Election, final week: All right, all right. A small measure of hope

Leavened, as always, by a heapin' helpin' of caution.

The polls, to the extent that they can be relied upon, continue to show a surge in the support for the NDP, to the consternation of both the traditional parties. Bay Street, apparently, is shitting its drawers. And the gutter press is all but disappearing up its own ass in a desperate attempt to make a smear stick.

Is this what they call a cheap shot?

Four senior Conservatives charged with violating Elections Canada spending laws.

This could be where we juxtapose the news with all the soft-on-crime rhetoric.

Remy Beauregard's legacy

I'm not going to go through the whole sordid story here. Much as I'd like to, I haven't been giving it the attention it deserves, but Paul Wells has been doing a fantastic job on it.

Best use of the word "socialist" this month

I've written recently about the need to win back the words, with this one being perhaps the most important, given the way the Venomous Loser^TM at the Toronto Sun flings it about so carelessly.

So it's especially heartening to see things like this.

It adds a little frisson to the schadenfreude.

All right, all right. I know. Cheap shot. More substantive post to come soon.

Just goes to show you

The most telling paragraph from Avaaz.org's response to the attempt to spam its petition:

It's deeply disturbing that in all Avaaz's years of campaigns against US President George Bush, Burmese, Zimbabwean and Sudanese dictators, irresponsible multinational corporations and corrupt politicians, no one has ever yet stooped to this kind of tactic to undermine our members' right to express their views. 

Yep. Of all the nasties Avaaz has taken on, only Fox News North's supporters have gotten this dirty and desperate.

Update: Susan Delacourt puts the whole mess in perspective here. If she's right, then not only did Kory Teneycke know someone was adding the names of real people (Kady O'Malley, Paul Wells, Stephen Wicary, Andrew Coyne) to the Avaaz petition without their knowledge – he wrote his piece slamming Margaret Atwood citing the fact that there were fake names on the petition in order to undermine it. And this guy's going to tell us we need a right-wing Fox Noise machine because the "lamestream media" lack journalistic credibility?

The Harpokons and Insite

I won't try to summarize Paul Wells' argument here. It's succinct enough on its own. The money graf:

This is not mere disregard for reliable data. It is an attempt by the state to put falsehood in the place of reliable data. George Orwell wrote books about this sort of thing.

Read it here.

Really, what more is there to say? I wrote recently about the damage that results from turning ignorance into a civic virtue, and here's a prime example.

And looky here: it seems some of Harper's fans don't like what Paul has to say. And they don't like what the peer-reviewed facts and evidence about Insite and harm-reduction strategies suggest. And, of course, they think that name-calling and sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la, I can't hear you" are the same thing as reasoned argument.

A couple of weeks ago Bob Herbert wrote about America's continuing abandonment of education as a public good. If what we're witnessing is the decline and fall of Imperium Americana, that's got to be a big part of the reason.

This is the road the modern right wants to take: knowledge, experience and expertise are no longer qualities to be valued, but indicia of condescending, out-of-touch elitists, to be reviled, disdained and demonized. How much hope is there for a political strategy (or a society, for that matter) based on the deliberate cultivation of stupidity?

(Update: Chet has some further thoughts on the matter.)