Did I Call It Or Did I Call It?

Pierre Poilievre's anti-democratic election deform legislation, 

OTTAWA - Pierre Poilievre won't stop citing a report to justify cracking down on potential voter fraud, even though author Harry Neufeld says the Harper government is misrepresenting his report and ignoring his recommendations.

"We are going to keep quoting Mr. Neufeld's report because it contains the facts that obviously support our position that people should have ID when they show up to vote," the minister for democratic reform told the House of Commons on Friday.

He accused opposition MPs of ignoring the "hard facts" contained in last year's report by Neufeld, a former chief electoral officer for British Columbia who was commissioned by Elections Canada to review the problem of non-compliance with the rules for casting ballots in the 2011 election.

However, Neufeld suggested it's Poilievre who's ignoring the facts.

What I said in response to the SCOC's abominable ruling on the Wrezenski-Opitz case:

Some progressives have been hailing the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Ted "Homo-Hater" Opitz his theft of the Etobicoke-Centre election. Supposedly, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that our rules, procedures and safeguards for conducting free and fair elections shouldn't interfere with Canadians' right to vote. At least, say progressives, that will be the end of right-wing caterwauling about Muslim women wearing veils being denied the vote, or Conservative Party goons disrupting polling stations talking about "illegal" polls. Right?

1. Such thinking underestimates harpercon shamelessness. They can, and they will, take advantage of this ruling while simultaneously pressing hot-button issues or hypocritically citing "procedural errors" to disrupt polls. (Something Ted Opitz's crew of goons did themselves in Etobicoke-Centre.) As long as disruption during elections prevents people from voting (in polls where their opponents tend to do well) these harpercon scum will disrupt. 

To whit; Now that they've got to keep Ted Opitz's stolen seat in Etobicoke-Centre through this bullshit precedent that makes it impossible to prove fraud after the fact, the harpercons will place tough barriers to honest voters due to non-existent "voter fraud."

This whole disgusting mess has been, as with all things with Canadian "conservatives," been imported from the USA, where shameless Repugnican scum shriek endlessly about "voter fraud" when the bulk of the (small) amount of such fraud is perpetrated by themselves.  This all about the very scuzzy attempt to discourage, or, worse, actually prevent people who tend not to vote for you from voting.  As I've said before, free and fair elections are as close as you can get to sacred in this world. For a party to dedicate itself to the evisceration of this process is atrocious. Such people are,  by definition, enemies of democracy. They should be labeled as such and treated as such.

What Pierre Karl Peladeau means to me

All I knew about Pierre K Peladeau was that he owned the SUN newspapers and the amateurish, 10th-rate FOX News North (just as stupid but with 1/10th the budget), SUN News network. And, I'm sorry, but while I'm sure that while everyone from stephen harper, to ezra levant, to Kory Tenyukyuk has some sort of "talent" or low cunning, or whatever the fuck it is they have, ... the bottom line is that these are all a bunch of shit-heads. So if PKP is the big guy in charge of ezra levant's wingnut welfare cheques, then he's got to be a shit-head too.

But apparently he's more than that. He's also a bigger asshole than he needs to be. He's one of the worstest, anti-union-ist employers in all of Quebec. And his joining the social-democrat Parti Quebecois would be like Conrad Black joining the NDP, except that PKP hasn't been convicted of anything yet.

So this rich, right-wing fuckface is being heralded as a "star" candidate 'eh? Well, good luck with that! Michael Ignatieff was a star candidate too and look how that turned out! The PQ taking on PKP as a candidate is a sign that the party's steering wheel has snapped off and they've no idea where they're going. It's also a sign that the "hyper-patriotism" of the SUN News mouth-breathers is bullshit. Just like Montreal Simon says, harper himself signed the "firewall" manifesto, revealing himself as just a mindless shill for the oil industry. PKP's SUN News just spews pro-corporate, pro-imperialist crapola to the right-wing rubes who imagine they're patriotic whilst going about loathing everything that Canada ostensibly stands for. They're all as clueless as their other hero, Rob Ford, who went on Jimmy Kimmel because he believes he's genuinely popular when he's actually a laughing stock.

PKP's nauseating presence in the Parti Quebecois will alienate Quebec voters and cause a moral crisis in the party itself. It's an open question as to whether Pierre Karl Peladeau will mitigate the damage to Canadian unity caused by the "firewall"signatory stephen harper, ... the worst threat to Canadian unity since forever.

Adieu to the "Mound of Sound"

He of "The Disaffected Lib." He's packing it in, at least for a while. And I can't say as I blame him. I only hope and pray that the results of his meat-space activism add up to more than what traditional "activism" (re: petitions, one-off demonstrations and information seminars for the converted) tend to amount to.

But hey, MoS; don't do what Sixth Estate did, and close-up shop altogether. Leave that record of dissent and analysis up for posterity to enjoy.

Two-Tier Justice

"3 Mohawk protesters could be charged after Ontario rail blockade." Ignoring the racist shit-heads saying "If hundreds of women from my personal demographic group went missing or were found murdered and the police couldn't be bothered to investigate, I wouldn't block rail-lines or protest at all. I think the First Nations of Canada should just shut-up forever and take whatever abuses we fire at them because I'm a stupid, ignorant, useless, ugly piece of garbage" ... I'd just like to say that I'll be happy when there's one-tier justice in this country.

When murdering corporate scum like Edward Burkhardt, who demand, and get "de-regulation" of their industries, which any functioning sentient person would know will inevitably endanger the public get tossed in the goddamned slammer for their poisoning and burning of their fellow humans.

Or, murdering, anti-democratic political scum like Peter Mackay, or Pierre Poilievre or Vic Toews or stephen harper, get thrown behind bars for election fraud, torture, and other assorted crimes against democracy and humanity, ... and stay there for the rest of their unnatural lives.

Then we can talk about First Nations protesters you racist shits.

What are YOU doing to stop the Un-Fair Elections Act?

What have you THOUGHT about doing? What have you heard about what ANYBODY is doing?

Isn't it terrifyingly ridiculous how completely devoid of ideas and initiative we all are?

A government that everyone but the politically-insane recognizes was in contempt of Parliament, engages in widespread election fraud, stymies the investigations of said fraud, uses its criminally-obtained majority to ram through the most appalling omnibus legislation in this country's history, and then gets a thoroughly partisan weasel like Pierre Poliviere to craft a massive bill to neuter our already tame elections watch-dog and enable it to steal more elections with impunity in the future, ... and we, and the Canadian left-progressive brain-trusts do NOTHING.

NOTHING.

(And in my Canada, "nothing" includes fucking goddamned petitions. Blow me "Lead Now." Just fucking blow me.)

What Else Is There?

It is the power of capital that corrupts and debases our democracy. There are only a few alternatives to choose from when it comes to strategies to destroy this power:

The Liberal Party of Canada strategy of working hand-glove with capitalism in order to attempt to impose your idea of "reasonable" behaviour upon it. Well, we all know how that's worked out.

The NDP approach. Campaign from the centre-left for decades. Cave to "reality" when in power and become Liberals. (Rae, Romanow, Dexter, the Manitoba NDP) Whatever.

Vote Green and believe in eco-capitalism as well as in your ability to force involuntary green policies on corporations without addressing the reality of power. I'm not waiting to see how it works in practice.

Vote Marxist. I wonder who believes this in Canada in this day and age.

Throw rocks through windows with a dozen or so of your friends and then scamper off to allow peaceful protesters to face the state's wrath. (Why didn't I think of this??)

Petition psychopathic murderers who think you're an idiot. Peacefully assemble to show them how many (or how few) of you there are to the psychopathic murderers. Brilliant.

The Left & a Reality to Terrible to Think About

What else could those 20-30 anti-harper activists chanting in the freezing cold outside the Toronto Convention Centre a few weeks ago, have been thinking? "Our power is in the streets!" they shouted out as they agreed to reject working with the slimy politicians and vowed to defeat harper on their own. I might have thought that the three cops standing nearby were amused by this except that I'm pretty sure they weren't even listening.

It must be the case that such activist types are aware of their own lack of consequence and the inevitability of the horrible policies coming their way. They must see their own faces when they think of Orwell/O'Brien's vision of the future in "1984" of "a boot stomping on a human face forever."

It's too terrible to contemplate. So they push it out of their minds and instead say completely deluded things like "Our power is in the streets!"