Higgly

Immigrants almost always vote Liberal.

I was in the Canadian Tire store today and saw that they are now offering leather chairs, settees, what have you, in the Debbie Travis line at ridiculously low prices. Some of you might remember Debbie Travis as the pretty Brit ex-model who made a living for awhile doing renovations on TV that Mike Holmes is now making a fortune out of. I asked a passing saleswoman if the furniture was really leather. At these prices? She said, "Well furniture only has to be 1% leather now to be called leather." I asked her "Who got that law passed?" She answered without missing a beat, "The cows!" I had to tell somebody

OMG! Who let the visible minorities have the vote? What were we thinking? Who screwed up?

Yikes-a-palooza.

Yikes.

Yes but the issue I was posting about was flights from one Canadian destination to another Canadian destination and flying through US airspace. Say YYZ to YYC. If you are flying to NYC, then it is their country and it is their rules. No problem. Did you actually think I was saying there might be an all-Canadian route to get to NYC from To?

This is a part of the province that makes a lot of its living from the natural environment. We have the natural harbour at Tobermory that is perpetually filled with big boats owned by big spenders, we have the cottage crowd, and we have the tree-hugger crowd that goes up to the Bruce Peninsula National Park - one of the most difficult in the country to get a campsite in during the summer - and likes to hike the splendid Niagara Escarpment trails. Plus the rest of the area is filled with farmers who bite their nails over the weather out of professional necessity. Voila, a natural environment for the Greens. I have to wonder whether the Green Party's stance on faith-based schooling (eliminate separate schools) might have hurt them to the extent that the candidate (Jolley) lost votes. I don't think the PC candidate they elected is going to get a lot more done for them, although I could be wrong. I agree that the Greens are a one issue party, but this was their best chance.

Mr. Layton. In the Globe and Mail on Saturday December 16, 2006 (page F3), columnist Doug Saunders wrote a column entitled "Privacy Is Not a Right, but an Indulgence". The basic thesis of Mr. Saunder's column was that there is no right to privacy in law, and that there should not be one. Where do you stand on the issue of privacy? Were your party to come to power, what would you do to reflect that stand and how much do you think that might cost us? <<edited to remove>> Please answer without referring to your opponents. <<what was I thinking?>>

One quarter? Are you sure? To where? Fargo? In any case, anybody who would drive to Buffalo is already lost anyways, right? How much does it cost you to get to Buffalo and park your car? And then get back after the return leg? And then there is the time it takes, what with the border and all. I've looked at all this, and I am still flying out of Pearson because the economics just don't work otherwise. And besides, american airlines have terrible on-time records.

You're joking right? Most of them came here on the tail of the Second World War and were penniless. You want to know what Italy was like after the Second World War? Watch Di Sica's "The Bicycle Thieves". You'll cry. These people were economic refugees, but we needed them and their skills to build post-war Canada, just like we need the people who are coming now. The most important thing about the Italian immigrants was not that they were Christians (althoughin those days that probably counted for more than it should), but that they knew how to lay bricks!

They do not have to compete with airlines from outside Canada on Canadian routes. This is what cabotage is all about. Do you honestly think an airline would go broke offering flights (even at a slighty higher cost) that took Canadian routes in order to protect your privacy? Advertising can sell anything and I'll bet there are a lot of advertising agencies that would just lick their lips at the thought of selling this concept to Canadians. Hell, they could probably even get Rick Mercer to be the hapless Canuck passenger. The guy would just eat it up. Even if they just offered it on the eastern Canada <-> western Canada routes, the brownie points would be a big win with Canadian consumers.

Nice coup Greg!

Yes you are right. Didn't work too well for them either. I thought it was rather un-NDP-ish

Thank you for your quick response, Greg! If you can't change the signature editor to remove the markup clicks, then would it be possible to put this in a sticky somewhere?

I was happy to see the failure of a campaign that relied heavily on attack ads and attack tactics. Why can't tese guys just put their agenda on the table? I hate attack ads and so do a lot of other people. I mean it's fine to say McGuinty broke his promise, but enough of the broken record!

Put pressure on Canadian airlines to fly Canadian only routes. This is just another data snooping adventure by the ever paranoid bum-sniffers in the CIA. Sure 9/11 was terrible but on the world scale, and certainly on a scale of the things that the US has done in some of its international frolics, it does not deserve this degree of obsession. You can be damned sure that record of your little jaunt will never go away and will be linked to every other blessed thing you have ever done anywhere near the almighty presence of the big head. I agree. Let them pound sand. Take your business to the first airline that offers to fly Canada-only routes. Hell, the scenery over northern Ontario can be damned pretty this time of year.

I noticed that the editor for adding and modifying signature provides HTML markup functions like bolding and italicizing, but the signature is displayed showing the markup tag and does not show the markup style. For example, my current signature is "It's not us or them, it's us [ i ]and[ /i ] them" (spaces added to make the markup show). However the signature shows the tags in square brackets rather than the style - "It's us and them". Am I missing something?

This might rankle, but it one of the reasons I was so against faith-based schools. Put them all in the same classroom flirting with ech other and things start to change fast

That is a great idea. Why not start one here? I wsa troubled by the MMP poll because it just seemed to come out of nowhere. There didn't seem to be a lot of public debate. You just woke up one morning and there it was on the ballot. Too much too fast.

I will answer the question with a question. Why are you so focussed on Moslems? You want to see somebody setting themselves apart? Go up to Markham. You will find entire shopping malls - and I am talking BIG shopping malls - where all the signs are in Chinese and everybody is speaking Chinese. Head down to Little India. You will find entire sections of the City (Dundas Street East, for example) where all the shops have signs in Hindi, Bengali, what have you. It's easier to buy a Sari there than a dress. Next we take you to Little Korea (Bloor Street West). Signs in Korean are everywhere. I grew up in a city where there was a very large Italian population. It was very common to find people who could not speak a word of English. They lived and worked entirely in the Italian community. You would go up to a bricklayer and ask him a question and he would just point to his boss indicating "go talk to him, because I haven't a clue what you're saying". That has slowly changed because sooner or later, they all blend in. One of the most common worries of new immigrants to Canada is when their children start to discard the traditional ways and start doing radical things - like going out on unescorted dates . Sooner or later, they all meld in, it just takes time and in Canada it is generally recognized that it is better to be patient and tolerant because you cannot force these things. This is just the way it is in Canada.

So you disagree but you agree that Lebanon could do nothing to stop it? A pretty circular argument. Yes there were raids by Palestinians into Israel - in a period of some 10 years, those raids killed 105 Israelis. Israel's response (Ariel Sharon, Defence Minister) was to invade Lebanon and kill well over 10,000 people. This thing can go around in circles forever so I am going to get to the heart of the matter and respond to the implied question here, which is a popular theme with pro-Israeli voices: why Israel, why don't you leave us alone and go get upset about Tibet? Here is my answer... First of all, nobody is going to blow up the world over Tibet. While there are nuclear-armed countries which could conceivably come to Tibet's rescue, nobody has shown any inclination in that regard. A very large Tibetan refugee population has found a home in India, including the Dalai Lama, but India has shown little interest in getting involved. Russia and Pakistan are similarly disinterested. The US could never do anything except perhaps launsh a publicity and diplomacy campaign. The sad truth about Tibet is that there is little that can be done other than the standard tools - a boycott of the Chinese Olympics or Walmart, for instance. Fat chance that will happen. Tibet is a very tragic and very good cause, and it is one just about everybody in the west agrees on: debate in these fora would probably consist largely of everybody patting each other on the back and saying "ain't it a pity?". If you have any ideas, go ahead and post them, I don't have anything new to say. Sadly, the same is true of Burma. I have been posting about Burma because it is happening right now an that is what this forum is about IMHO - current political issues. Yes there is historical debate here but generally as it relates to what is happening right now. Anybody wants to debate Stalingrad or Napoleon would more than likely be somewhere else. And so we come to Israel. This is a conflict which has been on the front page of our news media for 50 years. Nearly every day. Day in and day out. The Middle East. Can you recall a period of time when it wasn't on the front pages? It is constant. Like it or not, this is going to produce controversy and controversy means debate. Secondly we have the situation itself. We have a group of people - the Jews - who have been persecuted and murdered throughout the centuries, and here we have them conducting what is essentially an ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine to replace the resident population of Arabs with an imported population of Jews, and playing fast and loose with international law to do so. Whether you like that description or not, that is exactly what is happening. There is something about this that makes me ask how a people like the Jews could do something like this to somebody else. Thirdly, we have the deadly mix of nuclear weapons in a region that is by definition very unstable and run by leaders who are, quite frankly, a little crazy. Yes Ahmedinejad is crazy, but guys like Sharon are no better. One only has to look at Sharon's complete military record to come to the conclusion that the guy was a sociopath. There are too many guys like this in the Middle East, and they all want nuclear weapons. The main reason they want them is because Israel has them and the idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of a guy like Sharon or Netenyahu or Ahmedinijad or Assad is the stuff nightmares are made of. Fourthly, there is the massive PR campaign conducted in the west by the US and by the Jewish population. You can call me an anti-semite for bringing this up, but when people like Christian Ammanpour document it on national television, then maybe it's time to think again. Many have commented here about the number of posts I put up that could be considered friendly to the Arab side or hostile to Israel. If you were keeping track you might have noticed that a lot of them were responses to posts by pro-Israel members who, quite frankly, tend to play 'spin the facts' with history and geography, which in itself is worth debate. You might have noticed that I always quote well-reviewed and widely published works by accredited historians and journalists - many of them Israeli Jews. There is more than one side to this story. Finally. I don't care if you call me names, and I am willing to be convinced by arguments better than mine. But at the end of the day, democracy is about free speech, and that is more important than any issue we can discuss here, so don't expect me to shut up.

First you talk violence and now you talk politics. Baby steps, my eye. You are faulting Lebanon for not being able to defend itself? Well maybe if they didn't have to deal with a massive refugee crisis - hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooding across the border after having been expelled by Ben Gurion and Irgun. Lebanon did little after the 1948 war to provoke Israel, and in fact went out of its way to accommodate her. When Israel complained that Palestinian refugees were sneaking into Israel from their camps along the border, Lebanon helpfully moved the camps to Beirut. Anything that has happened with respect to Lebanon since the late 1980s has been from Hezbollah and it was Israel's behaviour during the first invasion of Lebanon that gave birth the Hezbollah. Many of the Arabs say, and rightly so, that Israel has consistently stalled discussions on all fronts in order to give itself time to grab land. It is not only the Arabs who claim this - a number of historians say the same thing, as do knowledgable observers like Jimmy Carter.

I guess they learned the Talisman lesson

Islamophobia much?

Oh I don't know. When McGuinty delivered the budget, he honestly told Ontarians that he had balanced the budget. Tory on the other hand was not so honest when he promised funding for faith-based schools, was he? I'm listening to Tory's speech right now and the guy is talking about accountability I think that accountability will come for John Tory in a way he wasn't counting on. Me, I'm looking forward to that February holiday