Latest Tory Attack Ad

According to the latest Conservative Party attack ad we should not trust Michael Ignatieff because he came back to Canada to become Prime Minister. Hmmm ... he isn't trustworthy because he wanted to be PM? He is an opportunist because he came back to become PM?

It is kind of funny to hear the Tories prattle on about someone coming back to Canada to be PM being bad. Aren't the Tories the party that brought Lucien Bouchard back to Canada so he would get into politics? Lucien Bouchard, the man who STARTED the Bloc Quebecois party. The separtist party that Harper now rails about. Why did they bring Bouchard into federal politics? They wanted to get votes in Quebec.

One party had a man come back to Canada because he wanted to lead the party and the country. The other party brought back a man because they wanted votes in Quebec. A man who would then dedicate himself to trying to tear the country apart. Who is the opportunist we should beware of again?

RCMP Criminal Background Check

As I mentioned in other posts, the rules changed last year for having the Vulnerable Sector Search in Canada and it is causing headaches for some people. If you have the same birthday and gender as a sex offender who was registered and/or pardoned then your name/file becomes flagged. You must submit fingerprints in order to clear your name and prove you aren't this person.

CTV news, Live at Five, had a short blurb tonight about how the new rules are affecting an artist in St, John, New Brunswick. He needs the VSS to get a job teaching art. Because the check will take 3-4 months he may lose out on the job. After they told his story they talked to the MP for his area. He put out the standard BS answer about better to have to go through the check instead of letting an offender go undiscovered. While I can agree with that it doesn't address why the check takes so long. It was typical glib answer from a politician looking to make a sound byte for the evening news while ignoring the issue.

I actually have no problem with doing any check but there are some problems with the process. Problems the politician didn't mention.

1) It takes 3-4 months to clear your name. That is a ridiculous amount of time in this day and age. It took the RCMP 3 bloody months to do my check last year and then tell me that they couldn't do the VSS.

3-4 months to run a fingerprint check just strikes me as insane. Some government agencies actually bypass the RCMP check and have their own security people run the check and it is supposed to take 2 weeks. According to what I was told the finger prints are digitized and then a check is done by computer. Which leads to 2 questions a) why can't the RCMP do it in 2 weeks and b) why the does it take THAT long if they can just be run through a computer data base? Is there a commonality between data of birth and sex offenders that means there are hundreds or thousands of them with the same birthday so the search is huge? It just doesn't compute. (Pun intended.)

2) Unless it is for a Federal government job or SOME volunteer jobs you must pay to have the police clear your name.

Yes, you have to PAY to clear your name. Why the hell should I have to pay the police to prove I am innocent? Aren't they supposed to prove we are guilty? Isn't it the job of the police to gather evidence of our innocence or guilt? That is what they are PAID to do already right?

3) They do NOT do the VSS for jobs outside Canada.

They don't do the VSS for jobs outside of Canada? That just doesn't make sense, unless they are trying to lower their workload so they have less VSS checks to do. We should be making sure that we DON'T export sex offenders to other countries. Not doing this check for people seeking work outside the country just doesn't make sense. Hell, we have to pay for the bloody check anyway so why does it matter if it is a job inside or outside of Canada?

Will these problems be addressed? Probably not. People just continue to be screwed over by teh process.

What the ... Things You Don't Say??!?!?

I was talking some friends about the idiot making the weight comment Saturday morning. We started talking about some of the stupid things we have heard people say that they didn't need to. Whether they were right or just rude they should have kept it to themselves.

One friend, S, was at a funeral Friday. A friend's son had committed suicide. S's mother died 4 weeks ago and was buried 3 weeks ago so that is still raw with her. Someone she knew at the funeral looked at her and said "At least your mother was 78 when she died." What a mook. I know what they meant, "Your mother lived a full life." because the funeral was for a 16 year old ... BUT ... you just don't need to say it, especially there and that close to her mother's death.

S went on to relate an incident at the hospital while her mother was comatose just before the end. She comes from a big Italian family so there were kids, grandkids, uncles, aunts, cousins visiting. A group of them were there to sit by her bed and a nurse walks in. She says "What? There is a party and I wasn't invited?"

S said her one of her brothers lost it and kicked the nurse out of the room. Then complained to the head nurse and said he didn't want that woman near his mother again. I can't say that I blame him.

It reminded me of the morning my father died. He died in his bed with family around him. A nurse was around for nights just in case. Dad wasn't dead a minute when this ditz says "What a beautiful death." I know what she meant, he died surrounding by family that loved him, but you just don't need to say that at taht moment. One of my sister-in-laws got her out of the room and the house.

Kind of like my Korean friend who walked up to a guy and said "You are black. You are a nigger." Leaving the racist aspect of it out do you really have to tell someone what colour their skin is?

When young kids make similar comments it easy to excuse them, and use at as a chance to teach them something, because at their age they don't know any better. These kind of mooks are adults and SHOULD know better.

Some people just don't think. They are mooks and stupidity is universal. They might have meant well. It might have seemed funny to them. But they just don't need to make their comments and 9 times out of 10 it was only funny to them.

I missed telling mooks off properly.

I was helping move some stuff around today for the candidate in my riding. There was a group of about 6 of us. One of the guys I hadn't seen in over 10 years so we were catching up a bit while working. He mentioned that I looked thinner. I mentioned how much weight I have lost.

Some mook I don't know decided he had to chime in and say "You could stand to lose a lot more."

My reply was a terse "Yes, and I will. Tomorrow I will be lighter but you will still be a fucking idiot." (I know, I bastardised Winston.)

He mulled it over for a few seconds and wisely walked away.

Fucking stupid mook. It felt good to tell one off properly in English. I couldn't do it justice in Korean.

What the ... hypocritical immigrant?!?!?!?

Writing and talking about my last post on WTK got me thinking about a friend I had in University. I'll call him Josef. He had immigrated from Russia with his parents when he was starting Middle School. While his English was good he had a strong Russian accent. Once when I was visiting we went to a McDonald's. The clerk serving us was Hispanic and had a strong Spanish accent.

As we were leaving Josef started ranting on and on about Hispanics in America. He said they should learn proper English before they are allowed in. They aren't good workers and their accent makes them worse. I started laughing at him. Then I ripped into him for being a racist.

It just seemed incredible to me. Here was someone who had immigrated to the States. Who spoke with a strong accent. While I didn't have problems understanding him other people did at times. He had faced similar comments from people who didn't like him just because he was a Russian immigrant. And here he was complaining about another immigrant who had a strong accent. Bloody hypocrite.

He didn't like being called on his hypocrisy and some of the racist stuff he said. That was pretty much the end of our friendship. The way I saw it was that it was no big loss if that is what he was like.

Alexandra Wallace

Have you heard about Alexandra Wallace? Well, if you spend any time on the net you probably have. Her rant about Asians's on their phones in the library at UCLA has become more than a little infamous. The other night she came up in a discussion with family and friends. They couldn't believe someone would put something that stupid on the net.

Me, I wasn't surprised. It used to be that people would make their stupid comments to their friends and that would end it. Their friends would usually not tell them what they really thought, you are one racist bitch maybe your push up bra is affecting your brain function, they would feel good for having vented and that would end their rant.

That was then and this is now. In the information age these people, for whatever reason or lack thereof, take their rants to the internet. They make what was once personal public. Hell, I have been known to rant on the internet myself.

Just look at some of the stuff people put up on Facebook. They will tell every little detail of their life. I know of one person who is always crying that he is poor. But when you see him on Facebook he is crowing about a prime rib steak dinner or spending money on booze. Yet he drones on about how poor he is. One of my nieces used to put up pictures on Facebook that would make a hooker blush.

For some strange reason a lot of people seem to think that they can say anything they want, no matter how stupid or racist, on line and it won't come back to haunt them. They don't seem to understand that once they post something it is already too late to take it back. They don't realize that many prospective employers will google you name and check out Facebook and MySpace to see what shows up. Then they get shocked when the words and pictures come back to bite them in the ass.

Western Forces

Damn ... its started a lot sooner than I thought it would. The Arab League is already backing away form the UN enforcing the no-fly zone and no attacking civilians. Talking with friends yesterday I said that I thought something like this would happen.

Considering the size of Arab League member airforces there is no need for the West to supply planes to enforce things. The Arab League members could and should be doing it. Hell Saudi Arabia has troops inside Bahrain attacking protesters. Why not use some of their f-15's in Libya? By not doing it, Arab nations can now stand back and say "We aren't doing it ... the West is." When the Muslim Fundamentalists start using it as a rallying point the Arab nations will just point at America and other Western nations and say "They did it." And we (the Western Nations involved) fell for it.

What's next?

Ok, the United Nations has decided to intervene in Libya. A no fly zone has been declared and UN forces will be allowed to attack any military formation threatening the rebels. The U.N.'s actions do beg the question What is next?

Will they move into Bahrain? People who want freedom there are be oppressed and killed. Saudi troops are in the country to help do it. Will the U.N. send forces there to stop that? Odds are they won't. Which then begs the question Why not? What is the line that separates the use of force in a situation like that? The U.N. has drawn a line in the sand but will it be applied equally everywhere?

Testing ... testing ... 1,2, Mook

I went to write a test for a term job with the government yesterday. They said we can't talk about the test but never said we couldn't talk about the people who came to write it. :)

The test was for a supervisory job dealing in many cases with the public. 5 of the 50 people who came to write it could easily have been mistaken for homeless people. Their clothes were scruffy and in 2 cases dirty. They wore ball caps. Now I am not saying you needed to be dressed to the 9's for this but at least look presentable.

It was kind of funny watching people file in and take a seat, I was the first. Everyone gravitated towards a back seat, myself included, and then started filling to the front. One guy who sat in the row in front of me should never have sat there.

As the proctor started giving instructions he would keep asking her to speak up. He couldn't hear because of papers shuffling. He couldn't hear because she didn't speak loud enough. He couldn't hear because of people shifting in their seats. Well, he couldn't hear properly period and never should have sat at the back of the room.

No one else had a problem hearing her, just this guy. Do you think he would move to the front? Of course not. You think he would address questions to the proctor during the test? Of course not, he kept bothering the people around him until "someone" told him to be quiet. That he heard. You think someone who was that hard of hearing would sit in the front. Of course not if he is a mook.

PM Harper

After reading Harper's comments about the disaster in Japan yesterday I can't think of non-profane words to describe him. The fucking asshole actually tried using the disaster in Japan to say there should not be an election.

I always knew he was an arrogant piece of shit. Just look at how some government departments have changed their letter head from "The Government of Canada" to "The Harper Government". But to actually try and tie the disaster to not having an election. What an opportunistic arrogant fucktard.

Great Quote

Great Blog post by Charles Pierce of The Boston Globe. The post is titled "Stop Your Sobbing".

There is one good thing to come out of the NHL's abdication of its duty to protect people like Max Pacioretty yesterday. That is -- the fans of the Boston Bruins now have lost forever any right to complain that "the league" is out to get their team, and that the Montreal Canadiens have some kind of pull inside the NHL home office. That Zdeno Chara got a complete pass on what he did obviates that talking point forever.

Well said Mr. Pierce. Considering the lack of a call on Lucic for a blatant cross check to a players head that wasn't punished, the emails of Colin Campbell's (the NHL head in charge of meting out supplemental punishment) that surfaced vis-a-vis his son and on ice officials, the fact his son plays for the Bruins, and now the Chara non-punishment Boston has little to whine about. In fact, there is a LOT of material to allow the conspiracy theorists to claim that Boston has special pull.

While I don't believe that I do think the mooks running the NHL have really screwed the pooch this time. It is time for some house cleaning in the upper echelons of NHL management.

Chara's Revelation

Wow, you don't often see a revelation like this but Zdeno Chara admitted to the world that he is a moron. Chara told reporters

I had no idea (Pacioretty) was on the ice . I had no idea it was him.

As Dave Stubbs pointed out this means that, among other things, Pacioretty's name running from shoulder to shoulder on the back of the uniform isn't big enough to be recognized and one of the top defencemen in the world skates around unaware of the opponent he faces.

This ranks right up there with his other tasteless and stupid comment after the hit where he blamed Pacioretty for jumping into the stanchion. What a mook.

Hmmm .... the NHL gave Sean Avery a 6 game suspension for his off icee "sloppy seconds" comment. I wonder if Buttman (Yes, I deliberately misspelled his name.) will use these comments as a chance to do something without blaming it on the bhit? A face saving measure. Chara is giving in a 10 game suspension for his stupid comments.

Naw, Buttman is just as much of a mook as Chara.

Punishment Worthy

Paul Kubina of the Tampa Bay Lightning was given a 3 game suspension and fined $60,000 and change today for an elbow to Dave Bolland's head last night. No penalty was actually assessed in the game. Bolland was not hospitalised.

Sean Avery was given a 6 game suspension in 2008 for comments he made about his ex-girlfriend who was then dating a player on a team he would face that night. The comments were made before the game. The Dallas Stars served him some punishment of their own. After the last day of his suspension the Stars announced that Avery was not welcome back on the team. For comments about his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend (Dion Phaneuf) made OFF the ice, before the game.

Nick Boyton of the BlackHawks made a throat slashing gesture at another player after a fight. He received a 1 game suspension.

Eric Goddard got an automatic 10 game suspension when he left the bench to help defend his goalie after Michael Haley skated the length of the ice to start a fight. Martin got a 4 game suspension for ANOTHER incident in that game. A game full of stupidity.

Zdeno Chara runs (one could easily say guided) Max Pacioretty into a stanchion leaving him with a concussion and a fractured vertebra. This is done when Pacioretty doesn't have the puck. He gets no "supplementary" punishment from the NHL.

I could go on and on looking at suspensions handed out. Some that make sense, some that could be argued. Yet it is the non-suspension of Zdeno Chara that leaves me shaking my head at the NHL. A throat slashing gesture after a fight warranted a 1 game suspension. Comments made to the media, before a game, warranted a 6 game suspension. Chara's actions warrant none? What a fucking joke.

Zdeno Chara ... what a Mook.

I don't think Chara wanted to do the damage he did to Pacioretty. I do believe he wanted to hurt him a little, with a check. But it went further, even if accidentally or due to negligence. Regardless of if it was an accident or not, Chara should have been held responsible for his actions and the NHL dropped the ball. Again.

The NHL's lack of a response pissed me off to no end and then I read some of Chara's comments. The piece of shit actually tried blaming Pacioretty for his own injuries.

We were racing for the puck and battling for position," Chara said. "As the puck went by, obviously I was riding him out and it was very unfortunate that at the same time when I pushed him a little bit, he kind of leaned and jumped a little bit and just hit the glass extension.

Pacioretty jumped into it? He did the damage to himself? What a fucking piece of shit Chara is. He reminds me of the rapists who say their victims "asked for it".

Call me strange but it sure looks like Pacioretty's "jump" was assisted and guided by Chara's hand/fist.

Of course Chara's remarks also leave out the reality of the situation. They WEREN'T racing for the puck when it happened. It happened well AFTER Pacioretty played the puck. Which is WHY Chara was immediately hit with an interference penalty, plus a game misconduct because of what happened. It was a gratuitous hit AFTER the play. Chara's comments instead of showing contrition for almost crippling someone, and the jury is still out on that, show him to be an asshole.

Whether the injury was intentional or not Chara deserved more of a punishment than he got. To hear Chara spout the BS he did after the fact is disgusting. What a fucking mook.

Chara not suspended longer than 1 game.

Wow. Chara only gets a one game suspension for the way he almost crippled Pacioretty. (Pacioretty has a concussion and fractured vertebrae.) At a time the League is saying it wants to clamp down on hits to the head, and Mario Lemieux is whining about it, that is all Chara gets?

NHL Senior VP of Hockey Operations Mike Murphy said;

After a thorough review of the video I can find no basis to impose supplemental discipline. This hit resulted from a play that evolved and then happened very quickly -- with both players skating in the same direction and with Chara attempting to angle his opponent into the boards. I could not find any evidence to suggest that, beyond this being a correct call for interference, that Chara targeted the head of his opponent, left his feet or delivered the check in any other manner that could be deemed to be dangerous.

Hmmm ... it looks like Chara's hand/fist is guiding Pacioretty's head into the stanchion to me. Now I am not an NHL Official with lots of experience but that doesn't look like a check that came late to me. What was it Murphy said?

I could not find any evidence to suggest that, beyond this being a correct call for interference, that Chara targeted the head of his opponent, left his feet or delivered the check in any other manner that could be deemed to be dangerous.

No evidence? Hand guiding head into stanchion. Correct me if I am wrong but a check is shoulder/hip contact. Your elbow, hands, or knees, getting involved make it a bad/illegal check.

Whether it is a good hit gone bad or not it sure looks like more than a 1 game suspension. I figured he would get 3-5 extra games ... but none? The decision also ignored the fact that Chara was gunning for Pacioretty after an incident 2 games ago.

Then there was this comment;

In reviewing this play, I also took into consideration that Chara has not been involved in a supplemental discipline incident during his 13-year NHL career.

So, because he has had a relatively clean nose so far that precludes him from doing something wrong or negligent? What a bunch of icetards.

I hope Pacioretty recovers and is able to continue playing hockey. I hate to see anyone's career ruined that way.

Added later: There is a GREAT post about this on another blog, The H Does NOT Stand For Habs. In the comment section someone posted the following quote from Colin Campbell after Ovetchkin's suspension last year.

If you cause a player to be injured, then you have to be responsible for the play that you're involved in, if there's any carelessness or recklessness in it.

And this incident was different just because Chara never had any supplemental punishment before?

Steve Doocy: Advocate of Knob Gobbling?

I almost pissed myself laughing after the Daily Show had a clip where Fox and Friends were rambling on about a new DNA test. Steve Doocy then had to show that Gretchen isn't always the stupidest person there by saying;

“all you gotta do is put someone else’s DNA in your mouth.”

Considering that FOX is just a mouth piece for the far right in the US it has to make you wonder if this wasn't Douchey err Doocy's way of "coming out" and advocating gay sex.

Amazing Race

Tokyo. Never been there, would like to go some day. I want to go to the tavern that has monkey waiters. :) But I digress.

Man oh man talk about the headaches of having a connecting flight. Would you take a flight that involved a connection instead of a direct flight to get a 15 minute lead on the opposition? It is tempting, and in AR 15 minutes can mean a lot. Based on my experience ... I would go for the direct flight but I never had the pressure of racing for a chuck of change. And it turned out, due to delays, the early flight was late so instead of a 15 minutes lead those who took it ended up with a larger deficit.

The car garage in Tokyo was interesting. Stig used one in Cheonan before. The kind where your car is put in an elevator and shuffled off to a parking spot. In Korea the attendant put your car in and out. It was funny to see the racers get their own car out.

Best line had to be either

"I have dirt in places dirt should not be."

or

When Zev? gets out of the car to ask for directions with only underwear and a t-shirt on and the commentary from him goes "If a guy gets out of his car in his underwear to ask directions in the States you run the other way. Here they don't even bat an eye."

Good episode.

You aren't really sick.

My brother and I were talking about growing up last night. One thing that always comes to mind is how our mother reacted to illness. I had allergies pretty bad back then. When they hit my sinuses would get plugged. That was the main way they hit me. However, when it came to being sick my mother would pretty much always blame it on my allergies unless I had a fever. Even when it wasn't. There were times I was really sick that she would slough it off by saying it was my allergies until a doctor said I was sick. It always kind of pissed me off. :)

She still does that today sometimes. Drives me crazy when she does