Today is officially Tax Freedom Day in Saskatchewan. That means that the average taxpayer has finished working for the governments of various levels, and may now earn their first penny of true family income.
Tax Freedom Day for Canada as a whole falls on June 28th. Monday, the 28th of June, happens to be the date of the federal election.
Isn’t it ironic?
Half the year, we work to pay taxes. But, don’t be bogged down by negativity. Be positive. The glass isn’t half empty, as they say. It’s half full.
“Glass half full.”
Say it over and over until you can visualize it. Then, on Monday, go down to the voting booths, and remember which two parties are actively campaigning that it’s un-Canadian to lower taxes.
You should know what to do with that glass.
Sweet Grapes
I remember seeing Beckie Scott interviewed just moments after she made Olympic history in Salt Lake City – the first North American to capture an Olympic medal in cross country skiing. It was a bronze.
She was angry. She said some intemperate things about the two Russians who had bested her.
Textbook sour grapes. I hear it all the time in my own sport – subject to subjectivity and political alliances and feuds, complaining about dirty tricks is commonplace, but neatly deflected by the “sore loser” accusation.
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Maybe Beckie has something to teach us about the difference between sore losers and undeserving winners and standing your ground in the face of contraversy. |
Today, it’s a gold. Congratulations, Beckie!
The New York Inquirer
Actually, that’s unfair. In recent years, the National Inquirer has cleaned up its act. They actually fact check their stories.
The New York Times simply buries the ones that don’t slide neatly into the intended bias. The fiasco of last week, in which the 9/11 Commission allegedly declared “No Ties Between Saddam And Al Queda” has properly been debunked throughout the blogosphere, and disavowed by the commission members themselves.
Until now, the media was given the benefit of the doubt – if you can call it that. They were characterized as sloppy or conveneintly obtuse. It turns out, that it’s been a little more complicated than that.
The New York Times reports an Iraqi document — one that it obtained several weeks ago, but that the 9/11 Commission seems somehow to have overlooked — outlining collaboration between Saddam and Osama back in the 1990s. This is, of course, consistent with these media reports of such contacts from 1999.
That’s right. They were sitting on evidence that refuted their own reporting.
Go read Glenn Reynolds round up of links, including this timeline.
Jeff Goldstein;
New York Times: “Okay, so there is a document proving ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but the document doesn’t really prove prove those ties — or rather, it does prove prove ties…
…but it doesn’t exactly prove prove that Bin Laden and Saddam ordered a single milkshake and two spoons, if you catch our drift.”
Another 15 Minutes
I’m supposed to be a member of the Murray Wood show’s “people’s panel” on 650 CKOM this afternoon. We’ll be talking about the election, of course. Show starts at around 1:30, they tell me. (I believe the station is at 980 in the south.)
All day yesterday, I practiced talking out loud about the LIberals without the use of interspecies reproduction analogies.
It’s harder than I thought it was. I hope they have a 6 second delay.
update
We were on for nearly an hour and a half.
Overall conclusion?
I want my own radio talk show.
And I Was Named After Mary-“Kate” Olsen
Silent Running: noticed this timeline discrepency in Bill Clinton’s book.
In his recently released book “I’m a Democrat so the rules don’t apply to me” Bill told us that his wife was named after Sir Edmund Hillary making Ed his “second favorite Hillary”.
Ohhhh, isn’t that just so sweet.
The question is why did her parents name her after a little known New Zealand bee keeper who’s most notable activities to date had been to hunt crocs while he was serving in the air force in the Pacific during WWII.
Of course when little Hillary was six years old Ed became a tad more well known when he got to the top of world.
McGruff The Crime Poodle
Canadian Crime Safety Tips:
Tip #5 : Safety in numbers – to protect oneself from risk, always travel in groups.
Whip Vs Whip
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Dominatrix and Marijuana Party candidate Carole Taylor is running in the riding of Ottawa-Vanier, against Liberal MP Mauril Belanger. Belanger is chief government whip. |
I couldn’t make this stuff up.
hat tip – Ghost Of A Flea
The Lesser Challenge
Mark Ames has a challenge for Ann Coulter.
“So here is my public challenge to Ann Coulter: I propose that you and I spend a night together in a four-star hotel. We will wine together, we will dine together, we will harden each other’s nipples with erotic pillow talk about Sen. Joe McCarthy, and yes, Ann, we will fuck. Ann, here’s the dare: I am betting that no matter how much you try, no matter what prostate-massaging tricks a John Birch Prom Queen like you possesses, you, Ann Coulter, cannot make me come.”
Ahem.
Mr. Ames – a real man would challenge the woman not to come.
Unregistered Dog Saves Innocent From Registered Guns
TORONTO — A man with five guns and more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition set himself up beside a Beaches water plant yesterday planning to commit mass homicide. But a dog’s affection apparently persuaded him not to go through with his plan.
The man started to ready his weapons in the early afternoon sunshine outside the grounds of the R.C. Harris filtration plant at Victoria Park Avenue and Queen Street. He later told police that he planned to shoot people in the park and then drive around the city killing whomever he could to ensure he would get life in jail.
[…]
The man had several rifles and telescopic lenses, a camouflage balaclava, as well as a .357 magnum and a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, a machete and other knives.
He had loaded his pistols and was readying the rifles, police said. They were in his car’s trunk along with the ammunition; he had removed the safeties and trigger locks.
He changed his mind when a dog on a walk in the park would not leave him alone.
“He happens to be a pet lover, and he decided that if there was such a nice dog in the area the people were too nice and he wasn’t going to carry out his plan,” Det. Ashley said.
He was not known to police, and all his guns were registered.
I’m sure someone at Animal Control is checking into leash law violations, though.
Sexual Orientation
CBC Watch has a story about the vagueness of the term “sexual orientation” in legal application.
Citizen’s Research Institute (CRI) press release :
CRI notes that on December 18, 2003, Judge Romilly of the British Columbia Youth Court in his reasons for sentence in the R. v. J.S. (para 50 -pg 36) case, opened the door when he stated the following concerning the term “sexual orientation” under section 718 of the Criminal Code:
“I am of the opinion that this crime was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on a factor similar to sexual orientation and is covered by this section of the Criminal Code. It strikes me that this section contemplates hatred against ‘peeping toms’ and/or ‘voyeurs’ as being within its purview, since in my opinion such activity represents a sexual lifestyle which some may consider deviant, but is a sexual lifestyle all the same.”
I’ve been arguing for a long time that this slippery slope is going to become very steep when research into molecular genetics discovers that there exists a genetic basis for some of these behaviors. Coupled with fuzzy thinking such as this on the part of liberal judges, things could get very interesting in years to come.
Partridge Wisdom
Farenheit 9/11 Out Takes
I haven’t watched any of these because I hate them enough for one lifetime already. And think long and hard before you do.
The murder video of South Korean Kim Sun-il is now available. And, not widely reported – the body was boobytrapped.
And via Stephen Green a documentary of Iraq, under Saddam. You know – before the days of BushHitler and the horrors of Abu Ghraib.
I sent “movie reviewer” Rex Reed the link by email. Subject line: Farenheit 9/11 Out Takes
The Moonbat Hunters
Jeff Goldstein is involved. With Peter Fonda. In a manner of speaking. Thus, the expected language warnings.
Special Needs Reporting
Via Drudge, this survey of Canadian business media. Some gems in answer to: What mistakes do company spokespeople make most often in dealing with the media?
“They don’t have much of a sense of what is news that would interest the general public.”
Translation: News is Entertainment.
“Not understanding our target readers and failing to understand that editorial must be geared toward what readers need, not what they want to sell.”
Translation: Wake up! We’re the Sellers here, not you.
“Avoiding questions. It seems many executives are under the assumption the reporter is out to get them. In reality most of us are only trying to understand the story better and to cover all the angles.”:
Translation: We’re really out to get you. Gotcha !
“Refusing to provide comment on competitive issues and developments surrounding rivals.”
Translation: Just as war reporters know nothing about military strategy, we know nothing about business strategy.
“Getting hostile when journalists ask tough but necessary questions. Accusing media of bias when it’s their obligation to report the news, favorable or not.”
Translation: We really prefer the unfavourable stuff, actually. See Entertainment. See Selling. See Gotcha.
Crossposted at the Shotgun
And, added to the Traffic Jam
Clinton Book Phenomenon?
Matt Drudge is so funny. From his current “headlines”;
Clinton’s Book Signings Draw Adoring Throngs in NYC…
CNN: ‘My Life’ sets records; 90,000 to 100,000 unit single-day expectation..
PUBLISHER CLAIMS: 400,000 copies bought in U.S. in one day!
BUT… Sales slow in Florida…
Stacks Left Untouched on Maryland Shore…
SAN FRAN YAWN…
Clinton book sales quiet in Arizona…
Memoirs not on Houston’s best seller list…
Tome slow out of gate in Cincinnati…
Not flying off shelves in Hudson Valley…
Mixed reaction in Manitowoc…
Mixed book sales in N.E. Georgia…
Creates little hoopla in San Antonio…
Not Selling in Shenandoah Valley…
Book not so magical in Wichita Falls…
Hoosiers react quietly to memoir…
Just hype? asks Gainesville…
Sales can’t measure up to Harry or Hillary in suburban Chicago…
Memoirs don’t stir Saginaw…
Memoir is no 1st-day best-seller in Ft. Wayne…
Not selling in VA Beach…
No best seller in Billings…
Slow in Sacramento…
A little mental exercise, now if you will.
If there had been no Monica Lewinsky in the White House, what would the buzz be around “My Life”? today…
think.
hard.
….
Can’t think of anything, eh?
So, why would anyone other than the usual suspects run out and buy a book, when they can get their curiosity satisfied for free on 60 minutes?
Anti-Alberta Bigotry
I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.
Cabinet ministers are going to fall. There is a new desperation in the Liberal campaign — a whole generation of Liberal MPs and organizers have never felt what it’s like to lose. They don’t like that feeling, and it shows.
They’re angry. And so they’re telling Martin to be angry — to do something, anything. And so Martin is getting angry at the easy scapegoat, the traditional Liberal whipping boy: Alberta. He really ought to be angry at Ontarians, who are rejecting him for the Conservatives, according to recent polls, by a 10- point margin, or at Quebecers, who are rejecting him by even more.
They used to vote Liberal, and aren’t. But Alberta makes a much more gratifying target.
So last week, Martin blasted Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, calling Klein’s health-care reform package un- Canadian. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will look Ralph Klein in the eye and I will say ‘no.’,” ranted Martin. From Ontario, of course — not over the phone to Klein privately, not in a memo, but at an election event, using federal-provincial relations as a desperate partisan weapon. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will defend medicare,” he said — defending it against Klein, the new Liberal demon.
Although nearly every province has private health-care facilities, Martin chose to attack only Alberta.
He did not criticize Ontario and Quebec, with their burgeoning private hospitals. Ontario and Quebec are run by Liberal governments.
The government of Alberta has kept Martin briefed about their proposed changes for months. Martin has never raised an objection, and Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister, has repeatedly approved of such changes.
So there was no reason to criticize Klein’s plans at all — at least until they provided a scapegoat for the Liberals. And if Klein’s plans provide a scapegoat, so do all the other provinces.
This is not coincidence. This is what the left would call “systemic bias” — an anti-Alberta bigotry.
This hypocrisy needs to be targeted hard by the media. Instead, they’re lining up behind the Liberal canard, awaiting the Klein “bombshell” that Paul Martin is predicting.
Funny how he doesn’t apply the same standards to his own doctor.
hat tipDebbye
Martin: Clueless About The Military
A Canadian soldier lets loose on Paul Martin’s military bashing campaign ads.
“I voluntarily became a soldier knowing that it might one day mean me losing my life for Canada. Can Martin say that? When did he ever serve? He’s a fat cat billionaire without a clue about what it means to be a soldier. What he said was an insult to every man and woman in this country in uniform. All of them better Canadians than him. But what’s he care? Our military size has been so shrunk he figures the Liberals don’t need their votes to win.”
The soldier was reacting to a front-page newspaper story he read on the weekend in which Martin, during an interview, attacked Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s plans for the Canadian military. Martin, according to the article, saying Harper would impose a warlike “ready aye ready” philosophy that is out of vogue in today’s Canadian society.
This is the same Paul Martin currently flogging the canard that Stephen Harper wants to buy aircraft carriers. Considering our media is listening with ears perked for any gaffe, real or imagined, to pounce on the Conservatives, you’d think they’d be all over this big, fat lie like white on rice…
You’d think wrong, of course.
Strategic Voting Lottery
Why I’m voting Conservative and not NDP in Ottawa Centre�:
3. $1.75
My vote is a $1.75 donation to a political party – I don’t want it to go to the NDP.
The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” voters might keep that in mind.
No More
Prior to [9/11], Conservatives, however distasteful, were inchoate; they had tacitly acknowledged the intellectual leadership of the Liberal project. No more. Now Liberals were confronted with people who didn’t want to read the New York Times, were unimpressed by celebrity and didn’t want to go to Harvard. Many liberals didn’t recognize “their” familiar country any more. James Lileks described the intensity of the revulsion at the barbarians at the gates; not Osama Bin Laden, but rather someone else.
I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen — Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated.
[…]
Through the long summer of 1990s, the wounds festered as the infection deepened. It was masked by the ineffectual cologne of NGO projects, corrupt aid delivery, United Nations peacekeeping public relations projects, by selective media coverage and by the jangling of fund raising concerts at which a Secretary General appeared, like some secular pope, to give his blessing, until the boil burst over Manhattan on that bright autumn day. As the debris showered on New York it obscured the fact that a new post-post-colonial ideology was ready to push the Liberal edifice aside and take up the challenge of Islamic terrorism; underneath the War for Terror there was now a War for the West.
James Lilek’s friends must know that electing John Kerry to the White House will not restore the antebellum world. Things have gone too far for that. The Third World in general and the Islamic World in particular have burst their bounds; they can no longer be herded into the decrepit and threadbare tent of the United Nations; the Kyoto climate agreement; the International Criminal Court or any of Potemkin treaties woven by the European Union. Islamic fundamentalists are openly attacking Russia; besetting India; seizing British naval vessels; threatening to interdict the Straits of Malacca; menacing the House of Saud; renewing hostilities in Kosovo; bombing trains in Spain; raging through the Sudan and building nuclear enrichment plants. No Clintonian ceremony in the Rose Garden can replace the planets in their old orbits. All John Kerry can do if he must pay the price of restoring the Liberal dream is to withdraw, like Prince Prospero, into the artificial gaieties of last Bal Masque while the Red Death stalks without.
He Speaks The Language
Typically, the Iranian kidnapping of British servicemen and patrol boats is being given less coverage than the Olsen twin anorexia story.
Wretchard, at the Belmont Club has useful insights, as usual.
If there’s any doubt that the enemy full-court press has begun, the seizure of three RN smallcraft by Iran and the attack on 4 US Marines in Ramadi, probably by Ba’athist special forces, should erase any doubt. Fighting with the Ba’athists began again after the US killed two dozen foreign terrorists in Fallujah. It was only a matter of time before they struck back, as they do in Lebanon, where many of the Syrian-backed fighters train with Hezbollah. That was expected. But the seizure of the Royal Navy patrol vessels is surprising because it represents a public and unilateral escalation by Iran. As a political statement, it must rank with Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, which was calculatingly delivered against a weak Jimmy Carter. It is an indication of how politically emasculated the Mullahs think the Coalition is, that they should have attempted this at all. Shortly after the conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Mullahs were practically trembling on their thrones. But now they smile; the BBC has done its work well.
Though, speaking of underreported stories on Iran…. perhaps the little guy from Shawinigan can make use of his new Iranian oil connections can negotiate a quiet little deal. You know, dictator to dictator…..
crossposted at the Shotgun