Month: September 2008

Absent Liberals – The video player

UPDATE: The code is now working. Copy and paste the code below.

Be sure to put this on your blog. Instructions are below.

I was browsing YouTube earlier this evening and came across some recent uploads by somebody messaging against Stephane Dion for instructing his party to sit on their hands during the last session of Parliament. Dion’s Liberals abstained 43 times and could have brought down Stephen Harper’s government with any of these skipped votes. The videos that I found were uploaded by a user called “AbsentLiberals” and I’m fairly certain that it’s an NDP war-room effort. I believe that the NDP campaign created these videos to emphasize the point that their party was the only national opposition party to stand against the government. The NDP is making the point during this campaign that the Liberals gave Harper a de facto majority because they allowed the passage of his agenda by abstaining from votes. Of course, if Dion had voted against the government, we would have been in an election long ago as the Conservative Prime Minister made most bills issues of confidence. I also think that these videos are a product of the NDP war-room because they are also provided in French. Most unofficial activists would make the videos in either French or English but not both (there are 43×2 videos). UPDATE: As I suspected, these videos are from the NDP war-room.

Despite this likely being an NDP production, the message is plain for Conservatives and their supporters too; these videos show that Stephane Dion does not show leadership.

Years ago, I wrote a video distribution technique for Blogging Tories television and I think that the same can be applied for these videos. I modified my BT-TV program to deploy these “Absent Liberals” videos easily on your websites whether you support the Conservatives, the NDP or perhaps you are a Liberal that doesn’t support Dion. Just copy and paste the code into your own blog’s sidebar to embed the “Absent Liberals” video player. Imagine the player embedded on hundreds of blogs both left and right.

Sidebar player

Large player

PMO listserv exploited by anti-Harper activist

I just received this email from pm@pm.gc.ca which was spoofed quite easily on the Conservative Party website willyoubetricked.com

Somebody emailed the PMO listserve address sending this email to whoever signed up on the Prime Minister’s government website for the email mailing list. Someone should look into the legality of using the Government of Canada’s resources to impersonate the Prime Minister.

The email seems to have originated in Winnipeg from an MTS Allstream account from this IP: 142.161.178.253.

Liberals from Alberta jump shift

Yesterday, Stephane Dion abandoned the Green Shift as a central plank of his campaign while the Liberal war-room and other senior Liberal communication officials did their best to shift the story by denying the departure.

Today, as revealed by the Calgary Herald, we see that the Liberals in Alberta are splitting from the rest of the candidates by releasing their own platform called the “made-in-Alberta agenda”. This rogue platform which promises free tuition for first year undergrads and a national pharmacare strategy shows that the Liberal Party’s Alberta candidates aren’t waiting around for Stephane Dion to flip-flop on ideas that are important to them.

In an election, the candidates are the team and the leader is the captain. Now, the Alberta candidates are off playing their own game while captain Dion is madly erasing the team’s chalkboard and fails to come up with any new plays.

Can you imagine a Prime Minister Stephane Dion that can’t implement his own agenda because his Alberta caucus has gone rogue? What does this say about Dion’s leadership when his team is turning their backs on Dion’s plan for winning this election?

Click here to download the “Made-in-Alberta” agenda