Here's To The State Of The Golden Era....

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Foisted by a leader whose heart and soul was in the bag....

VICTORIA (Canadian Press, Oct 4/11) - Former premier Gordon Campbell was a no-show at his Order-of-B.C. induction ceremony Tuesday, prompting the lieutenant governor to say his old friend deserves the award even though the nomination sparked controversy.

Premier Christy Clark, who said she was humbled to be in the presence of more than a dozen high-achieving British Columbians, did not mention the former premier during the ceremony.

Campbell was among 14 people who received the Order of B.C., which recognizes the excellence and achievements of individual British Columbians.

"I'm particularly sorry my friend Gordon Campbell could not be here," said Lt.-Gov. Steven Point as he addressed the 13 inductees at Government House. "It's my belief he is entirely deserving of this recognition."

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What Do The Wall Street Protestors Really Want?

AllTheExplanationsThatFit

TippingPointVille

Personally, regardless the various points of view, I think it comes down to two words.

Which are....

Fair.

And...

Play.

And, as Simon and Cathie point out, it is getting harder and harder not to think that all the fairness has gone out of the thing when you see stuff like...

This.

OK?

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Burying The Campbell-Clark Government's Longterm Legacy Of Fiscal (mis)Management ...

AnIronFistWrapped

InThinkTagRags

...How Media Manipulation 'Innoculation' Strategies Really Work

________

Monday Morning Update: As an Anonomized one points out at the top of the comments, it would appear that this one might come down to a Battle Royale between two of the Generals (eg. Auditor v. Comptroller) in a winner-take-all cage-match to either turn the lights on, for real, or keep them off permanently such that the Bunker of Secrets remains cloaked in in darkness forever....Guess which General is in favour of a clean, well-lighted Octagon....

_________

Step One....Spray a syringe full of think-tank manufactured botulinum toxin-laced poison into the body politic's immune system:

VANCOUVER, BC—The governments of Canada’s two largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, led by premiers Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest, are among the worst managers of provincial finances according to a new analysis of the fiscal records of 10 Canadian premiers, released today by the Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading public policy think-tank....

{snippety doo-dah}

....Former BC premier Gordon Campbell had the best record overall, scoring 83.1 out of a possible 100. Former Newfoundland & Labrador premier Danny Williams ranked second with a score of 72.9, while Nova Scotia’s Darrell Dexter ranked third at 60.4. Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall (53.8) ranked fourth and Alberta’s Ed Stelmach (52.7) ranked fifth....

Fraser Institute Press Release

Sept 13, 2011

Step Two.... When the real thing, a thing that should raise massive immune responses of allergy, anaphylaxis and revulsion amongst the public, arrives a few weeks later.....

Auditor-General John Doyle's latest verdict on the B.C. Liberal government's bookkeeping can be reduced to a single word: "Unacceptable."

The longer version of the independent financial watchdog's "observations" on provincial financial accounting was spread over a 54-page report, released Thursday in Victoria.

Doyle cited the Liberals for a range of accounting errors, some major, some minor, some debatable, others falling under the heading of just plain wrong.

One of the latter concerns prompted him to brand the B.C. public accounts with the most damning label in the auditing lexicon - a "qualification," meaning that in one key respect, "the information is not auditable or is misleading.....

{snippety doodle-dandy}

...Doyle also elevated a growing concern about long-term contractual obligations, undertaken as part of public-private partnerships and other contracts. They currently total $80 billion, an almost three-fold increase in five years, largely because of long-term power purchases by BC Hydro...

Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun

Sept 30, 2011

You can rest assured that, essentially, nothing will happen.

And a simple comparison of the Google-Cache, News Story Division, for the Auditor General's story and Potemkin Prop-Pieces for the $600 million Devil-Horned Roof atop BC Place Stadium is proof that this kind of innoculatory media manipulation strategy based on obfuscation really does work....

Here's the scorecard so far, as of Sat morning Oct 01, 2011:

Auditor General - 25

Devil-Horned Roof - 417

OK?

_____

It is important to be very clear here....This mismanagement does amount more than just a hill of beans in this crazy, mixed-up world where nobody could have 'predicted the recession of 2008' or what is sure to follow in the 2nd dip....Much more.....In fact, I would suggest this is a Mount Everest of Mismanagement, piled high with malice aforethought...Just go back and read the last sentence of Mr. Palmer's finest-of-the-fine, after-the-fact reportage.....Did you get that....$80 freaking BILLION...That is at least 30X more than the bogus HST unwinding costs that Kevin Falcon, who of course is one of Potemkin's finest financial (mis)managers, has been running around telling anyone who will listen will require us to kill all kinds of spending programs willy-nilly....

Why do I say 'after-the-fact' with respect to the Dean's reportage from yesterday?....Well....While I applaud the Auditor-General for telling it like it is, those big numbers, give or take 10 or 20 billion either way, have been there for all to see for a long time now if they have been paying attention....And we know Mr. Palmer has been paying attention.....So...Given all that....Why didn't he, Mr. Palmer, who has the power to do it single-handedly, just knock the syringe right out of the think-tank's hand two weeks ago before it could wreak its havoc?...Important question to ponder, don't you think?...

Wondering about the wordsmithing in the sub-header?.....All will soon be revealed...Raw logs will be part of the story....

Lastly....I have no idea what the new Corp Name is for the Devil Horns that we paid for...I have refused to read, listen or watch..

.

The Sunday Setlist: E., And Friends

AllTheButtonsThatPop

ProudAsPunchVille

My oldest kid first sang with me in front of an audience of about 500 when she was four years old.

Now.

There are a couple of things I should make clear before I begin.

First, it was a captive audience given that E. came into sing to one of the big classes I teach on the last day of the year.

Second, pretty much from the from the beginning it was actually me that was singing with E.

Not the other way around.

****

In the ensuing years E. became involved with all manner of big singing projects, including a whole lot of musical theatre and a longterm stint belting things out with the Bach Choir.

But one thing never changed.....

Which is that E., and later littler e. too, always came to my last day of class for a sing-a-long.

This became such an event that students from the past and students from other classes as well as members of our departmental staff, including some that had retired over the years, would stop by for the show.

And it is a show that has had a good long run.

Fourteen years long.

But next time out there will have to have a cast change.

Because earlier this fall E. went off to a college of her own.

A college that is not mine.

****

Almost two years ago now, I decided I wanted to sing with my kids more often.

Well, actually, there was a little bit more to it than that.

And some of that 'that' had a whole lot to do with my long pent-up desire teach myself to able to do stuff like this, even if only badly.

But a bigger part of it had a whole lot to do with the fact that I wanted to give E. the feeling that she could get up anywhere and unleash her magnificent instrument in any way she, herself, so chooses.

In other words, I wanted her to know, for absolute certain, that there really is no need for big productions or big producers or big directors or, yes, even teachers, to validate anything that you do.

Which, of course, is a DIY ethic that is, essentially, the very essence of busking.

So that is what we did, pretty often for an entire year.

Busk, I mean.

And the video at the top of the post, I think, will go down as, perhaps the best example of what it was we actually did.

Later, after the family project was done, E. headed off on her own down to Granville Island where she played for the vendors and the crowds for most of the next year or so.

Which brings us to yesterday.

Which was the day E. disappeared into the bowels Montreal Metro for the first time.

Three hours later she emerged with $80 in her pocket that she didn't have when she went down the stairs.

And a whole bunch of songs swirling in her head.

And, I know for certain, she left a whole bunch of smiles on the faces of the folks that heard her sing.

Can I possibly be prouder?

****

E. is also hanging out with her friends, some new, some old, in their dorm rooms.

Here, too, there is music (and revolution?) in the air.

A wee bit of that music has been captured, by her new friend H, below.

___________

If you would like to see and hear the evolution of our Busking Year, it starts here....And ends here.

And, just in case you were wondering, littler e., who fronts the very first busking video, is actually the dancer in the family....Now, how the heckfire am I going to keep up with that?

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Saturday Night Hansard Blogging

AllTheMedliesThatMatter

StartWithVanTheManVille

Going is never gone when you can keep on keeping on...

Like, say....

This!

_____

And here I thought, after getting hooked on a bunch of previous Hansardian versions, that I'd gotten to the nut of the thing by fronting the man from Belfast's Seven Day Plane with Martha Wainwright's Dirty Motherf*ckin' AHole (both in A)....But that, above, is just unbelievable to me...Guess this means I'm gonna have to get working on my own ragged melange of Hansard's 'Red Chord' and The Clancy Brother's version of 'The Parting Glass' wherein I mix in Darnielle's 'Love, Love, Love' (all in E)... Which also means that I just might have to get another bloody harpoon...Geez, sometimes I really do wish I could quit my day job...But only sometimes.

.

Insite: Now That The Supremes Have Spoken...

TheRealReasonMajorities

MatterVille

...Can The Howls Of "Activist Judges!" Be Far Behind?

Regardless, it looks like the Framers of the Cons figure they can make hay (or at least change the channel away from the Trostkyiest Abortion Zombies for a newscycle or three) with this one.

How else to explain why Mr. Harper instead of some flunkie, as in days past, was out front with the usual law and order babble after Friday's decision by the Supreme Court that Insite can stay:

...(Prime Minister)Harper expressed disappointment with the latest decision.

“The preference of this government in dealing with drug crime is obviously to prosecute those who sell drugs and create drug addiction in our population and in our youth,” he said in Quebec City.

“When it comes to treating drug addiction, [the government’s preference is] to try and do so though programs of prevention and treatment rather than through the issues that were in front of this court in terms of so-called harm reduction.”...

And on the 'all treatment, no harm reduction' point.....

How long will it be before the Framers, and their US DOJ backers, wheel out the good Dr. Mangham to start cranking the Wurlitzer with his own not-so purist peer-reviewed research that is all, how shall we put it.....

Meta?

_____

And Philip Owen is getting lots of well deserved props these days for helping make the Four Pillars happen in Lotusland....However, it would be a real shame if we didn't remember that somebody had to show the then Mayor, Mr. Owen that the junkies and the sick are people too....Me, I figure one of the most important somebodies in that regard was filmmaker Nettie Wild.

Oh, hang on....I'd missed the fact that the good Dr. Mangham and friends, now with new and, we can only assume, 'improved' sponsors like 'Real Women Canada' has already been out on the hustings priming the wurlitzer's pump with his usual 'analysis' that is not based on any primary data generated by either himself or his close colleagues.

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Generic Drugs: A Million Saved Is A Million Earned.

WithPotentialSavingsLikeThisLeftUnplucked

NoWonderWeNeedMoreRevenueVille

It's the Friday afternoon before tonight's big football game in downtown Lotusland and I'm pretty sure a whole lotta folks are starting to breathe a little easier now that they can look at this....

Why are they breathing easier?

Well, because, as we pointed out earlier in the week, it is not entirely certain that the new magic carpet atop BC Place (you know, the bolt of cloth that allegedly cost only a few hundred million dollars or so) will actually keep the rain out.

But that, and the Devil's Horned skyline that goes with it, is not what I want to speak about today.

Instead, I want to discuss the fact that we in this province are paying way, way to much for 'generic' drugs.

****

Now, what are 'generic' drugs?

Well, the first thing to understand is that they are NOT cheap-knock-offs.

And they are NOT crummy 'no-frills' versions of the real thing.

Instead, they are the real real thing.

However.....

Because they are no longer on patent, generic drugs can be bought and sold for close to what they actually cost to make, with a reasonable profit as part of the deal, rather than some made-up number that is often thousands of times larger than Orson Wells' waist-size during those not-so-salad days when he started swigging down all the generic wine that Ernest and Julio Gallo could pump out of the massive cauldrons hidden underneath either the basement of a fertilizer factory in Modesto or Randy Hearst's castle in San Simeon.

Or some such thing.

****

So.

What's my real point here?

Well, as Don Cayo pointed out very adroitly in the VSun yesterday, a 75% off sale on something that is ridiculously over-priced to start with (by literally hundreds of multiples in this case) is still a ridiculous price to pay.

And the fact that the members of the Gordon Campbell Legacy government (ie. the same members that will, allegedly, be celebrating the hundreds of millions we spent to build their friends the magic carpet atop BC Place, at no cost to said friends, this evening) have locked us into just such a ridiculous 'bargain' that is literally costing us millions upon millions of dollars every year for no good reason at all.

Mr. Cayo demonstrates this point very well with the following example, based on the experience of the Land where Conchords apparently sometimes fly away from:

....(I)n the words of Michael Law of the Centre of Health Services and Policy Research at UBC, "Even at 25 per cent, our generic drug prices are way too high by international standards."

Law offers one particularly dramatic example - the widely used cholesterol-lowering statins such as Lipitor and its many imitators.

When Lipitor's patent expired last year and generic companies were able to produce copies of the drug, I estimated that the B.C. government alone could save $24 million a year by buying cheaper substitutes - even at the high price we pay in this province. At Ontario's price, obviously, we'd save much more.

But Law has looked at a drug called Simvastatin, in the same class as Lipitor, in Ontario and New Zealand. In the former, a pill costs about 62 cents; in the latter, three cents....

So.

Why is it, once again that the Gordon Campbell Legacists are threatening us with doom because we refuse to allow them (ie. the Legacists who will be smiling for the cameras under the magic carpet this evening) to raise more money by stripping the skin off of the backs of the folks in this province that can least afford to give them more of it?

_____

I use the skin metaphor here with purpose because 'having skin in the game' is a term that a certain Lotuslandian media personality, whom I am almost certain will be under the magic carpet tonight with all other 'Friends Of The Legacists' just loves to use it whenever possible when he goes off on 'But how are we going to pay for schools' if we don't raise revenues rant.

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Those Who Can't Teach...Teach Gym.

WhatIfWileE.CoyoteWentFasterMilesAnHour

WithTheRadioOnVille

Now.

Don't get me wrong.

Because I think Richard Linklater, especially at his best, is a genius.

After all, anybody who can start a whole new genre of anything, out of almost, but not quite, nothing is pretty much the top-of-the-pops in my books.

But given all that, I really do have a small quibble with one particular aspect of Mr. Linklater's most successful bit of multilevel movie stratification fit for the whole family.

Specifically, he really should have had Dewey Finn go back past JRichman's 'Roadrunner' to JCale's & LReed's 'Sister Ray'.

Because, if you don't do that, how the heckfire can you possibly have a class in Rock History that comes even remotely close to explaining where the inspiration for the following came from...

Which, of course, changed absolutely everything.

And, in the very end, absolutely nothing.

Which, if you ask me, is the true magic of the thing.

OK?

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Orioles Win The (not) Pennant!

HolyBoog'sBBQBilly!

RipkenVille

Unbelievable that a team so bad could still get so much pleasure out of one small moment at the very end of its 162nd game of the year.

Which is the reason I love baseball so much.

(Well, that and the fact that you can be a huge success if you are able to do your job right just 3 times out of 10; Don't think that works when you pass through either the Sawmill's gate or the Lab room door....Although, come to think of it, if you mess up in the lab, you may have to run a bunch of extra PCR reactions but you don't usually lose a finger or three)

____

Why Billy in the SubHeader above and not his more famous brother?..... Well....For all kinds of reasons, including this one.....

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Would A $563 Million Dollar Casino Leak At Its Grand Opening?

AllTheBoondoggle'sThatFit

FoolsGold(en)EraVille

Of course not.

But a $563 million dollar magic carpet atop the old marshmallow just might:

"During heavy rain on Monday, water seeped into (BC Place) stadium through the closed roof, but CEO David Podmore says that's to be expected because the sealing work is not yet complete.

"There are six of 36 seams still to seal, and when those are sealed it will be watertight. So it shouldn't be a surprise," said Podmore. High winds prevented workers from finishing the seals on Monday, he said.

The stadium reopens on Friday evening when the BC Lions play the Edmonton Eskimos. Singer Sarah McLachlan will perform O Canada at the opening. The stadium is also expected to get a new name for the reopening.....

Hmmmm....

Haven't we heard promises from the good Mr. Podmore and Co. about his magic carpet and the constantly escalating costs* associated with it before?

Perhaps it is time to take one of those short, bumpy trips in the Gazetteerious Time Machine....

All the way back to, say, April of 2010 so that we can dig up a most interesting time/moneyline that was originally posted by commenter 'A Dave' over at Harvey Oberfeld's place:

May, 2008: Province (of British Columbia) announces upgrade to BC Place, including seat replacement, renovations to washrooms and concessions, and the replacement of the Teflon covering with a new retractable roof – total cost estimated at $150 million.

November, 2008: Province Treasury Board approves PavCo’s $365 million business case for all renovations noted above, with an estimate given by PavCo’s David Podmore that it will cost $200 million for the retractable roof alone – the approved business case is over $200 million higher than the original estimate of only 8 months prior.

October 23, 2009: Province reapproves PavCo’s revised business plan at $365 million, but only a month later a fixed-price contract to replace the roof (none of the other work is included) with Poole Construction is signed for $468 million(*) – the roof work alone is suddenly $268 million more than Podmore’s $200 million estimate of only 11 months earlier.

Note: Nearly $100 million in renovations have been reported completed prior to the Olympics, including both a seismic upgrade of BC Place, and reinforcing the concrete ring around the lip of the stadium to ensure the weight of the new roof would be properly supported. These large structural upgrade costs would, therefore, NOT be included in the fixed $468 million work contract with PCL.

So.

If it turns out that it costs an extra 10 or 20 or even 50 million bucks to fix the leaks, for real, that's no big deal, right?

After all, it's not like we are throwing handicapped people out of group homes or anything crazy like that for lack of 'revenue'.....

.....Right?

_______

*Costs now being born entirely by we, the Downtown-Vancouver Casino-Industrial-Complex-Free paupers of British Columbia by the way.

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Killing Jobs Softly With Her Logs

PauperizeTheBrutes!

TheFoolsGold(en)EraVille

Or.....

To be more precise, Christy Clark-Campbell's government's job-killing policies that have lead to the export of 40% of all the timber harvested in coastal British Columbia* this year as....

Raw Logs.

And that, to put it mildly, does not make the folks who make their living cutting and processing our homegrown timber happy.

Because it means that their jobs, which have been dissolving, Houdini's box-like, right-in-front of their eyes ever since the Golden Era first began, are now disappearing from Lotusland faster than even poor Mr. Owen Nolan.

And no amount of lipstick applied to any spur-line pig is going to change that real-life reality that really and truly affects families.

Really.

Which is something our local Sawmill correspondent, Mr. Beer 'N Hockey, makes abundantly clear.

Here.

(Please note: Because it speaks to both the truth and the rage of the thing, Mr. Beer's missive is neither for the faint of heart or the delicate-eared)

_____

*Thanks to reader Tony M. for correcting me....I had originally written '40% of all the timber harvested in the entire province'....But you could argue that 40% of the coast's cut this year is actually worse given that that timber has less of the beetle-infested junk in it (ie. one could argue that we are sending out all our best logs for, essentially, no public return).

And Laila, thanks to Mr. Beer's prodding as well, is all over this one.

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Has Christy And Co's Carpet-Bombing Of Mr. Cummins Concluded?

TheDangersOfLateNight

SportsTalkRadioVille

I did it again on Friday night.

Which was not a good thing for Saturday morning.

And no, it was nothing like what Mr. Beer 'N Hockey, allegedly, got himself into, on purpose.

Instead, I fell asleep Friday night with the radio tuned to one of the local Screamer Stations because I was half-listening to the sports-talk babble (which I actually quite enjoy most of the time, by the way) while reading an oldie-but-goodie from Bill Bryson, the subject of which which is about as anti-hyperspeeded-up/non-information overlorded as one can get.

All of which meant that the Screamer Station woke me up on Saturday morning.

Which was weird, in the extreme.

What was even weirder, though, was the fact that by the time I finally came fully awake an hour-or-so later and slammed the the thing off for good, I had begun to wonder something.

And it had nothing to do with what I had heard, but rather what I had not.

****

What I did not hear on the radio Saturday morning were more of those atrocious attack ads from the current Premier's political party attacking BC Conservative leader John Cummins.

Which is interesting timing, don't you think?

I mean, didn't the current Premier spend last week running around the province pretending she is a newly-bloomed Socialist Rose who will bring thousands of high-paying jobs to flower while, at precisely the same time, the vicious attack ads against Mr. Cummins were running everywhere in heavy rotation?

Which got me to thinking about something I have heard absolutely no pundit, professional or otherwise, pontificate on in the last couple of weeks.

And that is the possibility that Christy Clark and her Political Party's vile accusations that Mr. Cummins is not a true conservative because he apparently used the well-being of his 'offspring' to justify taking his Federal government pension may have been designed to protect her right flank while she momentarily veered way left for poll-raising purposes.

And so, once again, I ask....

Given the morally-bankrupt and cynical nature of this concerted and pre-meditated action by the BC Liberal Party, which included setting up the despicable website titled "Can't Trust Cummins.ca", why isn't the proMedia making Ms. Clark and her political party pay?

And not for the so-called 'boneheadedness' of the strategy, regardless whether it involved an attempt to drive up Mr. Cummins negatives or an attempt to protect Ms. Clark from her own right-sided base, or both.

No.

Instead, I want to know why Ms. Clark and her Party are not being made to pay, politically, for venal attacks that are explicitly attempting to sully the relationship of an unelected candidate with his children (eg. 'offspring') for absolutely no good reason at all at a time when there is not even an election campaign going on.

Specifically, why are members of the proMedia not asking Ms. Clark direct questions about her involvement, or even her tacit support, of this corrosive and decidedly anti-family 'tactic' at every opportunity?

And I say this with the full knowledge that the Deputy Premier of British Columbia suddenly quit both the Cabinet and the government in 2004, citing the need to spend more time with her young child as a major reason for her doing so.

****

Now, I want to be very clear here before I move on....

Specifically, I want to make it crystal clear that, based on everything I have ever read, seen or heard, the former Deputy Premier is a warm, attentive and loving parent.

Got that?

OK.

Here goes....

****

To the absolute best of my knowledge, no one from any political party, or any proMedia outlet, or even any blogger has ever cynically and derisively referred to the former Deputy Premier's young child as her 'offspring' when they have raised the possibility that other politically-charged events of the time may also have played a part in her sudden decision to leave public life in 2004.

In point of fact, again, the only group that I have ever read, seen or heard doing such a thing, particularly in a concerted manner, and with malice aforethought using paid advertising on major media outlets, is the Political Party of the current Premier of British Columbia.

Which is why that current Premier, who is, of course, also the same Deputy Premier who suddenly quit in 2004, must, together with her Political Party, be held fully accountable for their smears of Mr. Cummins and his family in 2011.

Otherwise, if they get away with it this time, ask yourself the following.....

What's to stop them from calling people's children, or their spouses, or their parents, or their grand-parents all kinds of names the next time something politically expedient has to be done to juice the poll numbers by a few points at just the right moment?

OK?

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This Machine Keeps Singing For You And Me...

CrossroadsUpTheTubz?

InspirationVille

You know that old story of a two-bit, hustling-and-still-scuffling young Dylan hitching to NewYork from Minnesota, in the depths of winter, so that he could sleep on couches in cold-water flats, scounge-up nickels at pass-the-basket, barely-above-busking gigs at the Cafe Wha? and then, in the midst of it all, walk across the barren wastelands of New Jersey in the sleet-slush to get to that psychiatric hospital that was holding a failing, but now famously "Not dead yet", Woody Guthrie?

Well....

A couple of months later Dylan was back in Minneapolis and everyone in what was the 'scene' there, including kinghell harp player Tony Glover, whose records Dylan had 'borrowed' to first hear the scratchy tunes of a fascist killer, knew he was not the same musician.

Or maybe even the same guy.

And soon thereafter the tidal-waving torrent that was no longer scuffling, and which may or may not have been 'channeling', of words and chords and wailing harmonica over a biting vocal ferocity that would not quit began in earnest.

Much later Dylan himself laughed the wryest, dryest laugh I have ever seen when he told Martin Scorcese:

"That's when I went to the 'Crossroads' and made that big deal....."

So.

Given all that.

How the heck am I, a guy who can barely string together three chords, and who can't sing worth a damn, but who can fiddle with words a little (in a two-bit, tin-plated sort of way), supposed to take this?

Sheesh.

Better get to work.

(on the harmonica, I mean)

.

A NorthVan Izzy Stone To Call Our Own?

DeepMiningTheDatabases

HeadLampShiningBrightVille

In case you haven't noticed, NVG over at the Blog Borg Collective is doing some really great work combing through publicly available documents online and is pulling out some really nice nuggets.

Like, say, the fact that Kevin Falcon's travel expense account went through the roof just as the HST gov't counter-offensive went into overdrive:

"Christy Clark was sworn in as Premier on March 15, 2011, Kevin Falcon as Finance Minister soon afterwards.

For the new Finance Minister:
Travel Expenses Paid (per month) were:

$169.82 in April;
$1,550.51 in May;
$1,408.24 in June;
$11,289.16 in July;
August we'll just have to wait and see...."

There's more like that if you just scroll on down the page over at NVG's place.

_____

I.F. Stone was a master public data miner, first class, back before there were either inner or outer Tubz to go down, or up in, or, whatever....

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Christy Clark's Sleaze Factor Is Bad Mojo For All Of Us

Here'sToTheStateOf

TheGoldenEraVille

Regarding Ms. Clark and her political party's concerted, orchestrated, pre-meditated and duplicitous multi-pronged attack strategy on John Cummins, Paul Willcocks gets to the heart of the matter:

"....The radio ads, and the anti-Cummins website with the standard attack ad creepy photo and allegations, also tie Clark to dishonest, sleazy, American-style attack ads — hardly a good thing for someone promising a new style of politics.

The ads sometimes work. The federal Conservatives attacked Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff relentlessly with slimy ads, and succeeded in defining them in negative ways.

But they are fundamentally dishonest and destructive to democracy and public life, encouraging mindless division and contempt for all politicians.

There are lots of reasons to criticize Cummins and the Conservatives and their policy positions. But these ads are about smearing a person, and presenting him not just as wrong, but as corrupt and “a joke.”

That should concern anyone who hopes for a functioning democracy.

And Liberals should also be concerned that the party has spent money on an amateurish smear campaign that does more damage to its own cause than the target....."

You want to end the 'success' of the 'Politics of Destruction' that drags all of us, regardless party and/or ideological allegiances, down into the ditch where the cynical and morally-bankrupt make their (very good) living destroying the very fabric of a liberal, participatory democracy?

You just have to have a proMedia willing call this codswallop what it really is, no ifs ands or buts.

Seriously.

That's all it takes.

After all, it has worked before and it can work again.

_______

The sub-header refers to a tune by Phil Ochs in which he rips-off himself to diss Richard Nixon....All kinds of folks have re-worked the song since...My favourite rendition is Eddie Vedder's much more recent evisceration of the State of George W et al.....And yes, just in case anyone is wondering, I am indeed working on a somewhat provincial 'Golden' version...

.