Tuesday digest II

- I thought that I took a backseat to no one when it came to posing unconvincingly as a cowboy, but Stephane Dion definitely takes the cake (pictured here at the Calgary Stampede, courtesy of Calgary Grit).

- Speaking of the Liberals, Bill Graham is giving Stephen Harper a hard time over his refusal to waffle on the Middle East conflict. Generally speaking, I expect the Liberal party to clam up when it comes to issues of right and wrong, especially when ethnic votes are at stake, but I'm still disappointed with Graham. However, that's infinitely preferable to the NDP, who clearly have a favourite in the conflict. Guess who they're rooting for? And another take on the cycle of violence, this time from Thomas Sowell.

- Today's loony left play of the day comes to us from the New York Times itself, which is cruelly about to throw hundreds of men and women out of work for the sake of - gasp! - profit!

Where's the compassion?

Where's the justice?

Oh, the humanity!

From The American Thinker:

A profitable company is to shutter a factory it built in 1992 as part of a much-hailed visionary strategy to take advantage of technology. But now it is just a cost to be cut. Eight hundred jobs, many of them well-paying blue collar positions (supposedly an endangered species) will disappear, while managerial and professional jobs are being protected.

Normally, this would be a juicy target for series of articles on the front and business pages of the New York Times. You know the drill: a parade of blue collar people victimized by the Bush administration, and now facing a bleak future. Meanwhile the insiders make out fine. There's even a fat cat CEO whose compensation package has done a whole lot better than its profits or stock. If Howell Raines still were editor, he'd get at least 40 stories out of it.

But today, the company in question is the New York Times Company. So don't expect the same rules to apply.

Nothing personal - it's just business.

And in typical limousine liberal do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do fashion, they can't even refer to the little people on the line as part of the team:

The Times is well known for its elitism and its unconscious condescension toward those occupying less lofty stations in life. Editor Bill Keller let slip a telling remark in remarks reported by the AP:

"...this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff."

The blue collar denizens of Jersey never quite made it being considered staff, after all. Not in the eyes of Bill Keller his colleagues in Manhattan. Not even close.

No wonder Joe Lunchbucket reads the right-wing Post.

- And on that note, you just gotta love a tax-cutting, Commie-hating, F-bomb dropping President, even if he's named Kennedy.