Figleaf

Word count in post = 107 Words required to make point of post = 10.

Treason???

What (if any) evidence do you have of these alleged incursions?

Or Britain is. Depending on whose version is true.

Wouldn't you agree that there is a huge difference between attacking an embassy and holding diplomatic personel hostage compared to capturing foreign military personnel in territorial waters?

You seem to be assuming that the British are correct that they were in Iraqi waters. What information do you have in support of that assumption?

Who are you imagining would do it? It's hard to agree with that, if the British sailors were indeed in Iranian waters.

What's the status of this issue? Has Day stepped aside, or is he corruptlly purporting to oversee the investigation of himself?

Thank goodness it's just a throwaway piece of preambular whimsy rather than bringing our constitution back to the dark ages.

What a mindless attack on a Government that has restored honesty and integrity in Ottawa. [emphasis added] indeed!

What. the. fuc*. are. you. blithering. about.? Reallly, What. the. fuc*. are. you. blithering. about??? One: how do you know that? Two: the waters are disputed, so what position are you taking in that dispute to decide what waters they were in? Evidence? If you were less deficient, you would realize that I have not, in fact, asserted that I believe one side or the other. I am keeping an open mind. If you won't at least read my comments before spewing vitriol, why don't you just bugger off? Well, I don't know about conspiracy, but we do know that the US getting into Iraq was the result of a deliberate, underhanded, corrupt, false, coordinated campaign.

What an excellent summary of 60 weeks of shabby government. I think these are my top three: 17. Spending more money in a single year than any other government in Canadian history, stoking inflation and threatening higher interest rates. 47. Constant campaigning, rather than governing. 6. Stacking the judiciary with pro-Conservative judges.

The problem with most accountability initiatives like senate reform, referendumbs, or alternate electoral systems is they all require sweeping changes. That's why I like recall: it's already been in place in BC for some time, it doesn't mean changing any boundaries, changing the powers of any existing institution, or changing the traditional principles of parliamentary government.

I think recall would go a long way toward addressing the democratic deficit we see every day in Parliament, and it would do so without imposing a radical change in our instutitional processes such as referendums or proportional representation. Basically, if voters could impose recall on their representative, it would realign the current incentive system that induces deference to the party heirarchy by moving control over an important incentive (the seat) into the hands of the electorate.

What point are you hoping will be drawn from that particular (somewhat inaccurate) passage?

The difficulty with that comment is that you don't live in a Christian society, you live in a liberal democratic society. Medieval Europe was a Christian society, and rather than stoning people, it burned them, broke them on the wheel, or drew and quartered them.

I would certainly give credit to the philosophy of Jesus for making the world more civilized. I concur with Jefferson and Kant that the ethical system he appears to have articulated is pretty much irreproachable. But Christianity? No. A fraud and perversion right from the get go. And, like almost all religions, it stands in inherent opposition the highest faculty of humankind.

Would you mind pointing me to the relevant canon? This one you've already found... Why were you looking for something that would do that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation What do you suppose that means? Nothing much different than what I've been saying, as you'll see if you look closely and read around the section you quoted. Preambles are not 'meaningless', rather they are not operational. When you interpret a statute you look at the parts that apply to your situation and ignore other parts -- You find that preambles are always among the other parts, except in rare cases where the legal challenge involves a fresh public policy interpretation. Here is an interesting article on the subject... http://www.journal.law.mcgill.ca/abs/vol47/1roach.pdf

That's more order than my opinion has so far. But I will note that a very frequent commonality among many of these cases seems to be failure to disclose relevant evidence to the defence. This is the prosecutors' duty, and is probably the most significant reason I blame them to the extent I do.

You wake up on a beach made up of thousands of flat stones going off miles in either direction. There is a note in your hand and it says: 'Find pieces of gold under some of the beach stones". You turn over one stone, nothing. You turn over two more, nothing. You try one last one, and LO! there's a dubloon of gold. When do you stop turning over stones and decide there's no more gold?

Not from that clause. Really? I was always under the impression that the preamble set the parameters of the following in any document. Not according to the canons of statutory interpretation. Preambles generally have no operational clauses and are only one aspect that may be used in interpretations of gray areas. In the particular case of the clause in question, as I've noted, in addition to being in a preamble, it is deliberately constructed to have no significant interpretational value either. In any event, we had moved on from there to talk about whether the 'inoperationality' of this clause left us without the rule of law. It does not. Our reliance on the rule of law is found in our unwritten constitution as well. Not according to the canons of statutory interpretation.

Hate? I don't hate them. I don't hate Bell Canada, but I think it's a crappy company with crappy management. Similarly, I think a cursory examination of the record in Canada indicates that there's a whole lot of crappy work and crappy management in prosecution departments all across Canada. I don't know of any. My point is that Mackay would be forced to go back to being a prosecutor, and as such he would be returning to a system that produces wrongful convictions like Microsoft produces system crashes. This is just one organization ... http://www.aidwyc.org/past-cases.cfm http://www.aidwyc.org/cases.cfm

Poppycock. Certainly a foreign affairs minister could go. But attending the inauguration of a foreign president is also certainly within the scope of the duties of a head of state.

She has no authority to make financial commitments. She might announce commitments that the government has told her to speak about. But what commitments are you talking about? Why's that a problem? You've managed to be both incomprehensible and incoherent.

Personally, I don't think the US government made it happen or let it happen. It's much more likely that rogue elements of the U.S. intelligence community engaged as 'consultants' for the New American Century/Skull-and-Bones/Bush Crime Family did it under the noses of law enforcement and security authorities.