Michele Bachmann's Holy War

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard."

I said lunch, not launch! But don't laugh. Don't do it. And don't look her in the eyes; don't let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Full Article
Source: Rolling Stone Politics 

Michigan Groups Sue Gov. Snyder Over 'Emergency Manager' Law, Calling It A 'Power Grab'

Nearly 30 Michigan residents filed a lawsuit Wednesday that seeks to overturn a law that gave state-appointed "emergency managers" near carte blanche in cases of state takeover of indebted municipalities and school districts.

The suit names Gov. Rick Snyder (R) as a defendant, and claims the law is unconstitutional because it suspends home rule, eliminates citizens' voting rights and violates the separation of powers. The suit also names State Treasurer Andy Dillon as a defendant.

The law in question, Public Act 4, passed in March and gave Snyder the power to appoint "emergency managers" in cities in financial disarray, revising an earlier law that allowed for the appointment of "emergency financial managers," a more circumscribed role. The suit claims the managers, endowed with fuller powers, have made local elected officials moot.

Several groups, including Detroit's Sugar Law Center and New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, are representing the plaintiffs in the suit.

"We haven’t seen this form of government put in place over a locality before," said John Philo of the Sugar Law Center. "It says you're not going to have local elected officials. They'll have one person with absolute authority. People across the country assume that if there's going to be a government, it's going to be an elected one."

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

G8 Legacy Fund Draws Liberal Calls To Prove Value Of Legacy Projects

THE CANADIAN PRESS -- OTTAWA - The Harper government has already been blasted by the auditor general for keeping Parliament in the dark about the $50-million G8 legacy fund.

Now the Liberal party wants the auditor general to determine whether taxpayers got any value for the millions sprayed around cabinet minister Tony Clement's riding.

Liberal MP John McCallum wrote the auditor general Wednesday, asking that a "value for money" audit be done on the 32 infrastructure projects in Parry Sound-Muskoka, which wound up receiving about $45 million from the legacy fund.

The fund was supposed to help support last year's G8 summit, held in Ontario's cottage country, and provide a legacy for the region.

It was spent on gazebos, parks, public toilets and other beautification projects throughout the region. Many of the projects were hours away from the summit site in Huntsville, Ont., and were never seen or used by summit leaders or their entourages.

"A value for money audit would provide Canadians with an accurate picture of how each of the far-flung 32 projects, such as the gazebo in Sundridge, Ontario, and the washrooms in Baysville, Ontario, achieved the intended purpose of supporting the G8 summit ... which in some cases was up to 100 kilometres away," McCallum said in a letter to acting auditor general John Wiersema.

"In my view, it seems obvious that the 32 G8 legacy projects had little, if anything, to do with meeting any of the objectives."

Opposition parties have long maintained the money was a political "slush fund" that Clement was allowed to dispense in his riding as he saw fit.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

Ontario's battle of the number-crunchers

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s promises to cut taxes, spend more on health care and education and erase the province’s multibillion-dollar deficit in six years do not stand up to scrutiny, say the governing Liberals in their most aggressive attack yet on his campaign platform.

With the provincial election in 18 weeks and Mr. Hudak leading in the polls, the Liberals are attempting to cast doubt on the credibility of the Tories’ promises. Their orchestrated attack on Wednesday set off a flurry of competing spin on the numbers contained in the Tory platform, known as “changebook,” and ended up raising questions about the number-crunching abilities of both sides.

The day began with senior officials in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s office holding a briefing for reporters, where they presented a 12-page document outlining an enormous gap between what the Tories say their promises will cost and the actual tab. According to the Liberals’ calculations, the Tories need to find $14-billion in unidentified savings over four years to make their promises mesh.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan denounced changebook as a “crock” and called on the Tories to “come clean” on how they plan to fill an enormous hole in their numbers.
“This is just chock full of holes,” he told reporters. “It’s dishonest.”

As it turns out, the hole isn’t quite as deep as the Liberals claim – a fact that became clear only after senior Tory officials held their own briefing with members of the Queen’s Park press gallery, where they presented an entirely different take on the numbers. This was followed by senior Liberals wandering the corridors in the provincial legislature, doing one-on-one impromptu interviews with reporters, many of whom were feeling a little dazed by that point.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail 

4,000 [out of 40,000] pages on Afghan detainees leave question of torture unanswered

A year-long, multimillion-dollar probe has failed to resolve one of the most heated political questions ever to dog the Harper government: Did Canadian soldiers knowingly hand over Afghan prisoners to torture?

The Conservatives had hoped a multi-partisan effort to sift through documents – which concluded Wednesday – would finally put to rest one of the most divisive subjects of their tenure.

The political furor over the treatment of Afghan detainees led the Tories to temporarily shutter Parliament during early 2010; it saw the Conservatives face the risk of a contempt ruling just months later, with the Speaker of the Commons forced to step in and urge a compromise.

But the 4,000 pages of records, released Wednesday from a process agreed to by the Conservatives, Liberals and Bloc Québécois, are still subject to significant censorship.

And there are serious questions around the process that unearthed the documents. For instance, any records that could be considered cabinet confidence or legal opinions – where some of the most vital discussion would have taken place – were excluded.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail 

WikiLeaks Haiti: Country's Elite Used Police as Private Army

Haitian business organizations and members of the country's tiny elite used the Haitian police force as their own private army in the wake of the 2004 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to a secret US Embassy cable.

Then–US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley warned in the cable "against private delivery of arms" to the Haitian National Police (HNP) after learning from a prominent Haitian businessman that "some business owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition from the street and distribute them to local police officials in exchange for regular patrols."

The May 27, 2005, report was in a trove of 1,918 cables that WikiLeaks made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the Caribbean country.

Haiti's private sector elite has been a key US ally in promoting Washington's agenda in the country, from free trade and privatization of state enterprises to two coups against President Aristide followed by US and UN military occupations.

Fritz Mevs, a member of "one of Haiti's richest families and a well-connected member of the private sector elite" with major business interests in Port-au-Prince's downtown and port, was the principal source for Foley's report.

Mevs told the Embassy that the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos, had "distributed arms to the police and had called on others to do so in order to provide cover to his own actions." Boulos currently sits on the board of former President Bill Clinton's Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which controls the spending of billions donated to rebuild Haiti after the January 12, 2010, quake.

The May 2005 cable describes the period after the February 29, 2004, coup d'etat, which not only removed Aristide from power but repressed his Fanmi Lavalas party, set up a US-backed de facto government, and ushered in a 9,000-strong UN military occupation known as MINUSTAH (UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti).

Full Article
Source: The Nation 

That Senate reform bill: alive in the water

In a recent dead-tree Maclean’s I gave a little preview of the constitutional issues that the government’s piecemeal Senate reform effort, now launched, will raise if it is brought before a court. Readers may not be aware that the nature of Senate elections was discussed very recently in the Senate itself—in March, when a Senatorial Selection Act (S-8) was briefly debated there. The provisions of that bill have now been incorporated into a schedule to House of Commons Bill C-7.

Today’s Star has a piece from Susan Delacourt in which scholarly all-rounder Ned Franks calls Senate elections “dead in the water” and “sure to get shot down by the Supreme Court”. I don’t want to call this a misrepresentation of the expert consensus, nor to challenge the stature of Ned Franks, but it seems to me that few other opponents of Senate elections are as confident as these quotes suggest. As I wrote, it is not clear exactly how much change Parliament is free to make to constitutional arrangements by statute alone. The Constitution Act text says that the 7/50 amending formula has to be followed before “the powers of the Senate and the method of selecting Senators” are changed. But under C-7, Senators are explicitly still appointed by the Governor-General as before. (“Senators to be appointed for a province or territory should be chosen from a list of Senate nominees submitted by the government of the province or territory.”)

Full Article
Source: Macleans 

Canada opposes labelling asbestos as hazardous

Canada told the world Wednesday it opposes placing limits on the export of chrysotile asbestos — a “bombshell” expected to derail international efforts to list the mineral as hazardous.

The head of the Canadian delegation at a United Nations summit in Geneva made the statement late Wednesday after a consensus was emerging to label the known carcinogen mined in Quebec as hazardous.

If chrysotile asbestos is listed on Annex III of the United Nations’ Rotterdam Convention, “Prior Informed Consent” would be required before countries could export the mineral. After being informed of the hazards, developing countries that import asbestos could refuse to accept the potentially cancer-causing material if they believe they could not handle it safely.

Until Wednesday’s declaration, the Canadian delegation had remained silent — fuelling speculation from anti-asbestos campaigners that Canada was letting a handful of other countries do its “dirty work.”

The stunning development — confirmed by the UN Environment Program and characterized by the Montreal-based Chrysotile Institute as a“bombshell” — appeared to contradict statements made by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver just a day earlier, when he told reporters in Ottawa that the question of Canada’s position was “moot” because four other countries — Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine — had already spoken up against the listing.

Under convention protocol, unless consensus among countries is achieved, chrysotile asbestos remains off Annex III. The UN meeting ends Friday.

When pressed by reporters about the possibility of a consensus emerging in the face of Canada’s silence, Oliver also suggested Tuesday that the federal government would accept the listing. “If they want it to be listed, then it will be listed,” he said.

Full Article
Source: National Post 

The mathematically challenged Tim Hudak

Tim Hudak is not the first politician to take voters for chumps, and he certainly won't be the last. But the Ontario Conservative Leader's platform, on which he'll fight the fall election, is based on so many dubious, to say nothing of false, premises that he must be counting on the electorate's ignorance for victory.

Like many politicians before him, Mr. Hudak refuses to face facts – or, rather, refuses to tell voters anything remotely resembling the truth. And the truth is that, whichever party wins the election, the provincial budget will have to be cut severely. It's a truth the governing Liberals also prefer to avoid.

Mr. Hudak, who visits Ottawa on Thursday, promises to spend more on health and education, which together take about three-quarters of all government program spending. He can do nothing about rising payments on the debt. So he's left with the threadbare promise to cut spending on what remains by 2 per cent yearly, saying this can be done by not filling public-sector vacancies as they arise.

This is bad math, cleverly disguised. Even if possible – and the reductions aren't possible without cutting or scaling back whole programs – the reductions would be smaller than Mr. Hudak would need to balance a budget to whose deficit he'll add by a series of tax cuts and new spending commitments.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail 

Tory axe hits ‘muscle and bone’ of climate science, Elizabeth May says

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is accusing Stephen Harper of letting ideology dictate job cuts to climate scientists at Environment Canada. And she is calling on Environment Minister Peter Kent to reverse them.

“What is clear to me is that the cuts are not in fat,” Ms. May said. “This is cuts into muscle and bone.”

Ms. May, who spoke to The Globe after holding a news conference Wednesday, is referring to 46 scientists in the climate-research area – all term employees – who were recently given their one-month notice.

The federal government is on a cost-cutting exercise, trying to identify areas where savings can be made in the hopes of saving $4 billion annually. But Ms. May says particular this staff reduction goes too far.

“If you are looking to make cuts in the federal civil service I would be the last one to say that you couldn’t find places you could cut that didn’t absolutely cripple programs,” Ms. May said. “But removing all the term scientists from important research in climate?”

She says the government is “disproportionately targeting” climate-change research. “And the only reason I can see for that is ideological. I don’t think it’s the minister. I think it comes from the top but it means that climate is a target of cuts,” she charged.

The Prime Minister and his government have expressed some skepticism about the science around climate change. But Ms. May said Wednesday that without these scientists and the research capacity they provide, “Canada will be in a much worse situation.”

Some of these scientists, she said, research scenarios on how the country can cope with snow loads, wind loads, floods and other common weather-related hazards facing Canadians this summer. “This is not research into whether climate change occurs or why it occurs,” she said.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail