Barrel Strength

The chap on the phone wanted to know if I would support the Conservative Party.  I said I would support the Conservative Party when the Conservative Party supported free speech.  My parting words were a request that he pass the message along, but I doubt he did.  I could have mentioned the need for a review of immigration policy, and the truly insane over-spending but he caught me a little unprepared, and free speech was about all he had time for anyway.

The One’s new tone of accommodation towards the Islamic world isn’t playing in Peshawar, much less Peoria:

A message attributed to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a “criminal” on the eve of the US president’s Middle East trip. Ayman al-Zawahiri said Mr Obama’s “bloody messages” would not be concealed by “polished words”

[...]

He called Mr Obama “that criminal who came seeking, with deception, to obtain what he failed to achieve on the ground after the mujahideen ruined the project of the Crusader America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia”.

[...]

[Obama] will travel to Egypt on Thursday, where he will make a speech at Cairo University. In the audience will be 10 senior figures from the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports from Cairo.

And the Muslim Brotherhood is equally charmed by the prospect of that visit.

So is the Salafist troglodyte community.

A very interesting analysis of the public finances of the United States compared to those of Canada. Upsets all stereotypes. Courtesy of the Brussels Journal.
The author reviews the data and concludes:

“The current Canadian government is a ‘conservative’ one, but its hold on power is tenuous because it is also a ‘minority’ government (in Parliament). It has little to do with the positive trends outlined above, since it came only to power fairly recently. That means that the credit for these positive trends goes largely to the center-left governments that have governed Canada for much of the past two decades and who have implemented major fiscal and some structural economic reforms that have made these numbers possible. And there are also indications that the Canadian banking system is in much better shape then the American one. Meanwhile, in the USA, many Republicans have been profligate with the public purse in recent years, and much of the political left marches today in the opposite direction from the one taken by recent Canadian center-left governments. And Obama-mania on the part of the mainstream media is not going to make matters better…before the next election cycle.”