SpankyMcFarland

Firstly, it’s the Vichyite searching for excuses for Trump’s behaviour. He was a bit over the top there but…You can see that in the NP and here constantly. And then there’s the indulgence of fringe ideas: crypto, convoys, anti-vaxxerism.

I’m talking about Poilievre if he wants to run this country for any significant length of time. Some of the Tory support has a distinctly MAGA whiff off it - that much is obvious here. PP can take their votes but he has to distance himself from them if he wants to win and retain fiscally conservative, centrist voters. Harper’s lesson should not need to be relearned. Canada does not want the Reform Party under any label.

It’s not just style that divides us. We need to know the PM will stand up for Canada against the thugs in charge down south.

I’d rather take my chance with the bears than with random armed campers. Although in northern Labrador I’d like to have assistance. The polar bears are mean up there.

Poilievre did an excellent job here. The appearance with Carney reminded me of Mitterrand and Kohl holding hands at Verdun in 1984 to symbolize reconciliation between France and Germany. It was a genuine moment too. The more PP behaves normally, the more people like me will look at his ideas on taxation and the economy. Over the long term I want to see balanced budgets and lower taxes in this country.

We are a long, long way from WWII. The technology of war has advanced a great deal since then and the lies of leaders are easier to find now. Examine what multiple Israelis in government and the army said at the beginning of this war - vengeance was a part of their strategy. The Palestinians have skin in the game too. From the start, Israel knew full well how many civilians they were killing and used their willing allies in America and Britain to conceal the carnage. Shame on all of them.

I don’t think it’s possible to predict what might come out. Evidence sufficient for a trial might indeed emerge, or, if not, other information that could direct reform. What strikes me is that the car-towing issue seems to have got completely out of hand in Ontario. An inquiry focused just on managing that better might be useful.

The Islamic regime are mass murderers. If you want to look at absolute numbers then, yes, Hitler, Mao and Stalin did more damage to humanity but they are all ghastly. Secular social democracy is the best form of government ever seen on this planet and we seem to be moving away from it. Religion is fine as a social activity but should have no formal place in the government of any country. Inevitably, it will be abused by authoritarians.

The registry was generally careful about the deaths it recorded, ie, bodies that could be identified. The IDF quickly realized that the registry was doing its job in that regard but concealed the fact from the media. Of course, the Americans blindly followed the Israeli line as usual. As in any war or mass disaster, determining what happened to the missing will take quite a while. Thus there should be a discrepancy between confirmed and estimated fatalities.

A few speed bumps? He got there by inheriting wealth, lying on his tax returns, stiffing his suppliers and somehow convincing bankers to lend him ever more money to burn. His spectacular business incompetence is well documented. He’ll make far more from his unprecedented corruption as president than he ever managed to hang onto as a businessman. Trump is the WWF impression of a big shot - all gaudy performance in a fixed game.

Good statement from Poilievre.

The Trumpster obsession with Greenland gives the game away. You can’t talk of new trade routes through melting ice up there and insist the climate isn’t changing at the same time. Here’s some advice. The tobacco lobby showed how this is done when you know you have a losing case but want to sustain it as long as possible through a series of incremental concessions and adjustments. The next obvious argument to retreat to is that, yes, there is change but it isn’t man-made. When that inevitably looks nonsensical you can then say that fossil fuel alternatives are not practical. There are lots of maneuvers left for anthracophiles but simply denying reality isn’t a good look. https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-trump-adviser-finally-admits-023125809.html

And your fanatical approach to this problem is, as usual, useless. There really is no point engaging with you at all. You have zero to contribute.

A simple way out of the confusion here and everywhere else would be to clarify whether the person was a cis or trans-female. Mass shooters born as women are incredibly rare.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, negotiated the Gordie Howe International Bridge deal with Stephen Harper in 2012. Here are some of his comments about Trump’s outburst, starting with a personal vignette a fair proportion of the planet’s population can identify with at this stage: So who loses out if this deal is canceled or delayed? And who benefits? https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2026/02/10/former-michigan-gov-rick-snyder-debunks-trumps-gordie-howe-bridge-claims/88605726007/ And shiver me timbers, look at this odd coincidence: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/trump-lutnick-bridge

Do you find talk of an invasion entertaining? Just a joke, right?

Gotta hand it to Republican Congressman Thomas Massie. He has a firm hold on that Epstein bone and he ain’t letting go: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/republican-lawmaker-demands-howard-lutnick-222446691.html?guccounter=1

There is no point arguing with committed racists. They’re not going to see any problem with what they are saying and will deny centuries of similar racist tropes until the cows come home. This attack on the only African-American president and his wife is what the white nationalist wing of Trump’s coalition wants to see.

I think it’s good when this stuff is exposed and punished. It’s always going to be there. It’s weird how they reported the Sunshine List earnings of these guys in the CBC article as if they ran out of news about them. AFAIK Ontario’s list remains a joke because those earning the most from the public purse, eg FFS medical specialists like ophthalmologists, radiologists and dermatologists, whose income can extend into the millions, aren’t included.

It is extraordinary how a ruined country like Putin’s Russia remains so focused on conquest. Madness of a sort.

People react to what they see. There’s a dose-response relationship there. In Canada, we can easily access a lot more coverage of Gaza than Sudan, for example. But think of all the other places wth serious human rights problems: Southeast Asia, Azerbaijan, the Arab world. How much do we see of them either? Of course, when it comes to the likes of the Arabian peninsula , who wants to annoy such generous leaders? https://freedomhouse.org/country/saudi-arabia/freedom-world/2025 The Stans, Iran’s Central Asian neighbours (even the word ‘stan’ comes from Farsi) are a big, black hole rights-wise that the West has good reason not to peer into too closely at the moment: https://euobserver.com/31336/the-eu-central-asia-summits-elephant-in-the-room-political-repression/ https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/turkmenistan So, yes, the Iranian regime is horrible but it has of a lot of company in that part of the world. Every despotic regime deserves to be called out.

Kyiv’s mayor, former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, is a living symbol of Ukraine’ tragic history, having lost relatives in both the Holocaust and the Holodomor. Now that they have tasted freedom, there’s no way Ukrainians are going to be ‘reasonable’, look at their cards or the lack thereof, and meekly surrender to authoritarianism again. They’re going to fight as long as they can. They have to.

For Ukraine, just staying free is winning the war. Ukrainians know what will happen if they give in to Russia - they are all too familiar with how ghastly Russian rule is - so they have no choice but to go on fighting as long as they can. Putin isn’t interested in any serious compromise of his war aims. Instead he’s allegedly offering a sordid deal to the Americans. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/69639

Europe is not dead functionally as Trump found out when he threatened individual countries with tariffs and got a united response from the EU. If TACO boy really wants a trade war he can have one but that would make the mid-terms even more of a disaster for his party.

Russia is a zombie state that barely controls its territory east of the Urals. The irony is that it needed Western support against China and chose to reject that. Unless there is radical reform and an end to Putinism, I can’t see it being more than a Chinese satellite.