It's not only the cream that rises to the top

Exactly what do you have to do to lose your job if you hold an elevated position in government? Lying, interference with proper government functioning, not protecting or serving those whose money you take and use for your own ends, fighting useless wars started by others to the last drop of someone else's blood? Aren't these good enough reasons?

From rabble.ca, an article on governments and the crooks and liars who run them.

A Tale of Three Governments by Jerry West

...[B]esides their bungling of the Afghanistan issue, Harper's government has also had its true colours exposed when the National Post ran a story on a manual of dirty tricks that the government had distributed to its key members. The document reportedly instructs government members on how to create chaos in committees and prevent the opposition parties, which hold a majority of the seats, from advancing their legislative agendas.

...[S]tephen Harper, George Bush and Gordon Campbell are birds of a feather. They lead governments riddled with corruption and incompetency and pursue policies that are inimical to the welfare of the majority of the people that they govern. The good news is that they are all running out of time. The question arises, how can we do better in the future?

No energy plan except to sell to the U.S.

Gordon Laxer was a victim of the Conservative dirty tricks campaign when he was invited to give evidence, then was rudely cut off and the committee hearing ended by one of the lock-step, black shirt (neo)Conservative government lackeys.

From "Easterners could freeze in the dark"

Instead of guaranteeing U.S. energy security, how about a Secure Petroleum Plan for Canada?

War is auto-cannibalism

General Rick Hillier, who, the last time I looked, was the Chief of Defense Staff, has now started putting his two cents in on economic policy.

Balancing trade with U.S. a challenge: Hillier

...[G]en. Rick Hillier spoke to the Economic Club of Toronto today on Canada's continuing mission in Afghanistan, and highlighted the important role the economy plays in supporting a war effort.

What a glorious future - working to support war. Take your profits and pour them into munitions, tanks, weapons of mass destruction. It's like auto-cannibalism. Your appetites will eventually kill you.

But some guys will get really, really rich. And you can bet whatever part of your body you like that none of these guys or their heirs will ever set foot in war zone. After all, they're dangerous. A guy could get killed!

Surprise! Did you miss me?

Stephen Harper made a surprise visit to Afghanistan yesterday amid tight security - probably to protect him from the press except for a hand-picked embedded bunch that traveled with him.

I imagine he was as welcome as the grim reaper at a wedding.

Why all the security, I wonder? Hardly anybody knows who the guy is, and certainly couldn't be bothered to attack him. But maybe it makes him feel important.

This report from Sun Media gives some details. I have a feeling that the following quotes are the real reason for the Afghanistan junket.

...[S]pokesmen for Harper described the unannounced trip as a ‘progress review’ of the NATO-led mission and rejected questions of the whirlwind trip being an attempt to bolster support for the mission or the Conservative party as both face stalled or flagging support in recent public opinion polls.

...[T]he visit comes at a time when Canadian support for the mission has flagged amidst doubt that progress is being made in beating the Taliban and reconstructing the country.

...[A] recent poll found 60% of Canadians surveyed want Canada out of the mission even before the end of its current commitment to 2009.

...[A]t the same time, public support for the Conservatives appears stalled at levels at or below last January’s election result that handed Harper a minority government.

But exactly how is this going to bolster support?

There was a visit to a school for street kids in Kabul that is supported by about $40,000 of Canadian money. How much did the Afghanistan junket cost, I wonder? Many multiples of $40,000, I bet.

But this comes at a time when some aboriginal people in Canada are living on toxic reserves without proper schools or safe drinking water. The Kelowna Accords, hammered out for years between the Liberal government and First Nations, which looked like they might finally get land claims settled in Canada, were scrapped by the incoming Harperites. Why? Because it wasn't their accord, and we all know that they are the only people capable of doing anything in Canada.

Now the Conservatives and the Indian Affairs minister say they are going to hand the whole thing over to an independent body to settle. Excuse me, guys, but that's what you're being paid for, not to make surprise visits to Afghanistan.

Mind you, with the poisonous atmosphere in Ottawa these last few months, when control-freakery was running wild, Afghanistan probably looked like a walk in the park for Stevie and the boys.

Questions? I don't have to answer any goddamn questions!

Harper's mortal fear (or contempt) of the press has gone so far as to keep the press locked up in a room until he has made a getaway. The RCMP deny they held the doors shut, effectively confining reporters to a room, until His Highness King Stephen the Stout has removed himself from the fray, although someone on the outside of the room clearly saw them.

RCMP closes Parliamentary Press Gallery president's complaint on PMO security

...[A]t both events, Mr. Brennan said reporters were prevented from leaving the halls until after the Prime Minister had left. At the Flag Day incident, for instance, he said two security personnel held the door shut to prevent reporters from leaving the school gymnasium.

...As he [Stephen Harper] zipped by, they just shut the door on us," he [Brennan] said. People pushed on the door, but security held it shut, he said. "Security for what? Then they let us out after he was gone. It was pretty stupid."

Just when you think the Harpercrits can't get any worse...

Not only do they act like a bunch of scuzzballs, Harper's federal (neo)Conservative government members (one synonym for a rather cruder description) have a playbook describing how they should act.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

[T]he handbook, obtained by National Post columnist Don Martin, reportedly advises chairs on how to promote the government's agenda, select witnesses friendly to the Conservative party and coach them to give favourable testimony. It also reportedly instructs them on how to filibuster and otherwise disrupt committee proceedings and, if all else fails, how to shut committees down entirely.

...[G]oodale said the manual also demonstrates that the government is in the grip of an "obsessive, manipulative mania," run by a prime minister who has "a kind of control fetish" in which there can't be "one comma or one sentence or one word uttered without his personal approval."

I think another way of saying that is that Harper is an anal-retentive control freak. Mr. Goodale is much more polite that I would have been.

Absolutely nuthin' - part 2.

And from James Laxer and linked from rabble.ca:

Should it come time for the U.S. realists to make peace in Afghanistan, they will happily help cobble together a new regime, comprising elements of the Taliban, the old Northern Alliance and assorted drug dealers and war lords. And it will all be done without a thought for Stephen Harper, Christie Blatchford and the editorial writers of the National Post.

War...what is it good for? Absolutely nuthin'!

As Conservative government defense officials and the likes of Rick Hillier go on (and on) about the need to increase defense spending, they might want to take a look at this, a piece from Chalmers Johnson on the fate of empires and the self-defeating practice of manufacturing and buying armaments. Originally posted on TomDispatch and linked from AntiWar.com.

Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The nonmilitary construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

With the Canadian economy already too closely linked to the U.S. and our energy security coming a distant second to that of the country to the south, we don't need to give it a further kick into the black hole that is the sphere of U.S. influence.

Best in Show

Now that Tony Blair has resigned and decided to spend his retirement traveling the world reconciling people of different religious faiths (God help us all!), Bush needs a new bestest friend. (Let's face it - he needs any friend he can get.)

From the latest Hill Times.

Harper's human wrongs

Murray Dobbin says it all.

No prime minister in the history of Canada has shown such contempt for the people he is supposed to be representing and protecting.

Some of my best friends are angels.

Harper's dresser talks to supernatural beings.

Friends of Michelle Muntean, who maintains Harper's image when he travels, say she claims to commune with angels.

They say the angels relay messages from the dead, and the former TV makeup artist occasionally stuns people with the details.

So that's where he's getting his policy advice from. But which shoulder are they sitting on when Ms. Muntean is applying the eye-liner and lipgloss?

Time to learn how to dress yourself, Mr. Harper.

Look like Mr. Harper's hairdresser and make-up artist is getting a little more attention.

"Even if she was being paid a very low wage, this is not something taxpayers should pay for," said Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch. "I would hope that any prime minister would be fully capable of dressing himself and combing his own hair if he’s going to reach this position."

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!

I knew I wasn't seeing things.

Close-ups of Stephen Harper, a horrible thing all by themselves, have shown what looks suspiciously like eye-liner and lipstick, presumably to give him the doe-eyed, dew-kissed look. But his sunburn, as revealed in the house of commons this week, couldn't be covered up.

An article in the Toronto Star reveals that he travels with a make-up and image consultant. He's tried to get her to move full-time to Ottawa, but she likes Toronto better. Maybe she feels the gig in Ottawa wouldn't last very long. One can only hope.

Maybe he should learn how to put on his own make-up. It's not so hard. Women have been doing it for years.

"The marks, which look more like a painful sunburn than a tan, have been the subject of speculation and several questions to PMO officials since Parliament resumed. And they apparently cannot be disguised by makeup that Harper is known to wear for TV appearances and other big events.

...[P]arty insiders say Harper is notoriously sensitive about receiving advice about his image and has swiftly put a series of subordinates in their place when they bring up the subject. Muntean [Harper's image consultant] remains the only person he tolerates tips from. Over the years she has become a cheerful fixture in his entourage, a vivacious blonde who stands out among the tense handlers that surround him.

She worked for years in television, and wound up as CBC Television's head of makeup in the 1990s. Muntean eventually struck off on her own as a private consultant, and began advising Harper during the Conservative leadership race. She went on to assist him in the last two federal election campaigns.

Sources say Harper has become her main client, and he has tried unsuccessfully to have her move to Ottawa from Toronto."

Reminds me of a remark one of my high-school teachers made when in despair over some of her less promising students: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Only one word for this - eeeeEWWWWW.

War without end, amen!

Defense Minister Gordon O'Conner decided to buy 100 used tanks from the Netherlands because he sees even more wars in Canada's future.

"Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said the government was looking past the current war in Afghanistan and towards the future when it decided to purchase 100 mothballed tanks from the Netherlands.

"We see Afghanistan is the future. Afghanistan and these type of engagements are the future for 10, 15 years," said O'Connor."

Oh, hurray. He sees wars.

I see dead people.

But don't worry. The Taliban don't show any signs of return, only roadside bombers.

"What we're seeing in Kandahar province is increased activity of these people who have set IEDs. But we haven't noticed at this time, anyway, any large numbers of Taliban returning into our province."

Oh, well, that's alright, then.

Drink Canada Dry

Harpercrits and the Conference Board of Canada are busy arranging the sale of our vital resources, including water and energy, to the U.S. Since the U.S. is running out of water and energy due to their massive overconsumption and refusal to conserve or alter their lifestyle in any way, the country to the north is the new place to pillage. The fate of other countries that have what the U.S. wants should give us a foretaste of what will happen to us.

[N]orth America, and particularly the United States and Mexico, will experience water scarcity as a result of arid climates coupled with growing populations and increased water consumption.

...One such option could be regional agreements between Canada, the United States, and Mexico on issues such as water consumption, water transfers, artificial diversions of fresh water, water conservation technologies for agricultural irrigation, and urban consumption.

...Water control presents even greater challenges, because international water policy is primarily rooted in decentralized state laws in the United States and in provincial statutes in Canada. Consequently, the federal governments of these two countries have limited jurisdiction over water control issues.

Since provinces, municipalities, and other local groups now have jurisdiction over these resources, the secret meeting at the end of April will discuss ways of wresting this control away from them and into the sweaty hands of the New Canadian Government. They will justify this removal by either fear-mongering or disguising it as a benefit.

When did losing control of the necessities of life to a government that nobody trusts suddenly become a good thing? Since the (neo)Conservatives told you so. Now, just lie back, close your eyes and think of Stevie or Peter. It will make what is about to happen much nicer.

Creation stories

Part of Stephen Harper's "celebration" at Vimy last weekend included the mention of a "creation story" - how Canada suddenly became a country because more than three thousand of its young men were massacred in one day in just one more battle of a bloody and pointless war. So bloody and pointless was it that its vindictive treaty provisions plunged Germany into poverty and set the stage for Hitler and the Second World War.

Creation stories are for pulpits and firebrand ministers. I was surprised to see that hardly anyone picked up that blatantly religious/mythological reference, except the lunatic right-wing fringe who worked so hard and paid so much to get the Harpocracy into office.

But the connection of Vimy to Afghanistan was just too much. When the news of the inconvenient deaths of six more young men from CFB Gagetown, NB by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan raced through the assembled company, Harper and Hillier were seen by several reporters to consult with each other in whispers. They may have been trying to ignore it and hoping that no one else had heard. Tough bananas, guys! Canadians on the whole are way ahead of you.

There is nothing, NOTHING, about Afghanistan that is similar to Vimy, except that young people are dying for no reason, a connection that was remarkable in the speechifying for its absence.

Canada became a country a long time ago. It does not need to be recreated into a war-mongering, selfish, vicious and nasty little country by the all-form-and-no-substance neo-Conservative New Canadian government run by the Harper cabal. It was quite a nice country. It even managed to recover from the Mulroney infestation it went through a couple of decades ago, although there are side effects from that dark period that still plague it. The thought of Harper as a majority prime minister is like the horror of a fever dream.

Kurt Vonnegut, someone who had actually been through the horrors of war, didn't think much of the Bushite policies that Harper seems so fond of. He died yesterday at the age of eighty-four. In a commencement speech at Syracuse University in 1994, he told the graduates about the greeting he received from his uncle when he returned home after the Second World War.

When I got home from World War II, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, ''You’re a man now.'' So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

...As I have told you, I had a bad uncle named Dan, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

We are already a country, Mr. Harper. We don't need to kill any more people to prove that.

Vimy and election vigour - what happened to "Never Again!"?

Lawrence Martin, in his column today in the Globe and Mail, puts the case that Stephen Harper may use the anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge to whip Canadians into a patriotic froth, after which he can drop the writ for a spring election.

I'd like to think that even this would be below Harper, but I doubt it.

He's already using that tried and true Bush-administration tactic of conflating anti-war sentiments with anti-soldier sentiments (garbage, of course). He was going to go to Vimy taking only his Conservative buddies, since everyone knows that the only true Canadians are (neo)Conservative, but a howl arose from the two-thirds of the country who aren't Canadians (sorry - Conservatives), so he invited (how kind of him) representatives of the rest of Canada to go as well.

If anything comes out of this, it should be that governments show their abject failure when their only resort is to go to war. Young men and women pay the price with their blood, families are left with lifelong sorrow, civilians die, and countries are left diminished in every way.

I wonder if the War Amps will send a member of their organization to the ceremonies. Their series of documentaries in the late nineties told of their experiences, of the horrors of war, and their wish to leave the children of Canada a legacy of peace. Their message was, ""In a war, everyone suffers...
we must never let it happen again."

And Stephen Harper couldn't commit Canadian troops to war-without-end in Afghanistan fast enough.

You're either with us or with the Taliban

The latest pearls to fall from the blubbery lips of Porkydork Harper saw light in the House of Commons yesterday. This report from the Toronto Star had this to say:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is being accused of reaching a new low after suggesting Liberals sympathize more with Taliban insurgents than Canadian soldiers.

His vintage outburst yesterday came during an exchange with Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who was calling for Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor to resign after the minister's admission that he misled the Commons on the issue of Afghan detainees.

"I can understand the passion that the leader of the Opposition and members of his party feel for Taliban prisoners. I just wish occasionally they would show the same passion for Canadian soldiers," Harper said.

Hmmmm..... where have I heard that before? Could it be from the sane and moral George W. Bush, using such black-and-white dictums (dicta?) to justify lying, torture and murder in defense of the American way?

Gilles Duceppe, in the same report, said that we were seeing the "old" Harper of 1993-94 in these remarks. There is no "old" or "new" Harper. This is what Harper is like. He hasn't changed. He is desperately trying to keep his true nature under wraps until he can get a majority government, and the "new" Harper will disappear as fast as the snow in spring, especially the new hot and dry springs that we can expect under the global climate change that Harper insisted didn't exist as recently as a few months ago.

You wanna know how to "support the troops", Stevie? Don't sent them into battle under U.S. direction to fight for an oil pipeline. Don't send them to prop up a puppet government composed of transplanted-from-London oil executives who are fond of boy dancers, drug lords, warlords and other less-than-savoury types.

From the Wayne Madsen Report - March 7, 2007:

Libby Defense Find features this photo of Libby with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Libby once penned a novel titled "The Apprentice," which featured pedophilia, bestiality, and rape. Karzai is rumored by our Afghanistan sources to be an aficionado of "boy dancers," underage male strip dancers that are popular with Karzai's fellow Pashtun warlords. One reason the Taliban banned music and dancing was to eliminate the attendant sexual exploitation of boys by the Pashtun elite.

I'm no fan of the Taliban, but the women of Afghanistan are not primarily being abused by them. According to American journalist Ann Jones, ninety-eight percent of Afghan women are abused by their husbands, fathers, and other male family members. Instead of propping up and perpetuating this patriarchy of oil and drugs, how about not pouring "our troops" and our money into the black hole that is Afghanistan. As far as I can see, the only way to eliminate this systematic abuse of women would be to elimate 98% of the male population of Afghanistan, which could be accomplished militarily (this is sarcasm, folks).

The Taliban objected not only to the ruling elites, but also to the oil pipeline that was to run through their country. That's why they are the target. Their right-wing agenda and supression of women was just a palatable excuse to peddle to war-wary citizens.

Since most of our money (ours, not yours, Stevie) is going towards military equipment, not to bettering the lives of women and their children, the only ones who benefit are arms dealers and defense contractors, and puffed-up little generals who want to "punch above their weight".

Harper supports the troops

Harper supports Canadian troops so much that, to keep his little "punching above our weight" war going in Afghanistan, he sends those suffering from depression and PTSD right back into battle.

Jeff Esau writes:

The Canadian military is sending soldiers to Afghanistan who are suffering from mental illnesses, including depression and operational stress injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

...[Psychiatrist]Col. Boddam added that deployment to a combat zone can benefit some depression and PTSD sufferers. However, he said, “we do not deploy knowingly anybody who is suffering from a mental illness that would impair their ability to function in this environment.”

Rather, the Forces “deploy people who are on maintenance phases of their treatment or who may have a minor illness that is not really impairing their function,” such as a phobia.

Add this to a report last week that stress and depression is skyrocketing in military families, with children in particular having trouble getting the psychiatric help they need, and we get the idea that while Harper gets the glory for his little war and gets to play with the big boys, kids are so frightened that one little boy whose father was killed has to go home from school several times a day to make sure that his mother is still alive or he can't function.

Harper - leading the troops into battle from behind, out of harm's way.

With friends like this...

Hugh Segal, long-time "red" Tory and Conservative party loyalist, even thought the Conservative party just ain't what it used to be, who was appointed to the Senate by the outgoing Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, has been booted out of a job.

"Privately, Liberals speculated that Segal had been on the outs with the Conservative leadership over different positions he had taken. For example, Segal's committee put out a highly critical report last week on the government's aid strategy in Africa.

He also recently urged his government to investigate the treatment and the demands of terror suspects being held at Millhaven penitentiary in Kingston, Ont. And during debate on the Federal Accountability Act, Harper's marquee legislation, Segal voted against the government on one of the measures."

It couldn't possibly be because Segal disagrees with some of Our Great Leaders policies, could it? Nooooo...surely not. Harper isn't a petty, vindictive, control freak.

Hold on a minute.

Oh, yeah - he is.