Today's News: Some scary stuff about Russia & NATO & the US military command & Alligator Auschwitz & Canadian mining. With a laugh at Hoekstra

I know there's weeks to go until Halloween, but I saw some "scary stuff" in the news: 

First, Russia seems to want to provoke NATO now:

⚡️Europe, NATO ready to shoot down Russian jets, Bloomberg reports. European diplomats told Russian officials this week that NATO is prepared to respond in force to further airspace violations, including by shooting down Russian planes, Bloomberg reported Sept. 25.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) September 25, 2025 at 2:36 PM

President Trump told reporters that he was fine with NATO aircraft shooting down Russian aircraft should they enter NATO territory again. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister responded to that with “Roger that.”

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— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 6:03 PM

Today's News: Carney says "there's a crack in everything, but that's where the light gets in"

(Lawren Harris Mountain Sketch)

Every time I hear Prime Minister Carney talk, I come away feeling smarter. Here is he talking to reporters at the UN: 

 

And after seeing Trump's ridiculous UN appearance, it is always reassuring that Canada has a grown-up in charge:

If Carney went to the United Nations to show the world that Canada and the U.S. have become sharply different countries, he can probably declare it mission accomplished. There's plenty of vivid examples of the two countries on diverging paths. #Opinion

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— Toronto Star (@thestar.com) September 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM

Today's News: Jimmy Kimmel socks it to Trump

In case your ABC station didn't carry it, here is Jimmy Kimmel's monologue after his show returned on Tuesday night:

   

Trump pushed Kimmel into going full resistance lib for the biggest audience he will ever have. Another masterclass from the president.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 23, 2025 at 9:54 PM

Tonight, the American people - in defense of free speech - returned a political satirist to the airwaves after a burgeoning fascist regime tried to silence him. It’s an historic night. I won’t forget it.

— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com) September 23, 2025 at 11:15 PM

Nothing like watching free speech give censorship the middle finger.

— Adam Parkhomenko (@adamparkhomenko.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 11:31 PM

Today's News: Winners and losers

Today, just a random selection of winners and losers:

Winner: Mark Carney

Cole Bennet reports: 

Yesterday, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia formally recognized the State of Palestine. Today six European countries, France, Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, and Monaco joined in endorsing Palestinian statehood at the UN.
Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the United Nations today, delivering a speech identical to his news release the day prior. But inside the UN chamber, the reaction was far from routine: thunderous applause erupted when Carney declared that “Canada officially recognizes the State of Palestine.”

Sunday Funday: a Disney parody, some Funny Laugh-til-you-cry posts and some Funny Ha-ha posts, plus TrumpWatch and Animal Crackers

First, an hilarious clip from Netherlands talk show host Lubach, about Disney's new stories:

   

You know, sometimes I'm not sure whether something I want to post for my Sunday Funday is actually funny or not -- some are closer to "funny laugh-til-you-cry" than "funny ha-ha".  

Anyway, here are some posts from both categories this week.

Funny Laugh-til-you-cry
Tonight this happened:

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Today's News: the latest in "Elbows Up!" plus Ryan Broderick on revenge

This guy Hoosktra! This fucking guy!

MAGA ambassador Pete Hoosktra is telling Canada that he doesn't like the term "elbows up." He says it's anti-American. Sorry, Pete, your president might be able to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but you don't get to tell Canadians how to talk. Elbows up, Mother-stucker.

- Charlie Angus / The Resistance

Read on Substack

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Talk Show Hosts v. Trump: clips from Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert plus Brian Tyler Cohen

As Stephen Colbert observed tonight, rising autocracy is now targeting America's most vulnerable - talk show hosts. 

So on their shows tonight, all of the remaining talk shows were talking about Disney's gutless Jimmy Kimmel cancellation and they didn't hold back.

First, let's just remember what Kimmel actually said:

Not a big fan of Jimmy Kimmel, but if you think his show should be canceled for this, you’re a hack and a total fraud who should never pretend to care about free speech

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— Republicans Against Trumpism (@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 6:17 PM

Personally, I think what made Trump explode wasn't what Kimmel said about Tyler Robinson, but what Kimmel said about Trump's own callousness "This is how a four year old mourns a goldfish". 

Here are the talk show clips from tonight: 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight:
Part one

Part two

Today's News: Some words of wisdom about Carney, plus some laments for the United States

I'm seeing so many good posts and comments over the last few days.  So tonight I thought I would just share a random selection. 

First up, I'm hearing about how Carney is doing now that Parliament is back.

Evan Scrimshaw / Scrimshaw Unscripted

Biggest Threats For Carney As Parliament Returns
On Freeland And Other Things
...The government’s got a very difficult balancing act to pull off this session - a combination of handling the American relationship and building a more resilient, and Trump-proof, economy, walking back the Trudeau era mistakes on criminal justice and immigration, rebuilding relationships and trust with the Jewish community and fighting against antisemitism while respecting free speech, and doing all in the backdrop of a UN General Assembly that is going to be almost entirely about Gaza and recognition of a Palestinian state. That would be a nearly-impossible task for a government running at full efficiency, let alone one full of rookies who still don’t know their briefs yet.
If the government is going to get its head out of its ass, it’s going to need to use this Freeland Cabinet resignation as an opportunity to reset not one face, but their entire attitude. The Take It On Faith approach that has marked this government so far has to end, and it has to be replaced by a government that views Canadians as adults who can understand a concept that’s more than 4 words long. At a time when the Conservatives are continuing to lean into Verb The Noun and other 3 word slogans - I guess this week’s is “Just Another Liberal” - Carney needs to respond by elevating the debate. You make the Conservatives’ sloganeering look like shit not by fighting fire with fire, but by showing them to be shallow morons who don’t understand the issues they talk about.
...Carney is objectively one of the smartest people to serve as PM of this country and frankly of most countries. He is also a political neophyte who, while running a good campaign in 2025, needs to remember that how you do things can matter as much, if not more, than outcomes. In the business world, skipping to the end of a process is a good thing. When you’re immediately sending a strike action to arbitration, you’re fucking the dog royally. There’s a political instinct that technocrats often miss, and that will be crucial.
If Carney wants to be a successful PM he will need to listen to the kinds of voices that Freeland and her old boss marginalized - progressive, but by no means sycophantically Liberal, voices who want the government to go well but also want good governance. Whether Carney can bring himself to listen to that dissent will decide the course of the next half decade. Let’s fucking hope he does.

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Should we call this one "The War Between The Hates"?

 Dali - Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Some comments tonight on the possibility of a new American Civil War -- which, if it happens, I think we should call "The War Between The Hates" because the MAGA Right seems bound and determined to hate the Progressive Left with the fire of a thousand suns -- damn those "radical leftists" who want to stop school shootings and give everyone health care!

The ppl who keep calling for Civil War & saying we need more guns & pushing the racist Great Replacement Theory & who mocked the murder of George Floyd & the attack on Paul Pelosi & who are totally ok w/beating Capitol cops for a lie... ...want you to tone down your rhetoric.

- John Fugelsang

Read on Substack

THIS JUST IN: The people who are rounding up migrants and throwing them into concentration camps are deeply insulted by the liberals who call them Nazis

- Dreamweasel

Read on Substack

Today's News: Parliament opens without fireworks, plus a regional roundup of interesting news, and more about Charlie Kirk

First up, Parliament resumed sitting, and journalist Dale Smith thought Monday's Carney-Poilievre Show was a little less vile than the Trudeau-Poilievre Show had been. But give it time!

...Overall, it was not an acrimonious day, but one where the civility and friendliness was perhaps slightly more cutting than it appeared on the surface. Carney was gracious enough in welcoming Poilievre back to the Chamber, and Poilievre repaid it by saying that Carney is just like Trudeau. It was a day where the message tracks were laid out well in advance, and each side knew it. The Conservatives have been telegraphing for months that they will be trying to pin food price inflation on Carney, because he (stupidly) said that his effectiveness would be measured by the cost of groceries, and so they hammered that question over and over and over today, so that they could get clips of it. And how did the Liberals respond? Not by talking about the causes of food price inflation (mostly climate change), but rather by saying that housing was the biggest cost item in a household and they were bringing down those costs (and patting themselves on the back for it. They could have driven the point home with the Conservatives that climate change is the primary driver of those prices, and that’s why there is an economic cost to climate change, but they didn’t do that (maybe because that would force them to actually come up with a real climate plan after Carney has been dismantling what is in place). Suffice to say, it was weak as a response, and they just walked into the plainly obvious trap that was laid for them, so good luck with that.
Otherwise, it was just a bunch more slogans and tag-lines (“He’s just another Liberal prime minister,” “broken promises,” etc) because everything was about getting clips. As usual. Only one Liberal minister actually bothered to call bullshit on the question he was asked, which was Sean Fraser on the bail laws....

Conservatives demand that the government should have brought down food prices. How, exactly? Price controls? #ZapYoureFrozen #QP

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 1:08 PM

Lantsman railing that Canadians are getting “fleeced” at the grocery store as if the problem wasn’t climate change affecting food-producing regions. #QP

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 12:39 PM

Sunday Funday: They're back! plus some Fear and loathing, Amazing stuff, Funny stuff, TrumpWatch and Animal Crackers

They're back!

Looking forward to the resumption of Parliament on Monday, are we? 

Well, yes -- but NOT to the toxic rhetoric that ruined Trudeau's prime ministership last year. 

Now that Poilievre and the CPC are trending downward in the polls, I expect we will see an "extinction burst" of hateful and insulting speeches - Poilievre is a one-trick pony in this regard, he dials everything up to 11 because that's all he knows how to do. Maybe after that, sometime after Carney survives his budget vote, Poilievre may actually lower the volume.

Polling Canada Federal Model Update: 🔴 LPC: 187 (+18) 🔵 CPC: 125 (-19) ⚜️ BQ: 21 (-1) 🟠 NDP: 9 (+2) 🟢 GPC: 1 (-) (Seat Changes With 2025 Federal Election) - September 13, 2025 - Full model article here: open.substack.com/pub/canadian...

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— Polling Canada (@canadianpolling.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 8:46 AM

And Canada's right wing no longer gets to think that "everyone supports us" - not after the Christie Pitts debacle on Saturday:

Headline “anti-immigrant protest chased out of Christie pits” 👏🏼 BRAVO TORONTO! No space for hate here 🇨🇦 ❤️ ❤️🍁🇨🇦TEAM CANADA FOREVER🇨🇦🍁❤️ ❤️🍁🇨🇦VIVE LE CANADA 🇨🇦🍁❤️

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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Massive anti hate crowd in the pits. Small Canada first group is on the run.

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— Shawn Micallef (@shawnmicallef.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 11:06 AM

The At Issue panel discusses Carney's projects and prospects. And beats the election speculation drums.

The CBC At Issue panel is finally back -- Rosemary Barton, Chantal Hebert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj -- talking tonight about whether Carney can get his projects underway, how the Liberal minority can find another party in Parliament to vote for the budget, and why Poilievre is taking aim at immigration.

And of course, as Real Canadian Journalists are wont to do, they just couldn't resist the lure of manufacturing some baseless election speculation out of whole cloth. 

Because of course the NDP will support the Liberal budget in the House this month, they have to because they are leaderless and broke. 

But isn't it fun to dream....

 

The five projects being referred to the new Major Projects Office include LNG Canada Phase 2, which would expand the liquefied natural gas export facility at Kitimat, B.C. Also on the list are modular reactors at Ontario’s existing Darlington Nuclear Generating Station; an expansion by the Port of Montreal in Contrecoeur, Que.; Saskatchewan’s Foran McIlvenna Bay copper mine project; and the Red Chris Copper and Gold Mine expansion in B.C.

"Taken together, these projects can deliver transformational benefits to Canadians, driving growth and jobs and incomes for decades," says PM Mark Carney re: list of first 5 major projects, which he claims will generate more than $60 billion for Canada's economy. #cdnpoli

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— CPAC TV (@cpac.ca) September 11, 2025 at 12:06 PM

Today's News: Demonizing "the Left", making a budget funny, and failing upward

Demonizing "the Left"

I am almost afraid to post this picture tonight, considering how "The Left" is going to be demonized now for the awful Charlie Kirk shooting. 

Almost. 

But it is going to be dreadful.

Charlie Kirk will be MAGA's Horst Wessel

— Cathie from Canada 🇨🇦 ✍🏻😷🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 (@CathieCanada) September 11, 2025

The hubris of Charlie Kirk is that he spent a significant portion of his career justifying the cruelty of these shootings as if he was somehow immune from them or could merely place the blame on other groups of people he deemed undesirable or uniquely violent

This affects us all pic.twitter.com/vncZECZFOx

— gregor samsung 𖢥 (@slimjosa) September 10, 2025

Bullets don't care if you are a Republican or Democrat. Reality is over 400,000,000 guns and too much hate. Political violence is happening to both parties. We need leaders to step up. Truly sorry for Charlie Kirk and his family. He was wrong. It is not worth it.

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— Fred Guttenberg (@fredguttenberg.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 5:48 PM

Roundup of good writing: Lorne Warwick, Steve M, Christopher Armitage, Charlie Angus, Colin Horgan, and a Epstein-gate update

There doesn't seem to be a "big story" tonight so I'm going to go through my "save for later" file to highlight some of the good opinion pieces I have seen lately, mainly about Trump's dictatorship.

The common theme is: "OMG, what the hell is wrong with us?"

Lorne Warwick / Politics and its Discontents

No More 'Good Guys'?
When we look at the world today, it is undeniable that the most powerful countries are led by evil men. Russia's Putin, Amerika's Trump and China's Xi JinPing readily come to mind, as does Benjamin Netanyahu leading the nuclear State of Israel. And I think it would be to declare the obvious that none of the aforementioned care about their people, except as means to certain ends.
While we expect authoritarian rulers to see their people as fodder, I have never really had a sense until now of a specific war being waged against the people of the U.S. by its government. To be sure, almost all American governments have cruelly abused their poor, their disenfranchised, their minorities. And of course that demographic has always provided the bulk of fodder in all of Amerika's post-WW11 military misadventures. However, one could almost have believed the abuse was rooted in the American disdain for the downtrodden (see the American Dream) as well as its historically racist nature.
However, to me it now appears that a wider battle is being waged by Amerika against its general population, a kind of social eugenics, in which a wide swath of a credulous population will be gradually eliminated, While it might seem a conspiratorial thought, there is evidence to support my odd thesis.
Consider, for example the changes at the National Institutes of Health, led by the unhinged Bobby Kennedy Jr. Unqualified ethically, morally, intellectually or temperamentally, Kennedy, with the tacit permission of Trump, is doing his damndest to undermine the health of Americans....
...Who benefits if there is a substantial die-off of Americans? It is the real movers and shakers of society, the powerful elite, who neither respect nor need "the masses" and really don't care for the 'burden' of taxation to take care of them. With large numbers ultimately eliminated, that burden will be much reduced.
You might quite legitimately ask, "But what if substantial numbers of MAGATS perish? Who will vote for Trump or his successor if not the credulous? To that I can only say such a question is predicated on the belief that meaningful elections will continue in Amerika. That is an assumption I am not, at this point, prepared to grant you.
Who benefits if there is a substantial die-off of Americans? It is the real movers and shakers of society, the powerful elite, who neither respect nor need "the masses" and really don't care for the 'burden' of taxation to take care of them. With large numbers ultimately eliminated, that burden will be much reduced. You might quite legitimately ask, "But what if substantial numbers of MAGATS perish? Who will vote for Trump or his successor if not the credulous? To that I can only say such a question is predicated on the belief that meaningful elections will continue in Amerika. That is an assumption I am not, at this point, prepared to grant you. 

Today's News: The Epstein documents will trigger America's gag reflex

Does anyone remember now that it was the release of Nixon's phone tapes transcripts on August 5, 1973 - with all the "(expletive deleted)" stuff - that finally turned America against Nixon? 

He resigned three days later. 

Well, tonight America is reading some Epstein documents released by the House Oversight Committee including the "birthday book" that celebrated Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003.

And they are just as appalling as the Nixon tapes were.
Trump's contribution to Epstein's birthday book fits right in with the smarmy, sleazy, leering frat boy tone of the cards in the book, page after page of pictures and drawings of pretty young girls with ugly old men.

Trump can’t hide from this and the Epstein files.

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— migas7.bsky.social (@migas7.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 12:06 AM

Page after page of photos and drawing of young girls, constant references to breasts and boobies and bums and massages and parties and sex:

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Being a child sex predator was such a part of Epstein’s life and personality that everyone he had even a casual friendship with felt compelled to mention it in a birthday card. Like writing “heh steal any burgers lately?” in a birthday card to The Hamburglar.

— Kristen (@kris10.bsky.social) September 8, 2025 at 11:30 PM