Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris sums up the first year of a Harper majority by pointing out the overwhelming need for change from the government we’re stuck with now: The curtain has been well and truly whipped away from the PM’s self-promoting deceptions and he is
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Tim Harper gets somewhat closer to the mark than most pundits in recognizing that any talk an NDP/Lib merger is neither timely nor particularly well-placed. But the “one more time” message is a little bit off: again, we’ve still run precisely zero election
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Murtaza Hussain nicely sums up why we should be pushing for businesses and wealthy individuals to contribute their fair share through a progressive tax system rather than through self-aggrandizing charity: The private social safety net, provided by corporate donors as compensation for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Dan Gardner writes about the Cons’ backup plan of answering their own wrongdoing with criticism of anybody who dares to investigate it – and points out the dangers of that approach: (W)hat happens if Elections Canada delivers a report even a fraction as
Continue readingWhat happened to Dan Gardner? The only reasonable man in the room is riding off the rails.
I had the greatest respect for Dan Gardner. He wrote such compelling newspaper columns that I, Mr. Short Attention Span, attempted to read his book Future Babble. I actually understood most of it and continued to look forward to his newspaper articles. His writing was an oasis of progressive thought
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: A friendly reminder
Some people who should know better are suggesting that universal media condemnation (as opposed to public involvement on social media) should be seen as the main factor in getting the Cons to climb back down on arbitrary online surveillance. So let’s take a ride in the wayback machine. It wasn’t
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Susan Riley brilliantly slams the message that austerity is necessary for everybody but those who already have the most: Is anyone else getting tired of being lectured about austerity by wealthy consultants in expensive suits who charge $1,500 a day for their advice
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Yes, the fraudulent collaboration between the Harper Cons and Sun TV should offer nothing but reason for suspicion about both portions of the right-wing noise machine – and Dr. Dawg, Heather Mallick, Simon Houpt and the Star have all had plenty to say.
Continue reading"Alpine perch": did Bob Rae compare Harper to Hitler?
Dan Gardner just tweeted this: Did Bob Rae really use the term ‘alpine perch’ to compare Harper to Hitler? I have a lot of respect for Dan Gardner but I wonder if this time he’s stretching it a little thin. I did a quick Google search on the term and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Following up on this morning’s roundup, I comment here on how the NDP’s group of leadership candidates includes loads of possibilities to take up Jack Layton’s mantle of negotiation and cooperation. As a brief bit of further reading, it was Dan Gardner who asked whether Stephen Harper had ever engaged
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Environics’ polling on inequality shows over 80% of Canadians wanting to see governments reduce the disparity between the rich and the poor – even as the current federal government moves as far as possible in the opposite direction: More than eight in 10
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Seth Klein somewhat jokingly offers up 10 reasons for upper-class tax increases. But particularly paired with the Cons’ fixation with tax-free savings accounts to further hand free money to the rich, this part looks like it’s worth some further focus: #4: The maximum
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the spread of bullying in the political sphere even as it’s been rightly rejected elsewhere – and what we should do as citizens to make sure it doesn’t pay off. For further reading, Hannah Tepper interviews Sam Sommers some of the mental shortcuts that are all too easily
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Unemployed people can’t pay taxes, and they certainly curtail their spending
Like the good neoclassical economist he is, President Harper said on Friday that he and his bulldog want to indulge their pathological addiction to austerity and tackle that mean old junk yard federal budget when, in fact, we know that they should really be focusing on the job creation strategies
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – pogge points out the Cons’ suppression of news that a lack of running water on First Nations reserves facilitated the spread of H1N1 – offering a case in point as to both how neglect of social needs can carry widespread ramifications, and how
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On manual adjustments
For all the failings of a Con government that combines extreme centralization with an utter lack of vision, let’s give Stephen Harper credit for successfully bludgeoning satire to death. Just this week, I considered this to be at least somewhat of an exaggeration in the department of “using what’s been
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Assorted content for your evening reading. – Alex Himelfarb finds a few positives in the Cons’ ramming their dumb-on-crime bill through the House of Commons: Thankfully many are not willing to “get over it”. How heartening, for example, to hear Leadnow.ca announce that they were simply regrouping for the next
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Dan Garnder rightly points out how too much concentrated power and a refusal to take advice can lead to bad decisions. And sadly, our federal government serves as a classic case in point: “Most of the time, taking advice benefits your accuracy,” notes
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Dan Gardner highlights how Stephen Harper is imposing exactly the kind of costly, top-down policies on Canada’s provinces that he once railed against:This week, at least five provincial governments, starting …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- I’d think it’s long past the time where any informed observer could cling to hope that the Harper Cons see good government as a goal worth pursuing. But Dan Gardner points out the role that Parliament …
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