Icebound

deleting accidental duplicate

A train wreck...while still happening ... Is news. The NDP 2.7 m train is still parked...the conductors are shuffling paper.. We have yet to see if somebody released the brakes. And by the way...I fully expect the ruling to be against them. I don't think Mulcair did them any favor by delaying repayment.

Water.

The NDPs 2.7 million is winding through the courts. When the decision comes down, it might be news... do they have to pay or don't they... if court says pay, will they accept or fight. Pretty straightforward stuff, and I expect they will cover it like everybody else, when there is something to cover. Marc Harb's case is coming up in the new year, apparently. Now, will Marc Harb's case be as interesting as Duffy"s? Probably not.... unless it comes out that somebody in high office tried to cover up his problem, but we will just have to wait for the court case.. I don't hear the CBC haranguing the CPC lately about their in-and-out scheme....old news.. or the G20 spending boondoggle in Muskoka .... old news.... though I might just bring those up here so that people can refresh their memory. In is interesting that Calandra, in his inane response to every question in those stupid 3-way panels.... includes the "we passed the accountability act" mantra in addition to the standard "terrorism/economy"... If must make viewers vomit. And Harper get his free 22 minutes of one-on-one with Peter Mansbridge every year to lay out his "vision", so I am not exactly sure how the CBC crititique is any harsher than for anybody else. Remember, nobody else is quite in the same spotlight. If there IS a bias, it may be that CBC is reflecting what the country is thinking. As somebody pointed out, Coyne used to be a fan.... now not so much..... .... .......

Ah yes, Valeriote. Fined $5000 .. no return number and no contact information in the call. Content had to do with the anti-pro-choice stance of his opponent. In effect, an anonymous accusation....which is against CRTC rules. It turns out that in the same riding, there were a whole bunch of outright lies in robocalls which directed Liberal supporters to wrong polling sites. Oh Yeah, and a Conservative staffer went to jail over it. But hey, we will get Elections Canada on the case to investigate.... Except that the Conservative Party refuses to cooperate. Now why would somebody refuse to cooperate in an investigation of blatant wrongdoing?

What kind of revisionist history is this? Liberal staff and ambassador fired, Liberal supporters convicted of criminal activity, Liberals voted out of power..... How was this "no problem"? The NDP's issues are before the courts. As we see this week, being before a court is hardly "no problem". They ALL got problems. If you are saying that the CBC did not report on the sponsorship scandal, etc., take a tour through the CBC archives. ... ...

TFSAs are good for YOU, but only if you have money. It is of no value to those that don't .....you can't save what you don't have.... And the country has to replace the revenue somehow.... Now that I think of, sure, expand TFSAs, and replace the revenue with a VAT. ...

So I have $10,000 in a savings account at 1percent. This year ... And all future years, I would make $100 in interest, and the government would get about $20 in taxes, or so, forever..as long as I had the deposit. If I put the 10k in TFSA, the govt gets nothing.. For ALL. FUTURE. YEARS. IF I have $100,000, that can represent a significant tax on the interest going with forward. But with TFSAs, I will have the whole thing sheltered within 10 years... And so, beyond that the govt is getting zero.... Instead of the tax on interest .... Tax that could be about 200 a year forever, even at the lowest interest and tax rates. F O R E V E R.

... i Especially those of the homeless, the sick and the unemployed.

Anybody notice the disappearance of this thread this morning? Apologies in advance, if I am missing something.....

.. This is a classic Faux News tactic. Create a false statement..... "Election will cost double...." Attribute it to somebody who never said it.... "CBC News..." Then attack the "false " statement which they themselves created. Milevski stated that the election will cost "tens of millions" more. That is not disputed. In the studio, CBC ASKED whether it is appropriate to extrapolate, they accepted the NO answer and did not dispute it. Party spending limits are raised due to the extra length of time..to approximately double of a 5-week campaign. That is not disputed. Taxpayers rebate the parties approximately 50-percent of their expenses. So if the parties spend their maximum, the REBATES will be double what they otherwise would have been. But NOBODY ever stated what the total cost would be.... So if Lilley is going to say... ".it is less than previously thought", then please let us know how much it was "previously thought", and by whom.

The only thing that I am interested in is the ethical behaviour of my government officials, especially those in the top office in the land.

Ah, I love it.... labour as a market-rate commodity.... You know, maybe labour has it all wrong. Instead of unionizing, they should form themselves into a huge corporation... Labour Inc.... If you want something done, you have to buy your labour from Labour Inc.... Of course, Labour Inc would find that it is quite inefficient to get their raw materials (workers) from such things as independent small families, so they would have to vertically integrate.... create huge farms where they could grow their labour... Also, it might make sense to get some raw material from 3rd world countries... much cheaper raw resource.. If it is smart, Labour Inc. could corner the market on this market-rate commodity. Its shareholders will make a killing. I think this may have been tried in North America in the 17th century. It was called slavery. And if we treat labour as a "market-rate-commodity", that is where we are heading again. Labour is every bit as entitled to a piece of the profits from a production as are the financiers, the designers, the shareholders. the executives. The fact.... fact.... that the wealth gap is growing between richest and poorest is a sign that labour is not receiving its share. Will it get reversed or will it continue to drift toward feudalism or worse? ... .

Well, a little bit of exaggeration may be okay, but I think Fraser's report said "up to 100 million", and when Gomery filed the report, he actually ended up with something like FIVE million. So I would say that "hundreds of millions" is a pretty big stretch. There is one other small difference in the two scandals, besides your interpretation above. The day after the report, Martin faced the nation, and called an inquiry. The day after the Senate scandal broke, Harper was running in the opposite direction and distancing himself as far as possible... repeating the same old line which is becoming increasingly difficult to believe with every email released into the trial. There may, however, also be one big similarity: at the next election, the voters punished the Liberals at the polls....... I mentioned this before and I will again. The issues of this election are not "security from terrorists" and the "economy". The issue is the integrity of our democracy. ...

Wait a minute.... ".... wont be as costly as once thought"....? ? ? is a great headline.... except: What was it "once thought" to cost? Who actually produced a number? There is lots of talk about it costing "more"... that is not disputed.... ....and the CBC question to Elections Canada was: "twice as long so can I extrapolate... to double...." ... a question.... to which he answered NO. But that was a question, not a statement. So WHO .... other than Lilly himself.... who else actually said that it would cost double? .

To interrupt the pi$$ing match for a short instant. Right now in Canada, we have all kinds of "terrorists" who "could" do something: Russian Mafia, Outlaw biker gangs, street gangs, Lawyers, etc.etc. For the most part, we know who they are, what they do, who there associates are, where they travel. Yet only once in a while do we manage to actually convict one, and it is usually after the fact. It is LUDICROUS to believe that.... (even if constitutional which I doubt) .... the proposed travel ban can be meaningfully enforced. Russian Mafia arrive in North America via Israel pretending to be Jews. Canadian radicals could go to Syria via BRAZIL, as tourists, or South Africa, as students.... or wherever. And now you are into a super-complex web of political decision-making that cannot possibly be fair or even based on the known realities. How CAN we REALLY know what someone is thinking???. Russia and Ukraine is a perfect example... and almost certainly a traveler to Western Russia could be suspect of supporting the pro-russian insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. But the government of Ukraine itself is not pure.... Would fighting against the so-called Ukrainian Taliban, (which is vowing to burn Moscow) ... would fighting against them be a Canadian crime, because Russia is not on "our" side? We cannot know what anybody is thinking. This is an open society. It has to remain an open society, or it will not be worth living in. If we have evidence of wrongdoing, arrest, try, convict, punish. If we suspect and want to investigate further, fine. But to presume that we can "prevent" Canadian militants from leaving is just as useless as presuming to "prevent" Russian mafioso from entering. ...

Do we monitor bank accounts of candidates or potential candidates?: Just to be sure someone doesn't sneak in a little extra under the table, you know. But that aside.... even if you are right and money does NOT affect WHO is elected.... it DOES affect the politician once in power. Because the most money gets the most access... the most money does the most lobbying... the most money controls the ability of public-private partnerships.... etc., etc. etc. Its not bad (not great, but not that bad).... when 20% control 70% of wealth. But it is trending toward 10% controlling 70, maybe even 2% controlling 70 eventually. We can complain about the influence of unions, but the facts show that their influence is squat... labour has received an increasingly smaller... NOT larger ... piece of the wealth that it creates.... ... and correspondingly labour has had an increasingly smaller influence on political decisions. Even the so-called labour-centered parties such as the NDP have been backing away from their labour roots. ... ...

Yes, absolutely correct.The problem is, that when all those wonderful trade agreements were made, nobody seemed to understand that the $11 toaster TODAY, meant that I won't have my job TOMORROW. But I'm okay: toasters are only $11, I can dip a little into my savings from when I HAD a job, and maybe I can do some part-time greeting at Walmart. Only problem is...I will never have the money for the deluxe $20 model. And now .....our 18 year old CHILDREN, starting out into the working world TODAY.... How many good-paying jobs are they finding in order to get at those deluxe models? ...

Oh REALLY? are you suggesting that marijuana is more brain-killing than today's, cocaine, crack, meth, etc., etc., etc.

Maybe. Have you considered new innovative ways of funding your dream? Have you come up with a dream that is SO worthwhile, that people are willing to sacrifice and HELP you to achieve it?

Well, nobody said anything specifically about Harper... That was a post about generic Wealth Inequality. As this inequality starts to reach a critical stage (if it hasn't already), whoever controls the money will control the government, no matter what the rules are. If it turns out that the UNIONS control 99-percent of wealth, they will. control the government..... Yeah, right...

The linkage that was being made in the debate between "economy", and "environment" "in the 21st century" has very little with "trade-offs" between "selling more oil", or "reducing CO2". It has to do about trust. The very definition of a business deal is trust. If Harper had been open and acceptant of environmental concerns 10 years ago and throughout his tenure... then all sorts of agreements would have been possible by now because Obama, and the native communities, and the provinces, and the environmentalists, and everybody else would have trusted that he takes their concerns seriously. Deals would have been made. But now... Nobody trusts him, because of that early position on environmental concerns, and deals are impossible.

Let's see...mmmmm.... How did the per-vote subsidy disappear? ....mmmm...Is it possible that the $1500 limit will disappear?.....mmmm

No big project starts without a "vision". If I have a "feeling" what I want my Canada to look like... In terms of social services, population mobility, research capability, foreign policy influence, trading partners, etc.... THEN I can try to get there. I may succeed in some ways fail in others, but I know where I am trying to go. A vision of "let's leave it all the same" is a death knell. Things grow, or they die.

WEALTH, not income. All of the above may be true and good, but as we progress and wealth gets concentrated tighter and tighter, who will be controlling the politicians that used to make those nice progressive tax rules that you cite, above?