I have to admit, some days this country just leaves me scratching my head. Sometimes it’s in a good way. Some times it’s in a “where are we going and what am I doing in this handbasket” kind of way. Still other times it’s in a “just what the hell was that” kind of way. Lately it’s been like the last one… a lot. It’s not that things have been going spectacularly bad, or especially good, or anything else like that. I just find myself poking around on the net, looking for anything that resembles interesting news, and I just can’t help but ask myself sometimes, “and where the hell else in the world could you possibly find this combination of events??” The answer, I think, is nowhere. Don’t take my word for it, though. See for yourself and you tell me what you think…

The last few days has seen everything from a uniquely Canadian solution to a shortage of beer on a warship (arguably also a uniquely Canadian problem) to ref abuse becoming a science. The Great White Oops of the Librano$ is bumbling across the land trying to convince people that he’s not really an idiot — starting out with telling Alberta oilpatch workers that they’re “living too fast for the easy money” and being bad for our economy — while punditos across the land furiously try to read the national entrails for signs of the next election. Speaking of elections, over in la belle province, PQ leader Andre Boisclair has begun to realize that his political fortunes are flagging and so has responded by creating a new, smarter package of policies to present the people of Quebec playing the Gay Victim card. Immigration authorities will violate the traditional sanctuary of a church to get your ass out of the country; unless you assassinate a head of state, in which case you’re welcome to stay.

Name someplace else where you can find that mix. Go on, I dare ya…

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?

Well, I kind of guess it’s inevitable, especially when the government is in a minority situation. For those of you that don’t know this little nugget of trivia already, the average life expectancy for a minority government in the Canadian Parliament is about a year and a half, give or take a week or two. That’s eighteen months, or 78 weeks, or 546 days. A quick peek to your right shows that Her Majesty’s Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honourable Stephen Hardass, has been leading the current Tory government in the House for 389 days now. In other words, if history is any indicator, we can likely expect to drag our collective ass back to the polls again sometime before Labour Day.

Whoopee.

No surprise then, that speculation about “when, when, when is it gonna be??” is running rampant, not just in Ottawa but in just about every other damn place between St John’s and Vancouver. For those of you that might be hoping this will all blow over so you can actually enjoy your summer, forget it. The media is all over this stuff like the homeless industry on a TO budget surplus, and that’s the way it’s likely to stay…

“Poll puts Liberals well back of Tories,” hooted a headline in the Freeps today…

The suddenly gaping chasm between the two front-running parties, after months of neck-and-neck polls, is less about a Tory surge than it is about foundering Liberal fortunes — but that’s enough in the capital’s hothouse atmosphere to fire fresh election talk.

Out in Cowtown, Licia Corbella says it’s “being called ‘the perfect storm,'” and she might well be right…

It’s being called “the perfect storm” and is instructive on so many levels, including attitudes about oil and gas, terrorism and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.

Over at the National Post, they seem to be taking a more wait-and-see kind of approach…

The pollster also said while the trend in recent polls is good news for the Conservatives, the chances of a majority win are still not there.

“He has the trend. It is hard to look at these numbers, especially given the splits in Quebec, and say there is a real big win in the offing for the Conservatives and so these numbers may still continue to argue a certain measure of caution,” Mr. Anderson said.

So what the hell does all this mean, you ask? Well it’s simple: like it or not, we’re almost certainly going to the polls sometime this year, and likely sooner than later. While it’s a pain in the ass, this still isn’t all a bad thing. Recent events — from the cheap PR stunt of Pablo Rodriguez’s little Make-A-Kyoto-Plan-Or-Else bill to the killing of anti-terror measures that the Grits passed in the first place — have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that if we want anything genuinely constructive to actually get done, we need a Conservative majority before it can happen. Until that happens, the Librano$ will continue stymying anything the Tories put forth (in order to prevent the Tories from being seen as getting anything done) while putting through more self-serving idiotic stunts like we’ve already seen, with the Dippers and Blocheads gleefully going along, all in the great spirit of the ABH principle.

The sooner we go the polls, the sooner we can get a majority, the sooner things can really start getting done, the better for everyone. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting damned sick and tired of waiting.

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?

In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the Grits’ gutless caving in to bloc voting that we saw in the Commons yesterday, there is one thing that seems to have been overlooked that I would like to mention here, if even for a moment.

Yes, we all know that the HypoGrits killed their own anti-terror legislation because Steffy the stiff knows damn well what side his bread is buttered on. But — in the interest of giving credit where it’s due — even in a Dion-led caucus, there was at least one man willing to stand up and do the right thing. That man is the Liberal Member of Parliament for Scarborough Southwest, the Honourable Tom Wappel.

Mister Wappel showed all the most important characteristics of service to his country as he, alone among the entire Liberal caucus, showed the balls enough to stand up and basically tell Dion, “take your bullshit and shove it; I’m here for my country, not for you.”

Only one Liberal – Tom Wappel (Scarborough Southwest) – outright defied Dion, voting with the Conservative government to renew the powers.

Click here to read the Hansard record for Feb 26, 2007, including Tom’s Speech in support of the Statutory Order to maintain the sections of the ATA pertaining to Preventative Arrest and Investigative Hearings for a further three years.

To share your feelings on this matter with the only Liberal who did the right thing that day, you can write to Tom at:

Tom Wappel, M.P.
Room 115, East Block
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Or, alternatively, you can email him at wappel.t@parl.gc.ca to be heard a little quicker.

All of us — yes, especially me — are always eager to sound off to anybody that will listen about everything that the Grits do wrong. Let’s see if we can be just as loud and honest when one of them does something right…

Here’s to you, Tom; you may not have won but ya fought the good fight.

“Like rats in a maze.” That’s how Ombudsman Andre Marin described the way that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board treats the victims of crime. So much for “helping the victims.”

For those of you that don’t know already, the CICB is the body that administers the Ontario’s Victim Justice Fund. The CICB is mandated by law to provide compensation to victims of violent crime and their families. Sounds like a good thing, right? The problem is that only about 1 in 40 victims actually get anything, and those that do still manage to get screwed by the bureaucrats…

London, Ont., parent Aurelio Almeida, whose 5-year-old daughter Naiomi was raped and murdered in 2001, was challenged by the CICB to explain what his injuries were.

[…]

The mother of a woman who was decapitated had to provide a form in which a medical practitioner had drawn the location of the injuries on a diagram of a body.

Marin said the stalling and nitpicking was a deliberate attempt by the agency over the last decade to discourage claimants and stay within its budget as required by the ministry of the attorney general.

The OVJF gets its cash from victim surcharges — the extra money tacked on all provincial offences like speeding tickets and booze fines — that range from $10 to $125 until fine is $1,000 or more, when the victim surcharge becomes a flat 25%. That’s a buttload of money when you add it all up. So what DO they do with that money?

Among some of the bureaucratic asshattery that Marin found were:

• Staff at the board developed a “document fetish” and became so obsessed with having their lengthy application forms filled out perfectly that they rejected one man’s claim because he forgot to dot an i in his name.
• Attorney General Michael Bryant broke the law by directing the board not to issue payments to save money and stay under budget.
• Ontario’s Victim Justice Fund has an $80-million surplus that the government refuses to use to compensate victims of crime.
• A man whose five-year-old daughter was raped and murdered who was treated as though he was trying to scam the board of money to pay for her funeral.
• A mother of a murder victim “berated” for forgetting her file number.
• A blind retiree who had to chose between buying food and burying her murdered daughter.

As much as I appreciate his bringing this mess to the light of day, Marin loses me when he starts saying that “It had no money. It was starved and forced into this situation and so the first thing we need to do is fund it properly.”

Andre, buddy; the God damned thing’s got a surplus of EIGHTY MILLION BUCKS!! It ain’t cash-starved. 🙄 No; the problem here — like with so many other governmental bean-counting behemoths — is that the CICB and OVJF aren’t about helping victims at all. They’re about keeping a bunch of lazy, bloated, unionized bureaucrat parasites in jobs at public expense.

Don’t believe me? Well then, if I’m wrong, you’d expect the Fiberals to be hopping to get the damned mess fixed, wouldn’t you (after all, it is an election year)? Of course you would. But they’re not…

After the report’s release, Conservative leader John Tory called on [Ontario Attorney General Michael] Bryant to resign.

What Bryant should do is toss out the CICB chair and the rest of the board. But Bryant indicated he wants them to help implement the changes. 😯

Talk about the fox and the friggin’ henhouse. But do you know what REALLY pisses me off about all this God damned this bullshit? IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER A DECADE!! The McSquinty Fiberals knew about it and did nothing. “Chainsaw” Mike’s Tory government knew about and did jack shit. When the Dippers were running the show, Bob Rae was as useless on this issue as he was on any other.

Well, it’s hit the fan now and everybody’s gotten splattered with shit; so can we please knock it off with all the partisan prickdom? This one is EVERYBODY’S FAULT…

So quit the squabbling and FIX THE DAMNED THING!!