BHS

The most childish and ridiculous thing in your post is your assertion that a country as enormous and complex as the US boils down to a short list of two-option preferences. You sound like a teenager who's figured out how the whole world works and is enraged that no one takes your views seriously.

Sharkman proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed bobblehead blonde is queen. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Now there's a troll name if ever I saw one. Coulter is amusing, in a rabid pitbull sort of way. When I read her I get the feeling she could switch sides and attack the right from a leftist standpoint without changing anything about her schtick, or missing a beat.

Which begs the question, "What's so bad about the US that we shouldn't want to become part of it?" I guess I'm just not smart enough to be a Liberal.

You're being entirely disingenuous. Not one of the things you've quoted was a lie. Firstly, it was a common opinion throughout the West's intelligence community that Saddam was making attempts to purchase components for refining U235 throughout the 90's. Secondly, if British Intelligence gave Bush bad information it's not a lie for him to quote it before it's disproved (and it still hasn't been). And you're third quote deals with an intelligence estimate based on Saddam's prior capabilities, and again it was not a lie to quote that estimate. Even if you didn't know the specifics, the generality of Bush's language suggests a man taking tough action to avert a potential catastrophe rather than waiting for that catastrophe to be confirmed. That you would characterize this as bald-faced lying suggests the depths to which you will sink to equate the seriousness of putting together a case for war with the unseriousness of defending the personal honour of an honourless man, who by the way provably did commit perjury.

No, really? UPDATE: Sorry, I got you confused with camthecat.

Has it occurred to anyone that a picture of Harper and Duceppe shaking hands would be ammuntion for a Liberal smear campaign? Keeping in mind, too, that Duceppe represents a party who's primary goal is tantamount to treason.

Actually I was referring to CIA sponsored dictatorships in Guatamala, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Philippines and Indonesia to name a few. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I go by the assumption that the CIA is a-political and works for the general American interest. Perhaps that's naive of me. In any case, the CIA's foreign influence has seriously waned since the end of the Cold War, which suggests to me that my arguments above still hold. Off of the top of my head - Guatemala - don't know anything about it (infoplease suggests it's a democracy though, so I guess the CIA aren't propping up the dictatorship anymore) Chile - Augusto Pinochet voluntarily stepped down in favour of a relatively successful democracy, so I guess the CIA aren't propping him up either. (Aside - you don't see this type of thing happening too often in dictatorships that were propped up by the French, for instance.) Iran - the Shah was pro-Western and presumably received assistance from the CIA when needed, though I don't think he was"propped up" by them. The Mullahs are decidedly anti-Western and were never a client state of the CIA, unless you're counting the whole Contra fiasco as "propping up" the theocracy. They were clients of the Soviets and maintain a distant friendliness with the Russians. In neither case is a dictatorship in the traditional sense involved. Iraq - Yep, the CIA (the whole American government, really) helped Saddam, in the interest of keeping the Soviets out of the oil-rich Middle East. Didn't work. Anyway, the American influence evaporated after the annexation of Kuwait and the "propping up" vacuum was filled by the Europeans between 1990 and 2003. Philipines - Ferdinand and Imelda were undoubtedly atrocious. However, when they were overthrown in favour of democracy the CIA didn't lift a finger (or, perhaps, they just didn't have their hearts in defending the Marcos). They're fickle that way. (Note: Wikipedia suggests that Marcos was a dictator only between 1972 and 1981, when he ended the authoritarian regime and was re-elected. There's that wacky dictator-to-democrat thing happening again. He has ousted in 1986.) Indonesia - Suharto (am I thinking of the right country?) was a total thug. Also, a good friend of our own beloved dictator-wannabe Chretien. The CIA should be villafied for supporting him, though again, in light of the Cold War, it was either our bastard or theirs. Suharto died a few years ago and his son has since been imprisoned for life for fraud (I think). I don't know much about the current situation in Indonesia, except that when food aid was sent to Banda Aceh province after the tsunami the local bureaucrats forced aid organizations to pay hefty import fees. I don't think the CIA was involved.

Oh, really assisted dictators. You mean, who propped up local pro-western pawns during the Cold War to prevent Soviet expansionism, the way JFK and Reagan did. As opposed the the implicit assistance that appeasers like Carter gave by looking the other way when their friends' obvious flaws were on display. In a way, Carter is an ideal ex-President (with emphasis on the ex) - he sets the benchmark for what a President ought not to be, and what happens when the wrong guy gets elected. (Though, to be fair, Ford probably wouldn't have been much better.) Legendary, indeed, in the sense that legends are like myths - a kernel of truth painted over with layers and layers of wishful romanticism. Good call on Bush Sr. He was a one-hit wonder in office, and it doesn't surprise me that his post-presidency musings didn't make much of a splash. Of the Fox newscasters I like Brit Hume the best, but even he has a tendancy to fluff his research when it suits his views to do so.

It's not really the reverse of France. Attacks are being perpetrated by hooligans from both ethnicities. The BBC, true to form, ignores this aspect, and buries the attack on lifeguards that triggered the riots to the last sentence of the article.

Tell me, did Bush Senior happen to dig this information up while he was campaigning against Clinton? Bush was hardly a "former president" at that time, and I don't recall Clinton's war record being an issue after the 1992 election. I don't recall Bush Sr. having anything further to say about Clinton or his policies after 1992, and in fact I recall him declining to make comment. What Bush Sr. did is not really hypocritical either, if what you've written is true - Bush Jr.'s not volunteering for duty that he ended up performing without complaint is not the same Clinton's scramming to the safety of another country only then to voice complaint against your own country's foreign policies. As to what Nixon had to say about Clinton, I'd have to read some of his articles. I know that he wrote periodically for magazines in the 90's, but I don't believe I've ever read anything that he wrote during the Clinton years. If you had a link it would be helpful. I'd like to add though that Nixon never assumed and was never accorded the sort of moral superiority that is regularly attributed to Carter, and to my knowledge Nixon's views on Clinton never extended to making statements or taking actions that my be construed as treason.

Paul Martin is lousy at answering questions he's been prepped for. It doesn't surprise me that he'd stammer his way through a response to a question that caught him off guard. I haven't seen the footage though. Political footage hasn't really been worth watching since The Scream, and before that The Shawinagan Handshake. How do you surpass benchmarks like those?

Sorry, but your post reminds me of John Cleese' character Anne Elk on the Flying Circus, who came up with a totally new theory about brontosauruses. Anyone who's familiar with Monty Python will know the sketch. Direct democracy isn't a new idea - it actually predates the more modern representational democracy we live under. The concept of the plebiscite dates back to Roman times. What makes the idea new again is the idea of using computer networking to co-ordinate regular (say, weekly) votes cast by millions of people. But your not the first person to come up with that innovation either. Another drawback of direct democracy: it lacks consistency. Even after a proposal has been adopted by Parliament, it takes time for laws and regulations to take effect. A solid party platform provides the consistency needed to give new laws a chance to work, and acts to ensure that new laws that get passes all fit together without overriding each other. Under direct democracy the discipline of a party platform doesn't exist, and the result is a mish-mash of conflicting laws, that in any case won't be given time to attack a problem before the fickle electorate vote in some new measure, that also won't be given a chance to work, and so on. Perhaps I was a little hard on elected officials in my previous post. They aren't founts of wisdom, but they do have the final say in how they vote on any given issue, and their access to the media allows them to push ideas into the public forum that might otherwise get buried. And they have to be consistent (well, they're supposed to be), as a part of being loyal to their party's platform.

I'm having a little trouble deciphering your meaning here. Your first sentence doesn't make any sense to me at all. After that, I'm pretty much lost until the sentence beginning "It is likely...". But even by the end of this paragraph, I can't decide what you mean by wealth. Is it good for the Russians to have wealth that they aren't using? If you possess something that you are unable to use or enjoy, is it still considered wealth? If I sit starving to death on a mountain of gold, am I really wealthy? Where are the lines between a poor standard of living, a good standard of living, and an ostentacious lifestyle? If you and I have similar needs, and you live in a hovel, and I live in a bigger hovel, am I more ostentacious than you? That's an interesting point, and I believe it helps to fuel my argument. The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, but it conveniently backdates emissions targets to 1990, when the Soviet Union was still cranking out an enormous amount of pollution. So former members of the Soviet Union, whose pollution output was seriously curtailed by the collapse of their economies, get to benefit from no-longer existant set of circumstances instead of the way they were in 1997 for the purposes of emissions targets, whereas our forests are considered part of the "global condition" and we can only apply for extra credit for forests that were planted after 1997. How do you reverse a threat? That's like unsaying a word. A more correct turn of phrase would be "reverse the damage", but then you'd have the more onerous task of providing concrete examples damage that has already been done and which hasn't already been addressed. Better to invoke scary future-tense scenarios based on plausible sounding theories, when you're trying to talk the world into accepting an entirely new worldview, complete with it's own unelected, supranational regulatory regime maintained in perpetuity by a noble class of enviromentally sensitive elites. It's Marxism through the back door, I tells ya.

You were arguing about Mike Harris doing what he said he would do... I guess your response is your way of dodging the 50 billion penny question ...... Because you know he lied, Eureka knows he lied, I know he lied... and so did most of Ontario when they gave him the boot... But it's funny how you can't come to admit that he lied..... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You know, you're so misinformed it's comical. Ontario voted out Ernie Eves. The teachers whined and cried about Harris all through his first term, then Ontario voted him back in for a second. It's time for you to get your head out of the unions' asses. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's in the anti-Harrisites interest to conflate the years under Harris with the decidedly different direction the Tories took under Eves, so as to say that voting against the Eves Tories is exactly the same as voting against the Harris Tories. Which simply was not the case. Unfortunately, in getting rid of Eves we got stuck with John Tory. I rarely hear much of interest eminating from Queen's Park these days; occasionally Dalton McGuinty (Liberal, premier) will make some sort of pronouncement on some non-issue, and very rarely Howard Hampton (NDP) will get some press lampooning Dalton, but I don't recall ever hearing a single word uttered by John Tory. I don't even know what his voice sounds like, to be honest. Come to think of it, I'd probably have a hard time picking him out of a lineup too. UPDATE: I just went to the Ontario PC website. I swear to God, I thought John Tory was older and wore glasses. I really wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a lineup. After a brief, cursory review of the site, it appears that the Tories have taken up the generic opposition complaints the Liberals used to use as their own. Grunts about the Liberals not providing "leadership" in key issues (issues that, honestly, pretty much take care of themselves). How depressingly unoriginal. I hope they kick it up a notch come the next election, but I'm not holding my breath. These Tories could be from Britain. Actually, that's a good metaphor: the Ontario Tories after Harris are a lot like the British Tories after Thatcher. It's hard to fill shoes that have been stretched by such big feet.

That's already the case. You kill someone, the motive and intent is considered. If it was accidental, you could get a charge like negligence causing death or manslaughter. If intentional, you'd get a stiffer sentence. Motive is not intent. The difference you've illustrated lies strictly within the realm of of the perpetrator's intent and doesn't touch on his motive. Another example: you sleeping with my wife prompts me to pick up a gun and shoot you. Your sleeping with my wife is my motive, my picking up the gun and hunting you down shows my intent to kill you. It's the intent that's taken into consideration, not the motive, in this case making my crime a first degree murder. A defense lawyer will probably try to bring motive in as part of his defence, as a mitigating factor, but it's up to a judge or jury to decide how much of a factor the motive was when deciding my sentence. What hate crimes legislation does is automatically make motive an important factor for the purposes of sentencing. As I said in my previous post (and which you neglected to address) it's easier to persuade the jury that the motive involved a component of hate when the victim actually possesses the attributes alleged to be the motivating factor, the end result being that punishment varies not only according to the severity of the crime but also according to the status of the victim. Ergo, two-tiered justice. It's no different from saying it's less of a crime for a black man to rape a black woman than a white woman. No, the prosecuter would have to show he hit you because of your race or sexual orientation. So, if I read your rebuttal correctly, it's only a hate crime if it's committed with malice of foresight and foreknowledge of who his victim is. So if some young thug goes out on the town and attacks people who he believes are gay, it isn't really a hate crime if he doesn't have proof ahead of time that his victims are, in fact, gay? So, just to be clear, spray-painting swastikas on a synagogue is really no different from any other act of graffiti? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Clearly, any reasonable person can see that their is a vast difference of motivation between defacing a house of worship with symbols indicating a clear hatred of that religion, and tagging a stop sign with your gang's logo. But the whole point of my argument is that motivation shouldn't take precedence. I'm not saying that swastikas on the side of a synagogue aren't reprehensible - clearly they are. What I'm saying is that defacing public property is not more virtuous merely because it lacks a component of hate. There's an ugly element of contempt in both cases. I'd like to add that where one is tolerated, the other will follow, almost as a matter of course. Another problem, that I haven't really touched on (intentionally), is the hierarchy issue inherent in the definition of what constitutes a hate crime. It occurs to me that the most vigorous prosecutions of hate crimes will occur in high-profile cases with fashionable themes and charasmatic victims. I have a feeling, for example, that neo-nazis spraypainting swastikas on the walls of a synagogue will be dealth with more severely than PETA protesters writing "FUR KILLS!!! in their own blood on the side of a store selling mink coats, despite a comparable level of negative emotion motivating each group of perpetrators.

Clearly, the SSM issue is a symbol of other beliefs. I suspect that many young people use it as a way to distinguish themselves from older people. Gay issues are a fad, like radical chic.Gay rights are ultimately a question of freedom. I am heartened when I see many people not directly concerned standing up for the rights of others. (Of course, we still don't know if anyone would sacrifice anything substantive to defend these rights.) Neither do I. But then, I don't believe the number is that much higher either. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Do you really think that 1 in 10 people you know, among friends, family, co-workers, annoying neighbours - do you really think 1 in 10 is gay? That number has always struck me as being way too high. I think 1% is much closer to reality.

I can't believe this is a serious premise for a thread. Does anyone seriously believe a ) The US would pick Canada as a country to rendition terror suspects to for interogation/torture? b ) Paul Martin (who, let's remember, didn't know anything at all about the sponsorship scandal) would know anything about interogation/torture if it were happening here? I mean, really.

Geyem: Try breaking up your posts a little. I found both of your posts too long, and you wandered off topic too often so that it was difficult to pick out what points you were trying to make. And keep in mind, this advice comes from a bloviating, verbose crank who often has no point to make at all. Here are some questions: 1) Do you know how long it would take to parse through 30 million opinions about any one issue, let alone all of the issues the federal government has to consider? I don't think that non-representational government is practical outside of a small community setting. You suggest that it would be more efficient to bypass the representatives in favour of direct democracy, but I'm telling you, using thirty million opinions (even filtered by a supercomputer) to run a country is anything but efficient. It would be hell's committee meeting. 2) If decisions are to be made by the voters, what do we need politicians for? You suggest they "educate" the public, but as often as not politicians don't know any more about an issue than the public does. They aren't hired for their knowledge or expertise - they're hired because they smile when a camera is pointed at them and they're willing to eat crappy Legion basement fundraiser cuisine 300 days a year. It's the ideas they represent that are important, and they didn't come up with those ideas by themselves. There's a long, trial-balloon-intensive method to developing a winning political platform and getting it implemented, from the local riding's nominations right up to the media scrum outside of the Parliament buildings, to Question Period, through the House and Senate and on to Rideau Hall. It's long and complicated and often doesn't work the way you want it to, but in the end it does work.

I think you've got the right take on this. The Liberals should quote this story non-stop for the next two months, if they want to smear Harper. It's no secret that I'm a fan of America and I've supported many of GWB's leadership decisions, but I'm a realist about how the average Canadian feels about Bush. This article plays right into the Liberals hands.

Does anyone have a link to this story in the Independent? I'm having some trouble locating it by search engine.

Something I've always wondered, maybe someone can kindly help me out. Isn't polling supposed to be random in order to be considered accurate and/or scientific? How can a telephone poll be considered truly random, if you only get to question people who agree to give up their time to participate in a poll? I mean, I resent the idea that Ipsos Reid wants to take half an hour of my time, earning thousands of dollars in the process, while I get nothing more than the satisfaction of helping the pollsters earn a living.

I thought mirror was bigdude. I don't think normanchateau is mirror - I don't recall mirror ever posting anything like an apology or clarification. I say we let new members establish themselves before jumping to the conclusion that they're new incarnations of banned posters. That being said, I fail to see the point of this thread. If we aren't talking about fundamentalist Christians taking control of a mainstream political party, then what are we talking about? Why does it matter if half of the Conservatives are devoutly religious while the other half are not, if consistancy of religious views isn't an issue? The primary assumption fueling this thread is absurd. Many Liberals come would probably identify themselves as Roman Catholic if asked - is there a Catholic conspiracy to take over the Liberal party? Is there a crackhead conspiracy to take over the Marijuana Party? Inquiring minds want to know these things. I guess.

Then the NDP is the party for you, friend! In 2004 the ND's proposed a combination of eliminating the GST on essentials and instituting an inheritance tax, so you can count them out of you rlittle formulation. An income tax cut for middle income earners and an increase in corporate rates (Canada's corporate rate is lower than the U.S's!) would ease the tax burden on the most productive segment of our society. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> While I salivate at the concept of paying lower taxes personally, I don't think it would be of longterm benefit to hike corporate taxes (if you can imagine that, coming from me). Lower corporate taxes are an important incentive to draw business out of the US and to encourage foreign investment aimed at the US to Canada instead. If our corporate taxes were equal to or higher than the US' the incentive would disappear. It doesn't necessarily mean that foreign investment would dry up, of course, but it would be one less reason to choose Canada as a place to build new plants or start new enterprises. Or for that matter, as a place to stay. Tax breaks for the middle class lose their appeal if the result is higher unemployment in the long run. Being a fan of individual choice versus collective decree, I have an almost visceral aversion to inheritance tax. I don't dedicate my life to the maintainance of government, so why should my life's residue be used for that purpose?

normachateau: - Hate crimes legislation is a particularly ironic farce. It proposes that some crimes are worse than others based soley on motive, making motive a more important consideration than result. If some guy decides he doesn't like the look of me and takes a swing for no other reason, he ends up convicted of assault. If the prosecutor can prove that he thought I was gay/Jewish/(fill in the blank), he's convicted of a hate crime. The problem is, proving what someone was thinking just before or during the commission of a crime is difficult, and in the case of a hate crime relies on the actual status of the victim. If in the illustrated case I'm not actually gay, it makes the prosecutor's job a lot more difficult if he's trying to prove a hate crime was committed, and that the assault that I suffered was that much worse because of it. Which means essentially that some victims receive a different level of justice than others, based soley on their personal status indicating the classification of their victimhood. The ironic bit is that the same people who favour this two-tiered system of justice are the same people who have argued most fervently against two-tiered healthcare on the grounds that it isn't right to allow different categories of citizens to receive different treatment. - So, if I'm reading you correctly, you propose that a party without support in Quebec shouldn't be allowed to argue Canada's case in a Quebec referendum, as if the rest of Canada doesn't have an interest in the question of seperation. Quite wrong. Let's ignore that the concept of Quebec seperation based on a referendum solely with in the province of Quebec is illegitimate and not really worth discussing. The federal government's role in such a referendum is to present the interests of Canada to the people of Quebec, and to remind them of what they'll be losing when they (try to) seperate. Being from Quebec is not at all a necessary pre-conditition for representing this viewpoint. If it were, there would be no legitimate reason for the federal government (representing all Canadians) to intervene at all, making your argument moot.

#1. I am not blisfully ignorant or young or brain damaged thank you very much. #2. I work at a local lunch programme with those so called lay abouts and drug addicts. I suggest you donate some of your time and work in one of those places for a month or so and you will see that the safety net has eroded. leaving many people at risk. Many of the people we have as clients are incapable of working at even the most menial jobs. You forgot to include those with mental and physical afflictions. Also those who are single parents who can't afford daycare for their children as there are too few places for them. The safety net, often doesn't cover basic monthly expenses. Some of our clients spend over 90% of their income on housing which leaves VERY little for necessities. Example, one woman pays $450.00 in rent which leaves her less than $100.00 for her other expenses. Last time I checked there is no way that you can survive on that little and have any quality of life. There are very few geared to income dwellings so those who are childless are stuck finding accomodation on the free market. With winter coming I am doing my usual scrambling to get donations of used warm clothing for our clients. #3 The reference to Mikey's father shows the irony of the situation. He didn't want his father to have to put up with pressure when he was ill unlike the ordinary dying patients in this province. As said so eliquently by a former poster, when Mikey cut funding for hospitals the nursing staff suffered from massive cuts. Those who are still working as nurses spend a lot of their time with paper work and not enough time doing that for which they were really trained. When sophisticated and expensive diagnostic equipment enters the market many hospitals can't afford to purchase it or enough of it so waiting lists grow longer. This is not the time to cut hospital budgets. I could go on but I'm sure you will come back with some rhetoric that will blame the victim as opposed to the perpitrator. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> 1) My apologies, then. But did long waits for healthcare in Ontario only start after 1995? Seems to me the issue predates Mike Harris. 2) Are there not additional programs to deal with people with mental and physical afflictions? My own uncle is a diagnosed schizophrenic living on a government stipend (in Ontario) and it's substantially more than basic welfare. Based on my own empirical knowledge I wouldn't have included people in those categories with basic welfare cases. I'm genuinely sorry that some people, who do not suffer from a diagnosed illness, nonetheless go through life with such underdeveloped lifeskills that they can't hold down a job. I'm sure that a meager income is only one of the problems they have to deal with. I wish there were an easy answer, but I'm convinced that making welfare more attractive to able-bodied individuals will make the situation better. I participated in a different thread on this board some time ago where I defended the welfare system, within a proposed system of parameters. If you'd like I'll dig it up and post a link here. 3) If Mike Harris' father lay dying in a public hospital, it stands to reason that he did indeed suffer the same difficulties as every other dying patient. All things being even, it seems to me that you're suggesting every dying man should be harrassed over whatever misdeeds he committed during his life. My mother-in-law is a registered nurse. I know people who've had difficult hospital stays. I've heard about the trouble hospitals have budgeting for new equipment. All that I know about medical care leads me to believe that things can only be made better by taking stress off of the public system by allowing private individuals to choose private healthcare, if they can afford it.