Rick Hillier, Hamid Karzai, Stephen Harper, Dick Cheney, the CIA and NATO

I have more "dots" for those who truly have any interested educating themselves.

The news seems to suggest Hillier did not retire, but was squeezed out
by Harper who did not like Hillier stealing the limelight. No one is going to steal The Harper's great thunder!! No way!! and he's got the powers that be totally behind his corrupt little agenda - for now.

I've posted comment often on Linda McQuaig's book Holding the Bully's Coat.

Rick Hillier is a deeply evil man with extraordinarily advanced skills at selling an illegal war whose main purpose was to raised a trillion a
year for corrupt officials and military people and the armaments industry. He's more "compromised" than even General Patreaus.

This (fill in the blank yourself) Hillier must take a huge share of the blame for building Afghanistan up from non-existent to #1 world's heroin exporter -- a trillion dollars a year. 90% of the Karzai economy is based on heroin.

Hillier could easily have put a stop to it.

Many hope that Revenue Canada follows this drug lord like a hawk for the rest of his life. We hope that if he ever spends a penny of that heroin money I want him locked up for life.

Why? Because he acted as hit man for the planet's biggest heroin
dealer, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Well if you still want to think that the Afghan war is about fighting for freedom and democracy, go ahead. By looking the other way you help the abuse exist - abuse that mainly falls on the heads of innocent women and children - orphans, wives of the maimed, the girls who are sold to make marriages to old men, young children being held in detention, children now forced into cities to beg, women who cry day and night ..

If you think places like Bagram should exist and Rendition take place - well, I reproach you.

If you think Canada is a bastion of freedom and democracy, I implore you to take a deeper look.

If you think there aren't gigantic offshore accounts for all these corrupt officials and the official drug dealers, then I point out you are in denial and it is SO.

Canoe.caMaxime-um damage
TheChronicleHerald.ca, Canada - 12 hours ago
If the Canadian foreign minister wanted to persuade President Hamid Karzai to replace the governor of Kandahar province, he certainly blew the sensitive ...
Afghan tribal leaders welcome Harper's pledge not to meddle Toronto Star
Karzai should replace Kandahar governor: BernieICTV.ca


I ran across these ever so enlightening urls while looking for a pic of Hamid Karzai

http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/july2007newsletter.html

http://www.afghanemb-canada.net/en/news_bulletin/2006/march/20/index.php

This is my most favorite line of all!! --

American policy may sometimes be unsubtle and overly militarized, but large portions of the European political spectrum remain maddeningly passive. It's a failing that reverberates well beyond Afghanistan. On Darfur, today's most serious humanitarian crisis, Europe has been even more disengaged and timid than the United States. Afghanistan is as good a place as any for Europe to start backing its sensibilities with some mettle.

David Bosco is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

See those human rights activists in socialist EU countries are to blame for ALL the genocide.

Get it?

When the RCMP raided the Conservative Party offices

and I heard the news while standing in line at the bank, I was a bit stunned, then I was quite happy.

I thought, hey! Perhaps our buddy Stevikins is gonna take a big fat fall.

Was it the Postal Inspectors were gonna pin him on the rap that he is using government money to put out endless ads to swiftboat Stephane Dion, at last ??

That would be good, as that's clearly a criminal activity and such a thing would make Stephane Dion look better.

Then I thought - well, maybe they figured out that the Conservative Party is using their blackberries on a CPC account to do their dirty business, just like the rePUGs. I mean it is possible that he's learned how the BuZhCo boyZ do buZiness and got caught by the RCMP.

But that seemed a bit, um, pushing it.

So here we have the goods - it's not even over the fact that the CPC tried to bribe a man to be a candidate for $1 million dollars to keep a riding - it's THIS:

RCMP raids Tory office for election file

GLORIA GALLOWAYAND CAMPBELL CLARK

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

April 15, 2008 at 9:45 PM EDT

OTTAWA — RCMP officers raided Conservative Party headquarters in downtown Ottawa yesterday to execute a search warrant requested by Election Commissioner William Corbett.

The police worked behind closed doors of the 12th-floor suite and at a mailroom on another floor. They were searching for information related to Mr. Corbett's investigation into whether dozens of Tory candidates improperly claimed advertising expenses that should have been declared by the national party.

At one point, an Elections Canada inspector emerged with a large portfolio of what he would describe only as “various documents” before escaping to an elevator.

It was a trying episode for a party that campaigned on a promise to clean up the corruption of the Liberal government that preceded it.

Enlarge Image

An Elections Canada sign is reflected in an office window in Toronto in this file photo. (The Canadian Press)

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper fired back with a counterattack against Mr. Corbett and Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand, who is being sued by the representatives of the candidates for failing to reimburse those expenses – a suit launched after Mr. Corbett opened his investigation.

“The Conservative Party initiated court action against Elections Canada some time ago on the advertising issue,” Mr. Harper told Parliament during the daily Question Period yesterday.

“I also would observe that tomorrow Elections Canada officials were scheduled to be examined by lawyers from the Conservative Party. While today's actions may or may not delay that somewhat, we remain extremely confident in our legal position.”

As Elections Commissioner, Mr. Corbett is supposed to exercise his investigatory powers at arms-length from the Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Mayrand, who oversees the administration of elections. The allegation that Mr. Corbett obtained a search warrant to influence the Conservatives' lawsuit amounts to a charge that he abused his powers.

Conservative officials would not speak on the record, but called reporters to point out, anonymously, that it was peculiar that the raid occurred a day before the deposition of party officials in the civil matter.

One of them said the police action underlines the party's long-held contention that Elections Canada's case against the party was weak.

Another said the Elections Commissioner had obtained the warrant to apply pressure against the Tories in their lawsuit against the Chief Electoral Officer.

“They may be scared of their case in court,” said the Conservative official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The Conservative Party sees this as a PR stunt and a tactic of intimidation.”

The Conservative official also said that Elections Canada has applied the law unevenly from party to party. The Federal Court recently rejected the party's attempts to file new material to make that case in court, after Elections Canada officials argued they were red herrings that were not similar to the Conservatives' case.

Both Mr. Corbett and Mr. Mayrand were appointed during the Conservatives' term in office.

Neither Mr. Corbett nor Mr. Mayrand would comment on the allegations made by Conservative officials yesterday.

The party issued a terse release mid-afternoon that said: “Today Elections Canada visited the Conservative Party of Canada Headquarters. This is related to an ongoing court case initiated by the Conservative Party of Canada in the spring of 2007. The Conservative Party has provided Elections Canada with all the information that they have requested.”

But Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said the Prime Minister and his party are muddying the waters by suggesting that the raid is related to the civil suit and not the Elections Commissioner's investigation.

“The Prime Minister is confusing two things: the civil lawsuit of the Conservative Party toward Elections Canada and the quasi-criminal inquiry of the commissioner about the Conservative Party. And it is this one that is involved,” Mr. Dion told reporters.

“I think all Canadians will be concerned by the fact that the government is not co-operating to the point that the commissioner had no other choice in order to fulfill his own responsibilities, his legal responsibilities, than to call the RCMP.”

Conservative officials, including government House Leader Peter Van Loan responded that they had co-operated fully with the investigation.

In what has become known as the “in and out” scheme, the Conservative Party transferred up to $50,000 to individual candidates who, in turn, gave the money back to the party for ads created at the national campaign headquarters.

If the TV and radio ads in question were in fact national in nature, the cash-flushed Conservatives surpassed the $18.3-million legal election-spending limit by more $1.2-million.

“I'm not surprised at all,” said Jean Landry, the Conservative Party candidate in the Quebec riding of Richmond-Arthabaska in the last election, whose campaign was audited by Elections Canada. “The truth will come out one day, and justice will follow its course.

“I swear on the Bible that I never received that money for local expenses. It was for the national [campaign], not for me. The money returned automatically into the Conservative Party account.”

The issue was first brought to public attention last August and the opposition has asked that the alleged scheme be investigated by the Commons Procedures and House Affairs Committee. The Conservative members of that committee responded with a filibuster that has gone on since early last fall.

The opposition members eventually replaced Gary Goodyear, the Conservative chairman, with Joe Preston, another Conservative MP. But Mr. Preston resigned from that job last week.

With a report from Omar El Akkad in Ottawa

Comment:

People losing their jobs!
People losing their homes!
Gasoline and Food prices escalating every day !
And we should care about advertising expenses !

Instead of dealing with REAL problems, Canada continues on the same old, the same old - politics AS PER USUAL

Nobody remembers we pay their stoopid salaries.

Two from the Garth Turner blog .. (man, I detest neocons)

Conservatives Attempting To Influence Media Messages

Sinister Attack On Canadian Democracy: Thought Control

Website has numbers of call-in shows, newspapers and primer on what to say

The Toronto Star
Allan Woods
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA–The federal Conservatives have created electronic tip sheets to surreptitiously push Conservative “ideals” and the party message in the media.

On various issues and the “supposedly correct way of viewing the world and all things” individuals can log on to the official Tory website to get a list of contacts for local newspapers and call-in shows to push the right-wing agenda.

“Tired of hearing the vested interests of liberal thinkers getting their messages out?” reads the website. “Call in to a show yourself and fight back!”

The Tory program, called “myCampaign,” tells individuals to enter their postal code and an area of interest. A sample query using the Star’s postal code offers six call-in shows with the time slot and telephone number and a list of Conservative “talking points”.

The new strategy also counsels individuals to turn down the radio once they get on the air, speak slowly and be ready for a provocative, interruptive host.

“Stay conversational – do your best to have a conversation with the talk show host instead of just reading your notes on the radio.”

This sort of surreptitious practice has been condemned as sinister and anti-democratic.

“It’s like we’re now living in communist Russia or China”,

one reader states.

Dear idiots

Well, you have to admire one thing about the Harper Conservatives. They don’t quit. But they also think voters are idiots.

This may explain a couple of things. For example, if you’re like me – and my neighbours, and everyone else I run into – you’ve received fistfuls of Harper flyers with pictures of Stephane Dion looking like a dork. On the way from the mailbox to the blue box, they tell you that Liberals will raise the GST, end the child care cheques, spend the country into oblivion and let criminals run amok.

As I detailed a week or two ago, the Conservatives have taken the free mailing and constituent communications privileges of MPs, lumped them together for a whole caucus, and pumped out more than 30,000,000 pieces of direct mail in the last few months alone. They are now burning through more than $3 million a year (taxpayer dough) printing and distributing these standardized pieces of party propaganda, stamping MPs’ names on them, and sending them to landfills everywhere.

Is this legal? No. Er, yes. Well, it might be until someone outside of the system has the guts to challenge what’s become a massive abuse of House of Commons rules.

Fortunately, a few such souls exist – proud Canada Post employees who have to haul this crud around with forklifts and then dauntingly distribute it home, by home by home. In the last few days some of them have said enough, already. They have provided me with documented and verified proof the mail-crazed Tories have exceeded the legal limit for MPs poop-o-grams by a factor of four. In substations where the sitting Liberal or NDP member is allowed to send out, say 7,000 pieces, the Conservative mailers have arrived in quantities of more than 27,000. Every week.

The rules governing who can send what, where, and into ridings held by MPs of other parties are complicated but – trust me on this (when have you not?) – these guidelines are now so much road kill on the Harper Highway to sustained power. Most galling is the fact that every single one of those thirty million pieces cost the Conservative Party of Canada nothing. You paid for the outright lies claiming Liberals will raise taxes, cut programs and ruin the country. Maybe you should sue.

On a related note, Tories think journalists are idiots, too.

How else to explain this? The “My Campaign” section of the Conservative Party web site gives you all the tools you need to trick editors and deceive talk show hosts. Whack in your postal code, and out pops a list of newspapers to send a letter-to-the-editor to, and radio shows to call. You can also dial up a set of talking points to go on-air with, or a sample letter for the dummy who publishes the paper. You, too, can get in the fun of distorting the truth and watching the MSM slop it up.

Like I said, the Harper Conservatives never quit. It’s not like they have, you know, ethics.

posted by Garth Turner on 03.25.08 @ 9:38 pm