Happy Quirky Alone Day...

...a Valentine's greeting from...

An End to Fear, Loathing, And All That...?

What a hell of an election campaign. Bearing down hard on the "hell".

Despite the fact that we semimythical coyotes watched our 6,000th birthday skitter away on the slipstream in the rearview awhile back, and thus have an, ummm, elastic take on time and reality, we're glad the rotten neverending thing is near barbecued. And if common wisdom says HarperCo counts on voter disengagement to haywire together an ill-earned plurality in parliament, most of the late signs look good for the rest of us.

But there's no denying that I'll feel more secure if we can slog ghrough Monday without those last poll figures upending, or rampant yet strangely untraceable dirty tricks arising, or in the aftermath, some evilly twisted, desperate attempt at a constitution- and/or convention-flouting end-run occurs. You know, to hang onto the keys to the PMO far longer than is seemly or legal, because Canada was supposed to be locked in as a Conservative satrap, and losing now would obviously mean The End Times.

Oh. And it'd be nice to see notarized witness statements attesting that a wood tent peg has been hammered through whatever passes for a certain rat-bastard heart. Without those, we who do not share whatever passes for Conservative "values" these days are gonna need a vintage red convertible trunkload of booze and random hallucinogenics -- including the ether -- to claw our way through the next four years. Because it has transpired that the soon-to-be-ex PM has an even more startlingly irresponsible take on, ummm, reality than I...

That I even consider any the above might come to pass disturbs me profoundly. Well, except for the private polling firm screwup scenario. Enough thinly-veiled partisan upstarts now exploit that loophole in the telecommunications legislation that the Coyotephone's call display started smokin' from overuse weeks ago. The pollsters can be wrong any way they like, as long as it doesn't get the Cons another majority. Then they can go back to the ring of hell (heh...) reserved especially for all telemarketers and phone solicitors.

I digress. It's an old habit. Cut me a little slack! At the moment, the sweet smell of blessed change seems to be starting to dispel the black, sulfurous reek of flopsweat, desperation and despair billowing from the Tory war room's smokestacks. And since I've become well-practiced during most of the last decade, I'm pretty sure I can hold my doggy nose long enough to suck in purer air sometime real soon.

Now, for crissakes: Dunno if all those big black flittering nightmares swirling round the Peace Tower are flying monkeys or just big freakin' bats -- but help me whack 'em away before I hafta scream...

This in from our campaign correspondent...

The secret Stephen Harper, revealed

Maybe not what they meant by "Tory attack ad". . .

Cat bloggers for Harper. . .

Sigh. Back to kitty blogging...

More like doggerel. . .

News Item: Supreme Court of Canada strikes down minimum sentencing law as unconstitutional.

Just like the last half-dozen other pieces of badly-thought-out and hastily-rammed-through HarperCo centrepiece legislation that have shown up before it.

Now, I'm just a dumb ol' semi-mythical coyote. So obviously not nearly as smart as the guy who runs roughshod over the country 'n all. But I think there might be a pattern developing here...

Jason Kenney: Maybe a brain transplant would help...?

"O, Harper Can-a-Duh,

VainGloreee-us and Free-eeee *

Our Bombs are Smart,

Much Smarter than Me-eeee..."

* Actual freedom may vary, depending on definition and pending legislation.

'Tis the season for politico Christmas cards... *

* Original image: Emperor Haute Couture from the fertile mind of Kingston artist Margaret Sutherland.

** Shooped accessorization from the fertilized mind of coyote.

As a coyote, I must protest...!

This just seems so wrong to me.

But hey. I'm a coyote... We're used to it.

Due to recent events. . .

Harper wears Iraq

The PM, it is reported, has decided to dip a toe, likely newly-clad in spit shined combat boots for the photo op, into the sucking morass that is Iraq: "It's just Noble, okay? Clear and present danger to Canada, okay? But I'm not telling you anything else, nyah, nyah, nyah!"

One columnist type, probably tick-boxed on the PMO Enemies List as "mostly on-side, except when he's disturbingly off-script" called it Harper's Churchill moment.

In fairness to the pugnacious ol' bon vivant, we must note that for Churchill the danger was far more clear and present, and the actual battle arena far better defined. As opposed to being an amorphous wanna-be state moshing around the outback Middle East.

We jaded coyotes, by now probably on the PMO Enemies List, period, know that the moshers are vile people who do very vile things. We're just not clear how tossing a half-dozen planes and maybe two dozen guys into that pit to chase 'em is noble, or makes the PM the kind of heavy international playa he thinks he is. And he and his minions remain fatally short on supporting details. But we await his no-doubt historic speech with interest:

"We shall defend our shrinking polls, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches of our fake lake, we shall fight on the landing grounds we shall build for the F-35, we shall robocall the hell out of our data fields, we shall run for in the hills ; we shall never surrender! Although you can bet your fuzzy asses we'll prorogue. Whenever."

Yup. Words for the ages.

Duffy vs. Harper: hidden evidence, bare knuckles. . .

Wow. No matter how you look at it, it was a tough week for the old popcorn maker here at Casa Coyote. Prudent semimythical quadrupeds have laid in industrial quantities of kernels and butter for the inevitable long, drawn shakeout.

All I got right now is that it totally depends on which lying sack of, ummm, spin, you care to disbelieve marginally less at a given moment. And whether you can untangle the double negatives in that last sentence. Because it definitely refers to two negatives. . .

So. Those increasingly loathed ads for 'Canada's' economic action plan...?

 The painful, unending ones that, increasingly, turn off Canadians?

 The ones that HarperCo™® is hoping you think of as political advertising for HarperCo™®? That urge us to share the HarperCo™® delusion, not particularly well supported empirically, that HarperCo™® is some kind of Great Economic Navigator?

 That PM HarperCo™® hisself has just said taxpayers need, and need to pay for, for four more years, 'cuz he has alleged that they create economic pride? That cost $100,000,000 clams -- and counting?

 Ummm.  Yeah, those ones.

 Coyote News has discovered that the reason that HarperCo™® is so stuck on running those damn ads into the ground - and possibly to the earth's core - no matter how much they piss off pretty much everybody else, is because they are Canada's  HarperCo™®'s Economic Action Plan. All of it.

 Thank you. We return you now to regular programming. You may notice an unusual number of  ads. Go figure.

The world needs Lo-Rez Ipsum

A few weeks back, whilst I was conducting an impromptu if spirited inventory of the trashcan behind Fourth Dwarf's place, as us coyotes are wont to do of a warm summer evening, he lifted the lid and invited me to get the hell out so he could dispose of his garbage. Then he invited me inside to watch a little cable, so long as I stayed on the newspaper on the floor, and away from his couch.

We lit the screen just as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo sashayed onto, ummm, The Learning Channel. It was like witnessing the wreck of a train full of obese, neckless passengers in real time -- no slo-mo about it, bubba! I was horrified in moments, but the Short Guy is made of sterner stuff.

"We're watching it!" he ordered. "It'll be educational!"

It was. I learned that the evil trolls who produce Honey Boo Boo have, against the odds, managed to tamp the ever-lowering cultural bar into a fresh grave somewhere beneath sub-sub-basement level. I hadda take a midnight swim in the Ottawa River to clear the air after. And I ain't impugning the reputation of the Dwarf's trash, either.

It was a harbinger of things to come. A couple of days ago, certain of the Irregulars noticed a net-based lorem ipsum generator modelled after Fifty Shades of Grey. As soft-porn cultural phenomenons go, Fifty Shades is a really, really badly written one. And selling like cheap chocolate bunnies right after Lent.

Lorem ipsum, for the uninitiated, is a body of random-pseudo Latin text that graphic designers put where text should be, when the real words aren't written yet. It's a way to mock up what the finished page looks like. So a Fifty Shades-based lorem ipsum generator is probably some kind of smart marketing move in certain circles. Some of us might even applaud, if we'd thought of it.

In fact, some ESIs even wondered whether we could use it to automatically write one-click posts for this blog, so we'd never ever have to look at, or think about, the damn thing ever again. When cooler heads prevailed, we decided that so long as we're blighting the webscape, we'll stay an original blight.

But what to do about all the cultural bar-lowering offenses that aren't ours? Honey Boo Boo and Fifty Shades prove they're epidemic! And they burn our eyes! They burn! How the hell do we get rid of 'em?

Then the genius idea: An ESI Lo-rez Ipsum browser plugin, to blur out everything that offends. We'll get rich! If we ever figure out a business model...

What passes for straight-faced, these days. . .

Yesterday, Foreign Affairs minister John Baird declared the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development done and stuck a fork in it, saying something along the lines of "it's time to put the past behind us and move on into the future." Deep, that. But not, I'm thinkin', nearly as deep as the fork thrust. I digress.

Baird claimed fiscal responsibility among other justifications, and opined that the formerly-respected NGO's functions would be better rolled up into his department. Possibly, he meant "just rolled up".

There was, sure as hell, dysfunction. The argument that killing the group was the kindest thing to do is at least plausible. The last couple of years were the exact opposite of pretty. Rights and Democracy was under attack by ideologues, and its board of directors was hallmarked by vicious infighting, including one meeting in 2010 that appears to have led, hours later, to the heart attack and subsequent death of the president at the time.

But examining that dysfunction, it's hard not to think that the Cons themselves caused rather a lot of it. Although begun by another Con PM, Brian Mulroney, Rights and Democracy was non-partisan in pursuit of its international goals and was respected for this, worldwide. It held this in common with a good many late, lamented, Canadian international efforts that the current government has seen fit in its, ummm, wisdom, to spike.

Most seem to fall afoul of the Harper Government's malign indifference to any international negotiations not involving either blowing crap up good in faraway places, or resources ripped unceremoniously out of the ground with scanty oversight, and sold quick. Disliking what they saw there, the Cons attempted to stack the board with partisans that would turn Rights and Democracy into something they could truly love. Which may or may not have had anything to do with actually promoting global rights and democracy.

The cons screwed it up. Then, yesterday, scrammed it for being screwed up, with what these days passes for straight-faced sanctimony in that increasingly dysfunctional house on the hill.

Hey. I wonder if they think they've screwed up Parliament enough, yet...?

Cons: "Quick, the F35 has to be good for *something*..."

The trouble with trumpeting yourself as the party of fair dealing and transparency in all things, is that when you don't deliver, you, ummm, end up with egg all over your collective Harper Government (™,®,but especially ©...) face.

This morning, the federal auditor told off the government of the day, in pretty scathing terms. Apparently, the procurement process for those F35 Joint Strike Fighters upon which they've been staking their hawkish reputations, despite any number of troubling, highly pertinent queries from people who might actually know something about these things, and coyotes who don't, smelled pretty much like rotten eggs.

The next spin cycle we hear from Harper Majority Government (™,®,but especially ©...) will likely have something, ummm, cleansing to say about it all being Somebody Else's Fault (™,®,but especially ©...)

But Canadians already seem to be coming to the opinion that the Cons really, really wanted to buy this turkey, and it laid an egg. Just in time for Easter. I digress... Imagine that. Trala.

Chinese democracy, one fiction at a time...

That nuanced thrash-metal philosopher, Axl Rose, famously spent a decade trying to spit-glue together his Chinese Democracy album, an assault on the fictional nature of that concept.

Predictably, it was banned in China, spiritual home of the Staged One-Party-State News Event. North Korea may beg to differ, but I digress.

Here in Canada, between: the PM gettin' his freak on over heavy-handed message control, such that even most senior ministers are only allowed to read canned statements lashed together by half-smart li'l ReformaTory twerps in the PMO's rapidly-expanding Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine (The acronym says it all. But I digress again. To make up for not doing it last post, Ms. Zoom, ma'am...); Other ReformaTory twerps ginning up SunTV as a de facto party organ (heh...); And Immigration Minister Jason Kenney ordering his hapless civil servants to cobble up a, ummm, very special, immigration affirmation ceremony for his very special pals over at that self-same party organ, "And make it snappy!", we might seem to be well on our way toward a solidly domestic version of the Chinese democracy that it took Axl 10 years just to wrap his heavy-me(n)tal bandanna around and write about.

In maybe only a little more than half the time.

An overpowered media vehicle is doing its very best to impose a series of fictions about the current government's deeds, and the country as a whole, upon the mass consciousness. Those fictions, swallowed, would supplant something beautiful, real, and far more inconvenient and messy for current government inclinations.

The hilarity, for the rest of us, comes when that vehicle - inevitably - fishtails violently, busts loose, and screeches, upside-down, into the ditch. Witness the yuks when some StunTV (news?)weasel's brave statement, "Lets do it! We can fake the oath!" was dredged into the actual sunlight. Despite the best efforts of the PM and his gang to make the (real) media lie down, roll over, and beg, they apparently ain't cowed to the point where everybody can look away and ignore authoritarian absurdity.

In the spirit of fairness and balance, I should point out that the immigration minister has disavowed all knowledge. Cool. This has all sortsa well-worn precedent, established by both the fictional Secretary of the Impossible Mission Forces and the possibly-fictional minister's all-too-real spin doctors. Whenever a fiction-based scam goes sideways, the offishul playbook says to pile more fiction onto that sucker like crazy, then hoof somebody who isn't you under the bus. And self-righteously pretend to all and sundry that that little PMO-approved set piece dealt with it completely.

People, repeat after the coyote: "Repetition does not make an untrue thing, right!". Remembering that grouchy semi-mythical coyotes was born with their long pointy noses, where the minister appears to be growing his... as he speaks.

At long last having pulled out a majority. . .

. . .Stephen Harper revealed his grand vision for the country to Canadians