… with President Backstreet Boy:

Putin aims to reduce the violence by getting his boy Assad to kill everyone he needs to. Obama aims to reduce the violence by giving a speech about the “intolerance that fuels extremism” — or is it the other way round? The world understands that Putin means it and Obama doesn’t —
[…]
Americans seem not to have noticed that the U.S. has just lost yet another war. But in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, they noticed, and they will act accordingly. On the wings of love, up and above the clouds, Obama wafts ever higher on his own gaseous uplift. Down on solid ground, the rest of the world must occasionally wonder if they haven’t confused the U.S. delegation with the world’s most empty-headed boy band.

Who stole the president and replaced him with Peter Sellers?

JFK had a clear message when he came to Berlin a half century ago – the free world must stand up to Communist tyranny. 24 years later, President Reagan stood in the same spot famously calling on the Soviets to “tear down this wall.” Reagan’s speech was a seminal moment that ushered in the downfall of an evil empire, and gave hope to tens of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. It was a display of strength and conviction by the leader of the free world, sending an unequivocal message of solidarity with those who were fighting for freedom in the face of a monstrous totalitarian ideology.

Always blame the Chicoms:

Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people.

***

Yeah. Okay. We haven’t heard that before at all.. . . .

…his leadership would be a failure if Western angst were not cured. However as his fortunes in the polls sank he reverted to Alberta bashing as a means to protect eastern seats”*

That’s just to remind everyone about the statements of the leader before Mr. Green-shaft.

If I remember correctly, and I do, Mr. “Cowboy” Martin, was booed at the 2005 Grey Cup in Regina.

Liberals . . . trust them at your folly. Here in the West actions speak louder that words. That’s a little advice for both main political parties.

Cheers,
lance

Naw, we don’t need to count *every* vote….
On October 14 Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh won his seat in Vancouver South by a margin of 33 votes, which under Elections Canada rules triggered an automatic recount. Here’s the curious thing, though: the judge in charge of the recount didn’t open all the ballot boxes. According to some sources, only 28 out of 184 ballot boxes — fifteen percent — were counted, after which the judge declared Dosanjh the winner by a now diminished margin of 22 votes. The Conservative candidate, Wai Young, said only “a sampling” of ballot boxes were recounted.
A sampling? In such a tight race, and with each counted box showing the race to be tightening, why on earth is it reasonable to stop after counting fifteen percent of the ballot boxes? Is it just too tedious, or…? And if a recount of fifteen percent of boxes brought Donanjh’s lead down from 33 to 22, wouldn’t that suggest that there might be some other, different numbers further down in all those uncounted ballot boxes? In Brossard-La Prairie for example, the BQ candidate who was declared the winner on election night by a margin of 102 votes was found by a recount to have lost to the Liberal candidate by a margin of 69 votes — a 172 vote swing.
Joanne at Blue Like You:

“What it all really boils down to is this: Why was there only a partial recount done in Vancouver South when the vote differential between the incumbent and the closest runner-up started to decrease?

“The second question is, do we have a right to know? Should Canadian voters be given some kind of explanation as to why this decision was made?

“The third question is, what kind of recount process is occurring in all the other ridings? If every vote gets counted in all other recounts, then why is Vancouver South the exception?”

This whole recount-“sample” procedure is fishy. There’s no good reason to not count all the votes cast. The usual suspects in the MSM aren’t concerned about the issue, but you can find info and links at Blue Like You.
UPDATE: Candidate Wai Young will be taking her case for a full recount to the BC Supreme Court on Thursday. (h/t Ruth)

“One man, one vote” is the foundation of our democracy. More than one-hundred million Americans cast their ballots in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, yet in the end the victory was won in Florida by a margin of approximately five hundred votes — about 0.000005% of all votes cast. The integrity of voters’ lists is, as Mark Steyn wrote, “a national security issue.” Elections must be fair, and not fraudulent; it’s not so much an issue of who holds power, it’s more about the existence of democracy itself, which “turns on our ability to convince voters that regardless of the results, they are honest results.”
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, aka ACORN, is a left of centre community organization that has been undertaking massive voter registration drives, primariliy in inner city and poor neighbourhoods. All efforts to get out the vote are a valuable contribution to democracy but ACORN, who have received $800,000 from Barrack Obama’s campaign, and whose national political action committee has endorsed him has been engaging in what is undeniably voter fraud at the local level by “registering” large numbers of non-existent and dead voters, and by registering single voters multiple times, and, in some cases, by encouraging their employees to engage in such fraud.
ACORN has been particularly active in key battleground states with a eye to the upcoming election. Even if a only small portion of the ACORN’s fraudulently-registered potential multiple-voters are activated, those votes would far exceed — would dwarf — the 500 vote margin of victory in the last election. In other words, we’re not just talking about just particular neighbourhoods here. ACORN has scope. In Kansas City, four Acorn employees were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting 15,000 fraudulent voter registration forms; in Lake County Indiana, a Republican state in the last election but now a battleground state, “ACORN turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there started reviewing them, and quit after they found that the first 2,100 were all fraudulent.” In Marion County, also in Indiana, there are 33,000 more registered voters than there are eligible voters. In Ohio — and this can’t be all attributed to ACORN — there are 200,000 more registered voters than there are adult residents. In Cuyahoga County, an ACORN employee signed 73 voter registration cards, sometimes in exchange for cigarettes; an employee of an ACORN affiliate was given crack cocaine for fraudulent registration.

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When a famous person such as a sports figure demonstrates that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, it can be disarming. When Bob Uecker was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, his legendary speech killed, as comedians say, because of the way he took the mickey out of himself. As a player, he quipped, he would be told to “grab a bat and stop this rally;” he’d sent to the plate without a bat and told to “try for a walk.”
When powerful political figures take the mickey out of themselves it can be a reassuring sign that confidence and humility are in appropriate balance, but there’s no such upside to being a good sport by participating in your opponents’ stereotyping of you. When Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live last week, she was in a nest of vipers, a participant in an uncomfortable spectacle that only abetted her opponents. When Alec Baldwin told her how “hot” she was, he was arrogant, preening and entirely disingenuous — he didn’t even look at her, instead chewing the horizon of his own significance. Palin’s appearance on the show ended up being an open display of political dominance by entertainment industry Dems.
Barrack Obama will not play the fool for anyone. Last Thursday, at a comedy roast in New York, Barrack Obama performed a routine of sorts that earned him plaudits for being a good sport. What largely escaped notice was that, far from taking the mickey out of himself, he was using the superficial form of a self-roast as an excuse to bring up, and display his pleasure in, his own popularity and success. When he said, addressing the question of what is his greatest weakness, “it’s possible that I’m a a little too awesome,” he was visibly tickled by his own mention of his own awesomeness, in a way that’s inappropriate in decent company, and he was similarly pleased with his vicious ad hominem shot against Rudy Giuliani.
It’s a cultural thing, really. Compare Obama’s and Uecker’s references to their Christlike beginnings: When Uecker recalled “a nativity-type setting…an exit light shining down” and three truckers, one bearing frankfurters, it was akin to a fat old comedian joking about his underwear modeling career — ironic self-deprecation, in other words. When Obama said “Contrary to the rumours you have heard, I was not born in a manger,” the laughs were about power in the room; his unprecedented position as a messiah of sorts to millions of people is the end-result of his lifelong effort to be in that position, so his “joke” was a nod to his own success even as it superficially co-opted the outward form of a good sport engaging in self-deprecation.
When Obama addressed a topic that didn’t provide an opening for him to pay homage to himself — his association with domestic terrorist William Ayers — the chosen one went missing from the punchline, and was replaced: “There was a point in my life when I started palling around with a pretty ugly crowd. I’ve got to be honest, these guys were lowlifes, unrepentant, no-good punks. That’s right, I’ve been a member of the United States Senate.”
John McCain laughed too hard, in a discomfiting way that suggests capitulation as much as good humour. Barrack Obama has arrived, apparently, in all his awesomeness, and everyone is now being called on to be a good sport.

The narcissist is dead serious about himself. He may possess a subtle, wry and riotous sense of humour, scathing and cynical, but rarely is he self-deprecating. The Narcissist regards himself as being on a constant mission, whose importance is cosmic and whose consequences are global.

Support for conservatism may be growing among Canadian voters, but the left has one considerable reserve strength that’s going to help them for a long time: language. Through what amounts to propaganda the left has been successful at co-opting formerly non-political words, with the result that now many common, undeniably positive sounding words are in effect free-ranging promo-pieces for the left’s worldview. “Fairness”, “empathy”, “peace”, “equality”, and “the earth” have become political word-weapons, and even the word “conservative” has come to imply an agenda that includes opposition to “empathy” and “fairness” and “justice.”
The same use of language that has allowed media outlets like the CBC and the BBC to posit, without coming out and saying it, that big-state bureaucracy is a synonym for peace and justice and fairness, has also helped enable academic institutions to promote entirely political agendas — who on earth would be opposed to “social justice?” British blogger David Thompson has been amply detailing, in a number of his posts in the last several years, the extent of blatant ideological bias in academia, particularly in Britain and the U.S., and he notes the common use of “fuzzwords” meant to disguise the promotion of an activist agenda. Reading his articles, it becomes disturbingly clear how common it is for universities to demand that students, often those studying to become teachers, toe the line of an ideological agenda as a precondition to further study. The implications go far beyond academia:

I’ve been told I make too much of these academic issues, as if such things are unimportant or indicative of nothing in particular. But given the number of incidents of this kind gradually swelling the archives, I’m inclined to wonder exactly how egregious and pervasive this phenomenon has to be before concern becomes legitimate. After all, if you want to propagate tendentious ideology and make it seem normative, respectable and self-evidently true, insinuating that ideology into schools and universities would be a pretty good way to do it. “Debate” can then be had on what is most likely an unequal footing, thus arriving at the approved conclusions with a minimum of informed and realistic opposition. If faculty and students are obliged to regurgitate that ideology and perhaps internalise it, while mouthing fuzzwords like “social justice,” all the better. Is it enough to bemoan certain socio-political trends or bias in areas of the media if one doesn’t also address the place where many of these things originate? And are we supposed to believe that the ideologues who push for such measures are going to get tired and desist of their own volition, and then politely roll back the idiocy they’ve been so keen to put in place?

Read the whole thing, including the links, and, if you’re inclined, check out his highly entertaining archives.
Brainteaser for SDA commenters: When one hears positive-sounding words like “social justice” or “peace” or “equality” in any political context one implicitly hears “the left.” Are there any words primarily associated, in common usage and across the political spectrum, to the conservative/right, that are universally viewed as positive, or good? Hint: don’t hurt yourself in the attempt.

The idea that Christianity and politics are a dangerous mix now passes for common wisdom. When a Liberal hack waved a stuff dinosaur during Stockwell Day’s campaign a few years ago, everyone knew what he was getting at: Day, a Christian, was superstitious and not rational. That idea still has legs, especially in the big city. Last night on SNL Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin said “We don’t know if this climate change hoozie-whatzit is man-made, or if it’s just a natural part of the end of days.” The audience — surely smart, witty urbane paragons of virtue and rationality compared to Palin’s upright, small-town Christian — hooted and applauded with a positive fervor of self-regard. They understood: Palin goes to church, so her beliefs are irrational.
As a lifelong non-churchgoer, I’ve never been able put my finger on why, exactly, such urbane, asserted superiority over Christians seems so mistaken, or why I get the unshakable feeling that such attitudes portend a rumbling, unpleasant cultural consequence-to-come. It might have something to do with the way noisier atheists believe they are rational because they are not Christian. Or it might be because their assumption that their views are the end product of rational examination flies so aggressively in the face of what is often so obvious, that their beliefs in many cases have been assembled piecemeal from a series of worldly, time-bound political fads.
Atheists believe they are free from the shackles of superstition, but are their beliefs actually more rational than those of Christians? Why, funny you should ask:

“(A) comprehensive new study released by Baylor University…shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Well yes, you might say, but “pseudoscience” could mean anythi…

The Gallup Organization…asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Okay, but maybe that’s because a lot of atheists are not educa…

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.

If the idea that prominent individuals in public life might have superstitious beliefs is “scary,” then perhaps the statist/left has been barking up the wrong tree.

Last Thursday The National aired a report on the Conservative candidate who had said, in reference to certain incidents in a particular constituency in Calgary, “we’ve got people that have grown up in a different culture, and they…don’t have the same respect for authority.” Peter Mansbridge, introducing Paul Hunter’s report, paraphrased the candidate as having said “crime in (Calgary) is mostly carried out by immigrants.”
Hunter’s report opened with a lingering, full-screen shot of the words “Regrettable remarks,” in large red letters. Various sources were shown voicing their ample outrage. Dion: “This kind of intolerance, and we cannot tolerate that (sic).” Former cop: “It’s just disgusting that anyone would say that…It’s just a very racist, prejudicial and xenophobic comment.” Hunter opined in closing, “Richardson’s comments are particularly thorny for Stephen Harper, who’s been courting the immigrant vote hard for months. The questions for Conservatives is whether, come voting day, new Canadians remember Harper’s overtures, or Richardson’s remarks. Paul Hunter, CBC news, Edmonton.”
Now, compare that with The National’s coverage of Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes, who had merely suggested that Israeli Jews had foreknowledge of the upcoming attacks on the World Trade Center, and that they alerted other Jews who promptly scuttled off without bothering to, erm, alert the goyim:
“Dumped! Controversial comments get a Liberal candidate fired — and wait ’til you hear how she got the news!” said anchor Diana Swain, priming the story at the top of the hour. Later, introducing the report: “The Liberals fired one of their candidates today. The problem is, no one from the party TOLD Lesley Hughes she was dropped! At issue, comments Hughes once wrote about 9/11 that some interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

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“Choice” is a powerful word in feminist politics which carries a tacit assertion that there is an opposing group of men who are campaigning to limit women’s choice. What gets in the way of the whole “fists-across-the-nation” righteousness, though, is that issues which are typically framed in terms of women being oppressed by men are often not actually divided along gender lines. This Gallup poll, for example, taken in 2005, found that in the US, Canada, and Britain more women than men favour stricter abortion laws.

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Last Thursday a CBC crew undertook a dramatic chase-down of Gerry Ritz in an airport. The shaky camera footage and the out-of-breath questions suggested a scandal of government-toppling magnitude. Viewers unaware of the details could be forgiven for thinking Ritz was some international criminal finally caught on camera by the Fifth Estate, rather than someone who had used ill-advised gallows humour in a private exchange during a tense crisis.
The Ritz scandal was just the latest installment in an ongoing series. The previous weeks’ scandal began: “Oops again! Stephen Harper pulls his communications director after another false step,” accompanied by a helpful graphic – “Oops again” – and video footage of the *Elections Canada raid* from last April. After a brief bit about gas prices, it was back to business: over the graphic “Derailed,” Mansbridge alarmed: “The mistakes and apologies are piling up! Is the Conservative campaign in trouble?”
Recently the NDP, now that they’re emerging as a threat to the Liberals, has been getting that same treatment. Last Thursday the NDP dropped a candidate after a video surfaced of him taking illegal drugs; it’s the sort of thing that merits a mention, but The National saw fit to air, as top news, a lengthy “worst-of” compilation from the tape. So we saw Dana Larsen taking LSD on a beach, and smoking a joint in a car; it went on and on. The word “NDP” was repeated so gratuitously as to render the report a piece of of Liberal-strategy campaigning, a “think again” warning-piece directed at anyone who’d been considering switching from the Liberals to the NDP.
The CBC’s scandal-mongering is highly suspect for two reasons. First, the scandals are too frequently based on events that happened long before they are presented as breaking scandals. Gerry Ritz’s remarks were made two weeks before the “scandal” broke; the Dana Larsen video was eight years old when it was aired at length in the midst of an election campaign; the Tom Lukiwski tape became a scandal fully seventeen years after a tipsy Lukiwski jokingly made the remarks at a private party. Second, such scandals are often not the result of investigation on the part of CBC journalists, but rather the end result of dirt about non-Liberals being handed over, by individuals who remain unnamed, to producers and/or reporters who then run with it.
Greg Weston:

“With the media leak coming more than two weeks after the fact, and timed to do the maximum political damage to the minister, the PM and the Conservative campaign, there is one obvious question: Who shot Gerry Ritz and why?

“A high-ranking Conservative familiar with what happened on the conference call says no one really has any doubts the leak came from a disgruntled bureaucrat.

“A Tory insider points to previous damaging leaks about the Conservatives’ environmental plans, and cuts to cultural programs as similar push-back from ‘some people who don’t necessarily agree with us.'”

For too long the LPC has had their own public-relations juggernaut, massively funded by Canadian taxpayers, with which to campaign against the other parties. It’s time to stop forcing Canadians who don’t wish to support the Liberals to pay for it.