My question to Conservative party supporters across the country is: why in the hell would anybody defend this ignorant clown?

Many point to the fact that the video was taken seventeen years ago. His attitude could have changed over such a long period of time, they claim. Then again, maybe they haven't. What we do know, is that once upon a time this guy had a seriously despicable attitude towards homosexuals.

In addition to having a bad attitude, Lukiwski demonstrated extremely poor judgment in allowing a statement like this to be video taped, even if it was meant as a joke. It really makes a guy wonder what other videos Lukiwski has starred in.

Tom Lukiwski's career in politics is probably finished for good. At this point, he's no longer an asset in the House of Commons, but a liability. For this reason, he should go, now. It would also send a strong message that the Conservative Party of Canada will not stand for homophobia amongst its members. I do believe his apology is heart-felt and honest, but his current demotion from parliamentary secretary is merely a slap on the wrist.

Lukiwski is entitled to his opinions, and entitled to video tape all kinds of crass, confusing, and offensive jokes. But I don't think any Canadian would want someone with a sense of humor as exhibited to be their representative.

Labels: politics, Tom Lukiwski, YouTube

Via Susan Delacourt:

It happened when Liberal leader Stephane Dion got up to ask a second round of questions, abandoning the Cadman controversy and turning to the Canada-Obama affair, which the NDP has been hammering away at all week.

Harper said: "I would point out to the Leader of the Opposition that when he was throwing around wild accusations of scandal, the leader of the NDP was already on top of this issue." [...]

Dion, to his credit, however, had a pretty decent comeback. "We do not know how to choose among all the scandals he has," the Liberal leader said.

Which brings us back to the last Liberal leadership race:
It would appear that Stephane Dion is still having a tough time "making priorities"

Labels: politics, Stephane Dion, Stephen Harper, YouTube

Dean Kamen has been changing the world for many years now. To Kamen, it's nothing new to invent a device that can improve the lives of millions. His most notable invention to date has been the Segway Personal Transport.

Most of Kamen's inventions however have a medical aspect to them. The Segway was actually derived from technologies used in the iBot all-terain wheel-chair. Kamen has received awards for his work on personal insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines.

Recently, Dean Kamen has started work on revolutionizing the way we think of prosthetic limbs. From the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference:
I've got two friends who have lost their arms just above the elbow. Both have overcome the obvious obstacles that arise when one looses a limb and have achieved some incredible things. It boggles the mind to contemplate what they could accomplish with a prosthetic arm like that.

Labels: Dean Kamen, Real Life, technology, YouTube

Lewis Black of The Daily Show; on eco-celebrities and hypocrisy.

Labels: Environment, Y2Kyoto, YouTube

The Manitoba PC Party wonders if Gary Doer and the NDP got their slogan "Forward, Not Back" from The Simpsons.

Labels: Funny, Gary Doer, NDP, politics, YouTube

Last week I wrote a bit about local blogger Curtis Webb at WinnipegTheft.com. Curtis is under investigation for linking to a YouTube video that disclosed the names of a few of Winnipeg's notorious juvenile car thieves.

Curtis' bravery has been trumped by the brazen stupidity of Starblubber at WinnipegPunks.com. While attempting to vilify Curtis Webb as a criminal-linker, he gone and done the very act he finds so offensive; he identified the same three youths that Curtis is accused of IDing. I guess Starblubber was trying to justify his anger by posting a screen-shot of WinnipegTheft.com with the names visible, but the end result is a smoking bullet wound in his own foot.

The page was here, but since it was noticed by Curtis it's been taken down. I wonder why? Thankfully, Curtis grabbed a screen-shot of the screen-shot (still with me?) in question.

Also, the good folks at Google still have page in their cache. The cached version doesn't actually have the names on it anymore, because WinnipegTheft doesn't have them displayed any longer. How? Because Starblubber used an inline frame to display Curtis' site on his board. What an inline frame does is display another webpage inside the current page. Therefore, when Curtis had the so-called "illegal video" on his main page, it was also displayed by Starblubber's post. Seeing as the time-stamp on Starblubber's post is April 17th, at 10:47pm. If the "illegal video" was on Curtis' site after that time, it was also on WinnipegPunks.

The irony here is that Starblubber thinks that Curtis should be jailed for the longest term allowable under the law. I suspect Starblubber's opinion will change a bit now that his own innocence is depends on Curtis'.

Labels: Canadian Justice, Winnipeg Crime, Winnipeg Police, YouTube

Global warming skeptic Steve Hayward has made a film called "An Inconvenient Truth... Or A Convenient Fiction". It's Hayward's own rebuttal to Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth", the first power-point presentation to ever win an Oscar (h/t Tom Cerber at The Politic).

Unlike Al Gore's film, A Convenient Truth is made up mostly of historical fact. Because of all the boring facts and lack of fear-mongering, it would not be a very marketable film, and therefore you won't be seeing it in theaters. Lucky for you, it can be viewed on the web at www.aconvenientfiction.com.

Steve Hayward is not a global warming denier. He beings a speech by saying "Much of what Vice President Gore says about climate change is correct. The planet is warming. Human beings are playing a substantial role in that warming." Where Hayward takes exception is in the ridiculous claims of a scientific "consensus", and that "the debate is closed".

A Convenient Fiction would sit somewhere between An Inconvenient Truth, and The Great Global Warming Swindle as far as balance goes. It's too bad that most of the people who've seen An Inconvenient Truth won't take the time to watch the other two films and hear the other side of the story.

Labels: Movies, Y2Kyoto, YouTube

The Liberals have released their latest ad promoting Stephane Dion (h/t).

First, watch the video.
Now a little perspective from The Manitoban.

That would be the same 2005 climate change conference at which Dion received the insulting "fossil award" from the Climate Action Network, the same award given to Rona Ambrose in 2006. Of course when Ambrose, a Conservative, received the award it was front-page news and there was outrage that she dare go against Kyoto. When Dion received the same award, there was barely a mention. No media bias there.

But doesn't Stephane Dion look cute playing with his gavel?
Update: Jason Cherniak points out in the comments that Stephane Dion did not win the "fossil of the day" award in 2005 - he finished second to Japan. But he did win it in 2004. Stephen Taylor also points out that the previous Liberal environmental Minister David Anderson won the fossil award three times. The Liberals record on the environment is not something they should be promoting.

Labels: Liberal Party, politics, Stephane Dion, United Nations, Y2Kyoto, YouTube

An interesting story is developing with local blogger Curtis Webb regarding his blog WinnipegTheft.com (h/t Dust My Broom).

The controversy surrounds this post. The accusation flying through the newspapers today is that Curtis broke the law by identifying a handful of dangerous young offenders, which bizarrely, is against the law in Canada.

The problem here is that Curtis didn't actually (as far as I can find) publish the names. He linked to a video on YouTube that ID'd them. So, if linking to a video is illegal, why isn't it illegal for newspapers to "link" to his website by writing about it? Just because the newspaper medium doesn't allow for clickable hot-links, they still achieve the same effect of driving traffic to a site.

One specific case boggles the mind.

The site also posted the photo of a 16-year-old suspect wanted in connection with the March 26 murder of Tom Phillips. A judge granted police and media special permission to publish the photo for a five-day period, which expired last weekend. The photo was still up on the website yesterday.

Of course it's still up on the website! The picture is still in every paper that published the picture as well. Did the local papers go around collecting and destroying every copy that contained the picture? Not bloody likely. So why should a blogger have to remove an old post? Would the photo published in the local papers not also be available in their archives?

What's really disturbing is the attempt to police blogs. Worse yet, is that "the law" is trying to hold a blogger to a stricter code. Best of luck to Curtis Webb, stop by his site and drop him a line.

Update: Winnipeg First reports that the Winnipeg Police are "investigating". By "investigating", apparently they mean sending intimidating e-mails.

Also, the Winnipeg Sun ran an online poll asking the question, "Should the media be allowed to identify young offenders?" At the momment, there have been 1181 responses to the poll, with a stagering 95% agreeing that media should be able to identify young offenders.

Labels: Canadian Justice, Real Life, Winnipeg Crime, YouTube

An interesting video on the Pakistani gun-market (h/t Dust My Broom.
Clearly, the Taliban won't be running out of weapons any time soon. More reason to kill 'em. More means to kill each other.

At least 40 people have been killed and more than 70 wounded in clashes between Sunni and Shia Muslims in north-western Pakistan, a senior security official said.

Labels: Afghanistan, etc, Guns, YouTube

Labels: etc, YouTube

Mexico Sunday is a little tradition a few friends and I have. How it goes is, we turn up the heat in the apartment. Way up. The point is to make you sweat, like if you were in Mexico. Then we all dress up in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and drink the afternoon away while pretending we're on a beach in Mexico. Usually to cap the day off we'll go to our favorite Mexican restaurant, Carlos & Murphy's for chicken wings and more beer.

The tradition is based on temporarily suspending our perception of reality, ie. pretending we're on a Mexican beach, not sitting in a shitty apartment in Winnipeg. Whenever we do this, I always laugh at myself because I'm behaving like a liberal.

Now, am I stating that intentional delusion is a trait that liberals extol? You bet I am!

Recently in the comments, the "Anti-Blogger" challenged me to make a "documentary". I figured the only documentary I could make would be me sitting in front of a white wall bashing liberals.

Fortunately, somebody (actually lots of people) have beat me to it, although the wall behind him isn't white. Not to mention that this guy bashes liberalism better than I would. He goes on for over 40 minutes, and each one is a gem. But it's worth the listen.

Labels: Dirty Liberals, Treason, YouTube

The world of "documentaries" is fast becoming completely irrelevant. The recent revelation about Michael Moore's Roger and Me, Al Gore and his eco-babble in an Inconvenient Truth, are two examples of documentaries gone wrong.

Hollywood is about to hit a whole new low (h/t The Vanguard).

Page Six has learned that Sheen, the hooker-loving Hollywood hunk, has agreed to narrate a new version of the loopy YouTube documentary "Loose Change," which claims that a corrupt faction within the federal government orchestrated the mass murder at the World Trade Center.

The latest edition of the movie on YouTube can be viewed by clicking here. The sad thing is that Hollywood will perpetrate lies and present it as a "documentary" just to sell movies.

Would it be so damn hard for somebody to actually make a balanced documentary? I mean, it's not like there aren't dissenting views for the opinions presented in these films.

Labels: Movies, YouTube

TurboTax is doing an ad campaign on YouTube starring Vanilla Ice. They're calling it, The Tax Rap.You can enter the contest and take a shot at winning $25,000.

Labels: Funny, YouTube

The documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" has been getting a lot of play on The Drudge Report lately. You can now watch the full documentary on Google Video.

The Swindle documents how the science behind Global Warming is in fact crumbling, and skepticism in the field is growing, which is not indicative of the "consensus" we're always told about. Along the same lines they attack the legitimacy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, quoting skeptical, but contributing scientists.

I strongly suggest everybody check it out if they've got an hour to spare.
Update: A great companion piece to add some balance to this film is An Inconvenient Truth... Or A Convenient Fiction.

Labels: Environment, Movies, Y2Kyoto, YouTube

What were the NDP thinking (h/t)?

Labels: Funny, NDP, YouTube

I don't touch off here often enough about the provincial politics in Manitoba. Aside from the newspapers, a few good blogs (most of which are listed to your left), politics in this province doesn't have much of a web presence. Even with an election right around the corner the wise guys, and the government mouthpiece have been pretty quite lately. I guess the combatants have to "feel each other out" before any good fight.

But it appears the first blow has been delivered by the PC Party. Via Jim Cotton we have a real-life internet attack ad in Manitoba. The PC's go after Gary Doer and the NDP over the Crocus Scandal on YouTube. And it's long over due...
Just as an aside, I should point out that as it stands, I have no intention of voting for the PC Party in Manitoba. Since the change of leadership, there has been a complete lack of, well... leadership. The PC Party seems to be trying to position itself as NDP-Lite, meanwhile the absolutely power-less Liberal party has been putting the boots to Doer. And if a libertarian-loon like myself can actually imagine voting for a "Liberal" party, you know the guys on the right are in trouble.

The only thing that really matters is that Gary Doer and the NDP suck.

Update:The PC's and Liberals are definitely coordinating their efforts. Liberal leader Dr. Jon Gerrard released his own YouTube video about Crocus yesterday.

Labels: Gary Doer, Manitoba, NDP, politics, YouTube

Joel Surnow, the creative genius who co-created and produces the Emmy winning (and my personal favorite show on TV) is bringing a new "comedy news" show to FOX. It's called "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" (h/t).

And now on to our feature presentation...If this clip is what we can expect from this show, then I'm excited. But what do you think the chances that a show like this would ever be syndicated in Canada?

Labels: 24, Funny, YouTube

Big Hat Tip to The Broom. I watched these several times tonight, and couldn't stop laughing at them.



The same guy has another hilarious one starring Condi.

Labels: Funny, Republican Party, YouTube