Moonlight Graham

oh yeah forgot about the cancer thing. well i wish him the best

I concur. Put Layton or most any modern politician on a "Favorite 1000 Canadians" list and you'd see most of them far down on the list. If Layton was popular at all among a majority of Canadians he would have been in Vancouver. A lot of Canada's favorite Canadians were at the opening and closing ceremonies. If Jack or Ignatieff or even the PM got in front of a mic to speak you would have heard some boos. i just can't believe some people don't realize that smilin' Jack was there for his photo op. It wasn't a coincidence. The media didn't follow him into the bar. "Hey look at me Canada i'm Jack Layton and i'm at a bar havin' a beer with my blue-collar joe canadian buddies watchin' the ol' hockey game and supporting the boys for the gold. I'm awesome vote for me!"

actually i think what kimmy does is quite healthy. Its not violence if the thing getting hurt is a punching bag. That said, i wouldn't say its the 100% most ideal way to express anger. But it works and it harms nobody. If i had kids watching i wouldn't do it. Maybe i'd go off on my own and yell into a pillow or something.

Don't you mean he's the 2nd least-hated federal leader? Also, i'm not a conservative.

C'mon man you've got to be kidding me.

Exactly. And to make things fair, Harper was also at the game at least partly for political reasons. He got face time, and with the Great One no less. But i'd argue that its partly expected for him, as PM, to be there. There might have been minor criticism on him if he didn't show up to such an important/historical Canadian event.

No. The difference is WHY a person at that bar would want to get on TV? An ordinary joe trying to get on national TV is doing it obviously because its exciting and fun, something to laugh and boast about with your friends/family, and maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Jack was simply doing it to score cheap political points & to make himself look good to the electorate. And it makes him look as phony as a 3-dollar bill.

Regarding the IPCC, this was all over the news last week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/26/ipcc-independent-scientific-review

This obviously wasn't assault, but Layton is still an arse. Him finding a place to get his mug on TV during the games and scoping out a prime spot in the front row just so he could get maximum airtime just shows how fake this dork is. Layton was trying to look like Mr. Patriotic Everyman Canadian but he just comes off as a phony attention-seeking arse. What a loser. i actually found it amusing watching him during the games and seeing how badly he was trying to get on TV.

Agreed 100%.

Exactly. Trudeau acknowledges that the U.S. can be as friendly as possible, yet every move it makes still affects Canada in a significant way.

good one i like that.

i agree with you 100% on both issues.

I never heard this quote before until today: I love this, it's so true (except the "beast" part, he probably could have found a better word lol)

Very true. Which is kind of sad, but i suppose is just the natural way things are because the US is such a huge influence on Canadians in so many aspects.

The problem with saying "God's in charge" is that i don't know of anybody who isn't insane who has direct communications with God where God can tell them what do to. People can guess, or try to interpret the Bible and take a stab at what he may want in certain situations, but Bible interpretations are very subjective and disputed. But not as much with the New Testament, so maybe that guy should have said "Jesus is in charge!". Or maybe Glen beck can talk with God or something & tell the POTUS what to do, who knows.

Waldo, you are obviously a believer in AGW. Currently i'm undecided on the whole debate as i'm currently educating myself on the issue. The biggest thing for me about whether AGW is real or not is whether there is a clear correlation between CO2 gases in the atmosphere and global temperature. Do you (or anyone on these boards) know of any web links (with graphs etc.) showing clear correlation between the amount of CO2 gases in the atmosphere and global temperature over the last few thousand years, or at least the last thousand years? I would sincerely appreciate it.

The U.S. has a geographical advantage to Canada as well. It's damn cold here, and only 10% of Canadians live beyond 100 miles north of the Canada/U.S. border. And i'm still freezing my ass off. I'm sure this was a major factor in Canada's rather lacking population and economic growth over the past several hundred years compared to the U.S.

Seen it already. It's pretty good.

Ok, i see where you're coming from now. Yes regime change was law. But the military aspect of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is strange to me. Wiki says "The Act specifically refused to grant the President authority to use U.S. Military force to achieve its stated goals and purposes, except as authorized under the Act in section 4(a)(2)) in carrying out this Act." That section says: "(A) The President is authorized to direct the drawdown of defense articles from the stocks of the Department of Defense, defense services of the Department of Defense, and military education and training for such organizations." What the heck does that mean? Obviously the act allowed Clinton to execute Desert Fox, but why? That section isn't written in very clear language (at least to me). Inevitable? Hardly. Would Gore have invaded Iraq? Doubtful. His cabinet/staff wouldn't have been filled with neocons like Cheney and Wolfowitz who were already bent on the strategy of preemption. The invasion was only able to be waged because of 9/11. The info Congress had at its access to understand the issue was not much different than you or I had at the time. The only major difference i see is the NIE presented to Congress, which most of them never read anyways. Most of Congress' understanding came from the Bush admin, and sure i'll include Clinton as well (not saying that admin is any clan of saints either). The National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's WMD's that was presented to Congress in Oct. 2002 was a piece of crap. Several former CIA members have spoken candidly about how flawed a document it was, and how they were pressured by Cheney and the Bush admin to include certain info etc. in the NIE in order to increase the perceived threat of WMD's in Iraq: PBS Frontline The above is actually a pretty amazing piece of journalism in a great series on the war by PBS, and should be required viewing by all. Different debate, but much of what led to America's current position as lone superpower also has to do with geography. If the U.S. were located in Europe during WWII, it may have lost much of its power as Britain and France etc. did after getting pummeled. But whatever.

I don't think you get what i'm saying. This isn't about "anti-war". Wars are sometimes necessary. Here's some trivia that might surprise you: Back in 2003, i was for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, since i live in Ottawa, i almost went down to Parliament Hill in early 2009 to join protests for Canada to join the "coalition" too (however, I very likely wouldn't have supported the war if the situation had occurred today just given that my views/knowledge have grown since then). But i supported the war back then based on what the Bush admin were saying, the key factor for me being that Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" (which we now know was based on a very unreliable intelligence source), and Rice etc. were saying that Iraq had the capability to have a nuke within 18 months. The nukes were a significant factor for me. Now, had i known that all of this was a pile of B.S., i wouldn't have supported the war. So this isn't about pro vs anti-war. as i said, sometimes wars are unfortunately unavoidable. It's about the people in government being accountable if they are feeding the public bogus intel in order to sell a war. Congress was given an NIE full of crap (which most of them never actually read) to base their decision to give Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq. What that admin did completely undermines democracy, since it is the people (through their Congress reps) who decide when to go to war. How are they supposed to make an informed decision when the information they are receiving is knowingly wrong? And what if they want war based on information that is fed to them by their gov't that is known by the gov't to be false, wishful, concocted bullpoop? I'm well aware that the push for that war went beyond Dubbya. Rummy, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Tenet etc., all responsible.

Check the UNDP's 2009 Human Development Index rankings: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ Canada is 4th, Scandinavian countries are all over the top of the list, along with east europe, Japan, and Australia also, among others.

The question should be, why shouldn't i care? I'm not a fan when the executives and people at the top of the world's only military superpower make false, deceitful, and concocted statements in the media, to its legislature, and to the world in an effort to start a war. Especially when it results in 100,000+ civilian lives dead. This isn't an ideological issue, or a partisan issue, it's an issue of right and wrong. The actions of the Bush admin , and Congress's unwillingness to call anyone on it after the fact, is one of the greatest disgraces in American history. Americans should be busting the doors down in Washington over this B.S. The fact that they aren't just shows how effective Bush's propaganda campaign was, and how ignorant people in all of western society are, since i'm quite sure a large portion of the U.S. public is still believes Saddam had links with al-Qaeda/Bin Laden. So let me ask you, why do you not care?

I just stumbled across this. Rep. Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, introduced a bill in Jan. 2009 called the "Executive Accountability Act of 2009". Here's the bill: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h743ih.txt.pdf The official summary of the bill is as follows: Sounds great to me! Maybe the B.S. that was the run-up to Iraq would never have happened if this bill was law, or at least some lowlifes would be in jail. From all i can find, this bill is currently still under judicial committee review, where it will likely die unless my American friends call your Congressmen!

To their defense, we are an officially bilingual country, so however amount of english was in the opening ceremonies should have been roughly matched in french. Don't hate the playa', hate the game. BIATCH!!!!!!