Shorter Stephen Harper: We need to give the police more powers to do the job they’ve already done without them.
Lapsed anti-terror provisions — extraordinary measures the Conservative government has been trying to revive — might have been useful in the current effort to round up suspects in an alleged bomb plot, the prime minister hinted Wednesday.
I’d laugh if there weren’t so many people in this country that will nod their head in agreement while swooning over how magnificant a job PMS is doing protecting them from the horde of dusky hued terrorists lurking under their beds.
According to our Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney, the European Roma that have been desperately trying to come to Canada are just a bunch of queue jumpers with nothing to fear back home.
Hungary’s leading far-right party said on Wednesday that Roma who are considered a threat to public safety should be forced from their dwellings and placed in highly-controlled camps, some of them for life.
Yup, life is just peachy for them there. Good call Kenney.
Ever since it was announced that Kory Teneycke would be starting up a version of Fox News here in Canada many of my fellow lefties have been filled with dread. They’ve even gone so far as to create and sign onto a petition urging the CRTC to prevent the station from getting on basic cable and doing for the Conservatives what Fox News has done for the Republicans.
Progressives however, are grossly misinformed about what Fox News has done for the Republicans. They haven’t made the Republican party stronger. They’ve weakened it by turning it into a rump party filled only with ignorant, paranoid bigots on the verge of openly referring to the President of the United States as a no good nigger. They’ve helped drive almost every single minority and moderate out of the Republican party. They’ve urged their viewers to place kookier and kookier demands on the Republicans that have shocked and appalled most of the nation to the point where the party lost power in the House, the Senate and the Presidency. And the ideology proudly wallowing in ignorance they’re helping to create will render Republicans impotent against even the most rudimentary arguments they come in contact with for many generations to come.
So bring on Fox News North. I look forward to it doing to the Conservative Party of Canada what Fox News has done to the Republicans.
I see that some of my fellow dippers are quite upset by the latest concerted attack on the NDP by the Liberals and libfloggers over the upcoming gun registry vote. I would just like to point this out to them. Think back to the last concerted attack on the NDP by the Liberals and libfloggers that occurred a year ago.
Do people remember;
a) that the Liberals maneuvered Jack Layton and the NDP into supporting the Conservatives in a confidence vote.
b) that Ignatieff declared he was going to pull the plug on the Harper Conservatives only to watch in horror as the plug was pulled on the Liberals’ polling numbers.
I bet almost everyone remembers b.
The Liberals have tried this nonsense repeatedly over the past few years and every time they do it accomplishes nothing. So chill out and let them flail away. In the end they’ll only end up hurting themselves again because they still haven’t learned one simple lesson; the Conservatives, not the NDP, are in power.
From Aaron Wherry comes some good news for fans of a coalition government.
“If we have one duty to this country, it is to make sure a Liberal, NDP, Bloc Québécois coalition can never govern this country,” Harper told a crowd of a few hundred at the Deer Creek Golf and Banquet Facility…
“The next election will be a choice between a coalition government of the Liberal, NDP and Bloc Québécois, or a stable Conservative majority government for this country,” he said.
So basically if Harper fails for the third time to win a majority in the House of Commons he’s admitting the people will have chosen a Liberal, NDP, Bloc coalition to govern this country. Thank you very much Mr. Harper for legitimizing a coalition government.
Twenty years after Deepan Budlakoti was born at the old Grace Hospital in Ottawa, the jailed businessman is now facing deportation from Canada — his birthplace and home all his life.
I think it’s time to storm the Bastille folks, and take back our nation from the collection of white supremacists, nativists, xenophobes and bigots that have begun to overrun it.
Harper will be spending nearly a billion taxpayer dollars to host a couple of useless meetings that will address tackling the soaring worldwide deficits. Meanwhile, in the crazy corner of the blogosphere, right whingers and libertoonians are outraged! about the billion taxpayer dollars they claim were wasted on the gun registry…um, 15 years ago.
Apparently Canadian Cynic has asked progressive bloggers to ban Patrick Ross from commenting on their site. Normally I only ban people if they’re being a nuisance but when a right whinger foolishly gloats about nobody doing so and then turns it into a referendum on the popularity of a blogger I enjoy reading I’m more than happy to oblige. So bye-bye nutsack.
The Hunt For Gollum
While browsing through the selection of movies YouTube is now carrying I came across a little 39 minute gem called The Hunt For Gollum that you might like if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan. It’s an independently made prequel to the Lord of the Rings that’s surprisingly good for a film made on a budget of just $5,000.
Over the holidays, the Cook Islands have become embroiled in a political crisis. The sacking of an incompetant Minister caused a walkout from Cabinet, and the subsequent withdrawl of support for the government by the Democratic Party. The Cook Islands Party won’t support them either. The Prime Minister now has the support of just 5 MPs in the 24-member House; when Parliament reconvenes, he will face a confidence vote, which he will lose. So, he has hit on a simple strategy: don’t call Parliament:
Canadians will beam with pride knowing the Harper brand of democracy is spreading about the world.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record.
I guess the climate change deniers will have to move on to their next delusion.
It’s a common refrain in the media, that the threat of terrorism comes from Islamic extremism.
Not true, according to a new study revealed by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which suggests that only 6% of terrorist attacks on the U.S. are from Muslims.
Three years after announcing $2 billion in subsidies for the biofuels industry, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has decided to probe whether the so-called renewable fuels might actually be harming the environment.
So who helped foist this $2 billion boondoggle on taxpayers?
Harper’s former director of communications, Kory Teneycke, led a team of industry stakeholders that successfully lobbied the government to promote biofuels, before he joined the prime minister’s office.
And here you have the very essence of conservanomics; a perfect storm of conservative incompetence and ideological ignorance fueled by corporate greed.
Driving the Porcelain Bus has put together a very long documented list of Harper’s numerous assaults on our democracy. I’d add his anti-democratic assault on the Canadian Wheat Board to that list.
An ugly little story has been leaking out of Afghanistan during the past few days.
On December 27, US-led forces in eastern Kunar province dragged eight children from their beds and executed them, some after they had been handcuffed. The youngest child was eleven years old. The deaths have been confirmed by the United Nations chief in Afghanistan, Kay Eide.
Canwest Communications Inc. is hoping to fetch at least $1 billion to $1.5 billion for its national chain of big city daily newspapers, including the National Post, sources close to the deal say.
That’s roughly half what the company paid for the publications, which includes the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and Calgary Herald.
I Guess Nobody Told Kenney The Roma Are A Nomadic People
Jason Kenney continues his campaign of persecution against the Roma.
The federal government is seriously considering imposing visa requirements on visitors from Hungary to cut off a growing flood of refugee applicants, mainly from the Roma community, The Canadian Press has learned.
It would be the third such move in less than a year, after Canada imposed visas on visitors from Mexico and the Czech Republic last summer.
Taxpayer Funded Bigotry
The Calgary Stampede is using some of the $2 million dollars taxpayers gave them to pay for a homophobic survey.
The Calgary Stampede, Calgary’s annual carnival and rodeo, has launched a marketing research survey that asks respondents for opinions on blatantly sexist and homophobic statements. Gems include “The only acceptable definition of a family is a husband, wife and children,” and “Some jobs are best suited to men. Women should just accept this.”
Are Conservative MPs Attending Meetings Sponsored By Pro Tamil Terrorist Groups? This guy seems to think they are.
Paul Calandra, MP
Conservative Member for Oak-Ridges-Markham
House of Commons, Ottawa
Dear Paul:
It has been brought to my notice by one of your Conservative Sri Lankan-Canadian constituents that you are now into the Hokey-Pokey cunning business of Town Hall meetings organized by the pro-Tamil Tiger front, the Canadian Tamil Congress. “Hokey-Pokey cunning” I said, since the recent planned meeting was under wraps until it was announced on the morning of the happening perhaps to filter the non-supporters of their separatist Eelam cause.
Now that 2009 has been officially prorogued we can turn our attention to the new year ahead of us and the magical wonders it will usher in. Like…um, and…um. Yeah, let me get back to you on that one.
In the meantime, via Canadian Cynic is the Blogging Whories II: Revenge of the Teabaggers; a place where right whingers who believe the original Blogging Whories is just too liberal, too open minded and simply not batshit crazy enough for their liking can gather in an environment hermetically sealed away from the rest of the world in order to exchange phacts that the evil emessem conspires to keep hidden from them.
On the second day of Proroguemas Harper gave to me:
Two silly talking points.
Silly talking point number one:
For the first time in twenty years, Conservatives will have a plurality in the Senate of Canada. Our parliament is a bicameral body consisting of a lower and upper house. While its activities may not be conducive to the lust of the cut and thrust of politics for the average Ottawa watcher — and who called whom “fat” on Twitter in committee this week — the Senate is constitutionally important to the parliament of Canada. When a new plurality exists in the lower House, the Governor General asks the party leader that can lead a stable government to form a cabinet. When a new plurality exists within the Senate, the government’s opponents accuse the Prime Minister of politics when the Prime Minister asks the Governor General for a chance to reset parliament so that its committees and functions may represent the new reality.
The case for prorogation is constitutional.The case against it is political.
The call for a new Throne Speech to launch the 3rd Session of the current Parliament is routine. The average Parliament comprises three or four sessions (and three or four Throne Speeches); some Parliaments have heard as many as six or seven Throne Speeches.
