Carol Wainio and a couple more Wente-isms: Nothing to see here

Here and here.

Second one even picks apart the correction, or clarification, or whatever the fudging mechanism the Globe's  using is called.

Uh-huh.

Well, I guess if the Sun's betting its saleability on Sue Ann Levy, we shouldn't be that surprised if the corporate meat puppets on Front Street are having similar thoughts.

Related posts:

• Wente, the Gelber, and the Globe: more quality control from Carol Wainio
• Media culpa: The Globe and Mail: Driving home a point about plagiarism
• Carol Wainio rips Terence Corcoran and Margaret Wente a new one

Hey, Lone Pine Resources Inc. — sue this

NAFTA challenge launched over Quebec fracking ban - The Globe and Mail: "Energy firm Lone Pine Resources Inc. is taking on Quebec’s fracking moratorium, saying it violates the firm’s rights under the North American free-trade agreement and demanding more than $250-million in compensation."

'via Blog this'


Y'see, that's the great thing about "free trade." We get sued for "lost profits" when we try to protect our drinking water.

And the Chinese deal Harper's pushing? Shhh. It's a secret. Everything about it is a secret. Even Diane Francis is shitting on it, for Chrissakes.

Guy's not only letting foreign corporations fuck us over, he's handing out souvenir bags at the door.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it.

Related posts:

• The Ethical Oil Spokespuppet Smear
• Electro-Motive: Foreign corporation takes Canadian tax dollars, fucks over Canadian workers | #cdnpoli
• Lawrence Martin on Harper's proto-fascism | #cdnpoli

@marcusbgee calls Ford on his bullshit, but who helped put him there? | #TOpoli

So a few people – Thor and Nancy for starters – are linking to this piece from the Globe's ideologically reliable urban affairs curmudgeon, who's arguing, not without reason, that Mayor Stupid should have known all along that he couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be any service cuts or layoffs.

One hesitates to accuse Mayor Stupid of lying, chiefly because it's obvious that he can't tell the difference between true and false. You know those people who are so out of touch that they don't even know what the facts are? The kind who pull facts and numbers out of their asses and know they'll never really have to account for it? The kind who just dispense with facts entirely and go with their gut because ... well ... just because. Shut up and fuck off.

@cityslikr on Team Ford's bullshit, and our complicity therein | #TOpoli

Which Lie Do You Buy? « All Fired Up In The Big Smoke

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

– Winston Churchill

So over at his place, @cityslikr's on about the fact that politicians have an uneasy relationship with the truth, and the cynicism and disengagement that breeds.

And George Carlin too, while we're at it

Michael Moore might have been bang-on with his analysis (see previous post), but he wasn't the first to make it.

The late George Carlin, in what might have been his finest moment ...

Coalitions and reclaiming the discursive turf

This is how Steve Harpoon wants us to think about the idea of a coalition.

(All right, all right. I wanted an image for "monster under the bed," and, well ... whaddayagonnado. Cheap laugh.)

Having a hard time arguing with this

This piece from Now's Enzo de Matteo's been on my mind for several days. Distilled down to a few words, he's urging Toronto's progressive councillors not to make nicey-nicey with the Ford regime, but to dig in and fight and play dirty every step of the way.

Could someone please change Ezra's diaper?

Honestly, he's starting to smell. Dear Lord, who told this little pisher that kacking into cyberspace is the same thing as a contribution to intellectual discourse?  ("Hey, look at me, I'm a Stockaholic!  Look at me! Look at me!")

Another smear job, another steaming pile of crap, lies and hysterical accusations. And for kicks, he ties Margaret Atwood to Al-Jazeera with a lurid story about some dirty Muslim terrorist who smashed a 4-year-old kid's head with a rock. Just in case it isn't clear that this is a Clash of Civilizations^TM, and the brown folks with the funny names are eeeeeevul.

But that's just setting the table. The main point, it seems, is to carry on with the lies, the anguished posturing as aggrieved victim, and whine about censorship and suppression. Margaret Atwood is demanding that Sun TV be banned, he says.

Of course, there's no evidence for that, and of course, that's not what she said. And again, he's displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of both freedom of expression and censorship. But then that's par for the course, isn't it. The rest of the piece is just more of the same: left-wing mainstream media consensus, the only opinions allowed on TV are anti-American, anti-Christian big-government mush, yargle bargle blegh, drool.

Yawn.

He's like a kid who never mastered toilet training, craps his pants regularly and then demands that someone change him. I suppose we can't hold him responsible for someone else's bad parenting, but he can't have it both ways by demanding to be treated like an adult either.

Update: Tip of the yarmulka to Sabina and thwap.

Again with the coalition fearmongering?

Can we give it a rest, for Christ's sakes?

In their seemingly endless quest to generate bullshit stories and manufacture controversies (honestly, don't these people have better things to do?  Like, maybe, I don't know ... govern competently?), the Harpokons are reviving the moldy and discredited spectre of a coalition among the opposition parties.  Stand by for the usual flood of crap:  anti-democratic, coup, seizing power against the will of the people, yargle bargle bleghhh ...

It's beyond me how this nonsense continues to find any traction. As anyone versed in even the most basic civic principles knows, this is how parliamentary democracies work: you get to govern only as long as you can command the confidence of Parliament. Once you lose that, your mandate is gone.  Moreover, coalition governments function all over the world, anywhere there are parliamentary democracies. They're a fact of life. Describing the possibility of a coalition as anti-democratic isn't just disingenuous -- it's a lie. A Pants-On-Fire lie. Plain and simple. It is a deliberate and calculated attempt to mislead.

And yet, in the poisonous atmosphere of partisanship and misinformation that seems central to the Harper government's modus operandi, that simple fact has been transformed into a rhetorical cudgel used to beat the opposition and the media. Pointing out the facts about how things work, or citing parliamentary convention, isn't merely a statement of fact any more. Now it's taken as evidence of bias and partisanship.

Never mind their sustained and systematic assault on the infrastructure of democracy for the moment. Among the Harpokons' many acts of vandalism against Canadian civil society, that's got to be one of the worst. The goalposts defining civic discourse have been moved so far that the simple act of telling the truth in the face of lies and bullshit is now not merely a risky act -- it's taken as evidence of disloyalty. The farther down this road we allow them to take us, the harder it's going to be to get back.

Sun Media leaves another mess on the sidewalk

I've never been fond of the news business's predilection for describing the late summer as the “silly season” It implies that there isn't any real news happening, which is patently not true. And it provides a justification for manufactured bullshit stories.

That's what we're seeing in the “controversy” surrounding Homegrown, one of the plays on the bill for the current SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. Apparently we're supposed to consider it objectionable because it portrays Shareef Abdelhaleem, one of the so-called Toronto 18, in a sympathetic light. And we're supposed to be even more pissed off because the festival got some money from Ottawa. Cue the braying from the Fox wannabes at Sun Media, the Levantines, the Corians, and the rest of the perpetually angry flying monkeys of the right.

As J. Kelly Nestruck points out, the festival got perhaps $35,000 from the federal government. When you do the math and consider how that was divided up among various productions, promotional costs, etc., he suggests that this particular play might have gotten around $850 or so. (Well, I can certainly understand the outrage. How many tasers and cans of pepper spray could have been had for that kind of money?)

Sun Media hack Brian Lilley has been the point man on this. He's taken issue with Nestruck's accusations of censorship in a blog post today, in which he takes the predictable tack of posing as a hard-working dogged reporter, crusading for the rights of the hard-working little guy, bristling at the sneering condescension of media elites, yada yada yada. We've heard the cliches so many times we can probably recite them in our sleep. As he puts it:

There is no right to arts funding, a point that many supporters of the performing arts just don’t understand. Just because a play is written doesn’t mean it should be funded. Just because a theatre company wishes to put it on does not mean it should receive a grant.

Nestruck, Toronto city councilor Adam Vaughan and other defenders of Homegrown would prefer it if the hoi poloi, the great unwashed would just pay the bills and shut up.

Apparently the issue is about public money being spent on things Brian Lilley and his bosses don't like. Well, boo fucking hoo. Can we talk about how tiresome and fundamentally anti-social that line of argument is? “Yargle bargle bleghh, I don't want my tax dollars spent on things I don't agree with.” Straight out of the teabaggers manual.

To anyone who still wants to dance to that music, I say tough shit. You're a citizen of a democratic society. It's not your money, it is society's money – to be allocated in accordance with publicly determined priorities. You get your say in how those determinations are made through your inherent right to participate in the political process. And if you don't get what you want through participating, you don't get to simply take your marbles and go home. I don't think the Canadian military should be in Afghanistan. I don't think public money should be spent on billion-dollar summits or paying cops to beat the shit out of peaceful citizens, but I don't get to withhold my tax dollars on that basis.

As for Brian Lilley, his argument is disingenuous bullshit. What he and his Sun Media paymasters have done is taken one play – one play, from a festival staging more than 40 plays – which may have gotten a tiny little percentage of the money allocated to this theatre festival and built a cynical and contrived narrative of “glorifying Islamic terrorism” around it for the sole purpose of working their knuckle-dragging, drooling readership into a frenzy. Another textbook demonstration of how right-wing operatives manufacture controversies.

What's worse, though, is the insult to our intelligence, with the wide-eyed, innocent “we're not advocating censorship, we're just asking questions about the funding” script. (Yeah, right. I'm not saying your sister's a whore, I'm just asking why she has sex with strangers for money.) They're not just asking. They've poisoned the debate before it's even started by framing this as a story about our hard-earned tax dollars coddling terror-symp artists who don't work for a living because they're milking our socialist government for grant money. It's faux-populist crap.

One last question: did Lilley actually talk to Nestruck, or Vaughan, before penning this load of shite? How can he presume to tell us what they would prefer?

But that's standard procedure for Fox / Sun operatives. Their object isn't to inform, it's to inflame. Just because it's late summer doesn't mean we can afford to relax our guard. The stupidity virus is a nasty one. If we're not vigilant, we could end up here.