The Battle of T-Dot

If it was enough to bring Chet back to the keyboard, it is certainly enough to prompt a little mid-hiatus commentary from me.

The apocalyptic combination of sweltering heat, thunderstorms, earthquakes, floods and tornadoes was a fitting meteorological accessory to the past shitstorm of a weekend in the city formerly known as “Toronto The Good” (though “Toronto the Cowed” might be more appropriate at this point).  The buildup of manic hyper-security ahead of the G20 Summit reduced downtown Toronto to a grim and fearful shell and fomented much resentment among city-dwellers and those who planned to take part in the demonstration that inevitably accompanies these multinational wingdings wherever they’re held.  The stage was set, the goonery that followed was predictable, and I am only surprised that, apart from assaults to civil liberties, nobody was seriously injured during the “festivities”.

While thousands protested peacefully, the spotlight was grabbed by a brain-damaged few who trashed businesses and cop cars.  The battered cruisers prompted speculation that they were purposely abandoned in order to lure the minority of violent protesters into doing what comes naturally to such lint-brains. In this case, what came naturally was leaping atop the vehicles, doing a fandango on the light-bars and setting the things ablaze in fires of such brainless magnitude that the images were astonishing people around the globe within seconds.

I don’t buy the “agent provocateur” meme that’s burning (metaphorically speaking) through the blogosphere at the moment, which is not to say it’s inconceivable. But unless the guy who took the first kick at the windshield was actually a cop in disguise, I don’t see an empty car as “provocateuring”.  And I’m decidedly uneasy with attributing the fault for the acts of violent dingbats to anyone but the individuals themselves: it kind of overlooks that whole free choice and personal responsibility thing.   Look at this guy, he didn’t need no stinkin’ provocateurs:

If the cops wanted evidence of property damage, they already had it.   Maybe not in as pyrotechnically-impressive a configuration as the Flaming Cop Car model, but reflective of the same general spirit of malevolence and utter human dumbness.

Which brings us to the police.  These guys –

— and their attitude that the citizenry they are supposedly sworn to Serve and Protect can be subjected to jeering ridicule and disrespect and even physical beatings at their whim.  Whether they acted as agent provocateurs or not, they behaved like degenerate thugs with the moral turpitude of rabid hyenas and the brains of common garden slugs, compromising civil rights in a dizzying array of ways from attacking peaceful protesters and even journalists covering the event to “pre-emptively” arresting people without cause.

The cops have a lot more to answer for than gifting the small criminally insane wing of the demonstration with a few 2-ton toys to play with.   The real issue is the aggressive brutality that was imposed on a largely peaceful demonstration, and the fact that such brutality is nothing new in Copland:  the past weekend was just the Cherry Beach Express on Steroids.  When 4 cops can basically summarily execute a man for the crime of getting lost and running mildly amok at the airport, we shouldn’t be too surprised at what transpires when 20,000 of them get together — Authoritariapalooza!:

Well-meaning anti-gun absolutists take note:  are you sure you want these guys to be the only people in Canada allowed to possess firearms?

Tremble with righteous rage, demand inquiries and Blame Harper if you will, because his decisions contributed to how this all went down. But the police mentality that allowed the weekend’s fascist police-state thuggery to prevail pre-exists Harper by many years, and history shows it’s non-partisan.  The real problem isn’t ideology as much as the fact that while we were sleeping we gave the government the right to bring its considerable coercive power to bear on us. I’d like to see a change in the governing party as much as anyone, but to think that such a change would alter the culture of police thuggery is, for lack of a better word, a “cop-out”.

Our own little Faux

BOOM!  A few days ago it was as if someone had set off a stink bomb as the Canadian progressive blogosphere roiled and recoiled with revulsion and dry heaves at the prospect of a Canucki version of Fox News. Obviously, the purpose of this sinister new channel would be to poison the innocent minds of credulous Canadians too dumb to discern Truth (seemingly the exclusive preserve of the CBC) from the regurgitations of right-wing propagandists.   Do not adjust your set, but maybe adjust your tinfoil hat:

Quebec billionaire Pierre Karl Péladeau is attempting a major shakeup of television news in Canada, with plans to launch a 24-hour cable channel modelled on the right-leaning U.S. network Fox News.

And bloggers aren’t the only ones vexed about the idea of a Fox-style braaaaaahhhdcast:

The first time I met Kory Teneycke, he told me that Canada needed a Fox News channel of its own.

I impolitely told him what he could do with the idea and we didn’t speak again for four years.

Ouchie… you know an idea has gone over like the proverbial lead balloon when it’s met with four(4) years of stony silence.

But not from me.  It seems like a pretty simple concept:  if it’s a good idea and people want it, it will succeed.  If it’s not, it won’t.  And if people want it, who am I to say they shouldn’t have it if private enterprise will provide it?

Some are concerned about propaganda — Woohoo, all Stephen Harper all the time! (Zzzzzzz) — and its potentially negative effect on wider discourse.  Stateside, Fox has done more than its fair share to poison the political climate — some of its talking heads are so deranged that they’d be better off neutered and caged in a zoo for the Criminally Insane to serve as horrible warnings about the dangers of overmedication and untreated syphilis. But somehow I doubt that Fox’s stable of inveterate bullshitters and bawling madmen would be taken seriously here in Canada, or at least not for long.

And after all, we got the supposedly left-leaning Al-Jazeera, so why shouldn’t conservatives get Fox Lite if there’s enough of them to make it viable?  Let us Celebrate Diversity, even in broadcasting! (Or braaaaahhhcasting, whatever the case may be.)

Hee

My respect for Jack Layton

…just took a turn for the better:

The fate of the gun registry rests with a dozen New Democrats, who are in the position to cast the deciding votes after the party signalled Friday it will not crack the whip by forcing the caucus to support the federal database.

Imagine that, allowing MPs to break from the party line and vote as per their constituents’ wishes.  This whole “breaking ranks” thing, that’s new and different, eh?

Not really.  The supposedly “unofficially pro-choice” Liberal Party does it whenever their socially conservative contingent votes “their conscience” on  abortion-related bills, votes which are driven less by the wishes of constituents than by the anti-abortion ideology of the individual MPs.  If some of the rural NDP MPs break ranks with their party and vote to ditch the Long Gun Registry, they will be doing so in direct response to their constituents, not to further some dimwitted cultural anti-abortion crusade.

As a rural resident, I can say with some certainty that there are many in ridings like mine who will take approving note of this development and, for maybe the first time ever, feel that their elected representatives are actually listening to them.  Considering the Long Gun Registry is little more than an insanely expensive monument to legendary brainless emotion-driven Liberal excess, dumbness and pandering,  the NDP MPs who vote to put it to sleep will also be leveling the field between themselves and their Conservative opponents in ridings where there are a lot of single-issue voters.  Allowing them to do so is some surprisingly high-calibre political cogitation on Jack Layton’s part.

Relax

Find a sunny spot and kick back with a friend

And with that, I think I’ll kick back for awhile myself.  Later…

Offshore drill baby drilling

She was for it before she was against it!

Damn those burdensome regulations that might have saved a few lives on April 20th.  Not to mention those damn bureaucrats, keeping oil companies from drilling the shit out of everywhere with reckless abandon.
So the Palinator was disheartened by the cancellation of offshore leases… well, who wouldn’t be?

“Drill baby drill” is rapidly becoming “Spin, baby, spin“. *WINK* drool, slobber

Tweeting the burning stoopid

Slobbering Sarah tells X-treme Enviro-weenies The Way It IS:

Yes, because oil companies have such a great track record on dry land.

Certainly the massive BP oil disaster in the Gulf is the fault of environmentalists who brutally FORCED the oil companies to drill offshore.  If ANWR was opened to drilling, oil companies would instantly lose their major defining characteristic — GREED — and immediately cease all offshore operations.

Since the blithering, dimwitted Palin has an answer for everything, maybe she can explain in 140 characters or less why 20 years of GOP-controlled congress and White House out of the last 28 — including 12 immediately following the enactment of the ANWR ban — never repealed the act, instead escalating offshore leases and dismantling safety regulations.

Olbermann is right:  that woman is an IDIOT.

UPDATE: Damn those Greenie-Weenies!

UPDATE II: On top of being a complete moron, Palin’s a bullshitter.  Olbermann responds to the twit’s tweet: