YankAbroad

Last I heard, she still had a few AM stations carrying her, had renounced Orthodox Judaism, and apaprently had had a nervous breakdown on air or something similar.

No I didn't. It only negatively impacts those who believe they have a "right" to ride the government gravy train, and I intend to do everything I can, immigration or not, to get them into productive society and out of their entitlement mentality. It's the best thing for their sakes, as well. No, governments exist to perpetuate themselves. If you think government cares about your best interest, or even the best interest of a majority of citizens, you obviously haven't dealt with government very often. No, I oppose government impositions. And I don't believe that an absence of government bloat, regulation, and entitlements equates to "social darwinism" either. That's a very religious, binary and simplistic view of the world.

But what does Dr. Laura think?

Thelonius is right. If you think you can survive by drinking your own pee, urine for a surprise.

Depends on how you define globalization. If globalization means 400 page "trade agreements" that constrain me because I'm an entrepreneur but give free rein to ExxonMobile to do what it wants, it sucks. You want globalization? Here's globalization. I'm a US citizen. I grab my American passport, leave London (England) tomorrow morning, get on a plane to Toronto, declare I want to find work in Canada and don't need a visa, the customs agent smiles and says "Welcome to Canada, good luck," and I can enter the labour, capital or other markets without any barriers whatsoever. If I don't have that, I don't have globalization. Neither does you or anyone else.

And even as this goes on, George Galloway remains a patronising, fascistic and odious twat.

What makes you say nobody is criticising them? Not only are people from across the political spectrum criticising the Arab states's reactions, but a number of papers running the gamut from "liberal" to "conservative" in Europe have reprinted the "offending cartoons" in solidarity with the original newspaper's right to free expression. Again, this tweedledee-tweedledum "conservative/liberal bad, liberal/conservative good" stuff takes away from the real texture and color of the world we live in and makes everyone's view of politics a ridiculous team sports "ah ha!" game.

Huh? The present system that we have is brutal and far from "equal." Again, huh? America, Canada and Australia all saw their economies surge and living standards improve during their high immigration days. And every economic study ever conducted indicates that immigrants grow economic performance and average income across the board, which only makes sense. New Canadians and Americans need jobs, homes, food, etc. which creates new economic activity. Nope. All government can do is take $1.00 out of your pocket, spent 40 cents of it on its own bureaucracy, give another 25 cents to someone else, then hand you back 35 cents and tell you that it gave you 35 cents of subsidy. Opportunity and upward mobility isn't created by government, it comes from a dynamic and competitive free market which rewards people based on their hard work and initiative, rather than skin colour, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Government should be providing only police, courts, and military defence. Most of the other government bureaucracies we've built up do nothing but take steam out of the economy, increase our taxes, and ensure lower standards of living. If government assumed only its proper role in society, rather than viewing itself as a redistributionist "change agent," most of your objections wouldn't be valid. Really, the reason we've restricted immigration is because too many fat Americans and fat Canadians are riding the government gravy train and don't want to "share" it with others. Of course, the same arguments they use against an Indian guy taking money from a working fellow for himself through government doesn't apply to them because. . . well. . . why doesn't it apply again? Oh yeah, right, just because.

I heard the WMDs are hidden in the Watergate office complex!

Apparently he's mine too. Except when conservatives then assume I must be a liberal. I'm so confuzzzzzzed!

Without being too snippy, Canada's opinion on military strategy doesn't hold much water these days. When Canada says "we don't think you need these for a military," it's not a compelling argument because Canada has effectively liquidated its military capability over the last 15 years or so. I'm not saying that I think landmines are lovely things -- I don't. But I certainly wouldn't want the US to abandon that technology when countries like Russia, China and Iran happily deploy them. Unilateral disarmament in such an environment is tantamount to suicide. Canada really doesn't have to worry about that, since if anyone ever attacked Canada, the USA would defend the country (and with land mines, if necessary).

Well apparently, if you're not willing to wait 12 months, you're a bad man who loves George W. Bush and wants to destroy Canadian values or something like that.

Ta da! I figured as much

Oh that's nothing. They also encourage pregnant women in Toronto to abort their babies so that they can feast on the foetuses. I've seen it. A pregnant woman walks in, someone asks her to abort the foetus. If she agrees, they take her to the clinic in the back. If she refuses, they tend to kill her and then take her foetus. Either way, they eat it, right on the spot. Those horrible immoral Torontonians.

I have to say I don't understand the insistence on a "single payer" system. It doesn't work. It never will. The UK has a multiple system. If you want only public care through the NHS (government service), that's available -- with all the pitfalls of government health care. If you want private insurance, that's available too. Now I know lots and lots of poor and working people in Britain -- guess how many of them are happy with government care and willing to settle for that? Almost none (except the healthy ones who don't need care). Everyone else has some form of private insurance they buy themselves or their employer provides -- the most popular form charges around £500 per year and will move you to a private hospital if you're on a waiting list for NHS care for more than about three weeks. My point is, even the "poor and working people" who single-monopoly care is supposed to "help" tend to reject single-monopoly care when given a choice. And the idea that "rapid access to care is a bad thing" is something that only a really ideologically warped bureaucrat could come up with -- let along push forward as a lawsuit to actually deprive Canadians of access to better health services.

Hmmmm, so I go away for a few days and I see: 1) None of my points have even been addressed; 2) Apparently the "inoffensive" folks advancing the "gays are pedophiles" arguments are using "gay" as an insult; 3) They've at least dropped their phoney "I'm hurt by your personal attacks" tone and let the real hate in their little stone hearts shine through. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of the obsessive nature of small-minded homophobia if I tried. Thanks, guys!

Wow. This is unreal. Here is a company seeking to open clinics that allow people who want rapid care in Canada to get it, and the government is telling people that even if they can afford better, they don't deserve it -- instead, they must suffer ever-longer waiting lines in Canada's crumbling public health care system. The irony is, the people who want care can just drive down to Buffalo and get it. So they're even undermining a Canadian company. But the idea that "rapid access to care undermines medicare" is revealing -- it's basically an admission that government monopoly health care doesn't work to fill the needs of Canadians. More below: http://www.medbroadcast.com/channel_health...l_id=1039&rot=3

That's not true. If Canada was a society which rewarded hard work and initiative, rather than parcelled out social entitlements it cannot afford, it would attract the best and brightest -- the people willing to work. Once North America decided that it wanted to turn into a big socialist blob, we just became a dumber, less populated version of Europe. And we denied hundreds of millions of people the opportunity to come to our countries and make something of themselves -- all so that we could keep "free" health care (which we pay for by borrowing against our grandkids' futures) and a bunch of other government cruft which has no real value and doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Send me the smart hard working people from Mexico, India, China, everywhere where people seek freedom and opportunity and a chance at a better life for themselves if they work hard. Keeping our countries "exclusive" and "strictly controlled" has just turned us into corpulent cultural and economic gulags -- also-rans in the global game.

Well, take the world's smallest political quiz and see where you fall! It takes literally 10 seconds. http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html I score well within the Libertarian quadrant.

Funny how you think that everyone who disagrees with your Tweedledum party line must be from the Tweedledee party.

I'm a libertarian who opposed the war from the beginning. I'm not really "left" or "right." And I think Sheehan is a mole hired by Karl Rove to make all people opposed to the war look like drooling, blithering anti-semitic knee-jerk morons.

You silly conservatives and liberals arguing over whether it was the federal government's fault or the state government's fault never cease to crack me up. To conservatives who support president Bush: If Dubya couldn't save New Orleans with five days' notice of the impending disaster, what the hell makes you think he can "protect" you from a terrorist attack? Get real. To lefties who think the whole disaster is Bush's fault: You're 1/3 right. The whole thing is government's fault -- if the bureaucrats had gotten out of the way and allowed the private sector access to the city, charities and volunteers would have had the entire place evacuated. Instead, government decided it knew best, closed all the access roads, and restricted exit so thousands were trapped. Of course, both conservatives and lefties want to flush tens of billions of dollars down the toilet to rebuild a city which never should have existed in its present form, and which will just be destroyed again in another 20 years by another hurricane.

I'm not aware of any legal regime in Canada or the USA which allows serious crimes like assault to be explained away by "cultural differences." Until evidence of such processes is provided, I'm going to assume it's bollocks.

Hopefully soon. Immigration is a net positive for the economy, and we never did better than we did when we had unlimited immigration. Canada should consider unlimited immigration as well -- it has lots of empty provinces to fill up, and the demographic time bomb of Canada's low birth rate is ticking, ticking, ticking. . .

On the other hand, Google did do the right thing in telling the Bush administration to **** themselves when they demanded Google hand over its records of individual's IP addresses and the search terms they used -- in order to "make sure people weren't downloading porn."