Contempt Cronyism

Well, well. That didn't take very long, did it?

Alykhan Velshi's climb up the ranks of the Contempt Party continues.

Alison at Creekside first took note of Velshi here.

Now CBC reports:

Former Jason Kenney staffer Alykhan Velshi is returning to Parliament Hill -- this time as director of planning for the Prime Minister's Office [...].

Velshi was most recently executive director of EthicalOil.org, an organization set up to promote writer Ezra Levant's take on Canada's oilsands.

Funny how the ReformaTory claim that Stephen Harper Conservatives would govern differently never happened.

Plus ça change, more there are Con jobs feeding at the public trough.

Update from The Mark.

News you won't see or read about on SunMedia

Où sont les islamophobes d'antan et d'aujourd'hui?

The moozlim-haters are worker ants busy-bustling around all levels of SunMedia. And that's why not a single morsel of information to read, hear or see will be found there, regarding this powerful humanitarian news story.

A remote First Nation in northern Manitoba will be eating better this weekend, thanks to a large shipment of meat and bread that an Islamic charity is donating to the community.

The Winnipeg-based Zubaidah Tallab Foundation is sending about 200 kilograms of beef, lamb and sheep meat, along with sacks of bread, by plane to Shamattawa Manitoba, on Thursday morning.

Hussain Guisti, who heads up the foundation, said Muslims butcher an animal at this time every year and give part of it to charity. Guisti said the foundation decided to send this year's donation to Shamattawa, a First Nations community of about 1,100 located just south of Hudson Bay, in the hopes of making an impact there.

This is why I love the CBC. It doesn't suppress new stories - unlike SunMedia and SunTV which only carry infotainment that fits into its corporation's rightwing ideological framework.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if SunMedia had positive things to say about Lou Engle and his *prayer* meeting.

Grand merci to Beari8it who tweeted the link to the CBC news story.

Dear Contempt Party of Canada:

you lie you lie you lie YOU LIE

Your MASSIVE Con Jobs - senators Doug Finley and Irving Gerstein, past party director Michael Donison, and past CFO Susan Kehoe - charged with criminal offenses were ^NOT "cleared of wrongdoing".

Your lawyer plea bargained to avoid a trial.

Crown prosecutor Richard Roy argued there was no point in sticking with the initial, more serious charges and dragging the matter out in court because the maximum fines allowed would have been the same.

As to dropping the charges against the four top Tory officials who actually carried out the in-and-out scheme Roy told reporters that "the public interest does not require that we continue on these charges."

How did you subvert the Crown prosecutor? Did you threaten his family or promise him a more lucrative job with your tar sand cronies?

What you did was illegal. From here:

The Conservative Party of Canada and its fundraising arm, the Conservative Fund of Canada, were fined $52,000 after pleading guilty to exceeding national advertising spending limits and improperly reporting the expenses incurred through a sophisticated “in-and-out” scheme.

Under it, Harper’s party shifted national advertising money, through wire transfers into and immediately out of local riding campaign accounts, in order to claim national ad spending as local. In the words of national campaign director Doug Finley, it would “run a major slam dunk” over competitors in the final weeks of the campaign.

You are a party of criminals that obfuscate constantly to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Something Different

Matt Taibbi wises up.

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

. . .

But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

. . .

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

. . .

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Something different. Like this maybe.

Hell-O kitty!

Go read Creekside: Outsource This! Boeing and Lockheed Martin war bling 'full of fake Chinese parts'.

*Epic* attack indeed.

DAMMIT JANET! admires Elizabeth Warren. A lot.

There is much in what she says and how she says it that is admirable.

Thus attacks upon her candidacy began, first with the sexist & idiotic and now ... with the big (though far from MASSIVELY endowed) hired gun.

Yep. Karl Rove.

It’s no surprise that Rove and his ilk are attacking Warren. She’s a major threat to the Republican Party and its allied corporate backers for two reasons.

Number one: she’s running even with Brown in a race that may very decide control of the Senate.

Number two: her reformist background and brand of progressive populism is deeply resonant right now. Unlike so many in Washington, she’s taken on the banks and their allies, is not beholden to them, and is not afraid of them. That makes her dangerous to the political establishment in both parties.

via AntoniaZ tweet.

Smells like a plea bargain.

Walks and quacks like one, too!

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid embarrassing Elections Act charges against four officials accused of deliberately exceeding spending limits in the 2006 campaign that vaulted the Tories to power.

In return, the Conservative Party of Canada and its fundraising arm are pleading guilty to lesser charges that characterize what took place as a mere error instead of intentional misconduct.

What a splendid display of the Contempt that PMSHithead's and his Con jobs have for the criminal justice system and the rule of law.

Patricia Coleman Is Full of Shit

From Psychology Today, an account of the thorough trashing of Patricia Coleman's latest effort to equate abortion and insanity. This time by UK's Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Much juiciness. Stuff like she used data from only 22 studies, 11 of them by herself. She counts her own data multiple times. Compares the equivalent of apples and oranges. And so on.

Sins against just about every law of science and truthiness, in short.

The author, Jim Coyne, promises further blogging on her background, which we look forward to, but mainly I'm posting this because of the photo.

The Dog Ate My Personhood Initiative. . .

After getting their collective ass handed to them in Mississippi, those persistent personhood peeps aren't giving up. They've got a raft of similar abortion-killing, birth-control-banning, miscarriage-criminalizing dealies rarin' to go.

All over the blogosphere and Twitter, fetus fetishists are advancing whacky reasons why their supposed slam-dunk failed so miserably. Here's some interesting speculation on what happened between the opinion polls -- that indicated it would pass easily -- and the voting booth by Amanda Marcotte. (Hint: secret ballots are excellent things in conformist conservative jerkwater places like Mississippi.)

But my favourite load of BS is by SUZYALLCAPSLOCK. This is a link to the tweet linking to HER post. Two clicks but no juvenile redirect to fetus pr0n.

Commenter lastchancetosee sums up HER increasingly desperate explanations of the fiasco:

So to recap:
a) even Pro-Lifers opposed it, preferring to actively pursue a humiliating defeat by voting against it than succeeding in passing it and thus stopping the "abortion holocaust" at least temporarily, not to mention the PR advantages, and precedent etc.*
b) if the Catholic Church with its negligible following in Mississippi had recommended voting for it, hundreds of thousands of non-Catholic voters would have marched to the polls for this, when their own convictions and religious leaders weren't enough to do so.
c) due to unspecified "circumstances" people decided to kill an initiative they supported
d) this is actually a huge win for the pro-life cause because a vote that was expected to be a close thing was a very clear knock-down, and that is a good thing.
e) this result still has absolutely nothing to do with 60% of the people, including many pro-lifers, opposing this measure.

The nile is not just a river in egypt.

* you do know what the purpose of all these initiatives for amendments, laws etc. is, do you? To get as many as them passed as possible, so that they get challenged in the courts, until you find one case where a court sides with you, thereby creating precedent. The people who push these things KNOW that they will be challenged. They WANT them to be challenged. Why do you think it is that most of these things have so very obvious constitutional issues?
This being challenged in the Supreme Court is a BONUS, not a drawback. But sure, pro-lifers opposed it because they feared it might be overturned ….

h/t for cartoon to @IAmDrTiller.

Link to original cartoon.

ADDED: The liars at LifeShite speak truth for once:

As pro-life political scientist and abortion law researcher Michael New explains, if the amendment can’t win in Mississippi, it’s likely not going to win anywhere in the current political climate.

“It is difficult to see where Personhood proponents go from here. Tuesday’s election offered Personhood supporters their best opportunity for electoral success. They qualified a citizen initiative in Mississippi — among the most pro-life states in the country — during a low-turnout election in which Democrats fielded relatively weak statewide candidates,” he explains. “In spite of all this, the Mississippi Personhood Amendment still lost by a double-digit margin.”

Knowing that the personhood amendment lost by a landslide twice in a swing state and a lopsided 17-point margin in arguably the most pro-life state in the nation, there’s little realistic expectation that the personhood amendment will be approved anywhere in the country. As the amendment continues to rack up defeats, support from pro-fie advocates willing to invest in what will almost assuredly be a losing proposition will wane. Media reports will continue focusing on the pro-life movement losing at the polls and the pro-abortion side will continue gloating that they are in the majority despite clear polling data showing America is pro-life.

The damage to the pro-life movement from suffering defeat after defeat in the polls will become more and more palpable as the losses mount.

LifeShite's strategy is to get more misogynist Supreme Court justices.