Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Pogge tears into the media tendency to proclaim the Cons "competent" when they've succeeded in little other than abusing Canadian institutions:

If I'm to give Harper his due, I have to acknowledge that he has ability when it comes to undermining democratic institutions and agencies that have been built up over decades. He's definitely good at figuring out how to sabotage the federal government's ability to work on behalf of all of its citizens instead of the select few who support the Conservative agenda. And he has a special knack for using taxpayer dollars for partisan advantage. He's quite good at a certain kind of corruption.

I guess that's what passes for competent government in some circles. Good to know.

- Meanwhile, Susan Riley gets it right:

far from providing a "steady hand on the tiller," Harper's response to global economic uncertainty has seemed improvised and contradictory. Only weeks before the Great Recession, Harper was insisting there wasn't going to be one. When it struck, he insensitively advised Canadians who were watching their life savings evaporate that is was a good time to buy.

After promising "never" to run a deficit, he presides over the largest in our history. In spending billions on stimulus, he was only doing what every other western government did in response to the meltdown, and what opposition parties urged him to do. But this is followership, not leadership.

Of more urgent concern is Harper's incoherence about his future plans. Suddenly, the government will pay down the deficit a year early, in 2014-'15, he tells us, thanks to $11 billion that wasn't mentioned in the recent budget.

This windfall comes not from the end of the rainbow, but from unspecified cuts in government operations. Incredibly, there will be no layoffs, no reduction in services, nothing to threaten John Baird's reelection. Fixes to government computer systems, a little attrition and bingo: $4 billion savings a year. Painless and utterly improbable.

- And in case anybody hasn't found it yet, Shit Harper Did has plenty more examples for the incompetence file.

- Finally, I'm still waiting for Stephen Harper's "I do not accept the truth" to be remixed. (Hint: it's available near the end of this shortened clip.) But until that happens, this will stand as the best riff off of the election debates: