HisSelf

I have found the ignore feature to be very calming for cases like bush_cheney2004.

Ha ha. I once knew a guy who lived with his mommy and would come over to my place to toke up. One night he started to rant and rave that the US had not really landed on the moon but that it was all staged in a studio somewhere and he could prove it because he had read it in the National Enquirer. I couldn't stop laughing at the guy. He got really huffy and left. The next morning I went out and found my tires had been slashed. It was worth it.

AngusThermopyle, when I put up my first response to this post, you were on line and you continued to be so for some time after. Now you have skulked away. When am I going to see your justification for this ad hominem attack?

I'll bet that's in the very very tiny small print

Nicely said.

The Wings deserved to win. They were definitely the better team. They opted to play a very physical game in the final and took a lot of penalties. The Pens power play just could not capitalize because the Wings' penalty killing was just incredible. At one point in the game Crosby had put in 12 minutes of ice time and only got one shot on net. The old adage is true. Offense sells tickets; defense wins games. I was neutral on the series - I like the Pens and their brash and very talented youth, but the Wings are one of the original six (counts for a lot up here in Canada) and their team was so well built and organized. This Detroit team is as much a management/coaching triumph as it was a player triumph. A great team.

No, but they blamed Bill Clinton for what happened. Hillary Clinton was a New York Senator at the time and she worked to get funding for 9/11 victims. Would they have booed any other Senator from New York, no matter what kind of politician they were? I think they were booing Bill Clinton by Proxy.

And those would be?

If this is true, it would mean that Bush and Cheney want to turn Iraq into another Puerto Rico. (West Side Story-America) Teddy Roosevelt. LOL Seriously, there are not many neutral voices in the media these days, but The Independent remains a shining beacon of truth. You sure as hell wouldn't have heard this first on Fox. Nice find, Topaz!

You are right about the constitution, but then there is the political thing where people, given a platform, use it to push their own agendas. I think that Clinton's attempt to push herself into the VP role, going over Obama's head through the press, was a big mistake and I would not be surprised if Obama saw this as a sign of what would be in store for him if he took her on as running mate.

Clinton made a couple of serious mistakes that I think made the difference. The Republicans had run a pretty much high road primary with both Romney and McCain eschewing personal attacks. Obama was following the same policy and it appeared as though a new style of politiics was emerging. When Clinton came along with her hobnail boots and her personal attacks on Obama, people just saw this as more of the same old Washington style politics as usual. The second of course were the comments by both Clinton and her husband that tried to paint Obama as just another black politician, which was seen as racist. To be sure Omama had his own mistakes. The 'disenchanted blue collar Americans with guns' thing cost him Ohio. The crazy religious leader could have hurt him, but Americans are used to crackpot preachers with whacko agendas so I think Obama helped himself a lot when he disowned the guy. I don't think gender hurt Clinton any more than race hurt Obama. I think this may have been one of American democracy's finer hours when equality and democracy for all has come to the fore.

How about this one... "I am a bigot when I post racial slurs on a public web site."?

Anybody who knows anything about the history of war could not possibly say that women were any more childish than men.

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Another issue is the constant extending of tours of duty. I'd say that if there was some sort of explicit contract about tours of duty, I'd say the deserters have a case, but I haven't heard that there is. Unfortunately, this is what it means to join the military. Hopefully, a lot of people are paying attention. Doesn't mean I favour sheltering deserters. I am sympathetic to their situation. The Bush administration is growing more and more desperate and American troops are being given a very shoddy deal. If it was conscript army, I would feel differently, but people who join the military - and I mean any miltary need to understand that once you are in, they own your ass, and will sacrifice it if they have to. If McCain gets in, it will only get worse for these guys. The US military is having a harder and harder time finding recruits and that means longer and longer tours of duty.

I agree with your first sentence whole-heartedly, but I don't think McCain would be better than Obama. If you were Iran, or any other of the many Moslem societies that the US is at odds with, who would you be most inclined to talk to shoulder to shoulder? A guy with some Moslem creds who says he wants to talk, or yet another in a long line of American hard-liners who says he wants to bomb? Iraq needs a regional solution. Iran is not going to sit around and suck its thumb while the US builds a pincer movement on its borders in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anybody who thinks it will is in 'cloud cuckoo land' as Margaret Thatcher used to say. Here's a map of the region.

It is sad to see yet another thread on First Nations People go down the tubes in a hail of misunderstanding and just plain pig-headedness. In all the discussions of racism that occur in our society, it is amazing how little touches on those who are most often the victims of racism and discrimination in Canada - First Nations People. There is an advert on the telly these days by the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. It touches on almost every form of bigotry in our society - Jews, Moslems, handicapped... and yet nary a whisper about the extraordinary amount of racism against First Nations People.

I don't ignore posts by people who quote somebody on my ignore list, so I guess I'm not a purist. I currently have 3 people on ignore. The first is a guy who routinely resorts to name-calling when he runs out of arguments. I come here to discuss political issues with informed respectful people, not to be a punching bag. The second is someone who it seems cannot debate opinions different than his own on the Middle East without playing the hate card. The first time he did it, I let it go, the second time, I hit the ignore button. Debating the Middle East with people like this is like debating black social issues with a white supremacist. Sooner or later, it's all about hate. The third guy is someone who spends all of his time trying to rationalize a foreign policy that most of the free world now considers to be completely bankrupt. This is a guy for whom foreign affairs is a zero sum game. There always has to be a winner and a loser and the winner is always going to be the guy with the biggest guns. It is pointless to confront someone like this because they are like a broken record. There are people here who have similar views, but they give other people space to make their points. On the other hand, there is no end to this guy. We all have a choice as to who we engage. I find the ignore feature helps me tune out the noise.

I don't agree with this at all. If anything, she has established herself as a serious player in the national political spectrum. Clinton is going to be a high profile part of whatever political environment emerges from the Bush fiasco.

With respect to the steel industry, there are a number of steel companies that have turned themselves around, thanks largely to the recent resource boom - IPSCO, Algoma, Dofasco for example. Theses companies were so attractive, they all got bought out at a premium. Don't forget that Algoma was a company that was owned and run by its union. If you had bought their stock in 2000, you would have been a happy guy 6 years later. Stelco has not been such a happy story because it was managed by idiots - something many business analysts have been saying for some time. You are right about unions and the big three, although that's not the whole story. Unions have built a massive and unsustainable featherbed for their employees. However, an equal share of the blame goes to the automakers. The plant in question makes big honking gas-guzzling trucks. Sales for these things are falling like a stone. Toyota was onstream with the Prius two years ahead of the curve while GM just kept producing the same old same old. The big three have not been nimble enought o respond to their customers. The Japanese got their foot in the door by building reliable vehicles when people were joking that Ford stood for "Fix Or Repair Daily" and they have been building on that responsiveness ever since.

I am and always have been dead set against the war in Iraq, but we have an extradition treaty with the US, and we should abide by their extradition requests. The only exception I would make to this is where extradition involves the death penalty. I don't think we should automatically extradite people back to face the death penalty - the justice system is too flawed.

Khadr is the last western prisoner in Gitmo. Says a lot doesn't it?

The problem with this, as was pointed out by Henry Champ of the CBC, is that with Hillary as Vice President, Bill would be running around sticking his nose in everywhere. If I were Obama, I'd run from this. Offer her a cabinet post, maybe Health, but Hillary as VP would be trouble.

That's where you're wrong. It does in fact make them go away, LOL.

Yeah, it's hard to believe she will be able to play second banana. Maybe after seeing what Cheney was able to do with his puppet, she's getting ideas...