That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

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I am the source of levity wherever I go. 

  

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He threw one back. He missed. 

  

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The one responsible for the biggest abridgement of civil liberties in Toronto’s history – the one who defended carding non-white citizens. 

Running for the Liberal Party of Canada. What a disgrace.

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There’s not much controversy surrounding it, at all, because:

1. She said, if elected, she’d invest in transit and infrastructure, and this budget is aimed at giving effect to that; and
2. She (and we) know that, to pay for the aforementioned, she needs to do some judicious cuts.

Voters get all of that stuff.  They therefore know she’s on the right track.  Steady as she goes.

 

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“The capacity of the gas chambers and the capacity of the crematoria were quite limited. Someone said that 5,000 people were processed in 24 hours but I didn’t verify this. I didn’t know,” he said. “For the sake of order we waited until train 1 was entirely processed and finished.”

I have been following the prosecution of this SS Auschwitz guard closely. His blasé recitation of serial horrors isn’t noteworthy – he was indisputably a member of the Nazi killing machine, and his apparent indifference to genocide is almost predictable, notwithstanding his much-reported sophistry about “moral guilt.”

What I find surprising, instead, is the neutral – almost disinterested – tone that some reporters and editors have adopted in covering this trial. Here, then, are some truisms that I have referred to before, in a tautological trifecta:

• It is acceptable to take a position on notorious crimes.
• Notorious crimes like genocide and mass murder should be condemned.
• Condemning such notorious crimes doesn’t compromise one’s journalism, it enhances it.

The Holocaust, and the way in which it was carried out in places like Auschwitz, should not be reported on as mere allegations, as we would report on someone charged with shoplifting and appearing for the first time in provincial court.  The Holocaust is no mere allegation.  (Nor the Armenian genocide, which commenced 100 years ago today, and which gets referred to in similarly antiseptic reports.) By admitting he was there, facilitating genocide, Oskar Groening – though an old man, and no longer in uniform, and expressing regret – was a mass murderer like the rest of those bastards.  And he deserved, and deserves, their fate.

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Here’s what the CBC’s polling aggregator has to say:

With the Liberals and Conservatives currently neck-and-neck in voting intentions, the tendency for polls to accurately predict the winner six months out is nullified. 

But the trend of the Liberals under-performing their pre-election polling at the ballot box tilts the odds in the Conservatives’ favour. The Liberals have averaged a drop of about six points per election since 1979, if we include the more limited polling prior to 1997. Since 1997, that drop has averaged eight points. That is virtually identical to the gains made by the Conservatives and their predecessor parties over that period of time.

I’m not sure I buy this theory: if the past six months have shown us anything, they’ve shown us that events can have a rather dramatic effect on voting intention. 
What do you think, Dear Reader? CPC for the win, as CBC suggests? Or someone else?

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I’ll bet Stephen Harper is very, very unhappy about what Joe Oliver said.

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