I do not normally observe special days but this is one where the cause is a worthy one. I despise lawfare, and this rather evil person is a major practitioner who should b exposed.
It baffles me that Barbra Streisand and John Kerry's wife help fund this clown, but maybe it should not baffle me. His thuggery seems to fit the Democrat profile of late.
Really there are so few reality shows that have any reality. This is one of them.
It is so much fun watching celebrities (even when you have never heard of them) stressed by being asked to excel in an area where they, all obviously competitive folks, might not have comparative advantage.
I watched no episodes before this weekend this season, but watched both this week. Reports I had read saying the quality was crazy were only confirmed. The Monday night show was an utter pleasure - high quality, high enthusiasm.
Last night every got a perfect score and rightly.
In the end the result I would have picked from the fact that voters are USAian is that the USAian would win, especially backed, I would bet, by a major Green Bay Packers voting block.
I cast all my votes for Kathleen Jenkins.
But you know it was a great outcome. I have never seen a final with such utterly quality on this show. Maybe the producers should reduce the quality of their searches for future drama. Hard call.
In the end, for me, I loved watching the total refutation of British reserve in Jenkins, the delightful Latino-ness of Levy, and, ultimately, how much Driver loved winning; the sight of him with that young daughter in his arms, crying her head off, was SO sweet.
DWTS is planning an all-star season. Other networks, please let me just watch it in peace! I know you do not plan to.
The last two nights were magic. I will not readily sacrifice them to your best shows.
It documents with savage clarity why the son of the current monarch of the UK is not fit to lead any organization. And he leaves out the moral depravity that destroyed the young Diana Spencer.
And yet!
This disgusting slimeball is touring Canada and getting the utter approval of our state media (perhaps also our private media). I'd be even more disturbed if our state media were really state-controlled; it is a lot like the BBC, just state-funded. This means both problems have a REALLY easy solution.
In any case my stomach was utterly turned by state-funded report this afternoon of this totally unfit jerk meeting with a bunch of 'First Nations' leaders, all about equally equipped and morally justified as leaders of any sort.
It amazes me a state media that went into hysterics over Diana Spencer so little later can forget her and forget the obvious message about the moral qualities of the guy tingling the legs of their reporters.
It can be a very sorry world.
This guy is in no way a nice person and why is everyone faking their orgasms?
The lights that night went out far more broadly than Massachusetts; I recall them going out where I lived then, and that has always made this song and its lead vocal, a favorite of mine, though I never listened to the lyrics in any detail.
And the moronocity is deep. It is not just that he was an utterly crappy groom, though that should also be a problem.
Hey Nick Cohen you think this is guy is OK? Neither do I, He is a pig and an utter idiot and likely damage as a monarch. Blecchh!
I am planning to flee Toronto as the idiots have decided to feature this sad clown in proceedings this weekends! Yeah tampon lady I can hardly wait to hear what people say!
Though maybe it has some advantages; I just spent a day with a niece and one of her presents to me was a nice long walk through her neighborhood, which she clearly loves, for many more reasons than just this vista (and it would be more dramatic if my future photo-editing experiments work better).
And I must say the weather is nice - roughly daily highs of 16 degrees Canadian (tx EclectEcon) versus just above freezing back home.
Nick Cohen provides a great tribute in The Guardian.
Happy birthday, comrade. If the British are slightly more tolerant than we once were, it is in part because we had the good fortune to have you live among us.
You have to know Nick Cohen's writing to feel fully that initial greeting.
h/t Tim Worstall, who has a slightly different view, more like mine:
His various forays into the world of economics have been laughably ignorant.
Certain of his campaigns have been based upon very, very, odd readings of the world.
Yet, as Sellars and Yeatman didn’t put it, he’s not been wrong but wromatic, nor even right but repulsive.
On balance, he’s been a Good Thing.
On which note Happy Birthday to Mr. Tatchell, someone who probably wouldn’t accept one but most certainly should be offered a peerage.
For we should cherish, promote, reward and acknowledge the loons that we are privileged to have among us.
Yup, priviliged is the right word, and I do feel so that Peter Tatchell lived during my time.
OK the title is provacative, and I have mixed feelings about how much it should be.
But let's face it; same sex marriage means something quite different when you swear it in a domain in which it is recognized compared to one in which it is not. So a Canadian couple marrying under Canadian law are conferred multiple benefits, legal and emotional.
Since the Canadian laws changed (well, no, they did not change, they were sort of reinterpreted, no they did change , no I am confused, and I am not alone) Canadian same-sex couples have been able to move into a married state exactly like opposite-sex couples (and yeah LGBT I know there are all sorts of other categories but I am in my 60s so give me a break).
But foreigners who come here to marry are clearly in a funny state. When they return to home turf, what rights does their Canadian marriage buy them? This is a deep question. It runs at the heart of the stupid outbreak last week over a same-sex married-pair trying to divorce in Canada again, though living elsewhere, and facing a perfectly reasonable (to my mind) residency rule. If locally where they live their Canadian marriage is meaningless how much more meaningful is a putative divorce?
This is for lawyers and lawyers were fighting it. It turns out it is obvious the problem starts earlier. If you are married in Canada and live where that does not matter what does your marriage mean?
Well, not much legally, but maybe a TON emotionally. And that is part of the point. The Canadians married under our law are privileged, in that these forms align. Those outside Canada must have a struggle. WE cannot make that better.
And surely for divorce it is even worse; to have a bond you swore under law (even if not your law) that you find you cannot break under anyone's law? That is what we saw.
I think most of what we saw was puffery. I have no problem with Canada offering symbolic marriages to non-Canadians; between Candians this would create claims between individuals, but why should Canada be fussed with such claims between foreigners? I don't know. Seems crazy to me.
But that was what all the fuss last week was about. I think it is nice our government will try to make foreigners feel good about their relationships, but I am really dubious about how much we have to follow up.
In any case I will give credit to our government that its solution to meaningless marriages was to find a way to offer meaningless divorces.
The Peltzman effect is the hypothesized tendency of people to react to a safety regulation by increasing other risky behavior, offsetting some or all of the benefit of the regulation.
I dont't think 'hypothetical' applies to that guy on the radio.
After long council meetings listening to the pigs at the trough, the endless procession of those currently on the receiving end of the budget squealing about how bad life will be if they are not handed over other taxpayer money, a budget is coming to council in about five minutes.
Toronto is in a hole, created by our previous mayor (the liar who promised tax rate increases matching inflation), who was in love with spending the money of others on what often looked to me like vanity projects (typified by his environmental junkets, and while they were a small part of the expense they indicated how much he seemed to love being loved in the spotlight, by his chosen audience, all of this funded by many people with NO sympathy for his antics). Sue-Ann Levy (apology - originally had Anne) documents some of how we got here.
While the disasters are extensive she gives a few examples of poorly-managed construction initiatives:
That laissez-faire attitude has permeated the organization from the bottom-up and the top-down — resulting in a never-ending stream of construction projects that have come in over-budget and well beyond their projected completion date.
The 6.7-km St. Clair dedicated streetcar line — Mihevc’s pet project — is a prime example. It took more than five years to complete and came in at least 100% over its originally budgeted $65-million.
The 40-bed Peter St. Shelter — one of Vaughan’s legacies — is still not finished and at $11-million, is more than 100% over-budget.
One of Miller’s final insults to taxpayers before he left office in 2010 was to push through a $2.4-billion capital budget and long-term plan that stretched borrowing for major capital projects — the Spadina subway line and the waterfront — over a 40-year time frame.
That refinancing scheme will end up costing taxpayers $1.6-billion more.
This will be somewhat of a battle, as many of what seemed like Miller cronies are still on council and will hate to see any impact on their pet projects using taxpayer funding.
I will wager that to get to financial sanity, this is only a step, amd more pain will be needed.
This is a very hard task politically, and I can imagine it may cost mayor Ford any prospect of re-election. It is, after all, we idiot citizens, who balance poorly the benefits we get from a government (we'd love to have it give us all sorts of goodies) against the cost of the taxation and fees the city must impose (though many of the pigs at the trough balance this VERY well - they get the rest of us to subsidize them no end, using their votes).
Add to this drama, the city is in the midst of a contract negotiation with many of the workers in CUPE, the union representing them, and this union is already negotiating in a canny way for the public, with an initial salvo of offering a three-year wage freeze. The city needs more in contract changes to get the flexibility to cut costs.
So I have switched over to watching council in action; a measure of how important I think this is is that I was watching Kelly Ripa and Jessica Alba.
Ezra Levant waylays celebrities attending the Waterkeeper Alliance for interviews (i.e. somewhat loaded and silly questions) and Baldwin, up until the end, fields the standard Ethical Oil question by recognizing there is a trade-off. His final answer, about buying a mix of both seems silly, but it is probably more politeness than analysis. You can watch starting at 7:00 in this clip.
There are more interviews with other celebrities, but they really are not worth hearing, except for the last guy who is an oil and gas man John Paul DeJoria, who is on part 4. You can surely find it if you want it.
