I’m still enraged by the puppet Speaker’s ruling. When a reader posted this, it made me even madder.

Anyone else knew this?

Carolyn says:
December 14, 2011 at 11:57 am
The firm that did the calling into Cotler’s riding also did $8,198.79 of work for the current Speaker, Andrew Scheer, in the last election. Scheer should have excused himself from making the Privilege decision yesterday because of a conflict of interest!

UPDATE: The CBC, at least, recognizes this is a legitimate (and significant) news story – and doesn’t relegate it to a little-noticed blog, like the Citizen does.  Read it here.

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…starring my brothers Warman and Murphy. Who, whether you know it or not, have done much to make Canada inhospitable to hate, and haters.

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Wonderful story about Stephen Harper by my former Carleton journalism classmate. Well worth a read.

Brings to mind a good line I recently heard in a lousy movie: “The Lord judges you for who you are, not who you were.”

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I know you all come here for rough political stuff and all that, but tonight I saw the most amazing film with my sons.  It was one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but take my amateur film critic’s word for it: it’s wonderful.  You’ll remember it for a long time.

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The Speaker finds:

• he has jurisdiction
• that Irwin Cotler’s complaints were factual
• that what the Conservatives did was “reprehensible”
• that Cotler had a “legitimate grievance”

Yet, despite all that, there was no “prima facie” case.  Because (a) Cotler continued doing his job and (b) people have read about it in the paper, and will hereafter be “wary.”

That is unmitigated bullshit. To use a hockey analogy: was Cotler supposed to drop to the ice, and stay there until the guy who gave him a head shot was suspended from further play?  Will this kind of thuggery stop, now, because a few scolding newspaper editorials were written?  It is to laugh.

This ruling was a test of a new Speaker, and he has utterly failed it.  There was a reason why the Prime Minister’s Office favoured his candidacy.

And now we’ve seen why.  He’s their water boy.

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Seeing as how there is an awkward photo in every Toronto paper today, I bring to your attention even more awkward (and sort-of-NSFW) photos. More here. You’re welcome.

 

 

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“We will keep it at six per cent for whatever the duration of the agreement is.”

Around the four minute mark, just in case he and his Boss try and weasel out of a very clear commitment.

If they try, we’ll make them wear it, big time.

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Does the above, seen of the front pages of newspapers across Toronto this morning, make you ill?  It does me.  I think the couple – who decided to bump uglies in the full view of commuters on the Bloor-Danforth line, mid-afternoon – should be imprisoned for life.

I’m a prude.  Not only do I oppose most pornography, I also favour categorizing PDAs as a criminal offence.

I subscribe to George Bernard Shaw’s maxim:  “The position is ridiculous, and the pleasure is momentary.”

What do you think?  Vote in our super-scientific poll, below!

 

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Words to remember.  I’ve felt this way for a long time.

“Unless we are bold. Unless we seize the moment. Everything we built will start being chipped away,” the former prime minister writes in a toughly-worded fundraising letter. “The Conservatives have already ended gun control and Kyoto. Next may be a woman’s right to choose, or gay marriage. Then might come capital punishment. And one by one, the values we cherish as Canadians will be gone.”

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It’s a journalist’s job to be skeptical, and to raise differing points of view, without fear or favour.

When a broad consensus is reached on an issue — in this case, bullying — it’s right for media folks to offer up contrary points of view. Dissent is a good thing, particularly when only one point of view is dominating.

This fall, there has been an avalanche of coverage about bullying in Canada. Every paper and every broadcast, it seems, has had investigations into the nature and extent of bullying. Many of the stories have detailed the tragic tales of teenagers who, after being subjected to bullying, chose to take their own lives.

Politicians have picked up on the media’s refrain. On Parliament Hill, and at provincial legislatures, politicians of every stripe have come together to denounce bullying, or to suggest measures to counter it. Some of the politicians haven’t necessarily practiced what they preached — like those federal Conservatives who have claimed to oppose homophobic bullying, while simultaneously opposing laws that would give gays true equality — but it has been nice to see the unanimous denunciations of bullying.

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