Peace, order and good government, eh?

For decades now the right wing in Alberta, which has been in control of the province for that whole time, has made no bones about not giving a damn about the rest of the country. They've been very forthright about it--firewalls, letting the Eastern bastards (and incidentally any stray non-Albertan Western bastards) freeze in the dark, all that.

So now we have Mulcair talking about Albertan oil causing Dutch disease for the rest of Canada, which it clearly does, and suggesting that we need to take measures to defend the country and its non-oil industries from this. And we have British Columbians not wild about a pipeline which will benefit Albertans but impose mainly costs on BC, costs the Albertans won't have to bear or, most likely, even help with in the event of a major spill.

What strikes me as bizarre is the Albertan right's response: Utter shock that other parts of the country would fail to prioritize Albertan interests. They seem amazed at the mean-spiritedness of other parts of the country in failing to cheerfully support Albertan money-making at their expense. Suddenly now because it's for them, the country must pull together; a benefit to Alberta must be seen as a benefit to all. Uh, guys, if you wanted anyone to give a shit about your welfare you might have thought about giving a shit about anyone else's welfare any time in the last thirty years. Really, why should I give a flying fuck whether their oil makes it to market?

Are you ready to party on a Friday night? 'Cos I'm going to begin the set with a song about dying. That said, it's a rather more upbeat version than most — this is Goin' Down Slow by Kenny Neal and Billy Branch (with a tip of the hat to Moose).

This post will be a little short on details but it will provide the links so you can follow them and fill in the blanks if you don't get the references. The main point is that I'm joining with bloggers at The Sixth Estate, Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff (any number of posts) and others who have expressed increasing frustration with the pace of Elections Canada's investigation into Robocon.

The first post linked to above mentions a couple of specific areas where the trail has gone cold. You might forgive the loss of the proxy server logs since the owner generally only keeps them for a week. But there's also the loss of the video evidence that might have identified Pierre Poutine which is the alias of the person who purchased the credit cards used to pay the bills at RackNine.

Eric Clapton started the Crossroads Guitar Festival series both to showcase guitar players and to benefit a drug treatment center called the Crossroads Centre. All three of tonight's clips are from the most recent festival in 2010.

The first tune may stir some memories for you if you're around my age. Comin' Home was released as a single by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett in 1969. This is Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes.

Update:

I guess I should have waited to do Friday afternoon Robocon blogging. Courtesy of The Sixth Estate, here are new reports from Postmedia (via the Ottawa Citizen) and the Globe and Mail. Short version: In not entirely surprising news, the connection between Pierre Poutine and the Conservative campaign in Guelph has been confirmed. The original post follows...

According to someone who knows a bit about using telephones to suppress the vote, what happened in last year's federal election campaign was "a fairly sophisticated operation" that was likely based on lessons learned in American political campaigns. That's from a former Republican political operative named Allen Raymond who served three months in jail for his own involvement in vote suppression.

So I guess we can add Raymond to the list of people who would surmise that what a lot of us have been calling Robocon wasn't the work of a single rogue operator but the result of a coordinated effort on a national scale. That was from the only new article I've seen in the last week that relates directly to this story — there have been no new developments reported in either the Elections Canada investigation or the Council of Canadians lawsuit. While we wait impatiently for more, contemplate this quote from Raymond:

"Voters are just a commodity when you're in this business," he said. "You're just trying to get enough to win. Are they people? Sure they are, but at the end of the day they're just part of the transaction. You detach yourself because you've got a job to do."

Seeing voters as a commodity and elections as a business is part of the same culture that views citizens as consumers.

Democracy is in deep, deep trouble.

Kate Heartfield has an interesting column on trade negotiations between Canada and the EU and specifically on the possible consequences for the cost of pharmaceuticals. The EU is insisting on changes to Canada's intellectual property laws and there's some dispute about what that will mean for Canadian consumers. You can follow the link for more but I wanted to draw attention to this, from Heartfield's closing paragraph.

...the whole point of free trade is to allow consumers access to the best goods at the best price.

I'm afraid that's only true in some imaginary land where so-called "free markets" work as advertised. In this world, there are actually no such things as free markets and their biggest boosters mostly wouldn't have it any other way. The point of the agreements that are sold to us as being all about free trade is actually to guarantee profits to investors and corporations while limiting the ability of governments to govern for the benefit of their own citizens.

The trade agreement under discussion here is a case in point. The negotiations have occurred out of the public eye and without public consultation. If proponents of this agreement have their way, then changes to our intellectual property laws will effectively be written by European pharmaceutical companies. Don't try and tell me their highest priority is the welfare of Canadian consumers or the democratic rights of Canadian citizens.

When I hear the term "free trade" these days I assume I'm being addressed by someone who hasn't been paying attention or who is about to try and put something over on me.

This op-ed in the Globe and Mail depends in large part on the uncritical acceptance of the conclusions of a Fraser Institute report. So it might have been nice if the Globe had disclosed that the column's author, Gwyn Morgan, is both a serious financial donor to the Fraser Institute and a member of its board of directors. Perhaps if we spread a rumour that Morgan is secretly a political blogger, the paper's editors would take more interest in these things.

Let's take a quick look at one small part of Morgan's column:

Germany has given away $130-billion, mostly to solar-power companies. Yet solar power makes up a minuscule 0.3 per cent of German power supply, while doing almost nothing toward the original objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In February, Germany's Minister of Economics and Technology, Philipp Roesler, announced a pullback from green-power subsidies saying the cost was "a threat to the economy."

It's true that Germany is making serious reductions to their feed-in tariff rates but Morgan makes it sound as though it's because the original policy was a failure. There seems to be another side to the story.

Good evening. Have some blues. As Chris Smither mentions in his intro, Statesboro Blues was originally written and recorded by Blind Willie McTell.

I don't often write about polls but I'll make time for this one. In support of their lawsuit contesting the results of last May's federal election in seven ridings, the Council of Canadians commissioned EKOS Research Associates to do a study. EKOS investigated the occurrence of fraudulent phone calls in those ridings and the political leanings of those who received them. To establish a baseline, the company also looked at 106 other ridings where there have been no reports of fraudulent calls.

Here's a summary of the results from the Globe and Mail:

Ekos president Frank Graves said the survey found voters in the seven ridings were 50 per cent more likely to have received illegitimate calls than those in 106 surveyed "comparison" ridings... And about three times as many Liberal, New Democrat and Green supporters as Conservative supporters claimed they were given false or incorrect information about polling station locations.

In a report on the same story in the Ottawa Citizen, Graves described the possibility that those results could be merely coincidental as "completely statistically improbable." The reaction from the Conservatives was entirely predictable: they ignored the evidence and attacked the messenger. Frank Graves must be a Liberal. There is no other possible explanation.

Levon Helm, best known as the drummer for The Band, passed away yesterday from "complications of cancer." He had already come back from throat cancer once to resume recording and performing until very recently.

I would imagine you'll find lots of retrospective looks at his career (like this one at the New Yorker) so I thought I'd just put up some of those recent performances. This is an appearance on the David Letterman show in 2009 where he performed a song called Tennessee Jed from a newly released album. If you want to skip the introduction the song actually gets under way just after the 1:00 mark.