Friday, November 2, 2007

Velkommen to the banana republic of Ontaristan

Election irregularities, anyone? Christina Blizzard of the Toronto Sun outlines just a few in her Nov 2 column, read it here.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Finding da tune behind dat Cabinet shuffle....

Several members of the media have their own takes on McGuinty's musical chairs...

Caveat has a broader analysis of the changes.

Christina Blizzard of the Toronto Sun is always worth reading.

Karen Howlett of the Globe and Mail made interesting comments.

Ian Urquhart of the Toronto Star doesn't mention Mikey's move at all, which I find surprising....although Rob Ferguson and Robert Benzie of the Star make the same comment about Mikey's leadership aspirations (and Dalton's opinon of them) as others.

Hmmmm....always interesting.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Quote of the day

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees therefore a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves, and therein we err, we greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by the man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and more complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

Henry Beston
The Outermost House
(Viking Press, 1972)

Civil rights threatened by dangerous dog law and breed-specific legislation

Brilliant statement by Responsible Dog Owners of the Western States.

Read it here.

Do dat Cabinet shuffle, Fibbies

I'm immensely amused by this Canadian Press article.

"Brazen, media-savvy Michael Bryant...the 41-year-old Bryant — a telegenic, Harvard-educated lawyer by trade with a fondness for media stunts and carefully scripted sound bites...".

Almost spat my soda onto my computer monitor laughing.

Brazen is not a flattering adjective. Its definitions, other than "made of brass" (a cheap metal alloy of copper and zinc), are "sounding harsh and loud like struck brass" and "marked by contemptuous boldness".

Ya, Mikey has a serious contempt for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That's why he legislated law-abiding people into second-class citizenship.

No more Justice League photos, okay, Mikey? That gave a lot of people some good laughs.

IMHO I can think of a few reasons why McGuinty is moving Bryant. One, to get Mikey out of the line of fire when his "pit bull" ban goes down in flames in the courts...as his adoption/privacy-violating law did. It looks to me like Chris Bentley is being set up to take the fall for that one, rather than the ban's originators (McGuinty and Bryant).

Or, to put Mikey into the line of fire with the hot potato of Caledonia. Is this Dalton's version of succession planning? Rather like the English kings of old, kill off any potential usurpers?

Smitherman's staying in Health. Ah, I can look forward to another four years of sitting for 12 hours in Emergency with a geriatric parent while a junkie gets taken first.

Education. That's sadly amusing. Standards have been degraded to the point where public school students are barely literate...when they graduate from secondary school.

No mention of Broten, the Flick Off girlie? Is Dalton going to bury her so she can't embarrass his government again? The Environment Minister who planned a monster garage, put up illegal election signs, and had so little political sense as to stand in front of a poster so it read "f*ck off"?

Hmm, Caplan weathered the Ontario Lottery Corp. scandal and is being left in place. Mike Colle threw himself on the sword for Slushgate, howcome Caplan was spared? What does that say to you?

Even more telling, what does Greg Sorbara's sudden decision to remove himself from cabinet say?

Regardless of who is where when the music stops, it appears to be four more years of sad entertainment with many of the same performers doing pratfalls.

Media oversight (or narrow vision)

Good post on chicobandido about a dog attack in Toronto covered by only one media source, and how it would play differently had the dog been a "pit bull". Read it here.

KC Dog Blog has a great weekly roundup, read it here.

Ban Bossy!

Aha, here's another animal for the Ontario Fibs to ban....honestly, an angry cow is not something I'd want to encounter. Read about it here.