It's astonishing that there are people in America who are so far gone in their islamophobia that they actually would celebrate 9/11 with a book burning.Ahh, but, just like Breitbart says about the NAACP, any anti-Muslim racism in America is really Muslim people's own fault, because their very existence is just so provoking.
1. Why were the police forcing peaceful protesters out of Queen's Park on Saturday when that was the designated protest area? ...
2. Were special powers actually extended to police for the duration of the G20 summit? If so, what exactly were they? ...
3. Why was the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms trampled on by the police through actions such as: Unwarranted searches, Intimidation to deter people from assembling, Arbitrary arrest, Detainment of innocent bystanders. Who is responsible for giving police orders to act this way? ...
4. Why are police officers allowed not to wear a nametag? Why are police officers allowed to refuse to identify themselves when a citizen asks for their name?
5. I would like to see every dollar of the security budget accounted for in a detailed expense report.
6. Who were the men seen in numerous videos in plain clothes, with batons, arresting peaceful protesters and putting them in unmarked minivans?
7. How does the 'kettling' technique (surrounding protesters with riot police and blocking exit paths from the protest area) comply with the rights of Canadians as laid out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
8. Will the tapes documenting the holding facilities be reviewed by an independent reviewer?
9. Why were members of the media cleared out of protest areas or in some cases, arrested?
10. Why were protesters blocked in and not allowed the option of leaving peacefully, especially those in designated protesting areas.
11. What were the reasons behind the orders sent to front line officers to 'stand down' when windows were being broken and cars were being torched, and who gave them?
Over hear in Blueville, there are certain things you don't do in polite company. For example, you don't break out in song with your rendition of "Barack the Magic Negro Lives in DC." You don't pose open-ended questions about the validity of the president's birth certificate. You don't use every cold day as an excuse to remind people that Al Gore is fat. If you don't know what socialism is, you avoid the topic and remain silent when it comes up. . . .
We increasingly live in two different, largely incompatible worlds. It's not all North vs. South. But it's definitely Blue vs. Red. And all of it is dividing people along the wrong lines. It should be those who have vs. those who don't. Instead, it's those who are tolerant vs. those who are not.
The problem with the JournoList scandal is the problem with a lot of right wing news: It's not happening on Earth I, where you and I live. Like the Black Panthers taking over the Justice Department, or Shirley Sherrod's night raids on Andrew Breitbart's small family farm or Glenn Beck's lonely one-man struggle against the Tides Foundation, it exists in a parallel universe that only superficially resembles our own.
A universe where straight, rich white men are the only victims of anything, ever, and shrieking like an infant is their only defense; where Christianity and capitalism are in constant peril, where black lesbians and the very, very poor run everything and Iran has the Bomb and we don't. And where Andrew Breitbart is Biko, and revolutionary political power doesn't come from a gun, it comes, under TV lights, out of the puckered, anus-like mouth of a whining pink face.
You can imagine why the people in that universe are so unhappy. You wouldn't want to live there for five seconds.
Dutiful silence is an honoured tradition in Canadian public service, but if it becomes a weapon in someone else's hands, that should make us all worried. And it might make public servants reconsider whether discretion is always the better part of valour.. . . we in the media, yes that means me too, should be careful about allowing mischievous spin to fill a duty-bound silence.So this is what it has come to -- Canadian civil servants have to resign if they want to tell us the truth?
...most of the people who look at Obama and start thinking such deep thoughts as, "We need to take our country back!" probably have kids who grew up in the post-King era--hell, in post-Yo! MTV Raps-era--and they have no idea why Mom and Pop are so het up ...
I know that living in a world that the Fonz and Richie Cunningham never made is rough on them, but in a way, they brought their seething misery on themselves. They look at all the people who disgust and bewilder them because they're not howling in protest about the black president and the immigrants and the welfare bums whose existence they register like a fish bone in the throat, and they can find no peace, a condition made all the more unbearable by the fact that so many people who ought to be on their side find peace with it just fine. They suffer from an apparently unbeatable psychological condition, one that I think George W. Bush described best: they look at all the sane people in the world, and they hate us for our freedom.
. . . in literally days, following Clement's out-of-the-blue announcement, a whole set of new convictions has been created about the perfidy of the census, and there are passionate tweeters and commenters pushing those convictions as if they'd had them for their whole lives.Of course our side has its own orthodoxies -- as I found out when I posted heretical opinions this winter about the gun registry and the Olympics. But the right wing construct is more elaborate, comprehensive and predictable
This is one reason, really, why following politics is so surreal these days.
a loud unending chorus of census evil! socialism! social engineering! liberal statist fascism! . . . [as well as] the usual guff about government-worshipping Stalinist prairie-hating hippiesAnd this tide of hyperbole engulfs everything, whether it makes sense or not -- for instance, why did climate science ever become a left-right issue, to the point that the ruminations of a bunch of nerdy climatologists are so threatening to the right wing that the mere mention of Al Gore drives them absolutely nuts? It's WEATHER, for heavens sake, its where we all live. And then there is stem cell research, and abortion, and who people can marry, and what children should be taught in school, and who we should let into the country, and what paperwork people need to fill out when they buy a gun.
"I think people are just, you know, wishful thinking. There is an absolutely really good reason why we have to be firm about the March deadline because as soon as the deadlines start to drag on, people begin to substitute other things and there begins to be other excuses. If we allow for one, believe me, every municipality from one end to the other will have a reason why their deadline should be extended," [Con MP Brad Trost] said in an interview.Emphasis mine.
"I understand where they're coming from, but the moment we extend the deadline they're going to be like kids with homework, all of a sudden they're out playing in the park rather than getting the homework done"
"What an insulting, condescending little twit. I mean, that is outrageous for a person of his position to lay that kind of abuse . . . on the cities and towns and villages and rural municipalities of Saskatchewan. That is just appalling," said Goodale.Trost is making some kind of announcement in Humboldt later this morning, and I expect we'll be hearing later today about how he was "mis-quoted" and "taken out of context" -- stay tuned.
they are not doing away with the mandatory longform as a way of defending privacy, but as a backdoor way of attacking the programs they hate.while Chet says the Conservatives want to prevent criticism that their economic policies aren't working:
what Harper really doesn't want is for the census data to show what the effects of his own policies have been in the here and now. Harper appears to like control more than anything else, and there's just no way he can control what a thorough and complete census will tell.POGGE suggests the basic goal is to make government ineffective:
Harper and his crew take their inspiration from American movement conservatives and Harper himself made that clear long before he became prime minister. . . This is a movement that crosses borders. Its members have been organizing and building out their infrastructure for forty years.The Georgia Straight also picks up on the American wingnut influence in the census decision:
“You see this attack on the census very much in the American right,” [NDP MP Charlie] Angus said. “It has had no traction here in Canada as far as I can see. I’ve never had a complaint and never heard of this as an issue.". . ."I’ve never gone into a Tim Hortons in Canada and had someone rail at me about big bad government spying on them with the census, but I am hearing this from Conservative cabinet ministers. I think the public is shaking its head.”The census decision certainly does undermine a internationally respected Canadian agency which may well have been resented by the Harper Conservatives.
