The *Ethical* tarsands performance piece.

New *ethical* tarsands spokesthingy Kathryn Marshall is a woman with astonishing artistic aspirations.

Last week she staged a performance piece in the vicinity of the US embassy in Ottawa.

Sun Media was there to interview her.

I was surprised how gentle the reporter was - when his Sun Infotainment colleague Krista Erikson spoke to Margie Gillies, she savaged the award-winning performer.

Wait. I'm confused. The reporter seemed to believe this was a demonstration .... where were the protesters?

There was a paid mouth and 3 actors paid to dress up in niqabs. That's an engineered publicity stunt, right? It's a marketing technique that decades of advertising companies have set up to promote their product.

So Kathryn Marshall is Mr Peanut, essentially.

News you won't see or read about on SunMedia

Où sont les islamophobes d'antan et d'aujourd'hui?

The moozlim-haters are worker ants busy-bustling around all levels of SunMedia. And that's why not a single morsel of information to read, hear or see will be found there, regarding this powerful humanitarian news story.

A remote First Nation in northern Manitoba will be eating better this weekend, thanks to a large shipment of meat and bread that an Islamic charity is donating to the community.

The Winnipeg-based Zubaidah Tallab Foundation is sending about 200 kilograms of beef, lamb and sheep meat, along with sacks of bread, by plane to Shamattawa Manitoba, on Thursday morning.

Hussain Guisti, who heads up the foundation, said Muslims butcher an animal at this time every year and give part of it to charity. Guisti said the foundation decided to send this year's donation to Shamattawa, a First Nations community of about 1,100 located just south of Hudson Bay, in the hopes of making an impact there.

This is why I love the CBC. It doesn't suppress new stories - unlike SunMedia and SunTV which only carry infotainment that fits into its corporation's rightwing ideological framework.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if SunMedia had positive things to say about Lou Engle and his *prayer* meeting.

Grand merci to Beari8it who tweeted the link to the CBC news story.

Anti-Quebec *study* from Institute of Marriage and Family Canada: FAIL

The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada just released a biased and unscientific 28 page report about the province of Québec. From QMI, the Quebecor (owner of SunMedia) *information* clearing house for Rightwing Nutjob propaganda.

"A Quebec family portrait," also suggests the preponderance of single-parent and common-law households will be less equipped to handle the possible dismantling of big government in La Belle Province.

Some studies suggest married men have more motivation to work harder and earn more money for their families than boyfriends, but numbers show husbands are in short supply.

Quebec has the highest percentage of unmarried couples in the world, according to the study. The 2006 census indicates that 34.6% of Quebec couples were in common-law relationships, compared with 13.4% in the rest of Canada.

Quebec also has the highest rate of children in daycare, noted study author Andrea Mrozek, which strains the province's much-vaunted $7-a-day daycare system.

"These things feed into one another in a bit of a circle," said Mrozek. "You have an expensive program, it increases the taxes, then you have to work to support the lifestyle to make money to make ends meet."

Huh? Andrea Mrozek .... gotcha. No wonder that sentence was pure bafflegab.

Mrozek is just a R.E.A.L. pro at cranking such retrograde *septic-tank* stuff out. "Marriage tames men ..."? Snort. Yeah, that's why the license bureau issues tranq guns and cattle prods to new brides.

Grand merci to @censoredversion for the tweet.

And here we thought SunTV would be

a pipeline for Stevie's PMO aka the Politburo, feeding English-speaking Canada non-stop ReformaTory propaganda.

Who knew that it would become the CONmedy Channel, with enough Poe's Law ambiguity to Confuse its intended audience? John Doyle describes an ersatz mash-up of Red Green and Stephen Colbert.

In its short but feisty life, Sun News Network has emerged as the finest of comedy sources. I’ve said that before. But now it’s even funnier.

I thought few instances of rip-roaring satire in the history of Canadian comedy could match the time Sun News host Ezra Levant marked Earth Day by assaulting a potted plant with a chainsaw. Levant, wearing a lumberjack shirt and a hard hat, began by making a lengthy speech at a pulpit. [...]

Then an assistant fired up the chainsaw and, after some small difficulty getting a grip on the instrument, Levant committed an assault on the unfortunate plant.

Sheer genius. Earth Day, Soviet communism and a chainsaw wielded by a guy not too familiar with the instrument.

And of course, there's Krista Erickson's totally hysterical impersonation of a journalist, replete with moves evoking Ann Coulter on crystal meth.

Meanwhile, the *real* Coulter's career as the official stand-up comic of Right-Wing Batshit Crazies has taken a queer turn.

"Hold on to your cowboy hats kids because there is a big surprise coming up on The A-List Dallas — an appearance from none other than Ms. Ann Coulter. While Ms. Coulter’s political viewpoints are a frequent source of debate, she has always been somewhat supportive of the gay community."

How can someone always be somewhat something? And Coulter supportive of the gays? Like when she endorsed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Or when she spoke in support of reparative therapy?

From here.

Grand merci to Jymm at Let Freedom Rain.

“I was always attracted to older men”...

This quote is brought to you by that paragon of journalistic integrity: SunMedia aka Sun Infotainment.

That much-vaunted integrity was on display when David Akin deign to step down from the heights of his high horse to rub elbows with hoi polloi - figuratively at least - and to defend his readers' right to view pictures of an accidentally exposed royal buttock.

In keeping with such rigorous standards of hard news reporting, the SunMedia hack who covered the trial of Bartley Sagmoen supplied the verbal equivalent of the porn industry's *money shot*.

A 15 year old adolescent girl allegedly declares “I was always attracted to older men”; ipso facto some girls are *naturally* inclined to feel libidinous urges toward grandfather figures. That would certainly be a self-fulfilling belief among pedophiles and SunMedia does appear eager to validate its readers' pathologies.

When a teenager announces the existence of a long-held interest in sports for example, one can safely assume evidence of family support, coaching, participation in events and so on.

What *cultural* environment and which institutions would foster the development of yearnings for the sexual attention of older men, now that the Vatican Taliban has stopped protecting clergy who are sexual predators?

I offer this observation. Beauty pageants that require female children to exhibit themselves as creepy parodies of Vegas showgirls might possibly provide good training ground in that regard.

UPDATE - I removed the embedded video. Strangely enough, the adverts for the Ontario govt played fine though the ABC report about Eden Wood didn't. Click here to view it.

There appears to be a number of such events in the US; The Learning Channel has dedicated itself to producing a series that covers this phenomenon. Hard-hitting journalism and serious analysis? Nope, just sugar and spice and all things nice.

Fortunately, it seems Australians are not eager to deprive their daughters of their childhood and to deliver them as raw material to mold and shape into budding pedophile bait.

You can imagine the howls of outrage from the owners of kiddy pageant franchises who are being denied their right to exploit girls, to train them in the art of being valuable sexual commodities and to get rich doing it. Greed just doesn't get ANY respect these days.

Unless one might happen to be Rupert Murdoch, of course.

Grand merci to JB and JCP for source material.