How stupid do they think we are?

Is anyone the least bit surprised that the Harper claim of "700 new food inspectors" is turning out to be a complete lie and the Ritz claim that XL Foods has a "full contingent" of CFIA staff is, at best, grossly misleading?

"There is a full contingent of inspectors on site, and there was before this incident," said Ritz, listing 40 inspectors and six veterinarians.
"That is a 20 per cent increase over the last couple of years. So we are ramping it up."
[Agriculture Union president]Kingston puts another spin on those same numbers.
The XL plant may have a "full contingent" now, but only after repeated union complaints to fill empty positions at the facility."That plant[XL Foods] was grossly — to the point of illegally — understaffed," Kingston claimed.
"All they've done is fill vacant positions. That's not quite the same as actually increasing the complement."
As for the overall 700 new inspectors everyone from the prime minister down has been citing in defence of the government's handling of the E. coli outbreak, Kingston says the number is meaningless.
"It's totally misleading to the Canadian public," he said. "It's not even worth discussing those numbers because they're simply not relevant to what's happened at XL beef."
"None of those 700 people went into slaughter plants — period."

Beef recall gibberish

This has got to be the most ridiculous "explanation" ever promoted to explain why thousands of beef products are being recalled. Does anyone actually understand what was going on in XL Foods or at CFIA?

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency conceded on Monday it’s a mistake not to require companies to analyze test results from beef trimmings to to allow inspectors to “connect the dots to get the big picture” about a packing plant’s operations.
...“The requirements for analysis of the data — in other words, what they had to do to look at it at the end of the day, weren’t as rigorous,” Arsenault said. “Well, I wouldn’t use that word. They were fairly rigorous because they had to do all that testing, but in terms of connecting the dots to look for these pictures, they didn’t have a requirement to do that.
“We didn’t think that was something that would have been useful. We now know that it is, so that’s why we’re going to change it.”

Huh?  Sounds like they were testing meat here and there and filing the results without looking at them.  How long have these guys been doing this anyway?  Here's the bottom line, the actual story:

U.S. inspectors at the border in Montana first detected E. coli in beef trimmings used to make hamburger during random tests on Sept. 3. The CFIA found traces of E. coli the next day, but it wasn’t until 13 days later that a recall was issued — by the company, voluntarily.

And while Gerry Ritz continues to flail around the Commons pointing his fingers here, there and everywhere, tomorrow I'll be throwing out all the beef in my freezer.  Because the stores I shop at -- Coop, Safeway, Sobeys, Superstore -- now seem to be recalling all the beef products they sold me throughout September.
Those are the dots I'm connecting, boys.

Hooray! Justin is in

Trudeau enters Liberal leadership race: 'I love this great country' | CTV News


And I'm not surprised his first stop is going to be Calgary, the lair of the beast. The national media will be paying the most attention to him and looking for every slight and insult they can find -- gutsy play, typical of the young Trudeau.
And why did he pick Oct. 2 to announce? It was Michel's birthday.

Great line of the day

Talking about the "sex-selective" abortion motion which Parliament is now being asked to vote on, Dawg says:

the abortion “debate” that Harper insists will not be re-opened continues to shamble through the House of Commons like one of the walking dead.

The fetus fetishests are trying their best to get MPs to give them a majority vote on SOMETHING, so they can use it as a wedge to pry the entire abortion issue open again.  Look what has happened in the States, where the fetishists used so-called "late term" abortions to demonize women and create a wedge against Roe V Wade.
It all comes down to is this:  what part of "woman's right to chose" do these people not understand? Whether a priest or a husband or a whole Parliament agrees with their decision, or not, its still the woman's decision to make.

Here's to the new TV season!

Thumbs up!
Great acting, great action
"

Interesting characters, potentially lots of fun


Thumbs down -
What a disappointment - overwrought, trite


Just dumb


Ehhh, maybe -- worth a couple more episodes anyway

Yes, but he was right about Powerpoint

So the Politico piece about how Ryan is going rogue and using PowerPoint now was just a joke though perhaps one that cut a little too close to the bone.
But what Simon said about PowerPoint was actually sort of hilarious:

A word about PowerPoint. PowerPoint was released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets. After PETA successfully argued in court that PowerPoint actually was more cruel than iron mallets, the program was adopted by corporations for slide show presentations.
Conducting a PowerPoint presentation is a lot like smoking a cigar. Only the person doing it likes it. The people around him want to hit him with a chair.
PowerPoint is usually restricted to conference rooms where the doors are locked from the outside. It is, therefore, considered unsuited for large rallies, where people have a means of escape and where the purpose is to energize rather than daze.
Ryan’s PowerPoint slides were officially labeled: “Our Unsustainable Debt (U.S. Debt Held by Public as a Share of Economy),” “Your Share of the Debt,” “Who Funds Our Reckless Spending?” and “How the Government Spends Your Money.”. . .
Sources close to the Ryan campaign tell me his two new PowerPoint presentations will be: “How a Bill Becomes Law” and “Canada: Friendly Giant to the North.”

Or maybe he could do the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.

So we're just afraid to discuss abortion?

Conservative pro-lifer Laurie Hawn says glibly 'Nobody's anti-life and nobody's anti-choice', a stunningly stupid statement because the 91 MPs voting in favour of Woodward's disingenuous motion to "study" when life begins are not pro-choice at all -- they want some parliamentary committee to decide whether a women can get an abortion or not.
Hawn continues "Canadians ought to be able to have rational, respectful discussions on difficult issues . . . we've got lots of difficult issues that we're afraid to discuss in Canada and I think that's unfortunate."
What a great idea. Too bad us pro-choicers are such cowards, we're so afraid to discuss it.
Here's the level that such a discussion would rapidly reach, Laurie old chum -- the priest who authored this piece wants "to expose evil and to call on public servants to know the difference between serving the public and killing the public." And it would be pretty difficult to discuss anything with someone like this commenter who believes that pro-choicers are history's greatest monsters:

How can anyone with even a shred of decency support this brutal and evil act of barbarism. We will all stand before The Lord Jesus one day, and will have to explain our actions. We must somehow stop this unthinkable atrocity from continuing to butcher children. God have mercy on us all.

Yes, a rational, respectful discussion? Not gonna happen ...

How to play football

Goofy - How To Play Football (High Quality) - YouTube: ""

If the replacement refs could just learn the game, they might avoid more calls like this:

The honoured dead

We just spent the summer watching all those "War of 1812" ads and now we find out that the Harper Cons have spent five years and three-quarters of a million dollars to try to claw back pensions from disabled veterans.
I guess the people who fight Canada's wars are only honoured by the Harper Cons if they're dead and gone.

Taxes "owed" vs. taxes "paid"

What's the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid?
Everyone is talking about how Romney's info dump yesterday showed that he did pay taxes between 1990 and 2009.
But PricewaterhouseCoopers said in the first bullet point that "each year during the period there were federal and state income taxes owed", and in the second bullet point "The lowest of any annual 'effective federal personal income tax rate' ... was 13.44 per cent".
Everybody is now reporting that Romney paid at least 13.44 per cent in federal income taxes annually between 1990 to 2009.
No, I don't think this is what those figures mean at all.
He "owed" income taxes every year -- of course, everyone who earns income owes taxes. Does this mean THAT HE ACTUALLY PAID ANY TAXES? How much you owe depends on income, but how much you pay depends on the deductions which can be found to offset the tax owing. And his annual tax rate was 13.44 per cent. Again, does this mean THAT HE ACTUALLY PAID THIS RATE? Again, it depends on the deductions which can be found to offset the rate.
The last carefully phrased bullet point tells the tale --it uses the terminology of "federal income taxes owed" and "state income taxes reported".
Harry Reid, I think you're going to be proved right after all.
Crossposted at Daily Kos.

Calling them out

Sixth Estate calls out Harper on his excuse for pension "reform" and the Globe and Mail for falling for it.
First of all, its not much of a reform:

The “reforms” are, in a word, horseshit. They’ll make MPs wait a few extra years before collecting, and they’ll apparently up the contribution rates. And — best yet — they won’t apply except to new MPsafter the next election. In short, the current crop are all safe. That’s Conservative “reform” for you.

Zing!
Second, the spin is already being spun:

And then I turn to the Globe & Mail for its coverage:

This would present their political rivals with a dilemma: If the NDP and Liberals oppose the budget – because of other measures in it – they will leave themselves open to charges they didn’t support MP pension reforms.

Oh, come on, Steven High. You’re getting paid for this, aren’t you? You’ve got to do better than that.
I won’t bother explaining to the national correspondent of a major newspaper why voting against an omnibus budget is a piss-poor way to judge whether you support any one of its many measures. I will, however, wonder precisely why said correspondent thinks it is his job to anticipate and even make some advance suggestions for the bullshit spin that some 30-year-old Conservative propagandist in the party campaign office might one day try to put on the budget.

Pow!

Be nice to the people you meet on the way up

Because you'll meet them again on the way down, as Mitt Romney has now discovered -- he shouldn't have said all those mean things about Jimmy Carter:

James Carter IV has come forward as the online sleuth who tracked down undercover videotape of Mitt Romney's damning comments four months ago to a US$50,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser in Florida....
For Carter, his mission was personal — the 35-year-old online researcher, currently looking for work, said he'd grown sick and tired of Romney slagging his 87-year-old grandfather, a Nobel Peace prize winner who has long worked towards peace in the Middle East.
..."I don't like criticism of my family," the younger Carter told NBC News on Tuesday after it emerged he'd persuaded the fundraiser attendee who secretly taped Romney to hand the video over to Mother Jones magazine.
"It gets under my skin. I'm proud of my role in being able to track it down. My motivation is to help Democrats get elected."
In an interview with The Associated Press, he added: "I've gotten a lot of Twitter messages from people supporting me and saying that it's poetic justice that it was a Carter that uncovered this, considering the way that the Romney campaign has been talking about my grandfather. I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly."

Great line of the day

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos sums up the Occupy impact::

There may no longer be occupiers sleeping out in parks every night, there may never have been a unified set of goals for the movement, there may be no Occupy candidates for Congress a la the tea party, but a year later there's no doubt that Occupy reinvigorated the economic left, gave even non-political people a language to question the great American wealth divide, and made protest exciting and creative again.

Occupy Wall Street is back, baby

It's already September 17 on Wall Street and the crowds are building in Zuccotti Park. Here's a photo taken around midnight.


Follow #s17 on twitter for the latest news.

Empty chair Obama betrays America!

Romney said this week that Obama sympathized with the embassy rioters and everybody else said "Whaaa?"
What we didn't understand was that John Bolton and Dan Senor and the rest of the Republican campaign retreads and also-rans who are supposedly giving Romney such expert advice on foreign policy were talking about the invisible Obama, the one who sat in Eastwood's empty chair and swore at him, the secret Mooslem Kenyan usurper Obama that no one can see except nutbar Republicans.
But I imagine we'll see lots more dumb attacks on the invisible Obama before this election is over.