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.

Baird says Iran could build nuclear bomb within months screams the CBC headline over Evan Solomon interviewing John Baird under a giant picture of visiting Israel PM Shimon Peres.

Fans of the Iran got nukes! cry-wolf sweepstakes will recall both Peres and Netanyahu predicted in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999, 1992 also being the year a former Mossad official advised “Iran has to be identified as Enemy No.1.”

“Remember,” said former IDF Chief of Strategic Planning Shlomo Brom in 2004 (page 167):

“the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes but they’re always five to seven years from the bomb.”

Juan Cole lists his top four Iran got nukes! predictions in the 90′s from a longer list at Christian Science Monitor, which notes that the alarums predate the 1979 Islamic revolution to a time when the US, Germany, and France were selling 20 nuclear reactors to Iran.

Wide Asleep in America has a more extensive list beginning in 1984.

Boris : “Baird also won’t talk about why Iran might want to develop a threshold capacity for nuclear weapons for regional strategic reasons.”

Let’s go to the map, shall we?

Gawd. What a horrible way to begin my day.

All I could think of was Stephen “Woody” Woodworth polishing his big teeth, and preparing for his big day.

Even my egg started to look like him, and I hardly dared boil it, in case it should hatch. For who knows when life begins eh?

But that’s OK. Because when I checked on Woody this evening, he had egg all over his face.

Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth’s motion proposing that a parliamentary committee study the legal definition of when life begins got zero support from MPs who debated it Thursday.

And to make matters even worse better, he was being whipped with a wet egg noodle by the gorilla from the military industrial complex Gordon O’Connor!!!!!

O’Connor said abortion is a serious decision for women to make and he wants all women to continue to live in a society where they can make that decision “without the threat of legal consequences.”

Although it must be said that old Gordo was clearly reading a speech written for him by the sinister thugs in the PMO. Because in all my years of watching Stephen Harper I’ve never seen him look so pale. Or sound so ridiculous.

The prime minister said party leaders do not have control over the motions introduced by MPs and that it’s “unfortunate” an all-party committee decided the motion is eligible for a vote.

He’s obviously still devastated by what happened to his beloved Wild Hog Party in Alberta. He offered his rabid base a bone, Woody bit him with his big teeth. So now he running scared, and wants to be known as a woman’s best friend.

Right.

Oh well. The struggle continues.

But the important thing is that today we WON. A lot of angry women, and their male allies, made sure the politicians heard their message. Women’s bodies are women’s bodies. And the days of shame and coat hangers are OVER.

So hooray for US!!!!!!!

As for old Woody, I can only imagine how he is feeling eh? Gordon, Gordon, et tu Brutus? Vic, Jason, hug me. WAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Lordy. I’d play “I am the Egg Man” if I thought it would cheer the old geezer up.

But since he believes that life begins at conception. Or somewhere between the cock-a-doodle doo and the egg.

I’m sure he’d prefer this one . . .

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

By Frank Moher

I’ll leave it to others to dissect why the PC’s ended up trouncing Wildrose in Alberta, despite all the polls and predictions. What interests me is what this portends for Stephen Harper and company.

Whether by happenstance or design, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is a near-clone of Harper (except for her much-remarked upon charisma, which the Prime Minister is in no danger of catching). She is a field-operative for big-business, especially the oil companies, and for the Calgary School of economics, and its crash-diet approach to government. And she is a pragmatist who has separated out her party’s fiscal and social conservatism and placed the latter off to the side, where she hopes, bozo eruptions notwithstanding, it will be forgotten. It’s the latter which is a relatively new phenomenon in Canadian conservatism — this newfound recognition that separation of state and church might be a good idea after all, albeit it for strategic, not principled, reasons — and which makes her resemblance to her older sibling in Ottawa all the more striking.

And Albertans, of all people, have rejected her. Yes, I know she won her riding and led Wildrose to a total of 17 seats, up 13 from what they had before. But when an electorate turns on a party the way this one did in the last week of the campaign (and perhaps even in the last hours — it wasn’t until a Forum poll emerged on Sunday night, showing Wildrose down four points and the PCs up three, that we began to get an inkling of what might happen), then that electorate is sending a clear message: we have given you sober second consideration, and found you wanting. Sorry.

The big question is, of course, why they did so. Much emphasis will be placed on the bozo eruptions (which we chronicled here and here, while drawing attention to a longstanding one here), and on strategic voting (otherwise know as “anyone but the Wildrose Party.”) But if the results indicate, withal, a general exhaustion with Canada’s far right, it could spell a wider problem for non-progressive conservatives right across the country. Canadians have had a chance to take their measure, and increasingly, we don’t like what we see. Certainly where I live, in British Columbia, the Harper government grows more unpopular by the day, both for its aggressive pursuit of the Enbridge Pipeline and its ties to the even more unpopular provincial Liberal party. Torontonians look shamefacedly away from the ongoing bozo eruption in their Mayor’s office (and longingly towards, yes, Calgary, with its shiny, cosmopolitan Mayor). Quebeckers, of course, took Mr. Harper’s measure long ago. That’s what makes him so vulnerable to disaffection elsewhere — unlike most previous Prime Ministers, he doesn’t have Quebec to fall back on.

And so, as Warren Kinsella put it last night, “A hole has been kicked in a wall at 24 Sussex.” Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. The NDP are tied with the Conservatives in national support, even without Jack; indeed, much of their strength has to do with Thomas Mulcair’s strong showing out of the gate. Of course, all honeymoons eventually end. But as Stephen Harper looks to Alberta today and wonders, along with his fellow travellers, just what went wrong, he might also wonder how best to reconstruct his party to look quite a bit less like Wildrose than it does now. Because if Albertans are no longer buying what the far right is selling, what are the chances anyone else will?

Our top Ministers of our Canadian Government are so very disgraceful. They continue to lie to us, after being caught by multiple non-partisan authorities. It’s often claimed that people expect politicians to lie, but there’s been an understanding in Ottawa that it was taboo for Ministers to lie to Parliament rather than simply dodge uncomfortable questions. That’s why Harper’s government fell last year on Contempt, and should again if there were enough Honourable members from the Conservative Party.

MacKay isn’t “muddled,” he’s lying. There are twerps eating up the lie, and defending the indefensible because they’ve invested in the Conservatives and are willing to go down with the ship (to a certain point), rather than stand up for Canadian values of honesty and integrity.

A more accurate accounting can be found publicly, than from our Prime Minister. That’s a disgrace, especially around a critical national issue like defence.

Double-tap that lie.

Since Harper, MacKay, Ambrose, and a few other less significant, lying, Dishonourable Members of Parliament won’t resign given their disgraceful track record of hiding plans to spend at least $10,000,000,000 more than they promised two years ago, Canadians will have to punish the entire Conservative Party instead. Blockheads don’t roll, but if they did, it might save the Harper government for another Conservative to lead it.

Hat tip to Dave

Newcomers to Canadian political watching should note that it’s considered a violation of the rules of Parliament not only to lie, but to claim that another member is a “liar.” The proper channel for such a claim is to raise the issue with the Speaker who chairs Parliament and can decide if there’s a situation where a member has lied to the House of Commons while working. It’s been expected for more than a century that the chances of an MP lying are so remote, that there’s no need to permit other members to rebuke a liar directly. That assumption is being rewritten thanks to Stephen Harper.

It’s not so unusual that a professional can face discipline for telling a lie to their coworkers, even their adversarial coworkers in competition with them for the better jobs at the workplace. Telling lies to keep your co-working competition from legitimately obtaining superior work roles is unethical, and against the rules in our democracy. If there is no punishment levied against liars for breaking this rule, what will keep Canada a free country with the best MPs in Cabinet? Show me a country that gives power to its best open liars, its military everything it desires, and I’ll show you a country that faces the threat of a military coup, or even totalitarianism.

An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

In our Politics section right now you’ll find Alison@Creekside‘s response to MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 132, which asks Parliament to examine the definition of a human being under Canadian law. Alison doesn’t like his initiative, to say the least. I don’t think I like it either — it seems like a weaselly way to get at what Woodworth really wants to do, which is to re-introduce an abortion law in Canada. But I don’t agree with Alison either. I think we should have an abortion law in Canada. Something like the laws that resulted from Roe v. Wade in the States would do. And no, I don’t think the fact that I’m male renders my opinion meaningless.

We pick up a lot of Alison’s posts from her Creekside blog, because she lets us and she’s a superb writer. Most of the time I read her to find out what I’m thinking. I wasn’t going to publish her post on Woodworth, though — not because I disagree with it, but because I didn’t read it until a few days after the event that precipitated it, and we try to keep things timely around here. However, then a scrap broke out on a site called Progressive Bloggers, which aggregates the feeds of various writers who think they fit that description.

Among these are Canadian Soapbox, The Scott Ross, Fern Hill at Dammit Janet! and Dave at The Galloping Beaver. When the former two published posts sympathetic to Woodworth and his motion (here and here), Fern Hill threatened, via twitter, to “organize a strike by actual progressive bloggers until mysogynists are booted,” and Dave delivered an ultimatum: “The moderators of Progressive Bloggers have 48 hours to respond . . . . They will censure those who believe a ‘debate’ on the rights of women is acceptable and they will do it on the front page of Progressive Bloggers.”

Well, that’s a bit too Maoist for my tastes. Just as Fern Hill and Dave believe absolutely in a woman’s right to control her body, I believe absolutely (or next-to) in the right to free speech, and that’s “free” as in “not subject to re-education or pillorying in the town square.” But to even have to say so, much less make the argument, seems to me so banal, so “Seriously? We’re even talking about this?” (which, again, I understand is exactly how Fern and Dave feel about the matter of choice), that I find it less irksome to simply publish Alison’s piece, even if I am late in doing so, and say, See? That’s how it’s done.

Of course, we aren’t a site calling ourselves “Progressive Blogger,” so I understand the semantic argument, which is what much of the furor seems to boil down to: who does and doesn’t get to wear the appellation. Backofthebook.ca tends to lean left, despite the fact that its editor/publisher is a mysogynistic theocrat-in-disguise (or so I expect I’ll be told), and we are certainly currently dedicated to afflicting the Harper government (including Mr. Woodworth, whenever one of our writers, or you, wish to do so — that’s the comments section down below). But what we really are is a magazine that values good writing, and argument. I have asked various right-wing types to write for us, and the only reason they don’t appear here is that, so far, they haven’t taken me up on the offer. If they did, I wouldn’t anticipate our left-wing types fleeing for the hills. If they did, it would be just as well.

Which is to say we are a magazine, not a silo. The Progressive Blogger affair demonstrates the disadvantage of the latter, whether they aggregate opinion from the left or, as in the case of Blogging Tories, the right. Eventually, the echo chamber becomes deafening.

By Alison@Creekside

Steve, one year ago: “I’m not opening this debate (on abortion). I don’t want it opened. I have not wanted it opened. I haven’t opened it as Prime Minister. I’m not going to open it. The public doesn’t want to open it. This is not the priority of the Canadian public or this government and it will not be.”

Yet here’s Con MP Stephen Woodworth, happily debating abortion with Choice Joyce at HuffPo.

Why?

Because the House Procedures committee, which coincidentally boasts four openly anti-choice MP guys — Scott Reid, Harold Albrecht, Laurie Hawn, and Tom Lukiwski (and do see yesterday’s  post for their particular shenanigans over robocon) — the PROC Committee has granted Woodie the right to debate his don’t-mention-abortion-I-did-once-but-I-think-I-got-away-with-it abortion Motion 312 in the House on April 26.

Woodie believes a human life begins at conception and he’s not about to allow us sluts to fuck that up for the state any longer. All he asks is for a committee of 12 MPs – 7 Cons, 4 Dippers, and 1 Lib with a Con chair all appointed by that selfsame PROC committee — to figure it out for us and let us know the answer to the question: Why doesn’t the state have legal custody over the breeding vessels any more? AKA Whatever happened to a trip to England for the rich; coathangers for the poor?

Woodie wants it all done “scientifically”: “If we accept one law that says some human beings are not human, who’s next?”

From there he makes the jump from what is human — which is not in dispute as fetuses are obviously human tissue — to what is a person, which is a legal argument. He’s pretty sure some kind of equitable agreement can be worked out that will allow two or more legal persons to inhabit one body which will be fair to both and so help me he likens it to freeing the slaves: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1859 that blacks were not persons under U.S. law. Wouldn’t you and I have objected if we had been there?

The Cons’ somewhat belated talking points about their use of the US voter contact firm Front Porch Strategies in the last election have been all about only using them for townhalls :

U.S. phone firm was just for town halls, say MPs 

“Jim Ross [Front Porch's Canadian liaison and Con MP Rick Dykstra's former campaign manager] said telephone town halls were about the only service the company provided in Canada. As for other calls, “Rick got all his live calling from Canada just like all the other (Tory) candidates.”  

and  “Del Mastro stressed that the U.S. company wasn’t hired to do any telemarketing or solicit votes. Front Porch Strategies was hired to host an April 7 telephone town hall on its server, he said, and was booked through its Canadian affiliate and paid in Canadian dollars.” 

Yet here is Front Porch Strategies President Matthew Parker sitting in the campaign offices of Con MP Julian Fantino with a phone to his ear, a pencil in his hand, and a paper with the header “Election Day is Monday May 2nd – You Can Vote Now” in front of him.

 

Photo caption from FPS: “Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA)”

What?

Okay, maybe Matt Parker and his business partner PJ Wenzel flew up from Ohio just that one time to do a little campaigning for Fantino, now the Assistant Minister of Defence, on their day off. Let’s go to twitter:

So how did all this front lines taking over business get started?

Sorry – wrong one. That’s one of their other causes – overturning Roe vs Wade in the US for the fetus fetishi.

Is this it?

Nope, not that one either.

Okay, here we go :

You mean effective communications like this?

Perhaps the Cons require another presentation from their Republican friends because their current credibility on RoboCon communications is in the fucking toilet.

Why Nobody Believes the Conservative Talking Points on the RoboCon Scandal.

Meanwhile in other RoboCon news:

Dawg : “The Speaker of the House of Commons is now ruling opposition questions about Roboscam out of order. … And what should be front-page news barely gets a mention in the corporate media — it’s as though the Parliamentary Press Gallery is on an extended sleepover with Rob Anders.”

Pogge does a round-up including a link to a great editorial on the above CBC story, and also notes that although the Elections Canada investigation into harassment phone calls in Eglinton (Volpe’s riding) was closed last May, now that over 2700 ballots of last minute unregistered voters with no or bogus addresses have turned up in the same riding, perhaps someone could take a mo to look into that please.

Dave unravels the stuffing of ballot boxes, plus the strategic targeting of voters over 60 for phone calls telling them to go the wrong or non-existent polling station: “Every single person I’ve contacted has been (born) between 1947 and 1949,” said one unidentified Elections Canada employee.”

Just one day in the media half-life of RoboCon.

…

Arghhh Update: Or, had I known, I could have skipped doing the first part of this post and just linked to this more complete version: The View From the Front Porch Looking North