Tuesday, March 26, 2019

"Russia-gaters" gonna hate


"It ain't over till it's over!" shouted Yogi Berra. And he was right! This appears to be the mentality of the people who have been shrieking "TREASON!!!" at the top of their lungs for the last 2+ years. But in this case (unlike Berra) I think they're wrong. Sure, we haven't seen the report. But Mueller hasn't spoken out against anyone who says that his inquiry found no evidence of collusion. So I'm 99% sure that he found no evidence of collusion.

Monday, March 25, 2019

"Russia-gate" Dead-Enders


So, Robert Mueller ... you remember him? This guy:


[That had been a video of Mueller lying to the US Congress about Iraq's non-existent "Weapons of Mass Destruction."]

Had somehow morphed into this:


Sunday, March 24, 2019

The Fake Scandal and the Toxic Trudeau Haters Part III

So, to review from parts I and II, ... It is upsetting that the Trudeau government interfered with the independence of the legal system on behalf of the powerful, Liberal-supporting, super-corrupt engineering firm SNC-Lavalin for crass political purposes. And it is stupid, self-defeating behaviour for self-proclaimed "progressives" to twist themselves into pretzels trying to defend this sleazy behaviour, just because the main opposition party is worse.


It is the way that these "progressives" ignore reality, put their fingers in their ears and shout "I can't hear you!" and become apologists for all sorts of evils, that I want to address with this post. (This applies to all partisans of all stripes. I said the same sorts of things to nearby NDP'rs who tried to defend Bob Rae against leftist critics [like me] by saying that we HAD to stick with him because the opposition was worse. It obviously applies to the mental wreaks who inhabit the Conservative Party of Canada. But such stupidity is to be expected from those types and they're most all of them, beyond redemption.)

I do not worship at the altar of St. Jody Wilson-Raybould. Firstly, I didn't pay much attention to her. Apparently the Mound of Sound did. He was highly critical of her legislation in response to the Supreme Court's ruling that the terminally ill have a right to death with dignity. Peace and social justice activist Matthew Behrens has consistently criticized her (along with her new friend and ally Jane Philpott and the entire Trudeau government) for their continued abuse of Canada's First Nations.

Was Wilson-Raybould angry at being demoted from the post of attorney-general? It seems so.


Bah! Blogging doesn't pay. I'll end this series by simply saying that Jody Wilson-Raybould might just be resentful of being demoted. Regardless, the asshat Liberal partisans are embarrassing themselves with lie after lie and smear after smear and denial after denial. They're spinning EVERYTHING as if it's Saint Justin Trudeau vs. All The Hordes of Hell. In so doing, they're imitating their shit-head cousins in the USA. The Hillary-bot dead-enders who refuse to accept reality and then stumble about in a daze wondering why everyone hates them.

Yes. Andrew Scheer is a hateful, Christo-fascist nazi just like the human garbage he panders to. The Conservative Party of Canada is a hate group and their existence as a party is an indictment of our culture.

That doesn't mean the Liberals aren't a different form of slime.

We're all idiots.

I can't take it anymore.


Monday, March 11, 2019

The Fake Scandal and the Toxic Trudeau Haters Part II


When I first heard about the accusations that Jody Wilson-Raybould had been removed as Attorney General because she insisted on prosecuting SNC-Lavalin, rather than allow the corporation to have a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, my ears perked up. You see, it's a pet-peeve of mine the way corporate criminals and fraudsters are almost never held accountable for their actions in this country.

Billionaire whining asswipe, untalented golden-spoon fuck-face Galen Weston's family-owned "Weston Bakeries" conspired with big supermarket chains (including Galen Weston's own "Loblaws") to fix bread prices for FOURTEEN years. Supposedly lil' Galen is really stupid and incompetent. Because he never knew about this all the years it was going on. Unnamed middle-managers supposedly did all of this and AS SOON AS GALEN FOUND OUT ABOUT IT he went to the government and promised his full cooperation in rooting-out the evildoers. It's either that or (much more likely) Galen Weston was very much a part of this conspiracy and someone tipped him off that an investigation was underway and came up with the bullshit story about how he was innocent of any knowledge as to what was going on FOR YEARS at two firms that he, himself ran. He was "cooperating" and so he could go back to the hard work of denying his companies' employees a living wage.

Bell is found to have been coercing employees to upsell customers with services that they neither want or need; gouging customers for services that aren't delivered, and lying about costs. Sickeningly, employees were told to refuse requests from relatives of deceased customers to cancel services and, instead, upsell them on new ones. Through a shameless wreak of a human being (called a "public-relations representative") Bell lied and insisted that none of these accusations of fraud and bullying (coming from thousands of customers and dozens of employees) were true. Don't worry though. A CRTC investigation might happen any decade now.

Leaks from two offshore tax-havens showed that Canadian corporations and wealthy individuals were illegally stashing their money there. The Canada Revenue Agency has done sweet fuck all to try to recover these funds. Apparently these wealthy people can hire top legal talent and it's expensive to take them on. CRA (and the Canadian federal government) simply don't have the resources to match any of these scofflaws, win in court with the fucking evidence handed to them on a silver platter, and make an example of even one of these assholes and hold them liable for the costs of having to prosecute them. Nope. Instead CRA is going after ordinary schmucks for alleged Child Benefit "over-payments" and forcing people to jump through hoops to prove they're entitled to the money. Because these targets of harassment can't afford fancy lawyers and fight back. Predators go after the weak.


So yeah, I was interested to hear that super-corrupt SNC-Lavalin might have had a non-compliant Attorney-General/Justice Minister removed because she wouldn't act in their favour. I didn't know the whole story. These were rumours based on anonymous sources. But it was serious stuff.

I didn't even know Canada had Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA's)at the time this story came out. Turns out that was part of the plan of the giant Liberal omnibus bill. Just like harper's regime: Use a majority to ram-through lots of legislative changes with little parliamentary oversight or debate. DPA's were created at the behest of SNC-Lavalin by the way. So there's that. All-in-all, pretty sleazy.

Well, that's enough non-paying blogging for one day. I'll post this AZ-IZ and finish it in my own sweet time. You the few, proud and brave readers of mine can come back in a few days and it'll probably be finished.


Right. So, continuing ... In Canada the Attorney General also serves as Justice Minister. Supposedly this had its origins in Sir John A. [let's starve the Plains Indians to death] Macdonald wanting to have as much power centered on his own person or something like that. But it puts the Attorney General in a bind. As Justice Minister they have to support the government in which they serve while as the Attorney General they are expected, nay obligated, to enforce the law without fear or favour to any party, including their own.

Do you understand this? The Attorney General is supposed to protect the rule-of-law and not act in a partisan manner. This means (among other scenarios) that if a member of the government or one of its "friends" (such as a wealthy benefactor of the party who can also provide lucrative post-government employment to said government's members) violates the laws, the Attorney General must not bend the law to accommodate the government or its friends.

I'll now provide two sources to illustrate how this pertains to JWR and SNC-Lavalin. First of all, there's the Tyee, with a very restrained, objective summary of the events and their significance. In "Five Facts to Help You Assess the SNC-Lavalin Affair," Paul Willcocks offers analysis that both mitigates the extent of the scandal but also clearly illustrates the troubling aspects of the Trudeau government's behaviour. And it's because a certain faux-progressive, partisan wingnut has been screeching hysterically about how this is all a "fake scandal" that I will focus on what Willcocks shows is the scandalous part:

Second, it is wrong ethically — and perhaps legally — for those same people to press Wilson-Raybould to shut down the prosecution because it’s bad for the Liberal Party of Canada. That would be a fundamental subversion of the justice system, a confirmation that there is one law for the politically well-connected and another for the rest of us. Wilson-Raybould says that she was repeatedly pressured to intervene on the basis of partisan political interests.
...
As soon as politicians can decide who face charges and who doesn’t, justice ends and cronyism and corruption begin. Again, Wilson-Raybould’s evidence suggests that line was crossed by pressure from the most powerful long after her decision was made, including “veiled threats.”
...
No one has denied pressuring Wilson-Raybould or raising partisan political concerns as reasons to allow SNC-Lavalin to avoid prosecution. No one has challenged her evidence to the committee about meetings and phone calls and “veiled threats” aimed at heading off the criminal charges.
Perhaps they will. The justice committee will hear from more witnesses.

Again, the entire article looks at the issue as a whole and is quite objective and fair. I'll point out that Willcocks wrote his piece on March 4th and that Justin Trudeau's long-time friend and [now] former principal secretary Gerald Butts would testify before the Justice Committee on March 6th and attempt to challenge JWR's interpretation of events.


Now, for my next source, I'm sure Liberal partisans and apologists will sneer, but as I said here (and on other occasions), Andrew Coyne showed himself to be a principled defender of Parliament and a consistent critic of stephen harper's abuses of it. As such, while I have agreed with Trudeau-groupie Montreal Simon that some of Coyne's criticisms of Trudeau have been overblown or even unjust, I have no qualms on using him as a source here.

Coyne gets to the heart of the matter (and dismisses the rancid Liberal hypocrisy) in this editorial: "If the system truly worked it would not hang on the defiance of one woman":

One response is to say: the system worked! Rather than dwell on the many attempts by officials up to and including the prime minister to subvert a criminal prosecution for nakedly partisan ends, we should instead give thanks, it is suggested, that their efforts did not succeed.
... 
The shields held, that is, despite his own best efforts, and those of the various other political staff, ministers and civil servants sent to undermine and overwhelm them. The shields, in fact, amounted to one person, Wilson-Raybould, and her refusal to submit to the demands of the prime minister and his delegates to do something unprecedented and probably unlawful: interfere in a prosecution to suit the partisan interests of the government.
This Liberal stupidity reminds me of the desperate flailing of harper-apologists when the Conservative's electoral fraud in 2011 election was being uncovered. Then, those shameless, stupid, anti-democratic scum farted out how it couldn't be proven that anybody sent to a phony voting address failed to vote and that therefore there was no crime. (I even recall the Con lawyer insisting that it was an insult to Canadians' democratic spirit to believe they'd let his party's criminal activity stymie our determination to exercise our franchise.)

Coyne continues:
So the glass may is 10 per cent full, perhaps. The former attorney general was indeed able, while she remained in office, to prevent the prime minister and his flunkies from trampling all over the independence of the prosecutor. The precedent was averted of a wealthy corporation with a history of bribery and corruption escaping prosecution by lobbying everything that moves and threatening to shift its headquarters out of a politically sensitive province.  ...  If the system were really working as it should, basic constitutional norms like prosecutorial independence would not hang on one woman’s defiance. If the system really worked, the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada would not have had to listen to lectures from unelected political staffers and supposedly non-partisan civil servants on the need to submit the rule of law to the higher demands of Liberal election strategy.
Coyne makes it crystal clear: The rule of law and the independence of the judiciary count for more than the government party's self-interest. Now, we can argue whether the Trudeau government really stepped over the line or not. But what brazen Liberal apologists are doing is showing us that they don't even understand the importance of this issue.


In a later editorial, "It was Wilson-Raybould's decision to make, as long as she decided it their way" Coyne examines Gerald Butts' [not under oath] testimony to the Justice Committee. Coyne argues that Butts' friendly, seemingly open manner betrayed a complete failure to appreciate the principle of judicial autonomy, incoherence, and a determined effort to not understand what constitutes "pressure" and what Wilson-Raybould said about it.

Pathetic Liberal hacks have made sport out of how JWR was only asked eleven times about her decision to allow prosecution against SNC-Lavalin. When you tell someone "It's your decision" and then you question that decision ELEVEN TIMES it should be clear to anyone who isn't a total shithead that the sentence "It's your decision" is a lie. And, when it's a decision made by the goddamned Attorney General and it is very much their decision by custom and convention and by the rule-of-law, then this constitutes interference.
The emphasis of Butts’s testimony was that the sustained and mounting pressure the former attorney general said she was under — from ministers, political staff, civil servants and the prime minister himself — was not really pressure at all. Or if it was, it was merely pressure to seek an outside legal opinion on the matter, perhaps from a former Supreme Court justice.
Various reasons were presented as to why this was justified. Wilson-Raybould had taken only 12 days to arrive at her decision not to overrule the DPP. The law permitting prosecutors to negotiate remediation agreements was “new,” having only been passed (in response to years of lobbying by SNC-Lavalin) earlier that year. Decisions on prosecutions are never final, but must be constantly reassessed in light of fresh evidence. And, of course, those 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs that were supposedly at stake. ... All of these may (or may not) be true. They’re just not anyone’s business but the attorney general’s, and the DPP’s. It is not relevant, as a matter of law, what the prime minister, or Butts, or anyone else outside the attorney general’s office, thinks about Wilson-Raybould’s decision-making process, or the new law, or what fresh evidence there might be. Those are considerations exclusively for the DPP, or in exceptional circumstances, the attorney general.
Just so, she was told: the decision was hers and hers alone to make. She was the “final decision-maker.” Only the decision was also “never final.” She could make it, that is, but she would have everyone from the prime minister on down coming back to her again and again — not because there was any fresh evidence, but just because they could — all the while implicitly questioning her judgment, in the sly form of that repeated suggestion that she seek an outside legal opinion.
This last is a distraction. The attorney general has available to her all the legal advice she requires. The only point of demanding she seek a second opinion was because they did not like the first.
And then there's Butts nonsensical testimony that it wasn't until 2019 that he learned of JWR's discomfiture:
Ah, but if she felt this was interference, Butts wondered aloud, why didn’t she tell anyone? If she had made up her mind, why didn’t she say anything?
According to her testimony, she did: to the prime minister, at their Sept. 17 meeting (“I told him that I had done my due diligence and made up my mind on SNC”); to the clerk, at the same meeting; to the finance minister on Sept. 19 (“I told him that engagements from his office to mine on SNC had to stop — that they were inappropriate”); to Matthieu Bouchard and Elder Marques, officials in the PMO, on Nov. 22 (“I said NO. My mind had been made up and they needed to stop – enough”); and to Butts himself, on Dec. 5 (“I needed everyone to stop talking to me about SNC as I had made up my mind and the engagements were inappropriate”).
Regardless of the obviousness of the truths that Coyne is telling, for some Liberal dead-enders, Butt's stupid, simpering testimony actually constituted "Blowing the fake scandal out of the water." It's everyone's right to question a legal decision. But in the process leading up to the making of any decision, the principle of the independence of the judiciary must be respected. This is especially so when the critic of the decision is the government. Butts demonstrates that he doesn't understand this and he willfully disregards JWR's testimony that she repeatedly told Trudeau, Butts and their henchmen to back-off.

Now, ex-Liberal blogger: The Mound of Sound has stated on several occasions that he's really not all that invested in this story. It's nothing compared to the scandal of the petro-state corruption that is causing Trudeau to betray the country and the world's future and push the carbon economy in the face of global warming. He's right about that. FWIW: I'm not all that consumed by it either. This country (and its progressives) have snored through the covering-up of torture and child-rape in Afghanistan. We have shrugged our shoulders (or cheered) the spitting upon responsible government. We have whined in impotence over the theft of the 2011 election. Contempt of Parliament. Global warming. Unilateral abrogation of treaties. Nothing is going to change. Certainly nothing I write is going to change anything.

What's motivated me to write is the sickening way that a former progressive comrade has mutated into a sickening embarrassment of a Liberal apologist. I have watched in dismay as Montreal Simon has ignored one Liberal scandal and betrayal after another to fixate on the way that the Conservatives have attacked Trudeau. Yes, Scheer and the Conservatives are disgusting. Yes; the Islamophobia, homophobia and the death-threats of these imbeciles are horrible things. But if you fail to honestly hold their opponents; the Liberals, the Greens, the Democrats, the NDP, whatever, to account, then your hypocrisy will only contribute to the stupid and useless polarization of our society into two warring-camps of idiots.


Regardless of what you might think about DPA's and their application to SNC-Lavalin; you MUST admit that even the potential of partisan interference in the Attorney-General's office on this is a serious issue. But from his very first post Simon has been carrying water for the Trudeau Liberals. Seeing the whole thing from the perspective of the Liberals. Instantly taking as gospel truth anything that undercuts JWR and that supports Trudeau. In short: shameless hackery.

In one of my first attempts to bring Simon back to reason as he began to soar to heights of partisan absurdity, he said "I haven't changed." That might be true. He despised the Conservatives and he still does. He never showed himself particularly interested in (or able to) critique anything more progressive than that.

Summarizing this hackery and its significance will be the topic of my next post.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

The Fake Scandal and the Toxic Trudeau Haters Part I

We are hard-wired to be indulgent to good-looking people. But adults understand that an attractive package is meaningless.

It's depressing what's happened to Montreal Simon. Perhaps he was so traumatized by the revolting, anti-democratic regime of stephen harper that his mind snapped and now he won't hear anything bad about the guy who finally defeated him, Justin Trudeau.

But how a guy can blog every day and never have mentioned Trudeau's murderous hypocrisy on global warming? His utter hypocrisy on reconciliation with the First Nations? His maintenance of harper's Orwellian spying legislation? The deranged, imperialist policies of his foreign minister? His taxpayer fleecing infrastructure bank? Etc., etc.

Yes. It's nice to have a prime minister who isn't an Islamophobic asshole/idiot like stephen harper was. But that's like saying that a good husband is a guy who doesn't beat his wife.
I don't follow politics as much as I used to, but even I'm aware of these things. But go to Simon's blog and it's invariably something about how rotten the Scheer Conservatives are. And, yeah, Scheer is a scary, Christo-fascist scumbag. And the grassroots base of his party (and many of his MPs) are nazi troglodytes. But Trudeau is the prime minister now. And as such, his actions should be held up to more scrutiny than the party that isn't in power. Because as much as his perennial commentator "Jackie Blue" might protest, when the liberal neo-liberal party continues to fuck people over, some among those people are the nazi troglodytes who vote Conservative. And the angrier they get the more crazed and deranged they get.And, sorry "Jackie" that is very much what happened in the USA and none of your screaming and babbling to the contrary is going to change that.

And, anyway, we wouldn't even have to worry about Scheer and his nazis getting a majority in an election if goddamned Justin Trudeau hadn't betrayed us all by reneging on his goddamned promise to reform our antiquated electoral system of "first-past-the-post." At the time, Simon and his horde of Liberal-lovin' commentators ranted and raved about how it was somehow the opposition parties' fault that electoral reform failed. But this is nonsense. Trudeau's Liberals have a commanding majority and they could have passed anything they wanted.

And it's refreshing to be done with that pathetic homophobe stephen harper and his disgusting, bigoted, sometimes closeted gang of freaks. But when Liberals pursue the immiseration of the majority while championing cost-free identity politics they only increase the hateful venom of right-wing chumps who associate their woes with the championing of identity politics. Liberal arrogance makes things worse in the long run.

It is the height of delusion, the height of hypocrisy, the height of arrogance, to shriek about the dangers of a Conservative majority and how we must all vote Liberal or defend the Liberals, when it is the Liberals we have to blame for the fact that the Conservatives are still capable of getting a majority.

That's enough for today. I'll continue tomorrow.

You can post as many pictures of this handsome man as you want but it doesn't change the reality that many of his policies truly stink.



Monday, March 4, 2019

Exciting (Futile) Times

So, Roger Cohen is testifying against Donald Trump. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's questioning of him created several leads for Congress to follow in order to expose the "con-man for life" Donald Trump's corruption. If Trump is impeached it'll be a good thing. That will, of course, bring us President Michael Pence, which would be worse. Although he'll only have a year. Then, the Presidency would probably fall to a Democrat. Which is often "less worse" or "lesser evil" (as Democratic Party apologists tend to argue). Although a President Sanders, or President Warren or President Gabbard would be far less worse and dareIsay "better."


The Wilson-Raybould saga continues to unwind. As of late, partisan Liberal hacks (when they're not stupidly insisting that this whole thing is a non-scandal) are clinging to two main arguments:

1. All of this special favouritism and interference with the independence and impartiality of the Attorney General was not bad because Wilson-Raybould didn't immediately offer her resignation.

and

2. Wilson-Raybould supposedly didn't interfere with the Director of Public Prosecution's decision because a subordinate of the DPP produced a memo saying that SNC-Lavalin should get a Deferred Prosecution Agreement.

The problem with 1) is obvious. Whatever honest or squalid reasons JWR had for not resigning does NOTHING to change the fact that the Trudeau government's heavy-hitters were all putting intense pressure on JWR to save SNC-Lavalin from the consequences of that firm's monstrous criminality. And they were doing so based on political calculation (elections in Quebec), financial calculations (SNC-Lavalin is a major contributor to the Liberal Party) and etc.

JWR might not have looked at the subordinate's memo, but she didn't have to. It was her decision. That's what the independence of the Attorney General is all about.


The fact of the matter is that the Trudeau government admits to major interference in the legal system on the behalf of SNC-Lavalin. This is a prime example of the capture of our political system by corporate oligarchies. Supposedly JWR was told that the Liberal Party could swing it so that sympathetic media types would speak in her defence, justifying her decision in the press if she felt it necessary to keep up appearances of integrity.

Polls are showing that most Canadians don't care about this scandal anyway I'm told. That's neither surprising, nor relevant. Most Canadians sleep-walked through the serial scandals of the harper years; up to and including covering-up torture and electoral fraud. That they can't grasp or don't care about the significance of this rotten behaviour is just par for the course.

Supposedly this helps the Conservatives. First of all, if Justin hadn't have betrayed principled Canadians on electoral reform we wouldn't even have to worry about those hypocritical troglodytes. But that's one of the reasons Justin betrayed us. Because the Conservative bogeyman is so useful for neo-liberal assholes like the Liberals. They just point to the monsters to their Right and insist that we all have to vote for them and that anyone who doesn't is responsible for the nightmare to follow.

So, yeah. The slimy corporate media in Canada hasn't spent much time on shit-head Andrew Scheer's sharing a platform with racist Nazi Faith Goldy.  Scheer should be getting pilloried for that disgusting behaviour continuously. But Canada's political culture is corrupt, racist, oligarchic, hypocritical, stupid, ignorant and profoundly anti-democratic.

Speaking of nightmares: Doug Ford just continues to disgust and appall. He's going to attack public healthcare. He's pursuing ruinous austerity. He's a completely scuzzy, rotten, stupid, nauseating individual. I get people not voting for Wynne (although I voted for her directly as my MPP). But I can't forgive the stupidity, ignorance, greed or what have you, of a vote for the ridiculously horrible Ontario Progressive Conservatives.

Listen Liberals; If you're going to insist that our only political choices are to be between the rotten and the horrible, then you have to admit that the path we are on will continue to be rotten. Inequality, corruption, austerity, and "business-as-usual" capitalism are going to lead to disaster and perhaps the extinction of our species. You're all going to have to grow-up and do the hard thinking that's required to get us all out of the mess that we're in. You can't be stupid, partisan hacks and expect people to take you seriously.

I really wanted to say more but I'm tired and blogging is a waste of time.