Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't

I expect Trudeau realizes that all of the people who are criticizing him for moving too fast on the Syrian refugee promise would turn on a dime and howl in betrayal if he announced he was slowing down.
Damn the torpedos, sir -- full speed ahead!

Great line of the day

The Mound of Sound writes about The Moral War and our new wars of the 21st Century:

All I've garnered out of those studies has led me to formulate a precautionary rule. Don't get into wars that you're not willing to win and, even then, not without knowing how you will win, how long that will take, at what cost, how you will know if you've won and if you've lost, and how you will get out. Those preconditions all sound so reasonable and yet, if applied to our military adventures in the Muslim world since the turn of this century, we would have stayed home.
Forget this bullshit about moral wars for it's the most heinous, most barbaric side that sets that morality bar in these new wars. There's no moral consolation prize that doesn't leave mountains of suffering and dead in its wake.

Emphasis mine.
I hope Trudeau withstands the twin pressures he is under now to continue showing off in the middle east with meaningless Canadian air strikes, while simultaneously running away at home by not admitting as many Syrian refugees as he promised.

Forty years ago the Edmund Fitzgerald was wrecked

Doctor Grumpy in the House: November 10, 1975:

Great line of the day

The Mound of Sound writes about today's story on how the Harper Cons "politicized" the civil service:

The mandarins are running for cover. They failed to stand up to Harper. They chose not to defend the public service over which they presided. They allowed themselves to be intimidated into colluding with a corrupt government. They abandoned their responsibility to the nation and the Canadian people and they now, unforgivably and outrageously, depict themselves as victims.

Yeah -- after ten years of "the Harper government" taking over what used to be The Government of Canada, after years of outrageous firings and resignations, after everyone was so sick and tired of Harper that the country threw him out, NOW the deputy ministers decide to complain about politics affecting the civil service? Give me a break.

I gotta get my life some writers

Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip, October 29, 2015 on GoComics.com:

How shocking!

I'm shocked SHOCKED that Justin Trudeau hasn't yet developed a plan for dealing with the Senate -- several ex-Liberal Senators are apparently feeling a little miffed that, in the nine days since he was elected, Justin hasn't figured out yet exactly what their role will be in his government.

With only a week before Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is to be sworn in, independent Liberal senators say they are being kept in the dark and have no idea how the new government plans to get its legislation through the Senate.
“It’s a great big black hole,” said Senator Jim Munson.

Poor babies, their delicate fee-fees are hurt.
So of course they follow the grand Liberal tradition of running to the media to complain.
Though I would imagine that Trudeau has had just a few other little things on his mind during the last week, like developing a cabinet, building the PMO, moving, making a thousand appointments... oh, and crossing his fingers that his mother doesn't say anything stupid.

So what's our excuse?

Montreal Simon has a great column on The Battle to Liberate Canada and the Betrayal of the MSM where he notes a determined effort on the part of Canadian media to "move on" and just forget all about the Harper years:

This would also be my message to Andrew Coyne, and all the other casual collaborators in the MSM, who would have us move on and forget the Decade of Darkness as if it never happened.
We will NEVER stop writing about that nightmare, until the day the guilty are held accountable for their crimes against Canada.
Until the day we can determine whether Stephen Harper used government departments and the security services as political weapons against his own people.
And of course, until the day we can be sure that his foul legacy is finally buried...

The United States has seen a determined effort to wipe everyone's memory about what happened during the eight Bush years, to the point that the US media was shocked, SHOCKED, this week when Donald Trump reminded everyone that Bush was actually in charge of the American government when America experienced 9/11.
But at least America had 9/11 as an excuse for going mad.
What's Canada's excuse?
Our FPTP electoral system?  That a few people were mad at the Wheat Board, the CTRC, and the long-form census?
And what is the excuse for years and years of craven, cowardly behaviour on the part of dozens and dozens of elected MPs -- all those Con MPs who spent years forelock-tugging, knuckling under, kowtowing to everything that the Hitler Youth in Harper's office told them to do?
I don't know, but I agree with Simon that we'd better keep on talking about what happened.
So it won't ever happen again.

Great line of the day

Michael Harris at iPolitics reminds us of why Harper really lost:

Harper’s downfall, and that of the party he built, had nothing to do with Harper Derangement Syndrome. Nor was it about the machinations of war rooms, whore rooms, evil gurus or a burnt-out lieutenant screaming at her own deckhands as the ship went down — assuming Tory MP Ron Liepert has it right.

It comes down to this: you can’t have a dictatorial liar running a democracy for the benefit of his corporate buddies and expect a country like Canada to tolerate it forever. Canadians ultimately drop the gloves when they come face to face with tyrants — and kick the stuffing out of him. [Emphasis mine]

That is what really happened here. The country really did embrace the “better angels of our nature”, to borrow the phrase Trudeau borrowed from Lincoln. It was more disgusted by than afraid of Stephen Harper.
It didn’t appreciate his lies about what he was doing and why, his degradation of Canadian foreign policy for domestic political gain, his toxic manipulation of information that belonged to everyone, and his vicious mistreatment of anyone who dared to tell him that the sun didn’t orbit around … him.

How ironic is it that his kingdom of secrets, that bubble once hermetically sealed, is now leaking like an old rubber boot. Party brass like Jenni Byrne and Ray Novak at each other’s throats. Ex-PMO lawyer Benjamin Perrin saying the PM had lost the moral authority to govern. Tory Blue Bill Thorsell saying throw the rascals out. And now even pipsqueak MPs daring to unload on the autocrats at CPC headquarters who made their lives a living hell as long as Harper rode the back of the tiger — before he ended up inside.

What scares me? These people still won 99 seats. For some of them, it should have been 99 years.

And so it begins

That didn't take long, did it
By describing one of Canada's most prominent and well-respected first nations leaders, Phil Fontaine, as just a pipeline consultant, the Montreal Gazette is already trying to fit the Trudeau government into a "corrupt Liberal" frame.
Fontaine, by the way, is the grey-haired guy applauding, at the bottom left of the photo that the Montreal Gazette ran with this smear story.
ALSO very suspicious, isn't it, that Fontaine is standing next to a woman with a red cell phone -- get it RED????  Maybe she's actually a Russkie commie sympathizer so how some SHE was at Trudeau's victory celebration?  Huh? Huh?
And whose baby is that in the back, wearing headphones?  Is Trudeau subverting our youth already with his neighbourhood dope houses????
And how come Sophie is wearing those silver earrings?  This must mean she is against Canadian gold miners....

Justin Bat-Flip

from the Halifax Chronicle Herald
Listening to the pundits tonight, I found out that they all knew two months ago that Stephen Harper was going to lose the election. Yep, Harper was doomed from the start and everybody on our TV news shows absolutely knew it all along
Too bad they didn't get around to telling the rest of us.
In fact, I noticed they didn't mention it until well after the Ontario votes were counted -- and it was absolutely, positively guaranteed that Harper and all the Hitler youth in the PMO were completely gone, finished, kaput.
I still don't think they really believe it, though.  Right at the end of the CBC coverage, one of the bright young things on the national set -- it might have been Rosemary Barton but I'm not sure -- anyway, she started babbling pathetically about how she had never covered politics except when Harper was PM and how great it was going to be now, because the press gallery reporters would actually know about when cabinet meetings were going on and they might actually being able to ask a government minister a question and all like that.
Of course, the older and supposedly wiser pundits on the set quickly started shouting her down about how naive she was and how she shouldn't get her hopes up that the Liberals would change anything -- which is the kind of cynicism that Trudeau has promised to end.

Newspaper endorsements are just another corporate press release

At the end of an election campaign, a newspaper's endorsement used to mean something. It used to be taken as considered and authoritative judgement by the newspaper's editorial office about that particular election campaign and that particular set of candidates.
Now? Its just another corporate press release.
The Globe and Mail started it off last week in a ridiculous editorial that endorsed the Harper Cons, without Harper, and it was widely mocked on twitter.
Then all of the Postmedia brand newspapers in Canada ran so-called "editorials" written by their corporate office supporting the Harper Cons, and the Edmonton Journal editor described it as the "right" of the Postmedia owners to do this.
Now the National Post has lost their editorial board chair, Andrew Coyne over their refusal to let Coyne endorse the party he wanted to endorse. Their corporate endorsement, of course, went to the Harper Cons.

There's no pearl-clutching in baseball

#THIS. Joey Bat Flip.
https://t.co/CO59JyFCsa

— MLB (@MLB) October 15, 2015

Wasn't that a party?
And its a side-note on the whole thing, really, but illustrative of how Americans think they own baseball.
First, I was amused during yesterday's stunning Blue Jays win by the pearl-clutching of the announcers over how the Toronto fans erupted during the disputed run ruling. The announcers seemed amazed at how angry the Toronto fans were -- why, they acted just like the fans would in any American baseball park and they threw stuff on the field! They so scary, must suspend game!
And then it was hilarious how the Rangers and the American sports media got so busy tut-tutting about Bautista flipping his bat after he saved the day, the game, the downtown, and the season -- how dare he act just like any other player would in any other American baseball park!
CBS Sports writes:

Dyson comes off as whiny little baby in all of this. I understand the Rangers just suffered a crushing defeat and they're looking to lash out, but of all the things to get mad about, they're mad about the bat flip?
Know what's disrespectful? Telling a player how to act after a career-defining moment. Dyson has no business telling Bautista he "needs to calm down," especially considering Dyson instigated not one, but two benches clearing incidents that inning.

Great line of the day

One of the commenters on a Huffington Post about the Ford brothers showing up at a Harper Con rally:

The Ford brothers were there to advise Harper on drugs and whorehouses. Who better?

Don't make me laugh

Once again following along with the Harper Con agenda, the Globe and Mail is "reporting" that Trudeau's spending promises are "under more scrutiny":

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is coming under mounting pressure to spell out just how his campaign spending promises would add up.

Yeah, sure.
The Liberals announced their spending and budget plans weeks ago; if the media hasn't scrutinized them until now (too busy focusing the election on Muslims like Harper wanted them to) then this isn't Justin's fault.
The only pressure that Justin is coming under right now is from the panicked Harper Cons, who are throwing money away trying to halt Liberal momentum.

Predictions

Sorry for the lack of posts -- we have been away.

But I notice that news outlets are now reporting the Liberals are within reach of forming the next government. So maybe for a change my mid-September prediction that Trudeau was beginning to pull away from the crowd will turn out to be correct.
Today's Nanos tracking poll confirms the Liberal's upward trend:

The current Nanos nightly tracking shows the Liberals at 35.1% support nationally followed by the Conservatives at 29.0%, the NDP at 25.0%, and the Greens at 5.1%.

The Harper Cons have done themselves no favours in this election with their niquab-baiting. When even Conrad Black turns against you (even considering how he must feel about the Liberals) you're doing it wrong:

This government has scraped the barrel in symbolic pandering: building new prisons and hiring new hosts of correctional officers as the crime rate declines, dispensing with elemental safeguards to due process in Bill C-51, claiming the right to expel and revoke the citizenship of dual citizens found guilty of terrorist offences, all in the name of enhanced public security, and now conducting the concluding phase of a general election campaign on an issue of no relevance involving a trivial number of people.

And Tabatha Southey's brilliant bear-in-a-bar analogy raises the question we now have to ask about the Harper Cons -- who is next?