Sri Lanka must deal with all of its people!

I agree with this NP piece on Sri Lanka. I vehemently opposed the ltte, but I don't think very highly of the Sri Lankan government either. The Tamils in camps must be rapidly released and allowed to return to their homes. Freedoms must be restored and peace must be found. It is time for Sri Lanka two warring ethnic groups to come together and live as one in an island, which is one of the most beautiful places on earth.


Even aside from these killings, there is little in the way of media freedom for critics of the government: Tamil activists and their allies have been threatened with prosecution under the country's "Prevention of Terrorism Act," or accused of the catch-all term of "treachery."

Sadly, most people in the West don't seem to care much about all this -- even those activists who proclaim themselves up in arms over events in Honduras, western China and Iran. The silence from CUPE, left-wing churches, Naomi Klein, campus activists and all the other folks who boycott Israel at the first sound of gunfire in Lebanon or Gaza is especially puzzling: The human-rights abuses and overall death toll in Sri Lanka are orders of magnitude above those witnessed in the recent Sri Lanka fighting. Press freedom, moreover, is vigilantly protected in Israel, a country where the most vicious criticism of the state, and even of Zionism itself, routinely appears in the country's media.

Jonah Goldberg: the god that bleeds

I am a big Star Trek fan, so Ilove this column by Jonah Goldberg on the obamessiah
but in a real way the Obama presidency is over. His messianic hopey-changiness has been exposed for what it was, and what it could only be: a rich cocktail of pie-eyed idealism, campaign sloganeering and profound arrogance.

With a mayor like this...

Toronto doesn't need enemies. Mayor Miller and his socialists have utterly surrendered to their comrades in the union. Why did he bother putting up the facade for the last 6 weeks. Council should reject this fiasco, but they wont. This contract will inevitably lead to more taxes. I guess Toronto voters are reaping what they have sown.

The 44 members of Toronto council owe it to the residents of the city to reject the contract reached this week with 30,000 striking municipal workers.


In rejecting the agreement, councillors will be standing up for voters in a way Mayor David Miller has failed to do. Mr. Miller promised much in leading the city into a strike, but has delivered little of what he pledged. His failure to keep his word means Torontonians have endured a summer of closed pools, shuttered daycare, scruffy parks and mounting trash heaps for no reason.


Voters will have a chance to cast a ballot on his actions in next year’s municipal election. Meanwhile, someone has to stand up for the people of the city, assuming the leadership role the Mayor has abandoned.

Another Great NP editorial

The NP points out more leftist hypocrisy.

National Post editorial board: Selective support for fashionable causes
Posted: July 30, 2009, 10:00 AM by NP Editor
Editorial, Full Comment

Diversity. Tolerance. Multiculturalism. Anti-discrimination. These are the supposedly universal values that inform our secular cultural canon. The words sound nice. The problem is that they're not actually "universal." Western societies -- Canada included -- exhibit zero-tolerance attitudes toward the vilification of certain minority groups. But it's no-holds-barred when it comes to bashing less politically fashionable constituencies.

In Glasgow, Scotland, for instance, an artist named Jane Clark -- who is also a pastor at a radical Church-- says her friends felt excluded from the Bible because it does not include positive messages about people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered. So she put an open Bible in the Glasgow museum's In His Own Image exhibit, and encouraged her followers to "write themselves into its pages." Then she claimed to be "saddened" when so many of the defacing entries were predictably profane and highly sexual.

Such a stunt should be legally permitted in a society that honours free speech -- despite the fact most religious Christians frown on homosexuality, and find it distasteful and even blasphemous to deface a Bible in this manner. If anything, Ms. Clark's action should be ignored as the trite exercise in attention-getting it is: From Andres Serrano's Piss Christ to Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, the desecration of Christian holy objects has become the avant-garde equivalent of dogs playing poker. But it is interesting to imagine what would happen if a gay activist invited all and sundry to pen their various same-sex musings into, say, a Koran. No doubt, riots would now be unfolding all over the Muslim world -- as they did when Danish cartoonists drew pictures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005. More to the point, said activist would be denounced as a bigot and taken up before who knows what European human-rights star chamber.

Ann Coulter on victimhood

Ann again exposes the politics of victimhood.


How About A National Conversation on Race Hoaxes?
by Ann Coulter
07/29/2009


You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the thesis of my latest book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America, than the black president of the United States attacking a powerless white cop for arresting a black Harvard professor -- in a city with a black mayor and a state with a black governor -- as the professor vacations in Martha's Vineyard.

In modern America, the alleged "victim" is always really the aggressor, and the alleged "aggressor" is always the true victim.

President Barack Obama planted the question during a health care press conference, hoping he could satisfy the Chicago Sun-Times, which has been accusing him of not being black enough. He somehow imagined that the rest of the country might not notice the president of the United States gratuitously attacking a cop in a case of alleged "racial profiling."

Adler on the serious media

Charles Adler is completely right. This non story was picked by the " serious " journalists and now they all have egg on their faces. I have seen few retractions by the CBC or any of the other outlets that trumpeted this nonsense. On that day this story beat out HM PM excellent performance at the G8. The reporting on the abject apology the New Brunswick paper has had less than big coverage by the cbc. Mansbridge and his crew are a national joke.

If the CBC and others want to continue to masquerade as agents of truth, as entertainers like me, talk shows hosts and pundits like me...if they want to pretend they are journalists why not practice Journalism 101, check out the facts as the newspaper laid them out. Confirm the story or drop it or say it's in one newspaper, one very liberal friendly newspaper. But if you simply adopt the story as truth because it conforms with your religiously held belief that the Prime Minister is an unknowing, uncaring, unfeeling, insensitive, anti-Catholic scoundrel, well then I suppose you would do what you did. And what you did wasn't honest, ethical, truthful, or useful. And you have not succeeded in portraying the PM as a scoundrel. But you have made yourselves look like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. A really funny movie in parts. This story was funny in parts until it became serious in the propaganda of some. Why are people tuning out conventional news? And, why are they tuning in talk radio and twitter and blogs and everything else that is available? Because what we used to think of as serious, has become a joke. And not a terribly funny one. I preferred Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the movie, to the stuff CBC airs at 10pm...

…The National...The National Joke.

Ever more Prof Plimer

Now prof Plimer in the Vancouver Sun

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Grit dirty tricks

Robert Fife has exposed the grits dirty tricks.
As I asked yesterday, who is the source. Fife answered: the grits.
Since catsmeat is in charge of grit dirty tricks will he now attempt to sue CTV. I doubt even this genius has that much chuptzah.
So the grits used the Sacred for profanity. They used the funeral Of HM Governor General to try and humiliate HM PM Harper.
catsmeat has made a career of using religion to try and batter his opponents. It now seems even his own faith is fair game. How very sad.
Then what of iggy. Did he approve this dirty trick? If he knew, when did he know? Or is his warroom no longer under his control?
Will iggy apologize to HM PM, the Leblanc family and the Roman Catholic Church?
More at AGW
I hope someone with more tech savvy than me will put this clip ( watch at 10:15) on youtube.
So much for iggy's more civility.

Liberty Summer Seminar 2009

It was a great weekend for the LSS except for the monsoon like weather. I only had the opportunity to attend the Saturday. It was great to see many friends and fellow freedom lovers. The lectures were interesting though some were controversial. Especially for me a conservative, who one of the speakers declared on their way out in the US. Prof Tavis from Concordia university and Prof Narveson gave very interesting talks. Scot Reid gave an excellent speech on our judicial system and history. You should all go next year!!!
I had a great time. It was nice to see Randy Hillier, Scott Reid and my good Gerry Nichols again. I have to congratulate Peter Jaworski and his family and Matt Bufton, Janet Neilson and Jamie for their stellar work! It is good to
Thanks to my friend Mike Brock for recording this.

Who is the source?

I want to know where this stupid non story originated. Who was responsible for the filming? I have no real proof, but a lot of suspicion that alleged Roman Catholic catsmeat and the grit war room, is responsible for most of this nonsense. Will he and iggy now apologize? catsmeat seems to frequently use religious issues as cheap political shots . Apparently that is his political "genius". At least the son of His Excellency Romeo Leblanc has a lot more class than most of the grits and the so called grit war room. This incident was a new low for nasty political tricks.
SAINT JOHN -- A New Brunswick daily newspaper issued a front-page apology Tuesday for a July 8 story that claimed the prime minister pocketed a communion wafer during the state funeral for former governor general Romeo LeBlanc.

The Saint John Telegraph-Journal apologized to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the story which the newspaper said "was inaccurate and should not have been published."

The story created a national controversy that lasted for several days while Harper was attending a G8 gathering in Italy and preparing to meet the Pope.

"There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now," said the apology. "The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the prime minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused."

Update: Who is the source?

Hayek/Friedman 2 Keynes 0

The changes made by discples of Hayek and friedman have made it much for difficult for th e leftists to go back to the bad old days according to this authour. I certainly hope so, but the statists are not giving up so easily.

Every dog has its day, and the same applies to economic theory. Today's dog is neo-liberalism, a policy framework developed by economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, which found political expression under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Initially bent on privatizing public entities and challenging trade union power, neo-liberalism has since become a more subtle, though still transformative, political force.

With its emphasis on deregulation, free trade, inflation targeting, user fees and public-private partnerships, neo-liberalism has, notably, replaced Keynesian notions of state-led community building with an ethic of privatized individualism.

Many blame the current economic crisis on this laissez-faire approach, and call for a return to Keynesian thinking. Some claim we are already there, pointing to the massive countercyclical spending and bailouts by governments in Europe and North America.

End of union insanity?

I can only hope. A follow up to Rudyard Griffiths piece.

Torontonians -- and Canadians in general -- can only hope that CUPE's 2009 Toronto Tantrum is part of the last, dying gasp of militant labour unionism in this country. And there may be reason for optimism on this score. Earlier this month, National Post columnist Rudyard Griffiths provided the following analysis in these pages: "Two relentless trends -- surging numbers of retirees and stagnant population growth -- will shrink our already unhealthy ratio of four workers for every retiree today to three workers per each retiree by 2025 ... For employers, especially in the public sector, the pressure to increase workforce efficiency will soon be overwhelming ... There will be little, if any, financial leeway to fund cushy union benefits -- like the 18 sick days per year that Toronto currently offers its workers. In short, we are fast moving into an era where the various kinds of organized underemployment that riddles union agreements today will be a financial impossibility."

We agree. And for residents of Toronto -- whose city will take weeks to de-stinkify, even if Monday's tentative agreement holds -- the demise of public union power can't come fast enough.

The cult of obamessiah

An interesting article in the Economist. It is essentially a book review. The conclusions of the book authour on obamessiah, sound about right to me. Americans really do want a Monarch. Perhaps her Majesty will agree to have them back?

The perils of over-promising

Nonsense, say his supporters. Taking over banks and car companies was a temporary measure to tackle a crisis. When the danger recedes, Mr Obama will pull back. The restructuring of General Motors, for example, is comfortably ahead of schedule. And far from lording it over Congress, the president has if anything abdicated too much responsibility to it.

These are all fair points. But Mr Healy’s warnings are still worth heeding. Mr Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy—energy and health care—so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them. Perhaps he is hurrying to get the job done before his polls weaken any further. In six months, his approval rating has fallen from 63% to 56% while his disapproval rating has nearly doubled, from 20% to 39%. Independent voters are having second thoughts. And his policies are less popular than he is. Support for his health-care reforms has slipped from 57% to 49% since April.

All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong.

More Prof Plimer

Here is an interview Prof Plimer did with Dennis Prager last April.


Dennis Prager: …If the social sciences have been corrupted, which I believe they have entirely in the Western academic world by political agendas, there was always the belief that if there’s a place where truth was dominant, it was in the natural sciences, and you’re telling me that’s not the case.

Ian Plimer: I think the natural sciences have now been corrupted. I think they’ve been totally politicized. I think the natural sciences now are driven by two groups. One group who go outdoors, collect the new evidence, who try to integrate a new interdisciplinary science to try to understand how the planet works. There’s another group who don’t collect this information, they sit next to their computer, model someone else’s data and come up with a conclusion, and then they go outside and find it doesn’t work. That’s what we’re up against now. The modelers are dominating the natural sciences, and the models they create are totally unrelated to reality.

Prager: …Modeling, as in computer modeling, we’re told what’s going to happen in 40 years. Is that what you’re referring to?

Plimer: Very much so, but they can’t even get it right a couple of years in advance. For example, the modeling that was done in 1990, did not tell us about a huge event, where we shift a massive amount of heat around the world, and that was the El Nino of 1998. It didn’t tell us that in this century it started to cool down. Just after a few years those models were absolutely and totally wrong. So what hope have they got at predicting what might be happening in thirty or fifty years time?
Listen here:

Yet again, the vile forces of censorship attack

Another attempt to silence and frighten my friend Ezra Levant. When will these cowards realize Ezra doesnt scare so easily. It is very unfair that Ezra seems to bear the brunt of the free speech opponents these days.
I greatly admire all Ezra has done for Canada and Canadians for free speech. Lets thank this Canadian hero.

I have sent money to Ezra yesterday. You all should!!!! Dont let the forces of censorship win.

More from Prof Lindzen

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His calm , logical dissection of the goreacle's hysteria is hard to refute.


Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal (a leading modeler refers to it as essentially guesswork). Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980's, global cooling in the 1970's, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more. This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

Economists apologize to HM the Queen

HM the Queen really keeps on top of things!

British economists send apology to queen
(AP) – 4 hours ago
LONDON — Sorry Ma'am — we just didn't see it coming.
A British newspaper reported Sunday that a group of eminent economists have apologized to Queen Elizabeth II for failing to predict the financial crisis.
The Observer newspaper reported that a letter has been sent to the Queen after she demanded, during a visit to the London School of Economics last November, to know why nobody had anticipated the credit crunch.
According to the newspaper, the letter says that says "financial wizards" who believed that their plans to manage risky debts and protect the financial system were infallible were guilty of "wishful thinking combined with hubris."
Signatories to the three-page letter include Tim Besley, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee and historian Peter Hennessy.
The newspaper said the content was discussed during a seminar with a group of leading economists in June, including Nick MacPherson, a permanent secretary at Britain's Treasury, and Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill.
"In summary, your majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole," the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the correspondence, but said the Queen often discusses current issues with experts. In March, Mervyn King became the first Bank of England governor to be invited for private talks at the palace.
"The Queen always displays an interest in current issues and is kept abreast of current issues. Obviously the recession is very topical," Buckingham Palace said in a statement.
Luis Garicano, a professor at the London School of Economics, said he had discussed the origins of the crisis with the Queen during her visit. He said she had asked: "Why did nobody notice it?"

Salim Mansur on the axis of evil

Salim Mansur defends President Bush's assessment of the axis of evil. Events since that speech continue to prove his point.

Bush was right in speaking about the "axis of evil," and what was required of the UN if it adhered to the principle of collective security. Developments in North Korea and Iran have proven, if more proof were needed, that Bush's warning in 2002 about these rogue states was consistent with their recent history.

But the good Bush did in removing Iraq as a threat and helping Iraqis acquire freedom to make their own progress is generally unacknowledged, even as most intellectuals deride him. There is no surprise in this, for secular intellectuals as a class are wilfully blind to facts that render their ideology false. The ridicule for plain speaking leaders such as Bush -- before him Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher -- demonstrates the disdain of intellectuals for truth about evil.

Paul Johnson, in his best-selling book, Intellectuals, provided an insightful and revealing portrait of these people as a class. Intellectuals and their acolytes -- as Johnson illustrated through the lives, for example, of Rousseau and Marx -- are quite often loathsome individuals in their private lives, pathologically consumed by envy and lust for power, and responsible for making hell on earth for people around them. Their views deserve to be heard with much skepticism.

The derision of Bush not surprisingly was entirely consistent with the ways of intellectuals. Yet despite this derision, Bush was right then and vindicated since in his assessment of the "axis of evil."

Tarek Fatah on dishonour killings

I am sure all Canadians are deeply saddened by the murders of the four women by their family. My friend Tarek discuses how to fight this evil.


What had Laleh Bakhtiar done to deserve the punishment of having her translation of the Koran banned from ISNA's Islamic bookstores? Her fault, in the eyes of Islamists, is that she believes the Koran does not condone spousal abuse, as claimed by Islamists.

If a woman's translation of the Koran is banned from an Islamic bookstore, what is available at such places. At one Toronto bookstore, the title of a gaudy paperback screamed at passersby: Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell. The book, which is also widely available in British libraries and mosques, lists the type of women who will face eternal damnation. Among them are:

• "The Grumbler ... the woman who complains against her husband every now and then is one of Hell."

• "The Woman Who Adorns Herself."

• "The Woman Who Apes Men, Tattoos, Cuts Hair Short and Alters Nature."

Not until the leadership of the Muslim clergy takes steps to end gender apartheid and misogyny will they be taken seriously when they say, "honour killing" is not permitted by Islam. They cannot have it both ways: proclaim women as the source of sin as well as deserving of death for consensual sex, and then claim the men who carry out the death sentence are acting against Islamic law.

"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."

I love this quote from H.L. Mencken. I call them environmentostalinists. The Investors Business Daily has an editorial on that article I posted about recently.

"We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis."
These findings are largely being ignored by the mainstream media. They simply don't fit the worn narrative that man is dangerously warming the Earth through his carbon dioxide emissions and a radical alteration of Western lifestyles mandated by government policy is desperately needed.
They will be ignored, as well, by the Democratic machine that is trying to ram an economy-smothering carbon cap-and-trade regime through Congress.
Despite efforts to keep the global warming scare alive, the growing evidence that humans aren't heating the planet is piercing the public consciousness and alarmists are becoming marginalized.
Sharp Americans are starting to understand H.L. Mencken's observation that "The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." That pretty much sums up the modern environmentalist movement.

R.I.P. Harry Patch

One of the last survivors of the great war has died at age 111. As we lose the living links to the past , we must strive not to forget their sacrifice.
In the words of Our Sovereign Lady
Her Majesty said: "We will never forget the bravery and enormous sacrifice of his generation."

Last UK veteran of WWI trench battles dies at 111
By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jul 25, 11:40 am ET
LONDON – Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.
Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."
"Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren't scared, he's a damned liar: you were scared all the time," Patch was quoted as saying in a book, "The Last Fighting Tommy," written with historian Richard van Emden.

The English-speaking world's beacon of enterprise and limited government

As I posted before the Bank of Canada Governor has said the recession is coming to an end. With obama's policies in ascendancy David Frum thinks Canada will be a free market beacon to the world. Hopefully Canada will get many high tax refugees from the US.

In the last three months of 2008, the Canadian economy lost 273,000 jobs more than it gained. Canadian unemployment has reached 8.6%, the worst level in 11 years. But Canadians can now feel some hope that things will get no worse: In the three months that ended June 30, Canada lost only 13,000 jobs more than were created. And on Thursday, the Bank of Canada predicted that the Canadian economy would resume growth in the second half of this year. Unemployment may take a while to return to a satisfactory level. Households may not feel prosperous again until later next year. But if the bank is right, the worst is past.

Not in the United States. The American recession started earlier than Canada's, and unemployment looks likely to continue rising into the fall, probably past 10%. While the economy is not shrinking as rapidly as over the winter, growth staggers along in negative territory.

Under the contrasting Harper and Obama plans, Canada looks likely to become in the 2010s what the United States has been since 1980: the English-speaking world's beacon of enterprise and limited government. Canada now seems poised to collect its due reward.

In the Bush years, the agitprop documentary maker Michael Moore released film after film demanding to know why the United States did not follow Canada's example. If Canada is returning to growth, that question will gain new urgency south of the border. Of course, now that Canada is setting a good example, don't expect Michael Moore to maintain his interest. But Moore is not the only one with a camera. There must be somebody else who knows how to tell this story -- and teach its lesson?

Travers on grit strategy

uber grit Jim Travers thinks the grits have missed their opportunity. Now they may have to actually think up a policy.

Good times spell bad news for cautious Liberals
Jul 25, 2009 04:30 AM
JAMES TRAVERS
OTTAWA

On Parliament Hill the sound of the recession ending is the same as a window closing. If Mark Carney is right – and the Bank of Canada Governor has been wrong before about the early return of boom times – the Liberals missed the most promising opportunity to defeat the Conservatives in spring and are now under pressure to take their next best chance in the fall.

In hindsight, that Liberal moment came and went in late June. With key advisers urging their new main man to seize the twin advantages of rising popularity and a sagging economy, Michael Ignatieff looked in the mirror and blinked.

After less than six months learning the leadership ropes, and with Conservatives negatively framing his public persona, Ignatieff wasn't confident enough of his readiness to force an unpopular summer election. Rather than roll the dice, he rolled over by cutting a transparently face-saving deal to keep Stephen Harper in power longer.

Controversial then, that decision is suddenly much more contentious today. Carney's prediction that growth will return this quarter is also a warning that fortune is again tilting towards the ruling party. "Time for a change" loses much of its appeal when the times are already changing for the better.

Instead of blaming Conservatives for job losses, misjudging the deficit and mismanaging the economy, Liberals would have to fall back on the weaker, more nuanced and less evocative argument that it was the Official Opposition that forced a reluctant government to open the stimulus floodgates.

None of that would matter so much if Liberals hadn't been overly confident Conservatives, with a lot of help from the recession, would defeat themselves. Gripped by the same hubris that convinced the party it could afford Stéphane Dion, Liberals failed to give Canadians reasons to vote for Ignatieff, not simply against Harper.

Travolta to break with Scientology?

I think scientology is dangerous. It's odd thoughts about treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders have previously lead to tragedy. Apparently John Travolta is beginning to uinderstand this.

Travolta is also said to be upset that senior members of the sect have instructed him to undergo intensive sessions with one of Scientology's 'ethics officers', trained to question the actor and other grieving family members to establish whether their 'negative influences' might have contributed to the tragedy.
But there is much more to this than just a questioning of a once rock-solid faith. 'I think it would be very difficult for John Travolta at this stage, given his history with the religion, to extricate himself from the Church of Scientology,' said Mr Ross, who has investigated the sect for almost 30 years.
'It would be a huge move on his part because Scientology keeps files on its celebrity members containing embarrassing personal information about them.
'And Scientology has proven in the past that it has a penchant for releasing that information to embarrass people who have left and who have said things it doesn't like.
'If celebrities leave, they tend to do it quietly and keep their mouths shut, because if they do speak out, they are opening themselves up to attack from Scientology.
'That's why I think Travolta will want to keep his problems with the Church private.'
Travolta's friends have been speculating among themselves for months that he now deeply regrets adhering so strictly to the cult's outlandish instructions over his son's medical treatment.

Lord Black on Obama's 6 months

People are beignning to realize the obamessiah is really plain old inexperienced obama. Lord Black has a great piec in the NP.
The hubris , that helped bring down the GOP, has set in with the dems very early.


But his own Environmental Protection Agency director acknowledges that his cap-and-trade bill will have no effect on the climate and it will neither raise revenue nor reduce carbon use. It must be replaced with a straight carbon tax of bearable impact, coupled with sensible conservation and alternate-energy-source and oil-exploration incentives. The bill that limped through the House of Representatives was a Rube Goldberg contraption of Al Gore myths and Congressional vote-buying boondoggles. Its adoption would be a disaster. The President's claim of putting millions of Americans to work making windmills and solar panels is a fable that extends the frontiers of quixotry.

Instead of the well-proven Roosevelt-Johnson-Reagan method for legislative change, of declaring an emergency and unveiling a plan of action to deal with it, sending precise bills to the Congress and whipping them through and using his forensic skills to rouse the nation, the President spent months frightening the public, which was by then a redundant exercise, to create conditions for adoption of a radical tax, spending, health-care and energy program. He wanted to incite panic on the scale of the 1930s, though the economic crisis was not comparable, in order to institute a more radical program than circumstances justified or the public wanted. The half of economics that is psychology was not well-served, and his own party is stumbling in the legislative gate.

Antidote to the goreacle?

Marlo Lewis of the CEI has an antidote to the goreacle's screed.



When Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), came out in 2006, I expected to see some hard-hitting criticism by scientists of Gore’s unfounded alarmism and by economists of his blithe disregard of the human suffering that energy rationing (cap-and-trade) and mandatory reliance on costly and under-performing renewable energy would inflict on low-income households and poor countries. However, with a few notable exceptions, Gore’s film got mostly rave reviews, earned an Academy Award, and later helped bag him the Nobel Prize. Because few specialists in the science and economics fields took Gore to task, I jumped into the breach. At first, I thought I could write an adequate expose of Gore’s errors and exaggerations in about 20 pages. But as I dug into the book version of AIT, I found that nearly all of Gore’s assertions about climate change and climate policy were either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or just plain wrong. My critique–published by CEI in March 2007 under the title Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth–grew to 150 pages....

Is Rex a climate realist?

Sure sounds like it to me. He is also recommending Prof Ian Plimer's Book.

I bring this up merely to make a single point. Not that these studio meteorologists were making the elementary mistake of confounding weather with climate, for this is a distinction familiar now even to kindergartners. Rather, to point out how “accepted” the vague, soft, but relentlessly propagandized theory of global warming has become. That being on the “right” side of the global warming argument is so very much the politically correct place to be. It's the “virtuous” side to be on, so naturally our supper-hour meteorologists, even if unconsciously, were eager to encourage virtue.

Now, however, Toronto in July is cool and I am waiting in vain for the lips of just one forecaster to ask how can this be. Waiting just once to hear the familiar phrase “global warming” in a sentence that even hints that the theory behind it is so much more tentative than we have been urged with such fervour to believe.

And while I'm waiting, perhaps I could recommend to people who study or report on the weather a wonderfully comprehensive and fearless book on the subject by Australian geologist Ian Plimer called Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science. If there are any willing to hear some truly inconvenient truths on the stampeding advocacy of global warming, Mr. Plimer's book is a collection of some of the sternest.

More bad news for the chicken littles

This appeared in Nature. The debate continues.
Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change

S. Fred Singer1, Hal Lewis2, Will Happer3, Larry Gould4, Roger Cohen5 & Robert H. Austin6

University of Virginia
University of California, Santa Barbara
Princeton University
University of Hartford
Durango, Colorado
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Email: austin@princeton.edu

Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change
S. Fred Singer1, Hal Lewis2, Will Happer3, Larry Gould4, Roger Cohen5 & Robert H. Austin3
1. U of Virginia; 2. U of California, Santa Barbara; 3. Princeton U; 4. U of Hartford; 5. Durango, CO
We write in response to your issue discussing "the coming climate crunch", including the Editorial 'Time to act' (Nature 458, 10771078; 2009). We feel it is alarmist.
We are among more than 50 current and former members of the American Physical Society (APS) who have signed an open letter to the APS Council this month, calling for a reconsideration of its November 2007 policy statement on climate change (see open letter ; APS statement ). The letter proposes an alternative statement, which the signatories believe to be a more accurate representation of the current scientific evidence. It requests that an objective scientific process be established, devoid of political or financial agendas, to help prevent subversion of the scientific process and the intolerance towards scientific disagreement that pervades the climate issue.
On 1 May 2009, the APS Council decided to review its current statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. We applaud this decision. It is the first such reappraisal by a major scientific professional society that we are aware of, and we hope it will lead to meaningful change that reflects a more balanced view of climate-change issues.

Obama apologizes

I have to say this is a classy thing for Obama to have done, though his original comments were pretty thoughtless.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama backed down Friday from a statement that police had "acted stupidly" in arresting a black scholar in a racially charged case that was rapidly becoming a distraction for Obama.

The president made a surprise appearance in the White House press briefing room shortly after he spoke by phone to Cambridge, Massachusetts, police Sgt. James Crowley, who had arrested Henry Louis Gates, a prominent scholar of African-American studies at Harvard, last week.

"Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up, I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically," Obama said. "And I could have calibrated those words differently."

Canadian conservatism

I think there is room for all of us in the conservative tent. This is an interesting article though a bit facile.

A lot of people are wondering about the future of Canadian conservatism.
Historically, it has developed in two main directions. One is mainly western, libertarian, favours small government, and is partial to fundamentalist Christianity. The older conservatism is Tory, based mainly in central and eastern Canada. It is statist and corporatist (Canada as a "community of communities"). Its founders were Victorians like John A. Macdonald and its closest parallel was the "Tory Democracy" of British Conservatives like Benjamin Disraeli, a cousin of the Canadian "Red Tory."

Even some in new labour understand

A very frank assessment of new labour latest byelection disaster. Congratulations Chloe Smith!
A crushing defeat of lasting significance
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

With a swing of 16.5%, Chloe Smith overturned a Labour majority of 5,000+ to gain and a new Tory majority of over 7,000 in Norwich North, a so-called Labour "safe seat" in recent history.

Excuses will no doubt be made and ministers will be herded out to say to the media that this was a "disappointing" result for Labour.

But excuses and disappointment are not enough.

The magnitude of this defeat shows that this was more than just a protest vote and it was more than simply a reaction to the expenses crises - that excuse did not wash after June 4 and it will not wash this time.

Indeed, this was more than a response to the apparently unjust deselection of Ian Gibson. He, too, would have lost.

No, a swing of this proportion - not unlike the one to Labour in the Wirral in 1997 - is a sign of embedded culture change. It shows that the country is ready and willing - if not craving - to vote for a Tory government in substantial numbers.

It is our challenge now to respond to that current desire and accordingly.

"Islamophobia"

Another writer claiming "Islamophobia" is rampant in Canada and the west, and once again ignoring the jihadi threat.
Letter writers were not impressed (me neither). One even used the opportunity to denounce the hrcs.

Muslims have a persecution complex
Re: "Who killed Marwa El- Sherbiny?" (Opinion, July 22).

I am pretty sure the so-called Islamophobia is more a product of worldwide violence in the name of Islam than any lack of action on the part of the Western world.

I am pretty sure that the Canadian Islamic Congress was given every opportunity to respond to the referenced Maclean's article, but it insisted on unrealistic conditions that precluded Maclean's from running its rebuttal.

Finally, I'm also pretty sure that the persecution complex exhibited by Muslim commentators, propagandists, academics, et al, is alive and well, as referenced in every word of the article mentioned above.

The day Muslims take responsibility for actions committed in the name of Islam, the day Muslims around the world stop calling for the implementation of Sharia law, the day Muslims understand that multiculturalism would stand a better chance of working if it were a two-way street, then and only then can there be real dialogue.

Jad Mouracade

Saint Eustache

Speak out against terror
Re: "Who killed Marwa El- Sherbiny?" (Opinion, July 22).

Ehab Lotayef speaks about the growing hatred against Muslims in Canada. He might be right, but putting the blame solely on the government is not right.

Terrorists attack throughout the world on a daily basis and the collateral damage to innocent children,women, and men is more of an outrage.

If the Muslims in North America would stand up and speak about these atrocities as much as they speak out about our governments, the Canadians he says discriminate against them might have a change of heart. All Canadians should speak in unison against terrorists. This will unite us in a common cause and bring respect for one another.

Albert Coccia

Greenfield Park

Susan Boyle on AGT

More of the interview with Meredith Viera, that bumped obamessiah.

From the Today show


From America's Got Talent

More bad news for the chicken littles

Another peer reviewed article in the Journal of Geophysical research contends most the warming in the last half century is natural. The chicken littles will probably ignore this or attack the authours. The evidence against their hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is becoming more and more untenable.
July 23, 2009
Nature not man responsible for recent global warming
Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.
The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.

Recession over: Bank of Canada

Good news for Canadians and HM Government. For the grits and iggy not so much.

Bank of Canada, in shift, sees recession ending now
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's economy will pull out of its worst recession since the early 1990s this quarter, the Bank of Canada said on Thursday, and the world economy has likely averted a worst-case scenario and is bottoming out.

"With the economy supported by better financial conditions and higher levels of business and consumer confidence than anticipated, the downturn in activity in the first half of the year has been less severe," the bank said in its Monetary Policy Report. "And growth is now projected to turn positive in the third quarter."

In April the bank had projected a turnaround in the fourth quarter. It now sees third-quarter growth of 1.3 percent on an annualized basis, rather than the 1 percent decline it forecast earlier, ending three straight quarters of decline.

It also projects stronger-than-expected quarterly growth through the first half of 2010, but weaker-than-expected growth through 2011, when its current forecasts end.

It said the recent rise in the Canadian dollar, which the bank attributed to higher commodity prices and a weak U.S. dollar, is moderating the overall pace of growth.

Good for you Lonesome George

I saw Lonesome George on my trip to the Galapagos Islands in 2006.

Famous Galapagos giant tortoise Lonesome George, who is believed to be the last of his species, could be about to become a father for the first time.
His keepers have spent years trying to encourage him to mate and now the latest pairing has produced five eggs.
The eggs are being cared for in an incubation centre in the Galapagos National Park and it could be clear by November whether Lonesome George who is between 90 and 100 will become a father.

Very Curious

What is going here? 4 women dead, their family members arrested. Dishonour killings?
Watery graves [Mark Steyn]
Three or so weeks back, a submerged car was found in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ontario, containing the bodies of three teenage girls and their aunt - a story initially reported as Mysterious Death Of 4 Quebecers Baffles Kingston Police. When it emerged that the four female Quebecers were, in fact, Muslim, the tearful parents offered up a strange tale of an impromptu midnight driving lesson gone tragically wrong (Driving Lesson May Have Led To Drowning).

La Presse is now reporting that the girls' father, mother and brother have been arrested en route to Montreal Airport, and that the deceased "aunt" or (alternatively) "cousin" was, in fact, the girls' father's first wife. The words "crime d'honneur" are beginning to creep into newspaper accounts.

Meanwhile, the blogger Scaramouche suggests that, while they're looking into honour killings in the Kingston area, the constabulary might take a gander at another curious aquatic accident this month:...

Dennis Miller

Dennis Miller comments on this smackdown of senator boxer.

Very Scary

The future bankruptcy of the west? Social programs will bankrupt our governments.

For a glimpse of what awaits Britain, Europe, and America as budget deficits spiral to war-time levels, look at what is happening to the Irish welfare state.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:40PM BST 18 Jul 2009

Events have already forced Premier Brian Cowen to carry out the harshest assault yet seen on the public services of a modern Western state. He has passed two emergency budgets to stop the deficit soaring to 15pc of GDP. They have not been enough. The expert An Bord Snip report said last week that Dublin must cut deeper, or risk a disastrous debt compound trap.
A further 17,000 state jobs must go (equal to 1.25m in the US), though unemployment is already 12pc and heading for 16pc next year.

Education must be cut 8pc. Scores of rural schools must close, and 6,900 teachers must go. "The attacks outlined in this report would represent an education disaster and light a short fuse on a social timebomb", said the Teachers Union of Ireland.
Nobody is spared. Social welfare payments must be cut 5pc, child benefit by 20pc. The Garda (police), already smarting from a 7pc pay cut, may have to buy their own uniforms. Hospital visits could cost £107 a day, etc, etc.
"Something has to give," said Professor Colm McCarthy, the report's author. "We're borrowing €400m (£345m) a week at a penalty interest."
No doubt Ireland has been the victim of a savagely tight monetary policy - given its specific needs. But the deeper truth is that Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the US, and Japan are in varying states of fiscal ruin, and those tipping into demographic decline (unlike young Ireland) have an underlying cancer that is even more deadly. The West cannot support its gold-plated state structures from an aging workforce and depleted tax base

An excellent editorial

The NP points out that liberal pandering to the Tamil Tigers cost many lives. The grits were repeatedly told to outlaw the ltte and repeatedly refused. Indeed senior grits attended ltte fundraisers. The grits should apologize to the people of Sri Lanka and Canada.

ITAC estimates that Canadian funding for the Tamil Tigers -- secured, in part, by coercive "taxation" of Tamil-Canadians and their businesses -- reached levels of up to $12-million a year, or about $1-million each month. That may not sound like a lot. Then again, terrorist groups don't need that much money to kill people. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, for instance, were thought to have required only about $600,000.

Shortly after Canadians elected a Conservative government that had the political backbone necessary to finally declare the Tigers a terrorist group in 2006 (thereby criminalizing LTTE fund-raising), Sri Lanka's civil war ended in utter defeat and disaster for the Tigers. It is difficult to say how much Stephen Harper's decision affected the balance of power in the last three years of this conflict. But we'd bet the effect was significant: The money that the Canadian Tamil diaspora remitted to the Tigers, as we now know, comprised a large portion of the LTTE's budget.

It therefore has become difficult to deny that the protection and sympathy extended to the cause of Tamil militancy until 2006 -- most notably, by Liberal politicians -- prolonged Sri Lanka's civil war, and increased the scale of the bloodshed.

Just For laughs

Its just for laughs season again ion Montreal so far I have seen Nasty Girls and the ,a Ethnic Heroes of Comedy.
The nasty girls was a litany of expletives not deleted and very sexual. My favourite was Nikki Payne a young Newf who recently gave a kidney to her dad.
I enjoyed the ethnic heroes show particularly the MC.

Brawl in Parliament

If you think our Parliament is unruly watch this.

Look who's coming to lecture...

More on the jihadi guest of a so called mainstream Islamic organization.


Terry Glavin: Sheltering hate while preaching tolerance among Canadian Muslims
Posted: July 22, 2009, 11:00 AM by NP Editor
Full Comment, Terry Glavin
It's all for the sake of our edification, and for the sake of some elucidation of fascinating revivals and reform movements down through Islamic history, says the Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought, about which I reported here yesterday. So, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of argument, let's begin by giving the Al-Fauz institute the benefit of the doubt.

Let's say the institute's patrons and principals are actually quite serious about embarking upon a nation-wide campaign to raise up a new, outward-looking generation of Muslims in Canada. Let's say they're not kidding when they say their plan is to train Canada's young Muslims in the application of Islamic ideas to Canada’s "pluralistic" society, and that when they say their aim is to “prepare young minds that will take up the mantle of the Muslim community” in this country, they mean it. Let's also say they're dead serious about presenting Canadians with "a balanced and comprehensive vision of Islam."

Transparency?

More hypocrisy and little change from obamessiah.


Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.
The Secret Service sent a reply stating that documents revealing the frequency of such visits were considered presidential records exempt from public disclosure laws. The agency also said it was advised by the Justice Department that the Secret Service was within its rights to withhold the information because of the “presidential communications privilege.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics said it would file suit against the Obama administration as early as today.

More polls show dems hubris being rewarded

Bad news for the dems. Generic polls going GOP

Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Support for Republican congressional candidates has reached its highest level in over two years as the GOP lengthens its lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Ballot.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 42% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 38% would opt for the Democratic candidate.
Support for Republican candidates rose two points over the past week, while support for Democratic candidates is up one point. Last week, support for Democrats fell to its lowest level in over two years.

Susan Boyle on NBC

Here is the segment from the Today show this morning.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The murderous mullahs and their minions are rapists

Tarek Fatah on the despicable mullahs who rape and pillage their own people in the name of Islam. These are the people obamessiah wants to engage in dialogue. These criminals need to be overthrown.


Confronting Tehran's vicious misogyny
When the Prague Spring failed in 1968, few people believed that the seeds of dissent that had been crushed under the weight of Soviet tanks would blossom 20 years later to bring about the demise of the U. S. S. R. itself. A similar summer of discontent and rebellion has blossomed in Tehran in 2009, and I would venture to say that, this time around, it will not take two decades for the ossified state structure to come crashing down.

The reason: This time, it is the mothers and daughters of Iran who have rebelled against the Islamic Republic of Iran and have come out in the streets to lead the men.

For 30 years, an entire nation has been subjected to imprisonment, torture, murder and -- unnoticed by the world -- the institutional rape of its daughters, all in the name of Islam. No other dictatorial society, not even the Saudis, have used rape as a tool of subjugation as the Iranian ruling ayatollahs have. Perversely, it has been dressed up as an act of piety and religiosity.

Susan Boyle meets Elaine Paige

I have seen the great Elaine Paige on stage many years ago. Susan Boyle has finally met her. She has even bumped obamessiah! Even the obamessiah worshippers at nbc , know which side their bread is buttered.
Susan will be on the Today show this morning in a taped interview with Meredith Viera.

Mr Obama had hoped to broadcast a televised press conference at 9pm on Wednesday on NBC to explain his plans for reforming America's private-sector health care system.
However, Boyle, who became an overnight success around the globe with her heart-rending performances on the ITV talent show, has pipped him to the prime time position.

Instead, Mr Obama has had to shift his address to the earlier time of 8pm, when it will be aired live on three US networks, including NBC.
A pre-recorded interview with the 48-year-old Scottish spinster will be broadcast in the 9pm slot.
A US television insider told the Daily Express: "The television networks normally comply even if it is in prime viewing time.
"It can lose them ratings and millions of dollars in advertising revenue. But NBC dug its heels in and refused to push Susan out of the prime time slot, so the White House just had to blink."
Boyle has enjoyed widespread popularity in the US after more than 275 million Americans viewed clips of her on YouTube.

Montreal Madoff still in Canada

Earl Jones seems to have cheated even his immediate family including his wife and children. Though some investors wonder about the role of his wife in all this.
He no longer seems to be missing. What a terrible betrayal.
MONTREAL -- Earl Jones is in Canada but fears for his safety and is remaining out of sight for the time being, his lawyer says.

The Montreal financier's whereabouts have been a mystery since allegations emerged in the last weeks that he had been running a Ponzi scheme that cost dozens of investors their life savings.

Jeffrey Boro, a Montreal defence lawyer, told The Gazette that Mr. Jones hired him after learning that police had searched his offices in the Montreal suburb of Pointe Claire.

Mr. Boro said other than a brief trip to the U.S. to see one of his daughters, Mr. Jones has remained in Canada while outrage over his sudden disappearance swirled. Mr. Boro would not say exactly where his client is.

"Obviously, Mr. Jones knows himself that there are many angry people out there and I guess that is why he hasn't been so visible the past few days," Mr. Boro said, adding he has concerns for his client's health. He described Mr. Jones as a "very, very depressed individual."

Mr. Boro said his client fears for his safety.

"To me, he is not hiding. To the police, he is not hiding. But is he going to walk down the streets of Pointe Claire and see all of the people who feel that he has stolen from them? I don't think that would be a good idea. From what I hear and what I read, there are a lot of angry people out there."

In the days leading up to the collapse of Earl Jones Consultant and Administration Corp., many people who had trusted Mr. Jones for years, including many elderly widows, started learning of cheques bouncing and the very real possibility that a life's worth of savings had been wiped out.

Some of his clients have turned to a food bank for help.

Acting on investor complaints, the Quebec securities regulator -- the Autorité des marchés financiers -- obtained permission to freeze Mr. Jones's bank accounts. The AMF discovered that almost nothing remained.

Since then, allegations of a sizeable Ponzi scheme have emerged and civil court proceedings have begun to have Mr. Jones declared bankrupt. His firm's remaining assets are under the control of an interim receiver.

Estimates of how much money has disappeared range from $30-million to $100-million.

Mr. Boro confirmed Mr. Jones is currently under investigation by both the Sûreté du Québec and the RCMP. He said he has scheduled a meeting with police investigators.

"I can tell you that Mr. Jones is in Canada. Besides a brief trip to the United States he has always been in Canada."

"Mr. Jones has always been available to me and I speak to him quite often. Consequently, he is available for the police and in fact I have been in contact with the police. We'll be meeting with the police when they want to meet. The police are obviously investigating these type of files to see if any criminal activity has taken place and whether or not charges should be laid. You can't do these investigations in a half an hour or an hour. They go on for a certain period of time and until that time we'll have to wait and see what conclusions the police come to in relation to their investigation."

Mr. Boro said his client might be ready to be interviewed by police investigators.

"I think that ultimately this is what we are hoping can happen. This will be predicated on the conversations I have with the police, when I meet with them. But as we speak now it is our intention to speak with the police."

The lawyer said Mr. Jones informed police investigators of his planned trip to see his daughter and told them what day he would return. Mr. Jones has yet to be charged with any wrongdoing so he was not bound by any travel restrictions.

Eliminate 25% of the civil service

I love this article by Rudyard Griffiths. We need to cut spending and the size of government. A lot of government spending is pure waste. Why don't we allow the civil service to shrink my 25% by attrition? Rudyard please, please run as a Tory!!!!

Rudyard Griffiths: CUPE makes a good case for eliminating CUPE

As Toronto’s public service strike enters its fifth week, with no end in sight, an interesting social phenomenon is starting to unfold in Canada’s largest metropolis: In bars, over dinner tables and around water coolers, Toronto’s tax-strapped and recession-conscious denizen are all talking about how little their day-to-day lives have been effected by the strike.

Yes, there is the inconvenience of having to pay $5 a bag to have garbage hauled away by the enterprising businessmen who come to your door. Yes, the city’s main thoroughfares are starting to look like the gritty set of a CSI: NY episode. And, yes, if you are a parent with limited means who was counting on city summer camps and daycare, the last month has been downright awful.

But for the vast majority of Torontonians, this summer is much like any other. Given this state of affairs, more and more people are asking themselves: What exactly were the 30,000 strikers doing before they took to the picket lines?

The very partisan obamessiah

Everyone knows that obamessiah is a leftist partisan. He has a lot less bipartisan support for his legislation than did President Bush. Now the media and the dems have new ways to define bipartisanship.

Only last summer we were told that Barack Obama’s political appeal rested on his vision for a “post-partisan future.” The post-partisan future was one of the press corps’ favorite phrases. It served as shorthand for the candidate’s repeated references to “unity of purpose,” looking beyond a red or blue America, and so on.

Six months into the president’s term, you don’t read much about this post-partisan future anymore. It may be because on almost every big-ticket legislative item (the stimulus, climate change, and now health care), Mr. Obama has been pushing a highly ideological agenda with little (and in some cases zero) support from across the aisle. Yet far from stating the obvious—that sitting in the Oval Office is a very partisan president—the press corps is allowing Mr. Obama to evade the issue by coming up with novel redefinitions.

The redefinition started during the stimulus debate, but it really picked up steam late last month with David Axelrod’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” There the president’s chief strategist explained that a bill didn’t need Republican votes to be “bipartisan”; it was enough if Republican “ideas” were included. A few days earlier, Rahm Emanuel had offered reporters another redefinition, suggesting that a bill was bipartisan if people merely “saw the president trying” to get Republicans on board.

The high price of so called green jobs

The Colorado governor has refused to endorse waxman markey.
h/t) The cost of 450 "green" jobs in Colorado was $71000 per job!






From Sen Inhofe
"Based on the widespread public backlash against the Waxman-Markey bill, I am not surprised that Gov. Ritter refused to endorse the bill," Sen. Inhofe said. "And if you read the testimony of the majority witnesses, Waxman-Markey is nowhere to be found. That's because this bill is the largest tax increase in American history, and they want nothing to do with it."

Liberty Summer Seminar 2009

Another reminder . You should attend LSS in Onono, Ontario July 25, 26, 2009

I am not a libertarian. I am a Blue Tory. I have lots of libertarian friends and we have a lot of opinions in common. I believe in free speech and free market capitalism. My friends at the Institute for Liberal Studies( nothing to do with the grits) do great work spreading the message of freedom. I have tried to help( in a very small way) them spread this message to young people. THE ILS holds an amazing event every summer called the Liberty Summer Seminar. This year it will be held July 25 and 26, 2009 in Orono, Ontario. I urge you all to attend. Spaces are limited so register now!!

Another jihadi to represent official Islam in Canada

Official Muslim organization seem to be peppered with jihadi apologists and actuall jihadis. The moderates are marginalized. This jihadi cements the view of Islam as a death cult. Very scary.


The Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought says its purpose is to teach young Muslims how to apply Islamic ideas to Canada’s pluralistic society and “prepare young minds that will take up the mantle of the Muslim community.” Tamimi is scheduled to launch the institute’s ambitious public-relations and proselytizing efforts in Canada with a July 24-27 Islamic history course at Ryerson University.

But Tamimi has loudly renounced democracy, explicitly praises suicide bombers, and he’s said he’d even be happy to blow himself up in Israel: “It’s the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity.” Tamimi distinguishes good Muslims from their adversaries this way: "We love death. They love life."

Tamimi recently proclaimed: “I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” and it was at an anti-Israel rally in Dublin only three months ago that Tamimi declared: “With regard to their attitudes to liberation, I say ‘Long Live the Taliban’.”

hope and change?

obamessiah's porkulus and other massive government spending programs are having devastating consequences.
Last week, the Federal Reserve raised its unemployment forecast to a "higher than expected" 10.1 percent and forecast it to remain high through 2011.


The Department of Labor reports that unemployment topped 10 percent in 16 states last month and that Michigan surpassed 15 percent, the first time since 1984 any state has crossed that threshold.

"Three feet high and risin'."

The administration and Congress received more bad news from the Congressional Budget Office. In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said: "In the (health care reform) legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs." Elmendorf added, "...the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run ... under any plausible scenario..."

I blame them both

Terence Corcoran has a good piece blaming cupe more than miller for more than a month of Toronto refuse not being picked up.
I blame them both. However Corcoran makes good points. The unions have succeeded in rewarding sloth and protecting the incompetent. Its true that this has been going in Toronto during the tenure of many mayors. What is the solution? will it take the bankruptcy of the city , like for GM, to finally get the unions to understand the damage they are doing. It is funny to watch union members complain about how expensive it is to live in Toronto without realizing that their costs are a big part of the problem. This is happening across Canada's cities.
Hopefully miller will soon be gone and a more center right mayor will be elected. Unfortunately i don't see anyone in the wings who will be willing to take on the union stranglehold and think about the citizens of the city first.


Like all union leaders, CUPE chiefs just make stuff up. The sick-leave unfunded liability, estimated at $140-million for the striking workers, is said to be an "accounting fantasy." Unions always say things like that about unfunded liabilities. The auto workers dismissed their unfunded pension liability as a non-problem until their pensions couldn't be paid. Then they blamed management for failing to properly manage the company and the liability, for which they should have prepared. While Miller is being hanged, the union operatives are getting away with murder. There is no winning against union arguments. Anyone who gets into a debate with union brass risks a mean personal battle. As part of the CBC Radio debate over the Toronto strike, Jim Stanford of the Canadian Auto Workers lit in to Catherine Swift of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business with a typical ad hominem: "She makes five or six times as much money as the people on the picket lines, but she's still pointing the finger."

With mean-spirited class warfare on its side, the union is winning the battle. The worse the Mayor and city hall look in public opinion, the more CUPE can count on a city capitulation to union preferences.

Eventually, the strike will end and Toronto CUPE members will return to work and the garbage will be picked up again. In the end, even if Mr. Miller is gone, nothing will have been done to rewrite Toronto's dismal union-dominated financial outlook. But CUPE's Paul Moist -- who should have been the Maclean's cover story this week -- will still be around, doing his shtick.

HM the Queen attends the annual Swan Upping

For the first time in centuries a Monarch has attended the annual swan upping ceremony.

And how many lives have you saved bono?

I like U2's music. I have attended 4 Youtube concerts and have most of their music on my new iPhone. bono irritates me. he is a self righteous, tax evading publicity hog. He apparently side stepped a hug by President Bush. President Bush's policies have been responsible for saving millions of lives in Africa. What is it that bono has accomplished?

HM the Queen and the Apollo 11 missin

Message from HM the Queen reached the moon!

21 July 1969 (UK time) - A 'micro-filmed' message from The Queen is deposited by the Apollo 11 astronauts during the first landing on the Moon. The message read:"On behalf of the British people I salute the skill and courage which have brought man to the Moon. May this endeavour increase the knowledge and well-being of mankind".

Her Majesty also sent a message of congratulations to the President of the United States of America:

"I send my warmest congratulations to you, to the crew of Apollo 11, and to the American people on the historic occasion of man's first landing on the Moon. I am filled with admiration for the fortitude of Astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, whose exploits add a new dimension to man's knowledge of the Universe. I offer my good wishes and prayers for their safe return".

The President responded:

"Your Majesty, on behalf of the people of the United States, and especially Astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, I thank you for sharing your kind thoughts on the manned lunar landing. This flight has added a new dimension to human experience. Let us hope it will usher in an era of increasingly fruitful international understanding and cooperation. Sincerely, Richard Nixon."

Prof Lindzen refutes the chicken littles video

Here is the video of the speech from the washington climate realist conference.

Awake and Sing

I recently saw Soulpepper's production of Awake and Sing. It is a play about 3 generations of a Jewish family living in the Bronx in the 1930's. It was a superb cast. The acting was great. However the plot was somewhat annoying. It is a diatribe against capitalism, family and tradition. Considering when it was written, I guess that is to be expected, but I found the play a bit too preachy.
My conclusion great performances, so so play.

Dual Standards

It is certainly not my place to criticize a decision by Our Sovereign Lady. She is fount of all honour . I am sure if HM believes chretien deserves this order, he does. chretien spent a lot of time escorting the on tours in Canada and seems to have had agood relationship with the Sovereign.
I do agree with this article by Angelo Perschilli.

We might like or dislike Black, and we needn't forget that he is in an American jail. But this is not about him. The issue is the treatment by a Canadian prime minister of a Canadian citizen who was forced to make a choice that was not imposed on others.

It is unfair that Canada is called upon to help Canadian citizens all over the world, even if they no longer live in Canada, and yet turns its back on a person who was forced to make a choice as a Canadian citizen. I agree that he made the wrong choice, but it was a choice that other Canadians didn't have to make.

Chrétien writes in his book that former British prime minister Tony Blair took only two weeks to give British citizenship to Black. I hope that Harper's government will decide to take no more time to give Black – who is not a foreigner but a Canadian-born and Canadian-educated individual who has contributed much to this country – back a citizenship that fell through the cracks of a dispute between two very stubborn and proud men.

I don't care if Black is a bad or a good Canadian but he is as much a Canadian as you or I.