Well, I didn’t see this one coming. Usually this is the kind of common sense that you just don’t see from a Lefty but hey, truth really is stranger than fiction. According to the story currently floating about, it seems that some clever little bureaucratic buggers in Queen’s Park seem to think that they’re the second coming of Martha Stewart. They’ve taken it into their little taxpayer-funded heads to yank out and replace all the drapes in the Queen’s Park offices. Never mind that there’s nothing wrong with the ones that are there now; that would just confuse the issue.

That’s right: it seems that those nasty drapes just have to go. As much as this latest waste of my money irks me, it’s not what baffles the bejabbers out of me. Nope. What has me scratching my head damn near hard enough to make my scalp bleed is that the only one who seems to have stood up and called “bullshit” on behalf of Ontario taxpayers so far isn’t a Tory, like you’d expect. He’s not a blue Grit, either. He’s a… er, well… he’s a Dipper… 😯

Peter Kormos is refusing to relinquish his old office curtains for what he describes as an unnecessary and expensive window-dressing exercise at Queen’s Park.

The NDP MPP said he was told by staff that all draperies are being replaced to give the legislative building a uniform look from the outside.

“If Martha Stewart gets elected to the legislature maybe we could understand how this would be a priority,” Kormos told Sun Media yesterday.

Kormos said that when he pressed staff to justify the expense, he was told the new curtains are fireproof.

No one is allowed to smoke in the building, and the existing curtains are in good shape with no signs of deterioration, he said.

“It’s just silly,” Kormos said. “I said, ‘No way, I don’t want you touching my drapes.'”

Well ain’t that the damnedest thing you’ve seen lately? Guess that’s gonna leave ol’ John Guess-What-Party-I’m-With standing there with that “he stole my balloons!” look on his face.

I never thought I’d say this but, hat’s off to the Dipper…

Quick: what’s black and white with a cherry on top? Any dieas? Aw, come on now, at least one of you out there must have some idea what I’m babbling about. Some of you must have heard the question before. If you know the answer to that one, you’re probably at least as old as me and you’re also going to find this picture to be, shall we say, vaguely familiar:

Yes, that really is just what it looks like: the OPP are back in black… and white. It seems that the OPP have decided to do away with the white cruisers that they’ve been puttering around in since the late 80s or so and get back to the good ol’ black-and-white. And no, it’s got nothing to do with going retro. 🙄 One of the main reasons for the return to the old school paint job is visibility, plain and simple:

“We welcome the return of the traditional black and white cruisers,” said Minister Kwinter. “Their enhanced visibility on Ontario’s major highways will add significantly to the safe driving message we want to reinforce with the motoring public. We support the OPP and the important work police officers are doing to keep our communities safe,” added Minister Kwinter.

The black and white cruisers will provide a distinctive presence to OPP stepped-up efforts to make Ontario highways safer and to bring traffic safety issues in line with other important public safety issues and concerns.

“Officer and public safety are the primary concerns,” said Commissioner Fantino. “The black and white patrol vehicle will be instantly recognizable as an OPP patrol car and, with the new LED high visibility roof lights and vehicle markings, will have a greater impact on the visibility of OPP vehicles patrolling our communities and our roadways,” added Commissioner Fantino.

Yeah, you can spot those things about a mile away, as near as I can remember. And yeah, most of slow down when we see a cop car. All we need now is for some loopy lefty to start hooting about “turning back the clock” that the story can be complete… 😆

Well, now; lookie here, willya? The Smoking Stasi have new marching orders. Check out what the Fiberals tried to do on the Q-T. It seems that the high-falutin’ Mr “I-Know-What’s-Best-For-You” Jim Watson (Dolt McSquinty’s Ontario Fiberal Minister of Health Promotion) has nothing but your best interests at heart when it comes to banning smoking. Unless you go someplace like a casino, where the Ontario government gets a cut.

Government-owned casinos in Windsor and Niagara Falls are allowed to build outdoor shelters for smokers, even though bars and restaurants in Ontario cannot do so under a provincewide smoking ban, Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson said yesterday.

The Smoke Free Ontario Act, which became law in June, doesn’t allow bars and restaurants to provide enclosed areas to protect smoking patrons from the weather, but Mr. Watson said casinos aren’t covered by that provision because their main business is not serving food or alcohol.

Yeppers. If you slide on in to your local pub (maybe run by a guy having almost as much fun making ends meet as you are) and you feel like a smoke while you’re there, you gotta stand outside in the elements and get soaked, freeze your arse off, or whatever. That’s because, under that lovely little thing called the Smoke Free Ontario Act, that the Grits decided to beat us over the head with, bars and restaurants aren’t allowed to provide even semi-enclosed areas to protect smoking customers from the rain, snow, sleet and other things that aren’t supposed to bother mailmen.

But HEY! Guess what? If you wanna go and blow a bunch of your hard-earned dough in some slots joint where the back-scratching swine from the Big Smoke can snout up to the trough, you get to light up in a jolly little “outdoor covered structure” with walls and a roof and probably ashtrays, too.

Can you say “bullshit,” boys and girls? I knew you could. As the Freeps put it in their editorial page today:

Uh-oh.

This sounds like trouble, smells like a rat and looks like one rule for the government, another for the private sector. To be sure, it’s an injustice of the highest order for Ontario’s hospitality industry.

It’s cynical, it’s hypocritical, it’s a betrayal and it may mark the point at which Ontarians finally lose all faith in the provincial Liberals.

Well, okay. Maybe something good will come out of all this two-faced sanctimony, after all.

We were told, in the most melodramatic of tones, by the Fiberals that the smoking ban was being brought in to protect workers from the Great Plague Of Western Civilization, second hand smoke. The latest HypoGrit hyperbole is that these little smoking pits are all fine and dandy because, Watson has barfed, employees will not have to enter these shelters.

HEY, ASSHOLE: pub and eatery owners were saying the same God damned thing over a year ago when you saddled them with your little bullshit law in the first place!! They also told you that if make going out a pain in the ass for smokers, places like them were going to lose money. Could it be that you’ve finally gotten it through your thick skulls that smokers are going to go to some other place to smoke… and take their money with them? Just like bingo halls and charities said they would.

The casino plan quietly received the green light as revenues plummet because of the tough, new no-smoking law.

Well, DUH! The Grits hooted away that there would be no such drop in revenues because, with all those nasty smokers out of the way, non-smokers would start coming out in droves and smokers would still keep coming out, anyway. Well, that never happened, did it?

News flash, HypoGrits: I smoke. It’s MY CHOICE. And I don’t like going to places where I can’t. Given the choice between a) going out and having to freeze my ass off and b) staying in and having a few friends over to watch the game, have some brews, scarf back some BBQ, whatever… I’m choosing B 9 times out of 10. I used to go out a lot; not anymore. And that’s why so many pubs and restaurants are closing, even though you boneheads said they wouldn’t. You assholes annoyed a bunch of us and cost plenty of other people their jobs.

And, come election day, we aren’t going to forget that.

This is kind of interesting, given the context of what I’m in the middle of right now. The Freeps has been doing an ongoing series on racism, immigration, multiculturalism, etc for the past few days now and as part of today’s bit, they had two rather interesting pieces, here and here, that asked the question, “is multiculturalism working?” As you can imagine, one is pro and the other con.

What I find interesting isn’t that Augie Fleras, comfortable in the majority, spouts all the usual leftist, feel-good, “inclusiveness” rhetoric that one comes to expect from multicult apologists. The clear indication is that nice people like multiculturalism, with the unasked question being, of course, “if nice folks like it, what must be the kind that don’t?”

No, what I find interesting is that the one to denounce this failed experiment is Mahfooz Kanwar, a Pakistani immigrant and (supposedly, according to multicultists) one of the people having the most to gain from the policy. Yes, he used to support the idea because he “believed it gave us a sense of pluralism, diversity and a variety of cultural and social customs.” But it didn’t take long for this man, from a fractious country himself, to see the flaws in the system. An interesting example of those flaws — and what they lead to — can be found in a June, 2006 column by the Cowtown Sun’s Licia Corbella, written not long after the arrests of the TO17:

Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar recently attended Calgary’s largest mosque for a funeral.

At one point in the proceedings, a man Kanwar has known for more than three decades led the prayers.

“He was saying in Urdu (the official language of Pakistan): ‘Oh, God, protect us from the infidels, who pollute us with their vile ways,'” recalls Kanwar, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal College in Calgary.

“I stood up and grabbed him by the lapels, which was shocking even to me because I have never done anything like that in my life and I said: ‘How dare you attack my country.’ And then I addressed the crowd and said: ‘I have known this man for more than 30 years and he has been on welfare for almost all of those years.’ ”

Kanwar chuckles at the memory.

“Then I said to this semi-literate man, ‘you should thank me and those you call infidels.’

“He asked me why and I said: ‘Because the taxes I pay are putting food on your table as are the taxes of the so-called “infidels.’ ”

Most Canadians and many Muslims would applaud Dr. Kanwar’s righteous outburst. But guess which of the two men is no longer welcome at the Sarcee Tr. S.W. mosque?

Not the intolerant, hate-spewing semi-literate. No, it’s Dr. Kanwar who’s persona non grata.

That, says Kanwar, is just one of numerous instances he has experienced as a result of the culture of ignorance and intolerance that permeates so many mosques in Canada and throughout the world.

I keep asking how many times a man has to see something happen over and over before he’s allowed to say he can see it coming.

Still waiting for an answer…

Yes, it is; and damned fast, too. As if averaging more than one a month wasn’t bad enough, there has been yet another shooting in downtown London. For those keeping count, that makes four in three months now. That’s not for all of London, either. Nosiree, that’s just for the core area and so doesn’t include the guy that was shot on McNay street a month or so ago.

I’ve heard some people trying to take the easy road, just saying that the problem is pretty much restricted to a “certain kind” of bar or club. Translation: those clubs that play hip-hop and assorted techno crap with the bass turned up to the point where it registers on seismographs for miles around and attract the early-twentysomething crowd. Well, you can put that idea to rest. While I don’t go there myself (I prefer a more blue-collar kind of joint 😉 ), the pub where the latest incident occurred is actually kind of snooty; the sort of place where seldom is heard a “yo, yo, wazzup” and you can find enough neckties on the patrons to make a giraffe a turtleneck.
As you can imagine, the fingers are being pointed in all the usual directions with the predictable suggestions being made:

An early-morning shooting in a posh downtown bar left one man in hospital yesterday and the bar owner calling for a “zero-tolerance” approach to the core’s escalating gunplay.

“London should adopt a zero-tolerance policy for its own survival,” said John Scott-Pearse, owner of Robinson Hall. “That (approach) worked in New York City and it will work here.”

I agree. We do need a zero-tolerence policy when it comes to these assholes that think it’s all jolly to send lead flying around on our streets. Don’t go looking at the cops to fix this, though. No, I’m not blaming them. The cops are already doing their job: respond to calls, follow the leads and nab the bad guys.

The problem crops up when the cops manage to track down and bag one of these creeps, only to have some idiot judge fire him right back out the revolving jailhouse door again. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the case of Ahmed Moalin-Mohamed (who I’ve ranted about plenty), the guy that shot four — count ’em: FOUR — people on Thanksgiving weekend, only to get sprung from the pokey by a jackass Justice of the Peace named Jack Carroll.

And before you go yapping that that’s the exception: don’t bother.  It isn’t the exception, it’s the norm.  From drug dealers to shooters to pedophiles and even child killers, they all puke up their sob stories and stroll away, frequently vanishing, no doubt laughing their arses off at the impotence of the courts.

We don’t need more cops; what we need are new judges.

This doesn’t happen to me much. Usually, my first impression of a thing, whatever it may be, is pretty accurate and changing my mind isn’t something that I find myself having to do very often. Some people (okay, okay; most people…) will call that stubbornness but I prefer to think of it as just paying attention to what the hell’s going on in the first place. It usually works out quite well for me. Not always, mind you; but usually.

Sometimes though, I end up doing an about-face. Like today, when I started reading the Freeps this morning and found this:

Police say kin shares fault

Thu, January 11, 2007
By KELLY PEDRO, FREE PRESS REPORTER

The parents of a woman violently gunned down by her former boyfriend are partly responsible for her death, London police contend.

In just-filed court documents, a lawyer representing the force alleges Tom and Kim Bol didn’t report contact between their daughter Vanessa and her ex-boyfriend, Emerson Dominguez, when the parents knew he was not supposed to contact her.

The “WHAT THE F***?!?!?” that came flying unbidden out of my piehole was probably heard in Lambeth. The first instinct was, as you’ve likely guessed, pretty obvious and something that I think just about any parent in the world will be able to relate to…

What the hell is wrong with the cops? Have they lost their God damned minds? Just who the hell was the shithead that came up with this lamebrained idea in the first place? Even if it’s true and the parents were somewhat at fault, these people lost a daughter, for Christ’s sakes; they’ve suffered enough. LEAVE THEM ALONE!

Pretty standard stuff, right? Yeah, I thought so, too. But then I kept reading and lo and behold, there was a little detail about the whole affair that, with all the time that has passed, I had managed to forget all about: following Vanessa Bol’s tragic death at the hands of Emerson Dominguez in November of 2003, it didn’t take long for the lawyers to start circling the carcass. After all, it isn’t for nothing that so many in this world consider lawyers to be one step down the food chain from plankton. Dominguez is currently serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, with no chance of parole for 20 years (theoretically, at least; with our revolving-door justice system, you can never tell… but that’s another rant). Vanessa died on the third of November and the Bol family decided to sue the London cops a little over six months later:

In July 2004, the Bol family filed a civil suit against London police for nearly $1.4 million, claiming officers failed to protect their 17-year-old daughter.

[…]

The civil suit names London’s police services board, retired chief Brian Collins and two London police officers.

An amended statement of defence says the Bols “did not report Dominguez’s contact with Vanessa Bol to other persons or agencies of authority who might have intervened to protect Vanessa Bol.”

[…]

The statement says the Bols did not report threats or assaults by Dominguez against Bol.

So there you have it. Puts the issue in a slightly different perspective, doesn’t it? No doubt about it, there’s a turd in this punchbowl someplace. The questions is: which side is right and which side are being utter assholes and pulling some pretty lowdown crap?

On the one hand, if the allegations are true, it takes some kind of God damned gall to try to and cash in — to the tune of over a million bucks — on your own misdeeds by pinning the blame on someone else. We rely on police to serve and protect the public from scum like Dominguez but it’s a two way street; cops rely on us to tell them when we know that bad people are doing bad things. These folks ain’t psychics, ya know. If the Bols really did know about Dominguez stalking and even assaulting their daughter and they did nothing at all about it… then I say lower the boom on ’em. Bring the hammer down and make an example out of them for others that would try and grab for such a loathesome Munchausen lottery jackpot. On the other hand, though…

If these allegations are false, this represents stooping about as low as you can get. This would be the ultimate in kicking someone when they’re down, the cheapest of cheap shots, and something that we should damn well expect — indeed, demand — that those who are trusted to hold authority in our society place themselves far above. If this is some bullshit stunt, heads should roll for it.

The problem is that we don’t know which story is the truth and which is bullshit. So there it is, big as life and twice as problematic. And here I am, in territory about as unfamilliar as it gets for me… on the fence.

And I don’t like it.

When I see stuff like this, my nature practically demands that I take one side or the other and be quick about it. But make sure it’s the right side. I wish I knew enough to make that decision but I don’t. So here I sit, in the mushy middle, wanting to speak up for somebody but not sure who, and haunted by the words of Mark Twain:

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Easier said than done.