Assorted Links: May 9, 2007

Tim Horton's Congratulates Sarkozy

In life you gotta take your Timbits with your French Cruellers.

Nicolas Sarkozy, president-elect of France, was duped by Quebec humorists pretending to be Canada's conservative prime minister in a telephone call, but he hung up after being invited to a "dinner of fools," the jesters said Tuesday.

The "Masked Defenders," who caught French President Jacques Chirac in a similar gag in January 2006, said they called the rightist Sarkozy on Sunday night after his election win over socialist candidate Segolene Royal.

Royal was herself the victim of a similar prank prior to the campaign.

In their taped conversation, obtained by AFP, one of the callers pretended to be Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and asked Sarkozy, "How's it going?"

"I'm well and everything seems to have gone pretty well (with the vote)," Sarkozy replies.

"You're very kind," he adds when congratulated for the win. "You know that I'm a big fan of Canada and our bilateral relations are excellent."

John Edwards Studies Poverty Alleviation

At a Hedge Fund.

In an interview with The Associated Press, the former North Carolina senator said his yearlong, part-time position with Fortress Investment Group helped his understanding of the connection but he has more to learn. Edwards has made eradicating poverty a focus of his second White House bid.

Edwards, a multimillionaire after years as a trial lawyer, would not disclose how much he got paid for a year of consulting beginning in October 2005. He said the amount will be revealed when he releases his financial disclosure forms due May 15.

Asked if he had to join a hedge fund to learn about financial markets, Edwards replied, "How else would I have done it?"

He said he considered going to an investment firm such as Goldman Sachs, but Fortress was the most natural fit. Presented with the suggestion that he could have taken a university class instead, he said, "That's true."

"It was primarily to learn, but making money was a good thing, too," the 2004 vice presidential nominee said in an hourlong interview with AP reporters and editors.

Making money is a good thing, unless you're the target of a John Edwards class action suite, then it's the mark of the Beast.

Buck Passer Passes Buck

Legend has it that when Bill Davis was premier a small sign sat on his desk, a nod toward a similar ornament that was once atop the Oval Office desk of Harry Truman, that read "The Buck Stops Here."  Davis, like Truman, was too skilled a politician to take the sign all that seriously, but even in the Great Red Tory's most evasive moments there was still a sense of bottom, that when push came to shove someone was in charge.  Not the impression you get from the Dalt, not even on a very, very good day.

The federal government is in a conflict of interest when it comes to settling aboriginal land claims and must create an independent body to clear the backlog of some 800 claims across the country, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday.

Frustration is growing across the country with a lack of action and something has to be done to deal with outstanding claims that have led to standoffs like the year-long occupation in Caledonia, Ont., he said.

"We need an accelerated process," McGuinty said Tuesday, adding Ottawa should create an independent body with the power to both study and settle the claims.

"Right now the federal government finds itself in an untenable position - it has to decide whether or not it's going to give up some of its own land. I think that puts them in a very difficult position."

Tragic position really.  Almost as bad as having gangs of roaming thugs threatening your property and family, all the while police officers, paid for by your taxes, sit impotently by because the gangs' members are of a different skin pigmentation that you.  Not something that's likely to happen to the Dalt's kith and kin anytime soon.  No group of private citizens, however legitimately frustrated by the judicial system, would be allowed to terrorize innocent fellow Canadians and get away with it.  This is apartheid with reverse onus; it's the majority that's guilty until proven innocent.

Conservative Wins Progressive Conservative Nomination

Ah, things just got real interesting for John Tory.

On Saturday, Mr. Hillier won the right to represent a newly-amalgamated Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington riding as a Conservative candidate.

He and Mr. Tory finally spoke about the victory yesterday morning.

"I reminded him that now he is part of a team of people--we're all accountable for the things we say," Mr. Tory said in an interview. "I also reminded him that some of the tactics he used to express disapproval of certain issues, such as road blockades and other tactics, would not be used, since he's part of a new team now."

Mr. Hillier, 49, stepped down in January as the head of the Ontario Landowners Association, a Lanark-based group vehemently opposed to what it sees as growing government bureaucracy in rural life. The organization -- whose slogan is "This is our land. Back off government" -- has sprouted 17 different offshoots and boasts close to 15,000 members province-wide, according to Mr. Hillier.

Back-off government?  The right of private property?  Who does this nut think he is?  Oh, right, an actual conservative.  The fun continues:

He has also written on the organization's website that taxpayer dollars are used by government to "support and promote Quebec, Native, Arts, Homosexual, Urban and Multi cultures. However when it comes to the independent, peaceful rural culture in Canada, government support is stifling, suffocating and controlling."

Amazingly enough Mr. Hillier has been until now allowed to roam the highways and by-ways of our fair province unchecked by the OPP.  No doubt this is due to the severe personnel shortages caused by the unfortunate events in Caledonia, all those OPP officers working diligently to ensure that more aboriginal territory isn't seized by predatory suburbanites.  The presence of Mr. Hillier on the slate of Progressive Conservative candidates gives us a novel image, that of a conservative joining, rather than fleeing, the kindler, gentler and somewhat de-Miked party of John Tory.  Let's say that the left-wing lynch mob, lead by our dear Minister of Health Rationing George Smitherman, in his recurring role as an affronted downtown Toronto homosexual, is right:  Randy Hillier is a redneck bigot.  This is something I doubt, yet the hours of entertainment this is going to provide, watching John Tory trying desperately to appease the Toronto-Ottawa latte crowd, while at the same time trying not to completely alienate the party's rural base, is well worth the price of admission. 

The Gospel According to Al

At first describing the environmental movement as a kind of wacky religion was a joke.  As time passes, however, it's becoming quite clear environmentalism actually is a religion.  Unlike real religions the Greenistas have one rather obvious fatal flaw, the foundations of their creed rest not on faith but on pseudo-science.  You can't prove or disprove the existence of God, you can disprove the theory that humans are significantly impacting climate change.  Scientific arguments aside, what will kill environmentalism as a political movement, as it did during the last Global Warming / Ozone Layer scare of the late 1980s and early 1990s, will be the weakening of US economy and the excesses of the environmentalists themselves.  Case in point, the Green hotel:

Visitors to the Gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa won't find the Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer. Instead, on the bureau will be a copy of ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' former Vice President Al Gore's book about global warming.

They'll also find the Gaia equipped with waterless urinals, solar lighting and recycled paper as it marches toward becoming California's first hotel certified as ``green,'' or benevolent to the environment. Similar features are found 35 miles south at San Francisco's Orchard Garden Hotel, which competes for customers with neighboring luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont.

``I'm not your traditional Birkenstocks and granola type of guy,'' said Stefan Muehle, general manager of the Orchard Garden, who said green measures are reducing energy costs as much as 25 percent a month. ``We're trying to dispel the myth that being green and being luxurious are mutually exclusive.''

Nothing like a designer hairshirt.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings Gift Shop Will No Longer Be Selling Its World Famous Pinochet Hat

The Communist Broadcasting Corporation at its finest.

Montreal resident Bryan Clark wrote the CBC to ask why it was advertising a CBC Radio 3-branded ballcap as a “Castro hat”. “How can the CBC in good conscience, as our taxpayer-funded “neutral” broadcaster, offer up such a symbol of communist oppression?” he wrote. “[The Cap] is a “loaded” symbol of a ruthless, murdering dictator.”

A representative from the Shop responded: “[The cap’s name] is a widely used and accepted term for the style of hat and many stores and retailers all over North America sell Castro hats. To call it another style of hat would not describe it properly…. It is in no way meant to glorify communism and murder simply a style of hat. (sic)”

Justin Trudeau Speaks the Truth

Then apologies immediately.

Justin Trudeau has stepped into his first political minefield as a Liberal candidate, issuing an apology Monday for calling into question New Brunswick's separate French-language school system, one of his father's enduring legacies.

Mr. Trudeau made his verbal faux-pas last Friday when he told a group of New-Brunswick professors that a single, bilingual education system would be more cost-effective than the current separate systems for francophones and anglophones.

To make his point, he lamented the fact that francophone and anglophone children did not play together when he went to school as a youth in Montreal.

“The segregation of French and English in schools is something to be looked at seriously,” Mr. Trudeau was quoted as saying in local papers. “It is dividing people and affixing labels to people.”

The remarks irked many Acadians, who fought for decades to prevent the assimilation of their youth in bilingual schools. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982 by late prime minister Pierre Trudeau, expressly guaranteed the right of francophones to separate schools.

Liberal MP Denis Coderre added: “Justin is in a learning phase, but it's clear that separate schools are essential.”

Much to learn, young grasshopper.

Oh, Where's Kevin Jaegar When You Need Him

While Trudeaupia's forte was Saudi Arabian goat stories, I'm sure he could have done something with this.

A Sudanese man who married a goat was in mourning after his wife (goat) died of swallowing a plastic bag. Charles Tombe shot to fame last year when he tied the knot with Rose, his domestic goat, said the Daily Mail.

A court ordered him to marry the beast "to save her honour" after he was caught making amorous advances toward the mother-of-one in the middle of the night.

Allan Fotheringham Is Still Alive

And he's amazed that the monarchy is too.

We have a suggestion. Either the Grits or the Tories could sweep the nation if they would announce tomorrow their major platform: Let Canada grow up and junk the monarchy.

There's a simple reason why the rest of the world doesn't take Canada very seriously at the United Nations or other world bodies.

Who else, on its currency, has the face of a foreigner? One who lives far away across a large ocean? Would France allow that? Germany? Italy? Spain? Of course not. It's about time this country grew up. And realized that our "equals" in the world chambers will not take us seriously until we shed off the shackles of being a colony - as India and many in Africa have done - of 10 Downing Street.

Right. Because our becoming a republic will instantly render us a credible force to the Taliban, the Iranians Mullahs and assorted African kleptocrats (such as Robert Mugabe). The Chinese intelligence services, seeing Her Majesty removed from the paper currency of her former overseas dominion, will think twice about stealing our technologies. The government France, now on its Fifth Republic, and the government of Germany, whose recent history it tries to forget, do not consider one of the ten richest and most advanced nations on earth a serious country because our Head of State is the Head of State of fifteen other countries. 

And what, pray tell, is the President of the European Commission except a lame continental attempt to replicate the transnational unity of the saner parts of the Commonwealth without all that nasty parliamentary tradition and national sovereignty stuff?  Germany, Italy and Spain?  They have something to teach Canada about independence?  As they surrender their sovereignty to Brussels?  Perhaps they can enlighten us on the nature of freedom and individual rights, when they have been able to sustain those freedoms and rights longer than the reign of one Canadian monarch, Queen Victoria.  What is certain to convince those paying attention to Canada that we are not a serious country is ditching our history in favour of some instant republic.  One of the hallmarks of maturity is making an objective assessment of the vices and virtues of your parents and your upbringing.  Betraying our past, and desperately trying to re-invent ourselves, seems like the clear sign of a never ending adolescence.