Dear Jack…

Dear Jack Layton:

I don’t know if you remember me, but I will never forget you.

We met in the mid-1990s, briefly, during the city council elections in Toronto. I was a journalism student at Ryerson University then. We were encouraged to take an interest in local politics and report on those issues. And since your wife, Olivia Chow, was running in the district where I lived, I turned out to observe at her campaign headquarters, and spent several hours watching the votes roll in. It was no sacrifice at all, since I was a strong progressive already, and I was delighted to meet the both of you. You both impressed me as excellent, dedicated local politicians, warm and open, very different from the usual blusterers, blowhards and talking heads who made the nightly news such a bore. You were both unabashed activists. Your track records were already impressive. You put your money where your mouths were, relying on bikes and public transit to remind us of the environment, defying ridicule in so doing. You stood up for the homeless when few city council members did; you even convinced Mel Lastman not to jail them, at a time when right-wing poor-bashing was becoming disturbingly fashionable. You stood up against violence against women in the age of the sexist backlash, throwing your support behind the White Ribbon Campaign after the Montréal Massacre. More than 60 countries are now members of that anti-violence campaign, thanks to your efforts. You made a real difference in the lives of your Toronto constituents on every level, and you were always on the good side of the issues.

And that was only on the local level. A few years later, I was overjoyed to watch you and Olivia make the jump to the federal level, side by side, as members of Parliament in adjoining ridings. You were sorely missed at Toronto City Hall, but Toronto’s loss was Ottawa’s gain, and that of your federal ridings.

And the NDP gained, too. Under you, they went from strength to strength. This year they scored their best election returns ever. You more than doubled the seat count and helped Québec consolidate its place in the federal fold. Even those who doubted you and disliked your politics had to admit that you had pulled a real coup.

And you did this while you were gravely ill. And you did it with such energy and verve that no one suspected until it was too late.

Now you are gone, and you left an amazing letter to us all. Written two days ago, I’m told. Even on your deathbed, your energy and optimism never flagged. The same personality that impressed me at City Hall all those years ago remained intact to the end. Even death could not bring you down. That’s a rare talent, you know, pulling such a coup in the teeth of death!

Writing this letter to you now, I wonder if you are really gone. You are still certainly present to me, and I suspect I’m not the only one who will feel your presence in spite of your absence.

Tonight there is a candle in my window, my porch light is on, and I’m wearing orange. It’s the least I could do for a true leader, one I like so much and will remember so well. There will be more, later — in the shape of the activism that you yourself lived to the end.

You never gave up on us, Jack. May we never give up on YOU.

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Posted in Canadian Counterpunch, Obits and 'bobs | 2 Comments

Heroes for Today: Maxine Waters

She tells the teabags where they can go (hint: it’s the same place they’re trying to drag their entire country.) You may also recall her from this opening scene in Fahrenheit 9/11:

This is the kind of fighting spirit that’s needed the world over, as the banksters try to hook us all into virtual slavery. Black people already know that story by heart. They don’t want the rest of us to learn it that way, too. That’s why they’re fighting.

And that’s why we all need to join them.

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Music for a Sunday: And do you feel scared?

I do. But I won’t stop and falter:

And after a day like the one I just had, things had BETTER get better.

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Fun With Photoshop: Somehow, I always did suspect…

…that Rick Perry had a skeleton in his closet, dancing the Watusi in a pink tutu and high heels:

Adam, on the other hand, looks like he’s had better.

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Posted in Fun With Photoshop, Pissing Jesus Off, Teh Ghey | 3 Comments

Wankers of the Week: Children of the Corn

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Oh, Basement Cat. You didn’t!

Crappy weekend, everyone! Are we enjoying fairground season yet? No? What, all those windstorms knocking down shoddily constructed stages and killing people getting you down? Shoot, that ain’t nothin’ but that global warming that we all know doesn’t exist. And if it doesn’t exist, then those people must be undead.

And speaking of undead, here are this week’s brainless fucking zombies of the apocalypse, in no particular order:

1. Michael Fucking Coren. This one slipped under my radar again last week (I blame myself for doing my best to ignore this inflammatory aging neofascist skinhead), but I think you’ll agree he’s a doozer worth starting this week’s wankapedia with. Racist as all fuck, and too cowardly to admit it. But hey Mikey, if you wanna make the London riots out to be about “culture” instead of race, how about your right-wing capitalist culture of raiding, plundering, raping and pillaging? A white-folks’ game if ever there was one. Figures, however, that this racist yob (who would not look out of place in full bonehead drag) decides to obscure THAT connection…

2. And while we’re on the subject of racist British yobs, how about that David Fucking Starkey? Newsflash, yobbo: The whites haven’t “become black”, they’ve ALWAYS been fucking barbarians. Especially in England, where so much of the world’s imperialism, racism, raping, looting and pillaging (from the top down, natch) originates. It was only a matter of time before the barbarism trickled down (!) to the lower classes. And look! There it is now!

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3. Michele Fucking Bachmann. No, of course she doesn’t JUDGE gays…she’s just bull-goose loony enough to believe that they are all suffering from “sexual dysfunction” that places them in “bondage” to Satan. Nothing judgmental about that at all! And she even says she’ll hire a token one if she’s elected preznit? Good luck finding a gay staffer who shares THOSE views. PS: Help, help, the Baby Jesus’s penis is threatening the Dark Ages mindset! Srsly, you can’t make this shit up. PPS: Liar, liar, pants on…how’s that go again? The real Abe Lincoln would be shrinkin’. PPPS: No, that’s NOT how to say “woman” in Spanish. Or even Spanglish. PPPPS: And how about that Soviet Union, threatening us all over again from the grave? Also, if people are known by the company they keep, then she really should be known as a terrorist supporter.

4. Philip Fucking Hinkle. Hey, maybe #3 could hire him, since he’ll probably be out of a job soon. Self-hating, closeted gay Repug, recently outed through his own arrogance and stupidity. What better qualifications do you need to work for the Queen of Crazy? And look! He’s part author of a same-sex marriage ban whose pointless cruelty was recently exposed by high winds and a flimsy stage! That’s surely a GREAT qualification right there…

5. Tony Fucking Warr. Retirement is a great time for you, a deputy chief of stormtroops, to say all the things you’d be too cowardly to utter while on the job. Like, oh, say, how a one-legged man deserved to get his prosthetic limb ripped off by your thugs — oh sorry, COPS — during the G20 débâcle in Toronto. And how they should “hold their heads high” for all being such assholes to about a thousand innocent people while letting provocateurs — oh sorry, vandals — get away with everything. Hey, as long as “nothing happened inside the security fence”, everything’s good, right?

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6. and 7. Sarah Fucking Palin and her First Fucking Dude, Todd Fucking Palin. They’re such quitbull sellouts that even in Iowa, Alaskans are coming up to them to say how fed up they are with all the Palin shenanigans. Time for Sawah to deep-throat a corndog; it may be the only way she can still keep pace with the preznidential ambitions of Wanker #3.

8. James Fucking Kirchick. James who, you ask? Yeah, I had no idea who he was until this week, either. Basically, he’s just another set of chattering teeth, yattering on about how Muslims are to blame for Anders Fucking Behring Fucking Breivik. And how racism and islamophobia here in the west are not a problem at ALL, much less the real problem!

9. Rick Fucking Perry. Looks like Guvnor Goodhair (or Crotch, as he used to be known when he’d just fallen off the turnip truck in Austin) thinks climate science is some kind of cult. And his fundie-whackjob pray-away-the-climate-change “religion” isn’t?

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PS: Why do you hate women and girls, Rick? No, seriously. Teen girls are apparently okay to exploit pornographically, but don’t deserve protection from a virus that causes cervical cancer? WTF? PPS: I wonder if this will turn up any dirt. PPPS: God crashed the economy? Really? “Too Big To Fail” is God, now? Well, when they directly promise to help Crotch out, I guess he has to start worshipping them!

10. Dany Fucking Larivière. He gave his ex-wife one of the rocks from his head for her birthday. Awww, isn’t that thoughtful of him?

11. Tony Fucking Clement. “Security” is a marvellous pretext for many things nowadays. Including, in the case of this old Harrisite Parasite of a SupposiTory, pork-barreling your riding, even when it’s far away from the actual summit you’re supposedly throwing all that money around to protect. And there’s no way Phony Baloney Tony could have NOT known he was doing wrong, because he diverted the paper trail to make it hard for that pesky Auditor General to track.

12. Maureen Fucking Chao. Ain’t nothin’ funnier than a whitey-white US diplomat making “jokes” about how the people of India, where she happens to be stationed, are “dirty and dark”. Oh wait, there IS something funnier: Seeing said diplomat’s career go down the toilet, like something that’s REALLY dirty and dark. Yuk, yuk, yuk.

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13. John Fucking Chambers. Everyone knows that corporate CEOs are tax-dodgers, and big-time ones. But until now, it was considered in poor taste to actually be one and BRAG about it. Well, no more. Not only did he brag of it, he actually tried to bribe the US government by offering to repatriate his offshore tax-dodge money in exchange for a much lower taxation rate than the already criminally low rate of corporate taxation. If the poor get so desperate and hungry that they DO start eating the rich (and you all had better pray it never comes to that), I hope they start at his house and work their way on down.

14. Shery Fucking Lanford Smith. Ain’t nothin’ funnier than a whitey-white teabagger making jokes about how she could throw Barack Obama out of an airplane window and “make 256 million people very happy”. Oh wait, there is: Remember that this “joke” is in fact a poorly recycled version of a much funnier one about Dubya, Rummy and the Big Dick. The very same whom the teabags would now canonize as some kind of Holy Trinity of racist right-wing stoopid.

15. Ann Fucking Coulter. Realizing that pretending to be a friend of the queers wasn’t going to do it for her, and would only get her in hot water with her (closeted) fellow right-wing nutters, the Coultergeist reverted to a tried-and-true strategy this week: Blaming liberalism (i.e., her usual suspect) for the UK riots. Phew — for a minute there I thought she was actually going to try to be human!

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16. The Fucking SupposiTories. Yes, ALL of them. Their party wrote a letter threatening the widow of a man who died of asbestos-related cancer, allegedly for using their trademarked SupposiTory Logo™ to raise awareness of their support for an industry that’s killing its own workers (not to mention a lot of poor folks in ill-regulated countries whose business Canada is supposed to want). I don’t think it’s the “unauthorized use” that really bothers them so much as the fact that it’s being used to draw attention to their shitty pro-business policies and general heedless psychopathy as a party. And now they defend their threat-letter, too. Real psychopaths are used to getting away with murder, after all! PS: Petition here; sign it and keep it rolling! PPS: Anti-logo above, courtesy Pale Cold.

17. Doug Fucking Lamborn. So racist that he can only talk in dog-whistles, and so cowardly that he can’t bear even a little protest outside his office. Where is said office? In Colorado Springs — one of the most right-wing cities in the US. Chickenshit much?

18. Newt Fucking Gingrich. Same-sex marriage is to blame for the downfall of the “free” (note quotes) enterprise system? No, that would be the system itself. It is inherently corrupt. And it didn’t need any help from the queers to collapse on itself like a house of cards.

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Oh yeah, and there’s always THAT, too.

19. Whoever the fuck thought it was a good idea to shut down cellphone service on the San Francisco BART system. It was to forestall protests. Really fucking boneheaded move, trying to stifle dissent in a city world-famous for its long tradition of good honest people doing just that.

20. Rush Fucking Limbaugh. The Pigman is so fucking racist that he can’t look at an Oreo cookie without seeing Barack Obama’s face all over it, and so fucking sexist that he can’t leave Michelle Obama out of it, either. One shudders to think what he’d do if Hostess put out a new Twinkie.

21. David Fucking Golding. This one’s a dickweed by definition. He gave his ex-girlfriend herpes in the belief that no one else would want her and she would never leave him. Happily for her, he was wrong on both counts. And he just lost a precedent-setting court case over it, too.

22. Donald Fucking Trump. Barack Obama goes on more vacations than Dumb Dubya? Not even hardly. But Dumb Donald is constantly out to lunch, so what the fuck does HE know?

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23. Roger Fucking Noriega. Still flinging random poo at Chavecito, hoping that some will stick. So far, nothing has. But that won’t stop him from trying, bless his fat-clogged, pus-laden heart!

24. and 25. Ashton Fucking Kutcher and Dan Fucking Peres. Somebody please educate these dudebros about the phrases conflict of interest and full disclosure. Those things are kind of important if you’re going to write an article hyping all kinds of companies you have a personal stake in. Kthxbye.

26. Christine O’Fucking Donnell. Being asked relevant questions is NOT “borderline sexual harassment”. If you’re going to make an issue of your (creepy!) ultra-prudish sexual views, on which you campaigned, you have no right to get squeamish when challenged on them in an interview. And if your book doesn’t stand up to questioning either, expect to find it in the remainder bin before long. All the cutesy smiling in the world won’t turn such a turd into gold. PS: Nice prepackaged sound bites about “gut and instincts”, too. So gutty-instincty, all that rehearsed drivel!

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27. Albert Fucking Lovering. How to get a woman to buy you tons of expensive Nazi shit and old military junk? Tell her you’re madly in love with her. Christ, it’s like the fucking Nigerian e-mail scam, but without the Nigerians! And people wonder why I don’t put up any online dating profiles, anywhere, and consider dating services to be a scam? You can stop wondering now. It’s because they totally fucking ARE!

28. James Fucking Mahoney. For being Crotch’s god-bag man. What else? (Awful nice of him to offer Crotch a bribe financed with other people’s money, too.)

29. The Fucking OPP. They screwed up badly in the Russell Williams case, leaving one of his surviving victims (“only” sexually assaulted and terrorized, not killed like Jessica Lloyd and Marie-France Comeau) trussed up naked for five hours while they scrounged for their cameras. They didn’t take DNA samples, though, and they accused her of “copycatting” a case that hadn’t even been made public (that of another Williams victim, as it turns out). They knew a predator was stalking and attacking local women, yet they didn’t warn a soul. Instead, they just dangled her like bait while they went around twiddling their thumbs (and possibly other parts of their anatomy, which I’ll leave to your imagination.) If ever there was a reason to yell “Fuck the Police”, this is IT.

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And finally, to Stephen Fucking Harper. He’s the reason I’ve watched so little TV lately; all I ever end up doing is flipping my set the bird, because he’s on it, blandly bullshitting his ass off. All week long I’ve been hearing him puke pablum about “protectionism”, which is a Tory dog-whistle for sound economic policy. Guess he’s really miffed at Dilma Rousseff for not signing a fucked-trade agreement with us (like either of our countries seriously needed one, much less wanted it). Or maybe he wants us to end up like the “PIGS” of Europe who got slaughtered by the IMF and the banksters. I can’t help contrasting his petulant toilet antics with the bravery of the Venezuelan president, who is steering his country toward prosperity while undergoing chemo, and all without a word of complaint. Don’t tell Harpo what Chavecito’s doing, or he might just blow an artery. There is no tyranny like that of a good example, and Venezuela is one of the few countries NOT to be hit hard by the three-year-old global recession, which shows no signs of letting up. (The other countries not hard hit? All in Venezuela’s Bolivarian orbit. Surely a malign coincidence, ossifer.)

Good night, and get fucked!

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Posted in Wankers of the Week | 6 Comments

Festive Left Friday Blogging: LOLChe

Maradona meets his idol.

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Augusto Pinochet: a bigger bastard than originally thought

I know…how is this even possible? (Well, I have an idea, but we’ll get to that in a moment.) While we’re on the subject of all things Chile and Chile-related today (a sheer, strange coincidence), how about this little item from the Beeb?

A Chilean commission investigating human rights abuses under the former military leader Gen Augusto Pinochet says there are many more victims than previously documented.

Commission director Maria Luisa Sepulveda said they had identified another 9,800 people who had been held as political prisoners and tortured.

The new figures bring the total of recognised victims to 40,018.

The survivors will get lifetime pensions of about $260 (£157) a month.

An earlier report by the commission recognised 27,153 people who suffered human rights violations under military rule.

The official number of those killed or forcibly disappeared now stands at 3,065.

So…9/11/73, a terror attack if ever there was one, resulted in many more deaths than 9/11/01. The horror from that day is still deeper and fresher for more people than that of the other 9-11. And I have a feeling that the new, upward-revised victim count is still on the lowball side. This is only what could be verified. Remember, Pinochet’s modus operandi was to “disappear” those who were inconvenient to his purposes. With time, more verifications might well become possible.

This story isn’t over yet.

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Posted in Chile Sin Queso, Fascism Without Swastikas | Comments Off on Augusto Pinochet: a bigger bastard than originally thought

Economics for Dummies: Another horrible trapped-miner story

Yes, this is satire. But it has a very large, uncracked grain of truth in it. Can you spot it?

PS: On a more serious note, read this. And remember, that original “trapped miners” story did not have a happy ending, because it ain’t over yet.

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Posted in Chile Sin Queso, Economics for Dummies, Environmentally Ill, Filthy Stinking Rich, Free Trade, My Ass!, If You REALLY Care, Isn't It Ironic?, The "Well, DUH!" Files, The United States of Amnesia | Comments Off on Economics for Dummies: Another horrible trapped-miner story

Carmen Quintana: still protesting against neoliberal dictatorship

Chilean high school and university students are currently involved in a mighty struggle against their government’s unfair and inequitable privatized education policies, which date back to the neoliberal “reforms” of the Pinochet era, and their struggle has been going on for a very long time, as this woman’s own struggle makes clear. After all, she is still a student herself. So it makes all the sense in the world that she would join the current fight:

About 200 people joined the protests for a free, good-quality education at the doors of the Chilean consulate in Montréal, Canada. In spite of the cloudy afternoon, the shouts of the Chileans could be heard loud and clear in the heart of the city. Among them was Carmen Gloria Quintana, a student whose history was marked with fire by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

On July 2, 1986, Carmen, 18 years old at the time, was burned during a day of protests against the Pinochet régime, along with photographer Rodrigo Rojas Denegri. He died, but she survived despite having burns over 65% of her body.

“We all have the right to an education of quality, no matter if you are rich or poor,” read the sign she carried in her hands yesterday. She was accompanied by her husband and three daughters, with whom she has been living in the city for a year, studying toward a doctorate in clinical psychology of children and adolescents in the University of Montréal.

“Enough of this shameful apartheid we Chileans are living. Enough of the lucre of the big business class. This struggle aimes at the bases in which the Chilean neoliberal model is sustained. A country which thinks it is developed and in which the business class pays the lowest income taxes in the world, cannot develop itself with equality. I profoundly support the students and I embrace them with great joy. At last we have the hope that things will really change, and not just be glossed over,” she said.

This is one of the many demonstrations which have taken place all over the world in support of student demands.

One of the organizers of the Montréal demonstration, María Poblete, stated that the demonstration was in rejection of the “repression and violence against demonstrators. We want to demonstrate that it is possible to demonstrate peacefully.”

Translation mine.

Since she and I are about the same age, Carmen Quintana’s terrible story resonated strongly with me when I first read it, around the time I was growing up and heading to university. It is also a stark reminder that the battle for a better world is long and hard, and spans generations. And that sometimes, you literally get burned, and literally suffer a trial by fire, to get to where you want your world to go.

It heartens me no end to see that Carmen is still alive and kicking, and that Pinochet, whose men burned her alive, is dead and reviled, as he deserves to be.

La lucha sigue…

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An icky, creepy (yet strangely apt) similarity

Separated at birth?

On the left, “Dr.” Marcus Bachmann, spouse of a certain US Republican presidential aspirant, and professional homophobe who always sets my gaydar bleeping. On the right, John Wayne Gacy, psychopath, serial killer of young men and repressed homosexual.

No respectable, accredited psychologist or psychiatrist would call homosexuality a disease, much less attempt to cure it. But “Dr.” Bachmann is not a respectable, accredited physician or psychotherapist. And he says LGBT people are “barbarians”, and he claims it can all be cured by prayer. Never mind that there has never been even one successful conversion from gay to straight; his racket is to try to pray away the gay. For pay, natch.

John Wayne Gacy was, on the surface of things, a fine, upstanding, conservative citizen who lived in the suburbs of Chicago, in a lovely house, complete with a lovely wife. But this heterosexual existence was one big closet, and in the crawl-space underneath it, the bodies of several young men were rotting and seething with maggots. Turns out that Mr. Gacy also was trying to cure the gay, but by projecting his own tendencies onto various young men he’d lured into his house, sexually assaulted, and then strangled to death with a rope. Since Gacy was a volunteer clown who entertained kids in his “respectable” day life, he gave his murderous modus operandi a cute, clownish name: the “rope trick”. In this way, he kept trying, unsuccessfully, to cure himself of his desire for same-sex love, which he had been taught, in true religious-right fashion, to regard as sinful and worthy of death. Only, since he couldn’t admit it in himself, because that would have meant death for him, he had to project it onto someone else, someone young and trusting and vulnerable (though not necessarily gay). That other someone became his scapegoat. He kept repeating this pattern, over and over and over again. Yet it never cured him of the gay. But he kept on doing it until finally, the FBI caught up to him. The day he was taken into custody was the day it finally stopped. His final victim count: 33 men.

33 young, potentially productive lives, lost to a psychopath who thought he could kill his own homosexuality by doing away with them.

The practical definition of insanity, some say, is to make the same mistake over and over again, expecting to get it right the next time. Both men, you might say, meet that definition. The one keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to cure the gay; the other kept trying, unsuccessfully, to kill it.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Marcus Bachmann is a serial killer (although his brutish remarks lead me to believe that he does, at the very least, have some sociopathic tendencies). But his likeness to John Wayne Gacy, in looks and attitude, is pretty scary, no? And as long as no one stops him, like Gacy, he’s gonna go right on doing it. And messing up lives, much in the same way “Dr.” George Rekers messed up young Kirk Murphy, who later killed himself.

The practical definition of an insane society is one that permits this sort of thing to happen, over and over and over again, and never does anything about it, never learns anything from it, and never tries to stop it.

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Posted in Isn't It Ironic?, Isn't That Illegal?, Not So Compassionate Conservatism, Pissing Jesus Off, She Blinded Me With Science, Sick Frickin' Bastards, Teh Ghey, The United States of Amnesia | 2 Comments