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Filched shamelessly from David Thompson, this ain't-it-the-truth quote from Theodore Dalrymple's Austerity in the U.K., published in City Journal:

"For some politicians, running up deficits is not a problem but a benefit, since doing so creates a population permanently in thrall to them for the favors by which it lives. The politicians are thus like drug dealers, profiting from their clientele’s dependence, yet on a scale incomparably larger. The Swedish Social Democrats understood long ago that if more than half of the population became economically dependent on government, either directly or indirectly, no government of any party could easily change the arrangement. It was not a crude one-party system that the Social Democrats sought but a one-policy system, and they almost succeeded."

[...]

"Wherever one looks into the expanded public sector, one finds the same thing: a tremendous rise in salaries, pensions, and perquisites for those working in it. In Manchester, for example, the number of city employees earning more than $85,000 a year rose from 68 to 1,746 between 1997 and 2007. In effect, a large public service nomenklatura was created, whose purpose, or at least effect, was to establish an immense network of patronage and reciprocal obligation: a network easy to install but hard to dislodge, since those charged with removing it would be the very people who benefited most from it."

(emph. mine)

Read the whole thing.

JAMES MOORE CONSERVATIVE PARTY MEMBER MINISTURE OF CULTURE AND HERITAGE I THINK.

Ezra levant riped him apart tonight and exposed the CBC for who they truley are .

No one not one person can tell or show me the ratingings for sun news network .

If somone knows of or how to get a hold of this information please let me know i just want to know if i am the only one in canada watching this station as much as i do.

Plaease help if you can thank you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxqIITtTtU&NR=1

Another fundamentalist Christian goes ape with a gun.

Perhaps one of the better early analyses of the tragedy in Norway: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/26/norway-illiberal-britain-patronising

Ok man, should I be horny now?

sun news has at least 2 viewers.

I hate to disappoint you dmorris but that was Alex with the rifle. I think that was GYM that gave Alex the rifle. Of course I could be wrong....meh.

Thanks for that, Rita. Excellent. And in The Guardian, of all places.

"The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics. We can sympathise with the bereaved, and with their country in its collective sense of loss. But the tragedy does not signify."

Kerry spokesman stripped of Silver Star
Thomas Lifson

John F. Kerry almost became president running on the basis of his alleged heroism in Vietnam. Thanks to the efforts of a group of truth-tellers, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the serious holes in the fantasy narrative propounded by the Kerry campaign came to the attention of enough Americans that John Kerry was not the first faux-Irish President of the United States.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/07/kerry_spokesman_stripped_of_silver_star.html

I know many you are not fans of the Daily Show, but Jon Stewart (nee Leibowitz) skewers Obama fairly well on today's show. Available, I believe, on CTV's website.

Blanks, there are many viewers. A few weeks ago there some figures and Sun News TV had more viewers that CTV on certain time slots and many more than CBC. Sorry I can not provide the figures. Maybe someone else is able to.

As to your question. If it works for you, go ahead by all means.

Bill O'Reilly's take on the Norway shooter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmtNPMvl0Xc

dmorris:
Beauty>
Actually she's a member of some left wing African gorilla group. I hacked her Facebook page and added that she was a socialist who worshipped Al Gore. Apparently she has a masters in Women's Studies.

Haven't seen anything on this. Obama's wishing that he could bypass Congress. Actually he's wishing he could be dictator. Where's the brouhaha????????
Link:
http://www.breitbart.tv/obama-its-tempting-to-bypass-congress-and-change-the-rules-on-my-own/

Remember how a couple of days ago the CBC's policy was "not to name suspects" about those 30 war crimes suspects? Well here they are naming one of those same suspects they had previously refused to name on policy grounds.

Paul in Cgy:

Sun News announced last night that they will air a program called "100 Days of Sun". In that presentation they will reveal ratings, viewership and other statistics. I can't recall when it will be aired but I believe it will be soon.
Stay tuned and all will be revealed then.

Okay, until last night i was mildly supportive of boehner's plan to increase the debt ceiling. Now having read about some of the details I'm against it.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/26/cbo-deals-boehner-devastating-blow/

I read in another column - trying to find and post it - that the total cuts in 2012 would be only 2 Billion (!!!!) and that 95% of the cuts in the plan would only take place in the last year - 2022(?)

I have never been a fan of Boehner and the big gov't GOP wing that he comes from. I am less of one now...

The socialist brothers, Red Joe and Brown Adolf, made war on each other and on human personality . Go here*.

The death struggle of socialism continues today.

Will socialism consume/eat/swallow all of western civilization?

Socialism is a cannibal, a human flesh-eating disease.

...-

“Nicolas Berdyaev And Modern Anti-Modernism”

“the state thus makes relentless war on personality”.

“In the analysis in Slavery and Freedom, the West has been moving in the direction of totalitarianism since the Sixteenth Century at least, just as it has been moving ever further into the de-spiritualized state of “objectivization.” As applied science seeks sovereignty over nature, the realm of objects, politics seeks sovereignty over humanity; the state thus makes relentless war on personality.

Berdyaev offers no political program or scheme – that would contradict his elevation of personality to the highest value. But Berdyaev does make consistent statements that converge with the minimalist formula for a polity, such as that promulgated by America’s Founding Fathers. The calling of the personality is to exercise itself in creative acts, by which it fulfills itself, or, as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it, pursues happiness. The wisdom of the Constitution and of Berdyaev is the same: A man must be free to pursue what he can imagine, but once any external agency presumes to guarantee to him the possession of what he pursues, he has sold his birthright. He is enslaved. It is true that Berdyaev regarded America with suspicion. On the other hand he admired England, on whose common law tradition the American minimalist formula for a polity arose. The politically centripetal America of the 1930s that Berdyaev disliked had already, itself, betrayed its own minimalist foundation.”

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4768

...-

*"The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin"

"Timothy Snyder. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. 544 Pages. $29.95.

There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the gas chambers and the gulags, the mass shootings and show trials, the wanton disregard for human life and the heinous ideas which compelled people to, actively or passively, play a part in the deaths of tens of millions of fellow human beings. Reading about this period, there comes a point when the sheer scale and horror of the events which took place — the instant incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, for instance — desensitizes one from appreciating the sheer terror and physical pain that individuals endured.

Even with the knowledge of these attrocities, there is still little than can prepare a reader for the grisly accounts of the Ukrainian Famine that Timothy Snyder details in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Of course, I knew something about the widespread starvation that afflicted Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. This mass culling was directly caused by Josef Stalin’s collectivization policies, which were comprised of seizing private farms and exporting whatever food was grown to the rest of the Soviet Union and beyond. Those who have studied the event in-depth will not find anything new in Snyder’s account. But most readers, I imagine, will reevaluate their conception of the depths of human depravity when they read, in particular, about the widespread cannibalism that became rampant in what Robert Conquest has referred to as “one vast Belsen.” These are tales that one imagined lay only in the realm of zombie films: parents cooking and eating their own children, children in a nursery eating each other, a starving toddler literally eating himself.

The lack of popular knowledge about the Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor, is largely attributable to two factors. The first is that, unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the question of whether the famine constitutes a premeditated act of genocide on the part of Joseph Stalin (as opposed to, at worst, a symptom of callous neglect, or, at best, a tragedy brought upon by environmental factors) remains a topic of a highly politicized historical debate. In modern-day Ukraine, a nation still struggling to find an identity for the post-Soviet age, this question is a contentious issue, to say the least (the first act of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, after his inauguration last year, was to remove a section on the presidential website dedicated to the Holodomor). Memory of the famine has also not been served well by the various apologists for communism, from Walter Duranty (who, as the New York Times’s man in Moscow at the time, not only denied that it was happening but won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so) to the celebrated Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, when asked in a television interview, “had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” simply answered, “Yes.” Secondly, the Holocaust of European Jewry in the subsequent decade has overshadowed the Ukrainian tragedy, in both scale and intent. Today, denial of the Nazi Holocaust is a crime in many European countries. While some former Soviet states have passed similar laws regarding the crimes of communism, minimizing or rationalizing said crimes as the result of poor leadership as opposed to the inevitable results of an inherently unjust doctrine remains, in some Western intellectual circles, a mark of erudition.

That the Ukrainian genocide (or, indeed, any of the Soviet Union’s mass-killing campaigns) is not popularly remembered as such is also partly due to the machinations of that regime in crafting the internationally agreed-upon legal definition of the term. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who devised the term “genocide,” intended that it include crimes against members of a “social collectivity.” Early drafts of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide included members of “political” groups in the definition, yet due to hard lobbying by the Soviet Union, this was written out. The Soviets cynically argued that defining “social” or “political” groups was a nebulous task at best; given Stalin’s wanton killings of enemies, real or perceived, this elision was obviously convenient. As opposed to the strict racial classifications of Nazi Germany, which left no room for ambiguity as to what constituted an inferior class of human beings, the mutability of the groups which the Soviet leadership invariably deemed “reactionary” or “counter-revolutionary” rendered Stalin’s terror all the more arbitrary.

With its ferocious attention to detailing the crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Bloodlands has inevitably become a new entrant into the long-running debate about the comparative evil of Nazism and Stalinism, though Snyder, a scrupulous historian who shies away from polemic (an exemplar of this increasingly rare breed), does not consider himself a partisan in this particular battle."

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/80201

Fascinating!
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
At WUWT or http://scnarc.rpi.edu/content/minority-rules-scientists-discover-tipping-point-spread-ideas

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/07/26/amira-elghawaby-why-are-only-muslim-prayers-offensive/

The article isn't worth much, but the comments are excellent.

this isn't quite the link i was looking for, but it gives some good bullets:

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/319261.php

Apparently, Sun News is going to give its viewership statistics some time today in its show about its first 100 days.

An ordinary small business man, Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, a message for his betters.

http://youtu.be/8SGyVNippvA

Via Claire Wolf.

http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/

Doug Ford about Margaret Atwood:

“Good luck to Margaret Atwood. I don’t even know her. She could walk right by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is,” said Mr. Ford, responding to the celebrated author’s remarks on Twitter opposing the proposed library cuts.

“She’s not down here. She’s not dealing with the problem,” he went on to say. “Tell her to go run in the next election and get democratically elected.”

Well-said, Mr. Ford. 'Just like Peggy I-don't-open-my-mouth-to-talk Atwood to mount opposition to City Hall's cost-saving policies from her garden in the Annex. I don't imagine she's in a position of having to cost-save, unlike the rest of us whose taxes are way too high, leaving us with little or no wiggle room, while the public-sector employees in our cities bankrupt us.

Link to Ford/Atwood story:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/library-cuts-will-happen-in-a-heartbeat-doug-ford-says/article2110242/

Paul in Calgary. Sun news had a feature about a month ago suggesting that SunTV is doing o.k. in their ratings. I think I also saw a flash indicating that they would be giving an update -- maybe around their 100th day celebrations. I have started watching them more recently as I am finding they are providing much more solid analysis of issues than CTV and CBC news (with the expection, for example of Power Panel which is usually pretty interesting.) Sun is getting good guests and asking probing questions. Ezra is both spot on and very entertaining. I think they have ironed out some early wrinkles and are into a steady climb. The more I watch the more I think they are essential as a way of accessing objective news in Canada.

Like others have mentioned, today is the 100th day of broadcasting for SunTV (Bravo, guys!) and they're going to give viewer statistics.

My understanding is that they are doing far better than they thought they would at such an early juncture in their telecasting. I think their numbers are going to grow because they are providing a bona fide alternative to the pc news spin in the MSM, which too many of us are sick and tired of. We're tired of being propagandized, especially as, in the case of the CBC, we're paying the bill to be brainwashed.

No thanks, Mr. Mansbridge. I'll take Mr. Levant any day.

A poll that needs assistance.

http://rm2.angusreidforum.com/LP/820f82b16aa44d398812f49c919dc577/a.aspx?rm_state=b$82836848dacb4fb0b76560278b81ce8c|e$0|l$0|u$&gclid=CPLhnO3coaoCFVDCKgodwnfQVg

One of the famous Muslim cartoons showed a turban which on closer inspection was really a bomb.

Now, life imitates art:

www.news1130.com/news/national/article/258475--suicide-bomber-with-explosive-turban-kills-corruption-fighting-kandahar-mayor

How communist is the Obama entourage?

A hair raising website:

http://commieblaster.com/socialist_czars/index.html

Socialist Lidicure* & Mockely* Report.

>>> "The IMF and some European leaders are calling on the US to get its act together."

...-

"At the End of Europe"

"Seeking a Path out of the Crisis in Portugal"

"After living beyond its means for decades, Portugal is now feeling the full brunt of the crisis. The government is responding with a brutal austerity package. But savings alone won't do the trick -- the country needs to find ways to expand industry and make itself more attractive for investment. The good news is that positive models already exist within its own borders."

"The air smells salty at Cabo da Roca, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Lisbon."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,776710,00.html

...-

*Mockery and ridicule:

"Debt Crisis"

"Europeans Urge US to Reach a Deal"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/

*H/T Mao Stlong, Liberal-socialist leader Basement Bob Rae's Uncle Mo Strong.

Social media? Two words.

Socialist media. Two words.

Social is code for socialism.

...-

"6 reasons to fan and follow your favorite brands"

"In the world of internet marketing, social media has become a huge trend. It's not surprising either because social media is exceptionally valuable for business."

...-

"Facebook feud leads to stabbing"

"It began with two 16-year-old girls threatening each other on Facebook. It ended with one girl in the hospital with a serious stab wound to her chest and another girl with blood-stained hands in handcuffs."

http://cnews.canoe.ca/

"Like others have mentioned, today is the 100th day of broadcasting for SunTV (Bravo, guys!) and they're going to give viewer statistics."

They're doing a great job. Still miss Theo Caldwell's take on what's happening.

Mao Stlong* Lepolt.

Mao's Chinese Wintel.

...-

"China fruit seller death sparks riot in Guizhou"

"Chinese police have quelled a mass riot sparked by rumours that a disabled fruit seller had been beaten to death by local officials."

"State media reported that hundreds of people threw stones and clashed with police on the streets of Anshun, in the southern Guizhou province.

The authorities said they would carry out an autopsy on the fruit seller to determine how he died.

Similar rumours sparked days of rioting in Guangdong province in June.

The Guangdong riot snowballed into a wider protest about official corruption and discrimination against migrant workers.

In Anshun, the unrest appears to have been limited to anger over the street trader's death."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14305484

*MS my Uncle? Bob Rae's my Uncle? BR is MS' nephew.

"Fast and Furious" = Obama's Watergate?:

Fox AND NOW CBS are reporting this...It's gaining traction in the MSM and not surprizing to see CBS being the first left one being NBC (GE owned) and ABC (Declared WH TV last year).

http://wizbangblog.com/2011/07/27/gunwalker-presidential-deniability-grows-thin/

How about charity fatigue?

How about, Canadians are fed up with multimillion dollar fundraising schemes?

Talk about overthinking a COLOUR. Maybe a prism will be next?

"Prof. Puntoni says he can’t explain why.

“We don’t know too much beyond this. I will say that seeing more men wearing pink as part of breast-cancer awareness may start to break down the colour’s effect as a gender cue."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/pink-makes-women-donate-less-to-breast-cancer-causes-study/article2111510/

I'm a little dubious about the "war criminals" currently being rounded up by the CBSA. Not in reference to the radical Islamists, but in reference to the people being picked up from Latin America (Peru, Honduras, etc.).

I don't know if anyone has noticed but these so called "war criminals" are all military people which functioned under democratic Governments. In other words, these people were not from the now defunct right-wing military regimes and "banana" dictatorships which were once common in Latin America -- the only dictatorships in Latin America today are on the Left and Marxist.

For example, the guy they picked up from Peru was supposedly part of a brutal government military unit that fought the "Shining Path" guerrillas there. Maybe Canadian foreign affairs doesn't realize it but the Shining Path is itself one the most brutal and bloody Marxist guerrilla organizations in the Americas -- it's one of the last remaining Maoist communist revolutionary armies in the world and has massacred countless civilians. The democratic Peruvian government was obligated to send in their army against these bloodthirsty criminals.

Not that there have never been people in the Peruvian or Honduran militaries who have committed crimes that should be prosecuted, but I'm suspicious of the fact that none of the Communist criminals from Latin America are on that CBSA list, who currently pose the bigger threat especially since they have been traditionally aligned with radical Islamists.

Interesting video on "Mosqueteria Protest at the Toronto District School Board July 25 2011":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8JqE-VfPz8&feature=player_embedded

The protest against Sharia and Islamic prayer in the public shools of Toronto was sponsored by four different organizations -- Hindus, Christians, Jews, moderate Muslims, and athiests were represented. And guess who else sponsored it? The Jewish Defence League! That's right, members of the JDL were standing in their JDL teashirts peaceably right in front of police -- so I guess the CBC has lied again -- the JDL aren't wanted terrorists after all. More CBC "taquia".

And of course most of the counter-protestors weren't Muslim -- they were TDSB civil servants and Marxists. I'll bet anybody $1,000 that if these Muslim prayers in the Toronto schools were cancelled practically no one from the Muslim community would complain. The only people who would complain would be the Commies in the Toronto school board -- they are simply using the Muslim issue as a Marxist "class warfare" tactic to get religious people fighting against one another to the ultimate end of diminishing legitimate religious liberties in Canada. The Marxists are using radical Islam against Christians and other faiths for that purpose. Evidence: the former Soviets attacked, persecuted, and jailed innocent Muslims as much as they did Christians, Jews and others. Muslims don't know it, but once the dominant Christian culture has been subjugated by the Marxists using "Islamophobia" as a pretext, then the Left will go after moderate Muslims.

The only poltical survivors will be radicals and tyrants from all sides. The solution is really simple: the Government or Education Minister needs to step in and order Public Servants to stop using their positions to impose their personal ideologies -- these people are supposed to be public employees, not "Czars" running their own personal feifdoms and writing thier own legislation. If you want to be a Marxist ideologue or an Islamist, then great -- be one at home on your own time and on your own dime -- but leave your political activism at the front door when you come to work as a Public Servant. It's not what these bureaucrats were hired to do.

Tom Friedman: "Anyone who says that either entitlement reform or tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission."

Link.

Stolen from Hot Air.

Tom Friedman: "Anyone who says that either entitlement reform or tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission."

Link.

Stolen from Hot Air.

Stories of failing, or contemplated bailouts are bumming me out. When I can understand them.

Have a go: http://www.acting-man.com/?p=9129

Tom Friedman's idea of American greatness would be a Soviet Union of American States.

ricardo, well said, both times.

Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.

Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019547/Islamic-extremists-set-Sharia-law-zones-British-cities.html#ixzz1TLzPUVPC

There's a blogue that did an unfinished biography on Phillipa Fallon, the actress who plays the beatnik chick in "High School Confidential"

http://phillipafallon.blogspot.com/