Dear Enbridge ...

Up yours. 



And you too, Pooky.



Now go read what the Vancouver Province did.

Apparently we the public are "annoying" to Steve now

“They don’t bother us. It’s just that they are annoying,”
a "senior Conservative official" told the G&M's Dear Jane this morning about the public uproar in reaction to the scrapping of the compulsory long-form census.
"Census freedom," this same anonymous Conbot amusingly called it.

Apparently we the public are annoying to Steve now.

And not just the Lib/NDP/Green/I-don't-fucking-vote-for-any-of-those-bastards public either.
Not even Con voters support Steve's "Après moi, le déluge" style of government.

According to Angus Reid, only 31% of people who voted Con last time "side with the government's argument that the long form census is intrusive", while 53% of previous Con voters "believe that the long form census yields data that is important to make policy decisions in all areas of public service, and should remain mandatory."

Jane's column header today is Clement digs in heels and gains a supporter on census
The "supporter" turns out to be a rightwing radiohead.
Ok ... that's one.
I dunno, Jane, I don't think you're helping here.

Over the weekend Feschuk took the piss out of Jane's many columns consisting almost entirely of quotes from anonymous "seniory super-inside long-time party whatever" Con sources. Lols.

For a decent column on actual facts regarding the census : the incomparable Zerb.

Christie Blatchford vs "real" journalism

First, go read this piece by the Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford from last week.


Then read this excellent dissection of Blatchford's  arguments by Fillibluster.


I find that on a logical and factual basis, there is little need to add to what Fillibluster said in commenting on Blatchford's petulant, nonsensical bloviations, but since I have earned my living in the newspaper business for most of the last 20 years, I feel compelled to comment.


Now, stand back and give me room to swing. You may want to get a drink, this is going to take a while.


To borrow a phrase, virtually every word Blatchford has written is wrong, including "and" and "the."

Sez the Blatch:

"First, journalism is not merely a collective of the self-anointed."

Yes, it is. Very much so. There are no licences, or government permits required to be journalist. Bill O'Reilly calls himself a journalist, Geraldo Rivera calls himself a journalist. Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson and even Christie Blatchford have never had or needed licences. You don't have to be a full-time employee of a major media outlet -- many journalists, especially in print media, freelance for most of their careers. And being self-published is hardly a disqualifier either. Journalism icon, I.F. Stone published his own work for most of the latter part of his career, as did George Seldes.

For all that it may not be a regulated profession, neither is it just a coming together of people with cellphones, video cameras and blogs as receptacle for an apparently endless stream of unfiltered, unedited consciousness.

Well, perhaps my initial criticism was unfair --even a broken clock is correct twice a day and some of Blatchford jumping off points are factually correct: I agree, journalism is more than a bunch of people with cellphone and cameras, but journalism is often unfiltered and unedited. Most live television feeds for example are, by definition, unedited. That is why we were treated to the moving spectacle of the likes of CNN's Anderson Cooper and even FOX-hole Sheppard Smith freaking out on location in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and demanding to know why something wasn't being done. You want to know who edited the work of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow when they were at the height of their network careers? Surprise, trick question - they were their own managing editors.


In other words, just as you are not a physician or a lawyer merely because you say you are, much as you may want to believe it so, neither are you a journalist because you and your friends say you are or because your “writings” appear on a website.


This is a completely bogus comparison, physicians and lawyers being regulated professions. You are not a doctor or lawyer until the appropriate professional association and the government say you are. Being a journalist, like being a clergyman or an artist, is a calling, an avocation - not a profession - and there is no set criteria for calling yourself any one of those three. Grandma Moses or Andy Warhol or Banksy can decide they are artists. The pope, Jim Jones and Jerry Falwell are free to declare themselves holy men. Amy Goodman, Paul Wells, George Stephanopolus and Bob Woodward can all call themselves journalists. It is up to their audiences to decide whether they are any good at it, but they are free to identify themselves as they choose.

You will have heard reports of various independent/alternative journalists who claim to have been illegally detained and threatened by the police.


Again the blind squirrel finds a nut. This is objectively verifiable truth.

Four of them, for instance, have formally complained to the office of the independent police review director, and as the insufferable Lieutenant Horatio Caine says ad nauseam on CSI: Miami, let us follow the evidence on that.


Oh yes, let's!

I am all in favour of their complaints, and anyone else’s, being investigated, and I reserve my opinion on how well they were treated by the authorities, or not, until that verdict is in.

Uh, that would be you hedging, Blatchford. If you are "all in favour" then why are you writing this transparent smear piece? Where is this evidence you mentioned?

But let us not pretend that these folks are working journalists or that they are the equivalent. They aren’t, for the most part.

Ooooh, bold statement, other than the "for the most part" weaseling. And nice attempt at a  qualifying statement with "working" -- as any journalist knows, one is always "working" because if there is a news story happening in front of you, you are working, whether it is your day off or not. And no one is pretending, they are working journalists, but more about that later. Now, about that evidence...

Their work isn’t subject to editing or lawyering or the ethical code which binds, for example, the writers at The Globe. The websites on which they appear don’t belong, as do most reputable newspapers in this province, to the Ontario Press Council, a body which hears complaints against traditional journalists and publications.

First, since Blatchford refuses to produce any actual evidence or even name the media outlets involved, let's look at her claims and how she weasels them.
One of the complainants, Jesse Rosenfeld, is a freelancer for The Guardian, one of the world's leading newspapers, which comes complete with layers of editors and a legal department. The attack on him by police was witnessed and described by TVO's Steve Paikin, who was also manhandled by the cops, though not arrested. (Let's see Blatchford explain how he's not a journalist either.)
Another, Amy Miller, who alleges that the police threatened to rape her, is an independent filmmaker (like Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald and many people who film news reports for media outlets overseas) who also writes for The Dominion, a web magazine that covers news from a left wing perspective, but certainly has editors and appears to be at least as reputable as the Toronto Sun or CFRB radio.
The Guardian is a British newspaper and The Dominion is based in Montreal, so neither are members of the Ontario Press Council. Neither are the Napanee Beaver or the Picton Gazette, the oldest community newspaper in Canada, both which I used to work for. Neither is the CBC or any other broadcast media. It also bears pointing out that the Ontario Press Council, while I think it is a very fine organization, is very much a self-anointed  collective and membership in the council and adherence to their codes of conduct and ethics is entirely voluntary.
As to the other two complainants, according to Canadian Journalists for Free Expression:

Lisa Walter, 41, an indie magazine writer for Our Times, said she was thrown to the ground and cuffed as she and another independent journalist covered the same group that was being arrested in downtown Toronto on Sunday afternoon, according to her complaint.  She said officers mocked her, saying her credentials were "fake," questioned whether she was a man and the sergeant who ordered her arrest called her a "f-ing dyke" and "a douche bag," her complaint states.

According to McIsaac's complaint, he was covering the same protest as Amy Miller for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. He said he was with Miller when he was assaulted and arrested by police. He was taken to a hospital after telling police that he had a pacemaker and then later transferred to the detention centre. The 27-year-old was also released later without being charged."

McIsaac's case may blur the line between journalist and activist in that he was not there on behalf of a news media outlet but was covering events for a website run by an advocacy group, but Our Times is unquestionably a legitimate publication, however since it is a magazine, it - like MacLeans and Time and The Economist - is not a member of the Ontario Press Council either. So much for Blatchford's contention that "for the most part" the four are not working journalists and for her attempt to discount the media outlets they were working for as mere "websites" as though they were blogging out of mom and dad's basement for an audiences made up entirely of their family and friends.


We in the mainstream media make plenty of mistakes and bad calls, even given the safeguards (layers of editors and other sets of eyes reading our copy; lawyers too, in some instances; established standards) that are in place.


Golly, "we" sure do Christie, and by "we" I mean "you" --like the other day when you swallowed hook, line and sinker the story put forth by Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair that masked black-bloc anarchists had disrupted the repatriation ceremony of the remains of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan, despite the fact that other eyewitness accounts and video taken at the event show that no such thing happened. But a man in uniform told you the story and so you ran with it.


Why should an alternative journalist (self-anointed, often with a demonstrable political agenda) be automatically assumed to be an infallible truth-teller or always accurate?


They shouldn't, but sworn legal affidavits attached to an official complaint to the official police review are a little different from something some guy said on some blog somewhere. And let me ask you this: Why should a mainstream journalist or columnist (paid by a large corporation, often with a demonstrable political agenda and history of being completely wrong) be automatically assumed to be an infallible truth-teller or always accurate?

Second, the press pass doesn’t grant even traditional journalists carte blanche access everywhere.

Stop the presses! Visually-impaired bushy-tailed tree rat finds second hard-shelled edible seed! For more on this earth-shaking statement of the incredibly obvious, see "No Shit, Sherlock" page 17.

In the midst of a riot, it is not a shield that can be waved to keep either police or rioters at bay. It is neither an avoid-jail nor get-out-of-jail-free card.

Which is clear from the fact that people with press passes got arrested. That isn't the point. Press passes have nothing to do with any of this. The complaint is that people who were observing the protests were arrested simply for being present. The possession of a press pass serves to explain why that person is present and indicates that they are an observer, not a participant. That's why we carry press credentials. Didn't they cover this is in employee orientation at the Globe?

One doesn’t get to cross the yellow tape at a crime scene in order to have a really good look at the dead body even if one has a press pass. One doesn’t get into cabinet meetings because one has a press pass. One doesn’t get to march into the judge’s chambers and sit in on the lawyers’ private discussions that go on there because one has a press pass. Etc., etc.

Media accreditation sometimes allows reporters to go where the general public can’t, such as sports dressing rooms and backstage at concerts and the like; it may give us better seats (as in a courtroom, where there may be a press row, or at a sports event, where there is a press box); it may get us closer to the action or the participants in the action.

Period.


Oooooh, she said "period" and even made it a one-word paragraph. I guess this discussion of irrelevancies is over. 


Thus, in the G20 protests, journalists, real or self-appointed, traditional or otherwise, had no special rights to go where we wanted and no special badge of protection against arrest.

No, journalists didn't have any special rights, but in Canada we have this thing called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that promises certain inalienable civil rights - perhaps you've heard of it? Last time I checked it said something about the police not being to arrest people without reasonable cause.

Third, I would point out that the area north of the Ontario Legislature was indeed designed as a protest area during the summit.

It was never, however, meant to function as a no-go zone, to which the darling practitioners of the Black Bloc arts could retreat unchallenged and un-interfered with by the police to change clothes so that they might blend back with the regular crowd.

Indeed, it might have been better for the police to arrest the vandals and miscreants while they were running amok instead of standing around Queens Park hassling the non-violent protesters. May the police should learn to obey the law, to wit:

Criminal Code of Canada - Neglect by peace officer

69. A peace officer who receives notice that there is a riot within his jurisdiction and, without reasonable excuse, fails to take all reasonable steps to suppress the riot is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

R.S., c. C-34, s. 70.

Speaking of the criminal code, Blatchford might want to keep this one in the back of her mind:

C.C.C. - Spreading false news

181. Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

But back to her so-called arguments:


Fourth, since with the wisdom of hindsight it is now apparent that everyone knew that the anarchists/Black Bloc types would try to wreak havoc on the city, why are the organizers of the legitimate protests not being questioned about their accountability? They too presumably knew – as did police and security forces – that their peaceful demonstrations likely would be disrupted; what steps did they take to stop such a hijacking?


So in hindsight why didn't the organizers demonstrate their foresight and stop the black bloc from joining their protest? How would they have done that? If "everyone knew" why didn't the downtown merchants board up their windows for  the weekend? Why didn't every single resident south of the 401 leave town for the weekend? 
The protest organizers were not being paid a billion dollars to provide security, the police were. It is not the responsibility of the protest organizers to vet everyone who joins a demonstration. It is the job of the police to stop crimes in progress.
I think better questions might be "Since the police bragged about having infiltrated the Black Bloc and having monitored their communications, why didn't they stop them from running amok?" and "Does Christie Blatchford not realize that organizing a political protest is akin to herding cats and that the organizers have no authority to make anyone do anything -- is she really that stupid or is she just being incredibly dishonest?"

Fifth, in Toronto Star lingo, since “the sweeping powers” granted the police via the “secret” law saw them, according to Toronto Chief Bill Blair, arrest exactly one (1) person under the temporary regulation to the Public Works Protection Act, isn’t the angst-ridden, hyperbolic debate rendered, as someone brighter than me remarked recently, nothing but an intellectual exercise?

"Toronto Star lingo?" Really, Blatchford? Well, I suppose this will let you play victim for your conservative audience if the scribes at The Star decide to hit back or fact check anything you write. From now on any and all criticism of the Globe or yourself can now be attributed to people at The Star not being able to take a little joshing, right?

And I guess if you haven't been arrested, just searched, yelled at, possibly beaten or otherwise abused under a law that doesn't actually exist, well your civil rights haven't really been violated.  I guess us angsty, intellectual eggheads should stop worrying about the rule of law and abuse of authority in civil society and just shut up, is that it?

It would quite one thing if the 1,000 folks who were detained on G20 weekend were detained under the temporary regulation. The discussion would be meaningful.

But when it’s all said and done, it will turn out that most of those detained were arrested for breach of the peace or to prevent a breach of the peace, which is an arrest authority, not a criminal charge.

So discussion of abuse of that arrest authority is meaningless?

In my view, it’s a vile authority too, generally speaking easily misused by police, and it may have been misused here as well.

So giving the police the authority to arrest people for breach of the peace is vile and you agree that such authority may have been abused, but talking about that is meaningless?

But the point is, it wasn’t under the new secret sweeping power, which was only partly secret and not very sweeping. It was under long-established common-law police authorities, such as arresting people for breach of the peace or to prevent a breach of the peace that has yet to take place, that most people were picked up.

You want to be angry about something, be angry about that.

We are, that's why people are complaining to the police review board. But we can be angry about more than one thing at a time. Don't you even read your own paper?  And "partly secret?" Is that like "sort of confidential" or "a little bit pregnant" or "slightly illegal" -- or is it sort of like "kind of a hack as a writer?"

Finally, how amusing it is to see Toronto, press and public alike, whip themselves into a frenzy of outrage over alleged police inaction and then alleged police overreaction, when all of this, in terms even more stark, happened in Caledonia, Ont., from 2006 onwards, and no one gave a fig.


Plenty of people, especially in Caledonia and on the Six Nations Reserve have been giving more than a fig for quite awhile, since well before 2006. I used to work there and trust me, the dispute goes back a lot further than that. You and the rest of Toronto just haven't noticed because it didn't happen in Hogtown.


Honestly, the Globe should be embarrassed by this ill-considered, poorly-written screed of a column.
Blatchford just doesn't get it at all. The point of the complaint is that the police were unlawfully attacking, abusing and arresting people for being observers at a demonstration that they forcibly (and quite possibly illegally) broke up. Their status as journalists strongly supports their contention that they were observers, not bystanders. Blatchford's attempt to smear them as some sort of lying amateur wannabes just because they don't work in her office is dishonest and dishonorable. Real journalists everywhere should be disowning this police mouthpiece as a colleague.


crossposted from the Woodshed

G20 : Maclean's does The Onion

It's been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn't it?
Inside - a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.
Outside - 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee's prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean's bravely decides to go for The Onion approach. Some highlights from Lock them up :

anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone ... arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements. ... The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

The Onion couldn't have done a better job.

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.

They hate us for our freedoms etc etc ...

I AM BORED

h/t Commenter at Balloon Juice

Why what words mean matters

In the neatest bit of spin since some PR hack coined the term "collateral damage" for dead and wounded civilian bystanders, NATO now appears to be trying to convince us that murdering civilians is something for which no one is responsible - and most in the press seem to lazy to call them on it.



Exhibit A from AFP (emphasis mine):

Five Afghan civilians accidentally killed in airstrike: NATO
(AFP) – 20 hours ago
KABUL — Five Afghan civilians were accidentally killed and two others injured in an airstrike in southern Afghanistan, NATO said Monday, in an incident unrelated to a major US-led anti-Taliban operation.
The deaths were accidental, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said, adding that the victims had been mistaken for insurgents planting improvised bombs.
"An ISAF airstrike against suspected insurgents accidentally killed five and wounded two civilians in the Zhari district of Kandahar province today," ISAF said in a statement.



An accident - as in "whoops, clumsy me, sorry about that! Could have happened to anyone. Completely unintentional, I assure you."



Bollocks.



This was not an accident. The bombs and missiles used didn't just happen to fall off the jets due to a loose bolt and happen to fall on this group of people by random chance. The pilot didn't unknowingly lean on the trigger of his guns while trying to find a dropped map or something like that. These people were targeted and killed by professional military pilots under orders to attack them. It was not an accident. If it had happened to a group of civilian workers on military firing range in the United States or Canada, the pilot would be facing murder charges.

An accident is an error involving random chance that occurs without any intent to do harm to the people involved. People don't get held responsible for accidents, because they are no one's fault and malicious intent is not a factor.

I'm not saying accidents don't happen on the battlefield, they do. Twelve people were accidently killed in an airstrike the previous day when U.S. pilots fire a pair of missiles into a house full of civilians. In this case, the pilots were trying to kill some Taliban, but missed the target. Now, admittedly they missed the target by 600m, but they didn't mean to blow up the house they hit. It was an understandable, if extremely unfortunate, accident. Oopsy!


A Canadian soldier died in a training accident just the other day on the firing range. It doesn't make his death any less horrible for his family, but he wasn't targeted for death by anyone in this case.


The aforemention airstrike was not an accident, it was a mistake. Whoever identified the target and called in the airstrike made a mistake, either through negligence or incompetence or garbled communication. Someone thought the people killed were Taliban planting a IED. They were not, and the airstrike was called in on bad information.

Mistakes happen on the battlefield, just as they do everywhere. Soldiers, despite what you may see on American television and conservative blogs, are no closer to perfection than anyone else. Friendly fire incidents have cost lives in every war and people make mistakes. Depending on the size of the mistake, sometimes people have to be held responsible. When it is a matter of people losing their lives, someone needs to be called to account - not only to figure out how the mistake occurred so that it can be prevented in the future, but to show that mistakes are taken seriously and carelessness will not be tolerated.

This applies whether you are talking about typos in a newspaper, filing errors in a medical clinic or hockey player who not playing to his potential. A minor typo in the paper isn't worth firing someone over, but if they consistently get the facts wrong or libel someone out of carelessness or negligence, they are going to cost the newspaper a lot of money and damage its credibility. A lost file in a medical clinic has the potential to be a very serious problem and a clerk who regularly loses files is not going to kept on the job for long. A hockey player who is constantly caught out of position or who takes stupid penalties or fails to execute plays properly is going to be benched at best or cut from the team.

This airstrike was not an accident, it was another in a long series of deadly mistakes that are turning the population of Afghanistan against the West. It is understandable that the military would do their best to protect their own and try to remove the blame by calling this an accident. It is unforgivable for the press to do so.

And as long as comments are down, you can come and comment on The Woodshed

Vancouver police beat up a guy; media coverage blows

Vancouver's finest responded to a domestic dispute call by going to the wrong suite at 2am and beating the crap out of the guy who answered the door. They were in plain clothes. Yao Wei Wu does not speak English. He said he did not resist because the men had guns.

"Mr. Wu was taken to hospital where he was treated for bruises to his head, waist and knees and fractured bones around his left eye."

Vancouver Police chief Jim Chu has personally apologized to the 44 year old man. There will be an investigation.

It's horrible I know. But I wanted to point out the media headlines.

MetroNews : VPD arrest wrong man on domestic dispute call

CTV : Vancouver police apologize for arresting wrong man

Van Sun : Vancouver police apologize for wrongful arrest

NaPo : Vancouver man injured during mistaken arrest

Notice anything about those headlines? What they all imply is that it's the wrongful arrest that's the problem, not the fact the Vancouver Police beat someone up regardless of whether they thought he was the right guy or not.

CBC : Vancouver police apologize after man beaten

Thank you, CBC. And to commenters below the story, mostly all 300 of whom seem to get it.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting to find out if anything will be done about the off-duty cops who beat up a newsie a whole year ago.

Update : This is cause for a wee bit of hope ... VPD actually admits first response was to spin it :

VPD spokesperson Jana McGuinness stated yesterday that the man, who was not involved in any crime and was mistaken for someone else by police, “resisted by striking out at the police and trying to slam the door.”

Today, VPD Chief Jim Chu stepped back from those allegations, saying, “I want to make it perfectly clear this morning that we do not stand by that statement.”

"Democracy and Parliament not side-stepped, only suspended"

with a little help from their friends ....

We would like to thank Con MP Brent Rathgeber for that lovely explanation of Steve's contempt for parliament - first ignoring its will and then proroguing it - and move on to how the media props up that contempt by ignoring it.

As pointed out by POGGE here and here, CBC and CTV/CanWest both blew their year-end interviews with Steve.
.
Mansbridge took a stab at getting some explanation from Steve on why he prorogued parliament but then allows Steve to blow him off with bafflegab about how Canadians don't care about it anyway. The question Mansbridge should have asked is why Steve is ignoring a parliamentary motion to hand over unredacted documents on the Afghan detainees and did he shut down parliament to avoid doing so?
.
At least Mansbridge gave it a shot. In their year end interview, the CTV/CanWest tagteam of John Ivison and David Akin don't even mention proroguing or detainees, never mind ignoring the will of parliament. They just skip the whole friggin thing.

Here's the opening question from their interview which ran in the National Post, :

IVISON: "Prime Minister, it seems there is not going to be much for us to write about, unless there are Senate appointments in our near future."

Yup, year end review, not much goin' on in Canada right now. What ever will they write about?
.
In his blog entry : Interviewing Harper: What to ask? Why not ask about prorogation? David Akin explains that Mansbidge already covered that issue - no, David, clearly he did not - and that they did not have much time to ask questions that could be rewritten up by their affiliate papers :

"[T]he goal for Canwest, at least, is to leave the interview with a story that the local editors of the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and other Canwest papers would find interesting enough that they would make (valuable) space for in their papers."

Yet within that admittedly short 13 minutes there was apparently ample time for questions like this :

AKIN: Do (you) see yourself in a decade -- you may not be prime minister -- do you see a career for yourself after this? I don't sense you're the board of directors type but I don't know, maybe you are -- an academic? What do you want to do? Where are you in a decade?"

Steve in a decade? Who gives a rat's ass? We want to know where our parliament is right now. Akin responds in comments at Pogge's.

Happily the conservative US UK mag The Economist, in two separate articles, goes straight to the heart of what the Canadian media mostly ignores :
.
Harper goes prorogue

Parliamentary scrutiny may be tedious, but democracies cannot afford to dispense with it
Never mind what his spin doctors say: Mr Harper’s move looks like naked self-interest. His officials faced grilling by parliamentary committees over whether they misled the House of Commons in denying knowledge that detainees handed over to the local authorities by Canadian troops in Afghanistan were being tortured.

A legislature matters more than the luge.

Mr Harper is a competent tactician with a ruthless streak. He bars most ministers from talking to the media; he has axed some independent watchdogs; he has binned campaign promises to make government more open and accountable. Now he is subjecting Parliament to prime-ministerial whim. He may be right that most Canadians care more about the luge than the legislature, but that is surely true only while their decent system of government is in good hands. They may soon conclude that it isn’t.

and

Canada without Parliament - Halted in mid-debate

Stephen Harper is counting on Canadians’ complacency as he rewrites the rules of his country’s politics to weaken legislative scrutiny.
The danger in allowing the prime minister to end discussion any time he chooses is that it makes Parliament accountable to him rather than the other way around.

It is now up to [the opposition] to show that Canada cannot afford a part-time Parliament that sits only at the prime minister’s pleasure.

One would think it would also be a matter of some concern to the Fourth Estate.

Meanwhile, CANADIANS AGAINST PROROGUING PARLIAMENT - 92,000 and counting

On Facebook .
.

A mighty wind blows up the arse of the CBC

CBC caves on Heather Mallick's column; promises more rightwing talking points real soon.
Jesus freaking baby momma o' god.

The CBC Ombudsman reviews Mallick's column on VP Embarrassment-in-Waiting Sarah Palin, "A Mighty Wind Blows Through the Republican Convention", and cites this quote :

"It’s possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she’s a woman. They’re unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night?"

Great line that last one, wasn't it? Here's the ombudsman's response:

"Ms. Mallick’s item generally stays in the opinion column but she does offer some flat statements that appear to offer "facts" without any backup. For instance, there is no factual basis for a broad scale conclusion about the sexual adequacy of Republican men."

Yes, there really are few things more ridiculous than a prissy serious pants deconstruction of snark, are there?
The ombudsman notes, apparently without irony, that Natty Post writer Jonathon Kay "urged readers to write to complain", and gets skittish on the topic of the CBC being "government-owned":

"I even received a phone call from the Fox News web outlet inquiring whether the views expressed represented the position of Canadians and "the Government of Canada."

Oh dear, the Fox is among the chickens again. And speaking of Fox :

"On CBCNews.ca, there does not appear to be a wide range of "pointy" views. For instance, many of those who complained claimed that there is no one of an opposite ideological viewpoint readily apparent on the service. Unfortunately, this appears to be true."

Uh-oh. Cue CBCNewshead John Cruickshank : We erred in our judgment :

"Mallick's column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan. And because it is all those things, this column should not have appeared on the CBCNews.ca site …We failed you in this case. And as a result we have put new editing procedures in place to insure that in the future, work that is not appropriate for our platforms, will not appear."

Will that be sufficiently spineless to appease Fox, do you think?

"Ombudsman Carlin makes another significant observation in his response to complainants: when it does choose to print opinion, CBCNews.ca displays a very narrow range on its pages. In this, Carlin is also correct. This, too, is being immediately addressed. CBCNews.ca will soon expand the diversity of voices and opinions and be home to a diverse group of writers with many perspectives. In this, we will better reflect the depth and texture of this country."

Uh huh. CBC : "Fair and Balanced".
Good. In that case I expect to hear a good deal more from the poor, the left, the disabled, prisoners, feminists, First Nations, and people who don't live in freakin' Toronto.

And is this the "great wind" of a possible Con majority you're feeling here, CBC?
The ombudman wrote "Liberty is not the same as license"; maybe Cruikshank is hearing "Liberty is not the same as having a licence."

Update : The Rev notes in comments that it only took 300 NattyPost driven crayola emails to put the wind up the CBC.
Hell, we can do better than that by noon : CBC Ombudsman
Normally I suggest using your indoors voice when writing a letter of complaint but Skdadl's suggestion is just so good :
"CBC executives are even more sexually inadequate than Republican men are."

Cross-posted at Creekside

If the Globe and Mail is going to give this guy a voice...

There is an obligation to produce the body to go with it. This is just plain bullshit.

"If Canadians cannot count on non-political, non-ideological justice from the Supreme Court of Canada, it compromises the whole justice system," Charles McVety, president of the Canadian Family Action Coalition and president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto, said in an interview yesterday.

I was once one of the "chief critics" of Brian Mulroney and I don't recall the G&M calling for my wholly unqualified opinion.

This whole thing is becoming less and less about the so-called Morgentaler controversy and more and more about the fact that the Globe and Mail seems incapable of doing 30 minutes of research into the background of those who gain a platform under their headlines.

Edward Greenspon needs to get out of his chair and kick a few asses. I would recommend starting with MacKenzie and Walmsley, the managing editor and national editor respectively. Surely they learned the value of research when they were in J school. Perhaps it's time to issue a few not-so-gentle reminders.

And in case, Mr. Greenspon, you think I'm a lone voice on this, you can check here, here and here, just to start. We're all seeing the same thing: The G&M taking the word of an illusionist with questionable credentials.

Questionable credentials? Oh yes. You see, Mr. Greenspon, you keep referring to McVety as "Dr.". There is a solid body of information out there which puts that particular title of McVety's to question. Bene Diction is a good starting point where you'll also find a trail of research and questions which expose McVety (and others) for what he really is. And is wasn't a solitary effort. Others contributed to the research and had started questioning McVety's "doctorate" in early June. From there others went to work. When we couldn't get answers to direct emails we took the next step - we made direct phone calls. Here are the results.

So, Mr. Greenspon, the story is now about your newspaper - and the shoddy job it's doing.

Conservatives, hotel rooms and whores

What is it with these freaks? I used to think that writing out a contract on a paper napkin was pretty sleazy, but the Harperites have proved that the Conservatives have real penchant for secret meetings in hotel rooms.

Really. It's an obsession.

I mean, look at the pattern!

And it's not like they're not aware of the status they give to the people they meet in hotel rooms. And, we're all aware of it too.

That's right. With the exception of one, who took the story and ran with it, the rest of you are a bunch of whores.

When the facts catch up with the headlines

At around the beginning of the month there was much rending of garments led by various media outlets who ran with headlines designed to... enrage you.

There is nothing they won’t do if they think it will work in creating carnage and the political fallout that comes from that.

Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq


... shows that al Qaeda has no political programme here that is acceptable to a civilised society and that this is the most brutal and the most bankrupt of movements

Condoleeza Rice, US Secretary of State

That was brought on by news reports like this one and this one describing the horrendous attacks on February 1st on the pet market and bird market in Baghdad. At issue was the assertion that the insurgents in Baghdad had employed two women with Down's Syndrome as suicide bombers. Headlines across the news media rang out the same story. They even had a US Army major general to support the story.

Senior American military officials produced photographs Saturday they said showed the bodies of two female suicide bombers who a day earlier attacked two popular pet markets, causing Baghdad's deadliest blasts in months. The photographs showed the lifeless faces of two dark-haired women with oblique eye fissures, a wide gap between the eyes and a flat nose bridge -- characteristics consistent with Down syndrome. "There are some indications that these two women were mentally handicapped," said Army Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad. "From what I see, it appears that the suicide bombers were not willing martyrs. They were used by Al Qaeda [in Iraq] for these horrific attacks." Hammond showed the classified photographs to a few reporters, including one for The Times, but he declined to release the images "out of respect for the deceased." "These two women were likely used because they didn't know what was happening and they were less likely to be searched," Hammond said.

Except that it wasn't true.

The reason the severed heads of the two women were so badly deformed had more to do with the blast than it did with any birth defect. And now, the US military has had to admit it.

The women were identified and case files indicate they had been treated for depression and schizophrenia.

“We know that we got their complete records, their case files, and we know they had in-patient treatment as recently as the last month or two,” Admiral Smith said. He said they had been treated for “typical kinds of psychiatric problems — depression, schizophrenia.”

Nor could the US military establish a link back to al Qaeda.

BAGnewsNotes has more.