The Wild Progressive Boys...The Mexican...And The Beer Bong.

WhoNeedsAScoreCard
WhenYou'veGotTheMacemanVille


Thanks to Gary Mason, writing in The Globe, everyone (else) now knows the starting line-up in the Big Brewery Boondoggle...

...Pacific Western (Brewing) hired Liberal insider Patrick Kinsella and his partner, Mark Jiles, to lobby for precisely the change the L(iquor)D(istribution)B(ranch) announced. Making appearances worse, the policy move was announced a week after (Pacific Western's owner) Ms. Komatsu made an in-kind gift donation valued at nearly $27,000 for use as an auction item at a fundraiser Mr. Coleman held in his riding...

{snippety doo-dah}

...You would think that the Premier of the province would have been given a heads-up on this. Christy Clark’s brother, Bruce, was a senior-ranking executive in Pacific Western until three years ago. He’s a good friend of Mr. Kinsella. While there are no direct links between Mr. Clark and this decision, at least on the surface, the Premier should still have been notified about what was coming down the pike given the discussion it might ignite....

So.

Now who's going to ask the hard questions about the playbook?

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SmearSiteGate, ctd...Was The Premier Involved?

DirtyTricksAreNotJustFor
TrickyDickAnymoreVille


While he reckons she sets the tone for her party's political bullying, Les Leyne of the VT-C thinks Ms. Clark was probably not directly involved:

...Clark has shown a penchant since winning the B.C. Liberal leadership for going negative in a big way on opponents like Dix and B.C. Conservative leader John Cummins. She wasn't likely directly involved in the (smear) websites.

But she set the tone, which encouraged the party to ignore the line that used to divide caucus work from partisan hackery...

But.

Here's the thing...

To the best of our knowledge no one in the proMedia has asked her, or members of her office, if they were involved.

In fact, they have refused to speak to the matter.

And no one in proMedia is banging down the door demanding an answer, one way or the other, for the record.

Which makes no sense at all based on Cassidy Olivier's original report in The Province that made it clear that people very, very close indeed to Ms. Clark were involved.

Essentially, right from the very beginning:

A Liberal Party attack website aimed at NDP leader Adrian Dix was crafted by government employees at the B.C. legislature under the watchful eye of the Premier’s Office and a Christy Clark loyalist, a series of government emails obtained by The Province reveal...

{snippety doo-dah}

...The recipients included two caucus research staff, a senior issues management co-ordinator with the Premier’s Office, and Don Millar, a close friend of Christy Clark who served as communications chair for her successful leadership campaign...

{snippety doodle dandy}

Hours after the initial Aug. 23, 2011, email was sent, Millar — who currently holds a lucrative contract with Government Communications and Public Engagement allowing him to bill up to $10,000 a month for advisory services — added Mike Wilson to the correspondence chain.

A former vice-president of the communications firm that helped Clark win the party’s leadership, Wilson was at the time on contract with the B.C. Liberal Party for “various” communications duties.

“This is good, adding Mike Wilson so he can get the domain in order,” Millar wrote. “Thomas, maybe you can develop a schedule for this project.”...

{snippety doodle-dandiest}

...On Aug. 31, 2011, Marshall sent out an email at 4:58 p.m. from his work account to the “team” under the subject heading “CantAffordDix” advising them that design on the site had been completed.

By this time, Shane Mills, director of issues management in the Premier’s Office, had been added to the thread. The message was sent to his private Gmail account, the documents show....


Millar.

Wilson.

Mills.


Again...

Rather than just assuming, as Mr. Leyne has has done, that Ms. Clark was not involved when members of her office and inner circle clearly were, why isn't the proMedia demanding that Ms. Clark answer, for the record, what she knew and when she knew it?

After all, when Woodward and Bernstein found out that Liddy, Haldeman and Mitchell were involved in Mistah Nixon's dirty tricks that was NOT the time that they walked away from the story.

OK?


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Meanwhile, it would appear that the Wild Progressive Boys are up to their old tricks again, too....Bob Mackin has the definitive, back-story laden take on that one....

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This Day In Snookland...Revolt In South Sliverville

YouCan'tStealAnElection
InA(not)DemocracyVille


Turns out some members of the grassroots of the BC Liberal Party don't like being dictated to by the dictator and those who pull the strings for her.

Laila, b/w a report from Abbotsford Today, has the story:

In a letter issued this afternoon (Nov 20th) the BC Liberal Abbotsford South Riding Association has resigned saying the election of Darryl Plecas was “both unfair and not democratic.” The letter came from former Riding Association president Stephen Evans....

(snippety doo-dah)

...Clearly, the powers that be running the show at BC Lib headquarters are bound and determined to demonstrate to the public that they don’t even care about democratic process in their own den of inequity...


Gosh.

Wonder if this will get as much Lotuslandian proMedia play as that massive 'revolt' against The Curmudgeon got?

Just askin'.



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Wondering about that mysteriously nonsensical sub-header?....It's all explained.....here.

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Cigar Tube Musings...

AllTheMilesThatFit
InSteerageVille


Just got out of the bloody thing.

The cigar tube I mean.

And now I'm in the Ottawash 'tube hanger, which is the only airport I've stumbled across where the pre-board line-ups have more passengers in them than those for the rest of us hoi-polloied.

Anyways....

I'm waiting for a fellow sci-geek to arrive so we can gossip a little and split the cab-ride to the bunker.

So I've got time a little time to kill.

And checking out the BlogCrawl (on the left), I stumbled across a raucous discussion of Translink 'optimization' over at FABula's place.

It really is a heck of a comment thread (250+ and counting)...

And, as far as I can tell, Ms. Bula didn't have to make like Mr. Tweedy* to make it appear.


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*And, no, I'm not talking about Jeff, the guy from Wilco....Think chickens and running...


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SmearSiteGate: Slapping The PAB-Bots On The Pinkie Toe...

.....Lightly

Here's the dressing down that the junior Donnie Segrettis and their CClark-connected seniors got for sitting 'round the digital campfire to cook-up their latest 'When did you stop beating your wife?' smear site while they were, apparently, working for the people of British Columbia (and taking our money for doing so)....


Good morning,

As you have read in today’s Vancouver Province, there is an article in which staff are accused of using Caucus funded email accounts to work on a partisan activity during business hours.

Given the nature of our positions, I realize that there are unique challenges that we face in performing our day-to-day tasks in supporting our BC Liberal MLAs. That being said, all of us must make sure we do not cross the line and perform tasks that contravene our Standards of Conduct.

Please note that our Standards of Conduct states that:

“If engaging in political party activities, employees must be able to retain the perception of impartiality in relation to their duties and responsibilities. Employees must not engage in political party activities during working hours or use government facilities, equipment or resources in support of these activities.”

What happened over a year ago is a reminder of what can happen when these lines are crossed. Those who had involvement in this incident have been reproached.

I wish to remind everyone to follow the Standards of Conduct. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you,

Prim Carson

Primrose Carson
Executive Director of
B.C. Government Caucus


Yup.

That's it.

So...Move along...Nothing to see here.

OK?

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Re-Invasion Of The PAB-Bot Snatchers....Fire Them All!

SlimeIsAsSlimeDoes
CampbellClarkVille


Cassidy Olivier, in The Province, has the blockbuster of a story.

Here's his lede:


A Liberal Party attack website aimed at NDP leader Adrian Dix was crafted by government employees at the B.C. legislature under the watchful eye of the Premier’s Office and a Christy Clark loyalist, a series of government emails obtained by The Province reveal.

Launched by the B.C. Liberal Party in October 2011, the CantAffordDix.ca website featured aggressive assaults on Dix’s character and unflattering photos of the NDP leader. The site called Dix “Pinocchio” and the “chief architect” of B.C.’s “nightmare” ’90s.

Featuring a smashed piggy bank as a central piece of art, the site also included a legal notice stating it was produced by the Liberal Party of B.C.

But emails leaked to The Province show the site was in reality conceived and developed by government employees, who used a taxpayer-financed computer network to brainstorm the project and, later, to liaise with the B.C. Liberal Party...

I mean, seriously, how low does one have to go to keep one's seat at the table in Snookville these days?

**** 

All snark aside, this is disgusting, corrosive to the body politic, and profoundly anti-democratic.

And it is being done by people who are being paid with our money while they do their Ratfucking. 

This type of stuff, which goes right back to  the 'media-monitoring' days when Mr. Basi was still in the Campbell-Clark government good books, is the real reason that they all must go.

Because they are ALL culpable.

(and, given that everyone knows it, anyone who signs up as a new 'star' candidate must go too)

OK?

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The Rehabilitation Of Ms. Wente...

BigSchoolBigCity
WillieT'sOldNewspaperVille


This just in from the Gelber Foundation and the UofT's Munk School of Global Affairs:

The Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues, was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber. A prize of $15,000 is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy Magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto...

Which means that they have a jury of esteemed experts on Foreign Affairs to figure out who should win said prize.

And, well, you know...


The Jurors for the 2013 Lionel Gelber Prize are: 

• William Thorsell, Jury Chair (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

• Daniel W. Drezner (Medford, Massachusetts, USA)

• Gaynor Lilian Johnson, Ph. D. (Manchester, UK)

• Walter Russell Meade (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA)

• Margaret Wente (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) 


Media Culpa has more.

Much more.

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Hey, Let's Get The Internet To Try It...

AThousandMonkeys
WithAThousandKeyboardsVille


But...

The Internet won't like it.

He hates everything.

Hey Inty!......He likes it!

(pundit shaming)

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When Sammy (First) Met Christy...

AllTheSignUpsThatFit
BigGreenBusVille


It was September of 2005...

And Smilin' Sammy Sullivan was fighting it out with Christy Clark for the NPA's nomination for Mayor of Vancouver.

And the Smilin' One was not a happy camper.

Sean Holman had the story then, and his PublicEye archives still have the story now:

Last night, a special meeting of the Non-Partisan Association's board of directors was held at the Marriott Pinnacle Hotel to discuss concerns about the mayoral nomination process. Those concerns were contained in a letter sent to the board last Friday by Warren Smith, a representative of nomination hopeful Sam Sullivan's campaign. Those familiar with the letter inform us the Sullivan campaign challenged the eligibility of 194 new association members to vote at the upcoming Saturday nomination meeting. According to review of 429 forms conducted by the campaign, those members aren't on the provincial voters list. Additionally, Mr. Smith questioned whether former Campbell administration cabinet minister Christy Clark's mayoral nomination campaign paid for the memberships of those they signed-up...


Fast forward to November of that year...

Sammy had vanquished Ms. Clark and he swept to power with an assist from James (not Jim) Green and his big green bus.

And here is what Ms. Clark had to say on election night about the Greenian misdirection, on the air, on the radio station that had not yet hired her to resurrect her sagging career:

"You can't steal an election in a democracy."

We note, with interest, that Ms. Clark didn't say anything about nominations and/or leaderships.

Then, or now.

OK?

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The Return Of The Bartender!

.

Billmon that is, with a 'Death of The Southern Strategy' chaser from Randy Newman...

And here is a small chunk of the word version....

...In the end, though, what really makes it hard for me to dine with gusto at the schadenfreude buffet is that the grieving faces on the other side of the partisan divide aren't those people, they're my people -- the middle-class neighbors of my Southern childhood, the kids I went to school with, my redneck uncles and cousins, my own mother and father.

The sagging chins and pot bellies, the crew cuts and blue hair, the bad make up and worse fashion sense -- these are all as familiar to me as the lines on my own face. I know these people too intimately, their pasts are too intertwined with mine, for me to look at them and see only the despised Other, even though I have no doubt that's how many, if not most, of them would look at me.

I also know that they have been lied to, with ferocious intensity and relentless dedication, by the conservative propaganda machine and its political masters. If we must have demons to hate, better to seek them among the con artists who have turned Rwandan-style hate speech into an industry profitable enough to rival the porn business...

Jeebuz.

If the good Docktor was Player One in the Bloggodome (even before it ever existed), this guy, this Mon named Bill, will always be 1A.

At least to me.

OK?



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Doubling Down On The Dobell Doctrine

CoverAllTracks
IncludingTheOnesThatDon'tExistVille


The FOI minimization doctrine of Mr. Kenneth Dobell, the right hand man of former British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, was invoked early in the days of the Campbell/Clark regime.

Here is how Stanley Tromp called it, in the Tyee, in 2007:

...(T)he insidious shift towards "oral government" is growing. E-mails must be preserved and accessible under FOI laws. A debate is looming over Blackberry records. Yet the premier's multi-tasking assistant Ken Dobell startled an FOI conference in 2003 by announcing frankly that "I delete my email all the time as fast as I can." (then Privacy Commissioner David) Loukidelis later reprimanded Dobell for publicly admitting he avoids taking notes so they aren't uncovered by reporters under FOI...

 ****

We recently invoked the 'Dobell Doctrine' as a way of, perhaps, explaining the fact that the government released a grand total of zero documents that pertained to the 'Boessenkool Investigation' in response to FOI requests by the VSun and Bob Mackin.

And now?

Well, it would appear that there was a doubling-down of the Double-D when it came to documents that might have shed light on the decisions that were made by the ChristyClark/GordonCampbell government that led them to spend $800,000 on glossy pro-HST pamphlets that they never released when their polling told them that they would be crucified by the public for doing so.

How do we know that this double-down actually occurred?

Because, when Mike Smyth of the Province filed an FOIR to get those documents he was told there were none, not because the documents never existed, but instead because they had already been destroyed.

Destroyed by the ChristyClark/GordonCampbell government.

Seriously.

Here is how Mr. Smyth told that part of the story:

...The government told me this week that, after the pamphlet plan was cancelled, all the records related to its creation were deemed to be "transient" and were destroyed.

All the planning, all the research, all the emails, all the strategic scheming that went into the pamphlet — all erased from the government's computer banks...

****

To paraphrase a tiny chunk of that old masterpiece from Mr. Heller...

...Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of the Dobell Doctrine and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some doctrine, that Dobell Doctrine,"...

I'll leave it you to decide which Campbell/Clark government functionary played the part of Doc Daneeka who replied:

"It's the best there is."

Doesn't it just make you wonder how many deals were made with all those Milo Minderbinder's who were crawling all over the province of British Columbia during 'The Golden Era'  for which there are no records whatsoever?

Deals that we, the people of British Columbia, will be paying for...

...Pretty much forever.

Sheesh

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Smilin' Sammy Returns...Bring On The Spam-A-Lot Slots!

There'sNoCasino
LikeASouthFalseCreekMegaCasinoVille


Yup, that's right.

Former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan wants to get into bed with Christy Clark, who he knee-capped in 2005, and run for the BC Liberal Party nomination in South False Creek.

Why?

Well, apparently, he's now an expert at generating linear regressions which demonstrate that both he and she will actually win.

Or some such bizarre thing, this according to Mike Hager's recent piece in the VSun:

..."It's called regression to the mean," Sullivan said. "The Liberals right now are an outlier, underperforming, and the other guys are overperforming.

"By the time the election happens we're going to see a much different situation."...


Regression to the 'mean'?

Hmmm....

Do you mean  'mean' as in, 'rip their throat out' mean ol' Smilin' One?

..."I like the fact that people underestimate me," Sullivan says in Citizen Sam, a National Film Board documentary about his 2005 mayoral victory. "You know, they pat me on the head and then I rip their throat out."...

And as for getting into power and then paying back those who filled your war chest by working with Suzie A. to smack a massive mega casino-industrial-complex down on the shores of the south side of False Creek?

Well, how about we rip the throats out of those scofflaws in the Co-Ops west of the fancy new Olympic development that is still costing us bags of our own money, at least in part, because of your decisions....

...I mean we never really liked those people and their families anyway, right Sam?

(the people and families and the like in the co-ops I mean)


_______
You want the audio and the visual from Mr. Sullivan's 'rip their (i.e. Jim, not James, Green's) throats out' rant?....You can still find it.....Here. 

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The Boessenkool Investigation (ctd.)...Mr. Reid Ain't Buyin' It.

CoverAllTracks
EvenIfTheyDon'tExistVille

While he does note that the Christy Crunch Bunch is likely open to the widespread invoking of the Dobell Doctrine, Ian Reid is not buying the fact that there was a purposeful avoidance of all things written when it comes to the Boessenkool investigation.

Instead, Ian has come to the tentative conclusion, based on the the complete lack of evidence* so far, that there likely was no investigation:

...Here’s what I think happened....

{snippety doo-dah}

...A complaint was made and that’s all that happened until a reporter for Global News got wind of the story and called the Premier’s office about it.

The Premier’s office went into damage control. They knew they couldn’t contain the story. Too many reporters knew about the (incident).... 

{snippety doodle-dandy}

...So they dumped Boessenkool. But they needed a story to deal with the month that passed between the complaint and the firing. Hence the “investigation.”

Of course there are no records. What records would there be of an investigation that never took place...

Well....

Let's see what our 'Deep Anon-O-Mouse', who has been popping up in the comment threads a lot lately and pointing us in the right direction, has to say.

_____
*Of course, there can be unintended consequences of a doctrine as all powerful as the Dobell Doctrine (aka 'The Double-D')...Which, we reckon can lead to the super-secret invocation of 'The Quadruple-D'....More on the latter later...

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My Morning Ride: Fall Creeps In...

...And Throws A Blanket Over Everything.

I love campus this time of year. First off, midterms are over and the false security blanket of the all pervasive powerpoint lecture keeps a good third to a half of the undergraduates snuggled in their beds early in the morning which gives the place a semi-deserted feel as I ride in, not to mention shorter lines for first coffee.

And then there are the leaves.

Unfortunately, the latter will all be gone by the end of the next week. In fact, the blowers were out in force this morning's slanting sun. Can the bobcats be far behind (and yes, the gardeners do get a little carried away when it comes to leaf removal)?


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The image above was taken nowhere near campus....And yes, I have used this scene, in a different context, before....

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Who Is The Better US Election Prognosticator...

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______

Update at bottom of post...

______

....538's Nate Silver with his crazy, witchy little thing called math?


Or...


...My kid and her friends with their crazy, witchy little skittles!

Tough call I reckon.


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Update, The Morning After....Now that I've actually read E's Email I can see that I was confused...Those aren't Skittles, they're actually Jolly Ranchers...What's more, the ProgMap was put together by E's roomate J, and while it's pretty good (but, Arizona Idaho and Montana?!), it sure as heck ain't, as TBogg pointed out late last night, 50 for 50...Clearly, Mr. Silver ran the table...Guess our American friends can expect the Republican House to try and enact anti-card counting....errrr....poll aggregational algorithms first thing tomorrow....

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