Halloween Week: the Maddening

What Obama said after four people were murdered in a French kosher deli:

President Obama has sparked some widespread fury over his recent comments to Vox about the Jewish individuals who were brutally killed by terrorists in Paris — specifically, he labeled them “a bunch of folks” who were randomly shot.

His comments: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” Vox reported.

Mr. Obama went on, seeming to place the blame for terrorist attacks at the feet of the United States.

 
Trump's comments after eleven elderly Jewish people were gunned down in cold blood by a mindless bigot:

Carry on.


Vaguely related - first of all, anyone who is even remotely familiar with Shakespeare should know about this play and should not have been shocked by it. Secondly, find something else to be offended by, like the fact that your government is riddled with anti-semites who can do far more damage than Shakespeare ever could:

An exclusive Toronto private school for girls has fired its principal for hosting an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice without warning students about its anti-Semitic content.

From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

Here is how Global News described the project.

The personal banking and financial transactions being requested include bill payments, cash withdrawals from ATMs, credit card payments, electronic money transfers and even account balances of Canadians across the country.
James Tebrake, director general of macroeconomics at Statistics Canada, told Global News that beginning in January, the agency will ask nine banks for the financial transaction information from a representative sample of 500,000 randomly chosen Canadians or a 1 in 20 chance of being selected.

Here’s the crazy thing, StatsCan claims that this is all allowed under their reading of the federal privacy act and the statistics act.

Also worrying, apparently the minister in charge, Navdeep Bains has not been fully briefed on this project that is set to start in January. He hasn’t signed off but he also hasn’t raised any red flags about the proposal.

Now why would StatsCan want all this info on you?

They want to be able to monitor spending, consumer trends and more.

While StatsCan says that at a certain point they will remove personal data to make it anonymous, it won’t be collected and stored that way at first.

That means if you are selected, without your knowledge or consent, then your name, address, SIN and all your banking data will be collected and stored on a government computer.

So much for privacy.

This database of highly sensitive personal information will eventually grow to millions of Canadians as StatsCan requests information on an additional 500,000 Canadians each year.

Canada’s banks have yet to agree with this request and they don’t seem impressed.

“Banks believed this proposed data acquisition project was still in the exploratory stages and were not aware that Statistics Canada was moving to compel disclosure of this information,” Canadian Bankers Association spokesman Aaron Boles told Global in a statement.

So far no information has been shared but if StatCan asks for it, the law says they have to hand it over.

Don't bring them into Canada. Shoot them where they stand:

Some Canadians left our country to fight for ISIS to fight for what they thought was their cause. They fought alongside a ragtag bunch of maniacs and sent pictures of their grizzly beheadings home. Now the tide of war has shifted, Syria seems to have the upper hand, and some of these Canadian ISIS allies find themselves in jail. The fighters want to pack up their wives and children and hop a flight to Canada.

**

Yet in an interview with Global’s West Block, Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon said that Canada has a responsibility to deal with terrorists in other countries.

Now if McCrimmon were simply a backbench MP then her comments wouldn’t matter much. Instead, she is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety.

Here’s what she told Global.

“We don’t believe in two-tier citizenship and if someone’s a Canadian citizen, we’re responsible for them whether we like it or not,” she said.
“When there’s Canadians abroad who have broken the law, it’s our responsibility to deal with it. We can’t just hand it off to some other nation to deal with.”

Now to a degree, McCrimmon is right, we don’t have two tier citizenship. So if we won’t go out of our way to bring home low level drug dealers caught and prosecuted in other countries, why do so for terrorists?

Once again, carbon is not a pollutant:

Again, it comes down to a matter of trust. If voters don’t believe the Liberals will do much to solve the emissions problem, that they’ll gobble up the tax money while still falling far short of their own targets, voters may decide that doing nothing is bad, but doing something that doesn’t work — while costing jobs and raising taxes — is worse.

Bill Morneau is an @$$hole who expects to sell the idea that a recession isn't so bad:

If Canada needs to weather another recession, it can.

That was what Finance Minister Bill Morneau told the West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson when pressed about whether the government has an end in sight for the deficit. There have been warnings coming from economists over the last year that a recession could hit within the next 18 to 24 months and pose a challenge to federal policymakers with a deficit still on the books.