STILL

Today's the day for the first hour of debate on 'The When Does the State Take Over Our Uteruses Motion'.

Yesterday, the Radical Handmaids took the 'Fuck the Debate' message to Parliament Hill.

And there's been a call for an online ruckus.

Námo Mandos kicks off DJ!'s contribution with 'Comic relief apéritif'.

Here at DJ! we've been on Woodworth's Wank for months, since the very beginning, in fact.

We've been outraged, derisive, logical. We've exhorted, cajoled, and cheer-led (izzat a word?).

We've taken various varieties of crap for our stand, including some that -- happily -- led to the creation of a brand-spanking new aggregator and home for real Canadian Progressive Voices.

Throughout though, I suspect this is what we were all feeling.

Niles certainly is/was.

Coz here's the really really really depressing thing. Women's rights are ALWAYS up for negotiation.

ALWAYS considered a frill, an afterthought, a wait-til-everyone-else-is-served deal.

EVERYWHERE. Just ask Mona Eltahawy.

STILL.

And here's another really depressing thing. The fucking Liberals still don't get it.

They consider reproductive rights a matter of conscience, not human rights, and therefore will NOT whip the vote.

Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said he’s personally opposed to reopening the abortion debate but Rae said he won’t compel Liberal MPs to toe that line because the issue is a matter of individual conscience.

“If there are individuals in my caucus who feel strongly for moral reasons one way or the other, we’re not going to whip the vote,” Rae said.

Pro-tip, Bob: This kinda thing is why your asses are NOT sitting in Official Opposition seats.

Image source

I Despair, Part Umpty-Five

I was just working on a blogpost encouraging Liberal and NDP women MPs to coordinate a strategy to shut down Woodwank's Dog and Pony Show, when my Twitterstream belched a bunch of crap about Olivia Chow throwing a hissy fit in today's by-election in Toronto-Danforth.

This seems to be the source of it.

@oliviachow kicked out of polling station in #TorDan after abusing scrutineer privileges & telling voters to "not vote Liberal". #shame

— Michelle Johnston (@JohnstonMich) March 19, 2012

Michelle Johnston's profile:

U of T Student, History and Political Science; President, @uoftliberals; Fighting hard for Ontario; Views are my own

Of course it's not true. Olivia is a class act, not to mention waaaay too smart.

Just a lying smear from a junior good ole gal trying to play in the big leagues.

One would think the respective women's caucuses would be salivating at the chance to take on TheoCon dinosaurs like Woodworth, Vellacott, Del Mastro, Trost et al.

And one would be wrong.

Even the women of the Fucking Useless Opposition® are too busy fighting each other to fight for us.

And pundits wonder why Canadians are turned off politics.

So, it's back to Facebook, Twitter, and the blogs. It's up to us regular Canadians to protect our rights.

Poisonous Partisanship

The despair is wearing off. And the anger is setting in. Shared, it seems, by several.

In the comments to last night's Totally Fucked post, Scotian writes:

The Dippers placed beating the Libs as more important than Harper and got what they were after, and in the process proved they are a party that places their own power and expediency ahead of their self proclaimed principles, in other words they are no better now than the Lib party they decried for this kind of behaviour for decades. However, somehow I doubt most Dippers will be willing/able to acknowledge this fundamental truth, how they can be so delusional as to believe otherwise I do not know but then I've never been a partisan of ANY party or leader despite the claims of many (especially Dippers) to the contrary.

And oh, look, Scotian has been saying it for ages. Dated May 4, 2010:

I have been saying since before Martin was beaten that Harper was the greatest threat to Canadian democracy out there because of his contempt for how we govern ourselves. I said back then that stopping him should be the most important thing for anyone of any progressive bent regardless of where they stood on the spectrum, but was I listened to? Nope, I was called a Liberal shill and flack by both right and left. I said back then that if the NDP really were a principles first party as they always had been prior to Layton's leadership they would have made common cause with the Libs to block Harper's rise to power and sustain Martin, that even a tired corrupt Liberal government under Martin would be less damaging than a Harper led government. Again, time proved me right in spades.

And you're right again, Scotian.

That's why it's over for me and Jack. And that was before I found out what a thorough-going flake he is.

Ruthless, relentless partisanship -- on all sides -- has fucked up this country but good.

Oh, and Jack? The Disaffected Lib has a few words for you.

It's Over, Jack

For sleazeball politicians, women's rights are always negotiable. Or at least, a political football.

But I never thought the Fucking NDP® would sink to this.

Here's the full text of the press release:

Reality check: Ignatieff record doesn’t match words on women’s right to choose

April 17, 2011

Michael Ignatieff today professed his personal support for abortion access.

What he didn’t tell the crowd gathered at his town hall in Vancouver? In December, ten Liberal MPs stood up in favour of a Conservative Private Member’s Bill that risked criminalizing abortion providers and promoted an anti-choice agenda.

Those Liberals are:
Kevin Lamoureux
Ruby Dhalla
John McKay
Dan McTeague
Paul Szabo
Alan Tonks
Jim Karygiannis
Gurbax Malhi
Albina Guarnieri
Lawrence MacAulay

In fact, when the Liberal caucus introduced a motion to guarantee a “full range” of family planning options in Canada’s G8 commitments to Child and Maternal Health last March, their own members caused the motion to fail. Mr Ignatieff left this fact out today when he spoke about the G8 initiative.

Some of that is true. Those ten Fucking Harper Liberals® did vote in favour of Rod Bruinooge's lying POS bill, C-510, supposedly to penalize 'coerced' abortions.

And, yes, the Fucking Liberals® did screw up the no-brainer vote against the Cons' hypocritical 'maternal health without family planning' initiative.

But as the CBC's own Reality Check points out, Iggy was there for the second and voted against it.

But [Iggy] did specify what his position is on abortion and indicated that not everyone in his caucus shares his view.

He's OK with that because, as he explained it, abortion is an issue of conscience.

"I want you to know what my position, the position of most of my party is," he said Sunday.

"I say most for a reason. We're talking about abortion, these are issues of conscience. A democratic society that truly respects freedom of belief, and freedom of opinion, cannot compel in matters of abortion," he said.

Ignatieff's position by the way is that he believes in defending a woman's right to choose and that there should be public funding support for "the full gamut" of women's reproductive health services, both at home and overseas, he said Sunday.

I do NOT agree with Iggy's position that choice is a conscience issue. It is a human rights issue.

But these are Fucking Liberals® we're talking about here. They are the poster children for 'Opportunistic Politicians R Us'.

I expected better of the Fucking NDP®.

With the continuing attacks on the Liberals, rather than joining forces with them to defeat a common enemy, the Fucking NDP® was fast losing my respect.

Now, with this totally sleazy move, they've lost my vote.

That's it. It's over between us, Jack.

Until the Fucking NDP® finds its conscience again and loses Jumping Jack Flash as leader, I'm outta there.

Luckily, in my riding, the Con has less chance than a snowball in hell. So I'm holding my nose and voting Fucking Liberal®.

You can all pick yourselves off the floor now.

Fantino and Dividing the Right

OK, depending on how one looks at it, it could be called 'far left and far right working together' or 'divide the right', but the Freaks are seriously pissed about Fantino's cabinet job.

Here's my Facebook friend Connie:

I'm willing to strike a deal with the opposition. If they bring down the government, I won't campaign, finance, or vote Conservative.

Here's a like-minded Freak:

I arrived to your same conclusion, a long time ago. I think I would be specially important to target 905 ridings , where the CPC has some red tories in some cases and in others people without spine to stand up to Harper.

I would suggest in those areas in which the CPC vote is close to that of the Liberals, one should hold their noses and vote for their opposition.

This would be not so much about voting against the CPC, but more like a lesson and a price to pay for departing from social and fiscal conservatisme.

That's all it would take. No campaigning, financing, or voting from the so-conneds.

Simple.

Yo! Fucking Liberals ®! You paying attention? There's electoral gold in and around Toronto and elsewhere. Exploit it.

You're welcome.

Progressive Push-Back

I started this blogpost soon after the Merkin election, but then got too busy for a long, linkful post.

While I was mightily depressed over the results, I was looking for silver linings. And I found a few.

Traditionally (somewhat) more progressive places like Illinois, New York, and California stayed Democratic.

In the Illinois governor's race, the Democrat beat the Teabagger after trailing badly for weeks in the polls. On election morning, did the good/sane people of Illinois wake up and say 'Holy crap! What were we thinking?'

In Colorado, where, despite its nutbars' obsession with the Humpty-Dumpty Initiative, the rest of the people are really quite sane. Not only did they thumpingly reject yet another attempt to give 'personhood' to fertilzed eggs, they crushed the ambition of another Teabagger, much credit going to the women.

Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, says Ken Buck lost his Senate races because independent women voters flocked to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) on Election Day.

“Ads attacking Buck on abortion and rape and all those issues were targeted to unaffiliated women and it worked, Buck became unacceptable and they voted for Bennet,” Wadhams said in an interview.

(This is the jerk who, as district attorney, referred to a woman's rape as 'buyer's remorse'.)

New York stayed Democratic too.

And in California, after one of the most vitriolic campaigns against an incumbent I've ever seen, the Dem won.

Yet in spite of her perennially weak approval ratings, a political climate that favored Republicans and what she called the "toughest and roughest campaign" of her lifetime, Boxer pulled out yet another victory, trouncing former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina 52% to 42.6%, with some ballots still to be counted.

Carly Fucking Fiorina is anti-choice, natch.

In the governor's race, millionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman went down to defeat at the hands of Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown, after reportedly spending $175 million of her own dough. This time, credit the Latinos after Whitman got 'tough on illegals'.

So, where the Dems had the wit to actively campaign against the nuttier notions of the Douchebaggers, the sane people woke up.

And I think -- and this guy too thinks -- that the extreme anti-abortion position acted as the clarion call.

While almost nothing went right for Democratic candidates this fall, one issue turned out to be a winner in some of the closest Senate races in the nation: abortion.

By branding Republican challengers as outside the cultural mainstream on the issue, Democrats managed to hold on to at least a slice of the political center by courting and winning over moderate women in a handful of key states.

The strategy ran counter to the one that enabled the party to broaden the political map in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats thrived by running candidates whose positions on abortion were closely attuned to the socially conservative areas where they sought office.

This year, however, Democrats adopted almost the opposite approach late in the 2010 campaign. As many of the anti-abortion Democrats elected over the last four years were going down in defeat, the party made abortion a central concern in a handful of battleground Senate races — and they ended up in the Democratic column as a result.

I think the boyos in the 'war rooms' underestimate the (sometimes) slumbering giant of women's rights as an issue.

Over Motherhood Steve's totally hypocritical Maternal Health Initiative, I was encouraging the fucking Liberals to use abortion rights as a wedge issue.

But, of course, being fucking Liberals, they fucked it up.

Maybe this US election will show our progressives how to do it right.

Call the shitheads out. Show them to be the extremists they are. Fight back!