Oscar chat

I thought the show went OK this year but the crowd didn't seem to be all that excited about most of the winners except Meryl Streep and Christopher Plummer.
I DO NOT understand why Martin Scorsese didn't win. The crowd didn't understand it either, I don't think.

Great line of the day

Matt Tabbi on the Republican Presidential Race -Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost:

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!

Be sure to read the whole thing. H/T

Being, as usual, a few years behind the States, I expect we will see the same deification of Harper among our Conservatives here as we saw with Republicans about Reagan in the US -- provided Harper leaves before he triggers our gag reflex, of course, and gets chewed up and spit out by the Canadian people like we have done with all of our other prime ministers for the last 40 years.

Twitter fail

I recently put a twitter widget on my page to show my twitters -- then nobody was commenting on my posts and I couldn't figure out why until Saskboy managed to leave a comment that the twitter widget was preventing live links in any post that was located beside the box.
So the widget is gone.
I haven't really figured out this twitter thing, anyway -- I don't have one of those smart phones to tweet on and while I do have random thoughts about everything all day long, I find they are seldom interesting enough to tweet about. Does anyone really want to hear about whether my hamburger at lunch used the right kind of bun?
And thanks, Saskboy.

Contempt

As we learn more about the robocall scandal, the magnitude gets bigger and bigger, and the contempt of the Harper Conservatives for the Canadian people becomes more and more obvious.

Even Andrew Coyne is utterly disgusted

There were not a few calls: there were thousands. They did not occur in one or two ridings: there were at least 18 of them, scattered across the country . . .
There isn't any doubt that this was election fraud . . .

This is far beyond just "dirty tricks" that we always hear candidates complain about, like knocking over campaign signs. "Inaccuracies can occur" isn't going to cut it, and neither will the usual 'rogue staff' excuse.

Somebody in the central campaign headquarters of the Conservative Party thought this up.

A bunch of other people in the central campaign headquarters approved it and agreed to finance it.

Constituency workers across the country provided the voters lists and wrote the misinformation scripts.

And the Conservative candidates, those men and women who are now Members of Parliament, said sure, OK, let's lie to my constituents, whatever it takes to get myself elected.

Everyone does it? No they don't

Here we go again. The Harper Conservatives get nailed for their dirty tricks and ratfucking and all of a sudden "everybody" does it and "everyone" has to clean up their act -- yeah, because Pierre Trudeau bringing in wage and price controls 40 years ago is somehow exactly the same trying to suppress votes by sending Liberal electors to the wrong polls 8 months ago.

Shorter

MacKay's office got the RCAF to dig up dirt on the opposition:

This will be so much easier when C-30 passes and we can just troll through their emails any time we want to.

Great post of the day

Tom and Lorenzo talk about last night's Glee and how the "it gets better" approach to gay teen suicides is well-meaning but flawed:

The way for the creative community (and indeed, the entire world) to address anti-gay bullying is not through weepy portraits of its victims, but through SHEER RAGE. Fuck “It Gets Better.” Show us a campaign against gay teen bullying called “THIS SHIT HAS TO STOP RIGHT NOW” and we’ll sign on in nano-seconds. Because the people who need to address anti-gay bullying definitely aren’t the victims – and not the bullies, either. It’s society that needs to change its attitudes toward gays, from the top down. And when the majority of people are righteously angered by any attempts to dehumanize gays or treat them as inferior – and more importantly, moved to act on that anger, rather than sitting at their computers and shaking their heads over it – then anti-gay bullying will practically evaporate. Every time a gay kid takes his life, it’s not he who’s at fault, nor is it the parents, the bullies, the church or the school district. WE ARE. WE ALL ARE. You should be furious about it, not gently weeping over music videos.

The other shoe just dropped

Step one -- Scare everyone about how the Canadian government isn't going to provide enough pension income.
Step two -- Create a new financial product called Pooled Registered Pension Plans that banks and financial companies can sell to all those scared Canadians.
Step three -- Profit!
(For the banks and the financial companies, of course.)

Blue meanies

They're nothing but a bunch of blue meanies.
The Harper Conservatives are bound and determined to make Walmart greeters, drugstore cashiers, and cleaning ladies work for an extra two years.

Now they think they can pit us against one another by arguing that Canada doesn't have enough younger taxpayers to pay for the benefits us older taxpayers will need.
This is such bullsh*t, its painful to listen to. We can get all the taxpayers we need, any time we want them. There are hundreds of thousands of hard-working young people in countries around the world who would just love to emigrate to Canada and raise their families here.

Of course, they might not vote Conservative....

Thank you, Lorne Calvert

Thanks for the Family Day holiday -- we really enjoyed it.

Money doesn't care where it comes from

Kthug writes about what is going on with the European economy:

Look, I understand why influential people are reluctant to admit that policy ideas they thought reflected deep wisdom actually amounted to utter, destructive folly. But it’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us.

They have it backwards, as usual. I'm no economist, but if there is one thing we should have learned in the last 80 years, it is that we can't wait for the economy to improve before we spend money -- rather, our economies improve BECAUSE money is being spent. Like any simplistic idea, of course, this can be carried too far, but basically money doesn't care where it comes from. Whether the money in an economy comes from a government or not, it is the circulation that is important, not the origin.

The stupid, it burns

Who is this incredibly stupid man?

...his understanding of the bill is that police can only request information from the ISPs where they are conducting "a specific criminal investigation."
But Section 17 of the 'Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act' outlines "exceptional circumstances" under which "any police officer" can ask an ISP to turn over personal client information.
"I'd certainly like to see an explanation of that," ...
"This is the first time that I'm hearing this somehow extends ordinary police emergency powers [to telecommunications]. In my opinion, it doesn't. And it shouldn't."

Why, that's the Minister of Public Safety. The person whose staff wrote the bill. The person who brought it to the House of Commons without bothering to read it. The person who thought that anyone who objected to it was a child pornographer.
Welcome to your nightmare, Vic.

And how stupid do they think we are?

I know, I know, but look at this:


At 10 am, the bill to allow warrentless electronic snooping by police is titled "Lawful Access Act"; at 11:17 am, the bill is titled "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act" (which, by the way, it apparently won't actually do).
H/T to Sarah Schmidt at Canada.Com who also quotes Anne Cavoukian, Ontario Privacy Commissioner:

“They’re calling the bill ‘Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.’ Give me a break. The warrantless access does not just apply to cases of child pornography or child predators. It can apply to something that’s not even a criminal activity. It’s ridiculous to go to these lengths.

In the iPolitics blog, Michael Harris summarizes the basic problem with this bill, however noble-sounding its name:

The only thing that separates a democratic state from a police state is the notion of accountability. . . Warrants don’t prevent the police from doing their investigations, they protect the integrity of the system. In order to get a warrant, the police have to demonstrate reasonable and probable cause that a crime is being committed by a particular person. Remove that requirement and you end up with a system that could be driven by unprofessional hunches, misplaced zeal, idle curiosity, or malice.

Or doing political favors for the powers-that-be.

Who do they think they are?

Paraphrasing Catherine O'Hara's memorable Beetlejuice line, the Harper Cons are going insane and they are taking us with them.
A question about expanding government surveillance powers, and Vic Toews responds: “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
A statement from the Parliamentary Budget Office that the Harper Cons are wrong about an OAS/GIS shortfall and Jim Flaherty responds: "Unbelievable, unreliable and incredible."
The Liberals and NDP have to resort to procedural sleight-of-hand just to have a discussion about Official Languages committee business in public -- and that public access will end the very minute a Conservative member is able to speak again. So much for Harper's open and accountable government promise.
And can you imagine what they are saying behind closed doors about the judges who are ruling against their pet ideas on mandatory minimums and prisoner transfers?

Just say no

The Wall Street Journal is just being silly when it continues to whine about the birth control flap:

The White House wants to impose its birth-control ideology on all Americans, including those for whom sponsoring or subsidizing such services violates their moral conscience.

The stupid, it burns!
Anyone who doesn't support birth control doesn't have to use it.
There, problem solved.