Our banks are better....

So says Stephen Harper and his so-called finance minister, Jim Flaherty.

Better than what?

Canadian banks were a constrained bunch of animals which, had they gotten past the finance minister known as Paul Martin, would have created three Canadian mega-banks and would have failed as spectacularly as any of the fallen in the US they lusted to become.

Banking and government sources both say Martin did his utmost to be diplomatic. He did not want to appear to have made up his mind, given that the federal competition bureau would not deliver its report on the mergers for almost two weeks, but he also wanted to prepare the banker for bad news. Like everything else arising from this year’s ill-fated bank mergers, however, this meeting between two of the most powerful figures in Canadian finance went off the rails fairly fast. For weeks, Cleghorn’s fuse had been growing shorter as his frustration mounted over Canadians’ inability to understand the bankers’ point of view. In response to Martin’s evasiveness, something apparently snapped. Cleghorn asked straight out whether the Royal’s merger with the Bank of Montreal, and the Toronto Dominion Bank’s copycat arrangement with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, were going to be allowed to proceed. "No," Martin said simply. Cleghorn, according to both banking and federal government sources, said something along the lines of "No, but . . . ?" or "Unless what?" Martin repeated his first answer. "No."

clip

In one swoop, the finance minister made it clear that government, not business, will decide what shape the country’s banking sector is allowed to take in the years ahead.

Oh, and didn't the banks make it obvious how goddamned furious they were.

But, what Martin had done was to ensure that a single bank failure would not be enough to lay waste to the Canadian economy. The Milton Friedman formula had no place in Canada. Martin was certain that one day, perhaps after he was gone, Canadians would thank him for his stand.

Then came Harper.

Harper handed the reins over to the banks. Luckily he was constrained. There wasn't enough time for the banks to rebuild their old merger deals and Harper, with a minority government, didn't have a lengthy enough forecast lifespan to guarantee the banks enough time to root themselves in a three bank national model. In short, the actuarial tables on Harper's government didn't give the banks enough insurance to prevent a future government from turning any ideas they had back to their former state.

It's a sure bet that had Harper won a majority in his first tenuous arrival in government, Canadians would have been screwed nine ways to Sunday and the effect of the toxic dealings of banks around the world in general would have affected Canada ten times worse than it did.

And then, the meltdown of the century. Banks around the world had been ripped off by the greedy behaviour of those larger than them. That trickled down, credit was cut off and people everywhere started losing their jobs.

Now we are pelted with a constant harangue of Harper telling everyone, including the world, that he commands the world's most stable banking system, and that the Canadian government never bailed out Canadian banks.

Harper and his sock puppets are blatant liars.

Canada did bail out its banks. The difference between the way Canada did it and the methods of any other capitalist democracy is that Canada did it "off book". In other words, it was never a federal budget item. Instead, the charge went against certain Crown Corporations as liabilities.

Sneaky? Yup. Dishonest? Absolutely.

Read this for more.

And you get down on bended knee and thank Paul Martin for saving this country from a certain and long-lasting deep depression.

Bonus! Reginald Stackhouse is having similar thoughts. Looking back at the failure in the mid-1980s of the Northland bank and the Canadian Commercial Bank he makes this point:

... another example of corporations being capitalistic on their way up, but socialistic on their way down. If they could be smug about individual responsibility in good times, they were not too proud to become welfare cases in hard times.

Time's up Harper

Produce.

We want the final written agreement as to how you, leader of the government, plan to meet the superior demands of Parliament.

Or was POGGE 100 percent correct once again?

Unless you believe that the voters, those people who elected more members from other parties other than the Conservatives, have no right to be heard.

How would you like an election call just before your precious little G8/G20 event?

Think Canadians don't want another election? Who cares? As long as your ass hurts after its over.

Getting unprepared for the next Exxon Valdez

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the federal government created six regional advisory panels of volunteer experts to :

• advise on an adequate level of oil spill preparedness and response in each region; and


• to promote public awareness and understanding of issues and measures with respect to preparedness.

"Their mandate is significant," reads the Transport Canada webpage, because :

"they are able to make recommendations on the full range of policy issues affecting regional preparedness and response, and may request information from Transport Canada, Canadian Coast Guard or response organizations on equipment placement, plans, resources, costs, training, exercises, or reviews undertaken of response operations, in pursuit of their mandate to advise and report on the adequacy of preparedness in the region."

Unless of course Transport Canada says they can't.

Over at the Tyee, Mitchell Anderson tells us the Pacific Regional Advisory Council on Oil Spill Response is being gutted:

• Of the seven member panel, five new members replaced last year had to sign a "Letter of Expectation" limiting their meetings to only two half days per year "unless pre-approved by the Regional Transport Canada Office."


• Their travel budget is restricted to attending those two half day meetings. So much for a mandate for research and "promoting public awareness"


• They have been denied access to drafts of changes to marine oil safety regulations on spill response preparedness because Minister Baird regards them as too "confidential" ... but not apparently too confidential to share with an industry based group.

New RAC member Stafford Reid has "20 years of experience in marine vessel risk assessment and spill response preparedness. He served for 17 years as an emergency planning specialist for the B.C. government." Reid asks The Tyee's Anderson :

"how the government or industry can hope to have public buy-in on new oil spill regulations when the review process is not even open to the committee of experts who are charged under federal law with advising the minister, let alone coastal communities or First Nations."

Anderson : "What is puzzling is why, at the very moment that tanker traffic is poised to increase on the B.C. coast, Transport Canada has seemingly weakened Pacific RAC's ability to monitor the shaping of key regulations, advise decision makers all the way to the top, and communicate with a worried public haunted by images of the Gulf oil catastrophe."

No, Mr. Anderson, sadly it really isn't all that puzzling. They'd just get in the way.

Enbridge seeks nod for Pacific oil gateway

Enbridge has asked Canadian regulators for permission to build its controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, which would carry crude from Alberta's oil sands to the Pacific Coast.

The C$5.5 billion (US$5.2 billion) project would move up to 525,000 barrels a day of oil from Alberta to the port of Kitimat, British Columbia, giving Asia direct access to Canada's vast oil sands via tankers. The line would also be used to import condensate.
Enbridge has said it wants the Northern Gateway line in operation by 2016."

Here there be weasels . . .

HARPER'S MAGAZINE has a chilling article, "Silencing the Lawyers", by Scott Horton. Of Gitmo:

What happened to the 600–800 Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders for whom the prison was originally conceived? We now have a pretty good idea. In the late fall of 2001, military operations in Afghanistan were successful, and Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership figures had fled to two last redoubts—the city of Kunduz in the northeast, and the Tora Bora region along the Pakistani frontier. But for reasons known only to him, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered a halt to the bombardment of Kunduz and opened an air corridor to allow the Pakistani military to airlift the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders out of Kunduz. The maneuver was ridiculed by one U.S. military official present at the time as “Operation Evil Airlift.” The United States quickly moved to fill Gitmo with nobodies. With that fact now becoming painfully apparent, you’d think that Congress would be calling for an investigation into how original plans for Gitmo were botched—specifically how the Al Qaeda and Taliban figures for whom it was built evaded capture in the face of one of the most powerful military forces ever fielded in Afghanistan. That could well be one of the most significant “lessons learned” of the war.

Here, there be weasels.

Corrupt, dirty and on the take...

“The conduct exhibited by Mr. Mulroney in accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Mr. Schreiber on three separate occasions, failing to record the fact of the cash payments, failing to deposit the cash into a bank or other financial institution, and failing to disclose the fact of the cash payments when given the opportunity to do so goes a long way, in my view, to supporting my position that the financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate.”

Commissioner Jeffrey Oliphant

Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations
respecting Business and Financial Dealings
Between Karlheinz Schreiber and
the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney

Commissioner Oliphant added a few pointed words: (My emphasis)

“I am driven to conclude that it is virtually impossible that Mr. Mulroney committed the same significant error in judgment on three separate occasions. It seems to me that, given Mr. Mulroney’s education, background, experience, and business acumen, his every instinct would have been, and should have been, to document the transaction in some manner,” he said.

Mr. Oliphant went on to say: “I therefore conclude that the reason Mr. Schreiber made the payments in cash and Mr. Mulroney accepted them in cash was that they both wanted to conceal the fact that cash transactions had occurred between them,” Mr. Oliphant said.

Corrupt, dirty and on the take.

Canadian commander in Afghanistan fired.

For allegedly engaging in an inappropriate intimate relationship with a member of his staff while on duty in Afghanistan.

Hmmm. Same guy who forget to switch his weapon to "safe" when boarding a helicopter and ended up with a "negligent discharge", a court martial and a $3,500 fine.

I have yet to get to the good part. Wait for it....

Michael Yon is laying claim to the "kill".

The interesting part is that Yon's claim might just be true. BruceR explains and, if you wish to connect some dots, shows that Yon has been grinding a personal axe for some time.

The requested backgrounder is in the comments section to this post.

Why the guy who wrote this song is better than Stephen Harper

Stephen Harper never had to be evacuated from his house because it was hit by a V1 flying bomb.



The difference between co-author Keith Richards and Stephen Harper is that Harper will, without hesitation, tell you all about flying bombs hitting houses.

Yo! Opposition parties! This is what an election issue looks like

Globe and Mail online poll G8/G20 May 29, 2010

Security for the billion-dollar boondoggle is being managed by ex-CSIS director Ward Elcock, who also just spent another billion on the Vancouver Olympics security.

Asked why the London G20 expenses clocked in at $30-million last year by comparison, Alcock answered, "Bookkeeping."

I wonder if we could possibly get some of that.

Britain opts for an increase in junk mail... and there is a job opening at Canada Post

Things that fly under the radar. Canada's highest paid bureaucrat is quitting at Canada Post and going for an even higher paying job at... The Royal Mail.

Royal Mail has named Moya Greene as its new chief executive, the first female to be appointed to the role.

Ms Greene, who is currently chief executive of Canada Post, will take up the position at the beginning of July.

Hmmm.... there was probably no need to highlight gender, but that seems to excite the BBC.

Moya Greene, as the highest paid public sector employee in Canada, was constantly at loggerheads with the unions at Canada Post. The unions accused her of signing off on a collective agreement and then promptly making a concerted effort to tear it up.

And if you think Greene was being somewhat over-compensated in her native land, wait until you see what the Brits are going to pay her. (Emphasis mine)

It it understood that she will be on a basic salary of just under £500,000 ($720,000).

The Treasury says that sort of remuneration needs its approval as is above the £142,000 cap the government has placed on public sector salaries.

Anything higher than that needs the permission of the chief secretary to the Treasury, David Laws.

The Royal Mail's position is believed to be that it is a commercial organisation, and therefore does not need the say-so of the government.

The Treasury, when contacted by the BBC, would not say if permission had been either sought, or granted.

This is sounding like a familiar old story.

Royal Mail workers might want to brace themselves. Things could get a little testy in the coming months. In the meantime, UK posties should get used to heavier mail bags and residents will need larger recycle bins.

And since Britain's "new government" is finding expensive Canadians so damned attractive, how about they take Celine Dion, Bryan Adams and David Hahn while their at it.

Now.... who is Harper going to reward with this plum position at Canada Post? If you don't think this new and sudden vacancy is important, you haven't been paying attention.

"No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"

"At the end of the day, [Ethics Committee Chair]Paul Szabo and this kangaroo court have no credibility and no one takes their summons seriously."

So said Con MP Pierre Poilievre in August two years ago when he was only an associate member of the Ethics Committee.
Since becoming fully-fledged, and also Parliamentary Secretary to Steve, his job there is apparently to pipe up "Point of order" every few minutes like some demented Energizer bunny until the Chair finally cuts his mike.

Lib Wayne Easter's spirited response to John Baird's surprise appearance before the Ethics Committee on Tuesday in place of Dimitri Soudas has already been well covered. Soudas cancelled only minutes before the committee convened, in keeping with Steve's new rules forbidding ministerial staffers from appearing before committees.

Chair Paul Szabo at first let Baird speak, setting off an hour of angry opposition motions to dismiss the usurper, interspersed with Poilievre's points! of! order! By contrast, the Con committee members dutifully bent over their brand new talking points on "ministerial responsibility for their staffers", carefully read aloud with heads bowed down when it was their turn to speak.
Eventually Szabo broke a tie vote over whether or not to let Baird stay and booted him out.

Well sure. After all, as Minister of Transport, Baird is not Soudas' boss and would not be able to answer any of the questions the committee was intending to ask Soudas, despite Baird's sinister hand waving about something he called "collective responsibility".

And as Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac of the Bloc pointed out, the last time a minister appeared before the committee on behalf of one of their staffers - that would be Christian Paradis, Minister of Asbestos - his idea of "ministerial responsibility" was to just blame the staffer.

Carole Freeman of the Bloc brought up committees' right to subpoena witnesses :

"[Soudas] is an ordinary citizen and should be treated as such. A house leader does not have the power to change existing rules simply by standing up in the House and making a statement."

But then there was another tie vote that I haven't seen discussed.

What to do about the many named bureaucrats already scheduled to appear in the few weeks remaining before the committee last meets on June 22? And what to do if their ministers wanted to show up in their staffers' place?

Chair Szabo asked for a motion to give him authority to summon the witnesses already scheduled to appear ... if necessary ... even if it meant allowing those witnesses' ministers to come as substitutes in their stead.

A pretty weak motion but as he explained, they were waiting on an expected future ruling by the Speaker on such witness substitutions. And he was only asking for either the scheduled witness or his/her minister to appear if that's what was offered.

OK so it was an astoundingly weak motion to exercise parliamentary committees' right to summon witnesses, but you know what? That vote was tied up 5 to 5 - the Cons vs everyone else - and only passed because the Chair broke it by voting in favour.

Pierre Poilievre suggested what he called "a friendly amendment" to solve the impasse over the next scheduled witness :

"just replace the name of the political staffer in question with the name of the Minister."

Your moment of hideous irony : The work currently before the committee is looking into "allegations of systematic political interference by ministers' offices to block, delay, or obstruct the release of information to the public regarding the operation of government departments".

The Savary Island mystery...

First... you get into The Gazetteer's Friday BC Rail post.

Then you get into the comments section of that post. You notice a smell. Then you realize that the smell is not the Savary Island septic tanks - it's coming from Belleville Street in Victoria.

Getting our money's worth

I mentioned in an earlier post that for the amount of money being spent on the G8/G20 meetings just for security, the government could build a money wall around the main venue for the G8 summit.

I ran a few more numbers. $1.1 billion dollars would allow the government to pay 150,000 security officers $100 per hour for the entire 72 hours and still have $20 million left to buy crullers and large double-doubles from Tim Horton's for the massive security detail.

It would take a better mathematician than I am to figure out the all the numbers, but I'm also confident that for $1.1 billion they could hold both conferences in a giant hollow sphere made of 18 carat gold floating off shore in Lake Ontario. $1.1 billion dollars would buy you nearly 36,000 kilograms of 18k gold. Maybe we could just have Stephen Harper and his Cabinet covered in gold leaf -- that would be sure to impress the visiting dignitaries!

This money is getting spent somewhere, and I suspect that a lot of it is going for fat "consulting fees" and no-bid contracts to Conservative Party of Canada backers. I expect the eventual auditor's report will have more pages discussing pork than the annual report of the Canadian Hog Farmers Association.

Leave your suggestions on how the money could be spent in the comments.




Crossposted from the Woodshed




NB: This is the 5,000th post on The Galloping Beaver - yay us!

Vive la revolution de sirop d'erable!

The latest edition of the Maple Syrup Revolution - in which Canadian Cynic's Lindsay Stewart returns to discuss copyright, lying Conservative Party of Canada MPs, the Harper government's fear of open government and the insane amount of money being spent on security for the G8 and G20 summits -- is ready for your listening pleasure.

Just for fun, I ran some numbers and the 1.1 billion dollars the Canadian government is spending on security for the G8 and G20 summits would build a wall of $10 bills about 3 meters high, 10 centimeters thick and 767 meters long--probably long enough to surround the Deerhurst resort--with enough left over to buy everyone within 100 km of Huntsville, Ontario, a beer.

Jason, Jason, Jason... you bloody liar...

Single combat! That's an offer!!!

It doesn't get better than that.

This is NOT a duel. This is a challenge between us warriors. We will use our skills at combat.

The best part is, we represent everything our side has to offer. You represent bigotry and I represent... everything that isn't you.

The winner tells the other guy's army to go away. And they will do that because the loser is a piece of dead hamburger. (Funny how that works.)

So, Jason, naval cutlasses on a swinging bridge. Unless, of course you would like to do something more difficult. No problem. I'm up for it, sport. I am, after all, a warrior and a veteran. I do battle with great reluctance.

But dispatching you, sonny, would be something I would consider a duty as a citizen.

And consider the alternative: If you win, you get to be as Hitlerarian as you want to be.

How cool is that?

I don't intend to lose. Just so you know.

Of course, we can point out that you, and Dimitri, are both rank cowards.

Meanwhile, under the security blanket . . .

Questions are a burden to others, answers are a burden to oneself

For years, we've known that Stephen Harper is a control freak who insists that every utterance of everyone speaking for the government be vetted through the PMO, but methinks he has now gone a bit too far. 
 First, it was gagging backbenchers so that the ignorant, knuckledragging rednecks let's be kind and say the "less sophisticated, less media-savy" among his Reform Alliance colleagues didn't start ranting about racial minorities and commies under the bed "get off message" and embarass  the "New Government of Canada." Then, after he realized he a had a few of these loose cannons in the Cabinet, ministers were told to zip it, that anything that had to be said would be said by the PMO. After all the press were hostile and prone to asking "gotcha" questions and-- let's face it-- your average Parliament Hill journalist engaging a Reform-Tory Cabinet Minister in a battle of wits is pretty much attacking an unarmed target.
Having shut out the press to the degree possible, Harper then decided that even Parliamentary committees should be served a nice big mug of STFU, and the party put out a manual for Conservative members that explained how to block committee business, even completely shut things down by being obstructionist arseholes if things weren't going their way. When that didn't work well enough to keep 
a committee from demanding information about the way Afghan detainees were being dealt with and whether Canadian troops could face accusations of war crimes for the negligent way their superiors had decided to organize things, Harper shut down Parliament and hoped the whole thing would blow over.
It didn't.
Next he tried the classic American conservative argument -- that everything was a matter of national security and  tippy-top secret to protect our wonderful troops and if you wanted to violate that sacred trust and find out what the elected government had ordered the troops to do on the nation's behalf,  well clearly you were a troop-hating pinko bastard who hated freedom -- Wolverines!!!
Then the Speaker of the House stuck a pin in that particular trial balloon.
Now, Harper has decided that ministerial aides and other senior staff answer to no one but the PMO and the Minister and couldn't possibly be called upon to answer questions by Parliamentary committees. The spin he is trying to put on this is both hilarious and ironically true. The justification for this notion that just because they draw a government salary, civil servants shouldn't ever have to explain their actions to Parliament is that the Ministers are ultimately responsible for what is done in their ministry. This is true -- and just you wait and see how responsible some of these schmucks are going to be held if their underlings are ever made to testify under oath about the crap that goes on at the behest of their bosses.

So if Dmitiri Soudas is able enough to command a handsome taxpayer-funded salary as the director of communications for the Prime Minister of Canada, he can damn well answer a few questions about his job from the House of Commons Ethics Committee. Parliament is supreme and if it summons him, he better show up, otherwise he will be guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And if Michael Ignatieff , Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton won't  go to the mat on this, then they won't go to the mat on anything and we might just as well let Harper appoint himself dictator-for-life and be done with it.

Also, what Dave said -- that goes double for me.

crossposted from the Woodshed

A resident of the glass house...

Tries to tell us all about "moral disorder".

If I might add to Alison's very succinct post, there is no individual serving in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church who can point at any other person's behaviour or actions and pass any form or moral judgement on them.

An organization which shelters known pedophiles, rapists and child-abusers, and which operates in a manner approximating a racketeering mob has no moral foundation from which to speak about the behaviour of others.

None.

In short, Cardinal, piss off. Your opinion isn't worth the powder to blow it to Hell.

Dear Cardinal Ouellet

We already had the debate.

Your side lost.

So you can just run along now ...

Baird Droppings . . .

Just so we're clear here...

Dimitri Soudas

is a coward.

He is a chickenshit, cowering piece of quivering liver. He cries for his mother when things don't go his way.

He is a conservative.

He let's other people fight his battles.

We have put the defence and the security of this country in the hands of the likes of him. Isn't that reassuring?

Look what a piece of cowardly crap your vote got you.

Want a piece of me Dimitri? No problem, you cowardly turd. Single combat. Look it up.

Some Conservative ideas have merit...

Consider... just for a moment, that I am in that decision-making moment where I have to decide whether to empty the last three rounds of my mag on something I'm not sure is a target.

Dilemma.

What if it's a non-combatant innocent?

The Harperites have saved me from that!! I love it! Look at me, I am legal!!!! Harper has saved me!

The minister will answer.

What do I do?

Squeeze, baby, squeeze. And then change mags, because Harper and his hillbillies have the answer.

This war is so much easier now.

I love the idea of being able to dump EVERYTHING on the minister.

Have fun fuckwads, because if it were me, (and it has been), I would abuse this one to the hilt.

A significant anniversary in Canadian Naval history

While this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy as a national institution in this country, today, 24 May, marks the 60th 70th anniversary of an event which changed the RCN and gave that service a permanent set of legs.

In the spring of 1940 Hitler's Germany began the now famous blitzkrieg through the Ardennes and into Flanders, invading the low countries of Europe. Belgium, The Netherlands and France were overrun and Allied forces, including the British Expeditionary Force were either defeated or being driven towards the sea. The British Isles were under a very real threat of invasion by the apparently unstoppable German forces.

On 23 May, 1940, Britain sent out a plea to Canada to send all available RCN destroyers to aid in the defence of Britain. No one had ever asked Canada for such assistance before and given that Canada only possessed seven such ships, it was a tall and potentially expensive order.

HMC ships Ottawa and Assiniboine were in refit and unavailable. HMCS Fraser was conducting operations in the Caribbean (considered "Home Waters") and was operating at a furious tempo. That left the destroyers HMC ships St. Laurent, Restigouche, Saguenay and Skeena available.

The cabinet of Mackenzie King approved the overseas deployment of four destroyers. Fraser would be released from the Caribbean and sent directly to Britain. Restigouche, St. Laurent and Skeena would be dispatched from Halifax. HMCS Saguenay would remain in Canadian waters as the sole defender of the Canadian gate.

The next day, HMC ships Restigouche, St. Laurent and Skeena departed Halifax on the first ever long range deployment of a Canadian naval force in response to an emergency. A fear existed in both Canadian Naval Headquarters and among the government that the situation was so desperate that those ships might never return.

And some didn't.

The deployment, however, changed Canada's navy forever. No longer a local defence force and a home waters navy, the RCN was asked to find her legs. However small, and regardless of what the future might hold, the Royal Canadian Navy was now a blue-water force and would remain so to this day.

------------------

HMCS Fraser - Lost in a collision with HMS Calcutta 25 June 1940

HMCS Skeena - Lost in a storm of Reykjavik, Iceland 25 October 1944

HMC ships Restigouche and St. Laurent served throughout the 2nd World War with distinction and honour. They were decommissioned in October of 1945 and eventually scrapped.

Correction: Clearly I have spent too much time behind that ugly green scope. Apparently, I lost a decade. It is the 70th anniversary of Canada's first naval overseas deployment; not the 60th. Thanks to CC for pointing it out.

At the going down of the sun...

With condolences and respect to the family and friends of Trooper Larry John Zuidema Rudd, The Royal Canadian Dragoons.

Killed due to enemy action.

Audax et Celer

Stevie . . .

Times change . . .

Bizarro. Marvellous.

I'm off to see the Izzard

the wonderful Izzard of .. not Oz, but Yemen apparently.

I'm dressed to kill, dahling. With a tray.

what don't we know about the Afghan detainees and when didn't we know it?

The latest edition of the Maple Syrup Revolution, in which Boris and the Rev.Paperboy discuss the Afghan detainee issue, is ready now for your listening endurance forebearance pleasure.

The graphic depiction of Milton Friedman's failure

You can sit there and believe that, according to Miltie, BP is going to have to go to the wall for their abysmal disregard for anything but the piles of dollars they could accumulate....

or

You could read what the flyingrodent has to say.

Yeah. Me too.

RailGate - Game On!

NaPo : B.C. devalued rail in order to sell, court hears

"The B.C. government concocted a conspiracy to devalue a provincially owned railway in order to justify its sale, jurors at a political corruption trial heard yesterday."
Defence lawyer Kevin Mc-Cullough also made the startling suggestion that "the fix was in" to sell B.C. Rail to Canadian National Rail Co. and to spurn other bidders. He made the remarks as he cross-examined Crown witness Martyn Brown, who is chief of staff to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.

Campbell's chief of staff characterized the suggestion as "absurd", but luckily RossK at the Gazetteer has a very long memory.

Bloomberg : CNR’s Purchase of BC Rail Was Rigged, Lawyer Alleges

Canadian National Railway Co.’s C$1 billion ($956 million) acquisition of government-owned BC Rail Ltd. in 2003 was rigged from the start, with British Columbia’s premier intent on handing over the operation to a former fundraiser, a lawyer said today at a trial.
“The fix was in for CNR to get the assets from the beginning,” said Kevin McCullough, a lawyer representing Bob Virk, who is accused of accepting bribes in exchange for information about the sale while working as assistant to the province’s transportation minister.
Virk, and David Basi, a former aide to British Columbia’s finance minister, are charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes for passing on secret information to one of the bidders for BC Rail in exchange for cash and favors.
Basi’s cousin, Aneal Basi, a former government communications officer, was charged with money laundering."

After six years of waiting for this to get to trial, you might need a wee refresher.

Meanwhile RossK fisks recent Canadian noosemedia coverage.

Post title rudely pillaged from RossK.

An explanation . . .

It is a slow day in the small Minnesota town of Marshall, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit. 

A rich tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. 

As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. 

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. 

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Farmer's Co-op. 

The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute. 

The prostitute, who has also been facing hard times, has had to offer her "services" on credit. She rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. 

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. 

At that moment, the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill, and leaves town. 

No one produced anything. No one earned anything...However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a Stimulus package works. 

Stephen Harper was a "professional student"

Harper was hatched sometime in 1959. He finally finished a degree in 1993. The arithmetic is simple to anyone who can add or subtract....

Harper was still a student at age 34.

According to the box of doughnuts and double-double crowd at Stephen Taylor's fatuous moron corral that would make Harper one of those them thar "perfeshinal stoodnts".

And the vacuous were forced back to the rear of the drive-thru.

Thank you, Scott....

The last time Harper was exposed to a genuine question, it ended with the words: “…fries with that?”

I think that sums it up nicely.

At the going down of the Sun...

With condolences and respect to the family and friends of Colonel Geoff Parker, The Royal Canadian Regiment, Land Forces Central Area HQ.

Killed due to enemy action.

Pro Patria

Talibannosaurus Rex

JIHAD JUST GOT JURASSIC! io9 has a post by Cyriaque Lamar that's a delight: "The Most Politically Incorrect Fake SciFi B-Movie Poster Ever". The CG Society held a contest, "The B-Movie CG Challenge". Cyriaque notes: 

Dan Evans' poster for Talibannosaurus Rex was too mind-blowing for both CG Society's B-Movie contest and reality. Look at that happy raptor driving the jeep!

Dan Evans has his own site, My Art Shame: Confessions of a Games Industry Sin-Slave, where he states, "I work in the videogames industry where I am regularly forced to commit sins against creativity, decency and good taste. Then I go home and commit some more."

Jihad just got Jurassic — ya gotta love it.

Read "Far and Wide" lately?

No?

Here's a reason to read every new post.

Happy International Day Against Homophobia

This has been known about for a few years now but here, courtesy of Rabble, is a reminder of the speech that Darrell Reid, former president of Focus On The Family Canada and now Harper's deputy chief of staff, gave in Singapore at a 2003 Focus On The Family seminar. Speaking as a historian, Darrell warned about the correlation between protection of gay rights and the rise of Hiltler and the Nazi party in the 30's :

... in a way I'm ashamed and sorry to be standing before you as a Canadian and telling you this, but my reason for doing so ...is that perhaps our present will never be your future.

There's a very narrow definition of religious rights (in Canada) ... our legal people, our media, our academic elite don't care what you believe (against same sex rights), they just don't want you to talk about it to anybody or act upon it. Now I'm a historian ... the best parallel that I can think of historically is in Germany in the 1930s, as the rise of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler came to power. You see, Adolf Hitler and his friends didn't care what you believed, you only became dangerous when you talked to somebody else about it, or you acted on it. I believe the same rational is taking place (in Canada.)"

Happy International Day Against Homophobia, Darrel. Here ya go. Try not to eat it all at once this time.






And a very special Happy International Day Against Homophobia greeting to Ratso ,who four days ago "condemned gay marriage and abortion as 'among the most insidious and dangerous challenges' to society."

High Velocity

DEFENCETECH has a report, "Killer Drone Builder General Atomics Builds Killer Electromagnetic Rail Cannon", by Greg Grant, that is worthy of your attention, with a, pardon the expression, killer video that shows what this piece of ordnance, built by General Atomics, who make the Predator, can do. 

The company has been working for a number of years with the Office of Naval Research on a 200 nautical mile gun system. In a parallel effort, they’ve been developing a smaller, pulse-power technology demonstrator, called the “Blitzer,” for ship defense against anti-ship cruise missiles and small boat swarms.

It's a "short-range" weapon, with just an 80-mile/140 km reach. The projectile exits the "muzzle" at over 10,000 feet per second, or just over 3 km/sec. That's quick. Apparently, the railgun will be capable of 1 round per second, if they can supply enough electrical power, which should not be difficult for Nimitz and Aegis-class vessels. Might be just the thing for dealing with those Iranian Silkworms, as it takes a round less than 7 seconds to reach out to the horizon.

The only other gun that matched this range was "The Paris Gun", from WW1, which took all day to fire 20 rounds.

Tea Party: tantrum?

THE ATLANTIC has a fine article on the Tea Party, by Michael Kinsley, "My Country, Tis of Me", which takes a look at what makes it tick, and doesn't like it: "There’s nothing patriotic about the Tea Party Patriots."

The right-wing populist Tea Party movement has politicians of both parties spooked. Democrats fear it will bring so many Republicans to the boil, and then to the voting booth, that they will lose control of Congress. Republicans fear the movement will frighten away moderates and leave their party an unelectable, ideologically extreme rump. The press, both alarmed and delighted by this political force that sprang from nowhere, is eager to prove its lack of elitism and left-wing bias by treating the Tea Party activists with respect. Journalists also sincerely appreciate having something new to write or talk about. It is in their interest to keep this story going.

Some people think that what unites the Tea Party Patriots is simple racism. I doubt that. But the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

Worth the read. 

Papers please!

a very very short podcast, in which the Rev.Paperboy and the Not Ready For Real Life Players address Arizona's new Juan Crow law.

Iceland

THE BOSTON GLOBE has some astounding pictures of the volcano in Iceland. Check them out.

At the going down of the sun ...

With condolences and respect to the family and friends of Private Kevin Thomas McKay

1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry

.

Killed due to enemy action.

.

Ric-A-Dam-Doo

Mediawatch - Bartending the Inquisition

The Ottawa Citizen recently ran an item under "News" entitled "End the Inquisition" in which the author equated the parliamentary committee on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan with Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt.

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?", quotes the author, while condemning "wild accusations of torture and nothing in the way of proof" :

"... the public hears only from the accusers. Some of Canada's most distinguished citizens have been called war criminals."

It's really all about getting out of Afghanistan, he says, and "putting maximum pressure on the government to ensure there is no backtracking on the decision that Canada leave next summer -- and leave Afghans to their fate.":

"Prevailing opinion to the contrary, there is a strong argument that Canada's responsibility for detainees ends when they are handed over and that the onus is on Afghanistan, not Canada, to keep track of them and deal with them pursuant to Afghan law. "

The author wraps up by invoking Eisenhower :

"When he was elected president in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was the great hope for those who wanted to see an end to the human wreckage McCarthy caused.
But Eisenhower would not intervene. "I just will not, I refuse, to get into the gutter with that guy." It was a noble sentiment he later regretted.

Would that good people in our own time not wait too much longer to intervene."

The Ottawa Citizen then provides a short bio on the author :

"Paul Chapin is a former director general for international security at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. He is an adjunct professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University and a director of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute."

Dear Ottawa Citizen : Rather more relevant would have been the information that as director general of the Department of Foreign Affairs international security bureau from 2003 to the fall of 2006, Paul Chapin was once a proud author of the original 2005 detainee agreement, in his own words : "happy to take ownership". And, as noted in his CDAI bio : "Mr. Chapin developed the strategy to shift the centre of gravity of Canada’s peace operations in Afghanistan from Kabul to Kandahar."

PS I'm bothering you with last weekend's CanWest histrionics here because said "news" item is featured today on the front page of Jack's Newswatch, was mentioned twice by Peter MacKay in the House yesterday, and is currently being approvingly parsed by various, uh, milblogs.

Edited to add last link to Wherry, who was already on this earlier today.

Movement on the tree line

When a politician, especially one like Harper, tries to inculcate himself/herself into the culture of the military the inevitable response is... We do your bidding, but you are not and never have been one of us. We're better than you.

And it doesn't take much to prove that truth.

A huge majority of serving members of the military despise politicians - of all stripes. And they hate groupies.

Harper is a groupy. And a groupy only wants in on the party. No groupy is willing to do the grunt work it takes get there. The frat boys in the PMO have stepped in a minefield and they can figure out why the pros won't show them how to get out.

That's why this comment by our own Boris, a former member of the CF, deserves to be out front.

You may be placing too much mistrust in the military brass. They have several interests which separate them from the Harpercrats. Their war is being directed by a government that finds itself in significant hot water over it's handling of the conflict, and is actively attempting to hide from teh public and parliament over it. If that government is willing to throw Parliament under the bus to protect itself, no institution is safe from big black Con Firestones, including the military.

Also, the CF and its uniformed leadership have a long term interest in institutional coherence and stability that goes beyond Afghanistan and Stephen Harper. Under Hillier the frame alignment between the CF and the Cons got pretty incestuous. Now that scandal and coverup is the order of the day from Ottawa, it's in the CF's (under new leadership) interest to get as far from the Harperites as it can.

Never run into the forest. Watch the tree line.

Oh right. We're not a milblog.

It looks like I may lose....

So, I'll quit before that happens.

For the first time, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell is not being so emphatic about seeking a fourth term in the 2013 election.

Because Campbell is actually a hard right, Thatcherist, conservative. And people like him don't do "hard".

Mr. Campbell told CTV, “it’s been an incredibly tough year. I’ve said that to people before. In all of my time in public life, I’ve never had as difficult a year as this.”

Yeah. That HST lie really did it to Gordo.

Arrogant prick.

Mario Canseco, public affairs vice-president for Angus Reid Strategies, said it appears that Mr. Campbell, first elected Premier in 2001, may be realizing it may be difficult to repair the damage.

Public scorn over the HST is galvanizing a core of voters who may never again be receptive to the Premier, and even Mr. Campbell’s enthusiastic participation in the Winter Olympics have not provided much of a polling bounce, Mr. Canseco said.

The best hope for the Liberals, he said, would be Mr. Campbell’s gracious departure and replacement.

Oh please. Let's not waste time being gracious. Gordo can just be himself. That should put him head-down in the shitter.

Armageddon tired of superstition dictating government policy

The Divine Ms. Z has a great piece in today's Toronto Star - an interview with Marci McDonald, author of the just-released The Armageddon Factor: the Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, about which I blogged the other day. She points out the release of the book come on the very day that Canadian politicians are taking part in what has become a staple in U.S. politics - the prayer breakfast. These meeting of the pious and the political have been an annual event in Canada for 45 years, but have never had the prominence or the political import of similar events in the U.S.

These prayer breakfasts were begun in Seattle during the depression by a preacher named Abraham Veriede as a way to pull local business and political leaders together to beat the labor movement. Veriede courted the rich and powerful and built the organization now run by Douglas Coe and described in Jeff Sharlet's The Family. The group believes that the rich and powerful are given wealth and power by God to do his bidding and that minor considerations such as ethics and morality do not apply to them because they are doing God's bidding. Veriede and later Coe, often speak admiringly of the dedication of men such as Adolf Hitler and Lenin and want to harness the same sort of dedication to their cause. Read Sharlet's book, it is chilling stuff. The Family already has dozens of senators and congressmen in its "prayer cells" and it can be assumed their tentacles reach into these political prayer breakfasts in Canada too.

Then read Marci McDonald's book on the Canadian wing of theocratic movement and realize that it can and is happening here. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't really have anything against religious belief - I'm a believer myself, at least on odd-numbered days. What I object to is allowing any one religion to sway public policy, especially a religion as goofy as the North American brand of tent revival fundamentalist Christianity. How goofy are some of these people?

From Antonia Zerbisais' article in The Toronto Star:

According to The Armageddon Factor, evangelicals believe Canada has to clean up its act on abortion, feminism, and homosexuality because it has a special role to play in the “end times.”

That’s because of Psalms 72: 8-9, which leads off the book, and foretells of “dominion … from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.”

Never mind that it was likely about an ancient tribal leader’s turf. Many evangelicals see it as a sign, as they see how Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower clock, which stopped because of electrical problems for the first time ever in 2006, stopped at 7:28.

Yeah, that's the kind of magical thinking that you really really want governing economic, education, environmental and defense policy, the kind that thinks Jesus will take of everything for us and that there is no point planning past next Tuesday because the Rapture is coming.

Expect the lead up to the next election to consist entirely of distracting "culture war" wedge issues like gay marriage, crime, and whether the National Gallery should have nude pictures in it. There will even be coded references to changes in abortion law rules on maternal health and funding for religious aid organizations. If the Conservatives have their way the economy, the war in Afghanistan and the mistreatment of detainees and the government's abandonment of its responsibilities to its citizens (see Omar Khadr, Abousfian Abdelrazik, et al) will never be mentioned.

crossposted from the Woodshed

"If they run, they're VC. If they don't run, they're well-disciplined VC"

Most of the news out of Afghanistan is depressing and occasionally enraging, but when I see Seymour Hersh's byline attached to a story, I make sure to read it even though I know it will probably be both depressing and enraging. This story is no exception. It seems "the good guys" are now executing prisoners on the battlefield, or at least that is the story that has been relayed to Hersh by U.S. troops.
I won't argue that Hersh is infallible -- no one is -- but he is one of the best reporters working today and his track record from My Lai to Abu Ghraib is pretty impressive.

This isn't a story, at least not yet. This comes from a talk Hersh gave at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva on April 24, 2010.

HERSH: The purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field and into the White House. It's not that the President or the Secretary of Defense Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush, or Cheney, it's not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It's that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen.

And I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change. 

[...]

What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now.

Frank Frazetta, 1928-2010

LOCUS reports that Frank Frazetta has died. If you're over 40, or if you're a sword-and-sorcery/SF fan, you've seen lots of his stuff. Frank inspired a whole wave of artists.

Artist Frank Frazetta, 82, died May 10, 2009 of a stroke in a hospital near Boca Grande FL. Frazetta is best known for his iconic illustrations for the works of Robert E. Howard — especially Conan the Barbarian — and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was a towering figure in the SF/fantasy art field.

Born February 9, 1928 in Brooklyn, Frazetta studied at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts from ages eight to 16, and began working as a professional pulp and comic illustrator as a teenager. His early work included funny animal comics,Flash Gordon, Johnny Comet, Thun’da, Buck Rogers, EC horror comics, and even a long stint ghost-drawing the Li’l Abner comic strip.

io9 has a nice gallery of Frank's oeuvres and a link to more of 'em. Of Frank, they graciously added:

Frazetta's art defiined "larger than life" and "epic" for generations of science fiction and fantasy fans, and it will live on in the genre he gave so much to.

Thank-you, Frank, for all the wonder.

Steve told me he would respect me in the morning...

And that he loved me!

Helena Guergis broke her silence Monday, telling the CBC in an exclusive interview that a month after her highly publicized ouster from the Conservative caucus she still doesn't know anything about the "serious allegations" that prompted her dismissal.

Un huh. Going through the quotes is pure comedy.

Guergis, who was travelling in the Dominican Republic at the time with her husband, Rahim Jaffer, recalls getting the phone call notifying her of the coming announcement. She greeted the news at first with silence, then with tears and a barrage of questions.

Tense drama.

"What have I done?" she remembers asking. "I don't understand what you're talking about. What are you talking about?"

Stunned disbelief. How politically astute of her.

The former minister for the status of women accuses the Conservative Party of treating her unfairly.

What?! The whole party? Pray, tell us more.

"I feel as though they've thrown the rule books out the window, that they're not respecting due process at all. I find it very undemocratic."

From the party (of which you are a floating bit) which has used every maneouvre known to lawyers to thwart and subvert democracy and rules?! Mygod! Undemocractic?! How can you say that about the Conservatives?

"I'm hurt by the Prime Minister. I am hurt because I did consider him to be a friend as well, so I find that very hard to deal with."

Ohhh. Welcome to the new Harper version of Canada, Helena. Get one simple fact through your mind: It's not about you; it's about Harper. He doesn't give a red rat's ass about you, your family, your feelings or, more importantly, your supposed friendship. Harper doesn't have friends - he has pawns. You were one until he used you in a sacrifice move.

"I'm not ready to give up my political career."

It's not up to you, sweetheart. Unless you haven't fully absorbed the surroundings, those round black things rolling toward you are the rear wheels of the Harper bus. The same bus you helped fuel.

You have a choice. From your McSeat in the McBackbenches, you can look across the empty floor.

The problem you have now is the poison you carry that nobody else wants go anywhere near. Maybe you can get a job as McVety's receptionist.

In the meantime, welcome to the Harper you helped create.

Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy"

LANGUAGE LOG has a report by Mark Liberman, "Whatever lifts your luggage…" which outlines how an American bible-thumper, George Rekers, got caught with "Lucien", whom he met though a web site called rentboy.com. The Miami New Times article, by Penn  Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, states

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

Then again, there could be other reasons:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay. 

Tsk, tsk.