Small Time Video

Gormley was critical of the bad language in Gunderson’s videos. I don’t care for foul language in most music either, but at least Gormley has a valid excuse for acting like a crotchety old man; I don’t know what my problem is.

I do love Dirty Spaceman, however.

And I wish UMG would screw off and accept a parody that uses some of their video, but has different lyrics and music is not copyright infringement. It’s 2012, not the stone age. Oh, wait, scratch that, C-11 is passing.

Don’t let Gotye kick your monkey, or anywhere near your goat. He’s a Wookie snatcher, and he’ll eat your pie.

RoboCop speaks out about RoboCon

Don’t worry everyone, MP RoboCop is on the job!

Fantino, the former Toronto police chief who is Tory MP for Vaughan, said he, too, is trying to get answers after his name turned up in court documents
[...]
“From my personal experience over 40 years of law enforcement I think it’s totally unethical, totally inappropriate…”

Yeah! Go find who conspired to prevent opposition party voters from going to polls, using criminal robodialed messages.
Oh, wait. He finished his sentence with, “and it’s more like a smear campaign.” Ouch.

I guess we can’t count on RoboCop to save us from Pierre Poutine, the RoboCon. :-(

–

Some journalists are not being kind with their pens:

Stephen Lautens ‏ @stephenlautens

Talk about foreshadowing: Sen Finley says any wrongdoing will be isolated incidents by local volunteers

That’s the Senator Finley convicted of Election Act violations within the last year, for the 2006 In and Out fraud. Why, oh why does Coyne say the Conservatives lack credibility when they deny any involvement or responsibility?

==

And now a word from RoboRadioHost:

John Gormley Live ‏ @JohnGormleyLive

THIS is what a lot of conservatives are feeling down about today: fxn.ws/wzHCPg

Oh, I understand. I’d be down too if my governing party, who rode to power on a wave of “sweep out Liberal corruption” was implicated in a more serious corruption scandal. Wait, what’s the link go to?
“Andrew Breitbart dead at 43″
Oh. Well, that’s sad too, I guess.

Breitbart became embroiled in a controversy of his own, though, for his reporting on a web video of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod. The edited video appeared to show Sherrod making a racist comment, but the full tape later put the remark in context and made clear that Sherrod was actually talking about bridging racial differences. Sherrod was fired after the edited video surfaced, and later filed suit against Breitbart.

Breitbart, though, went on to report on one of the biggest congressional scandals of 2011 — the tweets sent by Weiner to young women he met online. The former New York congressman, who is married, adamantly denied the reports at first, before admitting to them in a tearful press conference and resigning.

One of Breitbart’s most memorable moments came when he commandeered the podium before Weiner’s final New York conference, holding court with reporters and demanding an apology from Weiner — while Weiner waited to attend his own press conference.

Ah. I can see why they are upset. Seems like a great guy. That is Fox News’ perspective, too.

==

Bonus PD coverage for those who haven’t read enough political scandal for a day:

I WOULD HAVE NEVER IMAGINED THE DAY WHEN CONRAD BLACK OWNED THAT RAG The National Post, in particular, and Postmedia in general has been beating The Globe and Mail like a rented mule when it comes to coverage of the RoboCall scandal. And The Toronto Star has been doing some good work on coverage as well. Guess the Bellmedia empire is wanting to go down with the Cons’ ship.

Improve Your Mood

Biking to work improves your mood. It also gives you a better perspective on life, and helps you get enough daily exercise to avoid some of life’s more terrible ailments. You could also skateboard to work, since the mood improving properties are directly attributable to physical activity, and travel at a more human pace.

If you wondered why certain radio jockeys are so cranky (about cyclists) all of the time, it’s because they aren’t biking to work and are missing out on the benefits they begrudge their neighbours for taking.

Instead of the Green Party Leader John Gormley who:

…introduced a “Bike Scheme” in January 2009 which promoted cycling to work by offering tax incentives to employees and employers who purchased bicycles and switched to cycling. The scheme is part of a strategy to double the number of journeys made by bike by 2020, and also includes a multi-million euro cycle-path upgrade plan.[14]

We’re subjected to fear and grouchiness:

Biking in the winter. Is this safe? Should bikes be allowed on our roads in the winter?

Is it safe… to let people exercise and be happy while going to work the way they want? The whole effin’ system might collapse if tax payers are allowed to use roads using human powered vehicles!

==

I’ve cycled in every month so far in 2012. I’ve gone about 15km on 5 round trips to the south end of the city from home. All of the times I was out, it was warmer than 0 degrees C. at least one direction of the trip. Only twice was my destination work (the rest of the time I’ve walked, and left work by bus or car a couple times each).

==

Rick Hansen, the Man in Motion, was at the University of Regina and I stopped by to see his presentation. Here’s a clip:

Chantal Hebert – liveblog at UofRegina

Intro by Mitch D.
Then Rick Kleer
Last time she was here was 2004 when Martin won PM.

Journalists drank Regina out of white wine.

She broke a rib and got to cover an election from the ground, where most voters are anyway, giving her a better perspective.
Our new tools have built better silos. Sharing isn’t routine.
Background info from the govt is treated as FYEO (For Your Eyes Only).

140 char delivery is not delivering enough details to people. 30 seconds means 12 in radio. She’s had to edit some people down a bit so they sound effective, and to save her 8 seconds.

Rene Levesque was explaining a policy in detail once she recalls, and politicians don’t do that often anymore.

Layton didn’t produce a lot of memorable quotes prior to his deathbed letter filled with them.

Form response from government gives us “cones of silence”. A human can’t make themselves give detail-free form responses five or six times, but computers give us boring responses that people tune out.

She’s talking about media tech during Meech Lake. The TV was the best place to learn about a national debate. There was no great advantage to being in Manitoba or Newfoundland with only the politicians meeting there.

Ignatieff speaking at a rally in Quebec, talked about Harper barring attendees from his rallies. Some man told Hebert he wanted to hear about something the audience there cared about.
Twitter as a window into what people are interested in, is a distorted mirror.
“People on Twitter are junkies”.

People need to take to the streets still to finish the change started in cyberspace, like in Egypt for instance.

Not totally kidding, couldn’t use “prorogation” in news because it was too long.

Long form census scandal in July was surprising.

Nenshi in Calgary started at 1% in the polls. (Phone corrected Calgary to Calgarygrit – I must be a blogger.)

“Disconnected chattering class” is part of the problem.

Questions start. It’s unlikely that I will ask one this year.

Hebert likes a spin free environment. Know when they are going on holiday and ask them things when they have nothing going on. Know what they sound like when they are telling the truth. Each MP thinks what they are doing is in the public good.

Most politicians sound smarter when they are not in politics anymore. Party line is often a problem.

Twitter used to bounce stories off of it.

Election night publication law.
Elections Can may sue a lot of ordinary people. Voting isn’t like First Communion. BC might want to undo the damage done by voters in the East.

Municipal election lacks entertainment, except Toronto might object. She has a low interest in municipal politics these days.

Coverage of Ford is interesting in part because the cities are bigger than they once were, and many people vote for a mayor, as opposed for an MPP.

The nonConservative voters don’t have an easy way to win now that the Conservative party is united.

The Liberals and NDP are struggling for the same voters. Bruce Anderson argues the Liberals may come back as the spare wheel of Canadian politics. Minority govt is likely.
NDP and Liberals fight for the voters that Harper doesn’t want.

“We vote, and you don’t” is why govt talks about old age pensions instead of childcare.

Dan B. asks a question and starts out by mentioning that he isn’t a journalist. “Good” she said. (Too much competition in a field makes it harder to stay in a job anyway.)
Need healthy debate for healthy politics.
She votes as a citizen. Does a doctor like cancer more than cardiac arrest?
Vote as a parent to show your kids it is important.

ADDED:
Toward the end of the questions, someone wondered why OWS gets less coverage than he feels it deserves. She said OWS has unclear objectives, and doesn’t see the value in occupying public space. I found that odd, since earlier she praised youth in Egypt for taking their protest into the real world off of MySpace and Twitter. She thinks the ballot box is the way to make change happen, but also knows that her generation is more likely to continue to win, since it votes.

Another questioner was also disappointed by the answer they got regarding electoral reform. Hebert said voters and politicians don’t bring it up, so journalists shouldn’t. She neglected to mention that every political party uses methods other than FPTP to elect their party leader and/or executive. She did say that there is no voter appetite for PR or electoral reform. She thinks PR would work well federally though.

Radical Good Sense

The “Fight for Canada”, did not happen in 1812, since Canada did not exist as a nation for decades later in 1867. The Department of “Canadian Heritage” ought to be ashamed of its atrocious rewriting and dumbing down of Canadian history by calling the War of 1812 a fight for Canada. Who wants to bet that the winning Canada Day “1812: Fight for Canada” entry will have a Canadian flag on it, even though that flag didn’t come into being until 1965? Where historical accuracy loses to artistic license, that art becomes propaganda.

==

The not-so Honourable Minister of Natural Resources has kicked up Harper’s attack on environmentalism. Fortunately there are some real journalists out there still to hold his feet to the pyre he’s hoping to toss us onto.

Creekside’s Alison has the hilarious transcript of our Minister acting like a jackass on air, being caught with the plain truth. If non-Canadians with money for the oil patch want to spread money around for political purposes, it’s fine, but if non-Canadians want to spend money with the idea of protecting humans from pollution, then they are radicals.

The Globe dug up a few of those local Canadian “radicals” who probably voted Conservative last election.

Mr. Oliver was quite forceful, warning that such groups “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.

There could not be a more hilarious case of an old pot calling a (stainless steel) kettle black. Oliver described the Conservative party’s corruption of our democracy to make radical ideological changes on their well known “secret” agenda (ending: CWB, gun registry, Insite, all without logic or facts to back up their position soundly).

==

What I find amazing in this article is that an NDP leadership candidate is proposing something I proposed the NDP, Liberals, and Greens try before the next general election: joint nomination meetings for key disputed ridings. If only 30 of these are successful, that should give the Conservatives some measure of defeat in the 2015 election.

Note that the article headline would also be true if there were at least 15 ethical Conservatives left willing to put their country before their party, and vote as independents, apart from the Conservative caucus. Sadly “ethical” and “Conservative” do not belong in the same sentence anymore I fear.

I can’t find my original article with my idea when I first pitched it, but it may be prior or perhaps after this comment toward the end of the comment thread. It could have been after 2011′s election I brought it up, or maybe only on Facebook for some reason.

Basically the Liberals, NDP, and Greens would agree to run only one candidate, the most successful party at organizing the largest nominating group would run the respective candidate. That way each party gets a chance to run their candidate, and the vote splitting falls away long enough for election reform to pass.

Anonymous Promoting Occupy Saskatoon Protest

Someone identifying with the Anonymous Internet group may have decided that Saskatoon sounded obscure and cool enough to be participating in Occupy Wall Street, that they deserved a little extra boost of attention. The Saskatoon news media jumped all over it, but with an unbalanced article that appears not to have made an attempt to contact anyone in Anonymous for their side of the story.

The very nature of Anonymous, not having a command structure or hierarchy would make it difficult, but that should be explained well in the article. Instead I sent a criticism to the news director.

“Some have used the video’s call to extremism to colour the organized protests in Saskatoon and Regina as hooliganistic.”

These sort of “weasel words” wouldn’t pass muster on Wikipedia, and shouldn’t make it onto a news website. Identify who the ‘some’ are, or at least state that those people have been interviewed but did not want their identities revealed.

==

Meanwhile, in another example of failed “journalism” a guest rightly calls the CBC “Fox News” as O’Leary attacks him as a “nutbar” while obviously taking the guest’s position personally. It’s a video exchange you have to see, and should be on YouTube for a wider audience to share, as it sums up what’s wrong with the media, and what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

Topless Or Brainless

I know what I’d rather be on a hot day.

Making women wear clothing for religious/cultural reasons is something most John Gormley listeners critcise, but only if those women are in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan and it’s Islamic garb. If they are Westerners/Christians in Toronto or Regina, then those women had better follow customs and laws of decency!

The commenters on John’s facebook wall had me writhing in smug superiority. The spelling mistakes were amusing me to death, and the hypocrisy was delicious. I’ve highlighted some of my favourite mistakes and comments in the edited thread below.

John Gormley Live:
On now, yesterday women stormed Toronto topless after their request to do so in a park was turned down. Should women be allowed to go topless in public?
o
Chelsee Blackett: I’m all for womens rights, but I don’t get the point? I’m a woman and would hate drawing that kind of attention to myself taking my toddler for a walk or grocery shopping… It kind of confuses me that its important enough to some women to fight for it.

See Inside the Fukushima Nightmare

For the first time, I recently saw photos of the tsunami that hit the nuclear power plant Daiichi at Fukushima Japan. As I predicted soon after the disaster in March, there was going to be a meltdown. The evidence then available to me that TEPCO wasn’t being honest about the severity of the damage were the videos of the hydrogen explosions, the detection of isotopes nearby the plant that shouldn’t have existed unless the fuel was exposed to open air, and the information that corrosive seawater was desperately being applied to the hot reactors. The seawater was a dead giveaway, because if there was any hope of saving the reactors, seawater would not have been used on them.

I don’t trust the American or Canadian governments to be giving us accurate information about radioactive isotope contamination of our food in Canada. I wish I had a Geiger counter, because I’d be testing things here in Regina to see if they have an abnormal number, and eat and drink accordingly. It’s painfully obvious that nuclear power should have been an issue in the last election, but it didn’t even make a blip in the media circus of the campaign. You think they could have taken some of their crack reporters assigned to Harper, and when he told them to piss off after just 5 questions, they could have spent the rest of their day doing some coverage of the issues affecting the health and power bills of Canadians?

For those keeping morbid score at home, check out Gormley’s record, and then look at mine.

Two Videos, Two Leaders

A set of videos of the two leaders in North America every Canadian knows. Compare, and contrast please:

- Harper breaking another law taking advantage of his position for personal gain, and being caught live on the air instead of on audio tape this time. Kady informed me yesterday that interviews are exempt from the campaign blackout on election day, so technically Harper didn’t break a law by asking people on the radio to vote Conservative because he was invited onto the radio to speak as Prime Minister.

- Obama breaking a smile while amusing the press to death.

Oh, here are some Saskatoon election results.

Gormley Hypothetically Off The Mark

John Gormley spends a great deal of time carrying water for the Saskatchewan Party. He may not be doing so intentionally, his political stripe may simply lead to common ground with the conservative party in our province. Perhaps he sees their majority poll numbers, and figures that if he says things that conservatives like to hear, his radio show will have more listeners as a result, and he’ll be employed doing what he enjoys for longer. It’s just too bad that he doesn’t take his position of influence more seriously by reporting facts, especially about serious subjects like Sask’s role in the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan.

“It is clear that this nuclear disaster falls somewhere between 1979′s Three Mile Island and the much larger 1986 disaster at Chernobyl.”

That’s not yet clear. It currently falls somewhere worse than Three Mile Island, but has not finished yet. When the radioactive dust settles, then let us conclude what Gormley claims is the hypothetical situation. It’s amusing that Gormley in the following lines chides people making predictions.
“Feel free to give little weight to anyone who expresses a point of view prefaced by the words “if,” “in the event of” or “hypothetically.”"
Read more“

And we hope and pray that with the best of technology, expertise, skill -and a bit of luck along the way -a major release of radioactivity will be averted.

But ratcheting down the speculation and hyperbole would be nice too.[...]

The fact is that Japan was aware of the likelihood of disaster if a strong earthquake and tsunami hit a nuclear power plant. How do we know this? WikiLeaks confirms it.

So why does Gormley come to the defense of the black sheep of the power generation family, and label it a swan? Because it makes bloggers write about how wrong he is? Because callers will phone in to contradict his nonsensical position? Or because his buddy in the Premier’s office wants to build nuclear power plants one day in Saskatchewan?

Conservatives have lost touch with what it means to “conserve”. For instance, @EzraLevant is going to look into Ethical Radiation for his next astroturf book. He can co-write with crazy Ann Coulter.