Great post of the day

Read the whole thing but here's some tidbits:

On the economy, Dion's 30-day plan of action may not be adequate . . . But Dion's plan is more than what Harper is offering: himself as the Great Helmsman.
The Canadian economy is indeed better than America's, as Harper says, but it's not America-proof.
Dion is a sincere and honest politician, untainted by scandal. He is a polite and decent man. He is not mean or vindictive. He does not treat his political opponents as enemies. He does not question the patriotism of the critics of his Afghan policy, let alone call them agents of the Taliban. He is not proposing to send 14-year-olds to jail for life.
Vote against him because you do not like his policies, not because he is socially awkward or that he reads books.
Vote for Harper because you like his policies, not because he got himself photographed in a sweater in front of a fireplace.

Dissing everybody

Boris describes a case of Election Terrorism -- cutting the brake lines on cars parked at houses with Liberal signs -- and notes how this kind of despicable action follows when a political party adopts disrespect as a deliberate tactic:

The structural mechanism at work here is sinister and very dangerous. With the Harper government, we've seen a calculated campaign to delegitimise the other parties, and the parliamentary process as we know it. Obstructing parliamentary committees, advertisements with birds shitting the Opposition leader, and preventing candidates from participating in all-candidates meetings may seem silly and cowardly, but it serves the purpose of reducing the other parties to a general "other." It ignores their legitimate right to participate in political discourse as equals; it emasculates their leaders not for their ideas, but for who they are. The labels of Liberal and Left become synonymous with weakness. Direct associations between the ABC parties and the Taleban further this viewpoint, and stoke the fires of ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis. The simple act of suing the Opposition takes the legitimate, public democracy and turns into something bitter and personal. Not firing members and ministers who make outrageous statements furthers the impression among supporters and detractors alike, that these views are acceptable.

I guess it's all in fun until somebody loses an eye. The 22-year-olds who appear to be running the Conservative party these days seem to think all of their ratfucking and chippy tricks are simply hilarious -- but cutting brake lines could kill somebody.
As Boris says, the last time Canada experienced political terrorism, Trudeau called out the army. I don't want to have to go through that again.

Mavericky

Hmmm -- so Bible Spice AKA Cariboo Barbie is chattering to the press about how she disagrees with McCain's campaign strategy. Isn't that cute? I'll bet the McCain campaign is just lovin' her mavericky maverickness now!

Dion is battling the Economy and he's winning

Dion is battling the Economy.
And the Economy doesn't care that Dion's English isn't fluent or his manner academic. The Economy isn't trying to distract Canadians with oily splotts and puffins.
It's the Economy that could destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of Canadians. Dion seems to be the one who knows this and wants to do something about it.
What is Harper doing? He doesn't have any ideas except to mail out a few more government cheques.
Nanos is now showing just a 5 per cent difference between Conservatives and Liberals in their daily tracking poll. The Liberals moved up five points today, when the Oct. 2 figures are averaged in -- perhaps a combination of the debates (good for Dion) and the economy (bad for Harper). The Winnipeg Sun reported today:

Stephane Dion came out swinging on the heels of back-to-back leaders debates with a stride in his step and a surprising bounce in the polls.
Jockeying for public support in the broad middle against the “polarized” extremes of the NDP on the left and Conservatives on the right, Dion also tried to wrestle the upper hand from Stephen Harper on the number one issue of the campaign: The economy.
As the remaining campaign days dwindle, he began the final sprint to the finish with a continued outreach to progressive voters, and a fresh appeal to disaffected Conservatives.

Harper's lackadasical approach to the economy just isn't cutting it -- and telling Dion that he "panicked" just because Dion wants to hold a meeting about the economy was a bit of an over-reaction on Harper's part, indicating that Harper is the one who is spooked.
And he should be. Here's the latest bad news:

. . . most analysts were predicting the Canadian economy would be flat for the rest of the year before last week's financial tsunami on Wall Street. Now they say the situation has worsened and Canada could soon follow the U.S. into recession, with possible deep job losses in Ontario and Quebec.. . .
"The (U.S. rescue) plan cannot prevent a U.S. recession because we're already in one," said CIBC senior economist Avery Shenfeld.
"Canada already saw a decline in real output in the first half of the year, and while the third quarter got a great start on rising energy output, the economic headwinds point to another decline in quarter four (October-December)."
Moreover, the Bank of Canada conceded that the global credit crunch is starting to seriously affect Canada's financial system, announcing it needs to inject another $12 billion in cash to ensure Canada's chartered banks have enough capital to make loans.
Amid the roller-coaster of economic developments, the opposition accused Harper of failing the leadership test for not having a plan to deal with the problems. The Conservatives had yet to release their election platform even as advance polls opened Friday, although they have announced a series of targeted and modest economic measures

Does Harper think that giving plumbers-in-training a $2,000 taxable bonus is going to mitigate the coming collapse of our automobile, manufacturing, potash and forestry sectors? We need the Liberal plan to ramp up infrastructure spending and support for manufacturers.

Debate views -- Dion gets the nod

At the Globe and Mail, the editorial board calls it for Dion, while Andrew Steele blogs:

Stephane Dion had as good a showing as he could have expected. He was never really knocked down, although he stumbled over the language on too many occasions to count. . . There was another player in the debate that wasn't even in the room.
The 800-plus point drop in the TSE actually led CBC's The National rather than the debate. I cannot think of another occasion on which that has happened.
The economy was supposed to be the Conservatives' strong point, but Dion's gambit yesterday seems to have turned the tables, if only for a couple of days.
I'm giving the edge to Layton on points.
However, I actually think that Dion may wind up with the biggest bump out of this, because the economy is now the issue and his campaign was smart enough to judo flip themselves into the lead on the issue. . . .

James Travers at the Toronto Star and Don Martin at Canwest News Service think Dion had an OK performance but was not a knockout, while also agreeing that the economy is now front and centre in the campaign.

Third Wave StealthCons

We're up to 23 StealthCons now, and counting.
If it were just a few missed meetings, or if it was the Ladies Nazi Party Target Shooting Association that was trying to sponsor debates, then Canadians could accept an explanation that all these Conservatives missing all these candidate meetings was just bad luck or inconvenient scheduling. But the pattern now is clear and compelling. In this election, its obvious that StealthConning is a deliberate national Conservative Party policy.
What I wonder is -- why are these Conservatives so unwilling to defend what they have done in the past or what they want to do in the future?
The "StealthCon" term is RossK's great invention, and he defines it thusly:

A StealthCon is a Harpertronic conservative candidate who ducks the media and especially the public. Their most egregious acts of stealthitude occur when they subvert democracy completely by refusing to show up at all candidates meetings where the voters, instead of watching ads on the TeeVee actually head out the door in an effort to find out, via their own eyes and ears, what they will (or will not) be voting for.

Adding to StealthCon One and The Stealthening, here is my latest installment:
Regina Wascana candidate Michelle Hunter would not attend a debate at the University of Regina even though Ralph Goodale was there.

"The Conservative candidate's failure to be here is a gesture of profound disrespect. Just like not telling the truth about equalization or perhaps plagiarizing a speech," said Goodale.
Hunter did send a statement that was read aloud.

Well, wasn't that just so special of her? Pretty hard for those university students to have a discussion with a piece of paper.
There's more -- RossK's most recent report is John Baird. And the BC Liberals have compiled a list including these StealthCons types:

- Russ Hiebert (South Surrey – White Rock – Cloverdale) missed an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Crescent Beach Property Owners Association, forcing the event’s cancellation. (September 17)
- Sam Rakhra (Burnaby – New Westminster) was a no-show at a BCTV all-candidates debate. (September 17)
- Dona Cadman rejected an invitation to participate on a CBC radio panel. (September 24)
- Alice Wong skipped an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Canada-Asia Pacific Business Association. (September 25)
- John Cummins (Delta – Richmond East) skipped an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Canada-Asia Pacific Business Association. (September 25)

Thanks, Jeff, for that link. To be continued...

Great line of the day

In Salon, Rebecca Traister refuses to join The Sarah Palin pity party:

Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It's a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who -- love her or hate her -- was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.
In fact, the only people I feel sorry for are Americans who invested in a hopeful, progressive vision of female leadership, but who are now stuck watching, verbatim, a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Emphasis mine.

Mr. Sweater just stands there

From Cherniak comes this YouTube showing Harper's reaction when one of his Conservative-tshirt-wearing young supporters faints behind him. But I guess Harper just couldn't pause the press conference to find out whether the boy was going to be OK or not because, after all, the reporters were waiting and we know how much Harper cares about their deadlines and stuff ...

Canadian freeway blogging

At the Beav, Dave finds to ABC's post about Canada's freeway blogger:



Works for me!

Hidden agenda?

Harper's hidden agenda? Nope, its right out in the open, complements of the Western Standard's Adam Yoshida. And Canada, don't say you didn't know what you were voting for:

With a strong majority government – one not vulnerable to a confidence vote – the Prime Minister has the power to weather minor storms of public outrage and to use his five years to change this country in ways which will prove both popular and nearly impossible to undo.
In particular, I recommend that a Conservative government focus on the following:
1) Institutional demolition: The left-wing in this country relies upon government to keep itself running. The Prime Minister has taken some vital first steps in this area by junking the Court challenges program and cutting funding to radical feminist groups but, with a majority, the best option would be to go much further.
Sell the CBC. Junk most of the cultural subsides. Get rid of the human rights Gestapo . . . Gut the CRTC. Indeed, as I recommended before, the Prime Minister should forget his own copyright bill and instead pass the most liberal, progressive, and loose copyright bill in the Western world. Yeah, that’ll hurt some people – but screw them, they’re not going to vote Tory anyways.
Do too much, rather than too little. Don’t shift these things around. Burn them down and salt the Earth. . .

Yoshida's article goes downhill from there, from industrial arms production to brutalizing prisoners. Oh, its just such fun to be a Conservative!
Over at Canadian Cynic, PSA provides the smackdown to this insanity:

Here's a news flash for you Adam Yoshida, the cartoon left that you vilify and hate so deeply doesn't exist. There are however millions of rational Canadians that will stand up and fight your kind to the bitter end, to prevent seeing this nation turned into a tin-pot fascist state. You won't get your coup, you won't get your junta and you just plain won't get your way because the fantasy you've described here is at home on another continent, 70 years in the past. The entire world went to war to defeat that vision. Here's some news for you, we'd do it again too.

Thanks, Rev. Paperboy, for this catch.

Does anyone think Palin's a good choice?

Alison deconstructs the CBC's attempt to be "fair and balanced" in A mighty wind blows up the arse of the CBC.
My question to the CBC is this: to "balance" Heather Mallick, where are they going to find a Canadian who actually thinks the Republican choice of Bible Spice AKA Cariboo Barbie as a Vice-Presidential candidate was a good one?

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed"

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note quotes former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski on what the plan was for the President to handle a nuclear strike during the Cold War. I found this chilling, particularly because Brzezinski and everybody around him thought it would actually be possible to plan for something like this, and to assume everybody would be calm and rational and orderly:

. . . one of my jobs was to coordinate the president's response in the event of a nuclear attack. I'm not revealing any secrets, but it was something like this: We would have initial warning of an attack within one minute of a large-scale launch by the Soviet Union. Roughly by the second minute we'd have a pretty good notion of the scale and the likely targets. By the third minute, we would know more or less when to anticipate impact and so forth. By the third minute, the job of the national security advisor was to alert the president that this was ongoing, that we have this information. And the president then decides how to respond. It begins to get complicated immediately. If it's an all-out attack, the response is presumably easier. You just react in total. But suppose it's a more selective attack. There are choices to be made. The president is supposed to weigh the options. How will he react? There's an element of uncertainty here. In any case, the process is to be completed roughly by the seventh minute.. . . By the seventh minute, the order to execute had to be transmitted and whatever we decided had to be carried out. Roughly by the 28th minute, there's impact. That is to say, you and your family are dead. Washington's gone. A lot of our military assets are destroyed. But presumably, the president has calmly made the decision how to respond. We're already firing back. Six hours later, 150 million Americans and Soviets are dead. That is the reality we lived with. And we did everything we could to make it as stable, as subject to rational control, as possible.

Of course, nobody anticipated having the president who would just continue reading My Pet Goat for seven minutes...

StealthCon II: The Stealthening

Here's my StealthCon update for today, to add to the four from BC already hunted down by RossK and the nine more listed by the Liberals here.
In Comments, Penlan reports this one:

The Con in my riding, Perth-Wellington, in southwestern Ontario, has also been a no-show for all-candidate debates. It's Gary Schellenburg.

while Mound of Sound adds:

Nanaimo-Alberni, incumbent Reform/Alliance/CPC James Lunney isn't even putting up more than a few campaign signs.

At The Galloping Beaver, Dave reports on the Kamloops Thompson Cariboo riding, where StealthCon candidate Cathy McLeod is refusing interview requests from local media.
And Dave, in reply to your musical tribute to the StealthCons, how about this one?

It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well

Here's the only possible response to this this pathetic publicity stunt:


Why would we not be at all surprised to see Bible Spice and the odious McCain campaign turn a pregnant teenager's wedding day into a media circus?

StealthCons

RossK at The Gazetteer is tracking all of the Conservative candidates who seem to have disappeared. He calls them "StealthCons". Our list so far:
Saanich-Gulf Islands Gary Lunn
Vancouver Island North John Duncan
Chunklets doesn't know whether Edmonton-Spruce Grove Rona Ambrose is a StealthCon yet, but he points out that her Events Calendar ends abruptly on Sept. 22.
And here in Saskatchewan, we think North Battleford's Gerry Ritz may have actually discovered the formula for invisibility because the newspapers aren't finding him anywhere.
Here is Ross's definition of a StealthCon:

A StealthCon is a Harpertronic conservative candidate who ducks the media and especially the public. Their most egregious acts of stealthitude occur when they subvert democracy completely by refusing to show up at all candidates meetings where the voters, instead of watching ads on the TeeVee actually head out the door in an effort to find out, via their own eyes and ears, what they will (or will not) be voting for. We first became acutely aware of the StealthCons that walk among us during the invisible Mar 2008 by-election candidacy of Deborah Meredith in Vancouver Quadra. And here's the thing......Ms Meredith almost won. Thus, despite the jocular, snarkoleptic tone of these posts, this is no laughing matter.

Any other contributions?
UPDATE: The Liberal party website lists "a litany of Conservative candidates who have declined to participate in all-candidates debates and/or refuse to speak to media at all":

Jilian Saweczko in Parkdale-High Park
Health Minister Tony Clement in Parry Sound-Muskoka
Christina Perreault in Toronto-Danforth
Gloria Kovach in Guelph
Immigration Minister Diane Finley in Haldimand-Norfolk
Dave Tilson in Dufferin-Caledon
Michelle Hunter in Wascana
Helena Guergis in Simcoe-Grey
Environment Minister John Baird, representing Ottawa West-Nepean, has refused to participate in an all-candidates debate hosted by the City of Ottawa.
A debate sponsored by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario on October 8 is being rejected by the Conservatives.
Hull-Aylmer Conservative Candidate Paul Fréchette was a no-show [on Ottawa CBC's morning show] to discuss the issues on air with other local candidates.

So its quite obvious this refusal to participate in democratic processes is not just an idiosyncrasy of a few candidates but rather an expression of deliberate Conservative party policy.
I wonder if Canadians will realize that the Conservative party holds them in contempt?