I Need 3 Billion for Bus Fare. I'll Pay You Back.

PM harpo has really lost it this time. Because the economic crisis (you remember? the one harpo and fuckhead flaherty pretended didn't exist back in October?) is so bad, harpo says Canada can't afford the time it would take to have any parliamentary oversight on his stimulus spending. But don't worry says harpo; when it's all over, he'll give us a full accounting of where the money went. He promises.

The Tories are proposing the fund's cash be spent over 90 days between April 1 and June 30 and want to take shortcuts in allocating it – although they promise to report back afterward on its disbursement.

It's at that point that everybody else in the room should have erupted into rude guffaws at harpo's unmitigated gall. Just last week the harpocons were inventing bullshit reasons for not having to release the minutes of their meetings during the listeriosis crisis. (You remember that one too don't you? where twenty Canadians died after harpo cut the powers of federal food inspectors and allowed the meat industry to police itself?) This is a government passionately addicted to secrecy and idiotic lies and harpo wants people to trust him with THREE BILLION dollars??

harpo's back to his old self again in the totally psychotic asshole department. (Those long weepy hours in his darkened office waiting for his fear-beshitted trousers to come back from the dry-cleaners and trying to put the fear of the coalition out of his mind are now only a dim memory apparently.):

“Let's be clear. …These are confidence measures. We are not going to mess around with this … we have our bureaucrats working overtime to make sure we cut red tape and get this money flowing quickly. If the opposition doesn't like it, they will find themselves in an election.”
Mr. Harper took a swipe at opposition MPs, saying they've been little help in the stimulus debate.
“To be blunt about it, the opposition has nothing positive to contribute to this economy.”

One would say that harpo hasn't learned anything, but I think he has. He's learned that the new Liberal leader is even more craven and spineless than Stephane Dion was and that he'll probably get everything he asks for.

But just for the record, let's be clear. Let's be blunt about it. It was your party, harpo, and your idiot finance minister who intended to offer no stimulus package when you yourself knew that there was a major global shitstorm in the works. It was you, harpo, who decided that the "statesman" thing to do was to try to force the opposition parties to drink from poisoned cups two fucking weeks into your new minority parliament. It was that sort of immature brinksmanship that got you to ask for a prorogation from the Governor General that wasted months that could have been spent actually dealing with the crisis instead of your own petty ambitions. Yours is the useless party harpo. As it has always been. As it cannot fail to be.

There's a lot happening in the world today, ...

... but i'm too lazy to write about any of it.

Our Intellectual Adversaries

Okay, let's review here:

There's mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Klanswoman KKKate MakkkMillan (who shows her intellectual integrity by deleting comments that prove her cluelessness and stupidity)

There's NAMBLA-enthusiast Richard Evans.

There's "Hunter" who says that Canada's mud and our "families" make us a "conservative" nation.

There's Jonah Goldberg, who wrote a book called Liberal Fascism and that's really all that one has to say about that.

There's Rush Limbaugh; revered by "conservative" airhead chumps across the US of A as a straight-talking, conventional values kinda dude, who happens to be a multimillionaire who got addicted to OxyContin and decided to buy it off the street (via his housekeeper because he was either too cowardly, lazy or fat to get it himself) and who also was found travelling from the Dominican Republic with a bottle of Viagra perscribed to his doctor (to protect Rush's "privacy").

And it goes on and on. Including this guy:

At dinner (where he talked with his mouth full at about 3:15), Ziegler opined about relationships and in a nutshell, he thinks women are foolish. He believes marriage should have contracts that come up for renewal and review every five years. Isn't' that romantic?

When he said, "I realize talking about women and being rational is an oxymoron", that did it. Ms. Long Island was officially repulsed. It was the turning point of the date. She didn't even finish dinner, ending the date right there.

Yeah, it was a "reality" dating show. Maybe he was trying to be an asshole to make the segment interesting. But given his stated political orientation and the track record of these morons, I'm thinking that was sincere.

[For the record, the idea of renewing your marriage every five years doesn't sound like an inherently insane thing to do. But go to the link and watch the clip. He argues that as the years pass, the men will have more power in the relationship because they'll keep getting more "distinguished" looking whereas women ("you guys" he says to his date) just get older and more unattractive.]

Summary: They are stupid, disgusting people and therefore their politics are stupid and disgusting. That they chose to call their politics "conservatism" is perhaps an interesting accident of history, or, more likely, part of their stupid inability to let go of discredited ideas that they've only just been able to master.

Chris Sands on Afghanistan via CounterPunch

Another depressing article. An antidote to the stories of seemingly endless "progress" that never gets anywhere.

Hastily-created NGOs continued to flood in, eager for a slice of the action. So did journalists determined to write about democracy, the suave English-speaking president and the local golf course. It was the calm before the storm. Victory had been declared and, while Afghans were starting to feel the weight of its baggage, the rest of the world was still having fun at their expense.

...

A man working at the football stadium reminisced fondly about the old days when executions happened on the pitch. If capital punishment was still common, he said, the new government wouldn’t be so crooked. This was something I would hear repeatedly, until eventually it was said by Afghans across the country. The police were the worst offenders, looking for bribes at every opportunity to supplement their low wages.

...

In the spring of 2006 Kabul’s imams decided to speak out against all this and more. Officials were lining their own pockets and alcohol was easily available, they said. They were also angry at the house raids conducted by foreign soldiers in rural areas and accused them of molesting women during the searches. Most said the time for jihad was approaching and one announced that armed resistance was now the answer.

So when rioters tore through the capital on May 29, it was no big surprise. The spark for that particular day of unrest was a fatal traffic accident involving US troops, but the explosion had been primed long before. Protesters shouted “Death to America” and by the end of the anarchy at least 17 people had lost their lives.

...

Reports of civilians getting bombed from above came regular as clockwork that spring and summer. First some villagers or local officials would say innocent people were dead and the Nato or US-led coalition would deny it. Then all parties would agree civilian blood had been spilt, but argue over casualty figures. Hamid Karzai kept demanding that the carnage stop, but it never did.

...

Even the section of society that should have benefited most from the US-led invasion was full of sorrow. Female MPs told me they felt ashamed for not being able to help their constituents. One said she was sure the time was approaching when she would be a prisoner in her own home again. “For all this I blame America. When the Russians were here the people picked up guns to fight them. Now people are picking up guns to fight the Americans,” she said. “Soon my daughter will finish school and then she wants to start private education,” said another. “But I cannot let her because I cannot give her a bodyguard.”

Yet Another Disgusting Thing ...

Raphael Alexander.

Fresh from a triumphant engagement of giggling, hooting and frantic masturbation at the thought of torturing teenagers, Raphael now proceeds to hold forth on how non-white Canadians beg to be tortured so that they can turn around and scam real, honest-to-GOD, white Canadians of their hard-earned tax dollars.

Raphael really put his head up his ass with that one. (He must like the smell.)

One of those guys tortured in Syria was an Iraqi (a refugee fom Saddam Hussein's regime who thought he could go home because his country had been freed), the other was an Egyptian (who was engaged to a Syrian woman) and while the last of the three was a Syrian, he'd been a Canadian since he was 16, he'd never been troubled by the Syrian government before, and he was visiting briefly to see his grandmother before she died.

Raphael is a pasty, stupid little boy who needs a time-out from blogging. The last thing he needs is "enabling" from his co-conspirators in abject ignorance and filth, "The National Pest."

One of the More Disgusting Things I've Read Recently

This weekend I was checking out Canadian Cynic and blogging contributor "LuLu" had posted about the harpo government's saying "fuck you!" to accountability. According to the Globe & Mail:

OTTAWA — The Harper government has delayed for months the release of notes on conference calls held at the height of last summer's deadly listeriosis outbreak — a lag some experts say breaks Ottawa's own information laws.
...
Privy Council officials at first said they had records as requested, but needed four months “to consult other government institutions” about them.
Then Ann Wesch, the access to information director for PCO, wrote a letter dated Feb. 10 stating that in fact “the records retrieved do not fall under the scope of this request. Therefore we have no records relevant to your request.”
The explanation for the flip-flop? Records retrieved were handwritten notes — not minutes or transcripts, said the PCO analyst questioned about the response.This, despite the fact that the word transcribe is in part defined in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as “make a copy of, esp. in writing .. . write out (shorthand, notes, etc.) . . . .”

As University of Ottawa expert on federal information law put it:

“It is silly,” he said. “I would even say it's infantile to be making this sort of distinction.
“This goes against the spirit of the act and the letter of the [Access to Information] act.”

As was stated earlier in the article, twenty people died because of this failure of oversight. We all remember at the time that harpo was lamely arguing that these deaths were the fault of the Liberals, as if his own sweeping changes to the regulatory regime never existed. (We also remember Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz making jokes about poisoned food and deaths during press conferences at the time.) Now, despite the fact that harpo is blaming the Liberals he lacks the confidence to provide us with the information about what his government was doing in response to these deaths. But we have a right to this information. This is OUR government. There is no "national security" issue at stake here (which harpo loves to use to hide information about his torture policies).

This contempt for democracy, this contempt for accountability, this callous disregard for human life, this craven toadying to corporate interests, this is all an excellent example of the sort of long-standing behaviour that should have written off this party of morons, losers, murderers and thieves long ago. This is the party that pompous idiot Charles Adler had the gall to describe as "mature." This is not maturity. This is a bunch of brazen vandals spitting in our faces, confident that there is nothing that can be done about it. And you know what? Thanks to the cowardly, useless AND COMPLICIT Liberal Party, combined with the ignorance and confusion of almost half the electorate (this includes the full-time stupid 30% of the population that will stick with "conservatism" through thick and thin), there really isn't anything we can do about this.

In the face of murderous negligence and subsequent callous contempt for the law, for the principles of open government, the decent portion of Canadian society is powerless. This has to change.

The Titanic Danger of Islamic Fundamentalism

Last post I referred to sputtering gas-bag Terry Glavin as a "useful idiot" for Western imperialists' wars of aggression in the Middle East and parts "east, west, south and north somewhat." It goes like this: Western imperialists want the oil in the Middle East. Some of them want the Palestinians' lands. They want pliant, corruptable governments there. They want to eliminate any and all challenges to their total authority (there haven't been any genuine "threats" to their position of dominance anywhere in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union) globally or even regionally. They want to establish bases from which they can have striking capacity at China and Russia. Because of this, they topple governments. They prop-up dictators. They buy and sell weapons in huge quantities to oppress their own people and to attack others. They even invade from time-to-time. When they do this, they create enemies.

For a number of reasons, some indigenous some imported, the latest incarnation of Arab, Muslim, resistance to corrupt governments, US imperialism or Israeli barbarism has been led by radical Muslim clerics and militias. The Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, all of them sworn to defeat some vestige or other of the Western project and determined as well to enforce their own particular brands of religious obscurantism on their peoples.

This has given deluded neo-con blowhards, right-wing morons and useful idiots like Christopher Hitchens and Terry Glavin the chance to pontificate and/or screech about the dangers of "radical Islam" or "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Islamo-fascism." At its most deranged, these fools would have us believe that the West's secular society is at risk from these Muslim hordes. At a sublime level of asininity smashing an airliner into a building and blowing up a bus or train car once in a while will supposedly bring us to our knees and we'll all be praying to Mecca and our pornstars will be forced to perform wearing burqas unless we surrender all of our rights to the War on Terror. At a slightly less deranged level, devious Muslims will take advantage of Western tolerance AND leftist stupidity to infect our culture from within. According to Mark Steyn Muslim women are busy pooping-out little jihadists all over Europe in order to latch onto the teats of their welfare states and drown all of Europe with their numbers. America, thankfully, is populated by sub-intelligent Christian women who (thanks to their rejection of birth control) can't help but produce huge litters of intolerant Christian babies. In Canada (where South Asians of every religious stripe are the largest source of immigrants, followed by East Asians) the Muslim conspiracy is to work thusly: Radical Islamic groups will note an insult to Arabs or Islam, complain to the Human Rights Commissions and, before you know it, out of sheer politeness and leftist gullibility we'll be sending our homosexuals and drunkards to the chopping block, foregoing bacon on our pizzas and shouting "Death to America" at the Peace Bridge.

Which of course is all self-evidently ridiculous. But these wingnuts like to work themselves into a lather about this manufactured threat to all we hold dear. They're all for allowing our governments to hold anyone they want without charges and they're all for allowing our governments to torture us, indefinitely, to preserve our sacred traditions of human rights and the rule of law.

Too bad for them that their such enormous crocks of shit about everything. First of all, the wars that they're supposed to die in (and drag us into with them) are being fought for wealthy oil companies, weapons manufacturors and corrupt contractors like Halliburton. These rubes won't even see lower prices at the pump in exchange for cheering on the destruction of our genuine freedoms and their childrens' lives in illegal wars. Either that, or they'll happily suffer bombings and wars so that a foreign country, Israel, can attempt to reclaim what religious lunatics there imagine are the historical lands of the Hebrews. Why a Canadian of non-Jewish ancestry should care about Israel expanding its borders is entirely inexplicable.

Also too bad for these morons is the fact that one of the biggest exportes of extreme fundamentalism is the government of Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the stalwart enemy of Islamic fundamentalism, the United States of America. The USA has also granted all sorts of assistance to the government of Pakistan's efforts to foster extremist fundamentalist movements such as the Taliban. The USA has done more yeoman's work to smash and discredit secular democracy in the Middle East than is easily understood by these yahoos, whether in Iran, Egypt of Lebanon. It has armed and funded the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. (Israel itself funded Hezbollah when it could be used as a rival to the larger, secular PLO.)

The dismantling of our rights and the invasions of other lands for resources and geo-strategic purposes is all of piece in the decline of late-capitalism. The creation of a state of unending war against an imaginary enemy helps to make the population amenable to these crimes. I'm sick of having to endure the stupidity that attempts to make this all plausible, whether it comes from knuckle-draggers on SDA, assholes like William Kristol, or insecure, raving, self-important turds like Terry Glavin.