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...

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

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

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...

"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.

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.

Pierre Poilievre's root causes

Last night, our handsomely large and sensitive coyote ears were, ummm, pinned back on our fuzzy scalps, as the twittering classes became loud hooting classes exploding at federal MP Pierre Poilievre's latest brayed sophistry, on one of CBC's political panels:

"The Root Cause of Terror is Terrorists!!"

They were not kind.  But then, the boy-MP does not invite kindness these days, if he ever did.  Possessed of a (possibly voice coached) foghorn bellow, hyperconfident condescension, an over greased Brylcreem coif, blind trust in PMO talking points of highly dubious intellectual rigor, a penchant for blue suits far too expensively sharp for his actual status, and John Baird's insufferable hair for a political mentor, PP is a rising young ReformaTory's ReformaTory.

But his inability to think for himself on his feet - and probably reclining as well - is not the strong point that us coyotes imagine he fondly imagines it is.

Last week, when CBC's panel host Hannah Thibedeau drilled into him for repeated, dogged inanity in a discussion that had far exceeded the capacity of  his one-line script to cope, he smugly told her that she couldn't ask him that question.  Because it wasn't in his prepared talking points.  He looked to believe - proudly - that this was an unbeatable trump card.

This week, defending  in another CBC TV panel the PM's long-distance snipe at Justin Trudeau, that "now is not the time to commit sociology on terrorists"  Poilievre woofed up the circular reasoning in question.

I admit that labelling it "reasoning" is a disservice to the lingo as she is normally spoke.  And by the same token, us coyotes think that now is probably not a time to commit economics, either, since both it and sociology like to call themselves sciences, when they're more akin to reading horoscopes and crystal balls through a spreadsheet darkly.  Stephen Harper, trained-but-never-practicing-economist, please take note.  I commit a digression.  Oopsy.

Now, where was I?  Oh, ummm, yeah.

So.  By the callow MP's own(?) logic(?), it must now stand that the root cause of pinheadedness is pinheads. Draw your own conclusions from there, blogosphere.  Us coyotes have finished hacking our contractually obligated 350 words into this ESI thingy.  It's time for our coffee break. Is it too early to spike it?

No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy...

You might think that semimythical coyotes, living as we do in this weird little undocumented fold of the time/cyberspace continuum, would be death on science and empirical evidence. I mean to say, if you want to get all facty 'n literal 'n stuff, our very existence might be open to debate. It might.

And if it were, we might be forced to cease pawing these tiresome screeds into this bloggy space. We might.

Fortunately for you, cowpoke, we're actually capable of reconciling our semimythical cosmology with facts. Which seems to place us a doglegged step or two ahead of the heavy thinkers in the nation's current government.

Most governments, one would think, are big enough and broadly-based enough to have:

• enough confidence in their basic tenets;
• enough actual, ummm, intelligence;
• and failing either of those, certainly enough spin machinery;

that they would find torquing any, ummm, inconvenient actual facts to fit lame-o doctrine, after they hit the public arena, to be adequately efficient.

The current one, though, shows an unhealthy will to strangle any science project raising legitimate questions as to the basis of its cherished (if half-assed) party orthodoxies, right off at the roots. They prefer to spike them suckers with serious weedkiller before they see daylight. So much so, that 12-year-olds who enter science fairs may soon wish to check over their shoulders before they pick a topic. I digress.

I'm pretty sure that this is not a good thing for democratic discourse. We coyotes have always considered that the marketplace of ideas should be open to all comers. Only after they go on display there do we gnaw over the unworthy ones with our trademark snarky-puppy wit. I digress. Very probably not for the first time...

Apparently we coyotes are not the only ones disturbed by this. Today at lunch, a genetics conference became a springboard for a rather large march and demonstration by lab-coated geeks science types, featuring a butterfly-net-waving marshal, scythe-packing grim reaper, muted New Orleans snaxophone, and a black coffin symbolizing the death of public science. You know, the stuff that helps an informed citizenry make up its collective mind of the important issues facing the nation.

I applaud the effort, and the strong visuals, but I'm not sure they're enough. By now, the Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine has insulated its creators with such a thick-walled bubble that they figure the empirical reality where the rest of us live is strictly for suckers. They stand ready to ladle out plenty more delicious Kool-Aid to suck on... and we need public science to tell us when the stuff is laced.

Varmints... and varmints

Full disclosure: Us coyotes are no fans of getting our fuzzy butts shot off. Especially by half-tons full of baseball-capped pseud cowboys, careening full tilt across the foothills, blasting merrily and often, with a astonishing range of rifles apparently all called "varmint guns". I gather that rural stop signs are often also varmints... I digress.

Another disclosure: Granny coyote used to excel at a very tricky high-speed dance that would lure drivers of such half-tons over big rocks that bent wheels, busted springs and punched holes in oil pans, while younger coyotes - hell, even passing jackrabbits - laughed our fuzzy butts off at safe distance. Granny was quite a joker.

Just so you know where I'm comin' from on this one. I have watcha might call an opinion about that long-gun registry the current government is so hellbent on, ummm, gunning down.

Really, the news a couple of days back that the US National Rifle Association was lending somewhat less-than-moral support to Canadian gun lobbyists was hardly a surprise, despite quick government and lobbyist denials. Their patented paranoid-nutbar brochure spiels about ill-defined freedom and the registry existing "so the police can come and take away all your guns in advance of a Nazi takeover" were cropping up here with tiresome regularity.

See, here's what I don't get. People drive cars, and need both operator and vehicle licenses to do so. Good idea, given that vehicles are, in the wrong hands and/or in the wrong situation, two-ton-plus weapons. As much as I enjoy hanging my tongue out the shotgun-side window into the breeze when Aggie drives me somewhere, I know they pack enough potential kinetic energy to kill.

Yet start talking about licenses for machines expressly designed to make enough kinetic energy to kill, and suddenly a bunch of people, many of whom ought to know better, start yelling "FREEDOMFREEDOMFREEDOM" at the tops of their leathery lungs. Yes, yes, yes, I know some weapons are useful tools for farmers and duck hunters too. A firearms registry does not make them any less useful to those who use 'em that way. Even supposing that gun ownership does equal freedom, freedom still equals responsibility. And registering weapons that blast big, irreparable holes in living organisms as a design feature is a reasonable, responsible thing to do in a civil democratic society, no matter what the hell the NRA, or anyone else, may yell at the top of their intriguingly well-rehearsed, very well-financed, voices.

That's the evil genius of the NRA - managing to conflate owning a gun with a big, hazy, near-undefinable motherhood word, using a withering barrage of fallacious arguments. The evil genius of the Conservative party is in playing politics with those acquired arguments, then preemptively accusing anyone who calls 'em out on it of 'playing politics'. And people call me a varmint!

As one of my coyote brethren from the Alberta days says, "Fallacious arguments during crooked 7-card stud seem to be all there are anymore..."