So the throne speech includes this: “Canadians live within their means and expect their governments to do the same.”

That sounds familiar: “But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Obama said that not too long ago.

In both cases the remarks are vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

The throne speech comment is followed immediately with “Spending designed for a rainy day should not become an all-weather practice.” Again, vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

Spending isn’t necessarily bad. Spending more than you make isn’t necessarily bad either. So long as the spending is useful.

Also, I don’t know about the rest of the country, but there’s clearly a housing bubble in Toronto. You can rent for well below the cost of owning. Maybe this is a demographic thing with too many 20- and 30-somethings buying a house just because it’s what you’re supposed to do? I don’t know, it’s a hypothesis I’m not going to examine right now. Or a rush ahead of the increased restrictions? Are there readily available data on the types of mortgages being taken out? When everything crashes, the next mayor’s going to be fucked.

Why is it that whenever I see a headline along the lines of “[something something something] mayoral candidate says,” if I think “gee, that ‘[something something something]‘ is totally ass,” the “mayoral candidate” is Rocco Rossi?

The Star has an article regarding a video posted to Youtube.

In a tongue-and-cheek video posted by the politician on YouTube, Councillor Adam Giambrone shows himself working out to prove that he has the “years of physical and mental training that it takes to run the city.”

After a brief discussion of the video and some initial reactions (i.e. Youtube commenters, i.e. the worst people in the world), the article concludes with this:

Giambrone is expected to announce his candidacy for mayor on Feb.1.

In what sense has he not already announced it? He was on 102.1 a couple days ago in the morning talking about how he’s not confirming or denying that he’ll be running, but that everyone is invited to Revival on Feb. 1.

At the end of the video, the last thing (and the first serious thing) Giambrone says is “I’m Adam Giambrone, and I’m ready.” The video then invites everyone out to Revival on Feb. 1.

Either he’s running, or he’s being paid by Revival.

He’s running. He just hasn’t filled out the forms.

Do young people vote in municipal elections? Serious question.

I was initially sceptical of the “But look at facebook” polling, but given there are 177,000 people in the facebook group for Canadians Against Prorogue, and that 58% (of the 67% who are aware of it) are against prorogue, it’s clear there’s generally large opposition to the motion. It would be nice to think that this could be the kind of event that would politicize a generation, awoken by a cynical act in such a pure anti-democratic spirit. It would be nice to see this play out in a meaningful way, to see the Conservatives branded as the big party that wouldn’t. Given polling on where the parties stand, I’m guessing it will pass with too much effect.

Busy packing/moving for the next week or so, but just saw that everybody in Connecticut thinks Joe Lieberman is a loser, which is exactly what he is and exactly what he deserves, and it’s kind of freaking me out that the right conclusion came out of the right circumstances.

Harper will soon appoint new senators to give the Conservatives a plurality, if not a majority, in the Senate.

The original plan was basically to cap terms as a first step to abolishing the whole thing. Since he couldn’t get that accomplished, Harper said “Fine, y’all can go fuck yourselves” and made a bunch of appointments.

That’s not so much hypocritical as it is highlighting problems by creating those problems yourself.

But Harper could soon have a majority in the Senate. And he could have one in the House, depending on how things go in the next six months. If he gets both, and then doesn’t move on Senate reform, at that point he’d have some serious explaining to do. Though at that point, maybe that means there won’t be enough people caring to demand it.

I never liked Ignatieff. From the beginning I found his statements lacking, from either a political or intellectual perspective. But I knew people who liked him, smart people. And those people no longer like him. It seems Liberal support has settled on the level of people-who-vote-Liberal-no-matter-what. Those who actively require vision have left for NDP or Green. Those who are assholes have left for Conservative.

With a potential election always potentially months away under a minority government, it’s not easy to replace a party leader without seeming to put the party into a position of election unpreparedness. I think the main Liberal strategy right now has to be not about how to take down Harper, but to determine the optimal timing for selecting a new leader. And the whole party had better quickly get behind someone (as they did behind Ignatieff), because any infighting will only hurt.

Despite (or because of?) his unwillingness to govern, I have a feeling we may be seeing Harper for quite a while still.

Well it’s apparently official. Parliament’s been prorogued until March 3, 2010. Two months (and a bit) without governing.

Throughout the day there was no shortage of good reactions to the possibility of prorogation and a few of the potential effects.

Given the notably scarce conservative reaction, it struck me that this whole prorogation thing was just an idea being floated, to see the response, to see how it would play politically. Would it hurt among supporters would be the main question, since the non-supporters aren’t likely to be brought over anyhow. It seems the answer to that would be negative, given the assbackwards conclusion-first reasoning of some of the popular party dullards.

And here we are.

Does this happen elsewhere? Is this a surprisingly common thing in parliamentary democracies? I’m asking seriously, because I don’t know. But what I do know is that wherever it happens, it’s completely fucking ridiculous and seems the kind of thing we should be taking to the Ottawa streets over, though of course those of us who feel that way are also (as I’m sure the Conservatives figured) the people who have a general sense that being governed by nobody at all might be better than being governed by Harper.

Well, mark your calendars, enjoy the Olympics, and remember on March 3rd that Harper has to stop ignoring parliament, stop making us look ridiculous on climate change, and create 265,000 jobs. And that he’s just had a two month vacation and is a douchebag.

Of 200 nominations from the Obama white house, 75 were being held up.

A few have gotten through.

One of those finally approved was Miriam Sapiro, who had become the Obama administration’s prime example of stalled nominations since being chosen in April to be a deputy United States trade representative. Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, put a hold on the confirmation of Ms. Sapiro, an Internet policy consultant, to try to pressure the trade representative’s office to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization against Canada over a law that bans cigarettes with candy flavors.

Makes sense to me. Canadian policy seems so obviously backwards on this. How are you supposed to market cigarettes to children without fun mascots and familiar flavours?

So it looks like an invasion of Yemen will be called for by our peaceful neighbours to the south.

Given that Republicans/conservatives are the only party that seems to understand how to either keep a story in the news (by continuing to talk about it and make increasingly outrageous claims) or let it die (by just ignoring it), and given that Democrats/liberals have a gut reaction to anything to do with the military of “We’re not pussies, and we don’t want you to think that, so we’ll blow some shit up,” this idea is likely to get some traction.

And yes, there is and has been some crap taking place in Yemen.

The thing is, aside from whether or not an invasion makes sense or not, where are the troops supposed to come from?

Nobody’s going to be happy about a draft based on a single dude lighting his junk on fire.

Marc Emery documents the accomplishments of the Harper government. Surely he has some reason to be biased, but at a glance it looks pretty thorough.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet. I have a hard time concentrating beyond 500 words.

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

Seriously, this was probably a week ago, I just remembered it after my previous post.

I had a dream that I was watching the news (or maybe it was listening to the radio old-timey style), and there was a report saying that since Sarah Palin has been with her advisers memorizing facts for seven hours every day, public views of her have improved across the political spectrum.

I guess it was more of a nightmare.

After that I bought Going Rogue. When people with public access and a degree of respect are horrible, horrible people, we have a responsibility to forewarn ourselves about what’s going on inside of their mis-wired minds.

It’s an assumption by some and a fear of others that yes, the Conservatives haven’t seemed so horrible, but if they ever had a majority we’d see what they really think.

And sometimes we do have those little moments where the darkness slips into the light.

And today, courtesy of Jason Kenney, we have another such moment:

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has accused Christian aid group KAIROS of being anti-Semitic and disclosed that’s why the group suddenly lost its federal funding.

In a speech in Jerusalem about what he said was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government’s leading position combatting the enemies of Israel, Kenney lumped KAIROS – a Toronto-based ecumenical group that works for social justice abroad – in with what he described as other anti-Semitic organizations.

He said this is why Ottawa recently ended 35 years of funding for KAIROS, which encompasses Anglican, Catholic and other mainstream Canadian Christian churches.

“We have de-funded organizations, most recently, like KAIROS who are taking a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign” against Israel, he told the Global Forum for combatting anti-Semitism.

That wouldn’t seem quite as terrible if it weren’t for this:

KAIROS was stunned by Kenney’s remarks because International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda told the public and Parliament the group lost its funding because of shifting priorities at the Canadian International Development Agency.

There seem to be two main possibilities here. One is that Kenney went off the politically vague message of “shifting priorities,” in which case there was an awareness of this being inappropriate. Two is that he was bragging about taking away the funding.

In any case, the identification of being anti-policies towards Israel with being anti-Israel is stupid (I’m against certain domestic Canadian policies, but I wouldn’t consider myself anti-Canada). Then, the identification of being anti-Israel with being anti-Semitic, that’s just not doing anybody any favours.

I hate everybody.

A bit more thought at Impolitical.

As a Jew, I wish it weren’t Lieberman ruining everything. At least not in such a smug way.

Chris Rock has a bit about watching for skin colour in crime reports: “Everybody waits for the film to see what colour the guy was that did the crime?… Black people are like ‘Please don’t let it be a black guy, ok?’”

When there’s some jackass spewing shit everywhere, I have to think “Please don’t let it be a Jew, ok?” Lieberman, Morris, Pipes, Goldfarb, Wolfowitz, the list goes on I’m sure.

I don’t have Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold with me (it’s in storage, i.e. at my parents’ house), but how Gold feels towards Kissinger, that’s how any aware Jew of this generation will feel towards Lieberman. He’s the worst kind of human being.

UPDATE: I have to add Bill Kristol to the list. What a jackass moron.

My vision for climate change repair is also cliff-based. If we can’t fix it at the last minute, we can’t fix it.

Collaberatively, as a species, we’re just that horrible.

I don’t just think this because Copenhagen is failing to do anything more than find creative ways to provide limousines. The more countries involved in something, the more likely any resulting efforts will be token.

At best, countries don’t agree to do things but to agree to agree to do things. At worst, they don’t even do that, and that’s where we are with the most important issue in the history of humanity (maybe nuclear proliferation is up there).

Also, it’s probably too late, but some rebranding has to be in order. “Global warming,” “climate change,” neither sounds especially bad if it’s the only thing you know about the issue. We should start calling it “global devastation.” If all the world leaders left a conference to solve “global devastation” with nothing accomplished, it would look a lot worse than leaving a conference aiming to prevent the temperature from changing a bit.

ABC has a fun graph:

It’s explained this way: “The data track the average annual approval ratings of the last three presidents to find themselves enmeshed in unpopular wars.”

Maybe they were the last three wars to find themselves enmeshed in unpopular presidents. Maybe both were terrible. Where’s the graph showing presidents and popular wars? What makes it popular or not? This graph is mostly stupid.

But what it makes me wonder is whether popularity leads to starting wars.

Would Bush have started in on Iran if his popularity had remained high?

There are always war plans for everything.

And there are always a couple battles that are at least arguably worth fighting. But without popularity, unless it’s an obviously popularly critical war, you can’t really just go and start those battles. Popularity nudges those options into the realm of possibility.

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.”

Maurice Vellacott appears to be a generally horrible person.

New to the list is this:

Vellacott, who was not available for further comment Monday, said in the release “a growing body of research reveals significant health problems caused by abortion,” including breast cancer, cervical injury, uterine perforations, hemorrhaging and infections. The release does not include statistics from research studies.

Of course this isn’t the kind of thing people just forget about, at least not for a few days.

In the question period, the issue was raised (here is the actual audio, the full session is available here):

Yesterday the minister responsible for status of women refused denounce the unacceptable statements made by a conservative MP who implied that abortions contributed to the development of breast cancer. Besides being wrong medically, this assertion is meant to make women feel guilty. We would expect that the minister would defend women and the right to abortion with vigour, rather than saying things worthy of Sarah Palin.

That was Nicole Demers, of the Bloc.

This was the response, from Helena Guergis, Minister of State (Status of Women):

…this member is actually fully aware that there are elected members of this house who have said very similar things at different times. Members in this house represent their constituencies and they are free to have any opinion that they choose to. It does not mean it represents the government. Please let me highlight one of our most recent achievements to protect women across this country…

(In case you’re wondering, the recent achievement (there was only one) was that the citizenship guide now informs immigrants that female genital mutilation is not tolerated here.)

I feel the shared frustration of humanity past present and future a I explain this: a fact is not something you can disagree with. When the study says one thing, you can’t just say the opposite.

Shit on science, shit on women, it must be easy when you’re so full of it.

On the bright side, what I enjoy about all of this is the use of Sarah Palin as a bookend on the acceptable limits of political ridiculousness.

Maybe not in the States where Obama is Hitler and Palin is not immediately written off by everybody, but so far as the rest of the world is concerned it looks like in the area of political discourse Palin is the real Hitler replacement so far as Godwin’s law is concerned.

Speaking of lists where the US looks like a 3rd world country, I always enjoy the “Countries and territories that retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes” list:

Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad And Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States Of America, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe

I think a half-decent way to govern a country would be to simply institute a policy of “Don’t be on any list that includes North Korea unless it’s ‘Countries that are not landlocked.’”

To be fair, pretty much all US executions occur in the South (Ohio is the only one carrying the torch in the North–yes, with god, all things are possible), and of those pretty much most of them occur in Texas.

We understand. We’re just slightly more peaceful about it.