The economy is just fine, FINE I tell you, unless that Dion guy gets elected!

So on the radio while I am driving home, which takes about 10 minutes, I first hear Charles Adler and his guest Izzy [somebody] Asper proclaiming that a drop in the DOW to half of what it was a year ago is just a "correction" that happens all the time, don't worry, the Canadian economy is OK, the fundamentals are strong, blah, blah, blah.
And then they started talking about whether Dion might become Prime Minister, and oh, lordy, what a terrible thing that would be for the markets, they would fall, wouldn't that be just terrible, the economy would be in ruins, blah, blah, blah.
I was laughing so hard I could have had an accident!

Asides

The only reaction I had to Mike Duffy's "Watch this! The sky is falling!" video moment today was to laugh -- Duffy and the Harper Conservatives apparently think that it is utterly amazing to see a politician actually trying to understand and respond to a reporter's incoherent question, rather than just blowing the reporter off and dishing out talking points.
I don't have a post here, really, just a few asides. First, here's a funny comment from the comments on the CBC website:

. . . I would ask Mike Duffy: 'If you were a credible, non-partisan journalist today, how would your TV programme be different?'

Interesting to see that National Post's Don Martin thinks the incident tells us more about Harper than about Dion:

this is a damning insight into how desperate the Conservatives have become in their battle to belittle a Liberal leader they never dreamed could pose a threat to their government . . . To use his first spontaneous media appearance of the campaign to declare Mr. Dion the most unworthy of the two candidates for prime minister based on a minute of misunderstanding is not the most flattering reaction for the prime minister.
In the end the incident they hoped to use to define Mr. Dion as a confused ditherer may actually provide more telling insight into the character of Stephen Harper.

Andrew Potter says the Tory glee won't play well in Quebec:

And as for the Tory spindorks, have their brains completely fallen out? How on earth do they think this is going to play in Quebec? Quebecers don’t much like Dion, but to have a bunch of rubes mocking the man for his poor grasp of English — yeah, they’re going to love that in Repentigny. They’ll be slapping their thighs in the Gaspe.
Honest to god.

And I think this is why Dion couldn't wrap his head around the question -- if he had been prime minister for the last two years, he wouldn't have had to come up with any emergency 30 day plan -- because he would have handled the economy differently for the last two years and it would be stronger today than it is under Harper. As the Toronto Star story notes, in an aside to an aide during the interview, Dion said:

"Yes but if I would have been prime minister two years ago, I would have had an agenda"

Gone in 30 Seconds videos

Department of Culture is promoting a Gone in 30 Seconds video contest about the Harper government's arts cuts and Harper's smear job on the arts in Canada. Here are some of the entries I liked best:

YouTube - If Canadian Farmers Were Canadian Artists


YouTube - Gone In 30 Seconds: Kathleen Werneburg


YouTube - Hey Steve


YouTube - Gone in 30 Seconds: I Don't Get It

More insight about InSite

The other shoe has dropped. It isn't just the Harper government which opposes InSite, Vancouver's safe injection site. Now we find out it was the RCMP who commissioned this study on InSite, which was published in May, 2007 -- a study which I called at the time:

overblown, inaccurate, poorly researched, ideological tripe.

And here is why I said that, and criticized Canadian Press for its uncritical reporting about this study:

. . .the study's author Colin Mangham has been publishing reports for years against "harm reduction" drug policies -- which, briefly, are policies which tolerate drug use rather than try to prevent it. The safe injection site is a prime example of just such a policy in action -- and therefore, in this man's opinion, it must be stopped. What's the harm? Well, the problem seems to be that the harm reduction "ideology" makes us "vulnerable to the drug legalization movement". Can't have that, I guess.
Second, the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is an on-line journal which has published [at that time] only two issues, with articles like "The Lure and the Loss of Harm Reduction in UK Drug Policy and Practice" and "Is it Harm Reduction Or Harm Continuation?"
Third, the Drug Prevention Network of Canada is a pretty small organization which takes a fairly conservative approach to social problems. On their website, they post articles with titles like "In defense of the drug war" and "Cannabis - A General Survey of it's (sic) harmful effects" .
Fourth, though Canadian Press acts like Mangham's article is a research study itself, it's not. It is actually a personal critique of ten research studies . . . [Their authors]Evan Wood, Mark Tyndall, Julio Montaner, and Thomas Kerr are all at UBC; Ruth Zhang, Jo-Anne Stoltz and Calvin Lai are at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal? These are the top medical journals in the world.
And all these established senior researchers and highly reputable journals are just so blinded by their ideological allegiance to harm reduction that they are publishing misleading, weak research?
And Colin Mangham has found them out? Oh, sure.

Note that RossK also discovered that this journal was funded by the US Department of Justice -- and Ross posted about all this again, when Mangham testified to a parliamentary committee in May.
And now we find out that the RCMP was requesting it:

. . . Mr. Mangham, reached Tuesday evening, said the RCMP commissioned his report . . .
“I was asked to research and provide an independent critique,” said, adding that health officials on the public payroll “certainly couldn't have said what I said.”

Yes, well, probably that's because Canadian civil servants don't usually go around criticizing the peer-reviewed articles published by the world's top medical journals.

That One is the one they want

We were out and so we just caught the end of the debate on CNN. All the blogs are talking about McCain calling Obama "that one":



Well, at least he didn't say "boy", but what a jerk! And that mesmerizing opinion line running across the bottom of the CNN screen demonstrated that many American voters, particularly women, think so too.
You know what I noticed in the after-debate coverage? As Obama and McCain worked their way around the room shaking hands with the people on the stage, I noticed that several people had brought out their digital cameras. But it was Obama they snapped, not McCain. Quite obviously, they wanted a memento of an historic event -- the night they met President-Elect Obama.

StealthCon IV: StealthCon Awakening

Well, the StealthCons are finally getting the publicity they deserve.
Today the Star Phoenix had an editorial about them: Tory candidates have obligation to share views. The editorial highlights the case of Kelly Block, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar "who has refused outright to participate in any election debates" -- and so as a result she has generated a negative editorial when she is running neck-and-neck with Nettie Wiebe. The editorial highlights the cowardice of the StealthCons:

. . . what emerges is a picture of a slate of aspirants who either lack the courage of their convictions to defend themselves and their party in sometimes hostile public venues or who are possessed of chronic performance anxiety and shyness that make them singularly unsuitable for the job they seek.

And thanks to Geoff for emailing the link to this story about the Conservative candidates from Kitchener:

First, there was a debate Monday night at the Wilfrid Laurier University school of social work.
Kitchener Centre Conservative candidate Stephen Woodworth and Kitchener-Waterloo candidate Peter Braid both sent regrets.
Then yesterday, three Tory candidates -- Woodworth, Braid and Kitchener-Conestoga MP Harold Albrecht --- gave the cold shoulder to a "roundtable discussion" at St. John's Kitchen. . . .
Canadian Press is reporting that record numbers of Tory candidates across the country are failing to attend community debates.
One Calgary Conservative has made himself so scarce that a local radio station has launched a contest to locate him and prove he's still alive.

So what does any of this matter? The Kitchener Record article makes this point:

. . . the Conservatives, who called the election in the first place, owe us a full and open discussion.

And the Star Phoenix editorial concludes:

For a party that got into trouble with Elections Canada for funneling money to local candidates' campaigns to purchase advertising deemed to be national ads for regulatory purposes, it's damaging to send a message to voters that their candidate is but a mere pawn in a game far removed from local control or accountability.
It's bad enough when a party's candidate does no more than spew out packaged pablum prepared by the national office, that has little to do with local issues.
But it undermines the entire democratic process when candidates refuse to participate during an election campaign in public events that give voters a chance to assess their ideas in the context of what's being offered by other parties, especially when the party in question has not yet released a full platform that can be useful for comparison purposes.

The Conservative party seems to be turning "Undermining the democratic process" into an art form -- hey, maybe they should hold a gala!

Our Story So Far: The "StealthCon" term is RossK's great invention, and he defines it thusly:

A StealthCon is a Harpertronic conservative candidate who ducks the media and especially the public. Their most egregious acts of stealthitude occur when they subvert democracy completely by refusing to show up at all candidates meetings where the voters, instead of watching ads on the TeeVee actually head out the door in an effort to find out, via their own eyes and ears, what they will (or will not) be voting for.

StealthCon I, II and III are here, here and here.

Paying it forward

One day, in around 1975, when my mother was waiting at a bus stop, she noticed a woman crying -- she left her purse on a bus and she didn't have any money to get home with her little girl. So my mother gave her five dollars so she could take a cab home.
The woman was overcome with gratitude, and so was her husband when he came over later that day to pay back the money. They just couldn't get over that a stranger would give them money.
But that's the kind of person my mother was.
And now I read this story about a time when Barak Obama helped out a family by giving them $100 when they really needed it.
And I think that's the kind of person Barak Obama is, too.

I love these photos

These are from the Liberal Flickr page. You know what I noticed in these photos? Dion may be awkward sometimes speaking English but he's never awkward or uncomfortable when he is meeting people, especially children.

Great post of the day

Read the whole thing but here's some tidbits:

On the economy, Dion's 30-day plan of action may not be adequate . . . But Dion's plan is more than what Harper is offering: himself as the Great Helmsman.
The Canadian economy is indeed better than America's, as Harper says, but it's not America-proof.
Dion is a sincere and honest politician, untainted by scandal. He is a polite and decent man. He is not mean or vindictive. He does not treat his political opponents as enemies. He does not question the patriotism of the critics of his Afghan policy, let alone call them agents of the Taliban. He is not proposing to send 14-year-olds to jail for life.
Vote against him because you do not like his policies, not because he is socially awkward or that he reads books.
Vote for Harper because you like his policies, not because he got himself photographed in a sweater in front of a fireplace.

Dissing everybody

Boris describes a case of Election Terrorism -- cutting the brake lines on cars parked at houses with Liberal signs -- and notes how this kind of despicable action follows when a political party adopts disrespect as a deliberate tactic:

The structural mechanism at work here is sinister and very dangerous. With the Harper government, we've seen a calculated campaign to delegitimise the other parties, and the parliamentary process as we know it. Obstructing parliamentary committees, advertisements with birds shitting the Opposition leader, and preventing candidates from participating in all-candidates meetings may seem silly and cowardly, but it serves the purpose of reducing the other parties to a general "other." It ignores their legitimate right to participate in political discourse as equals; it emasculates their leaders not for their ideas, but for who they are. The labels of Liberal and Left become synonymous with weakness. Direct associations between the ABC parties and the Taleban further this viewpoint, and stoke the fires of ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis. The simple act of suing the Opposition takes the legitimate, public democracy and turns into something bitter and personal. Not firing members and ministers who make outrageous statements furthers the impression among supporters and detractors alike, that these views are acceptable.

I guess it's all in fun until somebody loses an eye. The 22-year-olds who appear to be running the Conservative party these days seem to think all of their ratfucking and chippy tricks are simply hilarious -- but cutting brake lines could kill somebody.
As Boris says, the last time Canada experienced political terrorism, Trudeau called out the army. I don't want to have to go through that again.

Mavericky

Hmmm -- so Bible Spice AKA Cariboo Barbie is chattering to the press about how she disagrees with McCain's campaign strategy. Isn't that cute? I'll bet the McCain campaign is just lovin' her mavericky maverickness now!

Dion is battling the Economy and he's winning

Dion is battling the Economy.
And the Economy doesn't care that Dion's English isn't fluent or his manner academic. The Economy isn't trying to distract Canadians with oily splotts and puffins.
It's the Economy that could destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of Canadians. Dion seems to be the one who knows this and wants to do something about it.
What is Harper doing? He doesn't have any ideas except to mail out a few more government cheques.
Nanos is now showing just a 5 per cent difference between Conservatives and Liberals in their daily tracking poll. The Liberals moved up five points today, when the Oct. 2 figures are averaged in -- perhaps a combination of the debates (good for Dion) and the economy (bad for Harper). The Winnipeg Sun reported today:

Stephane Dion came out swinging on the heels of back-to-back leaders debates with a stride in his step and a surprising bounce in the polls.
Jockeying for public support in the broad middle against the “polarized” extremes of the NDP on the left and Conservatives on the right, Dion also tried to wrestle the upper hand from Stephen Harper on the number one issue of the campaign: The economy.
As the remaining campaign days dwindle, he began the final sprint to the finish with a continued outreach to progressive voters, and a fresh appeal to disaffected Conservatives.

Harper's lackadasical approach to the economy just isn't cutting it -- and telling Dion that he "panicked" just because Dion wants to hold a meeting about the economy was a bit of an over-reaction on Harper's part, indicating that Harper is the one who is spooked.
And he should be. Here's the latest bad news:

. . . most analysts were predicting the Canadian economy would be flat for the rest of the year before last week's financial tsunami on Wall Street. Now they say the situation has worsened and Canada could soon follow the U.S. into recession, with possible deep job losses in Ontario and Quebec.. . .
"The (U.S. rescue) plan cannot prevent a U.S. recession because we're already in one," said CIBC senior economist Avery Shenfeld.
"Canada already saw a decline in real output in the first half of the year, and while the third quarter got a great start on rising energy output, the economic headwinds point to another decline in quarter four (October-December)."
Moreover, the Bank of Canada conceded that the global credit crunch is starting to seriously affect Canada's financial system, announcing it needs to inject another $12 billion in cash to ensure Canada's chartered banks have enough capital to make loans.
Amid the roller-coaster of economic developments, the opposition accused Harper of failing the leadership test for not having a plan to deal with the problems. The Conservatives had yet to release their election platform even as advance polls opened Friday, although they have announced a series of targeted and modest economic measures

Does Harper think that giving plumbers-in-training a $2,000 taxable bonus is going to mitigate the coming collapse of our automobile, manufacturing, potash and forestry sectors? We need the Liberal plan to ramp up infrastructure spending and support for manufacturers.

Debate views -- Dion gets the nod

At the Globe and Mail, the editorial board calls it for Dion, while Andrew Steele blogs:

Stephane Dion had as good a showing as he could have expected. He was never really knocked down, although he stumbled over the language on too many occasions to count. . . There was another player in the debate that wasn't even in the room.
The 800-plus point drop in the TSE actually led CBC's The National rather than the debate. I cannot think of another occasion on which that has happened.
The economy was supposed to be the Conservatives' strong point, but Dion's gambit yesterday seems to have turned the tables, if only for a couple of days.
I'm giving the edge to Layton on points.
However, I actually think that Dion may wind up with the biggest bump out of this, because the economy is now the issue and his campaign was smart enough to judo flip themselves into the lead on the issue. . . .

James Travers at the Toronto Star and Don Martin at Canwest News Service think Dion had an OK performance but was not a knockout, while also agreeing that the economy is now front and centre in the campaign.

Third Wave StealthCons

We're up to 23 StealthCons now, and counting.
If it were just a few missed meetings, or if it was the Ladies Nazi Party Target Shooting Association that was trying to sponsor debates, then Canadians could accept an explanation that all these Conservatives missing all these candidate meetings was just bad luck or inconvenient scheduling. But the pattern now is clear and compelling. In this election, its obvious that StealthConning is a deliberate national Conservative Party policy.
What I wonder is -- why are these Conservatives so unwilling to defend what they have done in the past or what they want to do in the future?
The "StealthCon" term is RossK's great invention, and he defines it thusly:

A StealthCon is a Harpertronic conservative candidate who ducks the media and especially the public. Their most egregious acts of stealthitude occur when they subvert democracy completely by refusing to show up at all candidates meetings where the voters, instead of watching ads on the TeeVee actually head out the door in an effort to find out, via their own eyes and ears, what they will (or will not) be voting for.

Adding to StealthCon One and The Stealthening, here is my latest installment:
Regina Wascana candidate Michelle Hunter would not attend a debate at the University of Regina even though Ralph Goodale was there.

"The Conservative candidate's failure to be here is a gesture of profound disrespect. Just like not telling the truth about equalization or perhaps plagiarizing a speech," said Goodale.
Hunter did send a statement that was read aloud.

Well, wasn't that just so special of her? Pretty hard for those university students to have a discussion with a piece of paper.
There's more -- RossK's most recent report is John Baird. And the BC Liberals have compiled a list including these StealthCons types:

- Russ Hiebert (South Surrey – White Rock – Cloverdale) missed an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Crescent Beach Property Owners Association, forcing the event’s cancellation. (September 17)
- Sam Rakhra (Burnaby – New Westminster) was a no-show at a BCTV all-candidates debate. (September 17)
- Dona Cadman rejected an invitation to participate on a CBC radio panel. (September 24)
- Alice Wong skipped an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Canada-Asia Pacific Business Association. (September 25)
- John Cummins (Delta – Richmond East) skipped an all-candidates meeting hosted by the Canada-Asia Pacific Business Association. (September 25)

Thanks, Jeff, for that link. To be continued...

Great line of the day

In Salon, Rebecca Traister refuses to join The Sarah Palin pity party:

Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It's a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who -- love her or hate her -- was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.
In fact, the only people I feel sorry for are Americans who invested in a hopeful, progressive vision of female leadership, but who are now stuck watching, verbatim, a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Emphasis mine.