This Is What it’s Come To: A Manifesto Against Islamism
It’s a case of surfer beware for journalists
Canada’s Phantom Menace In Afghanistan
Dubai Ports World Boycotts Israel
Ontario might claw back federal child-care cash

Anyone else notice this trend?

Harper meets with Quebec Premier, Jean Charest.

Premier Jean Charest praised his meeting Wednesday with Stephen Harper, saying the new prime minister wants to keep his election campaign promises to Quebec.

Harper meets with Ontario Premier, Dalton McGuinty.

The federal Conservative government wants to work with the provinces to help immigrants have their foreign credentials recognized in Canada, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Saturday.

Harper meets with Alberta Premier, Ralph Klein.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has signalled to the premiers that he’ll follow through later this year with a process for Canada’s first official Senate elections, says Alberta Premier Ralph Klein.

Does anyone recall the PMO making any sort of announcement on any of these issues? Me neither. During his two years as Prime Minister, Paul Martin was often accused of being nothing more than a headwaiter to the provinces but I don’t recall him ever abdicating the responsibility of informing the Canadian public about Ottawa’s policies by handing the job over to the Premiers. Seeing this trend, I can’t help but wonder who speaks for Ottawa; Harper or the provinces?

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one to notice this. Blevkog has too.

Harper announces Senate elections…
… through his spokesman Ralph Klein. Does anyone else find this strange? Perhaps Harper’s new communications director has performed another communications “coup”.

A streamlined Cabinet does not mean a more effective government
Corporate Fiscal Imbalance
Ag minister pressed to maintain wheat board
China’s Deserts Shrink, Partly Thanks to Tree Planting

Not so much. Antonia Zerbisias has the story on two reports, one an independent study by ERIN Research and the other an in house CBC report, showing that the CBC, that haven of liberal media bias according to the right whingers, was fair and balanced with its election coverage. And I don’t mean Fox fair and balanced.

Add this to the latest McGill study showing Harper and his conservatives received the most positive press coverage during the campaign and it spells out one thing. The right whinger’s shrieking about liberal media bias is clearly nothing more than a group neurosis induced, most likely, as a result of them being a bunch of preemies.

In a recent article for the Chicago Sun Times, Mark Steyn wrote;

Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:

”We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

A search of the internet failed to reveal a source for this quote prior to its publication in Mark Steyn’s column. I find it highly implausible, given the horde of bloggers and blog readers who scan the daily television and radio broadcasts looking for these type of inflammatory statements from Muslims, that this quote would have been missed.

So can anyone confirm that a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto actually said this or did Mark Steyn simply fabricate it?

Canadian troops can’t help Afghanistan
Tory plan to kill long gun registry going strong
Flaherty facing limited cash, wide demands in crafting federal budget
Conservatives admit it could be a long wait before they cap wait times

Here’s the deal: A reduction in the federal corporate tax rate to 0% if corporate Canada agrees to take on responsibility for the federal debt.

Last year Canadian corporations paid $30 billion in federal income taxes and the public debt charges amounted to $34 billion. That’s virtually a wash. But here’s the thing. Considering the federal debt is equivalent to only a few years of collective after tax profit, which came in at $132 billion last year, it shouldn’t be a problem for the debt to be retired in more than ten years time. Once done, corporations in Canada would begin to save themselves $30 billion or more each and every year thereafter. That would be a tremendous advantage over corporations operating in the rest of the industrialized world.

So what do you say, corporate Canada? Are you willing to make an investment that will reap huge rewards in the not too distant future?

Ohio lawmaker to propose ban on GOP adoption
Gen. Hillier pushes plan to boost army enrolment
Christian Grad Student Fails to Prove Discrimination

Link

I suppose we progressives should be happy that the Conservatives have finally taken off their blinders and are now embracing Kyoto and the need to do something about global warming, but their lies and arrogance make it so damned hard to give them any praise for it.

“We’re at a crucial turning point in Canada to address this issue,” said Ambrose. “There hasn’t been a lot of action on the file and for that reason we haven’t seen the results.

Gee Rona, do you think the reason there hasn’t been a lot of action or any results on this issue is because you dumb as fuck clownservatives have done everything possible to prevent that from happening? Even now there’s still a sizeable contingent of flat earthers denying global warming is real.

Gawd, a typical lying conservative. Arrives late to the barn raising just in time to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Well we’ve just completed our third week since Harper revealed his cabinet and appointed someone who is not an elected MP to his cabinet. And there is still no word from the Prime Minister as to when he’ll correct this situation by either removing Michael Fortier from the position or calling a by-election so he can become an elected member of Parliament.

While this type of appointment has precedence in Canada’s history, most unelected cabinet members have faced the voters within 2 months of their appointment and none have gone beyond 4 without doing so. For Michael Fortier not to do the same would be unprecedented.

Prime Minister Harper cannot continue to remain silent regarding this undemocratic appointment. The Canadian electorate has the right to know when and how he plans to address this mockery of our democracy.

I know that sounds like a ludicrous claim, but it must be true. How else can you explain the whisper campaign of smears directed at me by them? Here’s a couple of recent examples of what I mean.

From The Phantom Observer.

I don’t think highly of Robert McClelland, but his attempts to mock Christianity

Um, what attempts to mock Christianity would that be? The fact is that there are none but this doesn’t prevent these lying douchebags from falsely accusing me of doing so. Posts like this are not mocking Christianity, they’re mocking people like Kathy Shaidle who take the practitioners of Islam to task for the vile actions of a few of them while ignoring the vile actions being committed by practitioners of their own faith.

Here’s another example from a commenter at Comments Please.

Robert McClelland is a self-described leftist. It might be instructive to note his response to the following incident:

Swastikas, and the words “Die, Juden” were spray-painted on the walls of lecture rooms in Berkely; a cinderblock with the words “FUCK JEWS” on it was thrown through the window of a building where Jewish services are held.

Robert McClelland stated on his website that these events were not antisemitic. He decried the “whining” by the Jew who refered to them, calling the fellow “Whineberg”, and said his complaints were evidence of his “delicate sensibilities”.

The commenter EBD of course uses this to falsely claim that I’m anti-semitic. In fact, pretty much every right whinger has used my earlier discussions on what constitutes anti-semitism to make that same false claim. This is of course utter hogwash and only a rube would think that anyone who does not blindly accept what the right classifies as anti-semitic is in fact themselves an anti-semite. But that doesn’t stop the right whingers from repeatedly making this false accusation despite the undeniable fact that in over the 5 years that I’ve been on the internet, nowhere is there a quote from me saying something that is actually anti-semitic. So without me actually making an anti-semitic remark, it’s simply preposterous to claim I’m an anti-semite.

Rarely a day goes by where I don’t come across similar posts or comments by these right whingers that do nothing more than feed into this whisper campaign to smear me. And it’s been going on continously for nearly 2 years.

Now does my claim that the right whingers are terrified of me really sound all that ludicrous? I don’t think so considering the effort most of the right whingers have put into this whispering campaign. If I didn’t terrify them so, they’d simply ignore me.

By now you’ve most likely heard about South Dakota’s law to ban all abortions. And predictably the anti choice crowd is rubbing their hands in glee while the pro choice crowd wail and gnash.

Here’s the thing. This is going to be a crushing defeat for the anti choice crowd who’ve mistakenly pinned their hopes on a more conservative Supreme Court. What they’ve failed to take into account though, is that judicial activism is a figment of the right’s fevered imagination. This more conservative court is going to strike this unconstitutional ban on abortions down just like the more liberal court did back in the `73 Roe v Wade case.

And the reason for that is because the rule of law, even in the overly politicized US, still takes precedent over partisanship. Regardless of Alito’s personal feelings on the subject of abortion, even he won’t let them interefere with his decisions.

So the anti choicers have not won any battles but are merely walking into a trap of their own making based on listening to years of propaganda from the right. They’re about to get a harsh lesson in reality when they find out that the real world does not change merely because the propagandists have declared it has.

I think the idea of My Blahg News as a separate site is once again dead; it takes too much time and as I suspected, relatively few people use it. Instead I’ll just be doing regular news round-ups posted on the main blog under the category MBNews and will update them throughout the day as I find more news and opinion of interest.

Harper Gov’t: Michael Wilson double standard
Alberta registries soft target for criminals: critics
Most Cdns. uneasy about Afghan mission: poll
How to run Canada … into the ground

Despite what the right whingers say, Conservatives love nanny statism too.

A Conservative politician has resumed his crusade to ban drivers from using cellphones while on the road, calling on the province to follow the lead of dozens of other governments that have enacted similar legislation.

Conservative John O’Toole introduced his private member’s bill in the legislature for the third time Thursday. He said he has received countless phone calls, letters and e-mails from across the province urging him to keep pushing the plan until it is accepted.

Cue the outragesounds of silence from the right.

The Prime Minister’s chef makes between 73k and 79k per year. While that’s not unreasonable for a good executive chef, what confuses me though, is why our new PM needs a chef for 24 Sussex Drive when he’s got hisself a perfectly fine conservative wife to cook his grub and raise his young’uns.

Update: It looks like I’ve upset one of the humour impaired clownservatives. All together now, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, poor baby.”

As I pointed out in an earlier post, the Conservative plan to imprison people longer is going to be costly. In fact, it will likely double the $1 billion annual budget of the prison system.

The government cost analysis, prepared by Correctional Services of Canada during the 2004 election campaign, estimates extra prison spending at somewhere between $5 billion and $11.5 billion over 10 years, depending on the number and types of facilities needed, according to a document obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.

Now this wouldn’t be so troubling except for the small matter of it being a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.

A study prepared for the Canadian justice department last year noted the Australia Bureau of Statistics reported in 2003 that the prison population in its northern territory increased 42 per cent since the inception of mandatory sentencing.

Data also shows that the stiffened penalties have not lowered crime rates.

Great, so instead of wasting money on one useless gun registry that, according to conservatives, does nothing to prevent crime, we’re now going to have the equivalent of ten of them sucking our pockets dry. And this is only the tip of boondoggle spending as it doesn’t take into account the increased funding that will be required for other areas of the Justice Department, such as crown attorneys, judges and courtrooms.

Now I finally get why the Conservative’s campaign slogan during this past election was “Stand Up For Canada”. It makes it easier for them to pick our pockets if we’re standing up.

Do you think that Jews living in 1930s Germany could have legitimately claimed it was done in self defense if they’d begun killing the brownshirts who were spreading hate propaganda against them?

The movement grows.

Outspoken Conservative MP Garth Turner said yesterday he is considering a bid to become the next Speaker of the House of Commons.

Mr. Turner, who quickly ran afoul of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for criticizing his cabinet picks, said several MPs have asked him to allow his name to stand. Mr. Turner said he was leaning toward not running, but feels he owes it to his colleagues to consider the request.

While some believe this may be just a way for Harper to muzzle his wayward caucus member, I think it will serve to prevent the McCainification of Turner by the media who will flock to and label him as a “straight shooter” even though he’s not.

I’m sure most of you, like me, were left stunned in the wake of yesterday’s national tragedy and are desperately searching for answers as to why or how it could have happened. I’m also certain most of you are looking for strong leadership from our Prime Minister to lead us through this dark and tragic time.

But alas, that leadership has not surfaced. There has been no word from Stephen Harper to console a mourning nation nor press release from the PMO to comfort those of us who are suffering in the wake of this disaster.

This represents a complete abrogation of duty and needs to be rectified. Our Prime Minister cannot afford to be silent while our nation grieves lest some begin to call for his, or his cabinet’s resignation.

Even though he’s only been on the job three weeks, Stephen Harper needs to recognize that this tragedy has occurred on his watch. He needs to take full responsibility for this failure and in doing so, send a clear message to Canadians that the puck stops here.