Posts from our progressive community

 Writer, war correspondent, religious scholar, Chris Hedges has become increasingly radicalized over the past dozen or so years although he would argue it's society that has truly changed, particularly through the influence of religious fundamentalism and the capture of political power by the forces of corporatism.  Whatever the balance of changes and forces, he's calling for revolution as the last hope.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.  

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet.

...The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind ...horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible. 

...It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”   

As my commenters were happy to point out, my last post on Senator Mike Duffy and Conservative political strategy was hilariously mistimed, since Duffy resigned from the Conservative caucus mere hours later. I’ll cop to it: I was wrong, and superceded by events. There hasn’t been such a momentous blunder since Globe & Mail pundit John Ibbitson predicted that Bob Rae was “almost certain” to win the Liberal leadership campaign last year, only to have Rae confirm hours later that he wouldn’t be running in the campaign in the first place.

In my defence, I don’t get paid to be right.

Anyways, although I was wrong in the details, I stand by my broader point: the Conservatives probably do not think that the decision to have Stephen Harper’s personal chief of staff bail out Senator Fraudster will have a lasting impact on their political fortunes. To that end, although chief Nigel Wright has now left his post in a cloud of controversy, it’s worth noting that the Harper Conservatives have merely reverted to stage 2 of their standard story-killing strategy: they’re firing a staffer. This staffer happens to be an exceptionally able and accomplished Canadian businessman instead of a young activist recently graduated from a religious university, so it seems like more than it is. Once again, an aide has been sacrificed on the altar of Her Majesty’s Government.

And despite the present fixation of the media, there is every reason to believe that the Conservatives are correct in this evaluation. If the Conservatives are defeated in 2015, it probably won’t be because the Prime Minister’s Office bailed out a senator who had been caught filching on his “living expenses.”** Even if some people, and especially some journalists, will say otherwise.

Consider. What about the Duffy scandal would turn people against the government? Is it the fact that sitting politicians are being suborned with cash supplied by Harper? Surely not. If that were the case, then people would have turned against Harper after it was revealed that his representatives offered a terminally ill MP a $1 million life insurance policy in exchange for voting against Martin’s Liberals in a budget vote.

Is it the fact that the Prime Minister’s Office chose to defend Duffy by whatever means necessary instead of casting out a known abuser of the taxpayer? Again, surely not. Bev Oda burned through much more than $90,000 double-booking 5-star hotels and ordering the most expensive orange juice know to humanity, with no lasting impression on the polling numbers. Tony Clement diverted $50 million from the border security budget into a gazebos-and-sidewalks slush fund for his riding, yet even reporters seem to have forgotten about it. Even fewer eyebrows were raised when it was revealed that the Conservatives effectively funnelled almost $300 million in subsidies to the tobacco industry through a poorly-thought-out farm aid program. And most recently, the Auditor-General reported that the government had “lost” $3.1 billion in counterterrorism funding, with quite literally no idea who had spent the money, let alone what it had been spent on. So obviously it’s not that.

Or maybe it’s the casual disregard for accountability and ethics? No, I really don’t think it’s that, either. The Harper government has already skated past rulings that ministers flouted the ethics code by manipulating CRTC deliberations, meeting with friends who wanted government contracts and subsidies, etc. There was barely a peep of discontent about that. And it’s hard to get any worse than attempting to rig an election, yet the Conservatives have been convicted of doing so once, a Conservative staffer has been charged with doing so on a second occasion, and the Conservative Party remains under investigation by Elections Canada in many additional instances. After a few weeks of media hype, all those things passed and are now largely forgotten.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that, unlike most of the above scandals, this one reaches straight into Harper’s own office? That’s certainly a regular media refrain at the moment, but it’s transparently silly. This is hardly the first scandal to touch on senior members of the Prime Minister’s Office. Bruce Carson faced charges of influence peddling during the 2011 election. Keith Beardsley also had his knuckles wrapped for illegal lobbying. And of course Harper’s first chief of staff, Ian Brodie, got caught up in a scandal about leaking diplomatic information in an attempt to sabotage Barack Obama’s presidential campaign back in 2008.

All of this returns me to my initial thesis: the majority of Canadians simply don’t care much about these sorts of things. This includes the 40% of people who simply don’t vote at all, as well as another 20% or so who we can count on to vote for a conservative party regardless of what sins that party’s leadership may have committed, simply because conservatives are cool and liberals are socialists.

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Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Yes, there's plenty more on the Cons' Senate scandal, with Tim Harper headlining the latest discussion:
Mike Duffy is radioactive.
The one-time Conservative cheerleader is now the poster boy for the filth which envelops the party brand.
The man holed up on Friendly Lane in Cavendish, P.E.I., has brought down one of the most powerful men in Canada, shaken the Stephen Harper government to its core and blown a hole in the confidence the increasingly skeptical Conservative base has in the party.
...
Wright says he acted on his own, but could he possibly have acted on this without the Prime Minister’s knowledge?
Was he acting on the Prime Minister’s orders?
Did two of the shrewdest political operatives to ever land in Ottawa really believe that a handy chequebook would make a Senate spending scandal go away?
Did the government Senate leader, Marjory LeBreton, know an improper payoff was at the root of Duffy’s note from the teacher when his expenses were being audited?
We have to ask, because no one in the government is giving proper answers. - Meanwhile, Brian Webb offers his own set of scenarios as to why Nigel Wright may have offered Mike Duffy a get out of jail free card, while Chris Plecash notes that both Duffy and Pamela Wallin may have been singled out for special treatment. Lawrence Martin poses a few more questions about Stephen Harper's involvement. And David Climenhaga notes that if the Cons believed in ministerial responsibility as anything but an excuse to keep underlings from answering questions in public, Harper would be offering his resignation for the actions of his chief of staff.

- Theresa Riley interviews Andrew Rosenberg about the corporate sector's efforts to prevent an accurate assessment of environmental damage and other externalities from intruding on their profits, while Elliot Negin writes about the Koch brothers' attack on climate science in particular. And Miranda Holmes notes that Peter Kent has been spinning on behalf of the oil sector since before he became Canada's most Orwellian Minister of the Environment yet

- All of which is to say that there's yet more reason to want to ensure that our democratic representatives and public servants work on meaningfully regulating business activity, rather than naively trusting in corporate benevolence. But on the bright side, at least one Federal Reserve governor is starting to recognize the damage that inequality does to overall economic growth - signalling that some policy-makers are beginning to come around to the concept of doing their jobs.

Ridgewood South Precinct Area

Image Source:  Ridgewood South Precinct PlanThe Province is hiking the PST and Winnipeggers (along with the rest of Manitoba) are angry. Our Mayor has denounced this hike while renewing his call for one percentage point of the PST to go to the City so as to deal with the "infrastructure debt". Sam Katz keeps noting that this situation is desperate.

Meanwhile the City's in the stages of approving yet another suburban development: Ridgewood South. The City Council's Committee on Property and Development has unanimously approved this nonsense plan without debate.This development hasn't inspired protests like the PST hike or opposition on City Council, but it should.






Our increasingly rundown inner-city roads have inspired complaints and demands for something to be done. City Hall demands more money from the Province, critics of City Hall demand less administrative fat, and the odd guy/gal out calls for raising property taxes again. But if we're serious about long-term spending solutions than halting suburban and extraurban development is essential.

As a draft of the Ridgewood South Precinct Plan notes


As previously outlined, Ridgewood South has been identified as a New Community in OurWinnipeg. New Communities, such as Ridgewood South are large land areas identified for future urban development that are not currently serviced by a full range of municipal services. [My emphasis added]
City Hall seems well enough aware that this new suburb will cost us money. Yet they continue to support the fiscal drag of suburban sprawl, subsidizing these costly to municipally supply communities with services and further thinning out our road budgets. We simply don't have the tax base to keep playing this game.

Here's Wyatt!  He's terrorizing the inner-city &
hard-working poor Winnipeggers by axing city services.

Picture not actually of Russ Wyatt,
evident from guy looking too reasonable.

Image Source: Initially from film
The Shining, obtained by this blogger
from tumblrFor all the talks of "sustainable transportation" in the Our Winnipeg plan our city hasn't kept up with the need for bus rapid transit. After years of hassling and funding arrangements from other levels of government only a measly few klicks of BRT line are in operation. As well, our bikeway network is utterly disconnected and too geared towards recreational cyclists to be of use for Winnipeggers who bike to work.

What does the number two guy at City Hall think amidst all this? Well, Deputy Mayor Russ Wyatt is proposing deep cuts to the central city. Cuts that will disproportionately hurt hard-working poor Winnipeggers.

These nasty cuts include:

• Closing the Arlington Bridge.
•  Halting the construction of rapid transit projects
• Cutting snow clearing.
• Ending support for housing, community, & criss workers.
• Eliminating grants to Winnipeg museums.
• Ending support for the Aboriginal Youth Strategy.
• Ending grants to Economic Development Winnipeg.

In this context, in which Wyatt thinks it's okay to hurt hard-working poor rapid transit riders, aboriginal youth, and those afflicted by crisis, we're seriously considering extending our infrastructure to a new outer suburb? This is madness. 
What half-baked rationalizations our councillors coming up with? Well, let's take a look. 

"These new subdivisions that are coming up are filling up quite quickly, and I mean, if it’s not in the city of Winnipeg, it's in the bedroom communities beyond," said Browaty.

("Committee OKs plan for new Winnipeg neighbourhood". CBC (May 7, 2013))
Those are exactly the type of bright ideas that went behind the Waverley West project. The sad thing is that providing so many facilities on the edge of the city only encourages fringe-outer suburban and extraurban development by cutting the distance between city services and extraurban communities.

Freep columnist Bartley Kives has some other perspectives, from the City Hall establishment, on why the development of yet another outer suburb makes sense:


So the task at hand for the city is to balance off the demand for more development with the need to create more density, which is simply more people living in any given portion of the city. And that means doing what may sound unthinkable to hard-core urbanists: Winnipeg is opening up vast new tracts of land under the premise developers understand these new suburbs must be denser than the city's existing suburbs.

("Growing pains: The debate over Winnipeg residential development". Bartley Kives (May 11, 2013). Winnipeg Free Press) Oh boy, Ridgewood South.

Imagine the fortune it'll cost to run roads through
you!

Image Source: Winnipeg Free PressYeah, stopping suburban sprawl by making a few denser outer suburbs totally makes sense. I mean, if people really want supersized yards and strip malls I'm sure they'll settle for denser habitation so long as it's farther away from the central city services. Dense outer suburbs make little sense and even if there's some improvement compared to other low-density developments (which Ridgewood South is classified as) it'll still likely be a financial drag for the city upkeep infrastructure to Ridgewood South and will still shift more services to the city fringes, closer to the exurbs.

City Council has trouble with existing road repairs.

Now it wants to build more roads!!

Image Source: ChrisDIt's clear that City Hall can't make proper decisions and is using the risk of flight to the exurbs as an excuse for creating outer suburbs. As flashy as the precinct plan is - and much of it will be compromised away anyway - this represents a serious threat to our city. Fiscal axmen like Russ Wyatt are scheming about cutting services to our inner-city, which suffers from dilapidated physical and social infrastructure already. Thus far the Province has supported outer suburban developments, like Waverley West in a bid to woo South Winnipeg suburbanites.

For the greater good of our city and our province this has to stop.

To perserve our roads in the central city, we have to focus on inner-city and inner suburban development and redevelopment. We need supports for cooperative housing, rental development, and mixed-use facilities rather than more roads to more outer fringe suburbs.

If the City's unwilling to deal with sprawl,
the Province must.

Image Source: Government of ManitobaThe Province still has some perverse political incentives that favour suburban development. As noted, there are many existing outer suburbanites who'd like further development along the southwest of the 'Peg. The form a critical swing demographic. Nevertheless, City Hall is still more beholden to the advocates of outer-suburbanization, with developers having unreasonable influence over City decisions.  As well, the Province is the only entity that has the power to deal with the potential of exurban flight. Thus, a serious solution to unsustainable sprawl must rely on our province.

The Province has many policy tools they could use to stop this nonsense. For one, they could impose a binding urban growth boundary around the southwest of Winnipeg. No undeveloped lands outside of the boundary are to be developed until existing inner-city, inner suburb, and outer suburb neighbourhoods reach sufficient density.

To prevent flight to the exurbs, the Province could also restrict the development of newer exurban communities and impose growth boundaries around existing exurbs.

Alternatively, a more permissive approach could be taking by simply taxing those in newer outer suburbs and exurbs in a way that aligns the social cost of servicing them with their tax rates.

Either way, the Province needs to change course in regard to outer suburbs. The concerned citizens of Winnipeg need to petition the Province and City about this matter. The sustainability of our city depends on it.

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Steve Harper's namesake nemesis, the Toronto Star's  Tim Harper, writes of a government known for its "in your face" bombast that has abruptly fallen silent.

...our governing party has collectively lost its voice.

The “accountability” government gave us the news that Pamela Wallin, the senator so loudly backed by Harper over alleged expense account abuses,had resigned from the Conservative caucus  by news release as the long weekend was beginning.
Then it pulled all its scheduled spokespersons off the Friday political talk shows.
The night before, Duffy announced his departure from the caucus, then had the RCMP remove inquiring reporters from the vicinity of his home.
Then Wright announced his resignation on a Sunday morning in the middle of the weekend, and a junior MP from Alberta, a loyal soldier named Michelle Rempel, became the face of the government on the Sunday political shows.
But Rempel spoke before Wright’s resignation. After his bombshell, no one from the government came forward to explain, apologize or defend.

Everybody, it seems, the whole lot of them have gone to ground.  They're not even trying to distract attention or change the subject.

Then again when you get a break from the frothy snarling of John Baird, the indignant pontificating of Jason Kenney or the slack-jawed scolding of Joe Oliver, it really is kind of nice.  Silence is Golden.

New research suggests mankind may avoid the very worst predicted impacts of climate change.   That same research concludes what is actually in store is devastating anyway.

"...the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe.

"The researchers said that warming was most likely to reach about 4C above pre-industrial levels if the past decade's readings were taken into account.

"That would still lead to catastrophe across large swaths of the Earth, causing droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves and with drastic effects on agricultural productivity leading to secondary effects such as mass migration."

What's unhelpful about this report is that it looks at climate change in isolation as though it is the measure of the threats facing our civilization.   Yet, to get a more helpful perspective you must add climate change impacts to these related and compounding factors:
resource depletion and exhaustion, especially the freshwater crisis; species extinction and migration. especially the collapse of global fisheries; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all forms; pest and disease migration; overpopulation and population migration; and the gamut of local and global security challenges including food insecurity; inequality; revolt; terrorism; climate wars and the growth of failed states; regional arms races, especially in south and east Asia; and nuclear proliferation.   There, that fleshes it out, don't you think?

Climate change is just one of the major challenges we will have to meet in the span of the next generation or two if we're to hold civilization together.  Each of the factors listed here, and it's not an exhaustive list, makes solving the others considerably more difficult and unlikely.   Each of these factors compounds the impacts some of the others.  It's this matrix that makes taking climate change in isolation of somewhat limited purpose and effect.

It's important to remember that, despite their invaluable research, climate change experts operate in a necessarily narrow focus that has no means of addressing the overall challenge.    They're not exaggerating their predictions of catastrophic impacts from the floods, the droughts, the severe storm events, heat waves and sea level rise or the resultant agricultural collapse and population migration, it's just that unfortunately this is only part of a much greater basket of problems, all of them more or less man-made,  that will confront us and, especially, our children and grandchildren.

I have tried to watch these events as they have unfolded over the last fifteen years (which is about when I became a believer) and I have been struck at how the greatest peril of all is us, ourselves.  The very worst failure has been our addiction to growth.   We depend on growth today and consider it cataclysmic if our economy shrinks ever just barely.

We see growth in its narrowest form - on an annual basis.  We look forward one year and look back one.  And our noses are so hard up against that tree that we have no hope of seeing the forest.

We have come to consider 3% annual growth in GDP the indicator of a healthy economy for the developed world. That 3% compounded over 50-years, a single useful adult life, comes out to something in the order of 438% effective growth. The economy has to become 4.4 times larger at the end of that single adult life than it was at the beginning. That means we need many times more fossil fuels, and other non-renewable and renewable resources alike. Here’s the eye opener. Pursue that 3% growth for a century and you need to grow your economy 19.22 times larger. Make that 150-years and you will have grown your economy 84.25 times larger. Round it out to two full centuries and your economy will be 369 times bigger than it was at the outset yet each year saw growth just 3% greater than the previous year.
But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Of course. Yet we are bound and will remain in hot pursuit of impossible, inevitably self-destructive objectives that will either blind us to alternatives or close off our opportunities to change even if we want to on some levels.
Logic dictates that, in a finite world, a single fixed biosphere, growth cannot be infinite nor can it be maintained with any stability past a certain point. As we near these limits we start to get buffeted by human shortcomings including inefficiency, waste, greed, distrust and manipulation (among others).  And that is precisely what we're experiencing now.
Forget the climate, we are the real catastrophe.   Our human nature and its powerful inertia are far more lethal than any storm nature can conjure up.

William McGonnagal is, of course, best known as the Bard of the Tay River Bridge. While his imaginatively rhymed celebrations of its design, construction and tragic collapse failed to achieve for that architectural miracle the immortality that Walt Whitman won... Balbulican http://stageleft.info

In an attempt to put Nigel Wright's resignation in perspective, Paul Wells returns to a passage he and John Geddes wrote two years ago:

Someone who was there paraphrased Harper’s message to his ministers at his first cabinet meeting in 2006: “I am the kingpin. So whatever you do around me, you have to know that I am sacrosanct.” Harper was telling his ministers that they were expendable but that he wasn’t. If they had to go so that his credibility and his ability to get things done were protected, so be it.It wasn’t personal,” this source said. “It was his office.”
If you work for Stephen Harper you're expected to take the blame. That's what Nigel Wright did yesterday. The talking points will be: "This was Nigel's mistake. He paid the price. Case closed."

But this is Stephen Harper. We know the man well enough by now to understand that the $90.000 cheque was not just Wright's idea. His statement yesterday hints that there was more going on behind the scenes:

“I did not advise the Prime Minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy’s expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact.”
Harper didn't know the means. He didn't want to know. But who hatched the plan? And why? Surely the answer must have something to do with information Harper wants to bury. That's not surprising. Stephen Harper works hard to make sure information he does not approve goes down the memory hole. Wells writes:

It’s really sweet that Stephen Harper believes he cannot win a fair fight of full information in the light of day, but as an operating principle it is getting tired. The desire to bring every debate to a screaming halt rather than engage the debate is one of this prime minister’s two or three most obvious defining characteristics. It’s obvious even where scandal is not involved. As one example among many, the Supreme Court reference on Senate reform this autumn will hear three days of public arguments the Harper government did everything to avoid, first by stalling for years on the very notion of a reference, and then by asking the Court, pathetically, to bypass public argument and go straight to delivering an opinion.

We will see more of that in the days ahead. It is easy to predict, based on long observation of this prime minister, that any question about what this government did, what this prime minister’s Senate appointees did, how Harper’s office handled it, and what will be done to fix these attitudes in the future will be answered with, “Nigel Wright gave up his job. Isn’t that enough? It’s time to move on.”
Wright's resignation is supposed to put an end to the matter. It's all very Nixonian. But, as that president discovered, the cover up is worse than the crime.

H/t Dawg's Blog & Alison at Creekside for the inspiration.

Oh, the great outdoors beckon on this fine Victoria Day morning, so for now, allow me to offer you this from today's Toronto Star:

Hard to believe Duffy has no nest egg

Re: Duffy resigns from caucus, May 17

It seems egregious Mike Duffy has been running roughshod over Canadians for some time, without attracting public opprobrium. Five years ago the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council ruled that he had violated broadcasting codes and ethics. Three years ago Duffy criticized the University of King's College and other journalism schools for teaching critical thinking, and added that the schools were raising left-wing journalists. On Friday we read that he tried to influence the CRTC on behalf of Sun Media.

He accepted $90,000 from Nigel Wright, the top man at the PMO, because, reportedly, he was worried about his heart and that his death would leave his wife in dire financial circumstances.

Duffy has been a senior journalist — presumably with commensurate salary — for more than 40 years, yet we are supposed to believe he has no nest egg. As a senator, he has enjoyed a generous expense subsidy from the Canadian taxpayer. He owns a couple of properties. He is director of Mike Duffy Media Services Ltd. As he knows, his wife would qualify for a generous pension when he dies. So I am puzzled that he had to accept the $90,000 windfall.
When an employee fiddles with his expense account, most probably he would be fired and called a thief. When a senator is caught, he becomes an independent senator. No condemnation, no punishment. Just another day on Parliament Hill.

Jerry Tutunjian, Toronto

In 2005, Stephen Harper said that anyone in his government who acted inappropriately would suffer the consequences. We now see the Conservatives again doing back flips trying to justify the unjustifiable. In the case of Mike Duffy, there seem to be more allegations of improper conduct on a daily basis that would involve the police if it was someone other than a Conservative. If the senator had any decency he would resign from the Senate.

Chester Gregorasz, CambridgeRecommend this Post

I don't know why Nigel Wright decided to sell his soul to a man like Stephen Harper,  the sinister boss of the Con mob.

Or what dark force drove him to cut a $90,000 cheque for the sleazy senator Mike Duffy. A man he hardly knew.

But he sure learned a hard lesson today eh? When you work for the Con mob, and you get caught, it's all YOUR fault. And it's time to disappear. 
Read more »

This:


reminded me of this:

The Tories have a rich history of backstabbing.   Dalton Camp did in John Diefenbaker and was never forgiven.   Brian Mulroney shoved Joe Clark out of the way and into a ditch.   Could it be possible that the knives are coming out for Steve Harper in the finest Conservative tradition? 

Trying to make sense of what's been happening this week isn't easy.  On the surface, nothing seems to add up.  It has the confused improbability of palace intrigue.

Someone or some group on the inside is playing a high stakes game in which Stephen Harper may be the intended target.  Sure they're going through two of his most prominent Senate appointments, Mike Duffy and Pam Wallin, but that doesn't mean either of them are necessarily the target.   They could just be the means to a less obvious end.

The way Harper handled the Duffy problem suggests he saw himself as personally exposed.   Duffy was caught, sure, but he already had financing arranged through The Royal Bank.  Harper, however, had reason to bring that problem "in house."

He wanted it dealt with quickly and cleanly.   He wanted the problem to go away.  Forget about Duffy borrowing the money, give it to him with only a couple of strings attached.  He had to repay every dime in question and he had to stay clear of the auditors and remain silent.   The whole business was to be kept private, including the money trail.   That explains the personal cheque.

Those targeting Harper countered by feeding their media boy copies of Duffy's e-mails and details of the secret, private payment.  Duffy and Wright were forced to come clean and admit the curious transaction.

One other key element that was also leaked was that Duffy was promised that the senate inquiry would "go easy on" him.  So, when Duffy and the PMO said "debt repaid, nothing to see here"  Harper's foes released the original Senate committee report to show how the final report had been laundered just as Duffy said he had been promised.

Difficult as it may be to feel sympathy for Mike Duffy, it would seem that he has been used by Harper's dissidents and Harper himself and both have simply worsened the Cavendish Cottager's position.

So far all of the points have been scored by Harper's adversaries.  They have used a succession of well-timed leaks of e-mails, documents and information to keep Harper constantly on the defensive.   They have forced two key Harper senate appointees  out of caucus.   Best of all, they have forced Harper's most critical adviser, his powerful and brilliant Chief of Staff to resign in disgrace, leaving Harper isolated, vulnerable and under a very dark cloud.   Now a criminal investigation looms and it could go right to the top tier of the PMO.

This is a terrible position for a guy like Steve Harper to be in.  He's been an autocratic party leader.   He's not beloved, he's not even well liked.  There are plainly well positioned people who have been biding their time, waiting to get back at him.   A lot of his own people do not like how he has ruled the country, what Canada has become under the Harper regime.   Many of them were "progressive" Conservatives before Harper lurched to the hard right.

Could we be staring at a possible fracturing of the Alliance/PC entente?   Have the old school ProgCons had enough?   Are they preparing to move in for the kill?

All eyes should be squarely on Steve Harper in the coming weeks as he struggles to recapture his hold on power and vanquish these unnamed dissidents.

We left Ronda very early: we had to ring a bell at the desk and get the hotel manager out of bed to settle our bill. Poor guy shuffled out in his slippers, completely confused. We had to remind him we needed our parking validated, then remind him we needed to pay! Funny.

I had been up late blogging the night before, then woke up crazy early - a theme on this trip. I spent the wee hours of the morning getting directions and booking a hotel in Madrid, before it was even a halfway decent hour to wake up Allan.

As you might imagine, as we left Ronda, our main goal was to go around the mountains rather than over them. I navigate with a combination of Google Map directions, our own map, and a careful reading of the options at each roundabout and intersection. This seems to be the only way. The Google Map directions never completely correspond with reality. (Was that the fork where you bear left? Is this unmarked calle the street we need? And so on.) We seemed to be driving through the valley, but every time the road took a slight incline I was worried! Finally we could see that the mountains were safely in the distance, and could breathe easy.

We stopped at a gas station so I could get coffee (from a machine, with something like 8 possible choices of espresso, double espresso, cafe con leche, etc., but no tea), then later saw a big roadside cafe-restaurant with plenty of cars outside, and pulled in. It was La Meson de Diego! Having been to La Tala tapas a few nights ago, this was perfect. We took a picture of the sign on our way out.

Inside, it was lively and noisy, a bit of a shock! The place was hopping. We couldn't figure out if people were still partying from the night before or were up early for breakfast. Given that everyone eats dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., could they possibly be having breakfast at 8:30 or 9:00? Even groups of 20-somethings? But it seemed very late to be ending Saturday night. There were men ordering wine and beer! This mystery went unsolved.

The only thing available for breakfast in this area is coffee or tea and tostados (a long piece of baguette, toasted) and your choice of whatever on that. You can get butter and jam, or aciete (olive oil) or tomate (crushed tomatoes that you dip the bread into), or the ubiquitous jamon. There was no menu, we just had to guess what might be available.

Shortly after our breakfast stop, we connected with one of the larger roads, which soon brought us to the highway, and we were on our way to Cordoba. Getting into Coroba, everything was very clearly marked, and we easily found a parking lot right near the historic district.

* * * *

One reason we left Ronda so early is that one of the things we wanted to see in Cordoba - an old synagogue - was only open in the morning. So we set out to find this right away. We were walking through beautiful, empty, narrow streets, whitewashed buildings on both sides, flowers spilling out of window boxes. Then we'd turn a corner and there would suddenly be an enormous crowd of people! This happened a few times before I realized that this was the reason we couldn't find a hotel room in Cordoba - a patio flower festival. It was an open house festival - people had maps with house numbers and were touring patios - the interior courtyards in Spanish houses - with spectacular flowers. The old streets are rabbit warrens, and although we asked several people where la sinogoga was, we couldn't find it.

We saw two older policemen who were wandering around, presumably doing security for this house festival. One started to describe where to walk, then asked his partner, Do you mind if I take the señora to la sinagoga? (In Spanish, of course.) And he walked us there! He asked if I spoke French - it seems to be a very common second language here, many people have asked us that when trying to communicate. Our police friend was frustrated because he wanted to tell me about Cordoba. So I said, "Esta bien, puedo comprender" (That's ok, I can understand), and he was off to the races. Cordoba has the best food in Andalucia, Cordoba is the most beautiful historic town in all of Spain, Cordoba is where the beautiful horses come from and the spectacular riders who are unparalleled in the world... It was very funny. We passed the Alcazar, a fortress that apparently was Party Central for The Inquisition. Our friend said, "You know 'The Inquisition'"? I found that kind of amusing. Uh yeah, I've heard of that. I said, "Si, yo soy judia".

He walked us through the whole lower historic district into the main touristy area, chattering in rapid-fire Spanish the entire time. We thanked him and shook his hand. As it turns out, La Sinagoga is only a small room that you can see in a few minutes. It's one of only three surviving medieval synagogues in Spain and the only one in the region of Andalucia. The only section is a small room with shards of Hebrew writing on the wall. It's near the Plaza de Maimonides, named for the famous Jewish scholar who was born in Cordoba in 1135. When Cordoba was under Islamic rule, there was a thriving Jewish community, but the Catholics put an end to that.

The main attraction in Cordoba is La Mezquita, called the Great Mosque of Cordoba, or the Cathedral of Cordoba, or the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. Tellingly, all the tourist information in the town itself reads: "the Cathedral (the former mosque)". (Incidentally, I'm spelling the word Cordoba incorrectly, without the accent mark over the first o. It's pronounced Cordoba, not Cordoba.)

We entered the courtyard filled with orange trees, where people were milling about. The Mezquita was closed, but we saw guards directing people to queue up at a side entrance, so we waited there, too. After a while, a wedding party emerged, many men and at least one woman in military dress, and the other women decked out in wedding-party clothes. When they had all exited, everyone rushed in - and ran to sit down in a chapel! We had been waiting in line for a mass! Guards were directing everyone to seats and saying, "No photo, no video" - in case tourists were trying to use the mass to get back-door admission to the site. What a hoot. I didn't want to sentado for the mass, so they made us leave.

So we went back to waiting in the patio area. On Sunday La Mezquita is only open to the public in the morning, then after 3:00 in the afternoon. There are a few other little things to see in town, including a small archeology museum, but the narrow streets are choked with people, it's very difficult to find anything and very easy to get lost, and we had the feeling it could take an hour to find something that would then take 10 minutes to see. After we waited a while, I suggested we go get something to eat.

* * * *

There are zillions of touristy eating places among the zillions of schlock souvenir stores, so we went off the main drag and found a tiny place with a handful of tables and a few men standing at the bar. There were no free tables, but an older man offered to drink his wine at the bar so we could sit down. He did this like it was no big deal, like he wasn't supposed to be sitting anyway.

We ordered a bunch of tapas and wine, and while we were eating, people started piling into the restaurant, speaking Spanish very loudly and jockeying for an inch of space at the bar. We thought it was crowded when we walked in! There were one or two other tables with tourists, but mostly the place was packed with locals.

These places are all lovely - very small, usually painted a dark blue or purple, with mosaic plates on the wall, posters of bullfighting or flamenco events, with tiny tables and little stools to sit on. Usually one person is behind the bar and one friendly server runs around like a maniac. We had olives, really good chorizos, little medallions of grilled beef in sizzling garlic oil, and garlickly potatoes that we couldn't even finish. Plus wine, of course. And I immediately wanted to go sleep. It all caught up with me and I was ready for bed. But it was time to see the Mezquita.

* * * *

The Mezquita was an ancient mosque that was taken over by the Catholics, who built a church right in the middle of the mosque, converting the minaret to a bell tower and plopping a cathedral nave at one end. Our guidebook pointedly mentions that the site was originally Christian, and that the Catholic takeover was re-establishing the church, but that is a bit disingenuous. There was a foundation of an early Christian church on the site, but that church was no longer in use when the mosque was built.

The famous and most defining feature of the building is the red-and-white terracotta arches - all 856 of them - a forest of arches that echo each other through the cavernous space (see here). But in smack in the middle of this beautiful space is a hulking altar complete with gory crucifixions, clumsy paintings of saints, and all manner of Catholic iconography. Around the perimeter of the space there are dozens of small chapels, all very gaudy and inelegant, in my opinion.

Besides the beautiful arches, the highlight of the space is the mihrab, a prayer niche facing Mecca, dating from the 10th century, with all or most of the Islamic decoration intact. Like what we saw at the Alhambra, there is stonework so intricate that it almost looks like lace, and elegant Arabic script used decoratively. Islam, like orthodox Judaism, takes seriously the "thou shalt have no graven image" commandment, so there are no representations of saints, no biblical scenes, no people - just words, shapes, and designs. In this space, the contrast could not be more obvious - every time you see people (saints, biblical characters), you know you're in the church.

I find it significant that all the official information refers to La Mezquita as a cathedral only. Spanish Muslims have repeatedly petitioned the Vatican to be allowed to worship again in the building, but the Church refuses. Some people act as if The Mezquita is a monument to coexistence, as if the mosque and the church share a space. But clearly, it is anything but. To me it feels like a desecration, and it's very sad. The space is beautiful, though, and very interesting.

* * * *

We drove out of Cordoba, back to the same sort of country we had seen in the morning - vast areas of rolling hills planted with orchards, as far as you can see, with a mountain range in the far distance. Every once in a while, you see a town nestled in a valley between two hills, or on a hilltop - white buildings with red roofs. We passed by several of these towns until we found our turnoff, and followed some windy roads up, up, up onto one of the hills, to the little village of Zuheros.

Zuheros' striking feature is a castle - actually a piece of a castle, all that's left of an Moorish stronghold from the 10th century, rebuilt by the Christians in the 14th - built directly into the rock. Behind it is a tiny white town, including several restaurants with views and at least one hotel. We drove up into the town on impossible narrow streets - much to Allan's dismay - and found the hotel. The desk person spoke so beautifully slowly in Spanish that I could understand every word. I wish everyone did that!

We walked around the little town a bit, mostly looking at the incredible view. It's obvious why a castle was built there. Now it overlooks mostly farmland and a few towns. In the near distance below, we could see goats being herded.

We had dinner at the hotel's restaurant. I was looking forward to a non-tapas dinner; as it turned out, this went in the complete opposite direction. For starters, Allan ordered a "selection of local goat's cheeses," that turned out to be a meal's worth of cheese, generous portions of six different varieties. I ordered a "local salad" - a composed salad of oranges, tuna, figs, salt cod, and some other strange things - that was also a meal. Then our main courses arrived: the sea bass I ordered turned out to be an entire fish, and I could eat only a few bites. It was kind of amusing, although I wish I could have taken it with me to eat as leftovers. Alas, no fridge or cooler.

The restaurant starts serving dinner at 8:00, and I think we got there at 8:45 or so. But of course, because at 3:00 or 4:00 everyone is eating tapas or having coffee and pastries. So by the time dinner ends, we're both tired and I'm completely collapsing from lack of sleep. Tomorrow is a driving, relaxing, and taking care of business-y things day.

Well, boys ‘n’ girls, it appears that Stevie has had a bad week. What does Stevie do when the going gets tough? He either runs and locks himself into the nearest toilet available or skips town.

Senategate has proven to be no different. When revelations surfaced regarding Porky Puffy Duffy’s 90 grand “gift” from . . . → Read More: A Few Questions Regarding Senate Gate, Some Thoughts and Why Is All Excused if You’re a Conservative?

Stephen Harper knows he's got rats in the Conservative pantry and it must be giving him fits trying to figure out just who they are.

Somebody is leaking a steady stream of information, documents and e-mails to Bob Fife of CTV about Mike Duffy, Pam Wallin and Nigel Wright and who knows what or whom might be still to come.

Mike Duffy has taken refuge in his Cavendish cottage in P.E.I. and is quick to summon the police to clear off nosy journalists.   Harper is apparently in Peru although he's expected back to face down the Tory caucus on Tuesday morning.

This sounds like a settling of scores, a nascent civil war within the Tory senate caucus.  Perhaps it is the old guard, Progressive Conservatives, taking their revenge on the Harper upstarts, the new guard.   After all, when you look at the casualties so far - Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin, not to mention Nigel Wright - they were all handpicked by the prime minister.

An infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the Kirby report on health care reform. This is not a sound argument for spending hundreds of millions of public dollars on monkeys with typewriters.

They're two soul-mates. Only difference is that Rob Ford can be fired. Mike Duffy is settled for life. He won a lottery and he did not even have to buy a lottery ticket, Stephen Harper handed him the prize.

Plenty of others have had loads to say about the scandal surrounding Stephen Harper, Nigel Wright, Mike Duffy and the Senate generally - with Wright's resignation today serving as just the latest chapter of a story with plenty left to be told. But I'll add a couple of notes to the mix.

First, I'm not sure some commentators (especially those thinking that "the cheque" is the real story) have noticed the significance of this juxtaposition of events:
A senior government official told Postmedia News on Thursday that Wright wrote a cheque to Duffy’s lawyer “in trust.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the sole stipulation for giving the money was “that it would be used to pay back taxpayers” and putting it in trust “was the best way to achieve this.”

However, Duffy also took out a loan from Royal Bank to cover the cost of repaying his Senate expenses, according to a Senate source with knowledge of the financial arrangement. On Wednesday, Duffy told CTV in an email that he dealt with the bank alone and Wright was not involved in that transaction.Now, to the extent that account is accurate, we can draw a couple of conclusions. First, the issue was seen as a formal one requiring the use of Duffy's lawyer rather than a personal cheque - as might be expected if the "just helping a friend" storyline were to hold up. And second, it means that there's a paper trail consisting not only of the cheque, but also of some sort of trust conditions placed on the payment of the money to Duffy's lawyer - and I wouldn't use the "sole stipulation" wording in the Cons' spin to rule out the possibility of another agreement beyond the trust conditions themselves. 

And what about the content of that agreement? Well, that's where the open question of Wright's ability to ensure a whitewash of the Senate's audit of Duffy's expenses come into play.

In effect, no one Senate leader would seem to have had the ability to guarantee the outcome of a report from the internal economy committee. Instead, Wright's payment seems to have been predicated on the assurance that a majority of that committee would take orders, rather than even questioning whether the Prime Minister's Office should be able to dictate the terms of the Senate's own proceedings.

Of course, that utterly warped sense of loyalty to Harper is far from new for his appointed senators. But it absolutely goes to the core of the Senate as an institution.

If an operator from the PMO can make - and keep - promises as to what Senate committee members will decide in policing their own members, then there's absolutely no credible argument to be made that the upper chamber is even pretending to function as an independent body. And so, abolish, abolish, abolish.