Anglican Samizdat

From here:

TORONTO - What Jos Chiu remembers most is the sign. A long, red, illuminated sign with big white letters: MASSAGE. The sign was for years vertically attached to number 787 Dundas St. W.

It was a massage parlour, but no ordinary massage parlour.

It was the kind suspected by police as one of the many in the city where women were offering the “extra service” of masturbation — a place known on the street as a rub-and-tug.  It’s the same massage parlour where in January 1996 Toronto Police say they walked in on NDP Leader Jack Layton — then a Metro councillor — with his pants down — literally.  In a statement Friday night, Layton said he was there for a massage and that he was told by police he had done nothing wrong.

“It was a big vertical sign on the side of the building,” said Chiu, who has owned and operated a custom T-shirt shop across the street for over 20 years.

The question is, should anyone who is daft enough to go into a massage parlour that advertises its services on a long, red, illuminated sign and naïve enough to expect his protestations of innocence to be believed, be put in charge of running a country?

Perhaps, as his wife says, “Sixteen years ago my husband went for a massage at a massage clinic that is registered with the city of Toronto. He exercises regularly; he was and remains in great shape and he needed a massage.” Or perhaps Olivia Chow’s desire for vicarious power is sufficient to temper her outrage at her husband’s desire to graze in other pastures – publicly, at least.

According to the Huffington Post, out of the top 30 cable news programs, the first eleven places are occupied by Fox News. And number 10 is a repeat of number one, The O’Reilly Factor, at a different time.

1. The O’Reilly Factor
2. Special Report With Bret Baier
3. Hannity
4. Glenn Beck
5. Fox Report With Shepard Smith
6. On The Record With Greta Van Susteren
7. Your World With Neil Cavuto
8. America’s Newsroom
9. Studio B
10. The O’Reilly Factor (11:00 p.m. repeat)
11. America Live
12. The Rachel Maddow Show
13. Happening Now
14. The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell
15. Fox & Friends
16. Anderson Cooper 360 (10:00 p.m.)
17. The Ed Show
18. Piers Morgan Tonight
19. Hardball With Chris Matthews
20. The Situation Room
21. Parker Spitzer
22. Nancy Grace
23. Anderson Cooper 360 (11:00 p.m.)
24. John King USA
25. CNN Newsroom
26. The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell (11:00 p.m. repeat)
27. Morning Joe
28. The Daily Rundown
29. MSNBC Live
30. Andrea Mitchell Reports

 

It’s all part of the new political civility.

From here:

A Chinese pianist struck a sour note at a White House state dinner with a rendition of a well-known anti-American anthem.

With the Chinese and U.S. presidents among the dozens of dignitaries watching, Lang Lang belted out ‘My Motherland’, the theme tune to the Chinese-made Korean War film ‘Battle on Shangangling Mountain’.

The song has been a propaganda tool in China for decades and includes a disparaging reference to Americans as ‘jackals’ who will be shot with hunting rifles.

You can hardly blame the Chinese for treating the American government like half-witted wimps considering the same government gave a benign nod to the building of a victory mosque on the site of a mass murder committed in the name of Islam.

Here it is:

As is often the case with socialism in practice, taking care of the poor ends up turning into taking care of poor me.

From here:

[I]f the attitude of NDP power couple Jack Layton and Olivia Chow is any indication, many MPs still haven’t learned the most important lesson of last spring’s expense controversy: You are not entitled to this money, no questions asked, just because you are an MP.

Last year, Chow claimed $530,000 in expenses, Layton claimed $629,000. Both are above average and a little surprising given that both represent Toronto ridings. Last time I looked, T.O. was not that far from Ottawa. One might be forgiven for thinking it would cost less to ferry Toronto MPs back home as opposed to say, Yellowknife MPs or ones from Labrador. But maybe the short distance prompts them to take more trips back to their constituencies, racking up more expenses.

Chow’s sensitive, caring-for-the-average-working-stiff response when asked about her above-average expenses? “It’s within the law,” she told the Toronto Star curtly.

[T]he Layton-Chows act more like the Duke and Duchess of Downtown Toronto. They live more lavishly than the average Conservative or Liberal, then insist we peasants have no right to know more because they are acting “within the law.”

Or: this was the moment when we began to hand the House of Representatives back to the Republicans.

The Journal reports:

Canada’s next governor general, David Johnston, is a respected academic and lawyer. He is also Anglican.

Currently the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo, Johnston will succeed Governor General Michaelle Jean when her term ends on Oct. 1.

According to the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Johnston combines a mind that has traversed securities law, Quebec separatism and emerging high technologies with the formidable diplomatic skills of someone who has served as president of two universities. And he possesses what is universally described as a personality that combines unaffected warmth with boyish enthusiasm.

He will be guided, as well, by his Anglican faith.

Everything seemed fine up until that last sentence.

A fact that he appears to be proud of. From here:

‘With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.’

He also laid into the Internet gossip sites for spreading rumour around the world, even if it was false.

‘With so many voices clamouring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe, to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not,’ he said.

‘Let’s face it – even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience of that myself.’

And one of those crazy claims is that Obama doesn’t know how to use – how can I put it – easy to use devices designed for techno-dummies. Let’s hope no-one has told him where the nuclear button is kept: he might mistake it for a coffee maker.

And no-one does it better than Gordon Brown:

Gordon Brown issued a personal apology to a British widow and later said sorry to the entire Labor Party after branding her a bigot on the campaign trail.

The prime minister spent 45 minutes at Gillian Duffy’s terraced home to apologize for unguarded comments caught on a radio microphone that he had forgotten to remove.

Brown was accosted by the 66-year-old after stopping to talk to the voters in the suburbs of Rochdale and was attacked on subjects including welfare payments, student tuition fees and the national debt.

But it was Mrs Duffy’s complaint about immigration from Eastern Europe which prompted Mr Brown to criticise her as he got back into his car and blamed a staff member for not preventing the meeting. “She’s just a bigoted woman,” he told aides in his official car, unaware that his microphone was still live.

British politics is awash with politically correct conservative wimps, socialist dhimmis and money grubbing liberal democrats. Since the British voter has been deprived of any party worth voting for, it’s generous of Gordon Brown to provide the respite of comedic relief; at least the election won’t be a complete loss.

A pro-life blogger wonders if this goes too far.

This blogger wonders if it goes far enough.

From here:

HAVANA (AP) — It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

Can’t think why the US has waited so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago:

Word is getting out about the disastrous state of Cuban health care.

During that cold snap in mid-January, Cuban dissidents snuck out, via internet, a report claiming that over forty patients had somehow frozen to death in Cuba’s Mazorra mental hospital  — not far from the one featured in Michael Moore’s paean to Cuban health care, Sicko.  Cuba’s Stalinist regime, along with the media courtesans to whom it grants press bureaus and “journalist visas,” were utterly mum on the matter, however. It took three days — as the word spread through the mostly Spanish-language web –but finally the Stalinist regime issued a terse and exculpatory press-release on the matter.

But the story did not go away. Just last week, pictures of some of the dead were snuck out of Cuba. They proved that hypothermia alone was not the cause of death, any more than it was the cause of the death for the prisoners at Dachau or Buchenwald. Horrific malnutrition and savage beatings were plain to see for anyone genuinely interested in the causes.

Needless to add, such interested parties do not include Castro’s favored members of the press. True to form, they dutifully connived with the regime, as they have for half a century, to hide the catalog of Castroite horrors.

But don’t take my word for it. Apparently tormented by their consciences, two Spanish journalists have just released mea-culpa- books (sadly available only in Spanish) about this collusion. “Self-censorship is a very common practice,” one writes. “No journalist on the island can write the truth of what happens there.”  Whatever their faults, at least these Spanish journalists finally came clean. When will Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Andrea Mitchell, Ted Turner, Herbert Matthews and the rest of the bunch come clean? Don’t hold your breath.

The Cuban health stories ignored or buried by the MSM would require an entire 24-hour network broadcasting for five decades to disclose. Senor Marzo Fernandez, an economist who, until defecting in 1996, served as Secretary General of Castro’s Ministry of Nutrition gets us started. “The average height of Cubans has decreased by 8 centimeters in the past 25 years,” he reported on Miami television. “For the first time in Cuban history, thousands of Macrocepahlic children (abnormally large heads in proportion to their bodies) due to protein (primarily milk) deficiencies have been found in the eastern provinces.” This in a country that prior to the glorious revolution enjoyed a lower infant-mortality rate and more doctors and dentists per-capita than half of European countries, plus a larger middle class than Switzerland.