Wild Bill

Well Oleg, at least some young Afghani girls got to go to school, for the first time in their lives! Perhaps it doesn't matter to you but many others of us think differently.

Man, it's just too early to nitpick polls! The public hasn't had time to wake up yet! Once again, most Canadians are NOT political junkies! Or poll junkies either, for that matter. Right now they are still in 'summer mode'. They're thinking about the kids finally going back to school, not who they will vote for in the next election. The writ hasn't even been dropped yet! In two words: nobody cares! Give it a week or so before the polls even start to show any meaningful change. Right now we're within the same margin of error with results essentially the same as we've had all summer. Once school starts again and people return to their normal routine they will start to pay attention and think about it. Ignatieff is well aware of these factors. Why do you think he made his intentions known now? He gets a free test of the waters. If after a couple of weeks he sees support shift in his favour he will proceed on course. If things go against him he will find some excuse to backpedal, knowing that nobody really cared anyway so no harm done. Just because some of us desperately want a change is no reason to think that our opinion is in anyway shared by significant numbers of fellow Canadians.

http://www.geocities.com/famous_bosniaks/e...las_ribich.html "Nicholas Ribich, a Canadian and former resident of Edmonton, Alberta, was arrested on February 20, 1999 in Mainz, Germany and then charged as part of the Bosnian-Serb army that captured United Nations peacekeepers and used them as human shields against NATO air strikes in 1995. Ribich, of Serbian ancestry, left his home in Canada to travel to Bosnia-Herzogovina where he joined the Bosnian-Serb army at the height of the war. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Ribich "His trial began in October 2002,[2] However, the trial unraveled three months later when judge Douglas Cunningham declared a mistrial after only nine days of testimony."

Am I the only one who keeps thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne? Or the old joke: "If Ted Kennedy had been driving a Volkswagen at Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne would be alive today!" No matter what, Bryant has inherited Kennedy's albatross...

My wife works for the City Health Dept. All city employees HAVE to get a flu shot! It's that or lose their job. So we go as a family and all get hit up at once. This has been going on for a few years now. During that time I have never once gotten the flu. Before that, I always had one bout for a week or two every winter. So I don't have a problem with it. Being a techie, I never really thought I would. I have some understanding of how the vaccine works and it makes sense. The only drawback is that it's a crapshoot if the medicos pick the right strains of flu for their shots. They might miss the one that actually comes along that winter, six months after they started making the vaccine. Still, that's just my own personal experience. My family as well, I guess. As for the other claims of negative things happening, I don't see enough evidence to say one way or another. One person's experience of a one time event doesn't prove anything. As any techie would say, you can't plot a curve with only one data point. It could easily be just coincidence. Others can do what they want. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm not accepting that they're right, either. Me, I'm gonna keep getting the shots!

Mars wants our women! Mars ALWAYS wants our women! This has been a staple of scifi since the 1920's. Even when the monster is anatomically incapable of doing anything with them. It's just Hollywood.

It's beginning to look as if the most likely scenario as to what happened was "Ranting and raving cyclist has issue with car driver, hangs on mirror making threats. Driver is afraid for his own safety, if not life. So driver tries to shake cyclist away from his car. Cyclist finally does, but falls off his bike and dies of injuries." So it will sound like a variation of a self-defence situation. The irony if such a plea is successful is that an ordinary citizen likely wouldn't! There will be talk that Bryant over-reacted. It will be pointed out that a car is much larger and more dangerous than a bicycle. Some will claim that Bryant should simply have stopped and waited for police, meanwhile using only "proportionate force" to defend himself. My point is that these situations are immediate. There is little or no time to do much else, or to even think of something! There is only time to act by instinct. Yet often the law seems to be dictated by "armchair quarterbacks" with little or no grasp of the reality of the situation. Some years ago a talk radio show was discussing a case where a policeman had shot a youth in a dark alley. The youth had apparently jumped out at him suddenly with a fake gun in his hand. Many were upset that the cop had shot a minor and felt he reacted excessively. There were all sorts of callers with alternative suggestions for how the cop should have acted. None of them seemed practical to me. One even offered that the cop should have shot the gun from the minor's hand! Yeah, in a dark alley with a sudden appearance from nowhere, apparently armed with a gun, the cop is supposed to be a circus trick shooter. Bryant was Attorney General. I find it ironic that he is now experiencing first hand what many ordinary citizens have experienced. He may have had to re-think some of the opinions about law that he held before this happened to him. It might have been more positive if this had happened to the PRESENT Attorney General, in order to give HIM some real-world perspective!

This might be worth a thread of its own. Why is the Ontario Liberal support so confined to cities? What is it about the party that makes it so unappealing to voters outside 416 land? It IS mostly Toronto, at least for now! Hamilton used to send Liberals from almost all of its ridings but not anymore. It's become NDP turf, with a couple of CPC exceptions. So it's not just a city/rural thing. Except for a few seats it seems to be a Toronto/anywhere else thing. So much for the 'big tent' approach! It's become similar to the NDP support of unions and those on government assistance. Despite the CCF origins few Ontario rural folks ever vote NDP. Just curious.

Within the same article is this little nugget, MM! "When asked why they viewed a minority as favourable, 54.8% of respondents said: "It's good because it forces parties to co-operate." But when asked if minority governments actually do co-operate, Mr. Nanos replied simply. "No," he said, laughing." Things are still in flux, I would say.

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned a meme that has been slowly building, at least according to the media. It's about Canadians slowly becoming disenchanted with a minority government! When one goes on too long it starts to appear as if you can't make any significant changes without a majority, since the opposition parties will simply block you. According to some pundits this meme is out there, small but growing. How big it may become by election day is still not clear.

This just in: http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/abc/home/cont...election_090901 " 01/09/2009 1:29:14 PM CTV.ca News Staff Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says he will no longer support Stephen Harper's minority government. Sources have told CTV News that the Liberals will put forward a non-confidence motion to defeat the Tories and force an election this fall. In a speech Tuesday to the Liberal caucus, which is on retreat in Sudbury, Ont. this week, Ignatieff said his party "can do better" at managing the economic crisis, protecting Canadians abroad and making the country competitive in the 21st century. " Summer's over, I guess!

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Yeah, that was simply, totally and utterly unbelievable! I could understand someone choosing to reject Canada to go and fight for their original country. Obviously, they never truly accepted being Canadian in the first place. What I can't respect is how after fighting against Canadian soldiers they could have the nerve to return, in order to take advantage of any Canadian benefits. What is even more unbelievable is that we ALLOWED them to return! Am I the only one who finds it passing strange that these "returnees" don't seem to have been given much press?

Perhaps part of the problem is that the definition of multiculturalism seemed to change AFTER it was enacted as a government policy! No one really understood it when it first started happening but the assumption was that you would have respect for each other's heritage. Most people I knew thought it meant a Chinese dragon in a New Year's parade amongst the bagpipe bands. The idea was that we should all be proud of from where our ancestors came! Somehow, after things got rolling they changed. The idea of being Canadian first TODAY and celebrating your original heritage as a fond memory was morphed into some "mosaic" concept where you could always feel allegiance to your home country first and being Canadian a distant second, if at all. A mosaic needs glue along the edges of each piece or it will fall apart. Being Canadian first was supposed to be that glue. It was an immediate hit for getting votes, however! Cheques for "heritage centres" became easy to get, as long as your MP could get a photo op out of it. Criticizing multiculturalism became impossible. If you dared to raise a question you were immediately classed as being bigoted against other cultures. It was like a line from the old Firesign Theater hippy comedies, where when a politician robot was asked "Mr. President, where can I find a job?" and the answer was "Rest assured, in the future we won't have to answer questions like yours anymore!" Things went so far that for a while there census forms would ask your heritage with NO option of "Canadian"! For those of us who's ancestors may have come here in the late 1600's this seemed odd, if not outright wrong! There were incidents reported in the paper where StatsCan actually wanted to start laying charges against people for refusing to fill in this question correctly, having become upset at the number of people who had penciled in "Canadian" overtop of the other answers. This was the mid to late 80's, for those too young to remember. At least now we seem to slowly be able to start debate again on this issue. Still, I'm waiting for the first post to raise the "anti- other cultures" canard...

Of course! And Mulroney did nothing wrong in the Schrieber affair! In the words of the immortal Slip Mahoney, leader of the Bowery Boys: "Indubiously!"

And as I have said many times, it is not enough to knock the other choice without giving reason as to why your own choice is better! Without being presented with a BETTER alternative simple games theory would say it makes more sense to stick with "the devil you know". Frankly, I find such argument rather juvenile! When I was small, if I was caught doing wrong one tactic I would try would be to divert my parent by pointing out something one of my brothers had done wrong. If I was lucky, the attention would shift to them and I was off the hook. Glass houses and stones, jdobbin! Attacking Liberals attacking Harper for Senate patronage is like Charles Manson calling down Jack the Ripper for being a hypocrite about it!

In theory perhaps but hardly relevant to a modern world. Go ahead, defend your own property. How well will you fare against a modern army? Or a cruise missile? "The most expensive military is the one that proves only second-best."---Robert Heinlein

I think I'm seeing a common pattern in the posts from those against Harper. Apparently, Harper is at fault because he recognized the hypocrisy and fault with the traditional ways of picking Senators but ended up having to do it the traditional way himself. Meanwhile, the Liberals are somehow a better choice because they have never had a problem with how they picked Senators. So while they may be knaves, they are superior to Harper because they are not hypocrites. I would have thought that deliberately and gleefully doing wrong is less moral than reluctantly sinning but I guess many in this thread disagree. My head is spinning. I have to sit down.

Actually, the climate was never mentioned, as I recall! The issue was treated much more deeply. Slavery was far from universally supported by southerners. The only real constant value seemed to be a belief that each state should be supreme in its own government first, only deferring to federal power in strictly defined terms of mutual defense and the like. I was surprised to learn that Lee himself was against slavery, but then I am a Canadian and thus not as well educated in the history of foreign personalities. As for the character of those foreign leaders, for the most part I would agree. The convoluted arguments by some of the libleft posters on this board for many of the actions taken by these countries never ceases to astonish me. A scientist might say that is what happens when you accept your premises FIRST and then go looking for supporting evidence, ignoring anything you trip across that contradicts what you chose to believe in the first place. No wonder our society seems to be losing practical people who can build and fix things, in favour of "politicians, beauticians and telephone sanitizers". As proof of my point I cite reality TV! As an audience our tastes are telling. We've slid a long way from "Barney Miller" to "Paris Hilton's Best Female Friend". The fascination with "Jon and Kate Plus 8" is proof positive!

Which leads to another interesting point. Does slavery tend to diminish the slave owner? Does he lose industriousness to the point where he can no longer thrive by his own merits? You might enjoy a book by Harry Turtledove called "Guns of the South", if you haven't already. The author is a Civil War historian and the book's premise is that some Afrikans white supremacists from the early 21st century steal a time machine to go back to the start of the American Civil War, bringing AK-47's to Lee's Grays! The beauty of the book is that the science fiction premise is in itself only a small part of the story. The real tale is of slavery and how it affected both the Southern culture and that of the North. The history is incredibly detailed and accurate. The extrapolation of events after history begins to change is quite believable and consistent with known history. From the Red Sea to the Civil War, slavery always seemed to be happening somewhere. It is still practiced today in many parts of the world. I find it darkly ironic that so many criticize America and Europe for the incidence of slavery in their history, while ignoring that those were the folks who outlawed the practice around a century and a half ago. Meanwhile, they don't comment on those countries that practice the atrocity today, many of whom gang up on Israel in the UN.

A noble dream, but do you really think that environmentalists will be realistic about jobs? My observations over the years have been that they would far more likely block doing ANYTHING in order to absolutely guarantee no negative effects on the environment! Or, they would insist on such stringent conditions that no company could possibly afford them. Meanwhile, no one pays any attention to products made in OTHER countries with NO anti-pollution laws being imported into Canada every day. So local manufacturers have drastically increased production costs due to "green" laws while China, Russia and others have no such extra costs and can dump their stuff into Canada much cheaper, often below even our manufacturers' cost. Environmentalists are not businessmen. The two areas need different skill sets. Perhaps allowing environmentalists a single vote on a company board may provide balancing input but if the environmentalists ever had a veto we'd all be unemployed, scraping for money to buy foreign products.

Quite true! Jane Creba was not murdered on the streets of Red Deer.

We should also consider the value of popularity and precedent. If Harper can make some changes with term limits and being elected within a province, he may not need to actually force legal change. After a while those provinces who choose to be holdouts may face pressure from their own citizens, who witness the example of other provinces allowing the people to make their own choices. The same with term limits. When some Senators voluntarily retire after 8 years and some hold on to the bitter end, the hangers-on will face criticism of not being willing to pull their snouts out of the trough or of being too beholden to their party. I don't know if Harper will be successful with popularity and precedent tactics but I don't think it makes sense to totally blow them off...

Yeah, so the other guys can go back to putting THEIR hacks into the Senate! Same old, same old.

Because his party will guarantee his income from other sources, that's why! It's always been that way. Witness the negotiating for someone to give up his seat to allow a non-elected party leader to get in the House.