Extortion. That's how the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia obtained the money it would be blocked from using by a government bill introduced in the legislature Tuesday. Liberal leader Stephen McNeil should think hard before crying victim. Justice Minister Ross Landry, who introduced the bill, suggested the Liberals give the tainted funds to charity. A better idea would be to give it back to the provincial treasury, because that's who they stole it from. McNeil may think voters' memories are too short to remember the details, but a few of us old coots are still around to remind them. The money in question came...

20 October, 2009

Here's a clever wrinkle:  Nova Scotia Environment estimates that its Power of Green conference tomorrow will have a carbon footprint of about 50 tonnes, but some smart folks in the department's Climate Change Division arranged to offset these notional atmospheric emissions. With money from the Natural Gas Association, they will  convert the Metro Turning Point Shelter to gas heat and replace its residential grade washers and driers with more efficient, commercial units. This will save more than 50 tonnes of carbon annually, cut the shelter's electricity bill in half, and render the conference carbon neutral. As Tom Leher might say,...

20 October, 2009

Oh no! It's not a Playmobil toy, but a Contrarian regular directs us to "Charlie don't surf," a two-year-old post on the very peculiar website, Legofesto, featuring a (decidedly unofficial) Lego waterboarding device. Where will this stop? Legofesto describes herself as: A politics-junkie and news-hound, with a thing for lego. This is not a blog for children. She is very, very pissed off about how the War on Terror (or whatever we're now calling it) is prosecuted around the world, led by US/UK. Human rights abuses and real events in the world are recreated in lego. LEGO© in no way endorse this blog...

20 October, 2009

According to the website Raw Story, the Obama administration has reacted the the UK High Court decision (stayed pending appeal) to publish details of the torture inflicted on former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, and Obamaphiles will thre response hard to stomach: Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We are not pleased", adding that Washington kept such information confidential "to protect our own citizens." How exactly does it protect US citizens to be shielded from the information that CIA agents used scalpels on an illegally rendered prisoner's testicles? Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald continues to follow this story. A Contrarian reader points to this...

20 October, 2009

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke flags the droll consumer reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint on the Amazon website (scroll way down). Moneyquote: I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried...

20 October, 2009

Today's Antigonish by-election is a foregone conclusion. N-dip Moe Smith came within 275 votes of knocking off popular Tando MacIsaac in June's general election. Tando having abandoned the seat so abruptly, and the NDP firmly ensconced in Province House, Smith will take the riding in a walk. Inverness is a different matter. The riding is festooned with election signs in roughly equal numbers. Although then-Premier Rodney MacDonald out-polled his nearest rival by 3,431  votes in June, would-be Tory successor Allan MacMaster is widely expected to place third today. The premier's abandonment of the riding, like Tando's of neighboring Antigonish, will hurt MacMaster,...

20 October, 2009

In his game effort to wish away the cheque-writing scandal, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor posts a telling email from an anonymous Harper MP: When we formed govt the crats stopped bringing cheques to announcements & we were FORCED to cough up the $ to buy our own. Specifically, at [a government department I was involved with] the crats used to like to be in the photo ops giving out chqs, as though it was coming from them. They detested Conservatives being photographed handing out chqs, so they stopped bringing the chqs – when they even bothered to show up for announcements....

20 October, 2009

A group calling itself Know How They Vote is asking the Nova Scotia House of Assembly to abandon its traditional practice of unrecorded votes. A news release from Michael Kennedy, the group's director, points out that, although any two MLAs can request a roll call vote, only one percent of the legislature's decisions in the last six years have been by recorded vote. Moneyquote: The democratic deficit in Nova Scotia is growing. With every unrecorded vote in the Legislature, our MLAs get farther and farther away from our scrutiny. Choosing not to record votes is choosing not to be transparent and accountable...

18 October, 2009

The British High Court has ruled that, pending appeal, it will finally publish seven paragraphs detailing the torture CIA agents inflicted on Binyam Mohamed. The court had earlier redacted the passage from a decision about Mohamed at the request of  British officials, who said it would jeopardize US-UK cooperation on security matters. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, quotes an anonymous official describing the explosive contents of the passage: The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated...

18 October, 2009

A few months ago, a friend and I spent a week in Cuba—not the usual Canadian stay in a beachside resort, but a week spent tramping the streets of Havana seeking out baseball games, opera, and the wonderful music that is the island nation's rightful trademark. We enjoyed the music and the weather, but the overwhelming impression was depressing: grinding poverty, decayed buildings, and the leaden air of a police state. Last week, Yoani Sánchez, a 34-year-old Cuban writer, editor, and linguistics scholar, won the Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism that advances inter-American understanding. Cuban authorities...

18 October, 2009
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