By John Klein (aka Saskboy):

We’ve had a few days of no new news reported in the robocalls criminal investigation. The story yesterday on the CBC website, while factual, does make one claim that is disputable.

With the public paper trail cold for almost two months, there’s still little that’s certain in the Elections Canada investigation[...]

Alison’s preemptive retort says it best:

The trail is not so much ‘cold’ as overwhelming.

No, the main story is :

Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign – who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP- feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

There are the facts CBC presents, and there are the obvious deductions to make from them. Those deductions should have led to charges being laid, and/or a Royal Commission to be called into how Elections Canada could bungle and delay this investigation so badly that a random Canadian in Regina with an IT background could stay ahead of their progress to a certain extent. How well do you think the perpetrators feel knowing they’ve had a year to cover their tracks, and let evidence like the Shoppers Drug Mart tapes be destroyed?

CBC also left off this big fact (as reported in newspapers):

Why is one of the three CIMS reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott – phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters – now missing from CIMS?

That fact points to a cover-up, because the CPC haven’t claimed their system security was violated, and that sort of log doesn’t just go missing. The person at a local campaign who downloaded the phone numbers would not have had the system permissions to remove the log for what they did at CPC HQ’s database. A co-conspirator is at large, (more likely, many of them, in many ridings too) and the media isn’t talking about them because Elections Canada hasn’t revealed any details (or the media hasn’t uncovered them in courts) yet. Since it’s taking EC’s Mathews more than a year to gather evidence for fraud in one riding, if we assume little overlap in the people conducting crimes in 200 ridings, it should only take 100 years to finish investigating so we can get on with trials. (EC added a second investigator, Lamothe, sometime in the last couple months.)

Justice Delayed, is Justice Denied. You’re being denied justice.

For more facts, including recordings and documents revealed so far in the investigation, check out my list. If you know of documents related to this election fraud not yet listed, please leave a comment with a link.

A museum sex exhibit designed to educate teenagers has been proven too racy for some Ottawa parents — and it hasn’t even opened yet.

“Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition” is due to open at The Canada Science and Technology Museum on Friday. In response to over 50 complaints from parents who feel that the exhibit is more smutty than educational, the museum has raised the age of unaccompanied admission from 12 to 16.

Certain aspects of the exhibit, such as the “Erecto-Matic,” which allows observers to watch a cross-section of a flaccid penis become erect with the press of a button, have sparked the parental concern. The museum, however, says they offer precise and accurate information that teens might not get anywhere else. “This exhibition, developed by the Montreal Science Centre, is intended for adolescents 12 years and older, parents seeking a better understanding of the subject in preparation for their children’s questions, teachers of high school and their students, health care professionals, and anyone else who wishes to learn more.”

With teenage STD rates on the rise, they might be on to something. Memo to parents: explaining sex isn’t promoting it. If anything, the “Erecto-Matic” is liable to encourage abstinence for a good few years.

“Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition” runs until January.

- Emily Olesen

OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

Canadian literature and music legend Leonard Cohen, awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in Toronto last night, has chosen to donate the $50,000 that comes with it to the Canada Council for the Arts. The Montreal native is the ninth winner of the honour that has been called “The Nobel Prize of the Arts.”

As a young poet, Cohen received a $25 grant from the Canada Council, in the form of reading fees. At last night’s ceremony, he recalled another “highlight” of his early years: interviewing Gould, the pianist who was Canada’s first musical superstar, for a magazine profile, only to be “so engrossed by what he was saying, I stopped taking notes.” The article was never completed.

Recipients of the award, given every three years, are asked to choose a young artist to receive the $25,000 Glenn Gould Protegé Prize. Cohen chose a collective giftee: the students of Sistema-Toronto, a school using music education to teach cooperation and social responsibility.

Previous laureates have included Dr. José Antonio of Abreu, Venezuela, who founded a national system of young peoples’ orchestras in Venezuela, and Sir André Previn, the German-born composer and conductor.

But Leonard Cohen: He’s our man.

- Emily Olesen

Well I suppose it was inevitable eh? Ever since the Quebec students began marching, the Con media has been attacking them like a pack of rabid hyenas.

The Con liberal Andrew Coyne called them a violent mob. The windy little teabagger Rex Murphy called their protest a self-indulgent parody.

The petty-bourgeois hack Margaret Wente did her ghastly Marie Antoinette impression.

But now Michael Den Tandt has gone one deranged step further, and called for the Quebec students to be caned.

There’s a better way: Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain. In 1994, an 18-year-old American named Michael Fay, living in Singapore, was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of vandalism and mischief, after he keyed several expensive cars. He was sentenced to four months in jail, a $3,500 (Singaporean dollars) fine and six strokes of the cane, applied to his bare buttocks.

Barbaric? Not really. Arguably, caning is more merciful than incarceration for an energetic young vandal on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged career criminal. Many would probably rather be caned than locked up, given their druthers.

Caned like they are Singapore . . .

And I really don’t know what to say? Except is he serious?  Is it booze? Is it dementia? What kind of kinky stuff is this?

And of course what kind of savage country are we becoming?

You know the other day a friend of mine said the problem is the boomers invented the youth culture. But now they are old, so they hate the young with a passion. And  this is the beginning of a brutal generational war.

But I prefer to think it’s just another sign that Canada, corrupted by the filth of Stephen Harper and his Con thugs, has lost its way.  And doesn’t even recognize that the young are its future. And that they are fighting for a better world.

“When we defend the right to free public education to serve the people and their needs, we confront the bigger fishes that are obstacles along our path. And it is at this point that we must be more ingenious, more intelligent, more committed, more relevant, to avoid falling into the game and strategy of those who wish to divide us, frighten us, those who see us as hardliners, as delinquents.

A better world for ALL of us here now, and all future generations.

And I did point out to my friend that not all older Canadians are on the wrong side of history . . .

Didn’t you just love that fighting senior telling the cops what he thought of them?

Yup. Michael Den Tandt should shove that cane where the sun don’t shine.

The Con media should restrain themselves.

And the Quebec students should keep on marching . . .

London, Ontario’s Bethesda Centre announced on Saturday that Canadian-born pop star Justin Bieber will donate a portion of the sales of his new single to its Save the Bethesda campaign. The Centre is a Salvation Army-run centre for teenage mothers that provides prenatal care and daycare services. Bieber’s mother, Pattie Mallette, lived there when she was pregnant with him. The new song, “Turn to You,” was written for Mallette as a Mother’s day tribute.

The Bethesda Centre requires $1.5 million by May 31st to keep the doors open. So far it has raised a mere $108,656 from 341 donors, just 7% of the goal. The good news is that Bieber has 21,679,314 twitter followers, many of whom spread the news of his gift, and Bethesda’s campaign, over the weekend. They included Mallette herself, who tweeted, “@justinbieber wrote me a song for Mother’s day! So excited 4 #TurnToYou out 2morrow, it made me cry… Proceeds going 2 help single moms!”

Bieber may have been thinking about himself and his mother when he famously told Rolling Stone last year, “I really don’t believe in abortion, it’s like killing a baby.” Naturally, that created a ruckus. However, you don’t have to like his views on the subject — or his music — in order to think that donating to the Bethesda Centre is a good idea. To do so, click here. Or, to read more about the Centre and what it does, here.

Meantime, the new song is on youtube:

Though if you really don’t like Bieber’s music, maybe you should donate before you listen.

- Emily Olesen

A few days before The Avengers debuted I was asked why I was so excited about seeing what’s looking like the most successful comic book movie of all time. This was my answer.

I’m a lifelong comic book fan and the idea that it’s even possible to make The Avengers has my inner 16-year old doing cartwheels — which is seriously impressive because my outer 16-year old sure as hell couldn’t do cartwheels. The idea that The Avengers is doable is mind-boggling; the fact that they hired a lifelong comic book fan to bring the series to life . . . and that they handed the project to the guy who should have been doing The X-Men all along, is beyond cool.

Joss Whedon doesn’t just freely admit his comic book influences — he has actually written comics. He did a run of The X-Men that lived up to the title billing as “amazing.” What I love about the Marvel movies is that, whether they work or not — and even when they have inexplicably awful sequences like the Spider-dance — they all seem to have been written by someone who has actually read the comic books.

The Marvel movies also treat the inside nods to fans like Easter eggs in a DVD or video game, instead of slowing the plot with them and trying to hit various iconic moments as if they were compulsory figures in skating. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Mans featured several sequences that were literally lifted from famous Spider-Man covers.

But fan boy bliss aside . . two words: Joss Whedon. And again . . . not just ’cause he did Buffy, but because Buffy was so clearly inspired by the Marvel universe (especially The X-Men).

Personally, I’d love to see Marvel hand Whedon the keys to their universe, but until that happens here’s why I’m hoping Joss Whedon’s first sequel isn’t a new Avenger’s movie, but a solo story featuring the Black Widow.

1. Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.
2. Scarlett Johansson in the Black Widow costume.
3. Did you see Buffy? Did you see Dollhouse? Did you see how Whedon turned a tiny dancer into a lethal killing machine in Firefly and how he transformed the nerdly Fred into a lethal goddess on Angel? Did you see what he did with Black Widow in The Avengers?
4. Because Joss Whedon doesn’t just talk Fanboy, he’s the real deal. Kitty Pryde was his inspiration — and if you don’t know who Kitty Pryde is, you may have written or directed one of the earlier Marvel movies. The whole epic Dark Willow storyline on Buffy was dark Phoenix from The X-Men. Angel borrowed heavily from the Bat-world. Whedon even handicapped a fight between the Black Widow and Buffy.
5. Because somewhere the Mensa reject who pulled the plug on Whedon’s Wonder Woman movie is feeling like he’s just gone 15 rounds with the Hulk, so why not finish him off.
6. ‘Cause I can see it now . . . Black Widow returns to Russia to fight mob corruption. There’s probably a suitcase nuke, a dirty bomb and a love interest, maybe Hawkeye, who will die and need Avenging. (Hawkeye has a tendency to die in Marvel comics.) She’ll go rogue. It’ll be like the ultimate episode of Dollhouse. And, just maybe, the Widow’s sometime beau Daredevil will guest star and Whedon will be able to undue some of the damage done in one of the worst Marvel movies ever made.
7. If it fails, Scarlett Johansson can always come back for the next Avengers movie as the Scarlet Witch. Nuff said.

Mark Leiren-Young won the Leacock Medal for Humour for his memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen and was part of the team that adapted the Marvel hero Moon Knight — one of his all-time favourite members of the Marvel Universe — as a live action TV series.

Published by kind permission of Ronsdale Press.

“The police sent people on the vice squad to look at the show,” [director] Dorothy Davies said, “and they decided that Jeeter was urinating on the stage and that sexual intercourse took place on the stage.” While the script does not call for intercourse to take place on stage, it does call for two scenes which involve sexual teasing or, at the most, a crude form of foreplay. One involved Ellie May and Lov, the sex-starved husband of Pearl. In another incident, Bessie gets Dude sexually aroused during a scene before their marriage. Both of them call for a great deal of rubbing and petting but nothing beyond that. Nevertheless, the detective and the policewoman who viewed the show on behalf of the police department described the show as “lewd and filthy.”

Everyman producer Sydney Risk appeared with a delegation before Vancouver’s mayor Fred Hume to protest the police order of “clean up or close down.” He also met with City Prosecutor Gordon Scott. Risk declared that the theatre would continue to run Tobacco Road, even if it was ordered to close or was faced with prosecution under the Criminal Code of Canada. The night following the visit by the vice squad, Risk spoke to the audience to tell them he thought people should be allowed to decide for themselves what they wanted to see in the theatre. He received thunderous applause. Newspapers, magazine editorials and letters of the day supported Risk’s view.

After his speech, it became clear to authorities that Everyman was not going to pay any attention to the police edict and would continue to stage the drama without changing anything. At the time, Risk said, he had been told it didn’t matter if they cleaned up the play; they would be charged anyway. The morning of January 17, Gordon Scott confirmed charges would be laid. The only questions left were who would be charged and when.

The answers were not long in coming. That night police were standing by, waiting to arrest five of the cast members when the first act was over and the curtain came down, but the curtain never came down that night. The actors stalled the action of arrest by merely dimming the lights. Faced with having to make the arrests on stage in front of some one thousand patrons, the police waited. During the second act the cast made entrances and exits through carefully calculated routes, thwarting the police in their efforts. The management asked technicians, stagehands and even reporters to jam the wings, making it even more difficult for the officers to reach the actors they wanted to arrest. Police called for reinforcements, and at the opening of the third act they marched out on to the stage and made the arrests. The audience screamed and jeered, some shouting “Gestapo,” even as Sydney Risk tried to keep them calm.

Taken into custody at that time were Douglas Haskins (Jeeter), Douglas Hellier (Lov), Ted Babcock (Dude), Tamara Dlugo (Ellie May) and Louise DeVick (Sister Bessie). They were taken to the police station at ten in the evening and were finally released two hours later on $100 bail each, paid by theatre operator Charles Nelson. In the meantime, patrons at the theatre were given free coffee and impromptu entertainment by the remainder of the cast with the help of two fellow actors in the audience — John Emerson and Bruno Gerussi. Those arrested arrived back at the theatre close to midnight to finish the third act, and were greeted with a screaming ovation from the audience, only a few of whom had left.

The trial for the first of the defendants, Douglas Hellier, began in Police Court on January 28, 1953. The author of the novel on which the play was based, Erskine Caldwell, flew in to be of any assistance he could to the defence.

Most of the legal proceedings consisted of the prosecution bringing in witnesses to call the play “filth” and the defence countering with people stating that they were not corrupted by the performance. Crowds at the trial were large, and it was front page news in all the papers. Letters to the editor, which came in great numbers, were greatly in favour of Tobacco Road. Six witnesses were called at the trial for the Crown to say the play was obscene but defence responded with twenty-one witnesses, including clergymen and university professors. Both Sydney Risk and Dorothy Davies were called as defence witnesses for Hellier’s trial. Davies, who actually received some phone threats throughout the trial, was on the stand for almost two hours and took complete responsibility for anything her actors did on stage.

Douglas Hellier was found guilty of participating in an “indecent, obscene and immoral” performance, as were almost all the others in the final judgement brought down by Magistrate W.B. McInnes, who said the play catered “to the lower instincts” of the audience. The only one to escape the guilty rap was producer Sydney Risk.

Naturally, an appeal was launched immediately. A committee was formed by prominent Vancouver citizens to raise money for the appeal. All the profits Everyman had made with Tobacco Road had been eaten up by the trial. The actors convicted did not even have enough money to pay the fines, let alone to cover an appeal. Charles Nelson paid the total of $170 for the entire group.

The appeal lasted for only slightly more than three hours in County Court on March 17, 1953. The hearing was the first time during the case that the real issue of what was at stake was named. The prosecution chanced to use the word “censorship” and Judge J.A. McGeer, who presided over the proceedings, immediately said, “Ah, the ugly head of censorship.” The judge threw out the convictions on the basis that the defence witnesses who had seen the play were a good cross-section of society and had not found the production obscene.

Everyman continued its Vancouver season with Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky. “That was a production we did with very much the same people and much the same problems in the play that are in Tobacco Road actually,” Dorothy Davies said. “But nobody notices it when you dress beautifully and you’re drinking champagne. It is only when you look wretched and poor it causes great offence.”

A Crown appeal was made a month later to the British Columbia Court of Appeal to reverse the decision which had thrown out the convictions. This appeal, a test case against only one of the seven, Douglas Hellier, was successful and the conviction stood. The issue had finally reached its conclusion. An appendix to the story, however, reveals “how quickly they forget.” A year and a half after the Tobacco Road debacle, Dorothy Davies directed a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which represented British Columbia at the Dominion Drama Festival. Davies won the Louis Jouvet Award as best director. In recognition, the Vancouver City Council awarded her a civic medal, the first one to be given to an artist. “One year I’m having all this [the obscenity charges] done to me,” Davies said, not missing the irony, “and then all of a sudden I become a hero.”

Excerpted from The Opening Act by Susan McNicoll. Published by Ronsdale Press, 335 pages, $24.95.

Despite Wednesday’s somewhat dampening headline, Pierre Poutine robocalls trail goes cold in Saskatchewan, the main story here is not that Elections Canada’s Al Mathews was unable to secure phone records from a proxy server company in Saskatchewan a whole freakin year after the fraudulent election calls were made.

No, the main story is:

Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign — who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP — feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both use the proxy server IP and the Rogers IP from the same computer to call RackNine for two days prior to the election?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both call RackNine from the same IP address via that proxy server exactly four minutes apart at four a.m. in the morning on election day? First Poutine, then Guelph deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott.

Why is one of the three Constituency Information Management System reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott — phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters — now missing from the CIMS?

How did Poutine manage to crack the Guelph CIMS database in order to upload a list of 6,738 phone numbers to RackNine to send voters to the wrong polling stations?

And the biggie: Is Prescott, who has cancelled further interviews with Elections Canada, “Poutine” or is he being framed or is he merely the tip of a previously unsuspected and ongoing elections fraud iceberg in 200 ridings across Canada?

And so on and so on. The trail is not so much “cold” as overwhelming.

A Tale of a Boy and his TV Show is doing a breakdown of the RoboCon stories one by one. Good resource.

A BoB short:

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has announced that all broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, and video-on-demand services must silence erratically loud ads by Sept. 1, 2012. The federal regulator had previously told the TV industry that it had one year to turn down the volume. Rogers Communication, Quebecor, and Shaw Communications have all started to install in-house equipment to deal with the problem.

The initiative stems from 304 complaints in 2011 about unnecessarily loud advertisements. Last year the CRTC invited the public to comment and received over 7000 submissions. “Please make sure the noise level of commercials is the same or less than that of the regular programming to preserve our hearing and that of our children,” wrote one respondent.

“This has been a perennial issue,” CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told The Globe and Mail. “People have been complaining to us . . . we said, it’s time to do something.”

Our American cousins have already passed laws to control loudness on TV. The CALM Act, or Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, was passed in December 2010. The act requires the Federal Communications Commission to monitor TV networks standards and make sure that commercials don’t spike in volume.

Our bleeding ears thank you all.

- Emily Olesen