A Whole Lotta Catchin' Up Goin' Down...

Workin'ForThe
WeekendVille


Why?

Well, given Mr. Campbell's reckless decision to gut one of the funding sources that my lab runs on (just like sources for arts, culture, sports, and autistic kids, and recreation groups everywhere), this is the first weekend I've taken a breather since coming back from holidays because I'm scrambling to try and get a few more ever shrinking federal research dollars to prevent layoffs....

It's also the heavy teaching rotation season for me.

Anyway...here are a few comments based on my first pass back through the Lotulsandian Bloggodome in a while....

First....on BC Rail - Mary is keeping us up to speed, especially on the latest developments regarding the judge's leaving and her final decision which was not good news for the defense, and in my opinion at least, the people of British Columbia.

Second....Something I forgot to mention awhile back, which is the fact that in combing the Elections BC provincial party contribution stats Sean Holman pointed out (in separate posts mind you) that the BC Lib's four percent victory over the Dippers in the last election cost their supporters an extra $5 million or so..... which works out to just over a million bucks a percentage pont.....Me, I figure a lot of the Big Red Machine's supporters likely figure that was cheap at twice (if not 50) times the price.

Third....Paul Willcocks is still cooking with gas these days....especially enjoyed his comment about Shirley Bond channeling Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin mimicking Tracy Jordan calling out out 'I love you Gordy G.!'....Or some such thing.

Fourth....it appears that retirees 'round here are the only ones who are really speaking truth to demonstrable falsehoods these days (and no, I'm not talking about Bill Vander Zalm - sorry Mr. T., but I can't stomach the fact that Wee Willy took immediate advantage of his newfound anti-HST-assisted return to faux-populist popularity to take a spade shovel-type potshot at multiculturalism as the real bane of our existence, or some such codswallop)....One of the codgerly smackdowners of the spin is Harvey Oberfeld.....Another is Rafe Mair who has, unfortunately for all of us, been proven right re: The Silence Of The Sockeye.....Another is Norman Farrell who despite (or maybe because of?) the fact that he has never worked in the proMedia, appears to have a very clear-eyed view of things....

Fifth.....I have fallen behind in the Uke-Challenge Series....But the Reverand Paperboy needs to know this....Bigger E. is getting ready to purchase a 4-stringed instrument of her very own....Might be time to spring for a YouTube account to call my own....


Talk to you all (or as WestEndBob always admonishes me to say, 'ya'll') next week....

OK?




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And to the Anon-O-Mouse who mentioned my love for all things Buchsbaum in a comment to the canoeing post.....All I can say is......Wow!....


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Gone Canoeing....

AllThePaddlingThatFits
RedFiberglassVille

And where we're going we don't need the help of Tourism British Columbia and/or their 146 PR people.

Which, of course, is the real reason the Campbelleros needed to fold the thing.

Because it's all propagandists on deck.....errrrrr....In-House.

Back in a while....

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There's No Business....

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....Like The Dirty Oil Business.

GreenhouseAllTheGases
DrillBabyDrillVille


Alison has the both stories:


"Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America's addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive" oil if he is elected U.S. president -- and one of his first targets might well be Canada's oil sands."

June 2008

"The Obama administration yesterday approved a pipeline to carry oil-sands fuel from Canada into the US, saying its action was designed to send "a positive economic signal in a difficult economic period".

August 2009

Which begs the question.....

How long before our fun-loving, clean-green premier, Mr. Gordon Campbell, starts wielding his budget deficit 'crisis' machete around so that he can hack-up the the offshore drilling moratorium real good?


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Nike's Most Famous Slogan.....Irony Is Thy Name

TheDeclineOf
AllThePointsOnTheCompassVille

"Just Do It....."

...............................The Slogan That Sold Overpriced Sneakers As Life

___________________

"Let's Do It....."

........ ....The Last Words Of Spree-Killer Gary Gilmore As He Faced A State-Sanctioned Firing Squad

And guess what.....

Turns out the latter inspired the former.

Is it any wonder?

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My Adventures In The Bloggodome

Hyperlinks'RUs
PixelDustVille


Last week Ben Shingler threw up an interesting, if somewhat superficial, post at The Tyee titled "Obama Faces Digital Destruction".

The comment thread was OK, but not overwhelmingly interesting, although I felt compelled to weigh in with some supporting context and links about the U.S. healthcare reform flap, mostly because I've really been paying attention to if for awhile now.

Funny thing, is that the hits kept coming in.....

So I went back and found the following, from Jay Currie, tacked to the end of the thread:

"I can't help but be amused as the Democratic agenda on Health Care and, increasingly, "cap and trade" is picked apart by, yoiks, grassroots organizing. ((And, yes, I have heard that there is money from assorted interests in behind that organizing - so what? Move-On was not exactly unfunded.)

Obama ran a huge internet operation in his election attempt. He and his people understand how powerful you-tube and blogs and tweets have become and how lame MSM has also become. But they were under the misaprehension that the left in the US had the same hammerlock on the 'net as it does the MSM.

They have been surprised by the strength of the right and populist push back. They shouldn't have been. There is a huge, successful and self-sustaining media/web matrix on the right in the US. As Bush was clueless about the net and the Republican Party barely grasped it, the right side has evolved without any gatekeepers or talking points. There is no "townhouse" list to keep the right on message.

Now, critically, the left side of the web has been - like many other elements in the Obama victory - hemorrhaging readership since the One was elected. But the right side has been growing fast.

Expect to see more tea parties and more populists all organized using things like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Sort of community organizing for the 00's."

Now, normally I ignore this kind of stuff because I truly do believe that there are times when attempts to engaged in reasonable and reasoned discussion is futile.

But.

I've read quite a bit of Mr. Currie's stuff over the years and, while I very rarely agree with him, I do have some respect for his ability to be both relatively reasonable and to reason.

So I responded (and tried to set my snark meter as low as possible while doing so):

"Mr. Currie.......When, exactly, did you succumb to codswalloparianism?

Not to mention false equivalencies.

(You said....)

"....yes, I have heard that there is money from assorted interests in behind that organizing - so what? Move-On was not exactly unfunded..."

Two things.

First, the folks in MoveOn never hid their true intentions as is being done by the folks backing the wurlitzering of the deathpanel/beware nazi programs/they're gonna take away our guns! screamfests of the stoopid.

Second, the 'not exactly unfunded', but overwhelmingly truly grassroots, citizen-by- individual-citizen (majority of the) fundraising of Move On was never generated in ways that led to groups like this or this.

OK?"

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Sunday Morning Going Down!

MeetThe(Only)Press
WorkingInLotusandAtThatTimeOfTheWeekVille

Well.

We know of at least one early riser that's gonna want to tune in to Public Eye Radio Sunday morning at 8:00am.....

West End Bob.

Why?

Because Mr. Holman is going to have Bob's favorite pol on - Spencer Herbert.

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If you, like me, are just a wee bit too dopey to pay attention to things that matter at that hour, you can always catch a ride on the pod, which is usually up just after Enright (and/or who ever is filling in for him this week) goes off the Ceeb's airwaves around noon.

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Saturday Night's All Right For (Uke Cover) Fighting!

There'sNoUkeLike
CoverUkeVille


First, The Original...... because my oldest kid is an....

And now..... The Cover.....most especially because of the background singers....

Take that Reverand.....

And you too Jim Dandy!


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As always, the Uke Peg Head image at the top of the post is courtesy of Los Angelino Photo-Maven and dog-on-a-stick aficionado, Ellen Bloom.
Update: Ahhhhh........Cheese Willickers....The Rev. is fighting back with .....Wizardry.....Wizardry I tell you...No Fair!


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RailGate Revisited....Mr. Mulgrew Gets Up To Speed

AllTheNewsThatKinda/SortaFits
ProMediaVille


Well, well, well......

After the proMedia finally caught up with Laila and GAB yesterday, Ian Mulgrew of the Vancouver Sun today took things one step closer to Ken Kesey's old bus*:

"....If (Premier Gordon Campbell's former Campaign Manager Patrick) Kinsella is shown to have been working for both railways (CN and BC Rail) at the same time, the landscape of this politically charged trial will change completely.

That accusation is the lynchpin of the defence.....

{snippety doodle-dandy}

....If Kinsella did play a dual role in the deal (betweeen BC Rail and CN Rail), it would buttress the claim that Basi and Virk were only following the orders of their political masters, that the railway auction was rigged in CN's favour and that everyone knew it.

The defence argument holds that the Liberals wanted to sell the provincial freight operation to CN Rail and the troubled bidding process was designed only to legitimize the privatization; Basi and Virk were told to keep OmniTrax publicly in the running so it would appear the process was competitive rather than a fait accompli.

In return for playing along, the American firm was allegedly promised a "consolation prize" of remaining BC Rail assets....."
(stuff in brackets mine added for clarification)

Or, as we have been calling it for sometime now, the putative....

"Quid Pro Quo"

OK?

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*a.k.a........Further.

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RailGate Run-Around, Part Deux....

AllTheNewsThatKinda/SortaFitsVille
PublicInterestVille

Last night, I commented upon a Canadian Press report that completely vindicated the earlier eyewitness report of Lotuslandian Super-Bloggers Laila Yule and Great Aunty Bertha.

Now that the excitement has died down I thought I'd mention something else that the Canadian Press' Camille Bains caught the proMedia up on, which is the following:

".....Kinsella's role with both the seller and the buyer of the Crown-owned rail line, which eventually sold for $1 billion, was also questioned in the legislature in 2003 by then-New Democrat MLA Joy MacPhail......"

Hmmmmmm.....

How, we can't help wondering, did Ms. Bains stumble upon that little tidbit?

Well.....

Last night a 'source' (take that Mess'rs Baldrey/Palmer/Good) told me that it was raised in court yesterday but, regardless, we can't help but note that Ms. McPhai's 'question' was also mentioned in a comment tacked on to a Globe and Mail column by Gary Mason published last Monday (ie. five full days before Ms. Bains CP piece was published)?

Here is the precise text of that comment:

8/17/2009 11:58:56 PM

It's interesting, I seem to recall that Joy McPhail asked the good Premier of British Columbia a related question, on the floor the Legislature, way back in May of 2003......

It went something like this:

J. MacPhail: "A longtime Liberal Party fundraiser is Patrick Kinsella. He is the lobbyist for CN. Has the Premier or any of his ministers met with Mr. Kinsella and representatives of CN?"

And, the funny thing, the good Premier also refused to answer, either in the affirmative or the negative, that question also.

Hon. G. Campbell: "I don't have an answer for that. As the member opposite knows, if she wants to know about specific meeting times with either myself or the minister, she can do that through freedom of information."

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You can find the exchange in Hansard for May 28, 2003.....Just go there and type 'Kinsella' into the search box of your browser.

Here's the link for that day in history:
http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/37th4th/h30528p.htm

And who wrote that comment, you might be asking yourself?

Well.....

Ha!



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Now, to be absolutely up front here, I first came across the exchange between Ms. McPhail and Mr. Campbell because Paul Willcocks had the good sense to post it up after a reader alerted him to it quite some time ago.....All of which is a very good example about the true power of the Bloggodome when it is used wisely by folks who pay attention, are conscientious, and who do their best to check their sources (take that again Mess'rs Baldrey/Palmer/Good).



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RailGate Run-Around....ProMedia Catches Up To Bloggers Five Days Late

AllTheNewsThat'sKinda/SortaFitToPrint
PublicInterestVille


Here's TODAY'S lede, by Camille Bains, from the Canadian Press:

VANCOUVER, B.C. (Aug 21/2009) - Emails to and from a political insider show he had a strong relationship with CN Rail, suggesting the company was pegged to win the bid to buy Crown-owned BC Rail, says a defence lawyer.

Michael Bolton told a B.C. Supreme Court hearing Friday he wants to cross-examine Patrick Kinsella about his connection to CN Rail while he was also a consultant for BC Rail.

Bolton read a string of emails from between April and May 2004 showing Kinsella was the conduit between top-level executives for both BC Rail and CN Rail and a senior B.C. civil servant when the sale seemed to be in jeopardy.

"The way in which (BC Rail) gets answers to CN Rail is to go to Kinsella rather than directly to CN," Bolton said in a hearing related to fraud and breach of trust charges against three former government employees.

Bolton, who is defending one of the accused men, said the trio were tasked by their political masters to keep a third company in the bidding process to make it appear that the sale of BC Rail to CN Rail wasn't rigged by the Liberals.

Bolton also said lobbyists at a Victoria firm called Pilothouse, which was representing Denver-based OmniTrax, a third company bidding for BC Rail, had also known about Kinsella's involvement with CN Rail while he was working for BC Rail.

"Kinsella working for CN," said an Aug. 19, 2002 handwritten note in a journal kept by Pilothouse lobbyist Brian Kieran, defence lawyer Kevin McCullough told the court......

So.

Isn't that interesting.

Except....

Here's what blogger GAB told us TUESDAY, based on her eyewitness account of the courtroom hearing on MONDAY......

________________________________________

I was going to wait for Laila, but given this post, I think it is important to get this part of what was said today out.

The materials that contained the reference to Bruce...

Also contained 2 instances of Brian Kiernan writing in his notebook from 2002

"August 19 Kinsella working for CN" referenced on page 62/63

There was some difficulty finding the second, but the judge found it and I think she said it was on page 60 and I didn't catch a date only that it again said "Kinsella working for CN".

McCullough stated clearly that the notebook was for Kieran's use only, so there was no reason to believe that his statements that Kinsella was working for CN from the notebooks would be there for any reason other than his personal reference.

GAB
Great Aunty Bertha | 08.18.09 - 12:19 am | #

________________________________________

The 'Laila' referred to in GAB's comment is fellow eyewitness and blogger Laila Yule who wrote a very detailed post on Wednesday that can be read in its entirety here.

Now.

This led to a tremendous discussion in the comments to Laila's piece.

But it also led to some codswallop.

Including media monitoring contract-style codswallop like this:

".....Since when do they let stupid little blooggers into Supreme court? Shit, things must be wrong if they let you supid little wannabes in there. You know why real reporters dont write about this extra stuff Laila? Because it just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t add a thing to the story, you idiot. And if I were you, I would watch what you write about Kinsella. And the premier."

And so, almost an entire week after the fact, when there is finally a smidgeon of proMedia reporting about the fact that a notebook belonging to one of Crown's 'star' witnesses includes a passage that appears to explicitly link the former campaign manager of the Premier of British Columbia (a very fine fellow who was AT THAT VERY TIME [ie. 2002] in the employ of BC Rail) to the ultimately successful private bidder for BC Rail, was discussed in open court, well.....

The time has come to ask ourselves the following question:

Is it any wonder that the public of British Columbia is not paying attention to this story given the egregious lack of in-depth coverage of it by the Lotuslandian proMedia?*

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**And I also ask Vaughn Palmer, and Keith Baldrey and Bill Good, who insist on calling members of the public who actually pay attention to this stuff 'cultists' who just make stuff up exactly the same question.

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Barney Frank Invokes The Gilliard Doctrine At Townhall Healthcare Meeting

AllTheFightin'LibsThatFit
BackboneVille



"Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to have a conversation with a dining room table; I have no interest in doing it."

Democratic Congressman Barney Frank responding to a Townhall Nazi Screamer

******

"There's a tendency for liberals to try and be fair, to consider other viewpoints, so we get baited by them in debates on terms that they set. I'm going to act on the following: I don't care what conservatives think........

(because)

.....I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them.

I want to stop them."

Steve Gilliard, The Greatest Prog-Blogger Of All Time

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And year's winner of the Steve Gilliard Award of Merit is a firebrand from Homer Alaska named Shannyn Moore, who is the antithesis of that formerly perennial JuCo Sophomore from Wasilla with the perhaps the most inane TwitterFeed In The Entire Universe....


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Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But....

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Could not (former) Solicitor General Rich Coleman's rationale for providing a clean, well-lighted place to launder money and/or get hooked on highly addictive online Video Display Terminals not also be extended to, say....

Crack houses?


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Thanks to our good friend the Powell river persuader for the tip on the Money Laundering potential of that $9,999 per week (ie. not $10,000) limit.
Update: Thanks to il positino in the comments for noting that the (former) to the lede.


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Is This The Dawning Of A New Era Of "Disaster Gordoism"?

WeAreAllInBananaBoats
NowVille


As Colin Hansen runs around the province of British Columbia with his hair on fire telling anybody that will listen that revenues are suddenly (ie. in the last three months since the election) way, way, way, way down, you may want to consider the possibility, which was raised presciently by Paul Willcocks yesterday, that the Finance minister's leader, Mr. Gordon Campbell, may actually view this as a real opportunity to slash and burn like it's 2001 all over again.....

Times a hundred.....

If not a hundred thousand.....

Here's Paul's kicker:

".....Creating a crisis - this time through a wildly inaccurate budget - justifies all sorts of radical change...."

*******

But why, you might be asking yourself, would Mr. Campbell view his self-exacerbated budget shortfall as an 'opportunity', rather than a 'problem'?

Well, I think it might have something to with his ideological world view and/or a fondness for the bleatings of a neandercon named Norquist.

Here's the comment that I left for Mr. Willcocks explaining my 'hypothesis':
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Thanks for this Paul.

And it will be very interesting to read what others think about it.

Just to expand a little bit about what brought me to my hypothesis, I first started wondering about this after reading Monte Paulsen's interesting piece that was published in The Tyee during the early days of the election campaign just past.

Then, after the single TV debate that came later in the campaign, I really, really started to wonder.

Finally, when the post-election reports of the deep healthcare cuts first surfaced pretty much simultaneously with all that 'two-tiered is fine'-type talk that was floated by a Campbell-appointed official, which you commented on extensively, well, it was impossible for me to not think of that old saw from noted American uber-conservative Grover Norquist about wanting to shrink the size of government enough that so he could 'drown it in the bathtub'.

RossK
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What do you all think?


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Or as West End Bob keeps telling me "y'all".......Truth be told, I actually think 'you all' is the perfect expression, and it is something I've forcibly retained in my speech since coming back from the States....In fact, I use it a lot when I'm teaching....Why?....Because it's completely gender neutral.
There is another opening in the opportunity for Mr. Campbell, of course....which is really longterm scary....why?.....Well, because he could also use it to justify a whole new round of public asset sell-offs to raise so-called grace-saving short term capital....more on that later.

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All Killer, No Filler - America's True Healthcare Reform Warrior

ThisIsWhatTheRealLiberal
BaseLooksLikeVille

Yup.

It's Jane Hamsher, she who has whipped enough progressive Democrats in Congress to defeat, yes DEFEAT, any healthcare reform bill that does not have a real Public Option....

And that ladies and gentlemen is the best example of the real power of the truly progressive Bloggodome that I have yet witnessed.

Power that has absolutely nothing to do with death panel zombies, but instead has been harnessed to help those that are supposed to be on OUR side do the right thing.


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Oh, ya, and she raises money too.

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Real Railgate Reportage....Eyewitness News You Can Truly Use....

ThePublicGoodIsNotACult
CitizenVille

From the Woodsteinian tag-team of Laila Yuile and G.A.B.

Go and read it all, right now!

And marvel at all you were NOT told by the mainstream media maw earlier this week.

(I'll have more to say later)

Read it!

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