It isn’t confirmed yet, but it looks very much like Gov. Nikki Haley has made her choice to fill the seat being vacated by pathetic quitter Jim DeMint. Tim Scott is the sitting United States Representative for the First District of South Carolina. He is, of course, a Republican. Let’s take a minute to get to know him. Continue reading
Ice Shaman
43 posts
Today, December 6, is Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Every year on this day, Canada commemorates a terrible act of violence directed at women solely because of their gender.
L’Ecole Polytechnique is an engineering school affiliated with the Universite de Montreal. On December 6, 1989, a deranged gunman named Marc Lepine entered L’Ecole Polytechnique. He went into a mechanical engineering classroom, ordered the men to leave the room. He asked the female students if they knew why they were there, and told them it was because he was “fighting feminism”. He told them that they were women studying to be engineers, that that made them feminists, and that he hated feminists. He then shot every one of the nine female students. Six were killed. Continue reading
Mayor of Toronto and noted disgrace to the city Rob Ford was today ordered removed from office. After a three day trial, Mr. Justice Hackland of the Ontario Superior Court found that Ford had breached the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (MCOIA) and as a result that his seat on Toronto’s City Council was therefore declared to be vacant. Instead of accepting this, Ford has decided to fight on, blaming his situation on a conspiracy against him among the left wing of City Council and the judiciary. So what happens now?
To begin with, Justice Charles Hackland suspended the effect of his order declaring Ford’s seat vacant for 14 days to give City Council time to deal with the administrative difficulties that come with having to replace a mayor on the fly. So not very much is likely to happen in the first week or two. Continue reading
In news that I’m sure is shocking to absolutely no one, when last night’s election results are compared to the polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports, it turns out that Scott Rasmussen put a sweaty, slab-like, thumb on the scale in favour of Republican candidates at both the Presidential and US Senate levels. I decided to do a comparison between last night’s results and Rasmussen’s final polls so that I could quantify for all of our information just how much bullshit Rasmussen is shoveling.
Before I get into the meat of the subject, a few ground rules for this comparison. I looked at states for which Rasmussen Reports published polls with field dates falling within the last three weeks (for the vote for President) or the last four weeks (for the Senate races) before the election. If Rasmussen published more than one poll during that period, I looked only at the most recent one. I have calculated what I refer to as a “net miss”, which is stated as either R+X or O+X. That number is calculated by adding or subtracting the amount by which the Rasmussen poll number for each candidate differed from the final result for that candidate. If Rasmussen showed a given race with Romney five points over his final result and Obama three points under his final result, that would be noted as R+8. Continue reading
We all love things. Some of us love clothes, some of us love shoes, some of us love action figures and some of us (okay most of us) love the Fubar FatMax Extreme. Continue reading
Fortune magazine conducted an investigation into the so-called Fast and Furious scandal. Surprise, surprise, there is both more (and less) to this story than those trying to whip it up into a major crisis for the Obama administration would like you to believe. Continue reading
On Wednesday night, an anti-African race riot broke out in South Tel Aviv in Israel. It began as a protest against illegal immigrants from South Sudan, and spiralled into an orgy of violence in which the rioters attacked Africans or people who appeared to be Africans, and smashed up and looted shops owned by members of, or serving, the African-Israeli community.
I should be clear, right off the bat, that I don’t intend what I am writing here to be a slam on Israel. I have my issues with Israel, but that isn’t what this is about. The Tel Aviv race riot is only the most recent manifestation of the phenomenon that I want to discuss. Continue reading
Computers are like Old Testament gods: lots of rules, and no mercy. — Steve Wozniak
The religious fundamentalists have decided that they will embed the Old Testament rule that a man “shall not lie with a man as with a woman for this is abomination” into the constitution of North Carolina. How else can we help the fundamentalists of North Carolina put the rules of their holy book into the constitution? Find out after the jump. Continue reading
The Mayor of Toronto is a massive embarrassment to my city. Yesterday, one of the Toronto Star’s city hall politics reporters filed a story that Rob Ford wants to buy a slice of the park adjacent to his house so that he can build a bigger security fence. The reporter behind the story, Daniel Dale (and this is according to his own account, which differs from the mayor’s), went out to the park of which Ford wants to buy a piece and was taking pictures of the park and, it would seem likely, Ford’s fence, for the story. Continue reading
The Auditor-General has released a scathing report today finding that the Canadian military, and the uniform fetishists also known as the Conservative Party of Canada (our governing party at the federal level) deliberately low-balled the cost of the new procurement program for fighter jets to the tune of $10 billion, and then deliberately lied to Parliament about it.