As if I didn’t already have enough to bitch about when it comes to our idiotic immigration and ridiculous refugee systems, it now seems that even assassinating a head of state isn’t enough to get your sorry ass declared persona non grata in this country anymore. Yeah, you read that right. According to reports which are conspicuously NOT splattered all over the MSM lately, it seems that one Noor Chowdhury has decided to get all comfy in Canada after murdering the head of state back in his home country… and our screwball Immigration and Refugee Board is letting him!! See for yourself:

A Bangladeshi fugitive convicted of killing his country’s prime minister in a bloody coup won’t be deported from Canada because he faces a death sentence in his native land, an immigration board has ruled.

So friggin’ WHAT?? I don’t give a damn what’s going to happen to him once we get rid of his ass, I just plain don’t want him in MY country. And just who is this asshole you’re wondering? Well, he’s the guy that has been convicted of murdering Bangladesh’s then-PM Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975. Now, before you go tooting away about how Bangladeshi jurisprudence may not measure up to our own, bear in mind that the IRB agreed that this bugger is, in fact, a murderer:

“C participated in a coup against the president, walking into the victim’s home and killing him,” the board said in a ruling made available last week.

Yup, that’s us: haven to the world’s murderers. Pissed off yet? No? Try this for size:

Chowdhury and two others allegedly involved in the coup fled to Canada after years on the run. The two have since obtained citizenship — one lives in Ottawa, the other in Montreal.

And just how much do you want to bet that not a damn one of them lives on the same street as anybody on the IRB?

Yup, it’s back again. Sunday is here, I’m too lazy to really rant about anything (although, with this being Lent and all, I’m at least not hung over for a change), and so I just toss out a bunch of links to stuff that I think is worth checking out. Sometimes I think they’re worth checking out because I like the article, sometimes because it pisses me off and, let’s face it, misery loves company.

But anyways, here they are, one way or another. Make what you like of ’em…

The future of citizen journalism
Paul Berton, London Free Press

It’s the exchange we’ve had with readers on our letters page for decades, even centuries.

In many ways, it is about the democratization of the news media. We’ll introduce more voices and points of view and experiences to our news products. We’ll be more reflective of the entire community, not just the parts journalists decide are worth covering.

Harper’s strategy to force Liberals’ hand
Ted Byfield, Calgary Sun

So, if Harper holds the West, and makes a few Quebec gains, it all comes down to Ontario — as usual.

Here Dion, no doubt, hopes to cash in on his environment crusade, but he suffers a triple disability.

Opposition gainsaying rarely productive
Jim Chapman, Freeps

In this country, we have developed three main schools of political thought, and labelled them the Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic parties. The Green party may be on its way to a noticeable share of public support, but they’re not quite there yet.

It is natural to assume that within these groups, the better minds tend to rise to the top as often as not — that’s the case in many similar structures. And if that’s true, then the parties should, loosely speaking, represent the best thinking of large segments of the population.

(I acknowledge there are serious flaws in this premise that are all too apparent to anyone who studies Canadian politics, but stay with me anyway, at least for a few more paragraphs.)

Supremely foolish
Micheal Coren, TO Sun

So a group of unelected and unaccountable judges have slapped your government on the wrist and told it to go away and change the way it protects its people.

Because they know more than the men and women of the police and armed forces, more than terrorism experts, more than agents who have put their lives on the line for years.

More inconvenient truths
Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun

The more you research global warming, the more you realize we’re being told things that don’t add up.

Here’s some examples.

Suzuki playing gutter politics
Paul Jackson, Cowtown Sun

Well, I’ve always had doubts about Suzuki’s own credentials as a so-called expert on climate change. But I never knew he also claimed to be an expert on the economy.

What Suzuki really is — in my opinion — is little more than a popular entertainer for the liberal-left set.

Negotiate with the Taliban
Eric Margolis, TO Sun

Negotiating a deal with Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of this morass, not expanding a war that is already lost.

Just how nice to the terrorists do we have to be?
Rachel Marsden, TO Sun

In today’s ridiculous, politically correct climate, had 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta actually been hauled off his flight before ramming it into the World Trade Center, he’d probably be a member of the millionaire’s club today, while having the cops apologize to him.

Not so free in Germany
Joseph Quesnel, Winterpeg Sun

It took 15 German officers to take 15-year-old Melissa Busekros from her home, as the German government began cracking down on these nasty enemies of the state. By court order, school officials ordered the breakup of a family with five children, after the state asserted its belief that Christian homeschooling is a “parallel culture” that Germany can do without.

Enviro-whackos should stop recycle of abuse
Ian Robinson, Calgary Sun

One expects governments to be dumb. One expects governments to sway with the political whim of the moment. But I had hoped they wouldn’t be quite this stupid.

How Gore’s massive energy consumption saves the world
Mark Steyn, Sun-Times

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the other day the Rev. Al Gore declared that “climate change” was “the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.” Ever. I believe that was the same day it was revealed that George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas is more environmentally friendly than the Gore mansion in Tennessee. According to the Nashville Electric Service, the Eco-Messiah’s house uses 20 times more electricity than the average American home. The average household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours.

Harper surging, Dion fading
Greg Weston, Ottawa Sun

OTTAWA — As the Commons fades to blessed quiet and MPs head home to their ridings for a two-week March break, the once almighty Liberals can only pray they won’t be returning to a spring election.

In his first three months as the Liberals’ great hope, Stephane Dion, has been his own worst attack ad, so overwhelmingly underwhelming voters that the Grits are today less popular in most parts of the country than they were with no leader.

Well now, isn’t this interesting? Here I am, slurpin’ on my Timmy’s and munchin’ on a Boston creme with not a care in the world, ’cause it’s almost payday. Yeah, the weather’s kind of crappy, but I grew up in Huron County and I have to admit, I still like a good snowstorm. Watching snow fall and cover trees in a soft white blanket is just so… just so damned Canadian, you know? I start thinking that I just might get through the day with nothing to piss me off.
Boy, was I an idiot.

I like to bitch about media bias. Hey, I’m conservative; it’s one of the things we do. 😛 A lot of people will tell me that I’m just making it up, persecution complex, paranoia, not enough beer, whatever. 🙄 It would probably be better if that were true. But it’s kind of hard to ignore, especially when I see stuff like I saw in my Freeps this morning. It’s a story about, among other things, how the PMO has changed the formula for calculating flight costs on the CAF‘s fleet of Challenger jets:

Neither the original formula nor the reduced charges came anywhere close to what Harper himself in Opposition had called “$11,000 per hour Challenger jet flights” by the previous Liberal government.

The invoices, obtained by CP under the Access to Information Act, show three Challenger flights by Harper in 2006 for which the military billed the Prime Minister’s Office.

The first flight was Feb. 10, shortly after the minority Conservatives won power. Harper’s return trip to Halifax from Ottawa for the retirement party of Nova Scotia premier John Hamm was deemed a partisan exercise and the Conservative party paid the freight.

The invoice from National Defence, which lists Harper and six staff on board, calculated the trip cost “3.1 flying hours X $2,139.00/hour.”

It also points out an interesting difference between the current government’s attitude of accountability and the Librano$’ Culture Of Entitlement®…

“Following up on our telephone conversation, it is the wish of the Prime Minister’s Office that the Conservative Party of Canada compensates the Crown for the use of the Challenger on July 26,” wrote a PMO official on Aug. 10.

[…]

“There was no previous protocol, as the former Liberal government never reimbursed Canadian taxpayers when they used the Challenger for non-government business,” she said in an e-mail. “Aside from the first instance, Canada’s new government has been consistent in its protocol for reimbursing the cost of an economy return trip ticket.”

I know, I know. You’re sitting there saying to yourself, “Damn, Dennis; what the hell are you bellyachin’ about? That doesn’t sound bad at all. Whiner.”

I do sound kind of thin-skinned today, don’t I? Well, it’s not the story that I have a problem with. After all, it shows pretty clearly that, with the Tories in charge, the flight costs have dropped from $11,000/hr to $2,139/hr (a drop of more than 80 per cent!). Hell, it even shows that the Tories actually pay their way, whereas the Grits just latched onto the public teat and sucked for all they were worth; so it’s not exactly like they’re smearing the PM now, is it?

No, it isn’t. But what’s got a burr under my saddle isn’t the body of the story; it’s how it’s spun. You see, that’s what the MSM does. They tell the truth but always seem to slant it to make liberals look good and conservatives look bad. Take this story for example. What kind of headline would you expect for that? How about something like…

Harper Slashes PMO Jet Costs 80%

Wouldn’t sound too unreasonable, would it? Or, how about this one…

Tories Pay Own Way

That would be okay, too, wouldn’t it? Either headline would be honest, accurate, even a little eye-catching. Ah, but that wouldn’t fit in with the Lefty-loving media’s little agenda now, would it? Hell, no. So, instead of a headline that hints at how the Conservative government has a) cut flight costs and b) actually pays their own way where the Grits just mooched a ride, we get this bullshit…

Taxpayers on hook for PM jet

Yup, that’s it. No bias there, is there?

Some crap really does just boggle the hell out of the mind, doesn’t it? Take, for example, the recent colossal kerfuffle over yet another twit who thinks he’s found the tomb of Christ. 🙄

Here we have some dork — and James Cameron too, it turns out — burbling on like he’s some kind of authority when, in fact, he’s nothing more than just another media hack:

A Canadian filmmaker and author claims to have new scientific evidence that could have profound implications for Christianity.

Simcha Jacobovici, from Toronto, is expected to reveal at a news conference in New York on Monday that a tomb he explored under a Jerusalem apartment building once contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

Further, he suggested that the tomb, stored in a warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquity Authority outside Jerusalem, may contain microscopic remains of the Christian saviour’s DNA.

[…]

The boxes were inscribed with the names: Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.

A quick peek around the net reveals that our little Mr. Jackoffski (pictured at right) is an Israeli-born Canadian, and received a B.A. with Honours in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. That’s right, two degrees: one in bullshitology political science and the other in bafflegab philosophy.

Philosophy, of course, is a Greek word that means “why do something about it when you can drone on endlessly about it with needlessly big words” that was best described by Ambrose Bierce as “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” Let’s face it, kids; the only thing you can really do with a degree in philosophy is teach philosophy. And I think everybody here already knows what I think about a degree in polisci…

But enough about what he’s got. Let’s see what he hasn’t got. I wonder if he has any degrees in…

Archaeology? Nope.
Anthropology? Nope.
Theology? Nope.
Okay, how about codicology or philology? Nope.
Damn. The guy’s gotta at least have one in history, right?? Nope.

The article could just as easily — and just as accurately — be headlined: “Dude With Camcorder Says Outrageous Shit.” But you just know that the MSM and all the usual loopy Lefty suspects are going to be all over this like maggots on Saddam Hussein. Okay, tell ya what we’re gonna do…

Just for the moment, we’re going to forget that I’m Christian and therefore already know that Christ’s tomb is empty and this dolt is just yapping out of his arse. Let’s just examine his excuse for methodology for a few seconds, shall we?

University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger calculated the odds at one in 600; while Dr. James Tabor, chair of the department of religion at the University of North Carolina, placed the odds at one in 42 million.

“If you took the entire population of Jerusalem at the time and put it in a stadium, and asked everyone named Jesus to stand up, you’d have about 2,700 men,” Tabor said. “Then you’d ask only those with a father named Joseph and a mother named Mary to remain standing. And then those with a brother named Yose and a brother named James. Statistically, you end up with one person.”

So here we are, over two thousand years later, and some twit finds a tomb with the name tags of “Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.” All of these were common names at the time. It’s like finding the tomb of “Jim son of John, Rob son of Jim, Linda, Jenny, John and Mike.” It means virtually nothing. The most important thing though, is that this whole theory hinges on one grasping compulsion: if this is, in fact, a tomb containing the remains of Jesus, Mary and Joseph themselves, then the mitochondrial DNA from the “Jesus” remains absolutely must be consistent with mtDNA from the “Mary” remains. There is no way around this whatsoever; NONE.

So, without further ado, allow me to throw in the monkey wrench (from the same article, no less)…

According to Jewish custom, the bones have long since been reburied in unmarked graves in Israel. But tests conducted at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., on DNA obtained from the Jesus and Mary tomb and show that the two individuals were not maternally related.

Not… Maternally… Related… How’s that for lowering the boom? Ah, but what’s a little snag like that when your head’s so far up your ass you chew your food twice? You don’t really think that you let inconvenient little things like a few piddling facts get in your way when you’re a card-carrying kook, now, do you? Hell no; you just decide to pull a Homer Simpson and pull your arms out of the tar with your face. Undaunted by having his little attention-whore balloon popped, he promptly shifted gears and fell back on the same old, tired, predictable, discredited, Gnostic bullshit…

“Perhaps Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married as the DNA results from the Talpiot ossuaries suggest and perhaps their union was kept secret to protect a potential dynasty – a secret hidden through the ages,” narrator Ron White says in the documentary.

“A secret we just may be able to uncover in the holy family tomb.”

Gimme a friggin’ break. Okay… Let’s assume for a minute that “Mary” isn’t genetically related to anybody else in the tomb; marriage would be a reasonable hypothesis to explain her presence. But married to whom? There are four sets of male remains in that tomb, folks, and nary a marriage certificate to be found. It’s an assumption perched on a presupposition built on a conceit. All in all, a pretty rickety affair.

On the bright side though, for a change, the gobsmacking of this idiocy isn’t confined to just folks like me. For example…

“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary – the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel – might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

“I don’t think the James Ossuary came from the same cave,” said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. “If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus.”

Nice to see scientists being scientists for a change.

As most of you already know, the Librano$ have their collective panties in one hell of a bunch lately over the supposedly underhanded comments that the Prime Minister didn’t make in the House on Wednesday. And we’ve seen the Liberal/Left-loving media spin it every which way ever since. We’ve seen everything from “Liberals shout down PM over ‘base’ attack” to “Harper forgot the dignity of his office in quest for blood” and just about every damn thing in between.

Oddly enough, the least slanted-sounding headline that I could find, “Gloves off in terror law fight,” cropped up in the damned TO (Red) Star, of all places. No idea how the hell that happened… 😕

Everybody and their dog knows that the media spins things whatever way the staff leans (which usually means to the Left of the political spectrum) but very few publications ever actually come right out and say it. Well, the National Post did just that today. Not only that, but they also bluntly point out some of the BS we’ve been getting fed lately for what it is: a Left-loving, almost Machiavellian, MSM busting it’s ass to reinforce their beloved Grits. It skillfully paints a picture of deception, misdirection, hypocrisy and most of the other things that spring to mind when you think about the Fiberals and their lapdog media.

So, since I’m not above stealing somebody else’s stuff when they say it better than I would, here is the NP editorial in question, in full (with a little emphasis added here and there by me)…

‘Shame’? Hardly

National Post
Published: Friday, February 23, 2007

Journalists employ a special term when a politician accidentally speaks a forbidden truth out loud: They call it a “Kinsley gaffe,” after the legendary American editorialist Michael Kinsley, who pointed out in 1992 that the word “gaffe” is never really used by native writers of English except to describe such a situation.

The catcalls of “shame” that drowned out the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday are the infallible sign of a Kinsley gaffe. Mr. Harper was about to describe an article from the Vancouver Sun pointing out that the father-in-law of an important young Liberal MP and organizer was once a spokesman for Babbar Khalsa, a group officially recognized by the Canadian government as a terrorist organization. This same individual is a potential witness in the Air India investigation, the very same inquiry that will be hobbled if Stephane Dion prevails in his new-found and oddly passionate quest to kill provisions of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act that permit such investigations.

None of the Liberals leaping to their feet to denounce Mr. Harper have bothered to deny the facts presented in the Sun by Kim Bolan: given Ms. Bolan’s reputation as an investigator and chronicler of Sikh separatist activity, it would be foolhardy to try. It is the context in which the fact was brought up that bothers them. Or so they say.

No one–including us –is accusing the MP in question, Navdeep Bains, of any illegal behaviour. And voters are entitled to make their own individual judgments on whether the PM was engaging in dirty pool by opening the pages of the Sun in the privileged environment of the House of Commons. But they would be advised to ignore the slanted, indignant language that some other media outlets are trying to disguise as impartial reporting.

The PM is being accused of suggesting that the Liberals changed their policy on ant terror legislation to protect Mr. Bains’ father-in-law, Darshan Singh Saini, or, more generally, to cripple an Air India investigation that many in the Sikh community oppose. In fact, it is only by clairvoyance that reporters can claim to know what Mr. Harper would have said in his complete reply. He was shouted down long before he had the chance to make the “suggestion” being freely attributed to him (readers may wonder why the Liberals did not sit quietly and let him continue covering himself with “shame”).

But even if Mr. Harper intended to suggest what he is being accused of suggesting, his only “shame” lies in saying what millions of Canadians are thinking. The Sikh voting bloc that Mr. Bains drew to the Dion camp (via Gerard Kennedy) at the Liberal convention in December is a critical reason why it is Mr. Dion, as opposed to Bob Rae or Michael Ignatieff, who now sits as Leader of the Opposition. Why would it be out of bounds to suggest that Mr. Dion’s sudden and stalwart opposition to key anti-terrorism provisions — even over the objections of many influential members of his own divided caucus — might somehow be traced to those same provisions being potentially used to compel testimony from the supporters of a king making MP?

We recall that, in 2000, the Liberals used the same specious calls of “shame” to attack Reform politicians who questioned the Liberals about their party’s stance on a Tamil terrorist group. Yet it was the Liberals themselves who were disgraced when it turned out Paul Martin and Maria Minna had attended a fundraising event for a group identified by the U.S. State Department as a front for the Tamil Tigers, which — like the Babbar Khalsa outfit for which Mr. Bains’ father-in-law once acted as spokesman — is classified as a terrorist group under Canadian law (over Liberal objections, of course).

Even given the premise of Mr. Bains’ personal unimpeachability — a premise to which the Prime Minister’s press secretary was glad to assent on Wednesday — this may be a trickier question than it appears. The premise that a Member of Parliament’s family and ethno-political connections are irrelevant can easily be carried to the point of absurdity. Apparently in recognition of his delivering the votes of his fellow Sikhs at the Montreal convention, Mr. Dion appointed Mr. Bains to the party’s national election readiness committee last month. If an equally important Conservative had a father-in-law who stood to benefit from a newfound Conservative policy, are we to believe that no reporter or opposition member would dare ask uncomfortable questions? No one can show that Mr. Bains’ family connections to a possible Air India witness have played any part in the sudden Liberal rediscovery of civil liberties, but when did it become inappropriate for a politician to point out a potential conflict of interest among his opponents?

It seems to have happened right around the time the conservative parties reunited and formed a national government. We recall that some of the publications now lashing out at Mr. Harper were happy to wallow in “family legacies” when it came to Stockwell Day’s Western-separatist father or Preston Manning’s ancestral Social Credit connections. Could the apologies owed to these men have gotten misplaced in the mail?

Okay, I know I’m supposed to be on vacation right now (that’s why I’ve been so quiet lately) but as I was flipping through the Freeps online today, I found myself saying, “what the hell is this?”

There’s an old gag in the media industry — older than even Ted Byfield, if you can believe that — which says that some headlines just write themselves and… well, apparently this one did, because I can’t see anyone without a severely sadistic sense of grammar doing it:

Spring budget forecast to spark election call forecast after spring budget

Huh? 😕

So… what? We’re forecasting forecasts now? I gotta say it, kiddies: things are getting hilariously buggered if we’re actually at the point where the MSM prognosticators are gawking into their crystal balls and seeing nothing but… well, their crystal balls seeing something else seeing something else seeing something else…

Gimme a friggin’ break…

PS-
Not-so-hot off the presses of the fart-in-a-windstorm department: Garth’s a Grit.

Who gives a rat’s ass?