From the Antisocial Media Dept...

Triumpalism

"...Look, all I do is tell the truth. I’m a truth teller. All I do is tell the truth..."

The Donald Trump interview that should terrify national Republicans, annotated.

--Washington Post, August 11, 2016.

Harper congratulates self on economic skillz -- crowd goes wild

Newsflash: Con campaign (finally) concedes Harper not perfect. Grudgingly.

Very grudgingly. They still cling, though, against a great deal of strong evidence, to their quaint illusion that their Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Guy is some kinda economic genius. And also to that wobbly alternate-reality bubble, inside which they're not wrong, all the rest of us are. . .

The Kool Aid in there must be getting awful warm and yucky by now...

On the Heartburn Campaign Trail...

Day four of former Prime Ministerial Chief of Staff Nigel Wright's testimony at the Senator Mike Duffy Trial:

...and yes, that is Comic Sans in the caption. He deserves it.

The secret Stephen Harper, revealed

Ashley Madison: doing everything but the numbers, apparently

So, a few days back, it came to light that a public-spirited group of extortionists had hacked a website catering to marital infidelity with a brand name much like, ummm, Mashley Addleson. They kindly offered not to release the names of everybody signed up to the site in exchange for a whack of cash.

The web, predictably, went Twitteristic.

In a similarly public-spirited vein, I gather that Mashley Addleson has since contacted individual users with offers to do a "full delete" that would vacuum out all trace of an account. For smaller, individual whacks of cash.

Terrific philanthropists, all of 'em...

And as ummm, investigative journalists everywhere started delving deeper into this event, it also arose that the site was claiming some 200,000 subscribers in Ottawa, or one in five residents. According to one Brit rag possessed of ethics nearly as dubious as Mashley's, that figure would make this sleepy burg the world's "love rat capital".

After pondering on that for longer than I shoulda, I looked up 2011 Statistics Canada census figures for the Ottawa Census Metropolitan Area.

So I obviously have waaay too much time on my paws, but this whole story really does beg the question: why the hell hasn't anybody in the media bothered to do this? ** It was like, 20 minutes' work, even allowing for the fact that paws and keyboards do not play well together. Easy story! Just, maybe, not a sexy story. Since a CMA isn't just the city whose name it takes -- a CMA extends beyond city boundaries proper -- I figured that the cachement area would roughly cover people in surrounding small towns who might craftily list their residence as "Ottawa". Because that's just the kind of convenient little cover story that the thinking cheater might figure would reduce their chances of being identified and outed in a smaller place.

Say, "Russell Township" or "Ashton Station" or something. Small towns bein' what they are, everybody in one likely has thoughts about which of the neighbours might be foolin' around, but no sense in giving 'em outright confirmation, right?

Now, as an ancient coyote whose eyes are now nearly as fuzzy as his ass, I am certainly open to the possibility that I'm misreading a government statistical agency table. I am therefore open to correction. *

Since the current government screwed over the reliability of the official census some time back, the government statistical agency is also open to correction. But I digress. Where the hell was I? Oh, yeah. So, anyway, what I think I'm seeing is a total of 411,110 people who are married/common-law in this CMA.

Which means that according Mashley Addleson, on average close to 1 in every 2 married persons in Ottawa CMA is steppin' out. Doin' the dirty. Bonkin' outta wedlock. Which seems, you know, a touch... flagrant. If not downright delicto.

Of course, there are other takes on the situation. When I confided my doubts to the Independent Observer (remember him...? We still talk.) he, being of a practical frame of mind, just waved his hand and said, "Should we trust the statistics of a company that encourages cheating...?"

Oh yeah. Right. Nevermind...

*... So it turns out, inevitably, that after that pretty little sketch of Census Metropolitan Areas, someone with a far more obsessive eye for detail than I has pointed out that I did not in fact use CMA figures, or link to them. The numbers are for Ottawa, the city proper.

But it also transpires, happily, that the fragrant flagrance of that one-in-two ratio holds. So there's that.

Figures. Us coyotes are not built for trapping errors. In my defence I will say that we are exquisitely tuned to catch small rodents, partridges, grouse and your cat. On the fly! But owls? Don't get me started on owls. Them things is fiends...

** Although, to the eventual satirical credit of the Last Week Tonight research team, John Oliver finally did...

And now a message from the Party of Fiscal, ummm, Responsibility...

Just, maybe, not the definition of responsibility they thought they meant. . .

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.

HarperCo: "In Space, Nobody Can Hear Our Sh*tty P'Shoops..."

Government crudely alters reality, thinking no one will notice. Again. Then blames bureaucrats when somebody at The Economist calls 'em out. Then tries to pretend it never happened.

So just another lazy late Friday afternoon in Ottawa, really.

Tra-la.

The Unbearable Lie-ness of Being Stephen J. Harper

Let me start by digressing: a new low, even for me. My Uncle Donny was a flake, even by coyote standards. Hell, prairie chickens thought he was clueless, which you'd know to be pure insult if you'd ever seen one of their Mensa meetings.

Anyway, Uncle Donny used to obsess about climbing those skeletal old paddle blade windmills you once saw on most prairie farms. The kind that pumped water into cattle watering tanks and such, on any number of home quarters. He figured if he could get up high enough, being able to see further than anything else would be an advantage.

Dogs ain't really climbers. With supercanine effort, he could scrabble about a third of the way up the tower. Then his fear of heights would kick in, his brain would go "tilt", he'd have a vertigo attack and fall off. Usually on his head.

"There goes Don Coyote, tilting off windmills again," the prairie chickens would say.

Here (finally, you might say...) is the point: sometimes, despite Uncle Donny's kinda-concussed example, I too feel the urge to tilt off windmills. It's a coyote thing.  And careful readers of this space know I've tilted at The Right Honorable Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper since his first minority government.

We'd like to welcome a recent crapload of national pundits and columnists to this soiree. Because, hey, better late than never. Us semimythical coyotes have been well-placed to see plenty of cases of prairie populism. We expect to see more. They're all characterized by true believers, chugging deep from a heady brew of opportunism, mendacity and batshit-crazy. And us coyotes are of the considered opinion that of the lowdown, lyin' rattlesnakes that have led these movements, the PM is right, ummm, down there.

Now he, and this week's human furniture up at the PMO, wish us to think that a highly controlling PM was about the only person in the PMO who was not party to the strangely large and desperate scheme to pay off Senator-in-Disgrace Mike Duffy to, maybe, shut up and put up.

Since Duffy loudly and serially did not, everything about the PM's story has, ummm, evolved. Except for that one item about him having nothing to do with it. Kinda odd, for a guy obsessed with talking point discipline. And an unholy titanic sales job is going into making us buy this talking point above all others. I expect the calculation is, that the waxed, buffed, yet still-strangely-unattractive face of the Harper Government must cling to plausible deniability, no matter how implausible, for the party to survive.

For a man with Mr. Harper's record of high moral rectitude and avowed strong views on openness, transparency, accountability and responsibility in government, I'm sure such disappointing evidence of all this unethical lying and chicanery among his hand-picked political and administrative types would be so unbearable that he would quit politics in disgust. Except, ummm, oh, wait...!

At some point, I wonder if any of the cast (surely of thousands by now...) that have been forcibly frog-marched off the Plank, or the large stock of pliant, fresh noobs lining up for their turn,  might begin to think that the party would actually fare better without the guy who's doing the shoving.

Yeah, he brought 'em to the promised land. But they're now well past that particular hallelujah.  Are they not at least beginning to wonder if anybody will be left to be the party except him?  I mean, after he knifes 'em all in the back to save his face, his implausible deniability, and remaining shreds of his reputation?

From where I sit, about a third of the way up this old windmill, the guy looks willing to kill the party he leads, to keep keep his illusions of self-respect. Kinda like another lyin' rattlesnake oil purveyor who, a couple of decades back, totally trashed an earlier mark of Tories. Whom Mr. Harper, if memory serves, froze out when he started to smell like tainted goods. Yet again.

Against type, them true believers might want to take notes and learn.  In case.

Just sayin'...

"Spin": not the same as "Rinse"

It has come to my (increasingly) jaundiced yellow coyote eye that HarperCo,  feeling (increasingly) singed under the (increasingly) lampoonable The Harper Government (™®©) brand, has lately been  trying what one would expect of persons that rely more on spin, respin, and re-re-spin, than on intelligent policy:  semi-stealthily trying to rebrand itself as Canada's Founding Party.  

Hey, nothing distracts an electorate curling its lip at the fragrant kind of openness, transparency and hyperpartisan overentitlement that leads straight to, well, DuffsterCluck and thence to the PMO slamming its door in the public's face. Except maybe callin' in makeup to respackle and respin that ol' pig.  Again.

Guess they haven't learned much from the mistakes of the country's former Natural Governing Party, except to rewrite 'em as cartoons.  Sadly for them, "spin" ain't quite "rinse".

Set aside for the moment the fact that the current Conservative Party reads as more Reform usurper than Tory. Which makes its claim to be the sole legit license holder for all those tacky souvenir Sir John A. MacDonald shot glasses and beer mugs, ummm, debatable in some circles.

Which somehow segues, with our usual cement-mixer-like grace, to how all us semi-mythical coyotes have been amusing ourselves this summer. We've been playing that meme-ish word game in which one removes a letter or two from a book, movie or play title, to arrive at a different better title.  Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven becomes The Rave, f'rinstance, which I picture to be about goths being bricked into a warehouse where a DJ is spinning really dark tunes.  Frank Herbert's Dune becomes Dun, a really, really long, dull science fiction epic. And Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus becomes Tits Andronicus.  Whom I see as a 40s noir private eye who holsters her gat  in her stocking top.

I digress. It's not hard, with my attention span. Where the hell was I?

Right.  Seeing this "Canada's Founding Party" gag in that light, I figure that a bunch of PMO staffers a few Fridays back got squiffled on two-for-the-price-of-one lite American beers after work while brainstorming - using the term loosely - how to hose down and hotwax that increasingly soiled bus that so many expendable bodies have been thrown under, lately..

So it's not hard for a coyote to rediscover the title from which they were trying to depart:  "Canada's Foundering Party."

There.  Fixed that for you . . . much better.

Dean Del Mastro: MP for Peterborough/Orange Sauce

How the mighty have fallen. If, by "mighty", we mean a guy who thought he was a Mastro of the Universe because he once was allowed to work himself into a regular thespian froth during parliamentary question period, reading angrily incoherent talking points scripted and handed to him by those clever partisan children who work in the Prime Minister's office.

Then, last year, Dean Del Mastro was launched heavily, nay, gracelessly into the news for something that looked a lot like hanky-panky with his election financing. (Standard disclaimer: not proven in a court of law, still under investigation, blah blah, blah.) The welcome upshot was, suddenly, lo, not a peep from the Mastro anymore.

As in all cases where a Harpo Tory has been observed with a webbed mitt not unadjacent to some cookie jar or other, everybody but the Mastro was out there skatin' into the corner with elbows, shoulders, knees, (and likely Don Cherry's mouth) flappin', while Dean was roped and gagged, schtum, down to the bench by imperial fiat. Or something much like it.

For practical purposes, this named him as a bad boy in all but name. If only the cut-from-a-very-similar-dark-blue-polyester Pierre Poilievre could, finally, be similarly gagged, it might be a personal coyote dream come true. I digress. Not sorry ay-tall!

Anyway, yesterday the old Mastro apparently decided he'd spent enough time banished to Coventry (look it up), and made his comeback move by trying to smear a Postmedia reporter who's been watching all sortsa election improprieties rather closely.

Then, maybe because old habits die hard when there's muddy backsplatter, he denied he'd ever done it and blamed it on the PM's office. After which, possibly due to a stern talking-to by someone who might be even more twitchy about deniability than himself, he issued a lame-o retraction in which he sorta took responsibility but still sorta denied a personal hand in the sorry episode, instead sorta trying to pin the actual wording back onto the PMO, much like a paper tail on a birthday-party ass donkey.

Yes, it's complicated. But the dumb-coyote short version is that Dean Del Mastro seems to waddle and quack a lot more like some unhappy variety of duck every time he tries to splorp back out of that suckin' black ooze at the bottom of Little Lake. . .

Coyote couture

Dearest Internet;

So, it finally comes to this. Snarky fashion commentary from an addled, ancient, colourblind dog. Like you don't have enough of that kind of thing already.

I was primed to go all semimythical on Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente's ongoing plagiarism woes this post, but then realized that chuckin' rocks at her from a glass palace housing a remarkable collection of putative monuments to copyright infringement might be taken wrongly. (Pro-tip for Peggy Plagiarist: fair use and satire provisions of the copyright act figure heavily in any future legal defense of this blog. We ain't proud.)

So on to Plan B: fuzzy fashionista-ing. Sadly, I'm not even sure who to blame for this turn of events. The, ummm, Learning Channel's weird-ass assertion that What Not to Wear, and Honey Boo Boo constitute education? The guilty coffee-break pleasures of seeing Go Fug Yourself.Com -- a cosmic-level snark-ladler, even on off-days -- tear fraying strips of red carpet off actresses and celebutantes I've never heard of?

Now that I consider, the question burns hotter than any random Tory cabinet minister's pants in any given Question Period. But it is, as usual, a(nother) digression. Betcha didn't spot that one comin'!

No, we're here to speak of the tricks of perception and public relations that cause fashionistas worldwide to suddenly label one young woman possessed of Mediterranean extraction "fat", while another young woman possessed of Mediterranean extraction and pretty much the exact same body morphology, but arguably less talent, manages to keep getting called "hot".

I mean, yeah, Lady Gaga has been thinner, and maybe Kim Kardashian has, too. (See how I cleverly mentioned two heavily-Googled celebrity names in the same sentence? Pure hit counter gold, that. Not that this blog would ever stoop to such a thing.) Apparently I, ummm, digress again. Us coyotes are really no good at the fashion commentary thing, even though some of us were paper trained on back issues of Women's Wear Daily. Go figure.

What I meant to say, before chronic ADD once again bested my good narrative intentions is that Gaga's and KiKa's (can I call her KiKa...?) hips are pretty obviously about the same relative circumferences for their heights.

So from where I sit, KiKa's spackle-and-spin support team is earning its pay, because to my untrained yellow eye, both women are selling the same runway strut. Both outfits are analogously ridiculous. Ditto the shoes. Peroxide aside, there isn't much to tell the hair. Cheez. If we didn't have publicists, reality shows and entertainment "reporters" constantly telling us what to think, we'd be in deep, deep trouble...

Air Kisses and Fake Professions of Undying Love,

Coyote

Harper: starting to wear that robocall thing...?

In all of the old and new media characterizations of the prime minister, Stephen Harper - including, but not restricted to, suggestions that he is a hyperpartisan, ethically-agnostic, neo-conservative, humourless, neo-controlfreakazoid, scheming, democratically-challenged, micromanaging, vindictive, teflon-milkshake-chugging, fiber-glass-haired robot, there was never much indication that it was the robot part that might take him out.

It has so far merely been the stuff of This Hour Has 22 Minutes satire.

But if I read aright the minor tsunami of e-ink rushing onto the shores of the rapidly-developing robocall scandal, he might actually be wearin' this one. It seems so obvious now, with even a short weekend's worth of retrospect. All the best reference works - yallerback science fiction paperbacks, graphic novels, comix, movies and futuristic role-playing games - often recommend fighting fire with fire.

Or in this case, ill-intentioned robots with ill-intentioned robots.

Although us semimythical coyotes hail from an ancient, far more animistic age, we try to stay on top of breaking trends. But we confess our ancient fuzzy-assed selves to be as flummoxed as anybody to find that the dumbest, scummiest, least-loved robot in modern life - demon dialer, robocaller,what you will - appears to have become, inadvertantly, the unlikeliest of unlikely heroes of the piece, rattling the relentless grey course of the uber-robot currently in charge of the country. He's probably telling the truth when he says he didn't know anything about it, but the weight of past evidence certainly suggest he actively fostered a,ummm, certain atmosphere and mindset among his partisan minions.

Irony abounds.

One can only imagine the mindset of the untold legions of spin doctors and strategists who've burrowed into the pickled oak wainscotting up at the PMO and PCO like a King-Hell carpenter ant infestation. They followed the standard playbook, fer cripes' sake, admitting no guilt but making the required ritual sacrifice. In this case, a low-level, hyper-enthusiastic little tory shit somehow fell under the party's increasingly bloody bus for unspecified, but highly-implied reasons. It should've satisfied the party base, and, really who cared about anybody else? They're all liberals and/or child pronographers anyway.

But the howls of the torch-bearing rabble under the ramparts got louder instead. Many who in the past could be relied upon to defend such behaviour have taken offence and started yowling themselves. It all appears to be too endemic, organized and well-bankrolled to be the work of one half-smart, if misguided, kid.

Seems you can pull a lot of fast ones in pursuit of partisan goals these days. Ignoring the traditions and laws of parliament has lately been seen as "welcome decisiveness" among a certain goal-oriented crowd, as if it was a good thing. But suddenly, it's seeming that if you appear to have really screwed with the bases of democracy enough times... well, then. Pattern recognition kicks in. Things Change.

We coyotes seen lotsa changes in our time. We're keepin' our yellow eyes on this one with more than our usual interest...

Ode to beavers

Who could ever forget the Elgin Street Irregulars' historic, heady foray into the (very likely lucrative, if we'd ever actually winched our notoriously incoherent act together...) BeaverBalls™ biz?

Yup, we've long reserved a warm spot for Castor canadensis and his charming, if strange, habits. Such as (allegedly) eating his own testicles when threatened.

So, it is with a certain, ummm, proprietorial disdain that we tee off to trash conservatory senator Nicole Eaton's (ev)ill-conceived proposal to replace Our Illustrious National Rodent with some polar bear.

If beavers were ever to actually chew off their own business to spit at somebody, they might wish to begin with Ms. Eaton.

Her cover story is that the Beav is a "dentally defective rat". We need barely slow down to point out that slagging rats places her in the position of badmouthing many sitting members of her party, before hitting the gas to note that the more plausible reason for her libel of our furry pal is that, while he's claimed squatters' rights to the national identity for centuries, he was only officially installed in 1975. Under, you guessed it, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals.

It takes no genius to see that the focus of the Harper Government™®© since gaining its coveted strong stable majority™®© ain't so much the stupid economy as tearing down, stomping, burning, shooting and pissing on any and all things liberal. And calling it nation building. ™®©.

So despite the senator's cutesy persiflage, we can, ummm, probably agree that this is one more case of these guys' systematic scorched-liberal policy, as they try to replace all those inconvenient decades of collective national memory with (yet more) crap, artfully spin-doctored from the whole cloth.

Do I have to stoop to quoting literary classics, like some intellectually-bankrupt Ottawa Citizen columnist? Yes? Crap. Okay:

"If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

You already know the book. Oh, never mind. I digress

Base image: Wikimedia Commons

In the blood.

Repeating a Harper Majority Government (™,®,but especially ©...) mantra that already glitters with either the polish of hard wear or that sparkly Twilight vampire crap, the federal anti-labour minister has ordered Air Canada's flight attendants' union straight to a procedurally-sketchy Industrial Relations Board arbitration tomorrow. Do Not Strike. Do Not Pass Go. Definitely Do Not Collect $200.

She opines (again) that these people must not be allowed to hurt the economy. Probably better than when she opined that "cancer is sexy," huh?

"These people" took a 15 per cent pay cut back in the day when Air Canada was hurting, and are still starting out at a monthly wage that barely covers a so-so one-bedroom apartment in downtown Ottawa, never mind the food and utilities. Forget cable. Even basic.

But, hey! If you could afford that hookup, the new retrosoap Pan Am's success would prove that the job's glamour still totally makes up for the poverty, obscene shifts, and antediluvian management. Right?

Apparently it's okay for these people to hurt, as long as "the economy", usually limned as some kind of shadowy, all-powerful, yet strangely fragile third person, does not. This quasi-person must be protected with the kind of dumb, short-term union-shafting tactics that, down the line, inevitably will lead to bunch of (here's an economic term, for, ummm, trained economists...) pent-up demand. From labour.

It has apparently not yet dawned on too many Harper Majority Government (™,®,but especially ©...) types that the economy is made up of individuals. Like, say, flight attendants. And that if you pull this shit enough, they'll eventually get pissed enough to come back at ya.

About the first time Lisa Raitt started dropping legislative howitzer rounds on any union that even smelled like it might be thinking about a strike, she began to tell interviewers that she grew up in an old-school union family in Nova Scotia, that her affinity with labour was "in the blood".

Was it really only this past June that she could still pull that one straight-faced? At the time, the great grey Glob said she was "an awkward foil for critics portraying the Conservative government as an enemy of Canada’s labour movement."

To establish that article's background (and to launch my now-trademark digression, a full nine paragraphs late in my books...) one must note that its top photo is of Ms. Raitt, sportin' what looks, to my jaundiced yellow eye, suspiciously like a blue sweater, and, ummm, cuddling an expedient kitten.

In retrospect, that should have been the only tell that we really needed, to give context to her poker-faced claims to blue-collar cred...

BREAKING NEWS

Coyote spotted driving in downtown Ottawa

At first he doesn't see me (what a big nose he has)

Suddenly his keen doggie senses kick in (what big eyes he has)

Then he sees me, and I run for my life (what big teeth he has)

Slavishly Devoted to Buffy

I asked Fourth Dwarf if he liked Buffy.

"Do I like Buffy?" he responded in his usual sexy voice. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I was only slavishly devoted to the show since the third episode originally aired. You know how I'm obsessed with Battlestar Galactica? Buffy was worse."

"Well, hum, Buffy is going to be at Westfest," I squeaked out.

I paid for my deceit. Dwarfie loved this other Buffy too, but so that he could see above the crowds he insisted on sitting on my shoulders during the whole evening.