Closing Time

You knew it was coming.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented, agreed and disagreed, linked and un-linked, and especially those who’ve hung in here over these past few erratic and troublesome months.  I’m humbled.  But I’ve become discouraged with the blogosphere in general and my own recent feeble offerings in particular — the bell has rung, for now anyway.

(Who knows, maybe as soon as I hit “Publish” for this post, I’ll think of something that I really really really want to blog about… but I seriously doubt it.)

Thanks again.

xxxooo

 

Charles McVety, champion of censorship, free speech martyr (huh?)

Shorter Charles McVety:  “WAAAHHHHHHH!”:

An evangelical minister says his television show’s content will now be “pre-screened and censored” after his remarks about homosexuals drew complaints that were investigated by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.  [...]

The Word TV statement released Wednesday also criticized the CBSC’s “heavy hand of censorship” and the way it investigates complaints and makes decisions.

Comparing the CBSC practices to “the Salem witch trials” and to “Josef Stalin’s Show Trials,” Word TV said the organization did not give programs the opportunity to defend themselves.

Well, here we go.  As heartwarming as it is to see Mullah McVety’s deranged on-air diatribes earning him a long-overdue boot to whatever he’s got that passes for nads, it was inevitable that it would prompt his hideous metamorphosis into “St. Chuck”, free speech martyr Silenced by the Powers-That-Be and the Rainbow Jackboot of Persecution.

And suddenly the air thickens like frozen snot as it’s heavily permeated by the foul fragrance of BULLSHIT.  Airwick, stat!

To be clear, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found McVety in violation of some of their rules.   Whether one agrees with the reach of regulatory agencies like the CBSC is another debate — they are what they are, and McVety isn’t so special that he shouldn’t have to play the game by the same rules as every other Canadian broadcaster.   If McVety considers what the CBSC does to be a kind of government or bureacratic overreach*, he should lobby to get it shut down so he can jabber away unhinged and unfettered. (*As Antonia notes in the comments, the CBSC is an independent, self-regulating non-governmental council made up of private broadcasters.  However, McVety’s language in complaining about them seems lifted straight from past complaints about agencies like HRCs, no doubt by design.)

But McVety doesn’t really object to overreach, as long as it’s his overreach.  And he certainly doesn’t oppose censorship, as long as he’s the censor.  For instance…

There’s “blockchildporn dot ca“, McVety’s ongoing campaign to have to the government force cable companies to block any website that hosts kiddy porn. While child porn is indeed odious, the criminal code already has it covered and law enforcement regularly ferrets out its users and purveyors.  Empowering government to dictate censorship to private cable companies seems like a convenient point of entry onto a slippery censorship slope — what else does McVety think the government should force cable companies to block?  I can well imagine.

Then there was the new porno channel (are we sensing a trend here?) that was up for licensing a couple of years ago — a run of the mill adult porn channel, no kids or squids.  But it was still more than the perpetually-aggrieved and sex-crazed McVety could tolerate, so he lobbied relentlessly against it, making feverish demands that the Harper government intervene to block its license.  (Why does Charles McVety hate the free market?)

And let’s not forget Bill C-10, a piece of backdoor censorship legislation that was proudly championed by McVety, who bragged about being responsible for it. Ostensibly C-10 was to eliminate government funding for films deemed “objectionable” (by the likes of Charles McVety?  That could mean just about anything including nature movies about gay penguins).   Whether one agrees with the concept of taxpayer funding of the arts is another debate:  Bill C-10 didn’t cut all arts funding, only specific “objectionable” projects, some with McVety-head-exploding titles like “Young People Fucking“.   (In a classic case of false advertising, YPF wasn’t actually about young people fucking at all.  But that didn’t stop McVety from chanting the title for months on end with obsessive-compulsive frequency, like some psychotic parrot — “Polly wanna Young People Fucking!  BRAAAAK!  Polly wanna Young People Fucking!  BRAAAAAAAAK! BRAAAAK!” — spittle and drool at no extra charge.)

You get the drift.  St. Chuck, Free Speech Martyr?   Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Another bill bites the dust

Steve walks warily in to vote on the latest anti-choice bill

Ain’t no sound but the sound of him telling his flunkies to vote to kill

The foetishists are ready, they’re ready for this, they’re hangin’ on the edge of their seats

Out of Lifesite the shrieking rips, to the sound of the tweets

Another bill bites the dust

Another bill bites the dust

And another bill’s gone and another bill’s gone, another bill bites the dust

Hey!  We’ll kill the next one too!  Another bill bites the dust!

Ooooohhhhhhh yeah!

DJ reports that yet another backdoor anti-abortion bill from the infamous Pro-Life Caucus is no longer pining for the fjords but has passed on, is no more, has ceased to be, expired and shuffled off its mortal coil.  It is an EX-bill.  The doomed Bill C-510 was voted down today by 178-97, the NO vote being a healthy majority that included — shriek – Stephen Harper.

C-510 is just the latest entry in the never-ending competition among anti-choice MPs to see who can actually get an anti-abortion measure passed.  This redundant and patently phony “anti-coerced abortion” bill is clearly useless — it doesn’t stop violence against women and even the bill’s sponsor, MP Rod Bruinooge, openly admits that it would be virtually unenforceable. Clearly the legislation serves no purpose other than to chip away at abortion rights by putting abortion providers at legal risk.

Here’s what the Canadian Civil Liberties Association had to say about it:

However, the new prohibitions that Bill C-510 attempts to create are not helpful in addressing the question of violence against women.

A young pregnant woman has the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term or to terminate it. Whichever option she chooses, she should not be subjected to harassment, intimidation, threats or the removal of financial support. The Criminal Code already prohibits all of these activities. Thus there is no need for Bill C-510. In any event, this bill only addresses the “coercion” of abortion.

Furthermore, by only creating prohibitions around abortion, the Bill effectively implies that this is not a valid or legitimate choice.

In addition, Bill C-510 is so broad in its language, that it might have the potential to criminalize the activities of Planned Parenthood and other social and healthcare workers, who provide important information and medical treatment – including abortion – to those who choose it.

In light of the above, CCLA calls for the withdrawal and the defeat of Bill C-510.

Anti-choicers have long since come to grips with the reality that upfront anti-abortion legislation isn’t in the cards under any government in Canada and that only an incremental approach stands a chance.  But so far success has eluded even the cheap, sleazy “death by a thousand cuts” strategy, and there’s no reason to think the winds of such change are anything but the anti-abortion movement’s own mental flatulence.  Not that the sneaky fuckers will ever stop trying.

So until the next time…

For Whom the Poll Tells

Today’s Big Number is Thirty-Eight(38).

With the comfortable space of 2 years between them and the last election, and with the next one hovering tantalizingly on the horizon, the latest Angus Reid poll shows the CPC well ahead at 38%.  38%… I can almost hear the saliva dripping from conservative fangs across the nation… 38%… so close and yet so far.

Or maybe not.  The poll also finds the LPC in somewhat more disarray than could be considered strategically opportune at this pivotal pre-election moment.  Once again a majority of LPC voters are expressing dissatisfaction with their party’s leadership.  Only 38% would keep Iggy as leader, and the rest would presumably drop him like a dead donkey:

While large majorities of Tory and NDP supporters are content with Stephen Harper and Jack Layton, only 38 per cent of Liberal voters in 2008 would keep Michael Ignatieff at the helm.

38% of Liberal voters would keep Iggy at the helm?  38% of the Canadian electorate would vote CPC?  Coincidence?  Hmm??

But check out the “Attributes” section of the poll.  Respondents were scathing in their assessment of Ignatieff, saying he was more boring and out of touch, less intelligent, and only slightly less arrogant than Harper:

Does that mean Iggy’s 7% more boring than Stephen Harper?  That’s quite an achievement, when you think about it.

Are MC Harper’s little musical interludes working their PR magic?   Come on Iggy, time for some one-upmanship:  think Ladies’ Night at the Eldorado.  You might still lose the next election, but nobody will call you “boring”.

Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon

And so marches on the terrible twisted saga of “doctor” Charles McVety, who just got a karma-driven boot to the withered nads (FWOMP!  Ooof!) from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.

 

Mmm bacon.

MC Wanker

(Subtitle:  “Things that make me want to fill an intravenous drip bag with Mezcal and mainline it straight into the supraorbital vein in my forehead. For a whole bunch of reasons”.)

What’s that sound?  It’s the sound of our Singing Prime Minister, setting the stage for the next election with yet another outburst of song, this time at the CPC Christmas Orgy.  For those who like to live nauseatingly, here’s MC Steve’s version of “Sweet Caroline”… click it, you are powerless to resist:

And there’s more (including a rendition of “The  Seeker” that was far too disturbing to post here).  Harper got right into it, performing five(5) songs for the appreciative partisan crowd.  Oh well.  Why not?  The people at the party apparently liked it, and even Harper himself momentarily seemed slightly less reptilian than usual. And as I remarked after Harper’s first Outburst of Song last year, I suspect it can’t hurt his image to be seen doing such Average Guy things as tickling the ivories and singing, slightly off-key, just like we all get roped into doing sooner or later at this time of year.

But wait:  did someone say  “off-key”?:

Upstaged yet again by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who took to the stage Wednesday night at the Conservative caucus Christmas party, the Liberals were up early grumpily emailing reaction. “Not even one song in French,” a senior Ignatieff official told The Globe and Mail on Thursday morning.

It’s just baffling, baffling I tell you, that the Liberals have so much trouble getting the average Canadian to warm up to them.

UPDATE: And not to be outdone by western capitalist pig-dogs…   Careful, Harpie:  next time you get together with Vlad he might start boasting about how his piano is bigger, stronger and faster than yours.     (h/t SQ in the comments)

(h/t the Woodshed)

Game changers in Canadian Politics (prepare for excitement!)

“Power & Politics” has compiled a list of nominees for Canadian political “Game Changers 2010″, and woohoo — they want our input!

Who made the biggest difference on the political scene this year? Who had the most profound impact on the direction of the country? Who changed the political landscape in a significant way, positive or negative? We want to know what you think.

See?  They want to know what you think, so tell them already, then report back here and tell the rest of the class who you voted for and why.  (Or who you would have voted for had they been on the list — which, by the way, is information CBC invites you to share.)

Go on now, run along and votey-vote-vote.

(h/t the Divine Ms. Z on Twitter)

He used to say he’d marry me

…if only I was a dude.

Such was the wit and wisdom of my friend Bruce, who is gone now, and I am so much poorer for it.

Of all the people I’ve “met” on the innertubes, there are many that I might like to have a beer with, but few that I consider Good Friends.  Bruce was one of that latter rarified class, and the fact that we’d never actually met in “meat space” didn’t diminish it.

Ours was one of those “instant” friendships that springs up when for some quirky reason, two people just hit it off.  A similar age and rebellious history,  an appreciation of twisted humour, all things Mac and men in leather  and engineer boots — the last being a shared addiction that both delighted and dismayed us (“We’re drawn like moths into the flame”, one of us sighed during one of our many discussions on the topic).   We also shared decades of indentured servitude to the advertising industry — sometimes even at the same agencies, albeit at different times.  We were two unrepentant freaks laughing out loud at a hostile universe, delighted to have found each other.   What a gift.

But not for long, as I found out yesterday.  Again.

In a bitterly ironic coincidence, Sunday was the anniversary of the death of my older brother, another gentle soul that succumbed to the inner voices of evil and wretched secret despair.   And now the shadows of early December fall darker still.

Goodbye, my friend.  I will miss you.

Must be the clouds in my eyes

 

 

I wonder

…how many of the same people who went into paroxysms of frenzied outrage and wanked themselves stupid over the sight of Janet Jackson’s nip during the Superbowl half-time a few years ago would be perfectly okay with something like this?:

For only three hours a year do Americans actually look forward to watching commercials rather than ignoring them, muting them or running to the bathroom during them, as we do the other 8,763 hours.

That is during the Super Bowl.

In fact, commercials have become part of the entertainment during football’s annual big game, a cultural phenomenon.

So imagine a 30-second Super Bowl ad showing the graphic reality of abortion.

Fetus pron during the Superbowl — just to make those Superbowl snacks a little more appetizing, eh?  Predictably, Nurse Stanek is pretty gung-ho about the idea:

Most Americans, including many pro-lifers, would abhor such an ad.  But pro-life activists like me would be ecstatic, if such a word can be used to describe fulfillment of a passion to see a multitude of people face the truth about abortion….

Such a word can indeed be used, but there are many many more accurate words  at our disposal to describe such mania:  “psychotic” springs instantly to mind.

The plan was hatched by the ubiquitous Randall Terry, whose foetishizing derangement extends beyond all known parameters on the sanity scale.  All he needs is a cool $2.5 to 3 million and, oh yeah, the blessing of whatever network is running the Superbowl…

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

Guess the backstory

The little routine in the video below apparently happened in nearby Nanaimo, right on Stewart Avenue on the way to the ferry… oh yes, I know it well… and who knows, the guy in the video looks awfully familiar so I might even know him.  (Or more accurately, I might have known him in a past life.)

Huh?  What?  So what’s the backstory?  Just say no to drugs?

 

Open Mike with Mike

A hot mike and a disgruntled but unaware politician with an axe to grind.  What could possibly go wrong?

I mean, other than a savage little truth-telling spasm such as the one that seized Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) yesterday in the Senate as he complained to a colleague about the Democratic strategy for the lameduck session — whoops!:

“It’s all rigged,” Bennet said (clip below). “I mean the whole conversation is rigged. The conversation, the fact that we don’t get a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged. This stuff’s rigged.“

Can’t say I disagree.