Mid-Week Post

Four days until Easter...


Former Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was remembered by family and friends earlier today.


I would suggest that the same person being sued for political man-handling also took his opposition for the Fair Elections Act from south of the border just like his ideas about the middle-class:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has pledged to repeal the government’s Fair Elections Act if he forms government next year, a move that comes amid mounting opposition outside of the political fray.

Just ask: who would benefit from vouching rather than bona fide official forms of identification, of which there are forty?

Can I vouch for this guy? He's a friend of mine.

Nepotism: it oils the gears that make the Liberal party go round:

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s brother-in-law has been appointed “interim” CEO of eHealth, the Toronto Sun has learned.

David Rounthwaite, brother of Wynne’s wife, Jane, was appointed to the $210,000-a-year job effective March 7.

A spokesman for eHealth said Rounthwaite has been general counsel for the giant agency charged with getting health records online for more than four years — before Wynne became premier.

I often wonder if Kathleen Wynne wants to be kicked out of office and then I remember that in Ontario, no Liberal voter would allow it, hence her girlfriend's brother lands a cushy job.


A nineteen year old has been arrested for the Heartbleed hack that took nine hundred social insurance numbers:

A Western University computer-science student described by acquaintances as bright and studious has been accused by authorities of exploiting the online security vulnerability known as Heartbleed that led to a breach of personal data from the Canada Revenue Agency website.

Do people still believe that Russia will not take all of Ukraine?

On Wednesday, NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen upped the ante promising to increase its military footprint in Eastern Europe amid growing concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin's intentions in the region.

"Today, we agreed on a package of further military measures to reinforce our collective defence and demonstrate the strength of Allied solidarity," Rasmussen said in a statement.

"We will have more planes in the air, more ships on the water, and more readiness on the land.

"For example, air policing aircraft will fly more sorties over the Baltic region. Allied ships will deploy to the Baltic Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere, as required. Military staff from Allied nations will deploy to enhance our preparedness, training and exercises. Our defence plans will be reviewed and reinforced."

In response to a question from a reporter, Rasmussen added that NATO does have the capacity to implement these measures.

"We already know that some Allies will come forward with concrete contributions and I’m sure that more will follow," he said.

Just weeks after Russia annexed Crimea, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers are now believed to have massed upon the eastern Ukrainian borders. Meanwhile, pro-Russian separatists have taken over government buildings and facilities in about 10 eastern Ukrainian towns and cities.

In 1994, the United Kingdom and the United States made Ukraine surrender its weapons to Russia in exchange for protection. Discuss.


No one wants anyone to suffer from a hemorrhagic fever but imagine if such a fever was detected in a major metropolitan area, like, say, Sydney, what then?

An outbreak of dengue fever at an Australian refugee detention center in the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru sparked calls on Thursday for greater oversight at the facility, which has been criticized by rights groups and the United Nations.

 Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison's office said that medical officers at the center had confirmed three cases of the potentially fatal tropical disease, which is transmitted by mosquitoes.

Two of those affected by the sickness are potential refugees awaiting processing, while the other was a member of staff working at the center, they said.

"All three people have been isolated and are receiving appropriate treatment and are expected to make a full recovery," a spokeswoman for Morrison said in a statement.

But Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, immigration spokeswoman from the opposition Greens Party, said that outbreaks are inevitable in crowded camps like the one on Nauru and called for greater independent oversight of the overseas refugee detention system.

"The government can't control these types of outbreaks in the harsh detention camp environment. With seven families to a tent, it's impossible to keep children safe from the disease," she said in a statement.

Australia uses detention centers in Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to process would-be refugees sent there after trying to get to Australia, often in unsafe boats after paying people smugglers in Indonesia.

(Sidebar: yes, I am aware of how dengue is spread but there are cases of it in these detention centres, so... Also, bringing the UN into this all the while ignoring human smuggling is just so morally profane.)


Ringing in the Easter season with this:

Nigeria's military said on Wednesday its forces had freed most of the more than 100 teenage schoolgirls abducted by Islamist Boko Haram militants and were continuing the search for eight students still missing.

Uh-oh:

Nine people died and 287 are missing after a ferry sank off the southwest coast on Wednesday morning. The ferry carrying 475 people was on its way from Incheon to the resort island of Jeju. The passengers included 325 students of Danwon High School in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province who were on a school trip, of whom about 200 are missing.

Some 175 were rescued before the ferry went under completely, but the others apparently became trapped inside the ferry.

The disaster looks like the worst since a ferry with 362 passengers sank in 1993, killing 292.

Because he's Mark Steyn:

One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly. Take the brothers Tsarnaev, the incendiary end of a Chechen family that in very short time has settled aunts, uncles, sisters, and more across the map of North America from Massachusetts to New Jersey to my own home town of Toronto. Maybe your town has a Tsarnaev, too: There seems to be no shortage of them, except, oddly, back in Chechnya. The Tsarnaevs' mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: "I would prefer not to have lived in America," she said.

Not, I'm sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

"The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers."

Maybe. Alternatively, the above opening sentence should "prompt Americans to reflect" on whether whoever's editing America's newspaper of record these days "does an adequate job" in choosing which pseudo-credentialed experts it farms out its principal analysis on terrorist atrocities to. But, if I follow correctly, these UCLA profs are arguing that, when some guys go all Allahu Akbar on you and blow up your marathon, that just shows that you lazy complacent Americans need to work even harder at "assimilating" "immigrants." After all, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were raised in Cambridge, Mass., a notorious swamp of redneck bigotry where the two young Chechens no doubt felt "alienated" and "excluded" at being surrounded by NPR-listening liberals cooing, "Oh, your family's from Chechnya? That's the one next to Slovakia, right? Would you like to come round for a play date and help Jeremiah finish his diversity quilt?" Assimilation is hell.

The same people who delight at the removal of acerbic but mostly harmless fellows are the very same who cannot force themselves to feel even the tiniest bit angry that an eight-year-old boy was blown up.

And that, in a nutshell, is the left for you: hypocritical, cowardly and mentally incongruous.


Speaking of mental incongruity:

Three hundred students from 11 Saskatoon schools gathered at the Western Development Museum Tuesday to show off in-depth projects on sustainability.

At Bishop Pocock School, Grade 6 and 7 students worked to cut waste at the school and at home. They got their hands dirty with a garbage audit - which "was gross and everything, but knowing we were helping the environment was a good feeling," said Kristen Weisgerber, one of the students who took part.

There one has it. Nothing but fluffy feelings were achieved. Children in the Third World still pick through garbage for food, waste at the farm level still occurs and there certainly won't be a moral discussion on materialism, greed or gluttony because that would be too Jesus-y. Nope. It's all about feeling good.

That is also the left.

Ladies and gentlemen, Nina Simone.

(Merci)


Her punishment should be getting struck by texting driver:

Texting while driving is so totally wrong.

But according to 21-year-old Kimberly Davis, it’s totally not her fault. 

Davis, who according to phone records was texting with seven different people while driving her vehicle through Koroit, Australia, slammed into a cyclist from behind, severely injuring him. Local police say she used her phone 44 times while driving during the trip.

It happened at about 7:20 p.m.

Apparently the warning lights that had been placed on the front and back of the cyclist’s bike were invisible to Davis.

“I just don’t care because I’ve already been through a lot of bullshit and my car is like pretty expensive and now I have to fix it,” Davis told police, according to The Standard.

She was apparently "pissed off that the cyclist hit the side of her car."

What a little b!#%^.


And now, Easter egg bark candy. Enjoy.