Here’s some more crap that I don’t need; and neither does anyone else who lives in this city.

At least my weekend went off pretty well: I got to spend some time with my boy as we worked on a school project he’s doing on Juno Beach. Not a bad way to spend my time, I think. So, Monday notwithstanding, I was in a pretty good mood this morning as I hopped on the bus to get to work.

The LTC sardine can, with its cargo including yours truly, boogied on down Dundas just like it does every day until it got to Wellington; then it turned right, made for Queens and headed west again.

“Oh, fer [badword]’s sakes,” I thought. I had been assuming that construction season was supposed to be over, at least until Wiarton Willy tells us how much longer we can play hockey outside. So I hop out at Queens & Richmond — about 50 metres from where Ahmed Moalin–Mohamed decided to scratch his itchy trigger finger on Thanksgiving weekend — and started walking the extra two blocks that had been added on to my way to work today. On the bright side, my adjusted route took me past a Timmy’s and, let’s face it, a little Timmy’s on the way to work never hurt anyone.

No luck with that either, though. No sooner do I get to D&R then I’m stopped dead in my tracks by the cop on the far side of the yellow police tape stretching clear across Dundas Street.

“Sorry folks, but the street’s closed,” the cop said, in the most polite voice that a guy freezing his butt off and wanting to be someplace else can be expected to muster. “There’s been a shooting.”

Several of us were then informed that getting to work on time this morning was something that we could just save ourselves the trouble of worrying about; the street was closed from Richmond to Clarence and nobody was getting in. Period. Which led to the next natural question: closed for how long?

“Hopefully, we’ll be all finished here within the next three hours or so,” advised the officer, managing the difficult feat of simultaneously conveying both a courteous demeanour and the unmistakable impression that this was something that he was absolutely not willing to be screwed with about.

It turns out that about ten or so shots were squeezed off (not fifty feet from where I work) sometime in the wee hours of the morning today, likely around 02:45, by at least two shooters and once again, we’ve got a couple of gun-toting scumbags running around London:

Police arrived and arrested five people, but said early today those arrested are in custody on “unrelated matters.”

Dundas Street between Clarence and Richmond is still closed as police investigate.

I can remember, not so long ago, when things like this just plain didn’t happen in London. Now, it’s getting to be more and more like TO has been becoming for some time now. If this crap keeps up, we’ll have our own “year of the gun” soon enough…
More on this later.

Okay, I’ve kept my trap shut on this one for a bit because, to be blunt about it, I never saw this one coming in a million years. For both of you that haven’t heard yet, Stephane Dion is the new Grand Grit, crowned in Montreal yesterday.

Now, you might be forgiven for sitting there going, “Stephane who??” Don’t feel bad; I sure as heck didn’t pay a lot of attention to this guy during the race. Me, I was hoping the Librano$ would drop the Rae bomb and nuke themselves in the next general election.

But never in my life would I have guessed that the Fiberals would have gone with Dion like they did. To be completely honest, even I didn’t think that the Liberals were that dumb. Let me see if I’ve got this straight or not. The federal Fiberals — driven from office by the stench of sleaze and corruption emanating mostly from the party’s Quebec wing — think they have a plan for getting back in the saddle:

1. Elect a leader from Quebec who is virtually unknown in the ROC and speaks the worst English since Jonny Cretin
2. ???
3. Form another majority and get back to robbing the national till again

Who’s running this outfit, anyway; the Underpants Gnomes???

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder if poor Stephane just might end up being the dog that caught the bus: okay, he’s got the damned thing… now what the hell does he do with it?

I don’t like the media very much. You can tell, I know. More often than not, the media displays a habitual, even vindictive, Leftist slant in virtually every issue. Sometimes, reading the paper or watching the news, it’s hard to imagine that they believe conservatives can do anything right or that liberals can do anything wrong. Every now and then, however — not often, mind you but just often enough — I come across something that just plain makes good sense and demonstrates that even the media is capable of heaving its head out of its arse from time to time.

Maybe I judge the media too harshly. Or maybe it’s just a case of even a stopped clock being right twice a day. Whatever it is, I do enjoy seeing it on those occasions it comes along. Today’s editorial in the Freeps was one of those occasions. Check it out for yourselves:

Reinforce our troops

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rightly reminded the opposition parties that Canada has an obligation to its NATO partners in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But NATO has an obligation to Canada as well.

Because, along with the British and Dutch, it is our troops who are on the sharp end of the stick when it comes to the fighting in the deadly Kandahar region.

To date, 44 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan, 36 of them this year in and around Kandahar, including two killed in a suicide bombing this week. Almost nine per cent of the 511 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan since fighting began in 2001 have been Canadians.

This week, Harper came away from a NATO meeting in Latvia with only vague assurances that more countries in the 26-member alliance will start sharing the heavy lifting in Kandahar.

There was also confusion about which NATO countries will supply needed troops; and about the extent to which restrictions they have placed on their military that preclude their forces from serving on the front lines in Kandahar, will be lifted.

Harper who had gone to the meeting looking for reinforcements from other NATO countries, acknowledged that while Canada will be getting some help, it is not at the level he had hoped.

“Look, we’re not going to kid you, the security situation remains a challenge in the south,” he said. “We still believe we are under-manned, but we’re getting more forces all of the time, we’re getting more flexibility from our NATO partners.”

Gone are the days when Canada stood apart from these deadly conflicts and self-righteously lectured from the sidelines. Canadian soldiers are now in harm’s way, doing what must be done in Afghanistan if it is not to fall back into the hands of the religious fanatics and terrorists who first plotted 9/11 from within that country.

Canada has earned the right — through the sacrifices made by its soldiers in Afghanistan — to have its concerns taken seriously at the NATO table.

As if any of us actually needed one more reason why the federal HypoGrits (or any other branch of that malodourous menagerie of Machiavellian manipulators, for that matter), they decided to toss us another one anyway. At their Grand Poohbah Pageant in Montreal yesterday, the Fiberal old guard elected — in a vote of 318-299 — to stick with the “tried and true” system for electing party leaders and turfed the treacherous talk of switching to a “one member, one vote” system.

Under their current system, only delegates at the leadership convention get to vote on who leads the party and those that can’t afford to cough up several hundred bucks for travel, hotel, time off work, etc so that they can go to the little shindig are SOL. Every other federal party — and most provincial ones too, for that matter — long ago switched to an all-member voting process where every party member has a say in who leads. It’s called democracy; a peculiar notion quite foreign to the Librano$. The reaction was, of course, predictable:

Youthful Liberals whooped, clapped high-fives and hugged as delegates voted by a narrow majority to reject the constitutional amendment. The resolution needed a two-thirds majority to pass, meaning the count really wasn’t close.

Oddly enough, the most prominent (if feeble) criticism of this insider mentality came from what was for me, at least, the most unlikely-seeming of sources:

The vote marked a repudiation of sorts for MP Belinda Stronach.Stronach, a Conservative leadership candidate in 2004, declined to run in the Liberal race, saying she was committed instead to reforming her new party’s leadership process. She reportedly spent hundreds of dollars out of her own pocket this week paying for flyers to promote the one-member, one-vote initiative.

“You know what, we’re missing 98 per cent of the family here today,” Stronach implored delegates, speaking from one of the floor microphones at the Palais des congres.

So why the hell would the Grits not want all their membership to be able to vote? It’s simple, really. For the same reason that they refuse to put truly important things (same sex marriage being just one example) to referenda: being the typical, social-engineering, we-know-what’s-best-for-you Leftists that they are, they are utterly terrified that the Great Unwashed Masses might vote wrong!

This is what the Fiberals think of their own party members. Too damned dumb to be trusted with any important decisions where they might disagree with the plutocrats. This is what they think of their own.

Imagine what they think of you.

And away we go. Strap yourselves in, boys and girls, because this ride is promising to be bumpier than a ride on Highway 32 at 120Kmph. Yes, the big, bad Tories are making good on yet another election promise by bringing the issue of same-sex “marriage” back to the House, this time for a free vote, and the usuals are wasting no time getting themselves worked up into a lather. Gee, what are the odds? 🙄

The Conservative government under HMPM Stephen Harper has announced that they are going to fulfill their election promise to review Bill C-38 in the Commons and submit the issue to a truly free vote.

Government sources say the Conservatives will table a motion asking MPs whether the debate on gay marriage should be re-opened, which could see debate start Wednesday and could be voted on late next week.

The HypoGrits and their social engineering henchmen would have you believe that this is all a done deal and that the Tories are whipping a dead horse because there “has already been a free vote” on the issue. But Bill C-38, you may recall, was undemocratically rammed through the House in June of last year after then-PM Martin ordered all cabinet ministers to vote in favour of the bill or else lose their jobs. Joe Comuzzi, the minister responsible for Northern Ontario, resigned his post in protest so that he could vote against the bill. The final count: 158-133.

Hardly an ideological victory, especially when one considers that the entire Liberal cabinet was voting under duress. The Grits at the time, tried to spin this issue as a question of the Charter:

The “vote is about the Charter of Rights,” said Martin. “We’re a nation of minorities and in a nation of minorities you don’t cherry-pick rights.”

There’s just one little problem with that: the Charter — which was a poorly thought-out document to begin with — says absolutely nothing about gay marriage, or homosexuality, or marriage, or sexual inclination, or anything else having to do with this issue. You will find no reference whatsoever to sexual orientation anywhere in the Charter. It just plain isn’t there. The courts, however, have decided that they can “read in” things that aren’t in the Charter and that the Charter, therefore, says whatever they say it says.

Ever since then, the Charter has been wielded as a hatchet by a motley assortment of malevolent social engineering malcontents to impose upon the rest of us changes to our very way of life that could never have been passed in the House (where all who sit are periodically held accountable to those whose lives they are fiddling with). It has also been used in some truly disturbing ways, not the least of which is the erosion of religious rights, by federally funded special interest groups, under the pretense of “equality.”

As a result of all this Machiavellian manipulation and using the Charter as a sword rather than a shield, this issue has become less and less about whether or not Adam and Steve can get hitched and more and more about just who does and does not make the laws in this country: the government (chosen by, and accountable to, the people) or the courts (elected by, and accountable to, none)? When laws are made by those who owe no obedience whatsoever to the citizenry, there is a name for that kind of system; and it’s not democracy.

What kind of country do you want to live in?

If it weren’t for the fact that they’re doing it out of such sheer frustration, this would be funnier than a clown convention. Eleven men and one woman from Leader, Sasflatchewan — who have had it up to here with the provincial NDP (No Damn Pavement) government’s do-nothing approach to the appalling condition of too many roads in the Land of The Big Flat — have gone and done something a little… creative to bring attention to the problem. Just ask anyone from Leader to Swift Current and most will tell you that the worst of the worst (so bad it’s got its own website) is Highway 32. This place sounds like 90 miles of Jean Chretien speeches:

“Highway 32 from Leader to Swift Current was so bad . . . you were driving all over the road trying to avoid these potholes,” said [Gord] Stueck.

It was so difficult to travel, Stueck said, that ambulances were forced to take alternate, longer routes.

“You couldn’t transport patients that were cardiac patients or fracture patients. You just couldn’t transport a patient on that.”

And that’s just a tiny snippet of the complaints that you’ll hear. The Dippers, of course, have taken the typically arrogant Lefty approach to the whole affair:

“They’re very creative people,” [Saskatchewan Highways Minister Eldon] Lautermilch told reporters after seeing the calendar at the provincial legislature.

“But I don’t think a calendar is going to rebuild a road. I think recommendation from my department in terms of priority will probably be a fairer gauge.”

Isn’t it nice to see a government so responsive and accountable to the people that elect them? Why do I get the feeling that Flatland is heading for their own Chansaw Mike (2.0)? 😆