Sigh

I don't understand how anybody ever got the impression that Stephen Harper is such a great manager, as we watch his ministers wreck the agencies they are supposed to be directing.
Now Tony Clement has destroyed the reputation of internationally-respected Statistics Canada and he continues to wiggle around the truth -- after saying for the last week that Stats Canada had endorsed the voluntary long-form census, Clement now sort of admits he was lying and it was the government's decision. In his statement following Shiekh's resignation, Clement says

As I have noted previously [yeah? where?] Statistics Canada's preferred approach would have been to maintain the mandatory long form census.
However, after the Government's decision to replace the mandatory long form census Statistics Canada was asked to provide options for conducting a voluntary survey of households. One of the options provided - the voluntary National Household Survey - was chosen.

Emphasis mine.

Don't panic

Maybe the Obama White House will learn from the Sherrod debacle exactly what all leaders have to learn -- don't panic.
It was panic that made the Obama administration react too quickly, without investigation or due process. So they tried to kill the racism story quick by firing a person who didn't deserve to be fired, and made themselves into a bigger story about poor decision-making.
The moral is, you will be criticized no matter what you do, so do the right thing.

I love the internets

I haven't posted anything about the census long form brouhaha yet but everyone is posting this song tonight.
Andrew Davidson says:

some people can unleash their pent-up creative energy on literally anything.

Skdadl says

So what do Canadians do when the presumptions of the popinjays in Ottawa provoke them to proving once again that we can be a pretty uppity bunch? Well, we write songs, of course. As Tom Lehrer once sort of sang, "They may be winning the battles, but we've got all the good songs."

Considering what a hit the video is, one of the singers notes:

“We should have discussed royalties earlier. Now that it’s taken off this will be a much harder discussion. Statistics say that nine time out of ten, plus or minus one, 80 percent of the time in any group of ten there will be at least one Yoko Ono.”

Getting back to the main issue, this comment on Warren Kinsella's site sums it all up:

Things we all have to do as Canadians:
- pay our taxes
- fill out the census
- register deaths, births, marriages
- be registered in school until you’re 16
No mandatory service, no volunteering, no national population register, no identity card… Christ, we don’t even have to work if we don’t have to, and we’ll get some kind of income support. What is the matter with Canadians? Fewer than half of us seem to be able to pry ourselves away from reality TV even to vote, depending on which type of election we’re talking about.
Lookit- the census isn’t about YOU. It’s about US. Nobody cares about YOUR information. They care about averages, aggregates, trends.

Yes, like the news that that there are 21,000 self-declared Jedi Knights in Canada -- and they're pissed off too!

Shorter

Shorter David Olive column on what some guy told him:

See? The G20 protesters really DID have Weapons of Horse Destruction! They DID! They really DID! We just didn't TELL you about any of this before or SHOW you any of these weapons because ...because ... oh, I know! -- we didn't want them to know we were on to them when we charged our horses needlessly through peaceful crowds. Yeah, that's it...

Black Bloc -- still crazy after all these years

Two articles - here and here - provide an interesting analysis of the Black Bloc protest tactic and what it means for economic and social protest movements around the world.
And this lengthy report appears to have been written by someone who participated in the Black Bloc violence himself during the G20 -- he calls himself Zig Zag.
Far from endorsing the conspiracy theory that Toronto police deliberately let the Bloc run wild on Saturday to justify the billion dollar summit security cost, Zig Zag asserts that police incompetence, lack of maneuverability, and inexperience allowed the Bloc to burn police cars and break windows in spite of its own ineptitude and disorganization -- which were so bad that, if police response had been nimble and smart, most of the Bloc members could likely have been caught when first police car was set on fire.
It was news to me that there were several vandalism incidents across Canada during the week after the summit which the communiques left by the perpetrators indicate were done in solidarity with the G20 Bloc vandalism. Zig Zag lists the following:

In Calgary on the night/morning of June 26/27, an RBC and McDonalds were vandalized . . . On the night/morning of June 27/28, two Bank of Montreal branches were vandalized in Toronto, with windows being smashed and ATM machines being glued . . . On June 30, a Kiewit construction company truck was arsoned in Vancouver, with a communique targeting Kiewit for its work on the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion as part of the 2010 Olympics, and declaring solidarity with the anti-G20 resistance. . . . On July 1 . . . two RBC branches were vandalized in Montreal . . . On July 2, a Canadian Forces recruiting centre was bombed in Trois-Rivieres (between Montreal and Quebec City).

Also interesting to view the photos in this photo essay as you read Zig Zag's article.

Disconnect

In response to the Toronto police request to send in their videos and photos about the G20 protests., Victoria Times-Colonist journalist Paul Manley says:

The only footage I have of any violence or criminal activity during the G20 protests is of police perpetrating that violence. The police are welcome to that footage but they won't be able to identify many of the perpetrators because the officers were masked and had their badge numbers hidden.

This isn't, of course, what police had in mind at all -- has anyone seen any sign whatsoever that police care how they acted or who they hurt?
Chet and Alison typify the reaction of many Canadians to the "most wanted" swagger. Chet writes:

what we've seen is an enormous mass arrest . . . which seems to have failed to net its ostensible targets, and which violated the civil rights of hundreds of ordinary citizens. This looks to me like an astonishing failure. Yet, all the top officials are swearing up and down that everything's fine.

The disconnect will continue to increase between what the police and politicians are saying about the G20 "thugs and anarchists" and what we are finding out about the ordinary Canadians who got arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the "one-legged anarchist" and the "bubble thug" -- hardly such threats to public safety that they had to be arrested and thrown into cells without phone calls, food or water. Hundreds of Canadians gathered in cities across Canada today to continue the demand a public inquiry, and more stories are being told all the time -- see the Post-G20 Bulletin and G20 Justice.

Amply covered

I'm sure the people whose G20 stories are now being told will be satisfied now that The Globe and Mail has spoken:

The existing reviews amply cover the most contentious policing issues:
The Ontario Ombudsman is investigating the implementation and communication of Regulation 233/10, apparently misinterpreted by some as granting additional police powers. The Toronto Police Service is doing its own review of “all aspects of summit policing.” The Toronto Police Services Board is doing an extensive independent review of the policing operation. An activist coalition is planning its own review. And there is a process to investigate each individual public complaint about police conduct.
With so much police behaviour already under the microscope, a full parliamentary, independent or judicial probe, as demanded by some, is not needed.

Well, its nice to get that settled -- let's not bicker and argue about who killed who...

Why Ignatieff will be Prime Minister

We read story after story about how Canadians don't like Michael Ignatieff, but I don't believe it -- when they see him and listen to him, they like him.
And here's why -- he engages with people, he listens to what people say, and he says what he thinks.
At Susan Delacourt's Toronto Star blog from the Liberal Express bus, she quotes Iggy replying to a question about how the Liberals can regain favour with the national media.

It’s a waste of time in politics to blame the messenger. It is a waste of time to try to manipulate the messenger. These guys have got a job to do. ... (CTV national reporter) Roger Smith is five feet away from me here and he’s got a job to do. And we welcome him here and he can report any darn way he wants. And if I get it wrong, it’s my problem, not his problem. So let’s get out of the Harper mindset, which is: we’ve got to control this, we’ve got to spin this, we’ve got to manipulate this, we’ve got to keep them 45 miles away, we’ve got to set up a roster of which questions get asked and which can’t get asked. If the bus breaks down, we don’t tell them some story. We try to get a replacement bus and try to get them on the bus as soon as possible. And we did. I don’t know any other way to do it, other than ‘what you see is what you get’. And you go to Canadians and you make your pitch.

Try to imagine Stephen Harper ever saying something like that.
Today's news is full of the most recent attempt at ratf**king Ignatieff, the story about how he is going to go and work for the University of Toronto. After yesterday's news was filled with Conservative pearl-clutching. I guess we have all summer to look forward to this.

Great line of the day

On the Facebook page where Toronto police have posted the photos of G20 vandals they are trying to identify a commenter asks

Did you check your staff lounge?

Another commenter posted a link to the G20 Justice site where there are more unidentified photos -- of police.

What the Cons really think about Canadians

Alison notes that the Conservatives on the Public Safety committee repeatedly called the G20 protesters thugs, hooligans, and anarchists so I thought we should definitely round up some photos of the Canadians who are now held in such contempt by the Harper government.
Like this one-legged anarchist:



And how about these hooligans -- no, not the ones in blue, the other ones:



And here's some photos which the Toronto Community Mobilization Network has posted showing more thuggish violence:





Here's a bubble-blowing thug:



And finally, a bunch of unpatriotic rabble:



Seriously, the Harper Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves, to suggest that all these Canadians are thugs and hooligans.

Read a newspaper, why don't you?

And I feel the same way about those angels that keep showing up on my teevee -- do scriptwriters not grasp the logical incongruity that their angels futz around with lovesick teenagers instead of solving world hunger?
HT Miss Cellania

Great line of the day

From Booman:

...this present Congress is the most productive and progressive Congress since 1965-66 and this president is the most successful and progressive since LBJ, and too many of us are focused on our disappointments and not focused on the right-wing threat that lurks out there with all its institutional advantages, just waiting to destroy this country, for good.

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

The G20 finger-pointing begins:

“It’s as if whoever was in charge is using Black Bloc tactics. They’ve taken off their uniform and dispersed into the crowd – nowhere to be found,” said Toronto police board member Hamlin Grange.

I guess the people in charge are realizing its not just going to all go away.

Imagine who he would appoint if he WASN'T reforming the Senate?

As Dave points out

Harper froths at the mouth that he insists on an elected Senate and who does he appoint? People who can't get elected.
...Instead of elected senators, we get a steadily increasing list of electoral failures finding their way into Parliament. Harper's democracy.

A BCer in Toronto has the complete list of failed Conservative candidates who are now Canadian Senators.

Why Obama doesn't get respect

Booman has an excellent post listing Obama's many accomplishments and asking why he isn't getting the credit he deserves.
Two reasons, I think:
One is Obama's own fault. The White House has not developed a simple narrative line that frames and reinforces the overall direction they are taking and the philosophy of what they have accomplished -- for example 'we're improving the lives of American people' or 'we deliver the results people need' or 'Every day we work on making America a better place to live' or some such phrase. They don't seem to realize that nobody really understood the details of 'Morning in America' or the 'Contract with America' either but they wanted an elevator speech.
The other problem is not Obama's fault. Racism is still a powerful force in American society.
In the overblown criticism dished out daily at Obama, sometimes in the posts and often in the comment sections on some progressive blogs, I detect a racist undercurrent which dismisses or minimizes his achievements, nitpicks his behaviour and mannerisms, and inflates every fault into a hanging offense -- basically, blaming Obama himself for what I think is the blogger's own visceral discomfort with the leadership of an African American man. It's like they're saying "I may have cheered him just like I cheered Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods but now day-to-day I find I just can't bring myself to respect him and of course it can't be because he's black, oh no I'm not a racist, so my lack of respect must be his own fault, not mine."
Here is Booman's list of Obama's accomplishments:

Legislative bills in 2009
January 29: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
February 4: Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act
February 11: DTV Delay Act
February 17: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
March 30: Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009
April 21: Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act
May 20: Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act
May 20: Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009
May 22: Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act of 2009
June 22: Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act
August 6: Cash For Clunkers Extension Act
October 22: Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act
October 28: Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act
October 30: Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act
November 6: Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act of 2009
2010
March 4: Travel Promotion Act
March 18: Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE Act)
March 23: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
March 30: Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010
May 5: Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2010

Booman continues

...his appointments, presidential directives, foreign policy achievements, and even some important symbolic acts.
You might not be too impressed that Obama is the first president to have a Seder in the White House or care that bodies can now be filmed as they arrive home at Dover AFB in Delaware. But you should be impressed that he expanded Pell Grants, strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, cut funding for missile defense, expanded the SCHIP program, improved our vaccination programs, provided funding for stem-cell research, won a credit card bill of rights, filled the Medicare Part D donut hole, improved pay, benefits, and health services for service members and veterans, expanded AmeriCorp, got the FDA to regulate tobacco, and limited the salaries of White House staff.
All of this seems to go unmentioned and unappreciated in most of the liberal blogosphere. And that's the small stuff. Obama has passed the biggest health care bill since 1965, rescued the auto industry, got almost all TARP money paid back, and is on the verge of passing the strongest financial regulations since the 1930's.
He's also reinvigorated the anti-proliferation and nuclear disarmament efforts by working successfully with Russia and China.
In a year and a half, he's already done more than Clinton and Carter combined did in twelve years . . .

Anyone who cannot appreciate what Obama has accomplished, and who continues to obsess about what he hasn't done yet -- immigration reform, or closing Guantanamo, for example -- needs to look very seriously at their own motivation.