Robo-caller.

(Wow. Suspect people are paying attention to the Robo Scandal.)

Comments (24)

“The RCMP has executed a search warrant at the offices of an Edmonton-based call firm hired by the Conservative Party in the last federal election, as police investigate allegations of voter fraud in the growing “robocall” scandal.

Racknine Inc. is being asked to hand over any data, such as emails or billing records, linking it to the Conservative campaign in Guelph, Ont., where the robocall accusations originated. Residents said they received phone calls directing them to the wrong voting locations.”

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Truly shocking – and unnecessary.

If senior people within the Conservative Party of Canada conspired to rig the May 2011 election – and, increasingly, it looks like they did – what are the consequences?

For Stephen Harper’s party, the penalties could be very, very significant. They range from fines and jail time, to deregistration of Harper’s party and liquidation of its assets.

A recap: as has been well-documented in the media, Conservatives used automated pre-recorded “robocalls” to contact voters in ridings across the country to provide them with false and misleading information about polling stations. Other voters were called late at night and, they say, harassed and intimidated.

Comments (11)

Last week, as in this morning’s Hill Times (below), I decried the willingness of some Liberals I liked to use the “vikileaks30” crap. For my trouble, I was called every name in the book – by former and current Liberal staffers. When Postmedia had all but convicted the NDP of being behind the smear campaign, I found that a bit odd.

No longer. A Liberal did this, and hurt his leader and his party.

So, are we now to believe that this Ontario-based staffer got those divorce pleadings all by himself? That he traveled to Manitoba and back to get them, without anyone’s help?

I don’t think so. But I do think everyone else involved in this dumpster-diving should be fired, too.

Comments (25)

Around 80,000 words, written between now and the end of October.

Stephen Harper, are you listening?

Comments (44)

I was reading a history of the Clash when the Vic Toews thing broke.

This may seem more than tangential, but bear with me. In about 1984, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon kicked Mick Jones out of the Clash. No one’s quite sure why they did it, but they just did. Mick Jones, the guy who created the Clash, had been kicked out of his own band. It was a huge shock.

Here’s my stab at making a link: if you were a progressive person — a Liberal or New Democrat — watching your comrades swim through the muck of the Toews file was a bit like Mick Jones must have felt. People you had worked with for years, people you had admired, utterly took leave of their senses. They looked like jerks of the first order.

So, there were the Toews’-haters on Twitter, or on Facebook, or whatever else they consider to be “social media,” digging giddily through the muck. There they were on comments threads, excoriating Tim Harper or Dan Gardner for having the decency to demand that people act with decency. There they were, piously claiming that some new media revolution was underway, and they were leading it. There they were, saying over and over that “Toews deserves it.”

But you know,Toews’ kids, and Toews’ ex-wife, and Toews’ wife DIDN’T deserve it. Not at all.

What in the name of all that is holy did they have to do with a poorly-conceived, over-reaching, invasive piece of legislation? What did they do to deserve being dragged through the biggest wave of slime and muck Ottawa’s seen in ages (when Ottawa’s seen plenty of slime and muck)?

Here’s another little tale: I was at a campaign meeting with the Ontario Liberals last spring, and we were getting ready for the October 2011 election. And one of the smart and experienced McGuinty senior staffers there just said, out of the blue, what the difference was between us and the Conservatives. “We have boundaries,” she said. “They don’t.”

I don’t remember anything else from that meeting, but I remember that: we have boundaries. The Conservatives don’t.

Well, in the past few days, we boundary-observing types have fully become what we once claimed to despise. We have become just as bad as them.

So, when Steve Maher’s amazing robocall story broke, around the time the Toews thing started to subside, Lefties were in full dudgeon again. They were entitled to be angry. But the high ground, they no longer had. When the choice came, quite a few of them didn’t hesitate to toss Vic Toews’ wife and kids onto the funeral pyre, did they? No, they didn’t.

Like I say, it’s about boundaries. The Clash crossed one, and they never found their way back.

Liberals who dug through Vic Toews’ divorce files may find their way back. But it’s going to take a while to get the stink off them.

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The CPC better come up with some new talking points; the ones they’ve been using have just been shown to be unadulterated bullshit.

Comments (64)

It’s not often that a respected disciple of Reaganomics poops all over the Right, and calls on the Left to get its act together. But, last week, it happened.

Some background first.

The great global recession of 2008 — and the cataclysm of despair that it unleashed — has receded, somewhat.

But its effects are still felt all over and nowhere as much as among what we once nostalgically called “the middle class.”

Foreclosures, layoffs and broken dreams are everywhere to be seen.

Where, in the midst of all of this, have been we on the Left?

Hard to say.

Progressives have been virtually invisible, at the very time when the old dogmas and old fixes of the Right are, to many, a cruel joke.

In the midst of this, a big surprise. A neo-con icon steps up to excoriate his fellow conservatives.

Comments (46)

Way, way back in July 2001, I wrote this single paragraph for a column in some Canwest papers. I was poking fun at (yet another) screed Paul Wells had typed up about Yours Truly, in which Jazz Boy suggested (yet again) that I had never done anything good, ever, anywhere, and that he knows for a fact – a fact! – that I have never been part of a winning campaign. Not even as janitor.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Anyone reading this, naturally, will wonder why this Liberal ‘strategist’ is being so nice to [Stockwell Day], a political opponent. I am, after all, the Liberal ‘strategist’ who ran the entire federal Liberal election campaign all by himself, every damn thing, with no help from anyone at all (that, at least, is the recent analysis of one of the macrocephalic, girl-crazy columnists at the Post).”

I didn’t even use the words “Paul Wells”! But when he saw that good-natured bit of ribbing, well, Wells went apeshit. He didn’t say anything to me, natch, because he’s a gutless wonder. But he lodged complaints all over the place at Canwest, demanding that I be fired or disciplined or worse.

This, naturally, only encouraged me. So I posted on my then-youthful web site a cartoon of Wells with horns sticking out of his impressively-sized head. I did it myself, and I was rather proud of it. Anyway, that effrontery and insolence resulted in him going totally bananas again. So, while I was on vacation with my family, Wells demanded that my editor call me, and order me to take down the cartoon. “Seriously?” I asked my editor. “Seriously,” my editor said.

“What a fucking crybaby,” I said. “No comment,” my editor said.

Anyway, Paul – who thinks me to be insufficiently awed by his intellect and talent (true), and not nearly as deferential as I should be when in the presence of the national herald of dentist office waiting rooms (ditto) – has lately re-taken to raging about Canada’s Best-Loved Political Web Site™ and its fun-loving owner (ie., moi). This resulted in me describing Paul to a regular correspondent as, quote, “a pompous, pretentious, North-of-the-Queensway zero who has never done anything of significance, who wouldn’t know how to communicate with a real person if his life depended on it (which is why he’s never asked to go on TV, by the way, and which he perpetually whines about). Oh, he tweets every moment of his boring life, in the way that pre-adolescents do. Except that he’s supposedly a grown up. And he name-drops jazz.”

But I mean all that in the nicest possible way.

Anyway, you get the point. He’s an idiot. Moreover, I think Paulie is a bitter, petulant little man who probably got knocked around at recess once or twice, and he’s been using his typewriter to get back at the world ever since. So, to show the extent of my respect for the Girl-crazy Macrocephalic©, and to christen our renewed affection for each other, I have commissioned a beautiful new portrait of Paulie Jazz. I’d encourage him to go complain about it to Kory Teneycke, but I have on good authority that Kory thinks it’s pretty funny.

So will a lot of people.

Paul Wells, girl-crazy macrocephalic©. Clip and save.

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I’ve written about both.  The first is legal, the second isn’t.

The legal:

Nowhere in the ad does Harper’s campaign team declare they were hoping to persuade one million Liberal voters to stay home.

But that in fact was their objective and they achieved it. Extensive focus group and polling research had told the Tories that while many Grits despised Harper, they also had serious misgivings about Dion’s “image” as a leader and his ability to communicate.

If they couldn’t persuade those million Liberal voters to come over to the blue team, the Conservatives concluded, they would persuade them to stay home on election day.

Thereafter, the Tories spared no expense in their multi-million-dollar voter suppression strategy. It worked.