Archive for: October 2007

I just can’t believe this one.  Really, I mean it.  Those of you that come here with any frequency know and I’m no fan of Stephie “no relation“ Dion, his policies, or anything else having to do with him but I’ve always managed to keep myself in the “no, he can’t really be as stupid as people say,” camp.

Until now.

It’s one thing to step on your dick.  You don’t need to be a politician, either; we’ve all done it at one time or another.  It’s just part of the human experience.  Stephie, however, seems bound and determined to tap-dance on his own pecker.

No sooner had HM Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty announced that us hard-working Canucks will finally be getting some long-awaited tax relief than Stephie Greener-Than-Thou-Except-When-We’ll-Get-Clobbered-At-The-Polls yurped up his Greatest Hairball Ever™ on the lobby rug.  Not only that, but he managed to do it with an arrogance that was absolutely… er, well… Liberal:

Dion also said if he were elected he would consider rescinding GST cuts promised by the Conservatives in Tuesday’s mini budget.

The Grit leader said many people believe the two percentage point cut to the goods and services tax was the wrong move. He said it amounts to $34 billion that the govenrment could spend elsewhere.

He then promptly flings open the other side of his yap to tell us how the Liebrals won’t be voting against the mini-budget, even though it’s Bad For Canada® (which is Gritspeak for “it’s conservative”).  And why are the Librano$ so willing to let this oh, so Bad For Canada® nasty thing get by the House, you ask?  Why, for the good of Canada, of course: 😕

“Yes, we will be abstaining for the good sake of Canada. It is not a good declaration. It is not sending the country a good direction,” Dion told reporters after a caucus meeting Wednesday.

“We are the party of compassion, the party of Kelowna for aboriginals, the party that wants to put the fight against poverty at the core of agenda. We want to invest in Canadians and families, seniors, in regions, and there is no good balance in this declaration of the minister of finance about investing in Canadians and tax cuts.” [Translation: “Screw Canada; we aren’t doing Jack Shit that might risk us going to the polls until we’re sure we can win and get our fingers back in your pockets again.  Don’t you realize there are ad execs in Quebec that can’t even afford Grey Poupon anymore, now that we aren’t around?”]

Think about that: “that the government could spend elsewhere.”  My gawd, haven’t these assholes learned ANYthing???  Have they actually managed to forget that the main reason they got turfed in the first place nearly two years ago was because the rest of us were sick and God damned tired of the way the federal Grits were throwing OUR money around??

That’s right, Stephie: our money.  Not yours,

OURS!!

But you sonsofbitches clearly still don’t get that, do you?

Enjoy your time in the political wilderness.  Get comfortable.  You’re going to be there a while.

Alright, everybody, pay attention.  This is important.

It seems like all the quibbling of “is there one or isn’t there one,” is over when it comes to the question of whether or not southwest Ontario has itself a resident cougar.  And I’m talking about the kind that doesn’t wear lipstick.

The Freeps carrried the story today, telling how the big cat — that all the “experts” told us couldn’t possibly be here — made such a mess out of some poor fella’s standardbred trotter out on Elliott Drive near Parkhill that the horse had to be put down…

Parkhill residents have been warned to be on the lookout for a cougar after a horse was viciously mauled by an animal with sharp claws and had to be put down.

Since the attack, which left the horse torn up and bleeding on an Elliott Drive farm last week, there has been at least one cougar sighting, Middlesex OPP Const. Doug Graham said.

In response to the attack and the sighting, police and North Middlesex council issued a public safety notice yesterday, warning residents to avoid walking alone at night in the bush and to secure barns.

“The risk is low, but we know (the animal) is not as fearful of humans as it normally would be,” Graham said. “Normally we see losses of pets, dogs and cats, but this is the first attack of a horse.”

The attack on the horse has not been confirmed as a cougar attack, but the injuries are consistent with that of a cougar hunting prey, police said.

[…]

“It was traumatic,” Graham said. “The wounds (were made by) one animal as opposed to a pack. It wouldn’t be consistent with a coyote or wolf — they hunt in packs.”

He said the wounds were made by “sharp claws. This (horse) was attacked by a large predator that knew how to attack a large animal.”

Cougar sightings have become almost legendary in the region.

Last summer, a wildlife specialist with the Natural Resources Ministry investigated 32 sightings in London, but found no hard evidence of a cougar in London.

The expert did find proof of deer, coyotes, raccoons, wild turkeys and possibly a bobcat.  [gee, he was thorough, wasn’t he? 🙄 -D]

Cougars, also known as pumas, mountain lions and panthers, roam remote areas across the country, mostly Western Canada. Their presence has been confirmed in New Brunswick and Quebec and provinces west of Ontario. Wildlife experts concede they likely roam remote regions of northwestern Ontario. Most of the past Ontario sightings have been at night and in the early fall.

For the most part, the community is not overly concerned, Graham said.

“People realize there has never been an attack on a human. The cats are normally out at dusk and dawn (and) young children tend not to be out at that time of day.”

Apparently Graham doesn’t know too many small town and country kids.  When I was growing up, depending on the time of the year, we could be damned near anyplace around dusk, so make sure that you know where your kids are and when.  And make sure they know what to watch for and not to mess with it.  I’ve seen what one of these things can do to a grown man and don’t even want to imagine what could happen to a kid.

And, as cool as that guy was to hear about, I don’t exactly feel like writing any posts about a local Marc Patterson anytime soon.

CKNX is also reporting that the OPP are warning folks that the critter is still around:

Middlesex OPP are advising area residents that there has been a cougar sighting along a creek in the Parkhill area.

This sighting follows a mauling of a horse last week.

The mauling of the horse has not been confirmed as a cougar attack, however, the injuries are consist with that of a cougar hunting prey.

A cougar expert says they prefer forested or bush areas, usually follow a water course and try to avoid human contact.

Most of the Ontario sightings are in the early Fall.

So for the time being, keep the kids close and your eyes open because this thing’s getting a little too ballsy for my liking.  And while it might not be a bad idea to keep the ammo near the old 12 gague for a few days, don’t go hunting the thing just yet, because a) deer season’s just around the corner so this critter might come to an unlucky end anyway and b) you likely don’t need the hassle of explaining why it is that you shot something that there isn’t even a season for in this province.

But if you see it going after your livestock — or even worse, somebody’s kids — that’s another matter.  Just be observant, keep your head, and for God’s sake, make sure what you aim at.

You know the drill.

UPDATE

The Freeps has a follow-up today from Cheryl Penny’s farm:

When Penny and partner Bob Rundle went across the pasture to collect Rainbow, they were shocked.

“Her head was all smashed in, she was bleeding from a nostril and there was this long gash, right to the bone,” Penny said.

A veterinarian examined Rainbow’s injuries and recommended the horse be put down.

“I agreed because I hate to see an animal in distress,” Penny said.

Rundle said he’s convinced Rainbow was spooked.

“There’s no way she’d jump three fences and that cut from shoulder to knee,” he said.

“I didn’t see a cougar and I can’t prove it, but one was spotted not far from here and it was either that or some other wild animal that spooked her.”

An absolutely huge tip o’ the old toque to Dr. Roy for putting this where I could see it so that I can, in turn, pass it along to the rest of you (couldn’t have done it without ya, mate).

I wasn’t going to post anything at all today due to my temp hitting 102 — that’s 38.8, for those of you that have been fully metricwashed — and generally feeling like a can of smashed arseholes.

Thanks again, Doc. Just when I thought the day was a wash… 😀 The original townhall.com article is here (along with plenty of other good stuff, so take the time to check it out).

How to Shut Up an Atheist if You Must
By Doug Giles
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The atheist’s days of running circles around the Christian with their darling questions are drawing to a close. Yes, the fat lady just wrenched herself off her humongous backside, has cleared her throat and now is fixin’ to sing the finale on the atheist’s ability to have fun with their specious little fairy tales at the Christians’ expense.

That is if the Christian will buy, devour, commit to memory and stand up and challenge the pouty anti-God cabal with the atheist-slaying facts found in two new books from Regnery namely, What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Authors Dinesh D’Souza and Robert Hutchinson skillfully answer, once again, the atheist’s pet questions about the existence (or non-existence) of God and how Christianity has allegedly made the world suck. Suck, for you thick atheists, is a slang word which means to make or to be really, really crappy (kind of like how our culture becomes anytime you guys mess with it).

These books will be especially beneficial for high school and college students to draw upon when their secular anti-God fuming delirious instructors start railing against God and Christianity.

For instance:

1. When the prissy anti-Christs tell you the Bible stands in the way of science, inform them that the greatest scientific geniuses in history were devout Christians – and scientists from Newton to Einstein insisted that biblical religion provided the key ideas from which experimental science could develop.
2. When the pissy God haters tell you the Bible condones slavery, you can remind them that slavery was abolished only when devout Christians, inspired by the Bible, launched a campaign in the early 1800s to abolish the slave trade.
3. When the screechin’ teachers tell you the Bible has been proven false by archaeology, hark back and show them that each year a new archaeological discovery substantiates the existence of people, places and events we once knew solely from biblical sources, including the discovery of the Moabite stone in 1868, which mentions numerous places in the Bible, and the discovery of an inscription in 1961 that proves the existence of the biblical figure Pontius Pilate, just to name a few.
4. When they get sweaty and tell you that the Bible breeds intolerance, refresh their memory with the fact that only those societies influenced by biblical teachings (in North and South America, Europe, and Australia) today guarantee freedom of speech and religion. Period.
5. When one of them queues up and quips that the Bible opposes freedom, smack ’em with the fact that the Bible’s insistence that no one is above the law and all must answer to divine justice led to theories of universal human rights and… uh… limited government.
6. When they tell you that Christianity and the Bible justify war and genocide, unsympathetically remind them that societies which rejected biblical morality in favor of a more rational and scientific approach to politics murdered millions upon millions more than the Crusades or the Inquisition ever did. Hello. Atheist regimes have caused the greatest mass murders in history, says D’Souza. Inside D’Souza’s book you’ll find little gems like, The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and witch hunts together make up less than 1% of the murders that have occurred during modern atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

This is just a smattering of the various 411 fun the Christian is going to get as they plow through What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Senior pastor, college pastor and youth pastor: do yourself and your congregants a favor and teach this stuff to your church. Equip Christians to stand against the BS (belief system) of the atheists. The culture war is heating up, therefore make sure your people don’t stand intellectually naked and neutered before these no-God numb nuts.

Lastly, comfortable and cocky atheists, you had better brace yourselves. Hundreds of thousands of Christians and authors are about to read these books and, as stated, systematically dismember your old and haggard arguments.

In addition, everywhere I go and speak – be it in conferences, on the radio, on television or in print – I’m going to encourage the tens of thousands of Christians I address that every time and everywhere they get crapped on by an atheist with unfounded arguments to open their mouths and slam dance them with facts found in these two new brilliant books from Regnery.

Doug Giles’ new book 10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People: The Successful Loser’s Guide to Life is now available. Doug’s award winning talk show and video blog can be seen and heard at www.ClashRadio.com.

Yeah, there’s been plenty of cutlery broken out for poor li’l Steffie Deedles lately, some Liebral and some not, but the sharpest fork stuck in his flip-flopping backside seems to have come from, of all palces… Owen Sound, Ontario.

Owen Sound Sun Times edotor Michael Den Tandt managed to sum up, in no uncertain terms, exactly what pretty much the whole damned country is thinking about Citoyen Dion these days. While I normally tend to shy away from kicking someone when they’re down, this bugger really did ask for it, and Den Tandt delivers with both barrels:

Stick a fork in Dion – he’s done

Posted By michael den tandt

Stephane Dion, welcome to Hell. You will be a resident of Hell for several months, perhaps six. During that time Prime Minister Stephen Harper will take you apart in little pieces, like a mean boy pulling the wings off a fly. When it’s over there will be an election, which you will lose.

Far from appreciating your effort and sacrifice, the Liberal Party will drag you kicking and screaming into a scrubby field. There it will dispatch you cleanly and quickly – with Michael Ignatieff standing by, murmuring messages of encouragement and condolence. Ignatieff will take your job. You will retire to a modest pension in the south of France, where you will sit in a patch of sunlight, a blanket over your knees, dreaming of what might have been.

Farfetched? Not so much.

In the aftermath of the Liberal leader’s decision to prop up the Harper government for another few months, there’s been much talk in party circles of how very clever it all was. “He is a very capable individual, who maneuvered through deep waters,” was how Huron-Bruce Liberal MP Paul Steckle phrased it.

To hear them talk, it’s almost as though Harper fell into Dion’s trap. On one side we have the wicked Stephen Harper, scheming to engineer an election that “Canadians don’t want.” On the other we have a newly savvy Stephane Dion, who has a few tricks up his sleeve, thank you very much. It’s as though the Liberals are saying: See, we can be sneaky and opportunistic too, just like Harper. What’s so special about him?

Only in dreamland can anyone suggest this episode connotes anything but desperation on Dion’s part. According to multiple reports from within the Liberal Party, he wanted to go to the polls. How could he not? In recent weeks he’d laid down a string of unshakable conditions for keeping this government alive. The most important of these was a hard date of February, 2009 for an end to Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. Harper stared at that line, eyeballed Dion, eyeballed the line, then hopped right across it with a big smirk on his face.

Dion’s first instinct was to fight. But he couldn’t. His caucus wouldn’t let him. They know that if they go to the voters this fall, many of them will lose their $178,000-a-year jobs. In Quebec the Liberals are imploding. In Ontario, where you’d think Dion would have had a little more currency because of his national unity credentials, he’s gained none. Out West he had none to begin with.

Here’s the poison: The decision to pan the throne speech virtually in its entirety, then concoct a grab-bag of exquisitely nuanced excuses for passing it, feeds directly into Dion’s greatest political liability – the perception that he’s weak. In chess they call this a fork. Move one way, you lose your rook. Move the other way, you lose your queen. Either way you lose. Dion is well and truly forked.

In Quebec, some voters dislike him because of a perception that he is arrogant, aloof and out of touch with ordinary folk. He speaks like a Frenchman – a testament to his French mother. But that doesn’t play well in the Saguenay. Other Quebecers tar him, unfairly, as a traitor, because of his authorship of the Clarity Act. Still others continue to mistrust the Liberals because of the sponsorship scandal.

In Ontario Dion began with a reputation as a smart, honest and hardworking minister. Despite his gawkiness and heavily accented English, he was known as a man of conviction. Journalists who remembered his fight with Quebec separatists in the 1990s referred to him as having a “spine of steel.”

Then came the Harper strategy, taken directly from the Brian Mulroney play book, of seeking a majority through Quebec. First Harper learned to speak French better than any other recent prime minister, including the francophone Jean Chretien. Then he declared Quebec a “nation.” Then he struck a back-room alliance with Mario Dumont’s soft-nationalist, centre-right Action Democratique. Taken together, it worked.

This put the Liberals in severe need of a wedge issue for Quebec. They seized on the most obvious one, the Afghan mission. Polls showed Quebecers overwhelmingly opposed the deployment. Overnight the Liberals, who conceived and launched the mission, transformed themselves into its harshest critics. Trouble is, that hasn’t worked. Liberal fortunes in Quebec have only worsened. Has anyone in the Liberal brain trust considered that some Quebecers’ interest in and support for the mission may actually increase because the Valcartier, Que.-based Vandoos are over there now? It doesn’t seem so.

Meantime the various Liberal flip-flops on Afghanistan have sewn confusion in Ontario and in the West. Dion says one thing, Foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says another, Defence Critic Denis Coderre says something else. Do they want our troops to stay and finish what they began or do they want to pull them out? Nobody knows. In Dion’s speech to Parliament Wednesday he came up with yet another nuance: An extended mission focused on training Afghan security forces would be “acceptable.” Um, Stephane, that’s what the mission is focused on now. Does this mean you support it again?

Dion has made his choice. He now faces an endless succession of confidence votes. In each case Harper will press legislation inimical to Liberal principles and dare Dion to call him out. With each new concession Harper will look stronger and Dion weaker. If Dion pulls the trigger, he loses. If he waits, he loses. In effect Stephen Harper has just maneuvered himself into a majority in all but name.

That makes Dion many things. Unlucky? Doomed? You be the judge. Savvy, in my view, doesn’t make the list.

Michael Den Tandt is editor of the Sun Times in Owen Sound and a national affairs columnist for Osprey Media. Contact mdentandt@thesuntimes.ca

Well, will you just look at this? Everybody’s not-so-favourite bag of maggot shit is (Surprise! Surprise!) fiddlyfrigging about and playing the system. That’s right, Jesse Imeson is doing what scumbags like him always do whenever they get caught in this country: jerking the system around and dragging his sorry ass for all he’s worth.

And no, I’m not surprised. You shouldn’t be, either [my emphasis, of course]…

GODERICH — Accused triple murderer Jesse Imeson is represented by a new lawyer, his third since his capture after a massive police hunt.

[…]

Court was told Imeson is now represented by Raymond Boggs. His Toronto law firm, Boggs and Levin, works exclusively on criminal cases.

Boggs’s firm’s website promises clients “aggressive relentless defence” and boasts that Boggs’s cross-examination in a multiple sexual assault case prompted a complaint by the Crown that it was “the most vicious that he had ever seen.”

[…]

Boggs wasn’t in court yesterday and although identified in court several times as Imeson’s lawyer, When contacted, Boggs said he could not confirm that information.

“I don’t have authorization to make that disclosure,” he said.

Asked what it would take to get authorization, he said: “I would need to talk to my client, if I have one.”

Court was told Imeson spoke to Boggs Sunday and Boggs is still awaiting disclosure of all the police evidence against Imeson, who is scheduled to appear again by video link on Nov. 2.

Waiting for disclosure, eh? Well, maybe if the prick would stick with a lawyer, the crown would know where the hell to send the shit, wouldn’t they?

So here we are. Imeson has finally found his kind of lawyer: the kind of weasel/pit bull crossbreed that will browbeat a rape victim on the stand but will mealy-mouth his way around anything resembling a question pointed at him. These pricks really deserve each other, don’t they?

Just think of how much better this world would have been if some farmer, hunter, or whoever up in Huron had just managed to trip over this bastard and blow his head off before he managed to skip the county…

“Dennis,” people have been asking me a lot lately, “what the hell’s up with you, man? There’s been an election campaign going on all summer in Ontario and, aside from a couple of posts about how lousy an idea MMP is, we haven’t heard a damn thing from you. You’re not packing it in, are ya?”

No, I’m not packing it in. It’s just that getting laid off back at the beginning of summer, job-hunting and then getting settled in to the new job have taken up one hell of a lot of my time lately. Anybody out there that’s ever had to switch jobs knows exactly what I’m talking about. And as far as the provincial election goes, well, I think I can sum it up pretty well…

Faith based schools. Faith based schools. Faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools faith based schools.

Just about sums it up, doesn’t it? Way back at the beginning of the race, John “Guess What Party I’m With” Tory said that if he got elected, faith-based schools in Ontario would be able to get some funding, therby bringing them into the public fold and holding them to the same academic standards as the rest of the schools in the province. He made the announcement and then moved on to other things. Dolt McGuilty, however, seized on it like a tarrier with a rat and has maniacally banged away on that same drum over and over, drowning out all other discourse in the campaign. The stupidity of the whole transparent ruse, along with the baffling herd-of-sheep response of Ontariens to it, got to such an extreme that even Howard Hampton J. Pig blew a gasket at the media for having gone so gleefully along with the whole sham. And that’s probably what pissed me off the most…

An irate Howard Hampton swept through Southwestern Ontario yesterday, dragging a campaign’s worth of baggage.

That burden — his party falling in the polls, the faith-based school funding issue dominating debate — blew open in Hamilton, as the NDP leader strafed his Tory rival and the media, accusing journalists of hijacking the campaign and ignoring real issues.

[…]Hampton’s frustration boiled over into a blistering attack on Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory, whom he called a “disaster” whose mistakes have given the ruling Liberals a free ride. “Mr. Tory’s campaign has been chaos,” Hampton said, noting the faith-based school funding vow has hijacked the campaign debate.

… because, as all of you know, there’s just about nothing in the world that I hate more than being forced to agree with a socialist. And, as Lorrie Goldstein saw when he talked to Hampton, Hampton might be getting the same nauseaous feeling, even going so far as to say something sounding vaguely … conservative…

Asked what he’d say to voters poised to give Premier Dalton McGuinty a second majority government, while ignoring his record of fibs and broken promises in favour of the minor issue of stopping public funding for non-Catholic religious schools, Hampton deadpanned: “What do I say? I say, well, then people get the government they deserve (laughter) that’s what I say.”

Hampton, meeting with the Sun’s editorial board, knows, as we do, that if McGuinty wins big Oct. 10, it won’t be long before voters who abandoned the Tories and NDP to back the Liberals will be asking themselves what they’ve done.

No shit, Sherlock. For the record: I’m against public funding for faith-based schools, but not for any of the reasons that McSquinty and the Liebrals barf up. He who pays the piper calls the tune and I don’t think it’s a good idea to let a rabidly secular government ministry be in the position of holding a financial gun to the head of a school that might be teaching something that goes against whatever the trendy Leftbotâ„¢ dogma du jour might be. Keep government the hell out of it; it’s better for the schools. That’s my take.

But, to listen to McGuilty, you’d think that white kids would be going to all the good schools and black kids would be lucky to end up in a one-room schoolhouse if Tory’s plan went ahead. You don’t think he’s hammering away on the word “segregation” by accident, do you? And the media, from top to bottom, have been all too happy to help him out.

But it’s the smart thing for McGuilty to do, isn’t it? The sad fact is that Ontario is likely the most intolerant province in Canada (yes, even worse than Quebeckers or those nasty Albertans), especially when it comes to religion. This is because Ontario has become infested with the disease of the Leftbotâ„¢ mindset and religion is the ultimate enemy of the modern neoliberal ideology…

The neolib socialist philosophy (there really isn’t much “neo” about it) requires, above all else, that the masses give their first and foremost loyalty over to the authority of the secular state (of course, you and I know how well that has worked out in the past, but they don’t, for some reason…). Religion gives people a higher authority than the state, therfore it has to go. They won’t come out and say this out loud, but that’s still the meat of it. This is the mindset that has infected Ontario; especially urban Ontario.

John Tory should have known this. He made a rank-amateur mistake and now he’s given McGuilty four more years in Queens Park and the people of Ontario four more years of weak leadership.

This week, I’ll still be voting Conservative, but I’m afraid J.T. already sold the farm.