The front of today’s New York Daily News.  The NRA, and organizations like it, are terrororist organizations, and should be treated as such.

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Nothing.

I watched every minute of the Celts-Heat game on a JetBlue flight from Florida to New York, and then drove back to Toronto with the kids, getting in late, late, late.

My detestation for James and the Heat kept me awake.  They are the most loathsome and dislikable bunch of pricks to ever don a professional sports uniform anywhere, ever.  Did you see James yelling at his coaches in the second half? His self-congratulation? This jerk is more arrogant than North Korea.

I pray for great disaster to befall the Heat.  Pestilence, floods, locusts, angels of death. My God, do they ever deserve it.

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The worst part about this story is, of course, that anyone would still get wasted and get behind the wheel:

“Peter Murphy, lead singer of 1970s British goth-rock band Bauhaus, was being held in lieu of $500,000 bail after allegedly rear-ending a vehicle in Glendale, police said.

An eyewitness followed Murphy, 55, from Saturday’s crash at Central and Goode avenues in Glendale to the 3400 block of Barham Boulevard in Los Angeles because “he was afraid [Murphy] would kill someone with his driving,” according to Glendale police.

Murphy, who was in a Subaru Forester, reportedly struck a Mercedes about 11:48 a.m. Saturday at the intersection, then drove around the vehicle and entered the 134 Freeway, police said.“

The second-worst part is that the lead singer of Bauhaus drives a Subaru Forester.

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Or, not.

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Stephen Harper is going to win the next federal election. That’s a fact.

That may horrify Liberals, presently re-experiencing Trudeaumania. It probably upsets New Democrats, too, because they were in third (and fourth) place for a long time, and they don’t want to go back. But the Conservative Party is going to win the next election. And federal Liberals and New Democrats are the reason.

Harper’s Conservatives won the 2011 general election with money — they have more of it than any other political party. They won with incumbency — they’d been in power for a few years, and Canadians saw they weren’t as radical as many had feared. They won it with discipline — they had a ruthlessly strategic leader and a well-oiled election machine that lived and breathed the Daily Campaign.

But, mainly, they won because their two main opponents were out to lunch. Still are, too.

In 2011, the NDP and the Liberals together received the support of close to 7.3 million voters, about 50% of those who cast a ballot. The Conservatives got far less, about 5.8 million votes, under 40%.

In 2006 and 2008, Harper won power with even fewer votes. Just 36% in 2006, and 37% in 2008.

Exactly a year ago, before he was running for his party’s leadership, Justin Trudeau spoke to a group of students in Victoria. Asked by one of the students about Conservatives winning power with just a third of the vote, Trudeau said: “If, by 2015, with the election approaching, and neither party has got our act together enough to shine and be the obvious alternative, then …” and here he paused. “There will be a lot of pressure for us to start looking at that.”

A year later, Trudeau doesn’t talk like that anymore. He and his team dismiss any talk of cooperation between Liberals and New Democrats. The only Liberal leadership candidate who favours one-time cooperation is Liberal MP Joyce Murray, and she is routinely dismissed as a defeatist crackpot for her trouble.

The same thing happened to Nathan Cullen when he ran for the NDP leadership — he favoured bringing together the progressive majority, too. The front-runner, Thomas Mulcair, didn’t. End of Cullen’s idea.

There’s some political psychology at work, here. Nobody wants to win their party’s leadership simply to turn out the lights. And, among rank-and-file Liberals and New Democrats, there are undeniably deep emotional attachments to their respective party’s histories.

But the outcome of the next federal election shouldn’t be determined on the basis of nostalgia or warm feelings. It should be determined by cold math.

Stephen Harper acutely understands math. He saw conservatives humiliated by Jean Chretien in 1993, 1997 and 2000, and resolved to bring together the warring factions of the right. He did so, and went on to win power shortly thereafter. He hasn’t been defeated since.

Liberals will switch places with New Democrats in 2015. But power will remain with Harper’s Conservatives.

So, after 2015, will Canada’s progressives finally come together — as Liberal Democrats, say — and finally put an end to more than a decade of Conservative rule?

If they don’t, they’ll have only themselves to blame. And that, too, is a fact.

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…and from someone who works there.

Well worth a read.

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This study doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

Its findings will be endlessly analyzed and re-analyzed, naturally, but to no effect. You’ve heard it all before. The end result is the same: the traditional media continues to slowly die, and traditional media types don’t know how to stop it.

One of their claims irritates or amuses me, depending on the day. It’s their claim that democracy itself is at risk, because they alone are the people who safeguard democracy.

Their solipsism is breathtaking. It is beyond arrogant.

The reason why big media are dying is because of democracy – not despite democracy. As I wrote early this month, here, it is big media themselves who digitized everything they do, mostly so they could maximize profit.

As historians of the era will note, that’s how they screwed themselves on an epic scale. It was a delicious Marxist irony: with digitization, they placed the means of media production in the hands of average folks. Average folks thereupon took the ball and ran with it.

That isn’t AGAINST democracy, corporate media! THAT IS DEMOCRACY.

This web site (not blog!) has been going for over a decade. Since re-design, it’s had well over six million visitors.

That’s not because Yours Truly is particularly insightful or innovative. I don’t think I’m either, in fact.

Web sites like this one are read because citizens like the idea of citizen media. They don’t like hearing from the same old voices all the time, about the same old stuff. They like being able to contribute themselves, if they are moved to do so.

They think democracy is improved, not diminished, by more voices. And, along the way, if that means that corporate media bosses have to find new ways of doing things, or find new lines of work?

Well, tough shit. That’s democracy.

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Modelled by Son Two and me!

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Here.

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