Moonlight Graham

Says who? Please prove this with any evidence whatsoever. I could write a book that said that through God-given wisdom and faith, God has given me the ultimate power to lead to the earth and control all human governments in order to lead humanity to salvation and all must bow before me and bring me delicious baked goods as I am the voice and will of God. Would you believe it? Why not? I'm appealing to your fool-proof logic of faith & "god-given wisdom" aren't I?

The ON government wants teachers to take a wage freeze given the economic recession, they want to cut their paid sick days from 20 (4 work weeks of paid leave! ie: a month!) to 10 (2 weeks). They want to change how teachers can now bank those sick days and cash them all out when they retire. I think those are reasonable demands by the ON gov. Teachers understandably hate it, but as a taxpayer it's not fair that we still have to pay them to eat off gold-plated dinnerware and bloat the ON budget while most everyone else in ON has to suffer through this recession and make many sacrifices while still paying these whiners. Welcome to reality, teachers of ON. I hope you all are forced to live like the rest of us.

Just watched a Lucas interview. He basically said he's getting close to retirement from the filmmaking business. Also, he's handing the company creative controls off to a friend and longtime creative partner within Lucasfilm so now I'm doubtful of any future home video release of the original trilogy without the recent crappy Lucas CG changes...at least while he's alive. At least he didn't hand the company off to his children where there'd be no chance they'd go against his father's twisted revisioning.

I'm a massive Star Wars nerd. This is shocking, but honestly a relief. It means much needed change, and change by a powerhouse company like Disney. The Star Wars brand has been a sinking ship creatively since George brought out those garbage "special edition" versions of the original trilogy a few years before Episode One came out. Lucas made those horrible prequels, and has continued to tinker with the original films in awful ways (with awful CG) every time a new home video release comes out. The further the Star Wars brand is from Lucas, the better. He's a more of a business man than filmmaker now, twisted and evil. The best things that have come from the brand in the last 25 years have come from other creators/writers, so I'm excited to see where Disney will lead SW. They have Pixar in their pocket so even CG films could be amazing. I've also always dreamed of a SW amusement park where i could explore the millennium falcon and Death Star, drive speeder bikes, say wussup to Jabba the Hutt etc. so I'm sure Star Wars will now be incorporated into the Disney theme parks in a significant way which is exciting. Following huge criticisms of the prequels and home video changes, Lucas has felt for years like he can never please fans. I think he's tired of the Star Wars brand, I don't think he wants much to do with it anymore and wants to move on in his life. He's said he wants to create new kinds of films, like small dramas like "Red Tails". Maybe this will mean one day we'll finally get a restored & unedited dvd/blu-ray release of the original trilogy as they appeared in the theaters without all of Lucas' crappy CG changes.

You are progressing well young Padawan.

This isn't an anti-Christianity thread. It's an anti-bigoted-Christians thread. It's also an anti-child abuse thread.

This is story is from several months ago but I don't remember seeing a thread about it here. This is one of the most vile rants I've ever seen from a "so-called" Christian (a pastor no less!). How did the people in the pews not get up and leave after hearing this? I don't see anything remotely 'Jesus-like' in this man's preaching.

Maybe because many people in the military are violence-obsessed hawks who rarely saw a war they didn't like. Gearing down in Iraq and Afghanistan is bad for business for them. People in the military tend to be conservative-leaning anyways.

I never said Republicans were more aggressive than Democrats. I said neoconservatives were much more hawkish regarding Iraq than the Clinton admin.

I just read the whole Act again. The Iraq Liberation Act was pretty clearly an authorization to support the removal of Saddam and his regime from power via direct or clandestine assistance to Iraqi political opposition groups. The last section (8) made clear: As laid out in Section 4, with this act the US was to provide assistance to opposition groups. The Act doesn't say anything about the US leading this regime change, only that it would support efforts (most specifically those of opposition groups within Iraq) to remove the Saddam regime: My original point was that there would have been a difference between the foreign policy of a Gore vs Bush presidency. The Clinton admin, very likely including Gore, wanted Saddam gone. They were willing to see him removed via supporting Iraqi opposition groups and launching air attacks, and I'm sure other clandestine operations we know nothing about. There wasn't support at the time for 100,000+ troop invasion. Neocons (see: PNAC), of which a prominent many served in Bush's admin, were much more aggressive in supporting regime change and military action in Iraq. Immediately following 9/11 I don't see why a prudent US gov would want to commit 100,000+ troops in invading Iraq (which was a security threat to the US, but had no link to 911) while committing less resources in Afghanistan where a far greater & immediate threat remained. Bush and linked neocons obviously had a massive obsession with removing Saddam that Clinton et al. didn't have. 8 months into power those in the Bush admin got the excuse they needed to legitimate the Iraq invasion they long sought. Neocons also historically showed a disdain for needing UNSC approval of US foreign policy ("American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council" ), a disdain the Clinton admin didn't have, meaning if Gore did want an invasion of Iraq in 2003 he probably wouldn't have done so without UNSC approval unlike Bush. We'll never know, but i think if somehow Gore did want an invasion of Iraq post-911 he (and most any other logical administration not run by neocons) would have waited until after securing Afghanistan/al-Qaeda before dividing such military resources. I just find it hard to believe a Gore admin would also have been so strategically stupid as the Bush admin.

Please post the latest polls here. Thank you!

The Iraq Liberation Act was not a plan of troop invasion. As President of the Senate, VP Gore couldn't vote on legislation unless to break a tie, and he didn't vote on this Act. Big-shot wannabe George Tenet aside, if you look at the interviews/testimony of the CIA employees who were around in the run-up to the war, the consensus have said there was no evidence of ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and 9/11. The "intelligence" drummed up on WMD's was also a load of concocted B.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction The invasion of Iraq was not based on recommendations/intelligence from the CIA or DoD, it came right out of the Bush White House by neocons like Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Perle etc. who had wanted Iraqi regime change via military means for in some cases almost a decade before 9/11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnac#Associations_with_Bush_administration There was no logical reason to invade Iraq in response to 9/11, so why would any other US administration not made of neoconservatives hell-bent on war with Saddam have gone to war with Iraq right after 9/11? Al Gore would almost certainly not have invaded Iraq in 2003.

Welles played Unicron, not Optimus Prime. "You've got the touch!...."

Swing and a miss by Mr. Blowhard Trump

I agree with this. Unfortunately, few young people vote in our elections so their opinions and interests aren't listened to very often by politicians. As we've seen, sometimes this can be overcome by protest movements, which young people/students are more enthusiastic in conducting than any other age group. I also agree with this. I've recently been taking some university courses, and in my experience university student unions are horribly corrupt and in many ways undemocratic organizations that give a bad name to poilitically engaged students. Many of these elected students envision careers as future politicians in Canada, and knowing this, the political future of this country isn't going to get any better. Some of the things these student representatives do is downright scary, some real authoritarian b.s. that would never pass a Charter test Some of these reps i've come across are 4th year political science students, so they should know better, but they don't. It's as if many students have no concept of our Charter of Rights & Freedoms.

What if the government passes a law that is unconstitutional? ie: A law that is unlawful. What is they pass a law saying police can come into anyone's home at any time without a warrant to search for evidence? What if they pass a law barring women and Jews from Parliament? See, laws need to be checked by the SCC, otherwise the government could do whatever it wanted.

Of course you can. How can you get 54% of the seats in the HoC with only 39.6% of the national vote? There's obviously something wrong with the distribution of seats and/or constituency boundaries with such a gap. With our current electoral system you're never going to get a perfectly balanced distribution of seats vs votes because populations of constituencies will always change. But something, whatever it is, should be done to correct this rather significant democratic deficit.

If Gore was elected in 2000 9/11 likely still would have happened, but I don't see much if any reason why Gore would have wanted to invade Iraq. The many neocons in Bush's White House wanted Saddam removed via military action or otherwise since not long after the 1991 Gulf War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism#1990s

Wow that's ridiculous.

That's what people said about Bush and Al Gore.

Well, I guess you could try to do that with his domestic policy, but what about foreign policy? Romney has no record there, we can only rely on his words. But Romney`s words have zero credibility. He is clearly an avid liar, his views are horribly inconsistent. So now we have 3 Romney`s with 3 different views: Governor Romney, GOP candidate Romney, and Presidential candidate Romney. I`m guessing a President Romney would make that a new 4th version of Romney we`d see since he`d have to pander to an entirely different population than he did as Governor. Who the heck knows what Romney would do as president! That's legitimately concerning.

That's the first time i think i've heard a conservative say such a thing to another conservative. Kudos blueblood.

I don't know if telescopes are the answer, or some other technology, but i hope something of the sort could be possible. The moon array scenario is interesting. On a somewhat unrelated note, I want scientists to invent fast-than-light travel so we can send a telescope many light-years away so it can take pictures of the light images of the earth as it appeared in the past...almost like time travel. Imagine being able to take a picture of the earth when the Hiroshima nuke went off and witness that again? Then send those images back to earth via faster-than-light travel.