The Conservatives, that’s who! Plus, bonus Kady “Dude, I know how to use ‘affect’ vs. ‘effect” O’Malley twitterfeed.
Continue readingTag: voter suppression
Robogate will test the mettle of the opposition
The opposition, especially the formerly powerful Liberals, deserves a lot of blame for Canada’s fall from grace. The left and centre-left parties allowed the Conservatives to lie and cheat their way into a majority. With Roboscam, the opposition has everything it needs to begin the dismantling of the Conservatives. Is
Continue readingWhile Stephen Taylor feigns outrage over Roboscam, his Blogging Tories crew is in full-on denial mode
Leftist Jab has a great post on the reaction from the Blogging Tories to the voter suppression accusations. Go read their comments. Most of the greats are there, including Crux of the Matter and BC Blue. They really might’ve taken the tack of their founder, Stephen Taylor. But the temptation for victimhood
Continue readingLeftist Jab: "Voter Suppression Is The Cost Of A Balanced Budget" -Blogging Tories
A “strong stable national majority conservative government” brought to you by Voter Suppression! When thousands of Canadians from all across the country get phone calls deliberately misleading them to believe that the location of their polling stations for the election has changed, I get rather concerned. When constituents of Liberal
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: One Young Staffer is Not Enough
Conservative operative Michael Sona, is taking the fall for the voter suppression scandal and has resigned as a staffer. What the conservatives would like us to believe is that he acted alone. Give me a break. Sona, in the background during Ezra Levant’s sponsorship of Ann Coulter, is a product
Continue readingsomecanuckchick dot com: Robocall Roundup
Robocalls A pre-recorded message with a female voice, in both French and English, claimed to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada. This message directed voters in ridings across the country to the wrong polling stations. RackNine Inc. — used by many Conservative Party of Canada candidates — has confirmed its
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Case of the Cons and the Demon-Dialers
Golly Sherlock, I see the bizarre case of the Cons and the Demon-Dialers has taken another strange turn. It seems that the Harper mob is trying to shop one if its own. A young campaign worker named Michael Sona, seen here posing with Great Robot Leader… In a photo supplied
Continue readingMore “clean and ethical” politics from the Conservatives
On the heels of assurances from Jenni Byrne and Stephen Harper that Conservatives would never, ever do anything unethical despite the voter suppression accusations hanging over them, comes this bit of unwelcome news that the party worked in cahoots with the military to cover up Peter MaKay’s lavish lifestyle. OTTAWA—Military personnel were asked to
Continue readingMore "clean and ethical" politics from the Conservatives
On the heels of assurances from Jenni Byrne and Stephen Harper that Conservatives would never, ever do anything unethical despite the voter suppression accusations hanging over them, comes this bit of unwelcome news that the party worked in cahoots with the military to cover up Peter MaKay’s lavish lifestyle. OTTAWA—Military
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Did the Cons Steal the Last Election?
When I first heard that Elections Canada is investigating attempts to suppress the vote during the last election, I wrote that at the very least bye-elections should be held in the 18 swing ridings that were targeted by robot calls. But now I believe that it must declare the last
Continue readingLaugh-out-loud line of the day: "The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity."
The face of clean and ethical politics. Kind of like their ‘oil’. Jenni Byrne, you’ve just entered the Conservative Idiot Hall of Fame. Thanks, I needed a laugh.
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around.
Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and Liars posted today. It’s dead on in so many ways and extremely funny, but the language is definitely NSFW.
So to begin by following up on the Iran acquiring the technology to create a nuclear weapon and why the west should now go to war with Iran story, well, things remain unclear. The leaks that were making the rounds this week suggested that the IAEA was absolutely going to confirm that this was in fact the case and since they have considerably more credibility than the US and NATO on such issues, this was going to bolster the case for an attack on Iran. It turns out however, that this is not the case. The IAEA report in fact says that they are “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities,” according to the report by the UN watch-dog.
Iran has been accused of “…being slow to respond to IAEA requests for further information “concerning the construction of ten new uranium enrichment facilities,” the sites for five of which have been decided and only one of which has begun construction.” That’s far different from being ready to arm a long range missile with a nuclear warhead – in fact it’s not the same thing at all.
There is apparently only “…circumstantial evidence, provided by Western intelligence sources, that Iran has engaged in research and development activities which are “strong indicators of possible weapon development.” No direct evidence, however, is provided of an active weaponization program; the report’s concerns mostly arise from the absence of evidence disproving weaponization.
Did you get that? What evidence the IAEA claims to have comes from the same Western intelligence sources that have been beating the drums for war for some time now while baselessly claiming that the Iranians are a threat. And their concerns are about the absence of evidence disproving weaponization! That’s an insane reason to impose sanctions, let alone wage war. But it does this sound like the same kind of rhetoric that was heard before the illegal war on Iraq. It’s not out of the question that Iran could be pursuing such weapons, but it would likely be to ensure that they don’t find themselves the victims of attacks from the outside. They represent no threat to the west or to the world unless they also possess a desire to be incinerated.
There’s no war on poverty taking place in the US, but they are arguing about how to define it. The latest estimate says 16% of Americans lived in poverty in 2010. There’s only one word necessary to describe that, shameful.
There has been a war on the poor and it’s what the Occupy Wall Street Movement is about. It’s been going on for decades now …but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Over at Alternet you can find a Francis Fox Piven piece that a great job chronicling the numbers and the moral force behind tackling this ongoing assault on the poor.Some numbers to consider: Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children.
In the US, there’s also the war on the elderly and their pension plans. CNN’s reprehensible Candy Crowley …badgered the Director of the AARP, David Certner about whether seniors are going to be willing to “put skin in the game” when it comes to getting our budget deficits under control. That’s right – don’t tax millionaires and billionaires. Go after the pension plans that seniors paid into their entire working lives and deprive them of a decent retirement and dignity. Seems the wealthy won’t be happy until the elderly are living on cat food.
The war on the environment is being championed by those at Fox News, and this week they are pretending to have uncovered a “scandal,” …claims that IPCC reports “have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study. Well, they left out some rather important and pertinent facts. Turns out that there were over 450 lead authors for the 2007 assessment report, plus 800 contributing authors and more than 2,500 reviewers. Fox identified only one graduate student who worked on the 2007 report. So they spoke about 1 out 1250 authors. I know, I know, it’s shocking that Fox News would engage in this kind of deceit.
Thanks to the changing climate, mountain pine beetles have been waging war on hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines and winning, making this rugged pine a likely victim of extinction in the very near future.
And by the by, the latest research on current climactic conditions finds clear evidence that the global warming we’re witnessing is unprecedented in the past 20,000 years. And remember, climate change come with all kinds of costs, some of the cash. So far in 2011 the costs of extreme weather in the US is upwards of $52 billion dollars! Go to the link and do the math – it’s extraordinary. Seems that prevention would be a money saving idea whose time has long since come.
Going to end this post on a happy note… actually, three of them: There were elections tonight in the US and voters in Mississippi went out and voted down the ghastly personhood amendment which would have defined a fertilized agg as a person. In Ohio voters defeated the anti-labor law Senate Bill 5 which would have stripped workers of their right to collectively bargain. And in Maine the voters defeated a voter suppression law keeping the state’s longstanding practice of same-day voter registration on election day.