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It could be just me, but I get the sense that Air Canada isn’t happy until I’m not happy.

(Old one, but good one.)

That’s just fucking great. Just great. Thanks.

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One of the best songs on the new record.  Saw her and the band do it at World Pride, and it lifted me up.

It’s a little like being charged with speeding when you’re not in a car.

Or, it’s like robbing a bank when, you know, there’s no bank. Or, say, being busted for breaking and entering, when nothing was broken into and entered.

A first-year law student understands it, and I’m certain you do, too: in order for criminal offences to be successfully prosecuted – and, presumably, the RCMP and the Crown want their high-profile prosecution of erstwhile Senator Mike Duffy for bribery to be successful – there has to be ALL of the criminal act he’s been charged with.

To wit, allegedly taking a bribe.

Now, we lawyers love Latin. We accordingly call this “act” part of a criminal offence the “actus reus.” It’s the action or the conduct part of a crime. In a bribery charge, it’s “accepts, obtains, agrees to accept or attempts to obtain, for themselves…money.”

In Latin, the mental element is called “mens rea.” It’s the requirement of having a “guilty mind.” In a bribery charge, it’s committing the act above in a “corrupt” way.

To successfully prosecute someone with a bribery charge, you need the act part, and you need the mental element part.

Now, the onetime Conservative Senator from PEI has been charged with plenty of other things, too, but it’s the bribery charge that has generated the most controversy. Here’s why: how can Mike Duffy be charged with accepting a bribe when, um, the cops aren’t also charging the person(s) who allegedly offered it?

But that’s what the Mounties and the Crown have done, here, and they look idiotic as a result. They look like they are trying to protect Prime Minister Stephen Harper, instead of enforcing the law.

It was Harper’s former Chief of Staff who, bona fide, entered into discussions with Duffy about repaying $90,000 in improper expense claims. The Chief of Staff hasn’t been charged with anything, and nor has his boss.

Why not? The “act” of bribery requires two parties. I mean, you can’t really bribe yourself, can you? It takes two to tango, bribery-style.

But here, only one party – Duffy – has been charged. Make any sense to you? Me neither.

There has been some speculation that the Prime Minister and his ex-Chief of Staff were not charged because the RCMP, in their wisdom, determined that neither man acted “corruptly.” That is, the mental element was not present.

If that’s so, can’t Duffy’s lawyer – and he’s got an Ottawa criminal defence lawyer who is legendary, believe me – argue the same thing? “Your Honour, Senator Duffy wasn’t acting corruptly! He simply was seeking help to repay the treasury. That’s not corruption, Your Honour – it’s a public service!”

Whenever police forces play politics, it ends badly – mainly for them. They stink at it. They tried to smear the Ontario Liberals mid-election campaign, and arguably helped win the Grits a majority. They blew up the Toronto Police Service’s criminal investigation of the city’s mayor, giving Rob Ford the best news he’s had in months. And so on.

In the Mike Duffy case, the RCMP and the Crown seem to have gotten together, and actually conspired to protect the Prime Minister and his staff.

They can call that whatever they want. I say it meets the “actus reus” and “mens rea” test for something else.

Corruption.

To whom it may concern:

I write in respect of an article written in your publication by your Jessica Smith Cross, with whom I have spoken once, to my regret.  In March, she lied to me about her objectives, and I have not spoken to her again.  I kept a record of our exchange, which clearly shows her to be dishonest on that occasion – but, because I was on holiday with my children at the time, I let the matter go.

Today she is at it again, in a story about Ward Two.

Some background is in order. A week or so ago, a Toronto Ward Two council candidate, Andray A. Domise, took to Twitter to attack Olivia Chow’s announcement about crime.  You can read more about her announcement here.

Domise suggested on Twitter that Olivia was not “a progressive.” He also said she had engaged in “dog-whistle politics,” quote unquote.  ”Dog-whistle politics,” for those who don’t know, means using code words to hide your true meaning – in this case, it meant that Domise was suggesting that Olivia Chow was a racist.

He then went on to call the announcement “bullshit.” He said it was “pandering.” He retweeted comments that Chow was using a recent murder to “pander to conservative Torontonians.” He retweeted comments that it was “fear-mongering.” He called the announcement “garbage.” And so on.

He then took to tweeting at me, suggesting – none-too-subtly – that I was a racist.  I had nothing to do with Ms. Chow’s announcement, I was not involved in any way with its development, and in fact I was away when it took place. I replied to Domise that I didn’t know what he was talking about, and blocked him.  My approach is to generally block anyone who calls me a racist the first time I hear from them.  Life’s too short, etc.

A supporter of Domise (I presume) then went after me for being “rude” to Domise.  I told him to piss off, and blocked him, too. As noted, life’s too short.

Domise was seemingly delighted by the attention.  He started repeatedly claiming – and is still claiming – that I told him to “piss off.” I didn’t.  I told someone else to, after I had already blocked Domise on Twitter.  He is in your paper today, falsely claiming I told him to “piss off.” He is lying, and your reporter did not do the most basic legwork to ascertain the real facts.

I don’t know Andray Domise, at all.  Lately, he’s been attacking Michael Ford, who hasn’t yet said a single word about his desire to run for council in Ward Two.  All I know about Domise, really, is that he is quite good at twisting the facts to get himself media attention.

He may be a good candidate, he may not be.  What I do know is that your paper, and your reporter, has permitted him to repeat a lie.

As such, I require a correction.  It can simply state that I did not say to Andray A. Domise what he has claimed I said.

It can also state that I will continue to block Jessica Smith Cross, as well, as I have done for months.  But I doubt you’ll print that part.

Sincerely,

Warren Kinsella

Sure, you lost the Ontario election, and the Trinity-Spadina by-election. Sure.

• Suck it up. Your brand still has value. That’s why federal and provincial Grits needed to kick the crap out of you – your brand had value.
• It wasn’t easy for them. They had to devote a lot of resources to doing that – because, again, you guys represent a real and manifest threat to Liberals in urban Ontario.
• You’re down this Summer, sure, and you’re licking your wounds. But you’ll be back – if you have discipline and conviction.

Take it from this Chretien and McGuinty Liberal: people will write your obituary a million times. Your job is to wipe your feet with the obituaries, and find your passion again.

Both those guys, who I was privileged to work for from 1993 to 2013, were written off many, many times. They came back.

You can, too, Dippers. Now quit your moping.

Tory’s top campaign guy is Nick Kouvalis.  Nick gets paid lots of money by Tory, who has taken on a more and more prominent role in the mayoralty candidate’s campaign, just as others have drifted away.  So he’s not irrelevant.  Repellant, maybe, but not irrelevant.

Kouvalis is the guy who makes the Tory campaign nervous.  None of the other people there have been charged criminally with making death threats, nor found guilty of serial ethical violations by a respected marketing association, nor acted as Rob Ford’s friend, campaign manager and Chief of Staff.  Nick Kouvalis has done all of those things.

Now, there’s a new bad thing to add to the list.  Kouvalis has taken to promoting the words of actual white supremacists. Seriously.

On Friday, Kouvalis started publicizing the thoughts of “Five Feet of Fury,” Kathy Shaidle, on social media.  Who’s she, you ask?  Well, she’s a bigot, and is known widely to be a bigot; she’s so bad, Sun News won’t even let her on-air. Here’s some of her own words, as captured by Scott Tribe and others:

• On Muslims: “…your religion is fucking retarded…ungrateful foreign savages…These are people who love watching beheading videos on the internet…A sick, sick religion. Basically Scientology with bombs. Pathetic whiny losers.”
• On Muslim and Pakistani immigrants: “Muslims…most of them can’t even read…What we really need to do is stop immigration from Pakistan and other crazy Muslim countries filled with illiterate, violent tribal peasants…”
• On Muslim children: they are “parasites.”
• On a group of Muslim students who object to some statements by Mark Steyn: they are “motherfucking parasites.”
• On Muslims: “Muslims always have to be on top, in reverse proportion to their ability to do anything with competence or creativity.”
• On aboriginal people: they are “parasites” who “extorted tax dollars [for] booze, smokes and junk food. Not to mention free everything else, including university educations they don’t bother getting.”
• On blacks: “…there is nothing ‘compelling’ about a black man impregnating a white woman. In more than one Toronto neighbourhood, that’s what they call Saturday night.”
• On the only people who can get excited about Barack Obama: “black, stupid or both.”
• On Jamaicans: “Just think of how much Jamaican immigrants contribute to our culture and economy: monotonous, illiterate music that all sounds the same, filthy hairstyles, those little tricoloured Rasta doohickies.”
• On the blacks of New Orleans: they are “pathetic losers” who cannot have their IQs raised “a single point.”
• On the poor: they are poor because they are “too lazy and stupid to a) finish high school and/or b) keep their pants on.…I don’t care about the poor. They’re no more real than Bigfoot.”
• On AIDS: “From the beginning, AIDS activism has been more about mainstreaming the gay “lifestyle” than saving lives.”
• On Sikhs: “Backward foreigners [who] shit on hand that feeds them…Unable to invent their own iconic product due to too much time spent worshipping monkeys and cows, setting women on fire and obsessing over imperceptible differences in each other’s skin colour…”
• On blind people: “Giving blind people real jobs…is not working out.”
• On Chinese: “[They are] spitting and shooting snot on the sidewalk…throwing broken crates of rotten bock choy all over Spadina Avenue [and] eating dubious, illegal foodstuffs” [and cause SARS.]

Nearly 13,000 words in less than a month, Daughter was in opening ceremonies at North American Indigenous Games, sons again tore up the links in a golf tournament – and heading to Sask with Lala early Wednesday. It rained, but whatever.

Not bad.