Rose's Cantina

#463047935 / gettyimages.com Watching W5 on Saturday, and its fawning hour-long profile of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, I was brought back to a time in the 1980s when Tom Hayden was running for state legislature in California. Hayden was a famous 60s radical, then married to Jane Fonda, who was trying to rehabilitate his image, to make himself seem more palatable to voters. Getting him elected wouldn't be easy -- Tom was a bad guy in his youth -- so a gaggle of Democratic political consultants were enlisted to undertake a renovation of sorts, putting putty in the cracks of the foundation, giving him a new high gloss coat of paint. The media campaign included television ads, and a glossy brochure entitled Tom Hayden, Growing Up in America. The brochure featured sad images of racism, segregation, shootings of presidents and preachers. It was meant to explain how Tom Hayden and his politics had been shaped by events in America. Not his fault...

The Parliamentary precinct is beginning to smell like a steaming pile of horse manure. There's no escaping it. Everybody -- the media, the cops, the politicians -- has a fork in it and they're all trying to find the Prime Minister. He says he didn't make the mess. His pals did. But that doesn't cut it with Canadians. Harper may not have created the shit, but it's on his shoes and anyone who's ever stepped in shit knows what that feels like. You try to wipe it off and it sticks to your hands and you can never, ever, get rid of the smell. It's sickening what's happening in Ottawa. And it's stopped being funny. Well, in truth, it's still a little bit funny. It's great to see Oz, the Great and Powerful, squirming in his seat, answering the Opposition questions in that same robotic tone until he can't take it anymore then hands it off to the Chief Parliamentary Clown Paul Calandra who would have made an excellent warm-up comic on the P...

Well, here is something you don't see every day. The Toronto Sun has officially endorsed Justin Trudeau for.....prime minister! Shut my mouse. Sounds like a Bowie song. (Musical interlude to follow). After a long and raucous editorial board meeting, one that led to the unprecedented dismissal of several senior editors, Sun Media has decided to endorse Justin Trudeau as the next prime minister of Canada. Put aside everything we have said before. Reality speaks volumes, and Sun Media, more than any other news organization in this great country, is not afraid to face reality when it starts to stare us down. In reviewing Justin Trudeau's run for the Liberal leadership, we have come to realize that he cannot be simply dismissed as a Shiny Pony and, although somewhat vacuous in both policy and substance, scientists tell us that all a vacuum needs to break out of its nothingness is a bit of air. Let's give Trudeau that air, for the time has come to forgive...