Adios, Mork . . .

EVERYBODY HAS their favorite(s), Moscow on the Hudson is one of mine. With the stress on our society and democracy, this clip is especially cogent. We are so lucky to have been blessed by Robin's genius.

Like the Mask says . . .

TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL! Just check out Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone, "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever". Worth your time and attention. It's all about the big banks:

The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

What's it going to take? Maybe we can't do much, but little things like doing business with credit unions can really help.

Get angry . . .

KUDOS TO THE SIXTH ESTATE, for going to all the cerebral effort to post "Inside Elections Canada’s Whitewash Report on Election Fraud: Armwaving, Cynicism, Red Herrings". If you missed it, you must read it — and get very, very angry.

King Rat speaks

What Donald Segretti says is very, very important. Rod Mickleburgh phoned the head Ratfucker of the Nixon Watergate scandal just to see how the Harper campaign robo-call affair all played out in his mind. Just to compare scandals, y'know. What Donald Segretti had to offer is not pretty.(My emphasis)

Mr. Segretti told me over the phone from his Orange County law office that he was appalled to learn robo-calls may have been used to provide misleading polling-station information to Canadian voters on election day.

“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.”

Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters.

Let's keep something in mind here. Donald Segretti was one element of a political machine. There were others of which he was not aware. That's pretty clear from the history we now know.

That was in the back of my mind as I was writing this post. It was something in Lawrence Martin's article which niggled at me.

Mr. Giraud, the Lunn campaign manager, was categorical: “Nobody has ever asked me to do dirty tricks.” But it’s conceivable they were done without his knowledge. The party had a separate team, he said, that worked on swing ridings.

My first thought was that it was just another attempt to deflect blame, but I had not let go of the idea that maybe this was a slip of information. While I didn't dismiss it completely, I wasn't sure that such a sophisticated mechanism was likely.

Then The Gazeteer, dropped a footnote on his post. He saw it too!

Was there a hit squad of Conservative campaign operatives pulling out all the stops in the swing ridings?

 If so, they were not there to persuade or influence voters; they were there to eliminate opposition votes. That's a 21st Century version of a thug with a baseball bat outside a polling place.

So, yeah. The only way to resolve this is offered by Thwap. Because the Grey Lady of Canadian investigative reporting is repeating history.

Truth in numbers . . .

Darth Vader's Memoirs . . .

Darth, himself.

GETTING AWAY WITH TORTURE, the title of Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate, commenting on the publication of Dick Cheney's memoir, "In My Time", seems to be a fair summation of Dick's adventures to date, unless, of course, some brave soul in the US gov't. decides to give it a try.

My focus is what Cheney's books tells us about the rule of law in America. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted—and further enriched—as a Wise and Serious Statesman ...

Implicit in Greenwald's commentary is that the Obama administration is responsible for Cheney's continued legitimacy in the debate about torture, as well as the legitimacy of the debate itself. By deciding to repudiate torture while doing everything in its power to protect the torturers, the Obama administration has succeeded in elevating not only Cheney but the idea that, in America, some torturers are too important to be punished.

Rule of law, what a great idea. We should try it here, too, what with Dalton and the un-published, un-Gazetted secret amendment to the Public Works Act, plus Stevie's contempt for Parliament and anything Stevie doesn't like.

The head weasel speaks . . .

SCANDAL ABOUNDS, and Rupert says he's not responsible. Yet the dead-carp smell continues to grow, engulfing Newscorp in a miasma, and there are signs that it might even make it to the US, to become Fox's worst nightmare. Jeremy Kinsman has a fine op-ed comment on the CBC site, "Don't cry for Rupert Murdoch": it's a nice overview of how the whole brouhaha started, and the implications for all the weasels involved, and for us. Like Jeremy says, "The press tycoon broke all the codes essential to a democracy".

The Crazy Years . . .

WHEREVER HE IS, Robert Heinlein must be ROTFL, because the Crazy Years must surely have arrived, as according to Gail Collins' article in the NYT, "School of Glock", there are disturbing things afoot:

Well, in Florida, a state representative has introduced a bill that would impose fines of up to $5 million on any doctor who asks a patient whether he or she owns a gun.

But wait — it gets better:

The nation’s state legislators seem to be troubled by a shortage of things they can do to make the National Rifle Association happy. Once you’ve voted to allow people to carry guns into bars (Georgia), eliminated the need for getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon (Arizona) and designated your own official state gun (Utah — awaiting the governor’s signature), it gets hard to come up with new ideas.

This may be why so many states are now considering laws that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring guns on campus.

It's November

And in November is when someone pulls the pin. It's when the hillbillies in Harper's office get caught with their pants around their knees. Something happens that they weren't prepared for and they have to resort to drastic measures to save their own asses.

It is now tradition. Harper will do something to further erode the conventions of Canadian democracy to serve his own needs. We are in very real peril of having some bloody-minded little prick like Harper turn Parliament into the Government's whore.

This past week, it was the unelected Conservative senators audaciously killing a climate-change bill passed by a clear majority of elected MPs in the House of Commons. 

The week before, it was Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with tacit agreement from the Liberals, deciding to bypass the Commons in any debate over extending Canada's troop commitment in Afghanistan — a decision that itself flew in the face of a Commons vote to end the mission in 2011.

Real democracy taking a real hit from a real autocrat.
Harper, who only came to govern on a backlash punishment vote, all the while promising to diminish the limited influence of the Senate, has turned the upper house he claimed to despise into a weapon against the voters and representative authority.

And he's not done yet.

This is the time of year when the political animals running the endless Harper campaign from the PMO miss something or miscalculate and event. At that point, any shred of democracy standing in the way of their retaining power is trampled by the scramble to retain power. Government runs for the bunker in hopes of avoiding a pasting. Twice now, that has involved shutting the doors of this country's representative assembly.

I predict it will happen again. What will be the issue the gamers in the PMO have missed while stuffing their faces with cheese puffs?

Ahhh. There's one now. A showdown the Harper/Soudas gang didn't see coming.

It's November. Prorogue is in the air.

(h/t Scott)

Two reads for you today

First, go to Impolitical and read about Harper's abuse of democracy through the misuse of no confidence votes.

Then, go read Pretty Shaved Ape who tears into "just an ordinary guy" Steve Harper.