Re Trudeau / Fantino: I hate to be a buzz kill, but...

Justin Trudeau's slap at Julian Fantino over the Charter of Rights would carry just a little more weight if his party hadn't tried to draft Il Dunce as a candidate and weren't enabling the Harperites in their continuing campaign to use the Charter for toilet paper. Not to mention the fact that under Iggy, they vote with the government every time it really matters.

Sorry, Liberal friends. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy, no matter where it's coming from.

Authoritarian whacking material: the Stacy Bonds video

Via JJ and the Dawgster. As JJ puts it, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.



(c) Canwest Ottawa Citizen

I really can't add anything.

Oh no, wait – yes I can. Matt Humphreys, John Ayre and Chris Bentley: today's Little Eichmanns ^TM. Take a bow, guys. You're a credit to the legal profession.

Julian Fantino, in action

Let's review:

Currently, as the Conservative candidate in Vaughan, he refuses to attend an all candidates' meeting. He won't respond to questions about his role in the wiretapping of lawyer Peter Maloney and whether that extended to former police services board chair Susan Eng.

The essential Alex Himelfarb

Is it possible, from a legislative point of view, to declare this man an essential resource, indispensible to the national interest? In a new post on our dysfunctional democratic institutions, he writes:

The new populism we see developing to the South is profoundly undemocratic. Giving up on the possibility of collective progress leads not to democracy making but to institution busting, not to open knowledge sharing and public education, essential to democracy, but to the denigration of knowledge and expertise and surrender to slogans and spin, and, despite the rhetoric, not to greater personal freedom, except for the already rich and powerful.

He's probably a lot kinder to Bob Rae than I'd be, but that's because he's a gentleman.

Big props to pogge for #onpoli

Cross-posted from over here ...

A polite and proper acknowledgement to pogge for setting up this lovely sitting room. For weeks now, I've been somewhat disturbed by the, um, tone of some of the posts in the blogosphere. I won't mention any names, of course, but some folks are descending to, well, gutter language.  

What Stageleft said

So Vern White's reaching out to the community in response to the Stacy Bonds scandal, wanting everyone to know that the Ottawa police take this sort of thing very seriously.

Is the Ottawa Citizen undermining the authority of the court?

Note the wording of the lead sentence here:

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit is probing what a judge has called the unlawful 2008 arrest and strip search of a 27-year-old woman by Ottawa police officers.