This post at Impolitical links to a Toronto Star online poll showing overwhelming public support for Sheila Fraser to have access to MP’s receipts. In this case I’m willing to believe the online poll results. The post ends up wondering, “Why no party is grabbing this issue for advantage… is a mystery.”

It’s no mystery. Even someone with only “legitimate” expenses is going to have something that they’d be forced to apologize for if someone else decided to make an issue of it. Then there’s all the illegitimate expenses. Nobody would come out of this looking good. Even if there are a few scattered individuals who could make it through an examination, within each party there will be at least a few bad spenders who make the entire party look bad. Frankly it would probably undermine confidence in our entire political representation. You could argue that so will not giving them up in the first place, but that’s not true, people forget things quickly.

For the record I’m for MPs having to give up their receipts to the auditor general, and think it’s horrible that they’re not. I’m just saying it’s no surprise.

Apparently today he was trashing Mother’s Day. Right before reading out a Mother’s Day ad.

Either he doesn’t have any clue what he’s doing, in which case he’s completely insane and should be transferred to a tollbooth or the back of a KFC (along with everybody who takes seriously the words that leave his face), or he does know exactly what he’s doing, in which case he’s hilarious (and everybody who takes seriously the words that leave his face should be transferred to a tollbooth or the back of a KFC). I try so hard to think it’s option 2.

The most recent Conservative Party post, in its entirety:

The Liberals, Bloc Québécois and NDP came together today at the Canadian Heritage Committee just as they did when they tried to seize power through their undemocratic Coalition.

They voted AGAINST a Conservative motion to require CBC executives to explain themselves for using Frank Graves, a Liberal-supporting and self-described “progressive” as the network’s “neutral” pollster on party politics. By voting against this motion, they are endorsing Graves’ call for a “Culture War”.

Graves’ “Culture War” is designed to divide Canadians – East against West, young against old, urban Canada against rural Canada. It’s also ideologically consistent with the world view of the Liberals, Bloc Québécois and NDP.

At the next election, Canadians will have a clear choice between a strong Conservative Government, or a reckless Coalition that will aggressively wage a divisive “Culture War” to divide our country.

First, no matter what I’m against any political involvement in the CBC. I’d be happy to support a constitutional amendment ensuring their separate existence and guaranteed funding.

Having said that, I’m not exactly clear on how when three parties representing a majority of the country come together on an issue, that’s somehow “undemocratic.” I also don’t understand how something being “ideologically consistent with the world view of the Liberals, Bloc Québécois and NDP” is wrong. Because it excludes a single party?

Here’s the basic logic as I understand it (and I’m pretty sure I do). If YOU want it (no matter how many of you want it), it’s undemocratic. If WE want it (no matter how many of you don’t want it), it’s democratic.

It’s tempting to think that Canadian Conservatives are importing that sort of thinking from their batshit insane bretheren to the south, but I have a feeling it’s just a distinguishing feature of the right-wing mind.

You have to resign. You have to say “Sorry, I was drunk when I wrote that, I’m not actually a horrible person, I apologize to anyone I’ve hurt, I have had stresses in my life and will spend some time trying to recalibrate with my family. I am retarded. Oh shit, I shouldn’t have used that word, I’d better go.” shed tear

Dan Gardner writes, “The essential problem advocates of the bilingualism-on-the-bench bill have is that the court functions just fine. It is internationally admired. It is respected at home. If the presence of unilingual Anglophones is a practical problem — not merely a symbolic one — it doesn’t show in the court’s decisions. And in the end, the decisions are all that matters.”

I’m not making a point here about whether Supreme Court judges should be bilingual or not. I’m just saying the above statement is patently ridiculous. If we banned [insert ethnic group here] from [insert profession here], that particular [insert occupation here] wouldn’t suffer at all. But it would still be racist. It would still be wrong.

What is this, grade four? Who writes this stuff is one thing, but who publishes this crap? What the fuck?

“Who mistook this crap for genius?”

In BC a poll was taken showing support for increasing early childhood spending.

Polls will always show people saying they want more stuff. They just don’t want to pay for it.

Although I suck at updating this turd of a blog, I feel like it’s important that within 24 hours of our neighbour’s passing “historic” legislation I acknowledge that here, even though this forum is currently less public than if I were to shout out my window into a hobo lot.

I hope Obama is well-protected these next couple days. It’s hard to underestimate the number of nutcases running around. (Whenever one of these crazy people really does something completely insane, I will (do) blame the media. In part.)

I think (hope) that comment (the first two sentences) is less a statement of serious concern, and more a meta-statement on how concerning the concern over the concern of fearful morons is.

This whole underwearman thing is driving me nuts, the reaction to it.

Dibgy quotes Chris Matthews:

You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don’t do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you’ve got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane’s safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don’t own the right to be on that plane because you’re getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights…

You know, people can do horrible shit in places other than planes.

You know, on a Greyhound bus, someone decapitated someone else and started eating his brain. Maybe before getting on a bus you should have to give up all kinds of rights.

A 737 will have about 150 people on it. In terms of the human toll (the economic toll/disruption would be different), bombing three coach buses (at 50 people apiece) would be about equivalent to bombing one plane. Yet it’s definitely more than three times as easy. Yet it doesn’t happen very often. Because people, generally, aren’t completely fucking insane. People are generally stupid, assholes, and schmucks, but it’s a big step to go from yelling at your kids and their baseball coaches to blowing up tens or hundreds of people.

What about buildings? Maybe before entering a building you should have to give up all kinds of rights. You could blow up a building really easily. In an average apartment building, you could run from top to bottom through the stairwells, dropping a bomb on each floor, without anyone saying anything. Yet it never happens. Because people, generally, aren’t completely fucking insane.

The list goes on.

It’s important to have security. And with good security, sometimes shit will still get blown up. And every time someone dies in such an incident it will be tragic. But it’s important not to lose our shit about it, especially when instead of blowing something up someone just sets his junk on fire.

why don’t they ever realize that liberals know how to use google?

So in the holiday spirit of things Steve Benen and Digby are asking for some cash.

Money makes the world go round, I get that. If I could do this all day every day while still paying bills, I’d take that option. But I guess no getting around the money thing means no getting around the (almost certainly outside) possibility of some bias. What if I said “Look, I’ll give $15,000, but then you have to link to my blog once a month”?

I wish what we’d see is some really, really rich people doing is establishing endowments for media/journalism, maybe in addition to some sort of public financing distributed according to some as-fair-as-possible scheme (say some kind of weighted average of political spectrum location and Technorati rankings or something, or just letting me decide until I get old and reactionary).

some some some some something

“It” being the inane insanity that is for some reason widely considered acceptable.

Being in Canada I can’t link to Hulu, so know this is from the December 1st episode.

Regarding Dubai:

STEWART
In hindsight, a crash like this seems inevitable. Why didn’t Dubai see it coming?

[cut to CNBC report by Erin Burnett]

BURNETT
[overpronouncing words, being generally condescending towards an entire country in an innocent, racist kind of way]
Over the past few years I would say they were literally, “ebullient,” would be the right word to describe it. You know, keep in mind this country’s only 38 years old, so there was sort of a newness and a naiveté about it.

STEWART
Ahhh, ebullient naiveté. can you show us what that looks like, CNBC’s Erin Burnett, almost exactly two years ago?

[cut to segment on Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai built on man-made island with eight staff for every room]

STEWART
… Luckily Burnett was on the air that day with someone who wanted to dig deeper.

[cut to Matt Lauer being asked if he had a question]

LAUER
If she could look for the golf ball I hit off that helipad there.

STEWART
Ahhhh, “if she could look for that golf ball I hit off that helipad there.” In the category of sentences you hear at the exact moment that your nation state may be too decadent to survive, that’s got to be right there in between “I want the guest vomitorium redone in venetian marble” and “what is the Matisse doing in my Monet closet?” We’ll be right back.

I remember him casually swearing about something to do with the leadership race, I liked that.

His response to Harper’s direct implication that people who question some aspects of the military are not proud of the entire military was a good one:

Rae told reporters that the issue is not about questioning the conduct of Canadian troops, but instead probing the actions of the Tories.

Rae said to argue that some political parties are stronger supporters of the Canadian military than others is “reprehensible” and to suggest that raising questions over the Afghan detainee issue is “somewhat unpatriotic, is frankly beyond the pale.”

Harper’s attempt to deflect the issue over the handling of detainees by resorting to the “If you question the military you don’t respect the troops” argument is a play from the Republican playbook, but of course it’s stupid to be taking plays from teams that play in a different league with different rules. Just because Democrats live in perpetual fear of being labeled “liberals,” that’s not a four-letter word up here.

The Toronto Star article starts with this: “Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a partisan shot at his opposition critics…”

Now that’s liberal bias you can be proud of.

The article is titled “Harper takes shot at opposition over torture allegations,” not “Harper claims opponents disrespectful of military.”

It’s probably true that most astro-wealthy people mostly just want to hold onto their money.

Some of the decent rich people out there should put some of that charitable goodness towards establishing independent media organizations, and not necessarily limited to any one specific country.