The difference between George Bush and Stephen Harper?

[ClusterFreak]

Harper pronounces it nu-cle-ar.

And ain't it amusing to watch the jilted lover, CTV news, as it huffs and puffs about the media blackout at CFB Trenton and the half-mast flag issue.

[glarius]

1. Yes...I watched CTV's R. Fife and Roger Smith showing displeasure at

Harper's banning of the media from covering the returning soldiers' bodies at Trenton. Especially Robert Fife, who has been soft on Harper. Piggy Mike Duffy, of course is his usual apologist for Harper, but it seems the journalists might be about to rebel. We can only pray so!
Edit: Duffy at this moment has 2 right wing radio talk show hosts on...both saying their callers agree with what Harper is doing. Of course as anyone who has ever called a talk show knows, for the most part, only those people who will voice support for the host's opinions gets on the air.

[Spazito]

2. Geez, Duffy is so nauseating in his sycophantic cooing whenever

he talks about Harper. They should just get a room and get it over with, lol.

[MrPrax]

3. half-mast flag?

It's a mast if it's on a ship;it's a staff if it's on land.

[ClusterFreak]

4. Half-staff flag. n/t

[IntravenousDemilo]

8. No, "half-staff" is chiefly US, but it's starting to creep up here a bit.

In Canada, as in the UK, Australia, New Zealand (and elsewhere in the Commonwealth), it's officially and almost exclusively "half-mast". We don't make any nautical / non-nautical distinction between the two. Or at any rate, Parliament, the Canadian Press, and the CBC don't.

I don't think I even heard the term "half-staff" with any frequency until just a few years ago. When I do now, I try not to wince.

[iverglas]

10. ta

Glad to see the good fight being fought in my absence.

I didn't actually know that one (although I'd actually never heard "half-staff"), but I'll put it on my list, along with ninth grade, college, cub scouts, ant-eye and sem-eye this and that ... and, of course, mawm.

;)

[MrPrax]

11. Cub Scouts!!

You were in that imperialist old Empire patriarchical brainwashing factory???
Did you KNOW that Baden Powell based his movement on the Junker nationalist wandervogel movement which was the ideological precursor to the Hitler Youth!!!

I was a sixer ;-)

(gods truth--I mentioned being in the cubs once at a lefty-type 'get together' in passing and some guy actually starts this rap at me...I am just glad I didn't mention I had to go to Sunday school at one point...I probably would be dead ;-)

[iverglas]

12. uh, no

You may have missed the point ... but "cub scouts" is the USAmerican equivalent of what we have up here in Canada: wolf cubs.

And actually (and I really thought we'd figured this out), I was in Girl Guides. For a relatively short time. It wasn't the fun it was made out to be in all those girls' books of Empire that I gobbled up. (Although I got a line from one that I still use frequently, given my distaste for both housework and loud noise: that thing you use to suck up the cat hair from the rugs is called "Nature's Abhorrence".)

And I got tired of holding up three fingers and saying "I promise to do my best to do my duty to mph, the mph and my country". I was an anti-monarchist in my very tender youth, and by that point enough of a doubter that I preferred not to make promises about my duty to a being of questionable existence.

However, about a year later, I was still teaching Sunday School and getting confirmed in the good old United Church of Canada, before wandering off to the Unitarians' Liberal - eek! - Religious Youth, the home of all the cool kids from North London Ont., of which I was not one, although I'd pretty much walked out the metaphysical door altogether by grade 12. So I gots no fingers to be pointing in your direction.

I'll bet we could still sing a rousing duet of What A Friend We Have In Jesus, eh? And then you can stand up with me while they play Mph Save the Mph.

[MrPrax]

14. Correction noted...

Right wolf cubs...I never did graduate to 'scouts'...

Oh...right...you couldn't be in the wolf cubs...

Apologizes again...because the 'guides' and 'brownies' usually had their weekly meetings on the same night at an old Anglican church. We usually delighted in snapping their training bra straps and tossing their hats out the door.

LOL

[imouttahere]

5. Signs of simian resemblance are forming with Harper.....

could he be more of a lapdog????? I'm thinking yes...

[ClusterFreak]

6. Without a doubt.

Dude's tone-deaf mimickry of all things Chimpenfuhrer makes Mulroney's Reagan/Bush 1 ass-kissing seem almost charming.

[imouttahere]

7. Excellent wordsmithing, chimpys!

[ClusterFreak]

15. Thanks, I post drunk most of the time!!!

:toast:

...just kiddin'!

[Bassic]

9. If he keeps on going the way he has

He'll have a full scale media war on his hands before long. The piece of shit is trying to turn us into the Bush Adminsitration Light regarding the media, I just hope they pack more of a fight than the U.S. media.

[Hand]

13. Blair and Harper: The Poodle and the Ape. nt