News of the day

Friday brings welcome relief from a hot and muggy week, both literally and figuratively.

• Here's good news and bad news: good for ordinary folks, bad for conservative lawn-order zealots: for the third consecutive year, the crime rate has dropped in Canada. Blame it on the Liberals?
  

• The CBC, for all its faults under the dubious captaincy of Richard Stursberg, still retains some investigative capacity. It managed to obtain emails that show both RCMP Commissioner William Elliott and BC Liberal premier Gordon Campbell as genuinely shoddy, hypocritical, unprofessional individuals.
  
  Elliott wept crocodile tears in public over the death of Robert Dziekanski, but sent private messages of support and encouragement to his killers. Campbell, despite his public apology to the bereaved mother, was actually "disappointed" that the RCMP was being criticized over the killing, and expressed support for Tasers. I wonder how she feels today.
  
  The feckless Commissioner indicated pearl-clutching concern about "tough or dirty" questions from the media such as "Why did the RCMP lie?" (in today's Globe and Mail coverage, print edition). I wouldn't call that one particularly tough or dirty: it's arguably a stupid question, because the answer is so immediately obvious, but it's instructive to watch the squirming and evasion that follow. (The Horsemen, by the way, don't like some of the media very much, including the Globe and Mail and the CBC.)
  
  Cover-up and information management, as many have suspected all along, have been the order of the day from the very beginning. As soon as the video of the killing became public, a containment strategy was orchestrated out of Ottawa. The fix is in, and it has been from day one. Watch Dziekanski's killers get off scot-free. Maintiens le Droit.
  
  What do the screech-warriors say about human rights commissions? It applies more aptly to the top brass of the RCMP: Fire. Them. All.
  
  
• Happy birthday, Nelson! Rob Anders' card probably just got lost in the mail.
  

Enough for now. I'm off to consider a contribution to the debate shaping up in the comments on my previous post, which are pretty good, the occasional troll-sniping aside.

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Muggy as hell today.