Calling all Alberta Liberals!
Today! Hot Nasties reunite in Calgary!
I’m in Calgary, but I’m having a good laugh right about now
Calgary!
It's disconcerting when people clap when the plane lands, because it means you were travelling with people who thought we were all goners.
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 14, 2016
You have one job, Governor-General
To be seen and not heard. That’s it.
I admire this man. But he is the Governor General and he should NEVER comment on politics. Ever. Huge mistake. https://t.co/t0IQL3waPF
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 13, 2016
You have one job, Governor-General
To be seen and not heard. That’s it.
I admire this man. But he is the Governor General and he should NEVER comment on politics. Ever. Huge mistake. https://t.co/t0IQL3waPF
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 13, 2016
A message from daughter to each one of you
We are not a country.
That is the only conclusion that can be reasonably reached, when what is happening in Attawapiskat is happening again. Suicides, and suicide attempts, in numbers that leave you without words. Or should.
When the Attawapiskat stories started to break over the weekend – with their bleak, black, grinding sameness – I came to the conclusion that there are now only two things that will truly change all this. One, the police start investigating it, and some people – the ones responsible, as well as the ones who have been irresponsible – get thrown in jail. Or legislatures get shut down, literally, until a cabinet minister or two is forced to resign.
I have written about this subject before, more than once. And, yes, I am biased, because I am so proud to be a father to a citizen of the Carcross-Tagish First Nation. But I am so fucking fed up with these serial horrors, and nothing ever changing.
My daughter, meanwhile (and typically) is much more gentle than me. I encourage you to read what she says, and the Boyden too.
And then I encourage you to push, once and all, for real and meaningful change. Because, until we do, we will never be a real country.
We will only be complicit.
To all New Yorkers, as your primary approaches
Me and the boys in SFH got together last night and did a blistering version of this here love letter to The Donald. Sing along, New York!
Going neg works
From YouTube:
Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who tracks campaign advertising, pointed to Wisconsin as a place where the ads, paired with a focused message, a smaller field and a persuadable electorate, had an effect.
“Negative ads are never a silver bullet,” Mr. Goldstein said. “What negative ads in particular do is allow people to introduce or amplify messages that are out there with movable people.”
From one of my books on the subject:
One of the better studies in this area is by the Annenberg Campaign Mapping Project (ACMP). ACMP divided campaign discourse into three types: advocacy, which are arguments in favour of a politician’s position; contrast, which are arguments contrasting two or more political choices; and attack, which are arguments critical of an opponent or the opponent’s position on something. Only the last type can be fairly seen as negative, but all three are often lumped together as just that. It is worth remembering that the Annenberg study found that attack ads actually contain a far greater percentage of “policy words” and more issue content than contrast or advocacy ads. And a 1998 national U.S. poll, also by Annenberg, concluded that voters regard contrast ads as “responsible” and “useful.”
So what’s negative about any of that? Nothing. Reporters (who are more negative in a day than you will be in a lifetime) like to call tough campaign messages negative because they prefer to report on conflict not agreement. Political opponents like to call the other side’s ads negative because they know voters believe they don’t like negative ads, and they hope to win support by condemning the opposition’s use of them. Don’t believe the hype. Most of the time, when you hear a politician is being negative, it’s not true. They’re merely being political.
As I wrote in this space some time ago, going neg on Trump (and anybody, really) would work. And it has worked.
Oh, and any Liberal who has persuaded themselves that Justin Trudeau wasn’t brutal with his two opponents in all of the televised leaders’ debates in the 2015 federal election? You’re dreaming in technicolour. Trudeau kicked the living Hell out of Messrs. Harper and Mulcair, over and over.
And they’re now gone, and he isn’t.