My new job: some big news https://t.co/MDvZpfaq5K #cdnpoli
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 1, 2017
Doesn't Lisa already run Daisy?
— Lisa Raitt (@lraitt) April 1, 2017
Welcome aboard. This is going to be fun. https://t.co/ghksh96HoR
— Gerald Butts (@gmbutts) April 1, 2017
Clip and save!
It’s Forum. It’s early. It’s voodoo seat projection. But:
The poll found not only would the Liberals suffer a crushing defeat in the election, they would also lose official party status.
The poll suggests voters would elect the Progressive Conservatives with a huge majority at 43 per cent support, while the NDP would be the Official Opposition at 28 per cent. The Liberals would be in third place at 19 per cent support.
The Tories would snag 86 seats with the NDP at 29 seats. The Liberals would only manage to snag seven seats. Right now, there are 107 seats at Queen’s Park, but that will rise to 122 seats in the 2018 election. Parties need eight seats to maintain official party status in Ontario.
I’ve got the smartest political commenters around. So, a serious question: if you were Kathleen Wynne, what would you do to fix this?
Be specific. Be serious. Be strategic. The smartest suggestions will be posted below, soon.
That’s the question k. d. lang asked Jason Kenney:
You're gay aren't you? @jkenney
— k.d. lang (@kdlang) March 29, 2017
She asked it because Kenney had proposed outing Alberta kids. That’s right, kids. Just one of the fiery responses that elicited – plus background – is here.
Is the newly-selected Alberta PC leader gay? I don’t know. Many of us always assumed he was. None of us cared, either. It was his business. It was nobody else’s business.
I know many – many – politicians who are in the closet. I wish they didn’t feel like they had to be. But, again, it’s their business.
Jason Kenney made the personal the political when he said what he said. It became important – as lang pithily observed – when Jason Kenney proposed one rule for gay kids, and an entirely different rule for guys like him. You know, like hypocrites do.
I grew up in Alberta, like Jason Kenney and k. d. lang. The vast majority of my male friends in high school were gay, and I’m not exaggerating. They were all in the closet, in those days, because they all felt they had to be. They had their reasons.
Jason Kenney may have his reasons, too. It’s his right. But Jason Kenney shouldn’t ever, ever use the law to take away the rights of kids.
When he tries to do that? Well, that’s when people will start asking Jason Kenney if he is gay, too.
Because a hypocrite is a hypocrite, gay or straight.
…sounds like a Kellie Leitch campaign rally, doesn’t it?
But, no, it’s Dundurn’s page about my new book, found here!
Here’s the cover. If you are so inclined, you can bookmark it, so you can purchase the thing in paperback and digital download, over and over! Amazon, too!
Also, I’m get an “X” tat this weekend. Long story, as it were.
As musical historians will note, SFH was always way ahead of the curve on the whole anti-Putin thing. This morning, Son Four spotted this on South Park (when he probably should’ve been getting ready for school), and thought he should bring it to our attention. From Season 16, Episode 13: right at the end!
SFH and South Park: we think alike!
Ron Banerjee and Rise Canada Hate Group Meets With Kellie Leitch
…Banerjee also operates Twitter accounts for both Canadian Hindu Advocacy and Rise Canada in which he celebrates the deaths of Muslims and Sikhs, post misogynistic diatribes against women, and attacks the LBTGQ community.
The post assumes the reader knows a lot about the group in question. So I would encourage you to read the whole thing, at the link above. More about Banarjee here and here. More about his hate group, which Leitch apparently supports, here.
Leitch has made a lot of mistakes in her campaign. This is a big one.
What Donald wants, Donald gets.
Well, not really. He wanted a Muslim ban. Didn’t get it. Wanted Obamacare killed, and something else instead. Didn’t get that. Wanted – promised! – ISIS defeated in 30 days. Didn’t get, or do, that.
But getting more money out of Canada for NATO? He’s going to get that.
Now, if you were to poke through the entrails of the 2017 federal budget, released with a minimum of fuss last week, you would not find any statement that read: “Her Majesty’s Government pledges to commit more resources to the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), because we are concerned what the short-fingered vulgarian to the South will do to us if we don’t.” No such statement is in there.
There is, however, this on page 186 in Chapter Three of the budget:
“The Government will soon release a new defence policy for Canada, following substantive public consultation and extensive analysis. It will be more rigorously costed than any previous defence policy. It will commit the level of investment required to restore the Canadian Armed Forces to a sustainable footing with respect to finances, capital and people, and equip the Forces to meet the challenges of the coming decades.”
That paragraph is the Donald Trump paragraph, you might say. It was written just for him. As we speak, Canada’s highly-capable Amabassdor to the U.S., David MacNaughton – probably the best appointment Justin Trudeau has made to date, but that is a column for another day – is shuttling around Official Washington, a photocopy of that paragraph in hand, solemnly assuring the hawks in the Trump regime that Canada will start paying its way in NATO very soon.
Because we don’t pay our way in NATO, and we haven’t for a long time. And we need to.
There are 28 members of NATO. Its budget is north of $900 billion annually. The United States of America contributes an extraordinary $650 billion of that. The United Kingdom, $60 billion; France and Germany, in and around $40 billion each, give or take. Canada?
Canada is in the bottom third of NATO members, alongside military powerhouses like Slovenia and Luxembourg, and others with bankrupt and/or struggling economies. By agreement reached in 2014, NATO members are supposed to be devoting two per cent of their nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to defence. Canada doesn’t, and consistently hasn’t. We spend less than one per cent.
During the Republican primaries, and during the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump would be asked often about defence by reporters looking for some new insane Trump statement to report. Trump wouldn’t disappoint.
So: “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them. And we’re paying the majority of the costs.”
And: “We’re spending a tremendous — billions and billions of dollars on NATO. We’re paying too much! You have countries in NATO, I think it’s 28 countries – you have countries in NATO that are getting a free ride and it’s unfair, it’s very unfair.”
And, this gem, which gave plenty of Western leaders heartburn, and which transformed Donald Trump’s presidency from something that was mildly amusing to something that was deeply terrifying: NATO was “obsolete,” he said. And: “The US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”
That statement about NATO’s obsolesence, uttered during an interview in January with a German newspaper, was a shock. “[NATO is] obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump said. Secondly, he said, it’s obsolete because “countries aren’t paying what they should.”
His first point, like so much that the Unpresident says, was certifiably insane. With Trump’s pal Vladimir Putin massing troops and guns on the border of assorted Baltic states, NATO is needed more now than perhaps ever before. But on his second assertion, that NATO is compromised because many countries aren’t paying what they should?
Donald Trump is right.
[Your eyes are not deceiving you. Hillary Clinton-loving Warren Kinsella wrote that “Donald Trump is right” about something. Clip and save, folks. – Ed.]
The unofficial word around official Ottawa is that the budget’s Donald Trump Paragraph means that the forthcoming defence review – with the Trudeau government’s amorphous pledge to “equip the Forces to meet the challenges of the coming decades” – will result in Canada finally meeting its NATO commitment. A Conservative government had long been a NATO free rider, but it will be a Liberal government that will finally pay its way in NATO. To this Liberal hawk, that is profoundly ironic – but highly satisfying.
Donald Trump is a traitor to his nation and its constitution. He is a thug and a demagogue. He is an Internet troll, elevated to the Oval Office. But on NATO, and on the requisite contributions to NATO, he is right.
Ask the guy who said this: “NATO needs more Canada.” That guy?
One Barack Obama, in the House of Commons on June 29, 2016.
Many of you have sent me a story in which the Sex Pistols frontman expresses enthusiasm for Trump, Brexit and the racist UKIP. To wit:
In an interview today with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Johnny Rotten said he supported Brexit and described Donald Trump as a “possible friend” while dismissing accusations that the president is racist. The Sex Pistols frontman told hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid that Trump was a “complicated fellow.” “One journalist once said to me, ‘Is he the political Sex Pistol?’ In a way,” he said.
“What I dislike is the left wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist, and that’s completely not true,” he added. “There are many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not that, and there just might be a chance something good will come out of this situation because it terrifies politicians. This is a joy to behold for me.”
When Morgan pointed out that Trump’s anti-establishment streak mirrored the Sex Pistols’ approach to music, Rotten replied: “Dare I say, [Trump could be] a possible friend.”
Rotten also described former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and his Brexit movement as “fantastic.”
“The working class have spoken and I’m one of them and I’m with them,” he said.
Does this shock me as much it has clearly shocked some of you? No, not me.
I’ve interviewed Rotten many times, and have long held the view that he is – truly – an asshole. And he’s always been pretty right-wing, too.
Read this, from my book Fury’s Hour:
It is twenty-five years since an emaciated, feral Johnny Rotten snarled that he was the anti-Christ on the Sex Pistols’ astonishing ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ …It seems almost impossible that Johnny Rotten and John Lydon are the same person.
To say that Johnny Rotten, former anti-Christ, has become John Lydon, utter hypocrite, would not go over well with his adoring audience this day. But a hypocrite he is, without much doubt. He sneers at the United States of America, calling it “the new Russia.” But he lives there, and has for many years.
He repeatedly pronounces that he is above politics, and insists that we need to “break down these barriers that we keep fucking putting between us” – and then he appears to mock black people, suggesting that their music comes from “the jungle.” (On that single occasion, the audience goes silent.)
And, later, at a Sex Pistols show in Toronto, as I looked on from the side of the stage:
I note that Rotten is looking down, squinting. On the ground, between his microphone stand and a bank of monitors is a three-ring binder, filled with laminated pages – presumably to protect them from such phlegm assaults. The binder contains Sex Pistols lyrics.
Binder or no binder, by the time the band gets around to ‘God Save the Queen,’ Johnny is forgetting the words a lot. He looks intently at Matlock, perhaps for inspiration. If Matlock notices, he gives no indication. He keeps playing bass, bouncing back and forth to Rotten’s right. A steaming geyser of human saliva is now cascading down on the stage and Johnny Rotten. The place is slick with it.
Looking suddenly weary, Rotten carefully places his microphone stand near Cook’s drum kit. Offstage, he is regarded with concern by his money manager Einbund, and Rambo, the bodyguard. Rotten then addresses the crowd, some of whom are lunging at him to better place the next wad of gob. Rotten is snarling: “Canada, I hope you enjoy your fucking socialism because it is fucking you up the arse!” He then stalks off the stage, shortly followed by Jones, Matlock and Cook. Einbund scurries after him; so does Rambo, who scoops up the binder of lyrics along the way. No one is quite sure what socialism has to do with anything, but one thing is clear: Johnny Rotten is livid.
Backstage (where I have been smuggled in by a friend), Rotten is handed a towel to wipe off the sweat and saliva. His money manager and bodyguard flit around him, nodding sympathetically as he rails about the crowd. The rest of the Sex Pistols regard him with unconcern, or not at all.
Sorry to go on at such length, but I wanted to document that Johnny Rotten has always been a crypto-racist (cf. his remark about blacks), and he has always been a conservative (cf. calling Canada “socialist”).
Bottom line: great band, great album. But Rotten was, is, and always will be an asshole.
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