Wow:

OTTAWA—If Justin Trudeau is elected Liberal leader this month, he still has to convince about half of Canadians that he’s qualified to be prime minister, a new poll shows.
With Conservatives reportedly set to attack Trudeau’s fitness for office and his claims to speak for the middle class, Forum Research asked more than 1,300 Canadians about how they viewed the qualifications of the 41-year-old former teacher and son of the former prime minister.
While 48 per cent said Trudeau was qualified to be prime minister, 37 per cent said he wasn’t and another 16 per cent said they didn’t know.

I wonder if we could go back in time to 2005 and ask those same people whether they thought Stephen Harper was qualified for the job… what do you think? Yeah, me neither.

HAHAHA!

Absolutely shocking news this morning: Pope Benedict announced he would be stepping down at the end of the month. Word is that the new pope will be elected in time for Easter, which falls on March 31 this year.

Could the next pope be Canadian? Not impossible – the leading contender would be Cardinal Marc Ouellet, of Quebec.

From the WSJ:

On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.

Thanks to the congressional testimony of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey late last week, we know they met with President Obama on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. in a pre-scheduled meeting, when they informed the president about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The meeting lasted about a half-hour. Mr. Panetta said they spent roughly 20 minutes of the session briefing the president on the chaos at the American Embassy in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi, which eventually cost the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean Smith.

Secretary Panetta said the president left operational details, including determination of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, “up to us.” We also learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr. Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at all with anyone in the White House that evening—or, for that matter, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That’s not all we discovered. We now know that despite Gen. Dempsey having been informed of Ambassador Stevens’s repeated warnings about the rise of terrorist elements in Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to possible trouble. It also seems that during the actual attacks in Benghazi, which the administration followed in real time and which lasted for some eight hours, not a single major military asset was deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.

And we learned one other thing: Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a terrorist attack. This didn’t prevent President Obama, Secretary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the nation afterward.

Why the deception? Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president’s claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn’t convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn’t even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night? And that he has resolved, and instructed his senior staff, to take care that he not be derelict in his duty as commander in chief ever again?

John Bolton deconstructs the Benghazi debacle.

Senator Lindsey Graham asked the day’s most telling question: Who was in charge as the attack progressed? Incredibly, Panetta first responded, “What do you mean, ‘in charge’?” Then, perhaps even more incredibly, he said, “It’s not that simple,” pointing to Ambassador Stevens, “the people on the ground,” as being in charge. Pressed further, Panetta said, “We all were [in charge].” Notwithstanding Panetta’s confusion, the answer is obvious: The President was in charge. Or should have been.

It is precisely this failure of leadership by the Obama Administration, before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, that should concern us. Benghazi was an unnecessary tragedy, compounded by White House incompetence and disinterest, but there are far broader risks and threats that are even more gravely concerning. The failures surrounding our second September 11 were only amplified in the following months as al Qaeda assumed control over an area in Mali larger than Texas, and terrorists attacked a large natural-gas facility in Algeria, killing over forty foreign hostages.

Adding Mokhtar Belmokhtar to the target list would constitute a big expansion in the drone war on terrorists. There is no question this terrorist needs to be brought to justice. But is the drone program the way to go?

For what it’s worth, my gut feeling (and yes, it is just that, a gut feeling) is that President Obama will set his drones after Belmokhtar and not think twice about the consequences of expanding the drone war this far into Northern Africa. That will make his Nobel peace prize fans blanch… and cause real headaches for his successor.

PQ minister Bernard Drainville thinks the Feds’ reform of EI is a conspiracy against Québec. (in French)

The idea, see, is for the Feds to make it so difficult to stay gainfully unemployed in remote Quebec to force those people to take jobs in Alberta’s oil patch.

That darn Stephen Harper. He’s all about the oil, he’s from Alberta, he likes oil, he obviously hates Quebec, well – if you mix all these things together, add a dash of paranoid delusion and stir until you are quite literally blue in the face, of
course you get this. IT IS ALL A PLOT TO KILL THE FRENCH CULTURE!!! WE MUST SECEDE NOW!!!

There is a small part of me deep down somewhere that feels sorry for Drainville and those who think (and I use the term loosely) like him.

In which the president is expected to promise more of the same.

President Obama will map out the contours of his second-term agenda when he speaks to the nation in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

In a speech meant to build on his second inaugural address — which was directed at the Democratic base and served as a bookend of sorts to his reelection campaign— Obama will put details on the far-reaching government agenda he hopes will become part of his legacy.

The economy will remain Topic A, and Obama’s speech is expected to warn of the danger automatic spending cuts known as the sequester pose to a slowly improving economy. At the same time, Obama will give due weight to other priorities such as immigration and gun control.

When it comes to terrorism, Barack Obama is more George W. Bush than, well, Barack Obama.

And isn’t it typical that he’d be arrested in Quebec?

COLD LAKE, Alta. – An Alberta man attempting to run across Canada to raise money for an Edmonton children’s hospital was arrested in Quebec for being on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Cops arrested Curtis Hargrove, of Cold Lake, Alta., on July 2 near the village of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, about 100 km from Quebec City. Hargrove was arrested for wilfully obstructing the work of a police officer on the highway, said Gregory Gomez, spokesman for Quebec’s provincial police force. But Hargrove said he chose to be arrested for running on the Trans-Canada to “prove a point” because he is “stubborn.”

Despite this, he did not fault the officers involved, saying that they were just “doing their jobs.”

Upon arrest, police took Hargrove and Morgan Seaward, who has been following him in a recreational vehicle, to Quebec City. Hargrove said that while he at the station, he signed a statement saying he would not run on the Trans-Canada Highway. Instead, Hargrove said he plans to run on nearby Route 132, a long road that follows the Trans-Canada and will be able to take him into Ontario to continue his coast-to-coast trip. He has also agreed to a court date on Sept. 21, but said that he will aim to push that court date back to give him time to finish his run.

Gomez said it will be up to a provincial prosecutor to determine whether Hargrove will face charges, and that it would be too early to say what kind of sentence such a charge would entail. Last May, Hargrove began running across Canada to raise funds for the Stollery Children’s Hospital. Beginning in Newfoundland, he has since crossed three provinces in an attempt to raise funds, often running on provincial highways to do so.

I used to live in a small town right off the 132 east of Quebec City. I used to jog in that area. And let me tell you this: I would choose to run on the Trans-Canada highway over the 132 if I could. At least you can see the cars coming at you…