...because you always have to look like you're having one. And Justin does. Sure his party sometimes looks like its going to become an all night kegger, but he keeps advisers around to make sure that doesn't happen. Never underestimate how far an outgoing, enthusiastic personality can take you in politics.
As for Forum, does it even matter anymore if their polls are crap, since crappy polls are all that's on offer these days? They're basically treating their surveys as adverts for the company, and its working. Read the papers these days and you'd think they're the only polling firm in Canada.
Last time around, it was emphatically not Canada-Israel Committee (CIC), though one of their reps went along. The whole junket was planned in (semi) secret, as though the sponsor was ashamed of what they were carting along with them, and when a picture of the CIC rep in question appeared on the website of Shaidle's hubby, it was swiftly disappeared. Now the CIC has been folded into CIJA; so are these folks behind the latest adventure of Canada's most famous racist couple? That would be extremely disappointing.
The guy helped process payments from "adult" sites, among other things. And I've heard worse stuff about him. The issue politically is, everyone knows him. Leftys, Rightys, in-between-ys. He's a genuinely friendly, charismatic guy. If he goes down, who goes down with him? Does his downfall trend Left or Right?
Are there going to be any? I'm told that the big do will be held at Maple Leaf Gardens, the site of so many glorious victories these last years. One rumor says it will be an old fashioned delegated convention. Another says the potentials will just get drunk and draw straws.
In any case, the federal NDP let us bloggers all in for free, and gave us a place to set up and write from. Frankly, they made it too difficult to get at the free food and booze--you had to swap a single MSM pass-card back and forth among bloggers and then fight Postmedia guys for a last lick from the bottom of the whiskey bottle--but they tried. Nevertheless, Ontario Libs Should be able top their performance easily. Because Libs are supposed to be the normal folk--you show up at one of their parties, and you get fed, liquored up, and maybe even laid. Just like going to a neighbor's BBQ.
Note that the problem with the data noted here is not even among those most often flagged by critics of the government change. Therefore expect unforeseen problems to crop up along side of the foreseen ones.
In any case, not content, the Tories have decided to go after the NRC:
Which is to say that the indices that measure international performance in basic research will all show Canada ranking lower. A plot to render the nation incapable of doing anything but hewing wood and hauling bitumen?
Here's hoping Bernie's new responsibilities don't stop him from penning the occasional Op-Ed piece on the same issues that have always concerned him. It would be a pity to lose that voice.
Not sure of the provenance of this last item, as George Smiley might say, but I will note that @sunnewsmedia stills gets you results via google but seems gone from the twitterverse.
And I'll tell you a true story. Back in 2008 I was an up-and-coming blogger, and Ezra in the process of crashing and burning The Western Standard. He had bragged on his own blog that there would be some awesome video footage coming next morning, and to stay tuned for the exclusive. But me, realizing the time difference between here and Alta., got up early and pinched the footage off his youtube channel before he could post it, then shopped the link to NN and other news outlets. The rest, as they say, is history...the Neo-Nazis, the lawsuits, the repeal of S13.
Remember, old Ez didn't have much clout at the time; if he had pushed the story it probably would have gone nowhere. So in a way he owes me for relaunching his career. He couldn't have moved out of his dad's basement, come to Toronto and made himself a Fox News North Super Star, without my help.
Mind you, he also wouldn't have been able to launch his Anti-Roma rant and get himself investigated. Now the guy might wind up doing slammer time, married to the inmate with the most cigarettes. Funny how things go. Its almost like Life is a Wheel, that goes up before it goes down...
An Angus-Reid poll taken after McGuinty resigned and prorogued although, as Volkov notes, not long enough afterwards for the news to have really sunk in. Still, Hudak has blown bigger leads before. Hopefully, news like this will convince some of the leadership potentials that its still a job worth pursuing.
PS. Not that moving that gas plant wasn't the worst sort of pandering. The Ontario Libs really laid an egg with that one.
Mark Steyn's piece was the one inThe National Review. His defense, as far as I can parse it, is that when he accused Mr. Mann of committing fraud, he was not accusing him of committing fraud. As I wrote at the time:
Frankly, I know of nowhere that a reader, be they careful or careless, could interpret the term "fraudulent" when applied to a scientist's work as implying anything less than that they were guilty of scientific misconduct (the kind of thing they discuss here) or straight out fraud. I am unaware of any place the term has been used merely to state that the scientist's work is incorrect. This is quite a bit different than the situation with "blackmail", where there is an established colloquial sense that is weaker than the more precise legal sense (the colloquial sense does not entail criminality where the more legal sense does). I will try and find out if there is a method of donating to Mr. Mann's cause. As most good Canadians, I would love to see Mr. Steyn tarred and feathered, but a successful lawsuit is likely to be the best result attainable.
I like elections. In fact I don't think we have enough of them. In fact between elections I like to organize "pick up" elections with my fellow bloggers to pass time until the real ones. In any case, between now and the Spring I will start camping out at Randy Hillier's Facebook Page and wait for him to say something that sends Tim Hudak into conniptions. It happens, as night follows day. Also:
Kathleen's my gal. I remember her from back in the old C4LD days. She's badass.
PS. No predictions, but if I had to, I would give Andrea Horwath a better shot at forming the next government than Tim Hudak. People look at him and think "squirrely".
Meanwhile (from the article through the link) Torys are handing out these same medals to jail-birds. Apparently they hide them inside of cakes when they visit or, according to one rumor I've heard, they "hoop 'em". Google that one.
But why spoil the vibe with grotty details? Good going Richard. I hear those medals can get you into any disco in Ottawa.
PS. Reading it again, that last line is presumably a major bung-up on Glen McGregor's part. Add "legislation" to the end of it and you're in the right ball-park. And hopefully Mr. McGregor will make a quick change. Otherwise the Leader-Post mayinadvertently land in "get your balls sued off" territory.
PPS. Change made. I've added the correction in square brackets.
A brief note on an otherwise uneventful Saturday. There has been no new material added to the Ethical Oil website since September 10th. The same thing applies to their twitter feed. Furthermore, most of the people that took over from creators Ezra Levant and Alykhan Velshi seem to have left the project. Kathryn Marshall hasn't had much to say since her demotion. And (something I had missed previously) Jordan Graham quit after a mere two months, deciding that he didn't want to live in Ottawa. Before September 10th posts were coming at a rate of one or two per week. Worth noting that, as these posts accumulated, opposition to the Northern Gateway Project rose inexorably.
Has the money behind the AstroTurf asked these folks to kindly STFU? Wouldn't surprise me.
A nice take-down can be found here. Although I would note to the author Mr. Mandryk that at least they're aren't after Hunkys anymore. No. The Harper government has more or less randomly chosen Hungarians as their scapegoat du jour. They're thinking a few moves ahead, post Afghan mission. Who do we get the base to hate next, after the Muzzys?
Well, no, in their response to the Daily Mail story, which Goldstein actually references but perhaps did not read, The Met provided this graphic (which, in addition to being informative, is really quite pretty):
Not only does it show that eight of the ten hottest years were recorded in the last decade, it shows both 2010 and 2005 as being hotter than 1998. Who knows how Goldstein managed to bung this one up? It is true enough, though, that the ranking for the various years can change retroactively as more data becomes available. Nevertheless, since March of this year, all the relevant sources, including The Met, have shown 2010 and 2005 as being warmer than 1998. Perhaps Goldstein has simply not kept up.
Farber, who will attend the university’s gala event as a guest, said he has a “deep and abiding respect” for Kenney’s stances on Israel and antisemitism.
“On those issues, we stand shoulder to shoulder, and I consider him a friend. But like all friends, we can have differences of opinion on some issues,” Bill C-31 being one such item, he said.
Farber added that he felt Kenney was being “very hard on the Roma” and that many respected representatives of the Jewish community are in agreement. Earlier this year the Toronto Board of Rabbis and Elie Wiesel, among others, had urged the minister to reconsider the legislation.
Some of the other groups protesting the event include Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Independent Jewish Voices, Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Jews Opposing Zionism.
PS. Its quite possible that Ezra, an official "friend of Haifa", will be at the same reception. If it comes to it, my money is on Bernie by TKO.
No link yet, but Dalton McGuinty has chosen to retire as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party. If you are from around the GTA, when you think of him in future--especially during the middle of a summer heat-wave--take a sniff of the air and notice how clean it is. How you don't get clouds of smog settling over the city for days, and don't taste the noxious chemicals in those clouds when you taste your own sweat. That's--partly, not entirely--the smell of coal plants that Dalton has gradually shut down and replaced with something cleaner. He has by force of Will transformed this province into a manufacturer of green energy tech, a path into the future that, if we stick to it, will position Ontario well for the world to come--if you can't make cars, make wind turbines and solar arrays. Yes mistakes were made, and yes in recent months they seem to have been piling up, but in the end Mr. McGuinty served his province and country in a manner that can only be described as exemplary. All hail Dalton McGuinty.
While Mr. Topham still cannot post to his Radical Press site he is being allowed to use email. The most important bit from his email to the gang at FreeD is:
Just prior to the Thanksgiving weekend the local Crown Council Jennifer Johnson sent Doug Christie an email saying that she had recommended the laying of the charge against me but that it still had to go further up the legal ladder before final approval from the BC Assistant Deputy Attorney General. Only then would the indictment be approved.
So there you have it. We are now officially in the world post S13. Hatemongers may enjoy it even less.
PS. Has the Times already abandoned its firewall? I've been visiting Nate Silver three times a day and have been able to get the full-text articles no problem. Same with Revkin.
We all have issues with The Facebook. For Canadian Neo-Nazi Kevin Goudreau, they appear to centre around the fact that its founder Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish, not around the fact that The Facebook experience has sucked for years and is getting worse. But Goudreau has also struck closer to home, threatening a well-known Ontario hate crime expert in addition to the relatively unattainable Mr. Zuckerberg. Surely, those journalists and on-line activists who supported the repeal of Section 13 will leap, leap to denounce Mr. Goudreau, for the only means available to fight such people after the repeal of the nation's one effective bit of hate speech legislation is to initiate a stream of counter-chatter. Jonathon Kay...Mark Selley..start blithering
Look, I support this policy for the reasons the Paiken ladgives in his IPolitics article. But too many party activists want it to be the centre-piece of any LPoC revival, and I am afraid such thinking is madness. Not because it enables the party to be labelled soft-on-crime. The Tories may try that, but I don't think it will work: the majority of the country has supported either decriminalization or legalization for years, including a fairly large part of the CPoC base. No. Its madness because it allows the party to be labelled un-serious, and if the Tories have any brains that's the line they will take.
An election should be fought on the economic direction of the nation, on whether Canada's defence policy should be more or less closely tied to that of the U.S. On big issues, that is. Not on whether or not the occasional careless stoner gets away clean when a cop finds a roach in his car ashtray.
In any case, what practical effect would legalization have in the first place? Weed's been about $300 an ounce since I came to Toronto (so representatives of the sub-culture inform me, at least). Its almost impossible to get busted for simple possession. And you never get those dry spells you used to back in the 80s, no matter how many grow-ops get busted. So who really cares?
Can anyone seriously imagine somebody like Justin Trudeau, who is already being criticized as a light-weight, making this bit of frivolity the key to his election strategy? If so, they must be smoking something considerably stronger than the herb.
Worth noting that this this is after Harper's government's attempt over the last month or two to cool down the rhetoric re the pipe-line. Also worth noting: the people behind Ethical Oil.org, the government created pro-tarsand's astroturf group, haven't published anything in over a month. Previously, they were spewing propaganda at the rate of a couple pieces a week. I suspect that Harper and co. have realized that yelling at people isn't a very good PR strategy.
Mike Moffat has a valid point. It isn't, as David Suzuki sometimes contends, that economists don't understand "externalities" or claim we should ignore them. The term is a bit of economic jargon, after all. No. The people who ignore/downplay externalities are those folk who, for example, say they want to help clean-up the environment but decry a carbon tax or whine when somebody sticks a turbine out in the lake.
I'll probably write more about this story eventually, as it tries to play the "Anti-Israel" card against Ms. Csanyi - Robah on some pretty weak grounds, and also insinuates that Bernie Farber (noted above) is somehow up to something nefarious. But right now its only available at Shaidle's place, and I won't send traffic there.
Sun TV's reaction to all this should be interesting to watch. I'm told they've got a lawyer that pours over Ezra's material, but that he missed the "Roma Rant" because he's primed to look for defamation, not hate speech. Their official grovelling apology sounded a bit like they were washing their hands of Mr. Levant.
Gary Mason, author of the above, apparently thinks having a divisive leadership race that will end a couple weeks before next year's election is called will somehow put the B.C. Tories into contention. But let's face it--Cummins is the provincial equivalent of Elizabeth May: a mainstream figure drafted-in to make a party of largely weirdos appear normal to mainstream--to, in this case, non-Zalmoids. The "rank and file" should be kissing his ass, but instead they seem intent on dumping him and reclaiming the fringe right.
And if you want to meet the jilted Tory lunatic who's largely behind the internal revolt, well that would be Dean Skoreyko. If Christy Clark wins again, something that can no longer be consider beyond possibility, she should appoint him to something.
These kind of fuck-ups seem to be on the increase lately. For example, that whole thing with the Lussiers and the Canadian Immigration Report. But what is interesting is that somebody must be telling Tory MPs that the Lussier's are the kind of folk you want testifying before parliament about immigration, and that MacMurchy is the kind of gal you want to unveil a plaque for. In other words, they are running into trouble by listening to their political base.
Something that might be useful to know in the months and years to come.
This post, from GridTO, implies that the group Canadian Hindu Advocacy, led by Ron Banerjee, consists entirely of Ron Banerjee. Me, I've always assumed that Ron had exactly one follower by the name of Naresh Patel, pictured below to the right:
Or was this just some poor sap who wandered onto the scene and got gestured towards by Ron?
...but I hear Mitt Romney, in his first act as president, promised to smash Big Bird's skull in with a tire iron. If I were the Obama campaign, I would work that angle relentlessly.
The decision can be found here. Warman's comments can be found here, and I will write something up that's a bit more substantial when I read the entire 72 page decision. But essentially, the decision accepted the pro-CHRC arguments as summarized below:
3) Judge Mosely rejected the notion that S13 definitions of hate speech were too vague to be workable. 4) Judge Mosely decided that S13 only minimally impaired Free Speech:
5) Judge Mosely basically exonerated the HRC and Warman, As Richard himself puts it: 2) Repeated efforts were made by the Commission and Richard Warman to engage Marc Lemire in mediation or negotiation but these were always refused by Lemire because he would not accept a cease and desist order as part of any settlement. (para 60)
Now, Bill C-304 repealing S13 is wending its way through the Senate, but Lemire is apparently not off the hook. He faces a return to the tribunal and a permanent cease and desist order. Furthermore, whatever its fate with the Harper Tories, Mosely's decision will mean that a future government will have justification for reinstating the section or something close to it. And by that time most of the MSM opinionizers who were willing to carry Lemire's water for him last go-round will be unemployed and in a soup line.
So when The Globe goes behind its pay-wall, maybe you can keep up by reading The Times (I think all you have to do is clear your cache to beat their system).
Same problem as all of these new media ventures: there didn't seem to be an obviously sustainable source of income. The problem is, there may never be one. All these MSM firewalls going up aren't just another misstep to be eventually corrected when somebody in the industry finally "gets" it. They're the last twitch before the final dirt-nap.