Dog Bites Man

Actually, I've lived my whole life as a boy/man, and haven't been bitten by a dog yet. But a Neil Reynolds column that is a deliberate lie meant to deceive readers of the Globe and Mail into believing something that isn't true, I have seen. Many times.

Greg documents the latest, Reynolds suggesting that Canada shouldn't have a mandatory census because the Scandinavians don't, when anyone who's paying attention at all knows that if Canada wanted to adopt the Scandinavian system (where the government collects so much information on everyone that they don't *need* a census), Reynolds would be the first person fighting against it.

To be honest, given that the Globe and Mail continues to employ Neil Reynolds after years and years of every column of his being either an attempt at deception or hilariously bad advice, it's hard to take anything in the paper seriously, or believe that the editors really have any concern whatsoever for producing a publicly useful product as opposed to just selling papers.

Even if the Globe wanted to make the argument that Reynolds is useful in a George Castanza, do-the-opposite, sort of way, like a compass that always points South, surely they could just provide his advice on what (not to) do directly to policymakers, without taking up valuable newsprint and possibly temporarily fooling people who are reading the Globe for the first time, or those poor folks with an IQ under 50 who haven't yet figured out that they should ignore (or do the opposite of) everything Reynolds says.

Getting Back to Basic

Greg over at Sinister Thoughts made me laugh with this post, which helps explain why federal politics seems to be stuck in an endless loop these days.

Someone really needs to move the punditocracy's cheese.

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¹ Important: Go read Greg's post before reading this footnote.









So you see, that wasn't a typo in my title after all, it was just a clever pun on the programming language called 'Basic'. What do we learn from this? Any time you see what looks to be type-o, misspelling or improper punctuation on this sight; you should just assume that it is something clever, even if you're not clever enough to see how it is so clever.

Lazy blogger

Yes, I've been a lazy blogger over the weekend, but luckily Greg over at Sinister Thoughts hasn't been.

Whether it's electoral reform or the ongoing aftermath of last week's health care ruling including a link to Paul Krugman's latest column, or the National Post turning on Harper, Greg's been covering the important stuff.

Random Thought For the Day

I was reading this article in the Star and a thought occurred to me: maybe Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal really did make a deal with the Liberals - and everything we've seen in the past couple of weeks has been him fulfilling his part of it.

If so I sure hope he got something good in return or the Liberals really ripped him off.

UPDATE: On second thought, this mess makes the Liberals look bad as well as the Conservatives - it must be an NDP plot. And of course, Ujjal Dosanjh is a former leader of the NDP party in B.C. - before *he* suddenly switched parties to join the (federal) Liberals. One switches ahead of time to act as the inside man and another comes along later and pretends to want to switch thus making both the Liberals and Conservatives look really sleazy - brilliant!

With this kind of genius planning, Greg may be right and we could be looking at an NDP government in no time.

Ringing Endorsement

I see that the Brits had an election yesterday. With most of the results in it looks like (roughly) 36 out of 100 voters voted for Tony Blair's incumbent Labour party, 33 voters out of 100 voted for the Conservatives, 22 out of 100 voted for the Liberal Democrats and 9 out of 100 voted for other parties / independents.

Naturally the logical outcome of such a vote is a Labour majority government (56% of the seats so far) with 64 voters out of 100 left completely powerless. Gotta love that First Past the Post electoral system.


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Update: I forgot to mention that Greg at Sinister Thoughts was way ahead of me on this one.