The Black Rod

Quick. Call 311 to get the 411 for 911. Somebody has drugged all the political pundits in town. Why else would they have missed this story? The Left's champion in the coming mayoral race shows up at City Hall to go nose-to-nose, eyeball-to-eyeball with Mayor Sam Katz on a burning issue that can turn the election, and it warrants hardly a brief in the news? It all happened last Wednesday. As reported in The Black Rod, Katz had handed challenger Judy Wasylycia-Leis the single issue she can use to defeat him. He wants to abandon bus rapid transit midstream, to adopt a wildly expensive electric streetcar system instead, based on a) an embarassingly pathetic excuse for a "study" which he claims proves its viability and b) his ego-driven need for a legacy, cost be damned. JustJudy, as she now calls herself, marched down to City Hall to appear before council in person to speak against Katz's plan. It was her 'coming out'. For the first time she wo...

There's a split in Manitoba's ruling NDP and it's growing wider and nastier by the day. The first crack in party solidarity developed when Thompson MLA Steve Ashton took on Finance Minister Greg Selinger for the leadership following Gary Doer's departure. There was no love lost between the men. It was papered over at the leadership convention when Selinger topped the vote with 1317 to Ashton's miserly 685. But the split has obviously festered ever since and was positively oozing last Wednesday when Ashton's campaign manager Russ Wyatt tore several strips off unelected Premier Selinger at the last city council meeting of the summer. Speaking on the debate over adopting Light Rail Transit as the priority for the city over Bus Rapid Transit, Wyatt attacked Selinger for failing to respect council's choices for its infrastructure priorities. Instead, the provincial NDP is trying to force the city of Winnipeg to spend all the money in the infrastr...

The blogosphere is humming with the revelation of emails showing left-wing journalists on a private web forum (Journolist) discussing ways to coordinate their coverage of the Obama presidential campaign to divert attention from his 20-year-association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his incendiary pastor. Pick one of Obama's critics, anyone will do, and accuse him of being a racist, was one suggestion. The editors, reporters, and columnists on the site swapped ideas on the best line of attack to undermine Sarah Palin as the Republican running mate, and, for good measure, they tried topping one another in showing their hatred of prominent conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh. Nine years ago CBS reporter and producer Bernard Goldberg wrote a book simply titled Bias . Calling on his 30 years of experience in the news business, Goldberg described how the mainstream media slants its reporting to promote the left-wing viewpoint without even thinking about it. There's no...

Winnipeg's city councillors, staring into the headlights of a civic election, are flopping around trying to seize hold of every populist issue in sight to save their skins from a restless electorate. At the last council meeting of the summer on Wednesday they voted 10-4 (against the usual dead-end rump) to radically change the rules on mosquito fogging. They want the city to start fogging sooner, before the number of mosquitoes caught in monitor traps reaches nuisance levels instead of after. They want to reduce by a day the notice given to homeowners that fogging is starting. And they want to shrink the buffer zones that have allowed anti-malathion nutbars to effectively kneecap fogging efforts on their streets. All the news stories refer to "100 metre" buffer zones. CBC (demonstrating again how the best reporting in town is now on television news) earlier this summer used a reporter walking along a residential street while unrolling a tape measure to...

We had barely started to write about the latest smear campaigns by the Winnipeg Free Press when---look out----we were swamped by a BP gusher of bias in the mainstream media. Obviously, of course, we had to roll 'em all into one post on a theme. First, there was the NAACP racism video featuring Shirley Sherrod, which was followed almost instantly by the most intense leftwing MSM diversionary assault on truth in reporting since, well, Obama's election campaign. Speaking of which.. . The same day as the NAACP firestorm, t he public learned from leaked emails how leftwing "journalists" discussed amongst themselves how to save Obama's 2008 campaign from the damaging effect of association with his preacher of 20 years Jeremiah Wright, perhaps, one suggested, by diverting the debate by accusing one of Obama's critics of racism. But let's start with the NAACP. Obama, you see, has been such a disaster as President that his popularity ratings a...

In the first week of July, Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz jumped the shark. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means the precise moment when, in this case, a politician, does something so incredibly stupid his popularity begins to slip irreparably from now on. Katz, who could have sleepwalked to victory in the coming mayoral election, turned it into a horserace in an instant. Despite all the media hype, Katz's opponent with the unpronounceable name, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, had everything going against her. She has never had a real job in her adult life. Not one at the age of 59. She has never had an independent thought in her working life. As an NDP apparatchik from her university days, she has toed the party line, breathed the party line, parroted the party line and voted the party line. She has worked against the interests of Winnipeg in her 13 years as an NDP member of Parliament. In particular, while Winnipeg was wracked by a car-theft epidemi...

Tut, tut, tut.... what have we here ? We should have expected this from Winnipeg's biggest panhandler, millionaire moocher Gail Asper. Actually, in fact, we did. Which is why we checked. Her pet project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, has stiffed the City of Winnipeg for $360,000 in property taxes. You paid your taxes. You scrimped here and saved there, and by June 30 you paid your fair share . But the CMHR apparently doesn't believe it has to contribute to the roads, water lines, policing, and recreation services provided by Winnipeg. The museum had no problem finding the money to send their Chief Operating Officer Patrick O'Reilly to London and Copenhagen, New York City and Philadelphia, Paris and Bilbao, Spain, all over Australia, Toronto, Chicago, and Ottawa for meetings and visits to museums and conferences and more meetings. Or to pay for his lunches at Rae & Jerry's and Stella's and Hy's Steakhouse and Ear...

What's going on here? * The City starts fogging for mosquitoes in mid-June without the usual whining from the moonbats on and off council, and footdragging by hippy dippy city entomologist Taz Stuart. The spraying of malathion is aggressive and weekly. ** Mayor Sam Katz, the erstwhile champion of fighting mosquito infestations with briquettes, dragonflies, minnows, and assorted other Hogwart's magic methods, muses that the conditions to begin fogging are too restrictive and need to be changed. *** The City announces that wading pools and spray pads will stay open well into the Fall as long as it stays warm and children want to play. Nobody says we can't afford it. **** The City declares war on property owners who fail to repair derelict buildings that have peppered low-income neighbourhoods forever, acting as magnets for crackheads, arsonists and gangs. The goal is to eliminate 100 vacant and derelict buildings a year. A new law giving the c...

Oh for the good old days. You know, when you believed what you read in the newspapers because, well, if it wasn't true, they wouldn't print it, right? Those were the days when you assumed reporters were "professionals" who researched their stories before writing them. Oh, and they had editors who made double sure everything was accurate and true. Right? Then -- damn you Al Gore --- came the Internet. And, suddenly, people could actually check the so-called "facts" in the newspaper for themselves. And, whoops, it appears the "professionals" were making up a whole lot of what they wrote, editors or no editors. Enter Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett, who has taken to imagining himself a commentator on national issues. His latest observations, headlined "Public's HST phobia needless" consisted of insulting people who opposed the blending of their provincial sales tax with the federal GST into one gia...