The Cadman affair

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took the unprecedented step of suing the Liberal Party of Canada for libel over statements made by the party on its website. After the release of a taped interview with Harper from 2005, Liberals began accusing the Conservative party in general, and Harper in particular, of bribery with respect to Cadman …

Doing my part for one party democracy …

Its election time in Alberta again … the King is dead, long live the King. For those completely unfamiliar with Alberta provincial politics, I wrote a primer on the subject here on View from the Edge last year, whose title I stole for my opening line above …

Mounties always get their man

The title words for this post have taken on a stark new meaning in recent times in Canada. I’ve been trying to write about the Robert Dziekanski incident from Vancouver International Airport in October for a week or so now …

Upgrades …

The new version of Wordpress, the software that powers the main version of this blog and many others, was released yesterday, and I took the opportunity today to upgrade to the latest and greatest. If the blog was offline for you for a bit, thats probably the reason, but I must say its a very quick and painless process that involves very little disruption in access …

Meditations on betrayal

This past Wednesday (Sept 26, 2007), the US House of Representatives voted to condemn Moveon.org because of an ad they ran in the New York Times. The Senate had also voted to condemn move on the previous week, so its now clear that all three branches of the US government …

When comedy goes too far …

Everybody loves a joke … well, except when they don’t. In all honesty, its hard to believe that the people who came up with this idea truly didn’t see the potential for chaos and problems. In today’s world, its very hard to imagine anyone thinking that security personnel guarding a major international conference will have [...]

A call to violence

I stumbled across an interesting article this morning over at the War Room at Salon, that highlights the differences between the left wing and right wing elements in the US right now as far as rhetoric is concerned. Tim Grieve found a clip from a recent Ted Nugent show that is very interesting. As most [...]

agents provocateurs – Updated below …

The Youtube video posted recently of a protest rally in Montebello, Que raises some pretty big questions about the role of SQ and/or RCMP officers in violent protest. Coming late onto this story, my first exposure to it is through the Youtube video (well, in truth, I found the Youtube link 3 lines into a [...]

We don’t know Dick …

Jon Stewart is one of those guys that falls into the trap of excellence. The Daily Show is comedy and satire at such a high level so consistently, that it takes something truly great to grab attention and provoke comment. On the August 15th segment of “You don’t know Dick” he really knocked one [...]

Activism abroad

This week has seen 3 Canadian activists arrested, then later released, in China for activist related activities. As is often true in cases like this, the immediate media attention around the arrests focussed on the message of the protest for which the activists were arrested, and on ways to free them. What’s interesting in cases [...]