Happy St. Patrick's Day

We saw Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers perform, and later attended a Liam Clancey concert when the group had broken up -- a memorable evening because afterwards we were part of the group that sat around with him and gassed about music and Ireland and Canadian beer.

Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem:

Good luck, Mike MacDonald

Mike MacDonald has had a liver transplant.
He has always been one of our favorite commedians -- hope he returns to good health and good form:

They have no shame

The Harper Cons spent $21 million on those boring Action Plan ads last year.


Rick Mercer was ranting about this last fall. And back then, it was a mere $16 million they were talking about spending.


A million here, a million there, pretty soon we're talking about real money!

Here Comes The Sun

Here Comes The Sun -- Live At Prince's Trust Concert 1987 - YouTube: ""

From 1987 George Harrison and Ringo Starr with Elton John, Jeff Lynne, Ray Cooper and Phil Collins at The Prince's Trust Concert.

Stompin' Tom

Stompin’ Tom Connors will always be remembered for this:


Isn't it odd to see them playing without helmets?

Off with their heads!

The NDP are proposing to abolish the Senate. Good for them, and wouldn't it be good for us.
What a useless, pointless, parasitical, insipid and boring organization.
Not only that, but we would save more than $100 million a year if the Senate was gone.

Being stupid about porn

Heather Mallick explains why Tom Flanagan is saying stupid things about child pornography, and why it matters

“It’s a real issue of personal liberty,” [Flanagan] said, amid cries of “That’s disgusting” from the largely First Nations audience who had come for another kind of discussion entirely. “To what extent do we put people in jail for doing something in which they do not harm another person?”
Flanagan was dumped from the CBC, condemned by Harper and rightly so. But that obscures a more important point, which is that Flanagan is sincere.
For he is an ideologue, and ideologues are always sincere. It’s what makes them dangerous. Concepts like untrammelled liberty are clear spring water to them, and real life, as it is lived by small soft-limbed splayed children weeping with pain and terror on camera, is irrelevant.
Take freedom of speech. Ideologues don’t think there should be limits, which is why they so dislike Human Rights Commission rulings for black people barred from restaurants. Take personal liberty, which ideologues say is infringed on by the long-gun registry, by border guards finding child porn on the laptops of travelling Catholic bishops.
Flanagan is saying that watching child porn is a passive crime. Police worldwide say with all the passion they can muster that it’s not.

Blame the staff

We're just about reached the "blame the staff" phase of the Senate expenses scandal.
Harper is laying the groundwork for finger-pointing:

“They are reviewing all of their expenses to ensure not only that the expenses are appropriate but the rules in the future for governing such expenses are appropriate”

Yes, indeedy, now its "the rules" that are to blame.
And who wrote and enforced those rules? Why, the Senate staff.
The audit report is going to tell us that the staff "misadvised" and "accepted erroneous travel claims" and "neglected to require documentation" and in the end some clerk in the Senate office might be transferred.
In the meantime, let's investigate Mike Duffy's parking place.

Looking under every rock

They tried to deny it, but now the Harper Conservatives have been forced to admit it -- their EI investigators are each expected to ferret out almost half a million dollars annually in supposedly-fraudulent EI claims.
NDP whip Nycole Turmel asks

"Rather than saving $485,000 on the backs of these poor sods, why don't they start sending inspectors to senators' homes?"

Well, because they'd have to find them first.

Great line of the day

POGGE describes why basing our real Canadian 'economic action plan' on part-time, temporary, contract, non-union precarious jobs is just ducky with big business and big government:

People who feel their economic position is precarious will settle for lower wages, fewer benefits and more abuse. Their employers can look forward to bigger profits on which, thanks to those same co-operative governments, they'll pay lower taxes.
And based on the way so many politicians have embraced the latest phase of neoliberalism — the Austerity Agenda — this is exactly what was supposed to happen. Now they can really go to work on public sector employees too. Those offshore tax havens won't fill up with huge piles of money all by themselves, you know.

Emphasis mine.
It is, of course, a terrible strategy for any long-term economic stability or growth or future.  Someday the Harper Cons might understand that, but only when they themselves are out of a job.

Hey big spender

Introducing the Top 10 spenders in Canada’s Senate:

Gerry St. Germain, a Conservative who retired in November, was the top spender ($378,292), while Liberal Robert Peterson, who retired in October, landed in the fifth spot ($320,234). Sen. Pamela Wallin, whose travel expenses are being audited, ranked second-highest in overall spending ($369,593), while Sen. Mike Duffy, another senator whose expenses are being audited, was ninth ($298,310).
The top 10 spending list is rounded out by Sens. Terry Mercer, James Cowan, Nick Sibbeston, Fabian Manning, Bert Brown and Pana Merchant.
Three of the top spenders — Wallin, Peterson and Sen. Pana Merchant — are from Saskatchewan, the most heavily represented province in the analysis of top spenders.

Great news that we're number one, isn't it!

Its time for MHF to STFU

Could Martha Hall Findlay be any more ridiculous?
She's concern-trolling Justin Trudeau for being popular -- does she actually think that someone as unpopular as she is would be a more credible national leader?
And she keeps babbling about how she's really Trudeau's friend while endorsing the vicious Conservative narratives attacking his credibility and leadership skills.
Martha, if you can't lead and you won't follow, then please get out of the way.

"The Prime Minister is calling"

The latest news is that more than one-third of Canadians say Senate should be abolished.
Only a third? I'm surprised -- I would have expected at least 80 per cent would want to get rid of the Senate.
In fact, I don't know why anyone would want to keep it.
But I guess its like the lottery -- lot of  us think we're actually going to win a lottery and maybe a lot of us are also expecting to get that phone call from the Prime Minister someday too.

The difference between dogs and cats

It's the crash at the end that slays me again...

Its a pipeline, not a morality play

In The Keystone Principle: Stop making it worse environmentalist KC Golden makes the ridiculous argument that opposing the Keystone pipeline is some kind of moral test of environmental purity:

Keystone isn’t simply a pipeline in the sand for the swelling national climate movement. It’s a moral referendum on our willingness to do the simplest thing we must do to avert catastrophic climate disruption: Stop making it worse.
Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “locks in” dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is a both a conspicuous example of that kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category.

Now, its quite possible to object to a pipeline's route or its environmental impact or long-term effect on fossil fuel consumption or increased pollution from oil sands or whatever.  But portraying the Keystone pipeline as a "moral referendum" on climate change is silly.
It's just one more pipeline, joining several others that already carry Canadian oil to the United States.
If there is any moral component here, I believe it is this:  the quicker the United States can reduce its dependence on Middle East oil, the less likely we will find ourselves tangled up in another Middle East war.