Families Can't Eat Fireworks

Vancouver, British Columbia
49°15' North; 123°08' West

The apparently no-longer-feral Mr. Gary Collins has good news for all British Columbians.

We are now running $2Billion surplus.

Now, never mind the massive short-term bulge in commodity exports that produced the flashpowder for this surplus.

And whatever you do, don't consider the one time Federal Gov't windfall that is the fuse that has been inserted into this surplus

And most of all, do not even think about the fact that it has been the sales of hard assets that we will have to rent back until after we're all dead that gave Mr. Collins the matches to light a fire under this surplus.

Because it's Mr. Collins job to make us forget all those things while he uses them to orchestrate the blindingly bright, but very short-lived, fireworks show exploding high above the SS Gordon Campbell.

It is a spectacle that is being taped even as write this so that it can be re-played over and over and over again during the Ad-Blitz that will run non-stop from now until election day.

****

Why does this no substance flash across our horizon bug me so much?

Because I have seen, up close and personal, just how mean-spirited and bullying Mr. Campbell's regime has been in simultaneously carrying out its dubious social agenda.

Specifically, I volunteer with a small time non-profit agency that families get by when they need help.

Well, actually that is 'used to' help poor families.

Why the past tense?

Because last fall, just as it was being revealed that the Ministry of Child and Family Services had cut/slashed/wasted tens of millions of dollars, we, like hundreds of other similar small non-profit social service agencies, had our funding cut off completely.

And how much did Mr. Campbell get to steal for his fireworks show to kill us off and deprive hundreds of families of needed services that we supported?

A grand total of a lousy $28,000 dollars per year.

That goes into two billion about 71, 429 times.

Which works out to a whole lot of families, and old people, and disabled people, and hungry people, and sick people, and just plain people that have been robbed of goods and services for no good reason at all.

So, please excuse me if I refuse to watch the show.

SkimmingTheSurface

Vancouver, British Columbia
49°15' North; 123°08' West

Random thoughts from a time-challenged map watcher.....

The Santa Day Parade in downtown Vancouver last weekend was a good idea but it came too early in the season and it runs too long. Our kids liked it anyway.....

The Ukrainian election, which has been severely criticized by international observers, in part because of the discrepancy between exit polls and the '0fficial' result, was won by the incumbent's hand-picked successor by about 3%...... Coincidence?........

Does anybody actually think that Carolyn Parrish now has less power as a free voting independent who can hold a sword over the neck of the government on a close vote compared to when she was a forced to cowtow as a Liberal backbencher?.....

We are being forced to go to Ottawa next week which is bad enough, in and of itself, given the time of the year. However, there is another delegation arriving in the Nation's capital one of our travelling days..... Will be be trapped forever at Ottawa International?..... Will be stuck in a traffic jam and miss a plane because all the roads are blocked for a passing Humvee-assisted motorcade?...... Will we get a chance to turn our back on a visiting potentate with a smirk?..... Stay tuned......

Underfoot, Undermind

Santiago, Chile
33° 23' South; 70° 47' West

So, Paul Martin met Mr. Bush today in Santiago to talk beef-flowing borders and soft-wood lumbertrucks.

Which is all well and good, we guess.

But what we're really wondering is, did any of the smart young alecks from the PMO discreetly pick the following up on their PDA's while the the Boss was confabbing.

"Bring 'em on.....I'll crush him underfoot like a George Bush Doll."*

To know for sure look for the smirking one, not Shrub, standing behind Our Paul in the post-meet scrum on the uncut footage from Newsworld.

* uttered by the Content Factory on CBC Radio One's round up of all things parliamentary, 'The House" this am just as the Soft Wood Heads of State were entering the boardroom. Don't forget Santiago is right under T.O. (79°, 24' West) in the same time zone, so it coulda happened.

Smart State, Dumb State?

Hartford Connecticut
41° 44' North; 72° 44' West

A lot of ink has been spilled trying to explain how Cheney/Rove '04 managed to conquer all those Red States.

One theory that is starting to gain some traction is the IQ factor.

Which is just as dumb, but not dumber, than any of the other high-falutin', values-laden explanations.

And it just might explain why Lincoln was right about being able to fool some of the people all of the time....

But Do They Have a Stockwell Day?

Pensacola, Florida
30°28' North; 87° 12' West

Or, put another way, do they have a day just for Stockwell?

At a park called Dinosaur Adventure Land, run by creationists near Pensacola, Florida, visitors are informed that man coexisted with dinosaurs. This fantasy accommodates the creationists’ view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false. Among the park exhibits is one that illustrates another creationist article of faith. It consists of a long trough filled with sand and fitted at one end with a water spigot. Above the trough is a sign reading “That River Didn’t Make That Canyon.” When visitors open the spigot, the water quickly cuts a gully through the sand, supposedly demonstrating how the Grand Canyon was created, practically overnight, by Noah’s flood. That’s nonsense, of course, but what else would you expect at a creationist park?

And wetsuits?

Well, perhaps they were being worn by the folks that sea-dooed across the flood plain to check out that big-bang thing that happened 6001 years ago.

Don't Judge a Book By Its Jersey

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
39° 52' North; 75° 14' West

Rabid American NFL football fans are all knuckle-dragging, whacked-out mouthbreathers, right?

Wrong.

Twins Ahoy

New York, New York
40° 44' North; 73° 44' West


Sorry, couldn't resist this bit of silly gossip:

'Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov.....
....the bush twins along with 2 massive secret service men tried to have dinner they were told by the maitre 'd that they were full and would be for the next 4 years upon hearing the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots it was amazing!!! [Ed: We're hearing that this is actually true.]'

Most Peculiar Momma

An Undisclosed Location
Nowhereville USA

Has the US vote count dike started to crack?

"Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a disturbing answer. Looking at the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, he concludes that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one"

And then there is the business with the Florida 'polling-tapes':

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer.......

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she (Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator) said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

Which just might explain the analysis from UC Berkeley that concludes that electronic voting machines gave Mr. Bush at least 100,000 extra votes.

Of course there are other academic opinions that counter the folks from Penn and Berkeley, opinions that led the NY Times to trash the notion of peculiarity out of hand (funny that they never used alternative sources to discredit Ahmed Chalabi, but that's another story I guess).

But, if there really is nothing to the Voter story, why are the Freepers and the Wingnuts going hard after Keith Olbermann, the only American talking head who has dared to even, well, talk about the 'I'* word?



*I = irregularity

The Minors Come Through

Vancouver, British Columbia
49°15' North; 123°08' West

My wife's favorite minor league baseball player of all time, Steve Springer, once said that it's not the spectacular that separates the minors from the majors, but rather the consistency.

And Mr. Springer knows of what he speaks, seeing as how spent 11 years and more than 1000 games at AAA and less than 10 in the big leagues.

It's the same for the newspaper business.

Sort of.

The difference is that 'round here consistency in the major dailies is of the crap variety.

Witness the Vancouver Sun, if you must.

Every once in a while though, one of the CanWest Juniors comes through in the clutch.

Case in point, yesterday's Nov. 17th Vancouver Courier Op/Ed pages. You can find it all here, but if you live in Vancouver dig it out of the bottom of the birdcage and have a look at the full spread; it's better that way.

First, an interesting piece from Allen Garr who describes how one of his Langara College journalism students was roughed up by a couple of Vancouver's finest while interviewing squeegee kids. Garr then makes a convincing case that no amount of high priced spin control can hide the fact that things have gone downhill on Chief Jamie Graham's watch.

Next, is a great take from Barry Link on how we have nothing to fear from the emergence of China as an economic superpower and it's influence on our ever changing city. It's a story of hope and, maybe, future glory.

Even the letters are great. All are well informed, well reasoned, interesting and deal with a wide range of topics that include: how STV could really work for the better; how Arts coverage can be improved; what the Canadian Club does; why we should bite the bullet and wean ourselves from U.S. dependence; and, my favorite, a treatise on coffee geeks and what it means to be 'cupped' in bean-freak parlance.

In short, it's a cosmopolitan smorgasboard that feeds the mind.

Good stuff, indeed.

What's Not To Like?

Ottawa, ON
45° 19' North; 75° 40' West

So, Paul 'Who Me?' Martin has finally decided to kick Carolyn Parrish out of the Liberal caucus.

The question is, why?

After all, who in their right mind would argue that Mr Bush is not "War-Like"?

Playing the Canadian Card

Washington, District of Columbia
38° 53' North; 77° 02' West

Intrepid White House correspondent Russell Mokhiber once again nails Bu$hCo mouthpiece little Scottie McLellan, this time by playing the Canadian 'indictment' card:

Mokhiber: Kofi Annan in September said that the Iraq war is an illegal war. If it is an illegal war, then the 100,000 who have died there – according to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health – are victims of war crimes. Now, the President is going to Canada later this year. And the largest circulation newspaper in Canada (the Toronto Star) printed a column yesterday titled “Should Canada Indict Bush?” – raising the question of a war crimes prosecution. They have a war crimes law in Canada. And I’m wondering –

Scott McLellan: Do you have a question or is it just a statement of opinion?

Mokhiber: No, this is the question. Has the White House counsel looked at the President’s legal exposure to a war crimes prosecution?

Scott McLellan: It is a ridiculous question that you bring up. You were out on the Nader campaign at the time that this issue came up. It was addressed at that time. And I’m not going to go through it again.

Perhaps Scottie has been trapped in Jimmy Darren's Time Tunnel for the last two weeks, because, as far as we know, the Nader campaign ended long before 'yesterday' which, as Mr. Mokhiber rightly points out, was when the Star piece by Tom Walkhom was published.

Paging Dick Morris

Kitimat, British Columbia
54° 01' North; 128° 42' West

In our last post we suggested that the Cruise Line Operators with the deep pockets will soon be bringing in hired guns with media blow torches from down south to patch up the gaping holes in the rusting hull of the SS Gordon Campbell.

Of course, before that can happen the Money Men have to put their own lackeys in place to provide local cover.

Well, it looks like chief fixer, but never lobbyist, Patrick Kinsella and organ grinder Gary Collins have already started the ball rolling by hiring on homegrown 'advisors' Jess Ketchum and Greg Lyle.

Sean Holman has the whole story.

Suffice it to say, Ketchum truly is a full-fledged longtime local flack who most recently has not been aversely affected by CN's privatization of BC Rail routes. Mr. Lyle on the other hand is in the demonology business given that he has studied wide-eyed on bended knee at the foot of the bi-national Axis of Evil man himself, David Frum.

And these days neandercon demons come in all shapes and sizes, just ask 'Big Labour'.

____
From the Big Book of Neandercon Definitions....
Morris, Dick (n.): mercenary, hired gun; willing to say anything/ do anything to continue spouting ever shifting opinions of utter expediency on FOX News.

Mutiny on the Gordo, Part III

Victoria, B.C.
48° 39' West; 123° 26' West


If you were to pay attention only to the mainstream media including, sadly, the CBC, you might come to the conclusion that today's release of the report by the 'Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services' (warning: pdf) is an indicator that the SS Gordon Campbell has battened down the hatches in preparation for a concerted, all hands on deck, change of course.

But if you dig a little deeper, or read Schreck, you might come to a slightly different conclusion, especially given the fact that Joy McPhail was a contributor to the report.

Because clearly there are a significant number of Liberal backbenchers, particularly those outside the Lower Mainland, that are scared crapless about being thrown overboard come May 2005. As such, they are screaming for the skipper to ignore the owners of the Cruise Line, at least for the time being, and pull hard to port (ie. left) to save their skins. Why else would they say that:

"....the government spend more on a wide range of social programs, health care and education in the next provincial budget."

Of course, this type of talk is nothing short of mutiny for a Commander bent on the total dismantling of the social safety net.

So the question is, will Gordo keep up the Cap'n Queeg act, or does he order the Ferret to fire up the $30 million Whirlitzer and start doling out dollups of very little substance that do nothing but grab headlines without actually helping anybody or anything?

Call us cynics, but we figure our Fearless Leader, or more precisely his surely soon to be hired U.S. Republican battle-hardended Handlers, will surely find a way to bash social programs while simultaneously using them as a feel good success story in the run-up to the campaign.

Example.....can't wait to find out what our not-quite homegrown version of the 'No Child Left Behind' act will be. Perhaps having today's grade 7 students take yesterday's grade 4 evaluation exam all over again to demonstrate just how much they've progressed in the three years they've been in Gordo's bareknuckle, bootstrap school system?

Evil Will Triumph If....

Ottawa, ON
45° 19' North; 75° 40' West

Sometimes a country has gotta do what a country has gotta do.

One Nation Under Godzilla

Spokane, WA
47° 40' North; 117° 23' West

Because if it was, there would be no reason for holy wars.

Which is one of the reasons why the folks who came up with American Constitution worked so hard to keep church and state truly separate.