You can take the cow outta Cowtown … but the smell of cowflops lingers.

Can it be more than two decades since I reported that they weren't going to sell cows in Calgary any more? For those of you who collect statistics, the last one they sold in Cowtown wasn't actually a cow, it was a 1,915 pound Texas longhorn steer, name unrecorded, probably because it didn't have one, and it fetched the princely sum of $3,700.

Back then, I reckon, they figured cows just didn't match up with the notion of what was certain to become Canada's most dynamic city.

Sylvia Ostry may be shocked, shocked, at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's drive to deprive Statistics Canada of its ability to conduct meaningful research, but no one who has been paying attention ought to be.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.

          -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Schenck v. United States, 1919

Friends of the notorious American hate-caster Ann Coulter have attempted to frame the controversies stemming from her continuing Canadian speaking tour as freedom of speech issues. This is, of course, baloney.

Oh, what a difference a single year can make!

Can it be only a year ago that Jason Kenney, Member of Parliament for Calgary-Southeast and Canada's diligent minister of immigration, was loudly barring the nation's gates to British Member of Parliament George Galloway, whom he proclaimed to be a grave threat to our national security?