I’m about to rush out the door for a meeting, and then have a heap of work to get done this afternoon. Yes, I’ll write another post or two later today (I promise), but in the meantime, you should head on over to Blazing Cat Fur for all the latest jihadi dirt.

There’s also an interesting article that I missed last week in The Daily Beast (I refuse to regularly read anything that gives a platform to Paris Meghan McCain): The Ground Zero Mosque people are broke. Well, beyond broke when you consider they owe a few hundred thousand in back taxes, as I wrote yesterday.

I know it’s not Topless Wednesday or No Pants Friday, but because I’m in such a rush, I give you this to keep you occupied while I’m gone.

Sofia Vergara, hot chick from a show I've never seen, and you probably haven't either

Interesting…

Sharif El-Gamal, the leading organizer behind the mosque and community center near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show.

El-Gamal’s company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.

The delinquency is a possible violation of El-Gamal’s lease with Con Edison, which owns half of the proposed building site on Park Place. El-Gamal owns the other half but must pay taxes on the entire parcel.

This leaves the property open to tax liens and even seizure by the authorities in lieu of payment. Which opens up a whole new can of halal meat. Does Gamal want to turn the old Burlington Coat Factory into an Islamic center to avoid paying more tax on the property? Is the whole concept merely a tax shelter? Will the city/state/IRS seize the property - well within their rights to do so - and make this whole kerfuffle go away without fucking up the First Amendment in the process? Or will the idiot gas-me-last Jew mayor of NYC give El-Gamal and the Cordoba Initiative a complete pass in an effort to “build bridges”?

Unless El-Gamal and his band of merry Muslims come up with some big money fast, the whole project might disappear in a cloud of smoke. Wait, what does that make me think of…?

A worker was paid for 12 years without ever showing up for work at a Norfolk, Virginia, agency funded by federal, state and local money, officials say.

Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim told CNN on Friday that when a new director took over at Norfolk Community Services Board recently, she was “doing her due diligence” when she discovered the hooky-playing employee was on the books. The director, Maureen Womack, then notified the city attorney’s office, Fraim said.

Sandy Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Community Services Board, told CNN Friday that her agency couldn’t comment because of the ongoing investigation.

TWELVE YEARS!

Publicly funded hospitals are understaffed and over-stretched. Add to that the fact that people no longer care for their elderly parents the way it was done in previous generations, and you get this:

Many hospitals across the UK are not doing enough to spot elderly people at risk from malnutrition, says a charity.

A poll of 1,000 nurses for Age UK found just under a third did not feel confident that malnutrition would be noticed by staff.

Fewer than half said their hospital screened patients on arrival, as guidelines recommend.

The Department of Health said local hospitals set their own policies on “nutritional care”.

Welcome to hell. Hell is the First World with all its social safety nets, allowing its elderly to starve to death, the same way a Third World infant does.

He may be a buffoon, but I just don’t see another choice. You see, I had planned on voting in the Toronto mayoral election for Rocco Rossi - a liberal, with good conservative fiscal policy. His ideas were very good, and he was running a clean campaign.

But today, Rocco Rossi unequivocally proved that his decision-making skills are questionable and he shouldn’t be trusted with the gigantic budget of Canada’s largest city. He hired Warren Kinsella to work his campaign. (Hello Warren, you chronic self-googler.)

For those of you not in the know (because unlike Warren, you’re not constantly googling “Warren Kinsella”), Kinsella is a spent Liberal party hack that very few people want hanging around. While every job loss in the last several years - from the Canadian Jewish Congress (which he wasn’t paid for) to the Federal Liberal Party - have been “resignations”, it’s pretty clear that he is the kiss of death to everything he puts his name to.

On top of his endless “resignations”, Kinsella is also the bored internet troll - we all know the type - who gets a hate-on for negative press and stalks the hell out of anyone who says anything negative about him. He actually pays his so-called “propeller heads” to sniff out his critics so he can serve them with legal papers*. Anyone with skin that thin should have their internet disconnected, because they obviously can’t handle it.

And this is the person Rocco Rossi - the closest thing to a sane candidate Toronto had on the ballot - wants working his backroom. Jesus.

Toronto mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi got a much-needed boost Monday as veteran Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella confirmed he is joining Mr. Rossi’s team.

“I’ve told Rocco Rossi I want to volunteer on his Toronto mayoralty campaign,” Mr. Kinsella said in an email.

“He’s super smart, he treats all people with respect — and he’s fiscally conservative and socially progressive. He’s a good man. Rob Ford is no good on the social issues; George Smitherman is not top-of-mind when it comes to fiscal discipline.”

On the plus side, Rossi isn’t paying him. Hence my liking of his fiscal policy.

* Screen cap of Warren offering a bounty for the deets on a blogger he didn’t like. Naturally, the original post is gone from his archives. Imagine that.

Drunk shouts ‘terrorists,’ urinates on mosque rugs

Happy Friday, Mohammad.

Apparently it was “right wing rabble rousing” that led a far-left filmmaker to stab a Msulim cabbie. Hm. I didn’t know we had that kind of across-the-aisle reach. Although leave it to a lefty to fuck things up.

“I have been working on behalf of other Muslims for more than 30 years and I have never see it like this, not even after the 9/11 attacks,” says Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington. [Never believe anything Hooper says - even if he tells you today is Friday]

Mr. Hooper blames the harshness of language toward Muslims not just on the heated protests over the Islamic center planned for a site 2-1/2 blocks from ground zero, but also on right-wing rabble rousing, continuing resentment over the election of Barack Obama, and the difficult economy.

“We’ve had a perfect storm for Islamophobia,” Hooper says.

Look, these whining turds have been hoping for an “anti-Muslim backlash” for nine years, so they could hang out on their crosses and chat with the Romans about how tough life is. Now they’ve got it, and they won’t waste a moment of it, finding Islamophobes behind every rock and tree - the same places they are supposed to look for Jews and kill them.

And get this: There are TEN “hate crimes” against Muslims in New York every year. Ten. Wow - we have a real problem on our hands. It’s Mohammad Crow Laws down there, so it is.

The “Holy Month”, when violence - especially toward other Muslims - is frowned upon. Unless those ingrates don’t follow the rules. Then beat the snot out of them.

He was eating breakfast on the terrace of a restaurant in the center of Lyon on the weekend of August 15th, when three youth jumped him because he didn’t observe the fast of Ramadan. The father of the Senegalese family from Vénissieux was hit on the head with a glass bottle, and then beaten with a chair. Rushed to the hospital with a fracture to the back of his head, the victim was operated on. The attack was caught on CCTV, but the images are of poor quality and it is impossible to identify the attackers. The Lyon prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation. According to our sources, the manager of the kebab (restaurant), fearing reprisals, wants to testify anonymously.

They’re all like barbaric children, unable to play with each other or anyone else without starting a fight.

I don’t go to the movies very often. It’s far too expensive and provides very little value for money. But I have in my hands a 2-for-1 coupon for the cinema, and I have no clue what I’d like to see.

Leave a comment with a suggestion, and tell me why it’s good.

Thanks!

I get kinda babbly and meandering in today’s podcast, recorded on the fly. The mosque, junkies, immigrants… the usual!

And remember kiddies, if you’re not clickin’, I can’t afford chicken!

On my way to my post-apocalyptic-marriage group therapy this evening, I popped into a  greasy spoon for a bite to eat. While noshing my dinner, I watched the TV set to CP24, Toronto’s all news channel. At five o’clock they introduced the top stories of the day.

Wanna know what #1 was, despite the 2 shootings that took place in Toronto and the terror arrest in Ottawa? Guess. You’ll never guess.

The number one news story for Toronto - Canada’s largest city - was that a traffic officer illegally parked in a disabled parking bay (in a Tim’s parking lot, naturally), and someone got cell phone snaps of it. The first SEVEN minutes of the newscast were dedicated to this deeply pressing issue, with interviews from the appropriate special interest groups, and the woman who snapped the pics.

Toronto has absolutely no sense of priorities. We are doomed.

This time nine years ago I was in New York City with my then-fiancé (now evil ex-husband). My relationship status isn’t all that’s changed since the whirlwind weekend we spent in the Big Apple.

I showed my man the sights - sights I’d seen many times before and took for granted. We did a little shopping and a lot of walking. We drank mimosas with brunch. Life was beautiful and carefree - we were in love and all was right with the world.

From the window of a taxi, he took a picture of the looming towers on the horizon. “Too bad we don’t have time to go up there,” he said. “Next time,” I replied, not knowing what the future held.

A couple of weeks later came the phone call, hysterical and sobbing, from my best friend who lived down the street from me. “I hope that when you were in New York you saw the World Trade Center, because it just fucking blew up!”

The world changed.

Last summer I returned to New York for the first time since the attacks. I stared out at the vast hole in the ground where the great towers once stood. I watched the helmeted construction workers, like ants, hauling gear from one end of the giant crater to the other, on their toy-like bulldozers. The space was so large, everything within it looked tiny and child-sized, as if viewed from … well, from a 120 stories above.

And in it’s place… Ebonics.

Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.

The Drug Enforcement Administration recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.

Ebonics, which is also known as African American Vernacular English, has been described by the psychologist who coined the term as the combination of English vocabulary with African language structure.

Some DEA agents already help translate Ebonics, Sanders said. But he said wasn’t sure if the agency has ever hired outside Ebonics experts as contractors.

As gross as all this seems, at the same time I think it’s kinda cool that street skills are transferable to real life jobs. Yo.

We’re supposed to pretend that the civilized Western world isn’t better than everybody else.

That’s bullshit.

The UK has decided that Avastin, the drug used to treat and prolong the life of cancer sufferers, can’t be used. Despite the fact that almost every other civilized country in the world offers this drug to cancer patients, the UK has seen fit to ban it.

However, the Government rationing body NICE ruled yesterday that it must stay banned because it is too expensive.

Palin might be nutty as Grandma’s Christmas fruitcake, but it doesn’t mean she’s wrong.

Those poor, woebegone and godforsaken Palestinians.

Colognes by Hugo Boss, Dunhill and Givenchy line the shelves of the cosmetics shop. One of the two women’s clothing stores features a window mannequin in a hot pink T-shirt and low-slung jeans. In the supermarket freezer is Nestlé ice cream and on its shelves are salty and cheesy chips and doodles that well-off societies consume by the bagful.

Quick, let’s send them aid money!

I got an interesting tweet from one of my regulars the other day. He asked, since I was so vociferously against the mosque at Ground Zero, how I felt about having British consulates and embassies on American soil, given the slaughter during the War of Independence.

I’m not sure, as a Canadian who has the Queen on her money, if I can appropriately answer that, but here goes.

No, I don’t see a problem. The U.S. fought for her independence, and she won. Once she was established as a sovereign country, she set up trade with the British, thereby giving them call for having consular offices on site.

Unlike Islam, the United Kingdom is an actual recognized country and political body. Islam is a political movement in the guise of a religion, and therefore need not adhere to standardized rules of trade or of war. There can be no gentleman’s agreements with Islam, for there are no gentlemen within it.

In addition, I do not believe that the British ever asked to set up a consulate, embassy or museum of excellence on the site of a battlefield.

It’s apples and oranges, my friend.

Female doctors are trying to figure out why they don’t advance as far as male doctors or make as much money.

Fewer than 30% of consultant posts in the health service are held by women, even though two-thirds of doctors entering the profession are female. Female doctors also earn, in general, 18% less than male doctors.

Now the British Medical Association – which represents more than 140,000 doctors and medical students — is launching a new initiative called Women in Medicine to try to boost the number of women in senior medical posts.

Great. How much is this little ploy going to cost at a time when there’s  a shortage of all doctors, not just women?

How often does this subject have to come up? Seriously, every couple of months I read an article about women moaning in the workplace, and saying the working hours have to be more flexible to suit child rearing. Sorry sister, but it just doesn’t work that way in most cases.

There will of course be exceptions, but for the most part, women will put in fewer career hours in their lifetime. And if these frequent articles are anything to go on, they will be deliberately obtuse about the amount of hours they’re willing to commit to the job, yet still demand equal promotion.

I worked in the law office of a major corporation. Female lawyers would give up firm practice to come to the corporation so they could get pregnant. Seriously. In a firm, if a lawyer misses six months or a year of work, they’ll never make that time back up in billings and never be promoted. They’d have to work incessantly for years to even be considered for a partnership. But in a corporate environment, where a lawyer isn’t expected to make rain and all the clients are a sure thing, taking a year off does not destroy one’s career prospects. Women would apply for open positions withing our law department, and within 18 months they would be pregnant.

If basic physiology can’t be changed to allow men to have babies, maybe those of us with indoor plumbing should finally accept that the “you can have it all!” meme is a lie.

I switched doctors here in Toronto about four years ago, because the one I was seeing only worked part-time and wasn’t available to meet my needs. She chose to work part time because she was a mother to young kids. I chose to move on because she couldn’t meet my needs. Her children don’t have the option of finding another mother to meet their needs, so I would say the choice for everyone was clear.

I have to admit, my gentleman friend and I have the strangest late-night conversations. Last night it was about Dr. Laura’s nigger tirade (notice I didn’t say “n-word” - this is because words are bullshit and can’t hurt anyone who doesn’t want to be hurt by them).

My kindly gentleman asked how I would feel about Jews using a diminutive to address each other, and the difference between them and say, Germans, using that term.

I asked him if, despite the hundred years or more of Jewish comedy we’ve been exposed to, if he’d ever heard one kike refer to another kike as a kike? Of course not. Jews don’t address each other in the diminutive, because it’s insulting. There’s no heeb or sheeny or kike in their confabs. And until Jeff Foxworthy, no average American addressed themselves in a diminutive, either. Latinos don’t call each other spic. Italians don’t call each other dago (though I have heard the term guinea bandied about occasionally).

Blacks call each other nigger as a term of endearment - how endearing can it really be? No other race or faith or creed that I know of does this. Muslims don’t call themselves dune-coons or towelheads or terrorists. Though the Irish do call themselves mics - I’ll grant that, though I’ve generally only heard it used in a derogatory way, between classes of Irish “Bernadette, you stay away from that dirty little mic or it’s back to the convent with you!”.

Dr. Laura, though a little over enthusiastic in making her point, was asking why blacks can be so offended by a word that they so lovingly embrace.

Nigger. Discuss.

Rima Fakih, Miss USA, a Muslim

The reigning Miss USA has come out against the Ground Zero mosque, saying “it shouldn’t be so close” to Ground Zero.

The 24-year-old Rima Fakih, is the first Muslim winner of the Miss USA contest and is preparing for the Miss Universe Pageant, scheduled for Monday in Las Vegas.

“I totally agree with President Obama with the statement on Constitutional rights of freedom of religion,” Fakih told “Inside Edition” in an interview that will air tonight.

“I also agree that it shouldn’t be so close to the World Trade Center. We should be more concerned with the tragedy than religion.”

Though she’s been living in Dearbornistan, she spent a few years with her family in New York. And compared to the “professional Muslims” and cynical politicians we’ve been hearing from, she’s the closest thing to an average American we can hope for.

And hot. Did I mention hot?