Londoners are crazy.

And I thought my house was small. Check this out: $990,000 US, ten feet wide at the widest point, five levels.

Further to "Official Concern", small wonder they're worried!

This is just too rich.  We read that Transport Minister Jean Lapierre is all concerned about immigration and maybe terrorists attacking the USA across the border.  Well, I'm glad he gives a shit, because the Immigration Minister has THIS situation running in his department.  (Way to go Angry In The Great White North for digging this steaming nugget out of the Liberal manure pile.)

News today of a complaint filed against York Regional Police Services Chief Armand LaBarge, who went on a tour to Israel to study anti-terrorism and law-enforcement strategies:

Tomorrow, Khaled Mouammar and a few other members of the Arab community will ask the York Regional Police Services Board to publicly apologize for approving Chief LaBarge's week-long trip to Israel in March.

''Chief LaBarge's visit to Israel will definitely reinforce the stereotype of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists,'' he wrote in a letter to David Barrow, chairman of the board.

To be fair to the chief, it is Arabs and Muslims blowing themselves and the people around them to smithereens that reinforces the stereotype.

But then Khaled Mouammar and his whole family are quite engaged in the Palestinian cause. Violently so, on occassion.

That is not to say that they don't also work in Canada's interests. Khaled and wife Mary serve, or have served, on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, making decisions about who is a legitimate refugee claimant, and who might be trying to take advantage of the refugee system for their own ends, like Fatah or Hezbollah members looking to set up shop in Canada.

Angry did some digging it seems, and discovered that this guy, his wife and their adult children are seriously into the Palestine biz.  Let the Jews swim to Greece kind of thing.

That's a sample of who our Immigration department has minding the store.  No wonder Jean Lapierre can't sleep at night.

The Phantom

Refreshing change, a solid Leftist stating the obvious

Here's something you don't see every day, courtesy of Frontpage and my buddy Albert:  a red underwear Socialist saying something about George Bush and Iraq that isn't an abject lie.  Christopher Hitchens spake thusly:

Let me begin with a simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

He goes on from there to savage the anti-war crowd like a dog with a stuffed rabbit.  I love it when people tell the truth about things.  Its so clean.

That's pretty much my single biggest complaint with the Left.  Economic theory, social theory, who cares?  If it works I'm happy, if it doesn't work we'll do something else.  No problem.  But if it doesn't work and then they lie about it?  Nuh uh.  No sale boys.

So when some mouthpiece of the Left starts in lying about global warming or guns or Iraq or tax cuts or whatever, that's what torques me.  Since they never ever do anything but lie, Mr. Hitchen's candour is refreshing.

The Phantom

Oooh, official concern! Wow!

The complete lack of action by the Federal Liberals since 2001 on the issue of immigration, such as failing to identify known criminals that Canada has both jailed and  punted back to Jamaica TWICE and letting them in a third time, would seem to indicate a complete lack of concern that immigrants to Canada might travel to the USA and maybe blow something up there. 

Not so, my friends!  I spotted this report at NealNews, aparently there is great concern in cabinet that bad people might go to the USA from the glorious Great White North and do bad things there.

MONTREAL (AFP) - A senior Canadian minister reportedly expressed fears that Canada could be used by terrorists as a base from which to launch attacks on the United States.

"My greatest fear ... is that we will be used as a springboard for a new attack against the United States," Minister of Transport Jean Lapierre said in an interview with the local newspaper La Presse.

"If that happens, of course there would be the shock of the attack. But the consequences for Canada would be worse than anything we have ever seen," Lapierre said, adding that the United States would likely close its border in such an event.

"If there is anything which prevents me from sleeping sometimes, it is this fear. We have a responsibility and, if that ever happens, the consequences will be dramatic. It would last several years," the minister said.

I suspect Mr. Lapierre's sleep is disturbed more by his fears of what an investigation into his ministry would uncover than his fears of the damage to Canada that would ensue from a closed border.  No doubt Romanian strippers figure prominently in his nightmares.

But it is nice to know he cares.  ~:D

Lessons not to be learned by Liberals, Torontonians, or the media.

With the latest spate of shootings in Toronto (not to mention other cities across Canada, which the media never seems to) it can be surmised that the hated, two billion dollar gun registry isn't living up to the hype. Thoughtful individuals will not find this surprising, but Liberals and their supporters seem to.

The Edmonton Sun opines thus:

We have armies of bureaucrats shuffling paper to and fro to make sure that everything related to guns in this country is all very above-board and law-abiding.

So there can't possibly be any gun violence in Canada!

OK, we made our point. There is still lots of gun violence in Canada, and the gun registry hasn't done a single thing to stop it.

And it's not like we'd ever wish daytime street shootings on anyone, but surely the irony of the latest spate of gunplay to plague Toronto - where shootings have become almost a daily occurrence - is not lost on people. The gun registry was originally put in place by the Liberals to placate urban Ontario voters. And who is currently being terrorized by rampant gun violence? Torontonians.

There's a lesson here to be learned, but neither Toronto voters nor the Liberal party is going to learn it.

So what's the lesson? That registering the guns of normal citizens will not reduce crime? That the Customs agents have trouble finding small metal objects hidden in among the billions of tons of cargo and millions of cars that cross the border daily? That the Liberal government screwed up with this registry thing and spent too much money?

Back in late 1994, when then-justice minister Allan Rock first unveiled the gun-control program, he declared, "This tough new gun-control program will improve public safety and also send a strong message that the criminal misuse of guns will not be tolerated."

Eleven years later, the Liberals are suddenly worried about gun crime because Toronto has been blitzed by gun violence. In a more sane country, Toronto would realize that the gun registry has been exposed as an expensive waste of money and would punish the Liberals for lying to them by voting them out. And the Grits would shut down their useless registry and put the money into actual police officers fighting crime.

I have to disagree with the editorial here. That Alan Rock was lying about the effectiveness of the registry and that the Liberals deserve to be booted out for wasting all that money is NOT the lesson. That's because Torontonians think the registry is a good idea even if it has zero effect on crime.

The true lesson to be learned is the nature of the Liberal Party. Canada back in the 1970's did not have a crime problem. Toronto had a population of maybe two million and had maybe ten murders a year. Shootings on the street were unheard of. Fast forward through 30+ years of Liberal rule, and we still don't have much of a crime problem in Canada EXCEPT in Toronto. There the Liberals have created a Mecca of socialist thought. They have arranged the justice system and the police force into a perfect copy of New York City back in the late 1970's when there were six murders a day.

The first lesson is not that the Liberals did that, it is that they did it DELIBERATELY. On purpose, as it were. The gun registry is their answer to the situation they have created.

The gun registry has a three fold purpose:
A) Window dressing to take attention away from the abysmal state of the justice apparatus and point it towards creeeepy gun owners (who don't vote Liberal!) thereby providing them with a whipping boy AND an opportunity to be seen Doing Something To Control Crime.
B) Punishment for the sportsmen and self reliant types for resisting the Liberal Way (by not voting Liberal) and creation of dependency on government for basic safety by everybody else.
C) Providing a huge tub of money to spread around amongst the Liberal loyalists and hangers on. You can buy a lot of friends with a couple billion bucks. Adscam points the way.

Note that one of the purposes of the registry is NOT to control crime. Its a propaganda tool, an ATM with no daily cash limit and a method to control the enemies of the regime. That'd be us, just to make it plain enough for Toronto readers.

That's the second lesson, the Liberals are not interested in the welfare of the average schlep in Toronto. If they were they'd fix the immigration situation (can you say Jamaican gangs? How about Russian gangs?), fix the smuggling, fix the revolving door at the jail and allow Joe Average Schlep to defend himself against armed bandits. Why don't they do the obvious and fix these things? They want some crime to make Torontonians scared enough that they won't vote Conservative, but that's not the major issue. Fixing real government shortfalls doesn't give them any good opportunities to steal.

That's not a cynical statement, that's an observation of the facts kids. In this modern age it is impossible to waste two billion dollars on a computer system by accident. 20 million ok, hell even 200 million maybe, but two thousand million dollars? It is instructive in this regard that Sheila Frazer still hasn't got proper accounting numbers for the registry, and Conservative MPs are stonewalled at every turn by Cabinet, by the RCMP, by Customs and etc. as they try to find out what's happening.

To recap, the Liberals have deliberately created a situation of social emergency for the express purpose of stealing tax money and staying in power through fear. That's lessons one and two. Lesson three is the big media is in on it with them. They couldn't sell the obvious stupidity of something like the gun registry if Big Media wasn't in their corner.

You can't read a newspaper story about firearms written since the 1960's that doesn't imply that there's something not quite right about people who own guns. Many come right out and say gun owners are dangerous lunatics. Guns are implements of destruction, killers of the innocent, they have evile powers of compulsion that will turn a normal teenager into a murdering lunatic on a rampage. People can't be trusted with guns, they might shoot somebody! The gun registry is a Good Thing, its just too expensive. Banning guns altogether is probably a better move, eh? Cheaper, um hum.

This "guns are bad!" thing is an article of faith with media people. They believe it they way they believe in global warming and Medicare. You can't talk to them rationally about it, its religious. The Liberals of course have been quick to use this to their advantage. They get a free ride in the Star, the Globe and even the National Post by mouthing the right platitudes. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this confluence of interests is merely serendipity or if it may be enhanced by Liberal favors.

There you have it, the three lessons. This stuff isn't complicated, just shockingly low class. Elitist socialists in the media aiding grubby scam artists in the government for mutual benefit, at the expense of the public. So far this has kept the Liberals in power since Pierre Trudeau and allowed them to jack taxes up to the highest level in the Western world while providing really bad service. Nice set up for them, not so nice for the Rest O' Canada.

Going to be interesting to see what it takes to break this system. I'm thinking Western Separation has about the best shot. Hard to cling to power when half the country is pulling out.

The Phantom

testing email posting

Testing my email posting whatsit. Does she work?

Well, let's have a go at this blogging thing. Greetings all in the Blogosphere. This is my first post, obviously to zero audience. Hopefully that will change.