Moonbox

You start a lot of threads on this forum and a good portion of them are about REALLY trivial stuff that nobody cares about. That's not personalizing. That's stating fact. He added a little comedy to it, but he didn't say anything crazy.

EI was never intended to support people out of work for 2 years, particularly not overpaid auto union workers. No, that's not what he's supposed to do. He's supposed to govern Canada and act on the mandate given to him by the electorate. Unfortunately for you, "supporting" jobless Canadians (many of whom in Ontario are underqualified, uneducated and previously overpaid union employees) means taxing me and the majority of Canadians who are currently working. I'm very much in favor of extending EI benefits to long time workers who have been contributing for a long time and who've been struggling because of the recession. On the other hand, I feel that the qualifications of EI should be stricter in this sense and that seasonal/occassional workers or the chronically unemployed should not experience the benefits of it.

It really doesn't happen that often...as in barely ever. The security on the banking websites is about as good as it can get. The problem normally is with poorly secured personal computers who managed to download keyloggers etc that end up getting hacked. That, and doing things like giving your credit card information away to everyone doesn't help. Even so, online voting is a stupid idea. If you can't get off your ass and take an hour out of your day to vote, you don't deserve to vote. Increasing voter turnout for the stupid, apathetic, uninformed and the lazy isn't a big priority for me, nor for the rest of Canada.

Jack and Chow lived in a 3 bedroom apartment for almost TWO YEARS for $800.00 a month in Toronto. Co-op housing generally means you have low income tenants and market rate paying tenants. 800/month for a three bedroom apartment isn't market rent anywhere in Toronto and wasn't in the late 80's either.

I voted for Jack as the creepiest. With his porn-star mustache and his complete disregard for truth and ethics I really worry about what he's like under that ridiculous smile. I really can't trust someone who lived in subsidized housing while making well above average income. It takes a really special person to do that.

I haven't seen any of the ads. I've seen a few all in blue that talk about the HRTC. That's it. It's rather galling isn't it? One side does something and the other complains about it, but when the tables are reversed the same is still true?

and if it was as hard as it was for you and I to reconcile our thoughts, imagine how hard it is for them

It's pretty natural for the opposition to cry about everything the government does. As for the government advertising, I haven't seen any touting the CPC that wasn't paid for by the CPC. If it was a CPC electionish message, it's generally funded by the CPC. Maybe you can provide some examples of government funded partisan ads?

The west has no stomach for a fight that means nothing to them. It's natural that the conviction of someone fighting in their homeland against foreign invaders is going to be stronger. The resolve of the Canadian public for fighting in a shithole in the middle of nowhere is hardly surprising. The cultural pre-eminence of the West is barely in its infancy and destroyed the Soviet Union and is steadily eroding the foundations of China, North Korea and others. The West isn't weakening, it's just the rest of the world is adopting our customs and catching up. The fundamentalist Muslim world is weakening steadily and the longer it holds out on democracy and civil rights the worse and further it will marginalize itself. The religion itself may be growing, but that's more a testament to how appealing fundamentalism is to people with low standards of living. Islam isn't the problem. It's fundamentalism and fundamentalism is rejected by a good portion of the Islamic world and by the vast majority of Muslims in Canada and the West.

Okay well it seems we've cleared that up finally. I'll agree that continuing settlement growth is sand flung in the other side's eyes yes. If the immediate sides could agree to and enforce peace and clamp down on its own militants, then yes. If, on the other hand, groups like Hezbollah and Hamas continued to be funded from Iran and continued to operate extensively in the area, I don't think it would be possible. Perhaps. I don't know enough about how East/West Jerusalem were divied up, but I do believe Israel annexed the rest of the city decades ago and I simply believe that it would be a harder point to negotiate on. Sometimes a peace agreement doesn't bring you back to how things were 40 years ago. You have to focus on the best possible peace at present then, rather than how things were back then. and that's something the two sides are really going to have to figure out themselves.

US foreign policy for the last 30 years might be blamed for the mess in Afghanistan, but it was a mess well before Bush sent the troops there and he really didn't make it any worse than it already was (i'm not defending Bush I just don't think you understand what it's like there) Culturally, Afghanistan is about 10,000 years behind the rest of the world. For longer than history has been written, it's been a stinkhole country full of warring tribles with a literacy rate lower than a Canadian kindergarten class'. The place is an absolute mess. It's been that way longer than anyone can remember. Nothing we've done lately has made it worse, it's just it might be well beyond saving. If Pakistan would clamp down on its militant north and police its own borders, things would be about 500x easier than it is now. Unfortunately, it doesn't. The international force there now is facing the same problems the Soviets did in the 80's. To pacify Afghanistan you'd have to move in to Northern Pakistan, and I don't think anyone's too excited about that prospect.

It's advertising for the government. They are advertising legislation passed by Harper and your buddies in the LPC. Things like the Home Renovation Tax Credit and the TFSA have to be advertised to let people know they even exist. Don't get butt-hurt because the government advertises popular legislation.

It all goes down to polling. If the LPC takes a dive in the polls you'll see the NDP drop its support for the Cons and the Liberals will start supporting them instead. This isn't about 'making parliament work'. It's about 4 political parties doing what's in their best interest to do.

A lot of the time it doesn't matter how you campaign. The party leader has more impact on each individual riding than the actual candidate him/herself. I would say probably over 80% of people don't pay a second of attention to the local candidate's campaign. I did, but only because I knew the Liberal candidate (he's a good guy and I would have voted for him if not for Dion) and the CPC candidate's campaign was a total botch job.

I see you've gone back to the mindless rhetoric again. There's nothing 'pathological' about a party leader undermining the opposing party. I also don't really see the problem with shaking up the status quo in Canadian politics. I don't think it's a good thing that one party should be able to dominate on a regular basis and I think it's better for the country if we don't have ANY 'natural governing party'.

I think all it does is make the Tories look good. When you have a series of different parties propping them up, it almost starts to look like they're able to run a minority properly.

I think being kicked out of your house is different from killing, and I don't think you can lump them together. I think this is something you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on. Agreeing to talk needs to come first and then they can arrange to halt aggression. That's how it has always been done in the past, and simple logic would dictate that talking about mutual concessions should precede actually making concessions. Those concessions could include, but are not limited to, withdrawing from settlements, vowing to stop violence and enforce the end of violence, and mutually recognizing each other's right to exist. In this I see a very genuine bias in your writing. You're attacking Israel's commitment to peace, which is admittedly in question given their expansionism, but at the same time you're ignoring that the other side has made an official and vocal commitment to violence. It wouldn't be hard for someone to argue that Israel continues its 'aggression' simply because they're going to be surrounded by enemies regardless. No, like I said before, and which you (or perhaps someone else) argued against, was that the past needs to be forgotten and the two sides need to focus on what would be an agreeable peace. To say that Israel needs to remove all settlements to even start talking about peace is absolutely false. I'd agree maybe that if they want to talk peace they could maybe stop expansionism and freeze settlement growth, but I'd also suggest it's equally necessary that the other side make some commitments to stop the violence and violent rhetoric. Obviously, in the conflict with this history, it's hard to expect that things would go by orchestration and violence would cease at once. Yet In order for this proposal to be worthwhile, we'd have to see who would ratify it. If a lot of the big players refused (ie Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria etc) then it would be fairly pointless. Also I think it's worthwhile to mention that withdrawl to 1967 borders (which none of them realized at the time) is a slightly ironic request. I'm not sure that Israel would be receptive to giving up half of Jerusalem, for example, and to declare that this is a prerequisite for peace is also false. The peace negotiations, and any mediation, have to focus on something that, overall, benefits both groups. It works both ways. but again, you have to communicate this to both sides. Part of the problem with negotiating with the Arab side is that it's an EXTREMELY different and some might say politically backwards culture. As they are not democratically elected they're a fair bit less interested in the best interest of their people than the West (and Israel) are. What you and I think might be a good idea might hold no interest to Khamenei and others of his kind. I can't say I'm an expert on what makes people like him tick, but it's worth mentioning that there may be very conflicting goals and viewpoints in the area. That's part of the problem.

and what did the British 'give up' in these 'treaties' really? The French got Guadeloupe and Martinique, which are tiny islands amongst a swathe of predominantly British posessions and the British got North America, India and a bunch of island territories. It appears to me that old Louis got the crap end of this deal, and I'd wager that's because he'd already lost what he 'conceded' in the treaty.

Subjective to the people experiencing (or not) and the regions experiencing it (or not). Jobs recovery pretty generally lags behind economic recovery as you well know. As for the numbers, I don't know where that's coming from. Jobs are still being lost as we know, but 500 jobs were lost where? I live in one of the areas hardest hit by the recession (KW has 10% unemployment right now) but the pace of job losses has slowed to a crawl and it APPEARS the cycle is turning around. We'll see.

I'm glad you wrote this because otherwise I would have had to. Thank you for saving my wrists and fingers. The fate of colonial France, in North America AND elsewhere, was all but decided long before the battle of the Plains. It was cemented and sealed in November of the same year when the British beat the French navy at the battle of Quiberon Bay and pretty much permanently ended them as a contender for naval power. A vastly outnumbered colony cut off from the motherland really had no chance. That France relinquished it formally in a treaty in 1763 is barely even relevant.

For the time being we can only hope for a minority. As the economy continues to improve things may improve for Harper, but until then it will be more of the same.

I'm not sure I share your prediction. Aren't jobs lagging indicators in a recovery? For good reason.....

I thought that Layton's posturing was actually helpful to the Liberals. Now they're definetly going have to back up their election bluster. They're not going to win the next election so what on Earth is the point in one? I guess they want to call one now before the economy fully recovers. If Harper leads the country out of recession and can work on the debt, he'll have a strong following. The Liberals don't want to give him that chance.

Rae wouldn't fly in Ontario. We remember him as premier. I believe he was the most unpopular premier EVER.

These are the people that we constantly somehow manage to elect....