Read this one on air. If a certain Ottawa City Councillor aide isn’t careful, he’s going to get linked to this disgusting targeting of Toews’ family.

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Many guys will understand what I mean when I say this: your father is both a bit of light, and a bit of shadow, over your path through life.

Mine, T. Douglas Kinsella, MD, OC, would have been 80 years old today. Eight years after we lost him, he remains a constant in our lives. He still illuminates some of the path. Without even being here, he still quietly persuades me to examine the choices I have made.

Me? I have made bad choices. I have been reckless and cruel with the hearts of too many. I have not lived by the single rule he left us.

“Love people, and be honest,” he said to us, and I often feel I have done neither.

He saved many lives as a physician, and he won accolades, and he was a member of the Order of Canada. But for us – my brothers, my closest friends – he was the man we aspired to be.  Not for the distinctions he received, but for how he was, in his soul.

He was unfailingly honest; he was kind to everyone he met. He married his high school sweetheart, and was with her every single day for 50 years, and my God how they loved each other. We would sit there at the kitchen table in Calgary or Kingston or Montreal, and we would listen to him. He’d listen to us, too, and persuade us to try and figure things out. There were some great times, around that table.

The best thing is having a father like that. The hardest thing is knowing that you will never be like him.

On Saturday night, then, I dreamt that he died in 9/11; I don’t know why, but I did. I woke up weeping, and remembered that I wasn’t a boy anymore, and that he has been gone for almost eight years. I don’t think he would like what his son has become. I know I don’t.

So I put on my pants and shoes, and went out into the day, looking for what’s left of the path.

Happy birthday. I miss you.

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From reader AP:

• Atheist
• God Hater
• Child Hater (remember it is always about the children)
• Rural Canada Hater
• Outdoor Sportsman Hater
• Tim Hortons Hater
• Oil Sands Hater
• Witch Lover
• CBC Lover
• Lover of the Arts
• Book Lover
• Statistics Canada apologist
• Baby Seal Lover
• United Nations Lover

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Keep it simple. Show it, don’t say it.

On the weekend, a great example of that happened in Canadian politics, whether you noticed it or not. Chances are you did.

Some context: A few Democratic Party strategists participated in a panel a few years back. James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun, was one of them. Carville made a pithy observation that all progressives should remember: “(We) need a narrative. It’s tough to beat a narrative with a litany. And that happens to us again and again and again.”

Progressives — be they Democrats in the U.S., or Liberals and New Democrats up here — too often make things too complicated. Instead of promoting just a few memorable campaign planks, like Ronald Reagan or Stephen Harper do and did, progressives and liberals always come up with litanies of stuff. That is, mind-numbing laundry lists of policies.

If you have too many priorities, some wag once observed, you actually don’t have any. So, in the historic 2006 federal election campaign, Harper had just five: Government accountability, GST cut, slash health waiting times, child care cash and tougher sentences for gun crime. That’s it.

His Liberal rival, Paul Martin, had his platform leaked before its official release, and it contained nearly 200 priorities. The Liberal document was bursting at the seams with weasel words, such as “work with,” “work closely with,” “work to develop,” “work towards,” “work to increase,” as well as lots of fuzzy promises about “reviews” and “dialogues” to consider, study, encourage, and explore. Blah, blah, blah.

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Great. Terrific. Brilliant.

An experienced, great guy like Lang gets pushed aside for, um, no one in particular. Wonderful. Did someone say Bob’s pal Furious George was running this show? Surprise, surprise.

Meanwhile, coming down Coxwell from Son One’s hockey game last night, we observe more NDP signs than houses.

Not a Lib sign in sight, not anywhere.

Sigh.

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From the New York Times:

“Big media companies love when their employees hit Twitter. After all, the short-form social media platform gives consumers direct access to media personalities, and along with it, an intimate connection that large media organizations, and the public, revel in.

Until something goes wrong. Roland Martin, who is paid to spout opinions on CNN, posted a controversial one on Twitter and now he is on suspension.

Like a lot of us, Mr. Martin watched the Super Bowllast Sunday and like many of us, he frolicked on Twitter as one more way of “watching” the big game, including commercials.

Mr. Martin, a syndicated newspaper columnist and a political analyst for CNN, got in trouble for writing, “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl.”

Many, including gay advocacy groups, felt that the post advocated violence against homosexuals. Mr. Martin, a longtime hater of soccer, saw the immediate blowback on Twitter and said he was just mocking that sport, and nothing more. CNN also saw the outcry and suspended Mr. Martin indefinitely, saying in a news release that his post was “regrettable and offensive.”

This is not the first time someone who makes a living on one platform has been clobbered for making remarks on another.”

I’ve written about how fabbo Twitter is before (for political parties).  I’ve also written about how dangerous it can be (for media).

Here are my thoughts on the MSM and media, written in Tweet-style (that is, journalism with Tourettes):

• It is amazing how many seasoned journalists are utterly without self-awareness on Twitter.  Too many of them act, and sound, like pre-pubescents.  They thereby diminish the real journalism they do elsewhere.
• The tone they adopt on Twitter is awful.  They affect a cynical, world-weary tone, 24/7, that is boring and in no way endearing.  They come across looking like a bunch of pseuds trying to out-clever each other.
• Contrary to what the CBC evidently thinks, Twitter is not journalism.  Paying people to Tweet, and not much else, is absurd.  Their readers/viewers deserve more than brain burps.
• Political parties and corporations monitor Twitter regularly.  They use it to determine, in advance, how a journalist intends to put together a story, and what their bias might be.  I predict it will soon start showing up in defamation actions to provide evidence of malice.
• Everyone needs an editor.  Twitter removes editorial oversight, and some journalists we thought were great – turns out – aren’t.  Turns out their editors are the stars, not them.
• They sound clubby, cloistered and (often) clueless.  They do themselves, and their readers/viewers, no service.

Therefore, I’ve simply stopped following some of them.  Life’s too short, etc.

What do you think?

 

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• Ciano’s firm was paid $389,890 in total by 39 federal Conservative campaigns in 2011 general election (The Hill Times, December 15, 2011)
• Campaign Research used a push poll against Irwin Cotler in 2011, actions deemed “reprehensible” by Speaker of the House of Commons
• His firm will likely be subject to investigation for “professional misconduct” by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association after they received multiple complaints of ethics violations
• Ciano’s company used unethical push polls against Liberals in 2007 and 2011
• Denying involvement in the 2011 push poll, Ciano told CBC that the poll was “super-shady”, “breaking Canadian law”, and “raises serious legal and ethical issues” (The Globe and Mail, December 16, 2011; CBC News, April 14, 2011)
• Campaign Research manipulated social media during Rob Ford’s campaign, and later bragged about it

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Lots of hands went up.

Chris Levy, our brilliant criminal law professor at the University of Calgary, had just asked who among us favours the death penalty. My hand was one of them.

It was our first year of law school, 1984. The death penalty had been abolished by Parliament eight years earlier.

“Very well,” said Levy. “I will ask you again in your final year.”

It’s almost three decades later, and the subject of capital punishment is again with us. Last week, Angus Reid Public Opinion surveyed more than 1,000 Canadian adults about the subject in an online poll. We don’t know why they felt compelled to do so, but they did.

The results were surprising to some of us.

Sixty-three percent believe the death penalty is “sometimes appropriate.”
About a quarter of Canadians, however, believe capital punishment is never warranted.

The pollsters also found that 61% of Canadians say they support reinstating the death penalty for murder in Canada. A third of the respondents disagreed.

There were some unsurprising regional differences — westerners, being mainly conservatives, favour it; Quebecers, being mainly progressives, oppose it.
Asked why they disagree with the death penalty, 75% of opponents said they were concerned about “the possibility of wrongful convictions leading to executions.”

That is, making a mistake. When you execute the wrong person, there’s obviously no going back.

Me? As a liberal, I’ve (cravenly) avoided taking a public position for years. The hemispheres of my brain — like public opinion — are divided.

The right side of my brain, where scientists tell us emotion holds sway, feels this way: If someone killed someone I love, I’d want to kill them with my bare hands.If someone kills a child, with malice aforethought, I’d want to see them receive the same treatment.

That’s admittedly an emotional response to a very difficult question, but it’s no less valid for that. It’s a position held by other progressives I admire, such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

The left side of my brain, where reasoning purportedly dominates, holds a contrary view. For example, what we all learned in law school — more than anything else — was how imperfect our system is. When you study the law, you learn that it is in need of continual improvement, and that it is fundamentally flawed. It is flawed much like the human beings who created it.

When you study the law, you also learn — as 75% of Canadian dissenters apparently already know — wrongful convictions are common enough to concern every right-thinking person.
And, therefore, it’s irrational to impose death sentences in a legal system that everyone agrees is deficient.

That’s probably a position held by another progressive I admire, Jesus Christ — who, it should be noted, was the victim of a wrongful conviction himself.

It’s not, however, that progressives like me oppose ending another’s life in any circumstances.

Our view on war isn’t dissimilar. Waging war against an enemy, and killing its combatants, isn’t any sane person’s first preference.

But when we sometimes wage war — as we did, say, against Nazism — our cause is just and defensible. But make no mistake: There is still a moral failing, even when fighting fascism, the ideology of murder.

In most cases of capital punishment, you see, society is terminating the lives of those few found to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But in wars, we know — or should know — that we are, inadvertently or otherwise, killing innocents on a large scale (witness Dresden and Hiroshima). And we still do it.

Reason over passion, someone once said. It’s not the world we live in, but it’s the world we should aspire to.

Oh, in the final year of law school? Prof. Levy asked us again who favoured the death penalty.

No hands went up.

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The media are grumpy, and so are the Ontario PC delegates, waiting for the results of PC leadership review vote. It’s already hours behind schedule. Kind of reminds you of something, doesn’t it?

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Ciano signage mocked: How do these things keep happening? Damn those pesky Ontario Liberals!

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