March4Lies Part 2: Faith and truthy-ness

So, this happened on Thursday May 8.

There was a lame attempt by antiChoice Faith Goldy, a StunTV performance-artist-wannabe-Ann-Coulter, to bully members of the Radical Handmaids as well as other proChoice counter-protesters into saying something, anything while the camera was recording that could be edited and spun into a sensationalistic GOTCHA! - à la Ezra Levant school of faux-journalism.

What is it with StunTV media circus performers and their penchant for fake or trumped up news? Their broadcasts are never-ending infomercials, infotainment or simply outrageously skanky and amateurish filler engineered by Levant and his entourage.

Fortunately the media-savvy Julie Lalonde was one of the protesters approached by Goldy.

A pro-life rally in Ottawa Thursday that drew thousands of people to Parliament Hill got wall-to-wall coverage from Sun News Network, but some of the pro-choice activists who staged a counter-demonstration say the conservative news channel’s Faith Goldy crossed the line with her aggressive questioning.

Ottawa-based social justice activist Julie Lalonde said Goldy and a cameraman approached her and other pro-choice demonstrators and began peppering them with questions without introducing themselves or asking what brought them to the annual March for Life event.

“They were super fast, rapid-fire questions and the very first one was something about whether I supported abortion after 32 weeks. No ‘Why are you here today? What’s your group about?’” she wrote in an email to Canada.com. (Full disclosure: Lalonde has previously contributed to our site.)

“She filmed me extensively, even when I asked her to back away and leave us alone. She actually did a close up on me when I told her to leave us alone and said, ‘Or else? If I don’t walk away, what are you going to do?’

“She was clearly trolling and trying to provoke us to build some outrageous footage.”

From here.

She called out the unscrupulous tactic and followed up on Twitter and sent a media advisory to actual professional journalists and legitimate news gathering organizations.

And thus, just like the two FEMEN protesters, Goldy and her agit-prop shenanigans became the subject of other news media coverage of the March4Lies.

Fitting, is it not?

A Most Opportune Death

well, it wasn't for Flaherty but it most certainly is for Harper.

We will all die.  Every one of us.

But let us consider Flaherty's CONvenient demise and how Harper will play it out.

All in all, Flaherty's sudden death after dumping Harper and his party, is awfully CONvenient for PMSHithead - if he needs to strike fear in his partisans.

Paul Wells, a most rigorous and understated political reporter, gives us an insight into the internal gears of Harper's CPC that are grinding Canadians down as well as a portrait of a corporate conservative, here.

Flaherty's death offers Harper's Politburo glorious, flashy opportunities to display him in a *good* light which is a tactic that PMSHithead badly needs to deploy right now.

So, let's watch how Harper plays the Canadian and international media in order to exploit Flaherty's death for his own purpose.  It can be his new sweater-and-kittens schtick!

Will Harper insist that Flaherty receive a state funeral, with all the pomp and protocol, and the attendant bells and whistles? I bet he does exactly that. PMSHithead's government needs a MASSIVE sparkly diversions from all the attention the lies, the fraud and the corruption that Harper has facilitated.

As tweeter @dexterdyne asked: The Harper government has cut programs and funding for our veterans, scientists, health care, unemployed, the CBC, the public service.  So what exactly are they spending it on? 

In order to evade such probing questions, Harper's Politburo in currently in full War Room mode.  Right now its richly-paid communication flunkies are spinning tactics to best exploit Flaherty's death for maximum benefit: to make PMSHithead look *good* to voters and to the media.

They are probably looking to North Korea, as they did when they wrote the *Fair* Elections Act, for inspiration on how to shine up Harper's image.

Perhaps Harper's Politburo will claim C23 was Flaherty's brainchild; thus any critic of any word of the Elections Reform Act could be smeared (or worse?) for "disrespecting" his memory.

I suggest instead of listening and watching a week of disgusting and crass CPC Con glurge, Canadians might view _Angel Heart_ or any film that explores what happens when someone sells their soul to the devil.

Once you start thinking of Harper in THAT light... 

Manufactured outrage

It's what all bullies do.  Every single one.  

Whether serial intimate partner abuser or totalitarian politician.

Harper has made this particular Karl-Rove-perfected tactic the centre-piece of his Politburo PMO propaganda communications strategy.

Reframe whatever criticism that is directed at you as an *attack* upon yourself or your party.

Wildly exaggerate what was said; prevaricate outrageously.

Shrieeek loudly to drown out any objections.

Discredit whoever had the temerity to express the notion that the Emperor might be prancing about, nekkid and weenie-wagging at small children.

Demand an apology.

Use the manufactured outrage and putative victimhood to elicit support from acquaintances or your political base.

The Parti Québecois' spin doctors are attempting to deflect attention away from their crass veer to the rightwing corporate agenda by demanding an apology from Amir Khadir of Québec Solidaire, the only progressive political party currently active in Québec.

Khadir related his personal experiences in Iran when left-leaning progressive activists and militants joined forces with right-wing traditionalist folks, to oust US imperialism and invite a leadership that spoke to the needs of oppressed Iranians.

The rest of that history is known: Ayatollah Khomeini took power; he and his fundamentalist islamist entourage established an anti-democratic, repressive, totalitarian regime in Iran.

From what Khadir stated, the PQ propagandists spun a tale that claimed Pierre Karl Péladeau was compared to the Ayatollah.  

The intended criticism was likely directed at Pauline Marois and her party, but the shrieeek potential there was not as meaty for the spin doctors.

Delusional fabulations.  It's what bullies do.

Added: Rob and Doug Ford. They use manufactured outrage not only as a political strategy, but engage in it as though it were an Olympic event.  More examples forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

Toxic Harper killing everything that is Canadian.

Possibly the only truly honest statement Harper has ever uttered was his 2006 threat to reconfigure Canada: “You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it”.

More here.  And here.

An article in the Winnipeg Free Press deconstructs the Harper government communications strategy that stamps PMSHithead's brand on every media event.

Internal documents show the prime minister's department micro-managed a media event staged by Parks Canada, trying to erase the venerable agency from a public announcement while promoting the Harper government.

The incident is a case study in communications control from the centre, a signal feature of the governing Conservatives since they first came to power in 2006.

The event was an Oct. 17, 2011, news conference in Halifax to announce an agreement to transform Sable Island, a fabled sand crescent 290 kilometres off Nova Scotia, into a national park reserve.

The deal had been meticulously negotiated by Parks Canada with the Nova Scotia government over the course of a year, and proud officials wanted a splashy announcement as a way to celebrate Parks Canada's 100th birthday in 2011.[...]

Alas for Parks Canada, the carefully wrought plan started to unravel days before the event when a vetting team at the Privy Council Office began to pick apart the agenda, the news release and two background documents, demanding changes. The office is the central organ of the federal government, under the control of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.[...]

When the Privy Council Office finally responded, officials demanded a raft of changes, many of them designed to quash Parks Canada's identity at the event.

A so-called "backgrounder" for handout to news media, for example, erased the agency's name altogether.

"I note the only change was that Parks Canada was 'disappeared,'" an agency official noted. "I have never seen our name completely eliminated in this manner before."

The stage backdrops for the news conference in Halifax were to have included a Parks Canada banner celebrating the agency's centennial in 2011. PCO told officials to get rid of it.

"No Parks Canada banner — the brown and yellow is ugly. Please stop using this," an unidentified official demanded in a note.

Remember, the Harper government has slashed and burned essential, front line services as well as exemplary best practices and performance achievements in world-respected programs, such as the Experimental Lakes Areas, "the one-of-a-kind outdoor laboratory that has informed the world about the effects of contaminants such as mercury, acid rain and phosphorus".  

But it has hired hundreds of communications hacks to crank out propaganda in line with the PMO aka Harper's Politburo's tactical campaign of disinformation through speaking points regurgitated by Attack™ MPs. 

And then, there's the millions of $$$ spent advertising Harper's brand of conservatism.

Update: More calculated BS from the Corruption Party government: 

Canada’s longstanding shortage of skilled workers has apparently made Prime Minister Stephen Harper mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Sources tell [DJ! emphasis] CBC News that, for the past year, the prime minister has been banging heads in his government to come up with new ways to help Canadians get the right skills for the right jobs — namely, thousands of vacancies that companies are begging to fill.

This is a classic message-framing tactic, straight from the Karl Rove / Tom Flanagan play-book on media manipulation.  Next step: Diane Findley will be wringing her hands over the *fact* that non-union, cheap imported indentured workers have to be imported from China and other authoritarian regimes to fill those jobs in the tarsands and other raw-resource extraction industries.

Why Do We Even Bother to Blog? Part 1

In a recent rant on the CONTempt Party government's compulsive spending of our money on pure propaganda, we gave a shout-out to Stephen Lautens for graphic help in the form of another of his wicked Demotivational Conservative Posters.

He graciously complied.




There. Says it all.

Propaganda: Haz We Had Enuff Yet?

This is what set off my rage-o-meter yesterday.

Canadians may be growing weary of - even hostile to - all those Economic Action Plan ads the Harper government has been pumping out for the last four years.

Eight polls the Finance Department commissioned between 2009 and 2012 suggest the TV, radio, print and Internet ads are starting to fizzle - and annoying some people.

. . .
The eight surveys, commissioned from four polling firms for almost $300,000, have asked the same core questions of random samples of 1,000 people contacted by telephone.

'Even hostile'? Everyone I know is thoroughly and MASSIVELY enraged by the ads and billboards and website badges and and and. . .

It is, quite simply, propaganda.

And clearly not very smart propaganda, because it is not working.

But, in a move that tells you everything you need to know about this truth- and evidence-averse gang of vandals, they're going to keep pouring our dough down that money-pit.

The Harper government continues to buy ad time for its Economic Action Plan, including for Super Bowl Sunday football just last month, when Human Resources and Skills Development bought a series of pre-game ads featuring the EAP logo. The coming 10-week ad campaign by the Finance Department, which launches Monday, will reprise last fall's version.

Today's rage-o-meter was set off by spending yet more dough on focus groups to tweak the CONjob tarsands propaganda.

Focus-group testing on what the Harper government calls its Responsible Resource Development campaign found the advertising to be light on facts but uplifting and patriotic, according to a government-commissioned study.

The fruits of that taxpayer-funded labour will again be on display this spring as a second wave of ads — designed to persuade Canadians of "the importance and impact of Canada's energy sector" — hits the air.

Natural Resources Canada has budgeted $9 million in the current 2012-13 fiscal year for ads that show a cross-section of resource industries in a job-friendly and environmentally sensitive light.

What? The oily companies we fund with corporate welfare can't afford their own fucking propaganda?

The ads repeat and repeat and repeat ad nauseum.

But mostly they are INSULTING.

Yes, fellow and sister citizens, they really do think we are that stupid.

For the full picture of how this government is pissing our money up the propaganda rope, look at this.

Surely this bullshit has far outstripped Adscam by now.

I'm not great at naming things, but this needs a catchy title. Suggestions? #CONprop?

Also. Paging Stephen Lautens for a suitable Demotivational Poster on Propaganda.

Rightwing Investment Info Broker Claims Doctors Are in the Health Biz for the Money.

US physicians work in the health care business for the money? That would seem to be the premise of a *MASSIVE* poll done by Investors' Business Daily.

45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul

Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found. The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors' own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.

So this purported 'scientific' sampling of doctors who read IBD and share its views are *MASSIVELY* out of step with their colleagues in the AMA. What a shock.

And the response to this *MASSIVE* poll is predictably rightwingbatshit teabagger frothing-at-the mouth lunatic:

Doctors Threaten to Go Galt if ObamaCare Passes

It would be a miracle of biblical proportions if Big Government's minions could decrease costs while increasing coverage, as Democrats have been promising to do when they seize control of the healthcare industry.

Miracle of "biblical proportions" is the US religious rightwing zealot term for *MASSIVE* I'd guess.

Who are these so-called investors business experts anyway? Oh wait. Gotcha!

Read about the original *MASSIVE* poll here.

Apparently, I'm a propogandist

When it comes to the so-called abortion debate, I don't know which sort of opponent is more irritating -- the debaters or the authoritarians. Here, we have a combination of both, and a supposed progressive to boot.

The debaters want to get, as CC puts it, 'nuancy': when does life begin? what role does the state have? whose rights are they anyway?

The authoritarians are shalled and appocked that Canada has *gasp* NO LAW on abortion. Butbutbut all other countries have laws on what women can do with their own bodies. What kind of pissant country doesn't have a law on what women can do with their own bodies?

What's really rich is that Gordie the Progressive accuses us of propoganda [sic and snerk]. Check out The Signal Hill's links page, Gordie. While the outfit professes neutrality, it links to all the usual lying liars.

By the way, here is a progressive who does get it.

Zygote Zealots Distort Results of Study.

It should no longer surprise me whenever I read a headline that distorts information from a typical fetus fetishist perspective. Here's the most recent example.

"Drug abuse common among women who have abortion"

Yet information about the study provided in the news item does NOT make that claim.

Kaeleen Dingle from the University of Queensland's School of Population Health examined 280 women aged between 18 and 23 who have experienced pregnancy, and found a link between losing a baby and mental health issues.

The data was taken from a long-running study that has followed a group of Brisbane mothers for 21 years, checking in at various intervals to examine the outcome of their pregnancies. As part of her PhD research, Ms Dingle interviewed the original mothers' daughters who had fallen pregnant themselves in their late teens and early 20s. She found the group was three times' more likely to abuse heavy substances, including heroin and speed.

"The young women who reported having an abortion and those who had suffered a miscarriage had equal increased risk of illicit drug use and alcohol problems," Ms Dingle said.

A quick google search for the name Kaeleen Dingle indicates that the habitual disseminators of lying bullshit and zygote zealotry such as Free Republic have already started to distort the information available, even though science and reality-based news sources are reporting the data correctly.

“Our findings suggest that this increased risk of psychiatric problems in some women after an abortion may be associated with pregnancy loss rather than caused by the experience of having an induced abortion,” she said. ...

Ms Dingle said the study had implications for caregivers, who may need to give more counselling and support to women who have lost a pregnancy. “Also, health professionals involved in the care of young women with mental health problems need to take good pregnancy histories, as young women can have complex pregnancy histories involving births, miscarriages and abortions,” she said.

Ms Dingle's PhD project is examining common mental health outcomes of young people who enter adulthood earlier than their peers through circumstances such as early parenting, early live-in parenting and early independent living.

Note also the context of her research, which will be conspicuously absent from the right wingnutter's and abortion criminalizers' shrieeekkk blogging as they distort the information to suit their propaganda needs.

Lessons about Feminism from a Virulent Feminist Hater

Via small dead brains, we find out that self-righteous rightwing political zealots never spare the hyperbole when they deign to shrieeekkk about sexism.

Never mind that this one gets downright hissy when it's pointed out to him the faux outrage he claims in the name of women's rights, regarding a 'sexual assault' he compares to the gang rape depicted in "The Accused" is actually a disgraceful, dumb and drunken gesture directed at a cardboard figure.

For which an apology has been issued.

It is so instructive how right-wing ideologues such as Andrew Breitbart trivialize the real, harmful and life-threatening violence that is done to girls and women when they use their deliberately wrong-headed understanding of feminism as a weapon to batter their political opponents.

The pic of Breitbart was found at LoneStarBear.

Shhhhhh

OK, we admit it. Sometimes we at Birth Pangs make shit up. But we didn't make this up.

Back in March we started calling Bill C-484 The Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill after a prominent fetus fetishist called it that on his blog.

So, despite the fact that an anonymous commenter there helpfully pointed out that the post had just made a liar out of Ken Epp, today the same blogger posted Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill - The Sequel. (The Freak Dominionists are also discussing it.)

He links to a LifeShite story about Courtney Love refusing to have a abortion despite her heroin use. This is of course celebrated (though we doubt very much else about Ms Love's life would be celebrated by the fetus fetishists). Then the article maunders on about proposed legislation in the US somewhere about banning 'coerced' abortions. This is par for the course for fetus fetishists. They believe that most abortions -- except those for Culture of Death Feminazis -- are coerced, mainly by the menfolk in these women's lives, and of course by Culture of Death Feminazis. They figger if they can outlaw 'coerced' abortions -- presto change-o! -- abortion would just about disappear -- except for those of the Culture of Death Feminazis of course. He wants such legislation here.

Here, we'll let him tell you:

With C-484 and then this as a follow-up? Holy smokes, Batman, talk about having the devil on the run.

Can you imagine how much this kind of legislation is going to cut down on abortion in Canada when we truck it up here? It will show just how fraudulent the whole “choice” of abortion really is.

But, please, nobody go over there and tell him he's just made a liar out of Ken Epp and his minions. Again.

(First published at Birth Pangs.)

Girls and Women, Girls and Women, Girls and Women

We at Birth Pangs are heartily sick of this bullshit meme.

From the recent throne speech:

Our mission in Afghanistan is a noble and necessary endeavour.

It is making a difference in the lives of men who were victims of Taliban oppression, for children forced to live in ignorance, and for women who had no human rights.

From Peter MacKay:

We are supporting women who, under the Taliban regime, were forbidden to go to school, to work or to vote. . . . We are building a future for children, so that they can all be educated, have access to medical care, and have the freedom to grow up in a climate of security and hope rather than in fear.

And from Bev Oda:

"After years of conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan’s education system is one of the weakest in the world. This has deeply affected the country’s ability to rebuild and sustain itself,” said Minister Oda. “But progress is being made, and Canada continues to reinforce its role as a leader for education in Afghanistan, particularly for women and girls."

Well, thank Gord for the Canadians.

Um, well, maybe not. Today, UNICEF released a report on Afghanistan's children.