Higgly

Wow. From Brampton to Iran in the wink of an eye. And you say my books need adjusting?

You need help. Third largest religion in the area? That's not doing bad, by my books. This is a hospital in Brampton that has to serve the Peel region all the way up to James Bay? You mean after they get past Ottawa, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Barrie.... Self hating. No, I just think that "us" means more than a bunch of whitefaces.

This has got to be both a moral and a religious issue... :angry: The Saturday October 27 edition Toronto Star (FRONT PAGE) informs us that one of the biggest losers in the NHL, the Toronto Maple Laffs, AKA Toronto Maple Losers, is generating an astonishing profit margin of 22%. How do they do it? Oh they have ways... After Matts Sundin scored his 500th goal, Leafs Management took the netting from the goal, cut it into a thousand little pieces and sold it off plastred to a crad with picture of Sundin for a total of $C 40,000. Just one of the many ways Maple Leaf Sports has found to extract money from the public without having won a Stanley Cup in over 40 years! Sort of reminds me of the troop surge That's right, folks. An ordinary guy can't afford to take his family to the game any more, what with tickets up in the stratosphere, but corporate seasons ticket holders wil keep paying just to have somewhere to take their customers for the big show. Anybody who thinks that capitalism awlways produces the best results, need only look at this farce. Just incredible.

ROBTV, our very own (and very good) business channel is saying that economists would rather see cuts to income and corporate taxes, which are disencentives to earn. Consumption taxes like the GST are discretionary, sort of like the lottery, and are much better at providing an incentive to the government to make the economy run well so everybody has loose cash jingling their pockets. A system which leans on consumption tax also favours saving, and the poor. You want blue line seat to see Leafs lose, mistah? Cost you extra.

All they've done is replace Saddam with Tommy Franks. Iraq is a looking glass country invented by the British to suit their own purposes. Sort of like Yugoslavia... So, who is going to keep it all together when the surge goes home? Or will the US dollar keep sinking forever? One of my favourite movies is "The Cincinnati Kid" where "The Kid" (Steve McQueen) gets gutted at stud poker by "The Man" (played by Edward G. Robinson). In the poker game of realpolitik, the US is the Kid right now and the man who is holding all the markers, excuse me, monetary instruments, is over in Asia somewhere. Ha so. Great movie though. Edward G. Robinson, Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Ann Margaret, Rip Torn, and a whole host of really good character actors. Directed by Norman Jewison. The man is a genius.

Welcome to Toronto! Go down to University Avenue and have a look at the various named hospital departments, wings, what have you? Ten million bucks ain't chump change, no matter what per cent it is of the whole. I'll bet it's enough to fund an emergency department. Let's face it - not a lot of real expensive diagnostic stuff - that's all over in radiology where the taxpayer foots the bill . If there are discriminatory hiring practices, then I agree that is wrong. You don't want a guy for any other reason than he was the best you could afford at whatever the position called for. I would not use "call-ins to a CBC program" as definitive proof myself. As for the meals and translation, where is the hospital located? In an area where there are a lot of Sikhs? You can walk into City Hall in Toronto (called Metro Hall) and get spoken to in damned near any language under the sun if you're willing to wait for them to locate the translator. I have no doubt you can get served in Chinese and a whole host of other languages in many Toronto hospitals. What's the problem?

You are right. I was expanding the word beyond its defined usage. Moral high ground? Now who's putting up straw men? I am arguing logic. The system makes mistakes. Death is final. How much more simple can it be? If you do not favour the death penalty out of expediency, then what is your reasoning? What possible reason can you cite that would justify the execution by mistake of those who are actually innocent? That is what you are arguing for. I am encouraged by the fact that a basis is now being built in case law for the review and retrial of people who have been wrongfully convicted of capital crimes. Hopefully this will one day extend to other serious crimes. I would not be at all surprised to find that there is a very large number of people who have been railroaded into convictions they did not deserve.

That's what I meant

There most certainly is something wrong with following the money. Monitoring the accounts of terrorist organisations is one thing, but invading the privacy of law-abiding citizens is quite another.

Strawmen? You said 10 years, I put up a guy who served 12. You are using jingoism, while I am stating fact. Why my resistance? Because the justice system is not perfect. Lock them up forever with no chance of parole, but I don't believe any system is good enough to always be right.

It doesn't really matter what he was doing for the money. A prime minister getting money of this magnitude from someone is a big deal. You have to ask, who else had this guy on their payroll? What was NAFTA all about? The problem is that you have to take the word of a rather dodgey character to believe it. I have never liked Mulroney, but I sure hope somebody has some evidence for all of this because this is a really ugly mess for our democracy. How can we shake our fingers at anybody else over governance issues?

Do you know what a Philistine is, JBG?

The guy in Newfoundland seved 12 years before he was proven innocent. How long did Truscott serve? How many more are there like them? What is it with this obsession to kill people? Given the number of appeals, is it really cheaper than just locking them up? You can keep someone locked up for a long time for what it costs to run an appeal by all those lawyers, judges, what have you.

Sounds like a good start!

It was the Moslem community who turned in the guys who were going to bomb the CN Tower.

How do you explain the problems with the Ogalala Aquifer? I'd say the title of this thread should not be "Crisis feared as US water supplies dry up", but "Crisis expected as US water supplies dry up". The question is: do we have a government strong enough to drive a bargain that is best for us? Right now, I'm kind of sceptical. So many issues are still on the table between us and the US and the US has consistently driven us to the wall with hardball (in fact unfair) tactics. This is an opportunity to right the wagon, but does the present government have the balls to do it? Let's not forget that it was the Liberals who refused to go to Iraq and it was our current PM who took out an ad in the New York Times advocating the invasion.

The number of falsely convicted people is constantly growing. We have in Canada over a dozen such cases, the latest being in Newfoundland. This case involved a man who was convicted of raping and murdering his 11 year old niece. Modern evidentiary technology has proven the girl died of natural causes. He served over 10 years for that before the Innocence Project proved him innocent. Can you imagine what that 10 years was like given the attitudes of society and prison society in particular towards pedophiles and child killers? The Truscott case is another. The state of Illinois has stopped using the death penalty. Few states still use it, among them, Texas (George Bush, it figures). I have come to believe that the death penalty is favoured by those who look to the justice system to provide expediency rather than truth.

Those waits and lack of accessibility to physicians are why I say put money into health care. Tommy Douglas lead the pack, and now we are hind dog. You know how to spend your money because you have money. I doubt that you understand the financial implications of chronic disease.

You know, there is a song from West Side Story that says why people come to these shores (American and Canadian too). Sondheim and Bernstein said it so well.... I like to be in America! For the most part, people who come here come for the right reasons, and while few may come for the wrong reasons, the number who come here because they believe in the promise of our culture and political system are in the majority. We really should put more faith in our strengths and less in our weaknesses. What happened to Arar was a betrayal of the most fundamental elements of that promise. These people connect us to the world in a way that we could never achieve on our own. Read Sterling Seagrave's "The Lords of the Rim: The Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese" which describes the effect of the Overseas Chinese on our culture, our economy, and our world. We have enjoyed tremendous benefit from every immigration to our country, and we will enjoy still more from those still coming and yet to come.

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss...." From the album "Won't Get Fooled Again"; Who's Next; The Who; MCA Records

On the other hand, health care is so ..... Canadian.

You're right! I forgot to mention that the $700 increase in the basic personal exemption was something that the Liberals had instituted and that the Conservatives cancelled when they came into power! Thanks for reminding me!

Patricia Croft, Chief Economist with Phillips, Hager and North (very good Mutual funds if you can afford them) says that the GST cut is a mistake and that more should have been done on income taxes. I agree. Taxing income is a disincentive to earn, and to save.

The environment is a policy issue. If you have a separate forum for it, then you should have one for a number of other policy issues.

A lot of tax cuts! Short term happiness. What the Conservatives have done, and this is something they always do, is toss the dice with the economy and project that the good times will keep on rolling. The Liberals were more conservative in their projections and always ended up with surpluses which they squirrelled away for a rainy day by paying down the (Mulroney) debt. We'll see if the Conservatives have guessed right. Me, I would have rather seen the money go to better health care.