TORONTO - Turns out the public rage directed toward Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino was paid for by the union whose jobs are being cut.How condescending and disrespectful can you get? Its not his fault he was a rude self important pig, its the unions fault for 'duping' the apparently child-like and naive veterans.
The veterans' rage toward Fantino was put on display for the whole country to see. What wasn't told was their trip to Ottawa was paid for by the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
The whole show was orchestrated.
"The veterans were used by the union," Fantino said Thursday in his first interview since Tuesday's incident. "They were duped.
The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the publication permanently. According to The Week, a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review Online (NRO).
Scientist Michael Mann is suing the Review over statements made by Canadian right-wing polemicist and occasional radio stand-in for Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn. Steyn was writing on the topic of climate change when he accused Mann of falsifying data and perpetuating intellectual fraud through his research.
Steyn went on to quote paid anti-climate science operative Rand Simberg — an employee of the right-wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute — who compared Mann to Penn State’s convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.Though the National Review likes to style itself as the genteel intellectual voice of American conservatism they are in fact a hard right operation that supported segregation, Apartheid South Africa and some of the most retrograde and reactionary ideas in American politics. More recently on the website side of their operation they suggested that President Obama's mother must have been a communist because only a communist white woman could have married a black man.
"It's important to know the officer has never acknowledged really any wrongdoing in shoving Ms. Davidsen and has continually held to the unbelievable position that she was grabbing for his gun," Bernstein said Tuesday.If he doesn't think he did anything wrong that's basically a 100% guarantee he will do it again or something even worse if he thinks he can get away with it.
"The video shows her hands nowhere near his gun," he said of the June 2010 incident. "It really is unbelievable he can continue holding to this position, but that's what he's doing."
Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church Fayetteville, North Carolina is the latest pro-Amendment One pastor to demonstrate just how virulently anti-gay the campaign is. In his sermon this past Sunday, he gave the parents in his congregation “special dispensation” to use violence against their children if they violate gender norms. For example, if you see your four-year-old son “dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist.” Pastor Harris says boys should have their girlish behavior “squashed like a cockroach” and similarly advises forcing girls to conform to female gender normsFor those who argue biblical justification for their bigotry against gays: If you saw your brother working on the Sabbath would you bash his head in with a rock? Do you believe in the death penalty for eating shell fish? If our country defeats another country in a war, do you believe that gives us a right to slaughter their children and take their women as sex slaves? No? Then you are already picking and choosing which parts of the bible you will follow and which you won't, the fact that you embrace the passages that justify bigotry against gays says more about you than it does about a rule book written for nomadic goatherders thousands of years ago.
OTTAWA - When the CBC's Mary Walsh shows up unannounced with a camera crew at Toronto mayor Rob Ford's house, the state broadcaster considers it comedy.
When Sun News Network's Ezra Levant pops up in the lobby of the CBC's Toronto headquarters with a camera operator, it's a matter for police.
Access to information requests have revealed then-director of operations and contingency planning at the CBC, Julie McCambley, authorized a call to police on Aug. 19 to force Levant to leave the 13-floor tower.
"Mrs. McCambley approved the ejection of the group with police involvement if they continued to be disruptive," reads an internal security report obtained by QMI Agency.
Levant showed up demanding a meeting with Hubert Lacroix, Ottawa-based president and CEO, or Jeff Keay, head of media relations.
The CBC denied the fiery talk show host any meeting and told him to stop recording his encounter with security.
Note that the source of this story is Canoe, ie Quebecor, ie Sun Media."This is a public building and I can record here if I like," responded Levant.
Emmily Lucas died seven years ago Tuesday.Factor in the bizarre and almost incomprehensible decision to proceed with prosecution against Stacy Bonds despite the clear video evidence of the abuse she had been subjected to by the police and we are left with a portrait of provincial prosecutor's offices seemingly being run without adult supervision.
Her battered body was taken off life support after 10 comatose days at the Hospital for Sick Children. She was 2 years old.
On Monday, the jury was dismissed in the second mistrial in the case against Erika Mendieta, Emmily’s mother, who was charged with second-degree murder in the toddler’s beating death.
A prosecutor from the first trial — assistant Crown attorney Paul Alexander — distracted the jury and intimidated the defendant by making faces while sitting in the gallery as a spectator.
“I’ve been involved in the criminal justice system for 30 years, and I can’t say that I’ve heard of a similar circumstance,” said Attorney General Chris Bentley. “It’s just very, very unusual.”
Last week, the jury wrote a note to Justice Nola Garton stating they wanted a man removed from the gallery. “We find him very distracting, and he is making strange faces all the time. We feel very uncomfortable with him.”
They did not know at the time who Alexander is.
The defence counsel brought forth a motion for a mistrial, and Mendieta testified — in the jury’s absence —that Alexander was rolling his eyes, shifting awkwardly, and making faces during Crown Attorney Allison MacPherson’s cross-examination.
“His look intimidated me a lot,” Mendieta said. “It made me feel very uncomfortable.”
Mendieta said it made her nervous, and changed the way she answered questions. She said she didn’t know she had the ability to challenge his presence in court until the jury wrote the note.
Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul supporter behind the white sneaker that notoriously stomped on a MoveOn activist's head in Kentucky, sought to play down the importance of the incident Tuesday, and went so far as to ask the victim for an apology.
"I don't think it's that big of a deal," Profitt told WKYT. "I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you."
By most accounts, Stephen Harper and his government were humiliated Tuesday at the United Nations, losing a coveted Security Council seat to Portugal. The defeat is still the buzz of official Ottawa and political spin doctors have been working overtime.
Cabinet ministers and even the Prime Minister's own communications director, Dimitri Soudas, are blaming Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for torpedoing the deal. This, after he publicly declared Canada did not deserve the seat because of the Harper government's foreign policy.
The Liberals, meanwhile, are blaming Mr. Harper and his international policies for the loss. Mr. Ignatieff has accused the Conservatives of ignoring the United Nations.
Ottawa's eviction from a Mideast military base has exposed a rift within the Harper cabinet over how far Canada should go to satisfy its Arab hosts: an internal debate in which Stephen Harper cut Defence Minister Peter MacKay out of negotiations.
Canada is set to vacate Camp Mirage, a once-secret military installation, by Nov. 5 after failing to reach an agreement with the United Arab Emirates over what would amount to compensation for nine years of accommodation near Dubai.
The UAE has been seeking additional lucrative landing rights for two state-backed air carriers at Canadian airports, and Mr. MacKay was one of several ministers, including Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan, who had favoured doing more to help the Arab ally, a senior Conservative MP said.
The Prime Minister ultimately cut these ministers out of negotiations, the official said, favouring the forceful arguments against big concessions advanced earlier this year by former transport minister John Baird.
The loss of the base has left some cabinet members frustrated and angry at how Mr. Harper handled it.
"[It's] all gone because of a fit of pique and a hard [core] position that is truculent and unreasonable against Canada's short- and long-term interests," the MP said.
'Out of touch, arrogant and dictatorial' are by now well established descriptions of this, the most secretive and PMO dictated government in Canadian history. We knew that Harper's machivellian scheming always has a tendancy to slam up against his own bitter hatred of dissent and opposition, his bully boy need to 'stick it' it to anybody who challenges him. 
'I'm a victim of an onslaught for daring to take on the bad guys! Pity me! Pitttttyyyyyyyy meeeeee!'
Billionaire George Soros is threatening to sue the Sun Media chain over a column penned by a conservative gadfly expected to play a key role in the media giant’s Sun TV venture.
Soros spokesman Michael Vachon said the chair of Soros Fund Management was deeply upset by a early September Sun Media column by right-wing activist and author Ezra Levant.
In the piece, which has since been removed from Sun chain news websites, Mr. Levant offered his opinion of how Mr. Soros, a Hungarian Jew born in 1930, survived the Nazis.
Mr. Vachon said Sun Media was notified of Mr. Soros’s reaction earlier this week.
“It made false, defamatory and offensive statements and as a result Mr. Soros has notified the relevant parties of his intent to sue,” he said.
“What is of concern in the article are the false assertions that Mr. Levant makes regarding George Soros’s conduct as a 13-year-old child in Nazi-occupied Hungary.”
