Mid-Week Post

Your go-to spot for the work-week ...




Well, at least one PM is thinking about post-NAFTA Canada because Mr. Socks sure isn't:

Stephen Harper says he believes Donald Trump is genuinely willing to pull the plug on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The former prime minister is in Washington to discuss the fate of the ongoing trade negotiations, making rare public comments on a current political issue. ...

The former Conservative leader, who’s known as an ardent free trader, says powerful anti-trade forces that predate Trump’s presidency are at play in American society and aren’t going away anytime soon.

Harper says he understands the frustration: he described his annoyance at spending his 50th birthday signing a bailout package for General Motors Canada, only to see the auto giant move jobs out of the country.

He says he is advising companies to start planning for the possibility of a world without NAFTA.

Instead of figuring out why NAFTA bothers the US so, Trudeau instead threw Mexico under the bus. It seems to have bought him some time as now Trump is bandying about a tempting trade pact sans Mexico.

I wouldn't believe him. Trump seems adept at telling the gullible Trudeau what he wants to hear.


There are several reasons to scrap NAFTA, some of which may even be beneficial for Canada, but one simply cannot trust Trudeau to pull anything like that off. After all, Mr. "Budgets Balance Themselves" cannot even come up with a tax plan that doesn't sound like highway robbery. His deficit projections just get higher and higher. This is what happens when a trust-fund brat is offered the public purse. I'm sure a jet navigated by monkey could be maneuvered more successfully.


Also:

In the wake of predictions by Ontario’s independent, non-partisan Financial Accountability Office that Wynne’s plan will cost at least 50,000 jobs, the poll of 814 Toronto residents taken Sept. 16-19 found 61% oppose the policy, with only 39% in favour.

Of the 61% against the plan as proposed by Wynne, 44% want a longer phase-in period. Another 17% want the minimum wage hikes scrapped entirely.

That the numbers for something more sensible are lower makes me doubt the goodness of man.




How is Canada handling the potential powder keg that is North Korea? It isn't:

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson isn’t the only North American official talking to North Korea amid escalating nuclear threats. Canada is also trying to negotiate with the nation ruled by “Little Rocket Man,” as President Trump has nicknamed Kim Jong-un.

“North Korea we’re very concerned about. We’re a Pacific nation as well,” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Foreign Minister, said Tuesday at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Washington, D.C.

Freeland, who serves in the cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said she and her colleagues “have been working closely with the United States with Secretary Tillerson” to neutralize risks posed by North Korea and its increasingly powerful missile arsenal.

(Sidebar: and what are those plans, Chrystia?)

Trudeau still thinks that this is his father's era and that the Americans wouldn't mind protecting the country.

How humiliating.




Why Canada needs a firing squad:

Alleged terrorist Rehab Dughmosh insisted during a court appearance Wednesday that she does not want a trial.

However, Justice Michael Dambrot bluntly told the 32-year-old Scarborough woman that despite her comments, she will be tried on several terrorism-related charges.

“Down with Canada,” said Dughmosh. “Add the charge of insulting the judiciary.”

How could this go wrong?

Yes, there is a new halfway house for federal parolees being built above the John Howard Society office up on Eglinton Ave. West.

Yes, it is adjacent to an elementary school.

What those behind the project say is it won’t be used to house sex offenders or convicted pedophiles.

“People with that background would not pass the assessment screening,” said Sonya Spencer, Toronto executive director of the John Howard Society (JHS). “We are very aware of the concerns of parents and the worries of the community, too.”

No sex offenders or people who have harmed children. But there will be a 10 bed unit at the 1669 Eglinton Ave. W. location for people on day parole from their federal penitentiary sentences.

“We hope to have it up and running this fall,” said Spencer.

The fact that Obama has never been impeached over this still bothers me:

A CIA witness testified Tuesday that the body of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was returned after the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, only after he overheard Libyan militia members discussing whether to tell Americans about a dead compatriot at a hospital.

Speaking of failures one can directly attribute to the former Liar-in-Chief:

This isn't a "market correction." It's a government catastrophe. Premiums for individual health plans in Virginia are set to skyrocket nearly 60 percent in 2018. In New Hampshire, those rates will rise 52 percent. In South Carolina, individual market consumers will face an average 31.3 percent hike. In Tennessee, they'll see rates jump between 20-40 percent.

Private, flexible PPOs for self-sufficient, self-employed people are vanishing by design. The social-engineered future -- healthy, full-paying consumers being herded into government-run Obamacare exchanges and severely regulated regional HMOs -- is a bipartisan big government health bureaucracy's dream come true.

And as with Benghazi, Obama is nowhere to be found to explain this ongoing debacle.




A custodian at a hotel where a gunman killed fifty-nine people warned staff about the man before the massacre started:

A maintenance worker said Wednesday he told hotel dispatchers to call police and report a gunman had opened fire with a rifle inside Mandalay Bay before the shooter began firing from his high-rise suite into a crowd at a nearby musical performance.

Listening to people distance themselves from an open secret is watching the rot from Hollywood spread:

We have seen the video of Meryl Streep calling Weinstein “God” at the 2012 Golden Globe awards, and specifying that Weinstein’s particular deity was “the punisher.” Nice touch. Quite a contrast to the 2017 Golden Globes, when Streep lit into Donald Trump for mocking a reporter’s disability. Perhaps Weinstein did not mock the disabled.

Streep has since denounced Weinstein and protested that she was shocked, shocked, to find out that there was gambling going on in Casablanca. ...

A more remarkable intervention came from Tina Brown, for a time in the 1990s the undisputed queen of celebrity journalists, running Vanity Fair and The New Yorker consecutively. She was lured away from the latter by Harvey Weinstein to run his media business.

“When I founded Talk magazine in 1998 with Miramax, the movie company Harvey founded with his brother Bob, I also took over the running of their fledgling book company,” Brown wrote this week. 

“Strange contracts pre-dating us would suddenly surface, book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women, one I recall was by the stewardess on a private plane. It was startling — and professionally mortifying — to discover how many hacks writing gossip columns or entertainment coverage were on the Miramax payroll with a ‘consultancy’ or a ‘development deal’ (one even at The New York Times).”

So Brown, perhaps one of the most powerful women in journalism, had the goods on Weinstein. She saw the payoffs. But she quietly kept cashing her cheques from Miramax and attending Weinstein’s swanky parties.

 
China does not care why South Korea has the THAAD system. It cares that South Korea does have it:

At a ceremony at the South Korean Embassy, Roh said he will explain to Beijing officials that Seoul's THAAD deployment is purely for defensive purposes against North Korea's nuclear and missile threats and is not aimed at China. 

 

Consider that China was implementing punitive economic measures like trade sanctions because South Korea will not remove the THAAD system. Even without it, China would still squash the South Korean economy (China is more than willing to be South Korea's money-lender). It seems that it is not enough that South Korea surrenders its lines of defense (as Trudeau is more than willing to do for Canada) but that its economy is brought to heel, as well. A weakened state poses no opposition for a hungry paper dragon.