It's Official Harper Is A Coward

Try to imagine a Prime Minister who gets up in the House to denounce one of his own departments and then doesn't show up to vote non-confidence in that department. Well, you don't have to imagine because it happened yesterday. Harper hates Elections Canada, there can be no doubt, but not enough to be caught on camera voting against it (bad for the image you see. Don't want those nasty opposition parties holding him to account for voting against an agency with more credibility that he has). To me a coward thumps his chest and makes threats, but then runs away when he is called upon to take an action which might come back to bite him. In my mind, our PM exemplifies that definition, in spades.

Update:And in case anyone is in doubt what this whole "in and out" stuff is all about, Lorne Gunter helpfully explains the real Tory goal -- the end to spending limits during elections.

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Please, Can't They All Just Go Away

Here is the kind of drivel that drives me mental. Don't get me wrong, it is great that a Tory actually admits that his party is crooked. But, in the next breath, he falls back on the old "but look at the Liberals" routine. By the end of the piece, I couldn't help but admire the nerve it took to be proud of being slightly less crooked than the Liberal Party of Canada. I also wondered why the collective political leadership in this country is still walking around, free.

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Oh Peter Van Loan

Why won't you learn, sir? You just have to make a fool of yourself every day, don't you? I was watching the Newman show at supper time and who did I see, but Duff Conacher (begin at 16:16) who said that Van Loan repeated half of a sentence uttered by Conacher on tv, in order to make it look like Democracy Watch supported the government's position on the in and out scheme. Conacher has demanded an apology.

Now, any normal politician, in any other political party would have admitted some kind of error. But, this is not ordinary politician from no ordinary party. Van Loan is now demanding that Conacher apologize to all Canadians for misleading him by making a false statement of support on television.

This is amazing to me, but illustrative of what we are dealing with here. A politician takes part of a statement by someone, uses it under false pretenses, gets caught and then blames the person whose statement he falsely used. It kind of sounds like the thinking behind the in and out scheme itself. These conservatives believe that the ends justify the means and they will not let anything, not even reality to get in their way.

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Question Du Jour

I wonder, if this guy was named "Ahmed" rather than "John" and he was a recent immigrant from Pakistan, rather than a former Ontario cabinet minister and he pleaded guilty to possession of a restricted weapon, whether he would have been let off with a shrug and a "He's been embarrassed enough" speech, by the judge? It's nice to be one of the boys, neh?

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Learn From It

I see the Tories are complaining that the RCMP scared young party workers, when it conducted a raid on Tory Central. Perhaps that isn't such a bad thing. Being on the other side of a police raid might give these young Tories some perspective. Perhaps they won't be so quick to mouth off about "locking up the bad guys and throwing away the keys". Perhaps they will drop their slavish, unquestioning support, for everything someone in a uniform does. To me, such an outcome would be a good thing.

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Nudge, Nudge

The "logic" of this post seems to be that Sarah Polley is a Nazi because she played one in a movie. By that same logic, Jeffrey Hunter must be Jesus.

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Meanwhile...

According to David Akin, the Conservatives okayed a scheme to allow Canadian forces personnel to join Bush's war in Iraq, but failed to let anyone else know.

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