Campaign Round-Up

Whoa.  What a campaign.  I worked on Chrystia Freeland's by-election in Toronto Centre and it was an amazing experience.  Or set of experiences.  I got to photograph Justin Trudeau from close up, sat through Friday prayers at a mosque, watched a Deputy Returning Officer get fired at 4PM on election day, listen to an NDP poll worker's racist rant about non-english speakers, talked about artillery with Lt. Gen. (ret) Andrew Leslie, watched Kevin Clarke go ballistic, met dozens of fascinating people, had tons of energy, got to be a part of the game, and to top it off, a fantastic party after we won.

It was a good time.  The biggest thing was that they asked me to take photos.  I forgot that I could do people pictures.  Its been such a long time.  But I knew exactly what to do, and despite being very rusty, managed to do it.  Here are some of the best photos.  Some are duplicates of earlier posts, but I did all these over again as I gained practice at Lightroom and Photoshop.

 Justin Trudeau

 Chrystia Freeland

 Justin Trudeau canvassing on Parliament Street.

 Linda McQuaig, John Deverell, Chrystia Freeland at the UofT debate.

 Paul Martin canvassing in Yorkville.

 John Tory moderating the debate at Jarvis Collegiate.

 Chrystia at the Jarvis debate.

 Chrystia's handlers Rebecca and Ben fiercely concentrating during a scrum at the Jarvis debate.

 Bob Rae, Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne at a campaign rally.

 Justin Trudeau at the same rally.

 And again with Kathleen Wynne.

Senator Art Eggleton watching the early results.

Chrystia during her victory speech.

Bob Rae

My Pix

Paul Martin light:

Paul Martin dark:

My Pix

Candidates at the U of T debate, Nov 16.

My Pix

Got to take a photo of Justin Trudeau while working on Chrystia Freeland's Toronto Center Campaign.  He cleans up real nice.

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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
Aldous Huxley

My Pix

Chrystia Freeland at her Toronto Center election headquarters, Oct 27, 2013

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As everyone in this room knows, it has become a right of passage for aspiring leaders and prime ministers to promise Senate reform - on their way to the top.  

The promises are usually made in Western Canada.  

And these statements of intent are usually warmly received by party activists, editorial writers and ordinary people.

But once they are elected, Senate reform quickly falls to the bottom of the Government's agenda.


Stephen Harper, September 2006, from his own website.

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the issue is not a matter of perception … you can not claim an expense you did not incur. That is not right, that is not proper, and that will not be tolerated in this party.
Prime Minister Harper's complete non denial.

Harper's Bad Week

   
Unbelievably, Mike Duffy is a hero.  Two days ago, he looked like the archetypical insider crook.  Today he is the only known case of someone publicly defying Stephen Harper and living to tell the tail.  That's bad for business.  Queue the counter-attack.  Not that anything besides monumentally stupid incompetence by the PMO could have restored Duffy's reputation to the point where a counter-attack is necessary or viable.

The worst possible outcome of this scandal is that it could get attached to the Prime Minister personally.  His party is known for enthusiastic betrayal when the leader shows some blood.  Like The Man Who Would Be King.  And the suspension might have passed last week, but its gone now.  Total defeat for the PMO and tar all over the PM.

The most fascinating thing is that the only story having a ring of truth is Duffy's. That he's a self-serving crook makes his story even more credible.  He knows what he's talking about.  It looks like the $90,000 was a straightforward bribe, the Prime Minister knew about it, and probably approved it.  And who created this Duffy monster?  Stephen Harper, in one of his more transparently cynical moves as PM.  His cunning, paranoia and vindictiveness have finally come back to stab him deeper than any enemy could have.

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Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

There is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.
Mark Twain

A Rebellion In The House

    Dan Tague

I finally figured out what the Republicans are up to with the debt showdown.  Republican Senator Tom Coburn said last week: “I would dispel the rumor that is going around that you hear on every newscast, that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, we will default on our debt. We won’t. We’ll continue to pay our interest.”  The Government will be able to do that with their tax revenues, so the story goes.

By refusing to let the US Government borrow any more money, the Tea Party faction can force Obama to shut down everything except the military, social security, and interest payments on the debt.  No money for things they don't like, especially Obamacare.  When everyone wakes up on Friday to realize the world didn't end, Obama will have to negotiate, and the GOP can raise the debt ceiling for 90 days on Monday morning.  Crisis over.  The Tea Party faction will have pulled off a political masterstroke and finished the Reagan revolution.

Or so I am guessing.  Its taking brinksmanship into previously unknown territory, but its brinkmanship all the same.

If my guess is right, then the tea party types will do their damnedest to prevent any vote at all until they get what they want.  If they don't allow a vote, then Boehner can't fold and compromise with the Democrats.  With party discipline, nobody, not Obama, not the Senate, not the Courts, can stop them.  The House GOP will effectively run the country until at least January 2015.

For their ploy to work, Obama has to be able to pay for at least Social Security the military and interest on the national debt out of taxes and not be able to use any executive tricks to keep borrowing.  If the Tea Party faction are wrong about this, there will be an economic meltdown and a political showdown.  Nobody can say what would happen, but it wouldn't be good.

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I hope Putin has taken adequate protections. Now that he is a Russian journalist his life may be in grave danger!
Gary Kasparov on Putin's NYT op-ed

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It's when the 'international community' expresses 'concern' about your 'situation' that your situation is well and truly fucked. 
Michael D. Weiss

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The uprising in Egypt was initiated by the young generation. The uprising achieved two things. One is it made the lives of dictators impossible. Today, if you are looking for a safe job, don't become a dictator.
Shimon Peres

Why Morsi Had To Go

Debate over the legitimacy of Mohammed Morsi's defenestration continues, with John McCain calling the action a coup. "Coup" is a loaded word because political activity by the Egyptian Military would stop American military aid.  However, this was not a coup.  It was not an abrogation of democracy.  For the future of democracy in Egypt, Morsi had to go.

The Morsi government was a disaster by any measure.  The economy was a shambles and getting worse.  Foreign Policy was incoherent and sporadic.  The security situation in Sinai is a shit show.  Morsi pissed off everyone, the Army, the Police, the Media, the Judiciary, the Copts, the Shia, Islamic clerics, and even other Islamic political parties.  While the country fell apart around their ears, the Morsi government proved interested in only one issue, institutionalizing the Muslim Brotherhood's grasp on power.  At the same time, they frightened just about everyone who did not vote for Morsi by pushing Islamization when he had no mandate to do so.  Indeed after promising they would not.

In the days before Morsi was deposed, 15 million Egyptians came out in the streets to demand his ouster.  Egypt is 3x the size of Canada.  Imagine if 5 million people came out here to demand a change of government.  There would be a change of government. 

The key point is that while elections are the lungs of democracy, political accountability is its heart.  Do a bad job and lose your job.  Morsi and his party were building a system where the Muslim Brotherhood could not be held accountable.  In this way, Morsi was subverting democratic institutions on a permanent basis. For all these reasons, Morsi had to go.

UPDATE Aug 20:
It's important to say that because Morsi had to go does not mean the suppression and murder of his supporters by the military is justified in any way whatsoever.  Morsi's mistakes were political, and subject to political accountability, not criminal prosecution.   The Army is massacring protesters on the streets. 

The Secret Coup

In a secret coup, US security agencies have apparently taken over the United States Government.  With key members of Congress, the Executive has given itself secret powers, authorized by secret laws, interpreted by secret courts.  There is no accountability at all.

To facilitate this takeover, the President, his Administration, its agencies and House and Senate leaders have conspired to conceal the nature and scope of these activities from Congressional and Judicial oversight.  They have subverted the Constitution and broken both the law and their oaths of office, an impeachable offense.

These are crimes under US law.  You can argue all you want, but from Obama on down, the defense of these programs amounts to "If the President does it, its not illegal", to quote Richard Nixon.  He was wrong about that.  And what we are talking about here is 10x worse than anything Nixon did.  Watergate was a personal scandal.  Here, the Administration has declared a permanent state of war, and is permanently suppressing Constitutional rights.

This is not an abstract issue.  Reuters has uncovered that the DEA was getting information from these illegal programs and concealed the source of their evidence from Federal Judges in criminal cases.  That is a major crime and people should go to jail.  Another impeachable offense.

Note I am not just specifically accusing Democrats.  The Republicans are in this up to their necks as well.

Its all going to lead to a political crisis.  At least it better. 

UPDATE Aug. 8
Reuters is reporting that the IRS also participated in concealing the source of evidence gained from NSA intercepts.

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People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
Otto von Bismarck 

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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken

From The Campaign Trail

 Peter Milczyn interviewed at his campaign headquarters, July 29, 2013. Only the cameraman showed up.  The reporter asked questions on speaker phone. 

No posts in the last few weeks because I was working on Peter Milczyn's campaign in the Provincial by-election.   It was a great experience.  The best part was scrutineering.  I got to watch the votes counted on my poll and was responsible for checking the count and challenging any ballots I saw as invalid.  None were.  We won my poll, but lost the election.  From my lowly viewpoint as a volunteer (volunteers get the mushroom treatment), the vote was decided by Liberal voters who elected to punish us by staying home.  I managed to turn out less than half the Liberal voters in my poll.  On the other hand, Conservatives came out in droves. 

Yet it was a respectable loss; 46.6% for Holyday, 40% for Milczyn.  Turnout was a bit above average for a by-election: ~35%.  I made a complete fool of myself by saying we would win despite the polls.  I could see we had the votes, and thought we could turn them out with our superior ground game.  That was spectacularly wrong.  I had slipped into magical thinking. 

There were many funny and interesting things that happened.  Like the man who wouldn't vote for Peter because he didn't like his neigbours's fence.  Or the woman who screamed that I'm an asshole, just like her son.  One man called me a dictator for knocking on his door.  The best conversation was with a voter who wanted me to tell him if it was OK to put diesel in his gas car.  I thought not, but he advised that you could get away with 20% and wanted my views about going to 30%. 

Here are a few pictures:

An apartment door in Maybelle.  Pat's in deep shit.

Toronto Hydro's attitude to danger.

NSA Scandal: The Bolivian Plane Incident

Welcome to Vienna Mr. President!

Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters

The shenanigans surrounding the blocking and subsequent search of Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane last week will probably never be publicly explained.  That is the way of these things.  Fear not, I have an expansive conspiracy theory that reveals everything.  Like most good conspiracy theories, this one hasn't a shred of proof.  100% unadulterated speculation. 

For those not following the story breathlessly, here is a write up from The Guardian.  The brief version is that Morales was flying home to Bolivia after meetings in Moscow.  France, Italy, Spain and Portugal denied passage to the plane which ended up in Vienna.  There it was searched by the Austrians to determine if Edward Snowden was on board.  He was not.  These airspace closures were, as has been admitted, requested by the Americans who were apparently convinced Snowden was on the plane.  Just about everyone in South America is up in arms over the incident. The European governments in question are running for cover.  So what happened?

Here is my guess.  The Americans got information that Snowden was on the plane, and they panicked.  Remember that they are still extremely freaked out over Snowden's ongoing leaks.  They don't simply want to get him for what he has done, but for what he might do yet.  So they asked these five European governments to act (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Austria). But Snowden wasn't on the plane.  And all five governments, plus the Americans, are now humiliated. 

Why were the Americans so certain he was on the plane?  The information must have come, one way or another, from Moscow.  American agents could not have seen Snowden get on the plane.  He is at a different airport, and was nowhere near the Bolivian plane.  So the information must have come from from sources in Moscow, or from an intercept.  So that brings us to the crux of the conspiracy theory.  I think the Russians deliberately gave the information to the Americans as a nice "Fuck You", anticipating the panic and embarrassment that would ensue.  Further, to get the Americans to bite on the bait, it must have come from a source the Americans believed in.  Like an intercept.  An intercept like the ones Snowden is in trouble for revealing.  Wouldn't it be delightful if the Russians communicated the false story among themselves through a channel they knew the Americans were listening to?  One that the Americans thought the Russians did not know was compromised?  

If they did pass false information, the payoff was immense.  The incident might be forgotten soon among the general public and media, but institutions have a longer memory.  Trust has been broken.  Politicians are embarrassed.  Careers could be derailed.  And Snowden is still in Moscow.  So it was all for nothing.  Somehow I think the next urgent request from Washington will get a frosty reception in Europe.  Whether they are behind this or not, the Russians must be delighted.