Comrade Kate of SDA

Will wonders never cease, the entire Conservative movement in Canada appears to be moving to the Left. First Comrade Harper keeps talking about 'Canadian workers' and 'working families', which is only a hop skip and a jump to him saying 'working class'.

Then Edmonton Centre candidate Laurie Hawn joins Federal Prison Guard Union members in Solidarity Forever.

Now Kate McMillan from Small Dead Animals in her latest blog on CBC quotes Vladimir Illich Lenin. No really. She quotes Comrade Lenin.

Now of course if I quote Comrade Lenin then I get accused of being a Lefty. But if Kate quotes him well..... ok lets put it in context. She really is NOT supporting a return of Red Toryism in the Conservatives she is attacking her favorite bug a boo, socialised day care. Ok and she is attacking socialized health care.

Lets deal with the former first. In her blog she says;

But that anyone would propose that government "knows best" when it comes to early learning and child care is nothing short of frightening.

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." - Vladimir Lenin

Oh that clever Lenin, he surely is responsible for the Liberals and NDP day care policies. I bet they hired him as a disembodied advisor. But wait this quote sounds familar. Hmmm let us google around for a minute and see what we find.....
Oh dear Lenin was paraphrasing that famous Jesuit quote:

"Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards."

And since this has been the core philosophy of Catholic Education, I wonder if Kate is as frightened of the Church knowing best. Specially since Canada is a Catholic country. Perhaps not by government edict but certainly by census, if not concensus. Of course she doesn't mind Church indoctrination. Like most Blogging Tory's she is all in favour of private delivery of services by the Church. Moral values and all that. But the government funding secular non profit daycares, oh heaven forbid such interference in our individual and family lives.

Instead she makes a straw man out of Lenin, raises the bugaboo of daycare as a communist plot, not unlike the old red scares around flouride back in the early sixties. Except she says nothing at all about education having always been the delivery of ideology by the Church or State.

The only free school movement that has historically existed is not what Kate has in mind. No siree it has been Anarchist, starting with Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School Movement in Spain in opposition to the Catholic Education system in that country.

Early in the summer of 1908, after his release from jail, he wrote the story of the Modern School. The work was entitled The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School and was translated into English by Joseph McCabe and published by the Knickerbocker Press in 1913.

Following the declaration of martial law in 1909 during the Tragic Week, he was arrested and executed without any proof by firing squad at Montjuich Fortress in Barcelona on October 12.

Shortly after his execution, numerous supporters of Ferrer's ideas in the United States formed what were called Modern Schools, or Ferrer Schools, modeled after la Escuela Moderna. The first and most notable Modern School was formed in New York City in 1911.

Coincidental with the anarchist Modern School Movement was the Summerhill Free School movement in Germany which moved to England and influenced the homeschooling movement of the early sixties.

Summerhill: the early days

Summerhill was founded in 1921 in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden. It was part of an International school called the Neue Schule. There were wonderful facilities there and a lot of enthusiasm, but over the following months Neill became progressively less happy with the school. He felt it was run by idealists – they disapproved of tobacco, foxtrots and cinemas – while he wanted the children to live their own lives. He said:

I am only just realising the absolute freedom of my scheme of Education. I see that all outside compulsion is wrong, that inner compulsion is the only value. And if Mary or David wants to laze about, lazing about is the one thing necessary for their personalities at the moment. Every moment of a healthy child's life is a working moment. A child has no time to sit down and laze. Lazing is abnormal, it is a recovery, and therefore it is necessary when it exists.

Together with Frau Neustatter (later his first wife), Neill moved his school to Sonntagsberg in Austria. The setting was idyllic – a castle on top of a mountain – but the local people, a Catholic community, were hostile.

By 1923 Neill had moved to the town of Lyme Regis in the south of England, to a house called Summerhill where he began with 5 pupils. The school continued there until 1927, when it moved to the present site at Leiston in the county of Suffolk, taking the name of Summerhill with it.

Yep social engineering is what Kate opposes, of course unless its delivered by the private sector as a commodity. Or perhaps by the church through access to public school funds or through religious based home schooling (an extension of Sunday School).

That is what she wants for day care, education and health care. She calls these commodities, at least she is honest about her capitalist apologetics. She wants all this delivered by the private sector. Or in an unregulated fashion, such as Baba babysitting, which is all the Conservative plan pays for.

Where she is not honest is of course her revisionist history of Canada and our social programs. She rely's upon her reading of American right wing propaganda and applying it uncritically to Canada. Lets look at Medicare for instance.

In her same blog item she says this about Medicare.

With the generation who remember life without socialized medicine slowly passing into history, the nation fully indoctrinated with the belief that the words "commodity" and "right" are interchangable, the Liberals have decided to welcome a future voting demographic to the concept that "babysitting" is a government responsiblity.

Oh what generation is that Kate? You obviously missed my blog about how Socialized Medicine Began in Alberta, even before it began in Saskatchewan.

And it was demanded by the ruling classes, the political powers that be, in the medical establishment as well as the government, and it was introduced by a right wing government; Social Credit. It began in the 1940's.

So there has not been a modern generation without Medicare in Canada except your grandparents, when they were children. After WWII every Canadian that came home from the fight for freedom was prepared to fight for social programs, cause when they left home there had been a depression and no social programs and when they returned they were not prepared to settle for less than the current social programs we enjoy. If they hadn't gotten them there would have been a revolution. Which is why Keynsian economics was used to createthe welfare state.

But Kate the historical revisionist denies all this.

Mind you Medicare as it existed in Alberta and Saskatchewan were different then Medicare is today. And different from the private insurance policies that folks in other provinces lived under. And I don't imagine that generation wants to return to that.

Nope they are seniors now and they ain't much in mood to listen to wet behind the ears whippersnappers like Kate tell them that what they consider a right should now be sold back to them as a commodity. Nope. Thats why they vote. And they vote in large numbers. And they vote to keep pensions, medicare, etc. They are the most vocal defenders of the status quo, cause they and their parents fought for it and built this country around those rights that Kate would sell off.

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Conservatives Turn Left

In a stunning move to the left Edmonton Centre Conservative Candidate Laurie Hawn called a media scrum to exploit, err expose the plight of Federal Jail Guards and their union which have been without a contract for five years. But before Laurie could start singing Solidarity Forever, he was turfed from the jail.

Now these guards of course are under the jurisdiction of the last Liberal left standing in Alberta; Anne McLellan, whom he is running against.

Blogging Tory Civitatensis blogged about this to which I left this reply;

Gee is this the same Conservative party that has Rob Anders as an MP the same Rob Anders who opposes Forced Unionization....and wants Right to Work laws....do I smell opportunism here...yep smells pretty strong too.

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CTV scoops CBC

Yesterday morning as CBC ran Don Newmans Politics show, 10 AM EST and CPAC ran their Talk Radio show CTV NEWSNET scooped them both and ran Jack Laytons Pharmacare announcement from Windsor live. Don only quoted from the press release in his discussion with the Media wonks from the Three Party War Rooms.

And Jacks announcement was original not a retread or 'me too' like the Liberals and Conservatives who announced identical Immigration Head Tax and Health Care plans. Tweedledee and Tweedledum indeed.

Yep I am more and more impressed with CTV on the election than I am CBC, and even more so now that Angry in the Great White North is praising CBC for its coverage of the Harper.

When Blogging Torys like CBC, cause they publish racist Kate of SDA, and say nice things about Harper, are right wing phone pledges for public broadcasting far behind?..."its the end of the world as we know it."


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Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

Read it and weep. The US intelligence community bungles again. This is another case of SPY VS. SPY. Bad enough that Iran got its nuclear material and bomb making information from America's new found friend Pakistan. Now it turns out the CIA in a dirty tricks operation screwed up and actually gave them bomb blueprints.

US blunder aided Iran's atomic aims, book claims

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian

The CIA may have helped Iran to design a nuclear bomb through a botched attempt to channel flawed blueprints to Tehran's weapon designers, according to a new book on the US "war on terror".

In an excerpt from State of War, printed today in G2, the author and New York Times intelligence correspondent, James Risen, writes that the abortive operation misfired when a Russian defector on the CIA payroll, chosen to deliver the deliberately flawed nuclear warhead blueprints to Iranian officials in February 2000, tipped them off about the defects.

The operation, codenamed Merlin and approved by the Clinton administration, was intended to send Iranian scientists down a technological dead end, according to this account. They would spend years building a warhead which would fail to detonate. Instead, Risen writes, the operation may have helped Iran to "accelerate its weapons development" by extracting important information from the blueprints and ignoring the flaws.

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Coal Mine Disaster No Accident

(CNN) -- As family members waited for word on the fate of the 13 West Virginia miners trapped in the Sago Mine, they looked up to God and north to Pennsylvania's Quecreek Mine. Both gave them hope.

"Whatever did God do for us?"

Anger over false news of US miners' survival It was a mistake, families told, after hailing news of miners' survival

A Disaster in the Making

There are no such things as accidents in coal mining. Never have been never will be. Accidents, acts of god, do not occur in coal mines. What happens is that the company fails to provide for the safety of its workers, by cutting corners. Lack of safety precautions or inspections, lack of follow up, poor mining practices, these are the causes of miners deaths.

This is what happened in Canada's worst coal mine explosions such as Hillcrest in Alberta, Springhill in Nova Scotia and the recent disaster at Westray in Nova Scotia.

As we move towards increasing reliance on coal due to energy shortages, and the need for coal for power plants such as those in Ontario will mean the opening of more mines reviving old mines, and in some cases strip mining. Underground mining of coal is by far the most dangerous. It is why we associate the canary with coal mining because of the methane gases given off by coal.

Increased production of coal will mean more speed ups in the mines, ignoring safety regulations and inspections, more fast buck risks taken by the investors for quick profits and thus higher risks for the workers who mine King Coal.

This is what occured this week in West Virginia. Sago mine was plagued with problems that inspectors found and the company failed to resolve. Which of these was the cause of this weeks explosion and disaster will be discovered soon enough but the companies record of violations and roof falls, only show that this was no'accident' but a disaster that was waiting to happen sooner or later.

The International Coal Group was formed in 2004, when business entrepreneur Wilbur Ross Jr. led a group that bought many of the assets of Horizon Natural Resources in a bankruptcy auction.

Last year, ICG bought Anker, which previously owned Sago. The company has mining operations in West Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland and owned or controlled approximately 707 million tons of coal as of Jan. 1, 2005.

The Sago Mine was cited 208 times over alleged safety violations in 2005, up from just 68 citations the year before, The Associated Press reported. Federal regulators' allegations against the Sago Mine included failure to dilute coal dust, which can lead to explosions, and failure to properly operate and maintain machinery, according to the AP report.

Sago Has A History of Safety Violations

In 2005, the government proposed fines for Anker, the company that operates the Sago Mine, that total almost $25,000 for violations; the company has paid a little more than $14,000 (so far).

Only a few weeks ago, the feds cited the company for a number of violations, but inspectors did not propose any fines. According to the MSHA chart, the most recent Sago Mine violations have not yet been assessed. (Click on the "Standard" column to see the specific violation for each item listed.)

Among the December 2005 inspector findings were fire-extinguisher violations and violations for surface (above-ground) travelways such as railways. There were three violations issued just since Dec. 18, 2005 regarding a "roof control plan."

The mine was also cited less than a month ago for allowing coal dust to accumulate. Last month, the mine was cited (not fined) for not having proper atmospheric monitoring systems.

In November, inspectors did propose fines for inadequate mine ventilation and inadequate roof bolts.

MSHA has been updating information on the West Virginia mine on its Web site.

---

History of Accidents

Many of the accidents include unintentional roof falls. The Charleston Gazette explored the roof-fall angle under the notion that the series of recent minor roof falls may have been an indication that the mine needed to fix roofing problems. The paper said: Three of the roof falls occurred after International Coal Group finalized its purchase of the Anker operation in mid-November.

Mining Accident Raises Broader Safety Questions

The mining disaster at West Virginia's Sago Mine has raised new questions about safety in an industry that has long been among the most dangerous in America.

Tougher government regulation and technology improvements have helped reduce mining accidents over the past two decades. But at a time of increased mining demand and a shortage of skilled workers, safety problems have continued to dog the industry, contributing to more than 300 fatalities since the year 2000.

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Dead Men Tell No Tales

Nor do dead women. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists , 47 journalists were murdered doing their jobs last year. At least half in Iraq. Which may be the reason the Pentagon saw fit to publish their own good news stories and plant them in the Iraqi press. Just covering for all those journalists murdered by friendly fire.....

Iraq still remains the most dangerous place for journalists: 22 journalists lost their lives there in 2005. A total of 60 journalists have been killed on duty in Iraq from the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 through the end of 2005. That number surpasses the 58 journalists killed in the Algerian conflict from 1993 to 1996.

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Harper Runs from the Centre Rules from the Right

I just can't get over how many times the Harper announces he is for 'working families' in Canada, messaging usually associated with the Left and the NDP in particular. He has talked about workers and workng families through out this campaign. And as I wrote here before, he wants to be the friend of blue collar Canadians.

But has the leopard really changed his spots? Well no. He doesn't eliminate the GST he reforms it, chips away at it a percentage here and there. Does he eliminate the Liberal immigration Head Tax? Nope he chips away at it, leaving it reduced to $100. He does things half way. He doesn't support more day care spaces, he gives working Canadians a tax credit instead.

But is this a new Harper, as flawed as his positions are, really appealing to the needs of working class Canadians? Not really says an excellent column in todays Winnipeg Free Press. Which because it is a subscriber only page I am reprinting here in case it no longer sits in the Google cache after today. And besides he says exactly what I have been saying all along.

Canadians terrified of Harper's real plans

Wed Jan 4 2006

FRANCES RUSSELL

WITH the wind at their backs from NDP leader Jack Layton's calls for a change in government and a cheerleading national media, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are cruising at 54 per cent in the polls, just as Brian Mulroney was in April 1984.

Well, no.

After almost two years of all-scandal, all-the-time, the Free Press headline Monday summed it up best: "It's Tories by a nose in new poll." All other surveys still show the Liberals tied or with a slim lead.

How can this be? How can the Liberals even be close after the gaffes, the insensitivity, the dithering, the lack of focus, the culture of entitlement, the arrogance and yes, the scandals? Not to mention the 22 months of the most relentlessly negative campaign in Canadian history, staged by Harper's Conservatives.

Part of it may be public turnoff from the daily battering of words like "corrupt," "corruption," "organized crime," "criminal conspiracy" and worse, spilling daily from the Conservatives, amplified by most of the media. Like battery acid, it's corroded the civility of our political culture and is driving voters away from the ballot box in droves.
But mostly it's because, furious as all Canadians are at Liberal sins, they remain terrified of Stephen Harper and the direction he would take the country.

Like the Bush Republicans, the Harper Conservatives set groups in society against each other. Like Bush Republicans, they govern for the secure and affluent, for the "have mores," as President George W. Bush once memorably described them. And like Margaret Thatcher, they don't believe in society, only in individuals.

Their idea of public policy, as a prominent New Democrat once put it, is to give everybody a bucket of gravel and tell them to go out and build a highway.

It sounds so democratic to give individuals money to "choose." But Conservative promises of taxable allowances and credits, for day care, for public transit passes, for private but not public pensions and for children's amateur sports, don't create public services available to all. They just help individuals with above average incomes. Taxable allowances and credits do nothing for people who don't pay taxes and little for people who earn a modest living.

The single mother working at Wal-Mart on minimum wage can't benefit from a taxable allowance for child care. She needs a subsidized child- care space, a space that won't be available. A tax credit for a bus or subway pass isn't any use to her either if she can't afford all that money at once or if there is no public transit to use. As for the tax credit for sports equipment, she needs it for food and rent.

Harper's $400 million for individual transit tax credits would be better used assisting municipalities to improve their public transit systems. His $1,200 per child taxable allowance is of no use if there is no quality child care to be bought at any price. And his $250 million for new child care spaces is conditional on those spaces being provided by business through tax credits, hardly comparable to the Liberals' universal national childcare program, modelled after universal public education.

The senior relying on the Canada Pension, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement is by definition worse off than the senior with a private pension. But the worse-off senior gets nothing from the Harper Conservative plan for tax credits for private pensions only.

Harper says his plan to station the military in big cities is to deal with natural disasters. But it has sinister connotations of a U.S.-style security state and is far more likely to be about social control.

As the gun violence currently plaguing Toronto illustrates, there is blowback from government policies designed to punish certain groups in society simply because they are disadvantaged. Toronto today is reaping the whirlwind that the former Conservative government of Mike Harris sowed when it slashed welfare rates by 22 per cent and terminated social housing. And Torontonians should take note that several former Harris cabinet ministers are running on the Harper ticket.
In addition to squandering billions on tax allowances and credits to well-off Canadians, Harper intends to cut the GST by two percentage points, transfer a substantial number of tax points to the provinces as he takes Ottawa out of national programs and further slashes personal and corporate incomes taxes.

Vancouver entrepreneur Jayson Kaplan recently returned to Canada from the U.S. In a letter posted on the Politics Canada website, Kaplan is urging his fellow Canadians to see the close similarities between Harper and Bush. He says Harper is using Bush's 2000 election strategy, allaying voter fears by promising to be a "compassionate" conservative, not to intrude the state into matters like abortion and only to spend "projected surpluses." Once in office, Bush did the exact opposite.

"Voting for Stephen Harper is like voting for George Bush," Kaplan writes. "The two are just too similar in their campaigns and their beliefs for it to be a coincidence."

FrancesRussell@mts.net

My Columns on Harper

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The First Attack Ads

In all the discussion about who will launch the first attack ads in this campaign everyone forgets it was the NDP who did so with their "The Gift" Give the Liberals The Boot ad. The y did it back before Christmas. And it was done right, with humour. Laughter is the most effective weapon because it ridicules rather than scares.

NDP `taking it up a notch' on airwaves

The NDP's first two English-language ads have only been gently negative, presenting lighthearted criticism of the governing party. The New Democrats' pre-Christmas ad, for example, reminded viewers that all the Liberals had given Canadians this holiday season was a lump of coal, but they'd given their Liberal friends big gifts. Then, it encouraged voters to turn around and give the Liberals "the boot" this holiday season. Although critical of the Liberals, its witty approach softened any blows.

But the boot is gone and gloves are off as the NDP prepare to launch two new attack ads. 19 Days and counting.

the New Democrats are set to release a pair of new ads, one that hammers the Liberals' record and another that pushes the NDP agenda as the only possible option for voters come Jan 23.

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Gotcha!

Poor deluded Herr Patels he likes to call people names but can't take it when he is outed for his blogosphere political identity psychosis. But hey I got him to write about me again. Thanks Werner. He has however learned not to link to my website when he attacks me, as he did, again today in his blog item Clarifications

As Mark Twain once said; "Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

It appears that the singular author of Alberta Avenue has this problem and I don't think its' because he has tapworms. To be an editor means you actually have someone, other than yourself, to edit. So I will leave it to you dear reader, does this not sound like a case of multipleblog personality psychosis;

Eugene Plawiuk has attacked this online magazine and one of its authors claiming that AlbertaAvenue - The Voice of Alberta does not know where it stands.

This blog claiming to be an online magazine has only ONE author, poor deluded Werner.

He knows full well the Le Revue Gauche is a journal of Libertarian Communism, which is a school of poltical and philosophical anarchism, but he prefers in his haste to comment to shorten it to communist. Either that or he is red-baiting. Could it be? Say it ain't so, in this day and age!

This seems terribly disingenuous for a 'professional' translator of languages. He cannot even translate or even transliterate the term Libertarian Communist correctly. I will not be hiring him to do translations of any Marx or Hegel or heck even Gustav Landauer for me anytime soon. And perhaps this is why as a professional translator he has so much time on his hands.

His current attack on me of course clarifies nothing, it merely repeated his rambling illogic of why he supports the parties he does which I pointed out in my orginal article makes him a certified political opportunist at best or a certiriable nutbar at worst.

So I suggest that since he is planning to run for the Provincial Liberals he should resign immediately rather than wait, since all his blogging will come back to haunt him. Just like it did Klander and Stamp.

No, No, Werner don't thank me I just don't think you are ready to run for any party until you get over your political psychosis. And your overt fixation on gay politicians like Svend Robinson. Which you say is the reason you can't support the NDP......

In addition, we cannot condone their decision to put up an ex-con and jewel thief as a candidate, which goes against their repeated claims of fighting against thieves in government.

And he uses that royal 'We' thingee again just like Her Majesty.

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Tory TV Ad Unrealistic

At least one Blogging Tory has raised concerns that the Conservatives new set of attack ads on TV, may have been a boo boo considering the positive message ads the Liberals launched this week.

There are two Tory ads, one with a grim faced Paul Martin with messaging rolling over it.
The other TV ad is average Canadians in various public locales with a TV going on in the background announcing Liberal scandals. The first scene shows a TV announcement then zooms in on two guys in a Tim Hortons, ok maybe not a Timmys but a coffee shop, and low and behold in front of them is the Globe and Mail, with a headline on another Liberal scandal.

This is completely unrealistic no one in a Canadian coffee shop, or even a Timmies reads the Globe and Mail, they read the Sun. The Sun. It can be found in every major city in Canada including Toronto. The only people who read the Globe and Mail drink lattes at Starbucks, and even then they may be found reading the oversized edition of the Sun; the National Pest. Both papers are available at Starbucks.

Clearly this ad was made in Toronto by latte drinking liberals, out of touch with mainstream Canadian culture. Shame on the Tory's. They could have least brought in their resident expert, on all things Timmy, Monte Solberg to advise them. He would have immediately pointed out this flaw in their props.



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