineer a negative vote against him in the mandatory leadership review. The plotters believe the vote results would leave Stelmach with no option but to resign, after which he would be replaced at an early date by the darling of Calgary’s oily Tory set, Jim Dinning.
See: Saturday, September 19, 2009
STELMACH HEADING FOR THE LAST ROUND-UP? KLEIN'S BARBARIANS AT THE GATE? YOU CAN SAY YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!

Yesterday, Ralph himself seemed to publicly confirm at least part of the story. In a brief Email exchange with Canadian Press about what Stelmach should do in response to the results of his leadership review Ralph said, “I would advise he step down if he does not reach 70%.”

Klein's bold Email message follows closely upon the heels of a recent Email sent by one of his long-time inner sanctum, back splappin’, good ol’ boy pals, Hal Walker. Walker, a prominent businessman and former President of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, sent his message to 200 party members and business leaders complaining bitterly about the new royalty regime and that nobody in the Stelmach government was listening to the gripes.
See: http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jOVge4x6xHnntGNQZOVZihz6R1uQ

Calgary Tories are not happy these days. They are all smarting over their third place finish in the by-election in Calgary Glenmore. They are worried sick over the rise in popularity of the Wildrose Alliance Party and see many of their former members embrace the new neocon movement. They remain angry at the bumpkin Stelmach for stealing the Tory leadership from their classy urbanite Jim Dinning. Of course, they blame Stelmach for all of their political woes and did not even allow him to campaign for the Tory candidate in the Glenmore by-election. More importantly, the oil patch, feeling the pain of sharply reduced oil prices and feeble gas prices, is up in arms at the government over the royalty policy. And everybody – Tories included – blames the government for shaky and costly health care and the mounting deficit. Add to that toxic brew the fact that the old Klein operatives are seething about being long ignored and neglected by the new regime, and you have an Alberta Tory party that is ready to explode.

My guess is that there is more than a good deal of truth to the rumour of a coup d’etat against Stelmach. I also foresee a disappointing leadership review vote for him particularly coming out of Calgary and Southern Alberta. If he is forced to pack it in – and I predict that this will happen – it will set the stage for another Tory leadership brawl. I can foresee Stelmach’s Northern Alberta and rural support being very antagonistic to any Calgary-based insurrection. I also foresee Stelmach’s ethnic voting base in Edmonton and Northern Alberta getting mad as hell at the knifing of one of theirs by a bunch of rich anglos from Calgary. In these circumstances whoever replaces the Premier is not going to have an easy time of it.

It is easy to sympathize with Stelmach as he faces his sad plight. Because of bone headed fiscal policies of his predecessor Ralph Klein – the man who just stuck the knife squarely between the Premier’s shoulderblades – Stelmach was forced to increase spending by billions of dollars on neglected infrastructure and declining services. Then he’s hit by an economic downturn that drives his province into a whopping deficit. Hell, he hadn’t even begun to start solving the huge problems left on his desk courtesy of Ralph Klein. Surely, one could – and probably should – blame Ralph Klein for the current mess we are in.

But wait a minute. Not so fast. Let’s think about this. Or preferably, read this:
Saturday, January 27, 2007
FAST EDDIE: RALPH'S BIG STICK

That brings us all back to earth, doesn’t it? Alas, there should be no tears when Special Ed throws in the towel.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: YOU'VE EARNED YOUR STRIPES!

2009-09-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Michael:

After today’s development I have no doubt but that the next letter I write to you I will properly address you as Dear Prime Minister.

It was just last Saturday that I had the temerity to offer you some sound political advice on the basis of hard earned experience grinding it out for the Liberal Party for years in the hardscrabble and mean streets of Calgary.

I told you that you had to unite the party in order to fight an election campaign and warned you about the dangers of internecine warfare. By God, you listened. You overruled your Quebec Napoleon wannabe warlord and he packed it in and got out of town. See:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090928/coderre_quebec_090928/20090928?hub=TopStoriesV2
Talk about a huge, but delicate and inflated ego! He went up in a puff of smoke, as if David Copperfield himself might have had something to do with it. But now, as a result, the party is more united than it has been for a very long time! Good on you!

I told you keep all of the grass roots happy and to honour our tested veterans and not stand in their way if they wished to serve. And you did just that for Martin Cauchon. Bravo! And I know you will do the same for Stephane Dion and others who are in the great Grit Hall of Fame. Thus, you are well on the way towards keeping all of the grass roots happy. Kudos again!!

I told you to be guided by good advice. And by Jove – as Jacques Parizeau used to say – you listened to some Ontario wise men so we’re told and they gave you some good sound advice. Because of it you decided to give Cauchon a crack at Outremont! I toast you and your wise advisors! Keep them close to you – they’re really good!

I told you to stop appointing riding candidates, and you are doing just that. Cauchon has got to run for the nomination. It will be good for him and good for the party. Look what it did for Justin Trudeau in the last election. It gave him instant credibility and stature. He ran for the nomination, won it, built up his organization and proved his mettle by winning a tough campaign! Exactly the way it should be done.

And finally I told you that you were the boss and to put misguided underlings, power trippers and other riff-raff in their place. You did just that. You overruled your portly field marshal because you thought he was wrong. It took a while, but you did it and that is the main thing. Next time it won't take you as long. You did just what a boss should do! He was so distressed he quit. That’s the kind of guy Michael you never want to have in the trenches beside you, because when you need him most he won’t be there. Either that, or he’ll offer to support you in the event you win or tie.

All in all, an excellent day for you, sir! Now its onward! Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes! Keep up the good fight! Sleep well tonight knowing that during the last couple of days you have proved yourself a leader!

Your Pal

Darryl

AN OPEN LETTER TO MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: UNITE THE PARTY, LISTEN TO GOOD ADVICE, STOP APPOINTING CANDIDATES AND SHOW THEM WHO'S BOSS!

2009-09-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Michael:

Hopefully, the next letter I will write to you will address you as Dear Mr. Prime Minister.
Alas, we are not there yet.

You’ve had a tough week. It could have been a helluva lot tougher had not the UN and G 20 meetings together with Obama, al-Gadaffi, and Ahmadinejad not squeezed almost everything else off the front pages. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to squeeze it all.

I am going to offer you some sound advice. Yes, I know I come from Alberta, and I know Liberals out here are protected by the game licensing laws, and yes, I know, we have our conventions in phone booths, yada, yada, yada. But out here in Alberta a Liberal has to fight for every vote he gets, and we’ve been doing it for years. Accordingly, we Alberta Liberals have learned a few things along the way that seem for the moment to be forgotten in the greener Liberal pastures of central Canada.

One of the things we have learned is that a political party has got to be united to fight an election campaign. Actually, I thought the Ottawa crowd might have picked up on that after the last three federal elections. Had it not been for the Martin-Chretien internecine warfare we would probably still have power. But it was not to be. Many in the party wanted to slug it out amongst ourselves and they did – often times using every mean trick in the book. And all it got us was one weak minority government and so far almost four years in opposition.

So my first piece of advice is to unite the party. This means giving due respect to tried and true warriors like Martin Cauchon and Stephane Dion. It means that we must honor our people who have contributed to our success and not stand in their way if they are obviously willing and able to contribute more. This also means not foisting an unknown candidate on ridings where there have long been strong and viable party organizations. In short, it means you must strive to keep all of the grass roots happy.

The second piece of advice I have for you is that you must listen and be guided by good advice. The events of this week show that there are lapses of sound advice within your organization. Get good advisors around you and listen to them. Beware of self-serving ward-heelers with their own private agendas and please watch out for power trippers. They can be spotted a mile away, so keep your eyes and ears open, and when you see them, don’t listen to them. They’re trouble.

The third piece of advice I offer you is that you must stop this infernal practice – launched by your predecessors, to be sure – of appointing riding candidates. By appointing candidates, you are losing the advantage of party renewal. If a nomination is contested, new members come into the organization. They are generally excited, energetic, and motivated because of the contest. By appointing candidates you are avoiding the contest and thereby lose its advantages. The other very negative aspect of appointing candidates is that it carries with it the stench of the laying on of hands. As such, it is anti-democratic and always invites harsh criticism and recrimination. Use the power only in very rare circumstances. Otherwise, let democracy take its course.

Finally, remember it is not any of your minions that are the boss. You are the boss. I suspect that one of the reasons for the unseemly battle over Outremont – which went on far too long – was an unwillingness to offend someone who was giving you bad advice. I couldn’t imagine your glorious predecessors like Trudeau or Chretien ever being that sensitive. You have got to put lesser people in their place when they attempt to lead you into a quagmire and if they persist, well, get rid of them.

So that’s it for now. Keep up the good fight and don’t listen to any of the nervous nellies. Just take my advice.

Your Pal,

Darryl

See: http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5h2gGPpXnGFH04C1yFU80HTRGK8Ew

OBAMA: NO TIME FOR TALK WITH RIFF-RAFF LIKE GORDON BROWN

2009-09-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

Once again President Obama is doing the right thing. This time he’s sticking it to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the lame-duck leader of the once mighty, now disgraced British Labour Party. Obama within the past few days has turned down no less than five requests from Brown and his minions to have a meeting together at the UN or at the G20 summit.
See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/23/barack-obama-gordon-brown-talks

While in New York Obama had bi-lateral meetings with Russian president Medvedev, Chinese president Hu Jintao, and Japanese prime minister Hatoyama, but not riff-raff like Brown. Obama obviously has his standards.

Obama is still pissed at the Brown-Gaddafi Faustian deal to have the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi released from prison and shipped back home to Libya so that BP could fatten its profits with the proceeds of a gazillion barrels of Libyan oil. For Brown, the only ethical lapse of this sorry deal was that his pal Gaddafi promised a low-key homecoming for Al-Megrahi and didn’t deliver. Instead the Colonel gave the convicted murderer of 270 innocent victims a hero’s welcome. Unlike Brown and his oily and unctuous predecessor Tony Blair - now taking up space as the most useless special Middle East peacemaker in history - Obama has principles.

Not only is Obama ignoring him, the hapless Brown was even outmuscled for a prime time speech slot at the UN by his pal Gaddafi whose 100-minute wacko speech left hardly any time at all for Brown’s snore fest about climate change.

But Brown has even bigger problems than being snubbed and ignored by Obama or bulldozed and elbowed out of the way by his pal Gaddafi. The lastest of a very long list of beefs from within his party and caucus is that he is now under fire for refusing to fire his Attorney General who was convicted of employing an illegal immigrant. Backbenchers, ex-ministers, and party regulars are demanding that he put the party and the country out of their misery by leaving office now, while the party still may have a chance to avoid a cataclysmic defeat in the next election expected in 2010.

This could be the beginning of the end to the once mighty Labourites. If so, because of Brown and Blair there will be few tears should it come to pass.

STELMACH HEADING FOR THE LAST ROUND-UP? KLEIN'S BARBARIANS AT THE GATE? YOU CAN SAY YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!

2009-09-19T20:35:00.001-07:00

HEADING FOR THE LAST ROUND-UP?

I have just had a pleasant evening with good friends in one of my favorite restaurants – Caesar’s Steak House in downtown Calgary. The conversation was scintillating. The steaks were excellent as usual – Caesar’s is one of the great steak houses of the world! – and the excellent vintages flowed freely and generously. As is usual in the social milieu where I lurk about, politics was very much a hot topic of conversation. On occasion at these soirees one hears something for the first time that may not yet be in the public domain - a scoop, as it were.

Tonight I have what may be a scoop. It comes from a usually reliable source. If the event comes to pass, you can say you heard the essence of the story here first.

Here goes. A prominent, middle-aged, and colourful oilman much in the news is leading [financing][encouraging][promoting] a coup d’etat against Premier Ed Stelmach. The pissing contest – at least the initial salvoes thereof – is scheduled to take place November 6th and 7th at the venerable Capri Hotel in Red Deer, Alberta during the Annual Meeting of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party. For more details of the venue and proceedings see: http://www.albertapc.ab.ca/admin/contentx/default.cfm?PageId=9437

The story is that the aging but prominent and colourful, oft seen, oilman gazillionaire – reputed in some circles to be a lothario - together with assorted neglected, seduced, and abandoned apparatchiks and hangers-on from the old Klein organization, have had it up to their ears with the befuddled, dweebish farmboy. The ignominious loss of Calgary Glenmore was the last straw. They have conspired to band together and begin moving heaven and earth to have their esteemed leader booted from the party leadership and the Premier’s office. Sounds like something that could happen in the Tory party, right?

But, you may ask, just who do these plotters have in mind to replace the Czar of Fort Saskatchewan - Vegreville? Why none other than the man Fast Eddie vanquished in the leadership contest of 2006 – the Honorable Jim Dinning! Think of it, Dinning is the logical champion of the insurrectionists. Not only did he serve 11 years in the legislature and preside over three portfolios - but these days he has a lot of time on his hands. I mean, he only serves on the boards of twelve public companies and institutions – including his flagship, the Liquor Stores Income Fund. And he hasn’t received an honorary degree since 2002.

So there you have it - the dashing oil baron and the forgotten Klein operatives who have been licking their wounds in abject silence for so long, slithering into line behind a beaten and forgotten former minister who doesn’t have enough to do.

And you can say you heard it here first.

CANADA'S VERY OWN BEST AND BRIGHTEST HAWK: CHRIS ALEXANDER

2009-09-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

I happened to watch a CBC interview last night with Chris Alexander. In case any of you don’t know who he is, he was Canada’s first ambassador to Afghanistan appointed after the fall of the Taliban government. Alexander took the job in August 2003 at the tender age of 35 and held it until October 2005. Doing the math, I presume he was born around 1968 (I’m not exactly sure of the date as he has not been around long enough to have his vital statistics posted on Wikipedia).

In any event, 1968 is the same year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, that Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister, that Lyndon Johnson stepped down as President, and that Richard Nixon was elected President. The Viet Nam war which began in 1959 - a full 9 years before Alexander was born - was in full throttle in 1968 and would continue for another seven years until 1975. The American administration was up to its neck in the war as it blindly embraced the now-debunked domino theory as the basis of its policy of containment against the spread of communism. The American people finally turned against the war prompting Congress to stop direct U.S. military involvement by August 1973. By the time the war was over in 1975 – former Ambassador Alexander was 7 at the time - it is estimated that between three and four million Vietnamese had perished in the conflict, as well as 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians and almost 60,000 Americans.

I was reminded of Viet Nam as I watched the Alexander interview. I also reflected on David Halberstam’s outstanding chronicle of the war and the mistakes that led to it and prolonged it - The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam painted a picture of how bold, intelligent, and youthful men of brilliant academic achievement and with careers marked by success after success could be so blinded to the real world that they could lead their great nation and together with several others into an tragic international catastrophe causing the deaths of millions, and in the end to have accomplished nothing.

Surely, ex-Ambassador Alexander is one of our best and brightest. Consider this: he has a BA in history and politics from McGill, and an MA in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College at Oxford. In 2005 he was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He joined the Canadian foreign service back in 1991 and has done two three-year stints at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, one as Second Secretary and another as Minister Counsellor. Back in Ottawa he was Deputy Director in the foreign affairs department responsible for bilateral relations with Russia, as well as an Assistant to the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. After his time was up as Ambassador he became Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Afghanistan, a post he held from December 2005 to May 2009. Yes, Alexander is one of Canada's best and brightest.

Like the young men Halberstam wrote about in his book, on his war in Afghanistan Alexander is a hawk. He wants more international troops on the ground and he wants to attack militant targets in Pakistan. He believes that even though the situation is getting more unstable the problems are not insurmountable and that more troops are part of the solution. He believes that NATO troops should be present everywhere that the enemy wants to be present and that progress must be made on the military front or development goals will continue to slip. As Halberstam described bright older figures seeking the counsel of the bright young men that he wrote about, so do bright older figures like Richard Holbrooke U.S. Special envoy to the region and Kai Eide the top UN official in Afghanistan regularly seek Alexander’s advice. Alexander also believes that although there was voter fraud in the recent election, it did not affect the result.

Sound familiar? It does to me. It is the Best and the Brightest all over again. After 8 years of war and the sacrifice of lives and treasure, the show must go on. The historian does not mention history. He does not mention our sacrifice. He does not mention the defeats of the forces of the British Empire. He does not mention the Russian nightmare. Like the best and the brightest of Halberstam’s world, Alexander believes that all we have to do is more and just let he and his brainy pals do the planning.

One further thing about Alexander. While he served as Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Afghanistan, he was responsible for political affairs, including international support for political outreach, elections, disarmament, governance, regional cooperation, the rule of law and police reform as well as cooperation with the International Security Force. In fact, on Alexander's watch the political situation has deteriorated, international support is feeble, disarmament but a pipe dream, governance is corrupt and invisible, regional cooperation a concept known only to the war lords, and the rule of law and police reform being reflected by the heroin crop and torture. Alas, this Canadian wunderkind’s report card is not impressive.

Alexander has just announced his candidacy for the Conservative nomination for the riding of Ajax-Pickering for the next federal election.

THE DISGRACE OF THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY: IT'S TIME TO THROW THE BUMS OUT!

2009-09-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

Simply put, by the time he left office Tony Blair had become a disgrace. It took awhile for people to figure it out. He had style and elegance, and could give a good speech. Those attributes and skills were good enough to get him elected as leader of the British Labour Party in 1994 at the young age of 41. At the time, Labour had been out of office for several years. It was hankering for someone who looked young and vigorous and who had the bearing and potential to win the big enchilada and become Prime Minister. So too was the British public that had grown tired of the Conservatives under the hard as nails Margaret Thatcher and the doltish John Major. The talented Blair was embraced by first his party and then his country, and by 1997 was Prime Minister.

As a politician Blair had an eel-like quality to him that saw him move from being a socialist to the centre right and in the process create the right leaning New Labour out of the traditional old left-wing Labour Party. Indeed, under Blair’s watch the British Labour Party for the most part became indistinguishable policy-wise from the Conservative Party.

Blair went off the rails with the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’ in 2001. He quickly wrapped himself in the American flag and offered his unflinching and misguided support to George W. Bush. Through the whole of the disaster of the Iraq war Bush had no greater admirer, yes man, and lackey. Blair promoted the Bush lies about weapons of mass destruction, and led his country into the rag-tag coalition of the willing which proceeded to make an even greater mess in Iraq without any plan for cleaning it up. His coziness with Bush earned for himself in his own country the same disrespect and opprobrium that Bush gradually acquired in his. Like Bush, Blair has even been accused of war crimes.

Blair was also a man who looked out for Blair. During his years in office he repeatedly displayed a Republican Party-like affection for money and power. His genuflections to Bush were an example. Indeed his kowtowing to ‘W” earned him the coveted Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. He also enjoyed the company of more unsavory representatives of wealth and power. He vacationed with the likes of Silvio Burlusconi and Rupert Murdoch, and acquired a somewhat odious record of stroking media barons. The trappings of and proximity to wealth and corporate power were important to Blair, the former socialist.

The Labour Party gradually grew exasperated with Blair and finally sent him packing in 2007. By then he cuddled up to enough people in high places that upon his resignation as PM in June 2007 his pals in the UN, the U.S. Bush administration, Russia, and the European Union – self described as the Quartet of International Mediators - made him Middle East Envoy to promote peace . This was despite the fact that not only were his credentials for objectivity in the region never high, they were most certainly shattered with his blind devotion to Bush. Predictably, Blair’s record as a peace envoy is not enviable. An example of his effectiveness was that the press noticed his attendance at the opening of the Armani store in Knightsbridge during the first nine days of the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza hostilities.

Blair proved, as countless but well-connected failures have proved in the past, that friends in high places can compensate for a lot. Presently he is a senior advisor to JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services and performs obscure but expensive services for other giants in the corporate world. He is reported to be making a cool $ 15 million a year, and stupid people throughout the world continue to shell out $250,000 in fees for one of his 90 minute rubber-chicken circuit snore fests.

In recent weeks it appears that the moral decay that was so evident in Blair’s final years in office has been passed on to the Labour government of his successor Gordon Brown. It has recently been disclosed that the promise of future trade and oil deals helped get the convicted Lockerbie bomber, 57 year-old Libyan national Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, an early release from a UK slammer and back safely into the welcoming arms of Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli. The oil deal was for Britain’s mega oil company flagship British Petroleum, or BP – which, by the way, is still reviled in Iran as the great Satan because of its earlier days as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company when it used to siphon off gazillions of revenues from Iranian oil straight into the British Exchequer.

Scottish authorities initially took the fall for al-Megrahi's early release, saying that the convicted killer of 259 people was released on compassionate grounds because he was dying of prostate cancer. Naturally, victims’ families joined opposition politicians and sensible British citizens in condemning the move. Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied complicity in any Al-Megrahi for oil and business swap. However, Brown’s Justice Secretary Jack Straw says that a BP oil deal in Libya was very much a factor. Other UK officials say that the release of Al-Megrahi was an attempt to bring in Libya from the international cold and improve British – Libyan trade. Col. Gadhafi’s son who was part of the negotiations that led to al-Megrahi’s release says that Libya put the heat on the Brits to include al-Megrahi in a prisoner release program tied to future trade deals. Documents have surfaced which seem to confirm the Straw/Gadhafi version of events.

It is also true that BP inked a $ 900 million oil deal with Libya and the company admits that it urged the government to sign a prisoner transfer deal, although it points out that it did not specifically refer to the bomber. Brown continues to profess innocence in the whole matter – much as the piano player in the bordello who claimed he didn’t know what was going on upstairs.

Also, in the past few days it was reported that The UK’s thirst for oil has led it into further moral quicksand. Sources say that the UK’s secretive SAS – one of the world’s most efficient commando units – is giving special forces training to Libyan soldiers. This is the same SAS who fought IRA rebels in Northern Ireland who were armed to the teeth with weapons and explosives supplied by, guess who? The Libyans. The government’s response is that Libya has changed from rogue state to responsible ally, a conclusion hardly in keeping with the very public hero’s welcome bestowed upon Al Megrahi when he arrived back in Tripoli after his years of incarceration for the mass killing conviction.

The story is clearly one of a political party having lost its moral compass. These events convey the unmistakable principle that in the UK, if one has access to a large supply of oil and is prepared to part with some of it to British interests one can get away with murder. Or to put it another way, to the Labour government of Great Britain money and oil, trumps all else - including justice. This is the legacy of Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown. In these circumstances the British people should either provide the British Labour Party with a very long respite from political power in order to allow it to try to restore to itself some semblance of honour and principle, or, throw it into the trash heap of history. In light of recent events, I believe that the latter alternative is the best.
See:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/05/uk-official-oil-played-a-_n_278112.html http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hfXTbOTyYDD_tqwD8e1cX67p2x6QD9ALST5O2
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/09/05/libya.megrahi.britain/index.html

THE CALGARY HERALD: SEINFELDIAN; THE ELECTION: CERTAINLY NOT SEINFELDIAN

2009-09-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Calgary Herald’s current stable of columnists include arch- conservative Nigel Hannaford (who I believe is actually on the payroll of Canwest Publishing Inc, a division of that paragon of fiscal responsibility, CanWest Global Communications Corp). Mr. Hannaford’s specialties include defending neocons and right-wing loud mouths, attacking human rights commissions, and denouncing all liberals including Barack Obama.

Then there is Susan Martinuk. She too inflicts invective on everything progressive in society. She is also a member of the ‘Proud to be Canadian’ conservative blog joining such literary giants and luminaries as the lovely and talented scourge of civility, Ann Coulter. As a matter of fact, the Proud to be Canadian book store on its website plugs several books by Coulter and even one by that intellectually-challenged elfin pipsqueak from Fox News, Glenn Beck.

Also on the Herald's editorial pages you will find Mark Milke's column once a week. Whether he's paid to write it I can't say. If he is, it is an expense his bankrupt employer should surely bring to an end. Milke is a senior fellow with the Frontier Institute, a Winnipeg-based, conservative, political tub thumper for corporate special interests masquerading as a think tank. Indeed, the Frontier Institute is quite similar to the more well-known and notorious right-wing pamphleteer, the Fraser Institute. Milke believes that global warming is a crock, favours unbridled capitalism, has no time for human rights commissions, and promotes the idea of unfettered freedom of speech. From his writings one can only conclude that Milke believes that the current trend of public figures and loud mouth talking heads yelling and screaming at each other and riling up their publics so that they bring guns to political meetings is what freedom of speech is all about. See: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/04/16/mark-milke-on-canadian-human-rights-commissions-and-misreading-john-stuart-mill.aspx

That is just a sampling of the sorry state of the CanWest press in my city, and I haven’t even touched upon the trite but mercifully, increasingly rare columns of nonsense foisted upon the Herald’s declining readership by its editorial page editor the Contessa Corbella.

The above sorry lot have been joined now by Michael Taube. Surprise, surprise – Taube is a former speech writer for what could be the Herald’s patron saint – if only he knew what to do with a communion wafer - Stephen Harper.

Taube today writes that if an election is called for this fall, it will be ‘Seinfeldian.’ (For you readers who are not couch potatoes addicted to the idiot box, the Seinfeld show was said to be a comedy about nothing. Taube thinks this will be an election about nothing. Get it? Yes, yes, I know, the analogy is trite and old). Read Taube's piffle here: http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=d41faab8-f2fb-4daf-8a95-f19d39de49e9&p=2

The piece is predictably an attack on Ignatieff and the Liberals from beginning to end – fully conforming to the Herald’s editorial policy over the last 50 years.

Just as the Herald’s editors have been largely wrong on public policy for those 50 years, so too is Taube wrong about the forthcoming election. There are plenty of issues and they are not Seinfeldian:

1. Afghanistan is an issue that must be debated in this election. The Canadian people have been misled and lied to by its government. There has been no progress made. Most of our NATO allies want to stay clear of harm’s way. Our troops continue to die and the Canadian people continue to spend billions on a cause that is going nowhere and there is no time like an election to come to grips with it.

2. Unemployment in Canada is an issue. It is unacceptably high and we need effective policies to bring it down. Those who are unemployed and their families need help. What additional help should be provided?

3. Infrastructure money has been slow getting to its destinations. This has exacerbated unemployment and made it more difficult for Canadian families. Why has this happened, and what can we do to speed it up?

4. How will Canada deal with the soaring deficit and at the same time maintain services?

5. How do we respond to the U.S. ‘Buy America’ program? And what does such a program do to Free Trade and NAFTA?

6. What should our relationship be to the emerging great powers of China and India. The Harper government did its best to alienate the Chinese up until a few months ago? Do we dare trust him to do the right thing by these important nations in the years ahead?

7. What about the way Canada is treating Canadian citizens trapped abroad? Is the government truly racist? Or is it just incompetent? Does the government not have a duty to properly represent and protect all Canadians trapped abroad? Does the government have a duty to get Canadian citizens out of ratty and infested jails ran by outlaw states? Does the government have a duty to protect its citizens against torture? To repatriate its citizens who have been jailed for years without trial?

8. What about the sorry state of the RCMP? What are we going to do about making our National Police service more accountable? Why is it that people like Conrad Black and Alan Eagleson faced prosecution for their crimes in the United States rather than Canada? What will Canada do about stepping up its resources to properly investigate and prosecute white collar crime?

9. What should be the long-term involvement of the federal government in our health care system?

10.And what about Prime Minister Harper? Should the Canadian people re-elect a government led by a mean, petty, gaffe-prone, untraveled, uncultured, right-wing ideologue?

By Taupe’s definition these days the Herald is clearly Seinfeldian. For sure most of its columnists are Seinfeldian. And for certain Taube himself is Seinfeldian.

But – and you can say you heard it here first – the election will be about something. It will be about real and important issues. And it may well determine the direction this country will be heading for a long time to come.

HARPER'S MESSAGE TO STRANDED MUSLIM CANADIAN CITIZENS OF AFRICAN ORIGIN: YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN

2009-09-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

Quick, what do Omar Khadr, Abousfian Abdelrazik, and Suaad Hagi Mohamud have in common? They are Canadian citizens. They are Muslims. They are products of an Islamic cultural heritage. They are people of colour or semitic Muslims. They are from, or are members of families from Africa. They have found themselves in dire circumstances stranded in a foreign land, wrongfully accused, jailed, tortured and mistreated by the authorities. And they were all either ignored or abandoned by their government – the Stephen Harper government of Canada. I know, I know. Some of you will ask, what is a bad guy like Omar Khadr doing on that list? Well, he has yet to be proven guilty of anything in any judicial proceeding, and in our country we have a law that says one is presumed innocent until proven guilty – no exceptions, ifs, ands, might have beens, or buts.

Omar Khadr, the now 22 year-old Canadian born citizen and former child soldier, was born in Canada of Egyptian parents. He was picked up by the U.S. military 7 years ago - at age 15 - after a particularly vicious fire fight in an Afghanistan village. The facts of his incarceration and questioning by Canadian and U.S. authorities are long and sordid. He has been in military custody since, spending most of that time in Guantanamo facing accusations of war crimes and killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade. However, despite his years of imprisonment, mistreatment and torture, he has not been convicted of anything. Khadr is now the only Western citizen remaining in Guantanamo, the rest having been repatriated by their respective governments. The urgings upon Canada by Amnesty International, UNICEF, the Canadian Bar Association and other groups to extradite or repatriate Khadr to Canada have fallen upon deaf ears. And now the Harper government refuses to repatriate him despite a Federal Court order ordering it to do so. Instead the Harper government has decided to appeal the order. Mr. Khadr continues to rot away in Guantanamo with the complicity of the Harper government. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr

Abousfian Abdelrazik was born in the Sudan and was admitted to Canada as a refugee in 1990 after political turmoil in his home country. After setting down roots in Canada where he worked as a machinist Abdulrazik became a Canadian citizen and started a family in his new country. He returned to Sudan in August 2003 to visit his ill mother. Shortly thereafter he was arrested in Khartoum as a suspected terrorist and jailed for about one year. During the time that he was in jail the authorities tried to get him to admit that he was a terrorist. There are even documents indicating that Canadian authorities had requested his detention. After the hard year in prison in a Khartoum slammer - no doubt a very unpleasant place indeed - he was released. Because his passport had expired and he was on a UN no-fly list Abdulrazik was unable to come back to Canada. In April 2008, in desperation, he took refuge at the Canadian Embassy. At first, Canadian authorities refused to give him emergency travel documents. Then they changed their minds and issued the documents, but insisted he pay of his own ticket. When friends in Canada bought him the ticket, the government warned that any Canadian who gave money to buy the ticket could be charged under anti-terrorism legislation. In May 2009, after Abdulrazik’s lawyers sued the government, the Federal Court found that his Charter rights were violated and ordered the government fly him home. At the same time the judge accused foreign minister Lawrence Cannon of ignoring due process of law. Although the government considered an appeal, it finally capitulated and Abdulrazik is now back home in Canada. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abousfian_Abdelrazik

Most recently, there is the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud. Mohamud is a Canadian citizen of Somali origin. She is employed with a courier company and resides in North York with her young son. After concluding a visit with her mother in Nairobi and about to board the plane bound for home, she was stopped by a Kenyan airline employee who she says asked her for a bribe. According to Mohamud when she refused to pay the bribe the employee accused her of being an imposter. Canadian authorities were quick to agree and cancelled her passport while the Kenyans laid fraud charges against her. Other forms of identification including a driver’s license did not budge either the Kenyans or the Canadians, the latter declaring that they had carried out “conclusive investigations” of her identity and that she was a fraud. She was in a Kenyan jail for 8 days and after her release on bail spent the next 3 months living in a seedy hotel awaiting her fate. Thus, she was stranded in Kenya, away from her son, her job and her home country. It took a DNA test proving that she was her son’s mother to convince Canada that in fact she was who she claimed to be. She is now home and has sued her government. See: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/08/12/f-haji-mohamud-timeline.html

In the case of Khadr the Harper government that has not done for him what other western governments have done for their citizens in assisting them in getting out of Guantanamo. Furthermore, the Harper government is ignoring a judge’s order directing it to get him out of Guantanamo. The government's actions are especially egregious given that Khadr was a child soldier at the time of falling into U.S. military custody.
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The Harper government’s actions towards Abdulrazik have been reprehensible. It erected every road block it could to prevent him from returning to Canada – where, by the way, he has children - and had to be forced by a Federal Court order to help him get back to Canada.

The Mohamud case is entirely the responsibility of officials of the Harper government. They embraced a decision by officials of one of the most corrupt countries on earth and lied about having done “conclusive investigations” concerning Ms. Mohamud’s identity.

So, what does all of this tell us about the Harper government? The evidence is clear. The Harper government does not want these Canadian citizens back into the country. Why? No doubt one reason is to stroke its political base of lunatic right-wing rednecks and wing nuts.

Another credible reason is the Conservative immigration policy stressing the need for new Canadians to integrate. The Conservative government gives every indication that it does not believe that people such as Khadr, Abdulrazik and Mohamud can ‘integrate’ into Canadian society. In the mind of the government, such Canadians remain apart from a society of real Canadians. I can just hear some of its Neanderthal party members asking themselves, What kind of a real Canadian looks like they look, dress like they dress, or would even think about traveling to such places as Afghanistan, Sudan or Kenya?

To all Muslim Canadians of African or Asian stock, I have news for you. The Harper government is not your friend. They would just as soon you leave this country and not come back. Remember that when you vote in the next federal election.

GREED, LIES, AND GULLIBILITY: PAUL KRUGMAN TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

2009-08-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

To those of you who seek out my ruminations from time to time on my blog, I extend to you my apologies for not maintaining my average periodic contribution to the political discourse of our time in recent weeks. The truth is that I have been taking it easy this summer, primarily eating, drinking, reading and observing.

I have also just completed a comfortable 11 day cruise of the Baltic on the Eurodam during which I walked the medieval streets of Tallinn Estonia, marveled at the excesses of the Romanov dynasty in St. Petersberg, became awestruck by Finnish beauties sipping wine or cappuccino in the sidewalk restaurants of Helsinki, stood agape at the gorgeous island vistas of Stockholm, and ate bad food at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

I also had the misfortune to be among almost 2000 American tourists on the ocean liner. I spoke to many of them and had the bad luck to draw several as dining room campanions while on the cruise. A more ill-informed, parochial, and self-centered bunch I hope you will never have the bad luck to meet.

I weep for President Obama at the many tasks he has ahead of him in his quest to drag much of American society kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Let all of us pray - and I'm am not a religious person but by God in this case I am - that he survives all of the insane perils and hate-mongers that lurk around every corner, in every hall, in every crowd and on every network, that can do him and his administration in in an instant.

However, there are intelligent voices of reason in the United States, one of which is Nobel prize-winning economist and columnist with the New York Times Paul Krugman. His piece published yesterday in the New York Times is brilliantly coherent and accurate and is a welcome injection of sanity in the screwed-up debate on Health Care that is taking place in his screwed-up country.

Here it is:

Op-Ed Columnist
The Swiss Menace
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 16, 2009

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

Let’s talk about health care around the advanced world. Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That’s how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It’s also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are. Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies. In this country, the Massachusetts health reform more or less follows the Swiss model; costs are running higher than expected, but the reform has greatly reduced the number of uninsured. And the most common form of health insurance in America, employment-based coverage, actually has some “Swiss” aspects: to avoid making benefits taxable, employers have to follow rules that effectively rule out discrimination based on medical history and subsidize care for lower-wage workers.

So where does Obamacare fit into all this? Basically, it’s a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

So we can do this. At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?src=twt&twt=nytimesopinion

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JEAN CHRETIEN: ONE OF THE GREATEST CANADIANS OF ALL TIME

2009-07-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

The Right Honourable Jean Chretien, P.C., O.M., C.C., Q.C.

During his long career, many of his political opponents from all parties – including his own - took every opportunity to vilify, defame and humiliate him. They made fun of the way he looked and talked, viewed him as an unintelligent proletarian rube, and accused him of having no class. Some even said he was thuggish.

His major opponents in his beloved Liberal Party knew that they spoke more elegantly than he, and took comfort in knowing that they - unlike him - had achieved a level of enriched refinement by having attended some of the nation’s best schools. In fact, his upbringing was strictly working class. Naturally, his competitors thought they were smarter than him. When he seemed to move forward in politics many attributed his success to good luck alone and recklessly convinced themselves that he was too much “Le petit gars”- the little guy - and not enough Plato.

Many in the press spent great slices of their professional careers parroting his political critics about his intellect and character, and worked overtime turning over every grimy moss covered rock they could lay their hands on to get something on him. Lofty elitists like Quebec notables and conservative English speaking Canadians, were embarrassed by his rough-hewn French and heavy accented, malapropism-laced English. For the 40 or so years he spent in Canadian public life, most of these detractors pooh-poohed his many accomplishments, and attributed whatever success he had merely to a fluke of political nature or being in the right place at the right time.

Boy, were they wrong! When the counting was done, the carcasses of his political opponents were strung out across the country from Bonavista to Vancouver Island, and from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes waters. He left one of the big ones rotting in a Florida jail, and even demolished the reputation of an egotistical Judge who had the temerity to call some of his activities ‘small town cheap.’ In the end Le Petit Gars proved that not only was he a match for the Platonists - he was better than all of them. He whupped them all. The Right Honourable Jean Chretien – the little guy - prevailed.

Oh, he was a tough customer alright. In 1985 he wrote,

“The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It’s a survival game played under the glare of lights. If you don’t learn that you’re quickly finished. It’s damn tough and you can’t complain; you just have to take it and give it back. The press wants to get you. The opposition wants to get you. Even some of the bureaucrats want to get you. They all may have an interest in making you look bad and they all have ambitions of their own.”

In politics no truer words were ever written.

It does not take rocket science to figure out the reasons for the success of this great and unique Canadian. All it takes is an open mind. Throughout his public career he was first and foremost, a great communicator. Who cared about the accent, mangled English or bad French, when everyone understood perfectly well what he said in any of his official or unofficial languages? He made every Canadian - big, small, rich, poor, Eastern, Western, Northern, or of any race or culture – know where he stood better than any Canadian leader who ever passed before him or since. And he did it always with wit, simplicity and passion.

He also knew every nook and cranny of the country. No politician in Canada’s history spoke so many times, for so many years, in so many church basements and in so many cities and small towns strewn about the length and breadth of the whole country as Jean Chretien. He knew and understood every wrinkle of the Canadian people, their values and their aspirations. And they knew and understood him.

When he spoke, his central theme was always his love for Canada. It was always delivered with raw emotion and passion and his audiences always knew that it was visceral and real. His “I love Canada” speeches were legendary. The patriotism he expressed was infectious. At the end of his speeches his audiences – many with tears in their eyes - were on their feet, giving him a long and rousing standing ovation which they very often followed with a spontaneous, spirited rendition of ‘O Canada.’ His love of Canada was true and honest and everybody knew it, felt it and shared it with him.

To say that his record in government as a minister or Prime Minister was illustrious and as successful as any other Canadian, is almost to demean his accomplishments. Consider this - from the time of his entry into the House of Commons in 1963, he served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, Minister of National Revenue, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, President of the Treasury Board, Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, Minister responsible for Francophone Affairs, Secretary of State for External Affairs, and Minister in charge of Social Development. Oh yes, I almost forgot - he also served for ten happy years, as Canada’s 20th Prime Minister presiding over three consecutive majority governments during unprecedented, prosperous economic times.

As a member of the cabinets of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, Chretien was a major player in all of the initiatives of that era, including Medicare, and the Official Languages Act. He was the first francophone Minister of Finance and the point man for the federal government during the Referendum campaign of 1980. In 1982, while Justice Minister he was responsible for the appointment of Bertha Wilson to the Supreme Court of Canada, the first woman to serve on Canada’s highest court. As minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development during the years between 1968 and 1972, he and his department created 10 new Canadian national parks. This was a stunning achievement, particularly when considering that in the previous forty years only 4 national parks had been created. Chretien’s contribution to our national parks will forever stand as a huge landmark in our nation’s quest to conserve and protect Canada’s environment.

He also had a strong hand in the strategy and negotiations that gave rise to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Patriation of the Constitution of 1982. He was a sturdy and brave opponent of the Mulroney mish-mash called the Meech Lake Accord. As Prime Minister his government slashed the deficit, paid down a lot of debt, and cut taxes by $100 billion. Although the Referendum vote in 1995 was a squeaker, he had the courage to have his government pass the Clarity Act, finally setting some clear rules for any declaration of independence. His four trade missions to China led to a new era of good relations and vastly increased trade between the two countries. His efforts alone kept us out of the Iraq War, but we did gave our help and money in the following reconstruction effort, and at the same time kept our focus and contribution of arms and manpower on the real problem – Bin Laden and his Taliban protectors in Afghanistan.

Oh, he had his detractors. There are plenty of mizzling Canadians who whine about the controversies that he brushed up against, assuming the worst of course, even though no one has proved one iota of wrongdoing on his part. But for every mizzler there were hundreds of Canadians who recognized and appreciated a great Canadian when they saw one and who knew that brushing up against controversies in a long public career was an occupational hazard that few long-serving politicians are immune from.

Among the universities that honoured him with Honorary degrees are:

Wilfrid Laurier University (1981), Laurentian University (1982), York University (1987), University of Alberta (1988), Lakehead University, University of Ottawa (1994), University of Moncton (1994), Meiji University (Tokyo) (1996), Warsaw School of Economics (Poland) (1999), Michigan State University (1999), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2000), Memorial University of Newfoundland (2000), Queen’s University (Kingston) (2004), McMaster University (2005), University of Western Ontario (2008), University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres (2008).

He is also an Honorary Member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and a Companion of the Order of Canada. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Chr%C3%A9tien

On June 29, 2009 the Queen recognized this great Canadian with his appointment to the very exclusive and prestigious Order of Merit. He is one of only twenty four other living persons who hold the honour, among whom presently are Baroness Margaret Thatcher, The Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Edinburgh. Some of the 150 or so recipients of the Order who have passed on are Sir Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, and Florence Nightingale, Bertrand Russell, Lester Pearson, Mackenzie King, and Wilder Penfield. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Merit

This was a worthy honour awarded to a great Canadian. His contribution to the well-being of our country is unequalled. All Canadians should be rightfully proud of his achievement.

STEPHEN HARPER AT THE G8: HOW TO MAKE A SOW'S EAR OUT OF A SILK PURSE

2009-07-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

PRIME MINISTER STPEHEN HARPER AT G8 MEETING IN L'AQUILA

Yesterday at the end of the G8 Conference in L’Aquila, Italy, the Prime Minister once again shot himself in the foot. And once again, his self-inflicted wounds were the result of his rash, nasty, and obsessive propensity to wreak havoc on his opponents, regardless of the occasion, appropriateness, or whether or not what he says is true.

With his wrap-up press conference Harper had his golden opportunity to act as a statesman. All he had to do was put together two or three coherent sentences of no-brainer reflections on the light-weight gabfest of the previous couple of days and he would have been home free. With CanWest and CTV doing the rest of his heavy lifting to drive the message home back in Canada, Harper would have looked positively Prime Ministerial – indeed, no small achievement for such a klutz. It should have been a romp in the park.

Instead, Canada’s Icarus* (or Inspector Clouseau** – take your pick) screwed it up for himself again.
* Read: STEPHEN HARPER: DONE IN BY HUBRIS AND IDEOLOGY
* * Read: PRIME MINISTER HARPER: CANADA'S INSPECTOR CLOSEAU

First of all, in his response to a question at the press conference Harper exhibited his usual class and elegance, vowing not to take “dumb” advice from Parliament budget officer Kevin Page. The courageous Page, increasingly becoming one of Harper’s chief pains in the ass, had earlier in the week stated the obvious – that the Harper government had misread the effect of the Canadian recession on both the economy and government coffers. As a result, said Page, there would be more job losses than previously thought. Furthermore, Page noted the government was now running a “structural deficit” which would preclude a return to surpluses when the economy got better. All of this, he said, pointed to “significant discretionary actions” for the government so that it could rid itself of the red ink.

Harper took Page’s words to mean that the government would have to impose higher taxes and slash programs, all of which said Clouseau, er, Harper, was a “dumb suggestion.” Sounding much like President George H. W. Bush (father of Harper’s pal, young George) when the elder Bush told a crowd on the campaign trail, “Read my lips. No new taxes” (words which later caused him much grief), Harper said, "It will not be the position of our government. We will not be raising the GST or any other tax during or after the recession.”

But it wasn’t enough for Clouseau to merely trash Page. There was little challenge in that, Page being in the PM's mind merely a miserable, lowlife bureaucrat. No, Harper now had to go after a bigger fish like Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff. Without the reporter even hinting of a question about Ignatieff or even mentioning his name, the PM gratuitously accused the Opposition Leader of saying publicly that the G8 should be replaced by a group of nations that do not include Canada.

As he ad-libbed his way through his attack it was clear Harper wanted to keep on message with his party’s earlier attack ads that belittled Iggy’s Canadian credentials. Those ads, you will recall, questioned Ignatieff’s commitment to Canada because he had studied and lectured at some of the best universities abroad, authored well-written books from a world perspective, and reported from war zones far from home. According to Harper and his cronies, Iggy’s background is no match for one whose intellectual pursuits and job experience consists of being of brainwashed in the neocon political science classes of Tom Flanagan at the University of Calgary, or reciting the collected works of Ronald Reagan as chief honcho of the National Citizen's Coalition - surely the lunatic fringe of Conservatism in Canada. Harper said of Ignatieff’s so-called remarks,

"I don't think you go out and throw out ideas like this that are so obviously contrary to a country's interest and nobody else is advocating them. I think it's an irresponsible suggestion, and Mr. Ignatieff is supposed to be a Canadian.”

But alas, Iggy had not said those words and Harper was forced to issue this ignominious apology immediately after the conclusion of the press conference:

"During my press conference I attacked Mr. Ignatieff for some things he had allegedly said about Canada in the G8. I learned shortly after the press conference this was not a quotation of Mr. Ignatieff. I regret the error and I apologize to Mr. Ignatieff for this error."

For a complete transcript of the exchange giving rise to Harper’s statement about Ignatieff and the abject apology, read this very carefully.

Of course, there is always somebody around to take the fall for the PM on the many occasions he puts his foot in it. This time it was his media mouth piece Dimitri Soudas – who seems to be getting a lot of press these days - what with having to explain the unexplainable, like the case of the missing communion wafer.

Soudas, who because of his yeoman service in taking bullets for his boss should be in line for a permanent job with the Fraser Institute before the summer is out, admitted passing false information about Ignatieff to Harper without substantiation.

In fact, it was former Canadian diplomat Gordon Smith, director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, who made the statement attributed by Harper to Ignatieff. Smith laments Canada’s not taking a leadership role in the G8 and believes the country is losing its importance internationally.

During the same press conference, Harper also displayed his continuing irritation over the wafer fiasco during Holy Communion ceremonies at the funeral of former Governor General Romeo Leblanc. Skipping over the fact that it was highly unusual - to say the least - that as a non-Catholic he should take Holy Communion in a Catholic ceremony, he said,

“First of all, as a Christian, I have never refused communion when offered to me. That's actually pretty important to me. Somebody running an unsubstantiated story that I would stick communion bread in my pocket is really absurd and I think it's a real, frankly, a low point. This is a low moment in journalism, whoever is responsible for this. It's just a terrible story and a ridiculous story and not based on anything, as near as I can tell."

Well, given his negative ads and his record as a campaigner/politician, Harper clearly knows something of ‘low' points. I mean, he’s an expert at low points, having spent a lot of time wallowing amongst low points of his creation himself.

As far as the wafer story not being based on anything, perhaps he should look at the video and see it for himself. Once again it can be found here.

HARPER BOTCHES ROMAN CATHOLIC COMMUNION: Attempt to hustle RC votes collapses

2009-07-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

Prime Minister Harper (on the left) with Spiritual Advisor

Astonishing! Scandalous! Sacrilege! Heresy! Sinful! In his ongoing effort to shamelessly hustle votes by trying to be all things to all people, Prime Minister Harper recently tried to pass himself off as a Roman Catholic at the funeral service for former Governor General Romeo Leblanc in Memramcook, New Brunswick by accepting sacramental communion.

Given his sparse worldliness, his early background as a frequenter of United and Presbyterian Churches, and his current affiliation with his fellow arch-social conservatives in the Evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance, it is little wonder that the klutzy Harper found the ceremony quite foreign and confusing to him. Unlike Roman Catholics who rise and gulp the wafer and bolt real vino (if they so wish) when communion is served by the Priest, in Harper’s ho-hum religious world communion involves seated parishioners discretely passing along wafers which each of them consume, together with small glasses of unfermented grape juice.

It would appear from a video of the Harper communion that when the Priest gave Harper the wafer, he did not immediately gulp or devour it. He slipped it into his pocket! See it for yourself here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/08/stephen-harper-puts-commu_n_228023.html as it disappears amongst his loose change, kleenex and other personal debris.

What made the Prime Minister do such a thing? Was he confused? Disoriented? Did he have qualms of guilt? Was he playing an improvised shell game? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game

In the Roman Catholic Church, not to swallow the wafer immediately is a grave no-no! In case you are interested in this ancient practice, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist

The Roman Catholic clergy in New Brunswick is up in arms at the insult and is demanding an explanation. The wafer – properly called “the host” in Roman Catholic ritual – is the body and blood of Christ and must be consumed when received. No ifs, ands, or buts. Not only that, in order to receive “the host” you must be a Roman Catholic, unless perhaps there is a real emergency - like imminent death.

Monsignor Brian Henneberry the vicar general and chancellor in the Diocese of Saint John says, if Harper accepted the wafer but did not eat it, ". . it's worse than a faux pas, it's a scandal from the Catholic point of view." See: http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/front/article/722036

So with a multitude of Canadian Roman Catholics being irked and upset at the gaffe (or sin, insult, heresy, scandal and/or sacrilege), all of this bodes ill for Harper’s audience with the Pope, expected to take place over the next few days in Rome.

Today, Dimitri Soudas, Harper’s chosen mouthpiece in the debacle, said that Harper ate the wafer within seconds and that all is well with the world. And surprise, surprise, he blamed the CBC for the whole affair saying that regardless of what the video shows, the cameras were not on the prime minister long enough. Read: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2009/07/08/harper-archbishop.html

Well, have another look at the video and see if you agree: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/08/stephen-harper-puts-commu_n_228023.html

MORE ON McNAMARA'S DEPARTURE: NOT EVERYONE IS SAD TO SEE HIM GO

2009-07-07T07:43:00.000-07:00

Reading an obit with great pleasure

Joseph L. Galloway McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: July 06, 2009 03:56:15 PM

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara's comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.

The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.

When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.

McNamara abandoned the tour.

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha's Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/v-print/story/71328.html

ROBERT S. McNAMARA DIES: HIS SYSTEMS AND STATS WERE NO MATCH FOR HEARTS AND MINDS

2009-07-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

Robert McNamara, Architect of Vietnam War, Dies at 93

By Thomas W. Lippman Special to The Washington PostMonday, July 6, 2009 9:07 AM

Robert Strange McNamara, the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died early this morning at age 93.

Family members said McNamara died at his home in Northwest Washington. They did not give a cause of death.

McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In that capacity he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.

Before taking office as secretary of defense in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer, whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. He was said to have built a record of achievement and dedication in business, government and public service that few of his generation could match.

After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues.

But more than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered almost exclusively for his orchestration of U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, a failed effort by the world's greatest superpower to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by the Vietnam ghosts.

From the day in 1961 when he burst upon the Washington scene as a political unknown selected by Kennedy to be secretary of defense, McNamara's trim figure, slicked-back hair and rimless glasses made him instantly recognizable, a Washington monument whose interests covered everything from nuclear war to the fiscal health of local governments.

At the Pentagon, he reorganized the military bureaucracy, built up the country's nuclear arsenal, and instigated a massive campaign to end racial discrimination in off-base housing. At the World Bank, he was often described as "the conscience of the West," for his relentless efforts to persuade the industrialized world to commit more capital to improving life in the have-not nations. In retirement, he avoided celebrity-for-hire appearances on the lecture circuit and the television talk shows, devoting his time and talent instead to improvement of education, government and health in this country and abroad and writing when he thought he had something to say.

He served as secretary of defense longer than anyone else, and in that role he was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile.

But his reputation foundered in Vietnam, a then-little-known country halfway around the world. Many Americans held him largely responsible for the futile and humiliating military adventure there--a responsibility he accepted in a controversial 1995 memoir of the war.

It was "McNamara's war," matching his technology, statistics, weaponry and organization charts against a peasant army from a small, impoverished country. The peasants won. In retrospect, it could be seen that McNamara's can-do, technological approach to military issues might have been perfectly suited to a conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe, but it led him into disastrous miscalculations in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam.

On his first visit to South Vietnam in 1962, before most Americans had heard of the place and before the involvement of American combat forces, McNamara said that "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war."

It was a statement often quoted by his critics in later years, because it seemed to encapsulate the fallacy of his approach. American troops did prevail in many of the big battles and the United States did win the war by every statistical measurement on the Pentagon charts that McNamara so admired. But the numbers--even the few that were accurate--had little to do with the political reality on the ground.

In fact, despite his addiction to charts, statistics and briefings in which the United States and its ally in Saigon were always winning, McNamara privately had a broader appreciation of what was happening in Vietnam. As early as 1964, after Buddhist uprisings that shook Saigon's political structure, he observed that the Viet Cong had "large indigenous support" and were held together by "bonds of loyalty." In 1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War tensions gripped Europe, he said it was "a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped word . . . The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so."

McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could not cripple the Vietcong because the Vietcong hardly needed any supplies other than ammunition. But as critics pointed out and as he admitted many years later, he was unable or unwilling to translate these assessments into policy reversals that would extricate Johnson administration from the Asian morass.

The harshest critic of all, David Halberstam, describing McNamara's trips to Saigon, wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was "a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie."

In Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in "The Lost Crusade" that McNamara's brilliant staff and his "unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington." But McNamara's insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara's approach in one memorable portrait:

"His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o'clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings liberally seasoned with charts, graphs, maps, and the inevitable sequence of slides. While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers."

The problem was that as the war escalated the briefings grew increasingly irrelevant to what was really happening. McNamara tolerated, even encouraged, a system in which optimistic Washington analysis dictated the content of the briefings, rather than the other way around.

For all his participation in the great events of his time, it was the Vietnam war, always the war, that shaped the nation's perception of McNamara and his performance, and eventually eroded his credibility. When he said, in 1966, that manpower requirements and draft calls would be reduced in the following year, hardly anyone seemed to believe him. When he told congress that the purpose of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail was to reduce North Vietnamese troop infiltration into the South, newspaper analysts pointed out that the Pentagon's own charts showed infiltration was increasing.

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November, 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "murderer."

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirtsleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd, "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

It is inaccurate to portray McNamara as an unreconstructed hawk to the bitter end; his early doubts became known after the war. But he failed to persuade the president and such hard-line White House insiders as Walt W. Rostow to moderate their views. He succeeded only in hastening his own ouster from the Cabinet, and because he waited 20 years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to go public with his confession of error about the war, he retained his reputation as a technocrat committed to firepower above all else.

McNamara later dismissed as "absurd" and "baloney" suggestions that he devoted himself to helping Third World countries through the World Bank to atone for his record in Vietnam. But he never attempted to defend himself against critics of his role in Vietnam, or to justify the escalation there. For more than two decades after leaving the Pentagon he avoided the topic of Vietnam in his public statements.

Even when testifying under oath, as he did in the 1984 trial of a libel suit against CBS filed by the former U.S. troop commander in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, McNamara remained resolutely non-judgmental about the conduct of the war. He testified that unlike Westmoreland and senior White House officials at the time, he began to believe as early as 1965 or 1966 that the war "could not be won militarily." But he added, "I say this without saying that I was right and they were wrong."

In a 1983 interview, he said he went to the Mall to see the memorial to the more than 58,000 troops killed in Indochina shortly after it was dedicated in 1982, but he declined to say what he felt when he read the names. "I just don't want to talk about it," he said. "Those are personal things." He skirted the topic of Vietnam even in long interviews with his biographer, Deborah Shapley.

It was what one would have expected of McNamara, who preferred an analytical, unemotional approach to every issue. With his characteristic penchant for dispassionate analysis, he said he would have been interested in a careful, scholarly study of the war, of the decisions that were made and of what the alternatives might have been, without regard to his personal sentiments or motivation.

That was the book he finally produced, to a storm of criticism and controversy, in 1995. In his memoir of the war titled "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.

Once again McNamara was vilified by critics who said he should have spoken up when it might have made a difference and accused him of salving his conscience with a last-minute conversion.
Publication of that book opened some kind of intellectual floodgate for McNamara; he developed a virtual fourth career of organizing and participating in seminars about the war--about who did what and why, and about how doing something else might have meant, if not a different outcome, at least less death. In 1999 he published a book about this quest for the truth about the war, with a title signaling that he did not find it: "Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."

Thus in the final years of his life, the war again took over the reputation of a man whose life in many ways had embodied the American dream.

McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, where his father was sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. He demonstrated academic brilliance from the time he was in elementary school, and achieved straight As in high school. At the University of California in Berkeley, where he studied economics and philosophy, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa after his sophomore year.

After graduation in 1937, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where he earned his MBA degree in 1939. He went back to the west coast for a year, to work for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co., and during that time he married a former classmate, Margaret Craig. (She died in 1981.)

In 1940, he returned to Harvard as an assistant professor. When the United States entered World War II, he volunteered for military service, but was initially rejected because of weak eyesight. He worked closely with the military, however, teaching courses for officers and serving as a consultant to the Army Air Corps on the establishment of a statistical system for the control of logistical operations.

He took a leave from Harvard to go to England on a military mission in 1943, and there he was finally granted a commission and accepted into the service as a captain.

In three years of active duty, he traveled in several Asian countries. He later said that it was the experience of visiting Calcutta during a famine, when there were as many dead people in the streets as live ones, that first stirred his interest in trying to improve conditions in the poorest nations.

McNamara and his wife were relocated from Calcutta to Washington during a serious polio epidemic in 1945, and both contracted the disease. His was a mild case, but hers required eight months in the hospital and another year in a back brace recovering her muscle strength.

McNamara left the service in 1946 with the Legion of Merit decoration and the rank of lieutenant colonel. Instead of returning to Harvard, he joined with nine other Air Force statistical control experts who offered their services as a group to various corporations. This extraordinary ploy resulted in all ten being hired as a team by Ford Motor Co.

Ford was admittedly plagued by deficient management at the time, and Henry Ford II, chairman of the board, sent the ten into every department to study operations and make recommendations. Their unending questions at first earned them the snide appellation "Quiz Kids," after a radio program of the period that featured bright youngsters, but their performance soon changed the title to "whiz kids."

Several of the "whiz kids" made careers at Ford; McNamara rose fastest and highest. Though his specialty was the application of statistics to management, he was also credited with a sense of public taste that led him to bring out new models that scored great success in the market.

Starting as manager of Ford's office of planning and financial analysis, he rose to controller, assistant general manager of the Ford division, general manager of the division, and vice-president in charge of all car and truck divisions. In 1957 he was named a director of the corporation, and in 1960 he succeeded Henry Ford 2d as president--the first president who was not a member of the Ford family.

During his tenure, McNamara was credited with enhancing the company's market position by emphasizing sleek, expensive cars that appealed to affluent buyers, in addition to the basic transportation that had been the company's staple product. His biggest success was in tripling the sales of the Thunderbird, by converting it from a sports car to an expensive four-door model.

He had been president of Ford only a month when Kennedy offered him the post as secretary of defense. When he left to join New Frontier cabinet, he said he was relinquishing $3 million in personal profits he would have realized from his stock options had he remained with Ford.
Henry Ford 2d said of him as he left that "if he is allowed to do as good a job for the country in this new assignment as he has been able to do for our company in a series of previous assignments over the past 15 years, the gain, measured in terms of the national interest, will make it easier for the Ford Motor Co. to sustain the loss of his leaving."

While he was at Ford, the McNamaras stayed out of the Grosse Pointe social orbit dominated by the auto industry. They lived in Ann Arbor, where they cherished the academic atmosphere around the University of Michigan. Once they got to Washington, it became more difficult for McNamara to insulate his family from the demands of his job, and except for skiing vacations in Colorado it often seemed that he was on duty all the time.

"Bob lives an 'on-call' kind of life," his wife once said. When he had time to himself, McNamara tended to spend evenings with his wife and a few close friends, not on Washington's party circuit. The McNamaras kept their three children out of the news.

At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his own stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management revolution. He centralized control, broke down the traditional fiefdoms of the individual services, and imposed multi-purpose, multi-service weapons on the brass.

According to an account published in The Washington Post at the time, "he shook all five floors of the Pentagon in his search for the tools he needed to get a firm grip on the biggest military establishment in the world . . . McNamara brought in computers to help with the spade work, hired systems analysts to comb through the technical points and then list the pros and cons for the generalists, reassessed the war plans, regrouped weapons into programs."

The Kennedy administration came into office vowing to close the "missile gap," the apparent Soviet lead in strategic nuclear weapons. McNamara later acknowledged that there was no "missile gap"--he said it was based on "a total misreading of the information"--but by that time the United States had greatly expanded its nuclear arsenal and the Soviets had responded in kind.

According to critics such as John Edwards, in his book "Superweapon," the U.S. actually had nuclear superiority over the Soviets in 1960, and the American buildup only convinced Moscow that this country was seeking the ability to attack the Soviet Union with impunity.
The American nuclear buildup, Edwards said, "far exceeded the forces developed by the Soviet Union in the first half of the sixties. The secretary himself later judged that the American buildup contributed to the dramatic expansion of Soviet forces."

McNamara sponsored development of missiles that could carry up to 14 nuclear warheads each, giving the U.S. the ability to strike more and more Soviet targets without adding any more missiles and the capability of launching more warheads than the Soviets could fend off. This, McNamara later acknowledged, was substantially responsible for the nuclear arms race.

"I have no question," he said in a 1982 interview, "but that the Soviets thought we were trying to achieve a first strike capability. We were not. We did not have it. We could not attain it; we didn't have any thought of attaining it. But they probably thought we did." Their response, he said, provoked a counter-response by the United States, and the cycle became self-perpetuating.

McNamara's tenure was punctuated by sensitive strategic decisions and political controversies over difficult issues: a national debate over whether to build an anti-ballistic missile system (in which McNamara's role was to wage a rear-guard bureaucratic campaign against it, despite demands from the military establishment to go ahead); the development of the Poseidon submarine-launched missile; his decision to override the military professionals and award a contract for building the F-111 bomber to General Dynamics Corp. instead of the Boeing Co.; his proposal to require all young Americans, drafted or not, to devote a year or two to public service.
He was at the center of Washington decision-making during the 1962 confrontation with Moscow over the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro's Cuba. After a retrospective discussion of those dramatic days with his Soviet counterparts in 1989, McNamara wrote in a Newsweek essay about the crisis that "as I left President Kennedy's office to return to the Pentagon, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night"--so great was the threat of nuclear war. All parties to the confrontation in Cuba, McNamara wrote, were guilty of gross miscalculations and errors that nearly resulted in a catastrophe. A quarter-century later, he wrote, "It is inconceivable to me that we should be content to continue on the present path of East-West confrontation for another 40 years. The risks of disastrous military conflict, so dramatically demonstrated by our re-examination of the Cuban missile crisis, are totally unacceptable." The hardware-loving strategist of the Cold War had come full circle.

McNamara never publicly broke with Johnson over the war in Vietnam, but a gradual process of disillusionment seemed to set in as he lost control of tactics to the generals. In one well-publicized incident, he rejected a list of bombing targets that the military officers wanted to hit, including targets near Hanoi and other civilian population centers. The joint chiefs off staff went over his head to Johnson, and the president authorized the strikes.

Even when he resigned to move to the World Bank, McNamara remained publicly loyal, staying on as secretary for a transition period of several months until his successor, Clark Clifford, took over in early 1968. During that interval, the Viet Cong staged the Tet Offensive, the nationwide uprising in South Vietnam's cities that shocked American public opinion by demonstrating the hollowness of all the Pentagon's claims of military success.

Unlike other high government officials who seemed to spend their years out of power waiting around Washington for a chance to get back in, once he moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank McNamara threw himself into his new assignment with zest, and concentrated on using the bank's resources to help alleviate the poverty of the most backward nations.

The year before he took over the bank, it had a staff of 767 and made 60 loans totaling about $954 million. In the last fiscal year of his tenure, a staff of 2400 made about 250 loans, totaling $11.7 billion. And yet he wanted more, and importuned the industrialized nations to expand their commitments.

As president of the bank, he could have given a speech a day if he wanted to, but he chose a low profile and private persuasion. "I just don't give a damn whether I'm on TV or not," he said. "I just am uninterested in personal publicity. I've had all I need. Other people in town have different objectives."

He limited his public appearances to one or two a year because, he said, he only wanted to speak out when he had "new ideas" to offer, and "I don't get those ideas so frequently as to require me to speak out on them." His technique was to choose his spots, decide what message could best advance the objectives he was pursuing at the bank, and take his time deciding what to say.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America's "century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to a heavy price for it for decades to come." He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

In retirement, McNamara maintained an office on K street and worked, by his own count, with 55 corporations, universities, foundations and other groups in which he was interested.

"I'm not wealthy, but I don't have to do anything I don't want to do," he said, "and I decided not to do anything that doesn't meet two criteria: expand my understanding of the world, and allow me to apply whatever understanding I have in some productive way."

He was a director of The Washington Post Co., Royal Dutch Shell and several other companies, a trustee of the Ford Foundation and California Institute of Technology, and chairman of the Overseas Development Council, a nonprofit organization that sought increased American understanding of economic and social problems in the developing countries.

In 1982, he diverted his attention from global concerns long enough to serve as chairman of the Greater Washington Research Center's task force on local government, which conducted a thorough examination of the finances of Washington-area governments and warned of revenue shortfalls to be faced in the mid-1980s. With careful planning, he said, the local jurisdictions could meet those gaps without drastic service cutbacks or fiscal gimmicks of the kind that brought turmoil to other cities.

McNamara is survived by his second wife Diana, who he married in 2004, and his three children: Craig McNamara, of Winters, Ca.; and Kathleen McNamara and Margaret Pastor, both of Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070601197_pf.html

PETER PUCK TAKES THE FIFTH

2009-06-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

Peter Pocklington

As Peter Pocklington’s legal miseries mount and his August 11 criminal trial* for allegedly bamboozling bankruptcy authorities with lies about his assets draws ever closer, the former car dealer, NHL team owner, federal Tory leadership candidate, and serial welcher**, has decided to 'take the fifth': See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/peter-pocklington-takes-the-fifth/article1197982/

*http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2009/03/hot-off-press-peter-puck-is-in-slammer.html

**See:http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2008/10/peter-puck-welches-on-commitment-to.html

As we speak, Pocklington is being pursued on two separate fronts in connection with his assignment in bankruptcy in his adopted home state of California. First of all, there are the bankruptcy proceedings themselves. At this point, Trustee in Bankruptcy Robert Whitmore wants to know just precisely what Peter Puck’s assets are as well as their whereabouts, so that he might scoop them up and distribute them amongst Puck’s patient creditors. To that end, Whitmore has a bunch of questions that he would like to put to the shameless and duplicitous ego maniac*** to be answered under oath. Questions such as where are your Stanley Cup rings? Who owns the 10 Andy Warhol prints of Mick Jagger and other objets d’art already seized? And what about those reported off-shore bank accounts in the Bahamas and elsewhere? These are questions arising from what Whitmore already knows as well as Puck’s astonishing declaration that he has debts of 19 million bucks and assets of - heh, heh, - $2900!

***http://www.peterpocklington.com/

The other front on which Pocklington is doing battle are two felony counts he is facing for allegedly filing false statements to conceal assets in connection with that same assignment in bankruptcy. He is scheduled to face trial in criminal court on those charges on August 11.

It was reported yesterday that the former insufferable Edmonton sports impresario and ex-director of the right-wing Mickey Mouse think tank known as the Fraser Institute, now wants to be protected by the Constitution of the United States in order to avoid answering the further questions that Whitmore wants to put to him in the bankruptcy proceedings.

Yes, the disgraced bamboozler and legendary welcher now wishes to seek the protection of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, or, ‘take the fifth’ as it has been invoked in other well-known trials or congressional hearings by lawyers and their unsavoury, rough-hewn, swarthy gentlemen clients who often wear bulging pin striped suits, black shirts, white ties, and wide-brimmed fedoras and who sometimes go to jail for very long periods of time.

The dilemma faced by Pocklington is that the answers to the dicey questions about his assets that Whitmore wants to put to him in the bankruptcy proceedings may very well sink him in the criminal trial in August. In the words of Pocklington’s mouthpiece, lawyer Brent Romney, “His [Pocklington’s] testimony may ‘provide a link in the chain of evidence' needed to prosecute him in either federal or state court.” Well, I guess.

This is not to mention that Whitmore’s questions and Pocklington’s answers may also alert a whole slew of Canadian creditors – including the government of Alberta - as to the whereabouts of some of those assets so they can get their grubby little hands on them.

About the assets thus far, Pocklington’s lawyer argues that Pocklington long ago gave some of the stuff – including Inuit art and Buddha sculptures - to his long-suffering wife and therefore it doesn’t belong to him. Pocklington, for his part, disclaims knowledge of the location of the Stanley Cup rings and says they have already been sold. As to the reported off-shore Bahamian bank accounts, Whitmore has asked the Bankruptcy Court to hire a special counsel to chase them down for the creditors.

Anyway, Peter Puck’s miserable life continues. His light at the end of the tunnel may very well be the train.

TORY MLA DOUG ELNISKI: A TWITTERING TWIT

2009-06-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Doug Elniski as a Young Man

Doug Elniski, MLA for Edmonton Calder today

For those Canadians who live in parts of Canada other than my beloved Alberta, don’t think you are missing anything. Apart from substandard roads and health care, a lack of schools, services for seniors, adequate nursing homes, and overcrowded universities, many of the province’s citizens are represented by Progressive Conservative members such as Doug Elniski.

The knuckle-dragging 6 ‘ 7” Elniski who drives a smart car, squeaked out a victory against the NDP in Edmonton Calder in the last provincial election. Over the past few days he has shown that he is right on top of things when it comes to new technology by revealing his proficiency at twittering. Obviously using the technology for his official purposes, he recently twittered his followers that they should direct their attention to a bikini car wash where “girls look cold.”

In addition, In his capacity as an MLA he attended the Edmonton gay pride parade a few days ago. While attending to his official functions he tastefully twittered to his avid followers that at one point he was "surrounded by bumping and grinding lesbians."
Read: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Tory+draws+fire+offensive+Twitter+posts/1723327/story.html
But that’s not all. Recently while using the new technology to publicize his lofty views on junior high school graduations, Elniski posted some homespun advice to young girls. Elniski declared that "Men are attracted to smiles, so smile and don't give me that 'treated equal' stuff, if you want equal it comes in little packages at Starbucks."

He also opined, "There is nothing a man wants less than a woman scowling because he thinks he is going to get sh--for something and has no idea what."

For more of Elniski’s twittering intellectual musings, read: http://twitter.com/ElniskiMLA?max_id=2255128223&page=2&twttr=true

The publicity generated by the offending posts brought forth considerable derision from many thoughtful Albertans thus prompting Elniski to expunge his musings from the internet. He observed, “"To be honest with you, I feel kind of foolish because as I go back and look at it now I can say I never, ever should have done what I did." Indeed.

Elniski’s gaffes came only a few days after Stelmach’s Finance Minister Iris Evans said in a speech in Toronto that families with two working parents did not properly care for their children. Like the erudite Elniski, the high positioned ditz also apologized for her offensive comments.

Tom Olsen, a former Calgary Herald columnist and prominent Tory cheerleader during the dark ages of the Klein years, is now Premier Stelmach’s mouthpiece on damage control matters. He reported that Stelmach is not considering disciplinary action against this Neanderthal Calder MLA.

So, all you Canadians out there in the hinterland, you are not missing much!

RALPH KLEIN: UNHERALDED HERO OF 9/11

2009-06-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

God help us all. He’s back. Yesterday, Ralph Klein returned to the political rostrum in Calgary where he spoke to an audience of about 150 moles, spies, geeks, James Bond and Dick Cheney wannabes, and other right-wing maniacs and pursuers of government largesse. His subject ? Get this – “his government’s experiences related to security and public safety in the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.” For more on the advance hype to his speech read this bullshit: http://www.trilateralcalgary.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=36

The sponsoring organization was the Trilateral Conference, a group of delegates representing the lunatic fringe of the most conservative elements of society, top heavy with security corporations trying to get pork barrel government contracts.

In the course of his scintillating presentation of the dramatic heroics of his government in the face of code red terrorism, the ex-Premier of Alberta took the opportunity to hurl a couple of typically witless Kleinisms at federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. In answer to a question from the audience about Iggy, the cerebral Klein said, “Ignatieff, I think he’s playing a game. He says all the right things, especially when he’s in Alberta and in British Columbia, he says whatever the population desires. So what I think he should do to keep his mouth shut.” He then accused Iggy of saying different things about the oilsands to Westerners, than he did to Easterners - without offering a scintilla of evidence, of course.

Ah, yes, vintage Klein to be sure - cutting, rapier-like, clever discourse – akin to some of his previous gems like “bums and creeps” from Eastern Canada. Or his view that “dinosaur farts” caused global warming. Or his prescription for dealing with mad cow disease in Alberta, when he said, “I guess any self-respecting rancher would have shot, shoveled and shut up . . . ” Needless to say, the 150 others in attendance whose organizations paid good money for them to hear this drivel, har-de-hared at his every breath and gave him much applause. An increasingly typical Calgary audience, I'm afraid. Read: http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/alberta/2009/06/19/9848346-sun.html

Also, http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2008/08/fraser-institute-invites-you-to-evening.html

and, http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2009/02/george-w-bush-is-coming-to-town-as.html

Klein however was content neither with merely talking about his bold and decisive actions in the wake of 9/11 nor trashing Iggy. The ex-Premier - who blew up hospitals and allowed his cronys to buy the land thereby vacated at cut-rate prices, who laid off teachers and nurses, and who allowed Alberta’s infrastructure to go into the tank, all in the name of an “Alberta Advantage” that Albertans have yet to see – also had some economic advice for his successor.

He criticized the steep Stelmach deficit and suggested he (Klein) would cut government services in order to deal with it if he was in Eddie’s position. How much would Klein cut? Klein had these trenchant and thoughtful comments: "You know, I'm not in politics any longer so I don't know what I would cut.” "Ten per cent or 5% ... across the board. Everything."

He bragged about his own record as Premier of cutting government employment by a third, rolling back government salaries, and getting “rid of our pension plans,” - no doubt forgetting the $700,000 severance allowance he pocketed after the Tories gave him the boot. Naturally, he took credit for his phony legislation – now repealed – making it illegal for Alberta to incur deficits.
Read: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1712547

For an enhanced and electrifying record of his piffle, read: http://communities.canada.com/calgaryherald/blogs/insidealberta/default.aspx

Fortunately, his successor Premier Stelmach - no prize or mental giant himself - shows no signs of listening to the failed ex-Premier's economic advice.

Klein’s appearance was a scary and nightmarish back to the future moment to be sure. Hopefully for Albertans, his reemergence onto the public stage is merely an anomaly and not a sign of things to come.

MIKE DUFFY FOUND GUILTY OF ETHICS VIOLATION IN HIS KNIFING OF STEPHANE DION

2009-06-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

In a column published today in the Ottawa Citizen, journalism professor Andrew Cohen reminded his readers of the sleazy depths to which some media are prepared to stoop to promote their political causes and the depths to which some politicians may be prepared to stoop to pay them off. His subject was the sorry hatchet job CTV and Senator Mike Duffy did on then Liberal leader Stephane Dion on October 9, 2008 just 5 days before the last federal election. The issue arose as a result of a twelve minute taped television interview of Dion by CTV Atlantic reporter Steve Murphy. See: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/News/tale+Dion+tape/1700130/story.html

The facts of this shameful episode are worth reviewing.

The interview was in English rather than Dion’s mother-tongue French. The nub of the interview was this question put to Dion by Murphy:

"If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?"

Dion did not understand the question and asked Murphy to repeat it. After repeating the question two more times, Dion still did not understand it and said so. Dion looked confused and befuddled and requested that the interview recommence. After the completion of the interview CTV Atlantic broadcast the entire interview replete with Dion’s apparent confusion together with his requests to repeat the question.

Later on the same day on his national show Duffy told his viewers that the program would include a discussion of “Stephane Dion’s struggle with the English language (which) is going to be one you will be talking about for days.” The Duffy show ran only that portion of the interview that contained the exchanges between Dion and Murphy on the question that gave Dion trouble, with Dion’s hesitant attempts to grasp the meaning of it and answer it. Of course, that portion of the interview was aired a multitude of times over the next few days.

Prior to the interview and Duffy’s show, polls had been looking good for the Grits and it appeared that they were about to peak at the right time. The Duffy show changed all of that. Liberal momentum went into the tank, its polls started to go south and on election day, Harper got his second split decision.

Many Canadians were outraged at the behaviour of the CTV talking heads and lodged several complaints against what they perceived as unfair and unprofessional reporting. Those complaints wound up on the desk of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a body which is responsible for maintaining the code of conduct among Canadian broadcasters.

As reported by Cohen in his column the council recently issued its decision on the complaints. It found that CTV had indeed violated the code, stating that Murphy’s question was “confusing, and not only to a person whose first language is other than English.” It observed that Murphy’s question contained mixed tenses and moods and it was no wonder that Dion was puzzled. It also said that Murphy could have clarified the question and that Dion had every right to expect the footage showing him to be confused would not be broadcast.

As to Senator Duffy, the Council found his report to be unfair and unbalanced. Duffy, the Council held, had breached the code of ethics.

Michael Dennis Duffy was sworn in as a member of the Senate of Canada on December 22, 2008, two months and 8 days following the Harper victory and two months and 13 days following his breach of the broadcast code of ethics when he stuck the dagger between Dion's shoulder blades. His patron was his pal Stephen Harper.

For more on this great Canadian, read: http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2009/02/senator-duffys-senate-qualifications.html

A foul smelling episode indeed.

LISA RAITT: JUST ANOTHER ONE OF HARPER'S KEYSTONE KOPS

2009-06-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

The government of Stephen Harper Group Picture 2009

Sadly, Stephen Harper's Keysone Kops government has just acquired a new member. She’s none other than Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. I use the word ‘sadly’ because she stood out in the Harper cabinet as articulate, cool and even funny. No kidding. Funny and still part of the Harper cabinet!

After meeting and hearing her recently in Calgary I mused that the Honourable Ms.Raitt would be far more at home with the Grits. She’s from Cape Breton – lots of Grits come from Cape Breton – and she is the daughter of a man who worked in the mines and earned his keep for a time as a union negotiator. She has three degrees from three top schools and won a scholarship that allowed her to train with British barristers in the Middle Temple in London. She also has a distinguished record of public service. She was Canada’s first female harbourmaster and just prior to getting elected in 2008 she served as President and CEO of the Toronto Port Authority. And - get this - she’s married to a comedy writer. Now that is a Liberal resume! It is certainly not a resume one would expect to find in the files of the dark and brooding, xenophobic, and unworldly government of Stephen Harper, unless it was on some enemies list.

Alas, poor Lisa as been stuck in deep political doodoo now for several weeks. First of all, there is the problem of shutting down the Chalk River nuclear reactor thus causing a world wide shortage of medical radioisotopes. As a result probably tens of thousands of cancer patients have to go without treatment. The problem falls under her department’s responsibilities and it has come to prominence on her watch. Her government is seen to have bungled the issue. Bad stuff indeed for any minister to face.

Last week Ms. Raitt’s fortunes took a turn of the worse. A couple of secret briefs on Chalk River were left inadvertently at the CTV news offices in Ottawa after a visit from Ms. Raitt and her chief aide, Jasmine MacDonnell. Jasmine up to that time was having a remarkable meteoric rise career-wise. A mere child of 26 years of age, Jasmine’s boss had promoted her to communications director, a gig that paid 120 grand a year. CTV hung on to the briefs for a week before doing the honourable thing of releasing its contents to the public. Jasmine, thankful at the opportunity of having served the Minister at such a young age and at such a high salary, took the fall and resigned. All of which was treated by the opposition in the House with the usual angry and indignant questions followed by loud guffaws and catcalls heaped upon the government. Raitt however stood her ground and fessed up to the botch-up glibly,coolly, and very alone. Her performance generated considerable admiration and even sympathy from many political observers.

Yesterday, life became much more complicated for the Minister. Steve Maher, a press gallery reporter for The Halifax Chronicle Herald reported that he had a tape of Raitt nattering away in a car between two political events in Victoria. On the tape the Minister called the isotope crisis “sexy” – hardly a worthy comment considering that thousands are going without cancer treatment because of it. About the isotope issue she said on tape,

"when we win on this, we get all the credit. I’m ready to roll the dice on this. This is an easy one. You know what solves this problem? Money. And if it’s just about money, we’ll figure it out. It’s not a moral issue."

The tape also had the Minister opining that her fellow minister, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq was not up to the task running her department, an opinion not likely to contribute to the peace and tranquility of the Conservative caucus. Read: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/9012061.html

And how did the redoubtable Maher get his hands on the tape? Enter the absent minded, probably ditzy, highly paid, twenty-six year old ex- communications director. According to Maher, she left the tape in a women’s washroom on Parliament Hill. Maher did the honourable thing by contacting MacDonnell and telling her he had the tape. She expressed interest in getting it back, but for several months thereafter did nothing about it. After MacDonnell’s resignation, Maher and his superiors decided they should hear what was on the tapes. Presto! A five hour treasure trove of nasty politics!

MacDonnell, or people behind her, did not take this turn of events lightly. They immediately applied to the Courts for a publication ban. The Judge wisely decided that there were no legal grounds for such a ban and so Canadians everywhere now know the story. The Prime Minister’s Office has denied that the government nor the Conservative Party was behind the court application to keep the tape under wraps. Ahem. Read: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/isotope-crisis-a-sexy-story-raitt-says/article1174367/

Come to think of it, after some consideration I think the Minister should stick with the Conservative Party.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: RAYMAKER BLOG SCOOPS NEW YORK TIMES ON DR. STRANGELOVE

2009-06-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

Dr. Strangelove's last day in office

Well, far be it for me to brag, but I've got to tell you that I published this blog:http://darrylraymaker.blogspot.com/2009/05/evisceration-of-americas-dr-strangelove.html on May 22, 2009.

Thus, I even beat the great Frank Rich of the New York Times by a whopping 8 days with my reporting of the significance of the Landay/Strobel piece. So you can say once again that you read it on my blog first. Tell all your friends.

For proof of the above proposition, See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31rich.html

BILL CLINTON: TIME TO GIVE IT A REST

2009-05-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

The Incredible Shrinking ex-President

The Clinton-Bush Toronto snore fest of a few days ago was as revealing as it was reported to be dull. For one thing, the event proved that Calgary isn’t the only Canadian community to be so crass and insensitive that it would welcome a putative war criminal to speak to its citizens for hundreds of dollars a pop each. Nor was it the only city to reward him with guffaws at his ghost written jokes and a standing ovation after listening to his nonsense.

Predictably, Calgary has been joined by its big bucks, greed is good, sister Canadian community – namely, Bay Street. Hell, the Bay Street pin-striped brigade turned out a crowd of 6000 to hear these two clowns. Calgary couldn’t hold a candle to that. However, the cowtown is still well up there in the crass department. By my last count, it has welcomed no less than three of the Bush outlaws to regale its corporate citizens about shock and awe, the war against terror, and other shibboleths of that sorry administration. Karl Rove, then Bush, and more recently Condi Rice have graced Dallas North – at prices ranging from $400 bucks a head (Bush and Rove) to Condi (the most expensive at $500). Hogtown – a label better applied to Bay Street than the rest of the great city of Toronto – have only had two – Rove and Bush, with Rove generating $700 a head. Bush and Clinton in TO again made Calgary look like pikers, getting up to $2500 a ticket.

Read: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1644965

As might be expected for a man whose classy speeches were a staple of derision on the David Letterman show over the past year, Bush’s repertoire of jokes at the affair included two that dealt with animal fecal matter, and another apparently cribbed from the tired joke file of the disgraced Brian Mulroney. Nonetheless, the crowd chuckled and guffawed and at the end of the day, the two sorry comedians left the city like a couple of absconding pool sharks, a few hundred grand to the good.

Apart from the corporate big wigs and their minions shelling out the big bucks to hear Bush and groveling to him with chuckles and ovations, the big story of the day was that neither Clinton nor Bush knew anything about the new U.S. requirement of Passports for all Canadians going into the States. Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. Bush appointed an Ambassador to Canada whose previous Canadian experience was limited to one previous trip to Niagara Falls and who knew sweet tweet about the country. Clinton’s wife thought that some of the 9/11 terrorists had made their way into the United States from Canada, as did Janet Napolitano, Obama’s new Homeland Security Czar. By the way, Napolitano’s only venture into Canada until now was to see polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba. And people like Jack Granatstein believe that we are anti-American when we get fed up with some of this stuff!

All of which is interesting in a sick sort of way. But what really sticks out in my mind is how far Bill Clinton has fallen. I liked Bill Clinton from the moment he arrived on the political scene. He was thoughtful, smart, and could give a speech like no President before him in my memory. I thought his dalliances were reckless but certainly not impeachable, and the resulting attacks on him were launched largely by right wing Republicans most of which lived in glass houses. I thought he was a good President and was saddened when he stepped down from the Presidency. I even paid to hear him speak once.

But what the hell is he doing traipsing around the world at events such as this where he shares the spotlight with such a twit? With a man who sanctioned torture, was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, lied to and divided the American people, pushed the United States into becoming a pariah state, let New Orleans flow into the Gulf of Mexico, did nothing while the economy went to hell, and rewarded greed like no President before him? I guess he does it for the money. And in the process he diminishes himself daily. Indeed, the Toronto Star thought Bush was the more entertaining of the two. See: http://www.thestar.com/news/columnist/article/642978

I think its time Bill Clinton gave it a rest. He had his turn at the plate. If he wants to make some big bread by giving speeches, he hardly needs to do it with riff-raff like George W. Bush at his side. And there is certainly no reason why he should be interested in salvaging Bush’s legacy or reputation. Better he give more help to Barack Obama who is saddled with the responsibility of cleaning up Bush’s mess.
See also:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/05/29/clinton-bush-conversation-toronto.html

CANADA SUFFERS WHILE HARPER/NIXON LISTENS TO TAPES

2009-05-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Harper just doesn’t get it. His bully-boy meanness, his surliness, his lack of discretion, his inclination to mislead the public to further his ideology, his intuitive pursuit of totalitarian or dark objectives have all consistently stood in his way to forming a majority government.

For the benefit of my Conservative Party readers I will simplify his plight by using a baseball analogy to describe his three years as party leader. In those three years he has been up to the plate three times. The first time he was thrown out at first base, and the last two times he managed to fluke two Texas league blooper singles – a minority defeat, and two narrow minority wins. Days after his second single, he was bloody near picked off at first base, and since then has been playing as though he was trapped and ran down between first and second – the distance between the first baseman and second baseman ever narrowing for the tag. And all because of his very own and personal errors on the field.

Most people learn or try to learn from their mistakes. They get up in the morning after suffering a setback or defeat, look at themselves in the mirror and try to figure out what happened. They talk to their wives and friends for objective advice to learn what went wrong and how they might change themselves or their tactics to avoid a similar fate in the future.

Not Harper. He still believes he’s the smartest guy in the room. He hasn’t read a helluva lot. He knows little history. His knowledge of economics is rudimentary at best and what he knows is burdened down by ideology. He hasn't traveled much. He surrounds himself with sycophants and ideologues who share his misguided views on people, events, and juvenile political dirty tricks. He fumbles, trips, runs into walls, does his pratfalls, and edges ever closer to oblivion, but he picks up no wisdom along the way. Alas, he remains the same Stephen Harper that most Canadians know and have learned to increasingly dislike.

Yesterday in the House, he was at it again. In question period while delivering a blistering attack on the government's response to the recession Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff demanded that Harper fire his finance minister James Flaherty for having misjudged the ongoing recessionary deficit. Harper’s response was vintage Harper. He replied,
“I cannot fire the Leader of the Opposition and with all the tapes I have on him, I do not want to.”
Read: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/641670

Ignatieff said that Harper’s response was the “most Nixonian” of anything he had heard Harper say and that, “Every day that goes by, he’s more like Richard Nixon.” Warming to the analogy to the deeply flawed – not unlike Harper – former President of the United States who was forced to resign over Watergate, Ignatieff said, “We are in the middle of the most serious economic crisis since the Second World War and the Prime Minister . . is wasting his time listening to tapes of me.”

Unhappily, Ignatieff is right. Rome burned while Nero fiddled. Canada’s jobless struggle and Harper listens to tapes. The country suffers while Harper tries to get the goods on his political enemies. Very sad.

Harper remains Harper. Or Nixon.

For those who might be interested in the Nixon - Harper joined at the hip phenomenon, read: http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/12/11/02900.html