The NDP's Culpability

The NDP's sin in the Turmel business was assuming they were dealing with people who have an internal moral compass. They should have known better. The Liberals made the mistake of thinking there was a low point past which the PMO wouldn't stoop and they lost two leaders as a result. The NDP have to realize they are dealing with a group of sociopaths, led by the Prime Minister himself. They will literally do anything to destroy anyone who opposes them. The NDP can either fight back or not. It won't matter to the PMO, either way.

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Conservative Economics

What would you do if you had a shaky economy with not great employment numbers and you want to balance the books? Well if you are the Harper government, you start by laying off 6000 people. Meanwhile, the owner class is doing very well, thanks very much. You remember them, they are the ones who destroyed the economy in the first place. We can't raise taxes on these folks, oh no. They are too important to make sacrifices. Best lay off more clerks. That will fix everything.

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The Harperites Faked A Climate Change Report You Say?

I'm shocked, shocked! Not really. In fact I would have been shocked if they told the truth. Cats are cats and sociopaths are sociopaths

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Thank God We Elected A Conservative Government

Otherwise, gas prices would have gone up. Oops.

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Iggy May Be On To Something Here

It is totally bizarre that the PM's people do a more thorough background check on teenagers attending his rallies than they do for people working in the PMO.

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The Road Ahead: Stephen Harper

Given the fiasco of the rebellious press corps incident yesterday, we can expect the PM to be hermetically sealed away from the ink-stained wretches. What we will get is one photo op after another, with out intrepid PM dressed up in all kinds of neat hats (he loves hats, helmets, any head covering really). No questions please, this is the PM's chance to talk to the peasants voters. If he is ahead in the polls, watch for him to push for a very early debate with very strict rules about the actual debate part. Look for it to be as content free as the Conservatives can make it. Meanwhile the Conservative smear machine will fling crap in every direction. Finally, if he does happen to lose (God forbid!), he will take it gracelessly and will retire to Calgary to write an angry screed, calling for Alberta to separate from Canada.

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Naughty Lobbying And Alleged Hookers

Or maybe it's the other way round. In any case, this baby has got it all. I wonder if you can prorogue and election and just declare a winner? I bet Steve is looking into that, right now.

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Welcome To Harperland

It's a wonderful place, full of older, smiling, white folks, who just love them some ethnics. Canada was so 20th century anyway.

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On Legacies

If you want to know the legacy of Stephen Harper don't look to the pundits, look to the news section. Harper's main legacy is making policy on-the-fly, based on personal prejudices and gut feelings. That isn't a bad thing necessarily, but when it is combined with a paranoid worldview (which Harper has in spades, or why destroy the census), it leads to outcomes that are not good for Canada nor Canadians.

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Shorter Jim Flaherty

Well, since the rest of you don't want to destroy the CPP today, I will have to wait until Tim Hudak is in power in Ontario. Let's move on.

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Harper's Method Of Misrule

Step one: Make a decision in secret that will negatively affect Canadians.

Step two: If caught out by the opposition, change the policy, but only if it is easily demonstrable that it affects a key demographic of the Conservative base (see the long form census for a counterexample).

Step three: Blame the bureaucracy and act like you had nothing to do with the policy change in the first place.

Step four: Stand back and watch the MSM print headlines like "Ottawa gives low-income seniors a break", rather than "Conservatives caught trying to screw seniors".

Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Ottawa's Kegger Crowd

Travers today:

In politics it's possible to score points being right and wrong at the same time. Peter MacKay is testing that quirk — and Stephen Harper's patience — with frat-boy antics.

Harper's sole reason for caring about the incident was its target -- him. Otherwise, Ottawa is chock-a-block with "frat-boy-antics", oringinating in the Langevin Building. Harper, in other circumstances, would be as proud of MacKay's "antics", as any fraternity president. That is what Harper is, after all.

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There Is An Old Saying

I just made up: If you have no plans to govern, you might as well just fuck around. That is Harper's moto. This latest move has nothing to do with actual Senate reform (to say nothing of climate change). This is all about sticking it to the opposition, so the braying morons at the Blogging Tories can throw feces around, for a while. The geniuses at the PMO are up to their usual frat-boy stunts. *

*With apologies to frat-boys, who are mature in comparison to the motherfuckers at the PMO.

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A Winning Strategy

Give billions to billionaires to build stadiums, while simultaneously cutting benefits to the unemployed and raising payroll taxes. The Vulcan chess master has either outdone himself with brilliance, or this is a trial balloon made out of lead.

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Dear Dr. Malloy

You seem confused by the Harper government. Let me help you with that. If you want to know what possesses the Harperites, look south. The Harperites have infused the modern Conservative Party with the credit card conservatism of the U.S. Republican Party. Conservatives believe that if you blow vast amounts of cash on prisons and the military, while at the same time running up the debt by not cutting in other areas (except taxes which exacerbates the above trends), eventually the country will hit a wall, and the government as a player in the lives of citizens will have no choice but wither and die, for lack of funds. It is clearly the course of action preferred by this government and will continue whether or not there is a majority elected. I hope this helps to clear up your confusion.

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Mr Harper Sort Of Right

It is kind of bizarre to have a potential coalition member that believes that national parks are a federalist plot. But, it isn't as bizarre as a government that believes its own census is a communist plot.

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More Census Fallout -- With 100% More American Content

Item:

Canada will pay a huge price for the Harper government's "short-sighted" decision to scrap the mandatory census, say leading U.S. statisticians.

"This decision will lower the quality and raise the cost of information on nearly every issue before Canada's government," Stephen Fienberg at Carnegie Mellon University and Kenneth Prewitt at Columbia University say Thursday in the journal Nature.

Fienberg elaborated in a telephone interview from Pittsburgh, saying the decision makes little sense and the added costs will be enormous.

"It's just mindless," he says, predicting that government will end up spending "billions" replacing the mandatory long-form census that was sent to 20 per cent of the population with the voluntary survey to be sent to 33 per cent.

The problem with these fine statisticians is they do not understand the Canadian conservative mind. Conservatives are insane yes, but not mindless. To Stephen Harper, wasting "billions" is a feature not a bug. In fact, the more money he can waste, the less his government has for useful things like health care and day care. Also, he knows that wasting billions of dollars will give his loonie followers something to obsess over, as they sit in their bomb shelters, awaiting the knock on the door, from the men in black they "know" is coming.

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Of Health Care And Long Guns

Headline: Health care system’s value can’t be measured, Auditor-General says . Don't tell Shelly Glover, she will say that that means it is worthless.

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Dear Steve

I really think you have gone and done it this time. You have made Don Martin cynical. You bastard.

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Twofer

Our PM held an event to whip up anti-refugee sentiment and coincidentally, divert attention from his government's bungling of the Veterans' Affairs file. That Steve, what a class act.

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