Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2012

We must make internet freedom the new “third rail” of politics

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

L. Neil Smith on the most recent attempt by the US government to get formal control over the internet:

After many previous attempts on the part of different groups for a variety of reasons, the United States House of Representatives has passed a bill that could result in the destruction of freedom on the Internet.

And the erasure of the First Amendment.

I won’t bother you with this week’s misleading acronym for such an atrocity. This specimen is likely to fail in the Senate — because it doesn’t go nearly as far in muzzling each of us as that “parliament of whores” wants it to. The Faux President declares he will veto it, but we’ve heard that before from a criminal imposter who couldn’t move his mouth to speak the truth if his life depended on it — because he couldn’t recognize the truth if it came up to him and pissed in his ear.

What I will tell you is what a lifetime of fending off similar assaults on the Second Amendment — and the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry weapons — has taught me. I know what has to be done now, and what will happen if we don’t do it.

First, don’t be relieved or satisfied if this particular bill doesn’t pass this time. Others will be introduced, one after another, until they wear down our resistance, unless we make every attempt cost them something they can’t afford to lose. We must make our freedom to communicate a political “third rail” and aim for nothing less than total eradication of the very notion of censoring the Internet in any way.

May 1, 2012

Quebec’s student protest concentrated in certain departments

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

In the Winnipeg Free Press, Stefani Forster looks more closely at the composition of the Quebec college and university protest movement:

They are the 66 per cent. And they have been mostly invisible in the torrent of stories about Quebec’s student unrest.

Roughly two-thirds of Quebec students are not on a declared strike from their classrooms, are not necessarily participating in daily marches against tuition hikes, and not getting the attention of the national and international media.

What are they doing? They’re completing their semester on time.

At McGill University, classes and exams have been largely unaffected by the student unrest. Only three departments — Gender, Sexuality and Women’s studies; Graduate Art History; and French Literature — are on strike.

A second Obama term might be better for the Republicans

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Shikha Dalmia explains why a Mitt Romney presidency is far from the best outcome for the Republican party:

One: Smart folks are betting that the Supreme Court will outlaw the individual mandate but leave the rest of ObamaCare to Congress. Hence, one conservative argument for a Romney victory is that, combined with a GOP-controlled Congress, it’ll offer the last hope for repealing the law. But repeal is not an end in itself. The question is, can the GOP replace ObamaCare with sensible market-based reforms?

[. . .]

Two: Commentators like Michael Gerson maintain that precisely because Romney has been a serial flipper previously, he’ll be less likely to flop now on conservative issues. But Romney’s desperation to establish his street cred with the base is not a blessing when it comes to government spending.

[. . .]

Three: Both the left and the right, according to the polls, are troubled by the fact that America is becoming a land of crony capitalism. No doubt that’s why Romney has been mouthing clumsy platitudes about how “you’ve got to stop the spread of crony capitalism” and striking a brave pose against the auto bailout.

But, tellingly, the financial bailout was just fine with him. That’s no coincidence. He is, after all, the ultimate Wall Street insider, receiving millions of dollars in subsidies and government handouts for companies he was trying to rescue as CEO of Bain Capital. He might not be running with the intention of helping his corporate pals, but it is inevitable that they’ll have his ear. Their interests and needs are far more comprehensible to him than, say, those of consumers

[. . .]

Four: If Romney wins this election, odds are he’ll automatically be the Republican nominee in 2016. Regardless of whether he wins then, this will effectively kill all prospects for putting a more serious Republican reformer (such as Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan) in the White House until 2020 or 2024. It might be far better to swallow hard and accept another Obama term to keep the path clear for a Republican more likely to deal with our fiscal and political dysfunction, rather than elect President Romney and block that possibility for another generation.

April 30, 2012

Twitter’s “Red Guard” of flag-spam abusers

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive:

Shortly after their video “If I Wanted America to Fail” went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social media resource that allows users to post very short messages. After a few hours of confusion, their account was reinstated.

This past Sunday, the Twitter account of Chris Loesch, husband of conservative pundit Dana Loesch, was abruptly shut down. After a massive outcry, and the creation of a Twitter topic called “#FreeChrisLoesch” that swiftly became one of the hottest “hash tags” on the network, Chris’ account was reactivated… for a couple of hours. By Monday morning, he was gone again, after his account was restored and removed several more times.

What did Free Market America and Chris Loesch do to warrant suspension? After all, people like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr flagrantly, openly, defiantly violated Twitter’s terms of service, and put human lives in jeopardy, by distributing personal information about George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. Their accounts have not been suspended. What violation of Loesch’s compares to using Twitter to target someone for assault by an angry mob — and, for that matter, sending the mob to the wrong address?

These suspensions were apparently the work of “flag spammers,” digital brown shirt gangs that make coordinated attacks to silence conservative voices by abusing Twitter’s spam flagging feature. Al Gore coined the term “digital brown shirts” to describe the online squadrons supposedly unleashed to “harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” Of course, he was talking about President Bush, and there weren’t any actual “digital brown shirts” at the time, but this is precisely the sort of behavior he was describing.

April 27, 2012

Colby Cosh on the Alberta election results versus the pollsters

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Most of the national press live and work in either Ottawa or Toronto. Neither location is a good vantage point for figuring out what is happening in the rest of the country:

One point three. Twelve. Fourteen. Seventeen. Eight, seven, seven, six, eight, seven, ten, nine, nine . . . two.

That’s a word picture of the polls taken in the run-up to April 23’s Alberta election, starting with a Leger survey for which interviews took place April 5-8. The numbers represent the Wildrose party’s estimated province-wide lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. No public poll taken by a respectable firm during the campaign had the Wildrose behind the PCs. All pollsters agreed that at least a narrow Wildrose majority government was likely. Reporters in Eastern Canada dutifully filed “Wildrose wins” copy for the April 24 morning papers, believing that the outcome was certain.

And then came the shocking result of the election itself, arriving at the end of the mathematical sequence like some indecipherable symbol from a lost language:

Minus nine point six.

April 26, 2012

The public choice analysis of the “Jeremy Hunt affair”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

On the Adam Smith Institute blog, “Whig” explains why the Jeremy Hunt affair should be no surprise to anyone, regardless of their party affiliation:

First of all, it is salutary to remember that this is not a party political issue. As evidence to the Leveson Enquiry itself shows, politicians are drawn to newspaper proprietors and editors like flies to the proverbial. The two have a symbiotic relationship with each other, and always have done. Clearly this relationship is the result of a classic public choice style problem — politicians have power but need votes and newspaper editors can deliver votes in exchange for a chance to influence how that power is directed. Of course, this is a very reductive description of the relationship but that is what it boils down to.

Such a relationship is evidently corrupting and open to the exploitation of special interests at the expense of general ones. How should we prevent this? Whilst party politics calls for the minister to fall on his sword, such an action will hardly prevent future occurrences. The general tone of public discourse suggests the introduction of rules, guidelines and procedures on ministers with greater bureaucratic control and less personal control by the minister. In many ways this represents the general trend of constitutional developments over the past 100 years or so. Powers should be vested in ‘disinterested’ civil servants or, better yet, in ‘independent’ Quangos like OFCOM or the Competition Commission, rather than politicians.

The bureaucratic solution, however, is no more acceptable — as any fan of Yes Minister will confirm. Aside from the issues of democratic accountability such developments raise, we should remember that civil servants and bureaucrats are human beings and have a series of vested personal and ideological interests of their own. Bureaucratic rule-making is just as susceptible to corruption as ministerial rule-making. This is especially true in the case of newspapers, which are extremely well-placed to use their influence in order to promote their own interests. Again, the Leveson Enquiry shows us exactly this situation: journalists allegedly entering into corrupt relationships with police officers.

Rupert Murdoch: the secret ruler of Britain

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

At least, it’s quite clear that most of the chattering classes consider Murdoch to be the arch-manipulator/secret ruler of British life. Brendan O’Neill disagrees:

So there he was, the secret ruler of modern Britain, the dark, rotting heart of the British state, the man who has wielded his ‘extraordinary power’ in order to ‘manipulate officialdom’ and extend his influence over ‘politics, the media and the police’. I hope you weren’t fooled by Rupert Murdoch’s diminutive stature or his octogenarian demeanour as he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday, or his denials about using his ‘political power to get favourable treatment’. Because this small, old newspaper owner is, in fact, the mastermind of a ‘shadowy influence-mart’ who has exercised a ‘malign influence on our politics for the past 30 years’. And now, thanks to Lord Leveson, we finally have an opportunity to ‘banish’ this ‘tyrant’ from our shores and a ‘glorious opportunity for meaningful reform’.

At least, that’s what the Leveson cheerleading squad, the media and celebrity groupies of this inquiry into press ethics, would have us believe. These people are rapidly taking leave of their senses. Their depiction of Rupert Murdoch as the dastardly puppeteer of the British political sphere has crossed the line from rational commentary into David Icke territory, sounding increasingly like a conspiracy theory about secret rulers of the world. And their claim that Murdoch singlehandedly ruined British politics — that he is, in the words of one commentator, the architect of modern Britain’s ‘heartlessness, coarseness and spite’ — speaks to their inability to get to grips with the true causes of political crisis today. Yesterday’s shenanigans made it pretty clear that Murdoch-bashing has become a cheap substitute for grown-up debate.

It is of course true that Murdoch is very influential, as you would expect of a man who, in Britain alone, owns both the newspaper of record (The Times) and the bestselling tabloid (the Sun). But not only do the Murdoch-maulers overestimate how influential he is; more importantly they misunderstand the origins and nature of his influence in modern Britain. It is not that Murdoch set out to create a ‘shadow state’ that could ‘intimidate parliament’, as madly claimed by Labour MP Tom Watson. Rather, it was the increasing alienation of parliament and politicians from the public which boosted Murdoch’s political fortunes, making him the go-to man for ministers and MPs desperate to make a connection with us. In other words, Murdoch didn’t destroy British politics in his scrabble for greater influence — it was the already existing death of British politics, its loss of meaning and purchase, which, by default, made Murdoch influential.

April 25, 2012

Complaint submitted to CRA over the David Suzuki Foundation’s charitable status and partisan political activity

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

It’s been an open secret for years that some organizations with charitable status under the Canada Revenue Agency’s rules are stepping over the line with regard to partisan political activities. A complaint has been lodged with the CRA over the David Suzuki Foundation on these grounds:

The David Suzuki Foundation on Tuesday became the target of a complaint to the Canada Revenue Agency, just days after its namesake co-founder stepped down amid heightened tensions between environmental charities and the Conservative government.

EthicalOil.org, a non-profit organization that promotes oil from Canada and other democracies, sent a letter to the agency asking it to investigate whether the David Suzuki Foundation is breaking rules that pertain to political activity. Registered charities are allowed to devote only a small fraction of their resources to political activity, although they can never be partisan.

“If you find the Suzuki Foundation is in contravention of the CRA rules, then we request that you consider whether the Suzuki Foundation should have its charitable status revoked or otherwise be sanctioned,” EthicalOil.org said in its 44-page letter, which was drafted by Calgary-based JSS Barristers and obtained by the National Post.

April 24, 2012

Colby Cosh on the “Alberta surprise”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

From his most recent column at Maclean’s:

An Alberta astronaut returning from Titan and seeing the result of last night’s election would say “Meh, so what else is new? The PCs carried 61 of 87 seats? Kind of an off year for them, I guess.” Yet the ostensibly boring, familiar outcome wrong-footed much of the media and absolutely all the pollsters. Even PC insiders, correctly detecting a last-minute shift away from the Wildrose Party heirs-presumptive, envisioned a much smaller vote share than the 44 per cent Alison Redford’s party achieved. The public polling firms all botched the job, with none forecasting anything but a Wildrose majority even on the final weekend.

The Wildrose Party’s final count of 17 seats must surely leave its braintrust, heavily stocked with Conservative Party of Canada veterans, obliterated with horror. The CPC has built a pretty good electoral machine, but as old Ralph Klein hand and Wildrose supporter Rod Love reminded CBC, the Alberta PC brand is the most successful in the country. He probably could have gone even further afield if he wanted to. (On August 24, 2014, the PCs will officially become the longest continuously serving government in the annals of Confederation.) In 1993 the PCs were in trouble late, but succeeded in outflanking a popular Liberal opposition and running against their own record. They did it again in 2012. Redford succeeded in making herself the “change” candidate — though not without help from the Wildrose insurgents, who suffered late “bozo eruptions” of the sort the CPC itself has long since succeeded in extinguishing.

Update: Even Colby can’t seem to avoid the “Ten things” meme:

1. Proportional representation just won itself a whole passel of new right-wing fans.

2. Alberta Liberal morale remained high throughout an election in which pollsters warned continually of disaster. And the pollsters proved to be almost exactly right about this (if nothing else). Yet even as the mortifying results rolled in, Alberta Liberal morale still remained high. Then their egomaniac not-really-Liberal disaster of a leader, Raj Sherman, won his seat by the skin of his teeth. This means he will not have to be replaced unless an awful lot of people smarten up fast. Alberta Liberal morale after this event? Easily, easily at its highest point in ten years. “Please, sir, may I have another?”

[. . .]

5. Those who did boycott the Senate election seem awfully proud of themselves, because it was a “meaningless” election. Why, one wonders, does it have to be meaningless? The “progressive” parties could have agreed on a single Senate candidate in advance; if they had done so, that candidate would certainly have ended up first in the queue, and provided an excellent test of Stephen Harper’s integrity, which I am told is much doubted.

The problem is that Harper might pass the test, you say? Then what’s the harm? You get some smart, popular left-wing independent speaking for Alberta in the Senate? That’s bad for “progressives” how?

I’m still waiting for the definitive post-election analysis of why all the polls were so far off: I didn’t see a single poll in the last two weeks of the election that didn’t have Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party in clear majority territory. Nobody was predicting another PC victory in that time period (or if they were, the national media wasn’t picking it up).

April 23, 2012

French presidential voting: on to the second round

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

For the first time, a sitting French president did not win the plurality of votes in the first round:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is wooing far-right voters after losing narrowly to his Socialist rival in the presidential election’s first round.

Francois Hollande came top with 28.6% and Mr Sarkozy got 27.1% — the first time a sitting president has lost in the first round.

Third-place Marine Le Pen took the largest share of the vote her far-right National Front has ever won, with 18%.

Referring to her voters, Mr Sarkozy said: “I have heard you.”

“There was this crisis vote that doubled from one election to another — an answer must be given to this crisis vote,” he said.

Pollsters say Mr Hollande is the clear favourite to win the second round on 6 May, a duel between him and Mr Sarkozy, who leads the centre-right UMP.

If Mr Hollande wins he will become the first Socialist president in France in 17 years

[. . .]

Nearly a fifth of voters backed a party — the National Front — that wants to ditch the euro and return to the franc.

Reacting to the Front’s success on Monday both the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that populist politics was a threat to Europe.

Mrs Merkel said the Front’s “alarming” rise would probably be “ironed out” in the second round. She said she would continue to support Mr Sarkozy.

April 22, 2012

Earth Day: 42 years of crying “wolf”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Peter Foster piles on the scorn for the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day:

For more than 40 years, Earth Day has both reflected genuine environmental concern and mirrored the UN’s attempted eco power grab. Sunday’s Earth Day comes two months ahead of the vast, but significantly brief, UN Rio+20 conference. Both are pale reflections of their original radical aspirations. Earth Day is still celebrated, but 42 years of crying wolf have inevitably had an effect. The event has also been corporatized, greenwashed and taken over by such announcements as that of the “50 sexiest environmentalists.” Rio+20 will represent the graveyard of aspirations for all prospective — and inevitably less sexy — Captains of Spaceship Earth, Global Saviours, and High Priests of Gaia.

That Earth Day has gone Happy Face, and Rio+20 will be a farce, reflects the fact that their apocalyptic assumptions have turned out to be so wrong. In Canada, as in other developed countries, we can celebrate significant improvements in air quality, and success in coping with industrial impacts on water. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, forest cover has been maintained, and the amount of “protected” land doubled. The use of toxic chemicals in industrial production has been slashed. Some credit must obviously go to activism, but the more radical end of the movement has always had a lot more than just the environment in mind.

[. . .]

That misunderstandings and misrepresentations were at the root of radical environmental thinking was exemplifed by an “equation-of-doom” hatched in the 1970s by two prominent radicals, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (President Obama’s current senior science and technology advisor). The equation was I=P x A x T: Human Impact (I) equals Population (P) times Affluence (A) times Technology (T). The formula was vague, but it clearly suggested that population, wealth and technology were all “bad” for Mother Earth.

Such thinking was based on a primitive, static, zero-sum view of economic development and a demonization of business. Since resources were “finite,” all development was claimed by definition to be “unsustainable.” Advancing technology merely chewed up resources faster and accelerated us down the road to exhaustion. All this came with biblical overtones. On the first Earth Day, Prof. Ehrlich thundered that “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

April 21, 2012

Argentina: Canada without the boring politics and grey politicians

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Robert Fulford sees lots of similarities between Argentina and Canada, except the one difference that makes all the difference:

In some ways it’s much like Canada, a huge one-time colony with a talented population and endless natural resources — arable land, oil and gas and much else.

Except it is not like Canada. It doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is that it lacks a reliable, careful government, not subject to sudden bouts of hysteria. Argentina has few of the boring politicians who irritate people like Sid.

Public life in Argentina expresses itself through spasms of showmanship, braggadocio, paranoia and demagoguery. It’s the land of the eternal crisis, where a military coup is never unthinkable.

Argentina’s many economic failures, generation after generation, are self-created, politically induced. In all the world there’s no more obvious example of a nation that has squandered, through flawed governance, the riches provided by nature.

This week Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, President of Argentina, and the widow of the last president, announced she’s grabbing YPF, the country’s biggest energy company, taking it from Spain’s Repsol. Cristina, as she’s usually called in Argentina, thinks she can run YPF better than the Spanish. Of course the Spanish are furious and will sue as well as blacken Argentina’s name wherever possible. What Cristina has announced is a brazen, heedless act, with nothing to recommend it but high-handed nationalist fury.

Yet Cristina believes that when you encounter economic trouble, the best course is to strike out against something foreign. At the moment she’s also making anti-British noises, agitating to annex the Falklands Islands, which Argentina seized in 1982 and had to give back when it lost the war with the U.K. Somehow the Falklands (called the Malvinas in Argentina) are linked with the oil-company seizure as nationalist issues. A T-shirt has appeared on Cristina’s supporters: “The Malvinas are Argentine, so is YPF.”

The French presidential election candidates

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of the first round of the French presidential election:

There are five principal candidates, arrayed very symmetrically, from right to left: The reactionary anti-Europe and anti-immigration National Front’s Marine Le Pen, espousing petit bourgeois know-nothingism, though less rancorously than her father, the party’s founder, did. Next on the ideological compass is the centre-right Gaullist Sarkozy, who believes in the omnipotent French state of Richelieu, Colbert and Napoleon. He has lengthened the work week and boosted the retirement age. He has also raised taxes, and now wants to impose a heavy exit tax, as the wealthy French are again fleeing the country, as they often have before. The French call Sarkozy “the water-bug” and “President Bling-bling” because of his frenetic behaviour and garish tastes.

Then there is the radical centrist Francois Bayrou, who doesn’t really have a party, and departs his farm every five years to take 10%-12% of the presidential vote for a median platform of moderate tax increases and spending reductions.

Moving to the left, there is M. Hollande, who casually repeats: “I don’t like the rich,” and wants to raise their taxes to 90%.

The piece de resistance in every respect is Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the Leftist Bloc, a coalition of Trotskyites, orthodox Communists, dissident socialists, militant environmentalists, vegetarians, nudists and anarchists. Melenchon wants a 100% tax on incomes above 360,000 euros a year, a 20% increase in the minimum wage, and the inability of any profitable company to lay off anyone.

“Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Sun on the last public opinion poll numbers before Monday’s election:

Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history. The Tories’ 41-year rule seems set to end on Monday.

Wildrose still leads the Tories by 10 points, 41% to 31%.

Wildrose has fallen five points since last week – not surprising, perhaps, given the battering the party took early in the week when two of its candidates badly fumbled issues of gay rights and racism.

What is perhaps surprising, though, is that the Tories have not been the only beneficiaries of Wildrose’s tough week. While Premier Alison Redford and crew rose two percentage points between Week 3 and Week 4, so too did the Alberta Liberals under Raj Sherman. The NDP under Brian Mason also climbed a point.

April 19, 2012

The (richly deserved) end of the Tory era in Alberta

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Unless all the polls are way off, the election in Alberta will see the eternal rule of the Progressive Conservatives finally come to an end. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, the Tories have unleashed the last of their secret weapons to hold back the Wildrose barbarians — perhaps the most embarrassing political video ever posted. David J. Climenhaga saves you the pain of watching the video:

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

[. . .]

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

I’m not kidding about the quality of the video — I couldn’t make it past the first minute before feeling too humiliated on behalf of the folks who made it and I had to shut it off. If you want to watch it in all its cringe-inducing glory, David has it embedded on his site.

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