OK... we'll wait for a bit on this one

David Akin has extricated a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail from John Fryer, an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria.

It's pretty damning stuff.

I know John Fryer. He's not taken to misrepresenting events such as this. In short, I'm inclined to believe him.

Am I accusing the Manning Centre of anything? No. Nothing yet.

Do I believe they would show people how to engage in voter suppression? Not yet, but since it is little more than a Conservative political boot camp, they wear the same level of trustworthiness as the Harperites they spawned, and the behaviour of the Harperites is the worst we have ever seen in this country.

We'll keep an eye on this one because if Fryer expands on this in any way which suggest that voter suppression was a part of either training or a workshop, well, they have nothing to explain. They will have lived up to all our expectations.

Hat tip to Steve in comments who also writes here.

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.

Harper : Fresh muzzles all round for everyone

According to Jane, Steve has a new plan to protect the Cons from their own appallingly bad ideas.

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Twenty-six committees, comprised of three senators and six MPs each, will vet "proposed legislation, regulations and even ideas" before they hit daylight or an uninitiated Con MP's lips.

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Under the watchful eye of John Baird and his former chief of staff, Rick Dykstra - both Mike Harris alumni - and with the parliamentary secretary from each ministry serving as the committee chair, the idea is to identify C.R.A.P. ideas - like gutting the census and building hockey arenas in Con-convenient places - before they can set the curtains on fire.

"These permanent committees have a mandate to provide a new layer of troubleshooting ... to flag potential policy land mines to cabinet, catch issues that may fly in Ontario but won’t play well in Western Canada, help with communications strategy and reduce the dependence on ministers receiving advice from bureaucrats sitting in Ottawa."

Sure. Screw the policy making; let's ignore the already muzzled people who have spent their professional lives making policy and just troll for better PR in the Bushlands .

"Mr. Harper asked several of his senior caucus members – Mr. Dykstra, ... Marjory LeBreton, the leader of the Government in the Senate; and former House leader Jay Hill – to work on the initiative."

That would be the same Jay Hill, now replaced by House bully John Baird, who previously oversaw the implementation of the Cons dirty tricks manual, aka the Cons Guide to Chaos, for destroying the parliamentary committees.

You know, the same all-party parliamentary committees these new Steve-appointed Con committees are so obviously intended to eventually replace.

Harper's war on the Canadian Wheat Board

Aug 2, 2007 : (italics mine)
"One ongoing concern remains Harper's determination to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly on the marketing of western barley crops. A recent federal court ruling upheld the wheat board's right to serve as a single marketing desk for Canadian barley.

Harper said the monopoly would have to end, no matter what the court has said.
"We're obviously disappointed with the court decision," he said, "but that does not change the determination of the government of Canada to see a dual market for Canadian farmers.

"I hope the wheat board will start working with the government to make sure this is gonna happen, 'cause it's gonna happen one way or another, whether it takes a little bit of time or a lot of time, it's gonna happen."

Aug 2, 2008: (italics mine)
"The Harper government is tinkering with the rules governing the election of Canadian Wheat Board directors in an attempt to influence this fall's scheduled vote, critics charge.

Late Friday, Ottawa announced it would remove advertising spending limits for third-party interveners in wheat board elections.

"It's just another attack on the Canadian Wheat Board," said National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells. "They think they can marshal lots of corporate money and lots of big-spender money and try to destroy the board by advertising against it."


The spending limits for wheat board candidates, 8 out of 10 of whom support the wheat board's monopoly on wheat and barley sales, are capped at $15,000.
Monsanto, on the other hand, once blocked by the Wheat Board from Canadian registration of RoundUp Ready Wheat, will now be allowed, should they so desire, to run as many ads advocating "choice" for wheat farmers as they like.

A timeline of the Con's attacks on the wheat board includes firing the CWB president and two directors, striking 16,269 farmers - or 36% - from the voters' list, and issuing a gag order preventing the CWB from making its case to the public.

h/t Peterborough Politics for the Aug 2, 2008 newslink
Cross-posted at Creekside

Supporting the troops...not

First they send them to a place they just shouldn't be on the basis of trumped up charges and outright lies. Then they don't provide enough body armor or armored vehicles. Then they screw over the returning wounded at Walter Reed. Now, Bush is screwing the veterans out of health care so he can cut taxes for Haliburton and Paris Hilton.

Environment Committee scuttled

The Environment Committee appears to gone the way of other government committees who deviate from the Con party line.

Faced with the prospect of testimony hostile to the Con environment plan from a witness previously expected to be 'friendly', Environment Committee Chair and Con MP Bob Mills attempted to change the witness line-up, and when over-ruled by the rest of the committee he promptly resigned as committee chair. No other Con agreed to stand in for Mills, thereby effectively shutting down the hearings.

Another one for the growing list of sabotaged committees.
The silenced witness was Mark Jaccard, a Simon Fraser University economist who Environment Minister John Baird counted on to validate the Con non-environment plan right up til Jaccard published a scathing review of the government's climate change targets via the previously supportive C.D.Howe Institute.

Now we all remember the 200 page Con dirty tricks manual with its suggestions on how to disrupt and terminate committees not holding to the Con party line, and the subsequent presumably Con-initiated leak to NaPo's Don Martin a month ago that Con party whip Jay Hill leaned on committee chairs who didn't play along :

"A source at that meeting confided that [government whip] Mr. [Jay] Hill "lavished praise on the chairs who caused disruptions and admonished those who prefer to lead through consensus".

So it's more than a little interesting that following his resignation as Environment Committee Chair, Bob Mills refused all interviews and instead "referred all questions on the matter to the Conservative whip".

Con whip Jay Hill, apparently not yet informed of Mills' resignation, declined to be interviewed when questioned on it by reporters.

Is it far-fetched to imagine that Bob Mills, an apparently decent guy by all accounts, actually expected to get a little work done when he came to Ottawa? I don't imagine he envisaged having to resign his position as the optimum way of achieving that.

Just how much pressure are these committee chairs under to entirely discredit the whole concept of government?This entirely ridiculous experiment in being governed by people who hate government has been an unmitigated disaster.
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