Scotty

If I had sufficient trust in our judicial system that they wouldn't make mistakes I'd be all for killing him. He certainly deserves to die, and I'd push the button myself without remorse.

Stats Canada has never said the crime rate has gone down. It very specifically refers to 'police reported crime', not overall crime. And it's own studies indicate that what is going down on a consistent basis is the % of crime which winds up being reported to police.

I suppose it's too much to expect them to say, get a job and contribute something to their communities, huh?

Two thirds of the land mass of Canada... At least that's what they think they're entitled to...

Really? So presuming one was born in 1946 right after the war, you're saying that the children of these baby boomers were also baby boomers? I'm finding that pretty difficult to accept.

I'm curious. What country do you live in? Clearly you're not talking about this one, with Mr. Pragmatic himself as PM.

If that was the author's point he made a damned poor case for it. All I took from his rant was that he was furious that clement had said that for every new regulation the bureaucrats had to find an old one and delete it. And that tories were poo-poo heads, or words to that effect. Apparently PHDs in philosophy don't require an expansive vocabulary.

What's a 'torturous prison sentence'? I think people who rape and murder 15 year old girls should never be released from prison. Sue me for being strange.

There's no evidence it has done any such thing.

Harper has declared the pipeline, which will allow us to sell oil overseas, to be an economic necessity for Canada. I don't see any way to really disagree with that. Which means those 'people' you're talking about, are not going to convince anyone with more than half a brain. And the Liberals aren't in power...

Since contributions to charities are tax deductible, yes it is.

I like how they asked him about speaking fees and he said it was really not much at all. How many ordinary men dismiss $350,000 as not much at all? The mean income in the US is about $26,000

He's following the law he wrote. You expect people to be complacent about that? People are growing more angry over people like Romney, the cutthroat, every-man-for-himself uber capitalist rolling in the dough and buying politicians to ensure he doesn't have to pay taxes. He's the poster boy for the wall street types who threw the economy into the toilet with their outrageous game playing. Mind you, Gingrich is no better, crooked weasel who took more than a million dollars from one of the principals involved in the big mortgage mess - for services rendered. And anyone who thinks those services were talking about history and giving advice is a complete idiot. Clearly this was payback for protecting them in congress.

That wouldn't have happened if the evacuation was well-organized. The first men who tried would have been handcuffed and put in a cabin until they were done with the rest. If necessary they'd have been shot or thrown overboard to make their own way to shore. I didn't say the crew were cowards, only disorganized. And they were disorganized or two dozen people would not have died. The mere fact the evacuation started so late, and that passenger were sent back to their cabins is ample evidence of that. And from your own cites is this: Fights broke out to get into the lifeboats, men refused to prioritise women, expectant mothers and children as they pushed themselves forward to escape. Crew ignored their passengers – leaving ‘chefs and waiters’ to help out.

Buying on margin is one of those things only experts should get involved in, and even then only if they have money to lose. It's extremely risky. Buy solid blue chips and diversify your portfolio and there's no way you're going to be owing money.

This was clearly and extremely poorly trained crew who didn't know evacuation procedures or didn't act on them. Maybe if the captain and senior officers hadn't run away things might have been better organized. They waited far too long to start abandoning ship, and even sent passengers back to their cabins, telling them that the problem was fixed! By the time they actually started evacuations the ship was heeled over on her side too far for many of the lifeboats to be launched. Absolutely incredible that a ship a few hundred yards off shore can't evacuate its passengers without a couple of dozen dying. Of course, it doesn't help that the cruise line companies hire as many cheap labour third-worlders as possible for the crew. They're cheap, but that also means there's rapid rotation, and with a dozen different languages things can get awful confusing awfully quick. And call me ethnocentric, but I literally cannot imagine a Canadian captain, or a British or Scottish or American captain abandoning his ship like that. Nor a German or Japanese captain, or Scandinavians. There often seems something erratic and emotional about the Mediterranean types when the excrement hits the rotary device. Remember the Oceanos? The Greek captain of that ocean liner actually evacuated, along with his officers and many crew, without even announcing it to the passengers! It was left to the band (English) to go searching on the bridge for them and discover they were gone. Then the band had to contact the coast guard and organize a rescue!

So you don't want to pay welfare for ordinary Americans who can't find work, but you don't mind paying welfare to foreigners who are completely uninterested in work?

If he ended up in the hole he was playing complicated games that nobody but an expert ought to be involved in. For ordinary investors, you buy stock in a company, and that stock goes up or goes down. You don't wind up owing money on it, though.

They were talking about this on CNN. During the exit polls they asked people whether a candidate's religious beliefs mattered to them. If those beliefs mattered a lot, they voted for Gingrich. If the candidate's religious beliefs mattered somewhat, they still voted Gingrich, but less so. If the candidate's religious beliefs didn't matter, they voted overwhelmingly for Romney. Romney is a Mormon. The Christers of the south don't like Mormons. I wonder if this is an indication of a major reason for the general lack of enthusiasm Republicans are showing for Romney. They don't want a Mormon president.

When PET took over the national debt, note, not the deficit but the entire national debt, was $17 billion. He doubled spending in his first term of office, doubled. Then he doubled spending again in his second term. He was very popular for introducing all kinds of programs that nobody had to pay for. Of course, that meant borrowing lots of money. He raised the national debt by something like 1200% in his term in office - and those years were mostly good economic years. Trudeau first took office in 1968. I acknowledge the term 'baby boomer' stretches all the way to the late fifties, but in reality, the bulk were born right after the war. So most were voters when Trudeau was elected. And he was exactly the kind of politician who would most appeal to younger voters, and did.

You think the selfish boomers cared much about their kids? They cared less than any generation before them. Those previous generations made huge sacrifices on behalf of their children. What sacrifice did boomers make with their divorces, their fickle, narcisistic lifestyles, their ignoring their kids, their refusal to even pay for the schools so their kids didn't have to attend schools in cubicles... And the boomers financed their society on the back of their kids. They ran up hundreds of billions in debt and stuck their kids with it.

And who supports a 'party of the deeply stupid'?

I've heard it said that the royalty rate Alberta charges is among the lowest in the world. Do you know what the rate is for Bitumen vs crude? And what the royalty rate might be elsewhere, such as in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela?

I don't like dealing with any of these countries, but it's economically necessary. You notice I haven't said we shouldn't be shipping oil to China. I support shipping oil to China. I've said we shouldn't be giving control of our oil industry to China. And I'd oppose giving it to Saudi Arabia or Syria too. You're right. But what's in the best interest of the foreign owned oil companies is not necessarily in Canada's best interests. We should encourage Canadian oil companies to build the refineries here through massive tax writeoffs and, if necessary loans. I consider this to be in Canada's best overall economic and strategic interests and therefore worthy of government funding if private industry can't do it. I don't purport to be expert at the advantages of the different port facilities. I will state only that from what I've read, the northern port is an invitation to big oil spills, so that if at all possible, the facilities should be expanded in the south. As to Puget Sound, I think we've already seen the disadvantages of letting foreign countries control our oil exports.

There is no merging to this degree. A Japanese or Korean company is going to do what is most profitable for that company. It's not going to make decisions here which detract from their bottom line because it would help other parts of their country's economies in some way. Not to mention those country's governments are not our enemy.