Like someone promised I would be. I wonder what happened? I’d packed my toothbrush and everything.
Anyway, if Mr. Bourrie is successful in sending me to the slammer, I expect y’all to send me cards and letters, to help me pass the time in the big house.
Hell, you could send nice letters to Mr. Bourrie, too, while you’re at it.
One of my great loves, for the past while, is Massachusetts/Virginia Fat Wreck Chords band Smoke Or Fire. I love these guys, and I sometimes feel like no one else has heard of them. Couldn’t sleep last night, and so ‘1968’ was playing on an endless loop in my head. Here it is – plus Joe’s amazing lyrics – in the hope it gets a spot on your own internal turntable.
The tension in the air is swelling like a bubble about to break
Students have shut down universities and taken to the streets
The DNC has left Chicago burned and frayed
Cover your eyes
You think America’s recovered from the self-inflicted wounds it took in 1968?
Still Corretta led his people through the Memphis streets
In spite of the nightmare that was made out of a dream
[x2]
Young men sent overseas, their names are in a lottery that kills
There are social clashes, body counts, and rioting on TV screens
A bullet put another Kennedy to sleep
Cover your eyes
You think America’s recovered from the self-inflicted wounds it took in 1968?
Still Corretta led his people through the Memphis streets
In spite of the nightmare that was made out of a dream
[x2]
So why this disconnect in our youth after 40 years?
Peace, tried and failed, while the radio played “As my guitar gently weeps”
Where’s the rage in the young towards war and hatred based on race?
The CIA silenced “The people’s new messiah,” and now history repeats
Are we so blind to see this country hasn’t changed?
Cover your eyes
You think America’s recovered from the self-inflicted wounds it took in 1968?
Still Corretta led his people through the Memphis streets
In spite of the nightmare that was made out of a dream
Media probes of Ford crack-smoking were ethical and responsible, says press tribunal. But you already knew that.
UPDATE: I’m never a fan of her approach – here, the “I-oppose-the-Press-Council-but-let-me-quote-the-Press-Council-to-you-because-they-did-something-I-like” – but the Star’s crown coddled columnist wrote something about all this that I found quite useful:
That paragraph is a neat and tidy summary of the disgrace that is la famille Ford. If I get involved in the next mayoralty – and that’s only if my hoped-for candidate runs – I will do my utmost to ensure that every single voting Torontonian knows the above paragraph like the back of their proverbial hand. I want the hulking, shambling mass that is Rob Ford to slouch back to the rock under which he lives in Etobicoke every night, and cry like a baby – weeping, destroyed – in front of his thug-brother. I want him humiliated, because that’s what he’s done to this city.
Always late to the party, I just spotted these: me, Davey Snot and Lala onstage with the Palma Violets at the Grove Fest in August. Pix by Atsuko Kobasigawa. Cool.
We look like a “Christian rock” band to you?
Right now, lawyers are crowding into a Toronto courtroom for a fairly extraordinary hearing. They are there to gain access to a nearly-500-page police ITO (Information To Obtain) that led to a search warrant. The ITO apparently contains the name “Rob Ford” more than 100 times.
You may have heard of Rob Ford. He’s the Mayor of Toronto, and his personal driver apparently used drugs to get back Ford’s cell phone:
What will be the outcome of the hearing, and discussions with the Crown? We shall see. But my prediction is that Ford’s involvement with criminals will occupy a lot of folks in a lot of newsrooms this week.
Poking through the electoral entrails, looking for the federal angle, editorialists and opinion-opiners always assign far too much importance to (a) byelections, and (b) provincial elections.
It’s ill-advised, because (a) byelections are lousy predictors of future general-election voter behaviour, and (b) in Canada, federal and provincial political parties generally share only their names.
There is, for instance, absolutely no connection — zero, zippo, zilch — between federal and provincial Liberals and Conservatives.
Alison Redford and Stephen Harper? Christy Clark and Justin Trudeau? They are, respectively, Conservatives and Liberals who have nothing in common, with the possible exception of mutual disdain.
There is one political party, however, that is the same party federally and provincially: The New Democrats. In Ottawa, and in places like Nova Scotia, they are one big, happy social democratic family.
Well, sort of. Last week, of course, the NDP’s first government east of Ontario had its keester kicked, hard. New Democrat Premier Darrell Dexter, once a shining star in the federal NDP firmament, saw his majority government reduced to ignominious third-party status in the Nova Scotia legislature. And he lost his own seat.
There are all sorts of reasons why the Liberal’s sober, solid Stephen McNeil won big. Dexter said he wouldn’t raise taxes, for example, and he did. He said he had a budgetary surplus when, by most accounts, he didn’t. And he gifted the Irvings — one of the country’s richest families — with $300 million in Nova Scotia tax dollars, in addition to a multi-billion dollar federal ship-building contract.
All of those things hurt. But by my reckoning, there was something else that hurt the Nova Scotia NDP, too. And that was that their federal leader was Thomas Mulcair, and not Jack Layton.
Jack Layton possessed the rarest of political assets: He was much-liked and, in some cases, actually adored.
He was a genial, easy-going guy. And he was federal leader when Dexter was elected in 2009. Everywhere Jack went in that year, he cast a warm orange glow over New Democratic fortunes.
His successor, however, could not be more different. Angry Tom, Mulcair is called, because he is. Humourless, pitiless, bloodless: With his patrician beard, and his irritated disposition, Mulcair has unmade all of Layton’s good works.
The NDP could not have picked a leader more unlike Jack Layton if they tried (and they did).
Mulcair did not go anywhere near the Nova Scotia election campaign. Justin Trudeau did, however, and provincial Liberals say he helped them win plenty of seats.
The likeable Conservative leader, Jamie Baillie, trumpeted his connections to Stephen Harper everywhere he went, and he wasn’t punished for doing so — he, in fact, will now be leader of the Opposition in Nova Scotia’s legislature.
It isn’t hard to feel some sympathy for Darrell Dexter. He tried to be a businesslike New Democrat, in the Roy Romanow mould. For his trouble, he alienated his own base, and he never achieved the trust of the Halifax-centred business community.
On election night, as he surveyed the wreckage that was his party, Dexter deserved condolences, not contempt.
Thomas Mulcair? Well, New Democrats picked him, and they shouldn’t have. Soon enough, they are going to rue their choice, both (a) federally, and (b) provincially.
So, Parliament returns. My hunch? Thirty-odd million Canadians won’t notice.
The government that is led by Stephen Harper, and a few neatly-barbered, young Conservatives in PMO, is adrift—truly, officially and indisputably so. If they have a message, anymore, no one knows what it is. They—who used to have so much communications discipline—now have much of the latter, but not so much of the former.
The new top guy in the PMO comms shop—who, by all accounts, is decent and smart—is unlikely to improve upon this sad state of affairs. As any comms veteran knows, millions of dollars of advertising and press releases couldn’t improve the taste of New Coke. They could try and fool people, but everyone still thought it tasted lousy. They wanted Old Coke back.
Stephen Harper faces a similar dilemma. After nearly a decade in government, many of the big things he wanted to do—scrap the long gun registry, reduce the GST, eliminate corporate and union donations to political parties—have all been done. What to do now? What to say?
After the Throne Speech, ministers and MPs will be dragooned into service, and fan out across the country, singing the praises of their party, their government, and its Shiny New Vision. But it won’t work—because (as above) communications cannot obscure cold, hard realities.
Said cold, hard reality is this: the Harper government has lost its way. No one in the real world (i.e. South of the Queensway) knows what they are doing, anymore. There is a custodial feel to the whole enterprise, and no sense of direction anymore.
Governments defeat themselves, goes the maxim, and we are reminded of it every time we turn on the boob tube, these days. What’s hurting the Conservative brand isn’t the Senate scandal (Canadians always thought an unelected Senate was a scandal), or some other scandal (Rob Ford, if he has shown us anything, has shown us that scandals are irrelevant to most regular folks). It’s not that stuff.
What’s hurting them is the near-total absence of key messages. What’s hurting them is the lack of a mission statement. What’s hurting them is that Harper seems to be wholly disengaged—and even bored—by the job he once coveted so much.
That’s one of the principal reasons why Canadians have cottoned on to Justin Trudeau. Whatever you think of the man, or his father, or his absence of policy (or whatever), you know this much: he seems to have a pulse. He’s vibrant. He’s optimistic, and he says so. He’s ALIVE.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives ain’t dead yet, not by a long shot. But they seem to slipping into a mass collective coma of sorts. They’re excited by the MP’s pension, to be sure, but not much else.
Heed the lesson of New Coke, Conservative Throne Speech writers: you can dress it up in all kinds of communications finery. You can call it shiny and new.
But, at the end of the day, if the underlying product still tastes crappy, nobody will buy it.
From: Cesare Rizzuto cesarerizzuto31@gmail.com
Date: October 13, 2013 at 10:51:37 AM EDT
To: warren.kinsella@sunmedia.ca
Subject: I don’t know
Spoken like a true gay Man.or Women you must be proud of your shit
…well, my world did, anyway. Heard this, shaved my head, started wearing thrift store rags, and scrawled “ANARCHY” on the shirt I wore to the Bishop Carroll student council photo session. And the Social Blemishes (to become the Hot Nasties, who still have fans) took on an entirely new significance, overnight.
Jesus Christ Almighty, what a song this is. Thirty-seven years later, when I hear that opening riff and that laugh, it still literally sends chills down my spine.