Friday, September 06, 2024

Trying to protect the NDP vote in Elmwood-Transcona?


Canada is still mystified by Singh's decision to "rip up" his Supply and Confidence agreement with Trudeau. 
Here's an interesting interview that tries to dig into why Singh did it: Cochrane notes that Singh has been considering this move for a month - he recorded his video announcement in August -- so Cochrane asks Singh several times "Yes, but why, and why NOW?"  
Singh never really answers - lots about high food prices and higher rents, but never explains why he sprang this sudden announcement on the Liberals without even giving Trudeau a phone call heads-up.
Then at the very end of the interview, Cochrane mentions the upcoming Manitoba byelection. 
And that's when I started to wonder....
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Thursday, September 05, 2024

Ain't we havin' some fun now? Crazy stories today about Singh in Canada, and the Russians in the US

 

First in today's news, of course, was Jasmeet Singh's announcement that he is "ripping up" the Supply and Confidence agreement with the Liberals - whatever that means: The pundits seem to agree that it is unlikely the end of the agreement will result in an election this fall, but of course we never know whether Singh's tender fee-fees will be hurt by something Trudeau says in passing...
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Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Today's News: Roundup on vaccine denialism


Here is an excellent commentary on vaccine denialism - Timothy Caulfield Politics and Vaccine Misinformation: A Horrifyingly Bad Mix :
...Misinformation about COVID vaccines, and vaccines more generally, has become so entrenched and normalized that it now regularly forms part of political platforms.
Given that vaccines, including COVID vaccines, are widely considered one of the greatest achievements of biomedicine – it has been estimated that over the past 50 years vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives – this is a deeply worrying trend. We need to recognize that the merger of politics and vaccine misinformation is doing grave harm....
given the strong, broad and international scientific consensus on the value of COVID vaccines, how did we get here? Obviously, there are many factors at play, but, alas, the embrace of vaccine misinformation is increasingly about ideology.
Political identity has become one of the most significant – perhaps the most significant – variable predicting vaccine hesitancy, the embrace of vaccine misinformation, distrust of relevant scientific institutions, perceptions of risk surrounding vaccines, and belief in the efficacy of disproven COVID therapies (e.g., ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine). Indeed, numerous studies have shown a strong and growing association between vaccination hesitancy and ideology. In the U.S., political partisanship matters more than race, age, insurance coverage or education in predicting vaccine uptake. Studies have consistently shown that those who identify as Republican are much more likely to not get vaccinated and to hold a dim view of COVID vaccines. A 2024 study found that even the reporting of vaccine adverse events is influenced by political identity, showing that in Republican states, “vaccine recipients or their clinicians” are more likely “to report COVID-19 vaccine AEs” than in Democratic states.
A similar trend can be found around the world, including in Canada. ....
...The harms of increasingly politicized vaccine discourse are not isolated to COVID. The hesitancy created by the spread of misinformation during the pandemic has spilled over to adversely impact the perceptions of other beneficial vaccines. A 2024 study found, in the words of the researchers, that “conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines,” including flu, HPV, MMR and chickenpox. Studies show that politicizing public discourse about vaccines can also heighten equity issues and make it more difficult to counter harmful misinformation....
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Monday, September 02, 2024

Today's News: Paralympics pride; remarkable connections; funniest book Forward ever; and Animal crackers


I haven't been following the Paralympics as much as I should have, but here's some great news:
Here is a wonderful statement about the meaning of the Olympics and Paralympics:
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Today's News: International Overdose Awareness Day 2024

Saturday, Aug 31 was International Overdose Awareness Day and in Saskatoon it was marked at Prairie Harm Reduction through memorial and remembrance. 



The photos show artist Kamisha Alexson placing a star on the star blanket. Photos and story by Star Phoenix reporter Julia Peterson:
A bright red rose. A feather. A child’s hand outlined in blue. Dozens of names — full names, first names, nicknames, initials. Messages written on paper diamonds in careful script; in crayon scribbles:
“Forever in our hearts.” “#1 Dad.” “Brother.” “Love and miss you forever.”
Birthdays. Death days.
Laid out on purple canvas in front of Prairie Harm Reduction in Saskatoon, the community memorial star blanket filled up quickly, each diamond in the pattern paying tribute to a loved one who died from overdose.
When the International Overdose Awareness Day gathering began on Saturday morning, the plan had been to fill the canvas with 72 diamonds. Less than two hours in, organizers were quickly cutting their remaining blank tiles into quarters, so the memorial wouldn’t run out of space.
“It’s hard, as someone who has had some family history with addiction, to see so many names in such a short amount of time,” said lead artist Kamisha Alexson. “It’s eye-opening.
“But it’s empowering, too, to see how people honour those who have passed on: There’s no shame, no guilt, no anger or resentment. Just something beautiful.”...
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Sunday, September 01, 2024

Today's News: "But how is the chicken cooked?"

Sometimes I have thought that bloggers like me are too "down" on the media.
And then then I see how many in the American media persist in living in a myth world where they can pretend there is still a reasonable choice to make about whether Harris or Trump would be "better" for the country. Writer David Sedaris says this:


Some American media keep pretending Trump actually makes sense, and that the decision to vote for him or for Harris is just an ordinary choice between two credible candidates. 
But while Trump can charm people when he tries, basically he is dumb as fuck. 


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Saturday, August 31, 2024

Wrapping up the week: why Poilievre really wants an election; why Harris still needs to work really hard



Why Poilievre wants an early election: Too late! Looking to the United States, we see that Democrats still need to be the grownups while Republicans can still act like children Josh Marshall sums up The State Of The Race:
... in June and July, Joe Biden was looking at a map where the only clear road to victory was through the Blue Wall states, so plausible victory was holding the Blue Wall and winning with literally a single electoral vote. Harris now has multiple paths to victory. She can win in the Blue Wall states. She could win with a mix of Blue Wall or Southern Tier states. She could win them all. Simply put, she has options. She has to fight for every one of them. But she doesn’t have to win every one of them. And Donald Trump is fairly close to having to win every one of them.
Let’s remind ourselves that a two-to-four point lead for Harris isn’t necessarily a “lead.” It’s the range a Democrat needs to be in to overcome Republicans’ Electoral College advantage...
... Donald Trump has no better than a tie now in four or five states, all of which he needs to win: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania. That’s not a good place to be. At the moment Harris is nominally ahead in all but one of those states.
...I like where Harris is at this point in the cycle. It’s infinitely better than where Biden was even though numerically speaking they’re not dramatically different. But this is going to be hard slog all the way to November 5th.
Finally, this --  off topic but beautiful:
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Friday, August 30, 2024

Today's News: Christ, What An Asshole!

Back in 2006, blogger Charles Lavoie did a post to assert that all New Yorker cartoons would still be just as funny with the caption "Christ, what an asshole" and everyone was surprised about how well that works. It works with most cartoons and it became a meme.

Two stories today in the "Christ, What An Asshole" news, and its not surprising they concern Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump.
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I hope Singh is smart enough to realize that if he is ever elected PM, Poilievre will try to get rid of Pharmacare and Dental Care and Day Care -- it doesn't matter how many Canadians like them or need them, they are "Trudeau programs" and therefore Poilievre hates them. 
So the longer Singh waits to pull NDP support from the federal Liberals, and risk Poilievre getting elected as PM, then the longer these programs will have to consolidate and become integrated into Canadian consciousness.

Moving on to Trump's latest stumble, Arlington-Gate is entering Day 3 with no end in sight.
Josh Marshall describes Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Campaign Event:
... Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. ...a brief NPR article, published a day later, which reported that cemetery staff had sought to prevent the campaign from violating the law by holding a political event on the cemetery grounds. The details were limited but it seemed a verbal altercation became violent and two Trump campaign staffers physically assaulted a cemetery employee. The impression I got from the article was that they likely shoved the woman to the ground. But the details were cryptic.
What wasn’t cryptic was the Trump campaign’s wildly over-the-top response. Campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung denied a physical altercation had taken place... He then proceeded to make a series of bizarre claims suggesting the attacked employee was actually some random person undergoing some sort of psychotic break. ... Later the campaign’s hyper-aggressive co-chair Chris LaCivita gave an even wilder comment to the Times, calling the assaulted cemetery employee “a despicable individual” and “a disgrace” who “does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
At a speech Wednesday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance doubled down on the campaign’s defense, seeming to imply that campaign staffers were right to assault the cemetery employee. He said VP Harris could “go to hell” because of the backlash Trump is facing....
By Wednesday night a host of other details emerged.
The cemetery employee, a woman, filed a report about the incident. But she later declined to press charges, fearing — according to military officials who spoke to The New York Times — that Trump supporters would try to retaliate against her. ...
Late this evening, the Daily Caller reported that Speaker Mike Johnson actually got involved to force cemetery officials to allow Trump to hold his campaign event on the grounds.
... Arlington cemetery officials could see this was a trainwreck-in-the-making from the start. And the Speaker of the House was brought in to overrule cemetery officials simply trying to enforce the prohibition against holding partisan political events on the cemetery grounds, especially in the area of recent burials...
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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Today's News: Thinking positive thoughts about Trudeau


Last week, Ekos published the poll above - here is the discussion:
Conservative Party Sees Seven-Point Decline: The Harris Effect? Party still leads by 14 points, would likely win majority if election were held tomorrow
The Conservative Party has enjoyed a profound advantage in federal vote intention since Pierre Poilievre assumed leadership. Over the past year, this advantage has been in the high teens and reached 24 points in June. The stability and magnitude of this lead pointed to a pretty certain path to a commanding majority government. While the Conservative lead continues to be sizable, the past few weeks have seen the largest decline since Mr. Poilievre’s ascendance as leader. While the Conservative lead is still comfortable, the massive advantage of 24 points in June is now a more modest 14 points. The key movement has been a decline in Conservative support rather than a clear rise in another party....
... after a protracted period of holding a stranglehold on a majority outcome, the Conservative Party’s prospects appear less certain. The Conservatives are still in a majority position, but it is a far less commanding advantage than we saw only a month ago. ...
So things are a bit better for Trudeau, but it is still an enormous gap to try to overcome. 
The Liberals just wrapped up their caucus meeting in Halifax:

Some positive thoughts about Trudeau:
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Long Threads: Some things I didn't know


I suffer from"vellichor" myself!

X is slowing down but I still find some great "long threads" posts.

These comparison photos are fascinating:
Here's a "time capsule" post - some amazing facts and photos: Hilarious maps - I thought "the world according to fish" was particularly funny: Finally, a funny story:
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Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Today's News: Show Me The Money! Why Trump wasn't impeached in 2020

So Trump could well have been found guilty and impeached at his first impeachment trial, in February 2020. 
But the key people who could have testified against him -- John Bolton, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster -- all decided to shut up and let the nation suffer. 
They saved their juicy tales of treason and malfeasance for interviews with journalists or for their own books -- basically, they took the money. 
Yes, the House impeachment heard from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill. Their testimony was devastating. 
But it wasn't enough to enrage the country - so in the end, the only Senate Republican who voted to impeach was Mitt Romney. 
Just six months later, Bolton confirmed in his book that Trump actually had tried to withhold military aid to Ukraine so they would investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
Jim Mattis stayed quiet about how incompetent Trump was until he saw how Trump was mishandling the Floyd protests in June 2020.
In 2021, it was revealed that John Kelly had told reporter Michael Bender about Trump's Hitler envy, but nobody knew about it until the reporter's book was published in 2021. 
Now - four years later - we see H.R. McMaster also confirming Trump's incompetence in foreign policy and willingness to kowtow to Putin. 
I can hardly imagine how the world could have changed if they all had stepped up in December 2019 to tell the House impeachment what Trump had done. Their testimony would have been so devastating that I expect enough Republican Senators would then have voted with the Democratic Senators for impeachment on Feb. 5, 2020. 
And Mike Pence would have been president when COVID hit six weeks later. 
At least 1.1 million Americans died of COVID -- I wonder how many would have lived if the Orange Turd and his callow son-in-law had not still been in charge?

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Monday, August 26, 2024

Today's News: President of Joy


David Rothkopf writes Navigating Bullshitworld How Do We Keep the Fires of the DNC Burning When So Many Seek to Douse Them With Torrents of Crap?: 
As the peaks of last week’s Democratic National Convention recede into memory I feel they are also at risk of gradually being submerged by the ocean of bullshit that will immerse us from now through Election Day...The joy and the energy that was supplied by last week’s events was due in large part to the fact that the messages of the convention were so damn straightforward that even the nattering of commentators and the counter-programming of the opposition and the disinformation of our enemies and trolls and bots and army of idiots on social media could not obscure them or diminish their power.
Jeff Teidrich writes Kamala’s successful convention has broken the media’s brain boo fucking hoo, you sad losers and he has a message for the media whining that Kamala won't talk to them: 
 stop wasting Kamala’s time on bullshit, and maybe she’ll talk to you. 
Here is an excellent CNN article from a week ago, describing how Harris got her campaign underway so quickly and so well: Inside the fast-moving launch of Kamala Harris for president
Three weeks into her presidential run was the first time the Biden campaign’s pollsters — now hers — held a deep-dive call with Kamala Harris’ inner circle to discuss what she’s been saying on the stump.
Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, “We’re not going back.” It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative.
Harris’ advisers listened. They considered the arguments. They decided to stick with what the crowds were chanting in the arenas.
When advisers who had been on the call briefed the vice president on the suggestions, according to CNN’s conversations with close to a dozen people involved with internal campaign decisions, she told them she wasn’t going to listen to the pollsters herself and would instead trust the instincts she had buried under self-doubt for so long.
Harris has shocked even people close to her with how she’s been coming across in the just four weeks since she became a presidential candidate. Many political obsessives who had largely written off the vice president can’t understand how a woman whose early struggles they still keenly remember is now projecting as succinct and punchy, comfortable onstage and in her own skin.
And Dems just wanna have fun --  we will, we will rock you!
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Sunday, August 25, 2024

Weekend funny stuff: from Escher to Hercules; from politics to CEOs; from ancient wonders to wonderful paintings; from funny maps to funny dogs; from dancing ostriches to Ted Lasso!

First, a glance at art:



Here's a short look at politics with some compare-and-contrast posts:
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Saturday, August 24, 2024

Today's News: RIP Expertise


I'm seeing a number of news stories lately about how expertise is being downgraded, and experts dismissed. Tom Nichols talks about all this in his book, The Death of Expertise:
But I think it is important to remember that "both sides" are not equally to blame for this expertise problem -- for the most part, it is Conservatives who are the most vigorous at disputing expert advice and denigrating expertise.
I guess they simply cannot accept that reality has a liberal bias!  
Recent examples?  First, the Ford government decision to close Safe Injection sites in Ontario -- they just cannot seem to wrap their tiny minds around the harm reduction approach to addiction. It's like they are still thinking Nancy Reagan's "just say no" is the only plan we need. And they are following along with Poilievre's "Liberal drug dens" smears too - another evidence-free component of our Conservative anti-harm reduction / pro-lockup doctrine:
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Friday, August 23, 2024

Today's News: Kamala Harris, the Serendipity President

As I watched Kamala Harris's great speech tonight, I pondered the serendipity of the moment, the incredible chain of accident and surprise and coincidence and luck that brought her to that stage:
First, in 2020 Biden had picked her for VP, so she achieved a national profile and, eventually, hired an excellent staff.
Then, in 2023, Biden decided to seek another term, so the Democratic primaries last spring were not contested by democrats with much more political credibility and experience -- I suspect dems like Pete, Whitmer, Newsom, Booker, Warnnock, Beto, and Kelly, even AOC, might well have beaten Harris in primary voting last spring; she wasn't recognized as much of a campaigner and anyway she would have been stuck in Washington for Senate votes.
Then, the Republicans were so successful with their "he's old" smear / whisper campaign -- too successful, because it doomed Biden's reelection chances.
Then, Biden did himself no favours either. He was either so pigheaded or so poorly advised that he stretched himself too thin over the last year - agreeing to the Hur interview last Oct 8, when it looked like the Middle East would go to war, and to the June debate with Trump, even though he was sick, and exhausted from two overseas trips,  So ultimately, by July, Biden was losing so badly that even a slam-bang press conference couldn't save him, even though millions watched. So fnally Pelosi and, I think, Obama were able to persuade him to withdraw.
And the last serendipitous event: when Biden called Harris that Sunday, she was ready. She had obviously prepared for it to happen, she had set up her team, decided on her plan, and jumped into it so quickly, making hundreds of phone calls that very day, lining up endorsements and taking advantage of Zoom organizing sessions, with such verve and panache that no one else could catch up. 
And in the weeks since, she hasn't made an error or a flub.
The result was this magnificent speech:
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