Canadian Cincinnatus

Is Megyn Kelly auditioning for broadcast news?

What prompted me to ask this question is the recent exchange between Megyn Kelly and Ted Cruz, when Cruz accused Kelly of asking “the question every mainstream media liberal journalist wants to ask” and “the question Barack Obama wants to focus on”, after she criticized him on his immigration policy. This got me thinking. The questions she asked Donald Trump during the infamous Fox News debate came straight out of Hillary Clinton’s War on Woman playbook. Going back a year, she told Dick Cheney during an interview that “you got it wrong on Iraq”.  Now just because Fox News is ‘our news station’ doesn’t mean that I think Fox should refrain from criticizing conservative politicians. Quite the contrary, Cheney, Trump and Cruz should be fair game. Nevertheless, I do find it curious that, in each case, she deliberately criticized Republican politicians from a left-wing perspective. Which begs the question, why?

I believe a hint can be found in the TV ratings. Currently Fox News is the highest-rated cable news show in the US and Megyn Kelly is its top star. For Thursday, August 20, Fox had a total of 2.3 million viewers in prime time (with 456, 000 in the 25-54 demographic group), trouncing second-place finisher MSNBC, who had 766,000 (with only 144,000 in the 25-54 demographic group). From Kelly’s perspective, these numbers don’t give her much upside potential in cable news. On the other hand, looking at the ratings of the big three broadcast networks, third place CBS pulled in 6.4 million viewers  (with 1.45 million viewer in the 25-54 demographic group) in the week of August 17. This is almost three times the viewers of Fox News.

Could it be that Kelly’s willingness to criticize Republican politicians from the left is a signal to network news shows, telling them that she is ideologically adaptable? If she were to be hired on as a network news anchor, I am sure that she could negotiate a hefty salary increase, proportionate to the increased number of viewers who will now see her. And for a tired old network news program, snagging Kelly would be a significant feather in their cap. They can point to her and say that they really do provide fair and balanced news because they have a prominent conservative working for them. And then watch Kelly slowly morph into a typical mainstream liberal over time (while touting her Fox News pedigree whenever she has to defend herself against charges of liberal bias).

Don’t kid yourself. You and I can afford to be conservative purists because politics is just a hobby for us. Our income isn’t riding on our political positions. This is not necessarily the case with the professionals we see on TV and hear on the radio. While we can rely on radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to be faithful, this is only because their fame and fortune is inextricably tied to their political beliefs. And we can rely on people like Mark Steyn because they have been subject to serious career pressures and have never bent to accommodate them.

In the case of Megyn Kelly, she is known to be a capable host, a good interviewer, and an attractive woman. None of which depends on her political beliefs… whatever they may actually be.

Who is paying Mike Duffy’s lawyer?

Last week, columnist Christie Blatchford, who is covering the Mike Duffy trial for the National Post, asked this question. I thought: what an excellent question. Here is a guy, who is on trial for padding his expenses to the tune of $90K and who could not pay it back himself when asked to. How can he afford to hire Donald Bayne? Bayne is reportedly one of the top criminal lawyers in Canada. Can you imagine what his hourly rate is? Considering the length of the trial, and the amount of time Bayne has evidently invested in analyzing every e-mail, his bill must be exorbitant by now. Blatchford reports that Duffy has taken a $500K mortgage out on his house, but Bayne’s legal fees must be way higher than this by now.

Bayne could, of course, be defending Senator Duffy pro bono, but Duffy doesn’t strike me as the kind of defendant that would tug at the heartstrings of a criminal defense lawyer. He is not an underprivileged minority ‘youth’ who can’t afford to mount a defence, somebody whose public defence would go a long way in raising the moral stature of his legal defender in the salons of Yorkville. The case against Duffy also does not involve any higher legal or moral principle. It’s just about a grubby politician accused of stuffing his own pockets – and a conservative one at that!

So if it is unlikely that Duffy can afford to pay Bayne himself, and if it is unlikely that Duffy could inspire Bayne to defend him for free, and if it is also unlikely that Duffy could fool an old fox like Bayne into thinking he can pay Bayne’s bills when he really can’t, the only remaining likely option is that somebody else is paying them. Who could that be?

One clue comes from the vigorous multi-day cross-examination of Nigel Wright. Donald Bayne showed great interest in determining whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper knew about the $90K cheque that Wright wrote to Duffy to cover his disputed expenses. At one point in the cross-examination, the prosecutor objected that this line of questioning has nothing to do with the matter at hand. The judge dismissed this objection but I think the prosecutor was right. What has Nigel Wright’s cheque got to do with the ostensible purpose for the trial, to determine whether Mike Duffy committed fraud over his expenses? (As an aside, I think Duffy will be found innocent. His expense claims were approved, and the Senate rules about primary residence were, at the time, vague.)

One would think that if Duffy were as short of cash as he says he is, and if Bayne’s billable hours are as high as they likely are, Duffy would have instructed Bayne to keep his costs to a minimum by running a no-frills defence. But Bayne acts as if it had money to burn, as if he were part of the O J Simpson Defence Establishment.

The obvious guess is that the Liberal Party is paying them. Reinforcing this suspicion is the fact that Bayne seemed to deliberately slow-walk the trial this spring, in order to force it into recess. Christie Blatchford reported that the trial of former Liberal Senator Mar Harb was originally set for Aug 10. Because Harb and Duffy are accused of fundamentally the same thing, and because they share the same prosecutor, this would have meant that if everything went according to schedule, Harb’s trial would be happening right now instead of Duffy’s. Instead, Harb got his trial date postponed, so that – conveniently enough - the politically interesting parts of Duffy’s trial happened during the Federal Election.

Personally, I doubt the Liberal Party is paying Duffy’s defence directly. This would be too reckless and risky a move for even an airhead like Justin Trudeau. Personally, I suspect Bayne is being paid by some Liberal donor who would have liked to donate much more to the Liberal Cause than campaign finance laws permit. Paying Bayne’s salary allows him to contribute to the cause in a way that Elections Canada cannot scrutinize.

If the mainstream media really were a neutral reporter of the news, they would be asking who is paying Bayne as vigorously as they are now asking Stephen Harper whether he knew about Wright’s $90K cheque.

 

Donald Trump passes critical conservative litmus tests

The mainstream media claim that Republicans love to apply litmus tests to their leaders, implying that we only accept standard bearers who are purer than distilled water. This is of course bunk. Conservatives are perfectly willing to accept 80% candidates, or even 50% candidates. It is just that if they vote for a 50% candidate, they insist on that 50%. A more recent development has been the application of litmus tests by the GOP establishment to Donald Trump. This is an interesting development so let’s go through a few litmus tests in detail.

The first litmus test I want to consider is immigration. In this test, Donald Trump passes. His three immigration principles – “a nation without borders is not a nation, a nation without laws is not a nation, and a nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation” – are as sparklingly clear as they are conservative. Furthermore, most of the policy proscriptions he proposes in order to achieve these conservative aims are pretty good as well. His critics call him a bombastic clown who will say anything to get attention. With regard to immigration, they are wrong – perhaps deliberately. Ever since he entered the race, he has articulated a clear and consistent immigration policy and has defended it successfully against all comers. His critics charge that he has not fleshed it out his policies sufficiently. This is clearly wrong. The purpose of an election campaign is not to produce actionable legislation but to tell the voters where the candidate stands. In this Trump has clearly succeeded.

So how do the other GOP contenders do on this litmus test? For the most part, they have been unenthusiastic, evasive, and inconsistent – saying different things at different times, while saying something else altogether in the back room with big donors. For these reasons, I would give them a failing grade. The only other candidate who has been as consistent on immigration is Jeb Bush. But his position - which was encapsulated in his comment that crossing the border illegally was akin to “an act of love” - is saccharine schmaltz dressed up as a moral principle. It is the sort of moralistic reasoning that gives the left a bad name. So Bush gets an F on immigration. In my opinion, the only other candidate who manages to pass the immigration test is Ted Cruz, but he mostly agrees with Trump.

Another litmus test is free trade, a conservative principle if ever there was one. Here Trump’s position is problematic. However, there is another side to this issue that is rarely raised by free trade advocates and it concerns national security. Take China. It is a fact that China’s rise has been powered mostly by exporting goods to the West, especially the US. The problem here is that China is increasingly hostile towards us. It is a nuclear power and if trends keep advancing as they have been, a shooting war is possible in the near future. While American attention has focussed mostly on ISIS, with its lurid and barbaric videos, China poses a much more potent and existential threat. Is free trade – which I believe in as a general principle – so overriding a principle that one should keep on trading with one’s enemy? Taking this logic to its absurd conclusion, the US should have continued to trade with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. More realistically, at some point national security trumps trade freedom.

Of course, there are many other conservative litmus tests - on guns, health care and other things. On these, Trump has been all over the map, taking Democrat, Republican, and Independent positions as his whim and opportunity dictate. On these points, Trump’s critics are on solid ground. It is precisely because of these serious concerns, that I currently do not support Trump.

However, the reason these failing have not been fatal to Trump’s electoral prospects so far is that Republican voters don’t trust the other candidates on these matters either. Oh, they pass the written test well enough, dutifully checking off all the right boxes. But in practice, they have failed miserably. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner - the effective leaders of the Republican Party until a presidential candidate has been selected – have squirmed and equivocated and capitulated at every turn in their dealings with President Obama. The inevitable result is that the rank-and-file completely view all establishment politicians with suspicion. They may say agreeable things, but they are assumed to be lying, or too cowardly to do anything about it.

The poster child of this distrust is Jeb Bush, whose public apostasies go well beyond immigration. On Common Core and now global warming, he is firmly in the other camp. It has been said that he was an excellent conservative governor. That may be, but so far he has been conducting his presidential campaign as if his guiding principle is to antagonize as many conservatives as possible. When his campaign finally ends, I think he should sue his consultants for malpractice.

The reason Trump appeals to conservatives is that they think he is the 50% candidate who will actually deliver on his promised 50%. Well certainly, they feel he is more likely to do so than McCain or Romney, or Jeb.

The National Post’s Colby Cosh can’t spot the scandal in the Nigel Wright affair, and neither can I

 

In yesterday’s column in the National Post, Colby Cosh offered some much-needed perspective on Nigel Wright’s role in the Mike Duffy Senate expense scandal.

Personally, I was never understood what Stephen Harper’s now-former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, did wrong in writing a $90,000 cheque to Mike Duffy so that he could pay back his disputed expense claims. Nigel Wright’s accusers claim that they are motivated by concern for the public purse, not partisan score-settling in the middle of a federal election. If this is so, then why aren’t they praising Nigel Wright conduct? Isn’t the public treasury better off after Nigel Wright’s money was deposited in the government bank account? And if this is so, why aren’t they indignant that Harper forced Wright to leave?

Ah, you don’t understand, the $90,000 (which ended up at the Receiver General of Canada) is a bribe. OK, what is the quid pro quo, may I ask? If you think Nigel Wright paid a bribe, what did he want Duffy to do for it? Please be specific. All I can see is that Wright expected Mike Duffy to make his scandal go away by paying back his disputed expenses. That’s some bribe. Duffy was bribed to obey the law (what Duffy had already claimed he wanted to do but couldn’t because he didn’t have the money).

The other contention is that the $90,000 payment was to avoid a Senate audit. I can’t rebut this better than Colby Cosh:

“When media scalp-hunters say the Conservatives were trying to “avoid” or “tamper with” the Deloitte audit of Duffy, for instance, I find myself saying, “Well … yes: they wanted to make the audit unnecessary, to hold Duffy to the strictest view of his financial obligations.” Is that an illegitimate reaction to an audit? If the CRA threatens to audit my tax return, and I respond by filing a new one and adopting adverse interpretations of my allowable deductions, am I doing something bad? Is that a “cover-up” in the ordinary sense?”

A third contention is that Nigel Wright placed himself in a conflict-of-interest with his $90,000 payment. If you think so, please tell me what two (or more) interests were placed in conflict by his actions. Again, be specific. Sweeping denunciations won’t cut it when a man’s honour and legal guilt are at stake.

If it wasn’t a bribe and it wasn’t a conflict, then perhaps it was an illegal campaign contribution. If you believe this, then tell me: what office was Duffy running for? In Canada, a Senator has a lifetime appointment. Mike Duffy wasn’t running for office, isn’t running for office, and will likely never do so in the future.

Just to provide some perspective, look at how the media reported on the Pat Martin/Racknine controversy. What is that, you ask? In 2011, NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) accused the robocall company, Racknine, which is associated with the Conservative Party, of making illegal calls to misdirected voters to the wrong polling station. Racknine sued Martin for defamation, asking for $5 million in damages. There was an undisclosed settlement that Pat Martin couldn’t afford because he, a former union boss, isn’t rich. To help pay his settlement and his legal bills, he accepted donations from various unions. There was a kerfuffle about whether these donations were campaign contributions (and therefore exceeded donation limits) or constituted a conflict-of-interest, but it was relatively muted and short-lived. Nothing like the category 5 hurricane that has swirled around Mike Duffy every day for the past several years.

You know what? As far as I understand the facts, I am on Martin’s side. If something isn’t a bribe, doesn’t create a conflict, and wasn’t given to defray a campaign expense, accepting it should be legal. While it is clear Pat Martin has foot-in-mouth disease, I don’t think he did anything wrong by accepting donations to help pay his legal costs. Just as I don’t see anything wrong with Nigel Wright taking care of Mike Duffy’s expenses when the latter couldn’t pay them back. Is there a legal requirement for Martin and Duffy to go bankrupt?

What I do insist on, however, is that the media use the same standards to report on Nigel Wright - and Mike Duffy - that they used on Pat Martin.

Speaking of media bias, why is it that we hear about Mike Duffy 24/7 but never hear about the other Senators in similar trouble, like Mac Harb? Who is Mac Harb you ask? He is a former Liberal Senator, also charged by the RCMP with Fraud and Breach of Trust for dubious living expenses. Except that in Harb’s case, the numbers involved are $230K not $90K. Conveniently enough, Harb’s trial was postponed to the New Year. How many of you have heard about any of this? I bet most Canadians think that the only Senators under suspicion are Conservatives. And I don’t think that is a coincidence.

Toronto’s taxi drivers don’t pick up short fares, but hey, don’t allow Uber on our streets!

Late on August 4, two people were fatally gunned down outside the Muzik nightclub after rapper Drake’s afterparty spilled out into the streets. Now we find out that just before one of the victims was murdered, she was refused a cab ride by a licenced Toronto cabbie because she was a ‘short fare’. That is, the cab driver thought “her estimated $8 fare was too low” so he didn’t bother to pick her up. Minutes later she was struck by a random bullet.

As a result, a representative of the Toronto cabbie’s union wants “tougher penalties for cabbies who refuse short fares.” The Toronto “director of bylaw enforcement called the practice of turning down short fares ‘despicable’”.

These would be the same people who only a few short weeks ago were all in high dudgeon about the presence of Uber cabbies on Toronto’s streets.

So let me get this straight, the solution to the short fare problem is more bureaucratic enforcement of rules and regulations, and – presumably – more form-filling by complainants. But the solution is definitely not more competition in the marketplace. 

Toronto Mayor John Tory attacks free speech

World-famous pick-up artist Roosh V is going to give a few lectures in Toronto on how to pick up women. Toronto Mayor John Tory took time out of his busy day of governing a city of 2.7 million people to tweet the following:

“While free speech is the law in this country, promoting violence against women is wrong.”

While we’re on the subject of free speech John, you know what? If you don’t support speech you disagree with, then you don’t really support the concept of free speech. There is also the concept of tolerance, something that you no doubt wholeheartedly profess to support. However, if you stop and think about it, the word ‘tolerance’ means tolerating things you don’t agree with. If you only tolerate things you agree with, then you aren’t really being tolerant, are you?

And if you are really into stopping those who promote violence against women, why don’t you crack down on all the Marxist professors proselytizing at the University of Toronto and York University? According to historians, communism killed about 100 million people in the 20^th century, give or take a few tens of million. Given that at least a few millions of these victims were women, you’ve got some real misogynists on your hands, especially as both universities lie within Toronto’s borders. But I’m guessing you won’t be doing that anytime soon.

Then Mr. Tory took more time out of his hectic day to tweet this:

“I am calling on those hosting this tour to do the right thing – cancel this show.”

You know what I am getting sick and tired of? Politicians who refuse to stay within the bounds of their job description. In the case of the City of Toronto and its Mayor, these duties are defined by the City of Toronto Act. The City of Toronto Act gives the City and its Mayor plenty to do: collect garbage, run the police force, inspect restaurants, maintain the fire department, clean the snow off the roads, and many other essential tasks. You know what isn’t on that list? Regulating the content of private meetings held on private property. Doing that isn’t part of your job, Mr. Tory. Instead, why not concentrate of providing the best municipal services you can while keeping the property taxes down? If you do that, and do it well, not only will you be re-elected, but you will also find that your day will be filled from morning to night with productive tasks.

So Mr. Mayor, I suggest you mind your own business and make sure my trash is picked up on time.

 

How to defeat Donald Trump

In the 1980 Presidential Election, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan faced a third party challenger, in the form of disaffected Republican John Anderson. He was a ‘moderate’ who wanted to raise gas taxes, register guns and was skeptical about the effect of energy deregulation on solving the energy crisis. He initially ran for the GOP nomination but went third party when he didn’t get anywhere in the Republican primaries. I am old enough to remember how the Main Stream Media swooned over him, how they said he was the harbinger of a new era in politics. On Election Day, Ronald Reagan buried him. While he got 6.6% of the popular vote, he didn’t win a single state. Even with a splinter candidate on the ballot, Ronald Reagan still managed to win over 50% of the popular vote.

Considering that Republican Party of today has another loose cannon – Donald Trump, I was wondering if there were any lessons in Reagan’s handling of Anderson that would be applicable. I think there is. The most important is that you actually have to campaign for something. Ronald Reagan clearly did. Everybody knew where he stood. Anderson? Well, he’s in the middle, at least that’s what Walter Cronkite tells me. John Anderson is a moderate like me. What’s he stand for? I dunno, moderation I guess. You see the problem that Anderson had.

Trump is obviously different in this regard. Everybody knows Trump is against Mexican immigration. This issue is fueling him. It is fueling him because conservatives feel stabbed in the back by the GOP establishment over it. To beat Trump, you must champion immigration with the same zeal that he does. Hug Trump on immigration, not allowing an inch of daylight between your position and his. This will have the effect of neutralizing immigration in the primaries. Of course, to do this effectively you have to act as if you really believe what you say, and to do that, you really have to believe it. (Obviously, this advice cannot be followed by Marco Rubio and Senor Bush.) With immigration effectively dealt with, you are free to go after Trump for his liberal and anti-conservative past - and the electorate will now listen to you.

You know what you don’t do? You don’t dismiss his supporters – core conservatives and Reagan Democrats – as crazies or whacko birds. You need their support in the general election. Also you don’t do what Erick Erickson over at Red State has done, disinvite Trump from the RedState Gathering, whatever that is. While Erickson is free to embrace and shun anybody he wants to at his private event, I cannot imagine a more counterproductive strategy for defeating Trump than this. Because the other thing fueling Trump’s rise is the conservative base’s distrust of the Republican Establishment, as Glenn Reynold’s recent USA Today article so eloquently explains. The average conservative in fly-over country feels – and rightly so – that the GOP establishment is using their position and privilege to stack the deck against conservative outsiders. By denying Donald Trump – a legitimate GOP contender – access to a conservative forum, Erickson is merely reinforcing this perception, and therefore adding fuel to Trump’s continued rise.

You know, until the Trump phenomenon came along, I imagine conservatives were feeling pretty good about 2016, with many great candidates in the GOP, contrasting favourably with the Democrat Party’s old retreads, all of whom are hobbled with Obama’s abysmal record. I never did. I have been fretting for a while about the effect that the surrenders, back-room double-dealings and outright condescension of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will have on the upcoming election, as well as the poor performance of moderate hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney, who the party elders touted as the best candidates to beat Obama. To me, pent-up frustration with one’s own side is an explosive condition. I expected something to give. What I feared most was a third-party challenger. So far this hasn’t materialized but the situation remains dangerous and unpredictable. This can still be dealt with, but first, the GOP has to get its head out of the sand and look at the root cause of the problem – in the mirror. Because, unlike Ronald Reagan, nobody knows what you stand for, and nobody trusts you anymore.

 

Dear Republican Consultant, it’s not about The Donald, it’s about you

In an article quoted by Dave Carter, Republican consultant Rick Wilson said that Donald Trump could be stopped with a ‘killer ad’, one designed not to wound but to kill. You know what? You’re wrong. You don’t get it. You just don’t get what is happening, do you Mr. Jones? I mean Mr. Wilson. Let me tell you what is going on: The Donald is not riding a wave of support because people are attracted to his charisma or his alpha-male mojo or whatever. It’s not about him at all. Disaffected Republicans have gravitated towards Trump because they hate you. And when I mean you, I mean you, personally – as well as the rest of the Republican Establishment. Let me be the one to tell you, your core supporters really hate your guts, and it has been a long time in the making.

And you only have yourselves to blame. For two Presidential election cycles, you got your way with the candidate selection. Though rank-and-file conservatives were skeptical, you reassured them that McCain and Romney were the men best equipped to defeat Obama. And then they both blew it.

When the Tea Party rose up spontaneously in 2009 and delivered the 2010 mid-term election to the GOP, the Republican establishment pretended they didn’t know them. John Boehner was even caught on tape making fun of them – the people who made him Speaker of the House! What does Boehner think, that they went to the polls to make him Speaker? And when this same Tea Party anointed Mitch McConnell the Majority Leader of the Senate in 2014, his response was to surrender to Obama on every substantive issue.

The issue that most personifies the gulf between the Republican foot soldier and the GOP general staff is immigration. The grass roots is spitting mad about it but you people refuse to deal with it in any meaningful manner. Boehner and McConnell routinely lie about their intentions on this subject in public, while promising the Chamber of Commerce and President Obama something completely different. It is no accident that Trump’s campaign took off when he started championing immigration restrictionism. Yes, finally we have somebody who actually represents us, thought rank-and-file Republican. This is why your ‘killer ad’ will go over like a lead balloon.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why some nobody like David Bratt was able to defeat the sitting House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor. And why Trump rose in the polls after he made those impolitic remarks about McCain’s war record. The answer is that they hate Cantor and McCain. They view them as Quislings. That’s why serving veterans and serving members of the military are rallying behind Trump. 

This is also why Jeb Bush is doing so poorly, in spite of the advantages he enjoys in name recognition and big money support. He is viewed as a traitor. While he may have been a great conservative governor, it seems like in his Presidential run he has been advised to oppose the GOP base on every issue it deeply cares about. The results, for Bush, will be predictable.

That is also why your ‘killer ad’ won’t work. They have seen too many times where establishment politicians play dirty in order to defeat primary challengers. They remember what you did to save Thad Cochran the way Texans remember what General Santa Anna did at the Alamo.

And you should be thanking your lucky stars that Donald Trump has not gone third party, because if he did, the Republican presidential chances will go down to zero in 2016 – thanks to you, not Trump. There is an argument being recently propagated by establishment RINO’s that in 1993 Ross Perot harvested most of his votes from Clinton rather than Bush. As this seems dubious to me because Perot stressed inherently conservative issues like a balanced budget, let me throw some cold water on it with an even better example: Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

In 1984, he was elected with the biggest majority in Canadian history. After his reelection in 1988, he passed the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement. That was the last conservative thing he ever did. He then proceeded to enact a value added tax, impose draconian gun control laws, and tried – twice – to modify the Canadian Constitution to enshrine multiculturalism, socialized medicine, left-wing labour laws and an apartheid regime for our native people. All throughout this he thought, so where can Canadian conservatives go?

They flocked to join an upstart genuine conservative party, splitting the right-wing vote in half, causing the Progressive Conservative Party to go from 156 seats before the 1993 Federal Election to two afterwards – yes two. That’s where they went. I know I bring the 1993 Canadian election up a lot, but it is such a great go-to example illustrating the fate of a conservative politician who betrays his supporters. While I don’t think the Republican Party of 2015 is nearly as bad as the Progressive Conservative Party of 1993, it is heading in that direction and will suffer the same fate if the knuckle-dragging morons in flyover country don’t wrest power away from the ‘serious leaders’ in Washington.

This is why when you point out the obvious flaws of The Donald, you only show that you don’t get it. It’s not about him. And I say that as somebody who favours Ted Cruz and Scott Walker. Speaking of whom, the only ‘serious candidate’ who has handled the Rise of the Donald properly has been Cruz. Instead of calling Trump’s supporters “crazies” and “wacko birds”, he is respectful of them – because he realizes that you can’t win the general election without them. In other words, while others are busy rubbing salt into the wounds, Cruz is positioning himself to be their champion in case Trump implodes. Good thing for him that you are not his advisor.

How much will Canada’s Federal Election cost?

Finding myself on the road on Sunday, the day that Stephen Harper dropped the writ, this was the question that Toronto’s 24-hour all-news radio station (680 News) asked over and over again, on the hour, every time they told us about the federal election that had just been called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The was on the unnecessary cost due to Harper’s insistence that it be an unprecedented 11 weeks long. Because 680 is just a headline news station that has no talk-show hosts on it, I have observed it to be a reliable disseminator of whatever the Canadian news media’s current talking points are.

My first retort is costly to whom? By increasing the length of the campaign to 11 weeks, its cost went up by $125 million. This looks like a lot of money until you notice that the 2015 Canadian federal budget is $290 billion. This is what is really at stake, because the winner of this contest will determine whether Canada will continue with balanced budgets or go into deficit territory. If today’s fiscal discipline were removed by Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau, the deficit could easily balloon to $20 billion per year – if not more. These are the real fiscal stakes at play.

Also consider the reverse situation. What if Harper had shortened the writ period from the normal six weeks to four weeks in order to, say, save money? Then the opposition parties would no doubt accuse him of stifling democracy by limiting their campaigning time.

Obviously, the real reason for their complaint is that the Conservatives are better able to go the distance than the opposition parties are because they are richer so they, in effect, gave themselves an advantage. My response: OK, so what? In every previous Canadian election, the governing party dropped the hammer whenever they thought it was the most convenient time for them to do so according to the latest public opinion polls, and nobody thought twice about this selfish, partisan practice. In contrast, this is the first federal election when the governing party set the day of the election so far in advance that it had no idea whether it would be a good time to hold it or not. And Stephen Harper stuck to that date, voluntarily tying his hands in a way that no previous Prime Minister has ever done before.

The only way he could satisfy the opposition parties would be if he chose the most convenient writ period length from their perspective. And even then, they would likely still complain publically in order to score cheap points.

It is sad state of affairs that such a piece of blatant partisan propaganda could be passed off as a straightforward news headline. If 680 News were truly an objective headline news station, it would have instead matter-of-factly announced the election call, and then - in a separate news item - reported on the opposition parties’ complaint about its’ length.

The really surprising thing is that in spite of such blatant examples of journalistic abuse as this, there are plenty of people who still contend –with a straight face – that there is no left-wing bias in our media!