HisSelf

A Canadian who travels to any foreign country, including the US, surrenders all rights. In some countries (like Mexico) this puts you on the same plane as the locals. In other countries, like the US, it means that you can be sacrificed if a US citizen can find a way to shovel the blame in your direction. The Canadian government will do DICK ALL to help you unless you have somebody at home to SCREAM BLOODY MURDER (e.g. Maher Arar, Bill Sampson, Brenda Martin). Do not ever think that the Canadian government is on your side. Once you get into trouble abroad, deservedly or not, you are a pawn in a game you cannot possibly hope to understand from your miserable little prison cell. This is not bitter conjecture. It's just realpolitik.

So what's your point of reference? Wolfowitz? Perle? Cheney? Netenyahu? I cannot believe you can be so simple as to believe that there is any sort of free negotiation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Everybody knows the Israelis can always call on BIG DADDY to come and blow any troublemakers out of the water. The Palestinians, in spite of the fact that they have every right to be where they are, have absolutely no power to negotiate because Israel has always negotiated over their heads with the British, the French, the Americans, whoever had skirts big enough for them to hide behind. Carter is one of the few people in the US with the cojones to call a spade a spade. You go, Jimmy.

So true. There were cease fires during the Second Intifada. Arafat and the PLO sat on their hands while Israel continued to bulldoze homes, take political prisoners, and finally imprison Arafat in his own headquarters - all the work of the Likud, Netenyahu and Sharon. Western opinion is all too often shaped by the extraordinarily biased western press. The American press has become so biased in favour of Israel that it is not possible to believe anything they say anymore. Even the Brits, who have their own problems with Islam, don't take them seriously any more. Watch the BBC and read the Economist if you want to know what's really going on there. You sure as hell won't get the straight goods here. Israel continues to build settlements - illegal even under Israeli law - while the Palestinians are expected to just sit on their hands and do nothing. Meanwhile we are repeatedly bombarded with Holocaust stories....

And don't get me started on the dumb-@$$ drug busts.

I did not read this entire thread, but my response to people who whine about the justice system is to point out the number of people (mostly men) who have been found innocent due to the efforts of the Innocence Project over the past 5 years or so. What are we up to now? A couple of dozen? And these are just the guys who were in for the worst crimes that merit the attention of the Innocence Project - Murder, Rape, Child Rape, Child murder. How many others are in prison for lesser crimes that they did not commit?

I do not believe that the Holocaust is being represented untruthfully. I do believe, however, that it is being used to justify some pretty unsavoury things.

I don't know the specifics of the case but I sure am glad I am not going to have to watch this woman cry her Picasso tears on national TV any more. She is getting out early because she was tried in the media in Canada and found innocent. Whether that is justified or not will hopefully be exmined in detail by a credible journalist or two (damend few of those IMHO) at some point. In any case, this should be a lesson for all of you who might find it glamorous to go off into the wild blue yonder with a backpack strapped to your shoulders. If you think that you are protected by your innocence, you are naive. And if you think the Canadian government will come to your rescue, you had damn well better have a friend like Brenda Martin did.

That's right. Palestine was Britain's Iraq/Vietnam. The Brits just got tired of having their boys come home in body bags. Especially on the heels of WWII. They ran out on the sorry mess they created and the s**t is still hitting the fan 60 years later. I was being kind when I used the word insurgent. In fact they were terrorists, in every sense of the word. The blowing up of the King David Hotel by Itzhak Shamir's group remains one of the single biggest (in terms of body count) acts of terrorism in the Middle East, even today. By the way, that's the same Itzhak Shamir who went on to become Prime Minister of Israel.

I think Dion is definitely the problem. The money is in the west and Ontario. Neither wants to see another Quebec politician as PM. Especially in the West. Harper's advantage is that he is seen as a Westerner (despite the fact that he was a transplanted one). I think Dion also has a personal image problem. He just doesn't come across as prime ministerial. Ignatieff is an arriviste and not a lot better. I think Rae would have been a better bet for them. Yes he has baggage from his days as Ontario PM, but given enough time in the spotlighht, he could have turned that around. When the economy starts to slow, people start to look for change and they tend to shift left. Rae has a good base in Ontario, and there are a lot of votes in Ontario. There are a lot of votes in Quebec too, but Quebec does not like Dion. Another interesting tidbit with respect to contributions - the husband/wife team of Heather Reismann/Gerry Schwartz raised some 2.5 million for the Chretien Liberals. During the last Israeli/Lebanon dustup, Schwartz and Reismann swung their allegiance over to Harper because of his strong pro-Israel stance. Of course, it's dangerous to make assumptions based on the past, but if you take away 2.5 mill from the Tories and give that to the Liberals, what have you got?

The UN officially recognized the Nation of Israel in 1948 (moved by the US, seconded by Russia). It has never officially recognized a state called Palestine. A partitioned state has been proposed by the British and the UN. One was rejedted by the Jews, the other by the Arabs. The majority of the Palestinian Arabs who left were driven out by armed Zionists insurgents who had suddenly morphed into the Israeli army on the founding of the State of Israel 1948. This urging of neighbouring nations bit has been magnified to cover that up.

In 1932-33, Joseph Stalin imposed starvation on the Ukraine to force its farmers to surrender their holdings to Soviet collectives (Collectivisation). It is estmated that somewhere between 8 and 12 million Ukrainians died during this period. Walter Duranty of the New York Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for reporting on the Soviet Union. He denied that such a starvation was occurring while privately admitting that up to 25,000 people per day were dieing. Please take a moment to consider this motion currently before the house, to research it, develop a personal position, and to advise your MP of your position on the matter.

So you agree?

Just saw a clip on the BBC. Wright says he's open to being Vice President. I guess that's the end to him. At least I hope so...

Well fine. Instead of focussng on the Jews, why don't you focus on the situation?

Ziomism was a response to a repressive environment. You and I would do the same given the conditions that Jews were dealing with at the time. Israel is a legitimate state with a very big challenge. It needs to recognize the reality that can make it great or destroy it. Israel is the key to Middle East relations and it has so far failed to come to grips with its biggest opportunity.

Does it matter anymore?

When I see words like "National Energy Policy" I get a bit confused. Is this policy supposed to twist the market to make it favourable to one particular segment, or is supposed to make it transparent so that absolutely everybody everywhere can understand how it functions?

Yes, but how to make the market completely transparent. That is the holy grail IMHO. To make the market open and reliably accountable to every single investor.

I've been watching this play out with a lot of interest. I have a bit of a bias because my interest is mainly US foreign policy (what can I say, I am a foreigner) and I worry that Hillary Clinton leans too much towards Bill Clinton's foreign policy. George Bush may have screwed up the US response to 9/11 but it basically happened on Bill's watch. I am wondering about this guy Wright. What is his angle? Is this a guy who for once and for all wants to force the American Race Issue onto the front page, or is he a guy who wants to build revenue for his ministry. Another one of these sad sack Elmer Gantrys? This appears to be a game of brinkmanship of some kind. I don't know a lot about Obama, but I do not like Hillary Clinton. She wants to abrogate NAFTA. Well listen here, honey. it ain't about YOU. It's about US. You try to wriggle out of your NAFTA obligations and you just see where your limo's gonna get its gas. Harper said he would link any re-opening of NAFTA to energy. You didn't see THAT on CNN, did you?

What has been happening with globalization I think is we are discovering some services can been performed off-shore at lower cost, while some are local and cannot. Driving a bus definitely falls in the latter category. Of course, you can always bring the cheap labour in, which is how the US got into its "illegal immigrant" problem.....

No. Not properly so. In our system, the police run a black-box operation in order to keep armed force away from the hands of the politicians and so they are self-enforcing. Because of this, they should be held up to intense scrutiny whenever anything like this happens, and they should be given much less of the benefit of the doubt. The neighbourhood was dangerous? Doesn't that make the victim responsible for something over which he has less control than the police do? In Toronto, there was recently a similar case where police got off under questionnable circumstances. I have to wonder if this is the result of too many cop shows that make these guys out to be some kind of angels. Anybody with as much power as the police hold in our society rarely turns out to be an angel.

Focussing the discussion about Palestine on national self-determination ignores the inconvenient fact that many of the Palestinians being displaced in fact have legal deeds to the lands they live on. They bought them at some time in the past and own them in the same manner that you or I might buy a home, and pay a mortgage. The Geneva Conventions stipulate that an occupying power must respect the land registry as it exists at the time of occupation. Instead what Israel has been doing is using bureaucratic thuggery to illegally evict these people from their homes. Not surpisingly, Israel refuses to recognize the Geneva Conventions. Imagine the coverage on CNN were Iran to suddenly announce that it too refuses to accept the Geneva Conventions, LOL. There was an interesting documentary on the BBC channel not so long ago which showed this happening in real time. First of all you have a small group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who show up on a piece of land owned by a Palestinian. They set up a couple of shacks - one of which they call a Synagogue complete with a Menorah or some other suitable religious artifact. They make grand statements about God, Moses and the Holocaust, and proceed to expand the settlement, slowly putting up more buildings and bringing in more people. If a Palestinian Arab were to do this on Israeli land, the army would show up and kick him or her off forthwith, since Israel has a law which forbids such things. Palestinians though must go to an Israeli court and seek to have the Jews evicted. This is when things start to get weird. Sometimes the Palestinians win, but the Jews don't leave. In fact what happens is more Jews show up and sooner or later a developer comes along who finds some way to start building a housing development on the settlement. It's illegal, even under Israeli law, but somehow, it continues and nobody says anything. The Palestinian has no recourse because he or she won his or her court case, but nobody is enforcing the judgment. And before long, presto! We have an Israeli settlement, and another Palestinian family displaced. So imagine this happening to your home, the homes of your family, your friends, everybody in your town. How long would it take before you started to get really ticked off?

If you watch the Business News Network channel there is a raging debate on this among a lot of people one would think expert on the subject, so the debate here is not surprising. There are those who say that the price of oil is entirely demand driven, and there are others who say speculators (i.e. fear and greed) have gotten into the market and made it behave outside of its natural demand curve. Time will tell, but it is hard to ignore the fact (according to CIBC Chief Economist and Strategist Jeff Rubin) that demand growth as a result of the US economy over the past 3 years has been zero, adn that all oil demand growth has been coming from Asia.

High five!

Iran is not gonna use nukes against anybody. Nobody is. It's suicide. Everybody knows that. You want to get rid of nukes in the Middle East? Disarm everyone else first.