Damn. I knew they had an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, but this kind of bullcrap is ridiculous:
Two campaigners for Windsor West Liberal candidate Larry Horwitz were arrested on Tuesday after they shoved pamphlets in the faces of people at a grocery store.
[…]
According to the police report, a store employee noticed one of the campaigners push a pamphlet so aggressively at a customer that the customer snatched it and threw it back.
When store staff asked the campaigners to leave, they refused.
“They said, ‘No, I have a right to stay here,'” McNorton said.
Police were called — but even after the officers arrived, the campaigners didn’t relent.
“Our guys approached them and asked them to leave the premises, as their activity was disrupting the business and the management requested that they leave,” McNorton said.
“They responded by shoving a piece of paper in the officer’s face.”
The campaigners reportedly said they were protected by the Canada Elections Act, and that only the RCMP could stop them from campaigning.
[…]
“Common courtesy is if someone is not interested in what you’re trying to tell them, you just leave them alone,” McNorton said.
“They felt that they had a right to be able to do what they wanted in relation to promoting the election, even though it was on private property. And that’s the key issue here — It was on private property. The store has a right to do business.”
Yup, listen to us whether you want to or not, the law means what we want it to mean, whatever we want to do, yadda yadda yadda.
Last word:
University of Windsor political science professor Lydia Miljan said the incident “destroys” Horwitz’s public image, and she was surprised his campaigners would adopt such tactics.
“It’s just bad optics to be annoying people when you want their vote,” she said. “It sounds like they’re awfully desperate.”
As more and more people are finding out about The Absent-minded Professor®’s little deer-in-the-headlights moment on CTV the other day (even the Red Star couldn’t clam up about it), they are starting to get a really creepy feeling at the thought of this guy running the national till.
As if that wasn’t good enough, little Grit tadpole Geoff Regan had a chance to put the whole thing to bed and totally blew it. He could have said something like, “yeah, that was embarrassing; but the poor guy’s jet-lagged stupid these days, so what can you do, eh?” That could have been the end of it right there. People would have just assumed that Dion’s all tuckered out from dashing back and forth across the country for a month now and just had himself a brainfart. Could have happened to anybody.
But nope.
When Duff pointed out that this was reminiscent of Bob Stanfield and the football (best analogy so far, BTW), Regan fell back on the favourite HypoGrit tactic of ad hominem faux indignation, so beloved by them whenever they’ve been caught piddling on the rug and don’t think they should have their noses rubbed in it.
“Mister Dion has mentioned before that he has a hearing problem and that’s clearly what happened here,” he harrumphed. “I don’t think that we should spend a lot of time talking about someone’s physical impairment.”
When Duff quizzes him if it’s an impairment or just “a failure to comprehend,” Regan first sulks in silence, then tries to play dumb, and finally just goes all to hell in a handbasket amidst trying to deny that he just said what he just said when Duff calls bullshit on him.
… wants to be Prime Minister. He actually thinks that he somehow deserves your vote. 😯
For those of you that just come here but not to the BT website: that’s where I found this (thanks guys).
You know, I actually don’t know how to go with this one. Really, I don’t. Half of me wants to wallow in partisan glee at his idiocy, but the other half of me actually feels… what the hell is that, anyway? Sympathy???
Any fool knows I’ve never had any love for Dion, not by a long shot. But the poor bastard just seems so… utterly out of his depth here that I almost can’t help but feel sorry for him. Yes, I know; I’m a poor excuse for a partisan SOB. Tough.
But I gotta tell ya, after seeing this, the thought of this guy holding the levers gives me the willies now more then ever (and I didn’t think that was possible)…
And he wants us to trust him to steer our economy through what is likely an upcoming global recession. God help us…
Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, the good ship Gritanic is hauling ass for Davey Jones’ locker. The latest evidence can be found in the fact that even the rabidly Liberal-loving Mop & Pail is starting to sigh heavily and admit that the Grits are completely and utterly screwed.
Just how bad do things need to get before even the Glob starts admitting that their favourite horse isn’t even in the race anymore? Well, we all know the answer to that one, don’t we? Some highlights:
The more people see of Mr. Dion, the more they want to vote for someone else. Since the campaign started, his negatives have soared. Mr. Dion is now disliked far more than Stephen Harper, who has morphed into the nation’s tough-but-fair dad.
… Many Liberal campaign events are drawing only 35 or 50 people. If Mr. Dion were any weaker, he’d need a blood transfusion.
… what we have here is a train wreck. It’s the wreck of the Liberal Party as we know it.
… He talks like a professor, sometimes unintelligibly. He has no sense of audience.
… Could it get worse? Yes. Liberals are dreading next week’s English-language debate, when Jack Layton and Elizabeth May are likely to remind us how bad on his feet he really is. He may well deliver a knockout blow – to himself.
Ouch. If this is what his friends have to say about him… You get the idea. You know the Grits are screwed when even these clowns have given up on making excuses for them.
You really have to hand it to Stephen Taylor, he comes up with the coolest stuff sometimes. 😀
His latest creation, shown below in this post, is something he calls the “absent Liberals video player.” It’s based on the code for his old BT TV video distribution thingamajig (that I have embedded in the right sidebar) and it’s stuffed full of examples of exactly what kind of “leadership” the Grits don’t have to offer.
As Stephen points out in his post today, these are likely an NDP production, but what can I say? The truth is the truth, no matter whose mouth it comes out of. Say what you want about the Dippers (and I frequently do), at least they showed up for work in the last parliament. Can’t say that about the Grits.
So check ’em out and get a good long look at your tax dollars not at work. (If you want the code for your own site, just hit this page and you can get it there.)
UPDATE: Okay… for whatever reason, the player doesn’t seem to be working for me here and I don’t have time to fiddle with it right now. Guess you’ll just have to hit Stephen’s site and check it out there. Sorry, folks. 🙁
Ah, fer the love of… Some days, I just wonder if I understand anything at all.
I know that I promised yesterday that I’d have some footage of PM Harper’s appearance in London last night. Things went south from the get-go. Cam battery was deader than Elvis so I had to resort to using my phone (lovely quality, that). Then, when I tried to upload the damned thing to YouTube, it croaked because the vid was too long.
Not to worry, though, I’m not done yet. I’ll try to post the raw files later today and see if that works. (I apologize ahead of time for the crappy quality but, like I said, it was done with a phone…)
11:00 – Turner Trounced
Dang. The problem with staging a stunt is, when you don’t let the crew in on the joke, you might just get caught…
And to think that some folks still have it in their heads that the PM made a mistake by losing that loose cannon… Go figure.
19:05 – Update: AITGWN has more. this poor bastard just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper…
12:20 – Okay, let’s try this
Alright, I got the files uploaded to the server so let’s see how this works. It’s in two parts and, due to a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo that I’m not going to get into right now, it might or might not play properly in your browser. Sorry about that.
If they won’t play in your browser, the direct links are here, for the first part and here, for the second part. They’re in the .3GP format, so you’ll need something like QuickTime to play them. Again, sorry for the quality but it’s what I had to work with… 🙁
12:30 – Update to this: Okay, that didn’t work worth crap. Trying to embed the vids here made a mess of things and slowed down the loading of this post to a crawl. Sorry folks, but it looks like the links are as good as it gets…
13:05 – They’re still out there
Lest we forget about the malevolent HRCs in our midst, the National Post has an article yesterday by Joseph Brean to remind us:
The foremost legal precedent for deciding these cases is the 1990 Supreme Court of Canada decision about the neo-Nazi activist John Ross Taylor, in which Section 13 was held to be a justifiable violation of the Charter right to free expression.
It defined hate messages as those expressing “unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification.”
Simon Fothergill, a lawyer for the Attorney-General of Canada, said Mr. Lemire’s challenge of Section 13 is “relitigation” of settled law, and amounts to “harassment” of the government, which won the Taylor case by a 4-3 decision. A decade later, in 2001, it amended Section 13 to include the Internet.
[…]
Mr. Fothergill answered that if Section 13 puts a chill on public discourse, it is only to be around the fringes of hate speech, and that this is not “a terribly bad outcome.”
“A little bit of chilling … is tolerable,” he said.
“TOLERABLE?” Is this asshole utterly out of his God damned mind??? And why the hell haven’t we heard so much as a peep out of ANY party on this subject so far in the campaign? Too uncomfortable an an issue, perhaps? Tough shit, bud; you wanna be in charge, you have to have the balls to do what needs to be done! And God knows, these things need to be reeled in.
Nest time some vote-hunting blowhard (from whatever party) bangs on your door, be sure to find out where they stand on this issue, because it’s just going to get worse if we don’t tackle it NOW.
13:22 – Another update: How’s this for a coincidence? I just got me a call from Steven at the CPC’s fundraising dept. What are the odds?Once again, the Tories were hoping for a buck or two to help out with the campaign. He was a nice enough guy (not as knowledgeable as Fred was on the issue, but still nice) but I had to tell him the same thing I’ve told the last four people that called me: No action on HRCs, no money from me.
17:49 – Holy crap!
I agree with Warren Kinsella. 😯 No, really, I actually DO. Yes, you heard me right. And don’t look at me like that.
I don’t know how it happened, either, but there it is. And it’s not just on one thing, strangely enough; I agree with him on a whole bunch of stuff. Like:
Things are going badly for the Lieberal campaign
Free advice is worth what you pay for it
Warren is a has-been
I guess it just goes to show you, even a blind squirrel finds a nut some days.
18:10 – Practicing what he preaches
Say what you want about Steffy Dion, he sure does practice what he preaches. He’s always going on and on about how we should do this and that for the environment and, lo and behold, Steffy turns out to be one dead serious recycler. Trusty Tory has the goodies:
That’s right, folks, the old 1993 election campaign promise. This goes hand in hand with Dion’s continued election campaign against Brian Mulroney!
But, hang on a second. Didn’t Paul Martin promise this in the 2004 campaign? See for yourself.
Recycle, recycle, recycle! Because it’ll actually happen this time. They really, really mean it. Besides, it’s not as if the Green Shaftâ„¢ is earning them any love…
23:23 – Ker-SPLAT
Coincidence? Poetic justice? Prophecy? You tell me…
MONTREAL – Stephane Dion’s aging plane was forced to make an emergency landing on its way to London tonight in what Liberals hope doesn’t become a symbol of the party’s faltering campaign.
The leased 29-year-old Boeing 737 was en route to London from Sherbrooke, Que., when it made an unexpected stop shortly after 8 p.m. at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport.
On the bright side, at least I don’t have to put up with that waffling weasel in London now. 😉
Damn. I knew they had an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, but this kind of bullcrap is ridiculous:
… Just keeps on giving. And I’m lovin’ it.
… wants to be Prime Minister. He actually thinks that he somehow deserves your vote. 😯
… when the rats start running off the ship.
You really have to hand it to Stephen Taylor, he comes up with the coolest stuff sometimes. 😀
Ah, fer the love of… Some days, I just wonder if I understand anything at all.
[…]
17:49 – Holy crap!
