Elizabeth May's Cop Out

How come Elizabeth May isn't standing up for Canadians who disapprove of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and abuses of Palestinian rights against the insulting and false accusation of antisemitism?

 Its a despicable slur, the definition of a blood libel.

She is deeply distressed that 'some people think' the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is antisemitic. That's an opportunity to respect the democratic will of her members and use her public profile to educate people and push back against a despicable lying slander.  Instead she starts from the position of accepting the slur as fact and is clearly working behind the scenes to reverse the members votes in a way designed to keep them reversed.

BDS is a peaceful, legitimate attempt to hold a state that styles itself as a liberal democracy to the standards of behavior expected from a liberal democracy.

But she's more concerned with acting like a public drama queen and treating a democratic vote as somehow illegitimate because it gives her the sads.

The Green Party has always been a faux progressive joke, a way to blunt the power of the progressive vote and throw elections to the Liberals and with the panicked efforts to overturn a real progressive resolution by members who fell for the pose that just gets more blatant all the time.

A week of big wins for Progressive Americans (But a very bad week is coming for abortion rights)

This was an amazing week of wins for progressive Americans. 

Obamacare has defeated what was probably the last chance to strangle it in its cradle and there's not just no path to kill it now, there's no time left to kill it before it becomes a beloved and untouchable program the way Medicare did.  In a few years the Republicans will be denying they ever opposed it.  Much the same story as their once fierce opposition to Medicare which they will now scramble to promise to support at every opportunity.

A horrifying massacre proved to be the tipping point for one of the most divisive symbols of the culture war right wing media hustlers are trying as hard to stoke as the race war terrorist Dylan Roof was trying to inspire.  Instead he was the catalyst to turn white southerners away from a divisive symbol of the war he was trying to start.

And then the Supreme Court declared once and for all and everywhere in the United States that gay Americans are equal and their love is equal.  A ruling met with public joy and public mockery of those who didn't share that joy.  A massive social transformation in America has brought gay Americans unambiguously into the American family.

Next week the other shoe will drop.

Expect the Supreme Court to savagely restrict the medical choices of American women, possibly just by declining to hear a challenge to a Texas law poised to wipe out abortion access in the state, the trend the last few years of massive growing acceptance for gay Americans has been darkly mirrored by ever decreasing access to abortion for American women, particularly poor and minority women. 

A look at the cases the Supremes have left to rule on and their voting history on abortion restriction cases indicate the right to abortion is in severe and immediate danger.

A week of victories doesn't mean the battle to sustain and expand progressive policies in America is over.

It's never over.

BC Parents dropping their Christy Clark $40 bribe checks right into the Teacher's strike fund kitty

They were at $12,000 a few hours ago the last time I looked, they're about to hit $15,000 now. 

This is BC parents giving to the Teacher's Strike fund, in denominations of $40.

The Christy Clark Liberals are throwing a farcical $40 a day bribe paid for with public funds at BC parents in a desperate attempt to deflect the well deserved blame for the teacher's strike.  The parents, in huge numbers, are then turning around and giving that money to the Teacher's strike fund.

The Christy Clark government is helping to finance the Teacher's Strike.

Can there be a more symbolic and perfect demonstration how utterly the Christy Clark government has lost this public relations battle? 

The Teacher's arbitration offer is just a twist of the knife, the government knows it can't win a fair, unbiased arbitration, or even come out even, and they can't explain to the public that they are rejecting arbitration because they can't live with a fair settlement.

All that's left to this war is shooting the wounded. 

Region of Guatemala under Martial Law to Protect Canadian Business Interests

A Canadian silver mine.  Local residents afraid their home and way of life will be irretrievably poisoned frustrated that their protests are ignored and the mine is treated as inevitable.

Now military, police and Canadian paid private security forces hold sway and civil rights are on hold. 

Does this make you proud to be a Canadian?

[Posted from Guatemala City]
Residents of four towns east of Guatemala's capital woke up to news that their communities had been placed under a 30-day State of Siege by the administration of President Otto Perez Molina, following anti-mining protests that turned violent. One policeman was killed, six civilians were wounded by rubber bullets, and a number of police cars were burned and overturned on roadways. Here is the government's official public announcement. Public gatherings in the area are banned for 30 days.


According to Guatemalan Defense Minister Col. Ulises Giron Anzueto Noah (shown at right, photo today by Carlos Andrino), 3,500 total personnel participated in operations to bring the "estado de sitio" (state of siege) into effect. Some soldiers entered the areas in armored personnel vehicles and tanks. Hundreds of police officers were involved, as were private security officers for the Canadian-owned Escobal mine at the center of the controversy.

I Love Canada

The Canada Stephen Harper has openly revelled in his hatred for and unambiguously promised to destroy.   #DenounceHarper

Sourced from Unseat Harper

"You have to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada; people who live in ghettos and are not integrated into Western Canadian society."
Report Magazine, 2001

"Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society. It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."
Interview with Terry O’Neill of BC Report newsmagazine, 1999

"[Y]our country [the USA], and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status ..."
Op-ed article in the National Post, December 12, 2000

"Now 'pay equity' has everything to do with pay and nothing to do with equity. It’s based on the vague notion of 'equal pay for work of equal value,' which is not the same as equal pay for the same job."
National Citizens Coalition Overview, Fall 1998

"For taxpayers, however, it’s [pay equity] a rip-off. And it has nothing to do with gender. Both men and women taxpayers will pay additional money to both men and women in the civil service. That’s why the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law."
National Citizens Coalition Overview, Fall 1998

There's no hidden agenda, he's been quite open about it.

Quebec Spring

Most of you have probably seen this on Huffington Post already but damn its inspiring.

I Stand With Quebec Students

Poster by Molly Crabapple

Because we all hang together or we will all hang separately - and with this federal government are you 100% sure that is hyperbole?

Because this is something bigger, maybe even the start of a Canadian Spring.  Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Because whatever you think of the student's cause, Bill 78 is a breath-taking assault on freedom, Totalitarian by design, explicitly formulated to cripple dissent against the elites by intent.  This is a declaration of war.  The political class, frankly, need to be terrified by the social and political consequences into never trying such odious legislation in this country again. Shock and awe motherfuckers.

Because, as I've asked before, The question isn't why Quebec students are fighting back so fiercely against education being incrementally turned into a tiny gated community for the wealthy and the imposition of lifelong crippling debt for the rest of the population, the question is why aren't the rest of us?

The Real Question

The question isn't why Quebec students are fighting back so fiercely against education being incrementally turned into a tiny gated community for the wealthy and the imposition of lifelong crippling debt for the rest of the population, the question is why aren't the rest of us?

UPDATE: And lest anyone forget, it is a proven, established fact that the Quebec police engage in agent provocateur violence to justify a harsh response. We KNOW they do this, its not an accusation, its a fact.

Taking on a Revolting Bully

A billionaire Mormon backer of Mitt Romney with an anti-gay axe to grind and a habit of using his vast wealth to harass, intimidate and silence critics gets openly challenged by Glenn Greenwald to put up or shut up:

Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire and the CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a controversial billion-dollar-a-year company which peddles dietary supplements and cleaning products; back in 2004, Forbes, echoing complaints to government agencies, described the company as “a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway.” VanderSloot has long used his wealth to advance numerous right-wing political causes. Currently, he is the national finance co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, and his company has become one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the ostensibly “independent” pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future. Melaleuca’s get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company’s entering into a voluntary agreement to “not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid”‘; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general’s office, which found that “certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca” had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.

But it is VanderSloot’s chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics — magazines, journalists, and bloggers — that makes him particularly pernicious and worthy of more attention. In the last month alone, VanderSloot, using threats of expensive defamation actions, has successfully forced Forbes, Mother Jones and at least one local gay blogger in Idaho to remove articles that critically focused on his political and business practices. He has been using this abusive tactic in Idaho for years: suppressing legitimate political speech by threatening or even commencing lawsuits against even the most obscure critics (he has even sued local bloggers for “copyright infringement” after they published a threatening letter sent by his lawyers). This tactic almost always succeeds in silencing its targets, because even journalists and their employers who have done nothing wrong are afraid of the potentially ruinous costs they will incur when sued by a litigious billionaire.

Given Vandersloot's MO, Greenwald and Salon have to be expecting to be in the sights of the billionaire's legal arsenal for this blistering broadside.  It's an open challenge and a slap to provoke a SLAPP.  Repost this widely folks.

Delivering a Message

Explain to me the how the interests of public safety are served by a gang of black clad thugs showing up swaggering about and shoving people for a while, sucker punching one person and throwing another to the ground and then getting back in their cars and driving away?


Are the people holding the banner some kind of direct and proximate to safety or public order that I'm missing and if so why, after committing acts of intimidation and violence against these threats to public order, do the police suddenly drop everything and walk away and leave them still standing there holding their banner?

Is the perceived threat more an existential one?

Is this plain and simply about delivering a message?

The civic responses to the Occupy movement and by extension all economic protests as those against school fees definitely are, deliver a clear message. With their blatant and unambiguous coordination and collusion between media, politicians and police.  The 99% protests after all are explicitly and directly targeting powerful entrenched forces and their control over our society.  Did we think they would just roll over?

The 99% movement only accomplishes any of it's goals if support for it at least approaches a plurality of that 99%.  The monoculture construction we live in created and maintained by the economic power elite will defend itself and a majority of the population still believes there is no viable alternative.

But as the contradicitons become more blatant, as more and more people realize the system is increasingly stacked against them, as we watch Caterpillar continue the elite assault on the concept of the middle class, as corporate citizens annihilate the concept of informed democracy, as those who care about the environment are described as enemies of the state  and students are beaten for standing up for equal access to education the entire structure begins to display its structural weaknesses.

To everybody.

So yes, this kind of deliberately oppressive policing does in fact deliver a message, just not the one intended.  Intended to display power and authority it instead displays weakness.  It displays a huge stupid animal starting to notice pinpricks of opposition and retaliating stupidly and brutally against those threats. 

 First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.       -Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

The Man Behind the Mask

The author of graphic novel masterpiece V for Vendetta reflects on the strange new life of his creation as a symbol of protest and resistance.

It all comes back to Moore – a private man with knotty greying hair and a magnificent beard, who prefers to live without an internet connection and who has not had a working telly for months "on an obscure point of principle" about the digital signal in his hometown of Northampton. He has never yet properly commented on the Vendetta mask phenomenon, and speaking on the phone from his home, Moore seems variously baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased that his creation has become such a prominent emblem of modern activism.

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

"just another bad thing that happened in downtown Vancouver

Somebody overdoses decently out of sight in the east end and the response from the Vancouver government, the media and too much of public is a collective shrug. Have it happen 15 blocks to the west and suddenly its an urgent public health and safety crisis.

Ashlie Gough was happy and healthy the last time she visited her father's house on Vancouver Island.
She was 23. After high school she had drifted a little - she studied tattoo design and travelled the world with a new boyfriend who was a scuba diver.
"She zig-zagged back and forth a bit and led an interesting life, but she was really starting to grow up," her father, Tom Gough, said on Monday.
On the weekend she went to visit friends who were camping out as part of the Occupy Vancouver protest and on Saturday she was found inside a tent, unresponsive. The cause of her death isn't official yet, but it may have been a drug overdose.
During an interview at his Vancouver Island home on Monday, Tom Gough appeared sombre, if not in shock.
His partner Glenda Mercer's voice broke as she detailed how cheerful Ms. Gough had been the last time she saw her.
"She was just on top of the world," a teary-eyed Ms. Mercer recalled.
Mr. Gough said his daughter was not involved in the Occupy protest against corporate greed.
"We don't want her made into some kind of poster child for the occupation because Ashlie's death had nothing to do with that," he said. "This has nothing to do with the tent city or Occupy Vancouver. She just happened to be there. It's just another bad thing that happened in downtown Vancouver."

The Occupied Agenda

Ok MSM, you sneer that you can't get a coherant specific answer as to what the Occupy Wall Street crowds are protesting.  Here you go guys:

Paul Krugman is 100% right

The Right have gone mad with rage at Paul Krugman's 9/11 post.  It's far too honest.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

The most specious complaint is the disrespect card, like Krugman I would argue its far more disrespectful to those who died that day and in the Neo-con wars of choice since to perpetuate the mythology that allowed them.

I have no time for the 9/11 'Truthers'.  I believe 9/11 happened because 19 pissed off Muslims with x-acto knives made it happen, where we agree is that the Neo-con regime in the White House did leap on the terrible events of that day to perpetuate their own ideological agenda at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives since that day.

9/11 was used to perpetuate lies and death and torture and vanished freedoms.  It baffles me that there can even be any argument about any of this.

Toronto Police Swear off Kettling

Toronto police will never again use the controversial crowd control technique known as kettling, which was employed for the first and last time in the city’s history during last year’s G20 summit.

The decision was revealed to the Star in a police statement Tuesday, along with the information that two Toronto police superintendents were “responsible” for commanding and controlling G20 policing in the city outside the security fence.

On June 27, the final day of the G20 summit, some 300 protesters and bystanders were boxed in, or kettled, by riot police at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. for about four hours.
Not long after the enclosure, rain began to fall in torrents as some stood shivering in summer dresses and tank tops.

“The crowd control technique implemented at Queen & Spadina on June 27 will not be used again by the Toronto Police Service,” spokeswoman Meaghan Gray said in the statement, a response to a list of G20-related questions sent by the Star.

They won't concede it was a mistake to use it at the G20 - being the subject of numerous legal actions that's hardly surprising - but they claim they never plan to use the tactic again,

On the one hand, good that public pressure has made the police bend on a widely condemned policing tactic, but it also just seems like they're throwing the public a bone to try to evade responsibility for the police riot that victimized so many.

And what about other police forces?  Will the RCMP and the major city forces across Canada also disavow the tactic?

UPDATE: Another thought, as the tactic was literally found illegal by British courts and the British police now face potentially millions in court costs from lawsuits from those it was used against before being outlawed, perhaps the police simply want to avoid the tactics legality being considered by a court.

New Facebook group: Sanction the Toronto Sun for Electoral Dirty Tricks

It was clearly a late election hail mary attempt to undercut Jack Layton and the NDP.

An anonymous police officer with an axe to grind against a troublesome anti-poverty activist now trending to become the leader of the official opposition comes forward 15 years later and the Sun laps it up.  Jack Layton is a well known exercise enthusiast who went to a city licensed therapist for a massage and was surprised when it was raided by the police.  No charges were filed,  Now fifteen years later the Toronto Sun tries to use this innocuous incident to smear a popular leader of a party experiencing surging support with days to go in a tight election.

This kind of irresponsible scummy political manipulation and sleaze shouldn't be consequence free.  Join the new facebook group Sanction the Toronto Sun for Electoral Dirty Tricks to show how you feel about this kind of partisan manipulation.  And here's the link to the Ontario Press Council's complaint process.

Voter Supression: Another page from the Republican playbook

The ties between Stephen Harper's CRAP (Conservative, Reform, Alliance Party) and the American Republican Party are deep and intricate.  A shared network of 'think tanks', action funds, pressure groups, 'student exchange' programs and a deeply shared set of ideological tropes, attitudes, assumptions and tactics.  The days when the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party was still to the left of the American Democratic Party much less the Republicans are long since over.  The current incarnation of Canadian Conservatives has more in common with the American Tea Partys than the PCs of Joe Clark and Brian Mulrooney.

Now they appear to be taking a very noxious page from the Republican voter suppression handbook and attacking the voting rights of students.

The Guelph students say the poll was organized correctly, with a Conservative scrutineer on hand. But Hamilton's letter suggests there was no scrutineer and that campaign material was present at the polling station, which is prohibited.

According to a published report, an attempt was actually made to end the vote as it was happening.

Citing several students who were there at the time, the Guelph Mercury reports that the communications director for the Guelph Conservative Party candidate turned up at the balloting site, claiming the process violated the Elections Canada Act. He reportedly tried to snatch the ballot box away, but left empty-handed.

These kind of tactics and the underlying hostility to the voting rights of students has a long ignoble history in the US, from both the Republicans AND the Democrats (The Clintons did enormous damage to their credibility during the bitter primary battle with Barack Obama when they attacked the rights of college students in Iowa to vote where they went to school.) but it's been an overwhelmingly Republican tactic, particularly in older white communities with young racially diverse or majority black schools in their borders.

How much of a backlash the Conservatives face from this thuggish attack on student voters will affect how much of this tactic we see in the future.

UPDATE: Elections Canada: The poll was valid and the votes WILL be counted.

Shower of Schmucks

A tiny group of pathetic inadequates who can't find anything about their lives to be proud of but the melanin level in their skin cells plan a march in my town tomorrow.  So far all they've accomplished is some cowardly attacks on the streets and internecine attempts to kill each other and now the probable end of one of their idiot's military career.

WINNIPEG—Military police are investigating a Canadian Forces reservist from Winnipeg who is alleged to have been planning to attend a white-pride demonstration this weekend in Calgary.

Capt. Karina Holder says the military can take action even if the reservist doesn’t attend the event, providing investigators find evidence.

“Having that attitude alone is completely incompatible with the military culture,” Holder said Thursday from Ottawa.

“It runs contrary to effective military service. You have to have that basic respect for your fellow human beings, otherwise you cannot function in this organization.”

She said they received a complaint from a member of the public but can’t confirm it was the same complaint that prompted the investigation.

Although she wouldn’t provide details, it has been reported that the 17-year-old reservist was planning to attend a white-pride demonstration planned for Saturday in Calgary and that he had expressed racist views in online postings.

Quote of the Day

What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

One World. One People. One Struggle.