Not all harassment victims are viewed or treated as equal.

The journalist Ashley Csanady currently has a PostMedia piece that addresses Twitter harassment in general and in particular what happened when Michelle Rempel filed a complaint with the police.

Her excellent article provides a short account of the Rempel case as well as an overview of recent events, viz. the GAE trial.

It is factual and clear.

It doesn't editorialize or misrepresent as Blatchford is wont to do, when the demands of click-bait reporting or sob-sister sensationalizing gives her the cover she needs to champion the MRA cause.

Further to what Csanady wrote, there are points that bloggers and op-eds can raise.  This is where DJ! weighs in.

Last week I posted this about the sleazy grease of GAE's triumphant sneer.

The main difference between GAE and Damany Skeene is that the former oozes the slimy CONjob smarm that allow him and Ezra Levant to enjoy notoriety.  Their venal vituperation is widely disseminated and cheered by right wingers, racists, homophobe and misogynists.  In addition, GAE walks and talks the MRA/PUA philosophy. His entourage enables his narcissism and promotes him within the audiences of gynophobic orcs that slither at the edge of the world wide web.  He scored a point for Rape Culture!  His victims were not really victims because they had the NERVE to fight back against his vile invective!

Skeene, it would appear, is not supported or validated by any group.  In fact most people recoil from him.  One assumes the only compassionate attention he's likely to receive is administered by healthcare professionals.  He had used Twitter promiscuously to vent fury and hatred against a variety of targets.

The difference between Rempel and the women that GAE harassed, threatened, stalked and abused — online and "in real life" — is obvious. She was a Minister in the Con government when Skeene directed vile threats and verbal sexual abuse at her Twitter account.  Her complaint was legitimate and important because she was an elected official.  Police allocated the required resources to investigate, document, and prepare a case for the Crown to prosecute.  Her squadron of RCMP body guards was likely doubled.

But as Csanady points out, the trial unfolded under the media radar.

This gave me pause. Why did the PMO not seize this opportunity to demonstrate how their government was *tough on crime* and violence against women?

I suspect that if Skeene had been an individual who clearly associated with any left wing or progressive group such as anti-pipeline activism, or had expressed agreement with LPC or NDP policies, the PMO would have gleefully exploited the opportunity to smear the Harper regime's opponents.

But the truth is: deep down, Harper Reformist Cons never really gave a damn about Canadian women or even those prominent in their party. PMSHithead was a spiteful opportunist who attacked women who challenged him, and ditched or undermined those who became politically inconvenient: Deborah Gray, Belinda Stronach, Bev Oda, Helena Guergis, Beverley McLachlin, Cindy Blackstock ... a never-ending list, really.

Which is why Rempel was circumspect, and kept a low profile. There was no advantage then in using the criminal harassment trial to score political points for herself.  The PMO, or CPC HQ would have ground her into the dust.  She noted how the party destroyed Eve Adams because she wouldn't stick to the PMO script.

Nothing about Rempel's circumstances could be framed as a narrative that might enhance public sympathy in Harper's favour.  In fact, it was probably flagged as a potential nuisance and diversion from the grand election campaign plan.

But now.. Rempel is jockeying to gain an advance on other putative candidates for the CPC leadership.  I predict she will judiciously exploit the Twitter harassment trial, to establish credibility and to leverage whatever is beneficial to the image she is carefully crafting.

Update: As the tweet below points out, online campaigns that embolden threats of physical violence against Premier Rachel Notley in Albert keep escalating. The Wildrose Party leader has mildly spoken out against his supporters using these tactics that replicate the worst of US right-wing political dumpster fire rhetoric.

Alheli Picazo rigorously screen caps and archives evidence of online political incivility of all stripe. She documents what she has observed and caught before the thuggish authors delete them.  She regularly posts them in her Twitter line to remind partisans of that "people in glass houses.." thing.

Kathleen Smith has also noted and confronted those who instigate explosions of aggressive attacks against Alberta political figures.

Some journalists have reported on the scurrilous and terrifying threats expressed on Facebook, Twitter and in the comment threads at Levant's monetizing project, Rebel TV.  It is claimed the RCMP is investigating.

Yet NO charges of criminal harassment against the alleged RWNJ *rebels* have been filed yet, even though campaigns of online hatred against Notley have been encouraged and fed by Levant and his goons for over a year, now.

Let's make ALL the girls and women wear niqab, RIGHT?!

Now that I have your attention, my point is that Harper and the CPC are cravenly using the niqab to push hot buttons during this election.

The political cartoon above suggests the niqab issue will provide Harper with a "wind at his back" which he needs desperately needs to win the election race.

There are dozens of institutions that oppress women.  The niqab is the least of them but Harper's Attack Dingo™ Lynton Crosby has found one with formidable scaremongering OPTICS, right?

Susan Delacourt unpacks CPC doublespeak with regard to the niqab.

Rational people and critics of Harper's regime nail what the CPC tactic obfuscates:

This happened north of Ottawa last week. Basil Borutski 'allegedly' executed three women. How can this still occur, in Ontario, in 2015?

“Our systems need to try to pick out these warning signs sooner and do everything we can to provide safety and security,” [Illingworth] said. “There are absolutely gaps.”

The province’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, which works with the coroner’s office to review every domestic homicide in Ontario over more than a decade, has compiled a list of risk factors that “indicate the potential for lethality” within relationships or, to put it another way, a check-list to figure out the likelihood that an abuser will kill his partner.

Most of the boxes would be ticked off when it came to Borutski: a history of violence, an escalation of violence, obsessive behaviour, unemployment, isolation of victims and victims having an “intuitive sense of fear.”

From here:

Leighann Burns, the executive director of Ottawa women's shelter Harmony House, said many women feel that abusive men are not monitored closely enough after being released from jail, and that conditions placed on those who are released can, in some cases, easily be ignored.

"We hear from women routinely that the offences that men commit against them are not treated seriously in the criminal justice system," Burns said.

"Somebody who is lethally violent, who has clearly got no respect for the system or any sanctions that are meted out — there's not much that can be done, other than to lock him up or keep her hidden," she said.

So, probation officer are overworked, likely because of a large client load which, at the risk of provoking shrieks from Babs Kay, I will guess is 90% male offenders.

Remember Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Mohammad Amir, 50? Their bodies were found in the family’s Nissan, submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009. The family members who killed them were able to "justify" their murders using the same twisted patriarchal ideology that motivated Borutski.  

Women "provoke" their murderers by defying the Gawd-given control entrusted to men to extract resources from women.  If women and girls refuse to provide men with what they want and demand, they're disposable.  They can be threatened, harmed, damaged, tortured and killed with impunity.  That chilling premise is the core of patriarchal extremism throughout the world.

So, the niqab? Just as oppressive as Harper's Hard-On Crime regime of venal liars who did NOTHING during their 9 years in government to make Canada safer for women and girls.


For a rueful chuckle to end my pessimistic rambling, check out my co-blogger's post about #CdnNiqab as well has the photos that folks posted on Twitter.

CON Vetting Gone Wrong: Meet Hater Toyin Dada

Oh dear, it seems the CONs didn't do a very good job of vetting Etobicoke North candidate Toyin Dada.

Conservative Party candidate for Etobicoke-North, Toyin Dada, appears to have hidden or not disclosed two important parts of her past: (1) her participation with a homophobic Christian group in their protest at Toronto’s Gay Pride parade; & (2) her history of anti-abortion militancy, including protesting at abortion clinics.

She's involved with a gang called Christ's Forgiveness Ministries, that, according to CRA, gets government money.

And look! DJ! gets a link for finding her fetus fetish/slut-shaming connection to Back to Life.

Here she is as one of the "walkers."

The 25 women who walked from Montreal to Ottawa are the face of courage.  Each one has a different reason they walked but most walked because of a very personal experience they had with abortion.  Read a brief description of their reasons below.

The walkers are from different cultures in Canada, different ages, backgrounds and regions of the nation.

Odd, though, innit? that "Her Reason For Walking" is "coming soon." When, exactly, since the walk took place in the spring of 2013?

Here's her campaign website that mentions none of this devotion to hating in the Lard's name.

Well, maybe it did, but much of Dada's online life has been/is being scrubbed.

Video of Toyin wasn’t available. Like the video of her protesting at Pride, like the Google + post, it’s also been deleted. Though the ghost of it still shows up in search results like this.

Gee, I wonder what will happen when CPC overlords get a load of Dada's activities and remarks. Will they drop her like the "outspoken" Gilles Guibord?

Guibord’s exit as a Tory candidate follows the publication Thursday of screenshots of comments attributed to him regarding women, aboriginal people and religion.

And who might be ready to step into her place in Etobicoke North?

Hey! Here's a high-profile nutter candidate.

Asked where he would run, [Doug] Ford said Etobicoke North, where he did not believe the Conservatives had nominated a candidate. The Liberal incumbent, Kirsty Duncan, “outside of being a Liberal, is a good person,” he said. “She does a good job, she works hard.”

The Conservatives, however, say they already have a candidate nominated to challenge Duncan. The riding association has chosen Toyin Dada, a young non-profit executive director and singer.

And more machinations! Ford fans have launched a website urging him to run for CPC leadership.

Run Doug Run was started by a Milton farmer.

The SUN is reporting on the new website. There's a poll there. I voted "yes" to "Should Doug run for leadership of CPC?"

Stay tuned.

Is Nigel Wright to Harper what Chuck Colson was to Nixon?

From here:

So it was striking to see Nigel Wright, as a witness at the Mike Duffy trial, cite the Bible as his motivation for writing a $90,000 cheque for Mr. Duffy without telling his boss Stephen Harper. 

As quoted in Bloomberg, Wright said: "I was doing a good deed, and this is sort of Matthew 6. ... You should do these things quietly and not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." 

Citing the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew reflects Wright's reported devout Christianity, but it was a newsworthy statement in itself to the biblically illiterate reporters covering the trial.

It may also have been a coded warning to Stephen Harper, because Matthew 6 is one of the most explosively anti-Conservative passages in the Gospels, if not in the entire Bible. 

Read all of it: a trenchant piece from the erudite yet humble Crawford Kilian.

Both fern hill and I have been posting for years about this toxic intersection of extreme christian fundamentalist lobby and the US-style right-wing politicking, as staked out by Harper's CPC for the purpose of gaming Canadian democratic institutions to their advantage.

Prayer breakfasts. Special privileges for evangelical lobbyists. Innumerable private members bills to undermine abortion rights, which has emboldened fetushists to erode women's access in the provinces. Purported maternal health funding for international projects defined by anti-choicers. Prohibitionists pushing bills that criminalize and endanger sex workers. Downplaying violence against women and children - it's all gawd's plan. Christian extremists supporting war weapons sales to Israel and Saudis. Fake apologies to First Nations and Aboriginal people, facilitated by rightwing nutjobs. Progressive christian churches are audited by the CRA or their international projects defunded — as directed by Steve. The list goes on and on.

A recent event was savaged on Twitter, then crutinized by the MSM now seemingly capable of discerning between an individual's right to religious belief and the blatant deployment of religiosity for the benefit of a political party, à la *Grande Noirceur*.  It was the curious incident involving Con MP Wai Young and an evangelical church.

The Duffy trial, which one hopes will be the tipping point for the well deserved downfall and destruction of the CPC, has been chockfull of dramatic moments.  Wright's testimony and reams of email evidence bears witness to the byzantine works of PMSHithead's Politburo aka the PMO.

Some random christian dingbat chastised us for doubting the sincerity of Wright's religiosity.

Will the Duffy trial accomplish what the Watergate hearings did in the US? Will Harper be exposed, along with his thuggish team of Lee-Atwater-and-Karl-Rove wannabes aka the PMO?

And what about the cypher that is Nigel Wright: was he Steve's Chuck Colson?  

It's likely Wright was pressed to duty by corporate interests with deep, deep pockets who bankrolled Steve's rise to power. This happenstance clever and useful instrument had one assignment: keep a tight leash on PMSHithead.  

Whether he was contaminated by the toxic brew of paranoia and fury that Harper kept at a boil in the PMO, failed spectacularly at his job or deliberately left behind evidence of Mr Party-of-One's wrongdoing... it remains to be analyzed ad nauseam.

Bait and Hate

On March 8 2015, International Women's Day, the Harper government's Minister for Defence and Multiculturalism tweeted this:

Journalist Glen McGregor caught the mendacious tweet and investigated whether the misleading images were duplicitously used.

An article in La Presse has an interview with a scholar based at l'UQUAM, regarding the authenticity and provenance of images used in Jason Kenney's tweet. He deplored the lack of rigour shown by this tweet as well as the misrepresentation of what the images actually portray: the dramatization of a religious historical event (much like Catholic Good Friday re-enactment) and the public recitation of Coranic verses.

The press secretary to Minister Kenney, who is also responsible for Multiculturalism in the Harper government, declined to respond directly to requests for clarification regarding the choice of photos.

"This type of question obscures the real issue: [Daesh/IS] is a threat to women and minorities; it is a genocidal terrorist organization, a threat to national and international security," wrote Lauren Armstrong in an email sent to The Canadian Press.

That photo in the upper right hand corner is a still shot from a short video that Karren Brown found:

Kenney's tweet implied that the tearful girl is a terrified child bride of a Wahhadi Daesh fighter.  She isn't.

Watch the video. The girl is competing in a contest of memorization of religious text.  Her head is not covered.  Her audience is composed of supportive community members who encourage her.

Though there are other religions who do justify potential endangerment and harm to children because ... their ideology rules. Three years ago we wrote about the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board and how it facilitated such activities.

Yes, it's April and those three boys are exposed to the elements.  The board has now removed the photos from its Brampton school's website (child pornography?) but Andrea Houston got a screen cap which she kindly provided.

Kenney is a fundamentalist Catholic. My co-blogger is very fond of this video of a young and rabidly zealous Jason.  He didn't complete his undergraduate program.  We suspect that the Jesuits were far too liberal for his proclivities.

Need we remind our readers, as well as befuddled Harper Cons, that the Catholic Church facilitated, tolerated and enabled mental, physical and sexual violence exerted against thousands and thousands of children for centuries.  In countries like Ireland, the Philippines and El Salvador, women are still struggling to cast off the oppressive control of the Vatican's misogynist ideology.  They have uncovered great injustices and loudly demanded accountability from the Church.

Nonetheless, Harper Cons are putting all their communication eggs into one basket: systematically deploying fear mongering tactics to incite hatred and fear of Muslims as they ramp up to a fall election campaign. Also: fundraising!!!

On Monday evening, the leader of the Liberal Party

[..]accused Harper's Conservative Party government of blurring the line "between a real security threat and simple prejudice." In particular, he criticized the decision of a judge in Quebec to refuse the case of a Muslim woman who wore a hijab to court, arguing that it was a "troubling trend that Mr. Harper seems keen to accelerate and exploit" and linking it to the Conservative government's proposed ban on the wearing of Islamic face veils during the oath of citizenship. 

Trudeau told his audience. "So we should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a 'none is too many' immigration policy toward Jews in the 30s and 40s, being used to raise fears against Muslims today."

On Tuesday Harper's dog-and-pony show continued in Parliament, as his Minister for Public Safety obliquely referenced Islam during his presentation on Bill C-51 in committee.  Blaney justified this, claiming that "hate speech" sows the seeds that culminate in horrific events like the Holocaust. He rambled on, even alluding to the mass slaughter of Tutsi by Hutu.

The minister compared jihadist declarations to Nazi propaganda, saying "the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words." 

"Violence starts with words," the minister repeated. "Hate begins with words. I can talk to you about the genocide in Rwanda that began on the radio."

He was taken to task by NDP MP Randall Garrison who suggested Blaney was trivializing the Shoah. Later, the minister's office denied that he had paraphrased verses from the Qur'an. 

Since we're on the topic of hate speech, biblical text are still used to justify violence against women. The actions demanded in Deutoronomy 22:21 that Gary Pearson partly cited above may no longer prevail in law, but they persist in the stigma attached to sex work and in the shaming of women who refuse to let their sexuality be controlled by religious ideology.

"then they are to take her out to the entrance of her father's house, where the men of her city are to stone her to death. She has done a shameful thing among our people by having intercourse before she was married, while she was still living in her father's house. In this way you will get rid of this evil."

None of this is happenstance. Ordinary secular political parties are not seized by urgent, totalitarian needs to foment ethnic fear and religious hatred against muslims in order to stay in power.  But a party that is in thrall to Evangelical christian religious fundamentalism and bankrolled by foreign interests, as Harper's CPC is, certainly would be. 

The last words belong to Jed Bartlet, _The West Wing_ fictional president inspired by Jimmy Carter with some daubs of JFK.

Deploying religious text to expose the ugliness of religious fundamentalism.

Of interest to those with no particular religious adherence: the word TERROR entered the political vocabulary during the French revolution as these events unfolded. A demonstration that any ideology, even anti-religious, can be used to justify violent government repression.  

UPDATE: The hoax photos that Kenney deployed misrepresent their original use. Taken from an anti-Muslim hate-inciting site. Thoroughly deconstructed here.

Why aren't intelligent blondes speaking up against this abomination?

A few weeks back, I joked on Twitter about how *some* blondes made the whole... race? species? look dumb, and that the smart ones should sue for defamation of character.

You know, just as every secular, cultural or religious muslim should loudly, publicly denounce every act of violence committed by barbaric individuals and groups who exploit an ideological interpretation of Islam to justify their carnage and sexual terrorism. 

And now this, in my email box this morning.

Just put "Eve Adams" in a search box on Twitter. Hundreds of tweets and re-tweets.  Some amusing. Some informative. Some trenchant. Some ... not so much.

One has to wonder if the testosterone-endowed members of the LPC even bothered consulting the savvy women in their party to ascertain whether accepting Adams was a sagacious decision.

At DJ! we wrote this about Adams right after the 2011 election. Before the first break-up with Soudas. Their reconciliations. The betrayals. The ongoing media soap opera.

So. Did Eve Adams jump or was she pushed?

There's a third possibility.

She and her partner Dimitri Soudas are being deliberately planted by Harper to gather intelligence on the LPC election campaign plans and to deliberately derail them.  Yes, that would be quite a crafty, brazen Machiavellian move — but remember how the CPC was founded?

Or, the toxic duo's tactical defection to the neoLibs is temporary, one that they will leverage when Harper is gone and the CPC flounders as the PC did after Mulroney's departure + Kim Campbell's ignominious defeat in 1993. Will DimEve Soudams™ triumphantly return to the party with considerable political *assets* that can be exploited?

Frank has another take, as always quite irreverent.

Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, one is reminded of this famous unblonde quote:

UPDATE: Harper's Politburo/PMO orchestrates the predictable drive-by bousillage with the gleeful assistance of its pet trolls, Attack Parrots and smarmy QMI stenographers. This one from Sun hack Lorne Gunter is particularly vile and sexist.

C36 = CONtempt for women and CONtempt for the law.

Last week Justice Minister Peter MacKay, channeling all the prurient lunacy of General Jack D. Ripper and the worst pearl-clutching clichés of a Victorian schoolmarm, presented Bill C36 in the House of Commons.

The language Petey used and repeated for emphasis was quite revealing.

Harper and MacKay's new bill - C36 The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, the latest CPC government crap legislation and named the opposite of what it actually does - offers in one venal and meretricious piece of legal flimflam the worst of Con bias, prejudice and hatred.

It is a loathsome pottage of spitefulness (directed at the Supreme Court of Canada), class prejudice, racism, misogyny and fundamentalist religiosity.

The reaction on Twitter ranged from pithy excoriations by sex workers, lawyers, non-abolitionist feminists, charter experts and human rights advocates, to PMO-issued speaking points barked by CPC trained seals and fatuous accolades by anti-prostitution organizations.

This perspective was odd and interesting, with a focus on the utilitarian and economic aspects of sex work which allows a detached evaluation of the Nordic and New Zealand models. However its breezy conclusion: 
«..because the government regulates the activities of industries in which workers are put at risk, but also because machines have replaced much of the dangerous work that was previously done by workers the current state of technology is such that machines will soon be capable of providing the same services currently provided by sex workers. You don’t have to be an economist to predict that while governments have failed to reduce participation in the sex trades, technology is very likely to succeed» 
doesn't address the very basic human needs this service industry meets - and that machinery would likely not.

The last decades have seen an expanded commercial development of dolls that replicate some aspect of human bodies; though some are crafted to resemble in minute details all physical details of known porn actors, they are essentially very expensive, static silicone sex toys.  There's a niche market for (mostly) men whose sexual proclivities are geared towards the forcible penetration of beautifully crafted, inert objets d'art with compliant orifices.  It's worth glancing at the NSFW websites of Real Doll, Doll Story and Fantasy Sex Dolls to get a sense of which traits are valued and deemed desirable.

This segues aptly into the most lucid, trenchant and fierce deconstruction of sex work that I have read.

«What is prostitution? Are women selling a service, or are they selling themselves, as a commodity?

Many supporters of the Nordic model, both in feminist and family-values circles, say it’s the latter. Prostitution, they say, is a commodity sale. It is inherently objectifying and exploitative, they argue. It is itself a harm, even if all the associated harms can be eliminated. A woman who believes she is freely choosing her job has to be wrong about that, they argue. She is a victim whether she knows it or not.

Conservative MP Joy Smith is one of the strongest voices on this side of the debate, who says she recognizes “prostitution as an industry that is inherently harmful to women and girls and therefore must be eliminated.” She favours the Nordic model.

If you believe that selling sex means selling women, you believe that a woman’s value equals her capacity to have sex.

Framing this as a gender-equality argument is ironic, because that same notion underpins many of the world’s most sexist ideas — including the idea, still in place in some parts of the world, that rape is a property crime.

We in Canada don’t generally talk about rape that way any more, but we still use that language when we talk about prostitution. We use phrases like “selling her body” or even “selling herself” — rather than “selling sex.”

To assume that prostitution commodifies women, we have to also think a certain way about heterosexual sex. We have to think of it as male access to a woman’s body — not as something a woman does with her body. This is the "why buy the cow when you’re getting the milk for free" way of seeing women’s sexuality. Again, not exactly a gender-equality argument.»

(I interrupt Kate Heartfield's thoughtful prose with a crude example that illustrates how a married woman, in this case a politician's wife, is subjected to that very degradation that so incensed MacKay. Juxtapose this with the passage here in which Rob Ford attempts to traffick Renata. Also, if sex-workers were to publish clients' names, all would see that putative "family-values" rightwing Con men make up the majority of their lists.) 

«There is another way of looking at sex: that a woman’s value as a human being has nothing to do with whom she chooses to have sex with or how often or what conditions she imposes on that choice. If this is our assumption, then a woman who sells sex is not selling herself. She isn’t turning herself into a commodity, and neither is anyone else. Sex is merely the service she sells.»

Registered and practical nurses, athletes, child care workers, lawyers, therapists, morticians: all provide professional services that sometimes require that they engage in a particular activity that some people might find repellant and disgusting. The specific *ickiness* of a task does not detract from the knowledge, respect and dignity they bring to their jobs

What is most disappointing to me in this whole debate is the participation of abolitionist feminists who give credence to Andrea Dworkin's pragmatic and ideological analysis of women's bodies as pornographed and fetishized commodities.  Believing this construct to be so deeply embedded in all institutions that it cannot be uprooted, they think that in order to limit the horrific harm that's done to women who are trafficked or trapped by poverty and many vulnerabilities in the "sex trade", they are obliged to align themselves with punitive and sex-phobic Reformatory Evangelical conservative legislation.

Whatever their expertise, critics of C36 agree that it will NOT keep women safe; it will probably endanger them MORE than the old law did.

And, just in case you know people who still don't get why C36 is so MASSIVELY WRONG, direct them to Tabatha Southey's splendid slam dunk.

ADDED: Money for sex, sex for money is a personal reflection on sex work that I posted in March this year.

MORE: Joyce Arthur deconstructs the toxic misogynist religious ideology at the core of C36.

CON omertà

kirbycairo's definitive post about the Flanagan plummet cuts through the superfluous noise about "moral panic".  

At the heart of Flanagan's discourse was the legal question of the efficacy, expedience, and import of prosecuting people who consume illegal material verses those who are actually involved in the production of illegality. It is not unlike the question of dealing with those who consume an illegal product like, say, heroin versus dealing with those who produce it and distribute it. Now, no matter how sensitive an issue is one might need to address this basic legal question, particularly in circumstances of limited legal resources. But it would be impossible for someone as glib and impertinent as Flanagan to actually discuss such an issue. Rather, Flanagan always has a knee-jerk, extremist reaction to any issue. Flanagan never actually wants to discuss an issue, rather he just wants to pontificate as loud as he can to anyone who will listen.

In other words Flanagan doesn't know when to properly tailor his discourse or just keep his mouth shut. And in the end this is why Flanagan split with Harper. If Harper learned anything during his time in public life it is to say as little as possible and even if one has controversial (some might say offensive) opinions, keep them on the DL. And this is why Harper has always jettisoned political allies who he can't control, and also why his government is a grand exercise in keeping everyone around him quiet. And even those close to Harper who are regularly in the media spotlight are continually coached and controlled concerning government message.

Flanagan fell from grace because he is a man full of deeply offensive opinions who is convinced he is a scholar and a genius. It was inevitable that he would shoot his mouth off in a way that would undermine any authority he may have had. Other Harper allies like Brazeau and Duffy are similarly obsessed with their own perceived wisdom and authority. Meanwhile, other allies are just headed to jail.

Dissecting what happened to a man that the CPC and its numerous wingnut-welfare-funded mouthpieces - the Manning Centre for example - once described as "a major intellectual figure in conservative circles", the blogpost zeroes in on the operating mode of Harper's party and his government.

We have written much here at DJ! about the MASSIVE publicly-funded millions Harper has invested in the daily production of Con spin and propaganda, to portray himself and his oligarchy in the most media-savvy frame of reference.  We've dubbed his PMO the Politburo.  Interestingly enough, many CPC websites have been scoured clean of texts and photos that involve Flanagan.

Our Twitter buddy Fuzzy Wuzzy responds to a videorecording of the basic neo-conservative approach to interacting with the media with a different version of its rightwing omerta.  Hilarious!

First, from Alheli Picazo - a literal observance of "no comment": 

Then:

Duckette later said that he had been instructed by the office of Alberta Premier Stelmach not to make any comments. 

So. It's not only scientists that are muzzled by Cons.

Pity poor Tom Flanagan.

Had his verbal faux-pas occurred at any other conjuncture of the Harper dictatorship, a hastily-assembled crew of communications serfs would have nimbly cleaned up his mess.

But the CPC propaganda machine has been woefully stressed to the cracking point recently, and so Flanagan was unceremoniously jettisoned.

The first sign that his party had dumped him was a tweet from the PMO's Andrew MacDougall.

It was eventually followed by another tweet, this one quite terse, from Stephen Taylor stating that Flanagan had been dropped from the Manning Networking Conference's line-up of speakers at the annual media-savvy shin-dig.

This is not the first time the man described, by the forementioned Manning Institute as "a major intellectual figure in conservative circles", has opined with regard to the depiction of "child p0rn".

From Michael Harris' excellent piece at iPolitics:

In a bizarre exchange with a student caught on video, Flanagan said that he didn’t think people should go to jail for possessing child pornography.[...]

“A lot of people on my side of the spectrum, the conservative side of the spectrum, are on a kind of jihad against child pornography. I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures.[...]

The student who confronted Flanagan also made reference to a quote attributed to Canada’s answer to Karl Rove when the Manitoba government was hurrying through tough new legislation on child pornography. At the time, Flanagan suggested the whole subject was debatable: “What’s wrong with pornography in the sense that it’s just pictures?”

As my co-blogger and virtual roomie fern hill pointed out, Flanagan's fall from the heights of Con cronyism happened as the result of sustained Idle No More vigilance, with respect to issues and concerns important to First Nations, Indigenous, Métis and Innu peoples.

The tweetstorm in response to Flanagan's insouciance has been informative. This article reinforces Harris' point about the criminality and the organized child exploitation required to produce this material.

Will the stench of the Flanagan scandal trail the MNC events next week?  For good measure, we should keep up the pressure and investigate what dodgy, hypocritical, fraudulent and possibly criminal elements the other Con speakers bring to the table.

Update: Apparently Flanagan has become a liability to the University of Calgary, too.

With so many scandals exposed, the CPC is vulnerable, and its propaganda machine's capacities stretched to the limit.  Otherwise, it would have found a way to sweep his comments under the carpet, likely by attacking the First Nations videographer who posted the damning YouTube interview, but instead they hung him out to dry.

Like vultures or hyenas, Harper's conservatives have turned on a pack member who exposed an individual weakness, for fear his action could make the whole group vulnerable to its *natural* enemies.

Must watch interview.

For the record, DJ! apologizes to Michael Sona.

It appears the guy was in the throes of electoral fervour when he dispatched by CON war room bullies to play the role of a minor thug during the 2011 federal election.  For his troubles, he was thrown under the bus.

Watch his candid interview here.

PMSHithead's government, elected by means that appear to me and many others who are working to collect the evidence of CPC wide-spread electoral fraud, cannot fall quickly enough.

I hope the members of the CPC oligarchy who engineered this assault on democracy and the electoral process suffer the disgrace and punishment they richly deserve.

 
Especially the contemptible CON above, who bragged he'd change Canada so we wouldn't recognize it anymore. I hope he spends time in jail.

Update: "Sun News is kind of an alternate method of getting press releases and other stories out from the party, right? I mean everyone knows that, right? It's just a standard comm's tactic." There's the money quote from Sona's interview (transcribed by Alison), with regard to the cozy link between StunTV and the CPC, further developed by Big City Lib's blogpost here.

Jonathan Kay to the rescue of patriarchy!!!

*Shorter* Jonathan Kay: women lie, women are murderous, women make men do evil things.  

And so, to protect society from homicidal women, he opines that CPC politicians should pass a law that would give government "oversight' in determining a specific gestational minute when an abortion is no longer a therapeutic medical intervention, but a CRIME.

Never mind that in Canada for the last 25 years, the public health care system has efficiently regulated the termination of unwanted or life-threatening pregnancies by applying medical protocols, procedures and restrictions.

Patriarchy [is the name given to a] societal structure whereby men are dominant not in numbers or in force but in their access to status-related power and decision-making power. It is also connected to economics in that patriarchal societies men will have greater power over the economy. 

In our society, because men have higher income and greater access to the economy, they are said to be dominant. Power distribution in society should not be confused with power struggles at an individual level, although they can be reproduced in a smaller scale as well. 

For example, in many small businesses, the owner and top managers are male, and they will hire women to work for them. [And fire them, too.] Patriarchy can be enforced in a variety of ways, including intimidation of women through violence, sexual assault and other forms of harassment, and the discrediting of their efforts to organize and resist. 

Patriarchal societies are typically more authoritarian and rely heavily on legal-rational modes of organization, show stronger military implication and more reliance on police repression to impose authority. It is a society that tends to hold contempt for women [...]   

We've had it with Kay's smarmy, sneering assumptions about women, cloaked in a veneer of gentility and respect for the "public order" he perceives to be threatened by women stuck in a choice between a rock and a hard place. (Trigger warning: these stories by women who had late second trimester and third trimester abortions are heart-wrenching.)

Depicted below are Jonathan Kay's ideological comrades at arms: men like him, who expect the worst from women; they act pre-emptively against anticipated treacherous female machinations.

This guy, for example:

A prominent Saudi Arabian preacher who raped his 5-year-old daughter before torturing her to death because he reportedly questioned the child’s virginity has been spared a death sentence or even a lengthy prison term after agreeing to pay “blood money” to the slain girl’s mother.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a former drug addict who rose to national prominence as an Islamic television preacher, was arrested last November and charged with brutally raping and torturing 5-year-old Lama al-Ghamdi to death. According to a medical report, the little girl had been tortured with whips, electric shocks and an iron. She had broken arms, fractured ribs, a broken back and a crushed skull. She died on October 22.

And these ones: 

There are “two forms of feminism,” Buehner argued. There are “cute” feminists like Sarah Palin who will find jobs in the “marketplace” and “get themselves a husband” but will “never submit to the husband, in fact they will use their power probably to make their husband submit to them.” Then, there are the “ugly” feminists whose “lack of attractiveness has not given them access to power that they wanted in the marketplace.” These “attractively challenged” feminists will only find careers in academia and in government agencies, for instance, “you can run the EPA.”

What all these feminists have in common, Swanson argues, is that “all of them want to be free from the family” and together with “the homosexuals” are “destroying society.” Buehner speculates that in the future, feminism will be remembered as “a time in which women lost the love of their children” and “decided to become selfish, narcissistic, family-destroying whores.”

And how about this one:

Diallo, in a civil sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn, is saying his alleged actions reflected a pattern of misogynistic behaviour. New York City recently passed a law against gender-based violence and there have been other allegations made against Strauss-Kahn by women. Diallo's lawyers wrote in her latest claim: "Strauss-Kahn's conduct towards women generally is, and more specifically his sexual assault of Ms Diallo was, motivated by a gender-animus and a misogynistic attitude."

[...]Soon after his arrest in New York, the French writer Tristane Banon accused Strauss-Kahn of attempting to rape her during an interview in 2003, a claim he called imaginary and slanderous. Prosecutors said they believed the encounter qualified as a sexual assault but the legal time frame to pursue her complaint had elapsed.

Then French authorities lodged preliminary charges of alleged aggravated pimping, claiming Strauss-Kahn was involved in a hotel prostitution ring including prominent figures and police in the northern city of Lille. Lille prosecutors have said they are looking into an allegation that Strauss-Kahn might have been involved in a rape during a sex party in a Washington hotel in 2010.

[...]Diallo's lawyers allude in Tuesday's filing to all those allegations, as well as to an affair Strauss-Kahn had with an IMF subordinate.

Some would disagree that Kay belongs on this spectrum of men who enable, justify, exploit and enforce gender inequality through violent means.

Yet his cavalier disregard for facts in favour of anti-abortion propaganda could inflame mentally unstable individuals, much as Fox News' Bill O'Reilly did when he repeatedly called Dr Tiller a "killer".

Consider this: patriarchy rewards him hugely, when he advocates for a pre-emptive law that undermines women's human rights. 

In fact, Kay gets quite richly paid for pontificating that it's a "moral" question when in fact any decision regarding the termination of a pregnancy in its third trimester should be informed by medical science and ^NOT by the religious quackery of conservative politicians such as Woodworth, Vellacott and Warawa.

CON hogs at the trough!

It comes as no surprise that the Harper government is dispensing corporate welfare, in generous acts of CON cronyism, with taxpayers' money.  

If there's money to be made by accompanying PMSHithead to China, shouldn't these profitable private companies PAY their own way and cover their own business expenses?

The Conservative government covered expenses for some of the country’s top executives as they accompanied the prime minister around China a year ago, a move business leaders and officials defend as a good investment.

The trip signalled a change of approach for Stephen Harper, who for years eschewed the idea of leading big trade offensives abroad.

Then came the China trip last February.

The delegation to three Chinese cities included 30 executives from major oil, agricultural and manufacturing companies as well as roughly two dozen members of the Chinese-Canadian cultural community.

Compare that with a 2009 trip to China — Harper’s first — when he brought along eight people, including Laureen, his stylist and four Chinese-Canadian businesspeople.

The Foreign Affairs Department says local transportation, accommodation, meals and “miscellaneous expenses” incurred by an official delegation is covered by the government. For the 2012 non-governmental participants, that meant an average of $1,200 a person.

Corporations and associations — including Bombardier, Cenovus Nuclear Energy, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Cameco — confirmed that the government paid for portions of the expenses, with the amount varying from firm to firm.

From here.

Last word to Stephen Lautens who brought this story to our attention.

"What's a Harper photo-op without a paid entourage?"

Hence the photo at the top of this blogpost.

Of hunger strikes, CON pigs tweeting about bacon, and #IdleNoMore

As I stood on Parliament Hill in solidarity with #IdleNoMore activists and protesters I was reminded that the ancestors of those whose revendications I supported, taught my ancestors how to survive the harsh winters of Turtle Island.

Were it not for the extraordinary generosity that the Anishinabek, Cree, Abenaki and perhaps even Iroquois peoples extended to Europeans, settlement after settlement would have succumbed to the challenges and dangers the natural environment posed.  Famine, and diseases attributed to malnutrition, killed many colonists.

This is particularly ironic since Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence has chosen starvation as the means to express the urgency of a meeting between Harper, the Governor General and First Nations leaders (including Spence). She is putting her very life on the line.

Using self-starvation is one form of immolation that has been tactically deployed throughout history.  This strategy, the very embodiment of explicit resistance and defiance expressed through systematic physical, emotional and intellectual commitment to die, in the hope of reaching a collective goal, was particularly well exploited by Bobby Sands and other Irish republican prisoners - convicted paramilitary members of the Army - during the 1981 Irish hunger strike. 

Sands started refusing food on 1 March 1981; he died 66 days later. Other prisoners agreed to join the strike at intervals, which helped create publicity as increasing numbers steadily deteriorated over several months.  The prisoners' aim was to achieve recognition as prisoners of war as opposed to being treated as criminals, though the Washington Post reported the reason for the strike was to provoke international publicity.

The strategic use of self-imposed starvation as a political strategy is not unanimously acclaimed. While self-immolation by fire (Afghanistan, Tibet, Maghreb) is certainly more spectacular and *newsworthy* to the corporate media as they can report the event and not dwell on the motives behind such action, a hunger strike offers a longer process that allows the individual to reflect upon the gravity of the choice, and to enlist supporters for the goals envisioned. It is nonetheless just as deadly.

Predictably, members of the CONtempt party have reacted with derision to Chief Spence's decision.  Though infested with porcine individuals who can barely fit 4 to an elevator, the cpc *base* opinionates that most Indigenous people are "well-fed".  And yet, only a few members of First Nations communities are prosperous in that gross "well-fed Con pigs at the trough" way.

Even the flak who cranks out tweets for PMSHithead got into the spirit of Xmas the CPC as it acts in the House of Commons during Question Period.

Harper's ancestry (and the familial karma it suggests) does not leave me hopeful that his 99 sizes-too-small Grinch heart will respond to Chief Spence's ultimatum.

 


Photograph of Dzawada'enuxw First Nations supporting #IdleNoMore, via @godammitkitty and @SherryBGood.

A wealth of documentation is found at the FB page (no registration required) for Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources - the leading source for news, information, articles, videos, and more on indigenous peoples from around the world. Lincoln (whose Spielbergian biopic Harper and his entourage raved about) story about the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux on December 26 1862, details here.)

Photo of Harper, from here.