April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

conservatives

Blame it on Hamas

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With apologies to Kris Kristofferson

Harper’s up in Ottawa he’s really in stew
Canadians in Gaza what’s he gonna do?
But then he hears a whisper into his tin robotic ear
Lets just blame it Hamas

Blame it on Hamas, blame it on Hamas
You’ll feel so much better, knowing you don’t stand alone
Start the accusation, tell the bleeding nation
Get it off your shoulders, blame it on Hamas

Conservatives won’t take the blame, won’t take responsibility
Lies are cheap and easy, the truth it don’t come free
It’s not our fault if lives are lost
We’ll just blame it on Hamas

Blame it on Hamas, blame it on Hamas
You’ll feel so much better, knowing you don’t stand alone
Start the accusation, tell the bleeding nation
Get it off your shoulders, blame it on Hamas

So while civilians in Gaza are blown to little bits
Conservatives wax arrogantly but they don’t give a shit
They just sit there useless immune to all the cries
We’ll just blame it on Hamas

Blame it on Hamas, blame it on Hamas
You’ll feel so much better, knowing you don’t stand alone
Start the accusation, tell the bleeding nation
Get it off your shoulders, blame it on Hamas

See POGGE for the news story

Here is the original song

Harper’s Full of Ship Again

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An article today in the Ottawa Citizen has this quote from Harper

Harper’s platform speech was billed as the most important of the campaign, but he might want to think about firing his analogy writer. “As the saying goes, it wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. Which is why, when the rain came, Noah didn’t need to panic and he didn’t switch boats,” Harper said. He stopped short of saying that, like Noah, God speaks to him.

Seriously? Noah’s Ark?! That’s the image he wants to impose.

as brebis noire pointed out

“Any leader who brings up Noah’s ark at a time like this not only has an empathy deficit, but a deficit in political instincts as well.
Noah saved his family and two reps from every species. Everybody else drowned.”

Well at least we now know what his platform is.

D.J. Plagerize

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It's hard out there for PM
It's hard out there for PM
It appears Harper has been “sampling” from the works of others. Some have used this as an excuse to cast further aspersions on Harper’s character and abilities, but come on — sampling? All the best D.J.’s do it.

But D.J.’s do parties you say. Well Harper did the Conservative party. What I mean to say is Harper is part of the (not your father’s)Conservative party.

Yes but D.J.’s spin music. Well Harper et al do at lot of spinning of their own.

Ok you say but D.J.’s want to show people a good time. Well Harper wants some people to have a good time, it just happens to be with your tax dollars.

You know it’s hard out here for a PM wannabe (you ain’t knowin)
When he tryin to get majority (you ain’t knowin)
For the corporate breaks and sweater vest money spent (you ain’t knowin)
Because a whole lot of women hating on him (you ain’t knowin)

Conservatives Artfully Dodging Reality

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Conservatives and the art of deception
Conservatives and the art of deception
In the Globe and Mail Margret Atwood writes on the Harper Conservatives™ cuts to the arts. She explains how this is not in truth about targeting “elites” but is in reality about targeting Canadians of any socio-economic status or political persuasion.

The Conference Board estimates Canada’s cultural sector generated $46-billion, or 3.8 per cent of Canada’s GDP, in 2007. And, according to the Canada Council, in 2003-2004, the sector accounted for an “estimated 600,000 jobs (roughly the same as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil & gas and utilities combined).”

Perhaps Mr. Harper feels there are far too many Canadians employed in Canada and therefore jobs are expendable.

This sums up my thoughts about Harper and his neo-con co-oped Conservative party perfectly;

What’s the idea here? That arts jobs should not exist because artists are naughty and might not vote for Mr. Harper? That Canadians ought not to make money from the wicked arts, but only from virtuous oil? That artists don’t all live in one constituency, so who cares? Or is it that the majority of those arts jobs are located in Ontario and Quebec, and Mr. Harper is peeved at those provinces, and wants to increase his ongoing gutting of Ontario – $20-billion a year of Ontario taxpayers’ money going out, a dribble grudgingly allowed back in – and spank Quebec for being so disobedient as not to appreciate his magnificence? He likes punishing, so maybe the arts-squashing is part of that: Whack the Heartland.

Or is it even worse? Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they’re a mouthy lot and they don’t line up and salute very easily. Of course, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth – the only kind of art you might need – but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master’s Voice. Maybe that’s why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad. He didn’t like the competition for media space.

Read the full article here

h/t skdadl @breadnroses

Rights, the Right doesn’t believe in them

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Can you afford your rights?
Can you afford your rights?
In April of last year I blogged about the Court Challenges Program and this quote;
Rainer Knopff, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said the program was “a biased boondoggle that had gone well past its `best before’ date.”

The program only funded groups on “one side” of the political spectrum while “socially conservative groups never got any money. Not a penny, as far as I know,” said Knopff.
He also echoed then-Treasury Board president John Baird’s suggestion, made in defending the decision to kill the program, that it made no sense for Ottawa to spend public money helping groups challenge its own legislation.
“I don’t want to pay for surrogate litigants,” said Knopff, arguing public interest groups should raise their own money for Charter cases. “If they can’t raise the money – tough.”

Today CTV has a story about the further erosion of rights in Canada;

OTTAWA — A Montreal court may be about to make Canadian legal history in a case that could see offenders considered guilty until proved innocent.

A bail hearing at the court this week is believed to be the first involving so-called “reverse onus,” in which a defendant must prove why they deserve less time behind bars and why they should be released on bail pending trial.

This ‘test case’ involves gangs. Naturally one chooses the circumstance least likely to garner public sympathy to launch such an attack. It goes without saying that any argument to democracy and rights will be met with an allegation of supporting gangs and violence. It being the case, unfortunately that some cannot hold more than one thought in their mind at a time. This law may start out as being about gangs and gun crime but it will not end there.

Image via Wikipedia

Dave Schroder of Edmonton’s Guardian Angels network thinks the reverse onus rule is “long overdue.”

“When somebody has demonstrated their lack of respect for Canadian law, we do have the right to expect them to be put away,” he said.

We certainly do have a right to expect criminals to be “put away”, right after they have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers.

I say this as someone whose life has been touched by violent crime. The criminals never even charged. While I still am affected by these crimes, I don’t believe the Canadian criminal system should be built upon whatever revenge fantasies I may hold.

Our rights and freedoms are being stripped away by those who value sound bite over substance, authoritarianism over democracy and big brother over individual freedom. It is time for us, all of us, to speak up before our right to speak is taken too.

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