52 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  5. The media does not speak for me. No, not someone I wanted to have a beer with.
    Political games right to the end.

  6. Thanks for the links about the Futurliner. I saw one auctioned off a few years ago at Barrett-Jackson. What a stunner!

  8. I know I know there are all kinds of ‘haters’ out there who will dance on Jack’s grave. I’m not one. I never ‘hated’ Jack. I just sincerely disagreed with him. Funnily enough Jack is his last letter expressed very well what I see as Jack’s and his fellow travelers greatest delusion. It reads, “and we’ll change the world”. It is the delusion of the left that humanity can by force of will or intent change the world. A realist would say that at best we might change the circumstances in life but only the truly dangerously deluded would believe “we’ll change the world”.

  10. I’ve been following the CBC article that was featured here a couple of days ago,the one that wants you to finish the sentence,My CBC is ….
    The #1 comment is by someone that goes by the name “Calomine”,like the lotion I think,and hails from Smith ,Ontario (how original).
    The comment does reflect my thoughts but contains factual errors,and is a worthy comment,but certainly not worthy of #1.
    The #2 comment is concise and precise. Also as an added bonus,the comment suggests that the CBC should be a ‘small dead animal’.Extra also,rumour has it,is that the writer is an extremely attractive single man,who rarely lives in his mum’s basement.
    Do the right thing,turn #2 into #1, like poop into pee,it can be done,and it’s better for the enviroment. Think of the children,for god’s sake,please think of the children.
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2011/08/my-cbc-is.html

  12. Batb: ms blatchford pretty much nails it for me.
    The image I’m reminded of of jack today is him elbowing his way towards a camera and struggling to remain in its view during the Vancouver Olympics gold medal men’s hockey game. I think that it was during those moments that canadains got the most accurate, unvarnished view of what made him tick. And it wasn’t working all his life to make things better – as he claimed in his truly bizarre ‘deathbed’ letter.

  14. Blatchford nailed it.
    I actually really liked Jack, but if you take shots at Conservatives in your death bed farewell letter you’re open game. Them’s the rules.
    The other thing that I found ironic is how often the CBC compared Jack Layton to Tommy Douglas when the two where nothing a like. Jack, although a socialist, was a decent, respectful person who truly cared about people. Tommy was a vile, disgusting little man who referred to single mothers as “common prostitutes”, had a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard as a campaign manager and took a ‘payback’ job as an oil company executive. Jack wouldn’t have done any of that.
    When it’s all said and done, Jack was a good guy.

  15. Rest in peace, Jack.
    I never cared for his stunts as a Toronto councillor, but he showed more maturity as federal NDP leader, and he managed to exceed my rather low expectations.

  16. Trent: jack paid back the nationalist Quebec unions for their help in the last election by appointing one of their leaders as his interim replacement. He and TD weren’t as different as you assert.

  18. Will Shakespeare:
    “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground. And tell sad stories of the death of kings;”.
    John Ibbitson:
    “We are embarked on a generational sea change in Canadian politics. The only constant in all of this is Stephen Harper.”
    “Beyond this political speculation, there is simply sadness.”
    “Now, no one stands in Stephen Harper’s way”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/now-no-one-stands-in-stephen-harpers-way/article2138274/

  19. “Blatchford nailed it.”
    Pretty much. I’m still confused though why we would open a discussion about something and only allow positive comments. Isn’t that the lefts game? Why not just make an announcement if you don’t want negative feedback? And I don’t think this moral relativism of comparing people who thought Layton was a scumbag to crazy Muslims is appropriate at all.
    I think the old adage of “If you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question” applies here.
    Personally I think Layton would thoroughly have enjoyed herding people into boxcars.

  20. Didn’t Obama just take delivery of two new buses? He paid GM $50 billion for them. Talk about stimulus spending!!

  21. Blatchford nails it… agreed. The media’s fawning over Jack is a little much at times.
    I’m not saying there should be a pile-on or anything. I’m not saying that anything in his past demmed by some as “controversial” should be a focus, I’m just asking for fairness in media.
    If Mulroney were to die, god forbid, next week, next month or next year, I don’t want to hear anything about Meech Lake, Schrieber, or how he brought in the hated GST… I just want it to ne all sweetness and light…. but we know it’s not going to be.

  22. AlMoh’s Farcebook & Mugshots:
    “On Sunday the International Criminal Court itself had insisted the 39-year-old had been arrested and detained.
    But wearing casual clothes last night and looking relaxed and confident, Saif beamed as he reached out to touch hands in the crowd and declared: ‘To hell with ICC’.”
    http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/08/22/the-fog-of-war-2/#comments
    …-
    The Other Mugshots: PMSH Crime Fighter.
    “Three ‘most wanted’ foreign criminals nabbed”
    “Three violent drug traffickers — one with a history of weapons — were arrested by border agents for deportation within 24 hours of their mugshots being posted on a “Most Wanted” list, police say.
    Tips from the public to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) led to arrests in Northern Ontario, Montreal and British Columbia, said officials of the public safety ministry.”
    “Any information on their whereabouts should be reported to the CBSA Border Watch Line at 1-888-502-9060.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2011/08/22/18587826.html

  23. And I don’t think this moral relativism of comparing people who thought Layton was a scumbag to crazy Muslims is appropriate at all.
    I think the old adage of “If you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question” applies here.
    Posted by: $ FKA gord at August 23, 2011 7:34 AM
    I have to agree with this, I seem to remember when Teddy Kennedy passed on that this was one of the only places where one could come and talk about the Negative repercussions of his regular drunken stupors.
    Now Jack never killed anybody – that we know of, but he still was no saintly “courageous selfless warrior” people/MSM are trying to turn him into.

  26. Listening to elegiac paeans to Jack Layton on the radio, mushy, gushy, cliched praises along the lines of “we’ll never see his like again,” what struck me is how inarticulate all of these ravings are, how unoriginal, how packaged, how hum-drum, how predictable.
    I despair of the unthinking, knee-jerk, unintelligent, and unintelligible utterings of Jack’s idolators.
    Jack Layton, God bless him, was a human being, not a god. He was a flawed, frail, and imperfect man and politician (all adjectives we can equally apply to ourselves). This media frenzy to elevate him to god- or saint-status is truly bizarre and macabre.
    Christie Blatchford has dared to bell the cat. Check out Jonathan Kay’s article:
    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/08/23/jonathan-kay-who-has-the-guts-to-call-out-laytons-cynical-manifesto-blatchford-of-course/
    (Now I know why he had that expression on his face last night on TVO’s The Agenda: While saying all those nice things about Jack Layton, like all the rest of the panelists — specially chosen, of course, to eulogize — he knew this column was in the wings…) Well-done, Jonathan Kay, for joining Christie Blatchford in cutting the saccharine pap with a little lemon juice.

  28. batb (links to Ms Blatchford’s and Jonathan Kay’s articles). Ms. Blatchford was respectful but didn’t stray into fawning nor did she (as so many of her colleagues) yield to hyperbolic hypocrisy. Jack Layton used his death as a political tool and she called him on it. It takes immense courage to buck the tide. I’ve always admired her for that. Some of the commentors to Ms Blatchford’s column fall in the category of “criminal protected by anonymity”. (It doesn’t seem possible for some people to express a dissenting view without getting ugly and vicious.) I also liked Mr. Kay’s reminder of the column written by a colleague after Justin Trudeau’s eulogy to his father. He saw through the posing and calculation when everyone else was wetting their pants over this “phoenix” rising from the old man’s ashes.

  29. Posted by: $ FKA gord at August 23, 2011 7:34 AM
    Agree
    jack’s public behaviour was reflective of the underlying character, and it was not a pretty reflection
    when I see, “I didn’t like jack’s policies BUT…..”, hypocrit jumps to mind immediately
    and Lance and his locking the tread down….well, lefty comes to mind!!!!!

  30. I must be one of the few that wouldn’t have wanted to have a beer with Jack Layton. Maybe it had to do with my fear of being elbowed in the head by Jack as he scrambled to jump in front of a random stray camera or open mike.

  31. rita, I suspect that when all is said and done, and there’s been a passage of time, all of this fawning idolatry will amount to the proverbial sound and fury signifying nothing.
    The public and the sycophantic media’s paeans will fall away, leaving Mr. Layton’s family and friends to mourn his death, as all families and friends mourn the passing of their loved ones.
    Idolizing mere mortals is never healthy and I suspect that the fickle public will soon set aside their frantic and frenzied idolatry to pursue their usual daily rituals of trying to mooch off the government while consuming their usual quotas of beer and popcorn.
    Rest in peace, Mr. Layton, where He who created you will wipe every tear from your eyes, where death, mourning, crying, and pain will be no more (Revelation 21:4).

  32. The Palin factor.“Inside the Washington Beltway, both Republicans and Democrats wish the Tea Party would go away, but it’s only growing in power.”
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/22/the-palin-factor/
    Gord Tulk @ 3:08 am, exactly. The image of Jack elbowing the woman out of the way so that the camera would focus on him told me all I needed to know about him.
    $ FKA gord @ 7:34 “Personally I think Layton would thoroughly have enjoyed herding people into boxcars.” If not Jack, at least many of his followers would.
    Well said batb @ 9:41 Christie and Kay cut through the phoney adulation.
    I expect that some will try to make Jack a God like idol like they have Tommy Douglas and Trudeau.

  33. Of Olive Oyl and socialist ghosts & “An invisible crack”.
    …-
    “Resentment in the North”
    “Rich EU Members Lose Patience with the ‘Olive Zone'”
    “The rich countries of the northern euro zone are bearing the brunt of bailing out their debt-stricken fellow members. Resentment is growing among their populations, helping euroskeptic right-wing populists to win support. But there is little awareness of how much the European Union has done for their own countries.”
    “Officially, of course, the one-euro coin is worth the same everywhere. But given the current state of the euro zone, you could be forgiven for thinking that the coin with the Greek owl or Spanish king on its reverse is worth less than one bearing, say, a German eagle or the silhouette of the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix.
    An invisible crack now divides the euro zone. With their triple-A rating from the American credit rating agencies, six of the euro zone’s 17 member states are considered sound borrowers. And the more government finances in Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland are thrown out of kilter, the more the countries with the best credit ratings are expected to vouch for the euro. They include, in addition to Germany and France, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Austria.
    From the Austrians eating at sausage stands in Vienna to the regulars at fish stalls in The Hague, to Luxembourg bankers and Finnish businesspeople, many in the euro zone’s model countries seem conflicted nowadays. They are torn between the strong suspicion that some of their hard work is going down the drain with the hundreds of billions that are currently disappearing into aid packages and bailout funds for threatened EU countries, and the hope that their political leaders, in their efforts to appease citizens, might be right after all.
    This euro crisis is not only about rescuing a common currency. It’s about fundamental questions of political union.
    It’s about the suspicions of many Europeans that people in the southern part of the EU, derisively referred to as the “olive zone,” lived well at the expense of others, and that those who were more careful with their money are now expected to swallow the poison that is making its way northward.”
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,781710,00.html
    …-
    “Ghostbusters to Visit Naples Museum”
    “Ministry architect says suspicions were raised by photo”
    “It all started with a wheelbarrow that keeled over on its own, a bucket full of water that mysteriously emptied itself and various tools that were left in one place but reappeared elsewhere. For some time, labourers carrying out restoration work at the national archaeological museum in Naples have been aware that something is afoot. Last spring, they decided it was time to phone Oreste Albarano, the Rome-based architect put in charge of restoration in 2009 by the ministry for the cultural heritage. “Professor, strange things are happening here. We’ve got ghosts”, they told him. Albarano, a man of deep-rooted, science-based scepticism, hopped on a train and headed for Naples. At first, he was unable to find anything out of order and merely took satisfied note of progress on the museum’s new wing. Funding (or rather the lack of it) permitting, the job would be done and dusted by December.
    But a curse seems to be hanging over the site.”
    http://www.corriere.it/International/english/articoli/2011/08/23/ghosts-napoli-museum%20.shtml

  34. Mark Steyn has a great piece, excerpted from his new book “After America” in today’s National Post. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link to it on-line, so you’ll either have to buy the paper, or his book. Entitled “Bye bye Miss American Pie”, he details how the proverbial little old ladies baked pies for his church’s bake sale, but had the temerity to do it in their own kitchens. This was a violation of the state’s food safety rules, and the women were told they could either cook their pies in the church’s approved kitchen, or apply for an inspection of their own kitchens (with a cost, of course). It’s vintage Steyn – biting, accurate, and funny.
    Oh, and I made a mistake yesterday; Jack and Olivia would not have made $200k combined this year; as Leader of the Opposition, the pair would have pulled in just under $400,000 and had free room and board at Stornaway. To put that in perspective, the bottom 20% of Cdn. wage earners – the “everyman” Jack pretended to be – would have to work an entire decade to match their after tax income to what he and Olivia earned in a year. Rich socialist. Hypocrite. But I repeat myself.

  35. Remember when our betters scolded us for worrying about coalition governments, carbon dioxide taxes and/or carbon dioxide trading. I recall Australia and Britain were trumpeted as being fine examples to follow. It’s odd that now that things aren’t going so well there is an eerie silence from Canadian journalists. Shhhhhh…don’t mention energy poverty in Britain and Dion (or even Ignatieff) levels of political support for Gillard’s coalition government.
    Thank Gaia that Canadians avoided the coalition monster in the last election.
    “Andrew Bolt
    Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 06:07pm
    Exactly how desperate is Climate Change Minister Greg Combet to reach for this slur:
    Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of having a racist climate change policy.
     Mr Abbott has warned that Australian businesses buying carbon permits under an emissions trading scheme could be conned by unscrupulous international traders…
    Combet’s plan involves sending an insane $57 billion a year to carbon traders overseas by 2050. Does he really not know that such a torrent of cash could be scammed? Has he really not heard of this:
    The European police agency Europol has today revealed that the fraudulent trade in carbon credits that affected a number of countries over the past few months is far more widespread than previously thought and could have cost EU taxpayers up to €5bn in lost revenue over the past 18 months.”
    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/combet_smears_its_racist_to_oppose_his_carbon_dioxide_tax#88967

  36. Lovely new book out for the kids prior to return to school! Check out ‘Maggie goes on a diet’..encouraging eating disorders in kids as young as six? Author on Fox news this a.m. Looks like he could stand to eliminate fries from his own diet.

  37. “Charles P. Murray Jr., who received the Medal of Honor for single-handedly preventing 200 German soldiers from attacking a U.S. battalion while leading a scouting mission in France during the Second World War, died Aug. 12 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He was 89.”
    Thank you for posting that link,”grok”. While we’ve been discussing the untimely demise of a career trough feeder,a REAL HERO slipped away,unnoticed.

  38. Kevin, thanks for that! I just ordered Steyn’s new book yesterday from Amazon.ca. Incidentally, it was actually cheaper there than at Amazon.com. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that with any book. Perhaps Canadian booksellers finally acknowledge that our dollar is worth more than the U.S. buck!

  39. Thanks, KevinB, I bought Steyn’s book last week!
    Re Olivia and Jack: besides the huge amount of their combined salary, last year they racked up, between them, more expenses than any other MPs (close to or above $1 MILLION).
    And BOTH of them claimed the Ottawa housing allowance, even though they lived together. “It’s legal,” said Chow.
    The Emperor has/had no clothes. (Whoops!)

  40. Thanks, KevinB, I bought Steyn’s book last week!
    Re Olivia and Jack: besides the huge amount of their combined salary, last year they racked up, between them, more expenses than any other MPs (close to or above $1 MILLION).
    And BOTH of them claimed the Ottawa housing allowance, even though they lived together. “It’s legal,” said Chow.
    The Emperor has/had no clothes. (Whoops!)

  42. ‘Anyone else feel the earthquake? I checked the time and my computer said 1:54 p.m.
    The house rocked, there were guys up a ladder washing windows, so I wondered if it was them — and then I thought, “wait a minute, a ladder against a house can’t shake the foundation: EARTHQUAKE!!”
    My daughter texted me a few minutes later to see if I’d felt the tremor. I guess it originated on the East Coast and Washington felt it.
    I guess our attention to the unfolding of the universe is required.

  44. Let’s see if Layton can break Trudeau’s record for days of mourning at the CBC.
    The wailing and moaning for Trudeau went on for a full week, with Mansbridge almost breaking into tears at several points during that time.
    That week set the new standard for faux grief by the phony leftists.

  46. Kevin, thanks for that. I read the article in the NP.
    Robert, thanks for the tip on where the best price is.

  47. Over at SunTV, Ezra’s getting a real grilling by CBC security.
    I’m tired of these sanctimonious, thuggish gate keepers (not the red-headed kid who looked about four years old: whose son, nephew, neighbour is he?), supposedly on the public’s behalf, harassing members of the public who walk into the CBC building and start asking a few questions.
    They remind me of the KGB — at least, what the KGB looks like in the movies. Come to think of it, the CBC kind of reminds me of Pravda …

  48. Headline over at the CBC Web site:
    “Turmel vows to stay on until NDP chooses leader”
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/08/23/pol-ndp-turmel.html
    What the …?
    Why’s she “vowing”? Has someone threatened her interim leadership? Are big, bad C/conservatives harassing her?
    No! Who’s writing this stuff?
    Then Turmel says, “We promise we’ll carry on.” How banal. Isn’t that what any party would do?
    But, all of the left-lib cheerleaders are standing on the sidelines, clapping and cheering: “You go, Nycole! ‘So glad you’re not going to abandon the ship …”
    Sheesh.

  50. An interesting headline from Drudge
    “‘All DC leaves work at same time, US experiences brief economic recovery’… ”

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