Leger is a solid pollster, though I don't think they work the ROC very often. Anyway, they confirm one thing that everyone knows; Justin helped himself in the first debate. You can also infer that the Duffy Trial is beginning to take its toll on CPC numbers. Sure nobody but the poli-nerds are paying attention, but its kind of like an ugly buzz in the air that you hear whenever the news comes on, whether you're listening or not.
Justin Trudeau Our guy did good. Articulate. Didn't stumble (though I missed his closing remarks, which I hear weren't so great). Scored points in the one-on-ones, got off a few good lines: "And then they were 9. And so shall that number be 9." and etc.
Stephen Harper Played defense all night, for the most part well. Some shots got through on the economy; he admitted we're on the verge of a recession. And he stumbled re the issue of all of his Senate appointments who are prison bound. He was weirdly articulate on environmental issues & pipelines, displaying detailed knowledge re Alberta's carbon pricing system. So, perhaps, a weak point well covered. Not that I liked his answers on these questions, just that they were relatively well delivered.
Elizabeth May Did well, although at times to me she sounded like she had stumbled in from a wonkfest. She actually forgave Harper for some of his past-policies. But if I was in the "throw them all out and vote Green" mood and I stumbled onto the debate and watched her, I would be favorably impressed.
Tom Mulcair had weird body language issues. I don't think he blinked once the whole debate, and he tried so hard to avoid the "Angry Tom" persona that he wound up sounding sedated. He took a few hits from Trudeau on Que. Separatism and the SCC (Trudeau's "And Lo! Nine Judges appeared in the East" line), but later on spoke forcefully (although still in an oddly subdued tone) on the Senate.
The Debate Format Nobody expects CDN political debates to be exciting, but this one was probably as entertaining as it was possible to make it. The format forced interaction between the candidates, which I think actually worked against Stephen Harper. He appeared diminished. A mere mortal among mortals.
Are pride parades safe for LPC candidates anymore or have they been taken over by the NDP? If so I'd say skip 'em. Stay away from them queers.
PS. I may tweet the debate tonight, or not. I may go out and eat chicken wings with my wife and watch old UFC clips on Sportsnet 5. It doesn't matter. Its boring and the after-analysis is all about bubble-dwellers trying to guess what folks outside the bubble are thinking, when for the most part they are thinking about the baseball game.
I was sitting in my favorite workin' man's pub in The Scar when it hit! Sideways rain, hail, patio umbrellas falling over! The works! Total fuckin' Apocalypse!
Later, making my way South down Markham road through the wreckage, I saw this!
And I actually sat down at the bus shelter that this tree had fallen on top of, and I could hear ominous creeking and cracking noises. This sucker could give way any time! And its laying across live wires, so innocent bus riders underneath could get crushed and electrocuted all at once! OMG!!! OMG!!! OMG!!!
But we're tough out here in The Scar, which we also call The Bro (for reasons I won't elucidate at the moment). We'll come back from this! We will rise again!!!
PS. That's me in the picture. I've got a few shots without, but it provides scale (my head is about nine inches wide) and my wife said I looked sexxxy.
So there's an T.O. East End Newspaper calledYour Ward News. From what I gather its mostly a direct mail affair; the publisher, a guy named Leroy St. Germaine, has Canada Post deliver it to folks down in Ward 31 (The Beaches). It has apparently always been a bit flaky/racist, but the last couple of issues have seen a guy named James Sears gradually taking over, until recently he was appointed "Editor in Chief". And he has taken the publication "Full Nazi": articles promoting holocaust denial by old Heritage Front members; articles praising Adolf Hitler; articles promoting "white pride". The works. Your Ward has published a few more issues since then, and it remains nasty stuff. You can go look through the links above if you want; or you can read this post by WK, which shows a few of the worst bits. One thing that's changed, though, is the space devoted to ads. May had over two pages of color ads and two more pages of classifieds. This issue is down to one page of color ads and no classifieds. So the campaign a number of people have undertaken to contact advertisers and inform them of the paper's contents seems to have paid off. In fact it appears that some of the remaining advertisers are there against their will:
Some progress at least, then, even if Canada Post is still carrying the thing. I find it hard to believe that lawyers have told them it doesn't contain hate-speech.
If the proposed Mother Canada development were to proceed, any future use of the area and any future exercise of any Aboriginal and Treaty Rights by the L’nu would be extinguished. This would have a tremendous impact on the aboriginal and treaty right of the L’nu to hunting, fishing, gathering of medicines and practicing their culture in a place that is clearly significant both culturally and spiritually for the L’nuk.
And my favorite bit:
• If the project is to proceed, a starting point in accommodating the concerns of the L’nuk
people would be to change the design of the Mother Canada statue. Most L’nuk would see the
current design as an image of an oversize, dominant Catholic nun. Given the recent release of the
Truth & Reconciliation report, the design needs to be reexamined so as not to remind L’nu’s of the
cultural genocide and rampant abuse practiced at the Shubenacadie Residential School.
I find Ms. Young's level of expertise hard to assess, but if there really are legal issues with local FNs to be settled before this thing can proceed, I would think that its future is not bright.
No word of a lie, two of my biggest child-hood heroes were Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. In grade four my teacher played an LP of Cosby's stand-up routine on the last day before summer break because he had nothing more to teach us and it kept us quiet. That's what got me into him; I think it was The Chickenheart story. So I bought a copy of "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With" a week later (I was nine), and within a year I had collected all his LPs. Woody Allen of course I knew from his early movies, and later his New Yorker pieces. He did stand-up a bit as well, and I collected one or two of his albums, but it was never his thing.
They were, I thought at the time, the two funniest men who ever lived. I still think that. And Cosby's racial philosophy was intriguing. And Allen once wrote the truest thing anyone has ever said about the world of post-secondary education: "Don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf."
But of course over the years it's been revealed that both of these men are monsters. This is a little harder to process with Woody. Cosby hasn't done anything in decades. All the best bits of The Cosby Show were recycled from his stand-up routines. The show's ideology didn't bother me so much as the fact that I could see most of the jokes coming. But Woody still produces the occasional masterpiece. Boycotting him would mean not watching Blue Jasmine, and everyone should watch that movie.
Funny, though, how afterwards you keep running into things that make you think you should have suspected. Here's Bill Cosby from 1969:
PS. Something I forgot in the post is that, due to those records being played in school, Millstream Elementary's official game when I was in grade five and six became Buck Buck. We had several teams. And though there was no Fat Albert, we did have "Big Ben". This is a little school on Vancouver Island back in 1973 or something. Buncha little white kids, playing a game Bill Cosby had told us about playing during in the 40s and 50s in the Projects of Philadelphia.
