LIVESTOCK REPORT

1. "They are so pretty and so cute and they talk to you and follow you around," gushed Heather Havens.

The question we have to ask, of course, is..."Heather Havens?" Is that a made-up name? Or dare I ask, a "nom de PLUME???"

Heather is talking about her favorite hens, Zilla and Cheeks, whom she keeps in her Surrey backyard.

Heather is understandably all a-cluck with delight at the motion passed by Vancouver City council last week to legalize Z & C and all their feathered cousins and uncles and aunts.

The motion by the way was made by new council member, Andrea Reimer. Is this what you ran for civic office for, Andrea?

But enough about Andrea. Let's go back to the continuing adventures of The Loneliness of Heather.

Ms. Havens said keeping chicken isn't about saving money.

"You find yourself making excuses to go out and be with them," she said. "You bring them a treat, or check for eggs, but really, they are just nice to be around."

You cannot write material like this. It shows up once or twice in a lifetime.

2. Headline:

Saskatchewan farmers battle infestation of insidious boars

You see, there is some advantage to spelling.

At first, I looked at this banner and thought, "My god, what are all those politicians doing out in the middle of the prairie in this miserable weather. I know Larry Campbell has a family farm in that neck of the woods, but how did he persuade those other "insidious bores" to come along with him?"

But then...boars...b-o-a-r-s...

Oh. That's different.

Never mind.

INVITE

THE MEXICAN DRUG WARS ARE BEING PLAYED OUT ON VANCOUVER STREETS. WILL DRUG LEGALIZATIONS STOP THE GUNFIRE?

RESOLVED: LEGALIZE DRUGS, END GANG VIOLENCE

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Event details

7:30 – 9:00pm Vancouver Public Library, Downown Branch, Robson & Homer

Alice Mackay Room, Downtairs

Arguing the AFFIRMATIVE: Kirk Tousaw, Barrister, & Chairman, BC Civil Liberties Association Drug Policy Committee

Kirk is barrister and social justice advocate based in Vancouver, BC. He operates his own law practice, focusing primarily on criminal and constitutional litigation, and is also an associate of Conroy & Company, Barristers and Solicitors based in Abbotsford, BC. Kirk began practicing law in 1998 in the United States and has a background in business litigation, criminal defence and social justice advocacy pursuant to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He has been a practicing member of the Law Society of British Columbia since 2005.

Academically, Kirk holds a Bachelor’s of Art in political philosophy (Michigan State University) a Juris Doctor, cum laude (Wayne State University School of Law) and a Master’s in Law (University of British Columbia Faculty of Law). Kirk has completed two years of doctoral studies at the UBC Faculty of Law and is presently awaiting the opportunity to return to his studies and obtain the degree.

Kirk and his wife Debbie are parents to three wonderful children, Kaya (age 8), Caiden (age 3) and Oaklen (age 2). Kirk is active in the community, volunteering as the Chair of the Drug Policy Committee of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and is a member of that Association’s Board of Directors. Kirk is a member of the NDP Executive of both the federal riding of Vancouver-Quadra and the provincial riding of Vancouver-Quilchena.

Kirk has written and spoken extensively on issues related to drug policy, privacy, religious freedom and criminal justice policy. In addition, Kirk has had the privilege of testifying several times before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights of the House of Commons and also before the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.

Arguing the NEGATIVE: Barry Joneson, Recovered Addict, www.pacificlabour.com

Moderator: David Berner

HEALING COSTS

A "native healing centre" may or may not be the best thing to ever happen to rehabilitation, criminal justice and addiction in this province. But it sure can't hurt.

This is a 44-week residential treatment program that was supposed to open last fall at Centre Creek, a former youth detention camp near Chilliwack.

Let me tell you up front from 10 years of personal experience that, if well run, a 44-week residential program is exactly what so many addicted people need. Yes, it will turn people around and it will save lives.

But wait.

Enter, walking backwards and in silence, Tom Christensen, the worst Minister of Children and Families this province has ever tolerated. (The really good news is that he has announced he will not run again in May.)

So the program that was to begin last year will not open until...well...your guess is as good as mine.

But hey. What's the hurry?

Young men and women are dying and stoning and committing suicide and especially in our native communities.

Why should that move the good Minister and his UberBoss, the Olympic King, the do anything, like provide the operating dollars to start the work that will save lives?

The monies are a few million.

Olympic lunch.

AVALANCHE

What sympathies am I meant to have for grown men who ski out of bounds and die in the snow?

What stretch of Christian charity should we find for people who climb under ropes and move past sign after sign warning of the dangers?

I am small and limited.

THE ECONOMY

The news from India is truly horrifying.

At least 500,000 people have lost their jobs in recent weeks and the number could approach 2 million.

To make matters worse, there are no social safety nets.

A woman who worked 8 1/2 hours a day, six days a week earned $77 a month.

That is gone and she cannot buy buy milk and bread for her children.

As grim as things may be here in Canada, do we have any sense of how fortunate we are to be here and not in so many other places?

It must be frightening and frustrating and for Indian people living in Canada to know that their friends and families and country men, women and children are facing such dire hardships.

Investment wizard, billionaire and advisor to President Obama, Warren Buffet says succinctly "the economy has fallen off a cliff."

Asia Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda declared "This is by far the most serious crisis to hit the world economy since the Great Depression."

Hang onto your hats. Pray. Walk without a Walkman or an mp3 and notice your world. Enjoy simple gifts and pleasures. Turn to one another.

The coming few years will present enormous challenges. Individually and collectively we will need clarity and purpose and understanding of the basics.

BAIL MONEY

I've been thinking about government bail-outs of the auto manufacturers, which now, on both sides of the border, runs in the many billions of taxpayer dollars.

(I'm not sure yet what I think about similar bail-outs of banks -except for a natural disgust, of course - so perhaps more on that on another day. For the moment, I'll just add that to my list of reasons for being happy I am a Canadian and not otherwise.)

It seems very clear to me that the car companies as they are currently structured and focused are history.

The so-called Big Three have been making trashy products that not one person I know buys. The only place I ever see these products are on rental lots.

It is all well and good that the unions have made concessions and taken pay roll-backs to help these misguided corporations seize more of our money. But that is hardly the answer.

If Obama and Harper are so determined to save these industries, then why not ask for real change?

We'll bail-out your sorry butts if:

You start making electric cars today.

You make small cars like the Smart Car.

You take the plans and tool-ups for all your SUV's and turn them into nuclear waste.

Trucks will be built and sold to truckers, not re-designed as passenger vehicles and made exempt from pollution restrictions.

Every American preisdent and every American presidential candidate for ages has blathered on about the necessity for "freeing ourselves from the addiction to foreign oil supplies."

So?

Go ahead. Free yourself.

Go electric.

Go small.

Go You-Know-What until you can come up with real valid reasons for taxpayers to shore up these doomed and completely out-of-touch businesses.

Bang!

With another shooting early this morning, it is clear that Vancouver area newspapers, struggling to remake themselves in the hope of survival, will have to begin every day with a new category:

THE DAILY SHOOT

This is where rookie reporters will pay their dues and get their stripes.

The next section of the remade papers will have to be something like:

DAILY GOVERNMENT PROMISE OF ACTION

Oh My - This is Goooood

COOPED UP - Pooped Out

It is now legal to keep chickens in your back yard in the City of Vancouver.

This is what your City Council is up to these days.

And they did it all without Kim Capri.

Can you say, "RATS!' boys and girls?

Vermin, stink, guano, foxes, coyotes, raccoons...

Sometimes you read things or hear abut them in the grocery store and you think, "No, that can't be. Who would do something that idiotic?"

So you dismiss the whole idea for a day or two and finally you go back and do the research, and, yes, they really did it.

Vancouver city council voted unanimously Thursday to change city bylaws to legalize the keeping of urban hens.

I will never run for office.

But if I was in council on the day such a nincompoop notion was raised I would squawk, "SHUT UP! GET OUT! We have serious business to do here."

This a city.

Or an approximation of one. A facsimile. We try to be a city.

In real cities, people don't even have lawns. They have parks and commons.

Chickens are for farms.

I buy my already slaughtered chicken at Safeway. After I do some things to it over a fire we like to call a stove, it's just fine thank you. Yummy.

My grandmother, who was born in Russia, bought live chickens from a farmer and killed them and prepared them in our kitchen sink.

IT WAS DISGUSTING!

I was very glad to leave 1950 Winnipeg behind.

Why are we revisiting a disease-ridden, plague-driven, stinky messy gulag lifestyle?

What next? Lions? Alligators?

How about a piranha tank at 12th and Cambie?

Where We've Been

Where We're Going

Hearst makes offers to Seattle staff for online-only publication

Associated Press - March 6, 2009

SEATTLE — Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has made offers to some staffers to participate in an online-only version of the newspaper, the P-I reported Thursday.

An unspecified number of the P-I's 181 employees received “provisional offers” Wednesday and Thursday to work for the online venture, the newspaper said in a story posted on its website.

The paper, quoting two reporters, said the job offers would be formalized if a website is approved by Hearst's senior management.

Hearst announced Jan. 9 that it was putting the P-I up for sale and said that if it couldn't find a buyer in 60 days the paper would likely close or continue to exist only online. There has been no word on a possible buyer.

Calls by The Associated Press to Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer were not immediately returned Thursday.

P-I Managing Editor David McCumber declined to comment. “I'd like this process to play itself out,” he told the AP.

He said he did not know exactly when the P-I would cease publishing its print edition.

“I don't have a sense of that,” he said Thursday. “There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of logistics, lots of things to be considered.”

Permanent layoffs won't occur any earlier than March 18, P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby informed the state Employment Security Department in a January letter.

Hearst said in its January announcement that if it does become an Internet-only operation, the P-I would have a “greatly reduced staff.”

Metro reporter Hector Castro said he received a provisional offer Thursday but declined it, saying the package wasn't good.

“They're talking about a small team of people working hard to make this a profitable venture,” Castro said, adding that he didn't know how many people were offered positions.

A number of staffers contacted by the AP declined to comment.

Sports columnist Art Thiel said Thursday he had not been contacted and that the news of a possible online venture didn't surprise him.

“They said they were thinking of online, now they're doing it,” he said.

Since 1983, the P-I has shared business operations with its cross-town rival, The Seattle Times, in a joint operating agreement.

Under the JOA, The Times handles advertising, printing and other non-news functions for the P-I, so the layoffs at the P-I would only affect newsroom staff.

The P-I has a weekday circulation of 117,000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The P-I was founded as the Seattle Gazette in 1863. Hearst has owned the P-I since 1921, and the paper has had operating losses since 2000, including $14 million last year.

Hearst is a major media company that also owns TV stations, other newspapers and magazines including Cosmopolitan.

MORE on the YVR MURDER by a Commentor

NRF writes:

NRF has left a new comment on your post "YVR KILLING -Waldo to the rescue?":

Martino wrote, "The RCMP is not above the law of the land..."

Well, sir, I am afraid that it is and the Dzienkanski case is illustrative. The standard cover-up strategy failed because,early on, BC Coroner's Service stated publicly that Pritchard's video could be returned to its owner. In the RCMP's disappointed words, that removed their only legal justification for keeping the original video tape. As recently demonstrated in North Vancouver, Houston and Prince George, the RCMP prefers that videos of members' actions be unavailable.

Evasion of the force's moral responsibility in this case fails only because the video tape is here for all to see. In the past, officialdom has been compliant, even helpful, to such evasion. Examine Stan Lowe's statements when he disclosed that the Crown would not lay charges in the swarming. That Crown decision was defective, made without expectation of intense scrutiny to follow. (Unhappily, their spokesman is the new BC Police Complaint's Commissioner.) Here is the Polish Embassy's reaction: “Reading the [Crown's] statement, it appears that the main reason for Mr. Dziekanski's death was his fear of flying, tiredness and lack of ability to communicate in English. Particularly disconcerting, though factually baseless, are repeated insinuations of alcohol abuse..."

Only the naive imagined that police testimony was always unimpeachable but few citizens suspected that the entire agency, including its management hierarchy, would work together to spin a self-serving story as in this case.

The RCMP fails the ethical tests put to it in recent times. Corruption and political interference are unacceptable elements of Canadian justice. Rot at the top of the RCMP has been apparent for some time. Shuffling the deck chairs is insufficient. They should be removed as a local policing agency in this region and replaced by a provincial police agency that is not managed by authorities who live 3,500 kilometers away.

YVR KILLING -Waldo to the rescue?

"Recent allegations of fraudulent statements and a planned cover-up are leading to loud calls for a new look at the December decision by the B.C. Crown counsel's office to clear the four RCMP officers involved in the tragic encounter with Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski."

Thus begins Gary Mason's latest on the YVR killing.

Several commenters have kvetched about my use of the word 'murder,''in this regard.

Murder may be a legal word with clear delineations about intentions, but it is also a good old-fashioned English word for what often happens when two or more people collide and one or more end up dead.

This is exactly such a case.

Others have kvetched that I have called the police liars in this story.

But read all the evidence and all the reporting and you must only conclude that sworn evidence given IS FALSE.

Here is Mason's column in its entirety.

Every reporter covering this story has told us the same basics. The RCMP said that certain things happened. As a result the Crown declined to press charges.

But those things the RCMP said happened, DID NOT HAPPEN.

What's the problem kvetchers?

Be concerned less with fighting with me than with police investigating themselves and what that means for the kind of community in which you live.

Now, the truly scary part of this entire disgusting incident IN WHICH AN UTTERLY INNOCENT MAN WAS KILLED BY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN HELPING HIM is that the possibility of bringing charges against these disgraces lies completely in the hands of that great arbiter of justice, Wally Opaque.

Lord, spare us.

STRAIGHT SHOOTER

In a world of bullshit and political correctness, how refreshing it is to find one honest public servant.

There's a gang war and it's brutal, chief admits

That would be your Jim Chu.

MUST SEE MOVIE

Mark Leiren-Young is the brilliant writer who blessed me many years ago by asking me to perform his monologue, "Shylock."

That was a life-changing experience for me and I am for ever in his debt, and in the debt of the director, the late John Juliani, and the producer, Donna Wong-Juliani.

Now, Mark has done it again.

His new and first film as a writer-director opens this weekend at the Fifth Avenue here in Vancouver.

The movie is called "The Green Chain" and it is an examination of one of our most central problems here in B.C. - the future of forests and the lumber industry.

For video, tickets, background and more, go NOW to this site.

Then go straight to the Fifth Avenue and support your local - and always talented and engaging - filmmaker.

Victor on his Continuing Love Affair with Obama, The Second Coming of the Messiah

In the 14th century, when one third of Europe's population died of the
plague, the treatment of choice involved bringing the sick into
cathedrals where the monks would bleed them and preach soaring
sermons. It had no effect other than to make matters worse by
bleeding sick people.

Since Obama was elected, the stock market has lost 20 per cent of its
value. Soaring speeches have had no effect and bleeding taxpayers will
make a sick economy worse.

No speech, no matter how eloquent, will do anything to change
America's systemic problems including: unproductive workers producing
unreliable products, financial scammers at the highest level, a huge
and growing entitlement class and an economy based on mindless
consumption.

The Community Organizer in Chief and the monks have much in common.

SHERLOCK HOLMES & MY FAIR LADY

AN OPEN LETTER TO CASH HEED

Dear Kash,

With due respect, what in the devil's name are you doing?

Until I am shown otherwise, I will continue to believe that you are a good cop and sometimes a great cop.

I don't know if you've noticed lately, Kash, but we are in dire need of good and great law enforcement people these days.

We don't need new politicians, Kash. We need good cops, effective cops, honest cops, dedicated cops. Like you.

If all this swirl is true, if in fact you are going to be running for election in May with Gordon Campbell's Liberals, all I can ask is, "Why?"

What could you possibly expect to accomplish, even if elected?

You'll get elected and Gordon will make you Attorney-G or Solicitor-G? Is that it?

I hate to be crude, but...is money involved? Rewards of some kind, other than the vanity of public office? I would hate to think so, and until shown otherwise, I don't think so. But, as you can see, I am not very bright and I am struggling to understand why a man who can so effectively serve the public in an honorable way would turn to the Most Rotten Show in Town.

Has someone convinced you that you have a shot at being Canada's first Indo-Canadian Prime Minister? Barack did it, so you can too, the time is ripe...is that what people are whispering in your ear?

Maybe so. Maybe they are right.

And that would be exciting and yes, worthwhile.

But the distance from Vancouver-Fraserview to Ottawa is many many millions of light years, fraught with monumental perils along the way. One wrong move and you're toast, Kash.

All I can see at this point is that, at a time of public fear and distrust in our constabulary and increasing crime and decreasing criminal justice, we are losing an excellent policeman and possibly gaining another bullshitting politician. Just what we don't need.

Say it isn't true.

Housing Priorities

Here is the John Doyle,British Columbia's Auditor-General:

"Government has not been successful in reducing homelessness. We found that the government does not have a comprehensive plan for addressing homelessness. Government's goals and objectives are ill-defined and it has no overall measure or target for homelessness."

But Rich Cold Man differs.

Gosh.

Whom are we to believe?

Finally, I see some good coming from the Big Stupid Ski Party.

Victoria, embarrassed as it should be by its complete disregard for people with whom it is not in business, is now looking at building real and new social housing. It is asking the federal government to contribute hundreds of millions to that goal.

If any of this comes to pass, the Great Vancouver Luge-In will have been worth it.

I'm Salutin' You

Rick Salutin argues in the Globe this morning that ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK playing at a Canadian University near you right now is not anti-Semitic.

"Israel is now a state among nations and must be held to account, not absolved for fear of igniting a new Holocaust. Israel Apartheid Week should be gauged on its critique of its subject, not anathematized due to shadows and terrors from another time," he concludes.

Of course, this is an old writer's ploy.

I am the bravest and most fair person on earth because I can write truthfully and openly about legitimate criticism and everyone knows I am a good guy and would never harm a fly.

Right.

So, students breaking down the glass doors of Hillel House of York University recently, while screaming, "You filthy fucking Jews!" How does Mr. Salutin explain that?

He doesn't, because he cannot.

Israel is a sovereign nation and it is open to criticism as much as Canada or Vietnam.

But so much of this annual campus hate fest called ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK is Jew-hating and it should be clearly seen for what it is.

To apologize for this in a national newspaper is too clever by half.