So Much For Belt Tightening. Harper Just Needs Bigger Pants

With promises of major cutbacks for everyone else, Stephen Harper is again rubbing our noses in the fact that he controls us all, by spreading our money lavishly around his MPs.

39 cabinet ministers, at a minimum annual cost of $9 million.

But don't forget that he usually also assigns numerous Parliamentary secretaries from among them, in an attempt to bring as many as possible into the executive, ensuring that few are left to actually question the executive.

Not that any of them ever question anything the exalted one does.

They wouldn't dare.

Harper's Dictatorship Now Complete and Unchallenged

Warren Kinsella writes this week: Stephen Harper gives Canadians the finger

The discussion is Harper's latest snub of the media, no longer caring whether they challenge his decisions. It was deliberate and calculated. He didn't have to answer to them regarding his Senate appointments. They are no longer useful to him.

Let them stomp up and down. For the next 4-5 years he will no longer have to explain his actions to the Canadian people. He's always done what he wanted anyway, but now his control of our country is absolute.

Lawrence Martin writes: Behold the most powerful PM ever

He has it all:

•A fractured opposition and decimated Liberal party.
•An overpowering political machine that doubles and triples rivals in financial resources.
•A preponderant media advantage with most of the big fourth-estate players on side.
•A public service more submissive than ever before.
•Agencies and watchdog groups that are intimidated or stacked with governing party partisans.
•A majority in the Senate and the House, plus command over an increasingly dysfunctional parliamentary committee structure.
•A bossist structure in the governing party that allows no dissent from within.

Not to mention the fact that within a few months, he will also have control of the Supreme Court, and the Governor General is a Conservative insider.

When Jack Layton teamed up with Harper to destroy the Liberals, he must have felt pretty powerful. But looking around at the carnage, just how powerful is he really? Leader of what?

Stephen Harper is ending the democratic voter subsidies, where less than $2.00 was taken from each voting taxpayer, and going to the party of their choice.

Layton's surge was mostly superficial, and I doubt it will generate into massive fundraising, given that he's pretty much impotent, with few allies in the House.

And how easy will it be for the Liberals to rebuild? Their membership is currently on the rise, as many Canadians now realize that the Harper/Layton team has gutted the centre, but can the interest hold?

It's a very terrifying time to be a Canadian progressive.

James Moore's Double Standard

Heritage Minister James Moore is angry. Apparently, a Canadian punk rock group, Living With Lions, who received a government grant, trashed Christianity and the Bible on their latest album.

Ezra Levant reached into his bag of prose and called them "a bunch of losers".

James Moore issued a statement calling the CD “offensive” and “simply wrong” and expressed his “profound disappointment” with the grant.

But where was his outrage last week, when we learned that taxpayers helped to sponsor the Islamophobic Geert Wilders, as part of the Tulip Festival?

Moore could have stopped his appearance, but didn't. The Right refer to Wilder's hate filled diatribes as "freedom of speech". Why then is Living With Lions not given the same consideration?

They are an anti-establishment punk band, who would appeal to a very small demographic, though the headlines will probably help them sell more albums.

However, there is a troubling double standard taking place in Canada today.

Geert Wilders fine, George Galloway out. Hate speech at a Tulip festival fine, young people expressing themselves silenced.

Welcome to Harperland.

Is the Tea Party Becoming Tepid and What Will it Mean for Harper?

South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley, was brought to power with the help of the Tea Party. As reward, she proposed a Tea Party Coalition in her state, using grassroots activism, to promote their agenda.

The crowning glory for this coalition, would be a rally, featuring Donald Trump. But when Trump backed out of the presidential race, he also backed away from the Tea Party, resulting in perhaps the poorest showing of the AstroTurf group for some time.

Philip Stanley came to Thursday’s rally from Asheville, N.C., in hopes of seeing Trump but said he was pleased to learn Haley would headline the event instead. Stanley said he respected Trump for directly questioning President Barack Obama about his birth certificate without fear of being labeled with “the R word” for racist .... “I never thought he was serious,” Stanley said of Trump. “He’s a promoter. Then, I heard Nikki Haley was here. That’s almost as good.”

But apparently not "almost as good" for most people, as the event was attended by only a handful of the faithful.

Are the Americans now backing away from the crazies? Obama's approval rating is at 60% and the birther movement, has been aborted, now that he produced the document they all claimed would prove he wasn't American born.

What will this mean for our crazy people? The ones who have contributed so much to the career of Stephen Harper, with the promise that they would be listened to.

He held them off when he was in a minority, but with a majority, they will not sit quiet, especially since many of them are in his caucus.

They'll applaud his destruction of the welfare state, that is until they realize that they are also victims, but they will also demand the right to bear arms (something Harper himself wrote into Reform Party policy), the abandonment of gay rights, women's rights and the rights of minorities, and the end of a woman's right to choose.

However, if Harper gives them all of these things, will they go away quietly, or emboldened, simply become more demanding?

Have some tea. One lump or two?

Jason Kenney's Job Performance Gets Failing Grade

Jason Kenney has been called by some the hardest working MP on the Hill. But the question is, what has he been working at?

Kate Heatfield writes in the Ottawa Citizen: Will the real Jason Kenney please stand up He has grandstanded on big issues for political gain, and appears to be failing at his job.

During the election, a group of Canadian immigration lawyers and academics wrote a letter arguing, among other things, that Kenney has not made much headway cutting red tape, and that the backlogs and processing times for some immigration categories are getting worse.

The argument from those of all political stripes, however, is that his real function is capturing (or some, like me, might say "exploiting") the immigrant vote.

But apparently, he's not even doing that.

Susan Delacourt writes in the Star: The ethnic Conservative myth

... as political scientists have been sifting through the data of May 2, they’re learning that immigrant voters did not flock to the Conservatives in any large way in the election. This was among one of the most surprising revelations last week when Canada’s leading political scientists held their annual conference in the immediate aftermath of the vote.

The professors who’ve been heading up the prestigious Canadian Election Study shared some of their early findings on the final day of the conference at Wilfrid Laurier University. And when it came to the issue of the immigrant vote, it appears that this study is going to be doing some myth-busting.

“Across the board, there doesn’t seem to be anything but a minor shift in terms of the immigrant versus non-immigrant vote where Conservatives are concerned,” said Stuart Soroka of McGill University. “Up to this point, there’s a bit of gain there, but it seems tiny,” said Patrick Fournier, of the Université de Montréal.

I've always wondered why immigrants would back the Conservatives or even Jason Kenney. When he was with the Canadians Taxpayers Federation he fought agaisnt money going to immigrant groups.

And in a 2003 speech to the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Stephen Harper called multiculturalism a "weak nation strategy".

So if he's not good at either job, why has this man been given so much credit?

The Pentagon Deems That F-35s are no Longer Affordable

After the election results were in, Embassy magazine reported: F-35 firms breathe sigh of relief at Tory majority

But while the Canadian contract is secure, given that Harper won't budge an inch on his determination to own them, despite the fact that they come without engines, the United States could be set to abandon the project.

The cost of building the F-35 fighter jet, set to replace a large part of the US warplane fleet, is "unaffordable" in its current version and must be reviewed, the Pentagon's top acquisition official said Thursday. "Over the lifetime of this program, the decade or so, the per-aircraft cost of the 2,443 aircraft we want has doubled in real terms," said Ashton Carter, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

The culture of "easy money" for military spending after 9/11, is partly to blame in the U.S..

In Canada, it's Harper's ignorance. He's an easy mark.

Another Fudged NDP Resume

I would imagine that if you went over all MP resumes from all parties, you would find many that stretch the truth.

For the NDP, it hasn't mattered until now. But they want to present an alternative government over these next, at least, four years. Honesty will be one measure.

The NDP is taking the fall again for another MP’s erroneous resume posted on the party’s website. “It was a mistake made by the party,” said NDP spokesman Steven Moran.

... QMI Agency has learned the new Quebec MP does not have a degree from the University of Montreal, despite that his official biography stated he had three certificates from the institution. University records showed Larose signed up for courses at University of Montreal but never received a certificate.

I'll bet there are a lot of new MPs in panic mode right now.