And More

There often is...



And this is why you've been screwed:

Joseph Angelini, 33, served two tours in Afghanistan and was injured in a roadside bomb attack.

Last Friday at a town hall in London, Ont. he asked the prime minister why it had taken him months to get a pension cheque. 

He also raised concerns about waiting to hear if he'd get benefits for his parents who retired to care for him — both physically and financially. 

Angelini got an answer earlier this week and said he hasn't been able to sleep since.

In a phone call, his case manager told him his application for a family caregiver allowance had been denied.

"I don't understand," he said. "It was devastating."

Veterans Affairs tells CBC News they cannot comment on specific cases, but to qualify for the Family Caregiver Relief Benefit, an applicant's need for care must be connected to their disability and expected to last at least 12 months or more.

Angelini said he doesn't fault Trudeau —the prime minister promised to look into his pension file and Angelini said his file was expedited after the town hall — instead, his frustration is with Veterans Affairs.

Thank you for your service.

Get used to being ignored.




I have a better idea: why don't you stop telling kids that they are victims and that they should leave northern ghettos for towns and cities where the educational and professional opportunities are plenty and that parents should start taking a vested interest in their children's well-being instead of expecting everyone else to do their work for them:

It's time for First Nations leaders to consider a class action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of Indigenous young people who have died by suicide, says Isadore Day, the Ontario regional chief with the Assembly of First Nations.

Day's comments came as Wapekeka First Nation revealed this week that it had asked for help to prevent a suicide pact in the remote community, months before two girls, both 12, died by suicide in January.

Today in "we could have had an adult lead this country" news:

Former prime minister Stephen Harper says he is taking a "glass half full" approach to the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the White House, while acknowledging the U.S. election is to blame for a great deal of uncertainty. ...

"Trump is going to reverse the cornerstone of American foreign policy," Harper said. "He is going to reject and reverse the idea that the U.S. has an overreaching responsibility for global affairs. The U.S. will cease to view the rise of China as essentially benign."

Harper said Trump is simply reflecting the mood of his voters by taking a stronger stance against China, with which the U.S. has run major trade imbalances.

The former prime minister also said he thinks large, multilateral trade deals are "dead."

He said Trump's position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership makes it a "certainty" that the 12 country trade pact — which his government negotiated — will not see the light of day.

"You may be surprised to know I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Mr. Trump's view on this. I'm not entirely sure where he's going, but … what I share in common with Mr. Trump is I've actually negotiated deals."

Trump, in opposing TPP, is simply reflecting the anxiety of the U.S. voters who were not adequately "brought along," Harper said, unlike Canadians who were broadly supportive of his government's push to pen more free trade deals because there was a widely held belief they stood to gain from such policy moves.

He said, in that vein, there is always a danger of leaders falling out of touch with their supporters, and that good governance has to be paired with a knack for sales.

"We always have to remember [as world leaders] we are accountable to ordinary people and to explaining to them how — what we are doing — is impacting and improving their lives and if we fail to do that, we run into problems."

My God, it was like he was making sense. 

Also:

Remember when Stephen Harper was mocked all over the media for saying The Liberals would introduce a Netflix tax?

... Liberals are pushing for the HST, the sales tax to be applied to Netflix and other foreign streaming services, like Google Play or Apple.

Yep.

Far fewer people attended President Donald Trump's inauguration Friday than his predecessor's swearing-in eight years ago.

Yes, about that:

Protesters disrupted President Donald Trump's inauguration Friday, smashing storefronts, burning vehicles, blocking security checkpoints and leaving a trail of damage as supporters celebrated the new president.

When you're quite done carrying water for an unemployed Jew-hater, popular press, perhaps you could return to your day-job.

Whatever that is.


Also:

Watching Canadian elected officials swoon over a foreign leader was disrespectful of the place in which they stood.

Obama has that effect on people.

But he was no friend to Canada.

His North American legacy is most notably defined by his indecision and ultimate failure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

This one decision set our economy back billions of dollars and denied employment to many Canadians, because Obama put his anti-development ideology ahead of smart policy and economic growth.

But Obama’s mistakes vis-à-vis Canada were a drop in the bucket compared to his foreign policy blunders and the disastrous international impact of his presidency.

The world is less stable, more chaotic, and less free than it was eight years ago.

The Obama doctrine of “leading from behind” has left power vacuums across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which have been happily filled by nefarious, rogue regimes including Iran, Russia and China.
Obama ignored mass protests in Iran in 2009 over a fraudulent election, and passed up on an historic opportunity to encourage peaceful regime change.

Instead, Obama engaged with the wicked regime in Iran and, pretending it had taken a moderate turn, struck a convoluted deal to lift sanctions, remove long-term barriers to Iran’s nuclear program and provocatively undercut America’s long-time ally, Israel.

When it came to the civil war in Syria, Obama had an opportunity to stop dictator Bashar al-Assad before he ramped up his deadly rampage responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
Obama drew a “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Assad crossed it, using chemical weapons to murder civilians, and Obama did nothing.

He was called on his bluff, and exposed as an isolationist — a president more comfortable using drones to drop bombs from afar than dealing with the threat of a regional mad man backed by Iran and Russia.

Obama also led the charge of appeasement towards Islamists, refusing to name the enemy or identify the religious motives of terrorism.

Obama - the now has-been - embodied the arrogance, mental dissonance and undeserved sense of entitlement that Canadian L (l) iberals carry around with them like a stench. Liberals/liberals live such insular lives that they have no idea (or want to have an idea) of what their actions mean to others.

It must be earth-shattering to learn that people's patience for that sort of thing runs out.




Will Trump put North Korea back on the terrorism sponsorship list?

1. North Korea sponsors terrorism.

Three years ago, I decided I’d had my fill of “experts” writing that North Korea doesn’t sponsor terrorism without having made any apparent inquiry into the evidence or the law, so I sacrificed my Christmas leave to write a hundred-page, peer-reviewed report laying that evidence out, analyzing the legal standards for listing a government as a state sponsor of terrorism, and applying North Korea’s recent conduct to that standard. I’m not going to repeat that entire report here, but I should probably at least give you a taste of it: in the last ten years alone, North Korea has armed terrorists, sent hit teams to murder defectors and dissidents, held the kidnapped citizens of other countries as prisoners, harbored hijackers, launched cyber attacks against newspapers and nuclear power plants, and threatened movie theaters across the United States with terrorist attacks if they showed a film parodying Kim Jong-un. For which, Barack Obama did approximately nothing. …

6. It’s easy.

There’s no act of Congress required for this. All the Secretary of State would have to do is sign a one-page letter invoking section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act. If a pissed-off POTUS is looking for something nasty to do to Kim Jong-un the same day he has the red mist, this is the easiest thing to pull off the shelf.

(Kamsahamnida)



 
And now, Japan wants Christian sites and remote islands as UNESCO natural and cultural World Heritage sites:

The government said Thursday it will submit a proposal to add a number of islands and several places linked to the history of Japan’s persecuted Christians to UNESCO’s list of natural and cultural World Heritage sites.

The natural sites are Kagoshima Prefecture’s Amami-Oshima Island and Tokunoshima Islands, the northern part of Okinawa Prefecture’s main island and Iriomote Island, also in Okinawa.

For the cultural sites, places in Nagasaki and Kumamoto prefectures associated with the history of Japan’s persecuted Christians will be recommended.

(Sidebar: I don't know why Japan would need this sort of validation but whatever...)