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by Ezra Levant

Did you know that, when he was in high school, Barack Obama was a member of the Choom Gang?

Don’t worry. It wasn’t violent. Sort of the opposite. Choom is Hawaiian slang for marijuana.

Back then Obama was pretty laid back. He went by Barry, not Barack. His specialty was finding new ways to smoke dope — including in an enclosed van, so not a single whiff of smoke was wasted.

Barry Obama called that TA — total absorption.

Obama loved drugs so much, that’s what he wrote about in his comment published in the school’s yearbook.

“Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.”

Ray was his drug dealer.

Obama didn’t mention his mom, because his mom had abandoned him. Like his dad did. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was kicked out of America — where he was a Kenyan exchange student — when it was discovered that he was a polygamist. Turns out that Barry’s mom, the unfortunately named Stanley Ann Dunham, was not Obama Sr.’s only wife.

After he split, Stanley remarried another Muslim man, Lolo Soetoro, and followed him to Indonesia. Barry went with them for a while and attended school there. But he finished high school in Hawaii under the care of Stanley’s parents — that’s the “Gramps” Barry mentioned in his yearbook.

Did you know Obama was part of the Choom Gang in high school? Unlikely. As of yesterday, the New York Times — motto: All the news that’s fit to print — had run precisely one article on the subject, ever, buried deep in the newspaper. It was in a review of a new book about the president, by David Maraniss.

How many times did you hear about George W. Bush’s drug and alcohol use when he was young? One hundred?

The Choom Gang is a scoop. But it was no secret. It has been published in Obama’s yearbook, a public document that has been available to reporters for decades.

But it has only come to light now, in a book.

This, from the same Media Party that flew en masse to Wasilla, Alaska, to comb through the personal life of Sarah Palin, when she was running for vice-president. They vetted Palin’s children, including young Bristol and her boyfriend. They even vetted Palin’s Down syndrome child, Trig.

But basic facts about Obama remain willfully unreported. Do you even know how many brothers and sisters Obama has? Seven siblings by his polygamous father. Who already had a wife in Kenya when he married Obama’s mother.

In the months ahead, do you think you will hear more or less about Obama’s polygamous father, or some Mormon ancestor of Mitt Romney who was polygamous?

Do you think you will hear more or less about Romney’s religion than you have heard about Obama’s religion — under Sharia law, he is Muslim, just like his father and stepfather were.

Obama’s birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii. But a 1991 brochure published by a literary agency representing Obama claimed he was born in Kenya — a biography Obama surely approved, likely to give him more street cred as an African American, rather than a half-white rich kid from Hawaii.

Youthful pot smoking, or weird family trees isn’t the point here.

The point is the Media Party covered for their favourite candidate in 2008. And they’re about to again.

by Lorrie Goldstein

Now that the United Nations has asked Robert Mugabe to be a global leader for tourism, I’m trying to come up with a good ad campaign for Zimbabwe to help it attract more international visitors.

How about: “Zimbabwe: Come for the fixed elections, stay for the ethnic cleansing”?

Or, “You’ll leave your heart in Zimbabwe … along with various other body parts.”

Or, “Zimbabwe’s economy will surprise you … because it doesn’t have one.”

Aside from touting the infamous, 88-year-old dictator as a poster child for tourism — even though Mugabe is banned from travelling in Europe due to international sanctions — the UN’s World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) will also hold its next general assembly in southern Africa in August next year, under the joint sponsorship of Zimbabwe and neighbouring Zambia.

Faced with almost universal condemnation and outrage from human rights groups over its recognition of Mugabe — whom, they warn, will use it for propaganda purposes inside Zimbabwe to boast the world community accepts him — UNWTO hastily pointed out it is not bestowing any formal title on Mugabe, such as making him a UN ambassador.

Of course, this explanation satisfied no one.

Human rights groups and Zimbabwean political dissidents wondered out loud how the UN could do something so damaging to the cause of human rights.

Indeed, when the UN — now trying to muster a credible international response to Syria’s massacre of 108 people, including 49 children, in Houla — pulls stunts like this, it just makes people shake their heads in disbelief and disgust.

Then again, is it really all that surprising when, for example, Zimbabwe, Iran and China all currently sit on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women?

Iran, for example, not exactly known for its stellar reputation on women’s rights, joined the UN’s Status of Women Commission in 2010, right after one of its senior religious clerics blamed earthquakes on women who wear revealing clothes.

That was three years after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted to students at Columbia University, during a visit to New York to address the UN General Assembly, that women enjoyed equal rights in Iran.

He also told them Iran had no homosexuals.

But is all of that any weirder than the fact Libya was named to the UN’s Human Rights Council in 2010, when it was under the iron fist of the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, or that Saudi Arabia and China are also members in good standing of the UN’s top human rights body?

This keeps happening because membership in UN human rights organizations isn’t based on the human rights records of member countries, but on the calendar (i.e., when it’s their turn to join) and on their membership in various UN voting blocks.

In the real world, while one can see the value in a handful of UN bodies such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF — although even they are not entirely without controversy — when it comes to human rights, the UN lacks all credibility.

Canada is the seventh largest financial contributor to the UN among its 192 member nations.

At some point, don’t we have to start asking ourselves whether this is money well spent?

Not quite so.

I’ll give you some straight numbers on this and then get to the story of Little Lizzie May and her pogey lifestyle.

This year, the maximum amount that any Canadian paying into the EI system will contribute is $839.97. Their employer will contribute 1.4 times that amount to a maximum of $1,175.96. If you live in Quebec the numbers are different so I’ll just focus on the rest of the country.

Now you have to earn $45,900 in a year to pay this maximum. That’s about the average Canadian income for a full time worker, perhaps a little lower but not by much. Now the government is taking aim at frequent flyers, people that go on pogey again and again. Not for short periods - say 6 weeks in between jobs, but people that work a few months and then spend months more on pogey.

Most of these people will not have paid the maximum. I mean how many Canadians earn $45,000 in six months? A few sure but not that many. But let’s say you did and then took pogey for six months.

You would have paid $839 and your employer $1,175 and then for the next six months you would collect $12,600. Is that a case of taking out what you put in or is that a case of abusing the system when you do this year in and year out.

Elizabeth May abused the system in my eyes. She said that when she needed the system she used it. She told reporters this. And she did this for several years while working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant. It was a tourist place that shut down in the fall and didn’t open until spring.

Bloggers such as Small Dead Animals picked up on this shortly after May made the statements. May used the system to pay for her activist lifestyle. She became a prominent environmental activist during the time when she admits that she was going on the dole each winter.

A young woman from a well to do Connecticut family was living off the payments made by hard working Canadians to support her lifestyle.

Here’s how the blogger Publius put it.

“So a family of rich foreign Leftists comes to Canada, starts up a business in a remote though beautiful part of the country, struggles for several years and is aided by the Canadian taxpayer. Just makes you tear right up, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to move to a lovely stretch of the Maritimes and get the government to subsidize our lifestyle choices?”

And often times that is what is happening. We are subsidizing someones lifestyle choice. The regular annual users aren’t just taking out what they are putting in. They are taking out much more which means rates for you and I and the employers that hire us must be higher to pay for those guys.

If you choose to work in a seasonal job that only runs a few months a year that’s great but no one owes you an income the other six months of the year. The guys I know who are running lawn care companies right now, can normally be found plowing snow come winter. Or they find winter work. Most don’t say that they’ve cut grass and have done their part.

These changes are for the best for everyone and should be supported by the left and the right as good for working Canadians. We should all support them unless that is you feel entitled to your entitlements.

And that’s the Byline.

Help police find this man

This is going to be one of those stories that I wish I knew less about every day.

What started with a bizarre story of a severed foot being mailed to Conservative Party HQ in Ottawa has morphed into so much more – as if getting a severed foot in the mail wasn’t bad enough. Now police are looking for a man with a bizarre history that includes links to Karla Holmolka, claims of being a male model and a bi-sexual porn star. Here’s some detail from the Sun News story…

In a grisly twist to the case, a graphic and deeply disturbing video has emerged which is purported to show the murder and dismemberment. A Montreal police source confirmed cops are in possession of a video, which also includes cannibalism, but would not say if it is the same video.

The graphic video online shows a man being stabbed to death with an ice pick and then being cut into pieces. The video was shot inside an apartment that bears a close resemblance to the unit in west-end Montreal that’s at the centre of the homicide investigation.

In a strange twist we already had footage of this man in our files. Magnotta had been interviewed by the Sun’s Joe Warmington back in 2007 when there were claims he was dating Homolka, claims he denied.

You can read Warmington’s column from the time here.

I was asked why we would give this freak the time of day and the attention that he so obviously craves. The answer is simple. He’s still on the loose.

If Luka Rocco Magnotta is responsible for these crimes then he must be brought to justice. If he is not, then he has some explaining to do about the bizarre videos he has posted online that seem to show a murder.

by Lorne Gunter

Thomas (call me “Tom”) Mulcair, leader of the federal NDP, will be in Alberta today. But, he assures us, he has not come to disparage our region.

Rather, he claims, he is here to explain to us the need for Ottawa to intervene in oilsands development to protect the environment.

He has also promised to share with us the Quebec model for sustainable development that he helped devise when he was the Liberal environment minister there.

Monday, during a scrum on Parliament Hill following question period, Mulcair repeated his line that his recent attacks on resource development were not an attack on the West, or Alberta in particular.

Yeah, right. Like if I were to tell you you’re lousy at your job, your house is a sty, your wife is a skank and your kids are delinquents, but insist I’m not criticizing you or your family.

“The most important element for us in going out there is to talk about the sustainable development of all of our natural resources but of course, in particular, there’s the oilsands,” Mulcair told reporters. He said his message is about “maintaining the equilibrium” between the prosperity of the West and the economies of central Canada.

And, he added, “It’s about the enforcement of federal legislation … the Navigable Waters Act, the Fisheries Act, migratory birds, not looking at cumulative health effects, not looking at groundwater, not monitoring the water in any way shape or form.”

Oh, I see. You mean the way the federal government is always intervening in Quebec to enforce federal law.

If Mulcair wants to understand how ham-fisted his remarks have sounded these past few weeks, he should play a round of Shoe on the Other Foot.

How would he react to some preachy opposition leader from Western Canada showing up in his home province of Quebec full of sanctimony about how that province should be managing its economy?

I imagine that even though Ottawa has a legitimate role in enforcing federal environmental regulations on, say, Quebec’s James Bay hydro project and open-pit asbestos mines, Mulcair would be among the first to stand up and demand the feds honour provincial autonomy and leave poor Quebec alone.

Mulcair has already declared himself against the federal Clarity Act, for instance, the Chretien-era legislation that would require Quebec separatists to win a clear majority of the vote on a clear question in any province-wide referendum on sovereignty. What would he think, then, if the next federal leader of the opposition were from the West and took it upon him- or herself to travel to Quebec and lecture politicians and the populace on Ottawa’s obligation to enforce federal law in the fight for independence?

And Mulcair’s contention that Quebec’s model of sustainable development can be reproduced elsewhere is laughable.

The only reason Quebec can afford not to develop its natural resources is that the rest of the country pays the Quebec government $8-10 billion annually in equalization. Without that money, Quebec doesn’t have the tax base on its own to afford its lavish social programs, such as cheap daycare and low university and college tuition.

So, welcome Mr. Mulcair. But don’t be surprised if we’re too busy being self-sufficient to listen to your uninformed, hypocritical, holier-than-thou message.

by Christina Blizzard

It’s tempting to call it a shocking new tax, but the new fee that’s being imposed on electricians will hike the cost of electrical work to consumers — and that isn’t funny.

Worse, say electrical contractors, they can’t get a straight answer as to what’s being done with the cash they’re being gouged for.

The Liberal-created Ontario College of Trades will soon require journeymen electricians and electrical contractors to pay an additional $200 and $600 respectively annually to the College for unspecified services.

Stephen Sell, is president of the Ontario Electrical League, a group representing 6,000 electricians — most of them non-union.

He says this is just an unnecessary tax on his members — and a duplication of a process that’s already in place.

They’re already paying for licences, so it won’t enhance safety one scrap, he says.

“They’re adding all these extra layers where we already have a functional system and they’re not telling us what this will actually do,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.

He’s written to the college pointing out that these fees will provide an extra $24 million to the College of Trades — money he suspects will simply go to fund that body without providing any services.

Tory critic Garfield Dunlop called on the government to scrap the college. In the Legislature Tuesday, he called it a “banana republic agency.”

It’s easy to understand the Tory angst over that body. Patrick Dillon, a spokesperson for the so-called Working Families Coalition, a group that ran an expensive negative advertising campaign targeting the Tories in the last three elections, was appointed by the Liberals to the college.

“You’ve instituted this large, unnecessary body without consulting with Ontario’s skilled trades workers or employers,” Dunlop told training minister Glen Murray.

“Now you’ve decided, instead of taking financial responsibility for your growing boondoggle, you’re now going to implement a new tax — and this is what it is, a new tax — on the backs of hard-working trades people and their employers.”

Sell said this new tax, as well as the government’s restrictive apprenticeship ratios, are causing a problem with labour supply in the industry.

Currently, government ratios require three journeymen to supervise one apprentice electrician. Sell says that could easily be changed to one apprentice to one journeyman.

“We’ve had scenarios where a journeyman retires, it puts you over your ratio, so you have to lay someone off.”

You could open up employment for 6,000 young people in the trades by a simple change in the ratio, he says, and one apprentice to one journeyman makes more sense because they can work as a teaching team.

Murray told Dunlop he could sit down with him, “over a cup of coffee and explain the difference between a licence and a College of Trades, because there’s a difference between buying an apple and a bushel and he doesn’t understand the difference.”

Well, if you put it that way, neither do I.

What I do see is a government that created an unneeded and unwanted bureaucracy, then rewarded one of their key supporters with a position in that agency.

The result is that hard-working tradespeople have to pay more for the right to work — with no discernible benefit to anyone.

If this government were truly serious about finding meaningful employment for young people in high-paying jobs in the trades, they should stop putting archaic and meaningless hurdles in the way of legitimate professionals who are just trying to make an honest living.

But I’m still stunned to see Barbara Hall, the Chief Commissar of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, change the law by decree.Hall was appearing before the Queen’s Park Social Committee which was conducting hearings on Bill 13, the Liberals “anti-bullying” act which manages to bully anyone that gets in its way. There are few things wrong with what she said but here is the key paragraph.

“Ontario’s Human Rights Code is, in a sense, Ontario’s highest law. All schools—including public, Catholic and private—have a legal duty to provide students with an educational environment free from harassment and other forms of discrimination because of their race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sexual orientation, age, marital status, family status, disability and sex, including gender identity.” Barbara Hall, May 15, 2012

Wow!

First off Ms. Hall, the highest law in Ontario is still the Constitution of Canada and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but nice try. Secondly, you will notice that Ms. Hall says that her vision applies to all schools, including private ones. That means that even if Catholic schools stop taking money over the imposition of gay-straight alliances they will still have to allow them in Barbara Hall’s world.

But the biggest wow in there has to be the last bit, “…including gender identity.”

Ummm, when did the legislature pass a law making gender identity a prohibited grounds of discrimination?

The answer is that they didn’t but Barbara Hall wants it in there so she’s putting it in. Now there is a bill to insert “gender identity” into the act but it has not passed yet.  This was even mentioned at the hearing by NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: Thank you, Barbara, for your presentation, and also thank you for your support for “gender identity” and “gender expression” as explicit words in the Ontario Human Rights Code and your letter to that effect. As you know, Toby’s Act passed second reading. We’re hoping to get it in place by Pride.

Barbara Hall does not make the laws in Ontario despite what she may think. She is a mere public servant, there to do the bidding of the legislature, not direct. This is another reason that Hall has to go and her Commission be scrapped.

But the organization is just huge.

We’ve talked about this a bit lately what with Scooter coming to Canada and telling us that we are all fat and have food insecurity – maybe because he wants to take away our bag of Lays and have us adopt European socialism.

We’ve talked about the UN chat shop made up of countries like China – a pillar of human rights – investigating Canada’s human rights record when it comes to Omar Khadr. Then there was the lecture on refugees. Sure we take in one of the highest rates of refugees in the world on a per capita basis but because we won’t accept people from the US or Britain any longer we are big meanies.

And of course we’ve begun discussing the ridiculous sounding but absolutely real UN plan for land use control known as Agenda 21.

And with all of that, we are just scratching the surface. I went over to the UN website and even knowing it was a huge organization was astounded at how many different bodies and groups and commissions they have.

The opening of the website was cute though, it shows a globe and several langaugages, it’s a kinda kumbaya moment looking at that – all those countries getting along all thanks to the UN. Look, they even have a cute slogan – “United Nations – it’s your world.”

Sounds like a tourism slogan. Which is kind of appropriate because the UN has a tourism body to promote global tourism.

But look at all the organizations the UN has – (http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/structure/) a Population Fund, a World Food Program – which is kinda weird because the Population Fund wants fewer people on the planet but the World Food Program works real hard at keeping them all alive.

There is a commission on social development, an international court, the universal postal union, they even have a world weather office.

In all manner of ways the UN fancies itself as a government. Now don’t use the term world government, they don’t like that and it makes people that say it, like me, look crazy. But look at their system. They have bodies for international social policy, industrial policy, health and agriculture.

They even make laws.

One of the laws they are currently trying to get moving is the Arms Trade Treaty. This is an attempt to start an international gun registry. You think the one we had in Canada was expensive, wait until you hear about the global gun registry and guess what – as with all things UN, Canada not only gets to pay its share, but as a developed country – if this passes – we’ll get to pay for this system in poorer countries too!

“By its resolution 61/89, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to establish a group of governmental experts to examine the feasibility, scope and draft parameters for a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms,”

Now arms control and terms like conventional arms may sound spooky to some – it might remind you of Reagan and Gorbachev negotiating nuclear arms treaties in Iceland. Well this ain’t that.

This is about rifles and shotguns and pistols, oh and the ammunition that goes with each of them.

This is about making sure that we stop the large scale sale of small arms to thuggish regimes or the mob but it is also about making it harder to import a Winchester from the US to go hunting with.

Think I’m joking?

Last year Canada tried to get sporting and hunting rifles excluded from the treaty and the Harper government was blasted by the NDP and groups like Operation Ploughshare.

The United Nations is notoriously anti-gun and I would not put it past them to try and use all kinds of regulations to make guns harder to get by making them unaffordable or just not worth the hassle of the paperwork.

And remember, they view this treaty they are working on as a legally binding document.

In July gun control advocates from around the world will gather in New York to push for a tougher Arms Trade Treaty through the UN. Canada needs to make sure that its sovereignty and the rights of law abiding gun owners are protected.

And that’s the Byline.

by Monte Solberg

One of the best parts of a bona fide world financial crisis is it forces us to come face-to-face with reality, though that first meeting almost never goes well.

For instance, the Greeks are finally facing up to the unpleasant reality they’re broke. When this sad fact first became apparent, the Greeks rioted because they were mad about reality being so mean to them.

But now at least some Greeks are accepting reality, if not exactly celebrating that it has moved into the spare bedroom as a way to save money. Anyway, the people of Greece will be better off once they accept that for the next few years they will have to be worse off.

In Canada, Thomas Mulcair must face up to his own alarming reality, which is Canada isn’t broke. In fact, Canada is doing quite well due in part to our resource sector, which notably includes the oilsands. What I was shocked to learn from Mulcair is the oilsands gave us Dutch disease, which causes embarrassing symptoms like a flaccid manufacturing sector and excessive emitting from the petroleum sector.

Does Canada really have Dutch disease or is it Thomas Mulcair who has a disease? Could it be that he is allergic to prosperity?

I’m no doctor, but I am pretty good at arithmetic, and Mulcair’s story doesn’t add up. Canada’s oil and gas sector produced $54 billion in GDP in 2010, an impressive number to be sure. But manufacturing, mostly centred in central Canada, was almost three times bigger at $160 billion. Those manufacturers produce automobiles that run on petroleum, which in turn encourages more development of the oilsands.

Bigger yet is central Canada’s $257 billion financing, insurance, real estate and company management sector, which also finances the oilsands.

But we should ignore these facts because Thomas Mulcair has a disease he is determined to spread to us and you can only catch it if you ignore reality.

In this case, we are supposed to believe that, despite accounting for less than 5% of Canada’s total economic output, the oil and gas sector is somehow primarily responsible for the high dollar.

Then we are supposed to believe the high dollar is primarily responsible for the troubles in manufacturing. Then we are supposed to not notice the recent strength in the manufacturing sector.

We should also ignore the fact there wouldn’t be an oilsands if consumers, including millions of Canadians, didn’t demand more and more petroleum. For good measure, let’s ignore the new study that shows significant improvements in reducing carbon output per barrel in the oilsands.

But the real problem with Mulcair’s disease is it distracted us from noticing that a strong resource sector has helped protect Canada from economic shocks. Selling those commodities to the entire world ensures we aren’t too reliant on either just domestic consumption or manufacturing exports to the U.S.

The reality check for Tom Mulcair is the resource sector he derides gives Canada added protection and prosperity that is a comfort in these troubled times.