Of course its political!

What's the point of being in power if you can't use government agencies to target and harass your enemies?
It's a time-honoured political tradition around the world, and now it's come to Canada.

The NDP is calling for an independent probe into the Canada Revenue Agency's targeting of some Canadian charities for their political activities.
In a letter Wednesday to Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay, the party says the alleged misuse of tax agency audits against political opponents of the government is muzzling charities and draining them financially.
...A Canadian Press investigation reported that the tax agency has stepped up its probes of charities for their political activities, well beyond a first wave of audits of key environment groups that challenge the government's energy policies.
International aid groups, anti-poverty organizations and human-rights agencies have also been swept up in the net, with some 52 political-activity audits now in progress.
An initial budget of $8 million set out in the 2012 budget has grown to $13 million, and political-activity audits are being made a permanent part of the Canada Revenue Agency's work.
Asked for comment on the NDP letter Wednesday, Findlay's office provided a week-old statement that itself repeated the minister's talking points in the House of Commons: "CRA audits occur at arm's length from the government and are conducted free of any political interference."
Some charities report that the audits are driving up their legal bills, to more than $100,000 in one case, as they consult lawyers to represent their case to the tax agency. Some audits have dragged on for more than two years with no end in sight.

Mere coincidence? Ha, ha, it is to laugh.
We all know that there's a long-standing conservative meme that environmental organizations, anti-poverty groups, social justice charities, international aid NGOs and welfare agencies are all just secret fronts for traitorous evil leftists -- being reality-based, of course these organizations have a liberal bias.
The Harper Cons already know how much of their own support at the polls is coming from conservative-aligned groups like the ethical oil, right-to-lifers and evangelical churches.  So it would also be an article of faith that the leftie organizations must be secretly abusing the nation's charity rules to shill for the Libs and the NDP and the Greens.
The Harper Cons would never believe that their opponents would play by the rules, because they don't themselves, as Carol Goar notes in the Toronto Star:

Many of the “political activity” audits launched by CRA since 2012 were triggered by complaints from Ethical Oil, a lobby group with strong ties to the Harper government and the petroleum sector. This is a departure for CRA. Unlike the random audits it has always conducted — approximately 900 a year — the new ones are susceptible to external direction, compromising the fairness and professionalism in which the tax department has always taken pride.

It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out the whole strategy of targeting left-wing charities and dragging out audits was just another sleazy political tactic from the Harper PMO.

Zombie Lies

Bill Maher SLAMS Republican & Fox News Zombie Lies About Obama - YouTube:



Via

Tweet of the day

she has a point pic.twitter.com/NKVAcIoxFo

— (@Dory) July 12, 2014

Today's cheap shots

Two cheap shots noted today:
The Harper Cons wouldn't approve a helicopter tour of the Manitoba flood zones by the Leader of the Opposition:

Brig. Gen. Christian Juneau, commander of the third Canadian Division, had agreed to the tour, subject to approval by Defence Minister Rob Nicholson.
But late Tuesday, Mulcair said he was informed by Nicholson's office that his tour had been vetoed.

And Toronto's buffoon-who-thinks-he-is-a-mayor Rob Ford refused to stand and applaud the Toronto citizens who organized the WorldPride event.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford refused to explain today why he remained seated while city council gave a standing ovation to organizers of the recent WorldPride festival.
He did not answer questions from reporters outside his office about why he didn't stand along with fellow councillors, but said he's not homophobic.

Yeah, sure.

Tweet of the day

CTV has a story titled Best Twitter reaction to Germany's 5 goals against Brazil but they missed this one:

This won't be the first time that thousands of Germans will have to lie low in Brazil for a while for their own safety.

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) July 8, 2014

Of course, I'm not surprised, really....

Defining moments in Canadian history

I think this is rather neat.  Its from -- Defining moments in Canadian history at a corporate blog for American Appraisal:

here’s a fun infographic with little-known facts about Canada, events that made headlines, and uniquely Canadian milestones.

I found it at Cool Infographics

Government by talk show yahoos

 Christie Blatchford sums it up:

The government brought in a cruel and inhumane program aimed squarely at the most vulnerable people in the country, sold it in the basest way imaginable by appealing to the least generous impulses in us all and hasn’t proved it will save one red cent of the $91-million cost of the program.

The Harper Cons seem to think they should govern based on what some yahoo redneck is whining about on a radio talk show.
If you flick on a radio anywhere between Kamloops and Brandon, I'm sure you've heard these people complaining about how all those  underserving bogus immigrants are stealing all our health care.  It's stupid and they don't know what they're talking about, but don't bother them with the facts, they would rather feel aggrieved and persecuted.
So in response to these ignorant rants, the Harper Cons cut off health care for refugees two years ago.  It was a stupid decision, made by a government that doesn't know what it is talking about.
But at least our Canadian courts still believe that public policy should be based on demonstrable facts, not right-wing fantasies.
To absolutely no one's surprise, the Federal Court of Canada has struck down the Harper Con denial of health care for refugees.
And of course, also to absolutely no one's surprise, federal immigration minister Chris Alexander is going to appeal.
A year or two from now, the Supreme Court will strike down for good the Harper Con denial of health care for refugees.
In the meantime, Hanif Ayubi will have to hope that a pharmaceutical company will continue to give him diabetes medication. And Saleem Akhtar will hope that the Saskatoon Cancer Clinic can continue to pay for his chemo. And Garcia Rodrigues will hope an ophthalmologist will operate on him for free again if he suffers another retinal detachment.
But there is no hope for Naomi Marcos de Arroyo, who won't be going on any field trips with her Sea Cadets friends because she doesn't have health insurance.

Opus Dei comes to Washington

I think the anti-Obama Republicans who think the Hobby Lobby decision is a triumph are going to regret they ever heard of it.
Because this legal decision and the others that will follow are not going to be seen by the general American public as some kind of victory against Obama-care. Instead, its going to be seen as what it is -- the five Catholic Supreme Court justices abusing their oath of office to arrogantly impose the nutty anti-birth-control views of the Catholic Church on women and on their families.
As Booman says:

This battle isn't really over abortion. It's over female equality. And the Republicans are going to lose.

Women are not amused. We have had 50 years of equality and sexual freedom, primarily because we can control whether or not we get pregnant, and we're not going back.
I'm old enough to remember when Jack Kennedy was the first Catholic elected as President of the United States. And him being a Catholic was a very big deal, because a large number of Americans were very worried he would "follow orders" from the Pope rather than from the public. Kennedy even had to give a speech about it, where he had to promise not to be a "Catholic" president.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him....
I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me.
Whatever issue may come before me as President--on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject--I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

That was said 55 years ago.  And whether the American government would ever base its decisions on the tenets of a specific religion hasn't come up since.  Until now.
The Hobby Lobby decision is purportedly based on "religious freedom" but people just aren't that dumb. They know it is equality and sexual freedom for both women and men that is at stake here. And I think they are still just as concerned as they were then about anybody trying to impose a narrow religious belief on Americans.
In the news tonight is a story about ministers handing out condoms at a Hobby Lobby store.

The action in Aurora is part of a growing number of religious Americans who are publicly expressing their frustration with the Supreme Court’s decision. Several faith leaders have spoken out against Hobby Lobby’s position even before the decision was announced, and Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was quick to blast the ruling, saying, “I am horrified by the thought that the owners of Hobby Lobby as Christians think their corporation has a soul, and I’m even more appalled that the Supreme Court agrees.”

Over at Balloon Juice, John Cole says:

...it’s nice to see some people out there telling America that not all people of faith are taking their marching orders from the Opus Dei wing of SCOTUS and the Vatican.

This isn't going to be a vote-getter for the Republicans.

Tennis, anyone?

I love watching tennis now that we have a big screen TV, and its been great to see Milos Raonic and Eugenie Bouchard advance to the semi-finals at Wimbledon.
Two players who have been labouring at Wimbleton all week, under the media radar, are Daniel Nestor and Vasek Pospisil, who are each playing quarter-final matches in men's doubles, and Nestor has also reached the quarters in mixed doubles.
Nestor is some kind of grand old man of Canadian tennis -- he has been competing and winning matches since 1989, including a gold medal in Sydney in 2000. It was Pospisil whose magnificent doubles tennis with Nestor kept Canada contending in the Davis Cup last year.
So good luck to all of you.

I'm retired!

I've been easing toward retirement for the past several months, but I have finally got everything completed and so I'm outta there!

One of the things I hope I will be able to do now is to blog and tweet more often, though I hope not to the extent that my retirement will be like this:

 


We're both retired now, my husband and I, and we're looking forward to learning some new things and doing some new things, some of the things we never had much time to do before, like volunteer work and swimming and cooking and a little travelling, too.

Provided, of course, that we don't run out of money and have to go back to work somewhere:





If we remember how to do it!

#fail

Even Margaret Wente can't quite figure out how to support Peter MacKay:

I’m feeling kind of sorry for Peter MacKay. Nothing has been going right. He tried to appoint a guy to the Supreme Court and it turned into a massive screw-up. The Supremes have been messing with his laws. Judges have been refusing to follow his order to make criminals pay victim fines because it’s pointless and stupid.

And now, he’s been exposed as a blatant chauvinist who is completely out of touch with modern families.

...it’s partly the minister’s fault for landing in the soup. As a long-time politician, he ought to know that there are certain things you can’t say in public, even if (sometimes especially if) they’re true. Anything to do with gender differences, for example. If he isn’t smart enough to know this, then you’ve got to ask whether he’s smart enough to be a cabinet minister.

The answer, of course, is no.

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?

Well, it appears that the Harper Cons may have actually fixed the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in many of the ways suggested by its critics.
I know, I can't believe it either.
But I just wonder if Canadian employers can adjust their thinking? Right now, they're absolutely pissed!
Jason Kenny is absolutely correct here:

...the government wants to return the TFWP to its original objective -- to be the “last, limited and temporary resort for employers who absolutely cannot find qualified Canadians to take jobs at the Canadian wage rate.”
Kenney said some employers, “probably a few thousands in the Canadian economy, primarily out West, have begun building a business model around this program.
“As opposed to it being a last resort, in too many cases it’s become a first or only resort.”
Kenney said the government is aware of 1,100 businesses where half of the workforce is made up of temporary foreign workers.
“That is unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t care how tight the local labour market is, you shouldn’t be setting up a business and spending money on capital for business if you don’t have the human capital to staff it.”

Kenny is on the side of the angels in these remarks.  But Thomas Walkom in the Toronto Star questions the whole approach of the program:

In a country where the official unemployment rate hovers near 7 per cent (the real jobless rate is well above that), there is no shortage of labour willing to work at low-skilled jobs.
What there may be, however, is a shortage of Canadians willing to accept the wages and conditions that these jobs offer.
The market solution would be to offer higher wages and better conditions in the hope of attracting workers. The Conservative solution has been to let fast food outlets and others import temporary foreign workers willing to accept whatever wages employers offer.
Intellectually, Kenney seems to understand this contradiction.
Intellectually, Kenney seems to understand this contradiction. On Friday, he pointed out that real wages adjusted for inflation have fallen in Alberta’s food service industry — thanks to its use of temporary foreign workers.
His reforms would prevent employers in the food, accommodation and retail industries from hiring temporary foreign workers whenever the local unemployment rate is 6 per cent or higher (which, tellingly, excludes his home province of Alberta).
But he very specifically limited this ban to what economists call the non-tradable goods and services sector.
Other sectors that produce commodities traded across borders — including farmers, manufacturers, miners, meat processors and fish packers — would be able to hire temporary foreign workers, regardless of the local jobless rate.
Incidentally, hotels and restaurants in high unemployment area can also continue to hire certain kinds of foreigners — such as students — under reciprocal trade agreements. These temporary foreign workers are not covered by Friday’s announced reforms.

So there may be a few loopholes that business could continue to try to exploit.
I wonder if Canadian companies will adopt the goal of finding new ways to hire more Canadians, rather than just complaining to the Harper Cons and sneaking around to try to subvert the new regulations?

Outraged innocence and plaintive pathos

If you sensed a certain lack of enthusiasm from the Harper Cons about their own decision to approve the Northern Gateway pipeline, you were right.

A day after accepting a review panel’s recommendation to impose more than 200 conditions on the Northern Gateway project, a government spokesman is now insisting the Conservatives have not approved the pipeline.
Instead, it’s just “a maybe,” a spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford says.

@jbourbeau Inaccurate. Government support dependent on proponent meeting 209 conditions imposed by independent regulator. It's a 'maybe'.

— ChrisMcCluskey (@ChrisMcCluskey) June 18, 2014

So when the protests gear up, this is how the Harper Cons are going to play it -- outraged innocence and plaintive pathos.
They will stamp their little feet and proclaim how we have hurt their delicate fee-fees if we dare to claim they approved Northern Gateway.

The coming partition of Iraq

The War Nerd explains what is happening in Iraq -- basically, the country is being violently partitioned into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd countries and there's just about nothing anyone can realistically do, or perhaps should do, to stop this from happening:

ISIS is a sectarian Sunni militia — that’s all. A big one, as militias go, with something like 10,000 fighters. Most of them are Iraqi, a few are Syrian, and a few hundred are those famous “European jihadis” who draw press attention out of all relation to their negligible combat value. The real strength of ISIS comes from its Chechen fighters, up to a thousand of them. A thousand Chechens is a serious force, and a terrifying one if they’re bearing down on your neighborhood. Chechens are the scariest fighters, pound-for-pound, in the world.
But we’re still talking about a conventional military force smaller than a division. That’s a real but very limited amount of combat power. What this means is that, no matter how many scare headlines you read, ISIS will never take Baghdad, let alone Shia cities to the south like Karbala. It won’t be able to dent the Kurds’ territory to the north, either. All it can do—all it has been doing, by moving into Sunni cities like Mosul and Tikrit—is to complete the partition of Iraq begun by our dear ex-president Bush in 2003. 

Yes, it makes sense, though this is not a part of the world that I can easily understand. I keep remembering Robert X. Cringley's description of his experience in Teheran in 1986 when he saw just one horrific battle in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. He wrote this in 2004, just after Bush was reelected:

I...decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world.

So Tony Blair and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol are again trying to tell everybody how America should pacify Iraq?  Ain't gonna happen.

Liberals win in Ontario, hooray!

I haven't written any posts about the Ontario election campaign because I haven't been following it very closely, but now that the results are in, here are some random observations.
First, I am just so glad to see the Liberals win in Ontario, and the Conservatives lose. I sincerely hope this will mark the last time we will see a political party in Canada ever think it can get elected by threatening to throw people out of work.
On a personal basis, I am glad that Kathleen Wynne won, just to show once and for all that people will vote for a woman who is gay -- and the crowd cheered when Wynne invited her partner to join her on stage during her victory speech.
There will be lots of analysis for the NDP, but it seems that people blamed the NDP for causing the election in the first place, over a budget that was perhaps not outstanding but was at least OK, and they also accepted Wynne's argument that a vote for Howarth was a vote for Hudak.
The polling companies are going to have to look at their "likely voter" models -- even just before the election, the polls showed Wynne and Hudak in a dead heat, though maybe it will be found that the Liberals were able to use the Hudak threat to get their vote out.
Oh, and David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, should be ashamed of himself for fucking with his editorial board and then lying about it. I agree with Dawg

When a party tries to send opposing voters down a blind alley, the same party covertly attempts a “decline your ballot” strategy to give itself an electoral edge, and the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper essentially lies to the public (and is defended for doing so), something has gone badly awry with the way we do politics. Democracy is fragile, requiring the people themselves to make it operational. When they are deliberately misled by party and press alike, seemingly with impunity, we’re heading down a nasty slippery slope.