Quotulatiousness

March 7, 2019

JWR should have reconsidered as many times as necessary to come to the “correct” decision, apparently

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh asks who is the one with memory issues — former Trudeau puppet-master Gerald Butts who resigned unexpectedly (but not at all for reasons related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, we’re told) or the minister who was relegated to the least important portfolio (in the view of the Trudeau government) in a totally unrelated cabinet shuffle after failing to fold under pressure?

On Wednesday, in testifying about the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. Until the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin are heard in a trial and resolved, or until they are abandoned, the thing will remain news, and Liberals will suffer.

The government’s line is that it was inappropriate for former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to make a final commitment to leaving her Director of Public Prosecutions alone and to living with the decision not to enter a plea-bargaining process with SNC-Lavalin. Her successor in the office, David Lametti, will not make such a commitment now. We will never get the reassurance of hearing that the matter is closed. The professed view of cabinet, what’s left of it, is that it would be wrong to close it.

The government has tried to explain its belabouring of Wilson-Raybould as being perfectly appropriate. She was supposed to verrrry carefully consider the fate of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs and a head office in Quebec, and then consider it again, and then consider it again. Butts tells us that they weren’t looking for a particular politically convenient answer, mind you.

They just stayed after her to keep reconsidering the answer she kept giving, explicitly or implicitly. They reassured her at every turn that the decision was hers. And then they got rid of her and made it someone else’s.

[…]

In theory, if you wanted to get rid of a truculent justice minister who won’t put a thumb on the scales of justice, offering her a job you know she will never, ever take seems like a good way to set about doing that. But this is just an unhappy coincidence, and we are not to draw inferences from it. I would conclude that “The Liberal government undoubtedly meant well,” but saying this sarcastically has, I am afraid, already become a Canadian cliché.

March 5, 2019

It’s almost as if we elected the actor, but really wanted the character he’d played on TV instead

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells calls Justin Trudeau an imposter:

… the problem for Trudeau — who came to power promising a new era of transparency — is that this phoniness is a trait he shows all too often.

In 2016, when the Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had attended a Vancouver fundraiser attended by Chinese billionaires — one of whom promptly donated money to the private Montreal foundation named for Trudeau’s father — the Liberal Party of Canada said no government business is discussed at such events. Trudeau later admitted they asked about policy and he talked about jobs.

Legalizing cannabis is one of the signature achievements of this government. But Trudeau has never been able to say he did it so affluent consumers could more readily get high. Instead, he had everyone in his government swear the goal was to drain the black market and keep the stuff out of the hands of teenagers. Neither goal has come anywhere close to being reached. Judged by the standards of a bake-off for the children of privilege, legalization has been a great success. Judged by the standards the Prime Minister claims, it’s a mess. The operating assumption seems to be that we’re simply supposed to read between the lines — that we’ll understand that when Trudeau speaks he is not to be taken seriously.

[…]

I could keep picking examples of Trudeau acting one way and talking another (climate change, Indigenous reconciliation) until the cows come home. But at some point you’d say, with reason, that this is not exactly innovative behaviour for an elected politician. But what’s so damaging about the SNC-Lavalin affair is that, in private, there’s no evidence Trudeau governs as the future-looking sophisticate he plays on TV.

[…]

There’s a stack of assumptions behind that strategy as long as your arm: that SNC does work so good it could never be replaced, that a trial would wreck it, that a mere judge couldn’t possibly weigh the company’s social contribution in determining its legal liability. And the biggest assumption of them all is that all of this is so obvious, none of it needed explaining in two years of feverish PMO activity. Not to the attorney general — she got earfuls of explanation, delivered in shifts working overtime, for months after she made what Trudeau felt was the wrong decision. And not to you and me. Trudeau never thought you and I deserved to know why he was trying to keep SNC out of a trial court. This makes a mockery of a simple idea: the consent of the governed.

It turns out that behind the curtain, the wizard from the woke future of politics was indulging the oldest of old-fashioned industrial policy. Navdeep Bains, the so-called innovation minister, might as well legally change his name to C.D. Howe for all the innovation going on here.

As for Wilson-Raybould’s diversity of background and perspective, it turned out to be inconvenient. She didn’t buy into a cozy meeting of minds along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor. And the meeting of minds was what really mattered. Because it’s 2019.

The day got worse for Trudeau, as another cabinet minister resigned rather than stick around for the deck chairs to start floating away:

March 3, 2019

We need more data on the SNC-Lavalin affair

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne insists the whole story must come out before we call in the RCMP:

Where do we go from here? It is important not to get ahead of ourselves. Opposition calls for the prime minister to resign over the SNC-Lavalin affair, or for the RCMP to investigate, are premature at this point. However compelling Wednesday’s testimony before the Commons justice committee by the former minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, may have been, all of the facts are not in.

It is still open to the government to provide those missing facts, and still possible to hope they may prove exculpatory. That they have done their level best so far to provide none, alas, strongly suggests the contrary. Even in response to Wilson-Raybould’s detailed, documented account of the many and sustained ways in which he and officials in his government attempted to interfere with a criminal prosecution, to the point not only of threatening her job but, it would seem, of carrying out the threat, the best that Justin Trudeau could offer was that he “disagreed” with it.

The prime minister prevented Wilson-Raybould from speaking for as long as he dared, and is still insisting she may not discuss potentially significant conversations with him and his cabinet after she was shuffled out of Justice. The prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has agreed to testify before the committee, but no current employee of the prime minister’s office has yet been called, nor have any of the others Wilson-Raybould identified as having pressured her to go easy on SNC-Lavalin, save the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick.

Demands for a public inquiry, then, or at least for all of the relevant witnesses to be called before the committee, are closer to the mark. Whatever the prime minister and his people may or may not be guilty of, they cannot be allowed to get away with this blatant stonewalling. So, too, the Conservative and NDP leaders were justified in calling for Parliament to continue to sit next week, rather than take the next two weeks off. Indeed, they would be within their rights to hold up all parliamentary business, including the budget, until they get satisfaction. It is that important.

March 2, 2019

Mark Steyn – Trudeaupia on the Waterfront

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the “nothing to see here, let’s just move on” SNC-Lavalin affair:

Speaking as someone who gets sued a lot, I account Jody Wilson-Raybould as a killer exemplar of what every litigant dreads the other side coming up with – a credible witness. In a riveting performance, the former Attorney General of Canada laid out calmly and without overheated rhetorical flourish a campaign by the most powerful figures in the government to get their cronies at SNC-Lavalin off the hook of a criminal prosecution for bribing (Libyan) government officials. Ms Wilson-Raybould identified just shy of a dozen Liberal Party bruisers who leaned on her, including the most senior chaps in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Ministry of Finance – and ultimately the PM himself.

But, in a competitive field, perhaps the behavior of Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, a career civil servant and the highest-ranking in Canada, is the most outrageous. In a three-man meeting – the Clerk, the Attorney General and the PM – Mr Wernick acted not as an impartial public servant but as a gung-ho party hack demanding political interference in a criminal prosecution in order to help Justin’s pals beat the rap:

    The PM again cited potential loss of jobs and SNC moving. Then to my surprise – the Clerk started to make the case for the need to have a DPA – he said “there is a board meeting on Thursday (Sept 20) with stock holders” … “they will likely be moving to London if this happens”… “and there is an election in Quebec soon”…

    At that point the PM jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “and I am an MP in Quebec – the member for Papineau”.

    I was quite taken aback. My response – and I remember this vividly – was to ask the PM a direct question while looking him in the eye – I asked: “Are you politically interfering with my role / my decision as the AG? I would strongly advise against it.” The Prime Minister said “No, No, No – we just need to find a solution.”

When Ms Wilson-Raybould held firm against Justin’s pressure to lean on the Crown’s prosecution of a serious criminal case, he arranged a Cabinet reshuffle to remove her as Attorney General.

This is a protection racket: Underneath the LGBTQWERTY Ramadan socks and the Bollywood bridesmaid outfits for his passage through India, Justin Trudeau turns out to be Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront. My old friend Paul Wells calls this a “moral catastrophe” for Justin. Not quite: He is who he is. It’s a moral catastrophe for Canada if those who dote on the Dauphin make the rest of us go along with it.

February 26, 2019

“The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conrad Black on the ongoing SNC-Lavalin scandal:

The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy. It is alleged by unnamed sources that the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was pressured to order her officials to assess fines rather than prosecute executives for financial crimes in the matter of SNC-Lavalin’s methods in seeking certain construction contracts in Libya, not a country where the Better Business Bureau rules commerce with an iron fist. At a later date, Ms. Wilson-Raybould consented to be moved to the position of associate minister of national defence and minister of veterans’ affairs, generally considered a demotion. When rumours circulated in the media about the propriety of allowing the company to pay fines rather than prosecute some of its executives, the prime minister defended the government, denied the rumours, and stated that the minister’s continued presence in the government was proof that the rumours were unfounded. The minister then resigned, but has since attended a full caucus meeting and had a calming effect on the Liberal MPs. She has said nothing publicly because of the delicacy of lawyer/client privilege opposite the prime minister, who has declined to waive the privilege. This is, in fact, bunk. The prime minister was not the client of the minister of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair, and the prime minister doesn’t have any standing to waive anything on this subject, and his invocation of cabinet secrecy is twaddle, especially after the subject was aired before the entire Liberal caucus.

All government spokespeople deny any official misconduct or impropriety but the principal secretary and chief strategist of the regime, Gerald Butts, resigned, with the novel explanation that although nothing inappropriate had occurred, he thought the air should be cleared, so he walked the plank. This is the point at which this supposed scandal becomes uniquely Canadian. A minister belatedly resigns but informally continues to attend cabinet and expatiate on this issue and the government reinforces its protestations of absolute innocence of wrongdoing by the prime minister accepting the abrupt resignation of the most influential non-elected person in the government (and he also had a great deal more influence than almost all the elected ministers and MP’s).

I invite any reader to cite another country where a minister would consent to be shuffled down, maintain a complete silence while her father, an indigenous leader, has conducted an entertaining non-stop press conference denouncing the “white man’s justice,” although he has clearly gamed the system pretty well for himself, and the head of the prime minister’s office and closest collaborator of the prime minister resigns while proclaiming that nothing improper has been done and that he is only sacrificing himself to satiate the false accusers. This is too innocuous for the Americans and major European countries, too wholesome for Latin America, too complicated for the Swiss and Scandinavians, too discrete for Australia, and small potatoes for the Japanese. This is Canada, the land of Dudley Do-Right, and before him, of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald singing Rose-Marie in the Rockies. The story line of this scandal is absurd, but in its way, magnificently Canadian.

February 22, 2019

The odd dual role of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh provides an interesting tidbit of Canadian constitutional detail in the SNC-Lavalin affair:

As a minister she can be expected, and will have expected, to sometimes be given advice and orders from the PM. It would not be an unusual feature of her job to have one of the PM’s close advisers visit her with delegated instructions. Maybe sometimes those instructions would be delivered somewhat abruptly. It happens.

But. The minister of justice also bears an associated title: she is also the attorney general of Canada. You may have gotten the idea that this is just a matter of tradition, a romantic holdover from olden times. It is in fact a matter of explicit statute, the Department of Justice Act, as well as an important constitutional concept. The minister of justice is a politician who writes legislation and oversees the operation of law and courts. The attorney general, although always and necessarily the same human as the minister of justice, is a distinct person charged with the royal authority to commence, manage and cancel criminal prosecutions. When someone sues the Crown it is normally the attorney general who answers, and when the Crown sues it is done through her.

What does this mean? It means that if you are the prime minister’s trusted old chum who does his dirty work, it is all right for you to visit a mere minister of justice, operating in that capacity, and to tell her what the boss wants done for crude partisan reasons. But it is quite strictly forbidden to do that to an attorney general.

In matters of hiring or statute-writing, you can go ahead, kick down her door, and tell her “Orillia needs more red-headed Hungarian judges!” or “There really oughta be a law against candy.” When it comes to prosecutions — when madame has her attorney general hat on — it is very different. You, as a sunny-ways enforcer, are not even supposed to provide unsolicited advice or hints from the prime minister. The PM may be the minister of justice’s boss, but he is not in the chain of command between the attorney general and the sovereign at all.

An attorney general is supposed to make prosecution decisions with the good of the country in mind, and she can ask ministers for their opinions about what would be good, just as she could consult any other schmuck. But for a PM or his dogsbody to venture such an opinion spontaneously, whatever the motive, is not cool. If someone tried to give an attorney general such advice, and she told that person to shove off back to Cape Breton in a leaky dory, and she woke up one morning not long after and turned on the radio and heard that she was no longer attorney general, that would certainly be a mighty big deal.

November 6, 2018

Fly the “Party Flight” with Canadian (Forces) Airways!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Ottawa Citizen, David Pugliese reminds us that not all is right with the higher-ups of the Canadian military, based on what was allowed to occur — and at least partly covered-up — on a VIP flight last year:

The December 2017 “Team Canada” tour – now more popularly known in some quarters in the military as “the party flight” – has without a doubt been a major public relations black eye for the Canadian Forces.

The tour, with VIPs who were supposed to boost the morale of military personnel deployed overseas, turned into a fiasco. Some VIPs on the RCAF flight to Greece and Latvia were drunk and abusive to the crew, in particular the military flight attendants. The VIP civilian passengers, including former NHL player Dave “Tiger” Williams were exempt from security screening before the flight, and some — already drunk — walked on to the Canadian Forces aircraft with open alcoholic drinks in their hands.

Two individuals were so drunk they were reported to have urinated themselves. Video taken aboard the plane showed people — including a staff member from Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance’s office — dancing in the aisles of the aircraft with their drinks as a rock band played at the back of the plane. Others chewed tobacco, in violation of Canadian Forces rules, spitting the slimy juice into cups for flight attendants to clean up.

The military flight crew was prohibited from approaching the VIPs except to provide them with service. The crew felt they couldn’t do anything to put a halt to the antics as these very important people were Vance’s guests.

Williams has been charged with sex assault and assault. He denies the charges.

The $337,000 taxpayer-funded trip was planned by Vance’s office. Vance okayed the booze on the RCAF aircraft.

We know all of this now.

But almost right from the beginning, the Canadian Forces/Department of National Defence Staff Public Affairs branch appeared to try its best to mislead journalists – and ultimately the public – on what actually took place on that flight.

June 6, 2018

How to become Prime Minister of Spain without the pesky need for voter approval

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Black explains how the new Spanish leader got there without ever winning an election:

There is a big, fat, blindingly obvious problem with Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez: no one voted for him, or indeed the Socialist Party (PSOE) of which he is leader.

In fact, 46-year-old Sánchez has never been overly familiar with the electorate. He entered congress in 2009 as an internal Socialist Party replacement because a lawmaker was leaving his seat early. He then promptly lost this seat in the 2011 General Election. Fortunately, in 2013, another Socialist congressional deputy left her seat early, meaning that Sánchez could once more return to the political fray, bypassing the electorate en route. Improbably, he was successfully nominated, thanks to the backing of PSOE grandees, as the Socialists’ general secretary in 2014, leading them to their worst-ever result in the 2015 General Elections. A few months later, the PSOE got rid of him as leader, and Sánchez, in turn, rid himself of congressional responsibilities by quitting his seat. His reason, it seems, was to have time to concentrate on becoming the PSOE leader again. Which is what happened.

His triumph this past week, therefore, was not built on anything resembling popular support. Rather, it was a feat of constitutional chutzpah. It began last week, when the corruption scandal that has long dogged Mariano Rajoy, then prime minister, and leader of the governing Popular Party, came to a momentary head (the so-called ‘Gurtel’ case is ongoing), with the jailing of one of the PP’s former treasurers for 33 years for fraud and money-laundering. The PP was itself also fined for benefitting from the kickbacks for public contracts. Sánchez saw his chance, and proposed a motion of no confidence in Rajoy, a move that under Spanish constitutional law results, if successful, in the replacement of the subject of the motion by the proposer. Congress duly passed the motion and that was that – for the first time in Spanish political history, a sitting prime minister was deposed through a vote of no confidence. Sánchez, with the Socialists in tow, had ascended to power.

But that big, fat fly in the ointment of Sánchez and the Socialists’ success won’t go away. For a start, you can see the absence of any public mandate writ large in the congressional maths. As it stands (following the 2015 General Election), Rajoy’s PP remains the largest single party, with 134 members of the 350-strong Congress of Deputies, while Sánchez and the now ruling socialists have only 84. To be able to govern without going to the electorate, Sánchez will have to strike deals with the seven other parties and regional representatives, including, of course, Catalonia’s independence-demanding cohort. Which means concessions, deals, compromises, all rich in cynicicsm and opportunism.

April 24, 2018

The Windrush scandal in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:

The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.

For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.

It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.

The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.

March 9, 2018

DicKtionary – G is for Gangster – Arnold Rothstein

Filed under: History, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost
Published on 7 Mar 2018

G is for Gambler, relying on luck,
Or insider knowledge, to make a quick buck
G’s also for Gangster, you know what I mean?
And combining the two was Arnold Rothstein.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Like TimeGhost on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimeGhostHistory/

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Based on a concept by Astrid Deinhard and Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera by: Ryan Tebo
Edited by: Bastian Beißwenger

A TimeGhost format produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

February 24, 2018

“Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation”

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Britain — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple puts the boots to Oxfam:

It is very wrong, morally, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but I cannot disguise from myself the intense pleasure, amounting almost to joy, with which I learned of the public exposure of the wrongdoings of Oxfam in Haiti, Chad, and elsewhere. Its workers, sent to bring relief to the acute and chronic sufferings of those countries, used the charity’s money, partly derived from voluntary contributions and partly from government subventions (the British government and the European Union are by far the largest contributors to British Oxfam), to patronise local prostitutes, some of them underage, and also to conduct orgies, no doubt at a fraction of what they would have cost to conduct at home.

Oxfam, at least in Britain, has long been one of the most Pecksniffian of organisations, much give to auto-beatification. Mr. Pecksniff, in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, introduces his daughters, called Charity and Mercy, to Mrs. Todgers, adding ‘Not unholy names, I hope.’ It is therefore of the hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff that I think whenever I pass the Oxfam shop in my small town, with its unctuous slogan, Thank you for being humankind, posted in the window. It is only with difficulty that I resist the urge to throw a brick through it.

Of course, Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation — and the sexual exploits (or should I say exploitations?) of its workers in Haiti and elsewhere are the least of it. In the moral sense, though not the legal, it has for many years been guilty of fraud, of misleading the public.

I first realised this some years ago when I found a used book dealer of my long acquaintance poring in his shop over Oxfam’s annual accounts.

‘Look at this,’ he said, but I saw nothing until he pointed it out to me.

Oxfam, in common with many other charities in Britain, runs thrift stores in practically every British town and city. Such thrift stores are now more numerous even than Indian restaurants: they allow people to give away their unwanted belongings in the belief that, by so doing, they are furthering a good cause.

My acquaintance pointed out that, despite receiving their goods free of charge, paying practically nothing for their labour (which was voluntary), and paying much reduced local taxes, Oxfam shops made a profit on turnover of a mere 17 per cent, much less than his own, despite his incomparably greater expenses. How was such a thing possible, by what miracle of disorganisation (or malversation of funds)?

Until then, I had carelessly assumed that the great majority of any money that I gave to a large charity went to serve its ostensible end, say the relief of avoidable suffering. I was not alone in this, of course. When I asked the volunteer ladies in a local shop run on behalf of the British Red Cross what percentage of the money I paid for a book there went to the Red Cross, they looked at me as if I were mad.

‘Why, all of it of course,’ piped up one of the ladies.

The real average figure at the time for Red Cross thrift stores was 8 per cent; but the volunteer ladies supposed, because the goods they sold were free to the Red Cross and they themselves were not paid, that (apart from a small amount for unavoidable expenses) all the money raised went directly to victims of earthquakes and the like.

January 28, 2018

“[A] right to due process in politics? That has never been a thing”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the weird, fast end of Patrick Brown’s career as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives:

Many women often said they got a creepy vibe off Patrick Brown. His haircut was kind of odd. In question period, he was too shrill.

The Red Bull fridge in his office put me off. I associate Red Bull fridges and their foul contents with terrible nightclubs full of muscle T-wearing jackasses on the make. In 2012, Brown tweeted a photo of himself with two friends dressed up for Halloween at a terrible-looking Barrie nightclub he was known to frequent. He’s dressed up as James Bond. He’s pointing his toy Walther at Goose from Top Gun and Joel from Risky Business. I want to reach back through time and space and slap all three of them.

These would all be bad reasons for a bank to deny Patrick Brown a loan, or for a taxi driver to deny him a ride, or for a company to fire him from a job in the legal department.

But they are precisely the sorts of often silly, unfair, perhaps totally misguided little whims that can turn people off politicians.

It’s widely accepted that Robert Stanfield’s 1974 campaign was materially harmed by his dropping of a football. John Tory’s principled stance in favour of funding religious schools in Ontario besides Catholic ones sent the Tories’ 2007 campaign rolling downhill onto a pier that then collapsed into a lake. People still can’t believe Hillary Clinton’s emails might have cost her the presidency.

In short, there is no justice in politics. Morons win, geniuses lose, people get screwed who don’t deserve it. So it has been very strange to see some commentators and correspondents portray Brown as having been horribly hard done by in the aftermath of two women’s allegations of sexual assault and coercion at his hands.

[…]

In the (seemingly unlikely) event these allegations result in criminal charges, he will have his day in court and face his accusers just like anyone else. And we do have defamation laws in this country. Brown must surely know who his accusers are.

But a right to due process in politics? That has never been a thing.

As party leader, Brown could turf from caucus any MPP who displeased him — as he turfed Jack MacLaren after a spree of idiocies. Every four years, his and all his fellow MPPs’ job prospects rest in the hands of the voters. That’s assuming they pass a party review that considers criteria as vague as “any ethical questions or concerns,” and assuming the leader is willing to sign their nomination papers. (It seems unlikely that whoever leads the Tories into the June 7 election will sign Brown’s.)

I was never a fan of Brown, but I’m not a conservative, so it only bothered me in the sense that I thought he was unlikely to be the one to turf the Liberals out of office at Queen’s Park. I’ve paid so little attention to the man that this will only be the second time his name has appeared on the blog since he was elected leader (another Patrick Brown shows up in searches, but he was an NFL hopeful with the Vikings back in 2010).

December 2, 2017

Reaching the limits of the “Burleigh effect”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR on the recent wave of news about sexual misdeeds of powerful politicians and prominent members of the media:

So, John Conyers now hints that members of Congress have been covering up widespread sexual assaults and workplace harassment from within their ranks for years, and that if he goes down lots of others will go down with him.

This is credible. We already know Congress has been paying out hush money to the tune of $17M to keep a lid on such allegations. That figure suggests that if there’s full disclosure, the carnage is going to be terrible.

But…Democrats will get hurt a lot worse than Republicans.

Why do I say this? Because Republicans have already been through a media hostility filter. The same J. Random Reporter (and Reporterette) that will manufacture chin-tugging excuses for the likes of Bill Clinton or Al Franken positively slavers at the thought of catching some old white conservative dude with his pants down. It is therefore likely that the really egregious Republican cases are already over.

Democrats, on the other hand, have been protected by what I’ll call the Burleigh effect. You remember Nina Burleigh, who said in public she’d give Bill Clinton a blowjob if it would protect abortion rights? Yeah, that.

The sewage the press has been not covering (Cokie Roberts said every female reporter in DC knew not to get on an elevator with Conyers) is likely to bust loose now. Especially because the hard-left faction of the Democrats obviously sees this as a way to purge the Clintonites.

I predict it’s going to be a grim time to be a Democrat in the next three months. Republicans will doubtless try to prolong the agony into the 2018 election season, and might succeed. In any case their campaign to stop the odious Ray Moore is looking pretty doomed,

November 27, 2017

Steve Kates on growing up in a communist home

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Steve Kates reflects on how his early upbringing gave him insights into modern political discourse:

The one blessing about being brought up in a communist household is that you understand the left a good deal better than most. It also brings an added measure of concern when I see how easily a public unused to lying as a tactic is influenced by these manoeuvres which are standard practice on the left. My Dad was an expert in agit prop and I grew up understanding the role of the agent provocateur only too well. These are not well-meaning individuals who wish to investigate the truth. They are individuals whose only interest is to disrupt the communications among those on the other side through whatever lies they might find convenient and they hope persuasive.

[…] You will be lied to by the left to the furthest extent they believe they can get away with. That there is not an instantaneous scepticism amongst us on this side of politics from any unverified political story carried by a mainstream media organisation fills me with dread since most of us are so middle class that we find it hard to believe others will lie, distort, or withhold relevant information without the slightest hesitation if it serves their ends. The attitude you need to take when reading anything from an MSM report is the same attitude you might take when buying a used car. Do not trust a thing you are told and make sure you verify everything you can from a separate source.

Dishonesty is the trade mark of the left, not that they have a monopoly, but it is a specific tactic aimed at the fair minded who are seldom as aware as they need to be of the practice, and seldom think of the need to guard against the premeditated lies they tell. […] The interesting part is that for the left to succeed, they can only achieve their ends by lying. For the right, what you hear people say is almost invariably what they believe. The left often mimics the same concerns but it is tactical and never substantive unless for a change good policy overlaps what they see as tactical advantage.

The one valuable part of being on this side of the fence is that with so many out there on the left who will swarm around any genuine falsehood stated by someone on the right, the standard of probity is higher. This is part of the reason why sex scandals, to just name the issue in relation to Roy Moore, are not as common on the right as on the left. Except that when they are caught out – such as with Bill Clinton – it is no longer a scandal and is put to bed as soon as it is practical to do so. They never mean it. It is not hypocrisy, it is a policy of deceit. They are perfectly aware they are lying and just take the rest of us for fools.

September 30, 2017

Area poet exposes big-name poet for plagiarism

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bancroft is a quiet place (queue the joke about spending a week there one afternoon), and hardly the kind of place that you’d expect to be in the news for the investigative activity of a local poet:

A local Bancroft area poet has garnered international attention after inadvertently discovering and reporting alleged plagiarism by Canada’s former parliamentary poet laureate and Governor General Award-winning poet Pierre DesRuisseaux, now deceased.

“I was looking at Canada’s national poet laureate website, and I saw that some of the former poet laureate [DesRuisseaux’s] material was listed there,” Kathy Figueroa told Bancroft This Week. “I read the translation from the French for the poem J’Avance, and I was completely astounded … it was derived from Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise … I recognized it immediately. I was shocked … dismayed … incredulous.”

Figueroa then contacted the Office of the Poet Laureate to report her discovery. She noticed the poem was pulled immediately from the website. She also reported the information to Plagiarism Alert where a British investigator and poet Ira Lightman subsequently determined that other poems attributed to DesRuisseaux had plagiarized well-known poets such as Dylan Thomas and Tupac Shakur, according to CBC News. He reported his findings to the British Guardian newspaper, giving Figueroa credit for her critical part in the discovery.

As a poet herself, plagiarism is not something new. In fact, Figueroa has suffered from theft of her work on several occasions in the past.

“This is not trivial,” she said. “It is very dismaying when your work has been taken by someone else … and especially if that person has a respected name. There is a feeling of helplessness, and it impacts negatively on the person’s creativity. It can leave you disenchanted … you don’t feel like writing anymore.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress