No need to panic, folks...

...I'm sure the Car-Salesman-in-Chief has everything under control...

A Chinese ratings house has accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt, state media said Friday, a day after Beijing urged Washington to put its fiscal house in order.

"In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting," Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings.

You remember the good ol' days...

...back in your callow twenties... your buds were always deviously droppin' you smack in the middle of those huge Coke burns?

Yeah... me neither.

"Caught up with 'friends' he should have never been chumming with, Jonathan was duped by two men known only as Wolf and Bounty into acting as a middleman in a drug deal."

Just another victim, huh?

No such thing as a bad boy in fuzzy-bunny Toronto.

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RELATED: Bright lights, big city...

The hunt is on for a gunman who shot two men, one an innocent bystander, in Little Italy early Sunday.

The many bars in the trendy Bathurst-College Sts. neighbourhood had just emptied for the night when Toronto Police say the gunfire erupted.

Barry... time for a domestic military surge?

Remember back... you were a kid... the local leisure spots resembled downtown Beirut? --
Yeah, me neither.

P.S. -- It ain't just the Big Apple.

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THANK YOU, ONCE AGAIN, COMMENT MODERATION:

My biggest fan, nonny... under yet another alias, has decided to ramp up the pseudo-adulation under another two personalities. I'll give you a whiff of the latest lunacy...

"No need to bring the military for a northern-Mexico style bloodbath."

Yeah... you caught me mid-pogrom, you genius. But please... feel free to share all your (cough, cough) theories about those "genocidal Mexicans."

But, c'mon... it's not really the Mexican military that's been getting all that ink this past week... is it?

Nonny also thoughtfully provides some documentation in the form of links to Wikipedia... which really... is simply too lame for words. Yet another shining example of the behavior of the compassionate, intellectual left.

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LAST WORD: Let's look a little closer

The lunatic left always likes to trot out the "crime is down" trope. Of course, that overlooks the now infamous observation about "lies, damn lies and statistics".

It's true crime rates - crimes per 100,000 people reported to police, thus accounting for population growth - started falling slowly in the early 1990s.

However, crime rates have never returned to the far lower levels of the early 1960s. Today's crime rate is 131% higher than in 1962, the first year of comparable record-keeping.

Violent crime is up 316%.

I heard this was actually...

...the Globe's second choice... after Paul Bernardo told them to go piss up a rope...

Hey, America...

...you feeling safer yet? -- Hmmm, wait a minute... let's ask a Homeland Security Secretary...

"For example, we often times, for travelers entering the United States, we won't not do what is called a secondary inspection just because they are a 35-year- old male who appears to be Muslim, whatever that means."

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UPDATE: TSA apologises...

"In a statement to FoxNews.com, the TSA said it’s reviewing the incident but early findings indicate this was an 'isolated case of bad judgment.' The TSA reached out to the Mandy family to apologize and said the man’s toy hammer should have never been confiscated."

You ever notice... there's never a...

..."Queer Against Israeli Apartheid" around... when you really, really need one...

Nothing has been heard of her since she was seen being bundled into a car by three armed men in an area of central Damascus on Monday evening.

With that, Arraf, 35, a Syrian American who was born in Staunton, Va., joined the more than 10,000 people who have been plucked from their homes or from the streets of cities since the Syrian uprising began 11 weeks ago.

I blame the Hudson's Bay Company

"Meanwhile another internal government review sparked by the mishandling of the Sherry Charlie case discovered that the deaths of more than 700 children were not properly reviewed."

(link fixed)

The OPRAHFICATION continues

"I'm sure these guys will cure AIDS... the same way they saved all those lives in Rwanda."

That evil, war-mongering George W...

...wait a minute...

"The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign."

MSM nails it, yet again

Yep... as Canadian as maple syrup...

“According to what we’re getting from Mogadishu, and what we know, the guy is a Somali-Canadian.”

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UPDATE: In other "dastardly Canuck" news
Those damn Chicagoan-Canadians.

How the really cool kids roll...

...reader Jeff writes...

"I left a comment on the Ottawa Sun the other day. Warren had a new avatar. Wearing sunglasses and trying to look cool. About an hour later, the avatar was back to that silly grinning schoolboy one."

"After a quick poke around I found a page that hadn't been changed yet and got a screen capture."

Whaddaya wanna bet "Special K" wears his bluetooth thingie twenty hours a day?

Never a Community Organiser around...

...when you really, really need one...

-- CHICAGO -- The attacks occurred around 8:30 p.m. Saturday. Moments after a group of teens wrestled with Singer over his iPad and BlackBerry, members of the same mob attacked a 42-year-old doctor visiting from Japan. That doctor was beaten and robbed of his iPod Touch while walking in the 700 block of North Lake Shore Drive, authorities said.

Both physicians were in town for the annual convention of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which entered into a 10-year deal with McCormick Place in 2010. The five-day event typically brings in more than 30,000 doctors, vendors and other specialists from around the world.

But, but, but... "the childrens is r futcher"...

On Monday, two 16-year-old boys were ordered held in custody on juvenile charges of attempted armed robbery and aggravated battery.

Three other teens were charged with robbery as adults: Dvonte Sykes, 17, of the 7500 block of South Normal Avenue; Trovolus Pickett, 17, of the 8400 block of South Dorchester Avenue; and Derod'te Wright, 18, of the 3500 block of South State Street. They remained in custody Monday night in lieu of bonds ranging from $200,000 to $300,000.

Let's face it, despite all Barry's hard work... Chicago is a war zone.

Get out while you still can. He did.

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RELATED: In other "Windy City" news

-- CHICAGO - The wife of accused terrorist Dr. Tahawwur Rana says if he beats the rap here, the couple plans to come home to Toronto.

"We are Canadians," Samraz Rama said outside the courthouse Wednesday morning. "We are proud Canadians."

Obamathematics

"Through this sleight-of-hand accounting, the White House can conveniently ignore Bush’s loan, but even the Treasury Department admits that U.S. taxpayers will not recoup about $1.3 billion of the entire $12.5 billion investment when all is said and done."

A beautiful day... a Harper majority...

...the PQ is imploding... who could ask for anything more?

“In my view there is no bad timing to talk about sovereignty, there are only bad messengers.”

Mr. Aussant went further than three of his prominent colleagues – Louise Beaudoin, Pierre Curzi and Lisette Lapointe – who resigned Monday for similar reasons.

And NATO troops reacted to the news...

..."Oh, please, please, please...make it happen."

-- KABUL -- “If more civilian deaths happen, maybe Karzai will actually do something, such as stopping Afghan forces from participating in joint operations,” said Waheed Mujhda, political analyst at the Afghan Analytical and Advisory Centre in Kabul.

You've just gotta...

...be shittin' me...

"In it, a blond, blue-eyed Aryan-looking superhero comes to the rescue of an innocent baby who’s about to be attacked by a scissors-wielding villain named Monster Mohel."

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RELATED: It's time to fight back

Six of one... a half million...

...of the other...

"Nationwide, about 440,000 birds are said to be accidentally killed at wind farms each year, as well as thousands more bats. With the government pushing for more wind energy farms, that statistic is likely to rise."

Yeah... E.Coli on bean sprouts...

...that's what you should be worrying about...

"If its centrifuges continue to work at the current capacity, it will take around two months for the Iranian regime to produce the 20 kg of uranium enriched to 90% required for the production of a nuclear warhead."

Make it so

I don't understand any of this... but there's a kind of nerdish "contact high", just reading about it...

The same team succeeded last year in trapping dozens of anti-matter atoms and holding them in place for a fraction of a second, a world first at the time.

But that was not long enough for the excitable particles to settle into the stable "ground" state needed for precise measurements.

The new benchmark extended this storage time 5,000 fold, making it possible to carry out crucial experiments.

Scientists will now look for "violations" or discrepancies in something called the charge-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry.

Measurements of trapped antihydrogen are due to get underway shortly, and could yield results before the end of the year.

Cars do not crush people...

...pencils don't write poetry...I just don't get it... the implication here is that society... Canadian society... is somehow responsible for these deaths... instead of, you know... the sociopaths who slammed home the knife or fired the fatal shots.

"Through the prism of murder rates per 100,000 people, the disparity is even more striking: A person living in Toronto public housing during those three years was four to five times more likely to be a homicide victim than someone living anywhere else in the Greater Toronto Area."

It seems that J-School 101 also dictates that we learn endearing personal tidbits about the deceased. Reporters relentlessly pursue grief-stricken relatives for that tearful soundbite. And in the end, it's never enough that a life was lost... there also has to be lots of smarmy Oprah-esque subtext, dumping... not on the perpetrators... but on the rest of us.

Apparently, it's necessary to turn murder into "lessons learned"... providing, of course, you never actually point out that these "publicly subsidised" communities are self-perpetuating breeding grounds for violence & misery.

Maybe all the Lois Lane wannabes should save the politically-correct social commentary and bear down on the increasing prevalence of predatory "community-based" gangs who are tearing a swath of terror through the hood. Most of the crime reporting I read nowadays doesn't even give you a description of the perpetrators. It's more gossip than anything remotely resembling news.

You wanna provide your readers with some socially significant commentary, how about you tell us the percentage of shooters that originate in these "special" communities.

Maybe if people could see the outrageous percentage of killers that come from the hood... they'd be less likely to support two billion dollar lunatic left initiatives that target farmers, duck hunters & target shooters.

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RELATED: Don't get me started