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.