Next time a newspaper editorial tries to convince you that Ontario’s multi-billion-dollar HST tax grab is a good thing for the people of the province, ask the newspaper this: if it’s so great, then why did you pay the Canadian Newspaper Association to spend months lobbying (successfully) for an exemption?
November 29, 2009
Globe Reports: Judges, Defense Lawyers Don’t Like Tories (ya think?)
The Globe and Mail really is a sad old hag of a newspaper. In 2,200 words filling 51 paragaphs of dense, unreadable tripe, “investigative journalist” Kirk Makin reveals what I could have told you in one sentence: Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, and ivory-tower intellectuals don’t like the Conservative government and their tightening of the criminal justice system.
Outside of Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, ivory-tower intellectuals (and their sycophants), and criminals themselves, who exactly opposes: closing the 2-for-1 loophole; making the system less arbitrary by enforcing mandatory sentences; and ending the “faint hope” clause that allows first-degree murderers a chance to earn the freedom that their innocent victims can never, ever regain? (I’d call it the “endless nightmare” clause if it was a member of my family that was murdered.)
Congratulations, Globe. You’ve once again led with “Dog Bites Man”. Now (despite David Frum), get me my Post…
November 26, 2009
Former leftist speaks truth: The Wilding of Sarah Palin
Despite growing up in a largely hedonistic liberal-Jewish community and family, I never felt comfortable with left-leaning politics or the cultural mores of those around me. Although my conservative awakening started to emerge quite early (I remember feeling great sympathy for Preston Manning and his Reform movement for the snobbish bashing he was taking back in the early 1990s, when I was barely 20), it took until sometime just after 9/11/2001 for me to finally and forever consider myself “of the right”. As liberals – whose propaganda throughout my youth created the myth of “liberal compassion” versus “right-wing hate” (as in “The Holocaust is what happens when the right gains power”) – fell over themselves to make excuses for Islamic hatred, ignore the celebrations in the Arab street, promote the non-existent “anti-Muslim backlash”, and in many cases not-so-subtly imply that “America had it coming” (as if the hundreds of children whose fathers would never come home to tuck them in to bed at night ever again were somehow acceptable collateral damage in some sort of acceptable counter-attack to some sort of unacceptable American sin), I discovered the truth – that “liberal compassion” is indeed a myth, and the reality is that liberalism is cruel, selfish, and harmful. (The next major event to confirm this conclusion came a couple of years later, when liberals from Nantes to Nunavut were adamant to diagnose with certainty that a woman in a home for the disabled in Pinellas Park, Florida was brain dead, and insisted she be starved to death for the convenience and profit of her conniving husband).
For “Robin of Berkeley” (the pseudonym for a Berkeley, California based psychotherapist and former leftist who now writes for The American Thinker), the realization that liberalism really stands for cruelty came only after 30 years of hard-left activism. Probably in her 40s now, Robin abandoned liberalism and swung to the right less than two years ago, and gained affirmation that “everything I believed was wrong” in last year’s US election campaign thanks to the obscene treatment of, first, Hillary Clinton, and then Sarah Palin. I highly recommend going back and reading Robin’s earliest entries in her regular American Spectator career by browsing her columns here, particularly for her views on Clinton’s treatment; however, I insist you read her latest installment, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin”. In the column, she reveals the ugly parallels between the left’s hard-core sexualization, dehumanization, and humiliation of the Vice Presidential candidate, and the use of gang-rape as a tool of intimidation, dehumanization and humiliation in tribal war. By violating Palin and her family in the most personal way, the left seeks to both destroy Sarah Palin as a human being, and emasculate the men of the conservative movement who stand by powerless to stop the abuse.
The paradox here is that the Palin phenomenon is only gaining steam, as the former Alaska governor continues her rise to prominence and power. This is because, unlike the tribal primitivism that still dominates much of the world and still informs the sensibilities of the left, the progressive world of Sarah Palin and the American heartland does not believe that a raped woman has been shamed and must submit to a shunned second-class status or worse. Thank God, most Americans believe that a raped woman is simply a victim with the power to recover and come back stronger; in a civilized society, it is the rapist that must be shunned and must submit to a second-class status or worse.
It doesn’t take much more than a pinch of wisdom to recognize who, in any public persecution, is the rape-victim, and who is the rapist. It does, however, take great moral weakness to allow the rapists of “your team” get away with it. It takes great intellectual weakness to delude yourself into confusing which party is the victim, and which the perpetrator, or to use the “slutty dress” defense to convince yourself that “she had it coming”. And it takes a great spiritual emptiness to sit back and enjoy the wilding of an innocent woman, guffawing at the latest Palin joke as another installment of today’s soul-destroying revel-in-the-brutalizing-of-people-for-televised-amusement culture.
(h/t goes to The Tammy Bruce Show for this one. Listen to the former radical feminist Tammy for a month, and you’ll understand the left for a lifetime.)
(For more on the near-equivalence between the rape of a body and the rape of a name, read Dennis Prager’s seminal column, “The Rape of a Name is Also Rape”.)
September 24, 2009
Hannah Giles, American Hero

- Hannah Giles, 20-Year-Old American Hero – Artwork by David Bugnon
What, pray tell, can a disgruntled 20-year-old conservative do when she feels beaten down by events?
a) Whine, complain, smoke pot and enter the cult of Ayn Rand?
b) Listen to the David Frum defeatists, ditch her principles, and tie herself into knots trying to figure out a way to make “Climate Change” a Republican issue?
c) Succumb to peer pressure, mock Sarah Palin, take a job with AmeriCorps, and fit in with the cool kids?
d) Spend her summer and her savings traveling the country dressed like a prostitute, get priceless undercover footage of crime in progress, bust corruption, and take down a major peg in the arsenal of one Barack Hussein Obama.
For doing something positive with her youth, for being David to ACORN’s Goliath, for exposing herself to law suits and leftist harassment, and for poking a huge hole in the prestige of the Marxist-Demagogue-In-Chief, Hannah Giles has earned a spot in my Hall of Fame. I’m sending $15 to her legal defense fund at http://www.defendhannah.com.
To you non-conservatives who revel in attacking Palin, Carrie Prejean, Giles, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Tammy Bruce, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other women who refuse to submit to the tyranny of liberal orthodoxy: the jig is up, you’ve been exposed again. Because you know better than I do: there’s no bigger threat to the “progressive” cause than attractive and articulate female heretics.
June 29, 2009
John Tory to challenge David Miller again for Toronto Mayor? NOOOOOOO!!!!

John Tory, hoping to hand Toronto back to Miller again.
I am a Toronto homeowner. I am a small-c conservative and a big-C Conservative. I have seen the NDP’s union and activist-owned David Miller turn a mediocre city into a disastrous one over the past five years.
I have met John Tory. I like John Tory. I supported John Tory in 2003 when he lost to Miller, a socialist in disguise with zero public profile. I supported John Tory as leader of the Ontario PC party against Dalton “Not a Leader” McGuinty in 2007. I supported a massive failure both times, when the man snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
John Tory is a nice guy. Good businessman. Good husband and father. Good connections. Smart as a whip. Would love to play golf with him.
JOHN TORY IS A POLITICAL FAILURE. HE HAS THE POLITICAL INSTINCTS OF A ROAD PYLON. HE WILL HAND TORONTO BACK TO THE NDP AGAIN IF HE RUNS FOR MAYOR YET AGAIN.
There are two men I can see who could galvanize the public against the leftist-unionist block that is destroying this city. If you think a Mel Lastman-style unpolished firebrand is best to advance a common sense agenda, support Councillor Rob Ford, Etobicoke North Ward 2. If you think a more polished, serious, hard-working potential media superstar with less small-c conservative cred, but who came from nothing and whose thinking always seems to start with individual citizens and local neighbourhoods, support Scarborough Centre Councillor Michael Thompson.
Listen: you can make a business deal with a smile and a pat on the back. You can solve corporate problems on the golf course. But you can’t win an election against leftists without fire in the belly. You can’t win an election against leftists without the instincts of a shark. You can’t inspire the people if the people can’t identify with you. The people can’t identify with John Tory, and they never will. John, get out of the way, stop sucking the energy out of the opposition room, and let a competent politician do what it takes to bring down the blood suckers.
February 19, 2009
Words of Wisdom in an Age of Stimulus: Milton Friedman on Spending
With an extremely busy and challenging few months ahead with my business, and a home life that includes raising two energetic little boys aged 1 and 3, I’m putting Flaggman’s Canada on hiatus until Summer 2009. I apologize to my loyal readers, and I look forward to returning later in the year. In the meantime, in this age of “Stimulus Spending”, read the timeless wisdom of the late, great Milton Friedman, and commit it to memory:
There are four ways in which you can spend money.
1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2) You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3) I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4) Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.
January 30, 2009
“The Great Abandoner” – Charles Adler on Michael Ignatieff and the End of the Coalition
When it comes to covering big-time political events, Winnipeg-based Charles Adler is every bit the equal to his talk radio peers in the US who command daily audiences in the millions (unfortunately, he’s not nearly as good on a day-to-day basis, but we take what we can get). Yesterday, he was at his best with this 12-minute monologue on Iggy, the Coalition, and the Conservative budget, titled “The Great Abandoner” (click on the arrow below to listen, and make sure you stick with it to the end – it gets better as it goes along). Tells you all you need to know about Michael Ignatieff, the new crown-prince-in-waiting of the Canadian media elite:
Read the text here at Fullcomment.com, and join the conversation!