Thursday, October 03, 2024

Busy busy busy! Here's some stuff about Trudeau, the Jack Smith report, the US election, the Russia-Ukraine War

I have a feeling that things are going to just be crazy for the next five weeks. 

Tonight I am reading about a whole bunch of things -- the pressure on Trudeau to do something something, the Jack Smith bombshell report, the dark underside of the US election, sane-washing Trump, the Russia-Ukraine war -- and it is, I have to say, impossible to pick just one thing to talk about. 
So here are some posts, some links and some commentary. 

Pressure on Trudeau to do something something 
Trudeau did an interesting interview on the podcast of MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith  
Here are some excerpts:
...what drives Justin Trudeau? “Understanding that we are in a moment in this world where everything is changing. The way we work, the way AI works, the way geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything: The world is in a massive pivot moment right now. And we don’t know what the biggest issue is going to be.”
Here Trudeau is arguing that good instincts are better, in a storm, than easy remedies. ... “We don’t know what crises are going to hit the world. We only know there are going to be [crises]. And the question [is]: who has the capacity to respond?”
...“I do tend to get wrapped up in the long term,” he volunteers. This makes him brood about “the danger of squandering that lead we have, over so many of our competitors around the world — whether it’s on the environment and the green economy, whether it’s on child care and a responsible safety net, whether it’s on all sorts of different things.” If Canadians did something to blow that — “like electing a Conservative government that wants to bring us back to some past that never actually existed” — they would be jeopardizing “everything that we have been able to build that’s going to make the future so good for so many.”
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Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Today's News: "A damning non-answer"


WALZ: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? VANCE: Tim, I'm focused on the future WALZ: That's a damning non-answer

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 1, 2024 at 8:41 PM
If anyone is wondering where J.D. Vance actually came from, check out Jamieson Foser's column tonight None of us should even know who JD Vance is How did this meritless husk of a man end up in a vice presidential debate?
...the guy is a deeply racist and sexist autocrat on the cusp of power — and he got here in large part because some of the most powerful and influential people in academia, news media, entertainment, and tech saw something in him they were desperate to promote. Merit didn’t have anything to do with it...
Lots of stuff here about where Vance came from and why the New York Times loved him. 

On a completely irrelevant side note:
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Monday, September 30, 2024

Today's News: Remembering for Orange Shirt Day

 
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Some music to enjoy

We saw Jelly Roll on SNL and this song is remarkable:
"Nobody walks through these doors on a winning streak"    

I loved this too!
 

My husband saw a presentation from Playing For Change one year at Million Dollar Round Table -- a fascinating story:

Finally, Kris Kristofferson died yesterday:
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Sunday, September 29, 2024

Today's News: Hurricane Helene


This is terrible. We're been following the Hurricane Helene stories - its hard to imagine what these people are going through:
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Saturday, September 28, 2024

Happy Saturday! Here's some fun stuff about politics, golf, librarian spies, getting older, and cool maps


First, just a glance at politics:

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Friday, September 27, 2024

Poilievre and the "sore winner syndrome"

I'm trying to think whether there was any time in modern history that Canadians elected a Prime Minister they didn't actually like. 
Conservatives seem to have a pattern of finding unlikeable leaders -- Diefenbaker, Stanfield, Scheer come to mind -- but in our recent history, only those Tory leaders who appeared personable on TV were ever elected to lead a government - like Clark, Mulroney, Harper the kitten whisperer. 
(Yes, I know Diefenbaker was PM in the early 1960s, but as soon as people started seeing him on TV, he lost to Pearson.)
And Poilievre definitely falls into the "unlikeable" category, even in spite of his makeover, to anyone who catches Question Period on TV.
Cult Mtl's Matthew Renfrew writes Poilievre’s poor favourability will cost the Conservatives come election time
A new study by the Angus Reid Institute has found that net favourability of Pierre Poilievre has reached its lowest point in over a year, at -16%. Just 36% of Canadians have a positive opinion of the Conservative Party of Canada leader.
A previous study by Léger also found that, while the Conservatives are leading in the polls, just 26% of Canadians believe Pierre Poilievre is the best choice for prime minister.
The fact remains that Pierre Poilievre is just not that likeable. He rubs most Canadians the wrong way and a large majority don’t want to see him become prime minister.
As a result, support for the Conservatives will decrease as the election approaches, and as more light is shed on right-wing foreign interference scandals.
Toronto Star's Susan Delacourt writes Pierre Poilievre acts as if there’s power in being unlikeable. It’s not a good look
...Conservatives appear to be trying everything this fall to turn their poll lead into eventual election victory, with the exception of one force in politics — likeability.
Nothing in Pierre Poilievre’s repertoire in the Commons the past two weeks has been aimed at making people like him, beyond those who already do. He insults, he taunts, he name-calls, he sneers — all the things that parents tell their children not to do if they want to make and keep friends.
It may be making his base happy, but it is doing nothing to present a positive picture of what he would be like in power.
...Poilievre seems pretty certain that the next election will give him a majority, and not require that he work with any other parties in the House. He’s burning his bridges with the Bloc and the NDP, if any such bridges ever existed.
... About a month or so ago, I started to notice increasing mention of Poilievre’s lack of likeability in the political commentary, even among those who are not fans of the Trudeau Liberals. ...
I’ve heard this privately from some Conservatives too, who roll their eyes at what they see as unnecessary vindictiveness from a party that continues to bounce along at the top of the polls. Is this sore-winner syndrome? And what will that look like if they really do end up winners after the next election? More enemies’ lists? More paranoia about the media and the bureaucracy?
...Poilievre didn’t have a good week when Parliament resumed this month, failing to win in a Manitoba byelection and falling short in a bid to rally opposition leaders to bring down the government. He tried to pull that off with taunts and name-calling. Amazing that didn’t work.
Perhaps Poilievre is operating on the principle that nice guys finish last.
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Thursday, September 26, 2024

Roundup: Trudeau wins today; Scrimshaw writes a Trudeau speech; Rothkopf on the stunning Harris campaign

Unsurprising that Trudeau won the non-confidence vote. Parliamentary reporter Dale Smith describes the House of Commons today: 
Overall, the day started out stupid, and got progressively worse as it went on.
I expect we'll see more of these days this fall!
I saw a couple of postscripts to the Colbert interview: And I thought this was pretty good, too:
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Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Remembering Ebony, our brown-eyed girl


Just six weeks ago, we lost our Molly, and today we lost our Ebony too. 
We got Ebony as a rescue when she was three or four, and we had shared our lives with her for almost 14 years. 
She was a Labrador, a little on the small side but such a happy warrior -- I picked this photo for this post because it shows her protecting her chewstick, with her tail blurred because it was wagging -- it so often was! 
Ebony has been gradually declining for a couple of years - deaf, mostly blind, her joints getting worse with arthritis. The only good thing about it was that, because of the deafness, she was no longer terrified of thunder and fireworks!  But going up and down the stairs, and going outside, was harder and harder, and she kept falling more often, and painkilling drugs weren't enough anymore. 
Finally, today, she just couldn't walk at all, and we realized we had to let her go.
 
She was our brown-eyed girl - it was the song I used to sing to her. 

...Standing in the sunlight laughing 
Hiding 'hind a rainbow's wall 
Slipping and sliding 
All along the waterfall with you 
My brown-eyed girl 
You, my brown-eyed girl 

Do you remember when we used to sing?
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Trudeau knocks it out of the park


Trudeau was on Stephen Colbert tonight and the Conservatives are furious -- how dare he demonstrate his popularity, his interview chops, and his international standing so easily, when he is supposed to be crawling into the Parliamentary press gallery and whining about the confidence vote and grovelling about how awful the Liberal situation is...
Here's the clip that Colbert has released already: Here's the whole interview bootleg copy:
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Monday, September 23, 2024

"Basket of deplorables" 2024 version: fearful, credulous, vicious, cheap, thoughtless and destructive


Remember in 2016, when Hillary said some Trump supporters were "a basket of deplorables" and the US media clutched their pearls and fainted all over their couches and gasped how unseemly for a Democrat to be so mean to Republicans.
Well, like with everything else, Hillary was right. 
Now other commentators are trying to describe exactly what is deplorable about Republicans who support Trump in 2024. It isn't a pretty picture.

Defector's David Roth What A Lie Is For:
...Donald Trump is one of the most thoroughly known quantities in American life; the country has been stuck in here with him for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows that there is nothing he would not say, simply because he believes that he can say whatever he wants; everyone knows that once he starts saying something, he will never stop saying it, and will in fact say it louder and make it bigger, because to do anything else would be not merely admitting error but, given how over-leveraged his whole being is on the issue of his own invincibility, something like death. Seeding the belief that undocumented immigrants will vote against him in the coming presidential election is very much something Trump would say, whether as an early excuse for losing, or as a sop to various longstanding reactionary fantasies, or as advance justification for some subsequent attempts to bring those fantasies to life. But also like most things he says, it is a sound he makes because he noticed that people responded to it. He is a boring, stupid man, a bigot and a liar, and so will only ever do the boring, stupid things he does for the most boring, stupid reasons.
Which leaves us with this: One of the two biggest political parties in the country, the one that controls the highest courts, has as a decent-sized and growing segment of its base people who like to make bomb threats. The party as a whole lives within a prolonged and deranging fantasy of political violence, and offers its base nothing but the license to further lavish over those fantasies, as well as the teasing possibility that they will someday be permitted to make them real. Last Friday, at a rally, Trump said that he would deport Springfield's Haitian community, which is living and working in this country legally, en masse, to Venezuela. All of these people are unserious and behave unseriously, but it would be foolish to assume they don't mean it.
That is it. The tide rushes out on everything else, every other idea that the conservative movement (never very convincingly) pretended to have, and leaves this behind. The actual beliefs are self-evident: that the suffering of others is a tool, or a toy; that everyone else in the world is a threat or an obstacle or something to wad up and throw away; that even the most abstracted inconveniencing of their own sainted comfort is tantamount to the end of the world. A cohort of the most fearful and most credulous and most idly vicious people this country has ever produced, who have lately awakened to some strange and terrible appetites and whose only real faith is in their own unshameable blamelessness, watches to see what will happen next. This is what the lie is for—to freeze this uneasy moment in place and hold it there forever, a threat unspooling endlessly over the horizon, not so much into the future as instead of it.
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Saturday, September 21, 2024

Happy Saturday! Canadianisms, strange graveyards, animal crackers, and more!


As the weeks wear by, propelling us toward a crucial election in the United States and, increasingly likely, in Canada too, I find myself grasping occasionally at something less intense -- funny, even. Hope nobody minds the break:
Post by @amandahagelmusic
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Friday, September 20, 2024

Today's news: Canada's intelligence priorities

Yes, as a matter of fact, Canada does have priorities for intelligence - why did you ask?

Tonight's newsletter from Wesley Wark flags the recent announcement: Intelligence Priorites, secret no more!(after 60 years) He writes a fascinating article, well worth reading in full, but here's an excerpt:
...if we are asking—why now?—and looking for the exact prompt for publication of the intelligence priorities, it was undoubtedly the foreign interference inquiry (PIFI) and related attention to questions about how effectively the government has responded to national security threats. The Government already stole some thunder from PIFI by introducing legislation, Bill C-70, to counter foreign interference in May 2024, immediately following the publication of the Inquiry’s Initial report. The legislation progressed at lightspeed through Parliament and received royal assent on June 20. Publishing intelligence priorities and pushing foreign interference to the top of the list, is another instance of trying to get ahead of the Inquiry.
But if there are some political games being played around timing, the longer-term implications are significant. It will be difficult for any future government to backtrack from this initiative...
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Thursday, September 19, 2024

Mainly, we duck and cover....


From 2016 to 2020, Canada survived Trump by ducking a lot - Trudeau managed to save NAFTA mostly, we didn't get pulled into any American wars, we quietly helped out the refugees who found their way across the border, and only once was Trudeau caught laughing at Trump. 
But it was tense, and you could almost feel the relief in 2020 when Covid gave Canada a reason to stop Americans at the border -- both tourists and the 82nd Airborne, whichever came first. 
But now, here we go again --  
Jeff Tiedrich posts this video and writes elderly golfer blithers about a giant faucet in Canada it’s so easy to solve the world’s problems when you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about 
 ...it’s so easy to solve the world’s problems when you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.
 there’s no doubt that years ago, some hapless administrator at the Commerce Department was explaining to Donny all about California’s complex system of rivers, aqueducts and reservoirs — and at some point along the way, described water management as “think of it as a big faucet.” but whoever that was forgot about the part where Donny is a fucking idiot who has no idea what metaphors are. so in Donny’s mind, there’s a literal faucet in — I don’t know, Canada maybe — and it’s huge, and it takes an entire day to turn. 
and of course, Donny knows more about water management than all the water managers, so he’s got the solution to no one else is smart enough to come up with: just turn that big fucker in the other direction — and then sit back as all the big, strong water managers, their massive arms (because you need big muscles to turn that goddamn enormous faucet) tanned and glistening in the golden California sunshine, come up to Donny with tears of gratitude in their eyes, saying sir! sir! ‘just turn it in the other direction.’ we turned the shit out of it, sir, and now California has all the water it needs! sir, how do you do it? 
seriously, if someone in your own family started blithering about a “big faucet in Canada,” you’d be all come on, grandpa, we’re going for a ride and you’d bundle the old duffer off to a good memory-care facility, post haste. 
I think that was the same press interview, at his California golf course, where Trump talked about how great it was to see Hawaii in the distance -- and he was talking about Catalina Island.
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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Today's News: Trudeau v Poilievre - is it time to put up or shut up?

Disappointing but not surprising to see the Liberals lose that Quebec by-election yesterday. 
I saw some commentary online to the effect that now Trudeau will just HAVE to resign. 
But today, Trudeau is basically telling Poilievre, Singh and Blanchet "time to put up or shut up":
...the Liberals offered the Conservative Official Opposition the first chance at presenting a motion of non-confidence in the House of Commons, despite the Liberals’ loss Monday of a key south Montreal seat, the Star has learned.
The Conservatives have been informed by the Liberal House leader they will get a day to set the parliamentary agenda on Tuesday, Sept. 24, with a vote the following day, Wednesday, Sept. 25. At that time, Conservatives and their Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has vowed to trigger an election at the earliest opportunity, could call for the defeat of the Trudeau government.
If they succeed in winning the support of the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, a non-confidence motion could pass, triggering the fall of the government. Defiant, Trudeau is willing to test the resolve of the NDP and the Bloc to go to a general election — a prospect which the Bloc has downplayed....the Liberals are confident neither the NDP nor the Bloc want to go to the polls....
This point is also worth noting: From last week, here is a fascinating Toronto Star piece from Colin Horgan, a former speechwriter for Trudeau - Justin Trudeau is trapped in the internet of the past. Is Pierre Poilievre doomed to join him?
... In recent years, the social internet has become more right-wing and, at the same time, darker, angrier, and more confusing. It’s a tone that more Canadians are seeing reflected now in their own political sphere and that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has adopted to boost his populist message. But weeks from the U.S. election, and with a Canadian vote possible at any time, we sit astride a tonal edge — a divide made even more striking during the closing arguments of Tuesday’s presidential debate, when Harris appealed to the “the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the ambitions of the American people” and Donald Trump called the United States “a failing nation … in serious decline” that is “being laughed at all over the world.”
Harris’s capture of the positive online discourse suggests that this upbeat, hopeful vibe — the likes of which we haven’t seen online in a decade — might once again be ascendant, and not just in the U.S. If it bears out, it could mean Poilievre’s online gambit, and his entire messaging strategy, is riskier than it looks...
...The Conservative leader is the first politician in Canada to successfully harness the attitude of the contemporary internet right. Since taking the helm as head of the official opposition, he has wantonly but effectively pushed the limits of credulity in his social posts, posting misleading crime figures, declaring Canada “broken”, and sneering at the media. Even his promises of larger paycheques and easier home ownership come in the same aggressive tone.
...He looks and sounds like a YouTube bro selling drop-shipping schemes from a luxury condo — taking no lessons but endlessly teaching them. Yet, it works for him...
Poilievre appears wholly unprepared for any sustained growth in the kind of positivity Harris’s campaign has created....For now, Poilievre is beating Trudeau soundly by most any metric, his boastful bravado matched perfectly with the brash online realm he’s successfully leveraged against Trudeau. But, like Trump, he risks overreaching and being too online for his own good. While it’s unlikely he’d ever admit he could learn something from the prime minister, Trudeau knows a thing or two about vibes, and how they shift. And the vibes will change again — maybe sooner than we think. When they do, Poilievre may get a lesson in the true nature of the online hustle.
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