Media Friendly

It has been noted by reporters, especially the CBC reporters embedded in the campaigns, that the Harper has been Mr. Congeniality this election. He visits them with beer in hand on his plane, socializes. Same with Jack Layton who whips out the guitar to sing Kumabia and some old labour hymns.

Whereas His Royal Highness Paul Martin has locked himself away in the front of the plane unavailable to reporters. Scott Feschuk his royal jester blogs that despite this being a none issue, whether one is media friendly or not, the real reason for PMPM hiding in the front of the plane is that he is practicing his ole soft shoe.

The Prime Minister, meanwhile, HAS NOT gone to the back of the plane (although in his defence, the annual PMO mambo contest is coming up soon, and heand Sheila need to put in some serious floor time if they have a hope ofdethroning me and Scott Reid).

Tags Canada Federal Election Liberals politics Blogs Paul Martin

Guns and Butter for Conservatives

Back to the Guns and Butter economics.

Well the Conservatives are promising to shell out $5.3 million in waste, err military spending.

As the old guns and butter formula in economics teaches us, guns cost more and are a waste, butter costs less and is good for people from farmers to consumers. Butter better, guns waste.

Hmm wonder where Harper got his economics degree from, Stalin U? Under Stalin butter was sacrificed, Ukrainians starved, but heavy machine industry grew in the Soviet Union, and they produced the Stalin Tank, percursor to the German Panzer.

Under Harpers plan he may say he wants to build more battleships, frigates, etc. however there is no matching industrial plan for Canada to become self sufficient in industrial production for military harware. The old corporatist monopolies, the Irvings on the East Coast and Bombadier in Quebec would be the only bidders for these contracts. All other companies in Canada are now U.S. subsidaries.

What the Liberals have wrought, as Mulroney did before them, is the destruction of Canada's indigineous ship builidng and aircraft manufacturing industries. Which is why we have been buying used submarines and faulty helicopters and a pending bid on a failed Hercules, because we no longer have the industrial infrastructure needed to create these war machines.

The destruction of Canada's military industrial complex, as embryonic as it was, is the earliest form of privatization and contracting out of jobs in our manufacturing sectior in order to court favour with our NATO allies. What we couldn't provide in troops and material we made up for in contracts for used military goods as well as open skies and ranges for NATO training excercises.

Digital Payola

The new age of payola scandals continues to rock the corporate recording monopolies yet again. This time its the folks who cried foul over napster now conspiring to maintain a price monopoly on your downloads. Guess they need the money to run all those anti-piracy ads. New York probes price-fixing in digital music

Haiti Quebec's Shame

Yves Engler, Paul Maritn heckler, the writer and director of a film critical of Canada's role in the coup de dat on Aristide in Haiti has an excellent column in today's Toronto Star. The Bloc and Liberals align on Haiti policy

In an earlier article I refered to Haiti as Canada's colony, perhaps the actual term should be Quebecs colony. As Engler says;

Reuters and Associated Press have reported numerous police killings of
unarmed protesters over the past 18 months. On June 28, UN Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, described the situation in Cap Haitien, the country's second largest city, as worse than that in Sudan's devastated Darfur region.
More recently, Thierry Faggart, director of the human rights section for the UN mission in Haiti, admitted that the post-coup human rights situation is "catastrophic."
Yet Canadian-funded NGOs working in Haiti (largely based in Quebec) who criticized the Aristide
government and called for his removal remain curiously silent on the abysmal record of the interim government.
Officials from the Quebec Federation of Labour blocked a resolution originating in English-Canada union locals criticizing Canada's role in Haiti at the Canadian Labour Congress's annual
convention in June.
Even Quebec-based Alternatives, a "progressive" news organization that receives CIDA funding for work in Haiti, effectively supports the Liberal government despite growing grassroots opposition to Canada's
shameful role in Haiti.
Why are the Bloc and Quebec "left" organizations siding with what has been described as "Canadian imperialism" in Haiti? Could it be the numerous Quebec-based companies that do business there? Or the diaspora that sent many members of the Haitian elite to Montreal? Or the fact that the Aristide government promoted the Creole language at the expense of French?

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And now a word from Quebec

The next leader of the CPC will be from Quebec. Once again the rumour mill is running in Quebec that high ranking Conservatives are planning to oust the Harper if he loses this election. Comments to that effect were made on Mike Duffy's show prior to the Christmas election break.

Several high ranking Conservatives in Quebec are suggesting that the Conservatives need a leader from Quebec in order to win an election in Canada.The fallout over the Conservatives Western Canadian leadership continues from the fall.

They have dismissed Peter Mckay as a potential leader instead focusing on the current candidate from Pontiac if he gets elected, or failing that some old Conservative hacks from the Mulroney era. Either way, the night of the long knives will begin on January 24 should Harper lose again.

The Conservatives maybe Her Majestys Loyal Opposition on that day, but the party will disintegrate into faction fights that have been patched over in order to win this election. Conservative unity will be tested should they not gain seats in Quebec, the Maritimes and lose seats in Ontario, and the prairies, sans Alberta. This is a fragile party held together not by policy but by sealing wax and string, and Harpers ego.


Also See:

Tory Watch

Harper



Tags Canada Federal Election Conservative politics Quebec Stephen Harper

Gay Cowboys

The proverbial manure has hit the fan, and will continue to, over the movie Brokeback Mountain, because of its depiction of homosexuality on the open range. Queer Thoughts ~ News for the Gay Community has reviews and will have the Christian Conservative response to the movie on his blog. I left him this comment, without links, so I have added them here and expanded on it.

Whats interesting is that gay cowboy culture was first mentioned in the CD and Book Who Built America a working class history of the U.S. and caused such a fuss that Dick Cheney's wife, Lynn, when she was head of the Endowment for the Humanities under Bush I,attacked it. Now I am not saying this was the only mention, the Journal Radical History also had a good article on Gay Cowboy culture, History of Manhood in America by Bruce Dorsey in 1996. But it too came out after Who Built America. Lynns fury over the gay cowboy section of this CD caused Apple to pull it at the time, they were including it in a bundle with several other encyclopedias for the Mac.

The real Cowboys.

The truth is stranger than friction to misquote T Bone Slim, and such is the case with the John Wayne, John Ford, Hollywood and Zane Grey's fictional characterization of cowboys in the North American prairies. Cowboys are not merely an American phenomena but one that stretches from Mexico to Canada. Their real story is the story of Capitalist expansion westerward after the Civil War.

Home on the Range: Richard Phillips

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of
the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism
emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European
capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing
appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in
freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle;
mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand,
blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely;
pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. In
the late 1930s writers employed by the Federal Writers Project in Texas interviewed more than 400 cowboys, providing some of the only firsthand sources
about late 19th-century cowboys. In this interview, cowboy Richard Phillips
offered a firsthand glimpse of the hard life that awaited the men who trailed
cattle to market.

And like the masculine/male relationships in pirate culture why should we should be surprised to discover a gay cowboy culture, or even a female drag culture ( Annie Oakely comes to mind) in the North American west? For that matter why should we assume that all cowboys were white? In Alberta the first cowboy of renown was John Ware, a black cowboy and rodeo legend. Cowboy culture was far from the red neck stereotype so affectionately embraced today. And we can expect to hear the gnashing of teeth and the whining from the right wing as yet another historical fiction bites the dust.

For those who don't know the story of Mr. John Ware, he rightly deserves
his reputation. His cowboy skills were legendary, and contrary to the popular
Hollywood image of cowboys, he was a gentleman, led an honest, moral life, and
was a loving father. His work was extremely difficult, as the working conditions
were as harsh as could be possible, and in those days there was not much in the
way of assistance if he became injured or disabled. Cowboys were responsible for
the well-being of cattle as they were moved from ranch to ranch or from
pastureland to pastureland. They had to protect them against poachers and from
wild animals, and they had to keep them from wandering away from the herd (in
the days when the great plains of Western United States and Canada were not
fenced off).

Tags
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Brokeback Mountain
Gay
cowboys
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movies
history
Lyn Cheney
Who Built America

Take Tasers Away from Cops

As I wrote here its time to remove tasers from the cops. The Canadian Mental Health association agrees. Police training inadequate, mental health advocates say
"Certainly the use of non-lethal weapons is preferable, but here we have an incident where Tasers are not non-lethal." Yep I said that too.

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Taser / police

After Klander

In the aftermath of le affair Klander Paul Wells made this very funny comment:

"What can you say to stop people from extended reverie about how cowboy hats make people look gay? I mean, I'm not sure what warning would have forstalled that.''



Meanwhile the fallout from Klander has also hit the blogoshpere in general, inditing both Liberal and Conservative blogs for their intolerance and general nastiness. And the target of these attacks, are more often than not the NDP. Unfortunately giving them advertising like this just drives up their visitor numbers and puffs up their egos.

Blogging could come back to haunt some bloggers

Another blogger who describes himself as a supporter of Liberal candidate Deborah Coyne, describes her opponent, NDP Leader Jack Layton, as a "carpetbagger" that he doesn't like.
"I don't like Jack Layton, let's get that out of the way," Tyler King wrote at http://tyking.blogspot.com.
"I'll be spending as much of my holidays as possible on Deborah Coyne's campaign to unseat Jack."
A posting titled "Bye! Bye! Tommy 'Commie' Douglas!" at www.vivelecanada.ca isn't much nicer.
"Tommy Douglas was an idealist, but not a realist. This scumbag really believed that eliminating choice and taxing the crap out of the public was the best way of 'caring' for people. Douglas is a piece of crap.
Toss his 'legacy' in the garbage next to the graves of all those who died waiting/mistreated by this failed public health care system," Loonie wrote.
But the raving opinions, off-colour insults and offensive language seen in many election blogs are prime examples of what could one day come back to haunt the bloggers, many of them wannabe politicians

And even Shelia Copps got into le affair Klander, she knew the guy since he was a young wannabe politician. Her comment reflects the problem with many Liberal blogs, and of course the same can be said for Blogging Torys.

His blog struck me as stunning in its ignorance. No depth there, simply hate. Martin good, everyone else bad.

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Martial Law

Well it's not only the Harper that wants to bring in troops into Canadian cities, now its his fundamentalist backers that want to do the same thing, in T.O. This same dingbat called for the return of the War Measures Act last time there was a shooting in T.O. now he wants full blown Martial Law, to protect the (white) middle class from them (coloured) folks in the high rise crime zones.

And why is he a dingbat, cause the killers are members of his Christian congregation, so how come he ain't instilled in them the respect for the 10 comandments and moral values that he espouses. Yep he would rather blame society than his own failure to enforce the morality of his religious teachings. Gee Pastor, whats so hard to understand about Thou Shalt Not Kill.

A Toronto-area pastor says enough is enough and yesterday stepped up callsfor up to 8,000 soldiers to be deployed in Toronto to help root out gunmen
plaguing the city."We have had this scenario of killings all summer,"
said Pastor Allan Bowen, of the Abundant Life Assembly in suburban
Etobicoke. "TheBoxing Day shootings have all the earmarks of those in
the troubled areas." Bowen has attended or officiated over the funerals
of at least 10 men, somewhom were suspected gang members, murdered last
summer in the Jane-Finch area. "They (city leaders) have to call in the
army," he said yesterday. "There isno end in sight for the killings."

Instead of "turn the other cheek," this is what he wants.

Klandernacht

In the world of the blogs Paul Wells kicked it off Christmas day, revealing a High Powered Liberal insiders racist blog attacking other party candidates of colour. By the end of the weekend it resulted in the shutting down of his blog and his resignation for offensive racist comments and pictures of both an NDP candidate and a Conservative who were NOT white folks. Mike Klander resigned according to the Globe and Mail butLiberal spokesman Stephen Heckbert said: Mr. Klander, who could not be reached for comment, has a strong record of inclusiveness, he said. Yep he included people of colour in his attacks and only people of colour.

His intention was to have a humorous site with some biting humour that he and some fellow Liberals could [read]. He recognized there's a couple of things that crossed the line."

Well his blog was PUBLIC, he had not made it private, dummy, and even if he had made it as an inside party joke well its still racist and offensive. For a cross section of responses from the right and left in the blogosphere check here.

The Globe and Mail header is also misleading; Liberal resigns over vulgar blog

Vulgar denotes common, or bad taste, which is make light of what Mr. Klander really did. His blog was Racist, in the extreme. And aimed so. Against others. Comparing Olivia Chow with a Chinese Chow dog, with pictures is not vulgar, it is obscene and racist. If any thing wit was certainly not an off colour joke, but a joke at the expense of people of colour running in this election. But then what do you expect from the Globe and Mail with their connections to the Liberal campaign.

What was vulgar was Scott Reids remarks about Beer and Popcorn. Mr. Klander went even further over the edge. And got caught. So far the blogs in this election have had quite an impact contrary to comments made by Warren Kinsella.

The word vulgar now brings to mind off-color jokes and offensive epithets, but it once had more neutral meanings. Vulgar is an example of pejoration, the process by which a word develops negative meanings over time. The ancestor of vulgar, the Latin word vulgāris (from vulgus, “the common people”), meant “of or belonging to the common people, everyday,” as well as “belonging to or associated with the lower orders.” Vulgāris also meant “ordinary,” “common (of vocabulary, for example),” and “shared by all.” An extension of this meaning was “sexually promiscuous,” a sense that could have led to the English sense of “indecent.” Our word, first recorded in a work composed in 1391, entered English during the Middle English period, and in Middle English and later English we find not only the senses of the Latin word mentioned above but also related senses. What is common may be seen as debased, and in the 17th century we begin to find instances of vulgar that make explicit what had been implicit. Vulgar then came to mean “deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement.” From such uses vulgar has continued to go downhill, and at present “crudely indecent” is among the commonest senses of the word.


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