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She has no respect for hard working Albertans, and the fat bitch gets none in return. Where the hell is Rachel ?

She needs to calm down before she has a stroke.


Jason Nixon

Today, as I was asking important questions about NDP priorities and our ballooning unemployment the NDP Deputy Premier said that the Albertans who Wildrose MLAs spend time with were sewer rats. That's right, not just embarrassing cousins but now you can add sewer rats to the list of things that this government has called hard working Albertans.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... rSTfd&_rdr

   

If she could ever squeeze through a manhole she might find out what goes on in a sewer. That's a rehearsed quote from a 1 term party

   

______________

"Deputy Premier Sarah Hoffman is a gnawing, cheese eating fuckin' sewer rat."

   

Mainstreet poll shows more hurtin' numbers for Notley NDP as they attack opposition 'sewer rats'
Rick Bell
Today at 11:10 AM

Memo to Notley NDP.

From: Rick Bell, columnist Calgary Sun.

Marked URGENT.

A new Mainstreet Research poll reveals what you will hear on the street if you travel those streets from one end of this province to the other.

Most people aren't buying what you're selling.

They just aren't. This is not meant as an insult. This is the truth.

They want a change in direction and they want it now.

They've heard about the pipeline approvals and how we're turning the corner.

They've heard the talk of green shoots without quite knowing what that looks like. They've got their first rebate cheques and they know free or discounted stuff is on the way.

Yes, they've even registered for free lightbulbs and thermostats and low-flow shower heads because they want to see something from the carbon tax.

For those parents paying the freight, they like the news of a 25% cut in school fees.

Still, the poll numbers on your performance are not good.

Do not shoot the messenger. These are not the imaginings of some right-wing conspiracy. This cannot just be written off as the axe-grinding of NDP haters.

This is reality or at least a more accurate reflection of it than the everything-is-coming-up-roses Kumbaya conclusions of those in your bubble who are paid a pretty penny to tell you what you want to hear.

The reality is a good chunk of those polled likely voted for you in 2015.

You remember, when your leader kicked butt in the election debate. When your leader didn't talk about a carbon tax.

When so many people finally decided to put an end to the Toryland dynasty and thought you would be a good enough place to park their vote.

Please do not let your beliefs, fervently held though they be, blind you to the decisions you must make.

And please, do not pray for another boom to bail you out. Oil is at lower than $50 a barrel. It will go up. But you yourselves cautioned about depending on the up and down of the oil roller coaster.

Thanks for reading the memo. Please read further.

On this day we have a Mainstreet poll. Only one in four Albertans think the NDP are doing a good or excellent job handling the economy.

Almost half think the NDP's handling is very poor. Not just poor. Very poor.

More than half in Calgary think the NDP's handling of the economy is poor or very poor. Two out of three living outside the big cities make the same judgment.

Even in Edmonton, opinion is split down the middle.

The nosecount also shows most Albertans who have a decided opinion think six or seven years is too long a wait to balance the province's books, except in Edmonton.

The top two things folks want from the NDP government is lower taxes and reduced spending, except in government town Edmonton and with those over 50.

Mainstreet's Quito Maggi says the Notley NDP will likely stay the course, hope there are shovels in the ground on pipelines, hope the oil price goes up, hope the economy gets better, hope jobs are created.

And hope Albertans might even get used to the carbon tax with its rebates and giveaways.

They have two years until the next election.

Maggi thinks there is no other choice.

'There is no other path. Do you turn the NDP into conservatives?"

Do they completely change and risk losing their core supporters or do they stick with who they are and hope others can somehow be won over?

The challenge is a tough one.

Up at the legislature, the politicians play question and answer. They ask questions, they don't get answers.

Wildrose leader Brian Jean acts as if he's seen the poll. He hasn't.

"When will the premier admit her plan is not working?"

"Albertans are right to be worried about the NDP's gross mismanagement of the economy."

"Does the premier understand why folks just don't trust this NDP government to get anything on the economy right?"

The premier says her government wants to make life better for families.

The scrappy Sarah Hoffman, Notley's number two, says the Wildrose is "spending a lot of time with sewer rats."

P.S. TO MEMO

Calling those who oppose you "sewer rats" doesn't help.

   

   

I only have a passing interest in Alberta provincial politics. There are only two questions that have given me pause for thought. The first is why Alberta evolved into such a right-of-center place while next-door Saskatchewan became the first to elect a socialist government in North America. The second is why Alberta tends to elect a government, and then leave them in power for decades. I think before this Wild Rose thing started, there had only been four parties in power since the province was created -- the Liberals, United Farmers of Alberta, Social Credit, and the Conservatives. They seem to have saved up a century of political backbiting and unleashed it all at once.

   

I can't really answer the first, other than to say that seems to be the way Conservative parties seem to have evolved over time. Look federally - Progressive Conservatives, Reform Party, Alliance Party, CPC. They got more right of center as time goes on. Look down south, Democrats and Republicans used to work together, now it's become a cage match.

As to the second, I think it's because we don't pay attention. Don Getty might have been the best Premier we've had, although Ralph did a pretty good job despite his handicaps. But it took the raw corruption of Redford for people to wake up and see what had happened to what they thought was a good thing. And Prentice did himself no favours by saying things that were badly misinterpreted and not getting out in front of them early.

   

It's also a legacy from getting screwed by Eastern liberals for as long as Alberta's been a province. That more than anything else explains to loyalty to the conservative brand. The outside liberals that ended up in charge of the national government more often than not never bothered to disguise the contempt they have for us so the counter-reaction to it is deeply held by most Albertans even today.

Keep in mind too that the SUN papers really don't know shit and that anything they say shouldn't be taken seriously. They called the last two elections wrong, first when the PC's under Redford cleaned the clocks of their precious Wildrose and again in the last one when the Dippers took advantage of how pissed off most people were at Redford's corruption and wiped Prentice's government off the map.

What Hoffman said is fairly wrong and she should apologize for it. Maybe she'd gotten one too many fat jokes or one too many death threats from the hard workin' Henry's and Martha's the Wildrose represent and she lost control of herself for a moment.

   

^^ This!

Doesn't excuse what she said, anymore than there is an excuse for Brian Jean lamenting that he couldn't physically assault Notley.

   

I really only regard the Wildrose as an Alberta beachhead for Trump-style populism, i.e. nothing's too shitty a thing to do or say if it helps you win. It's been bubbling under the surface in Alberta for a very long time, mostly as a by-product of getting screwed by Ottawa for generations. Now could be it's moment. Hopefully not but who knows these days. Preston Manning kept believing that populism could be moral and ethical but by now anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear really has no choice now but to believe the exact opposite is true. Populism = demagoguery designed to appeal to the angry, low-informed, and injured, and it'll never be anything else.

   

See what I mean? I've never seen this level of vitriol in Alberta politics in my life. You vote a party in, and relax for forty years. Now we have angst and name-calling. Explain.

   

Everything is getting more and more polarized, as people whose lives are turning for the much worse
give up the middle ground.

It's not just Alberta.

   

See: Ezra Levant

   

What "middle ground", Alberta kept the Liberals in from provincehood until the early 30s, then went with the unlikely UFA and their unlikely strategy for a couple of decades, then went really nuts with Social Credit. Alberta has a long history of voting it crazy political parties, but usually they just lay back and suck up a few decades before they rebel.

   

Not sure if any of those parties have done anything radical enough to be labelled as "crazies". A party ruling for a generation then getting wiped out altogether is more a feature of the electorate than of the parties. The Social Credit party lasted far longer in BC than it did in Alberta and was even able to still send a couple of MP's to Ottawa in the early 1980's.

For all the crap Alberta takes from the rest of the country at least one thing was true up until the Redford disaster of 2013-2015; the PC's provided a level of stability from the 1970's onwards that allowed the province to mostly flourish. The place was turned into neither an environmental Mordor or a runaway-capitalist clone of the United States the way the left-wingers think it was. Alberta has the exact same level of social services, health, and education that every other province does. If anything it should be asked why the other provinces kept damaging their own potential over and over again by repeatedly going through a rinse-repeat cycle of Liberal/Tory/NDP changes in government.

   

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