Last refuge of a scoundrel

Samuel Johnson said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
These days, its setting up a website.

"We are propelling the War Canoe"

Its fascinating to read the Canadian blogs today.
The Galloping Beaver front-pagers are doing a bangup job keeping us up-to-date on the robocall scandal: among others, here, here, here, here, here, and most recently here. And Alison gathers up the stories here and RossK is all over it here. and Dawg here. The Sixth Estate has assembled the definitive list of 77 ridings where hoax phone calls have been reported. Buckdog notes how the media is responding to Con spin even though the strategy to blame 31,000 complaints first on the Liberals and then on Elections Canada voting lists should be laughable. Fern at Dammit Janet calls it crowdsourcing and says

We are propelling the War Canoe...the blogosphere and twitterverse will have a grand time hunting the evil-doers down.

"Mistakes were made"

Ken Mehlman's apology for going along with the Bush campaign's anti-gay ballot initiatives in 2004 isn't quite to the scale of McNamara's apology for lying about Vietnam, but in terms of the damage done to thousands of Americans, its closer than one might think.
Cowardice is never an acceptable excuse.

So It Has Come To This

From xkcd:

Works for me.

Shorter

Conservatives on the ethics committee:

Enough chatter about Harper stealing the election! We need to talk about how the Liberals hurt Vic Toews' delicate fee-fees.

False equivalency

No, Canadian media, embarrassing a minister isn't just the same as trying to suppress voter turnout. Montreal Simon gets it:

while Vikileaks may have embarrassed Toews, it was not illegal, and should not be mentioned in the same breath as this criminal attempt to steal an election.

I looked at the vote gap in all of the ridings that the Liberals and the NDP are now investigating, plus the fine summary at Sixth Estate.

Many of these ridings had margins of thousands of vote, sometimes more than 10,000, so a suppression of voter turnout would likely not have made a difference in the final result.
But how about these six seats?

The Conservative candidate squeaked in, defeating the incumbent party in every case.
- Elmwood Tascona (MB): Lawrence Toet (Con) defeated incumbent Jim Maloway (NDP) by 300 votes out of 33,000 cast.

- Etobicoke Centre (ON): Ted Opitz (Con) defeated incumbent Borys Wrzesnewskyj (Lib) by 26 votes out of 52,000 cast
- Mississauga East-Cooksville (ON): Wladyslaw Lizon, (Con) defeated Peter Fonseca (Lib) by 600 votes out of 47,000 cast. Fonseca was not the incumbent, but the seat had been held by the Liberals since the riding was created in 2004.
- Nipissing Timiskaming (ON): Jay Aspen (Con) defeated incumbent Anthony Rota (Lib) by 18 votes out of 42,000 cast.

- Willowdale (ON): Chungsen Leung (Con) defeated incumbent Martha Hall Findlay (Lib) by 940 votes out of 54,000 cast.

- Winnipeg South Centre (MB): Joyce Bateman (Con) defeated incumbent Anita Neville (Lib) by 800 votes out of 40,000 cast.
And I'm wondering about some of the other close seats now, too.

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....