Mission accomplished
Toby Sanger has a post up at The Progressive Economics Forum discussing the effects of changes the Harper government made to the census. Specifically, the Conservatives eliminated the mandatory census…
pogge
On red lines
Andrew Coyne, arguing in support of an intervention in Syria: Much mockery has been made of U.S. President Barack Obama’s “red line,” as if it were mere macho posturing. Very…
Friday night John Henry blogging
My earliest recollection of a song about John Henry and his hammer involved Harry Belafonte and Carnegie Hall. My father had the album. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a live performance…
Sunday morning: Commodity
This is Guthrie Trapp.
Friday night blues blogging
Good evening. This is a solo piece by Davy Knowles called Saving Myself. I thought he looked pretty young so I did the math: he was 22 when this was…
The Age of Austerity
The government of Ontario is pleased to announce that it’s improving the lot of those who rely on disability and social assistance benefits. Rates are being raised by 1%. Since…
Same shit, different country
Based on recent history, I wouldn’t trust the US and/or UK to lead a military intervention into anything, whatever the stated justification. They’ve consistently lied about their reasons for going…
Friday night blues blogging
You Upset Me Baby was written by B.B. King, whose recording of it was on the R&B charts in 1954. This is Buddy Whittington. Here’s The Allman Brothers Band, featuring…
On watchdogs with no bite
The watchdog charged with keeping tabs on CSEC, Canada’s signals intelligence agency, filed his annual report yesterday and I’d say it justifies recent demands by the federal opposition parties for…
Friday night blues blogging
This is Robert Johnson’s Come On In My Kitchen as performed by Kara Grainger and her band with her brother, Mitch Grainger, on harp. I’ve seen Otis Taylor’s music referred…
QOTD: Michael Harris on the surveillance state
The conclusion to a piece published at iPolitics yesterday: The cancer of the surveillance state, which has metastasized since 9/11, is out of all proportion to any threat it was…
"I’m not one to hide what I do"
Nick Kouvalis in today’s Globe and Mail, responding to the suggestion that he might be working behind the scenes to undermine Tim Hudak’s leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives: Mr.…
Friday night blues blogging
Let’s ease into it. This is Johnnie Bassett fronting the Brothers Groove and the Motor City Horns. He’s still got the blues but now he’s got them in his Fleetwood…
Sunday morning: While You Wait For The Rain
She’s an interesting songwriter. Good morning.
Friday night: RIP JJ Cale
According to his bio at Wikipedia, JJ Cale was considering giving up the music business when Eric Clapton recorded After Midnight in 1970. Cale spent the next forty years writing…
What Bruce Livesay said
Rabble.ca has picked up a piece from The Progressive Economics Forum by Bruce Livesay that discusses, among other things, the large amounts of money in uncollected taxes resulting from corporations…
Doing the math on a living wage
Via David Atkins at Hullabaloo, here’s an article about a business student named Arnobio Morelix who studied McDonald’s annual reports and investors’ data sets and crunched some numbers. He wanted…
Why should CSIS have all the fun?
We learned recently that the policy framework which allows CSIS to trade in information that might be the result of torture, or might lead to torture, or both, was actually…
Friday night: Trains
I’m pleased to be able to report that no Toronto city councillors were injured in the debate over which train songs to include in tonight’s post. This is British blues…
CSEC is just part of a larger picture
About six weeks ago when CSEC, Canada’s signals intelligence agency, was suddenly getting a lot of attention in the media, I wrote that in order to protect our rights as…