Bugs

Why all this belittling? The woman is popular because she identifies the problems in a way people can identifty with. She gives them voice, in a way lots of people understand and agree with. In fact, the only politician in the USA that can draw more people than Sarah Palin is Barrack Obama. She recently appeared at a small convention of Tea Party organizers in Nashville. Because she was there, the national media were there. They chose to write about her crib notes on her hand. Huffington Post had several posts dedicating to making Palin look ridiculous. That's part of the power of Sarah Palin. She attracts huge media coverage, a lot ofthem dedicated to her destruction. Yet, all the snottiness, all the venom doesn't seem to affect her. In fact, it underlines how smug and condescending her critics are. Every time the women of The View laugh bitterly at her, another chunk of people decide she pisses off all the right people, about all the right things. I don't think Canadians have any idea how bad parts of the USA are, and what a devastating blow North American industry is taking. I was in Windsor for two days back in October, and I was shocked. It looks like 20% of the homes are for sale, and the rental market has disappeared -- in Windsor!!! I crossed the border to take a look at Detroit ... where I had friends back in the 1970ies ... it was a pretty sad place, then. But now, it's worse. Whole parts of the city have been closed down. Houses are being burnt down by vagrants, or by owners -- who knows? Unemployment is about 50%. Schools are closing. Whole plazas are closed. Michigan is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It's a disaster area, a city returning to dust. Detroit is ground-zero, of course, but it's only marginally better all through the old industrial heartland ... In the US overall, one mortgage in eight is underwater ... millions of foreclosures are lined up ... nobody wants to say it out loud, certainly nobody in the media -- but when the interest rates go up, the jig is up. Ordinary Americans generally are coming to the conclusion that the stimulus has failed. That's why you should watch this woman. Fate has decreed that she is to have a huge role in the unfolding events because she gives voice to the feelings of lots of ordinary Americans, who played by the rules, and have been betrayed. She is certainly the one best positioned, at the moment, to become the first female President of the USA. You may not think much of the woman, herself ... but there's no denying that there's a lot of people behind her, giving her a kind of stature. They may end up rejecting her, but people want these words to be said. They want those words, and more ... better than any politician in America, Sarah Palin understands those people. That's why her enemies can't destroy her, and why observers should take her seriously.

It's a policy of 'ethic cleansing'. That's all. Same thing at Caledonia. Fantino helps them.

This economist examines the choices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zrVUWrAHdQ To be clear, he says that no country that has ever spent 40% more than it took in in tax revenues has ever avoided a hyperinflation. This is a statement based on a lot of research. If this is right, it is clear which course Obama has taken America down . It is also clear that probably any other politician would have done the same thing. It would take unusual courage to put the country into a depression, and to let the banks and mortgages fail -- even if there is no better answer. These might be the 'good old days'.

Perhaps you are being intentionally obtuse ... the significance of the 60th seat, for the Democrats, is that they control the procedure, and they have used that control to rush through huge pieces of legislation without the normal rights of all members to examine legislation at a pace that allows for reflection, and reactions from their home states. In this case, they control the timing of the vote. The Democrats don't want to open up the re-nomination of Bernanke. Nor do they want a lot of noisy publicity that would only get people upset about them raising the debt ceiling ... Bernanke's appointment might not have been in doubt, but there might have been some other gnawing questions about where the money went that just might come up ... questions about auditing the Fed ... that kind of thing.

My point is that it took something that hit at their organizational sustenance to get them to agree on a coalition. If they'd ever taken power, can you imagine Iggy presiding over a cabinet with Bob Rae, Jack Layton, and Ralph Goodale in it?

That isn't what I read. I don't think you even know. They said that having a Canadian government person at Khadr's interrogation at Gitmo violated some right or another. I don't quite get it, and that's half of the reason I was asking. The other half was that it seems nobody else knows, either. What can these judges have the PM do, in future? Chastise the official? Perhaps he could whistle the President of the USA in, to explain why Gitmo's now going to be the site of the NY Terrorist trial, and the implications for human rights ... This ruling seems to me to be a lot of hot air expended over an order that's essentially empty.

Why do you think the Democrats needed 60 votes in the Senate? It's to be able to over-ride their opposition, and limit their ability to speak on the issues. Why do you think it's all over, just because one seat changed hands? It's because they stuff they're passing is hugely unpopular with the American people, and the administration springs 1000+page Bills on the Senate, and want it passed 48 hours later. That's part of the scandal -- not even the Democrats can read the Bills they're voting on. (Interestingly, they rushed three things through the Senate before Scott Brown got there -- Bernanke's appointment, raising the debt ceiling by another $trill and a half, and changed the bookkeeping rules so the deficit will appear smaller than it really is ... ) Don't believe all this nonsense about Obama's non-partisanship, rising above the shoddy grunt-work of law-making, to transcend politics as usual ... it's stuff meant to delude the idealistic ... I read these events differently. I think Obama's bubble burst for yet another group of people, as a result of the State of the Nation speech. A lot fewer people believe him, after all of this, and the realization is growing (in the US) that the stimulus package hasn't worked. I see a very dark next three years ahead for Mr. Obama.

I don't think this is true. In the US, it's a little different, but in Canada, what Parliament does is let the people's representatives veto the funding of their program. However, the actual 'running of the country' is in the hands of experts, the top people in the civil service are recruited to the service of the dominant people in the cabinet. Small committees meet on topics, and report to other committees, where the inner circle of mandarins and politicians sit. Then the politicians go to the caucus, the way a sales manager would go to a sales meeting -- cranked up, and trying to motivate the sales staff to 'make sales! The caucus goes out, and rams it through Parliament. The people don't know anything about it, and can't possibly know if they want it ... but this will happen half a dozen times before they have an election. Then, they see all this stuff listed off as if its a good thing. "Huh?" he thinks to himself, hopeful nobody notices because they'll make him feel stupid if they do. None of this has much to do with democracy ... but can you mention even one thing that was initiated by the grass roots, and was passed into policy by Parliament? Even one?

Do you know why they were able to unite? Because Harper was threatening their subsidies! Because Harper threatened to take away the $1.95/vote/year that each party gets. For them, it was like the the end of their expense account life-styles. That's the only reason! Imagine the feelings of hatred and rivalry that exist between the Bloc and the Liberals, for instance, the legacy of all the dirty tricks that they had played on each other, over the years. Or the NDP and the Liberals. They hate each other. Look at the difficulties that the PCs had in merging with the CA. Believe me, they hardly had a history together, compared to the Liberal Party's history with both the NDP and the Bloc. Barring a catastrophe, there's only one way the Liberals can return to the old days ... and that's if the Liberals let Bob Rae go on a drive to power right over the plucky Jack Layton, and the cowering band behind him. And that's at least one election away.

I can hardly believe it's possible to see things from such opposite ends ... What the last attempt showed -- it you ask me -- is that the Liberals cannot form a coalition with the Bloc without Anglo -Canada mobilizing. That was the move that ended Stephane, remember his expedited exit? When Iggy started the countdown to the fateful vote that would either throw Canada into an election, or resurrect the poisoned coalition. The reaction of the public was negative, and immediate. Meanwhile, the stimulus is working. The economy is bad for autoworkers and soft-wood lumber, but it isn't that bad, over the whole country. Our PM is becoming an intenational star. The Olympics is about to open. All is well ... for at least a couple of weeks, while we watch the skiers, and the hockey players. The bigger point is ... the public may not feel warmly towards Stephen Harper, but they trust him by multiples, as the most competent leader for the times. And, when a depression is going on, its nice to have someone with some proven judgement in the top job. I don't understand why you think that the Conservatives are on the edge of imploding. Sorry. To me, it's more like we're stuck with them, like it or not. The Liberal Party simply isn't up to the job, at the moment.

Yes, but they meant that they, the Court, has no right to interfere in foreign policy. Not the government, the Court. That's recognizing that the Court is messing in politics, where they have no business. The point about 'rights' has to do with Khadr. I doubt if the Supreme Court said what is being reported. What possible right could anyone have that would entitle them to -- what? -- incession? Khadr went to Pakistan to learn how to kill Americans, Afghan style, from ambushes, etc. He ended up being wounded and caught, and his life saved by a lot of American medical care. Formally, the guy has no rights. He's caught, fighting without a uniform, in the employ of no state, killing Americans. Legally, he's just a criminal or an insurgent. Either way, he could have been lined up against the wall and shot, legally. He's lucky to be treated as a PoW. Does Canada have an obligation to seek the freedom of Canadians fighting against NATO? I doubt it. It would be more likely a crime for Canadians to fight against NATO. There's a lot of loose talk about 'rights' these days, as if everybody has a right to everything. The problem is -- they don't, and people who attack military units from ambushes take their own chances. If I am wrong, identify the right that Omar Khadr has supposedly not been accorded. I don't think you can.

Pickton waited six years for the police to find evidence against him, which is a kind of torture itself. Six years ... the fundamental reason being that the prosecutors didn't have the evidence to support the murder charges they laid against him. In fact, they never established that he killed a single woman, or that he's anything other than a damaged soul who served as a catspaw for the whole operation. And nobody amongst this whatever number of lawyers he head, not one of those great legal minds, thought for a moment to ask about the man's so-called Charter Right to a speedy trial? This whole thing is trumped up because the Liberal Party has no no valid criticism of anything the government is doing that would have traction with the public. What 'rights' has Khadr been deprived of, anyway? No body can seem to tell me. I don't see it. His beef is with the US govt. and he catches a break when they decide to treat him like a PoW, rather than a brigand or terrorist. There's no need for a trial, as far as I am concerned. If they return him to Canada, of course, there is no reason to try him here.

The problem is -- who else is there? Personally, I'm not quite with you on the " ... lack of respect for basic democratic practices ..." thingy. The more I learn about proroguing, the more it seems like a routine thing that Bob Rae (for example) used repeatedly to avoid having his party shredded by public opinion. (The public was nothing less than repulsed by him at the time.) Not a single figure saw it as abusive, and it wasn't because people were trying to be kind to Mr. Rae. It's like "Time-out for the Olympics." That's all it is. And I say, "Thank God", because all the Liberals are doing is posing and grandstanding. They don't have a single new idea to offer, and if they did, they'd hold it back so nobody else could take the credit away from them. You have to face some facts. There is no alternative government, with its own diagnosis and solutions, to go to. The alternative would be a coalition between some mix of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc, and whatever the mix, it would solve all of its problems by spending more money. It would likely be a disaster.

Yes, seriously. I gather you don't know either.

What are you saying? I think the idea that the Supreme Court can review our foreign policy, to me, is proof positive that 100 years of public education have been wasted, and that the Court has a bad case of mission creep. They need to have their ears pinned back. They have a bigger social agenda than some political parties have. What right has Kadr been deprived of? Does ANYBODY know?

Personally, I don't care which party is in government, so much as what rights are being violated. Is Canada compelled to bail Omar out of a jam he got himself into, with parental approval? Does this mean the rest of us get to go out and join a cause, and kill people, and the Canadian state is required to bail us out? The way this ruling is being presented makes no sense. What specific right is this person being deprived of? I can't think of what it would be.

Sounds like a surrender to me ... Not Canada's surrender, but NATO's. Keeping it well hid, of course. Let's see if the Americans really make the effort.

The thing about healthcare ... is that they have to be careful not to interfere with the rights of lawyers to generate incredible awards over medical mistakes. Not only does it cost the system piles for insurance, but it also forces huge amounts of paperwork on medical personnel. One of the keys is 'tort reform' - -a kind of 'cap and trade' on such settlements. Also, there should be ways to reduce the costs of litigation. The guy that 'won' the big lawsuit against big tobacco, Richard F. Scruggs, charged a fee of $1.4 billion. He's now in jail on charges of attempting to bribe a state judge. That's a mess that needs to be cleaned up if healthcare is to become truly reformed. (There are other things, as well, of course.) Think about folks in Mass ... they already have a pretty good system. Almost everybody is covered. This plan will cost them more, and give some parts of their population less coverage. It isn't ideological for most of these people -- it's just that it doesn't makes sense for them to support this deal. It's probably the same in California and a few other states. Canadians think the American health system has been a bad system. It has not. For the majority of people, Obama's plan means a degradation in their service, and they don't believe it will save money, because government plans never come in as projected. Bottom line.

I think you're exactly right, Pelosi is now calling for the passage of the health care bill by any means possible. Lieberman ought to think about wearing Kevlar. And then ... Cap and Trade ... But is it a good thing? Go to the 1:30 point, and pick up the quesstion to Noriel Roubini, and his answer. I think he's right. So, the Congress becomes gridlocked after November, and for at least two years shortfalls in revenue will likely be responded to by the Fed and the Treasury printing more paper money. A broken system gets more broken. The political atmosphere becomes poisoned with acrimony, and politicians who see defeat as nearly inevitable begin to loot what they can. On Main Street, prices begin to rise and jobs disappearing, as the start of a double-digit inflation sets in. You say this is good news. I know what you mean -- it's mismanagement on a giant scale. But it isn't really good news. For one thing, in the USA, the stage becomes set for all the redemptive acts the economy requires -- severe monetary reforms, a steep economic depression, and a decade where political extremism of all sorts is likely to flower. it will hit Canada. A third of our jobs are dependent on the US market. I don't know how it will hit, but it will. We could have a couple of million jobs at risk. We have dibs on what was the richest market in the world ... and they won't have that much to spend anymore. That's how I see it.

Full disclosure: Bob Rae is what took me out of the NDP camp. The media focus is on the issues between the unions and Rae ... as if that was a big deal. In fact, Rae gave the unions a big pay day shortly after coming to power. A year later, he was saying 'Whoops' ... He also stomped on one of the oldest of the party's promises, going back to CCF days -- government car insurance. But that isn't why people despise Bob Rae. Rae Days is a nostalgic memory. Bob Rae ran the most racist and sexist government that this country has ever seen! And that's the truth. Oh, sure, it was all stuff about fixing the past, and all of that ... his racism and sexism was of the redemptive sort. It got so bad that the job postings that circulate within the civil service ended with the cryptic suggestion that no white male Canadians need apply. The Rae government was all about making sure all promotions went to women, and gender became a job qualification of increasing importance as you went up the hierarchy. The same applied to race. They still do it. Well, they don't put the 'No white male Canadians need apply' on the bottom anymore ... now they add a longish paragraph which states that applications are particularly sought from women, first nations, visible minorities, etc. etc ... same thing. White males drink out of that fountain over there. It isn't that people disagree with this stuff as a goal, to evolve towards. It does seem that a fair hiring system would have people of every colour and natioality in every work caregory. But Bob Rae has no time for evolution. Bob Rae wanted every employer in Ontario to have a workforce that matched the racial and gender demographics of the census tracts that they were in, and he wanted step one done at end of Year 2, and he wanted it to be irreversible before the next election. What made it so impossible was things that people might have been accommodated over a generation were being forced to happen within a few years. This isn't a myth. Stats Can actually made provisions to change the census so that Rae's racial police could have the info they needed to enforce. I tried to order it, but it cost $90! Bob Rae started a cultural war. When he was elected, I saw myself as a worker who'd often been in unions, and who supported the working persons party. When they came to power, I found myself to be the enemy, one of the white males that were being held responsible for all the evil in the world. It was the time when every form of anti-male hate was permissible, even encouraged, when the Montreal Massacre happened, remember how they trooped University Student Presidents before the cameras, all to say that they, themselves, as white males, felt they had responsibility for the tragedy? It was like a Stalin show-trial, held in front of TV cameras. Not all of that was Rae's doing, but that's what the times were like. It was a different kind of mass delusion than our most recent -- global warming -- but it was the environment Bob Rae fit into, and he carried it further. That's why people hate and despise Bob Rae, Topaz. This is how bad it was. When that white ribbon stuff started, I worked in an office with an East Indian guy who was really sharp, and we actually had a lot of fun together. One day he comes in with a white ribbon, and he's trying to get everyone to wear one. He comes to me. I crack: "I don't need one, I don't beat my wife." It was a joke. He knew I was divorced, I didn't even have a wife. I got fired. I tried to get some support, to appeal. Everyone just looked at me with distaste. It didn't matter what the law seemed to say. Nothing there for me. It was really an educational experience, in a Kafkaesque sense. Rae Days have bugger all to do with it. Due to Bob Rae, my son, and his peers, now have no real shot with the best employer in the country, the civil service. The extends, in diluted form, to the state-regulated monopolies. Find a white male with Rogers. It is important to recognize that there is a terror here, which acts through the occupational structure, not through politics. That's sexism, pure and simple. It justifies itself with claims of fighting racism, but not very many black men are beneficiaries; it's a woman thing. and Bob Rae's the equivalent of Daryl Duke as far as I am concerned. That's the unspoken truth. Bob Rae is hated because of the cultural war he inflamed. By now, people have forgotten all the details of those days, but they remember when shaken. The terror comes through the job market, and Bob Rae is a terrorist in that sense. He pushes all the agenda items to the max, and he really tries to achieve them. He is probably the most radical politician in the country, and he doesn't care what the electorate thinks. If he gets office at his age, he'll care even less.

I agree with almost everything you say, but it seems a little rich to blame Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton ... when Dick Nixon closed the gold window ... and Greenspan lowered interest rates. The two Bush's weren't innocent either, and even Carter did his bit. In truth, the cause is complex, and is as much a system failure as it is a kind of robbery committed by the bankers. What is the best solution to the system failure? Any ideas?

Just curious ... Why are you so celebratory about this obvious sop to a fringe group? Marriage, after all, is a relationship between members of the opposite sex, and having to do with the creation of a family. That's what defines what it is, in culture after culture ... a special relationship between people of the opposite sex, and who plan to raise children together. Marriage never was legally discriminatory. Homosexual or heterosexual, anyone could get married. All they had to do was find someone of the opposite sex that was willing. Forcing a change in the definition of marriage doesn't change homosexual practice one whit. There's no new fetish associated with it, no new erotic degradation to celebrate, no new disease to pass about. The same strange figures will still lurk around the public washrooms of malls and bus terminals. The lattes at the Church Street Second Cup will get no frothier. Homosexuals aside, what are the real motivations here? Is it a fear of being taken for a bigot if one doesn't admire this latest emperor's new clothes? No real barrier has come down, after all. In fact, in Canada, same sex marriage brought with it zero new 'rights' ... Is the problem with marriage that it doesn't satisfy homosexual's self-esteem needs? (Gosh, it didn't satisfy my self-esteem needs either.) Is the marginality of homosexual relationships be due to the fact that homosexuals have transient, often anonymous sexual relations, with no permanency something the Courts should address? Why is the state that has no business in the bedrooms of the nation now think that homosexual self-contempt is that something that the state has a role in obviating? Who knows these things? Lawyers aren't going to tell you the truth. What really is happening here is that their are a set of 'special rights' that marriage has ... such as the practice of excusing spouses from testifying against each other. "Hey," say the big foreheads at the Law Schools, "I don't have anyone who can't testify against ME". They complain, "It's discrimination." The effect is to take things away from heterosexual marriage. It's not a gain in Liberty. OK, that's stupid enough to fool the courts ... but why does it fool you?

No, it's more like what the Obama Democrats have done to America! One key thing is that the US government has guaranteed a lot of the bank debt when the bailouts occurred. If the economy -- that is, the private sector economy -- doesn't come to life, and start creating jobs at at least a 200,000/month rate by June, then a lot of that money will have been wasted. With every month that ticks over, the realization grows that the stimulus part of his economic plan has failed. We can watch Obama's political base crumbling under him. We are seeing the American government becoming increasingly confused and disabled. Obama has to react. Will he slow down, move to the center, and concentrate on jobs? Or will he continue, undeterred by his setback on Health-care?

He's even a beauty-king, of sorts. At least a centerfold ... Cosmopolitan ... not bad. I don't think you give the ex-governor of Alaska sufficient respect. What you are decoding as simpleton could equally well be decoded as country yokel. Palin does not talk in the urban style, she has no tattoos or piercings, and she makes makes down to earth into a virtue. Not only that, she's does actually juggle her kid sometimes while she makes speeches. No wonder so many people dislike her. But if you look at the quality of her decisions, as a politician in office, you can't help be impressed with her gutsiness, and that fact that she puts community priorities before party priorities. She ran out a bunch of Republican grafters, and negotiated a gas deal that actually pays the taxpayers of the state a royalty. She has real political accomplishments. Scott Brown drove around in a pick up truck that has become his symbol. Nobody expects a Massachusetts man to field-dress a moose, but the guy looks like Holmes, except slimmer. He's the old-fashioned work-ethic type that'll do the job right. "No, sir, it's the peoples' seat ..." -- it could have been Patrick Henry. I mean, that is definitely not the way they talk around the Haw-vard Yawd. You may not like the people of America, when they get stirred up, because a lot of them go to church and a surprising number of them like country and western music. But don't think they're stupid, or that they don't mean it when they say something.

It's eerie, how alike the first steps of the Obama administration are to those of the Clinton, in that they both stumbled over healthcare. Of course, Obama hasn't lost healthcare, but I doubt if the politicians can ignore the sentiments of the electorate any longer. The the Clinton full-court press was behind healthcare, just as the Obama team is committed now. The early prestige of the administration had been banked on getting heath-care, of completing the welfare state ... and the Obama's similarly promised to come through for the party this time. Look at how Clinton handled it. This is a master politician at work, imho. This gives us a benchmark. Obama is has not been given such a clear defeat. The important new factor is that the whole of the Congress will now realize how much of the electorate is in play. Will they patch up a face-saving compromise? Will they accept the Senate version? Will they stop going along with the Democratic Party's agenda on cap and trade? Amnesty for illegal immigrants? We will soon be able to compare how Obama handles a smaller setback, with Clinton acknowledging a defeat, and on his way to salvaging his re-election. Any predictions on what Obama will do?