Juan Cole gives David Frum a whack

David Frum gets a well deserved smack down from Juan Cole.

Frum helped beat the drums for war with Iraq, and maybe he favors another war, this time with Iran. But for him to tell the American people that such unambiguous warmongering would *lower* the price of petroleum is nothing less than a Big Lie.

 Read the rest.

Get Rob Anders off the Veterans Affairs Committee

It's not just that he's a waste of good room air or even that he continually falls asleep on watch.

It's that he clearly can't stand veterans. When Jim Lowther and David MacLeod, of Veterans Emergency Transition Services, criticized Anders for sleeping through their presentations, this is how he dealt with it.

“It’s a smear job,” Mr. Anders said, categorically denying that he fell asleep during the presentation.

...

“They praised Vladimir Putin, at one point, for the way he deals with veterans, and then he just went on and on praising Peter Stoffer,” Mr. Anders said. “[Mr. Lowther] is the same guy who tried to crash one of the Prime Minister’s rallies and is on NDP press releases.” 

Lying little chickenhawk. Anders did fall asleep and his attempt to smear two veterans is nothing short of contempt for every person who ever wore a uniform, has campaign medals, has wound stripes and lives with nightmares.

From Jim Lowther:

“I’ve been called a Canadian hero – I did two tours of Bosnia and one in Afghanistan – and now I’m a NDP hack? Never been called that before.”

 Especially since he appears to be a Conservative party member.

From David MacLeod:

“I’m an ex-intelligence officer and worked on the NORAD closure. ... How likely do you think it is that I support Vladimir Putin?” Mr. MacLeod said. “I was just saying Russia, which doesn’t always treat its vets well, had a hospital for Afghan and Chechen vets who had post traumatic stress disorder.” 

Mr. MacLeod said he, too, is not an NDP supporter. In fact, he has voted for Peter MacKay in his Central Nova riding and is a member of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party.

Who also added:

“It’s just stupid to say we’re NDP hacks and frankly, I don’t think this reflects well on the party,” he added. “[Mr. Anders] should have just said he was sorry he fell asleep and that would have been the end of it.”

Not anymore. No veteran should be put in a position to have to share the same space with such a useless and self-absorbed piece of shit as Rob Anders.

You can't make this stuff up

But Mitt Romney can!

Romney recalled he was “probably 4 or something like that” the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile.

“My dad had a job being the grandmaster. They painted Woodward Ave. with gold paint,” Romney told a rapt Tea Party audience in the village of Milford Thursday night, reliving a moment of American industrial glory.

The Golden Jubilee described so vividly by Romney was indeed an epic moment in automotive lore. The parade included one of the last public appearances by an elderly Henry Ford.

And it took place June 1, 1946 — fully nine months before Romney was born.

And our Basset-loving somewhat popular blogger from America's Finest City (just a trolley ride from Tijuana) explains how Romney pulled that one off.

Gordon Campbell was just kidding about that tax cut...

Seems we didn't show enough love for Gordon Campbell when he tried to buy our popularity. The 15 percent tax cut he promised would happen at the start of 2011 has just been cancelled.

It seems responding to a pay-off with an elevated middle finger doesn't impress the average BC right-winger.

Yet, Gordon Campbell retains his desk in the premier's office in Victoria. The most unpopular politician in BC history cannot figure out that most British Columbians absolutely despise him.

If he were a dog someone would take him to the vet for his final visit.

Go to Maui, Cambell. Get drunk. Don't ever come back.

Rick Mercer has a great offer

Time's up!

The Harper government was given five days back on July 27th to produce documents supporting their claim that the census long-form was so intrusive to have caused a tidal wave of complaints by Canadians.

They have failed to produce.

Eliminate weekends, a stat holiday and add a couple of days for Harper-hillbilly factor and midnight last night (Muskoka time) would have been the double-double fudged deadline.

We have been handed... squat.

Buckdog leads us to this editorial which says the Harper Conservatives are arrogant. Indeed, they are, but it's actually worse than that.

The arrogance of the Tories, we are now seeing more clearly, is little more than bluster to cover the fact that they are truly lacking when it comes to governing. Harper knows that without tight control over anything said in the media, they will very quickly be revealed as bumpkins.

That's right and we've been pointing out that oft missed characteristic for quite some time now.

Tony Clement, devoid of any actual evidence of any of his prior claims, takes a leap into the bizarre defending his Dear Leader's pillaging of national census collection by suggesting that the information is just too good and actually having a law compelling people to provide it made the Conservatives feel like... the government.

“Hey, listen, they had a good deal going,” he [Clement] added. “They got good, quality data and the government of Canada was the heavy.”

Pick up that jaw, citizen. What Clement just told you is that the information from the census long-form was quality stuff. He's also being economical with the truth because he was attempting to tell you that anybody who wanted the washed data was getting it for free. Not so, as provided by Pogge:

Ah. So StatsCan has been providing "good, quality data" all along. Thanks for admitting it. Now you can wear it. And since Brian Mulroney's day, it's the federal government that has had a good deal going by being able to charge the rest of us for the data it should have been gathering anyway.

That's right. The Mulroney "user fee" doctrine which made your taxes nothing more than a membership fee in a club with a sales kiosk. The only people getting census information for free is the federal government. Everybody else has to cough up cash.

As David Eaves points out, every level of government relies heavily on accurate data produced by the census. Data which, by Clement's own admission, was accurate and reliable.

Clement has further suggested that the varying layers of government can get their data by paying private firms to gather it for them.

“All these provincial governments and these social institutions and private businesses – we’ll get them some data that will be useful and reliable,” he said. “If they don't want to use that data, it's up to them. They can pay for it another way. … You don't have to rely on the government of Canada.”

All these provincial governments?! Is that disdain we read? What Clement hasn't told you is that the federal government too will have to go out and buy the information. You'll be paying for that and you can rest assured they will not be sharing anything they get. And there will be no guarantee of reliability beyond the kind of error factor we see in polling data. For example, think of how many times you toss consumer surveys in the garbage after buying an item.

Aside from being worse liars than most governments, these clowns really are unfit to govern.

"Pirates didn't bury their treasure that carefully"

Heather Scoffield and Jennifer Ditchburn lay out the litany of lies propelled on the country by the Harper Conservatives over the census long form and underscore a simple fact:

From the PMO to the Treasury Board, with Harper controlling the entire process, everyone in government political circles was very aware of how wrong the decision was and how much irreparable damage would be done. Otherwise they would have no need to bury the evidence their handiwork.

They behave like criminals, hiding behind lies, inventing stories and attempting to divert attention from their actions.

Then they send in the greatest fabricator of all - Stockwell Day. Having called a press conference to discuss his party's "Economic Action Plan", Day found himself ambushed by reporters who are increasingly aware that when a Harper cabinet minister speaks to the census decision, a lie will be issued forth.

There is a simple point here: If the Harper government truly believes that what they are doing is correct and that the Canadian public agrees, they would not have to employ odious characters like Dimitri Soudas to invent outrageous scenarios of home-invading census workers; they would not have to send senior members of cabinet out into the public armed with easily rebutted falsehoods and; they wouldn't have to resort to the likes of Stockwell Day, (an individual who is truth-challenged at the best of times), to babble on idiotically, spewing bovine scatology on virtually any subject he is presented.

The Treasury Board President also faced questions about the Conservative government’s commitment to cutting the deficit while spending billions of dollars on new prisons while the crime rate is, in fact, declining.

Mr. Day doesn’t buy the view that crime rates are declining. Rather, he maintains crime is going unreported in Canada at “alarming” rates.

Based on what?!! The statement was so ludicrous that it got up the nose of Sun Media's (a Harper friendly organ) David Aikin, who decided it was time to put Day's claim to the test.

“I will follow up on that because I am baffled,” Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau chief David Akin said. “There is a statistic about unreported crimes? I mean if they are not reported by definition we have no idea about these crimes.

“You are just not making sense or I may be just a dolt and I don’t understand. Help me out on this one.”

Which pushed Day further into the pile of manure he had just dumped on the lectern.

In response, Mr. Day made vague comments about bankcard theft, fraud, home invasions and identity theft. And he promised to send Mr. Akin some statistics.

We'll be watching closely to see where and how those "statistics" were acquired. But more importantly, I'm calling absolute bullshit on Day right now. Does he really believe that someone who has suffered a bankcard theft would leave that unreported? Would you let a home invasion go without reporting it to the police? Identity theft is a massive unreported crime?

Is Day right out of his mind?!

A police investigator acquaintance told me recently that Harper's crew regularly exhibit all the signs of a criminal trying to evade justice and that if he had someone like Day, alone in an interview room for 30 minutes, he would have him confessing the truth and crying for his Mommy. They're that bad at covering their tracks.