Margaret Wente has written a stinging column about Dalton McGuinty and his shameless plan to get reelected. Here’s a sampling:

But never mind the real world. The Liberals are convinced that micro-pandering to crucial market segments is their key to re-election. And so we have, in no particular order, pledges to bring back doctors’ house calls for the elderly, a “healthy snack” program for schoolchildren, a home renovation tax credit to help your dear old mom install a walk-in shower, a whopping postsecondary tuition cut for the middle class, and a vow to reduce childhood obesity rates by 20 per cent. (Good luck with that.) The Premier will even refund your money if the trains don’t run on time.
I haven’t felt so warm and fuzzy since the Easter Bunny came to town. Vote for the Liberals, and there’ll be chocolate eggs for all! Just make sure you don’t overdose on all the saccharine.
What really bothers me isn’t the cynical opportunism of this approach. It’s not even the silly attempts at social engineering. It’s the sheer fatuousness of it all. The Liberals’ only aim is to reassure the public that, if they’re re-elected, nothing bad will happen and nothing much will change.
But it will.

Related: As part of the plan to reelect McGuinty, Warren Kinsella pulls the racist card on Tim Hudak.

And that’s why I’m sharpening my driving skills.
h/t martywd

This comment from SDA regular Stan was too important not to repost. It’s technically about the Vancouver Riot but really is about so much more:
We are endlessly blathered at by the Left about real and imaginary rights, but the concept of responsibilities is never mentioned, especially the basic responsibility for a citizen to not be an asshole.
And while some rights seem terribly important to them the right to not have your store looted and burned down doesn’t get a whole lot of air time. The right to not get beaten by drunken thugs who are destroying your livelihood isn’t big on their song sheet either.
As much as the cops dropped the ball [in Vancouver], if you have to have a cop standing beside you to keep you from beating a shopkeeper, something is wrong.
That said, the way to stop the next riot is to quickly throw a bunch of these rioters in jail for extended stays.
Send a message to those who can’t figure out how to act like human beings.

Tom Sawyer is a mere amateur when compared to the whitewashing abilities of the political elites in British Columbia. At every level in the hierarchical chain, the refrain is the same: “Couldn’t have been stopped. We did nothing wrong.”
There’s a strong sense out here on the Kumbaya Left Coast that few are buying into this nonsense. The Vancouver Sun’s Jeff Lee certainly isn’t.   Neither is Alex Tsakumis. Daniel Fontaine, of City Caucus, isn’t buying any of the spin either.
What’s even more appalling is that it looks to many that few to no one will be prosecuted for what happened on June 15th. Roy Green was all over this during his show on Saturday. You can listen to it here. First you’ll hear him interview BC’s Solicitor General and Interim Attorney General Shirley Bond. She used the phrase “we need to go through the process” so many times that I now anoint her BC’s 2011 Queen of Obfuscation.
Later you’ll hear yours truly and two other Metro Vancouver citizens explain how angry and ashamed we are about what has [not] happened. Finally, you’ll hear some callers phone in, two of which insist that we must have patience.
There are two important dates to look out for later this year:
Nov 19 – If the dreadful Gregor Robertson gets reelected mayor, likely with at least 65% of eligible voters not even bothering to show up at the polls, then we will officially know that Vancouverites just don’t care about their city.
Dec 15 – This will be 6 months since the day of the riots. Things get a whole lot more complicated to prosecute anyone after this date.

I’ve often been critical of David Frum in the past (and rightfully so) but his latest column is absolutely brilliant! He places himself in the role of media consultant for the beleaguered Toronto Municipal Employees and then proceeds to mock them incessantly. It’s beautiful! Here’s a snippet:

Some radicals might even suggest that public money be spent to support the creation of a universal downloadable digital library — by, for example, buying copyrights of out-of-print books and making them available to all for free over the Internet on any computer, tablet, or smart phone.
But those 21st-century approaches do not sustain unionized public-sector jobs! And sustaining unionized public-sector jobs must be priority number one, ahead of all other considerations. If we delivered a service a certain way in 1961, that’s the way it must be delivered in 2011 — only, of course, by a larger workforce, earning higher pay, with superior benefits.

Probably not what our friends in the Poverty Industry have lead you to believe:

To help you combat the insanity that is American politics these days, Mark Steyn comes to the rescue with his priceless wit:

1. King Barack of Decadence sure seems to have problems with optics of late. If memory serves, isn’t Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad an optometrist? Maybe he could help.
2. WGN’s Milt Rosenberg has an extended length interview with Steyn and even gets him to read a few passages from his new book. A most telling quip by Steyn: “What does 24/7 mean to public sector employees in Greece? They work 24 hours per week, 7 months per year.”

A friend of mine in Texas republished some recent financial numbers:
    U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
    Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
    New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
    National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
    Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000
Most people glaze over such numbers so he then equated it in simpler terms:
    Annual family income: $21,700
    Money the family spent: $38,200
    New debt on the credit card: $16,500
    Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
    Total budget cuts: $385
Finally, he wrote: “This is an impossible way for a family to survive. Bankruptcy is the only way out. This family is headed for complete failure.”
P.S. Keep in mind that anyone who “dares” suggest that much more should be done to get America’s fiscal house in order: is mentally unstable, wants to destroy their country, is a terrorist, and/or is a right-wing extremist. So says Obama’s foot soldiers in government and in the MSM.

One hopes Publius is right:

The End is Not Nigh
…
A falling off in educational, political and social standards is certainly evident. The Leviathan of the British state is a grave threat to the future of the country. But we’ve been here before too, in the 1930s and 1970s. In those times were was still a British Establishment worthy of the name. Politicians could quote Virgil while making public speeches and be understood [I’m not sure by how many, actually]. Britain emerged once from Hogarthian squalor, it can do so again. There has always been a great deal of ruin in the country, even in the good old days.

Bret Stephens in the Wall St. Journal:

Lesson From Europe (Take 2)
No, social democracy doesn’t ‘work.’
‘The real lesson from Europe,” wrote Paul Krugman in January 2010, “is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.” Here are some postcards from the social democracy that works.
• In Britain, 239 patients died of malnutrition in the country’s public hospitals in 2007, according to a charity called Age U.K. And at any given time, a quarter-million Britons have been made to wait 18 weeks or longer for medical treatment. This follows a decade in which funding for the National Health Service doubled.
• In France, the incidence of violent crimes rose by nearly 15% between 2002 and 2008, according to statistics provided by Eurostat. In Italy violent crime was up 38%. In the EU as a whole, the rate rose by 6% despite declines in robbery and murder.
• As of June 2011, Eurostat reports that the unemployment rate in the euro zone was 9.9%. For the under-25s, it was 20.3%. In Spain, youth unemployment stands at 45.7%, which tops even the Greek rate of 38.5%. Then there’s this remarkable detail: Among Europeans aged 18-34, no fewer than 46%—51 million people in all—live with their parents.
• In 2009, 37.4% of European children were born outside of marriage. That’s more than twice the 1990 rate of 17.4%. The number of children per woman for the EU is 1.56, catastrophically below the replacement rate of 2.1. Roughly half of all Europeans belong in the “dependency” category on account of their youth or old age. Just 64% of the working-age population actually works…
For the U.S., none of this is yet in our cards: That’s guaranteed by the tea party that so many Europeans (and Paul Krugman) find so vulgar. But it’s worth noting what the fruits of social democracy—a world in which, as Kipling once wrote, “all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins”—really are. And in the wake of the U.K. riots, the rest of his prophecy also bears repeating:
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The full poem is here. I’m not sure that Mr Stephens quite appreciates its message.

Oliver Darcy is one of my new heroes. With a simple, yet brilliant stroke of genius, he has figured out a way to effectively communicate to young liberals why the fiscal policies of their Great Messiah Obama are absolutely ineffective and unacceptable.

Finally, for the first time in their lives, these left-wing students are being challenged to defend their long-held beliefs. And lo and behold, they’re instantly discovering that it’s a whole lot easier to insist upon others giving up their capital than it is to give away one’s own.
Each of them now has a choice to make: Grow up and admit that socialism and wealth distribution absolutely does not work -or- live their lives with that little voice of hypocrisy constantly haunting them.

Spend! Spend! Spend! So says the NY Times:

Wrong Answers in Britain
…
Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services. Even police strength is scheduled to be cut. The poor are generally more dependent on government than the affluent, so they have been hit the hardest.
What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Mr. Cameron has figured that out. But, at a minimum, burdens need to be more fairly shared between rich and poor — not as a reward to anyone, but because it is right…

CS Monitor;

The mayor’s crackdown has placed him in the center of a simmering debate about how black community leaders should respond to violence within their own community. On one side are those who admire the mayor’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style and use of police force, while others say this approach lets the mayor off the hook for failing to address the needs of young black Philadelphians.

(h/t Jason)

And that’s why I’m sewing gold jewelry into the lining of my parka.

While in Seattle last week, I watched this segment of John Stossel’s show. It’s well worth watching if you want to understand how difficult it is [politically] for politicians to stop spending money.

The estimable Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece in the Wall St. Journal–worth the full read–thus:

…A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, “to come and sort him out.” The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason England should be any different.)
The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the “wrong” man, the assailant said he would have attacked the “right” one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.
So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.
David Cameron is not the man for the job.
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of the physician Anthony Daniels.

After all anti-Americanism is even more rife here than in England:

UK seeks advice of former US ‘super-cop’

More:

…
Last night, in an intervention likely to anger senior officers further, Bill Bratton, the former New York police chief who Mr Cameron said would advise the Government on how to deal with the aftermath of the riots, said young people had been “emboldened” by over-cautious police tactics and lenient sentencing policies.
Mr Bratton said a police force should have “a lot of arrows in the quiver”, advocating a doctrine of “escalating force” where weapons including rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper spray and water cannon were all available to commanders. “You want the criminal element to fear them,” Mr Bratton said…

As for the Canadian criminal justice system, riot section:

Days away from the two-month anniversary of Vancouver’s horrific Stanley Cup riot, no rioters have been charged for their crimes and questions continue to swirl around the pace of Vancouver’s riot investigation…

Meanwhile back in the UK:

Courts in London and Manchester have opened over the weekend as the number of people charged for riot-related offences reaches more than 1,000…

Furiously to think gives one it.

Oprah’s Flash Mob Brings Hope & Change To Innocent Bystander

The insane spending of President Obama and his merry Dems looks like it’s returning America to the situation it was in just under 3 years ago. It possibly could be even a lot worse. Mark Steyn has just published an important, but depressing, column about the state of affairs in Washington, DC. Here’s a key section:

If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem.