Saturday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your afternoon reading.

- Stephen Maher exhorts the Cons to stop stifling democratic debate, featuring a strong point by NDP MP Jack Harris:

When Harris was first elected to Parliament in 1987, he said, and Brian Mulroney had a majority, the government regularly adopted opposition amendments.

"We don't expect you to adopt every one of our amendments," he said. "We'd like you to, but we don't expect you to. We expect you to listen to them with respect. We expect you to consider them seriously and we would hope that you would adopt some of them that are either improvements to the bill, because you haven't thought of those things or you're willing to consider new ideas. That's not a bad thing."
...
It is easy for politicians to take advice from obsequious underlings and pass their time bragging, cutting ribbons, handing out cheques and receiving respectful applause. But it is dangerous to believe your own press releases, and wise to listen carefully to your critics.

The Conservatives have a majority. They should get over themselves and let the opposition MPs do their (expletive) jobs.

- Meanwhile, Chris Cobb highlights another perverse effect of the Cons' dumb-on-crime legislation. And Boris rightly slams another draconian bit of legislation that's far too likely to pass as a Con private member's bill absent some strong public outcry.

- JJ points to Chris Hayes' scoop about the effort of Republican-connected lobbyists to attack the Occupy movement on behalf of banksters.

- Dave Johnson highlights a few of the services that should be kept public - but have all too often been privatized based on the right's desire to hand over free profits to the corporate sector.

- Finally, a couple of new sources to watch in Saskatchewan: Slim Evans, featuring a review of some of the points the Saskatchewan NDP can stand to improve in the years to come; and an effort to Stop John Gormley.