http://blogs.btcalgary.ca Behind the scenes of Breakfast Television: Calgary's best-loved morning show on Citytv Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:51:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It'll be no surprise to my regular blog visitors that I've frequently been impatient with past examples of  facile rhetoric from Jack Layton - especially his drive-by denunciations of the Alberta oilsands.  And on occasion I've been genuinely irrirated about his rigid espousal of old-time NDP posturing which ignores the reality ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/jack Canadian Veterans:  Home Sweet Home The latest on this unseemly matter, which began a month or so ago with word that 29 elderly fellows - 20 of whom are veterans - were to be removed from their homes, is that the bureaucracy has set things right, and the boys will remain where they ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/follies-and-foibles-x-2 The farewell speech delivered in Calgary last night by the Duke of Cambridge, although comparatively brief, was nonetheless an encompassing review of the nine days he and the Duchess spent in Canada - and it included a sensitive reference to the veterans the couple met and frequently chatted with during this ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/veterans-out-you-go-boys They were just kids, mostly, in some cases still in their teens or barely out of them.  The odd NCO might have been in his early to mid-20s, but the great majority of 14 thousand Canadian men at Juno were boys, really, with high school not long behind them - and ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/juno If you accept the thesis that Stephen Harper does his politics as a chess game, always looking ahead by two or three moves, then there's some validity to the proposition that immediately after the federal election, he loaded a trio of Tory losers into the senate as the precursor to real ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/the-land-of-nod Until very recently Mr. Reynolds was a little-known sports agent based in Burlington, Ontario, with a stable of a dozen or so National Hockey League players.  None of them has elite status, with the possible exception of Mike Fisher, late of the Ottawa Senators and now doing his thing with the Nashville ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/todd-reynolds-pinhead-and-homophobe I have this political fishbone lodged in my throat, and I'm pretty close to choking on it.  Gilles Duceppe, the former leader of the defunct Bloc Quebecois, and for 20 years a treasonous member of the Canadian House of Commons, has proclaimed he will now return to his home province and will not ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/gilles-duceppe-if-i-were-a-rich-man The Dippers: I take a measure of comfort, a teaspoon's worth perhaps, in being among dozens of false prophets around the country.  My bold prediction that Jack Layton, after decisvely winning the English language TV debate during the election campaign, would then toddle onward to the typical NDP caucus of 30-odd MPs ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/notes-on-the-vote There were three striking points, I think, about the English language television debate last night - and one was a blow which landed squarely in Michael Ignatieff's face and left him with a bloodied political nose.  You can't say Ignatieff didn't walk right into it after rabbiting and hectoring away, ad nauseam, about the ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/thar-they-blow The auditor general of Canada discloses that the Harper government "misinformed parliament" about $50 million dollars in questionable expenditures for the G8 and G20 summits last year - and nobody cares. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff does his level best to make hay of this, and as he sees them, other ill-considered ... http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/mike/sominex