So prophetic, so appropriate.

"Once the toothpaste is out of the tube it's going to be very hard to get it back in." - H.R."Bob" Haldeman

That is a Watergate reference.

Stephen Harper - ever the opportunist and at times, plagiarizer - deployed that quote when describing the political situation in Egypt during the Arab Spring when Mubarak stepped down, throwing his authoritarian regime into a tailspin.

We are reminded these days by the spectacle unfolding in the Senate and in the House of Commons, with regard to allegations of criminal fraud, corruption, collusion and subversion of the Parliamentary process, how perfectly appropriate that analogy is.

And we salute Corporal Greg Horton, one brave individual RCMP officer who has rigorously pursued this criminal investigation, interviewing many hostile or fearful people, and finally, sifting through hundreds of documents and an ocean-sized cesspool of obfuscations to shine the light of justice upon some very ugly CPC machinations.

At this point, some in the media are playing it coy, aware that the teflon-coated Harper may yet walk away unbesmirched by the volcanic eruption of shit his Con government has produced.

Don Martin on Mike Duffy

Apparently, CTV has pulled this from its site and it recently disappeared from YouTube.

Now it's back and I'm grabbing it in case it gets disappeared again.

Remarkable truth telling.




UPDATE: Confirmation that CTV pulled the piece because it made them 'nervous'.


UPDATIER: Gone. I need to get smarter about saving stuff like this.

EVEN UPDATIER: Now it's on Facebook.

Liar? Idiot? In either case, unfit

Twitter is having a ball with the Puffster's admission that he 'misunderstood' the rules for primary residence.

It’s “extremely complicated.”

It’s “antiquated.”

It’s “very, very fuzzy.”

In the cold grip of an Ottawa winter, the “it” topic is the suddenly hot definition of residency for senators.

Sen. Mike Duffy, in a mea culpa performance, declared Friday that he misunderstood what is meant by primary residence when he filled out Senate expense forms, and may have wrongly claimed about $42,000 in living expenses as a result. He’ll pay back the money, but Duffy insisted he owns a residence — a cottage — in PEI and so is qualified to sit in the Senate.

Here's the form.






Of course, tweeps are joking that maybe the Puffster should have had Senator Jacques Demers read it to him.


Image via Paul MacNeill.

Duffy channels Agnew?

Very strange things happen to people's brains when they get religion or political appointments. Fully exploiting the fact that as a senator speaking within the Red Chamber he cannot be sued for slander or libel, Mike Duffy made a rude speech, later retracting a metaphor under pressure from Harper.

Duffy's speech referred to the "nattering nabobs of negativism on the East Coast" who loudly protested equalization adjustments in the Harper government's recent budget that could cost Newfoundland and Labrador and P.E.I. equalization money.

Right at the moment, Mike Duffy's former colleagues think that it's funny, given that his current target happens to be Atlantic politicians.

Will they still find it amusing when he goes full Spiro Agnew and starts calling them "an effete corps of impudent snobs", the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" and the "commie-pinko-liberal press"?

Update: Both pogge and Dave at TGB reflect upon Duffy, albeit from different perspectives. Yet both conclusions seem unanimous in observing that Duffy's appointment is the equivalent of Harper lobbing a MASSIVE stink bomb into the Senate.