Grain crime no! Grass crime yes!

David Climenhaga. The name alone is enough to induce giggling among almost anyone who isn't, like Climenhaga, a complete and total hack.

There's a reason for this. And it is embodied in a recent blogpost Climenhaga published at Rabble.ca, entitled "Grass crime no! Grain crime yes!" Wherein Climenhaga attempts to play the role of Mighty Casey, going to bat for Justin Trudeau, only to strike out. There is no joy in mudville.

In typically hackish fashion, Climenhaga attempts to shill for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, amidst the single, solitary policy point his has offered during his time as Liberal leader: the legalization of marijuana. It shouldn't be said that there isn't a case to made for this, just as it shouldn't be said that there's a case to be made against this.

But Climenhaga attempts neither case, and instead attempts to transform it into an ill-fitting microcosm of the issue that is almost certainly Climenhaga's #1 beef with the Conservative government Prime Minister Stephen Harper leads: the decline of statism under the Harper government.

As it turns out, Climenhaga is still nurturing quite the grudge over the Harper government's decision to pardon a group of Alberta farmers who had the nerve -- the utter gall! -- to sell their own grain outside of the Canadian Wheat Board's now-abolished monopoly.

"Unmentioned in the coverage of this brouhaha, however, has been Harper's inconsistency when dealing with lawbreakers whose misdemeanours involve other vegetative materials. Indeed, his hypocritical rallying cry seems to be: 'Grass crime no! Grain crime yes!'

I speak, of course, of the PM's admiration, affection and support for the 14 farmers -- one of whom is now an Alberta legislator himself -- who in 2002 openly broke the laws governing how to export wheat and barley to the United States. A dozen of them were eventually found guilty of willfully breaking several laws and served time in jail.

If you are a lawbreaker who takes a couple of tokes at home and admits it, apparently you earn a curled lip and Harper's undying contempt.

But if you are a lawbreaker who rolls past the Canada Border Services Agency's agents in a truck loaded with grain to sell illegally in the United States, and do it with sufficient defiance to calculatedly get a jail term, you earn a photo opportunity with the same prime minister, his unstinting praise, and the co-operation of Parliament to overturn the law you ignored. What's more, you get a prime ministerial pardon!

If you then decide want to run for public office yourself, you can count on the support of the prime minister's party apparatus -- as was the case with Rick Strankman, who is now the Wildrose MLA for Drumheller-Stettler.

Alert readers will recall that Strankman spent a week in jail for taking part in just such a shenanigan back in 2002 when he and a group of a dozen other market-fundamentalist farmers drove their trucks across the Canada-U.S. border at Coutts, Alta., and illegally sold grain to a US. broker to protest against the collective bargaining role that was then the responsibility of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Canadian farmers will undoubtedly suffer as a result of the eventual demise of the Wheat Board in 2011 -- indeed, it is already happening -- and taxpayers in all parts of Canada, rural and urban alike, will be asked to bail them out. But the farmers who took part in the willful violation of the Customs Act were certainly entitled to fight for their economic beliefs, however misinformed."

This is all giggle-inducing for a number of reasons.

First off, "journalism teacher" David Climenhaga apparently doesn't consider himself above using a press release from the Canadian Wheat Board Alliance to make the case that grain farmers are suffering under the open market that grain farmers themselves spent decades demanding. If Climenhaga had done any amount of independent research -- instead of simply parroting his statist bosom buddies -- he would have learned that the reduced premiums for high-protein wheat are being driven by an increase in abundance of high-protein wheat, particularly outside of Canada where the CWB has absolutely never had any say in what those prices will be.

Awkward.

Not to mention that the grievous crime of defying the statism that Climenhaga so cherishes pales in comparison to the kind of crime -- property crime and violent crime -- that swirls around the drug trade. Marijuana is not exempt.

Which, all things considered, is enough to demonstrate that, as far as wedge issues go, David Climenhaga could have picked a better slogan than "grain crime no! Grass crime yes!"

There is no joy in mudville.

Hey Rabblers and Babblers: Lookie What I Found

Who doesn't love a good pile-on? I'm not sure I have the answer to that question. But I'll tell you who does love a good pile-on: Rabble.ca.

In the days since Tom Flanagan's outrageous comments on child pornography, many Rabble commentators have taken it upon themselves to gloat about it. Flanagan has since explained his comments -- an explanation that I find satisfactory only to degrees -- something that the pile-on artists at Rabble will certainly ignore.

You would almost think that on the subject of child pornography Rabble.ca was pure as the driven snow. If you actually believed this, you might have been stunned to stumble upon this on their "Babble" forum, as I did:

It's hard to say what's more stunning about this: the paranoid idea that legislating against child pornography is a means of indirectly targeting the LGBT community, or the tacit suggestion in these comments that it's a-OK for the LGBT community to depict children sexually, even if that were something especially prevalent within that community. Personally, I severely doubt that it is.

Certainly, it could be argued that Rabble isn't responsible for everything posted on its forums. Personally, I wouldn't accept that argument -- it's well-known that Rabble moderators can be downright stormtrooper-ish when expunging anyone who doesn't slavishly share their personal views.

So is Rabble soft on child pornography? Soft on producers? Based on the comments above, it may seem that it depends on who they think is producing it.

Message to Bashir Mohammed: You Are What I Feared Canada Was Becoming...

...but fortunately, we're setting things right again

On Saturday, July 14, 17-year-old Bashir Mohammed interrupted a speech given by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in Edmonton, doing his damnedest to make a grand ol' spectacle of himself.

He was removed from the event -- and really, what else could he have possibly expected when he started bellowing at Kenney while the Minister was giving a speech that people had paid to hear? Here, then, is my response to Bashir Mohammed.


Sanctimonious. Self-reighteous. A little pig-headed. That's what the left in Canada is quickly becoming, and once upon a time I was worried that the whole country was becoming that way. We're setting that right, so don't you worry too much about that.

Once upon a time, Canadians had been so badly bushwhacked by guilt-mongering, envy-enshrining left-wing politics that when a governing party caught red-handed stealing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to keep themselves in power so much as peeped about their opponents having a "scary right-wing agenda," they overlooked the opposition in favour of the safety of living under the crooked. Like I said, that's a thing of the past. In fact, it was what eventually -- finally -- led us to where we are today. And it's a time and place that isn't nearly as disastrous as people like you are falling all over yourselves to make it out to be.

Hell, you were willing to interrupt a Minister of the Crown, at an event at which hundreds of people had paid $40 apiece to hear him speak. Let me make that perfectly clear to you: they didn't pay $40 a head to hear you preen on about your own personal political ambitions, they heard to hear the Minister. Apparently, that wasn't good enough for you. I guess you wouldn't be such a good little leftist if you didn't thrill at the idea of stealing someone else's spotlight.

But really, what bothers me the most is the sheer lack of self-knowledge in the statement you planned to deliver to Jason Kenney -- and which you subsequently published at Rabble.ca (also known as Canada's single largest left-wing suckhole). It's more than enough to underscore that you're the kind of person who really just doesn't get it. Things like this:

"Your cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program are ridiculous. You are separating Canadians by saying that we should help 'our own' before we help 'them', referring to the people that you seem to generalize as 'smuggled, or bogus asylum claimants,'" you intended to say. "When you say that, I am insulted. My dad was an engineer in Somalia and his education was removed when he entered Canada. He worked up north, and at Home Depot while going to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to re-earn the title that he lost."

You say you're insulted by talk about "bogus asylum claimants." You talk about your father's experiences after arriving in Canada (and really, who would have imagined that an engineering degree from freaking Somalia wouldn't be up to the Canadian standard?). Quite frankly, we can see by the fact that you are still here in the country that your father is quite ostensibly not the kind of person whom Kenney was speaking about. Clearly your father spent the time necessary to demonstrate quite thoroughly that he is not a bogus refugee claimant. So quite frankly, your "insult" was entirely self-imposed.

From how you yourself describe him, your father -- peace be upon his soul -- was precisely the kind of immigrant that Canada needs: the kind who goes through the proper process of coming to Canada, who waits his turn. I do personally see the virtue in allowing those refugees who are in truly dire and desperate straights to come to Canada through irregular means, but there must be some limit to whom Canadians roll out the red carpet for.

If you were truly up-to-speed on this issue, you would know full well that immigrants approved to stay in Canada will still be covered under Canada's Interim Federal Health Program. The Harper government rewrote their own policy statements to make sure that the program wasn't completely shut down.

Naturally, that wasn't enough for those who think that Canada should fit the bill for the medical and dental care -- heck, perhaps even gender-reassignment surgeries -- for every one who manages to somehow skip across Canada's borders and set foot on Canadian soil.

In fact, the policy of the Harper government is one that a great many Canadians will agree with: that immigrants to Canada should be genuine, prepared to contribute to Canada, and at the very least be prepared to stay here.

If you have a problem with that, it's your problem, and you can keep it.

The Far-Left's Great Varmint Hunt Leads Right Back to Them

Ever since Hillary Clinton made a reference to Saul Alinsky -- on whom she had written a thesis during university -- many conservatives have taken to examining the conduct of the far-left through an Alinskyite lens.

Famously, one of Alinsky's missives for the left was to always accuse their opponents of what the left themselves are doing.

What else could be at the core of the far-left's great varmint hunt centering around the Ethical Oil institute?

It began when CBC's Evan Solomon countered questions being asked by Ethical Oil spokesperson Kathryn Marshall about where the anti-oilsands movement is getting its money from. More and more, it's getting its money from outside the country. Solomon's question was whether or not EEI has received any money from Enbridge.

Solomon seemed to overlook the detail that Enbridge is a Canadian company. And sensing that they have nothing on their hands that will resonate outside the far-left echo chamber, they've instead taken to hunting for evidence a vast right-wing conspiracy.

And in order to do that, they've dug further into Marshall's personal life. What they've come up with is a shocking revelation that Kathryn Marshall is married to Hamish Marshall, who is a member of the Conservative Party Federal Council.

The far-left is feigning the vapours over this, but it's not really all that shocking at all. Nor is it really what they portray it is.

The Conservative Party stands nearly alone as the sole supporter and defender of the Canadian jobs the oilsands provide. It's not at all shocking that someone married to a Conservative Party official would also support the oil sands, and work with an organization that shares that common goal.

But perhaps the reason why the far-left has become so focused on this is because they honestly believe that conservatives do the same things they do: create elaborate front groups for their partisan political machinations, and expect people to see them as politically independent.

Take, for example, their favourite "news outlet", Rabble.ca. The site is almost dementedly far-left, a place where nearly any marginal far-left agenda can vent its spleen for the whole world to read -- although in all likelihood, comparatively few do.

One of their contributors is none other than David Climenhaga, a man who once described the Sun News Network as "Conservative Pravda", which is amusing considering that he's a contributor to a "news outlet" that is pretty much... well, Pravda. Just Pravda. Yeah.

The punchline is that Rabble.ca was co-founded by a woman by the name of Kim Elliott. Who is Kim Elliott? Well, among other things, she's NDP MP Libby Davies' life partner.

Is this enough evidence to proclaim Rabble.ca a front group for the NDP? In the minds of the far-left, it is.

The remarkable thing about Rabble.ca is that it's done a remarkable job of pretending to be a media outlet. They've even placed their own correspondent on Parliament Hill. They describe his reporting as "just reporting, not just reporting".

In other words, their correspondent reports stories that reflect Rabble.ca's interpretation of justice, which so often turns out to be justice for them, no justice for anyone else.

By the way, Rabble.ca's Parliament Hill correspondent is Karl Nerenberg.

All of this begs a question of how precisely one identifies a political front group. Perhaps the mere relation of one member of a particular organization through marriage isn't enough to define a front group.

The better way to judge a front group is by how devoted they are to the partisan interests of the political party in question. And there is no doubt Rabble.ca is relentlessly devoted to the partisan interests of the NDP.

Which is why the federal press gallery should waste no time in expelling Karl Nerenberg from the press gallery as quickly as they can. After all, it's not like he's there to do any actual news reporting.