Bob Rae slams the Canadian Conservatives over trying to starve The CBC

Harper's at it again. He's using the re/depression as an attempt to destroy public broadcasting in Canada. Liberal Bob Rae is taking him to account. What's even more assensiang is that Stephen Harper's ultra right wing, anti-gay, anti-enviroment, anti-daycare agenda is actually planning to give an AIG style bailout to Canada's two private broadcasters - CTV and Global (both right wing mouth pieces).

Click here to read how Rae is taking the Conservatives on

and click here to read about how the Cons are planning to pay off their private broadcaster buddies for their support during the last two elections.

Niall Ferguson's The Accent of Money: Download the MP4's or watch online

Click here to download part one
Click here to download part two
Click here to download part three
Click here to download part four

Each part runs approx 48 minutes.

If you want to get a primer on his work click here to check out the Colbert Report episode where Ferguson was a guest.

Amazon.com:
In THE ASCENT OF MONEY, Ferguson whose series War of the World garnered critical attention last summer traces the evolution of money and demonstrates that financial history is the essential back-story behind all history. Everyone needs to understand the complex history of money and our relationship to it, he says. By learning how societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we can find solid solutions to today s worldwide economic emergency. As he traverses historic financial hot spots around the world, Ferguson illuminates fundamental economic concepts and speaks with leading experts in the financial world.

BBC Doc: Super Rich: The Greed Game: Download in MP4 and watch online

Click here to download in MP4
Runs approx 58 minutes

Google Video: As the credit crunch bites and a global economic crisis threatens, Robert Peston reveals how the super-rich have made their fortunes, and the rest of us are picking up the bill

Canadian Conservatives lie to Obama on their love of the enviroment

After hundreds of ducks died because of Canadian oil companies (the people backing Canada's current Conservative minority government) what the right wingers in Canada are doing to the North American environment and Global Warming it caught the worlds attention.

Mind you when Obama visited Canada Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper pretended to love the environment however check out the before and after shots of what they've allowed to happen below direct from National Geographic.

If you want to contribute to stopping this boycott anything made in Canada (except for Naked Gord of course since I'm trying to be part of the solution here ;) ) and let your friends know what's being done.

Click here to read the entire article direct form National Geographic


Before/After side by side from TreeHugger.com

Mark Twain's The War Prayer MP3 download

Right click here to download in MP3

Runs approx 20 minutes




Archive.org: Mark Twain wrote The War Prayer in 1904. Since then, every gerneration facing war has found it as fresh and timely as when it was written. This radio drama version was produced and directed by W.D. Sherman Olson and stars Abbie Williams and folk singer/song writer Billy Krause.

Canadian TV comedian cuffed by cops during skit with Prime Minister

Click here to watch the coverage from The Canadian Broadcasting Corportion via Yahoo News

and click here to watch The CBC's "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" videos direct from CBC.ca

Did George Bush pass around a Iraq invasion handbook to world leaders?

There's a heated election going on in Canada right now mainly between Conservative incumbent Stephen Harper (we're really a pretty left wing country it's just that the Conservatives won last time because the three left wing parties split the vote) and Liberal Party Leader Stephane Dion.

Today the Liberals released a video side by side of former Australian Conservative Party John Howard and Canadian Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper where line by line the speeches walk the same path while being delivered in their respective House of Commons.

The scuttlebutt is either Harper plagiarized the speech two day after Howard delivered it or that the Bush administration was passing around a play book for fellow right wingers to use. I know it won't come as a suprise to Americans that Bush was speaking to world leaders but for it to extend to scripted comments from foreign governments being used in our political process it is of concern.

Click here to watch the full story by Julie Van Dusen direct from The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Runs approx 5 minutes

Click here to read the full story direct from CBC.ca

Sammy Davis Jr. speaks with Vietnam war deserters

Sammy Davis Jr. while paying a visit to Toronto stops by the headquarters of The Canadian broadcasting Corporation and meets with Vietnam war deserters living in Canada to discuss their mutual opposition to the war.

Click here to play in streaming video direct from The Canadian Broadcasting Corportion

Run approx 10 minutes. From 1968

Art Spiegelman's Canadian Controversy

Click here to play from CBC.ca in streaming Windows Media

Runs Approx 14 minutes
(however a couple minutes of that at the top and bottom is the anchor musing about the interview. As an aside one of my old profs said he had him as a seminar teacher when he was in university - seemed to think he was a bit of a dick from what I remember.)

The Pulitzer Prize winning mind behind Maus is having some trouble in the Great White North.

Canadian publishers wanted to censor a cover he drew for Harpers magazine to appease moral conservatives and Canada's only retail bookseller (Chapters Indigo who also owns the only other book chains in Canada - Coles and Smithbooks) banned the issue from their shelves - which puts him in the same category as Adolf Hitler since "Mein Kampf" is one of the few other things that have been banned for sale from their chain.

Robert Reich: On the hyper capitalist threat to democracy

Click here to play, or right click to download in MP3, to listen direct from TVO.org

Or click here to play, right click to download in MP4, to watch direct from TVO.org

Both run approx 30 minutes

TVO.org:

Supercapitalism: Robert Reich on how the unending quest for more power and profits is threatening our democracy.

Robert Reich is professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.

The Agenda with Steve Paikin is one of Canada's best news and current events programs that looks at the issues of our time from a more academic approach than the usual.

Stephen Harper's Conservative Government - anti-democratic?

Click here to play the debate, right click to download in MP3, direct from Canada's largest educational broadcaster - TVO
Runs Approx 35 minutes

TVO.org: From the re-distribution of seats in parliament, to senate reform, and the use of a tight leash: the Harper government and the uses and abuses of democratic institutions.

Guests

Sean Conway is a policy advisor with Gowlings law firm. He is also director of the Institute for Intergovernmental Relations at Queen's University. Mr. Conway served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003, as a Liberal MPP.

Tim Powers is vice-president of Summa Communications. He has served as the director of Policy and Research to the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Peter Russell has been a member of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto since 1958, and taught for two years at Makerere University in Uganda. His recent publications include, Constitutional Odyssey and The Clash of Rights.

Rick Anderson is is CEO of ASCI-Anderson Strategic Consulting Inc. He has also served as campaign manager or strategic advisor for numerous general election and leadership campaigns and candidates in the Liberal and Reform parties.

Story of a handgun: Firestar .45

Click here to play in streaming video direct from CBC.ca
Runs approx 45 minutes

The story of a legal handgun that traveled from the U.S. to Canada, where it's illegal, and then was used to kill a six year old child. A full length doc of an event that happens often in Canada and a disturbing amount in the United States.

CBC.ca: The story of two journeys--a .45 calibre handgun from Jonesboro, Georgia and a young boy from Jamaica--and how their fates collide tragically in a home in suburban Toronto, is the subject of the fifth estate's season premiere. The Firestar .45 that killed six-year-old Michael James is just one of the illegal handguns that flood across the U.S. border and end up in Canadian cities where they become weapons of mayhem and murder.

Bob McKeown takes us from the gun dealer to the violent streets of American cities, through the halls of power in Washington and into the heart of America's gun industry, a National Rifle Association convention, and illuminates a story that is filling today's headlines.

Middle East Peace: Missed Opportunities?

From TVO, Canada's largest educational public broadcaster, comes a provocative debate on if we've let peace slip through our fingers for the Middle East moderated by one of Canada's most respected journalists Steve Paikin.

Click here to play, right click to download in MP3, direct from TVO.org
Runs approx 60 minutes

TVO.org: 90 years ago: the Balfour Declaration. 60 years ago: Resolution 181. 40 years ago: the Six Day War. What if these anniversaries were markers of optimism? What if Jew and Arab had grasped opportunities ... instead of wasting them? What if history had unfolded differently?

Guests

Amir Gissin is the consul general of Israel in Toronto. Most recently, Mr. Gissin served as director of the Public Affairs Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he coordinated public relations policy and activities in Israeli missions worldwide. For three years, he headed Israel’s branding project.

Hanadi Loubani is a producer with therealnews.com. She also has been involved with Kairos, a social-justice advocacy organization, as their program coordinator for Middle East Partnerships.

Derek Penslar is director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His areas of expertise include Jewish political, economic and cultural life in modern Europe, the history of the Zionist movement, and the state of Israel.

Samah Sabawi is the executive director of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations.

Janice Stein is TVO's international affairs analyst, the Belzberg professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

Elia Zureik is professor emeritus of Sociology at Queen's University. He is the author of The Palestinians in Israel: A Study of Internal Colonialism (1979) and Palestinian Refugees and the Peace Process (1996). Professor Zureik has also provided expert testimony on the Middle East to United Nations agencies, the Canadian Senate, and several other organizations.

The View From Abroad: Is America Broken?

Runs: 83 minutes

UC Berkley: John Micklethwait, the newly appointed Editor of The Economist, talks with Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism about the direction he is taking the magazine, and about America's role in the world.

Presented by: The Graduate School of Journalism, The Economist, Haas School of Business, Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, and the World Affairs Council. Credits: Producer:UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

George Soros: The Consequences of the War on Terrorism

Runs: 104 minutes

Introduced by Chancellor of UC Berkley Robert J. Birgeneau

George Soros:
Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Institute, Financier, Philanthropist, and author of The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terrorism

Lowell Bergman:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for Public Service, and the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Professor of Investigative Reporting at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism

Dana Priest:
Author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Security Correspondent for The Washington Post

Mark Danner:
Author of "The Secret Way to War" and "Torture and Truth," MacArthur Fellow and Professor of Journalism, UC Berkeley

John Waters on free speech

Aclu: The American Civil Liberties Union, American University Washington College of Law and American University Law Review have joined together to host a two-day symposium titled Left Out in the Cold? The Chilling of Speech, Association, and the Press in Post-9/11 America. This clip runs 12 minutes.

Canada's premier abortionist speaks out on a womans right to choose

Click here to watch in streaming video direct from CBC.ca
Runs 8:15

CBC.ca: Throughout his life, Henry Morgentaler has been shrouded in controversy.

Morgentaler was born in Poland in 1923, he lived through Auschwitz, and survived the Holocaust. He came to Montreal, Canada at the end of World War II.

As a 'Humanist leader' he promoted the idea that people had a right to control their own sexuality and reproduction, without interference by the state.

Throughout his career he has faced several trials and was acquitted each time by a jury.

Morgentaler now operates six clinics in Canada providing care for women in need of abortions and contraceptive services.

Holyland Comics

Click here to watch direct from CBC.ca

Runs: 7:30 minutes

Arab and Jewish comics yuk it up together

36 minutes with George Carlin

WNYC: Veteran comic George Carlin looks at the humor ... Veteran comic George Carlin looks at the humor in today's politics and divorcing himself from the human race in an interview with WNYC's Brian Lehrer.



Right click here to download MP3
and check out a couple minutes of the interview in video format (why not do the whole thing WNYC?) below:

Movie: Why We Fight

Naked Gord: A scathing film. A must see.

Youtube: We Fight The BBC presents Why We Fight by Charlotte Street, a documentary on the commerce of war, and how the military industrial complex profits so much from war, that it must create wars to continue the growth of it's business.