ICYMI: Regarding the previously open question, “what does the Harper government’s door-to-door EI Stasi unit want to know?”

Not too too much, just, y’know, everything:

Investigators with the Integrity Services Branch were provided with a 23-page manual, dated October 2012, outlining investigative techniques intended to be used in a pilot project starting in November and winding up at the end of March.

The document makes it clear the Service Canada employees are to leave no stone unturned in their inquiries, even in the absence of evidence that selected EI recipients had done anything wrong. The document suggests investigators check addresses, bank accounts, medical documents and even the physical appearance of claimants.

[...]

Investigators are told to seek out the claimants’ former employer, and to select a sample of five prospective employers the EI recipient says he or she sought out for work opportunities. A check is to be made that the claimant really did make a job request, and employers are to be asked whether the claimant said the job was not suitable and if so, what reasons were given.

One section says the address a former employer lists for the EI recipient is to be verified, and if there is “indication of (a) manipulated residential address, the integrity investigator may … obtain from the financial institution a record of all deposits, locations and withdrawals.”

[...]

Another section suggests a claimant’s photo should be verified, or their name checked on utility bills or lease agreements that presumably must be handed over. An employer can be asked to describe the “physical characteristics” of the person who worked for them to see whether the description matches the EI claimant.

In some cases, the investigative techniques seem to delve into the far corners EI claimants’ lives.

For claimants who are collecting maternity benefits that are part of the EI system, investigators are told to verify:

• The child’s identity and parentage.
• In some cases, “the maternal relationship to the claimant.”
• Proof of the child’s birth, a date that can be compared to the “maternity window.”

[...]

NDP Opposition House Leader Nathan Cullen said Friday, “It seems somewhat hypocritical that they treat people who’ve lost their jobs as criminals, yet people in the Senate who may be committing fraud, they take a pinkie-swear and say that’s good enough. That they’re going door to door in a witch hunt manner after people on employment insurance, who sign a declaration every week and have to report every week what they’re doing — meanwhile, senators are milking Canadians for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

What, no drawing blood — no stool samples? Pssh. Silly Opposition Cassandras — way to blow an “opportunity to know that this system is intact” WAY out of proportion..

Related: I’m old I remember when CBC (sorry — I mean, OUR STATE BROADCASTER!!1) used to investigate entirely unsupported claims like $334M “suspected” fraud cases, instead of blithely repeating them without question in a superficial, he-said-she-said play-by-play. Because everyone knows Tories would never, ever lie with brazen disregard about entitlement [sic] fraud running rampant [sic] in order to reap the political benefits of targeting (what they consider to be) a marginal class.

Never.

The Week perfectly summarizes the GOP’s rationale behind the great Chuck Hagel freakout:

Hagel, a former GOP senator, won by the narrowest margin of any defense secretary since the job was created in 1947, raising concerns even among his supporters that he would emerge as a wounded leader as he takes over a Pentagon facing deep budget cuts scheduled to take effect on Friday. “He has had to renounce every contrarian view that endeared him to the president in the first place,” one Republican senate aide said.

Related: Speaking of damaged goods, Dave Weigel looks at how Rand Paul’s point position on the Chuck Hagel filibuster has soured Paul’s standing with daddy’s influential paleo-libertarian constituency (who kinda sorta like Hagel).

High-tech = high consumption. France 24′s Environment explores the environmental impact of contemporary digital culture, from energy consumption at data centres to ‘planned obsolescence’ and efforts to recycle dead hardware. Check it out after the jump:

To our shock and dismay, multiple incidents of plagiarism were uncovered from work over the last number of months. The staff member plagiarized various online new publications, while writing opinion pieces that appeared in this space. Entire paragraphs were copied and then blended into articles, removing a word here and there, or adding a clause to link certain phrases, but leaving the words of the original writer all or mostly intact, without attribution to the original writer or publication.

As of Tuesday morning, that news staff member is no longer employed at this newspaper.

As Sixth Estate modestly notes:

I can think of a much more important paper than the Citizen which showed us that when a minor charge like serial plagiarism comes along, there’s certainly no need to fire anyone as long as the writer in question says it was inadvertent and is willing to print a vaguely worded apology.

Not to name any names or anything.

Cough.

900ftJesus has some important questions for the Privacy Commissioner re: the new Harpercon plan to randomly audit EI clients for *gasp* fraud, via taxpayer-subsidized bureaucratic fishing expeditions (House calls? REALLY?):

What information are federal employees told to gather through house visits?

How is this information gathered? (silent observation, questions, questioning and/or observing people other than the client at the home?

What information is included on any reports given to HRDC?

What is the format of this information?

To what use is this information put? How is the information applied?

What privacy rating is assigned to this information?

Who has access to this information?

Where, how, and for how long is this information stored?

What training have employees who gather the information, and employees who have access to it received in privacy issues and security issues?

What information is given to the clients prior to a visit and during a visit concerning information that will be gathered?

What privacy considerations are specifically given to non-EI claimants sharing the home being visited?

Make no mistake: the Harper government is trying to do to EI recipients what its ideological predecessors, the Harris Reformatories, did to welfare recipients in Ontario in the 90s: demonize based on demonstrative appeals to self-aggrandizing Ford Nation assumptions about freeloaders (who, btw, were not, in fact, committing fraud willy-nilly back in the day, unless one contorts meaning into Gordian knots). Of course, EI != welfare. As 900ftJesus notes, “EI recipients are clients [emph. mine]. They have paid their insurance premiums and are clients, making insurance claims.”

Which is of course the overall point of the egregious Harpercon house call exercise: to dramatically shift Canadian perceptions on how we frame and view EI, until the lines between client and recipient (ie, leech) have been sufficiently blurred.

Pitchfork finally justifies its existence (after the jump):

Original Sin

Obama Is Wrong: Gerrymandering Isn’t to Blame for the GOP Fever

Has Obama Kept His Open-Government Pledge?

Neocons vs. Realists Is So 2008

Foucault’s Boomerang: The New Military Urbanism

Throwing Light on the Dark Side of Dorner’s Rampage

At Least 20 CIA Prisoners Still Missing

We’re All Terrorists Now

No, don’t skip the drone debate

The Art of Infinite War

Drone Wars: Tactics in Search of a Strategy

Keeping Drones in Context

Saudi Money Shaping U.S. Research

The girls are not alright

Suicide by self-immolation a rising trend in France

The Bulgarian Turn

Exit music:

The following nugget was buried at the bottom of a follow-up CP report on how CIDA helped fund the Ugandan aid work of the virulently anti-gay Crossroads Christian Communications (in full PR damage control mode now that its homobigoted Evangelical slip is showing) to the tune of half a million dollars last year:

Francois Audet, director of the Montreal-based Canadian Research Institute on Humanitarian Crisis and Aid, said he believes Crossroads is far from the only group with controversial opinions that receives CIDA money.

“There is, for sure, other hidden treasures, other organizations who do ideological propaganda with public funding from Canadian aid — and what is worrying is that CIDA does not check this,” Audet said in an interview.

Audet said that his own research on how CIDA allocates its funds shows that between 2005 and 2010, funding for religious non-government organizations increased 42 per cent, while secular groups saw an increase of just five per cent.

“I have the clear impression — and I am not the only one in the scientific community — that behind this, there is a deliberate strategy to finance the groups ideologically close to the actual Conservative government,” he said.

Hey, careful now — publicly musing about hidden Harpercon agendas is almost guaranteed to give the Queensway set the serious vapours. The last thing we need on a Tuesday (or any other day for that matter) is an especially vapourous Canadian punditocracy. Their regular pinheaded emissions are gaseous enough as it is.

I highly doubt Ottawa’s atmosphere can handle any more pollution.

Related: To be fair, not all Jesus-friendly NGOs are on board the CIDA gravy train:

In the past few years [KAIROS],  the Mennonite Central Committee and the Catholic Organization for Development and Peace have all seen CIDA funding cut:

CIDA’s shift away from working with long-time and often church-based development partners to financing private sector projects such as those of the mining companies has been in the works for several years.

In November 2009, CIDA cut off funding to the ecumenical social justice group KAIROS, which had been a long-time partner in development. Neither CIDA nor its minister Bev Oda would provide any explanation beyond saying that CIDA’s priorities had changed and KAIROS did not meet them.

Then in February 2012, CIDA turned down a proposal by the well-respected Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for $2.9 million for each of three years to provide food, water and income generation assistance for people in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Haiti, Bolivia, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

In March 2012, it became apparent that CIDA had also cut off the Catholic organization Development and Peace (D&P). CIDA, which had provided the organization with $44.6 million in the years 2006-11, chopped that amount by two-thirds, to a total of $14.5 million over the next five years.

More from AP (h/t).

Bonus: Celtic Frost, live San Diego 1986:

Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but things ain’t lookin’ good for the Brazman:

Senator Patrick Brazeau will be formally charged with domestic assault and sexual assault later this morning, following a brief appearance at the courthouse in Gatineau, Que.

Brazeau, who appeared in court wearing a black suit and white dress shirt, did not have his lawyer present for his first appearance at about 9:15 a.m. ET Friday.

Also (re: this):

If at #CTV's report is so important/relevant/factual, I'm sure they will look for me tomorrow in Parliament. I'll report back tomorrow.—
SenPatrickBrazeau (@TheBrazman) February 07, 2013

I hope the good Senator dressed those words with ketchup before chowing down in his holding cell.

Update: Tim Harper (h/t Zerb):

In the ensuing years, each time [Brazeau] displayed a stunning lack of judgment or acted in his typically boorish and bullying manner, he took to blaming the messenger.

When Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn reported on Brazeau’s woeful attendance record in the Senate — he was within days of being fined for his absences at the time — he took to Twitter to slag the reporter.

“Change the D to a B in your last name and we’re even! Don’t mean it but needs saying,” the juvenile Brazeau told Ditchburn on his Twitter feed.

In recent weeks, Brazeau must have seen it all coming apart.

The Star caught him mocking Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence at a Conservative fundraiser and CTV Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife found Brazeau was allegedly gaming the system, illegally claiming his father’s house as his primary residence so he could pocket a housing allowance.

Wednesday night, hours before police responded to the disturbance at Brazeau’s home, Fife reported that the senator had allegedly listed his mailing address as that of his ex-father-in-law’s house to gain an aboriginal tax exemption and Brazeau predictably branded Fife a racist.

[...]

Somehow, Brazeau seemed to think he could simply brazen his way through all this as charge was heaped upon charge, complication was piled upon complication and his enemies proliferated.

He has invited Canadians to once again heap scorn upon a discredited institution but, in this case, Canadians have no one to blame but Harper.

FLASH: Idaho State Sen. tables bill mandating the torture of Idaho youth en masse. No, srsly:

Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

When Sen. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, asked Goedde why he chose that particular book, Goedde said to laughter, “That book made my son a Republican.”

[...]

“It was a shot over their bow just to let them know that there’s another way to adopt high school graduation requirements,” Goedde said after the meeting.

Christ.  Extended stress positions and waterboarding would be infinitely more humane. Have you no decency, sir?

Related: Ayn Rand – The Comic.

This.

Senator Patrick Brazeau is in jail following an alleged domestic assault, sources tell CBC News, and has been removed from the Conservative Party’s caucus.

Brazeau, who has weathered several controversies since his appointment in 2009, will continue to sit in the Senate as an Independent.

It’s not clear whether any charges have been laid. Brazeau was arrested at 9:10 a.m. ET Thursday at his residence in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa.

Marjory LeBreton, the government Senate leader, sent a letter to Brazeau’s office and caucus members in the morning informing them of his removal.

“In light of the serious nature of the events reported today, Senator Brazeau has been removed from the Conservative caucus. As this is a legal matter, I cannot comment further,” LeBreton said in a statement.

A senior government source says Prime Minister Stephen Harper was saddened and shocked by the latest Brazeau developments, and took action immediately.

Developing…

Original post:

CTV News:

Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau used his former father-in-law’s address in a First Nations community when he claimed an aboriginal income tax exemption from 2004 to 2008, CTV News has learned.

Brazeau, who has publicly called on aboriginal leaders to be more financially accountable, listed the residence on the Kitigan Zibi First Nation in Quebec as his mailing address for four years, unbeknownst to his ex-wife’s father.

“I was not aware of that,” Daryl Tenasoco told CTV News.

Neighbours said it did not appear that Brazeau lived in the community.

“I’ve never seen him,” Jean Guy Whiteduck said. “It’s right across from my place. I’ve never seen him there. He may have visited. That’s about it.”

But documents show that income tax exemptions were applied to Brazeau from 2004 to 2008 when he listed the Kitigan Zibi home as his address.

DJ rewind:

Brazeau, who has publicly called on aboriginal leaders to be more financially accountable, listed the residence on the Kitigan Zibi First Nation in Quebec as his mailing address for four years… .

[...]

Neighbours said it did not appear that Brazeau lived in the community.

Hypocrisy is a real B, huh Senator?

(h/t)

Rosa Brooks unpacks the Obama JD’s targeted killing memo: “Like many legal documents, this one does fine on its own terms, but looks a lot less satisfying when taken out of its hermetically sealed legal universe.”

Related: John Fugelsang talks with Harper’s Scott Horton and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK about the kill memo and a possible slippery slope into domestic assassination:

Update: Via Jack Goldsmith, two different takes on the white paper — first, Jeffrey Rosen is outraged:

The Justice Department white paper released on Monday by NBC News is the public’s first direct glimpse at the legal reasoning that the Obama administration relied on in using a drone strike to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen living in Yemen. The memo’s arguments are troubling on many levels. Although the Obama administration’s brief is directed at the assassination of Americans abroad, the arguments it offers could apply with equal force to the assassination of Americans at home; lawyers for the Bush administration who tried to justify lesser outrages have been pilloried for supporting torture. But perhaps most troubling is the administration’s attempt to redefine the idea of the kind of “imminent threat” that can justify a targeted assassination. . . .

There are other reasons to object to the administration’s justification of targeted assassinations—including its questionable claim that they are legally supported by Congress’s authorization of the use of force after 9/11. On pragmatic grounds, the administration’s brief is a disaster: As the Church Commission found after studying the attempted assassinations of Castro, targeted killings are likely to produce an international backlash that threatens far more American lives than they protect. But, as a legal matter, the casual, and unpersuasive, attempt to read out of American constitutional law the principle that government can only kill citizens in order to prevent imminent death or violence in return is the most objectionable of all.

And then there’s Eric Posner, who is not so outraged (and wonders what all the fuss is about):

So far, the reporting on the leaked white paper from the Justice Department about drone attacks clearly assumes that we are supposed to be outraged by the Obama administration’s legal theories, just as we were supposed to be outraged by the Bush administration’s. And outrage is being dutifully ginned up. But the memo is utterly conventional as legal analysis; its arguments could easily have been predicted. . . .

Obama and Bush administration lawyers have stretched the Constitution and traditional rules of international law to accommodate the threat posed by terrorism. Some people will say they violated the law. But given the political consensus supporting these moves within the U.S., it is more accurate to say that the law has evolved. It gives the president the discretion he needs, or at least wants, to address an amorphous threat. Let’s hope he uses that discretion wisely.

Quite the leap of faith, that (YMMV).

More from Goldsmith here and here, and from Ben “Keep Calm and Carry On Killing The Wogs” Wittes, who thinks this is all much ado about nothing.

A friendly reminder from TAFKAdnA:

The Obama administration claims that the secret judgment of a single ”well-informed high level administration official” meets the demands of due process and is sufficient justification to kill an American citizen suspected of working with terrorists. That procedure is entirely secret. Thus it’s impossible to know which rules the administration has established to protect due process and to determine how closely those rules are followed. The government needs the approval of a judge to detain a suspected terrorist. To kill one, it need only give itself permission.

“Trust me” != due process, Mr. POTUS.

Related: Thomas P.M. Barnett:

For now, the only club whose membership can earn you such a “pre-sentence” is al-Qaeda, but how many dangerous organizations (you tell me where to put the sarcastic quotation marks on that phrase) will be added to this list in the years and decades ahead?

[...]

This is an extremely dangerous rule-set for America to be exporting around the world: threaten or scare of just plain piss off the wrong great-power government, and it reserves the right to assassinate you at will.  The quid pro quos are easy to imagine:  you, China, turn your back when we need to kill ours and . . . America can probably do the same when you take out those “protestors” (I mean, terrorists!).

I just have to ask: how does Obama lecture Netanyahu about anything at this point?

How Idle No More Could Help Save Canadian Democracy

Mounties snooped on Occupy protesters in nation’s capital: documents

Police drones raise fears over personal privacy

Anticipating domestic boom, colleges rev up drone piloting programs (h/t)

U.S. Memo Details Views on Killing Citizens in Al Qaeda

Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

Human Rights First Calls Legal Justification for Targeted Killing Flawed

Noam Chomsky, Why It’s “Legal” When the U.S. Does It

CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’

Extraordinary Rendition And The Axis Of Evil, How ‘Enemy’ Nations Iran, Syria, Libya Cooperated With CIA

The Vertical Axis in U.S. Foreign Policy

Tehranimal Farm

Welfare fraud is a drop in the ocean compared to tax avoidance

Jonathan Kay Still Ignoring Women

Why Aaron died

Skeeters Bit by the Image of a President Who Opposes Violence—Not the Second Amendment

Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: ‘Survivalism’

Can watching a couple of Rihanna videos really turn a girl into a knicker-dropping strumpet?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Reviews ‘Girls,’ Calls Donald Glover Role ‘Some Jungle Fever Lover”

The Least Happy Jamaican: On Volkswagen’s Super Bowl Commercial

Could New Orleans Be the Labor Movement’s Next Frontier?

China’s People Problem

New Gas Extraction Methods Alter Global Balance of Power

The Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Private Prisons Blur the Line Between Real People and Real Estate With New IRS Property Gambit

The State of Anti-Austerity Struggles in Greece

First African Female Billionaire a Testament in Corruption Not Success

Exit music:

BCL on the chutzpah of Jonathan Kay, junk science enabler debunker:

[T]here’s a real lack of self-awareness here.  Jonathon [sic], after all,  is comment pages editor at the National Post, and under his watch it has for years entertained  junk science from Global Warming deniers.  Sometimes this nonsense has been confined to the OpEd pages; sometimes its made the news, and sometimes the claims have been so egregiously false that defamation suits have been the result.

And as I have written on several occasions, you can’t open the floodgates a little way.  You can’t set teh crazy just a little bit free. When you start smearing a particular scientific field, you get mud over the whole edifice.

The NY Times:

Several recent polls and studies suggest that long waiting times in some places depressed turnout in 2012 and that lines were longest in cities, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll taken shortly after Election Day, 18 percent of Democrats said they waited at least a half-hour to vote, compared with 11 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans.

Wait — it gets better:

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites. Florida had the nation’s longest lines, at 45 minutes, followed by the District of Columbia, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, according to Charles Stewart III, the political science professor who conducted the analysis.

A separate analysis, by an Ohio State University professor and The Orlando Sentinel, concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida “gave up in frustration” without voting.

“When I got there, the line was around the building,” said Jonathan Piccolo, 33, who said he had waited nearly eight hours to cast a ballot in Miami-Dade County the Monday before Election Day.

“It’s one of the most sacred rights you have,” Mr. Piccolo added. “They should make it as painless as possible.”

Features, not bugs, kids. Democracy is apparently a major impediment to Real America.

Update: A reminder from comments that voter suppression tactics are a burgeoning export market for Uncle Sam.

Chris Kyle's death seems to confirm that "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword." Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn't make sense—
Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 04, 2013

Ok, so maybe the 140 is not exactly conducive to nuance.

Onward Facebook ho:

As a veteran, I certainly recognize that this weekend’s violence and killing of Chris Kyle were a tragic and sad event. My condolences and prayers go out to Mr. Kyle’s family. Unconstitutional and unnecessary wars have endless unintended consequences. A policy of non-violence, as Christ preached, would have prevented this and similar tragedies.

Yes, clearly the problem was not enough fortified Jesus in Kyle’s spiritual diet. Look, I’m not big on treating PTSD with MORE GUNZ either. However, this trademark reflexive knee-jerkism is the sort of tone-deaf hobby-horse humping that makes DOCTOR Paul’s preening moral vanity so bloody odious to those of us who haven’t wholly sacrificed critical thinking to the glibertarian Borg.

Check out Rand-boy’s desperate pre-2016 damage control effort here. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall at the next family dinner?

(h/t)

Transcript here (h/t).

Business Insider:

The AP reports that 5,000 Golden Dawn supporters marched past the US Embassy in Athens, chanting anti-Turkish, anti-US and anti-immigrant slogans. The anti-US feeling was prompted by memories of a 1996 territorial dispute between Greece and Turkey that only ended peacefully after the intervention of the US, and led to three Greek navy officers dying in a helicopter crash.

Related: The Indy: How Golden Dawn is nurturing the next generation; Der Spiegel: ‘Golden Dawn’ Fosters Ties with German Neo-Nazis

The Graun:

Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), the Nobel prize-winning organisation working on the frontline in remote and conflict areas, says vaccines bought with UK and other donor governments’ money cost too much and are not designed for the needs of hot and impoverished countries. When the pot of money subsidising the high prices of western pharmaceutical companies runs out, developing world governments will not be able to afford the vaccines and children will continue to lose their lives, MSF says.

MSF is concerned that the deals between the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), to which the UK was the biggest donor last year, and pharmaceutical companies such as the British giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Pfizer in the US, are not transparent and do not have inbuilt sustainability.

“It looks to us like a big subsidy for pharma – there is no other way of saying it really,” said Dr Manica Balasegaram, executive director of MSF’s access campaign.

[...]

Seth Berkley, chief executive of the Gavi Alliance, rejects the criticism and says the organisation is working to fashion a market for vaccines in poor countries that has not existed previously, and that will result in competition, eventually leading to lower prices.

Yes, because laissez-faire trickle-down indifference always pays off in the end (for somebody, anyway).

Definitely not the Super Bowl edition (sorry kids, matttbastard don’t do football — that said, go Ravens, because fuck these guys):

Boys

Christopher Hitchens, David Irving and the Holocaust

BDS, Brooklyn College, and the Daily News

The Torture Apologists Ignore the 4,000 Americans They Killed

Margaret Wente’s “Big Wind”: another error? (h/t)

The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It

Liberals, household chores and fickle TV program directors

Shell Wriggles Free Of Oil Spill Liability In Nigeria, But Case Is Far From Closed

The Future by Al Gore – review

The Sunday Cat on the recent attacks on cats

Men Go on “Guyets” Because Girls are Stupid

Head on over to mybloodyvalentine.org to grab MBV, the LOOOOOOONG-awaited (and oft-delayed) follow-up to 1991′s seminal shoegazer classic, Loveless (assuming you haven’t already been sated, natch).

The Observer (h/t):

Over the past few decades, average families have coped by more women going into employment, by working longer hours and by credit. But since 70% of the US economy is based on consumer spending, a lack of surplus cash means the engine is running out of fuel. The rich are small in number and don’t spend nearly as much as the majority. “Free” markets with the rules written by the richest result in a shrinking public sector, deregulation, unemployment, low taxes for the most affluent and the threat of globalisation, depressing wages still further. The sum impact isn’t “bad” capitalism, it is modern-day capitalism. How it changes, and how rapidly, is a challenge to its own survival. Once, the advancement of the employee was a part of the social contract. Under Thatcher, the aspiration of the average citizen was central via shareholding and home ownership. Now, a more brutal set of priorities pushes the requirements of “the little man” aside, while those who have money buy the influence that unjustly shapes the world in which we live. So how do we forge again the link between morality and the markets?

Hey, here’s a novel proposal: How about holding criminal bankers to account?

Sixth Estate:

I think we’re kidding ourselves if we say that the debate about abortion is now over and shouldn’t be reopened. It may have been closed in the courts since 1988. It may be closed in the Parliament insofar as there is not (currently) any debate proceeding on legislation to regulate abortion. But it is obviously not closed and done with in the public sphere. It’s silly to pretend otherwise.

O rly?

Twenty-five years after the country’s abortion law was struck down, Canadians are still divided on how – and whether – the procedure should be regulated.

But there is one area where there is widespread agreement across the political spectrum: This is not the time to re-open that debate.

That is what emerges from the results of a new [Angus Reid] poll…released [Jan. 28].

[...]

The one question in the poll that produced the most agreement was whether there was any point reopening the debate, with a solid majority, 59 per cent, saying No, compared to 30 per cent who want the discussion reopened and 11 per cent who are undecided.

Angus Reid also examined the issue based on voting preference and found that 55 per cent of Conservatives, 65 per cent of NDP backers and 66 per cent of Liberals do not want to reopen the debate.

Histrionic faith-based groups that are pathologically obsessed with clumps of cells != “the public sphere,” anymore than dead-end 9/11 Truthers or ‘Young Earth’-addled Creationists do. Besides, how exactly does one ‘debate’ those who don’t even traffic in rational argumentation to begin with?

DNFTT — especially the ones toting fetus-pr0n placards.

(h/t)

h/t Digby

Tom Fucking Flanagan. Why?

Answer: Because chicks [sic] dig “the full buffalo”.

No, really:

“[I]t is kind of a chick magnet. Women are drawn to the coat. They want to come up and feel the coat.”

Tom Fucking Flanagan, “icon of Canadian history,” ladies and gents.