More CON fraudulent fun with phones.

It appears that the CPC has engaged in other scam practices with phones. It's not enough that companies were paid (more on that below) to contact voters and *prank* them with harassing calls, while pretending to be the other parties.

It engineered a campaign to call voters on Election Day, claim to be representing Elections Canada and deliberately direct them to a wrong location that was ^NOT a polling station. This Rovian tactic is called voter suppression. It is a criminal act for people to impersonate EC staff.

Now it appears the CONtempt Party has been trying to pressure and scam vulnerable elders to donate money to it. From Le Devoir:

[...] voters complained that they had been asked relentlessly by the Conservative Party to donate, being told - wrongly - that they had promised to pay $ 200.

This happened to Fernand Coulombe of Montmagny. The man, who turns 90 in September, said he was called "three or four times" by a lady of the Conservative Party last June - after the general elections in May. She told him to pay $200. because she he had promised to pay this contribution.

"She told me that I promised that. I did not promise anything! I do not even know her, and besides, I did not vote for them, "said Mr. Coulombe in an interview with Le Devoir.

In addition, Mr. Coulombe was mailed a letter from the Conservative Party, addressed to him and dated June 3, 2011. Under the party's logo, it is written in bold: "Thank you for your generous pledge of: $ 200.00." In the upper right corner of the document appears a bar code, a series of identification codes and the phone number of Mr. Coulombe. The man lives in a long term care facility. [...]

The man does not understand how his personal information was used by the CPC. "It may have taken my name in the phone book." He insists he voted for the Liberal Party all his life and his family is well aware of this party loyalty.

Mr Coulombe brought his concerns to his MP, NDP François Lapointe who knows of others who were subjected to this scam. Lapointe is taking out advertisements in the riding's community papers to encourage other people who were subjected to this scam to come forward. He will help facilitate their formal complaints to Elections Canada.

A reminder: Lapointe's riding was the site of a curious reassignment of voter ballots on May 2nd. This was only discovered when he demanded a recount.

The payment scam: Andrew Prescott paid RackNine directly for robocalls done on behalf of his CPC candidate during the federal election. How many other CON supporters in other ridings, other campaigns, did the same? No paper trail, no reporting this as a campaign contribution.

Added: link to MacLean's coverage of the scam.

Did Con candidate shoot himself in the foot

while it was still in his mouth? From here:

A Twitter message by the Conservative incumbent for Kitchener Centre set off a flurry of negative online responses on Saturday night, before his Twitter account was deactivated Sunday. Stephen Woodworth, who has been an active Twitter user with nearly 850 followers on the social media service, quoted a joke on his @WoodworthCPC Twitter account at 8:36 p.m. on Saturday. “Cop says to falling down man outside tavern ‘You’re drunk’ Man replies ‘Thank goodness’ Cop asks ‘Why?’ Drunk: ‘I thought I was crippled!’”

Or maybe the man *lost* his prosthetic leg to a berserking G20 Rent-a-thug cop? Hardeharhar. Those Contempt party guys sure have a terrific sense of humour.

NOT.

And also, more about mythical Con accountability and ethics:

Stephen Harper's claim Canadians don't care his government was charged with contempt of Parliament is a clear indication of his ethics and his opinion of Canadians' ethics. Contempt for Parliament equates to contempt for the people it represents. Harper also has lessened Parliament with his importation of divisive American style "attack politics." Voters have found out Harper's 2006 election plank of a new honesty/openness in government and a tough on crime agenda wasn't meant to apply to the Conservative party. A smorgasbord of scandals include "in and out" financing, Bev Oda's creative writing, and RCMP investigations into Harper's close adviser Bruce Carson for influence peddling.

The question I raised on Twitter this morning: does the Governor General have the legal authority to request the release of the Auditor-General's - rumoured brutal - report about the misuse, by the Harper Regime, of $1 Billion of Canadian citizens' money?

How long can brave, brave *Sir* SHithead hide from real tough questions about his government's record?

Update: Kady O'Malley's answer to above question.

Further update as CBC news caught Contemptible truthiness from the Harper Regime:

The Conservative's report [...] quoted the auditor general as saying: “We found that the processes and controls around that were very good, and that the monies were spent as they were intended to be spent.”

But in a scathing letter addressed to members of a Commons committee on Friday, which was received by the clerk and members on Monday, Fraser said the quote had nothing to do with the summits. Instead, she said, the Conservatives inserted an 2010 comment she made during a CBC News interview on security spending by a previous Liberal government after the Sept. 11 attacks a decade ago.

“The comments attributed to me in the [Conservative] report are completely unrelated to G8/G20 spending,” Fraser writes in her letter. “I would appreciate it if the report could be modified as it is clearly erroneous.”

Dr Dawg was quick to post about the Con lie.

"... not a class story. It’s a crime story."

Greed. It's the underpinning of that oft-quoted christian aphorism "The poor will always be with us". The consequence of letting the greedy run roughshod and unchecked is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - and recently, in increasing numbers.

Matt Taibi has written an impassioned response to a NYT Op-Ed by David Brooks who defended wealthy bankers and, by implication the MASSIVE scams they engineered. Taibi expertly fillets tedious and disingenuous arguments that rationalize and justify the bottomless greed of financial manipulators.

Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.” [...]

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive “rich” feed the needy “poor”, and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

Taibbi also identifies an implicit bias in commercially oriented media:

The propagandistic argument [Brooks] makes about the dangers of “populism” is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

There's another aspect to the media coverage of the bankers' debauchery that has bothered me. Throughout it all, most if not all the engineers of these fraudulent investments remained anonymous and faceless. Understand this - the Wall Street financiers who masterminded the complicated schemes that left hundreds of thousands of US citizens bankrupt and homeless won't be held accountable for their crimes. They have walked away from the carnage with fat bonuses in their pockets.

Not so Bernard Madoff. He has become the scapegoat for Greed, diverting attention away from the blue-bloods and their wannabees at the top of the food chain.

There's a wide vein of anti-semitism in our North-American societies; exploiting the case of Bernard Madoff to draw attention away from the structural causes of the financial collapse is so very convenient. And so repulsive to many Jews, given that the majority of Madoff's clients/victims were members of, or connected to the social and cultural networks that he navigated.

Unfortunately the institutional champions of judaism are too busy attacking the critics of Israel to note a most insidious and repugnant populist display of anti-semitism shrieking at them in headlines, news items and prurient stories on TV, publications and the Internet during the last year.

Madoff has become the new Shylock. Is this happenstance? I don't think so. This is judeophobic opportunism, in my humble opinion. But don't expect rightwing socons David Frum or Mark Steyn to point this out. They know how their bread is buttered - and they like it that way.