Apparently this naked Hitler didn't go over so well:

Co-founder Jacques Leduc, a retired high-school teacher, says his motives are political, not profit-driven. If 100,000 sovereigntists drink one Indépendante a month, $300,000 could be invested in the sovereigntist cause each year.

"People who drink it will be posing a political gesture," he said. "It would be a symbol of a people who want a country."

While sales have been modest - about 38,000 bottles have been sold so far - Mr. Leduc believes there is room for growth. In a poll he commissioned last spring, carried out by Léger Marketing, 70 per cent of respondents said they liked the idea of a pro-sovereignty beer and would drink two six-packs a year, according to Mr. Leduc.(Globe&Mail)

This is great. The NDP in agreement with the Seperatistes to form a coalition government. It is real bad news for some sectors of the economy, but real good for others.

Like, did you notice the collapse of the financial stocks today? Is this because if the coalition gets its hands on all that money it is not going to bail out Banks? They will bail out food banks, and those areas that will help the NDP best. And you can sleep at night knowing that the downtrodden French-Canadians will get their fair share of handouts. But banks, no. So, if you work for a bank, then, well, I guess you can look forward to a layoff, oh, soon. But do not worry, the NDP will make sure you have access to a safe injection site, domestic violence literature, and a waiting list for housing where you can work off your white guilt as you scratch your bed bug bites.  

I already have a good sleeping spot in the homeless shelter. You bankers can go sleep beside the washroom. Bring some loose tobacco with you. Oh yeah, Banks are the second largest buyer of advertising on our main stream media! More layoffs everywhere but the CBC! I am filled with joy, I am joyeuse.

Lets change the subject, shall we?

The areas of responsibility of the four horsemen of the Apolcalypse are:

1) Economic Crisis

2) Social Unrest

3) Mass Arrests

4) Return to Feudalism

One horseman is Irish, the other is Chinese. I do not know about the other two yet.  You can leave your suggestions in the comments.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this

xpd Mitchieville, DustMyBroom

As the federal Conservative government stands on the verge - or so it seems to many - of collapse, another embattled Tory faces an uncertain future.

Politics is a sifter that eliminates all competent but honest people from the profession while retaining all those not necessarily intelligent but definitely smart.

In order to succeed in politics you need to be decisive but also unscrupulous (Jean Chrétien); you need to be charismatic but also willing to use your charisma to manipulate the electorate (Pierre Trudeau); you need to show leadership but also be ready to defend it by retaliating against your enemies (Stephen Harper); and be loyal to friends to the point that loyalty becomes complicity (Richard Nixon).

Political cover-up is the daily food of politics and governments. And honesty is proportional to a politician's ability to not get caught. Nixon was caught only because of a historic journalistic accident. The relevance of the issues and the competence of the people tasked to deal with them are optional factors. Honesty, on the other hand, can be tolerated but is a huge liability.

These considerations came to mind last week when I was at Queen's Park and had the opportunity to talk with some colleagues about the way John Tory, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, is treated by his own caucus. It is one of the most flagrant examples of how politics can be tough and nasty.

So where does Tory fit in this equation? He doesn't. That's why he is in trouble.

This sounds rather like a political obituary.  John Tory, too nice a guy to win.  Rumours have been floating around for over a year aboutTory's next move.  Running the Jays or the Leafs , or perhaps some patronage appointment either at the federal or provincial level, have been mooted as options for the PC leader.  Few seem to want Tory to stick around until the next election in 2011.  The reason for this is not that Tory is too nice to succeed, though he does have a kind of charming naivety at times, it's that his caucus can't stand him.  What remains of the Progressive Conservative party is a rural rump, representing the party's conservative core.  A man positioning himself as Bill Davis II is not likely to get much sympathy from MPPs who remember Mike Harris fondly.  The Red Tories may dominate the backrooms, and made something of a comeback - ironically - because of Harris' successes in suburban ridings, but they are despised by a grassroots that sees them as trying to peddle Liberal Lite.  Note the reluctance of MPPs to give up a safe seat for Tory.  The attitude of more than a few is this:  If you were stupid enough to run in Don Mills you're probably not smart enough to get us back into power.  An old political maxim of American politics is that your appeal to your base in the primaries and to the center in the general election.  Tory forgot to do the first before he did the latter.  Elections are sometimes lost because a party fails to move to the center, or move the center to it, but they are always lost when the base feels betrayed and abandoned.

You get to talk to people more when you are homeless. And alot of the people I talk to are social workers who write reports for each other to read, street nurses who you never see on the street, and food bankers battling obesity. To find a cure for our social problems is not going to happen in a day. You know, because alot of days have been spent gathering wealth to redistribute, subsidize, and collectively embrace. Days and days of days of your taxes going to bankroll the payroll of the socialist social services. And more days are going to be needed. You cannot solve social problems in a day. But you can solve them in a night.

Crime is bad for economic recovery. And one night, it would only take a night, it would take to round up all the people on parole in Toronto. This would mean overtime for the bordering police forces, like Durham, Peel, Simcoe, and Niagara. And when all those parolees were picked up, I would wager two cigarette butts to your one, that those parolees would be in violation of their parole. Ask anyone here in Toronto, ask TTC bus drivers, nurses in the hospital, public school teachers who work in fear, or grocery store people who sell lottery tickets, ask them and they will tell you that alot of those parolees would be in violation of parole.

So, you would have alot of people to keep somewhere. If you have a socialist government, they would get free health care, clothing, food, education, and a lawyer to help them to take more money from the government. They would have better health care than their victims, along with better clothing that the people they rob, better food than the children they sell dope to, and get educational opportunities that unemployed north american auto workers would not get, and better legal representation than any white christian denouced before an HRC tribunal. If you have any form of government other than socialist, they would be an extreme christian fundamentalist right white wing party. These guys would enforce Canadian law and deport those that could be deported, the rest would be housed in camps located in areas of economic depression, to create jobs.

 Of course, this is not going to happen. There are tens of thousands of man-days of high income, high pension, low effort work days to be taken by the socialist social services people. They need criminals roaming the streets to justify their caseload, they need babies to care for because their Baby Momma and invisible Gangsta Daddy do not do the job, they need toddlers, they need kindergarten, they need special needs, and they need new readers. What cute, cuddly things in need to justify their paycheques, their pension, their vacations in Cuba, their non north american cars that they drive.

 But tomorrow is another day. With a Jane Creba getting gunned down now, what, every six months, or is it three?, those fearful souls who fear losing their job, who live in the darkness of fear, will look to the familiar night for solutions, and not to the same-old, same-old days and days of nothing but things getting worse. Every day, and in every way the every on going violence makes the 'get killed by a Looter-Canadian lottery' more, shall we say, visible in the darkness of the existance of those who live in fear in Toronto. More days and days are coming, but they are getting shorter, and the certainty of night, The Night, is coming.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this

xpd Mitchieville, DustMyBroom

People are smelling blood all over Ottawa.  Unfortunately some of those people are Conservatives.  A website has - mysteriously - sprung up trying to start a draft Jim Prentice campaign:

Why are we promoting Jim Prentice for Conservative Leader while Stephen Harper is still PM? We don't mean to be disloyal to the present leader or government -- but we believe the next leader, whenever he may be needed, should be Jim Prentice.

That was posted Friday.  The coalition crisis erupted on Thursday afternoon.  Gee.  A few hours is an eternity in politics.  I do love the "whenever he may be needed."  Bets are then that Harper will be overthrown by the Grand Coalition and then tossed by his ungrateful - and frankly stupid - caucus.  But the Grand Coalition is going nowhere and Harper can easily survive this crisis.  He is still the most able man in Canadian politics and the caucus and grassroots know this.  It would take at least two strong election defeats before Harper would be forced to step aside.  Having engineered the creation of the new party he is still its dominant figure and there is simply no one with the stature, or profile, yet to replace him.  At first glance the authors of the blog might be disgruntled staffers, annoyed at having been moved down a peg or two because of recent cabinet shuffling, yet this post seems to suggest something else:

As you can see it looks like the Governor General might well say yes to such a proposal from the opposition parties. Such a coalition would be WRONG and would NOT represent the desire of Canadians who made a statement on October 14th that they wanted a Conservative Government. But if it does happen, we believe the Conservative Party has no one to blame but itself. Scrapping public welfare for political parties was the right thing to do, but Stephen Harper made a mistake and underestimated the opposition parties. If our Party loses power after only two months in office since the election, we cannot keep Harper on through another term. We have failed to get a majority government on his watch. And now his mistake could make Stephane Dion the next prime minister, every Conservative's worst nightmare.

This is not us trying to find fault with Stephen Harper. He has been a good and capable leader who has brought about a Conservative government, something that most people (and most of all the mainstream media) never thought possible. But the problem is that there is something keeping more Canadians from supporting him, maybe spooked by some of the things in his history like the "northern European welfare state" statement (which was taken out of context but still hurt perception of Harper). We believe that Jim Prentice has none of these handicaps and would perform better at connecting with the average Canadian.

If we are still in office after December the 8th, the authors of this blog will continue to support Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his leadership. But if we lose power before Christmas, we will be in favour of a change at the top of the Conservative Party, and our choice for the job will be Jim Prentice!

Red Tories.  I should have known.  It isn't just the Grits and DIppers that are out for revenge, the Prime Minister now has the detritus of the Progressive Conservative party trying to oust him, albeit very politely.  The blog's message seems to be that Stephen Harper is just fine, but he hasn't gotten that majority so, just in case he loses let's assassinate him and replace him with a cabinet minister no one off Parliament Hill has heard of or knows anything about.  Right.  If the Grand Coalition does somehow come to fruition - very big if - that would be the moment you don't want to remove your leader, especially a proven winner.  Harper has failed to gain a majority, but he has to contend with the most important factor in electoral politics since 1993, the rise of the Bloc Quebecois.  The existence of the Bloc removes 45-50 seats from the electoral calculus of both the Tories and the Grits.  Put those seats back into the play and a Harper majority would have been long ago achieved.  Can Jim Prentice, or John Baird or Jim Flaherty win through in Quebec? 

Harper's problem isn't that he is seen as too radical, voters have short attention spans and only partisans recall the "northern European welfare state" crack, it's that Quebec voters have yet to abandon the Bloc.  Where could leader Prentice win through?  Ontario, where he will be considered another Albertan?  Quebec, where his French is weak?  The West, where he will be seen as the man who replaced the most successful federal conservative politician in twenty years?  This is all part of that elusive hunt for the moderate voter who is turned off by Harper's alleged radicalism.  It's isn't Harper that they're scared of, it's the Conservative Party itself.  Whatever has been said about the current Conservative leader was said about Alliance leader Stockwell Day.  As far as these "moderate" voters are concerned Prentice, Harper or Jesus of Nazareth, it's just lipstick on a blue coloured pig.  There is in fact no moderate voter, at least in the sense usually implied.  The nice lady from Mississauga who is really just burning to vote Tory, just aching for it, if only they were nice, like her and her friends and family.  The nice lady doesn't exist.  Anyone scarred off by the Harper Tories is not a moderate, they're Liberals or Dippers.  Having little substantive to criticize the current government, they call its leader scary.  Harper, being one of the less amiable chaps in Canadian politics, the moniker stuck.  A Conservative party led by Prentice would still be viewed with suspicion, and Prentice himself considered a puppet for more radical figures.  Instead of a hidden agenda we'd hear about Karl Rove type figures lurking in the backroom.  The Tories have a branding issue, not a personnel issue.  The only thing more foolhardy than the Grand Coalition of Grits and Dippers, would be Conservatives dropping the man who has gotten them this far.

 "He's going to say its the socialists and the separatists and the opportunists getting together. Those are their talking points and so we just need to push back." (# )

NDP leader Jack Layton defending his caught on tape secret 'nation building' agenda with the Bloc Quebecois and Liberals.... More here.

Finally someone in the MSM lays it all out and cuts through the sh!t:

Absolutely no one pins even a sliver of blame on the Liberals, the NDP or the Bloc. Of course not. Faced with the unreasonable and extreme proposal that they raise funds in the same way as the Conservatives have been doing for years — by asking people for their money, rather than taking it from them — they really had no alternative but to seize power. What on earth were they supposed to do? Revamp their moribund fund-raising organizations? Find a message and a leader capable of motivating large numbers of Canadians to click the “donate” button on their websites? Get off their collective duffs? What were the Tories thinking?  *****

Tonight, a video review of PETA's new flash game "Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals", a bloody parody of a popular Wii game developed by Majesco. Turkeys have feelings and can appreciate music we are told as we play along and eventually can atone for our sins by preparing a tofurkey.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating, PETA gives honest vegetarians who mind their own tables a bad rep. Runtime: 9:31

{youtube}uczjofav7HQ{/youtube}

You can try your hand at this rather gruesome and unchallenging game here.

*gasp*

I can't believe it's true, but The Broom didn't make it to round two of the best podcaster/vlogger in the Canadian Blog Awards . How can this be? Are Blues and beer not the  source of all things well and good in the world?

Equally disheartening is that the screaming pages didn't make round two in the Personal Blog category. On the bright side, neither did Matt Good's blog so my work here is done.

You'll note that this post is cleverly titled "vote for us - round two". DMB made it into round two in the Best Group Blog category. So go vote.  Now.  I'm waiting. Don't worry, we'll still be here when you get back.

X-posted at: Dust My Broom and the screaming pages