At Home in Hespeler

I’m trying to remember, the Liberals are aways positive in their messaging, right?

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In politics, I’ll choose the ethical stance over the practical one every time. Conservative blog  Moose and Squirrel has quit the Blogging Tories over the candidacy of Julian Fantino in Vaughan. Her issue, it should be noted, is not with the Blogging Tories, but with the Conservative Party itself:

...the Julian Fantino candidacy has become kind of a final straw issue for me. I just can’t continue to support the Conservatives through my blog, and it seems wrong somehow to take advantage of the traffic the BT site sends my way when I just can’t support the party…

I have been considering the same move lately, mostly because I do less politics than ever, but also because I am drifting farther and farther from the Conservative Party. Fantino is high on the list of why, and if I lived in Vaughan I would be voting Liberal tomorrow.

Good for Moose and Squirrel for taking the stand, and to help keep traffic moving her way, I’m placing her on my sidebar.

Blogging Tories Blogging Tories, Conservative Party, Moos & Squirrel

Remember, Julian Fantino doesn’t break the law, Julian Fantino is the law:

Meeting Conservative Julian Fantino last month on the hustings for the upcoming Vaughan by-election didn’t go as Liberal Tony Genco expected. He’d imagined pleasantries between competing candidates…

“I gave him my best wishes…and he told me some of my signs were too close to his campaign headquarters so he’d had his people take them down.”

…“I asked him if he would please give them back — they’re expensive, you know — but he didn’t respond.”

Genco apparently never did get his signs back …

“My volunteers followed all the rules in putting our signs up on public property and they weren’t placed improperly.”

…Asked about Genco’s allegations, a Fantino spokesperson emailed a response: “(Liberal Leader Michael) Ignatieff’s candidate may want to talk about signs; I’m talking about what actually matters to families in our community.”

OK, you want to talk, here’s an issue: Julian Fantino is dictatorial and arrogant ex-cop who thinks the law is his to interpret. He is the kind of man who is dangerous to our democracy.

Hey, Conservatives in Vaughan: do everybody a favour, including the Conservatives, and vote Liberal on by-election day.

by-election fever, Caledonia By-election, Caledonia, Conservative Party, julian fantino, Liberal Party, OPP, Tony Genco, Vaughan

doesn’t include Julian Fantino.

This Friday in Vaughan, there is a rally to support Julian Fantino as the Conservative candidate for the riding. A counter protest, by Conservatives Against Fantino will also be held:

Fantino’s nomination is a slap in the face for every resident in Caledonia and Haldimand County; every police officer who served there; and every Conservative Party supporter who believes in fundamental justice and respect for the rule of law. Let’s tell Stephen Harper that Fantino must answer for Caledonia’s victims, not be rewarded for creating them.

I know which rally I would be attending if I wasn’t working (and they weren’t telling  people to dress up for the protest?).

Find out more about the counter-protest here.

Meanwhile, Christie Blatchford’s new book on Caledonia Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed Us All will hit bookstores October 26th. Here’s a preview video:

Caledonia, Conservative Party Caledonia, Christie Blatchford, Conservative Party, CPC, julian fantino

“Come on, let’s see that letter from Guy to Mary Dawson,” a senior Ignatieff official says. “I sincerely believe that the Giorno letter is at the heart of this thing because it will show the true nature of Stephen Harper – because he obviously approved it.”

Unlike, say, those nice Liberals, who wouldn’t publicly accuse someone of “unethical or criminal activity…” or of associating with organized crime:

…you don’t get cocaine at a corner drug store, right? You have to get it from somewhere, from someone and usually that means organized crime.”

h/t neocon

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OK, we’ve all seen the Stephen Harper assassination picture and can all agree it’s harmless: not like they had a bird pooping on him or any such major indignity. It was stupid, and the collective MSM yawn in lieu of howls of indignity, as they do every time a Conservative speaks ill of a Liberal, was embarrassing for them. Pity they don’t have the common sense anymore to realize they’re embarrassed.

Remember this picture next time you hear howls of Stephen Harper being a mean spirited, nasty bully.

But the Stephen Harper assassination fantasy/crime, and the Stephen Harper arming a cow (in the not with a gun context) picture aren’t the only graven images in the Liberal Party Stephen Harper Photoshop contest and hate-athon currently underway at Liberanos.ca. There are six finalists now showing and they range from the childish (Harper as Waldo, Harper in a bunny suit) to reasonably clever (Something rotten in the state of Denmark), to the dammed racist if a Republican did it with their President (the monkeys) to the disturbing: one with Harper riding a bomb, and this one

Seeing as Hitler pictures are so darned hard to find and David in Ottawa only had 45 or 50 seconds to do his entry, a quick slice of Harper into the Communist Party poster, because we all know how vile the communists are. Isn’t that clever? Why there’s Lenin. And Stalin and Mao, the two worst mass murderers in the history of the world. Oh, and look, there’s Uncle Fidel in the back…

Uncle Fidel?

Wait a minute, that uncle Fidel? Virtually the only world leader to make an appearance at the last Michael Ignatieff’s funeral? I thought the Liberals liked him. As for Mao, wasn’t last weeks big scandal that Harper can’t get along with Chinese Communists? In fact, if we imagine a party like the one pictured above, wouldn’t MM Chrétien and Trudeau be the Canadians most likely to RSVP in the affirmative?

What exactly is the message the Liberal Party is trying to send with this picture? That Stephen Harper is really a closet Liberal? Well, he did jack up the deficit, increase spending and stuff the senate? But it seems an odd message for the Liberals to be putting out none the less.

Maybe the message is they didn’t think this contest through very well.

Silly Liberals Castro, Chrétien, Communist Party, Conservative Party, Fidel, Hitler, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lenin, Liberal, Mao, Michael Ignatieff, puffin, STalin, Stephen Harper, Trudeau, Where's Waldo

Greg Weston was one of the journalists in the Parliamentary Gallery who got his nose particularly out of joint with the PMO when it got invaded by Conservatives. He has since calmed somewhat and seems to be offering fairer reportage. Today, he offers up a tidbit I never heard before, but which gave me a good laugh:

"Stop wasting my money!"

It has been almost 30 years since a flock of geese flying across Canadian television screens caused a national flap over taxpayers’ money being used for partisan political propaganda…

Liberal MP Bob Rae, then a member of the NDP, said at the time: “I will never be able to look at Canada geese in the same way again. I’ll see them as Liberals in disguise.”

Even right-wing commentator Gerry Nicholls decried the campaign as “an abuse of tax dollars,” describing the ads as “clearly partisan, clearly Conservative propaganda.”

Gerry Nicholls, Ink Stained Wretches Bob Rae, Conservative Party, Gerry Nicholls, Greg Weston, Liberal Party, NDP, Pierre Trudeau, Sun Media, Toronto Sun

sounds more like a patch honest politicians would wear on their Armani jacket. It is, instead, a rule for an MP sending Parliamentary flyers to someone else’s riding.  It’s wrong, and it should end.

When a bureaucrat designs a "ten percenter" patch.

John Mraz goes over the top,  calling it corruption. It’s not, but it is, as he notes, “the diversion of public resources to politicized ends.” I would not call it corruption more because it’s above board, and of such a small scale. Mraz, a former Liberal campaign manager, also throws a blame grenade at the Conservatives, both here and in the US. Note, for example, fringe Republican Obama birthers are the only ones who are nuts, ignoring Democrats who thought GW Bush was a) the dumbest man ever to learn to knot his own tie b) the criminal mastermind behind 911. In other words Mr. Mraz’s biases get in the way of his thesis.

His thesis, however, is spot on. Ten percenters are wrong. Parliamentarians are using the rule that allows them to send informational material to ridings other than their own, up to a total of ten percent of the constituents in their riding. I have complained before about this policy, but still receive quarterlies from Jack Layton. These things are not informational, they are propaganda. Paper wasted bashing the other party, taking biased surveys, that you can send back at parliamentary expense (i.e. taxpayer expense).

To be sure, I receive the same nonsense from my MP, Conservative Gary Goodyear, but he’s at least my MP. Their is a legitimate argument to be made that an MP needs to communicate with constituents, and needs to offer constituents a forum to let their MP know how they feel on issues. If I find the communiques so offensive, I can always vote for someone else. I can’t, however, choose to vote against Jack Layton MP. So why am I receiving his mailers? And why, far more significantly, am I receiving his mailers at parliamentary expense?

Conservatives and Liberals are not innocent in this, and Gary Goodyear has been the subject of a formal complaint to the speaker on this very subject.

They are all doing it. And they are all wrong. On this, I agree with Mr. Mraz. It’s time to stop the practice of ten percenters.

Politicians acting badly, Silly Politicians 911 truthers, Barack Obama, Canadian Parliament, Conservative Party, Democrats, Gary Goodyear, GW Bush, Jack Layton, John Mraz, Liberal Party, National Post, NDP, Obama Birthers, one percenters, Parliament, Republicans, ten percenters