Cambridge cops support their own in Obama-Gates affair

Great clip via Hot Air:

"I supported him [Obama], I voted for him, I will not again."


Update: Kathy Shaidle agrees with Ed Morrisey that "Gates should have stood on civil liberties, not race" and he would have provided a "teaching moment".

Sure, and if my dear old Aunt Lois had wheels she'd be a bus. Gates is a race baiter, so his first instinct was to get his back up about "racist cops". Had Gates not been Gates he might have used ordinary common sense and cooperated with Crowley who was there to protect his home from a suspected burglary in progress. In which case, Obama wouldn't have been suckered into defending his pal's race baiting and we wouldn't be hearing about any of this.

Preston Manning: Reforrrmm needed to fix “democratic deficit”

Preston Manning is glad that Canada’s electoral muckety-mucks are concerned about declining voter turn-out, "Canada’s democracy deficit" and suggests "open primaries" as a way of fixing the problem. My response to Preston:

Dear Preston,

I don’t know about open primaries or other reforms but I don't buy your initial premise. There is no "problem" with so-called "low voter turn-out". The 59% turn-out in the last federal election was excellent. It certainly doesn’t represent a "democratic deficit" and neither do the other quoted turn-out numbers of 51% and 41% for BC and Alberta respectively.

People don’t vote for a wide range of reasons but my guess is general apathy counts for the greatest numbers - they don’t vote because politics is not really relevant to their lives. They’re not tuned in to the various party platforms and so it doesn’t matter to them which representative or party is elected.

So whatever the voter turn-out and whatever their reasons, in a free society people are entitled to their apathy, to be left alone if they so choose. Everyone doesn’t have to be a political junky - and thank God everyone isn’t. Moreover, people who are unaware of the issues and party platforms have a duty NOT to vote - as their votes would only add random noise or, worse, distortion to the process.

Why not treat election results as a statistical sampling of voter preferences and not get anxious about voter turn-out? Let’s face it, a sample of 30%, 40% or more is a very LARGE sample. The daily polls which attempt to predict election results in the run-ups to elections typically consist of one or two thousand respondents.

So let’s not tinker with the system with a goal of enhancing voter turn-out. This could ultimately lead to idiocies as in Australia where voting is compulsory or to hokey proportional representation schemes. Both would be big mistakes.

So please don't encourage our electoral officers. Instead, spend your time and energy tackling some of the real democratic deficits such as unelected senators and regional inequities in seat distributions.

Sincerely,
JR

The Great Climate Change Con

At the Spectator James Delingpole writes up an excellent interview with Professor Ian Plimer Australian geologist and author of a newly published book "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science":

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses.

... Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’
　
... Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500 pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist.

Excellent comment thread too.

[via]

Obama-Gates: racial paranoia and profiling

White cop, Sgt Crowley, arrests black Harvard prof (and Obama pal), Henry Louis Gates, Obama sticks both feet in mouth.

By now this is old news but here’s some interesting commentary on the subject:

An LAPD police officer:

... let us examine the issue of racial profiling as it pertains — or doesn’t — to Mr. Gates’s arrest. As I wrote on Wednesday, the suggestion that Gates was "profiled" is ludicrous. Gates was not simply driving or walking along and into the awareness of some racist cop looking to exert authority over him.

... if Crowley’s account is accurate, it was Gates who profiled him, imputing racial animus as the reason for the sergeant’s presence on the front porch.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Somehow the president in the last few hours, in his now characteristic stereotyping, has managed to insult the nation's police with his "stupidly" comment, the nation's surgeons with his reference to greedy tonsil-cutting, and the nation's elderly with his aspirin quip — all reminiscent of the "typical white person" castoff, Pennsylvania clingers speech, and the Special Olympics one-liner. Given his propensity to apologize abroad for the purported sins of other earlier Americans, can we expect some "I'm sorry"s for his own clumsy generalizations?

Charles Krauthammer:

He should have said, "I am a friend of Gates, and therefore I'm inclined to believe his story. But since there's no way I can know what actually happened, I'll decline a comment."
... Instead, he developed the Gates' narrative of racism, and I think in a situation in which it was at least, as of now, entirely unwarranted.

Heather MacDonald :

... whereas Gates’s rantings about police bias might ultimately be dismissed as standard ivory-tower posturing, Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on a set of untruths that will only fuel disrespect for the law and impede the police in their efforts to protect inner-city residents from crime.

Hope and change in Obama’s "post-racial America".

Update: Mark Steyn:

... The photograph of the arrest shows a bullet-headed black cop – Sgt. Leon Lashley, I believe – standing in front of the porch while behind him a handcuffed Gates yells accusations of racism. This is the pitiful state the Bull Connors of the 21st century are reduced to, forced to take along a squad recruited from the nearest Benetton ad when they go out to whup some uppity Negro boy.

As professor Gates jeered at the officers, "You don't know who you're messin' with." Did Sgt. Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.

HST for BC - joining the losers

The BC Liberal government announced today that it would implement the harmonized sales tax (HST). That’s more or less out of the blue. No discussion, no debate - BC will join taxed-to-death economic losers in Atlantic Canada and declining, newly have-not Ontario in having the HST shoved down their throats.

The Liberals claim that it will "boost the economy". Bull shit! The real money quote is here:

[Finance Minister] Hansen said ... "In B.C., we have some big budget challenges because of declining revenues. This will help us to ensure we can continue to provide health care, education and vital social services."

"... big budget challenges" - no doubt exacerbated by massive Olympic Games cost overruns. Any way you slice it this is just one more giant freaking TAX GRAB.

The new tax will hit a wide variety of goods and services now exempt from PST - the restaurant industry being one big example. But the single biggest and most important asset most people have is their home. New homes will now cost tens of thousands of dollars more. Real estate commissions and lawyers’ fees will be taxed a further 7%.

Gordo, you f***ing martini-soaked weasel! [Mustn't cuss, mustn't cuss.]

It’s time for the BC Conservative party to get rolling.

Victoria sentiment:

Kingston Mills "honour killings"?

Police have arrested three family members of the four victims found in a submerged car at the Kingston Mills lock.

The Kingston Whig Standard has the full story.

[via Blazing Catfur and CanCrime]

Withering Red Toryism

I don’t think about it much these days but "progressive" conservatism and "Red Toryism" have always struck me as oxymoronic. Those that call themselves "Red Tories" always seem quite sincerely fanatical about their devotion to their cause but I’ve never been able to quite figure out what "cause" that is.

Today Publius’ at The Shotgun enlightens us in a post entitled "Wither Red Toryism". I don’t know if that title was a spelling error or a wish that Red-Toryism would just wither and die.

Anyway, Publius refers to an article in the Toronto Star that waxes nostalgic for has-been dweeb Joe Clark, progressive conservatism and Red Toryism. Apparently having a Blue Tory right wing representing the Canadian right is just too much - a left/lib "right" is needed:

We are all the losers as a result of this victory of the Reform party, its metamorphosis into a new Conservative party, and the new rigidity of the right.

Oh, really?! This is, of course, just one more confirmation that lefties, for all their blathering about the joys of diversity, really detest the diversity of ideas.

Publius nicely sets the record straight and in closing identifies Red Toryism with the "... homelessness of Liberals in Tory clothing".