Wild Bill

Judging by the products of the spinmeisters and handlers around each party leader, is that not the image they WANT to project?

And which kid is your Simpsons role model? Rod or Todd Flanders?

Only by comparison to Celine Dion! Then again, even Shaun Cassidy would have been 'heavy' compared to Celine Dion! I was a big KISS fan until Gene Simmonds got too greedy. Once I started seeing KISS lunchpails and even toothbrushes (teethbreesh?) they became a kiddy band in my mind and no 'cool' teenager could admit he still liked them! Still, I'd take KISS over most of the manufactured record label driven pap that is out today. I have a very simple benchmark. If I can play it it must be crap!

As opposed to supporting an Islamist state? Can't find better examples of "rule by one religion" than that! I care little for the various religions involved. To me it's quite simple. Some Arab states launched first strikes on Israel. Israel retaliated and won. Afterwards Israel found that if they returned the lands around their country their enemies would simply move in and use them as bases for guerrilla attacks and rocket launches. To expect Israel to unilaterally return the lands and ignore rockets landing on their bedrooms while not retaliating I find totally absurd! Some Arab states and the Palestinian leaders have for the most part demonstrated time and time again that they have no interest in stopping attacks on Israel. To those who think differently I say put your own kids in an Israeli neighbourhood that's being targeted by rockets!

So Iggy is rising in the polls because he's not Harper. It's a shame that once again Canadians are looking to vote someone out instead of being inspired to keep voting someone IN! It seems to be part of our national culture. We rarely get to vote for someone 'cuz we truly like him! Those times that it's happened it's been for candidates who presented a clear, unambiguous alternative. Trudeau-mania, Mulroney's back to back HUGE majorities, Mike Harris' two terms...we may have been disappointed at the end of their terms but we enthusiastically supported them at the start! Mostly we get choices that are puppets of the "suits", who believe that every candidate must wear brown shoes and keep to the "middle". Thus they please a marginally extra few to eke out minorities but for the most part turn off more than they turn on. They don't seem to realize that most Canadians are not policy wonks! For the most part we don't understand major issues and even if we do we don't really care! What the average Canadian truly wants is to have CONFIDENCE in a party leader! This is a function of leadership and image. Manning didn't really start to come on strong until he ditched the Ross Perot style flip-charts and economic diagrams "with the circles and arrows on the back of each one". We like someone who seems to be a bit of a maverick. Probably because we don't respect the status quo, which again is often confused with "the middle". Young people got behind Trudeau because he said what he believed and didn't give a damn if it bothered the "establishment". Ontario gave Harris those two record majorities for the same reason. His opponents came across as "phony" and slick. We thought we were finally getting someone different with Mulroney but after two terms we realized that he was the same as all the others, just much better at it! It was the disappointment that caused the rise of Reform, the splitting off of the BQ and the reduction of the Progressive Conservatives down to TWO seats! We've chosen both Liberal and Tory leaders in this fashion, so it's not just ideology. It's the leaders, pure and simple. Yet somehow all our parties tend to avoid strong personalities for their leaders and keep offering us the same old "schmaltz"! When Harper talks he could freeze a glass of water. Ignatief is NOT Trudeau! As for Layton or even Elizabeth May, they are so locked into a "faith" rather than a reasoned philosophy that they limit their appeal to only "faith-based" voters. By faith I don't mean religious, just religious in their style of thinking. They first chose to believe what made them feel good and forever more only accept evidence that supports their views and ignore anything that might be a contradiction. The way present trends are developing, Harper may lose the next election to Ignatief. I find it very hard to believe that Ignatief would get a majority. Except to some older women, he seems boring! He has the charisma of a Robert Stanfield! I keep waiting to see a clip on the news of him fumbling a football. So he can pick up the seats in Eastern Canada that Harper loses but has little chance of gaining any more in the West. A LOT of us Canadians are getting very desperate for an INSPIRING choice! Perhaps that's the real reason behind the continued drop in the number of people who actually bother to vote. WE'RE BORED WITH THE LOT OF THEM!

Shouldn't we first expect the NDP to pay attention to the "average working Canadian"?

It's been tried a number of times and its never worked. Soviet Russia was a good example. With wealth redistribution schemes comes a loss of incentive. Capable people who create wealth tend to stop trying. So there's little or no new wealth created. Contrary to the belief of many socialists, those folks who create businesses along with new technologies and better efficiencies don't do it simply because they are genetically programmed. You can't take them for granted. Once you turn the shoe factories over to the workers somehow you always produce fewer and fewer shoes. You never see new shoe machines, just old ones continually being patched together to keep working. The story of "The Little Red Hen" is quite valid and is never addressed in socialist schemes. As the 'system' keeps deteriorating the blame games start. Rather than accept that the initial premises were flawed the blame is given to "evil greedy people". Eventually the state feels forced to use more and more power to MAKE people work! Talk to anyone who escaped from East Germany. They didn't make their stories up! This is not to say that our own system couldn't use some improvement and a bit more "heart". We've never really had a capitalist system. When our politicians can rig the game by definition it's no longer a free trade system. And those politicians rarely rig the game for the people's benefit. I think if you ever had the power to wave a magic wand and make the world over to your simplistic ideals you would actually be causing even more heartache and pain.

I always suspected you guys were ABBA fans! Either that or you think that listening to that "Easy Jazz" station shows you like your music really 'heavy'! While the rest of us are listening to Kiss you guys can 'get down' with Celine Dion.

As I said before, one side believes that all such people are on the level and the other side doesn't believe that ANY of them are honest! This 'digital' way of thinking is simply illogical. It's been my experience that honesty has little or nothing to do with someone's character. There are lazy and crooked rich people and there are honest and hard working poor people. However, if someone thinks that ALL poor people are honest and ALL rich people are crooks then I know of some swamp land in Florida they may want to buy...

Lazy? Some are. Some are not! Any generalization is wrong, either way! The problem is that while the truly lazy may represent only a small percentage of the folks on assistance they can be responsible for a far greater share of waste and fraud! Policing such systems requires investment and intelligence, both things at which governments are notoriously poor. It's a sad fact that politicians don't get any reward for trying to make systems more efficient. They are instantly accused of being cruel and uncaring. The reward is only for shoveling money at the problems, not for solving them. So we get the excuse of the Big Lie: "Only 10% of people on assistance are involved in fraud!". That statement in itself may be true. I pulled '10%' out of my butt but how can anyone challenge it? It's impossible to know what's the actual level of fraud! Who is going to answer a pollster honestly if they are ripping off the system? However, the first time I heard the Big Lie was in the 90's, from some talking head in Toronto. For once the reporter followed up on the claim. That 10% was based on people who were caught, by a system that didn't try very hard to catch them. Who knows how much more fraud was or is going on? Meanwhile, that admission of 10% represented over $11 million dollars a year that could have gone to the TRULY needy! We can only wonder at the state of affairs today. A relative with the local police force once told me of the "Christmas Present" scam they saw every Yuletime. Someone on assistance would take their cheque for December to the bank and take it out in cash. Then they would walk to the nearest pay phone and call the police to say that they had just been robbed leaving the bank! No way to prove anything in such a case. The police would give a report number and the City would promptly cough up an extra cheque! As far as I know the scam is still going on today. I was told by my cop relative that every December they issued hundreds of such report numbers. This is the sad reality of government-run assistance programs. Like most things run by the government, about the best that can be said is that they are better than nothing. So some folks focus on the truly needy. If they are confronted with the inefficiency they just accept it as a necessary evil. Others focus on those who don't deserve help, branding them all with the same brush and using the corruption of a few to deny helping the many. The truly needy always seem to get screwed, probably because they can't mount highly visible protests. In the early 80's I had a good friend who was blind. She did everything she could to gain qualifications for a job. She could type from a dictaphone tape at over 80 words per minute with ZERO errors! Yet being blind as a bat she never had a chance of being hired. She lived on a pension of $320 per month. Even in the early 80's that was a pittance. I knew perfectly able guys at the time who got a welfare cheque of $1100/mo and played tennis most of the time! She married another blind person and they each had their pension cut by $20, since "two can live more cheaply". That's when I began to see the difference being just having assistance programs and having programs that actually WORKED! I don't have the answers, but I can now see that there's more to the problem than people on both sides would have me believe.

A wise old man once said; "Everyone's got a great idea that won't work!" A wise old woman once said "Details, it's always details!" (Gilda Radner) I call this phenomenon "intellectual diarrhea". We all suffer a touch of it through adolescence but with many folks it becomes chronic and settles in for their lifetime. They confuse being articulate with actually having knowledge and perspective. Anyone halfways intelligent can spin and extrapolate a few facts into an argument. The problem is that with too few facts you can "prove" anything! All that's contradictory is not yet under consideration. So they will spew out vast amounts of what might sound well-reasoned but collapses under the slightest realistic scrutiny. Like Prohibition style anti-drug approaches or registering legal gun owners instead of attacking actual criminals. They can make all the noise they want but the results cannot be disputed. Oh well, thus it has always been!

Most of those making over a $1m a year DO give up a little, if only in taxes! Many of them make huge donations to various charities! The problem is not the amount of available money. The problem is really the vehicles and mechanisms to get that money to those that need it. Many organizations like the "Committed Way" get workers to make automatic payroll deductions in order to "help their fellow man". 60 Minutes and other such shows have been pointing out for years that these outfits burn up to .95 of every donated dollar internally and actually deliver about a nickel to the needy! It's an old scam. Everyone is not truly trying to address the problem and actually do some good. They just drop some money in the bucket and walk away, feeling all warm and fuzzy! Few people ever go back and investigate if their money actually went where it was supposed to go. Why bother? That's a bit of work and besides, it might spoil the warm feeling. Care to think about how much of our tax dollars actually gets to the needy? Don't think in terms of how much was finally delivered. Think first about how much was taken from us in the first place and THEN look at how much was delivered! The difference is very, very sad. If I sound cynical it's only because I've seen good evidence to be so! If "techies" ran charity and welfare systems they might actually work! Meanwhile, most of what we have are more concerned with making some folks feel or look good, rather than actually doing good. For what it's worth, I take no pride at all in official vehicles that take my money for welfare or charity. For the most part I have no control over it. It's just taken away to be poured down some black hole. Hopefully there will be enough left at the end of the process to help out some poor soul but I don't have a lot of confidence. The waste is appalling! How much more good could be done with REAL systems! Meanwhile, I've learned to make donations on my own, personally. I've done what I can for friends, family and people that I actually know. The only "official" charity I donate to is the Sally Ann. I've checked these folks out and it seems that for nearly a hundred years they have been quietly working in the background, with a total reversal of that ratio I mentioned. They apply nearly .95 of every dollar to actually helping, taking only a nickel in administration costs! There may be other organizations like the Sally Ann but I don't know enough about any of them to recommend. Meanwhile, you might want to think beyond just "bleeding the rich" for a solution. As always, things are a wee bit more complicated.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Technology/...2169&page=2 This is an interesting link to an article about the various kinds of forum posters. I recognized myself in a few of them and of course, there are lots of others on this board! Intriguing, and worth more than just a chuckle.

I rather doubt if these suggestions would work in the manner you seem to think. They sound like something from the Toronto City Council. That city is a nightmare to drive in! Make gas more expensive? Fewer roads to make congestion even worse? Older folks trying to buy family groceries or take the kids to karate on the back of a bike or if walking, on their backs? Maybe this is how the world looks from the dorm windows of Queens University but if we implemented your suggestions we would probably have thousands of ordinary citizens going "postal" in the streets! Here's the way it is in the real world. Pleasure driving all but disappeared 20 years ago. People drive because they have no choice! Maybe they started off living close to their job but then the company closed that branch, re-located or went out of business. So they likely could only find a job at the end of a long commute. If they sell their house to move closer they likely would take a huge loss, since house prices are always higher closer to the major centres, as in Toronto. Besides, the two income family is the norm today. Not to live high off the hog, either. Just to live! The other marital partner likely still has a local job. If the family moved it would mean the OTHER partner would then have to commute! It is difficult for anyone to carry a week's worth of groceries for the typical family on the bus. Even if they were all "supermen" and WANTED to walk or cycle carrying that load ask them again in January! This is Canada and we have a winter, after all. We don't have enough roads now in many areas. People hate the traffic but have no choice if they want a job. If you think that having even fewer roads and making gasoline more expensive would help then you obviously are not considering how long it would take to make any positive adjustment. Decades, perhaps even generations! How to you expect people to cope in the meantime? It's a wonder right now that more people are not "flipping out" on the QEW commute to Toronto every day. You want to tighten the screws on those poor people even more? As for subways and elevated rails, public transit will NEVER be anything but a citizen's second, third or even last choice! If you force them to take it they will only resent it, assuming they can make it work for their situation at all! Public transit cannot serve everywhere equally. It always seems that you end up walking more than riding. My wife works for the City and they periodically get meetings encouraging them to "Take the Bus!". We live in a residential area of the eastern side of Hamilton. Her work is in the upper part of the city. It takes 10 minutes to drive there. As an experiment, she tried the bus one day. After all the transfers, waiting and walking from bus stops a fair distance from the destination it took her over 90 minutes! And this was in the summer. There is no way she would ever attempt it in January or February. As I said, we do NOT live in the "boonies"! Double decker buses? The ones we have seem to be lightly used now. Public transit is only efficient if you have only one large residential area and one area where all the jobs are situated. Outside of Soviet Russia, where is such a city in the real world? Even if for the sake of argument we agreed that your suggestions might work, the period of adjustment necessary is simply too long! People would suffer immense hardship, grow old and probably die before they could see any benefit, FOR THEMSELVES! Society as a whole might eventually reap the rewards but the citizens of today wouldn't. Last, what you're suggesting would be political suicide for any party that tried it! Any solution that imposes immediate severe pain against a POSSIBLE long term benefit for "the good of society", which Ayn Rand defined best as "everyone in general and no one in particular but never, ever YOU!" would be an impossible sell. I would dearly love to see certain politicians try!

Ah yes, situational ethics. My guy is always right. Your guy is always wrong. Even if they do the exact same thing! That's justice to some, I suppose. It might surprise you but I personally would support someone I despised if they were falsely accused. Likewise, I would not support a friend if they did wrong. When we start making excuses for those we like and treat unfairly others just because we don't like them we are heading down a slippery slope to disaster. I don't often agree with Rush Limbaugh but there's a saying of his that is right on! "Liberals define freedom as the freedom to agree!"

Judging by what you have written, would you and I not then agree that the tactics and actions of the aboriginal protesters from Six Nations at Caledonia, Ontario would fall under YOUR definition of terrorism?

Interesting use of 'logic' here. 'What he would LIKE to do'? Talk about arguing a 'what if' statement! What if Harper secretly is an alien reptillian kitten eater? What if he's actually trying to turn Canadians against conservatism in order to advance a socialist agenda? What if he's concealing the design of a 200 mpg carburator? Why don't you ask him how long since he stopped beating his wife?

No, it provides references that the claims were made! Not the same thing at all. 'Wiki' is often biased. Try posting anything supporting climate change denial and see how long before your words are gone. It's a politically correct source and so it's not surprising they are not kind to the Reform Party. One fact that is virtually never mentioned is that Reform had more visible minorities as MP's than all the other parties combined! Yet Refom was always accused of being 'white bread' and racist. I guess those minority MP's must have all been stupid and duped into not seeing all those 'crackers' all around them. I am reminded how just before one election a Reform candidate was found to 'have a pillowcase with eyeholes' in his closet. The leadership promptly gave him the boot, even though there was no time left to pick another to run in the riding. The Liberals, on the other hand, found themselves in a similar situation with one of their candidates but kept him on the ballot, saying "Well, it's too late to get someone else!" Nobody will ever convince me that leftwingers in the main and also the media do not have a bias. I saw too much of it with my own eyes.

We seem to be seeing a pattern here, Argus. Some folks will excuse Liberals of ANYTHING by pointing out the flaws in another party! I used the same tactic when I was a kid. My mother would accuse me of something and I would distract her by pointing out something worse that one of my brothers had done. My own sin would then be conveniently forgotten. Jdobbin seems to feel that two wrongs make an excuse and the other guy's wrong always trumps one from his own champions...

Well, they all do it! Witness the antics in the Liberal Party after Dion assumed the leadership and when he began his electoral campaign. That being so, the factor becomes null. If that is your only criteria for supporting a party you are left with no options. So why talk about it? As always, choosing a party to support comes down to other factors. With me, it usually depends on who smells the least!

Please be sure to board the 'B' Ark!

Those were Reform principles? How about a cite or a link? Frankly, I think you pulled those examples out of your butt. They are simply a leftwing propaganda cartoon of Reform principles. They make as much sense as if I made the claim that the NDP are part of a communist conspiracy to revive the corpse of Joe Stalin. Although if truth be told, Taliban Jack is looking more and more like Stalin since he grew that moustache!

If Six Nations is included then it has everything to do with this festival. I don't want my children going anywhere near it! Six Nations has already shown that they will inflict harm on innocents as a method of protest. I have no problem with any other aboriginal tribe but Six Nation's TACTICS have broken my trust! Until they acknowledge what they did and apologize to those they have harmed I cannot feel comfortable anywhere around them. Not to say that ALL SN people are a problem! I still have friends there who also disapproved of the protest tactics. However, if I were around some who I did not know I would be exceedingly cautious. To do otherwise would be illogical and going against proven actions.

Yeah, right! How many murders and crimes have been committed at a gun club? Tell it to Jane Creba!

I should think that would be obvious. The crime problem is virtually entirely to do with handguns. Yet the Liberal gun registry was for rifles. Few city folk are rifle owners. There are some who use them for hunting but obviously they head out of the city to practice their sport. The registry cost them money - in some cases a LOT of money! It was poorly run and cost them time and aggravation. Meanwhile, it was being spun in the media to imply that the rifle owners were the problem, in effect laying a guilt trip on them that was resented. To farmers and rural citizens a rifle is not a weapon so much as a tool, to control varmints that cost you money and BIG varmints that can threaten you or your children! The registry to these citizens looked like a tax grab and aggravation to appease city folks who would likely support ridiculously lenient sentences with those criminals and wingnuts who were the real problem. Worse yet, as I said before they virtually all used handguns anyway. There have always been some kind of registrations. Fire Arms Certificates must go back to the 30's! Your question is poorly worded. Perhaps you should be asking why so many were against THIS gun registry! There is a naive tendency with us Canadians to think that the name is all we need. A politician announces a new law or program and we never question if it makes sense and we never go back later and audit it to see if it actually did any good. It's like the old joke about Liberal solutions - "It doesn't have to work, as long as we can say we've got one!"