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Showing posts from July, 2014

Payback, Cutbacks, Kickbacks

Have you noticed that Jason Kenney has not been in the news as much lately? 

The Smiling Budha, Curry in Hurry, Minister of Citizen, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who is also considered to be a leadership candidate to replace Harper, failed to step up during the Senate scandal by dumping on Nigel Wright, leaving the heavy lifting in Parliament, to Baird and Moore. It would appear that this, along with Kenney's open dispute with Flaherty over Rob Ford, might not have gone unnoticed been Harper.

The governments multiculturalism budget which Kenney controls was reduced in 2013 by a third and is expected to be reduced further in the upcoming years. Kenney has also had his signature granting program, the Inter-Action budget cut back. Kenney's signature granting program was set up in 2010 to support events approved by Kenney's office that promoted intercultural understanding, respect for democratic values and/or civic memory and pride. 
In 2010-2011, about $14 million was…
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Maybe Merkle and Harper can sing Hey Jude together.

Remember Harper's much heralded EU Trade Agreement, the largest, most historic, trade agreement ever! Well it appears that the largest EU partner, Germany is objecting to the investor protection clause in the Canadian deal.

This is the clause that allows foreign corporations to ignore the laws of their trading partner, by giving the foreign corporations the right to sue if such rights are denied. It is known as the ISDS or Investor State Dispute Settlement clause and was part of the original and subsequent North American Free Trade Agreements.

Further more from the article we discover that the Europeans only consider Harper's so called, historic free-trade agreement as a test for the agreement with the United States.

So much for Steve's analysis back in October:
Mr. Harper too played down the approval process saying the provinces are on side and that he expects the deal to be in place by the next election in 2015.

“The agreement as it now stands is not going to change,” h…
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I will see your blitz and raise you one ghetto

Yesterday, Netanyahu compared the Hamas rocket attacks to what Britain endured during the second world war.

"There's only been one other instance where a democracy has been rocketed and pelleted with these projectiles of death, and that's Britain during World War Two. Israel is undergoing a similar bombardment now."

If a seven month, blitz, dropping over 36,000 tonnes of explosives, and killing over 60,000 civilians is similar to seventeen days of aimless, highly defensible, rockets, being fired in your general direction and killing one civilian, then Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel is similar to the Warsaw ghetto and the treatment by the Nazis.

At least in the latter comparison the numbers are closer.
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No where to run, no where to hide

We are lead to believe that there is a moral difference between bombing an abandoned hospital that snipers took cover in and bombing a hospital that you ordered to be evacuated before the snipers took cover.

Unfortunately, the end result is the same, Gaza looses a hospital.

A similar tactic was used today to destroy a UN run school sheltering displaced families seeking shelter from the onslaught. Unfortunately not enough time was allowed for the evacuation and as men, women and children (families) waited in the courtyard for evacuation the Israeli bombs started falling killing over a dozen people and wounding an undisclosed number.

That should teach the UN, to suggest that Israel might be guilty of war crimes for not taking enough care to avoid killing innocent civilians (families).
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How to fry mushrooms

Late one night, in the declining years of the seventies, after watching a midnight episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a tiny, bearded gnome of a chef, I believe from the west coast, appeared on my television screen, giggling, joyously hopping up and down and exonerating in a high pitched voice, that what he was about to demonstrate, would not only, change how I forever looked at the common mushroom, it would also change my life.

Being unsure if this truly was a cooking show or possibly some imagined, reverberating, continuance of Mary Hartman, I watched, as the tiny chef carefully snapped the stems from the caps of plain white mushrooms.
"It is very important that, no part of the stem remain within the cap, nor that the cap itself, is damaged or cracked during the removal process. Any poorly disembowelled caps should be discarded to the side with the now dislodged stems.", he warned."For the novice, long narrow stems are more easily, removed and should be considered p…
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Defining Alberta one vehicle at a time

My guess is that the conservatives in Alberta did not like advertising the Wild Rose Party on the provinces' license plates so they have three new designs that they want Albertans to vote for. Although new and stylish, the designs totally miss the mark in representing the new Alberta. I think the one below better defines the Alberta that the rest of world sees.


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Get a bucket and mop, clean the bottom and top

Shaw's Global Toronto ran a MacDonald's ad as a news story tonight. Watch the video here.

Global merged a story about, newly, published, research (with no MacDonalds references), by Dr. Marc-David Seidel, a professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business with onsite interviews, with nice, white, Canadian, teenagers flipping burgers inside MacDonalds.

MacDonalds Canada has taken a major hit to its reputation, after revelations that they have been taking advantage of the Harper's government expanded Temporary Foreign Worker program.

After being caught replacing Canadian workers with lower cost foreign workers, their CEO, John Betts, made matters worse by sarcastically making light of the issue, in a recorded message to his franchisees.

And unfortunately when the big guys, especially the arrogant ones, screw up and light is shone upon their corporation's greed and their own arrogance, we all have to suffer through their ridiculous attempts to restore order. But don't worry B…
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