The liar Kinsella is a flaming shitheel (possibly from Hell) but he is one hardcore political analyst. He runs the ten reasons why Dion is not catmeat. A few good points:
1. After many months of crappy headlines and no shortage of bad luck, the polls reveal that Dion’s Liberals and Harper’s Tories are still… tied, mostly. It’s a fair question to ask: if all of Dion’s critics are right, then why is Dion still competitive? Because voters - particularly female voters - still have a lot of a reluctance about penciling an “X” beside the Conservative candidates’ name. In politics, it’s always good to be underestimated by your opponent. The polls say [the Tory] team is underestimating Dion. Big time.
There are lots of reasons but the fact is that Harper has not been able to open up even a tiny gap.
3. Dion is no dummy. He knows the Tories want to run a campaign about “leadership” - they’ve been telegraphing that for months. So Dion need only do what Chrétien did in similar circumstances in 1993: step back a bit and emphasize plan and team. And he’s got a Hell of team: Hall-Finlay, Rae, Dryden, Ignatieff, Kennedy, and so many others. It is a powerful front bench, one with a lot of name recognition. Can the Tories say the same thing?
Even if Harper was a half decent Leader, which he is only relative to Dion and Layton, the team theme can work. Quick, name a federal cabinet minister who could take over if PMSH was hit by a bus.
4. The Tories have a message deficit. They can’t run an “outsider” campaign - they’re the incumbents. They can’t run a “scandal” campaign, thanks to Mr. Mulroney. So they will run a campaign about “leadership” - but leadership is an exceedingly woolly concept. Voters like meat and potatoes platforms (which is why Harper won in 2006, by the way). If I were Dion, I’d do a campaign on government services - making ‘em better, and not just eliminating them, the way Tories always do. Mix in some environment, some fiscal federalism, and voilà!
Yup. The problem with running a message free operation is that, well, there is no message. Dion can campaign on whatever he likes, Harper seems to be committed to campaigning on thin air.
Say what you like about PMSH, he is certainly in no danger of being called a “conservative”. He is in no danger of being called a “socon” or a libertarian. So what is he, exactly? What has he delivered? His Finance Minister has been bright enough not to derail the Martinite fiscal policy which makes Canada the envy of the OECD. Other than that, name a policy or a position which the CPC has adopted which could not have been adopted by the Grits.
9.The media remain distinctly less-than-friendly with the Harper folks. They may not love Stéphane Dion, but – during the campaign – you can expect to see them cuddling with him more than once, if only to get back at Harper’s PMO. It’ll be ugly, as love triangles always are. But Dion will benefit.
It is one thing to put the media in their place, it is quite another to run a press operation which antagonizes the media without running the other side, the end run, which marginalizes them. Harper showed willing to put the boots to the dullards in the Parliamentary Press Gallery; but he failed entirely to make the moves - on the net and in the non-MSM - which would have marginalized them. Bad advice and a very limited capacity to think outside the box.
The liar Kinsella expends some pixels on Jim Flaherty’s fight with McGuinty. It is probably important because the Harper folks think they might win a few more Ontario seats and they probably won’t as a result of this. However, the smartest thing Harper can do is to write off TO and enviorns and look to Quebec and the rest of Canada for his majority. Sadly he seems entirely incapable of ignoring “vote-rich” Ontario.
Dion, despite being possibly the worst leader the Liberals have ever foisted themselves with, could quite easily maintain the status quo and, with a couple of breaks, shift a few seats and form a government. This will not be a Dion win, it will be a Harper and CPC loss.
Yitzhak Danon, a student, told Israel’s Channel 2 television that an Arab man wearing torn jeans fired for several minutes at students in the library, using an AK-47 assault rifle. globe and mail
I suspect the murderous bastard was following your boy Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress’s logic about any Israeli citizen over the age of 18 being legit targets. Though there is no word of the terrorist IDing his victims.
So, Warren, let’s get to cases. There are anti-Semites in Canada and they are very real and very dangerous. They operate openly on college campuses “Israel Apartheid Week”, from mosques and on the net. Many, but not all, are Islamists. And here is the deal, Warren, they expressly want to destroy the State of Israel and its supporters. And you don’t have to dig very deep to discover that Israel and some, but by no means all, of its supporters are Jews.
So rather than wasting your time slagging people for supporting free speech why don’t you start digging where the real anti-Semites are burrowed. Start with Dr. Mohamed Elmasry and the CIC (and its now irrelevant CHRC law student sock puppets.) Get in and dig Warren.
Looks like the Alberta Tories may have actually increased their majority. Ex-theologian and Kyoto dweeb supporter is sitting in a bar with Calgary Grit and BCer in Toronto crying in their beers.
Apparently the “Liberal brand” is just not selling.
Somehow I am not surprised.
Update the First: “The extent of the Conservative victory stunned the Alberta Liberals, led by Kevin Taft, who are on the way to losing more than half of their 16 legislative seats, led by a collapse in their traditional base of support in Edmonton.” cbc
Here’s a little hint…Albertans, alone apparently among Canadians, actually recognize the real cost of the Kyoto nonsense. Taft wanted to, at least, look at Kyotoish thinking. That was more than enough to lose seats.
The Liberals rely on a book which purports to have the inside scoop on a CPC attempt to bribe Chuck Cadman for his vote to bring down the Martin government. The Liberal Party website reports the “bribery” as fact and adds that Harper knew. Harper sues. The widow Cadman now says that so far as she knew Harper didn’t.
My own thought is that this whole thing was a fairly well planned Liberal smear which was calculated to hit just in time for the early Spring election that Dion and the Liberals were too wimpy to force. The thing about a smear during an election is that the exact truth does not matter; what you are looking for is a two week sensation your pals in the Liberal media can run with. But without an election a smear can turn into a disaster as it is investigated. And the CPC is very smart indeed suing the Liberal Party. That party is very close to broke whereas the Tories are awash in cash. A couple of hundred dollars on a libel defence plus the very real possibility of serious damages will have the few remaining adults in the Party demanding some serious accountability.
Fresh from his triumphant outing of Boys Room Nazis, the lair Kinsella saddles up and rides to the rescue in Edmonton:
In the brave new Canada favoured by the National Post, PEN Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists and Steyn’s Crusaders, no one really gives a sweet damn.
I don’t think the National Post, PEN Canada or anyone else on the free speech side has suggested that vandalism - racist or otherwise - should be protected speech.
Back in the glory days of Kinsella’s washroom photography I wrote:
Hanging s. 13 on a bit of nasty graffiti shows just how intellectually bankrupt its defenders are. They want to justify its existence as a prophylactic against the one sort of speech it almost certainly cannot control. To give up free expression to better suppress graffiti is a bargain most of us will not make…*
Signs are defaced and ripped and knocked over in political campaigns. Some pretty nasty things are written on signs. S.13 and its provincial counterparts will do nothing whatsoever to to prevent that. Enforcement of the vandalism laws might.
I interviewed Keith Martin again today. He said support within the Liberal caucus for his motion is “huge.”
Stephane Dion has not talked to him about it, or asked him to withdraw it. Only a couple of Liberal members raised concerns, but no one has asked him to remove the motion.
“There is enormous support within caucus and across party lines,” he said.
Stay tuned. deborah gyapong
The issue with Kate McMillan’s “prank” is not that it was using the Holocaust as a joke. The issue was that her joke made Holocaust survivors, who deserve nothing but our deepest respect, as the punch line. That is simply inexcusable. jason cherniak
The punch line, Jason, is that Kinsella’s faux Nazi hunting, brute ignorance and willingness to use what he believed was a Holocaust survivor to boost his bogus arguments has been exposed.
I am hoping that Kinsella learns something from his humiliation. For example, he might learn that calling people “bigots” or “crypto-Nazis” without a shred of proof can turn out badly. He might learn that using fake names, sock puppets, agent provocateurs in sting operations is not a sign of bravery but rather of craven cowardice. And, with luck, Kinsella might even clue into the fact that the real enemy of the Jews and the West are not a bunch of neo-Nazi losers in Mum’s basement - rather it is militant Islam.
I suspect Kinsella is going to go all ballistic about Kate exploiting the Holocaust. Here’s a hint Kinsella…one letter, all numbers, usually 5 digits, Germans cross their sevens, sadly, pictures of real survivor’s tattoos are easily located using Google Image.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.