Today at 10 a.m., at a hearing room on the third floor at 4900 Yonge Street in Toronto, a special panel will start hearings into whether Canada Post should be delivering a pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying hate sheet called Your Ward News. Lisa, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, me and many others take the position that it shouldn’t. Some of us will be there for the first hearing.

There will likely be quite a few white supremacists and Hitler freaks there, too, to cause trouble, and to intimidate people. That’s what they do.

If you agree with us – if you agree that an agent of the Crown should not be helping to deliver hate to peoples’ mailboxes – we would be honoured to receive your support. Say so in comments, below, or contact us via our web page.

Images of the sort of garbage we are talking about are below.  Above: the “N” word, tributes to Hitler, and a column by a Heritage Front leader who was recently charged with attempted murder.  Below: Jews depicted as dogs, gays called Satanic, and Christ sexually assaulting a girl.

Here is this morning’s big news, from the Post’s Drew Hasselback, which will take bread off the table for 25,000 Canadian families, most of them in British Columbia:

Canada vows to fight ‘unfair and punitive duty’ as Trump slaps tariff on softwood lumber

And here is a headline from a short while ago, from the Star, about the BC NDP’s pals in Unifor:

Trump’s tough talk good news, says Canadian auto union

These big union fools specifically said they favoured Trump’s  trade policies.  That’s what they said.  And now those selfsame policies are going to put thousands of British Columbians out of work.

The BC NDP has allied itself with big union bosses, which is their business.  But when they ally themselves with the “president” who is killing Canadian jobs – and thousands of jobs in B.C. – it’s everybody’s business.

We thought you should all see how the Mighty Finn™ approaches the back yard. 
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[The ad, not the firm.  Although all of us would’ve gladly worked for her for free, if she’d asked!]

The bearded Republican regarded us suspiciously.

He had been washing his pickup truck (naturally) and listening to country music on the radio (ditto).  It was blindingly-bright Saturday morning in August in New Hampshire, and we were out knocking on doors for our candidate, Hillary Clinton.

The beard squinted.  He grunted.

My wife and I worked on Clinton’s presidential campaign in Maine and at her Brooklyn headquarters.  But this was the first time we had gone door-knocking for her in a heavily-Republican district.  “If we don’t get shot by a right-wing lunatic carrying an assault rifle, we will have had a good day,” I told my wife, as we approached the beard and his truck.

Lisa asked him if he planned to vote Democrat, up and down the ticket.  He grunted.

“Can we count on your support for Hillary?” she said, sweet as pie.  My wife isn’t just beautiful and smart, she’s sweet, too.

The beard looked like he wanted to spit.  “Clinton’s a crook,” he said, as the Interstate hummed nearby.  “She should be locked up.”

We had already heard this many times that morning, and not just from bearded Republicans.  A few registered Democrats had said it to us, too.

Lisa was undeterred.  “But Trump has got a few ethics problems, sir,” she said, still smiling at the beard.  “He’s under all sorts of investigations.”

The beard shrugged, looking like he wanted to return to his pickup truck, or shoot us with an assault rifle.  “She’s a crook,” he insisted. “But Trump is going to start a war.”

Afterwards, Lisa swore that she did not recall the heavens parting at that moment, or a host of angels heralding the arrival of a political epiphany.  She insisted we walked away and went to the next door in search of votes.  But I swear – I swear! – an epiphany is what I experienced, in spades.  I was practically thrown to the ground, Damascus-like.

For months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been dutifully reminding everyone that Donald Trump was a vile, venal racist groper.  Every day, Clinton and the mainstream media said that: “Donald Trump is a racist jerk.”

Except there was a problem.  Having lived in the Deep South as a kid, I knew what it was.  It was this: Donald Trump may have been a racist jerk, sure.  But millions upon millions of Americans were racist jerks, too.  Racism – from slavery to Jim Crow to segregation to the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X and beyond – was woven through their history of the United States, like a foul, feral snake.

By calling Donald Trump a racist jerk, Hillary Clinton was merely reminding millions of other racist jerks why they needed to vote for him.  It wasn’t an attack, you see.  It was a Get Out The Vote strategy in reverse.

But war?  The war that the Trump-loving New Hampshire beard had mentioned?  War – having lived in Texas during Vietnam, and having been taught to take shelter under my school desk in the event a North Vietnamese fighter jet figured out how to travel 8,584 miles without refueling or being spotted – was what every American, of every political stripe, feared most.  Racism was what divided the states.  But fear of wartime was what United the States.

And, here was Donald Trump, saying on the campaign trail that NATO was useless, or sort-of calling for someone to shoot Hillary Clinton, or repeatedly praising violence at his rallies, or wondering why the US had nukes if it didn’t use them, or threatening wars and walls against all and sundry.  War was Donald Trump’s thing.  He liked it.

The United States had been here before, of course.  In 1964, the Republicans had anointed Barry Goldwater as their presidential candidate.  Goldwater was Trump before Trump was Trump.  He was a racist, too, and he praised extremism and the John Birch Society and guns and promised to use nukes against the Commies.

So what did the LBJ-led Democrats do about Goldwater? They didn’t go after him about racism, so much.  They went after his fetish for war.

They put together an ad called ‘Daisy’ – I know this, because I named my consulting firm after that ad – and warned everyone Goldwater wanted to start wars.  The people listened.  The ad only ran once, but it destroyed Barry Goldwater.  LBJ was re-elected in a landslide.

As I watch Donald Trump giddily dropping the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan, or bombing Syria, or sending a US soldier to his death in Yemen, or threatening war with North Korea – as I watch all those things – I think of that bearded guy in New Hampshire, washing his pickup truck one sunny Saturday morning in August.  He warned us.  He warned Hillary Clinton.

We didn’t listen.

Also, the hand-washing thing.  Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m more OCD than Howard Hughes.  I carry Purell wherever I go.

Way to go, PM! Cabin socks rule!

Tomorrow at 10 a.m., at a hearing room on the third floor at 4900 Yonge Street in Toronto, a special panel will start hearings into whether Canada Post should be delivering a pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying hate sheet called Your Ward News. Lisa, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, me and many others take the position that it shouldn’t. Some of us will be there for the first hearing.

There will likely be quite a few white supremacists and Hitler freaks there, too, to cause trouble, and to intimidate people. That’s what they do.

If you agree with us – if you agree that an agent of the Crown should not be helping to deliver hate to peoples’ mailboxes – we would be honoured to receive your support. Say so in comments, below, or contact us via our web page.

Images of the sort of garbage we are talking about are below.  Apologies in advance.

Images from Your Ward News: racism, Holocaust denial, tributes to National Socialism, homophobia, promotions of rape, columns by former Heritage Front members.  It goes on and on.

So, I opined on Twitter that the neo-Nazi Le Pen cannot win in the next round of the French residential elections. It’s a widely-held view; the odds are decidedly against the Trump-favoured fascists in the next round.

That single tweet elicited this response from an Ottawa actor (who, tellingly, is a New Democrat):

So, I found that rather irritating, because it fell into one of the categories of Twitter things that are rather irritating to me:

1. People who ask me to do their research, instead of doing their own damn research.  Also, rhetorical tweets.
2. Passive-aggressive tweets.
3. People who tweet hate, naturally.
4. Humourless, pious people who are online hall monitors, perpetually tsk-tsking everyone else, and acting like God made them the arbiter of all that is morally/ethically/politically correct.
5. People who (like Sean, above) who cling to the (now popular) view that nothing is knowable.

In politics, you hear from the Not Knowable People all the time.  They’re like the Pharisees of the modern age.  To wit: you guys all said Kathleen Wynne wouldn’t win in 2014, but she did! You guys all said Donald Trump wouldn’t win in 2016, but he did!  Ha!

[Pithy responses, respectively:  The Ontario Libs didn’t win so much as the Ontario PCs lost.  There’s a difference, idiot.  And: Trump didn’t win.  He cheated in the electoral college, with the help of Russia and thousands of hackers, and Hillary got three million more votes than he did, which should count for something in a sane universe.]

This crew – this “nothing is knowable anymore” crew – drive me bananas.  Like the Pharisees, mediocrity is their medium.  Beige is their colour, and tapioca is their manna. They never take any risks, they never venture a strong opinion, and they are therefore never shown to be wrong about anything.  Like J. Alfred Prufrock, they doubt everything and know nothing.

As you might have gleaned over the past 15 years or so, the author of this web site is not shy about offering an opinion every so often.  He – and I know him quite well, so trust me – likes people who are colourful and creative and who take risks.  He despises Prufrock-like bureaucrats.  Dare I eat a peach?

I do, I do.  I dare. I’m going to keep daring to eat peaches, bushels of ’em, until I am booted off this mortal coil.  As my journalism prof Roger Bird said to me in response to a post a few days ago:  “You were a part of the continuing reward of teaching in the School of Journalism. It took a very short time for me to recognize stars soon after they walked through the door. You were among them of course. Beyond that, you were a shit disturber. My inner rule for such was, don’t get in their way. Clearly I followed the rule and you went on to do much good in the world.”

I will keep Roger’s note around until I croak.  It is a wonderful and needed shield against the Know-Nothings on Twitter. Meanwhile, you Twitter people who are lazy – or who hate, or who are too clever by half, or who are pious, or who say nothing is knowable?

You irritate us, but you won’t ever beat us.

So, Chelsea Clinton tweeted this cool thing, which I retweeted:

Who needs sleep anyway?

Here. Good thing we’ve been sucking up to him and his kids, eh? Yep.  Sure is working.

President Donald Trump has called protectionist trade measures by the Canadian government “a disgrace.”

“Canada, what they’ve done to our dairy farm workers, it’s a disgrace,” Mr Trump said on Thursday in the Oval Office.

The statement was part of larger comments on American trade deals that Mr Trump made while signing an executive order on steel imports.

“We’re not going to let Canada take advantage [of the U.S.],” Trump told the group of reporters, claiming Canadian policies had hurt US timber and lumber jobs as well.

The claims echo sentiments Mr Trump expressed this week in Wisconsin, addressing employees of Snap-on Tools at a signing for the “Buy American and Hire American” Executive order.

“In Canada, some very unfair things have happened to our dairy farmers and others, and we’re going to strategy working on that,” Mr Trump said in prepared remarks. He called the current arrangement a “one-sided deal,” and vowed to “work on it immediately.”