Peace, order and good government, eh?

Blame Twitter. Someone was tweeting about a musician named Lincoln Durham the other day and when he included the magic words — slide guitar — I went off to see what I could find. The result is the set you see before you beginning with Living This Hard.

While the National Post does its best to hype the threat posed by Iran, here's the news I can't seem to find from a Canadian source:

WASHINGTON, Feb 1, 2012 (IPS) - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told Israeli leaders Jan. 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.

Dempsey's warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall.

My emphasis. Recent comments from both our prime minister and our foreign affairs minister suggest they're content to play along. Apparently being a friend to Israel means helping to lay the foundation for yet another war of aggression in the Middle East.

Update:

Here's an interview with Minister Baird I hadn't seen when I first posted this:

...Canada's Foreign Minister John Baird says Iran's position on Israel is clear, and Tehran wants to build nuclear weapons • "It's very easy to put one and one together. I believe Iran will use these weapons."

Israel alone has enough of a nuclear arsenal to wipe Iran off the map — the choice of language is deliberate — many times over at the first whiff of an aggressive move by Iran and the Iranians know it. And so does John Baird.

I'm sure a lot of my fellow bloggers will be all over this story but I wanted my own copy to refer back to. I expect to get a lot of mileage out of this one.

Federal bureaucrats pose as 'new Canadians' on Sun News

Six federal bureaucrats were drafted to pose as new Canadians for a citizenship reaffirmation ceremony broadcast on the Sun News network, an event requested by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's office.

Kenney's staff wanted to do something splashy for citizenship week. But Sun TV resisted pressure to attend and broadcast an actual citizenship ceremony and instead suggested that something be done in their studio. After all, it's not like they do real broadcast journalism.

"Let's do it. We can fake the Oath," reads an email from a @sunmedia.ca email address, the name blacked out of the document.

That's the spirit. Don't let a little thing like authenticity slow you down.

Federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver

But it's easy to see why Oliver is in cabinet. With John Baird's new position keeping him on the road so much, the Commons needed a new Angry McPointy. Now stay the hell off Joe's lawn.

One of the hot topics of discussion right now involves the speculation that the Harper Government™ intends to raise the eligibility age for Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) from 65 to 67. And here's Brian Lee Crowley to argue that the real reason for doing so is that so many of us have secretly been hoping for just the kind of change that would force us to work even longer. We know we want to; we just need a little extra motivation and nothing motivates like the prospect of having to survive on cat food. What about that Harper Government™ eh? Always looking out for us.

Much of the argument in that column is based on this:

There was a time when 65 and retirement were closely linked for a compelling reason. A life of labour had left the average worker depleted. A few short years of decline was all they could expect before death. A Canadian male born in 1966, when the Canada Pension Plan was introduced, would only expect to live to age 68 or so. Today, it's 79.

And in the context of this discussion, that's just wrong.

What would make Stephen Harper think it's a good idea to go to Davos and tell other countries what he intends to do to us before he told us?

It's a low key, acoustic set this evening. The opening clip is from Peter Seeger's Rainbow Quest — Brownie McGhee performing solo on Don't Pity Me.

Last March the Harper government characterized Canada's participation in hostilities in Libya as a moral imperative. Hopefully they'll look upon today's request by Amnesty International in the same way.

The Canadian leader of Amnesty International is calling on the Harper government to use its influence with Libya's new leadership to put an end to the torture of prisoners that the organization says has been taking place.

That article doesn't give us much in the way of detail about it but it seems the people we helped to put in charge in Libya have been behaving badly. This BBC article reports that over 8,000 people are being held in secret detention centres "amid reports of torture" and includes this:

The humanitarian medical organisation [Medecins Sans Frontieres] said it had stopped work in detention centres in the north-western city of Misrata because some patients were being brought in for care between interrogation sessions.

That story's descriptions of abuse mainly involve the independent militias but there are other reports that implicate Libya's regular army as well as the new government's security agency in the torture of detainees.

If Canadian involvement in Libya was all about protecting civilians then perhaps John Baird could drop by there again and apply some pressure to curb these abuses. It seems like the least we could do since we share responsibility for them.

The House of Commons gets back to work next week and that means that parliamentary committees resume as well. In fact the Standing Committee on Health will meet tomorrow afternoon.

Kady O'Malley, as @kady on Twitter, was kind enough to link to this page which provides the schedule of upcoming meetings. O'Malley also took note of the number of padlocks associated with the entries which indicate when meetings will be held in camera — closed to the public.

Of the ten meetings currently listed, eight of them will be held in camera. Admittedly this isn't something I've kept track of but that seems high. It's worth noting that aside from preventing the press and public from viewing the proceedings, taking the meeting behind closed doors automatically binds the participants — including opposition MPs — to secrecy.

Eight out of ten would certainly suggest one of two things: either something is in the works that a lot of us won't like or keeping the public in the dark about what goes on in committees has become the default position of this government. Either way, democracy loses.

O'Malley has now posted on this herself. The relevant bit:

...this isn't an entirely unusual occurrence during the first few days of a new sitting -- there are, after all, various bits housekeeping business to which to attend, much of which is, in fact, traditionally done in private.

At the same time, given the frequency with which Conservative MPs were ejecting the public from previously open sessions before the House rose for the holidays, it may not be the most auspicious omen with which to start the New Year.

This isn't a new parliament. They're just getting back to work after the Christmas recess. So I'm not sure how much housekeeping they'd have to do before settling in to their normal duties. I think this bears watching.

Today's Crown First Nations Gathering was supposed to be historic. It would mark the first occasion since he became prime minister in 2006 that Stephen Harper would meet with First Nations leaders. So there was quite a bit of negative publicity when it was learned that Harper intended to leave the summit early. In order to counter that, an extra meeting was hastily convened yesterday evening between Harper and his minister of aboriginal affairs and the most senior of First Nations leaders.

I don't think it accomplished what the government was hoping for. Here's the headline on the APTN story reporting on the meeting: Harper tells chiefs they should contact their MPs.

So a prime minister who has been happy to continue with the trend of recent decades — to concentrate power in the PMO and turn MPs into bit players who stand up on cue and vote the way they're told — has just told First Nations leaders to talk to the hand the bit players.

Here's how the meeting was reported by someone who attended.