Get a load of this:
Like, as if the author would have access to the intimate thoughts of “several ministers and influential Liberals.” Let alone “the Liberal war room,” which I sort of know something about. Uh-huh. Riiiight.
So what is this about, you ask?
BCL strikes again. Check it out:
“Mr. Lemire” is Marc Lemire, a former leader of the violent neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front. “Mr. Chisu” is a Conservative MP. He’s new.
I will be charitable, therefore, and assume for a moment that Mr. Chisu and the young Mr. van Vorstenbos didn’t know Marc Lemire has been a central figure in the most powerful anti-Semitic, white supremacist group to emerge in Canada since the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the Eighties. I will, however, say that they are supposed to check these things out in advance, and not be total idiots. Which, in this case, they are.
If, on the other hand, Messrs. Chisu and van Vorstenbos knew who Mr. Lemire was, and sent their pithy letter anyway, I will only say this:
Thornhill, York Centre, Eglinton-Lawrence, Don Valley West, North York, et al., welcome home. We missed you.
UPDATE: Greg Elmer, who I like, suggested the headline was off, and I think he’s right. Thus the tweak, above. Grammar is everything!
At the moment, I am about 100 friends short of having 5,000 friends on my Facebook page. According to Facebook’s rules – which make sense to me, for what it’s worth – I will no longer be able to accept new friends after the 5,000 number is hit. Given the rate at which I get friend requests, I expect that to happen sometime next week.
So, for the folks who get stuff from me on my Facebook page – posts from here, and also stuff I don’t post here – things are going to be different. After 5,000 is hit, I am going to be posting to my newly-constituted “fan” page, found here. I may not be posting to the old Facebook page anymore – it depends on what the Facebook elf lords let me do. If I can do both pages, somehow, I will.
In the meantime, c’mon over to the fan page, if you like, and join the fun.
And, yes, to answer the question you may now be pondering. I really do know all 5,000 of my friends.
We are very close.
It’s the Steyr-Mannlicher HS.50.
Like the Ruger Mini 14 – the type of weapon used in the Montreal massacre, when 14 young women were murdered at École Polytechnique – the Steyr-Mannlicher will now be easier to acquire. And, according to the Toronto Star, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives plan to make both exempt from their new gun law.
Some days, it’s hard to come up with the words to describe this government. Other than this:
They make me want to puke.
UPDATE: This sentence in the Star story – “…in information sent to the Star, its researchers point out that under the Conservative bill the Ruger Mini-14, the .50-calibre sniper rifle known as the Steyr-Mannlicher HS .50…” – I read conjunctively, not disjunctively. They’re two different weapons, so I have amended the posting above, and offer apologies for those who were confused by the Star story, as I was.
But the criticism remains: a government that thinks it should make it easier to get the Ruger Mini 14 or the Steyr-Mannlicher is a government that has lost its mind.
UPDATER: I’ve spammed dozens of comments that were racist, disgusting, libellous or off-topic. As of this point, any more crap and we will post your identifying info and make it way easier for you (and your guns) to be found.
And, being sane, you haven’t paid any attention to the federal NDP’s leadership contest.
Who can blame you? The New Democrats seemingly have more leadership candidates than they do caucus members. The race is boring. Most of the contestants are nobodies, and that’s putting it nicely. And all of them, to a one, lack Jack Layton’s charisma. So why bother to pay attention?
Well, if you don’t, rest assured: The Conservative Research Group (CRG) will happily do it for you.
The CRG is the innocuous-sounding appellation for the dozens of neatly barbered young Conservatives who toil in a government office building on Queen Street in downtown Ottawa. They’ve been around since 2006, when Conservative Leader Stephen Harper set up the office under the tutelage of his capable communications director-to-be, Sandra Buckler.
From the start, CRG apparatchiks have done a good job. They are swift, they are deadly, and they are relentless. Most notably, they made miserable the lives of successive Liberal leaders — Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff in particular.
And, now, the CRG are getting to work on the many folks vying for the NDP leadership.
Destroying government records, as the Reformatories propose to do with the gun registry data, is against the law.
The Library and Archives of Canada Act demands that the disposal of records managed by government institutions “must occur under processes and procedures which permit the identification and preservation of archival and historical records.”
To be specific, per section 12. 1 of the Act, “no government or ministerial record, whether or not it is surplus property of a government institution, shall be disposed of, including by being destroyed, without the written consent of the Librarian and Archivist or of a person to whom the Librarian and Archivist has, in writing, delegated the power to give such consents.”
So, unless the top Librarian and Archivist has given the okay in advance, which I rather doubt, the Cons have announced that they plan to break their own law.
Ipso facto, call these guys.
You’re welcome.
From today’s HT, a regular exchange between me and my pals Tim Powers, Karl Belanger:
But here’s why it worked: IGGY AND DION DIDN’T RESPOND. Or, if they did, they responded too late.
1. Rip their faces off, first.
2. Leave no charge unanswered.
3. Rip their faces off, again. Make them cry like babies.
That’s it. That’s the politics we’ve got, now, thanks to Mr. Harper et al.
It’s sink or swim, Karl. Welcome to the bigs.
Sullivan is white supremacist who, typically, lies online about where she works.
She maintains a Twitter feed as “Right Girl” – where she smears blacks, Muslims, gays and others, and regularly suggests that minorities deserve to be “executed” – but she has recently tried to wipe all traces of her blog off the Internet.
We’re trying to serve her, but she’s elusive. Anyone with information in that regard, we’d be grateful to hear from you. Thanks.
In comparative terms, we’re in pretty good shape. In fact, we’re in really good shape.
The European “leadership,” meanwhile, is busily at work on blowing itself to bits. The EU has become “ungovernable,” billionaire George Siros said this week, adding that “a dynamic of disintegration” is tearing through Europe.
Early on Thursday, European leaders hammered together a deal, of sorts, to save the Union from ruin. But the 11th-hour deal addresses the symptoms of the crisis, not the root causes. Greece still has a debt level that is an extraordinary 150% of its gross domestic product (GDP).
Italy, with a far larger and far more significant economy, still has a debt-to-GDP level of nearly 120%. Places like Ireland are deeply in recession already — and there, as in Belgium and supposed super-powers like Britain and Germany, the debt-to-GDP ratio hovers at or above 80%. The exit of one or more countries from the EU now seems inevitable.
The damage done to European economies has been mainly self-inflicted. In some Euro-zone nations, their approach to pensions, retirement, taxation and public spending is the stuff of science fiction. The Union did little or nothing to address the economic cancer that has now spread throughout Europe.
Rob Ford helped to elect progressives in every Ontario municipality on October 6.
Now he’s going to help elect progressives worldwide!