Snowmageddon
Headed this way! Call in the army! Cancel everything! Repent!
Son One was pretty stoked about this one, this morning. He’s a counting on a snow day.
I told him he’s dreaming. Anyone care to offer some baseless speculation?
Dwight
Without Pupatello, I think it’s going to be really, really hard to keep that seat.
Canada needs more mayors like this one
Mayor Raye-Anne Briscoe, take a bow. I think you’re amazing.
She, like me and not a few others, think the Queen’s Jubilee medals are a joke, and have about as much value as a concession stand token. I said as much on Wei Chen’s CBC Radio show this morning.
Mayor Briscoe sent hers back a few days ago.
Boy oh boy, I wish Toronto had a mayor like this one (the letter’s a bit hard to read, but worth the trouble):
I write funeral songs: Secret of Immortality
Damian Abraham is the leader of Canada’s greatest band, and one of the world’s greatest bands, Fucked Up. They are more than good; they are god-like geniuses.
Last night, Damian tweeted that he wants a song Ras Pierre and I wrote in the Hot Nasties, ‘Secret of Immortality,’ played at his funeral. I hope that doesn’t happen anytime soon – but here’s his tweet, and beneath it a link to the song, in which you hear Pierre doing what he and I used to call his “fiddly bits,” and me pontificating (per usual) about life and death and Norman Rockwell. In a nasally, twangy teenaged vox, age 17 or so.
Apology by Matt Hopkins
“On January 18, 2012 I made allegations that Warren Kinsella was fired from Sandra Pupatello’s campaign for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party. The allegations were false. Mr. Kinsella was not fired from the campaign. I retract those allegations and I sincerely apologize to Mr. Kinsella.”
Matt has also made a generous donation to the Arthritis Society, at my request. Good luck to him and his team in the weeks ahead. Onward and upward.
In Tuesday’s Sun: Mr. Angry Invisible
Tom Who?
Thomas Joseph Mulcair, that is, the fellow alleged to be the leader of both the New Democratic Party of Canada and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
You may have heard of him, or perhaps even seen him on TV once or twice. Bearded, greying hair, doesn’t smile much. Bit of a temper.
Just about a year ago, New Democrats gathered in Toronto to select Mulcair as their leader. It was in all the papers at the time.
“Can Mulcair really become a team leader?” one headline queried, and the answer appeared to be “no.” Beneath it, columnist L. Ian MacDonald wrote that the former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister “has never been known as a team player” and had been “always a polarizing figure.”
The folks at Maclean’s purloined a phrase by Yours Truly, and dubbed Mulcair “Mr. Angry” in a pre-convention headline because, well, he is.
“Renowned for his short fuse,” Maclean’s wrote, adding “critics worry about his temperament.”
“Harper has little to fear from Mulcair,” Barbara Yaffe wrote in the Vancouver Sun, and she was certainly right about that, but for a reason no one anticipated last March. Mr. Angry, you see, has become Mr. Invisible.
He is a political missing person. If we didn’t know better, in fact, we’d reckon that Mulcair had entered a witness protection program.
Folks in Ottawa will tell you, at this point, they see Mulcair just about every day in question period (as if question period matters, which it doesn’t).
They’ll say he has been an active and visible leader of the opposition, but that is only true if you consider what happens in Ottawa to be relevant to the everyday lives of everyday folks (which it isn’t).
Out here in the hinterland — that is to say, in the real world — nobody knows or cares much about Angry Tom Mulcair. Sure, he popped up a few months ago to alienate millions of westerners with his musings about “Dutch disease.”
He fulminated about ethics and fighter jets and the economy. He has permitted a bill to ooze out of his NDP caucus that would repeal the Clarity Act and return us to the unity wars of the past.
And, after that … not much.
As Yaffe foretold, but for different reasons, Harper has indeed had little to fear from Mulcair. The ruling Conservatives seem listless and drifting, but they have remained at the top of public opinion polls for much of Mulcair’s tenure as leader of the NDP. The prime ministerial cat, Stanley, lately seems more relevant than the leader of the opposition.
The Liberals, meanwhile, are leaderless, and located in a distant perch in the House of Commons.
But the Grits generate more ink and more interest than Mulcair’s gaggle of former bartenders and golf course employees.
Justin Trudeau, the likely winner of the Liberal leadership contest, is a human ATM, raking in cash and looking like a winner.
Mulcair doesn’t look like a winner. His problem is that he is not Jack Layton. The much-loved, deceased NDP icon was everything Mulcair is not: Smiling, positive, likeable and energetic.
Why NDP delegates would pick Layton’s opposite to be their leader is an ongoing mystery. But they did.
Tom Who? More like, Tom Who Cares.
Canadians, mostly, don’t.
I am confused, as usual
Why would my friend Pupatello agree to be a Minister of Finance without a seat in the Legislature – when the very people doing the supposed asking were attacking her, not so long ago, for not having a seat in the Legislature?
Politics sure is weird, sometimes.
A penny for your Googled thoughts
That farmer ad
This football game makes me seriously ill
