WIP

In his own words: Full text of Stephen Harper's 1997 speech Updated Wed. Dec. 14 2005 9:20 PM ET But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy matters. In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s, early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the largest deficits in Canadian history. They were in favour of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand. Officially -- what else can I say about them? Officially for the entrenchment of our universal, collectivized, health-care system and multicultural policies in the constitution of the country. At the leadership level anyway, this was a pretty liberal group. This explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power. The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican, which I'll get to in a minute. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...51214/20051214/ So! As National Citizens Coalition leader, Harper voiced his opposition to P.C. social policies: gay rights, abortion rights, national health care and multiculturalism -- a Republican clone by any other name!

Maybe that statement has some meaning to you. THE STORY: In 1776 we declared our independence not only from British rule, but also from the corporations of England that controlled trade and extracted wealth from the U.S. (and other) colonies. Thus, in the early days of our country, we only allowed corporations to be chartered (licensed to operate) to serve explicitly as a tool to gather investment and disperse financial liability in order to provide public goods, such as construction of roads, bridges or canals. After fighting a revolution for freedom from colonialism, our country's founders retained a healthy fear of the similar threats posed by corporate power and wisely limited corporations exclusively to a business role. These state laws, many of which remain on the books today, imposed conditions such as these: ? A charter was granted for a limited time. ? Corporations were explicitly chartered for the purpose of serving the public interest-- profit for shareholders was the means to that end. ? Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose. ? Corporations could be terminated if they exceeded their authority or if they caused public harm. ? Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts they committed on the job. ? Corporations could not make any political contributions, nor spend money to influence legislation. ? A corporation could not purchase or own stock in other corporations, nor own any property other than that necessary to fulfill its chartered purpose. For 100 years after the American Revolution, citizens and legislators tightly controlled the corporate chartering process. Having thrown off English rule, the revolutionaries made certain that legislators issued charters one at a time and for a limited number of years and authority was wielded through laws like those summarized here in each state. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/pdf/primers/hi...ate_history.pdf

Do I really need to point out to you that it wasn't that long ago that the concerns of Jews were also "fringe" concerns, and of no concern to Joe Lunchbucket? Conservative Jews have forgotten what it was like to be treated as a despised minority group, now that they see themselves as part of the white majority.

The whole point about your thread "Why many Canadian people have inaccurate knowledge of China" is ludicrous in the first place, since the Chinese government effectively censors the information their own people receive, so a better question to ask is why the Chinese people have an inaccurate knowledge of their own country? Needless to say, the big part of the reason, is censorship that is being enabled by U.S. corporations like Google providing the filtering software to maintain a totalitarian system: The Great Firewall of China: Internet Censorship Run Wild http://blogs.splunk.com/thebaum/2009/06/18...rship-run-wild/

And who makes it contraband? Authoritarian laws that have little concern with the personal habits of a large portion of the population! And once again, you haven't dealt with my objection to these laws -- they are eroding the civil rights of everyone, including those of us who don't use illegal drugs in the first place! But that's all right by conservatives, because conservatives don't trust the majority of people having too much personal freedoms. And you conservatives are the very ones who dig up the Founding Fathers whenever it is convenient as a rhetorical device. But, in this case, the American Revolutionaries were not only revolting against the King of England, they were also rebelling against the trade corporations established by the Crown, and that's why it took over a hundred years before corporate rights were firmly established.

Which is why the middle class is disappearing! You capitalist fools are trying to turn the clock back to the days when a small, powerful minority had all of the wealth and wielded all of the real political power -- and that is the essence of conservatism. Maintaining a stable, authoritarian society requires a working class that is too busy struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table, to become active participants in the political process. The fact that unions are disappearing outside of the public sector, is not a fault of government or the people who work for the government -- it's an indictment of the free trade policies that you and other conservative ideologues trumpeted over 20 years ago, that would increase everyone's living standards -- "a rising tide raises all boats"" or some bullshit, as I recall. The truth is that most people's real incomes levels have dropped over the years, thanks to free trade policies that flood the market with cheap imports, and they've had to compensate by working longer hours or taking second jobs to maintain their standard of living. Up till the 60's, the average working man could buy a house, one or two cars, and support a family, without requiring a second income from his wife -- needless to say, those days are long gone thanks to the broken promises of conservative economic theorists who have made most of us poorer while enriching the top 1 to 5%. Another downside of your wonderful conservative economic principles is that the pay scales for government managers is way behind what they can make in the private sector. For some reason, corporations try to keep the vast majority of their wage employees at minimum wage levels if possible, and yet give ridiculous rewards to fellow members of the executive club. As a result, the civil service manager is more likely to be one who is not able to get in to the corporate management world, for whatever reasons. Think about it! If the people in charge of Toronto's public services had any brains, they wouldn't have written contracts that expire at the beginning of summer.....especially for garbage collectors!

Those labour laws wouldn't be there without the union movement that created a large working middle-class in the first place! Unions have had much the same impact in the workplace as vaccinations in epidemiology -- the existence of strong unions not only benefited the working union members, it also has had unrecognized secondary benefits for non-union workplaces whose management was forced to offer similar wages and working conditions for their employees, to keep their people from organizing in a union. Epidemiologists call the protection offered to morons who don't immunize their children to diseases "herd immunity;" and unfortunately, that herd immunity effect starts to break down as higher numbers of people have not been vaccinated (as is happening on a large scale in England and Australia right now). Same thing in the workplace -- as the unions have disappeared, a lot of workers who thought their skills protected their wages and benefits without the need to organize, have seen their earning potentials either flatline or drop, especially now that unemployment is increasing. BTW, for anyone who thinks labour laws make unions unnecessary -- good luck using those government labour laws to address problems with your employer! Under the current environment, most employers realize full well that 99% of workers will not risk losing their jobs by going to the LRB. I'll make a deal with anyone who wants to abolish unions and go back to the good old days when the employer held all of the cards -- let's abolish corporations also! Especially the doctrine of corporate personhood and rights. Corporations have more human rights than real people these days!

And why is it necessary to infringe on personal rights to combat the drug trade and the threat of terrorism? It makes a convenient excuse for those who have little respect for civil rights in the first place. Apparently these "wars" do not seem to curtail corporate personal rights though......like they say, money talks! Only in the last 100 years apparently! http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_acco...rations_us.html Before the turn of the last century, it seems that corporations were severely restricted by state governments before then, and their rights have continued to expand ever since...at the expense of the rights of flesh & blood citizens.

Irrelevant! It doesn't matter what countries that multinational corporations are chartered in; they do not respect national boundaries, and do whatever is necessary to maximize profits. It's kind of ironic that so many conservatives rail on about One World Government and the United Nations, while at the same time supporting a system of corporate ownership that have no respect for national boundaries.

We are seeing the same pattern that has already been established in the U.S. The political right courts fundamentalists who want to create their own little power bases, so the left responds by gathering together left wing churches with the appeal to the social gospel. I prefer the good old days when conservatives and liberals stuck to government and economic policy, and did not try to add God to their list of supporters. This screed is a convoluted mess because "liberal" could be anything and everything that threatens your conservative religious dogma. Just like idiots like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, you are building the "liberal conspiracy myth" by piling any and all criticism of conservative dogma and policies into one group that just happens to be conspiring against god-fearing, patriots. It's worth noting that this is the same tactic used by fascists to claim oppression while they are seeking to oppress others. Just read an english translation of Mein Kampf for example -- everybody is against the German people -- Jews, Communists, atheists, the educated elite, the brown races, the French, British and Americans....everybody is part of the conspiracy. Today's conservative ideologues and opinion-makers are trying to use the same strategy...more than likely for the same ends.

It's not private anymore, when a Republican clone, like Harper, is courting conservative religious voters, and when he puts an idiot creationist in charge of the Science and Technology portfolio! After Stockwell made a fool of himself as leader of the Canadian Alliance, any Conservative leaders -- whether it's Harper, or Gary Goodyear, are going to make all the right noises to appeal to crackpot fundamentalists, while at the same time claiming privacy when questioned about their own religious and/or scientific beliefs.

I would say it does! And reviewing the history of the time, it's apparent that England was trying to set up a informal colonial system of economic domination after they given up political control of their colonies. The British had an attitude of entitlement -- they drilled the wells and felt that the oil was theirs at a small nominal fee to the landowners. Many Americans are bewildered by the hostile attitudes in the Third World, and it's not all "they hate us because of our freedoms;" a lot of the resentment is boiling because of economic colonialism of multinational resource companies, and the actions of the World Bank and IMF, that put them into debt bondage and start dictating government policy and economic policy to maintain access to credit.

And the Theory of Gravity is just a theory also, by that analogy. If you want to test it, you can try jumping off a tall building! You are demanding that your chosen belief (sexual orientation is a matter of choice) be proven wrong. It should not be up to me or any one else to prove a negative; it should be a matter of assessing where the evidence leads -- and so far, there is substantial evidence to support genetic links to homosexuality from twin studies; prenatal hormones determining sexual orientation from evidence analyzing birth order -- younger males are more likely to be gay; and even possible prenatal infectious diseases being the cause -- there are seasonal correlations just as there are with schizophrenia. So it appears that sexual orientation is complicated by genetic, hormonal and germ factors -- any one of them could be a cause, or any combination of the three. Just as with left handedness, there is not one, single, solitary cause, but a confluence of physical factors -- all of which would be beyond the control of the individual. And the dismal results of so called gay reparative therapies should be the nail in the coffin for any ideology that wants to promote the fiction that homosexuals are choosing to be gay, and can be turned straight......but it won't! Because if homosexuals or bisexuals and transgendered people for that matter, are not making a free will choice to be the way they are, that takes away the remaining moral justification to despise and vilify them. In modern society, we are taught that people have to be exercising free will before we can make them an object of scorn; and the Abrahamic religions that have created the ideology that homosexuals are choosing to sin, so literal acceptance of religious dogma demands that homosexuals be "cured" of their condition, or cast into the lake of fire. How do we explain that some left-handed people are virtually ambidextrous, where as others like myself, have such a strong left-sided preference, that I can't perform any skill task with my right hand? There are at least three physical factors that alter the standard sexual orientation, so it shouldn't be any surprise that there are many people in between hetero and homosexual in their preferences. Obviously, if some people have to live their lives in secret, they are going to be something less than full citizens, and develop a lot of issues that mar their enjoyment of life.

I'm not up to speed on every issue, but from what I've gleaned over the controversy regarding human rights panels, most of the complaints revolve around the grey areas that do not have well defiined powers and fact that the commissioners do not need any special qualifications, even knowledge of law and legal process -- an invitation to cronyism. But scrapping the system, as proposed by two of the candidates in the Ontario PC leadership debates, is a bad idea and just an open invitation to return to the old tyranny of the majority. It was a former Progressive Conservative premier (John Robarts) who started the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal in the first place; if either Tim Hudak or Randy Hillier, two candidates who want to scrap the tribunal system, win the nomination, it will be further evidence that Canadian conservative parties are adopting the worst aspects of the American conservative movement.

While American theocrats -- fans of Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich, who proclaim America as a Christian nation favoured by God himself -- cheer on the secular revolution against theocratic government in Iran, and hope that their Islamic theocracy is coming to an end, they should pause and reflect on the direction they are trying to take their own nation: Theocracy and its Discontents We are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy in Iran. I don't mean by this that the Iranian regime is about to collapse. It may—I certainly hope it will—but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. We are watching the failure of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian government........... http://www.newsweek.com/id/202979?from=rss

If it's worth dredging up this story, it's worth noting that right at the bottom of your link, it informs us about how badly the British were ripping off Iran and paying little for the oil they were pumping out of the ground and shipping back home. If you're going to charge Mossadeq with theft, you first have to acknowledge the theft of natural resources by British Petroleum. Mosaddeq explained his nationalization policy in a 21 June 1951 speech: Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results this far. With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. and England responded with a blockade, and tried to bankrupt the country, and Winston Churchill told the Americans that Mossadeq was a communist to get the U.S. to change sides in the dispute: Despite Mosaddeq's open disgust with socialism, Winston Churchill told the United States that Mosaddeq was "increasingly turning towards communism" and was moving Iran towards the Soviet sphere at a time of high Cold War fears.[31][32][33][34] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mossadegh

Then you need to show what your judgment is based on. As someone else once said:"opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one." Then you shouldn't mind showing us some of your information. I haven't been following that story, but according to a statement from her in the Globe & Mail, some rights (like free expression) should not have priority over other rights, like protection from hate speech: Some who disagree with this notion would have Canada weaken its human-rights system, taking the view that freedom of expression is the paramount right in Canadian society, over and above the right of all citizens to be protected from the harm that can be caused by hate messages. In fact, there is no hierarchy of rights with some rights having greater importance than others. They work together toward a common purpose.

Do corporate citizens have free speech rights also? Well, apparently they do, according to your leading jurists, like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts -- but why are the rights of corporate citizens being expanded at a time when real flesh and blood citizens are having their right infringed on and denied in the War On Terror and the War on Drugs? Why should corporations be allowed to use freedom of speech as expressed through money in the buying of political influence with both major parties? This isn't a matter of rich people being allowed to support their candidates -- it's about whether the principle of free speech extends to artificial entities. The only realistic avenue for a third party or independent presidential candidate is if they have the money to match the fundraising resources of the two parties.

As long as your courts make assinine decisions like this one - First National Bank of Boston vs. Belotti - which effectively created a corporate right of free speech (through money), there is no legal means to enforce campaign finance regulations. With all of the money it takes to finance campaigns, a third party that is not beholden to the same old corporate interests will need a benefactor with deep pockets. And it would have to be someone working for the common good, and not motivated by personal ambitions like Perot or George Soros, who has turned his supposedly grassroots movement -- moveon.org -- into a Democratic Party organizing tool http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_..._v_bellotti.php

On the subject of that "strong, effective military," it is one of the reasons why Republicans are more dependent on big government than the Democrats are. The warhawks have created the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower feared would dominate under a permanent Cold War. How does the right wing square its claims to defend free markets with Iraq War policies of granting generous no-bid contracts to friendly corporations like Haliburton and Blackwater....not to mention all of the business awarded to defense contractors for the latest gadgets of war? And what guaranteed rights do Americans have left, after the creation of the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, indefinite detention without charges, the use of torture etc.?

First, killing human tissue does not qualify for a claim of MURDER since you have to make a legal, ethical and scientific case that full rights of human personhood should be granted to embryos and fetuses that are contingent life -- dependent on the mother; and second, they are not two separate issues. If you are going to claim some kind of moral legitimacy of being "pro life" then you have to show your interest in that life after birth and until it reaches the age of majority. Otherwise you are ethically no better than a deadbeat dad.....and for that matter so are the conservative religionists that you taken your upside down moral lessons from! Show me the science! Now tell me why that is obvious? For normal rational people, it is obvious because the life of the mother should be accorded more legitimacy than the potential life of the fetus she is carrying. But anti-abortionists need to explain why they are williing to "kill" that unborn life if there is even the risk that continuing the pregnancy if it endangers the mother's life. If there is even the chance that the mother may die during pregnancy, the fetus must be terminated, and along with it the claim that the fetus has the same rights of personhood as the mother! Once so called pro life believers give in to rational thinking and budge from their absolute stand that embryos and fetuses are persons, then they have to answer why not in cases where a girl has been raped? why not in cases where the fetus is deformed or will be born with birth defects? why not cases before fetal brain development has reached a stage where it is capable of developing conscious mental processing? etc. etc. Once you make one exception to your rule about where life begins, you need to explain why that is the one and only exception you will allow. You don't know that for a fact, and neither do the rest of us, since the actual medical records have never been revealed by the Kansas Attorney General's Office, and that "expert" you cited previously, turned out to be a Catholic conservative hack who was allowed to see only thirty of some pre-selected records provided to him by the former attorney general, obviously for the purpose of building a case for wrongful abortions by state law. One of the facts that has leaked out about the abortions performed by Dr. Tiller, was that one of the recipients was only 9 years old, and had been raped by her father. A few months back, there was a sensational Brazilian case where the Catholic Church (backed by the Vatican) excommunicated the mother of a nine year old girl for procuring an abortion for her daughter....and that's the kind of upside down morality conservative religionists want to push us towards!

We'll see what happens! Ross Perot almost pulled it off back in 92, at a time when there was also great dissatisfaction with the two part duopoly, and if a sane billionaire with deep pockets comes along this time with a sincere desire to create a legitimate third party, it could bring back real democracy to American politics.

Is that an informed opinion? I could say:"I think the Moon is made of green cheese," but what value is it if it is not based on any real evidence? Before I am willing to accept any arguments built on the foundation that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, I want to see some real evidence to back it up. If it is not a "lifestyle choice" than that means millions of gay men and lesbians have been scorned, abused and murdered for something they had as much control over as my lack of ability to write with my right hand. For real evidence of the causes of homosexuality, a good place to start is right at Wikipedia and religioustolerance.org, read the case studies, and then decide which side has the evidence. I didn't know you were still active duty, but it sounds like the policies you describe strike the right balance of accepting someone's sexual orientation, while preventing sexual misconduct. Back when I did most of my Armed Forces stint 30 years ago, a gay man would have been discharged, but during that time when women were just being introduced into more active roles, we were told by many of of our officers that it wasn't just our imaginations that they didn't seem to be the kind of girls we wanted to hang out with -- they were deliberately trying to recruit butch lesbians for female recruits, partly because they were presumed to make better soldiers than regular girls, and they figured it would cut down the risk of sexual misconduct with the enlisted men, especially at remote, isolated radar stations. And my position remains that if people hold hostile opinions about people because of unfounded beliefs and misinformation, then they need to be challenged to back up their prejudicial attitudes, just like white supremacists have been over the years. If you guys want the freedom to proclaim that homosexuals have made a lifestyle choice to be deviants and could be heterosexual if they wanted to, then I have the same freedom to challenge unfounded belief claims like this that cause pain and suffering for a minority of the population.

Interesting that you combined the two in the same sentence, because Sarah Palin's head is an empty vessel, just like George Dubya, just waiting to be programmed, and Newt has a snowball's chance in hell of being the centerpiece of a GOP ticket, but could very well play Dick Cheney to her GW Bush. Case in point: Palin's 2012 stump speeches include a number of verbatim quotes from Newt It appears that much of Palin's text was inspired by an article that Gingrich and Craig Shirley published in 2005 in the Manchester Union Leader, titled "Republicans Need to Relearn Lessons of the Reagan Revolution." As dissected by the Huffington Post's Geoffrey Dunn, the similarities between the Gingrich/Shirley piece and Palin's remarks indicate that she relied heavily on the article when preparing her own remarks. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/06/08/sa...-newt-gingrich/ But Gingrich is acting magnanimous: “I’m thrilled if Sarah Palin used a Newt Gingrich idea from an op-ed, or speech, or column or whatever,” Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler told POLITICO. “[Gingrich’s] response to people repeating his ideas has always been good.” Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/...0Iu49jeet&C Likely Newt is planning ahead, and has already realized that his high negatives among Republicans that kept him on the sidelines of the last campaign will lead him to choose the right candidate to play puppetmaster to this time around. It's more likely that America needs a legitimate third party, since Democrats take their money from the same corporate lobbyists as the Republicans, and this is why President Obama's response to the financial meltdown has been to try to re-inflate the bubble, rather than taking on real banking reforms; and leave the U.S. with some watered down compulsory health insurance system, rather than a real national healthcare plan that other developed nations have and the majority of Americans want; and no exit strategy from Iraq, Afghanistan, or Guantanamo, for that matter! Democrat or Republican seems to be a big deal stateside, but the rest of the world notices that there are very few actual changes between Democratic and Republican administrations. Maybe now that the economy is melting down, millions of unemployed notice that even their crappy HMO coverage is gone, and their jobs were shipped off to China because of free trade dogma -- maybe now will be the time for a real third party to address to deal with some of the issues that the majority want, but keep getting shot down by corporate money....and it all starts with real campaign finance reform, and an end to the dogma that corporations are persons and should be guaranteed full individual rights (just like fetuses) http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

That's the authoritarian mindset: the experts who agree with our aims are right, those who don't are wrong. I know, I've wasted time previously when he's started these anti-Children's Aid threads; but the subject has been a learning process for me, since I've been able to learn about the problems in the system, and the strains these agencies are feeling because of funding cutbacks at a time when they are receiving more calls from police and other officials to investigate cases of abuse. I was surprised how much of the condemnation of CAS in the media is unfounded, because it is based on abuse that occurred prior to CAS intervention, false claims by birth parents looking for revenge, and abuse that has occurred when the children were placed with relatives of the birth parents. I am starting to notice that media, right wing media like the Sun newspapers and the National Post in particular, are promoting this subject by placing every story about CAS abuse and group home abuse cases on the front page in banner headlines, whereas the abuse stories by parents - even in cases that cause death, are buried, if reported at all. A cynic might conclude that the right is actively trying to kneecap social agencies in their family values campaign, and return us back to the days of glorious patriarchy, when fathers could get away with anything except killing their wives and children. There have been a number of interesting psychological studies about conservatives and liberals of late. In general, conservatives are much less likely to question authority and stress loyalty to their leaders. I guess that's why I didn't last in the conservative movement. Many conservative ideas sounded good to me while they had little actual power; but now that this Republican-style conservative mix of religion, militarism and social darwinism is flexing its muscles, the authoritarian nature of conservative political philosophy is unmistakable.