One fact there’s just no getting around for the New Conservatives is that we were rolling in money before they took over the government. Now we’re not. And no matter how they slice and dice their press releases on the economy, they can’t deny that they have spent a helluva lot of our money on their propaganda. And I’m talking about real live political party propaganda, not the usual government propaganda engaged in by other parties in power.

But here’s something interesting, the retired judge, Frank Iacobucci, who now has more power than Parliament (speaking of Reform Party principles, such as they are) stands to make $4,000/day according to the terms of reference (such as they are) for his gig as King of Ottawa. And the aforementioned terms of reference are designed to take the good judge on a very slow ride to nowhere, because, as we all know, the New Conservatives are so guilty that they absolutely cannot afford to have the truth come to light.

No matter. With our money at their disposal, they can afford to keep the lie going as long as they’re in office. And they will because they don’t give a rat’s ass about our money. That’s because New Conservatives know there are more of us than there are of them, which means that government money is really enemy money.

We’ve put the fox in charge of the hen house, fellow farmers.

Apparently, when White People kill, other White People call it “snapping”. And also, it’s not their fault when White People kill, it’s someone else’s fault. Oh, and words DO hurt, they hurt White People. If they didn’t, White People wouldn’t kill. Er, I mean, “snap”.

Indeed, such is the perceived wisdom of the White People of Alberta in response to a recent murder/suicide in Edmonton which seems to have the White People on “Free Dominion” (a forum for White People who believe in free speech for White People) suggesting that the rest of us need to learn a lesson about the harm words can do to White People. Please read the comment below by one of the White People who run “Free Dominion” (which I believe refers to a Canada of the past and future, but not the present, where White People are in charge of EVERYTHING). The last line is my favourite:

So, it sounds like most people who actually knew him thought the shooter was a pretty normal guy. However, someone decided he was a “racist”, and he was suspended from his job and his reputation was ruined. Then they wonder why the guy snapped and started shooting people! Well, all I can say is that I’m surprised that more victims of the “racist” witch hunt haven’t done similar things. Punishing people for their political beliefs is a lose-lose proposition. It does nothing to eliminate hate (it increases it), and, every once in awhile, the wrong guy is put in the position where he feels he has nothing left to lose. I would like to think that people might learn something from this tragedy, but I don’t really see it happening.

Could someone, perhaps a backroom boy, tell Michael Ignatieff that he’s wearing his pants too high? I mean, c’mon - grow a set, you good-for-nothing fluffers. I once told a friend – a friend, no less - that, unless she shaved her big old hairy socialist legs, or ditched the Leslie the Lesbian sundress she was planning to wear door-to-door in Forest Hill (a clingin’ to old money like grim death Progressive Conservative area of Toronto) and wore a suit, I wouldn’t lift a finger in her campaign to defeat Barbara MacDougall.

She wouldn’t, I didn’t, and Barbara MacDougall won. Probably because she had the good sense to keep her grating cowbell of a yap shut at the door and just silently hand her constituents pamphlets of herself surrounded by clean cut staffers on Parliament Hill wearing private school boy blazers and grey flannels and looking every bit as gay as their own useless twit sons and daughters.

And I did nothing because the niqab is an instrument of oppression used to dehumanize women in countries where women don’t have the right to an education, to not be raped in their own homes, to feel the sun on their faces, let alone receive second language training at taxpayer expense.

But boy oh boy, some of us Feminists are really getting it from all sides on our niqabism. Particularly from men, whether they be libertarian anarchist unibombers or leftwing labour activist dutch-treaters or rightwing corporate boot and ass polishers. All on account of how we aren’t exactly rushing to protect the niqab wearing rights of our Muslim Canadian sisters against niqabist government rulings that pretty much tell the good ladies to go back where they came from if they want to wear  niqabs.

Personally, I think Feminists should tell men of all political stripes to just sod fucking off on women’s rights issues, anyway. I mean, let’s face it – they’re men. Even the rightwing corporate boot and ass polishers. Or, at least, they’re almost like men if you squint and plug your ears. And none of them give a shit about women’s rights, you know. They just want to be seen to be giving a shit in hopes of getting laid. Or something. Whatever. They’ve got lots of shit to give because they’re full of it. I mean, it’s all really just academic to them, isn’t it. Neither here, nor there, as evidenced by their comparison of a handful of fundamentalists insisting on the right to wear, in public buildings, a symbol of oppression that offends many women, to other such hard won fashion rights as the right to wear pants. And vote.

Well, you’re not going to get lucky with me, pal. But please, go to Afghanistan and tell the women there all about your support for women’s fashion rights here in Canada. You never know. They might have had worse offers.

You know who I hate? Stupid people who get paid to do work that I do for free.

Take paid pundits, for instance – please. The other night, on CBC, our taxpayer-funded network, I witnessed an interview between Mark Kelly and a man so stupid I’m amazed he could walk upright. His last name was Velk and he is a professor somewhere out in Canadaland. The topic was “Torture” and whether or not it could be justified under certain circumstances.

Subtitled: “Wtf?!”

Uh… look… tax-payer funded network… I’m no professor, but torture, by definition, is wrong. Therefore, it can’t be justified under any circumstance. You may think you can justify it, even when the certain circumstances you are claiming make it necessary are in no way present (like in Afghanistan), but you can’t actually justify it. You’ve simply convinced yourself and others that something wrong, isn’t.

But back to a man so stupid he managed to out stupid the stupid argument above by arguing that torture could actually be a good thing. Like, say, if “bad guys” (i.e. the tortured) had a nuclear weapon that they were planning to detonate, but only torture would force them to reveal to us (i.e. the good guy torturers) where the detonation device was hidden, then torture would save innocent lives and we’d all live happily ever after.

Then he abandoned this Hollywood scenario to make a bizarre comparion between a kind of torture used by the Japanese during the war that sounded suspiciously not like torture at all but like murder, and the sort of torture we are talking about in the Afghan detainee situation which is apparently not torture at all but rather something he referred to as ”holy book mockery”.

I mean, he was unbelievably, incredibly, unbearably stupid and yet still he babbled forth in that insufferably smug way that especially stupid pundits can, with Mark Kelly grimacing painfully and bracing himself for the torrent of stupid that would inevitably follow his next question. Alas, which was not: “Why am I interviewing you, the stupidest man on earth, about one of the worst moral failings by our government in our nation’s history?”

I have an obsession with time lately. As in, time remaining, and I’m having a hard time justifying spending any of it working – for money, that is. I have no trouble justifying to myself the work I do for free. Free work is very fulfilling. Work for money is banal and stupid. Beyond meaningless, really. It’s inexcusable.

But I have no idea how to make money without working for it. Which is why I don’t understand how other people can have such an appreciation for capitalism. My experience with capitalism is this: unless you’re born into money (alas, no), you have to find some way to make money. And unless you find something to do for money that you’d do for free, you’re going to be spending a large chunk of your life trading time for money. The older you get, the less attractive the trade-off – especially when the evidence is in that only a chump works for money. I mean, let’s face it. Unless you own the mine, you’re just feeding the beast.

And if you own the mine, you are the beast.

So, the New Conservative Government of Canada is pretty obviously guilty of knowingly handing over Afghan detainees to a third party that it knew had tortured Afghan detainees that it had handed over at one time or another. Which means that it’s also guilty of lying about what it knew and when. That it went on to attempt to silence a whistle-blower on the whole affair is a third offence and a perhaps the most significant one, to my mind. The fourth offence would have to be the ongoing obstruction of justice in preventing the truth from becoming known to the Canadian public about what the government knew and when regarding the Afghan detainee torture issue.

What’s interesting is that so many Conservatives and Conservative pundits have pretty much admitted to the Canadian media that the first offence is true, because they then go on to rationalize why it shouldn’t matter that it is. They do this in much the same way that every offence by the New Conservative Government of Canada is rationalized - that someone else has a lower bar and therefore the only way “we” can possibly compete is to lower our standards to meet it. It’s the same argument so-called fiscal Conservatives will use to justify free trade deals with countries like Columbia, or union busting for Vale Inco, or allowing industry to dictate the environmental agenda, or selling asbestos to India.

We appear to have thugs running the government and their Conservative supporters throwing up their hands to say, “Well, if we didn’t have thugs running our government, how would we compete with countries that do?”

Canadians need reminding that to have a decent standard of living we need to have decent standards.

Why do people want to die in their sleep? I have to ask because I want to know the dreams other people are having that I’m not having that they’d want to die during one of them. I mean, seriously. I have a variation on one of the following dreams every night.

 I’m at a crowded party, making merry in the living room, the total center of attention, when I realize I have to go to the bathroom. Then I notice a toilet in the middle of the dance floor. So I take off all my clothes and sit on the toilet. I don’t know why I take off all my clothes, but the point is I’m in the middle of a crowded party sitting naked on a toilet. And I keep sitting there, with people coming and going all around me, because I can’t seem to pee. And I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable because I’m the only naked person at the party sitting on a toilet in the middle of the dance floor trying to go pee and not having any success at all.

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m a hideous teenager at home in Sault Ste. Marie playing chess with my brother. All of a sudden I realize I forgot to buy any Christmas presents. I look at the clock and it’s after store closing time. If the dream just ended there it wouldn’t be so bad, but no – I decide to head out in the blizzard which has just started to look for a convenience store that might, just might, still be open – in bare feet. Lo and behold, I find a convenience store open but it’s Charlie’s which is the store just up the street from our house except in my dream it’s out in the middle of nowhere and I’m stranded there, the buses having stopped running hours ago, in my bare feet, in a blizzard. That’s when I notice the escaped serial killer working behind the counter.

I’m back at university, living in residence, yukking it up in the common room when someone comes in and says, “Could you keep it down, please? I’m studying for my Economics exam tomorrow.” Which is when I realize that the Economics exam is tomorrow and I haven’t attended any classes and I have no idea what Economics even is but I give it the old college try anyway and start studying except that the next day I sleep in until 9:00, which is when the exam is starting, and then I can’t find the building where the exam is being held and by the time I finally find it, I’ve got ten minutes to write a three hour exam and it takes me ten minutes just to read the first question and then I realize instead of studying Economics last night I studied French.

There’s a tornado on the horizon so I decide I should get playtime in before it hits so I take my kids to the edge of a cliff to play while I go off into the woods to make sure there aren’t any bears nearby. Partway into the woods I realize I’m naked and covered in honey. Then I see a baby black bear and give it a little playful kick to nudge it out of my way. Just before the mother bear comes out from behind the tree where she’s been watching and hiding all this time, I look towards the cliff and see the terrible mistake I’ve made in leaving the kids alone to play right by the edge.

I’m living in Toronto with my boyfriend. It’s the 80s.  He’s out-of-town at a conference so I go out and get really drunk and pick up a great guy, the best guy ever, and I bring him home and I’m having sex with him in my boyfriend’s apartment and we’re planning a wonderful future together and he knows a terrific girl who could be my old boyfriend’s new girlfriend so everybody will live happily everafter when my boyfriend shows up “surprise!” from his conference that ended early and when I turn around my great guy has reverted back to being a dirty old hobo with rotten teeth.

 Or wait… nevermind that last one.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a joke that pretty much sums up how I feel about the die-in-our-sleepers: “When I go, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my Uncle Pete – not screaming in terror like his passengers”.

As a Feminist, I do enjoy watching the New Conservative Government of Canada aggressively defend the idea that a decision by a retired judge (i.e. the courts) should take precedence over the will of Parliament (i.e. elected officials). Finally, we can all take a breather from the fight to ensure that abortion is not re-criminalized. You know, since the courts decided quite some time ago that it shouldn’t be.

Ah, the tangled web of deceit. New Conservatives twisting and bending like so many big soft pretzels. Department of Justice officials, as in, public servants, threatening other public servants against telling what they know to Parliament. Who knows? Maybe Judge Iacobucci will call the government to account and it will be found guilty of lying about what it knew when regarding the Afghan detainee situation. And whether he does or doesn’t, there will always be their smear job on the whistle-blower of the whole affair to remind us of who these New Conservatives really be.

Unrelated Addendum: What kind of latte sipping elitist takes a government jet to attend his own photo op at a Tim Hortons? Why a New Conservative latte sipping elitist, of course – Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty.

It’s a beautiful day in March, but I have no desire to go outside. I woke up feeling burdened by a lack of purpose. My lower back aches, my stomach is unsettled and I have no energy. I was kept awake all last night by the transgendered asshole who lives above me. She was moving furniture around. There’s nothing to be done about it. Complaining is a waste of time since she has no consideration for others and is a pathological liar. The idiot landlord would seem to have made her some kind of superintendant of the building, such as it is, too. I dislike my landlord. He’s a cheapskate. He’s also a millionaire, of course.

His judgment is terrible. I’d really like to move, but to where? Ottawa rents and housing prices are geared to senior civil servant salaries. Like everything in this corrupt and crumbling capital city.

Also, I have a meaningless job that pays decently. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, to be honest. So I’m having trouble going in to do it every day on account of the meaninglessness, but I’m having trouble making a decision to quit it, too, on account of it’s the best job I’ve ever had.

So, to get some inspiration from others who seem to be having more fun than I am, I decided to check out the blogs of a handful of Conservative women bloggers I happen to know about. I do this on occassion because I enjoy reading the approaches to life by people different from myself. The ones I like best are the single, childless Conservative women bloggers who have made themselves famous for speaking out on how other women should live their lives – which is to get married and have children. And then both stay married and stay home with children. They advise women to do this while still young.

I got married and had children and stayed home with them. To be honest, I couldn’t have conceived of doing anything else. But my reason wasn’t so much because I wanted to be a homemaker as that I didn’t trust anybody else to love my children as much as I did. Also, I’m a little bit paranoid (see any entry on Sooey Says) and didn’t trust myself not to spend my coffe breaks and lunch hours lurking outside a caregiver’s house. After a while, I really took to homemaking, too. Although I didn’t ever really take to marriage. I was older, though, so maybe that was the problem.

Or maybe the do-it-when-you’re young advice is just some sort of dating survival instinct. Certainly roping a man off from the herd is easier with the competition stuck at home with kids. But I also like the honesty of Conservative women bloggers, which I find refreshing, in admitting that they don’t care about anybody other than themselves. That may be a product of not having children (the honesty) or it could be the reason why they don’t have children to begin with. There’s a character in The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, named Xenia, who is supposedly modelled after Barbara Amiel, who says to another character, who would seem to be modelled after any and every Feminist on the left, “Fuck the third world”, in response to a lament about injustice. The Feminist character on the left gets a vicarious thrill just from hearing someone say something so honest. It’s like that with me and Conservative women bloggers, I guess.

To be liked, or not to be liked, that is the question. Because when you do what you want, and clearly I’m not doing what I want or I wouldn’t have the blahs, is to risk not being liked – if you’re a woman. And that’s a fact. What’s also a fact is that the whole world conspires to prevent women from doing what they want. I did what I wanted once. I know. The funny thing is, most people thought I was leading with my heart when in fact I was leading with my head. My heart kept me married. It was my head that got me out.

I still consider that an accomplishment, leaving my marriage, a positive as opposed to a negative. And I mean that – honest – because I went from wishing my husband would be run over by a bus, to wishing him a long and happy life.

Ah happiness. Now there’s something worth pursuing.

Another thing I find interesting about Conservative women bloggers is that they think having children is selfless. I suppose they think that because they think themselves to be selfish because they decided not to have children and to have fun instead. (Not that one can’t have both, but most of us who have children have them because we don’t know how to have fun anyway and we figure we may as well get something out of marriage. Okay, that may just be me.) Still, any parent who claims to have had kids through a selfless desire to yaddayaddablahblah, is either a liar or so self-deluded that they should be watched very carefully around liquor and medicine cabinets. People have kids because they want kids. There are a variety of reasons for wanting kids, but none of them are selfless. Of course, having kids turns you into an incredible liar, too, so don’t expect to hear that from any other parents.

I know, I know – but if parents are such incredible liars, why should we believe you, Sooey? Whatever. Don’t. I don’t care. Fuck you.

So yeah, back to the blahs and how I try to kick them when they start winning. Another thing I admire about Conservative women bloggers is that they seem to be very successful in pursuing their writing/punditry dreams. And not to be mean, but I don’t think they’re doing it on talent, either. They’re doing it on nerve, nerve and self-confidence. Which makes me envy them even more.

What’s kind of unfair in terms of genetics is that I have an older sister who had an art show in a gallery on Queen Street West in Toronto – and she can’t even draw. I mean, that would stop me from trying to make a living as an artist right there, a complete lack of drawing ability. But not my sister. She calls herself an artist, therefore, she is one. And she didn’t waste much of her life working in offices doing jobs she couldn’t care less about, like I have. She sleeps in, smokes dope AND she got married and had kids. AND she’s an artist. She spends her life in creative pursuits. Stoned. And very satisfied with herself and her life.

Even better? She gets to be the black sheep of the family because we come from a long line of Scottish Presbyterians. Work hard. Then die. No one cares if you’re happy or not. Put your money in the bank and keep it there. Which means she doesn’t have to answer to anyone about anything. She just does whatever and ignores the tsktsking.

Gawd it’d be nice to be able to throw out all that bullshit we start collecting almost the minute we’re born, what’s not already bred in the bone, of course – preconception preconceptions - and start fresh. At the very least it would be nice to rise above it, to accept that working, unless you like what you do, is a kind of insanity, really. It’s not responsible, it’s stupid. It’s not setting a good example or being a good role model, it’s not even a whole lot different than being a suicide bomber, if you really stop and think about it. Make money to appease the ghost of John Knox, fly a plane into the twin towers for allah.

Or get a paypal button and be a Conservative woman blogger.

The rambling blahs. That’s what I’ve got to show for myself.