Climate Change Deniers Get Caught With Their Carbons Down

Heartland Institute is an oil industry front group, devoted to dispelling the science of climate change.  The bulk of their funding comes from Exxon and the Koch brothers.  The same Koch brothers that Stephen Harper is using our tax dollars to build a pipeline for, so that they no longer have to pay decent Canadian wages.  The jobs will instead be outsourced to Texas.

Recently, Heartland got caught with their carbons down, when sensitive material was leaked to the press.

Astonishingly this leak required no espionage or hacking.  Someone simply contacted the institute for a copy of their budget, and got exactly what they asked for, by a careless (ex?) employee.

Maybe we should try this with the National Citizens Coalition.

But now that names have been named, can Heartland survive?  Several so-called socially conscious corporations are a little red-faced, and may not renew their tax-exempt donations, including General Motors and Microsoft.

Heartland are amateurs though.  Why simply rely on tax-exempt status and court corporations?  In Canada, Stephen Harper found a way to fund similar groups with our money.  Case in point, Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, once run by his former chief of staff Kory Teneckye.

After several of us bloggers blew the whistle on their 2005-06 annual report, filled with images of conservatives from Rhona Ambrose to Gerry Ritz, they pulled it from the internet.  I have a hard copy in my files that I keep meaning to get out and scan.  There is a photo of Harper that I'm sure was photo-shopped.  They probably bought in online as they do with many of their "official" images.

CRFA also tried to use a televised ad that included a speech by Stephen Harper during a campaign stop.

For their efforts, Jim Flaherty's 2007 budget included a two billion dollar grant for research into using Green Giant creamed corn to run your Hummers.  Or something else just as ridiculous.  It's not like they actually research anything.

Another 32 million was given for an ethanol plant in Collingwood, that never did go anywhere.

Stephen Harper even brazenly gave a Senate post to another CRFA employee, JoAnne Buth.  Nice to see that cronyism is alive and well and living inside the conservative bubble.

From Friends of Science to CRFA to the Heartland Institute.  It's all about money, money and more money.  Our money.

Gag the scientists but pay the fuel industry to spout nonsense.

This one's for Larry Miller:

"Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists." Adolf Hitler

So What Does Larry Miller Think of Jason Kenney's Hitler-Like Move?

'Walking past the hundreds of stately Somali refugees lined up outside the gates of the UN High Commission for Refugees here in Nairobi -- men in tidy shirts and slacks, women in baby blue, fuchsia or copper chadors -- the pasty face of Jason Kenney floats into my mind.

Later, watching the images of the nearly 400,000 starving Somali women, children and men crammed into the Dadaab refugee camp on Kenya's border with Somalia, there he is again, forcing his way into my imagination: Jason Kenney, Canada's minister of immigration and xenophobic rhetoric ....'  (1)

In Kenney's world only the tidy shirts and slacks need apply.  Unless of course you're a tidy shirt and slacks wearing Muslim.  His department has made it clear "No Muslims!" (Harperland)

Astonishingly, Kenney has been able to redefine the term "refugee" as "queue jumper," "illegal alien," or his favourite xenophobic term: "terrorist."
 
Fortunately for Peter Van Loan, someone like Jason Kenney was not immigration minister when his family fled Estonia after it fell to the Soviets.  They were able to avoid arrest and execution, when given asylum in Canada.  Or as Bruce Cheadle reminds us of Vic Toews.

There's a global recession and Canada's economy is not immune. Shiploads of strange, foreign refugees — economic migrants and oppressed minorities — have been landing on our shores, fleeing civil war, economic upheaval and famine. No one is certain how they can be assimilated and there are concerns about criminals, subversives and agitators in their midst.  "If (their) ... government is threatening to deport them ... it is probably because they refuse to obey the laws of the country, and we should have full information regarding the facts," one mainstream advocacy group objects.

The year was 1929 when migrant Mennonites were fleeing deportation to certain starvation in Siberia under Stalin. Fortunately for Toew's Ukrainian refugee parents and grandparents, they were able to find safe haven in Canada.  Those queue jumping, illegal alien terrorists.

However, today Toews refers to those like his parents and grandparents as "customers".  From his June 2011 press conference he explained the reasoning behind his mistrust of potential "smugglers".  "What we're trying to do is to put a big question mark in the minds of the potential customers.  About the prospect of quick family reunification and we're trying to say to them that you, even if you get asylum status in Canada, it won't necessarily be permanent. We believe that those doubts seeded in the minds of potential customers  will significantly depress demand and the price point ..."

"No one is certain how they can be assimilated and there are concerns about criminals, subversives and agitators in their midst."  The "customers" of the Toews family perhaps?  Just as fortunate for them, Vic was not yet in the picture and indeed there would not have been a Vic at all if Kenney was running the show in 1929.  At least not in this country.

In an unprecedented move, Jason Kenney has presented legislation that will create "safe" lists.  Bill C-31 would also block claimants from so called “safe” countries from appealing a negative decision to the new Refugee Appeal Division and it would eliminate a provision that called for a committee of experts to decide which countries would be placed on the safe list.  It also ultimately gives the Kenney full discretion over the yet-to-be-established safe list.

His list.

Where's our Nazi spotter Larry Miller?  It's a dangerous thing when one man can make and control a list that determines the fate of entire groups of people.

One country on Kenney's list is Czechoslovakia, and concerns the Roma of that country.  Those queue jumping terrorists need to stay home.  After all, as he points out, Czechoslovakia is a democratic country and champion of human rights.

Or are they?

According to Canwest European Correspondent Peter O'Neil:

A ghastly arson attack that has left a two-year-old girl fighting for her life contradicts Canadian and Czech government assertions that an exodus of Roma refugee claimants to Canada is driven by economics, rather than fear of persecution, say members of the Roma community here.  ... They say they face a constant threat of neo-Nazi attacks and hateful demonstrations, where marchers head into Roma communities and call them "parasites," organized by increasingly sophisticated organizations such as the far-right Workers' Party.

"We are afraid for our lives," said Martin Duna, 31 ... "We are worried that Hitler is coming back." ... Duna's reference to Hitler, who sent Roma, as well as Jews and homosexuals, to extermination camps during the Second World War, isn't as extreme as it may sound ... Czech municipal politicians have won nationwide public praise for evicting Roma from apartments to live in metal containers in city outskirts; and human-rights groups have reported involuntary sterilizations of Roma women from the late 1960s to as recently as late last year.  Growing neo-Nazi violence, as well as discrimination and even segregation in areas such as health, housing, education, criminal justice and employment, have been reported in numerous publications issued by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International.

Does this sound like a country committed to human rights?

And how does someone like Jason Kenney qualify as the supreme keeper of lists and authority of what constitutes oppression?

He has a high school education, dropping out of prep school at a time when that prep school, St. Ignatius was accused of running a cult.  He made headlines in San Francisco for his attacks on the gay community.  He challenged the Pope Paul because he opposed the Iraq War. He established the Christian Coalition in Canada, a group determined to take North America back to the time of the Reformation.

Or according to one of Kenney's teachers the '50s.  Not the 1950s but the 1550s.

He has had no job outside of politics, running a pyramid scheme called the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, inspired by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.  Much of his time was spent traversing the country forcing politicians to sign a pledge not to raise taxes.  Mike Harris signed Kenney's pledge.  Enough said.

This new legislation is nothing more that a power trip by a narcissistic nincompoop.

I can't wait to hear what Larry Miller thinks of all this.  Maybe I'll give him a call.

1. In Africa, It's Sickening to See Tories Play Refugee Politics: Here at the bleeding edge of the Somali crisis, I can't shake the face of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, by Cam Sylvester, The Tyee, July 20, 2011

Larry Miller Needs to Stop Quoting the NRA and Ezra Levant Just Needs to STOP!

Last week, Conservative MP Larry Miller, compared support for the gun registry to Adolf Hitler and his apparent disarming of Germans.

Most people were shocked but they shouldn't have been.  The NRA uses this argument all the time and before they pried the gun from his "cold, dead hands", Charlton Heston declared:  "Any of the monsters of modern history such as Hitler and Stalin-confiscated privately held firearms as their first act."  Wayne R. LaPierre, the current executive vice president and chief executive officer of the NRA, similarly highlights the link between gun registration, confiscation, and the German experience." (1)

Miller uses his NRA material to challenge the statement that the conservative movement is determined to socially re-engineer Canadians.  Maybe instead of reading the American Rifleman, Miller should read a bit of history on his boss.  Tom Flanagan claimed that Stephen Harper wrote the Reform Party's policies on guns and only stopped short at calling it "a right to bear arms".

Scrapping the gun registry is being seen by the gun lobby as only an important first step.  They firmly believe that if we all carried guns there would be less crime.

I watched an interesting documentary Gun Fight, and in it Diane Sawyer, after receiving so many emails that if students could carry guns the Virginia Tech tragedy would never have happened, she challenged gun enthusiasts to prove it.

Recreating the scene, when the gunman came into view, those involved couldn't even get their weapons out in time.  The shooter had the element of surprise.  Had others been armed, I think there would have simply been more deaths.

Miller claims that his comments were taken out of context, but I'm curious just how he would like us to take them.

Then of course, Ezra Levant, tiring of performing his impersonation of an owl on crack, for Sun TV, decided to pen (type, scratch?)  his support for Miller.  Under the heading: Censoring Hitler — and the Past, he gives one of the most convoluted history lessons, using not only gun control, but free speech and concern for human rights; as ingredients for a return to Nazi tyranny.

However, Levant does not blame Hitler, but  "do-gooders" and the Treaty of Versailles.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1918 and covered military disarmament.  The gun control law was passed a decade later, in 1928, by the Weimar Republic, to deal with the civil unrest after the war.

The Weimar government was attempting to bring some stability to German society and politics.   Violent extremist movements of both the Left and Right, were actively attacking the young, and very fragile, democratic state. A government that cannot maintain some degree of public order cannot sustain its legitimacy ... Gun control was not initiated at the behest or on behalf of the Nazis - it was in fact designed to keep them, or others of the same ilk, from executing a revolution against the lawful government. In the strictest sense, the law succeeded - the Nazis did not stage an armed coup. (2)

In 1938, the Nazis extended the gun control act, but by then they were firmly in control of Germany.

Levant's claim that attempts to silence Hitler had created the volatile anti-Jewish movement, are just as inaccurate.  I've written of this before.  It was actually the fact that the courts continued to rule in his favour, that accelerated the hatred and emboldened the Brown Shirts.

Sun media may be in dire need of a fact checker, but they also need a little reality check.  Levant's verbal attack on Irwin Cotler is not only unfair but untrue.

Mr. Cotler is a well respected human rights lawyer, who can count amoung his clients, Nelson Mandela,  Jacobo Timmerman and Muchtar Pakpahan.  Cotler also represented Natan Sharansky, who was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag for Jewish activism. After his release, Sharansky went on to become the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister. (3)

Ezra Levant sings to the choir of the deaf on his television program, and now attempts to write for the wilfully blind. 

As for Miller, he's obviously auditioning for a spot on the Friends of the NRA television program.  Maybe Winchester will throw a few bucks his way too.

1. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON GUN REGISTRATION, THE NRA, ADOLF HITLER, AND NAZI GUN LAWS: EXPLODING THE GUN CULTURE WARS (A CALL TO HISTORIANS), by Bernard E. Harcourt, Fordham Law Review, Volume 73, Issue 2, Article 11, January 1, 2004

2. The Myth of Nazi Gun Control, by N. A. Brown, GunCite, July 21, 2001

3. Wikipedia

Stockwell Day Says Voters Will Punish Stephen Harper for His Flip-Flops

Stephen Harper supported the gun registry. At least he did when he was a Reform MP.

He said at the time that he had made his initial decision after a poll showed his constituents supported the registry, but then a second poll showed that 60 per cent were against it after learning more about it. After he switched, he was accused of flip-flopping and rigging the survey to get the result he wanted, according to 15-year-old news stories, while at least one newspaper editorial accused him of retreating from his convictions to toe the party line.

Accusations resurfaced when Harper and Stockwell Day were competing for the leadership of the Alliance Party. And today Stocky is still suggesting that Harper could be punished for his flip-flop.

Voters will hold to account MPs who switch their votes on the fate of the long-gun registry after campaigning to scrap it, Treasury Board President Stockwell Day says.

I guess he's still after Harper's job.

Not that Day is unfamiliar with flip-flops himself. In 2000 he tried to form a coalition with the separatist Bloc but then later called coalitions with separatists, undemocratic. Flip and flop.

He also said Canadians should be in Iraq, but later denied that he ever said that. Flip and flop.

And speaking of flip-flops, Harper MP Larry Miller stood up in the House yesterday and accused the Liberals of whipping and the NDP of flipping. Rich from the man who opposed Harper's HST and then ignored the wishes of his constituents and supported it. 'Other Tories were expected to fall in line with the government, but some are clearly not happy about it. “I don’t get a vote on the HST, and you know that,” said Larry Miller, the Tory MP for the Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, after leaving a meeting of the Conservative caucus on Wednesday.' Whipped and flipped.

But lets take a little stroll down flip-flop lane, shall we?

Reformer Larry Miller May Not Care About the Geneva Convention But we Do!

Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound's Reform-Conservative MP Larry Miller, agrees with his boss that Canadians are far too self involved to care about what happens to human beings.

And we are far too self-involved to care about our reputation, and what a possible war-crimes trial will do to it.

But Larry Miller is wrong, and so is his boss, because we very much do care.

Sorry Larry. You lose!


Prorogue is indefensible no matter who is selling it
By MICHAEL DEN TANDT
January 9, 2010

Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound's Larry Miller says Canadians don't care about the Afghan detainee issue. And he strongly supports Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to shut down Parliament for the second year in a row, this time until March.

Perhaps, to be kind to Miller, he's not free to speak his mind. Or perhaps he really is speaking his mind.

Either way, he has done himself no credit here. His blank-brush wash of the Prime Minister's actions is not what we expected from the MP from this region.

What became of the Bruce-Grey tradition of independence? And what happened to standing up for the rights and voices of ordinary people?

Let's go through this one more time, just so the issues are crystal-clear.

The Afghan detainee question at its root is not about the detainees themselves. Suicide bombers and Taliban terrorists are not on our birthday-party list. We don't much care for them, as a matter of fact. Take that as a given.

It's not about them.

It's about whether the government and senior figures in the military lied to the people and to Parliament about what they knew.

It's about how the government tried to personally smear a senior Canadian diplomat, Richard Colvin, who did nothing more than offer sworn testimony, as he was required to do, before a Parliamentary committee.

It's about how this government, with its brazen school-yard-bully tactics, and its insistence on never acknowledging any fault, put Canadian soldiers in moral jeopardy.

How, moral jeopardy? Here's how.

Good soldiers follow orders. Our soldiers are professional, well-trained, idealistic and honest. If they did indeed turn prisoners over to the Afghans, and if those prisoners were indeed later tortured, thereby putting Canada in contravention of international law, it was a policy mistake -made by their bosses.

It was the senior brass and the men who run the Defence Department who were responsible. Not the guys on the ground, taking the risks.

So in avoiding and deflecting blame for a bad policy, the government is not-so-subtly casting future blame away from itself to -guess who? -the ordinary Canadian soldier.

That's why it is so incredibly disingenuous, insulting even, for Conservative politicians to cast this debate as though they're defending the honour of our soldiers. Our soldiers' honour is not in question here. Theirs is.

And there's another issue, overriding all the others: That is, very simply, cowardice.

Prime Minister Harper prorogued Parliament last winter to get himself out of a serious political jam of his own making. Now he's done the same thing again, and for the same reason.

It's actually about "recalibrating" the government and reforming the Senate, the government spin tells us. That's a crock, and everyone in Ottawa knows it.

Harper was taking serious fire on the detainee issue, and he was beginning to find it uncomfortable. The mess in Copenhagen didn't help. He didn't want to come back to more controversy. So he closed the doors, hoping the Olympics would take our minds off the workings of government.

He had an opportunity to rebut Richard Colvin's points about detainee handling. Instead he fled and sent Parliament home. He ran away, rather than face his critics in a stand-up, public debate.

Conservative apologists for this have been saying, as has become their habit: What's the big deal? Jean Chretien prorogued a few times too. It's routine.

Except it's not routine in a minority Parliament. It's not routine when you have dozens of bills on the table and work left undone. And it's not routine to do it two years in a row, and in both cases when you're under intense political pressure from the opposition.

The newest line, now that the PMO realizes the prorogue is not going over quite as he'd hoped, is to say it's merely intended to help the government bring about Senate reform, which will begin with the appointment of five new Conservative Senators. Good luck selling that. Maybe it's just us. But a move that will give yet more power to this minority government, further reducing Parliamentary checks on its authority? Hmm. Not sure that's going to fly.

This prorogue is indefensible. Larry Miller's support for it is also indefensible.