American Values? American Justice? American Shame?

Look at the picture of this CHILD ... and then read this. "God Bless America"? I think not!

Christians and Obesity: Food for thought?

Couldn't let this observation pass without notice. If faith in Jesus makes you fat - maybe its time to get a new faith?

"Christians are fatter than other Americans. One of several studies revealing this, published by a Purdue University team in 2006, found that 30 percent of Baptists are obese, followed by 22 percent of Pentecostals and 17 percent of Catholics, compared to only 1 percent of Jews and 0.7 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. According to the Journal of the Southern Baptist Convention, health screenings were given at the SBC's 2005 annual meeting: Over 75 percent of its 1,472 participants were found to be significantly overweight."

A Booze Conundrum: Despair UK Style

"Responsible drinking in local pubs has been a cornerstone of British society for centuries. Binge drinkers who wreak havoc should be targeted when they harm the well being of others, and cost taxpayers billions, but a proportionate response is the best way forward."

That the (noble?) drinking traditions which form the "cornerstone" of this wastrel western society are even mentioned in a sentence that goes on to admit its alcoholism problems are costing its treasury billions and 'wreaking havoc' across the land only proves this society needs to give its young citizens... a reason to live!

Crazy Hair, Crazy Eyes: what Stephen Harper does to people.

[Pic shamelessly poached from Globe & Mail]

Okay, okay, Becker was not really talking about Harper. He was actually talking about the bad choices Tiger has made. But still, surely you can see how Stephen Harper's bad choices of late would cause crazy hair & crazy eyes? I know I awaken every morn' looking the same... crazy hair, crazy eyes, ... and I blame it all on Stephen Harper!

Harper - what a mess!

Holy hangover Batman! What was this guy doing all night? Was he at a Bong-a-Thon, a Beer-fest? I know red eyes: I've had red eyes. The eyes in this pic, Harper's eyes, are fried! No wonder Prentice had to give the speech; our leader was clearly too incapacitated.

Uganda needs a regime change!

Question: What does the US sponsored anti-gay evangelical movement have in common with the Government of Uganda?

Answer: They both need to go fuck themselves!

Here's why:

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Religious Extremism always = Inhumanity

No matter one's faith, no matter one's belief system, no matter one's worldview there is no excuse for THIS!

November 18, 2009 - Daily Mail UK

SOMALI WOMAN... STONED TO DEATH BY ISLAMIC MILITANTS AFTER ADMITTING AFFAIR WITH BOYFRIEND
A Somali woman of 20 has been stoned to death after admitting she had an affair, an Islamic militant judge said today.

The woman was a divorcee - but even though she was no longer married, her affair was seen as adultery in the eyes of Somalia's extremist interpretation of Sharia law.

Her punishment was therefore to be buried up to her waist in front of a crowd of 200 people and stoned to death.

Her unmarried boyfriend was given 100 lashes for the affair.

Sheikh Ibrahim Abdirahman, the judge for the group al-Shabab, says the woman was killed yesterday in front of a crowd of some 200 people near the town of Wajid.

Abdirahman says the 20-year-old woman had an affair with a 29-year-old unmarried man and gave birth to a stillborn child.

The militants that control much of southern Somalia and have links to al Qaeda have implemented an extremist reading of Islam's Sharia law.

The stoning death was at least the fourth for adultery in Somalia over the last year.

It was the second time a female has been killed.

As if Afghanistan doesn't have enough problems?

KABUL, Nov. 2 (Xinhua) -- As a precautionary measure to check the possible rapid outbreak of the A/H1N1 virus in the war-torn Afghanistan, the Education Ministry of the country has shut down schools for three weeks, local media reported Monday.

"All the public and private schools will be closed down for three weeks beginning from Monday November 2 and this is a precautionary measure to check the outbreak of A/H1N1 in the country," daily Rah-e-Nejat quoted a statement of the ministry as saying.

Adulation and Song: Something Stephen Harper will never merit!

Ignore the intro credits to video - - - just relax - - - and listen. Then ask yourself: when all is said, done, and destroyed under the leadership of Stephen Harper will his memory ever warrant this kind of treatment? I think not!

I admit... I am TOO STUPID to understand this story

Okay, we all have our intellectual shortcomings - and, indeed, my own may be greater than most(?). But how often are you, after reading something, left completely baffled as to its import? I would appreciate it if anyone from anywhere can enlighten me on the guts the story below. I simply (and simple I am), I simply do not get what is being said here. Is this a joke I am missing? Can somebody please enlighten me... PLEASE! I am unable to understand what this story actually means.

[n.b. I don't mind being told I am stupid - I just want to know what is I am being stupid about. I simply don't get this story - any and all help appreciated.]

Physicists claim 'Big Bang' machine sabotaged by time traveller

Two distinguished theoretical physicists claim that the Higgs Boson, or 'God particle', may have come from the future to sabotage the 'Big Bang' machine because it is against nature.

Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya say that the yet to be discovered Higgs Boson could have the ability to turn back time to stop its cover being blown, reports NewScientist. A New York Times essay describes the theory this way:

The hypothesized Higgs boson... might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

The pair say their theory explains why the U.S. Congress scrapped the funding necessary to bring a Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to the United States in 1993, and also why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had a meltdown in September, 2008. They claim in their updated paper released two weeks ago, that the SSC was so plagued with bad luck that the U.S. congress was forced to shut it down. Neilson calls it an "anti-miracle."

Just last week the project was tossed into the limelight when a suspected terrorist was arrested for alleged links to al-Qaeda and plotting to blow up an oil refinery. In the paper they argue that there should be a restriction on the running of the LHC, determined by the drawing of a card, which was proposed in their original paper, published in 2007. The duo had proposed to prove their theory by printing millions of cards with the words "carry on" written on them, and then slip in a couple of cards that say "shut the thing down". They conclude that if you randomly draw out a card that reads "shut the thing down", that Higgs is attempting to influence the future, and that the world's largest machine should be shut down.

In an email message to the New York Times, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and co-writer of the papers said, “It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck." Regarding the theory, Dr. Neilson said, "One could even almost say that we have a model for God," the New York Times essay quoted him as saying. In a letter to a friend, Einstein wrote, “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

CERN scientists hope to begin the process of colliding protons at an energy level of 450 billion electron volts in December and gradually turn up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece, reports the New York Times. After a short break over the holidays, scientists will then begin to look for "the god particle", unless something interferes with that plan.

Harper, Tirture, Truth, and Consequences?

Dear Canadian Prime Minister,

You Bastard! In light of your morally retarded and indefensible stance to try and silence witnesses who are willing to testify in the inquiry into allegations of Canada's complicity in the torture of Afghan prisoners - I believe you should take note of this breaking story by Salon's Glen Greenwald:

British High Court rejects U.S./British cover-up of torture evidence

Sir, as one pecker-head to another, I aver it is time you reconsidered your efforts to silence those who wish to speak the truth to power. It is time you stopped trying to bury the truth under the faux guise of 'national security' and your turning of a blind eye to the systemic torture of defenseless human beings. Maybe, just maybe, your government's concerted efforts to hide the truth needs to be reassessed? Because maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world is going to start seriously questioning what Canada stands for, who we are, and what kind of government we have. And, maybe, just maybe, the world's spotlight will not be forgiving .... for as Greewald highlights: the "Court's ruling 'a devastating judgment,' ... [saw that] the 'judges roundly dismissed the foreign secretary's claims that disclosing the evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK's vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.'"

This is what a usury and duplicitous FUCKER looks like!

August 8, 2oo9

"My dear people of the Diocese,

As Bishop of the Diocese, I have publicly apologized to those who have suffered such abuse, and to their families. I want all victims of abuse to know how terribly sorry we are, how wrong this abuse was, and how we are attempting to right those wrongs.

Money can never compensate fully, but we are trying ... most of all, compassionate. If it was your own son or daughter, your brother or sister, your mother or father who was abused, you would expect and demand nothing less. ....

Sexual abuse, indeed any abuse, is wrong. I want assure you that for many years now this Diocese has taken, and continues to take, proactive steps to avoid the repetition of any such abuse.

I would close by asking your cooperation and support, and above all your prayers, ... [so] we can move forward and keep our efforts fully focused on the central mission of Christ’s Church: to preach his Gospel to the people of our time. Now, as always, let us pray for one another.

Yours in the Lord,

Raymond J Lahey Bishop of Antigonish"

Oh, but it gets better! -------------------->

"Police seek ex-bishop facing porn charges: Prominent Nova Scotia Catholic stopped at Ottawa airport over images found on laptop"

By Neco Cockburn and Andrew Seymour, The Ottawa Citizen - September 30, 2009 11:31 PM

"Ottawa - Until last week, Raymond Lahey was the Bishop of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Now, he is wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest on child pornography charges.

Lahey, who only three months ago oversaw a historic apology and financial settlement for sexual abuses committed by priests in his diocese, was picked up at the Ottawa airport on Sept. 15 when border security agents found images on his laptop computer. Lahey was returning from a trip to Britain at the time.

The Ottawa Police Internet Child Exploitation unit laid charges of possession and importation of child pornography and the warrant was issued last Friday."

** In this photo this abuser, this deviant, this FUCKER is standing on the steps of the church where I was baptized; and like all the other ordained hypocrites who came before him, he is clinging to the pomp and circumstance so often used by the Catholic Church to mask his sickness. One can only pray(?) that Lahey gets what his fucked Church promises to others who deign to violate their supposed sacrosanct teachings - - jail time in Hell!

More proof that there is no substitution for a good education system!

The failing US education system needs help! Need evidence? Look no further than this, this, and this.

And, if you are still not sure - watch this.




As the ever adroit Ms. Maddow demonstrates in her segment - there is an entire generation out there (we Canadians included) who did not 'git their learnin' done'. Susceptible to all sorts of balderdash, they are irrevocably lost because they are quite simply... too dumb for words!

And in today's NO SHIT! file we have...

Jesus, why did it ever take them so long to admit the truth? Most of us have known this for decades!

As reported by the Canadian Press:

"Amid conflicting internal accounts, disappearing e-mails and disastrous publicity following the death of Robert Dziekanski, a top Mountie admitted at the Taser inquiry Tuesday that the RCMP shouldn’t investigate itself. ....

RCMP Supt. Wayne Rideout, who was the third Mountie to take the stand Tuesday, denied a key part of his superior officer’s evidence and then told commissioner Thomas Braidwood that, “We are not perceived by the public to be able to investigate ourselves.

“We’re not good at this, we shouldn’t be doing this,” said Rideout.

He said he thinks “it is time” for B.C. to consider an independent body to investigate the RCMP."

NO SHIT!

Slicing & Dicing the Man-Child that is Quentin Tarantino

Could not have said this better myself!

(Thanks Huffington Post.)

August 27, 2009- by Johann Hari

The Terrible Moral Emptiness of Quentin Tarantino Is Wrecking His Films

Quentin Tarantino sauntered onto celluloid in the mid-1990s as a Natural Born Thriller, the boy-man who was going to stab adrenaline straight into the heart of American cinema. The movies he wrote and directed were highly stylized ballet dances of torture, hemorrhaging internal organs, and rat-a-tat-tat pop culture monologues about Madonna's vagina, the Brady Bunch, and what they call a Big Mac in France. (It's Le Big Mac.) He showed extreme cruelty in extreme close-up and -- somehow -- made the audience laugh with him through the screams. But there were always dark questions underneath the guffaws and applause -- and his new film, Inglorious Basterds, sucks them to the surface.

The story of Tarantino's rise is a film geek's fantasy-screenplay. Born to a single mother in Los Angeles, he dropped out of school at sixteen, got a job at a video store, and marinated himself in the history of film. He absorbed everything from Lucio Fulci's Italian horror-fests to Preston Sturges' one-liners to John Woo's Hong Kong shoot-outs. And as he took them in, they churned inside his brain -- and spilled out, reassembled and regenerated, into a string of his own screenplays.

The first to be made was Reservoir Dogs in 1994. Like all his films, it took an old stock genre premise -- an armed robbery goes wrong, and in the aftermath the gang tries to figure out which of them is an undercover cop -- and made it twitch back to life. He scrambled the chronology, poured hot sauce onto the dialogue, and made the bleeding after a shooting slow and real. Trapped together in a bare warehouse, the characters slowly destroy themselves. In the most famous scene, Mr. Blonde -- played by Michael Madsen -- captures a cop and tortures him to get him to give up the identity of the fink. As he dances to the old cheese-hit "Stuck In The Middle With You," he hacks off the cop's ear, and douses him with petrol, threatening to burn him alive. It's entrancing and repulsive all at once -- and one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema.

At the time, many critics recoiled, saying this was sadism served up as style. The film was even banned on video in Britain for several years. But I was inclined to defend the film: I thought this violence was more real and repulsive than the glib gore-free massacres of an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. When these characters bleed, they really scream. When they feel pain, you really flinch. Here was a director showing violence as it really is.

But since then, Tarantino has enthusiastically proved his critics right, and his defenders wrong. The moral vision of Reservoir Dogs turns out to have been something well-meaning viewers projected onto it: Tarantino really does think violence is "like, cool." He has been systematically squandering his cinematic talent ever since -- in ways that reflect disturbingly on us, the viewers.

He has turned suffering into a merry joke. From Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill, he encourages the audience to chortle at torture and mutilation and anal rape. A typical punchline is -- whoops! -- a man being shot in the face. Where there should be a gag reflex, he gives us a gag. In Inglorious Basterds, a group of Jews undercover in Germany torture and scalp Nazis, and he gets the viewer to roar with laughter as people are carved up, alive and howling.

"Violence in the movies can be cool," he says. "It's just another color to work with. When Fred Astaire dances, it doesn't mean anything. Violence is the same. It doesn't mean anything. It's a color." He scorns anyone who tries to see simulated violence as having meaning. With a laugh, he says: "John Woo's violence has a very insightful view as to how the Hong Kong mind works because with 1997 approaching and blah blah blah. I don't think that's why he's doing it. He's doing it because he gets a kick out of it." Praising Stanley Kubrik's direction of A Clockwork Orange, he says, "He enjoyed the violence a little too much. I'm all for that."

In the slightly pretentious language of postmodernism, he is trying to separate the sign (movie violence) from the signified (real violence) -- leaving us floating in a sea of meaningless signs that refer to nothing but themselves and the sealed-off history of cinema.

What's wrong with this vision? Why does it make me so queasy? I don't believe works of art should be ennobling. I don't believe the heroes should be virtuous, or that bad characters should get their comeuppance. It can show deeply violent and deeply cruel people, and tell us that -- as in real life -- they can be charismatic and successful and never pay a price for their cruelty. But what it should never do is tell us that human suffering itself is trivial. It should never turn pain into a punch-line.

Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilizing instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts.) Any work of art that denies this sense -- that is based on subverting it -- will ultimately be sullying. No, I'm not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture -- and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino's later films -- leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.

You can see this in the responses of Tarantino himself. Not long after 9/11, he said: "It didn't affect me because there's, like, a Hong Kong action movie... called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper." It's a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren't moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you'd already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence -- who sees the world as made of celluloid -- can respond like this.

Tarantino's films aren't even sadistic. Sadists take human suffering seriously; that's why they enjoy it. No: Tarantino is morally empty, seeing a shoot-out as akin to dancing cheek-to-cheek. He sees violence as nothing. Compare his oeuvre to the work of a genuine cinematic sadist -- Alfred Hitchcock -- and you see the difference. Precisely because Hitchcock enjoyed inflicting pain, the pain is always authentic, and it is never emptied of its own inner horror.

And yet, and yet... I have to admit that part of me loves Tarantino's films. The scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance the twist in a 1950s-style diner, and later when he has to stab adrenaline into her heart after she ODs, are burned onto my brain, even though I have refused to watch the film for more than a decade. There are scenes in Inglorious Basterds of perfect tension. This man knows how to make a scene work more than almost any director working today. But I can't forget -- it sees the Holocaust as just another spaghetti Western, and one where the suggested solution is more torture, coming from the victims this time.

Can you love a film even while you are repulsed by its moral vision, or lack of it? This is a question that goes right back to the birth of cinema (and beyond). The three greatest silent films are all explicit hymns of praise for totalitarianism. The Birth of a Nation champions the Ku Klux Klan, Battleship Potemkin hymns for Bolshevism, and The Triumph of the Will is a paean to the Nazis. They are ravishing and repellent all at once -- and I defy anyone to watch them and not get swept up in their power, even as your frontal lobes yell: "Stop! Danger!"

But aesthetics and the rest of life are not entirely separable spheres -- and anybody who claims they are is simply posing. We don't leave our moral senses at the door when we go to the movies, or pick up a novel, or go to a gallery. We feel such tension in Tarantino's movies because the good and sane part of us doesn't want the violence to come -- while the debased part of us is cheering it on. That's a moral conflict underpinning the aesthetics; by denying it is there, Tarantino is willfully misunderstanding the effect of his films on their audiences.

The artists who have claimed their work was purely aesthetic were either frivolous, psychopathic, or lying. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov -- who I love -- claimed in the introduction to Bend Sinister that, "Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent." He was writing in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he and everybody he knew came within a few hours of dying in a nuclear war. How could he be "supremely indifferent" to that prospect? How can you revere aesthetics and not mind if every aesthetic object you love is incinerated? The answer is, of course, he wasn't indifferent. If you read his letters, you find he worried about these issues at great length. Similarly, I suspect Tarantino has deeper instincts beneath his life-is-a-grindhouse-flick pose. He knows what he is saying isn't -- can't -- be true.

The tragedy of Tarantino is that he could have been so much more than the Schlock and Awe merchant that he has devolved into. If he had stopped mistaking his DVD collection for a life, he -- to borrow a phrase from a real film, etched with real pain -- could've been a contender. When I remember the raw force of Reservoir Dogs, I still hope that he will. It's not too late. He could do it. How about it, Quentin? Step out into the big world beyond celluloid, and use your incredible talent to tell stories about it. As Mr. Blonde says, "Are you going to bark all day, little doggie -- or are you going to bite?"

Actor Steven Weber's Ode to Republicans

From the Huffington Post I found this little gem from American actor (and self-confessed "wise-ass") Steven Weber, I think its got Wings!

Posted: August 27, 2009 12:13 PM

It's a Love/Hate Thing

I love God.

But I hate government.

I love something that sounds like I wanted my father to be but is really much, much better and lives nowhere near me. I love something that has lots of rules for everyone but ones that I am allowed to break. I love something that requires no logic or facts but which I can profess unyielding faith in.

I hate something that I can touch and that can touch me. I hate something that I must immediately answer to if I screw up. I hate something that can turn against me if I turn against it. I hate that everyone can vote for things I might...hate.

I love money.

I hate people.

I love brute force.

I hate mercy.

I love being a Republican.

I hate you.

What Ed Said: The NDP & "What's in a Name?"

It's no secret that I am no fan of Manic Jack Layton. As a national political leader I find him wanting. He's too churlish, too petulant, and his contrived outrage wears a little thin at times. Everything he says seems to be calculated. To be geared to creating a media stunt. He's just too damn slick by half and, sadly, often running on empty.

Yet, as a voter I pine for a day when the NDP will abandon its absurd machinations, preening pretensions, and ill-advised ranting outrage at media ops and finally say what it means, what it believes, and what it stands for and let the chips fall where they may.

This is a good start:

“One of the things that's irked me about this silly talk about changing the name of the party is we're not a democratic party, we're a social democratic party, the core value of which is equality.”

Too bad Jack will probably shy away from this sound advice from his elder. But Ed Broadbent is right. Its time this party stopped pussyfooting around, looked in the mirror and called a spade a spade: The NDP must become a true Social Democratic Party that stands for equality - for if it not that- then it is doomed to remain a perpetual nothing.

WaPo's Editorial: Obama's Health Insurance Scheme:

It's nice to see that amid all the vitriol and vile partisanship currently surrounding the Obama Health-Care plan in the US that some are actually making an effort to reflect sanely on its import.

Washington Post - 08/09/09

An Unhealthy Debate: Rhetoric and distortion imperil the opportunity to fix the American health-care system.

WHEN IT comes to health-care reform, August is shaping up as the loudest month. Angry protesters, spurred by conservative groups, shout down Democratic lawmakers at meetings to discuss reform, with congressional Republicans cheering these "recess roastings." Congressional Democrats lash out at what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described as "villainous" health insurers making "immoral profits."

These are unfortunate, unnecessary and counterproductive developments. No one, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, should be happy with the current system, which spends too much to cover too few. Insurance is increasingly unaffordable. Even those with coverage are at risk of losing it, being denied needed care or being locked into jobs because of preexisting conditions. Rising health-care costs threaten the economy, while entitlement spending consumes a growing proportion of the federal budget.

The moment is ripe for a responsible fix, which is what makes the current eruption of smackdown politics all the more depressing. Among serious lawmakers of both parties, there is more agreement than during the Clinton health-care battle of 1993-94 about the need for an overhaul. The hard-edged opposition of interest groups that helped kill the Clinton plan has softened; sensing the inevitability of change, insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and hospitals have been trying to position themselves to cut the best deal possible rather than to kill reform outright.

If this moment is squandered, it will be a sad indictment of the political system -- and there will be plenty of blame to go around.

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists have fanned the flames of uninformed opposition with familiar warnings about government-run health care and socialized medicine and irresponsible new twists, such as the suggestion that the proposals under discussion would strong-arm seniors into euthanasia.

Democrats, with polls showing increasing nervousness about health care, have resorted to vilifying the health-insurance industry. No doubt, insurers engage in rational but disturbing practices under the current system: They angle to attract the healthiest customers, refuse coverage to the riskiest and seek to avoid paying claims. But the insurance industry of 2009 is in a far different place than it was 16 years ago; it has agreed to accept all applicants and generally charge the same amount, in exchange for a requirement that all individuals obtain insurance.

So it is disappointing, to say the least, to see Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats revert to round-up-the-usual-suspects demagoguery. President Obama has been more restrained but hardly more accurate; in a news conference last month, he inaccurately complained about insurers making "record profits, right now." In fact, among U.S. industries generally and other parts of the health sector in particular, insurers are not particularly profitable. The latest Fortune 500 ranking of most profitable industries has pharmaceuticals third, medical products and equipment fourth, and health insurers down at No. 35. Drugmakers reported a 19.3 percent profit margin; insurers, 2.2 percent.

More fundamentally, the Obama administration is peddling health reform as an everybody-wins scenario in which no one, except perhaps the wealthiest of the wealthy, has to sacrifice anything. We recognize that selling dessert is easier than selling spinach, especially when the other side is falsely claiming that your food is poisonous. But if health reform passes and starts bringing down costs, it is going to pinch some patients who have become accustomed to getting every test or procedure they want. At that point, Mr. Obama might wish he had done a little more to prepare people for the changes.

An old twisted white guy whose time has past - Pat Buchanan

If there is one comfort we can take from America's so-called Free Speech laws, it is that culturally bigoted dinosaurs like Patrick J. Buchanan are allowed to speak their minds so the bitter cranial rot that defines them becomes clear to all.

Watch video below to see how Buchanan get owned by Ms. Rachel Maddow. Hardly a fair fight. Maddow, confident and forthright, gives crazy "dated" Buchanan all the rope he needs to hang himself. Railing against the future, Buchanan epitomizes the worst of those biased white-Americans who came of age in the white bread world of the 1950s.

One suspects that, tonight, Mr. Buchanan is having a nightmares that revolve around being bested by one of the best minds on MSM who (undoubtedly to Buchanan's utter horror) also happens to be a lesbian. One can only imagine how this haggard bitter old man is sleeping... probably poorly. And that is how it should be.

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Harper and Iggy - - Adults?

So Globe & Mail columnist Lawrence Martin is calling the Harper-Iggy pact an adult decision? In essence, all they have done is strike a mutually convenient political pact for both sides. One that, thankfully, spares we Canucks from a long hot summer of having our lawns littered with political placards of dubious aesthetic character, hooky BBQ gatherings, and sweaty disingenuous talk.

Good!

Good? Yes, good! Why? Because neither of the principles in this deal has graced us with a clear idea of where they want to lead this country. Neither man has bothered to advance a vision that distinguishes between where we are, where we need to be, and how we are going to get there. Neither man is being truthful over the absolute fiscal imperative that will see the federal government necessarily raise our taxes to offset our burgeoning national deficit. Neither man has come to grips with the fact that band-aid solutions tied to ill-conceived business friendly stimulus projects will not see us through. We need something more, something lasting. We need one of them to speak to people first, business second, and partisanship last.

Small differences and ephemeral core values do not a platform make. I, for one, am happy to wait until the fall to consider my options. Hopefully, by then, one of these gentlemen will be able to speak honestly, and with clarity, about why they deserve to be my Prime-Minister. As it stands, I have a lot of reason why Harper should not; but, as yet, I have few as to why Iggy should.

Both Iggy and Harper have some serious genuflecting and hard homework to do over the summer. Both have to learn how to speak honestly!

Do your work gentlemen, you may listen to Canadians this summer, but don't intrude too much - - spare us any further petty machinations, obtuse obfuscations, and asinine accusations borne of suspect intellectual and ideological rationalizations. All that can wait until the fall. In September, come back as leaders replete with vision - or, do not come back at all!


p.s. Manic Jack, you best do the same. Nobody wants to hear your outrage all summer; just bring us your ideas in the fall.