Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Emily Dee takes a first look at what may be a highly important story about the Cons' use of the notorious right-wing push-poller Responsive Media Group:

I had been conducting some research into the last federal election campaign, which was probably the most bizarre on record.

Many of the strange occurrences, especially the phone calls, could all be matched to similar strategies used by Karl Rove and company.
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I then looked at the first few ridings where those prank phone calls took place and examined the Conservative candidate's financial reports and darn if they all didn't have a similar entry for RMG, most for the same amount of $15,000.00

If they were conducting phone surveys, why would it cost Block, in a riding of 69,547; the same amount as Peter Braid of Kitchener-Waterloo with 126,742?

Or Rodney Weston of Saint John, population 82,078, the same as Marty Burke running in Guelph, with 114,943?

Or Tilly Oneill-Gordon of Miramachi with 53,844, the same as John Carmichael of Don Valley West with 117,083?

The "In and Out" immediately came to mind. Was this actually an expenditure of the national campaign, broken up into smaller invoices so they could again spend more than the legal limit? And remember by passing these expenses off to local campaigns, the candidates are eligible for rebates from Elections Canada on behalf of Canadian citizens. Our money.

I spent several hours yesterday combing reports and found 66 Conservatives claiming amounts paid to RMG, totalling almost a million dollars. So far everything is speculative, but it's amazing how well it fits with earlier research.

- Gary Mason profiles Leadnow as one of the key voices of Canada's emerging progressive movement, while Sixth Estate documents a few of the funders of right-wing causes who figure to put roadblocks in the way of change at every possible turn.

- Thomas Walkom points out a couple of key myths in our health care debate:

First, medicare isn’t about to be bankrupted by the elderly. That’s a common misconception, spurred by the fact that baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — are nearing retirement.

In both political and media arenas, this particular myth is treated as unshakeable truth, creating fears that doddering boomers will monopolize virtually all health-care dollars.

But as figures released this month by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) demonstrate, such fears are grossly exaggerated.

The government-funded agency calculates that the aging population has only a “modest” effect on medicare spending — in large part because, thanks to social programs like old age security, Canadians over 65 are healthier than they used to be.
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Second, medicare costs in general aren’t spinning out of control.

This is an even more pervasive media myth, spurred on by doomsayers who argue that health-care spending, if unchecked, will soon consume entire provincial budgets.

In part, this misconception results from the fallacy of extrapolation — the assumption that past trends must inevitably continue.

It reminds me of a prediction, made before the invention of the rotary dial phone, that by 1960 all North American women would be working as switchboard operators.

That turned out to be false. As physician and consultant Michael Rachlis pointed out in this newspaper, so has the myth of the voracious health budget.

- But of course, the privatizers always have new myths waiting to replace the ones which are debunked - and on that front, the push for privatized health care in Saskatchewan and elsewhere has often been justified by a supposed focus on the needs of patients or users of the system. Which means that it's well worth considering whether corporate care actually makes matters worse on that front.

And it shouldn't come as much surprise that in a direct comparison, for-profit care homes generate significantly more resident complaints than public and non-profit counterparts.