Conservatives throw down gauntlet with media

OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative caucus members are back at work in Ottawa and spoiling, it seems, for a fight — and not just with their traditional House of Commons rivals.

These days, while Liberal and NDP members of Parliament are sporting their share of political shiners, so too are the journalists who cover them.

Sparring between the Prime Minister's Office and the Parliamentary Press Gallery is hardly new. But the gloves came off on Wednesday when a dispute over access to a government caucus meeting turned into a Conservative fundraising pitch.

Number Of Billionaires In Canada Jumps By One-Third: Credit Suisse

Canada is experiencing a boom in the number of billionaires, even as the country’s wealth gap with the U.S. widens, a new report from Credit Suisse suggests.

The number of Canadian billionaires jumped to 24 in 2010, from 18 in 2000-2001, marking a 33-per-cent increase, the bank reported.

Granted, those are small numbers compared to the 405 billionaires in the U.S. (up a whopping 50.5 per cent since 2001-2001), but it still indicates Canadians at the top end of the earnings scale are seeing significant wealth gains.

Rickford defends the indefensible, ends up awash in applesauce

Greg Rickford, the PM’s choice for Minister of State for Science and Technology, wrote a letter to iPolitics last week. It was in response to a column I published on this site on October 6 — Harper’s Greatest Hits: the Science of Fundraising.

It was not a fan letter.

Greg Rickford said he was greatly “concerned” about the column and that he “would like to set the record straight.” He had my full attention.

Who will pay for Harper’s shopper-friendly agenda?

The throne speech is out, and the middle class is in. The Conservatives are courting that demographic with all they’ve got: balanced budget legislation, job grants and free trade deals designed to create employment, “greater tax relief for Canadian families” once the budget is balanced, and a ‘Consumers First’ agenda of reduced roaming fees, pick-and-pay cable, and price parity between identical U.S. and Canadian goods.

This bread-and-butter throne speech is a departure from the government’s last such address, in 2011. It reads more like a budget, with numbers, bullets, and headings similar to those in the government’s 2013 Action Plan.

Rick Scarborough, Tea Party Leader, Suggests Class Action Lawsuit Against Homosexuality

Former Baptist pastor and Tea Party Unity founder Rick Scarborough spoke with conservative activist Peter LaBarbera on Thursday about potential anti-gay strategies, including a class action lawsuit against homosexuality.

“The whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit,” Scarborough told LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, in a conversation at a Tea Party Unity gathering Thursday. People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, a progressive advocacy group that monitors and reports on conservative political organizations, posted a partial transcript and audio recording of the discussion.

7 Companies That Don't Support Gay Rights

You'd think in 2013, with DOMA having been found unconstitutional, people would step into the present and accept the future. That future being, of course, that, and you're going to want to sit down for this revelation: gay men and women are people, too! Seriously.

In the wake of Barilla's head honcho, Guido Barilla's homophobic and sexist remarks, a boycott followed, and we were once again forced to realize that some people just refuse to see everyone as equal.

Senate Conservatives Fund Shutdown Strategy Led To Record Fundraising

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Conservatives Fund posted record fundraising numbers in September as it backed the congressional campaign to defund Obamacare that ultimately forced a 16-day government shutdown.

In the month leading to the Oct. 1 shutdown, Senate Conservatives Fund raised more than $2.1 million, a record for the group in a non-election year and the second-highest monthly total it has ever reported. The majority of the fundraising, $1.9 million, came from small donors. The group posted similarly big fundraising numbers in August as the defund Obamacare campaign gathered steam.

Israel Cranks Up the PR Machine

In the post-Oslo era, as the strategy that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle refers to as “peace without peace” captured the Israeli consensus, human rights activists ratcheted up grassroots efforts to challenge the occupation of Palestine and Israel’s prevailing structure of ethno-religious discrimination. Popularly known as BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israeli institutions involved in occupation has generated shock waves in international pro-Israel circles and within the top levels of Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus. The government-linked Reut Institute has designated BDS as a key national security threat and produced a blueprint for sabotaging Palestine solidarity networks around the world.

New DHS Nominee Spent Years Justifying War on Terror’s Excesses

Back in 2012, just before he stepped down as general counsel for the Department of Defense, Jeh (“Jay”) Johnson delivered a speech at Oxford University titled: “The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and its Affiliates: How Will It End?” The very title carries an optimistic ring, since it often seems that the war on terror will never, ever end—as evidenced, perhaps, by the simultaneous raids last week into Libya and Somalia that captured a former Al Qaeda big wig and sought, without success, to take down an Al Shabab leader. The two actions, coming amid a steady stream of statements from top Obama administration officials that Al Qaeda has been decimated, followed an extraordinary sign earlier this year that Al Qaeda—or at least the threat of Al Qaeda as bogeyman—is still alive and kicking: that, you’ll remember, was the reported intercept of an e-mail from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chieftain in Pakistan, to the head of Al Qaeda’s Yemen franchise, containing an unspecified threat against the United States that led to dozens of American embassies shutting down from North Africa to the Middle East and deep into South Asia. No attack was forthcoming.

Rexton Protest In N.B. Sparks Renewal Of Idle No More

FREDERICTON - The RCMP's commanding officer in New Brunswick defended the police response to a shale gas protest where officers seized firearms and improvised explosives, saying Friday that if the Mounties hadn't acted, lives could have been in danger.

"There came a point in time where we knew that this situation was no longer safe and that we had to do something before it turned into a situation where, regrettably, somebody could've been injured or even killed, and that's what triggered the decision," assistant commissioner Roger Brown told a news conference in Fredericton.