Don't Let the Facts Ruin a Good Fundraising Drive

Back to politics:

Buckdog reports that Doug Finley is beseeching the Conservative Party faithful to fight the evil CBC. This all goes back to the tempest in the teapot over a CBC reporter feeding questions to a Liberal MP about Mulroney. This is amusing because a while ago Paul Wells pointed out that this sort of thing happens all the time in Ottawa. A sample:

"I don't know whether I ever did it with Reform, Alliance or NDP MPs when the Liberals were in government, but I know it got done and if I had a story I needed advancing, I'd have done it in a second. 'Hey, you might want to ask about....'"

Anyone who has anything other than a totally, totally naive view of politics must surely assume that such things happen all the time. Of course feigned naivety is a great political tool. Stephen Taylor and Doug Finley are shocked! Shocked that the media and the opposition sometimes share information.

George Jonas is a total idiot or The Killer Nic-fit

I'm not just using this as title because I often find myself at odds with the former Mr. Barbara Amiel, no, today I'm convinced the man is actually one of the stupidest columnists writing in Canada.

Some backstory: Paul Wells was touting his former employer's new website and, in all fairness to their web design people, it does look better. Nonetheless, this lured me into reading the Opinion section where I stumbled across George Jonas' theorizing about the RCMP killing of Robert Dziekanski.

According to Jonas, the real way that the state killed Mr. Dziekanski was by forbidding him to smoke in the airport! No really he says:

"Before the armed agents of the state ran wild, though, the unlucky Pole ran a bit wild himself. Why did Mr. Dziekanski start throwing things around at the Vancouver airport, which eventually conjured up the Taser-toting agents of the omnipotent state?

The probable answer is nicotine starvation. Before Big Nanny deprived Mr. Dziekanski of his life, she deprived him of cigarettes. There's a chance the enthusiastic East European visitor to our shores, gung-ho enough to keep a Canadian flag at home, who talked about looking forward to seeing grizzly bears in British Columbia, ended up dying to smoke. Literally."

Wow. That's an excellent use of Eastern European stereotypes. The real killer here is that people can't smoke wherever they want? Now in fairness, further on in the column, Jonas does concede that the RCMP electrocuting Dziekanski may also have had something to do with his untimely end, and that that too, was unwise. But a nic-fit as a cause of death in this case, I mean come on! Do we even know that Dziekanski was a smoker, and if so, even a heavy one?

Is it okay to stereotype Poles again? George Jonas, you are an idiot at best, a racist demagogue at worst.

An Update from Conservapedia

You may recall the right's attempt to correct reality's well-known liberal bias, Conservapedia. Anyway, Andrew Sullivan points out the most popular pages on the site. This may surprise some of you, or it may not. Anyway, for your edification, these are the things that concerns the users of Conservapedia:

Most viewed pages

1. Main Page‎ [1,897,627]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,491,453]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [516,210]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [416,891]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [387,456]
6. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [328,165]
7. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [327,141]
8. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [315,831]
9. Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [262,127]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [250,840]

You just can't write stuff like that!

Edit: It looks like Paul Wells has discovered Conservapedia.

Putin Drives Sarko to Drink?!

According to Paul Wells, that's what Belgian TV says here about the French President's state in this clip:

Drinking with Putin, eh? I'd be careful if I were you, Nicholas. You don't want this to be from his "Litvinenko" collection.