ScottSA

Just out of curiosity, is this code for "international Jewry"? I'm just wondering because your thesis is pretty much lifted verbatim from the "Elders of Zion", with the names changed to say "bankers" instead of "Jews". Just so you know, this is not new theory...the stuff you're spouting. It pops up every few decades with a new coat of paint and struts around like a brand new revelation, impressing the less educated among us. The 30s was the last time we saw it, although in those days no one much worried about being accused of anti-semitism, so "international bankers" and "Jews" were used pretty much interchangeably, first by American demagogues like Father Coughlin and Huey Long, and a bit later by Mr. Hitler, who dropped the "international Bankers" altogether and focussed on the Jews. Maybe you're not aware of that, or maybe you are...

They definitely were in World War One. This lead to the Royal Family exchanging all their German titles and house names for English-sounding versions. Pesky things those facts. And in WW II there was a great deal of talk about the abdication of Edward being forced by Baldwin because Edward was sympathetic to the Nazis. Certainly the memoirs of Goring and Ribbentrop mention the fact that they felt a real setback because of it.

The U.S. system is not ideal for the uninsured. It also has the fastest rising costs for healthcare in the industrialized world. I don't know that the Euroeans are going bankrupt. And if the promise was unrealistic, why did they make it one of their top five priorities? Election promises are things that can only be made with the assumption of a majority government. Whe a candidate says "i'm going to do X", it is assumed that s/he is making the promise under the assumption that s/he will lead a majority government and be able to do X. It's not fair to hold a government to a promise that will require a majority vote that will clearly not be forthcoming.

Well, most people think it matters.

With respect, this is a non-issue. Reducing the universal to the particular and then extrapolating to the universal again doesn't work. I'm sure lots of British folks had German friends too. Oh well. Ummm...yeah. That goes without saying. Precisely the reason the appeasement folks didn't want war, because war stirs up hornets nests. War also addresses the issue in the most immediate terms, and following a major attack on the US mainland the desire for that address will be overwhelming. Lets remember what my argumnent is here. I'm not all for immediately tossing thermonukes at every head that sticks up in the middle east, or suggesting that we should. What I'm saying is that if, and I tend to think the question is when, some faction of Jihadists manage to take a massive number of lives, we WILL begin to take this seriously. Total war never comes from a standing start...it is always led up to...death by death and battle by battle. We've been at this for the better part of a decade now, and people are starting to get tired of it.

I love this one. It not only leaves out the fact that this government happens to have more money than any government in history, but invokes "inflation" in what is, if anything, a deflationary period. Not that government spending could ever have the slightest effect on inflation anyway...what a hoot! Turner must be an absolute moron if he thinks this kind of circus act is gonna get anyone's attention.

They spend far more than we do. So should we throw money at it? Nope, we should streamline and get people out of the ER's and back into a reg Docs office . And not enough Dr's?, then we should open up the Colleges and streamline Dr's into working instead of driving cabs.There are options The wait times have come down. MRI's can be done any time of the day or night, but lots of people dont want an appt at midnite. We do need more MRI machines. But plenty of the healthcare crisis is manufactured. The ones that cry the loudest are the same people who complain about everything. They think they are sick and want to feel better right NOW . They are the same people who go into an ER with a stomach ache or flu, and bitch and moan that they have not been looked at in four hours, meanwhile the hospital is dealing with more urgent matters. If they understood triage, they might shut up. But I doubt it. Like I said, I'm not an expert. My experience with the healthcare system is the fact that my wife is a nurse and my previous experience in the world of Canadian politics...and that experience didn't have a lot to do with medicare. What I do know is that this system is not workable and that the American system works, silly guffahs from the peanut gallery notwithstanding. I don't know much about the European healthcare system either, except that most of Europe is on the edge of bancrupcy vis a vis public expenditure, so it's probably not that great either. But to return to the original point, the Cons can't really just make a law banning wait times. That's an unrealistic expectation.

They're not. They is no legislation. No one can just go around making laws in the face of opposing reality. In order to eliminate wait times, the government has to actually DO something. Making a law doesn't cut it. The something they'll have to do is start privatizing portions of the system so that it becomes more productive. I'm no expert on medicare, but I have certainly talked to experts and not one of them...not one...thinks the current system can be tweaked to work. It has to be scrapped and rebuilt in some form that is sustainable while the pig trots through the python.

Well, American style healthcare actually works. That's the funny thing about it. And there are no lineups, and everyone gets the medical care they need. It used to be a rite of political passage in Canada to pay lip service to the inefficient, wasteful and unworkable system we have in Canada, and pat ourselves on the back because everyone suffers equally here, but I'm not sure that's going to fly anymore, as the babyboomers begin to find out exactly what waiting 6 months for an MRI or CT scan really means when it's YOUR lump you want to have looked at.

there are none so blind as those who will not see and none so dumb as those who will not think

Ah, so now Bush is Stalin AND Hitler? Cool. Or is it Stalin is Hitler and Bush a collaborator with both? Actually, both Churchill and Roosevelt not only collaborated with, but became allied with Stalin too, so they must be Nazi collaborators too...right? No...wait...Bush...Stalin...I'm getting confused...

Of course they'll blame Israel. Christ, they blame Israel for 911...why would they stop at Iraq? Oh, and myata? When the US starts intentionally killing children as a matter of policy, it'll come close to the tactics used by these savages. When the US starts strapping explosives on its own 10 year olds and sending them against the enemy, we will have descended into the same level of barbary. Until that happens, your moral equivalency is nothing more than laughable putridity.

Blair is using Thatcherspeak war talk. He went to some pains to say, twice in the same speech, that Iran ought "not underestimate the seriousness with which we take this". That's politicaleze for "we're going to blow up something if you don't let them go".

But wouldn't that make Chamberlain collaborative as well? And what about Stalin? Surely the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent partition of Poland makes him a Nazi symp as well? And every other company (and there were lots) who did business with pre-war Germany, including most of Roosevelt's administration and a good number of Congressmen were heavily involved with Hitler's germany before the war. That's what happens in a global economy. This is a stunningly non-issue issue.

And the fact is that they WOULD be achievable...or at least might be implimentable...if the Cons had a majority. When it all shakes out in the end, the only way to reduce wait times is to embrace some form of the dreaded "two-tier American-style" system. Otherwise medicare will simply consume the entire budget and then begin to mount into debt. The current system is completely unworkable. But that's not on with the NDP and Liberals yowling in opposition, without bringing down the government and going no-where, so the Cons HAVE to have a majority in order to be able to work toward achieving that promise. You can call it a broken promise if you want, but it's not. If they go through an entire majority term without achieving it or tryiong to achieve it, THEN it's a broken promise. The Libs went through lot's of majority governments, kept almost no promises, and raped the treasury in the bargain.

They have for a large portion of the past 100 years. That's why people tend to think more highly of us, and that's why we have a higher quality of life. That's also the reason why we are so well liked in the world. Primarily because we aren't a nation of war mongers. I'm a canadian. We actually are a nation of warmongers and we're quite good at it too. It's just that we've developed a rather soft paunch with a tad too much much affluence of late, and we've bred a generation of fools who think peace and affluence is the default condition in social society, rather than something that has to be built and defended.

I hear Hitler started Volkswagen. Burn a dealership today!

Yeah, but would you ever really expect a minority government to fix that particular decades-long moneypit in a little over a year? I wouldn't say they "broke a promise" just because it's not a shiny new flawlessly humming engine at the moment, would you?

We don't need "hard power", as far as I'm concerned. With every post of yours I see, I become more thankful that your concerns don't run the country.

Not really, if it wasn't for World War 1 and the Treaty of Versailles, World War 2 probably would never have happened. You can't argue against it simply because you have very simplistic views of the world. I'll reply this once and hope to curb the urge to kick you in the future, speaking of simplistic thinking... Blaming WW I for WW II is about as loosely historical as saying that if it wasn't for the discovery of fire, napalm would never have been weaponized. Versailles IS, however, an apology used by the British appeasement faction prior to the war...they were willfully blind to Hitler's aims, well outlined as early as the 20s in mein kamph. Unable to change Hitler, they looked instead to themselves and Versailles for the culprit. But Hitler was quite explicit and public about his cynical use of Versailles (in fact, one could almost paraphrase bin Laden's 'yesteryear Caliphate' speech and Hitler's 'downtrodden Germania' diatribes and they'd be identical, but that's another story). In fact, after germany had become sufficiently strong relative to the empire and france, he dropped mention of it entirely and switched to Leibenstrau for the German volk as justification of expansionism. Versailles was nothing more than a grasp at self flagellating straws for people in the west who desperately wanted peace at any cost. Sort of like the pacifistic insistence on various bugbears like "imperialism, poverty, ignorance" yada yada...to place the blame for Sunni Islam on the west. Anyway, enough of this. Go yammer at another thread.

I don't think it is a strawman. You seemed to have a pretty good idea of who war needed to be waged on. I'm curious to know. Well, let me start with a couple clarifications then. Islam is the larger enemy, in the same sense that fascism was the larger enemy in the last total war. It's a 'grand philosophy' which, if left alone to fester, will keep popping up wherever it can. To parse that out a bit, Wahabbism itself is the enemy, but to attempt to fight Wahabbism to the exclusion of Islam is like fighting Nazism to the exclusion of Germany or Shintoism to the exclusion of Japan. It's a nice thought but unworkable. Second, Iraq really started out having nothing much to do with Islam; it was in part a last attempt by the US and Britain to revive the moribund circus that the UN has become. It's in vogue now to howl about WMD and oil in retrospect, but an honest recollection of events prior to the war brings 16 UNSC resolutions into focus, along with the fact that a de jure and de facto state of war had existed between the UN and Iraq since the first breaking of the ceasefire resolution in the mid-90s. France, as it did before with the League of Nations, pretty much reduced the UN to the state it is in now: a largely irrelevant talkshop. Not many people see that yet, but it's very unlikely that the UN will do more than continue its drift into irrelevancy at this point. Obviously Iraq is also of strategic interest to the west, and obviously oil, as the lifeblood of the west, played a part too, but neither oil nor the existence of WMD per se were much involved in the trigger mechanism, and to the extent that they were, didn't fall into the legal framework of the case for war. At this point, due to the interference of both Iran and Syria, Iraq has become a focal point for Islamic factionalism, and while that may be a bad thing for Iraqis, it can only be a good thing for the west. The aim of invading Iraq was never to make the population into happy smiling democrats; it was to depose Saddam...anything after that was icing on the cake. Besides, until the recent cynical Democratic Congressional mess in deadlining the withdrawal, the US and Iraqi government were actually starting to win in the democratization of Iraq. Now it's anyone's guess, although a lesson CAN be drawn from Iraq as regards war-weary populations: Because of and not in spite of the ongoing violence, the bulk of the Iraqi population (even in the Sunni Triangle) is supporting the religious factions less and less. It's not that they are becoming enamoured of the central government or the US occupation, but they are turning away from the alleged "insurgents". Sadr didn't leave because of the surge; he left because one of his countrymen was going to kill him sooner or later. Third, Afghanistan was a seat of radical Sunni Islam, and it was a powerbase of radical Wahabbism. Now it's not. That's good, but unfortunately the sidelining countries, including Pakistan, continue supporting the Taliban and offering it sanctuary. That's not total war by the Nato allies (who also happen to be a UN force, a fact much forgotten by the pacifist left), that's limited war and it's a recipe for bleeding the west white, like the existence of the USSR and North Vietnam did to the US. Total war against radical Sunni Islam would be to stamp it out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, AND, more immediately, in the west, where it is spreading faster than in Asia. We are simply not at that stage yet, and won't be until some enterprising faction succeeds in killing a lot of westerners. Hope that helps define my argument.

Not at all. jdobbin is arguing just fine...it's just that he got careless in his last post. You're a blithering idiot with at best a bare academic grounding and vigorously flapping lips. It's you I don't have the time of day for.

Apparently the Anti-Defamation League doesn't think so. Most people don't read extremist publication's on a regular basis so you're going to have to enlighten us beyond the "polynewbie" style allegations. Historical facts are not allegations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Brothers_Harriman Absolutely true. It's also true that Roosevelt and most of his administration, along with the rest of the world's leaders had all sorts of dealings with Hitler before the war. Duh. The war wasn't on yet, so why shouldn't they? We may go to war with China someday, but does that mean we ought to stop talking to it now?

I can only marvel at the ahistorical stupidity of this blatantly ignorant and blase' tripe. Is there an icon for laughter around here somewhere?

You're attempting to make a strawman here, so either you didn't read my post or you didn't understand it. Develop your argument to address mine and not some gross overstatement, and we can take it up again.