The Black Rod

The Winnipeg Free Press thought that the recent death of a respected Crown prosecutor was a pefect opportunity to malign and defame him with impunity. They didn't anticipate that the vile effort would damage an innocent victim- one of their own. Katrina Clarke is listed on the FP website as an "investigative reporter." She hasn't made much of a mark at the paper, so when offered a juicy story, it looked irresistable . "... the late prosecutor is linked to five wrongful convictions involving eight men who collectively spent more than 100 years in prison for crimes they did not commit." read the story.  "... the cases have left a trail of various forms of misconduct — undisclosed evidence, a reliance on junk science and secret deals with Crown witnesses. They have also spawned two commissions of inquiry and required payments of millions of dollars in compensation for victims." "Dangerfield was an outlier, a driven prosecutor blinded by tunnel vi...

  For years the so-called leaders of Manitoba's aboriginals have tried to anoint some doped-up, blind-drunk, gang-allied or suicidal member of Reserve X, Y or Z as a champion for getting killed while confronting police. Chief This, Grand Chief That and Superchief Whatsis could always be counted on to declare shrilly that the police had murdered the newly deceased, who, of course, was blameless, pure, and would be greatly missed because he always made people laugh. It was, they would say, proof of how The Man is prejudiced against the irreproachable aboriginals who-- allegedly-- try to shoot, stab, drive into or drive over police officers. But year-after-year the anti-police hate campaign failed to gain traction once the facts of each case proved that the police officers acted properly under the circumstances. So you can imagine how giddy the aboriginal leaders must have been last week when the RCMP announced that a guard at Headingley Jail had been charged following th...

When it comes to Fake News, nobody can match Dan Lett, the "political columnist" for the Winnipeg Free Press. But he surpassed himself last Friday when he concocted a story accusing Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister of hiring a private investigator to "dig up dirt on NDP leader Wab Kinew" prior to the 2019 provincial election. The story was based on those apocryphal anonymous "sources" who, of course, "have asked not to be named for fear of reprisal." Given that Lett has been a shill for the NDP for months (more on that soon), coordinating his anti-Pallister columns with NDP political attacks, its not hard to figure out who his "sources" are. The Page One news story, carried under Lett's name with no mention of being 'opinion', continued on the jump page where, if one read that far, in paragraph 20 of the 28 paragraph story Lett conceded that the PI was actually a researcher hired to pour through the legal records of Kinew...

  Early in the week we were watching a television news report on an anti-mask protest in Steinbach, when we heard possibly the stupidest comment ever spoken in Manitoba. The reporter (from Global TV if memory serves well) had plucked a young woman out to represent the anti-protest sentiment.  She said she recognized that the protest was about "individual rights" but, she continued, 'individual rights were not the mountain you want to die on.' WHAT????  We leaped out of our chairs as one. WHAT???? INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS LIKE THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH ARE EXACTLY THE MOUNTAIN YOU WANT TO DIE ON! we shouted. What made the shocking statement even more appalling was that it was made only days after Remembrance Day. You know, the day we set aside to honour the thousands who died fighting a world war to preserve individual rights.  And spoken only weeks before we mark the 30th anniversary of the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and the return, after 50 years, o...

Shamed by The Black Rod, Winnipeg's professional "journalists" finally decided there was something to report about an assault charge Manitoba NDP leadership candidate Wab Kinew didn't mention in his memoir. These "professionals" sat on their hands for almost three weeks after the revelation that Kinew had been hiding the existence of domestic abuse charges from 2003. Kinew said the charges were dropped because they were false, so the press stopped digging. Only after The Black Rod questioned why the woman's voice wasn't being heard did the professional journalists stir themselves. Within a day, Steve Lambert of Canadian Press had located the complainant and her story was picked up by the rest of the news herd. And what a story it turned out to be! “I went to the police because he assaulted me;  physically injured (me)."  she told Lambert. Tara Hart is her name. And she isn't backing down an inch on her claim of being assaulted by ...

Not so fast, Wabanakwut. Two and a half weeks ago some skeletons that NDP leadership candidate Wab Kinew had hidden away at the bottom of his closet lurched back to life.    It scared the hell out of him. But not as scared as he's going to be. Kinew had built a political career out of being the holier-than-thou candidate in the holier-than-thou Party. He turned his criminal record of drunk driving and assaults in his Twenties into an asset by claiming that he had seen the light, had reformed, and was now, in his Thirties, a paragon of virtue starting with taking ownership and responsibility for all his transgressions. Look, he said, how transparent I am with my past faults. How can you doubt my sincerity? But Kinew had to do some fancy tapdancing in late August when it was revealed that he hadn't been completely honest about his run-ins with the law. It turned out that he had concealed a pair of  arrests for domestic violence. Violence against women...