Oh, say...

This:


reminded me of this:

Tweet roundup

Some priceless tweets about Wright and Duffy and all that:

They're beautiful, those Chiefs of Staff, but lifespan wise it's like getting a great dane.
— Tabatha Southey (@TabathaSouthey) May 19, 2013

Fewer tears at the end, but the kids can't ride it like a pony, so emotionally on the Chief of Staff vs Great Dane choice, it's a draw.
— Tabatha Southey (@TabathaSouthey) May 19, 2013

@tabathasouthey We’ve had our Great Dane for nine years. Not as spry as she once was, but she hardly ever gives money to senators anymore.
— Daniel MacEachern (@DanMacEachern) May 19, 2013

You know, it makes me wonder...if Wright was so upright and honest and honourable and all that, like the tweets are saying, then why would it occur to him to give Duffy a personal cheque to make an audit go away? And if so, then who suggested it to him?

A Canadian Brownie

After reading Dawg's excellent piece about the man who was appointed by the Harper Cons as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, all I can say is, "Heck of a job, Danny!"

Leadership in borrowing

Was this the leadership that the Harper Cons were praising Mike Duffy for -- having a well-connected friend willing to give him $90,000?
With no strings attached, of course.
On that basis, I'm ready to show that kind of leadership myself! I can send Mr. Wright the address where he can mail my cheque.

Pathetic nonsense

The Harper Cons are trying to spin their loss in Labrador as negative for Trudeau. How pathetic is that?
Mia Rabson writes:

The Conservatives who are trying to spin that this is no big deal because well, majority governments don't often win byelections and well, the Liberals didn't win it by as much as one poll said they would a few weeks ago so really Trudeau messed things up and this is a sign he is in over his head, is just nonsense and kind of smacks of sore losership.

The question about Mike Duffy

There are two possible ways of looking at Senator Duffy's behaviour in the Senate regarding $90,000 in housing allowances.
Here's the Harper Con way:

The Harper government is praising Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy for showing "leadership" in the Senate expenses scandal.

That's because he paid the money back, I guess.  But here's the Liberal way of looking at it:

But Liberals say the Conservatives are protecting one of their own, tipping off Duffy about ineligible per diems and whitewashing a report on his invalid housing allowance claims.

Gee, which way is the right way to look at this? How can we ever possibly tell?
Well, when in doubt, I suppose we should look at what people actually do rather than what they say.
Yes, Duffy did pay back a whack of undeserved money.
But he kept signing those supposedly "confusing" primary residence declarations month after month, every month for three years.
And then he avoided answering questions about it by ducking through a hotel kitchen after a speech.
Some leader...

May the fourth be with you

We even drove past the comic book store today and saw a bunch of people in costume, but we still forgot that today was Star Wars Day because May the Fourth and all that.
Checking You-Tube, there seem to be an extraordinarily large number of Star Wars videos using Legos, I don't know why.



And don't forget Patton Owsalt's rant extraordinare, too.

How much is $3.1 billion?

It's hard to comprehend a figure like $3.1 billion.
Here's some examples of what us ordinary Canadian mortals could buy if we had this amount of money to spend:

62 million bottles of really good wine
Two hundred thousand cars
Eight thousand pretty nice houses
Pretty good salaries for four thousand people a year for ten years, plus the daycare costs for their children

Or, to put it in another way that we're all thinking about this time of year

Every penny of what me and more than 25,000 other Canadians paid in federal income taxes last year.

So that's how much the Harper Cons lost track of when they were frittering away those "anti-terrorism" dollars on airports and police and databases ... and gazebos, don't forget the gazebos ...

It was always Paul for me

We got tickets today for Paul McCartney in Regina in August -- as teenagers growing up in Saskatchewan, we never thought we would get to see him in person.


We're just a wee bit older now, of course, but I can hardly wait.

Pro-bullying legislation

The Cons have passed a law that allows police to bully anyone they want to:

The law will allow police to detain people pre-emptively and hold them for as long as three days without charges and would give authorities power to compel testimony through so-called investigative hearings at which people are brought before judges to answer questions.

Under Paul Martin, the police never used these powers. Under Vic Toews and the Harper Cons, does anybody think they'll be so careful and circumspect? The record so far isn't very reassuring.

Well, thank goodness that's over

Was it just me or did the United States completely lose their mind over the last week?

Shortly after the blasts occurred, the tabloid [New York Post] falsely claimed that 12 people had been killed and a Saudi national was in custody; and then, to add insult to injury, they ran a front page photo which libelously depicted a high school track star as a federally-sought suspect.
The Post then continued to stand by their reporting long after it had been proven wrong.
Meanwhile, on CNN, Wolf Blitzer and the "best political team on television" once again found themselves unable to keep up with a breaking news story that doesn't involve a poop ship—and were subsequently commended by their boss for it.
And lest you think the shit show was confined to old media, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
On popular websites like Reddit and 4Chan, amateur detectives conducted a crowdsourced investigation which wrongly named a missing college student as the wanted culprit; but that didn't stop them from congratulating themselves on their sleuthing

And by the way, the Czech Republic and Chechnya are not the same place...

Very strange

Strange days indeed

Priorities

Sigh.
The United States can be so mixed up at times -- I wouldn't be surprised if they start passing laws to limit the sale of pressure cookers, even though they can't seem to pass any laws about limiting guns.

A message from Iraq to Boston

These 2 Boys Have A Message For Boston, And It's Kind Of Beautiful:



It made me wonder if anyone in North America had ever thought of sending a message to all of the cities and towns and neighbourhoods in Iraq which have been devastated by IEDs.

Trudeaumania part deux

Canada's interminable Liberal leadership race is finally just about over.
And Justin is going to win:

The outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion: Justin Trudeau, eldest son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and the party's undisputed rock star, is widely expected to win handily....Most party insiders — including realists in the five rival leadership camps — are privately predicting a comfortable first ballot win, with Trudeau taking anywhere from 60 to 80 per cent of the votes cast.

You mean all those so-called "news stories" I have been reading over the last several weeks about how there was going to be such a low vote turnout and how Joyce Murray or Martha Hall Findlay or somebody was going to come firing up from behind and sweep the race turned out to be based on nothing but horse race journaminalism, thin air and Tory spite?
Quel suprise!