"Under My Thumb"

http://www.kennyshieldsandstreetheart.com/mp3s/undermythumb_sample.mp3

From an article on Open Democracy in 2005:

"Michael Ignatieff has been useful to the US government as it has tried to promote democracy in the middle east. He brings to this unofficial job a special, double-edged approach: he provides conservative arguments to the liberal audience and liberal alibis to the conservatives."

Heh. Seems nothing changes with this guy...straddles all sides of the fence.

Danny Williams is the Ron Jeremy of Canadian politics. He saddles up to the trough, unzips his trousers and Iggy doesn't even undo the belt.

In the immortal words of Michael Lewis Liars' Poker Danny is a BSD.

With King Danny running Nfld., Nfld. is going to be far worse than when Joey ran the place.
Why don't he say he is a Liberal instead of pretending he is a Conservative?
We Newfoundlanders are a proud bunch but I sure am not proud of him and his antics.
Newfoundlanders wake up and see what he is doing to the province. Alienating everyone against it.

And when danny enters a room they play Elton John's "The Bitch Is Back"

I like the Stones' version better.

I notice that the Liberals won 6 out of 7 seats in Newfoundland and Labrador in the last federal election. Keep this up, they'll be 7 for 7.

And 0 for 301 elsewhere.

Two wrongs. The Sun suggests party unanimity is always a good thing? Blind sheep MPs voting the party line is one of the worst features of Canadian Democracy.

Second error: Danny needs to think a bit more about how to win friends and influence people. Running his ABC campaign won't win him any concessions from Steve. It may even have come back to bite him.

I wish Danny Williams would just go away because one Hugo Chavez in this world is one too many.
I smiled when I read that John McCallum, finance critic for the Liberals, said that it was $1 billion that Williams will not be getting in future payments and not $1.5 Billion as Williams was trying to have Canadians believe. Also fact is that Federal government is not taking back or away any money that Newfoundland received because this billion is about future payments so you can't take back something that was never given. John McCallum and the Liberals have found out don't believe or trust anything that Canada's answer to Chavez has to say. Did Danny Williams expect that all other provinces were going to be cut back in this severe economic down turn except Newfoundland?

"Why don't he say he is a Liberal instead of pretending he is a Conservative?"

Because Williams is a socialist, too left-wing even for Libs. Remember he ran a cable monopoly. 'Nuf said.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we're talkin' about real money.

NFLD is scorched earth for PMSH - nothing left to loose. Good. Iggy has to keep those 6 seats so he'll have to submit to being led by the nose. The scenario is useful for Conservatives. A guy with a spine versus Gumby.

As i posted under reader tips earlier

"Senator Mike Duffy's comments 'offend' Danny Williams"
ctv.ca
Duffy is being manipulated & told what to do by the Venonous, nasty Harper conservatives.
Danny Williams - ctv.ca

*Danny did you just not just tell 6mp's from Nfld to vote against the Budget or Else?
WTF, talk about Nasty, vindictive & venonous, Time to grow Up, Canadians are sick of your crap & its about time somebody had the BALLS to speakout aagainst your constant Tirades,
Good on Duff.

I only wish that I was allowed to calculate my business fees or my taxes payable the way Danny is able to calculate NL's equalization. The budget reduces his options to calculate the equalization by one out of, I believe, four. Even though NL is now a "have" province, the options available allow them to continue to collect. I am surprised that McGuinty hasn't been yelling at the rooftops about this! Ontario is now "have not" and get peanuts.

from the article...

contribute to the dysfunction of Parliament, serving the interests only of a particular province.

Yeah and we all know exactly which province will come out on top don't we!

Certainly is fitting the Newfie anthem be played at the Liberal sham convention to crown a leader already moved into Storonoway.

Danny should be a guest of honour. Maybe he can pay for their red thongs and red condoms and a few tee shirts with the map of Nfld and Labrador on them as well. He is cutting in on Iggy's authority.

It appears he's also out to screw Canada by demanding equalization while in "have" designation. Nice to have your cake and eat it too, even in bad economic times.

I don't know whether it will come back to haunt Iggy, but I certainly despise the idea of cohesive parties that vote consistently along party lines. As abhorrent as the Bloc are, I still believe that MP's need to represent their constituents interests. I think voting along party lines is something that is necessary at times when its for the good of the nation, but in general I'd like to see MP's be alot more accountable to the people who voted for them.

Premier Williams is able to run around sprouting off and bloviating all sorts of nasty-nasties about PMSH because he's presiding over good times in Newfoundland, what with the oil and the optics of turning the tables on "have" Ontario and so on.

But as he's blowing his political capital so fast and furiously, he'll soon enough find that it's been spent and he's got little or none left once things on the Rock take a turn for the worse and the Newfs start getting antsy for some kind of action on his part. Then maybe the tables will be turned between him and PMSH...

BTW, I thought Senator Duffy's "in bed with/get the shaft" crack was hilarious and priceless and that Danny the Demon deserved the public mental image of him in bed with another politician (and not the hot-babe kind, either) and so on and so forth... I agree that I sure wouldn't want to see such a sight! I can't believe a politician can get away with such nastiness as demonstrated by Williams- shee-it, I mean, he sounds like Ahmadinejad, like Chavez, like Castro... wonder howcum? Guess he's an arrogant, aggressive, saber-rattling Leftwing banshee, too... And really needs to take a chill pill, washed down with a pint of Screech!

The posters here are kidding,right? Conservative? There hasn't been one of those animals in Duff sitter land since Turdeau.If you want to see a REAL Conservative Newfie,go to Ft.Mac,or Edmonchuk,or Calgary.C'mon,people.Saying Williams is conservative,is like saying NS doesn't take equalization payments,or Duceppe isn't a separatist!There is no Canada East of Lake Winnipegosis,just government,tit-sucking leeches.

danny will find a way to eff it up...just like every other Nfld politician. Sadly the Nfld people will pay the price when there is ZERO sympathy and no response.

Danny will have a very hard fall at some point.

I loved the lead editorial in the Post today. I've already recycled it, but I believe it was something on the lines "Vive le Bloc Newfoundlandaise"

Canadian Sentinal, I'm wondering if it isn't the Screech that's making Danny boy screech? If not, I'd hate to see him chugging down any of the stuff.

It's about time we tell him to go kiss some cod, if he can find any and kiss off if he can't

Danny can do anything to promote what he wants from the liberal party of canada or else every damaging news and liberals support for terrorist groups in canada will not falter in Danny's wake to reveal the information to his people .
Furthermore the liberals corruption will be brought to light every day hour on the hour.
The MSM will have a problem on their hands because canadians will question the MSM for their silence on information such as :terrorist groups, corruption and what have not been told to them.

OOPS, spelled "Sentinel" wrong, sorry 'bout that, "The Canadian Sentinel".

Harvard Lampoon sent up that particular song more years ago than i care to remember...i think they retitled it as "In the Palm of My Hand"...

which given the context is somehow appropriate.....

I think, Liz, that Danny-boy's problem is Severe Acute Leftist Mental Disorder. Perhaps Screech would only make it worse (why d'you think they calls it "Screech"?), so maybe he ought to just take two chill pills and a chaw of baccy...

Better yet, he ought to don a straitjacket and sit fer a spell in a rubber room, blissfully whacked out on an injection of happy serum or something... Hey, maybe he can be roomies with Warrin' K!

And lots of folks misspell "sentinel", so no biggie...

I wonder why my vision of Canadian unity has deteriorated over time? Maybe it's the cataracts assuming the names of Williams, Duceppe, Layton, Martin, Dion, Chretien, Trudeau, ect.

I have seen the same type of mindset in Sk. Not as venomous, entrenched or loud but not missed now it is gone. I find it refreshing to have the Premier on radio once a month taking questions from and providing answers to call-ins.

Yosemite Dan.
'When I says I wants a handout, I means I wants a handout now!'

http://www.entertonement.com/clips/50840/When-I-say-whoa

"I Will Follow Him."

Ode To Newfoundland

Interesting piece in the St. John's Telegram today about a report coming out of QUE with regards to privatizing Hydro Quebec. In it was written...

Hydro-Quebec would see recent annual profits slashed by 75 per cent - more than $2 billion - if it had to go without cheap electricity obtained from Churchill Falls. That's according to a research paper published this week by the Montreal Economic Institute, a Quebec-based think-tank. Study author Claude Garcia calculated the impact of Churchill Falls power on Hydro-Quebec operations in 2007, assuming the controversial Labrador power deal had ended on Dec. 31, 2006. "Profit of $2.882 billion in 2007 would have been reduced to $709 million," Garcia concluded in the report.

"Hydro-Quebec would have had to find supplies on the market to replace the missing electricity," the study noted. Assuming it had no access to Labrador power, Hydro Quebec would have lost nearly $1.5 billion from a resulting lack of export sales alone, the study found. The additional expense to import power would have cost Hydro Quebec another $773 million. Labrador power has a significant impact on the Quebec utility's operations, Garcia claimed. "If Hydro-Quebec has a return on equity of 14.5 per cent today, it owes this essentially to the Churchill Falls agreement, to its exceptional hydroelectric resources and to the fact that it is not taxed on its net profit."

The Churchill agreement renews in 2016, and will ultimately expire in 2041. The original Churchill Falls deal, signed in the late 1960s, has been a sore point for Newfoundland and Labrador for decades. The provincial government has claimed that Quebec reaped 95 per cent of net revenues from Churchill Falls - $19 billion of a total $20 billion - up to the end of 2006.

from another report The Origins of a Coming Crisis: Renewal of the Churchill Falls Contract, published in the most recent edition of the Dalhousie Law Journal.

In the paper, Feehan and Baker describe the post-2016 costs: “During the renewal period, the price is pre-set at two mills per kilowatt hour … two mills is 0.2 cents."

"Even in the late 1960s, a price of two mills was extraordinarily low … to put this price in perspective, in 2004 the average wholesale price of electricity in Ontario was 52.2 mills per kilowatt hour and in 2003 Hydro-Québec received an average of approximately 84.9 mills for its electricity exports.”

In other words, the authors say, that price “is barely distinguishable from being free.”With about 30 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to be sold annually, the gap between the value of the electricity and the revenue for the province “could amount to billions of dollars per year for 25 years."

For those of you who lived throughout the NEP, take that kind of resentment, that kind of hate, that kind of venom and multiply it by a billion trillion gazillion. Only then can you began to see why they feel so horrendously jaded. Hydro "rents" fron QUE-Hydro are not even included in the equalization formula, thus keeping their fiscal capacity ficticiously lower ensuring greater equalization payments and I have to listen how I, because of my Newfie accent, cultural roots and cut of me jib, am nothing but a duffster. HA!

Someone earlier mentioned there's no conservatives in NL. Well let me tell you I'm a Boeckter shabe of Blue and was the same shade of blue down there when it wasn't very popular to be any shade of blue. But that's OK, I have been out west here 12 years and there's no "Conservatives" out here either.

Check out dat der fedral budget buddy!

Hey by the way, how much does SK and MB charge for AB and BC gas to pass through its pipelines on the way to markets in ON & QUE?

Ode to Newfoundland

Sorry, link fixed.

All Danny's little goofy newfy cod suckers playing the poor me victim role, whining and bitching while all the hard working Rock’s are getting somewhere in this world, elsewhere, good on you Ft. Macer's.

Dat's "Under moy t'um'", Buddy!

Glenn:

Who signed that deal back in 1967? Wasn't it a Newfoundland company? Why in the name of God would anyone in his right mind agree to a contract that runs for 40 years, with an automatic renewal for 25 years after that? I agree that the contract is totally unfair, but no one forced Brinco to sign it, although I suspect some Nfld. politicians applied pressure.

But, geez, when the power from Churchill Falls is so vital to Hydro-Quebec, why not just shut it down? Williams seems to like to play brinkmanship. I'm sure they could find (i.e. cook up) some environmental or renovation excuse to shut off the juice. It wouldn't take long before HQ would be begging to get it back, and then Nfld. could re-open negotiations. It might take six months, but by then HQ would be losing so much money, they'd cave.

Instead of Williams railing about foregone equalization payments which you guys DON'T DESERVE while you're getting all that oil revenue, why don't you take on the real pricks who're raping you?

Who can blame Iggy for ordering his Newfoundland - Labrador MPs to "change their minds" so quickly on the budget?

After all, when Iggy was still living in the US in 2004 he was probably paying close attention when John Kerry did the same thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUTn6L0UDU

Note to Iggy: It didn't work for Kerry, and it won't work for you.

Agreed KevinB.

NL is sitting on a sea of oil and gas and only have themselves to blame. If they had developed their resources, even since the 2003 Accord, like normal, rational thinking people they would be rolling in it even more than they are now. They are tripping over a $20 to pick up a twooney.

Glenn,

In all fairness, I wonder if the Nfld. politicians were so obstinate about developing the offshore oil becauseof the Churchill Falls deal. They were determined not to get screwed again, and I don't blame them for that. But they did get a pretty fair deal eventually, and I don't understand why they - well, Williams - can't be content with that.

Ontario is now "have not" and get peanuts.

Posted by: Gus at 2:40 PM

we have Ottawa, thusly we have sorenuts:-))))

O Danny Boy the pipes are calling. In my humble opinion the only way to shut this so called Conservative up, is for all tourists to boycot travelling to NL. It hurts when the tourist money drys up. Then lets see all those TV adds depicting how wonderful the ROCK is. The tourist industry in NL would hang Danny boy from the nearest three (if there is any there) I know I or my family will not come within sighting distance to NL if they still Danny Boy in charge.

If I were a NFLD'er, I'd be railing against the aholes whoever signed this POS deal with HQ in the first place.
And what's with Quebec? In spite of this rip-off, and the billions siphoned in from Ottawa already in the phoney Equalization scam, its still not good enough for them! Sheesh.
Humiliated?? Soon enough the ROC will have had their fill.

Everybody should read what Glen has written and add to it the way that the Federal government of Canada, with the co-operation of NFLD Premiers have lied to and robbed the people of NFLD ever since they narrowly voted to join Canada. Canada promised NFLD the rights to the Grand Banks, promised to build a train to transport the resources of NFLD to a port (anybody see that railroad??), they promised them free trade with the rest of Canada, instead raw materials were transported out of NFLD. Now remember, folks, MFLD was bled blue during WWI and WWII and they were in debt (Canada boomed during WWII) because they contributed so much to the defeat of Hitler (unlike a certain province next to them). The baby bonus was the carrot old King and Smallman Joey dangled in frount of war widows and wounded soldiers, they were that broke - NFLD did not have enough money to help the widows or the returned soldiers; Canada did. With a very narrow margin, which some say was rigged, NFLD gave up their independence. There is great bitterness there, in living memory, for the raw deal the province of NFLD got from the ROC, esp the sell out of the Churchill Falls hydro project.

Danny Williams is the only Premier that I can remember who has stood up for NFLDers and I commend him for that. Danny is defending his province and the people of NFLD appreciate that gesture. When I look across this nation, I see two Premiers who have the people that elected them on the frount plate of their agendas: Brad Wall and Danny Williams.

The NFLD MPs in the puffin/dipper parties owe their positions to the Premier not to the love NFLDers felt for Deyawn, IMO. They know who is the boss and they act accordingly.

I am a strong supporter of our Prime Minister and I know that he can be trusted to treat NFLD fairly. NFLDers are some of the finest, most generous people that I have ever met; I want their Province to prosper. They would never have prospered without that 'in-your-face' Premier that they cheer for - I would be proud of him too, if I were a NFLDer.

Why don't you folks aim your ire at the real bloodsuckers in this dominion - the Yukon, NWT, Nunavut and Quebec. Why are the people in the ROC paying for next to free day care in Quebec? Why are you sending millions to the Yukon territory with 30,000 people and all of them working for the gument? The Yukon is rich in Natural Resources yet produces nothing but whiners in the environmental corner and more 'studies' of nothing. The only people who might have a contract for gold mining are a Red China outfit who plan to import slave labour from China to work here and who will own ALL the gold that they extract - google Yukon Nevada Inc. if you are skeptical.

If NFLD is treated with respect, the Prime Minister will have 6 Conservatives in his next caucus, from NFLD and a staunch supporter in the form of Danny Williams. This will happen because we have a thick skinned Prime Minister who does not hold grudges, neither does Danny Williams or the people of NFLD. Just don't insult them by claiming that they 'have had it all', from all of us - that is so wrong. Please, everyone, read some history before you jump the gun on this topic.

"*Danny did you just not just tell 6mp's from Nfld to vote against the Budget or Else?
WTF, talk about Nasty, vindictive & venonous, Time to grow Up, Canadians are sick of your crap & its about time somebody had the BALLS to speakout aagainst your constant Tirades,
Good on Duff."

I agree. Danny Williams needs a good dose of reality and a thicker skin.

Most news anchors/journalists have no sense of humour, lest any sign of wit "offend" the super sensitive.

Two exceptions are Mike Duffy and Tom Clark (CTV). THE best.

I agree 'Jema54' that the history of New Newfoundland is very diverse. Lets face it the lieberals put them on welfare and the people are used to the free stuff. The ones that are out west and have brought their family are going to stay for long term and are usually very good employees and leaders. The ones who come here for the money live hard, party hard and work hard and then they are gone. 'Why is their no factories on the east coast?'. 'Why is their no factories out west?'. The transfer payments and how they are used is nothing but a disaster.

dey 'ad one of dem dar trains. fershur buddy.

http://www.tidespoint.com/books/newfie_bullet.shtml

I really thought NFDL would be marginalized with the Liberal and NDP seats - but surprise, surprise, the King of the Rock rules. Now they are going to play the NFDL anthem at the Liberal Convention? Since when did they separate and become their own country? Boy oh boy, has Ignatieff ever got himeself a dilemma - Danny if necessary but not necessarily Danny. Me thinks the interim leader is snookered. He has the classic Hobson's Choice. Lovely to watch. Get out the popcorn, could be a classic.