Category: Canada

E minus 10 days and counting.

And here we go… The MSM continues to hoot that London North Centre is pretty much a writeoff for the Tories, the Dippers tried to suck up to the unions (BIG surprise there, eh?), Memogate seems to have finally shut the hell up and John Q. Londoner seems to think that Haskett’s going to win. Make what you will of it, boys and girls; I’m off to the pub…

The Freeps
No place for cliches
New Democrat appeals to auto workers, industry

The TO Star
Would you buy this brand?

Canada.com
Front-runners in Ont. byelection fight for left-wing votes
Battle wide open in London, Ont., byelection as voting day draws near

Hamilton Spectator
Candidates on the attack

E minus 11 days and counting.

It just keeps going, and going, and going… Move over, bunny, Memogate is here. Yup, the Night of the Living Dunderheads continues as the story of Dave and the Memo continues to lurch and shamble across London North Centre’s political landscape, stubbornly refusing to die. Most of would settle for having it just shut the hell up! I know I would. 🙄 Yes, it’s fun to see the HypoGrits getting spanked with their own favourite little paddle of indignation, but it does get old after a while. And not too much of a while, either. To be blunt, people are just getting sick and tired of hearing about it. Move on, already; there are real issues we want to hear about.

The first all candidates’ slugfest rolled into the UWO campus last night and brought about the usual anti-Tory spin in the media. The Freeps’ story (as you can see below) was headlined “Haskett draws wave of boos,” giving the idea that she is somehow universally loathed. Read the story, however, and you find this little nugget:

Her assertion produced a barrage of booing from the mainly student crowd, which was soon drowned out by cheers from her supporters.

Funny what a headline can do, huh? Time for the links:

The Freeps
‘Memo-gate’ remains a mystery
Campaign notebook
Haskett draws wave of boos

And away we go. Grit candidate Glen Pearson took a swing at his Dipper rival, Megan “never met a man I couldn’t blame for everything” Walker, over the latter’s gleefully opportunistic Munschausen-by-proxy over the turd typhoon (mostly of her own making) surrounding former Pearson campaign worker Dave Burghardt’s blogular musings:

“She took that and torched him,” Pearson said. “She torched the guy. That is as sick as they come.”

Torched the guy? 😯 Sounds like strong language; coming from a firefighter and all. But come on now, Glen; seriously, what did you expect?? YOU were the one that handed her this goose that laid the golden clanger on your campaign rug; remember? This was you, if I recall:

“I did say to her, ‘Megan, it is up to you and your team what you want to do about it, but Dave is a friend of mine,’ and I hoped she would do the right thing. These kinds of things can affect a person and I wanted her to be thinking about that.”

Haskett, meanwhile, has been taking the high road and having nothing to do with the fracas and Grand Treehugger Liz May (trying to BoGarth as much good press as she can) is urging both the Librano$ and Dippomotami to just drop the damn thing, already:

“We’ve only got two weeks left and we should be talking about issues that concern the voters,” she said.

The finger-pointing goes on full steam ahead, though, as Walker yaps that “interception of private communications is illegal,” while Pearson retorts, “Megan says we intercepted an e-mail but we did not. We got it in a mailbox. There was no secret.” The cops, as you can likely guess, want sweet bugger all to do with this idiocy:

Meanwhile, London police said they’re not looking further into the issue of how the Pearson campaign got hold of an internal NDP e-mail suggesting how the “golden” scandal could be exploited to help “bring down a Liberal.”

Also in London, Garth Nader blew into town to stump for May, Ralph Goodale pumped up Pearson (and badmouthed Haskett) and Diane Finley popped by while Haskett talked tough on crime.

Last but not least: DO NOT FORGET that the advance polls are scheduled Nov. 17, 18 and 20, from noon to 8 p.m. at locations listed on your voter ID cards. If you’re going to be busy on the 27th, be sure to vote early. You can also vote early by special ballot at the returning office at Galleria London until Nov. 21; Monday to Friday from 9 til 9, Saturday, 9 til 6, and Sunday from noon to 4. Any questions? Call the returning office at 1-866-241-7804.

And now, the links (yes, I know there’s never much on the race in Repentigny, but I’m just not finding that much…):

The Freeps
Walker ‘torched the guy’: Pearson
May gets a hand from rebel Turner
Haskett plays crime card
Campaign notebook

…plus ce la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Once upon a time, I was trained in the how-to killing Russians; it’s just the way things were, back then. Russian agents, we were told, were after our industrial and military secrets; and they could be anyone, anywhere.

Then The Wall came down and we were told that, from that moment on, everything had changed. The Ruskies weren’t going to be the enemy anymore; we didn’t have to be constantly on the lookout for commie spies; we could relax now. Then, along came Dmitriy Olshevsky and Yelena Olshevskaya:, operatives with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the successor to the KGB.  They had been Russian sleeper agents, living in Canada under the pseudonyms of Ian and Laurie Lambert until they were caught and promptly gotten rid of in 1996:

After a period of hesitation, the Russian intelligence services, for example, were reinvigorated by the passage of a new bill on foreign intelligence collection, signed into law by President Yeltsin in July, 1992. Since then, there have been several examples of traditional espionage activities by Russia. In May, 1996, two Russian illegal officers living in Canada under the assumed identities of deceased Canadians were arrested as a result of a Service investigation. Dmitriy Olshevsky and Yelena Olshevskaya, living in Toronto under their developing legend of Ian and Laurie Lambert, admitted membership in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to an immigration hearing and were deported from Canada.

Then, there were the two Russian diplomats kicked out of Canada in 2002. They were military attaches at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, long suspected by many of being a front for Russian spies.

And now what do we have? This bullcrap. A “foreign national operating under the alias Paul William Hampel” has been arrested in Montreal while trying to leave the country (with what, we don’t and may never know) and (surprise, surprise) although no such details have been confirmed as of this writing, he looks to be yet another Russian spy:

OTTAWA — The federal government is moving quickly to deport an alleged spy arrested in Montreal on a rarely used national security certificate.

The man was taken into custody by the Canada Border Services Agency on Tuesday.

Court documents made public today say he is a foreign national operating under the alias Paul William Hampel.

The papers accuse him of engaging “in an act of espionage or an act of subversion” and posing “a danger to the security of Canada.”

Hardly any surprise, is it, that word of this has promptly spread far and wide across the globe in only a few hours?

The only good news in this whole mess is that the government isn’t dawdling about getting rid of the bugger. The question is: when are we going to get laws that make it harder for these bozos and other undesirables to get into, and stay in, the country in the first place?

The Grits had years to do something, but all they did was to make the problem worse. The Dippers are too petrified of doing anything that might be even remotely seen as politically incorrect, so they’re useless in this, too. The Blocheads? Don’t even bother going there.

Gee… I wonder who that leaves? 🙄

Gee whiz, guys; I didn’t know you cared. 😆 I’ve only been ranting now for about six months and, while I’ve somehow managed to rack up over 12,000 visitors in that time, I had no idea just what kind of, er… interesting folks… were popping by to check out the stuff percolating up from the muck and the mire at the bottom of my brain. Then, the other day, I noticed this (click for a bigger look-see):

I figured I must have been drawing a few folks’ interest but, dang; the House of Commons?? Shucks, guys; I didn’t know ya cared… 😀

Cheers

These things have been popping up on YouTube like daisies lately. I’m going to have to find a bunch and post them in a batch one of these days. Remember that infamous “soldiers in the streets” bit of fearmongering that the HypoGrits tried to pull last January that came back (in a helluva hurry) to bite ’em right where the sun don’t shine? Ever wonder what it would look like if conservatives resorted to the sort of leftist-style attack ads that we saw in the last federal election? Oh, it’d be snarky, alright. Truthful, but snarky. Come to think of it, it would probably look something like this: