Visuals Of The Greenpeace Banners Because CBC Doesn’t Show Them

I'm trying to figure out why CBC put a really boring picture of tiny people on a roof on their site, and buried the story way down at the bottom of their page under the headline "Police break up climate protest on Parliament Buildings."

Sure, we didn't vote for Greenpeace, but most of us didn't vote for Harper either.

Here now is a video from the Canadian Press, that actually shows the "giant banner" mentioned in the CBC story:

(EDIT BY EDITOR STEVE: Carle's video appears to be broken but here's a link that should work.)

Tsk Tsk.

The Famous Leaked Climate E-Mails

Here's George Monbiot's take. To sum up for the link-clicking averse: Those awful illegal e-mails DO expose shady scientific shenanigans--but they don't prove global warming isn't real. But they are a public relations disaster. Here's a funny joke that makes a point.

Obama Joker Artist Interviewed

The scoundrel behind that portrait of Obama as the Joker has been found--and he's not the conservative you'd think he is. From the Los Angeles Times:

When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image? Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain? Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago. Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software. Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it. Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

Full, very interesting story here.

The pictures, of course, have been used by right-wingnuts to attack Obama as a socialist. The artist's critism of the President, however, is that there "wasn't much substance to him".

As for the Conservative red-baiting? "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature," Alkhateeb tells the Los Angeles Times. "First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"

third party advertising

Here's one of those third party political ads a British Columbia judge just said were, in fact, legal (The Tyee). It's basically like all the right-wing attack ads we've seen for 30 years. Except, kind of funny. And contains actual facts.

The "S" Word

the Conservative Political Action Conference is going on right now in Washington D.C. And those all-American Conservatives are buzzing about the country's new president.

Specifically, there is talk that Barack Obama is a socialist.

By "there is talk" I mean a Republican U.S. senator actually said Obama is "the world's best salesman for socialism." (CNN)

Senator Jim DeMint also says conservative Americans might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism,” which sounds to me like he might be advocating the violent overthrow of the United States' democratically-elected government. I'm not sure that's legal but what do I know, I'm a commie Canadian who doesn't own even one firearm.

The conference started Thursday. Noteable moment yesterday: Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said “the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.”

So what's with the socialism scare? The term “Socialism” describes an economic system where citizens, through their democratically elected government, own and control the means of production. There are degrees of socialism, from fully state-run economies to European-style social democracies, but in practice a country like Venezuela — with its nationalized oil industry and hostility to foreign ownership — is probably closest to what most people would think of as socialist.

The Obama-smearers know this. They know that by calling Obama a socialist they're suggesting the U.S. president is a dangerous extremist who's not much different than a Latin American dictator (yes I know Hugo Chavez was democratically elected but most Americans wouldn't, and while I don't have any actual "facts" on this I'll bet the few who DO know who Chavez is would be scared of him).

This is of course all insane, delusional propoganda. U.S. conservatives are trying to frighten moderate Americans into thinking their new president is a power-hungry dictator leading a coup against democracy to attract support for their jerky little political party, the Republicans.

Regardless, whatever one’s preferred definition, “socialist” is not a useful catch-all description for the basic government activities like collecting taxes, administering public sevices (like delivering the mail) and providing state health care (well, not in America because that would be "socialist").

Oh, and desperately trying to repair an economy wrecked by a terrible, and very conservative, president.

By the way, both Bush and Cheney addressed the 2008 CPAC. It's really nice that this year, a new president's got better things to do.

Not Busy Being Born, Coalition Now Busy Dying

This is a piece I submitted for the coalition feature in the latest issue. I've been assured it was left out because of a lack of space and not because it sucks. (And I'm sure I didn't help my case for inclusion by turning this in a day late and 200 words longer than asked for.)

But thanks to the miracle of the interweb, all that typing won't be wasted.

A note about writing this.... My conversation with Donald Gutstein ended with his comment about how the coalition has missed its moment. I liked the way he put it and thought the remark important so I opted to start writing with that. After doing so, the article naturally became an inversion of the way the interview played out. You'd think, then, it would leave us in a happier place. But it doesn't. And so it goes....

====================

Not Busy Being Born, Coalition Now Busy Dying

A deathknell is sounding for the coalition. And there seem to be two camps ringing the bell announcing its demise: those who welcome the news and those who hear the tolling with a certain amount of sadness. Among those in the latter camp is Donald Gutstein, senior lecturer at Simon Fraser University and co-director of NewsWatch Canada.

“The moment has passed,” he says with regret. “What’s happened is the resumption of traditional politics in Canada. We have Harper on the right and Ignatieff on the centre-right and that’s going to be the range of debate. And, I think, that’s it.”

With the entry of “prorogue” into our vocabulary and Ignatieff into the Liberal command chair, the media has declared the nacent centre-left uprising done. You could almost hear a sigh of relief in the coverage. We’ve already written these stories, the media seems to be saying.

“They’re part of the corporate elite too so they’re happier with this kind of political and economic system,” says Gutstein. “What twigged it for me was the morning after Ignatieff was crowned, Margaret Wente said, ‘Yes, we can live with Ignatieff.’”

But how did it all unravel so fast?

From the moment the coalition became a possibility, the spin machine in every party’s warroom fired up. On one side, Harper was portrayed as akin to a tyrant, a petty man out to wreck petty vengence on his opponents. From the other, the coalition was depicted as a naked power grab by the Liberals inspired to action by a threat to their government welfare cheque.

While Harper’s reputation took a bit of a hit, opinion polls showed over 60 percent support for his government -- a pretty clear indication that his message had the most traction.

A few factors contributed to this, not the least of which being many Canadian’s lack of understanding of their own political system. Coalitions are de rigeur in many parliamentary democracies, but to a populace more familiar with the idea of an American-style republic they can sound pretty threatening.

“They filled a void by creating a myth about how the Canadian political system works,” says Gutstein of the Conservatives. “Patrick Muttart, he’s the guy in their warroom who’s in charge of the master narrative, and in the 2006 election he spent time in Australia and spent time in the US. So I think the master narrative is to move Canada more in the direction of an American-type republic. Even voting for senators and everything is part of that. And the left was totally incapable of correcting that message.”

At the same time though, he notes there were many on the left who weren’t behind coalition either, and he points to the perceived weakness of its leader as the key reason for that.

“I think one of the things was the problem with Dion,” says Gutstein. “I think it was more of a tactical concern than a strategic or ideological one. You know, with Dion as the leader of the coalition, what is it really?”

Ultimately, Gutstein argues that the mainstream media itself should hold much of the blame for putting paid to the coalition message. He notes that it was the way the coverage framed the situation as a “crisis” that first set off his alarm bells.

“What’s this crisis? There really wasn’t one,” he says. “The crisis was the possibility of a centre-left government. For the corporate media and for corporate Canada that could have been a huge crisis. So, at the outset, they chastised Harper for getting into it in the first place. He shouldn’t have done what he did, so they were after him at first. But then they totally switched over to attacking the coalition.”

Is it any wonder, then, that so much of the recent coalition coverage reads like an obituary?