Minister Baird, thank you. Thank you for standing up to the UN on the matter of North Korea chairing the disarmament panel!
There can be no doubt that the UN needs to change, it is a morally corrupt organization that kowtows and caters to the bullies of the world. I am glad to see the Conservative government taking this principled action.
While no other democracy has the courage to stand with us now, I have no doubt that we have started something. Canada is once again taking the lead on the world stage I am delighted.
There is a documentary called U.N. Me that was shown by The Free Thinking Film Society here in Ottawa that really got to the heart of what is wrong with the UN and I am glad to see that Canada is trying to fix it.
Kudos and congratulations!!!!!!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Hey flotilla supporters - this is what you are supporting
Let's be clear on this. The suffering in Gaza is not happening because of Israel, it is happening because of Hamas and the cruelty of their sharia laws. It boggles the mind.
Hamas Declares War on…Male Hairstylists
Hamas Declares War on…Male Hairstylists
July 7, 2011 – 10:49 am
Fact is stranger than fiction – although this is a story that could have easily found its way into the Adam Sandler movie "You Don't Mess With The Zohan".
In this case, however, the facts are far from comedic. The BBC and others have reported that Hamas has arrested a man in Gaza for styling a woman's hair. This incident follows a law enacted last year which prohibits the practice as contrary to Sharia law.
The unfortunate Gazan in question is not the first to be targeted for this "crime". In February, five other male hairstylists in Gaza were similarly arrested, and were required to agree to an affidavit renouncing their work.
This development signals just one more step in Hamas' drive to create an increasingly Taliban-like environment in the Gaza Strip, rooted in its own radical interpretation of Islam. Since taking power of Gaza in its 2007 coup, Hamas has instituted "modesty patrols", shut down bars and theatres, banned lingerie displays, and prohibited women from riding in cars with unrelated men and smoking hookahs in public.
Court rules that illegal immigrants have no right to free health care
This is really good news! I am very please with this decision. Illegal immigrants should not be receiving free health care, I also think their children should not get a free education. Citizen contribute by way of paying taxes, voting and being invested to make this country a better place. Those would subvert the system to take advantage of our nature should be stopped in their tracks. I am sorry this lady is sick but she made choices not to become a citizen.
Illegal immigrants have no right to free health care: Court
Jul 8, 2011 – 7:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 8, 2011 8:32 PM ET
Illegal immigrants have no right to free health care: Court
Jul 8, 2011 – 7:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 8, 2011 8:32 PM ET
An illegal immigrant has no right to free medical intervention or ongoing health care under the Charter of Rights, the Federal Court of Appeal has ruled in a precedent-setting decision.
The ruling will help protect Canada from medical tourism, when people come to Canada expressly to get medical treatment paid for by the government, an immigration specialist said.
Nell Toussaint is a citizen of Grenada who came to Canada in 1999 as a visitor. Her visitor’s permit expired six months after her arrival, but she remained here without legal status.
In 2006, she developed kidney problems. She has received free medical care, but much more is needed. In 2008 she applied for a temporary residence permit that would make her eligible for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. She did not pay the application fee, however, and her application was not processed.
Her health has since deteriorated.
In 2009, she applied to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for medical coverage under the Interim Federal Health Program, which offers emergency medical care for indigent people legally living in Canada. As an illegal immigrant, her application was declined.
With the backing of refugee support organizations and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Ms. Toussaint appealed to the courts – seeking both to have her application fees to remain in Canada waived and to gain access to health coverage under the Charter of Rights, which grants the right to life and security of the person.
In May she won her appeal on the application fees, with the Federal Court ordering the government to reconsider its refusal. The Federal Court of Appeal, however, did not agree with her position on health care.
“The program could not have been intended to pay the medical expenses of those who arrive as visitors but remain illegally in Canada and who, after the better part of a decade of living illegally in Canada, suddenly choose to try to regularize their immigration status,” says the unanimous decision, written by David W. Stratas and released this week.
“The appellant by her own conduct … has endangered her life and health. The appellant entered Canada as a visitor. She remained in Canada for many years, illegally. Had she acted legally and obtained legal immigration status in Canada, she would have been entitled to coverage.”
The decision has been hailed as a significant and sensible one.
“This case is extremely important because it limits the potential claims that other classes of people in Canada may make for medical coverage, such as visitors or those without any status and under the radar, of which the number is currently unknown but estimated in the hundreds of thousands,” said Sergio Karas, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and analyst.
Iris Fischer, a lawyer who argued for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on Ms. Toussaint’s behalf, said covering crucial treatment is in accordance with international and humanitarian principles: “The CCLA is disappointed that the Federal Court of Appeal did not recognize that a denial of health care to Ms. Toussaint in these life threatening circumstances violates her right to life and to equality.”
National Post
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com
The ruling will help protect Canada from medical tourism, when people come to Canada expressly to get medical treatment paid for by the government, an immigration specialist said.
Nell Toussaint is a citizen of Grenada who came to Canada in 1999 as a visitor. Her visitor’s permit expired six months after her arrival, but she remained here without legal status.
In 2006, she developed kidney problems. She has received free medical care, but much more is needed. In 2008 she applied for a temporary residence permit that would make her eligible for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. She did not pay the application fee, however, and her application was not processed.
Her health has since deteriorated.
In 2009, she applied to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for medical coverage under the Interim Federal Health Program, which offers emergency medical care for indigent people legally living in Canada. As an illegal immigrant, her application was declined.
With the backing of refugee support organizations and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Ms. Toussaint appealed to the courts – seeking both to have her application fees to remain in Canada waived and to gain access to health coverage under the Charter of Rights, which grants the right to life and security of the person.
In May she won her appeal on the application fees, with the Federal Court ordering the government to reconsider its refusal. The Federal Court of Appeal, however, did not agree with her position on health care.
“The program could not have been intended to pay the medical expenses of those who arrive as visitors but remain illegally in Canada and who, after the better part of a decade of living illegally in Canada, suddenly choose to try to regularize their immigration status,” says the unanimous decision, written by David W. Stratas and released this week.
“The appellant by her own conduct … has endangered her life and health. The appellant entered Canada as a visitor. She remained in Canada for many years, illegally. Had she acted legally and obtained legal immigration status in Canada, she would have been entitled to coverage.”
The decision has been hailed as a significant and sensible one.
“This case is extremely important because it limits the potential claims that other classes of people in Canada may make for medical coverage, such as visitors or those without any status and under the radar, of which the number is currently unknown but estimated in the hundreds of thousands,” said Sergio Karas, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and analyst.
Iris Fischer, a lawyer who argued for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on Ms. Toussaint’s behalf, said covering crucial treatment is in accordance with international and humanitarian principles: “The CCLA is disappointed that the Federal Court of Appeal did not recognize that a denial of health care to Ms. Toussaint in these life threatening circumstances violates her right to life and to equality.”
National Post
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com
I couldn't agree more - and I know a lot of soldier who do too!
Spare the austerity, spoil the military
Christie Blatchford, National Post · Jul. 9, 2011 | Last Updated: Jul. 9, 2011 4:06 AM ET
With Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan ending this week and the nation awash in an attendant flurry of publicity, the usual questions are being asked: Was it worth the loss of "blood and treasure" (the common phrase, cloying in my view, for those who were killed or injured)? Did Canada achieve anything lasting? How will Afghanistan fare?
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master's in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army's operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the "decade of darkness" by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are welltaken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army's struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto's brave paper -No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus "environmental duty allowances" (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) socalled universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commis-sioned members -127 leaders anonymously completed the survey -to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops' well-being threatens the primacy of mission success.
In Afghanistan, the standard Canadian tour for most of the duration of the mis-sion was six months, though that has recently been lengthened to eight. Because every soldier had to get home for leave, some were heading back to Canada for their break within a month of arriving, with the result that much of the time, units were at 80% combat effectiveness.
At Kandahar Air Field, where Canadians were based with troops from a dozen other countries, the creature comforts were significant. So accustomed have troops become to such amenities that after Canada's 2010 relief mission to Haiti, for instance, the commander lamented in a post-op brief that the "CF has lost the ability to go in austere."
Some survey respondents commented in particular on what Gasparotto calls "the insatiable appetite" of troops for web access to "remain connected to friends and family no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing on operations."
As one respondent said, "Any suggestion to go without air conditioners, video games and unlimited access to communicate back to Canada is met with anger."
In fact, using the army's own figures, Gasparotto shows that since 2006, "the CF spent an average 3.7 times more on its own infrastructure [in Afghanistan] than what it spent on reconstruction" for locals.
The environmental duty allowances, some respondents argued, have a similar deleterious effect.
Soldiers (and sailors and air crews, too, who receive different but equivalent bonuses; there are more than a dozen different kinds) become accustomed to the extra pay, and when posted to jobs, such as those at the army's own schools, which don't offer the allowances, will try to avoid taking them.
This is also telling of the vocation-versus-profession dilemma: If in order to recruit from a decreasing pool of potential candidates who have their generation's high expectations for personal satisfaction, the CF markets itself as simply another good employer, what is lost?
"The CF must redirect its energy by strengthening the intangible benefits of military service -the very ones that attracted most of its members at the outset to choose a career in the military," Gasparotto says. "It is by focusing on the intangible benefits that the CF can fortify the vocational model of duty . among a new generation of Canadians who want to serve their country."
The emotional universality-of-service issue may pose the single trickiest challenge.
At its simplest, it means that everyone in the army needs to be able to fight as an infantryman and pass a mandatory fitness test. A soldier who can't may stay in uniform on a temporary basis not to exceed three years.
But as troops began returning from Kandahar with grave injuries, both physical and stress-related, and in the face of a widely reported promise from then-boss Hillier that "no soldier wounded in Afghanistan will be released" without his okay, the policy wasn't universally applied, leaving the CF vulnerable to legal challenges from recruits who can't pass the minimum test.
More important, the survey suggests, is that while the vast majority of respondents believe the Canadian government is responsible for providing indefinite care to injured soldiers, and that wounded warriors must get all the help they need, the CF itself must not be allowed to become what one respondent called "an alternate form of welfare."
The survey asked respondents if these policies, adopted since Afghanistan, are sustainable -emotionally, operationally and materially.
Two distinct points of view emerged, Gasparotto writes. But a marked number of respondents -and among Afghan vets it was half -say they aren't sustainable.
As an officer commanding in Kandahar, where he was in charge of 23 Field Squadron, Gasparotto struggled with this himself, and concludes now, as he did on the ground back then, that if a leader, unit or the entire CF is preoccupied with providing care to veterans "the CF will have mortgaged its future as a combat-capable force."
These are useful, timely and thorny questions for a battleweary army to ask itself.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master's in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army's operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the "decade of darkness" by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are welltaken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army's struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto's brave paper -No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus "environmental duty allowances" (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) socalled universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commis-sioned members -127 leaders anonymously completed the survey -to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops' well-being threatens the primacy of mission success.
In Afghanistan, the standard Canadian tour for most of the duration of the mis-sion was six months, though that has recently been lengthened to eight. Because every soldier had to get home for leave, some were heading back to Canada for their break within a month of arriving, with the result that much of the time, units were at 80% combat effectiveness.
At Kandahar Air Field, where Canadians were based with troops from a dozen other countries, the creature comforts were significant. So accustomed have troops become to such amenities that after Canada's 2010 relief mission to Haiti, for instance, the commander lamented in a post-op brief that the "CF has lost the ability to go in austere."
Some survey respondents commented in particular on what Gasparotto calls "the insatiable appetite" of troops for web access to "remain connected to friends and family no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing on operations."
As one respondent said, "Any suggestion to go without air conditioners, video games and unlimited access to communicate back to Canada is met with anger."
In fact, using the army's own figures, Gasparotto shows that since 2006, "the CF spent an average 3.7 times more on its own infrastructure [in Afghanistan] than what it spent on reconstruction" for locals.
The environmental duty allowances, some respondents argued, have a similar deleterious effect.
Soldiers (and sailors and air crews, too, who receive different but equivalent bonuses; there are more than a dozen different kinds) become accustomed to the extra pay, and when posted to jobs, such as those at the army's own schools, which don't offer the allowances, will try to avoid taking them.
This is also telling of the vocation-versus-profession dilemma: If in order to recruit from a decreasing pool of potential candidates who have their generation's high expectations for personal satisfaction, the CF markets itself as simply another good employer, what is lost?
"The CF must redirect its energy by strengthening the intangible benefits of military service -the very ones that attracted most of its members at the outset to choose a career in the military," Gasparotto says. "It is by focusing on the intangible benefits that the CF can fortify the vocational model of duty . among a new generation of Canadians who want to serve their country."
The emotional universality-of-service issue may pose the single trickiest challenge.
At its simplest, it means that everyone in the army needs to be able to fight as an infantryman and pass a mandatory fitness test. A soldier who can't may stay in uniform on a temporary basis not to exceed three years.
But as troops began returning from Kandahar with grave injuries, both physical and stress-related, and in the face of a widely reported promise from then-boss Hillier that "no soldier wounded in Afghanistan will be released" without his okay, the policy wasn't universally applied, leaving the CF vulnerable to legal challenges from recruits who can't pass the minimum test.
More important, the survey suggests, is that while the vast majority of respondents believe the Canadian government is responsible for providing indefinite care to injured soldiers, and that wounded warriors must get all the help they need, the CF itself must not be allowed to become what one respondent called "an alternate form of welfare."
The survey asked respondents if these policies, adopted since Afghanistan, are sustainable -emotionally, operationally and materially.
Two distinct points of view emerged, Gasparotto writes. But a marked number of respondents -and among Afghan vets it was half -say they aren't sustainable.
As an officer commanding in Kandahar, where he was in charge of 23 Field Squadron, Gasparotto struggled with this himself, and concludes now, as he did on the ground back then, that if a leader, unit or the entire CF is preoccupied with providing care to veterans "the CF will have mortgaged its future as a combat-capable force."
These are useful, timely and thorny questions for a battleweary army to ask itself.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
Conrad Black responds
Truthfully, this man is fascinating. I would love to meet him, but I would have to download some dictionary app for my Blackberry just so I could understand all those big words he uses. He has an interesting - if somewhat bitchy comment in today's National Post - check it out.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
TONIGHT:Bruce Bawer & Hege Storhaug The Problems of Immigration in Europe
TONIGHT:
Don't Miss this important discussion on immigration
Bruce Bawer & Hege Storhaug
The Problems with Immigration in Europe.
June 8, 2011, 7 PM
Library & Archives Canada
395 Wellington
Admission: $20.00, Students $10.00
Tickets available at the door.
Please join us for an amazing evening when Bruce Bawer returns to Ottawa with his colleague Hege Storhaug to speak on the problems of immigration in Europe
Hege Storhaug is the information director of Human Rights Service in Norway and the author of several books on immigration and integration, forced marriage, women in Pakistan, and related subjects.
Few people have such intimate details of what is actually happening on the ground in Europe. Storhaug has travelled over 17 times to Pakistan to monitor the situation of Norwegian Muslims as they are forcibly returned home for schooling and other reasons.
Storhaug will present facts and figures and also be ready to autograph copies of her new book.
Bruce Bawer is an internationally-acclaimed author, whose recent book is "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom".
David Harris, an expert on security and terrorism, will also be on hand to add a Canadian perspective.
Join our free panel discussion:
Persecuted Minorities Living Under Tyranny
The Free Thinking Film Society invites you to join Bruce Bawer, Peter Stockland and Benjamin Weinthal for a captivating panel discussion on the persecution of Christians and Gays & Lesbians overseas, and the left wing establishment's ignoring of real international human rights problems.
The atrocities Christians and Gays face overseas often goes unreported. The Christian population in the Middle East has been dwindling for decades while persecution in places like Iraq is on the rise. Gays & Lesbians live in fear as their basic human rights are denied and face the death penalty for acting on who they are.
All this takes place while groups like "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid," unions and academics focus their efforts on discrediting the only state in the Middle East where human rights of all people are respected.
In a discussion moderated by Chantal Desloges (One Free World International), Bruce, Peter and Benjamin will bring to light these important issues in a dialogue that endeavours to identify opportunities for change in places where tyranny prevails.
When: Friday, June 10, 3:30-5:00pm
Where: Oak Room, Westin Hotel
There is no cost to attend this event however seating is limited. RSVP to: info@freethinkingfilms.com
Bruce Bawer - Acclaimed author and social commentator
Considered one of America's leading cultural critics, Bruce Bawer was born in New York City in 1956 and received his BA, MA, and PhD in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Described by Kirkus Reviews as "a literary essayist for the ages," he has published several volumes of literary criticism, including Diminishing Fictions (1988), The Aspect of Eternity (1993), and Prophets and Professors (1995). His other books include A Place at the Table (1993), one of the most influential books ever written about homosexuality; Stealing Jesus (1997), which Publishers Weekly called "a must-read book for anyone concerned with the relationship of Christianity to contemporary American culture"; Coast to Coast (1993), which was named by the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook as the year's best first book of poems; and While Europe Slept (2006), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and New York Times bestseller. Bawer's latest book, Surrender (2009), was described by Booklist as "sublimely literate and rational...immensely important and urgent." Bawer has also contributed hundreds of articles and reviews to such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, City Journal, The Wilson Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, Cato Policy Report, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement, and is a regular contributor of literary essays to The Hudson Review. Since 1999 he has made his home in Oslo, Norway.
Peter Stockland - Former Journalist and Director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal
Peter Stockland is Director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal and a Senior Fellow with Cardus policy institute.
Prior to becoming director of the Centre, he was vice-president of English-language magazines for Readers' Digest Magazines Canada Ltd. He is a former editor-in-chief of The Gazette newspaper in Montreal, a former editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald newspaper and has worked as a journalist throughout Canada during his 30-year career in the media.
He currently runs his own communications company, Prima Communication, in Montreal where he lives with his wife, Linda. In addition to his journalism career, he is also a fiction writer who has published in numerous magazines across the country. His short story If Only collection will published by Siren Song Press this fall.
Benjamin Weinthal - Journalist and Research Fellow with the Foundation for Denfense of Democracies
Benjamin Weinthal, a Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) research fellow based in Berlin and member of FDD's Iran Human Rights Project , is an investigative reporter. He has uncovered efforts by European companies to circumvent sanctions, exposed the extensive trade relations between Europe and Iran, and written on Iranian human rights abuses against Iran's persecuted gay and Baha'i communities.
Benjamin is an internationally-recognized journalist who serves as FDD's eyes and ears on the ground in Central Europe.
Benjamin's investigative reporting has contributed greatly to the West's understanding of the Iranian energy sector. In November 2007, Benjamin broke a story revealing $5.7 billion in business transactions between Germany and Iran, establishing Germany as Iran's most important trading partner in the EU. In 2008, energy and engineering giant Siemens reduced its trade with Iran following a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Benjamin wrote. A January 2010 article by Benjamin reported on the pro-Iranian trade practices of the German-Emirati Joint Council for Industry and Commerce, which advised companies how to go through the United Arab Emirates to avoid sanctions.
He published the first English-language reports on the sale of Siemens-Nokia surveillance technology to Iran's regime, which was used to repress Iran's pro-democracy movement and dissidents.
Benjamin reports on European-Iranian relations, human rights violations in the Islamic Republic, and Europe-based anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism for The Wall Street Journal Europe, Slate, The Advocate, Gay City News in New York, The New Republic, The National Review Online, The New York Daily News, The Jerusalem Post, and The Weekly Standard.
Benjamin earned his BA in Philosophy at New York University and a Masters in European Literature and Culture from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Ezra, I love you but...
I like living in a cable universe where there is a Sun News Network but I do think it could shine a little brighter.
The sets are alright - pretty Foxish if you ask me but I am okay with that. And I like the idea that they were manufactured here in Canada.
But how about a news update every half hour? Better news crawlers would be appreciated too. What about a news hour at dinner and again around 10 pm? Seriously, if Sun News does this I might never switch the channel. Really. Because I like to know what is going on I switch it to CTV at the top and bottom of every hour to find out what is happening across the country and around the world.
The evening shows spend too much time looping. I don't like that. At all.
I know, I know, 20 million for a budget isn't much of a budget but surely there must be some Television Broadcasting new graduate who would be delighted for a shot at reading news and doing graveyard hours talk shows for cheap. Please note that I didn't say journalism grad - I don't think very much of our university journalism faculties. But that is beside the point. More meat, less filler please.
But I digress from the my original intent of my blog as the title above suggest, so here goes...
I have a crush on Ezra so it is really hard to say anything that can be construed as critical. Ezra, I adore you but do you remember that dinner back in October in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies? Remember the story Mark Steyn told about what it was like to be a guest on the Glenn Beck show? How Glenn would wax on and on about the guest and whatever the guest wrote/spoke out about but never actually let the guest speak?
Yeaaaahhhh.
Sorry buddy, but you need to let your guests speak a bit more. I know you have a lot to say and I want to hear it. Maybe you could let your guests speak a little more - you have lots of airtime coming to you so you don't have to get everything out there in the first week.
It's like the time I told my friend Lula that she needed to get her upper lip waxed. It was hard for me to say and it was harder for her to hear it but it had to be said.
Ezra, I tell you this because I love you.
The sets are alright - pretty Foxish if you ask me but I am okay with that. And I like the idea that they were manufactured here in Canada.
But how about a news update every half hour? Better news crawlers would be appreciated too. What about a news hour at dinner and again around 10 pm? Seriously, if Sun News does this I might never switch the channel. Really. Because I like to know what is going on I switch it to CTV at the top and bottom of every hour to find out what is happening across the country and around the world.
The evening shows spend too much time looping. I don't like that. At all.
I know, I know, 20 million for a budget isn't much of a budget but surely there must be some Television Broadcasting new graduate who would be delighted for a shot at reading news and doing graveyard hours talk shows for cheap. Please note that I didn't say journalism grad - I don't think very much of our university journalism faculties. But that is beside the point. More meat, less filler please.
But I digress from the my original intent of my blog as the title above suggest, so here goes...
I have a crush on Ezra so it is really hard to say anything that can be construed as critical. Ezra, I adore you but do you remember that dinner back in October in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies? Remember the story Mark Steyn told about what it was like to be a guest on the Glenn Beck show? How Glenn would wax on and on about the guest and whatever the guest wrote/spoke out about but never actually let the guest speak?
Yeaaaahhhh.
Sorry buddy, but you need to let your guests speak a bit more. I know you have a lot to say and I want to hear it. Maybe you could let your guests speak a little more - you have lots of airtime coming to you so you don't have to get everything out there in the first week.
It's like the time I told my friend Lula that she needed to get her upper lip waxed. It was hard for me to say and it was harder for her to hear it but it had to be said.
Ezra, I tell you this because I love you.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Thank you Liberal Party donors!!!
I have been glued to Sun News Network since getting home this afternoon and I would just like to take a moment to thank all people who have donated to the Liberal Party of Canada!
There are an exrtaordinary number of Liberal Party election ads and I would like to thank all you lefties for your financial support on this great new voice in the Canadian television landscape. Your support is appreciated! Your investment will do a great deal of good to ensure a more balanced approach to news!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
There are an exrtaordinary number of Liberal Party election ads and I would like to thank all you lefties for your financial support on this great new voice in the Canadian television landscape. Your support is appreciated! Your investment will do a great deal of good to ensure a more balanced approach to news!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Monday, April 11, 2011
Elizabeth May can't be PM because she's a girl!
Liz May said something in a recent interview with Peter Mansbridge that is so offensive, so disgusting it leaves one incredulous.
To explain her own lack of good judgement and moral courage she used the defense commonly known as "But I'm a girl".
Shame, shame shame!!!
It starts out at minute 8 when Mansbridge gets into her accusation that Stephen Harper cheated in the last debate. After being asked why she didn't address her claim immediately at the debate she rambled a bit about why she didn't bring it up then but then there it is at minute 10:15. She claimed that she didn't take a stand against what she clearly thought was the Prime Minister cheating by saying it was a "gender related school issue".
http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/story/2011/04/08/national-elizabethmayinterview.html
What the?!?!?!?!
She can't call someone out because as a girl she was taught not to be confrontational in school? Really?!?!?
So because she's a girl she wasn't able to confront the Prime Minister for cheating? She's running for the hardest job in the land.
Being Prime Minister is all about confrontation. Every single day in the big chair there is going to be someone confronting, challenging and doing everything they can to maneuver and manipulate the PM and she just told Canada that she will fold quicker than a lawn chair at the first sign of rain at a folk festival!
Clearly Elizabeth May can't handle this kind of confrontational job being the delicate petite fleur of a girl that she is!
She done a great disservice to Canadian women because she reinforced the idea that a woman doesn't have the balls or rather ovaries to make the tough decisions. This is not a message that should be coming out of the mouth of a female political leader. But then again, Liz May isn't much of a leader is she?
If I saw someone cheating, I would do the right thing and call them out. And I would do it because I am a girl who was taught to do the right thing.
To explain her own lack of good judgement and moral courage she used the defense commonly known as "But I'm a girl".
Shame, shame shame!!!
It starts out at minute 8 when Mansbridge gets into her accusation that Stephen Harper cheated in the last debate. After being asked why she didn't address her claim immediately at the debate she rambled a bit about why she didn't bring it up then but then there it is at minute 10:15. She claimed that she didn't take a stand against what she clearly thought was the Prime Minister cheating by saying it was a "gender related school issue".
http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/story/2011/04/08/national-elizabethmayinterview.html
What the?!?!?!?!
She can't call someone out because as a girl she was taught not to be confrontational in school? Really?!?!?
So because she's a girl she wasn't able to confront the Prime Minister for cheating? She's running for the hardest job in the land.
Being Prime Minister is all about confrontation. Every single day in the big chair there is going to be someone confronting, challenging and doing everything they can to maneuver and manipulate the PM and she just told Canada that she will fold quicker than a lawn chair at the first sign of rain at a folk festival!
Clearly Elizabeth May can't handle this kind of confrontational job being the delicate petite fleur of a girl that she is!
She done a great disservice to Canadian women because she reinforced the idea that a woman doesn't have the balls or rather ovaries to make the tough decisions. This is not a message that should be coming out of the mouth of a female political leader. But then again, Liz May isn't much of a leader is she?
If I saw someone cheating, I would do the right thing and call them out. And I would do it because I am a girl who was taught to do the right thing.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Why Stephen kisses Laureen
What a title! And I am sure that is why the Toronto Star decided to give it to the article by Alex Marland that was published today.
A provocative little catch phrase sure to catch the readers attention and it worked because I read it. This is about the noticable presence of Mrs Harper on the campaign trail and nothing to do with the state of passion within the Harper marriage.
It is a very positive commentary on Mrs Harper and undoubtably an bang on analysis of why she is so much more visible than in the past.
I like Mrs Harper and any man who can hold the attention of such a woman must have a few things going for him!!!
A provocative little catch phrase sure to catch the readers attention and it worked because I read it. This is about the noticable presence of Mrs Harper on the campaign trail and nothing to do with the state of passion within the Harper marriage.
It is a very positive commentary on Mrs Harper and undoubtably an bang on analysis of why she is so much more visible than in the past.
I like Mrs Harper and any man who can hold the attention of such a woman must have a few things going for him!!!
Friday, April 8, 2011
The first interesting news story in 2 weeks
Why do dogs like car rides so much?
Now tell me, don't you feel good after reading this? Beats the heck out of all that election blah blah!
You're welcome!
Now tell me, don't you feel good after reading this? Beats the heck out of all that election blah blah!
You're welcome!
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Are we there yet?
I didn't want this election to happen. Four elections in seven years in my mind is two too many.
I'm angry at the Conservatives for insisting on a budget that the opposition wasn't going to support. I'm angry at the opposition for not working with Conservatives to create a budget that everyone could live with.
Elections cost about $300 million a pop. Times that by four and that gives you over a billion dollars - yes over a BILLION dollars! How many hockey rinks would that build? Or kilometers paved? Schools built?
But, nooooooooo.
It hasn't even been two weeks since the writ was dropped and I can't take anymore of the news coverage or the advertising campaigns. It all just angries up the blood. And my head is still hurting from that unnatural shrill emitting from Elizabeth May when she found out she wasn't going to be part of the debates.
I am electioned out. Don't get me wrong - free and democratic elections are a good thing! I am grateful that I can vote. And if this democracy needs me, I would vote every day but this election has nothing to do with preserving democracy.
I'm not sure what it's about (couldn't this have been taken care of in the men's locker room with a ruler) but I am pretty sure it's got nothing to do with me, my family or the people I love.
I just want this to be over. Like a family vacation in a crowded car with broken air conditioning and a gassy little brother. I know that we are going somewhere with this election but really, I just want to know - are we there yet?
I'm angry at the Conservatives for insisting on a budget that the opposition wasn't going to support. I'm angry at the opposition for not working with Conservatives to create a budget that everyone could live with.
Elections cost about $300 million a pop. Times that by four and that gives you over a billion dollars - yes over a BILLION dollars! How many hockey rinks would that build? Or kilometers paved? Schools built?
But, nooooooooo.
It hasn't even been two weeks since the writ was dropped and I can't take anymore of the news coverage or the advertising campaigns. It all just angries up the blood. And my head is still hurting from that unnatural shrill emitting from Elizabeth May when she found out she wasn't going to be part of the debates.
I am electioned out. Don't get me wrong - free and democratic elections are a good thing! I am grateful that I can vote. And if this democracy needs me, I would vote every day but this election has nothing to do with preserving democracy.
I'm not sure what it's about (couldn't this have been taken care of in the men's locker room with a ruler) but I am pretty sure it's got nothing to do with me, my family or the people I love.
I just want this to be over. Like a family vacation in a crowded car with broken air conditioning and a gassy little brother. I know that we are going somewhere with this election but really, I just want to know - are we there yet?
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Free Thinking Film Society presents 3 Billion and Counting
3 Billion and Counting
Sat. April 9, 2011
Aviation Museum
11 Aviation Parkway
Ottawa
7:00 PM
Dr. Rutledge and his team take an in depth look into a disease that has killed more people than any disease ever known -- Malaria. They interview African, Indian, and US Governments, charitable organizations, scientists, politicians, doctors, clinics, victims, and survivors. They explore and expose the politics of domestic and international policies and find the evidence that the public never truly understood. What they find is astonishing. The greatest ecological genocide in the known history of man is laid bare -- the 1972 ban of an extraordinary life-protecting chemical DDT. This is politics -- the cold brutal crookedness that kills with a stroke of a pen. Shortsightedness of governmental and environmental policies is causing the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions. When the EPA, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, and Sierra refused interviews, Dr. Rutledge knew he had touched a nerve.
For businessmen and women to endorse and encourage "alternatives" while a safe and proven PREVENTION sits idle is like fiddling while Rome burns. Africa loses nearly 3000 women and children on a daily basis not to mention 12 billion dollars annually to malaria alone. The team discovers that malaria is completely preventable -- completely. These young filmmakers trek from R. Carson's SILENT SPRING to the dead silence of millions of corpses and billions of suffering ones. And, thirty plus years after the DDT ban the death toll is gargantuan. Is it a mere coincidence that deaths from West Nile virus, mosquitoes, and bedbugs are growing by leaps and bounds right here in the US?? This film is intended to go directly to you, the American people, with the certainty that it will dramatically open up a virtual blizzard of public debate. This is one film that is long overdue...
Admission: $15 (includes HST), $10.00 for students/ seniors
Compact Music, 785 1/2 Bank Street
Compact Music, 190 Bank Street
Ottawa Festivals, 47 William Street
Buy online
Tickets will also be available at the door.
Sat. April 9, 2011
Aviation Museum
11 Aviation Parkway
Ottawa
7:00 PM
Dr. Rutledge and his team take an in depth look into a disease that has killed more people than any disease ever known -- Malaria. They interview African, Indian, and US Governments, charitable organizations, scientists, politicians, doctors, clinics, victims, and survivors. They explore and expose the politics of domestic and international policies and find the evidence that the public never truly understood. What they find is astonishing. The greatest ecological genocide in the known history of man is laid bare -- the 1972 ban of an extraordinary life-protecting chemical DDT. This is politics -- the cold brutal crookedness that kills with a stroke of a pen. Shortsightedness of governmental and environmental policies is causing the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions. When the EPA, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, and Sierra refused interviews, Dr. Rutledge knew he had touched a nerve.
For businessmen and women to endorse and encourage "alternatives" while a safe and proven PREVENTION sits idle is like fiddling while Rome burns. Africa loses nearly 3000 women and children on a daily basis not to mention 12 billion dollars annually to malaria alone. The team discovers that malaria is completely preventable -- completely. These young filmmakers trek from R. Carson's SILENT SPRING to the dead silence of millions of corpses and billions of suffering ones. And, thirty plus years after the DDT ban the death toll is gargantuan. Is it a mere coincidence that deaths from West Nile virus, mosquitoes, and bedbugs are growing by leaps and bounds right here in the US?? This film is intended to go directly to you, the American people, with the certainty that it will dramatically open up a virtual blizzard of public debate. This is one film that is long overdue...
Admission: $15 (includes HST), $10.00 for students/ seniors
Compact Music, 785 1/2 Bank Street
Compact Music, 190 Bank Street
Ottawa Festivals, 47 William Street
Buy online
Tickets will also be available at the door.
Why isn`t this story going away?!?!?!?!?!
Bruce Carson had problems. He did some bad things and was punished for it. Years later he applied for a job that required a high security clearance and he passed.
Security clearances aren't approved by politicians or their aides. They are approved by bureaucrats. I know a little about going through this process. It takes months. And the people who approve them are not exactly geniuses.
With my application what seems to stump Public Works and Government Services (that`s who does it) is the fact that I can be a Canadian citizen who was born in another country. My father was serving in Germany when I was born and because of those special but hardly unique circumstances, the moment I took my first breath I took it as a Canadian even though I was breathing German air. PWGS planks don`t seem to understand it so delays, delays and more delays.
No back to Carson. He was cleared so he got the job. The PM doesn`t do the background check himself, he relies on others to do that and Carson was approved.
It seems funny to me but I know plenty of people on the left who believe that everyone should get a second chance. Drug dealers, human smugglers, murderers and yes even thieves (Svend Robinson) all deserve a second chance if they have made amends, so Carson was just getting his second chance.
PM Harper not only followed proper procedure but showed some compassion for giving a man a shot to redeem himself.
I don`t understand why the media and the opposition seem to keep hammering the PM with this. I also can`t understand why Harper isn`t just saying, yeah I knew the guy had a past but he changed, passed security and I believe in second chances. If our PM would give this answer he would deflect this and make it a non issue.
Security clearances aren't approved by politicians or their aides. They are approved by bureaucrats. I know a little about going through this process. It takes months. And the people who approve them are not exactly geniuses.
With my application what seems to stump Public Works and Government Services (that`s who does it) is the fact that I can be a Canadian citizen who was born in another country. My father was serving in Germany when I was born and because of those special but hardly unique circumstances, the moment I took my first breath I took it as a Canadian even though I was breathing German air. PWGS planks don`t seem to understand it so delays, delays and more delays.
No back to Carson. He was cleared so he got the job. The PM doesn`t do the background check himself, he relies on others to do that and Carson was approved.
It seems funny to me but I know plenty of people on the left who believe that everyone should get a second chance. Drug dealers, human smugglers, murderers and yes even thieves (Svend Robinson) all deserve a second chance if they have made amends, so Carson was just getting his second chance.
PM Harper not only followed proper procedure but showed some compassion for giving a man a shot to redeem himself.
I don`t understand why the media and the opposition seem to keep hammering the PM with this. I also can`t understand why Harper isn`t just saying, yeah I knew the guy had a past but he changed, passed security and I believe in second chances. If our PM would give this answer he would deflect this and make it a non issue.
Sun News Network needs you!
In just a couple of weeks Sun News Network goes live. I am not sure where they go live because my cable provider Rogers is not even going to give me the opportunity to pay to watch.
I sent them an email (which you can send too but more on that later) and this is the response I got back:
Thank you for your feedback.
At this time, Rogers does not have plans to launch the Sun News Network.
Rogers does its best to package and launch services that offer the best value to its customers.
We do appreciate your interest and suggest you continue visiting Rogers.com for future updates.
For future email correspondence with respect to this e-mail, please quote reference number 46268220
Regards,
Mathieu V
Rogers Online Customer Support
Well, there you have it! No Sun News for Rogers subscribers. Let's face it, money talks and providers will only bring Sun News to your tv if it's in their best interest and a bigger bottom line is in their best interest.
Will your cable/satellite provider carry Sun News? If not please go to the Sun News site and fill out the form which will automatically be sent to your provider.
Please tell your cable provider you want Sun News.
I sent them an email (which you can send too but more on that later) and this is the response I got back:
Thank you for your feedback.
At this time, Rogers does not have plans to launch the Sun News Network.
Rogers does its best to package and launch services that offer the best value to its customers.
We do appreciate your interest and suggest you continue visiting Rogers.com for future updates.
For future email correspondence with respect to this e-mail, please quote reference number 46268220
Regards,
Mathieu V
Rogers Online Customer Support
Well, there you have it! No Sun News for Rogers subscribers. Let's face it, money talks and providers will only bring Sun News to your tv if it's in their best interest and a bigger bottom line is in their best interest.
Will your cable/satellite provider carry Sun News? If not please go to the Sun News site and fill out the form which will automatically be sent to your provider.
Please tell your cable provider you want Sun News.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Democracy rules in Canada
A judge has ruled that Elizabeth May cannot bully her way into the debates!
Federal Court judge denies Elizabeth May her bid to join leaders' debates
OTTAWA - Green party Leader Elizabeth May has lost in her a last-ditch effort to get in to the televised leaders' debates.
Federal Court judge Marc Nadon has decided not to expedite the case before the first debate on Tuesday.
The Greens had been hoping the court would agree to hear her case and rule before the debates got underway next week.
Party lawyer Peter Rosenthal argued the guidelines used to decide who's in the debates change with every election and are "constitutionally deficient."
A lawyer for the media consortium that's running the debates argued the matter was too complex to be heard fully within a matter of days.
The Greens wanted a judicial review of a CRTC policy that says broadcasters do not have to include all political parties in debates.
The media consortium running the debates insisted that only parties with seats in the last House of Commons can participate.
The French-language debate will take place April 14.
Federal Court judge denies Elizabeth May her bid to join leaders' debates
OTTAWA - Green party Leader Elizabeth May has lost in her a last-ditch effort to get in to the televised leaders' debates.
Federal Court judge Marc Nadon has decided not to expedite the case before the first debate on Tuesday.
The Greens had been hoping the court would agree to hear her case and rule before the debates got underway next week.
Party lawyer Peter Rosenthal argued the guidelines used to decide who's in the debates change with every election and are "constitutionally deficient."
A lawyer for the media consortium that's running the debates argued the matter was too complex to be heard fully within a matter of days.
The Greens wanted a judicial review of a CRTC policy that says broadcasters do not have to include all political parties in debates.
The media consortium running the debates insisted that only parties with seats in the last House of Commons can participate.
The French-language debate will take place April 14.
A surplus of parties means a deficit of democracy
The Globe and Mail has an excellent op ed peice by Bob Plamondon. Bob wrote Blue Thunder: The Truth about Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper , Full Circle: Death and Resurrection in Canadian Conservative Politics and Hay West: A Story of Canadians Helping Canadians all available at Chapters or on Amazon!
A surplus of parties means a deficit of democracy
Bob Plamondon
If an election is about giving citizens the power to choose a government and a future direction for the country, it looks like this campaign is going to fall short of the mark. Since the polls indicate another minority government is likely, voters can’t be sure what the next Parliament will produce. Will the party with the most seats be given a fair crack at governing? Or will some combination of the parties who finish second and below cut a deal to grab power?
Some countries force clear majority rule by removing lower ranked candidates from the ballot until a true electoral plurality vote is achieved. This is also the way Canadian political parties choose their leaders. But since this would not work well in a parliamentary election, and for other reasons, some suggest proportional representation as the cure to our democratic ills. And yet, in a country as diverse as Canada – socially, culturally, economically, linguistically – I cannot think of a better way to undermine accountability while at the same time institutionalizing division and chaos in Parliament.
Meantime, our current system is clearly failing us. In a four-way race a riding can be won with a little more than 25% of the vote. This gets repeated riding-by-riding to the point where popular support in the high 30s can produce a majority government. Ironically, more choice can pervert the democratic will.
Thanks to a profusion of parties we have heard less in this election about vision and policy and more about strategy and tactics. We may spend more time talking about who is in the debates than about the debates themselves.
All this meaningless political chatter confuses and frustrates voters, which may explain why we had the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history in the last election. In America, where there are two parties on the ballot, voter turnout has risen in the past three elections, and in 2008 was the highest since 1968.
In Canada, with fewer of us voting and five parties on the ballot, a majority government can be had with about 25 per cent of the eligible votes. Why would a party bother to make a broad national appeal if it can guarantee a win by building a rock-solid base of support by catering to a small but reliable segment of the population?
Of course the parties that have no chance of winning government like minorities because it gives them disproportionate influence. But minority governments come with their own problems. By necessity they are more focused on day-to-day survival than governing for the long-term best interests of the nation. Minorities are short-lasting, which is why we are having our fourth election in seven years. A minority Parliament also makes a government less accountable to fulfill their election promises since the other parties can block passage of any legislation they deem offensive.
No one likes a minority Parliament more than the Bloc Québécois for the clout it gives them to negotiate for pecuniary and other gains for Quebec. And with so many federalist parties on the ballot, the Bloc won 65% of Quebec seats with only 38% of the votes in the last election.
Whether it’s a minority or majority government, with four or five parties in the House of Commons the opposition is divided, conflicted and ineffective. Question Period and committee meetings take on a different tone when the government does not face a concerted and co-ordinated attack.
Although our system is intended to produce an accountable government and an official Opposition, public funding mechanisms encourages a proliferation of political parties. Any party that gets two per cent of the vote gets an annual subsidy courtesy of the taxpayers of Canada. This may be a great way to sustain a think tank or advocacy group, but it’s not good for democracy.
I believe we would get a more accountable government, a more effective opposition, a more engaged electorate and a more united country if we had two dominant political parties rather than five. If we narrowed the number of parties and increased the likelihood of a majority government the relevance and influence of the Bloc would be diminished, and they might even disappear.
It is unfortunate that the parties have been unable to rationalize the choice for voters on their own. But I predict a structural transformation of the Canadian political dynamic is likely to happen naturally after this election.
If Stephen Harper wins a majority, a merger of the Liberals and NDP would emerge as a likely necessity to thwart a Tory dynasty. Should Mr. Harper win the most seats but not a majority, a major shake-up of the other parties is just as likely. Having defeated the government in March on a matter of contempt, and having collectively won, say, 60 per cent of the vote, the opposition parties would likely seek to defeat a Tory minority government at the first opportunity. The Governor-General would have little choice but to ask the second-place party to form a government. A coalition by name, co-operation by convenience, or floor-crossing en masse, the Liberal and NDP brain trust would merge into one.
There are few scenarios where I see the structure of our political parties remaining intact after the vote in May. This will be good for Canada as it will not only strengthen our democracy, but also obviate the need for strategic voting and make the choice for voters crystal clear next time out.
A surplus of parties means a deficit of democracy
Bob Plamondon
If an election is about giving citizens the power to choose a government and a future direction for the country, it looks like this campaign is going to fall short of the mark. Since the polls indicate another minority government is likely, voters can’t be sure what the next Parliament will produce. Will the party with the most seats be given a fair crack at governing? Or will some combination of the parties who finish second and below cut a deal to grab power?
Some countries force clear majority rule by removing lower ranked candidates from the ballot until a true electoral plurality vote is achieved. This is also the way Canadian political parties choose their leaders. But since this would not work well in a parliamentary election, and for other reasons, some suggest proportional representation as the cure to our democratic ills. And yet, in a country as diverse as Canada – socially, culturally, economically, linguistically – I cannot think of a better way to undermine accountability while at the same time institutionalizing division and chaos in Parliament.
Meantime, our current system is clearly failing us. In a four-way race a riding can be won with a little more than 25% of the vote. This gets repeated riding-by-riding to the point where popular support in the high 30s can produce a majority government. Ironically, more choice can pervert the democratic will.
Thanks to a profusion of parties we have heard less in this election about vision and policy and more about strategy and tactics. We may spend more time talking about who is in the debates than about the debates themselves.
All this meaningless political chatter confuses and frustrates voters, which may explain why we had the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history in the last election. In America, where there are two parties on the ballot, voter turnout has risen in the past three elections, and in 2008 was the highest since 1968.
In Canada, with fewer of us voting and five parties on the ballot, a majority government can be had with about 25 per cent of the eligible votes. Why would a party bother to make a broad national appeal if it can guarantee a win by building a rock-solid base of support by catering to a small but reliable segment of the population?
Of course the parties that have no chance of winning government like minorities because it gives them disproportionate influence. But minority governments come with their own problems. By necessity they are more focused on day-to-day survival than governing for the long-term best interests of the nation. Minorities are short-lasting, which is why we are having our fourth election in seven years. A minority Parliament also makes a government less accountable to fulfill their election promises since the other parties can block passage of any legislation they deem offensive.
No one likes a minority Parliament more than the Bloc Québécois for the clout it gives them to negotiate for pecuniary and other gains for Quebec. And with so many federalist parties on the ballot, the Bloc won 65% of Quebec seats with only 38% of the votes in the last election.
Whether it’s a minority or majority government, with four or five parties in the House of Commons the opposition is divided, conflicted and ineffective. Question Period and committee meetings take on a different tone when the government does not face a concerted and co-ordinated attack.
Although our system is intended to produce an accountable government and an official Opposition, public funding mechanisms encourages a proliferation of political parties. Any party that gets two per cent of the vote gets an annual subsidy courtesy of the taxpayers of Canada. This may be a great way to sustain a think tank or advocacy group, but it’s not good for democracy.
I believe we would get a more accountable government, a more effective opposition, a more engaged electorate and a more united country if we had two dominant political parties rather than five. If we narrowed the number of parties and increased the likelihood of a majority government the relevance and influence of the Bloc would be diminished, and they might even disappear.
It is unfortunate that the parties have been unable to rationalize the choice for voters on their own. But I predict a structural transformation of the Canadian political dynamic is likely to happen naturally after this election.
If Stephen Harper wins a majority, a merger of the Liberals and NDP would emerge as a likely necessity to thwart a Tory dynasty. Should Mr. Harper win the most seats but not a majority, a major shake-up of the other parties is just as likely. Having defeated the government in March on a matter of contempt, and having collectively won, say, 60 per cent of the vote, the opposition parties would likely seek to defeat a Tory minority government at the first opportunity. The Governor-General would have little choice but to ask the second-place party to form a government. A coalition by name, co-operation by convenience, or floor-crossing en masse, the Liberal and NDP brain trust would merge into one.
There are few scenarios where I see the structure of our political parties remaining intact after the vote in May. This will be good for Canada as it will not only strengthen our democracy, but also obviate the need for strategic voting and make the choice for voters crystal clear next time out.
Warning: This post has nothing to do with the election!!!
The other day in Toronto hundreds of women gathered in slut solidarity to protest the comments from neanderthal police officer Const. Michael Sanguinetti who suggested said and I quote here "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
WTF??!?!?!?!?! Are we in 1956 or in some stone age sharia state? Both of which are places where victims are blamed for the actions of their assailants.
Const. Sanguinetti has apologized and disciplined internally but the man has no business speaking to anyone in the public and I certainly hope that he is removed from any and all future public speaking roles.
Now reading about this got me thinking about the word slut and the women this word is assigned to.
When I was in high school the worst name a girl could be called was a slut. When my own girl was in high school it was the same and now I am pretty sure that still holds.
Just what is a slut? A woman who likes sex? A woman who has a lot of sex? A woman who has a lot of sex partners? Is a slut identified by the clothes she wears? How high do heels have to be, how much cleavage can be shown, how tight the jeans, how short the skirt? Are these women identified by how they dress or perhaps they are identified on the walls of men's restrooms.
Or more importantly - so what?!?! What does it matter what a woman wears or how lively her sex life is?
I've made a decision. I am reclaiming the word! If rappers can reclaim the word nigger and if gay men can reclaim the word fag then I am reclaiming the word slut.
Slut, slut, slut, slut.
I like the word. I am the word. I am a slut.
We all know of my penchant for CFM shoes and my proclivities in attire are most definitely sluttish. So in the name of sisterhood I proudly align myself with those women who marched in Toronto and every other slut out there who refuses to relegated to second class status.
I am a law abiding citizen in a democracy. I vote for who I want, I read what I want, I associate with who I want. I pay taxes, donate to charity, volunteer my time and am a good neighbour. I don't kick puppies and I follow the rules of the road. I say please and thank you and I tip well. I call my mother and am a good mother. I pray, I am grateful and I wear lots of make up and tight clothes. As for sexual partners that I have had, well, I don't kiss and tell. So I may be a slut but that doesn't mean my right to personal safety is null and void.
If anything, we should be proud of all the sluts in our community. Sluts are proof that western society and values are superior. Proof that in this society people don't blame their behaviour on others, we are accountable. There will be none of that devil (in a blue dress) made me do it crap! We don't imprison rape victims for adultery. We don't murder our daughters for dishonouring our family name because some animal brutalized her.
If you want to know if a society is a true democracy, look to your sluts! Are they roaming free and safe? If they are then you know you live in a society that holds dear the ideology of western culture and democracy!
So, in praise of all sluts, from a woman who epitomizes the modern slut I give you Lady Gaga!
I am beautiful in my way
Because God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track baby
I was born this way
WTF??!?!?!?!?! Are we in 1956 or in some stone age sharia state? Both of which are places where victims are blamed for the actions of their assailants.
Const. Sanguinetti has apologized and disciplined internally but the man has no business speaking to anyone in the public and I certainly hope that he is removed from any and all future public speaking roles.
Now reading about this got me thinking about the word slut and the women this word is assigned to.
When I was in high school the worst name a girl could be called was a slut. When my own girl was in high school it was the same and now I am pretty sure that still holds.
Just what is a slut? A woman who likes sex? A woman who has a lot of sex? A woman who has a lot of sex partners? Is a slut identified by the clothes she wears? How high do heels have to be, how much cleavage can be shown, how tight the jeans, how short the skirt? Are these women identified by how they dress or perhaps they are identified on the walls of men's restrooms.
Or more importantly - so what?!?! What does it matter what a woman wears or how lively her sex life is?
I've made a decision. I am reclaiming the word! If rappers can reclaim the word nigger and if gay men can reclaim the word fag then I am reclaiming the word slut.
Slut, slut, slut, slut.
I like the word. I am the word. I am a slut.
We all know of my penchant for CFM shoes and my proclivities in attire are most definitely sluttish. So in the name of sisterhood I proudly align myself with those women who marched in Toronto and every other slut out there who refuses to relegated to second class status.
I am a law abiding citizen in a democracy. I vote for who I want, I read what I want, I associate with who I want. I pay taxes, donate to charity, volunteer my time and am a good neighbour. I don't kick puppies and I follow the rules of the road. I say please and thank you and I tip well. I call my mother and am a good mother. I pray, I am grateful and I wear lots of make up and tight clothes. As for sexual partners that I have had, well, I don't kiss and tell. So I may be a slut but that doesn't mean my right to personal safety is null and void.
If anything, we should be proud of all the sluts in our community. Sluts are proof that western society and values are superior. Proof that in this society people don't blame their behaviour on others, we are accountable. There will be none of that devil (in a blue dress) made me do it crap! We don't imprison rape victims for adultery. We don't murder our daughters for dishonouring our family name because some animal brutalized her.
If you want to know if a society is a true democracy, look to your sluts! Are they roaming free and safe? If they are then you know you live in a society that holds dear the ideology of western culture and democracy!
So, in praise of all sluts, from a woman who epitomizes the modern slut I give you Lady Gaga!
I am beautiful in my way
Because God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track baby
I was born this way
Monday, April 4, 2011
An honest Liberal
I believe Alfred Apps, President of the Liberal Party, and that's why I am going to vote Conservative!
Reality makes oilsands hot | Editorial | Comment | Ottawa Sun
Reality makes oilsands hot Editorial Comment Ottawa Sun
There's even an equation for it.
Oilsands + eco-hyperbole = tarsands / (Mideast crisis + Venezuelan whackjob) - other options = Alberta oil.
While we admit this equation is rather crude, so is the end product the U.S. so drastically needs, even as it tries to reduce its dependence on oil imports as the Middle East and northern Africa goes through its various revolutions, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez continues to play Crazy 8s with a euchre deck.
Increasingly high prices for gas at the pumps -- which is still less than in Canada, thanks to our tax-on-tax fuel gouge -- naturally has Americans demanding action from their president.
And so where has Obama turned?
Well, he turned south to Mexico, it's No. 2 supplier, and then he turned north to Canada, its No. 1 supplier -- all to lessen his need to export oil from such venues Saudi Arabia, No. 3, Venezuela, No. 5 and Iraq, No. 8.
And all this is happening while these less politically-desirable oil producers look over their shoulder to the burgeoning Asian market.
So suddenly, at least in the eyes of Obama, the oilsands no longer look quite as "dirty" as they did when oil prices were lower and the Arab world was being nicely run by despots.
Remember the equation? The "other" options?
Only 8% of all energy consumed in the U.S. is what the eco-people would cite as "renewable," the majority of it being hydro, wood, and biofuels.
Only 1% of that 8% is solar, and 9% of that 8% is wind --both demonstratively unaffordable until technology catches up to pipe dreams.
In fact, 92% of the United States' total annual energy consumption -- as in 94.6 quadrillion Btu in 2009 -- is from what the eco-folk would call non-friendly sources. Oil (37%), natural gas (25%), and coal (21%).
Even the bogeyman of the moment, nuclear power, provides only 9% of the U.S.'s total energy requirement.
So "dirty oil" is suddenly OK.
Welcome to reality.
There's even an equation for it.
Oilsands + eco-hyperbole = tarsands / (Mideast crisis + Venezuelan whackjob) - other options = Alberta oil.
While we admit this equation is rather crude, so is the end product the U.S. so drastically needs, even as it tries to reduce its dependence on oil imports as the Middle East and northern Africa goes through its various revolutions, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez continues to play Crazy 8s with a euchre deck.
Increasingly high prices for gas at the pumps -- which is still less than in Canada, thanks to our tax-on-tax fuel gouge -- naturally has Americans demanding action from their president.
And so where has Obama turned?
Well, he turned south to Mexico, it's No. 2 supplier, and then he turned north to Canada, its No. 1 supplier -- all to lessen his need to export oil from such venues Saudi Arabia, No. 3, Venezuela, No. 5 and Iraq, No. 8.
And all this is happening while these less politically-desirable oil producers look over their shoulder to the burgeoning Asian market.
So suddenly, at least in the eyes of Obama, the oilsands no longer look quite as "dirty" as they did when oil prices were lower and the Arab world was being nicely run by despots.
Remember the equation? The "other" options?
Only 8% of all energy consumed in the U.S. is what the eco-people would cite as "renewable," the majority of it being hydro, wood, and biofuels.
Only 1% of that 8% is solar, and 9% of that 8% is wind --both demonstratively unaffordable until technology catches up to pipe dreams.
In fact, 92% of the United States' total annual energy consumption -- as in 94.6 quadrillion Btu in 2009 -- is from what the eco-folk would call non-friendly sources. Oil (37%), natural gas (25%), and coal (21%).
Even the bogeyman of the moment, nuclear power, provides only 9% of the U.S.'s total energy requirement.
So "dirty oil" is suddenly OK.
Welcome to reality.
Conservatives - meet your national campaign team.
The Hill Times has a great piece on who is who at Conservative campaign HQ, take the time to read it!
I am grateful for all the volunteers who give so much to bring home a Conservative win. These generous people are truly the foot soldiers of democracy and without them we would be nowhere.
What or who I am not so enamoured with are those who are running the national campaign. I have no doubt that they want a Conservative win but I am not exactly sure of some of the hair brained ideas coming out of the Lancaster Rd. war room.
I have heard that they are insisting that every candidate clear every interview request through them. I have also heard that they are telling candidates not to talk to certain media on threat of having nominations revoked.
I don't like the limits on reporters questions to the PM.
I don't like this debate fiasco and yes, it is a fiasco.
And the list goes on.
Actually, I got ticked off with Conservative HQ some time ago when I noticed that they were subverting the nomination process. In other words many ridings were being forbidden from holding the traditional nomination meetings and letting members of an EDA make the decision on who was going to represent them. There were a few too many acclamations for my liking.
I guess political parties are like families. They may really, really tick you off by what they do but in the end, you circle the wagons and give your support.
Political divorce | Christina Blizzard | Columnists | Comment | Ottawa Sun
Blizzard is right! There is a double standard in how media spins out different policies and I am sad to say as a Conservative I am used to the double standard. I guess that is why I am sooooooo glad that I will soon be living in a tv universe with Sun News!
Political divorce Christina Blizzard Columnists Comment Ottawa Sun
Political divorce Christina Blizzard Columnists Comment Ottawa Sun
I'm back Baby. I am back!
After a well deserved and high adventure hiatus I have returned to the blogosphere. Stay tuned!
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Hat's off to Elizabeth May
Yesterday, leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May walked into the lion's den. She came to a conservative film festival to debate Ezra Levant on the ethics of the Alberta oil sands.
This act of courage is to be commended. Unlike so many on the left Ms. May actually engaged a philosophical opponent in dialogue. And I say, thank you Ms May!
It is good to know that a leader on the left side of the political spectrum wants to have debates and is willing to speak in front of non believers. That really shows well her character.
Now, I wouldn't want any of her policies enacted and I will never vote for her but I do have a new respect for her.
Through the debate there were times when she made me laugh, frustrated the hell out of me but I confess she has given me a few things to think about - information that I didn't have earlier, but want to investigate. Okay, her voice got a little shrill and shrieky when the two of them were really going at it but she is improving in her debate skills.
Note to Ms. May's staff - while practice makes perfect perhaps a few lessons with a vocal coach and a communications specialist will help with that. Really, she needs to control the modulations of her voice - it will help get her points across better.
That's democracy in action. When people from opposing issues can come together (and it was a sell out crowd BTW) debate the issues and try, or at least try to try, to find some common ground on which policies and governance can be built.
Also let's face it - what kind of masochist do you have to be to take on Ezra? I wouldn't debate Ezra on something we both agree with! He has a memory that allows him to recall obscure bits of information, a vocabulary that should be consulted by the good people who publish the Oxford English Dictionary and the tenacity of a pitbull.
By coming to the Free Thinking Festival, Elizabeth May showed she has really big ovaries! And I want to again offer my sincere thank you for her agreeing to come and debate.
BTW people - it is not too late to come on down to the National Library and Archives to watch some fine films and get engaged yourself in debate. Today we are showing Mr. Conservative.
Producer, narrator and granddaughter CC Goldwater takes viewers on a cinematic journey into the life of Barry Goldwater. The film reveals Goldwater as a man either glorified or vilified by the American public, and traces the roots of Goldwater’s conservative philosophy, conveys how he united the conservative movement to lead the Republican Party into a new generation of politics and demonstrates how his consistently Libertarian mindset led him to diverge from the Conservative party orthodoxy in the ‘80s and ‘90s. As journalist George Will has said of Goldwater’s pivotal presidential race against Lyndon B. Johnson, “People say Goldwater lost in 1964. Some of us think Goldwater won. It just took 16 years to count the votes. In 1980, we finally got the results in. And conservatism had won.”
Speakers after the film include John Robson from the Ottawa Citizen, Joseph Ben Ami from the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, Karen Selick of the Canadian Constitution Foundation and our lefty in residence Terry Glavin journalist and author!
We are also showing the film For Neda, about the Iranian woman who during the recent protests for democracy was murdered. This is her story and it's important to hear it and help the people of that oppressed country find the freedom they so desparately deserve!
Our gala film tonight will be The Stoning of Soraya M, another story out of Iran. Academy Award® nominee Shorheh Aghdashloo stars as Zahra, a woman with a burning secret. When a journalist (Jim Caviezel) is stranded in her remote village, Zahra takes a bold chance to reveal what the villagers will stop at nothing to hide. Thus begins the story of Soraya (Mozhan Marnò), a kind woman whose cruel, divorce-seeking husband trumps up false charges of infidelity against her, which carry an unimaginable penalty.
Soraya and Zahra attempt to navigate the villagers' scheming, lies and deceit to prove her innocence. But when all else fails, Zahra must risk everything to use the only weapon she has left - her voice - to share Soraya's shocking story with the world.
From the Wall Street Journal:
"The Stoning of Soraya M." is as blunt as the rocks hurled in the execution of its title. The independent film, set in an Iranian village in the late 1980s, tells the story of a woman falsely accused of adultery, then put to death according to religious laws enacted after the country's Islamic revolution. A grisly climax helped doom the film's chances for traditional distribution in the U.S., but the filmmakers say it was essential to call attention to the horror of stoning, which still occurs in Iran and some other Muslim countries, according to human-rights groups.
"A movie like this needs to be absolutely uncompromising in its approach. The subject demands it," says director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who was born in Colorado to Iranian parents. He has tackled sensitive topics in his previous work, such as the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11," which he wrote and produced.
Please come.
This act of courage is to be commended. Unlike so many on the left Ms. May actually engaged a philosophical opponent in dialogue. And I say, thank you Ms May!
It is good to know that a leader on the left side of the political spectrum wants to have debates and is willing to speak in front of non believers. That really shows well her character.
Now, I wouldn't want any of her policies enacted and I will never vote for her but I do have a new respect for her.
Through the debate there were times when she made me laugh, frustrated the hell out of me but I confess she has given me a few things to think about - information that I didn't have earlier, but want to investigate. Okay, her voice got a little shrill and shrieky when the two of them were really going at it but she is improving in her debate skills.
Note to Ms. May's staff - while practice makes perfect perhaps a few lessons with a vocal coach and a communications specialist will help with that. Really, she needs to control the modulations of her voice - it will help get her points across better.
That's democracy in action. When people from opposing issues can come together (and it was a sell out crowd BTW) debate the issues and try, or at least try to try, to find some common ground on which policies and governance can be built.
Also let's face it - what kind of masochist do you have to be to take on Ezra? I wouldn't debate Ezra on something we both agree with! He has a memory that allows him to recall obscure bits of information, a vocabulary that should be consulted by the good people who publish the Oxford English Dictionary and the tenacity of a pitbull.
By coming to the Free Thinking Festival, Elizabeth May showed she has really big ovaries! And I want to again offer my sincere thank you for her agreeing to come and debate.
BTW people - it is not too late to come on down to the National Library and Archives to watch some fine films and get engaged yourself in debate. Today we are showing Mr. Conservative.
Producer, narrator and granddaughter CC Goldwater takes viewers on a cinematic journey into the life of Barry Goldwater. The film reveals Goldwater as a man either glorified or vilified by the American public, and traces the roots of Goldwater’s conservative philosophy, conveys how he united the conservative movement to lead the Republican Party into a new generation of politics and demonstrates how his consistently Libertarian mindset led him to diverge from the Conservative party orthodoxy in the ‘80s and ‘90s. As journalist George Will has said of Goldwater’s pivotal presidential race against Lyndon B. Johnson, “People say Goldwater lost in 1964. Some of us think Goldwater won. It just took 16 years to count the votes. In 1980, we finally got the results in. And conservatism had won.”
Speakers after the film include John Robson from the Ottawa Citizen, Joseph Ben Ami from the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, Karen Selick of the Canadian Constitution Foundation and our lefty in residence Terry Glavin journalist and author!
We are also showing the film For Neda, about the Iranian woman who during the recent protests for democracy was murdered. This is her story and it's important to hear it and help the people of that oppressed country find the freedom they so desparately deserve!
Our gala film tonight will be The Stoning of Soraya M, another story out of Iran. Academy Award® nominee Shorheh Aghdashloo stars as Zahra, a woman with a burning secret. When a journalist (Jim Caviezel) is stranded in her remote village, Zahra takes a bold chance to reveal what the villagers will stop at nothing to hide. Thus begins the story of Soraya (Mozhan Marnò), a kind woman whose cruel, divorce-seeking husband trumps up false charges of infidelity against her, which carry an unimaginable penalty.
Soraya and Zahra attempt to navigate the villagers' scheming, lies and deceit to prove her innocence. But when all else fails, Zahra must risk everything to use the only weapon she has left - her voice - to share Soraya's shocking story with the world.
From the Wall Street Journal:
"The Stoning of Soraya M." is as blunt as the rocks hurled in the execution of its title. The independent film, set in an Iranian village in the late 1980s, tells the story of a woman falsely accused of adultery, then put to death according to religious laws enacted after the country's Islamic revolution. A grisly climax helped doom the film's chances for traditional distribution in the U.S., but the filmmakers say it was essential to call attention to the horror of stoning, which still occurs in Iran and some other Muslim countries, according to human-rights groups.
"A movie like this needs to be absolutely uncompromising in its approach. The subject demands it," says director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who was born in Colorado to Iranian parents. He has tackled sensitive topics in his previous work, such as the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11," which he wrote and produced.
Please come.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The Showdown in O-Town
It's today people - the Ezra Levant and Elizabeth May debate at the Free Thinking Film Festival.
Yes, The Showdown in O-Town! Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada, will be debating Ezra Levant, author of "Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands," at the National Library and Archives. Seating precedence will be given to Festival Pass Holders.
The debate will follow the movie, Mine Your Own Businsess. This documentary hacks away at the cosy image of environmentalists' as well meaning, harmless activists, and asks the hard questions of foreigners who lead campaigns to "save" remote areas from development. Their answers are often disturbing, with racist overtones, but we, in the west, blindly support such campaigns that want to keep people in poverty.
Now for the first time we ask local people about their lives and what they want for the future. This film demolishes the cosy consensus that environmentalists are well meaning agenda free activists and shows them to be anti-development ideologues who think the poor are happy being poor and don't want the development that we, in the west, take for granted.
Needless to say, this documentary makes us all think about the unintended consequences of blindly supporting environmentalist/anti-development campaigns across the globe. It is a challenge to the cosy consensus that allows westerners to deny progress to those who need it most.
Be there!
Yes, The Showdown in O-Town! Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada, will be debating Ezra Levant, author of "Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands," at the National Library and Archives. Seating precedence will be given to Festival Pass Holders.
The debate will follow the movie, Mine Your Own Businsess. This documentary hacks away at the cosy image of environmentalists' as well meaning, harmless activists, and asks the hard questions of foreigners who lead campaigns to "save" remote areas from development. Their answers are often disturbing, with racist overtones, but we, in the west, blindly support such campaigns that want to keep people in poverty.
Now for the first time we ask local people about their lives and what they want for the future. This film demolishes the cosy consensus that environmentalists are well meaning agenda free activists and shows them to be anti-development ideologues who think the poor are happy being poor and don't want the development that we, in the west, take for granted.
Needless to say, this documentary makes us all think about the unintended consequences of blindly supporting environmentalist/anti-development campaigns across the globe. It is a challenge to the cosy consensus that allows westerners to deny progress to those who need it most.
Be there!
Friday, November 12, 2010
Free Thinking Film Fest
It's here.
After a year of planning, The Free Thinking Film Festival is going to launch tonight at 7pm in the National Library and Archives here in our nation's captial.
This is the only - I repeat only - film festival in this country that is strictly focussed on films with conservative values. THE ONLY ONE. It is important to support this event especially in a time when the media and pop culture are dominated by left wing values.
As conservatives you should understand this - it's economics. If you don't want documentaries, tv, news, music etc to be controlled by the left then you must actually support efforts to fight that. In other words - you need to buy tickets. You need to donate. You need to open your wallet when you open your mouth and make a valuable contribution.
Tonight is a fundraiser for the Military Family Resource Centre, an organization dedicated to supporting the families of military personnel. It's a good cause.
Tomorrow's hightlight is sure to be the Ezra Levant and Elizabeth May debate. I am really looking forward to it and if you are coming be sure to be there early to ensure a seat!
But go to the website and check it out. There are lots of movies and debates to see, great merchandise like books, mugs, t-shirts (for both the ladies and the gents) and caps, and of course we are going to have some great autographed books to purchase and some DVDs!
Free Thinking Film Fest!
After a year of planning, The Free Thinking Film Festival is going to launch tonight at 7pm in the National Library and Archives here in our nation's captial.
This is the only - I repeat only - film festival in this country that is strictly focussed on films with conservative values. THE ONLY ONE. It is important to support this event especially in a time when the media and pop culture are dominated by left wing values.
As conservatives you should understand this - it's economics. If you don't want documentaries, tv, news, music etc to be controlled by the left then you must actually support efforts to fight that. In other words - you need to buy tickets. You need to donate. You need to open your wallet when you open your mouth and make a valuable contribution.
Tonight is a fundraiser for the Military Family Resource Centre, an organization dedicated to supporting the families of military personnel. It's a good cause.
Tomorrow's hightlight is sure to be the Ezra Levant and Elizabeth May debate. I am really looking forward to it and if you are coming be sure to be there early to ensure a seat!
But go to the website and check it out. There are lots of movies and debates to see, great merchandise like books, mugs, t-shirts (for both the ladies and the gents) and caps, and of course we are going to have some great autographed books to purchase and some DVDs!
Free Thinking Film Fest!
Thursday, November 11, 2010
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Kalifornistan
Opening Night Gala
"Kalifornistan"
Friday, November 12, 2010
Library and Archives Canada
Main Auditorium
7:00 PM
The opening night gala is also a fundraiser for the Military Family Resource Centre which helps military families in the capital region.
In the shadowy Port of Los Angeles, an insane terrorist stalks a beautiful dancer ... while plotting the nuclear apocalypse he hopes will make him a celebrity. KALIFORNISTAN is a darkly comic satire on terrorism made by Canadian actress and filmmaker Govindini Murty and American filmmaker Jason Apuzzo. KALIFORNISTAN follows the deranged leader of a terror cell called 'Glorious Jihad of Kalifornistan' as he plots to destroy Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb - while being distracted by a sultry exotic dancer. KALIFORNISTAN fuses film, video, documentary and surveillance footage into a cutting-edge narrative on the violence, narcissism and delusional fantasies that fuel contemporary Islamic terrorism. KALIFORNISTAN takes viewers on a twisted journey of the post-9/11 world from Gitmo to Iran, from the dark corners of LA harbour into the mind of a terrorist too deranged even for Al Qaeda.
Human Events says of KALIFORNISTAN: “The film clicks as strong, effective satire ... Kalifornistan ... dares to see the average terrorist for what he truly is -- a laughably warped soul with a world view shaped by Islamic radicalism -- and too many extremist blogs ... and once you meet the terrorist at the heart of the film you’ll wonder why more filmmakers haven’t taken this approach before.” LA's Daily Breeze says that "Kalifornistan may be the South Bay's 21st century cinematic equivalent of Gone in 60 Seconds, the 1974 cult classic." Online journal Rational Review says that KALIFORNISTAN "is beautifully shot" and "it's Fellini meets Kubrick."
Govindini Murty is an Ottawa native who co-founded the Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles with her husband Jason Apuzzo in order to provide a greater diversity of viewpoints in Hollywood. Murty and Apuzzo have been frequently featured in the media, are independent filmmakers, and are also the Co-Editors of Libertas Film Magazine.
Speakers after the film: Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo
"Kalifornistan"
Friday, November 12, 2010
Library and Archives Canada
Main Auditorium
7:00 PM
The opening night gala is also a fundraiser for the Military Family Resource Centre which helps military families in the capital region.
In the shadowy Port of Los Angeles, an insane terrorist stalks a beautiful dancer ... while plotting the nuclear apocalypse he hopes will make him a celebrity. KALIFORNISTAN is a darkly comic satire on terrorism made by Canadian actress and filmmaker Govindini Murty and American filmmaker Jason Apuzzo. KALIFORNISTAN follows the deranged leader of a terror cell called 'Glorious Jihad of Kalifornistan' as he plots to destroy Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb - while being distracted by a sultry exotic dancer. KALIFORNISTAN fuses film, video, documentary and surveillance footage into a cutting-edge narrative on the violence, narcissism and delusional fantasies that fuel contemporary Islamic terrorism. KALIFORNISTAN takes viewers on a twisted journey of the post-9/11 world from Gitmo to Iran, from the dark corners of LA harbour into the mind of a terrorist too deranged even for Al Qaeda.
Human Events says of KALIFORNISTAN: “The film clicks as strong, effective satire ... Kalifornistan ... dares to see the average terrorist for what he truly is -- a laughably warped soul with a world view shaped by Islamic radicalism -- and too many extremist blogs ... and once you meet the terrorist at the heart of the film you’ll wonder why more filmmakers haven’t taken this approach before.” LA's Daily Breeze says that "Kalifornistan may be the South Bay's 21st century cinematic equivalent of Gone in 60 Seconds, the 1974 cult classic." Online journal Rational Review says that KALIFORNISTAN "is beautifully shot" and "it's Fellini meets Kubrick."
Govindini Murty is an Ottawa native who co-founded the Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles with her husband Jason Apuzzo in order to provide a greater diversity of viewpoints in Hollywood. Murty and Apuzzo have been frequently featured in the media, are independent filmmakers, and are also the Co-Editors of Libertas Film Magazine.
Speakers after the film: Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
I am a Zionist
I had the pleasure of accompanying my friend Fred from GayAndRight to the Gala Dinner for the conference being held in Ottawa on anti-semetism.
It was an honour and a pleasure to be there with hundreds of people from around the planet who are working hard to combat anti-semitism. A disease of the heart in the words of keynote speaker, John Mann who gave an inspiring speech that roused the crowd to a standing ovation!
I have never shied away from my support of Israel, but then again I haven't really blogged about it either.
So, today I shout from the rooftops that I am a Zionist and I want to know are you?
But what is Zionism? According to the Jewish Virtual Library:
Zionism, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions, left and right, religious and secular, joined to form the Zionist movement and worked together toward these goals. Disagreements led to rifts, but ultimately, the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland was attained. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.
Well, that is a very simple and concise explanation. But perhaps not enough to make you jump up and say "hell yeah!". Perhaps you think you need more information. And you ask yourself:
Are Jews a Nation or a Religion? Again, the good people at the Jewish Virtual Library have this to say:
Judaism can be thought of as being simultaneously a religion, a nationality and a culture.
Throughout the middle ages and into the 20th century, most of the European world agreed that Jews constituted a distinct nation. This concept of nation does not require that a nation have either a territory nor a government, but rather, it identifies, as a nation any distinct group of people with a common language and culture. Only in the 19th century did it become common to assume that each nation should have its own distinct government; this is the political philosophy of nationalism. In fact, Jews had a remarkable degree of self-government until the 19th century. So long as Jews lived in their ghettos, they were allowed to collect their own taxes, run their own courts, and otherwise behave as citizens of a landless and distinctly second-class Jewish nation.
Of course, Judaism is a religion, and it is this religion that forms the central element of the Jewish culture that binds Jews together as a nation. It is the religion that defines foods as being kosher and non-kosher, and this underlies Jewish cuisine. It is the religion that sets the calendar of Jewish feast and fast days, and it is the religion that has preserved the Hebrew language.
Is Judaism an ethnicity? In short, not any more. Although Judaism arose out of a single ethnicity in the Middle East, there have always been conversions into and out of the religion. Thus, there are those who may have been ethnically part of the original group who are no longer part of Judaism, and those of other ethnic groups who have converted into Judaism.
If you are referring to a nation in the sense of race, Judaism is not a nation. People are free to convert into Judaism; once converted, they are considered the same as if they were born Jewish. This is not true for a race.
Okay, this is good because it very simply explains what seems a complex question.
So are you moved to call yourself a Zionist? No? What's that - racist? No, just the opposite in fact - some more on that topic from you guessed it - the Jewish Virtual Library:
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution slandering Zionism by equating it with racism. In his spirited response to the resolution, Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog noted the irony of the timing, the vote coming exactly 37 years after Kristallnacht.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which holds that Jews, like any other nation, are entitled to a homeland.
History has demonstrated the need to ensure Jewish security through a national homeland. Zionism recognizes that Jewishness is defined by shared origin, religion, culture and history.
The realization of the Zionist dream is exemplified by more than four million Jews, from more than 100 countries, including dark-skinned Jews from Ethiopia, Yemen and India, who are Israeli citizens. Approximately 1,000,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Baha'is, Circassians and other ethnic groups also are represented in Israel's population.
Many Christians have traditionally supported the goals and ideals of Zionism. Israel's open and democratic character and its scrupulous protection of the religious and political rights of Christians and Muslims rebut the charge of exclusivity.
The Arab states define citizenship strictly by native parentage. It is almost impossible to become a naturalized citizen in many Arab states, especially Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Several Arab nations have laws that facilitate the naturalization of foreign Arabs, with the specific exception of Palestinians. Jordan, on the other hand, instituted its own "law of return" in 1954, according citizenship to all former residents of Palestine, except for Jews.
The presence of thousands of black Jews in Israel is the best refutation of the calumny against Zionism. In a series of historic airlifts, labeled Moses (1984), Joshua (1985) and Solomon (1991), Israel rescued almost 42,000 members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community.
To single out Jewish self-determination for condemnation is itself a form of racism. "A world that closed its doors to Jews who sought escape from Hitler's ovens lacks the moral standing to complain about Israel's giving preference to Jews," wrote noted civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
When approached by a student who attacked Zionism, Martin Luther King responded: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism."
The 1975 UN resolution was part of the Soviet-Arab Cold War anti-Israel campaign. Almost all the former non-Arab supporters of the resolution have apologized and changed their positions. When the General Assembly voted to repeal the resolution in 1991, only some Arab and Muslim states, as well as Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam were opposed.
And there you have it, an explanation of what Zionism is and isn't.
Why am I a Zionist? There are many reasons to plead the case for Israel - read the book and documentary The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. He is much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. The website has excellent information. Read the book, watch the movie.
I have no new arguments to add to this. I need Israel to exist. I need to know in that part of the world there is an oasis of sanity. A place where democracy and freedom can reign.
As some of you may know, this past year saw me visit Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Israel is the only place I would want to call home. It is a sanctuary, an oasis. A beacon for people like me - people who embrace human dignity, rights, individual freedom, equal justice for all and modern with a willingness to learn, grow and be better! Israel shines in spite of being in a very dark part of the world.
I could go on and on. Simply put, I believe that Israel has a right to exist. And I guess that makes me a Zionist.
It was an honour and a pleasure to be there with hundreds of people from around the planet who are working hard to combat anti-semitism. A disease of the heart in the words of keynote speaker, John Mann who gave an inspiring speech that roused the crowd to a standing ovation!
I have never shied away from my support of Israel, but then again I haven't really blogged about it either.
So, today I shout from the rooftops that I am a Zionist and I want to know are you?
But what is Zionism? According to the Jewish Virtual Library:
Zionism, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions, left and right, religious and secular, joined to form the Zionist movement and worked together toward these goals. Disagreements led to rifts, but ultimately, the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland was attained. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.
Well, that is a very simple and concise explanation. But perhaps not enough to make you jump up and say "hell yeah!". Perhaps you think you need more information. And you ask yourself:
Are Jews a Nation or a Religion? Again, the good people at the Jewish Virtual Library have this to say:
Judaism can be thought of as being simultaneously a religion, a nationality and a culture.
Throughout the middle ages and into the 20th century, most of the European world agreed that Jews constituted a distinct nation. This concept of nation does not require that a nation have either a territory nor a government, but rather, it identifies, as a nation any distinct group of people with a common language and culture. Only in the 19th century did it become common to assume that each nation should have its own distinct government; this is the political philosophy of nationalism. In fact, Jews had a remarkable degree of self-government until the 19th century. So long as Jews lived in their ghettos, they were allowed to collect their own taxes, run their own courts, and otherwise behave as citizens of a landless and distinctly second-class Jewish nation.
Of course, Judaism is a religion, and it is this religion that forms the central element of the Jewish culture that binds Jews together as a nation. It is the religion that defines foods as being kosher and non-kosher, and this underlies Jewish cuisine. It is the religion that sets the calendar of Jewish feast and fast days, and it is the religion that has preserved the Hebrew language.
Is Judaism an ethnicity? In short, not any more. Although Judaism arose out of a single ethnicity in the Middle East, there have always been conversions into and out of the religion. Thus, there are those who may have been ethnically part of the original group who are no longer part of Judaism, and those of other ethnic groups who have converted into Judaism.
If you are referring to a nation in the sense of race, Judaism is not a nation. People are free to convert into Judaism; once converted, they are considered the same as if they were born Jewish. This is not true for a race.
Okay, this is good because it very simply explains what seems a complex question.
So are you moved to call yourself a Zionist? No? What's that - racist? No, just the opposite in fact - some more on that topic from you guessed it - the Jewish Virtual Library:
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution slandering Zionism by equating it with racism. In his spirited response to the resolution, Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog noted the irony of the timing, the vote coming exactly 37 years after Kristallnacht.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which holds that Jews, like any other nation, are entitled to a homeland.
History has demonstrated the need to ensure Jewish security through a national homeland. Zionism recognizes that Jewishness is defined by shared origin, religion, culture and history.
The realization of the Zionist dream is exemplified by more than four million Jews, from more than 100 countries, including dark-skinned Jews from Ethiopia, Yemen and India, who are Israeli citizens. Approximately 1,000,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Baha'is, Circassians and other ethnic groups also are represented in Israel's population.
Many Christians have traditionally supported the goals and ideals of Zionism. Israel's open and democratic character and its scrupulous protection of the religious and political rights of Christians and Muslims rebut the charge of exclusivity.
The Arab states define citizenship strictly by native parentage. It is almost impossible to become a naturalized citizen in many Arab states, especially Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Several Arab nations have laws that facilitate the naturalization of foreign Arabs, with the specific exception of Palestinians. Jordan, on the other hand, instituted its own "law of return" in 1954, according citizenship to all former residents of Palestine, except for Jews.
The presence of thousands of black Jews in Israel is the best refutation of the calumny against Zionism. In a series of historic airlifts, labeled Moses (1984), Joshua (1985) and Solomon (1991), Israel rescued almost 42,000 members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community.
To single out Jewish self-determination for condemnation is itself a form of racism. "A world that closed its doors to Jews who sought escape from Hitler's ovens lacks the moral standing to complain about Israel's giving preference to Jews," wrote noted civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
When approached by a student who attacked Zionism, Martin Luther King responded: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism."
The 1975 UN resolution was part of the Soviet-Arab Cold War anti-Israel campaign. Almost all the former non-Arab supporters of the resolution have apologized and changed their positions. When the General Assembly voted to repeal the resolution in 1991, only some Arab and Muslim states, as well as Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam were opposed.
And there you have it, an explanation of what Zionism is and isn't.
Why am I a Zionist? There are many reasons to plead the case for Israel - read the book and documentary The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. He is much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. The website has excellent information. Read the book, watch the movie.
I have no new arguments to add to this. I need Israel to exist. I need to know in that part of the world there is an oasis of sanity. A place where democracy and freedom can reign.
As some of you may know, this past year saw me visit Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Israel is the only place I would want to call home. It is a sanctuary, an oasis. A beacon for people like me - people who embrace human dignity, rights, individual freedom, equal justice for all and modern with a willingness to learn, grow and be better! Israel shines in spite of being in a very dark part of the world.
I could go on and on. Simply put, I believe that Israel has a right to exist. And I guess that makes me a Zionist.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Harlan Pepper
Look at the future of Canadian music.
These young lads are 17 and 18. I just saw them open up for Lee Harvey Osmond and it was love at first sight! These young men are major talents. Incredible. Simply incredible.
Go to their website and buy their CD and buy some more as gifts! Christmas is coming so stock up.
These young lads are 17 and 18. I just saw them open up for Lee Harvey Osmond and it was love at first sight! These young men are major talents. Incredible. Simply incredible.
Go to their website and buy their CD and buy some more as gifts! Christmas is coming so stock up.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
What type of Conservative are you
Yesterday's slug fest ... I mean debate on the politics of sex got me thinking about the different factions in the Conservative party. So I started doing some research and it appears that others have put a great deal of thought into this.
Here's what I found from Justin Quinn,
There is wide debate within the conservative movement over how differing ideologies can fall under one common category. Certain conservatives may doubt the legitimacy of others, but there are arguments for each view. The following list attempts to clarify the discussion, focusing on conservative politics in the US. Some may feel the list falls short because conservatives can find themselves divided when attempting to describe themselves using these definitions. Admittedly, categories and definitions are subjective, but these are the most widely accepted.
1. Crunchy Conservative
National Review commentator Rod Dreher first coined the term "crunchy conservative" in 2006 to describe his personal ideology, according to NPR.org. Dreher says "crunchy cons" are conservatives “who stand outside the conservative mainstream,” and tend to focus more on family-oriented, culturally conservative concepts such as being good stewards of the natural world and avoiding materialism in everyday life. Dreher describes crunchy cons as those “who embrace a counter-cultural, yet traditional conservative lifestyle." On his blog, Dreher says crunchy cons are as mistrustful of big business as they are big government.
2. Cultural Conservative
Politically, cultural conservatism is often confused with social conservatism. In the US, the term often incorrectly describes members of the religious right because the two share ideologies on social issues. Christian conservatives tend to like being described as cultural conservatives, because it implies that America is a Christian nation. True cultural conservatives worry less about religion in government and more about using politics to prevent fundamental changes to US culture. The goal of cultural conservatives is to preserve and maintain the American way-of-life both at home and abroad.
3. Fiscal Conservative
Libertarians and Constitutionalists are natural fiscal conservatives due to their desire to reduce government spending, pay off the national debt and shrink the size and scope of government. Nevertheless, the Republican Party is most often credited with creating the fiscal conservative ideal, despite the big-spending tendencies of the most recent GOP administrations. Fiscal conservatives seek to deregulate the economy and lower taxes. Fiscal conservative politics has little or nothing to do with social issues, and it is therefore not uncommon for other conservatives to identify themselves as fiscal conservatives.
4. Neoconservative
The neoconservative movement sprouted in the 1960s in response to the counter-culture movement. It was later bolstered by disillusioned liberal intellectuals of the 1970s. Neoconservatives believe in a diplomatic foreign policy, stimulating economic growth by lowering taxes and finding alternative ways to deliver public welfare services. Culturally, neoconservatives tend to identify with traditional conservatives, but stop short of providing guidance on social issues. Irving Kristol, co-founder of Encounter magazine is largely credited with founding the neoconservative movement.
5. Paleoconservative
As the name suggests, paleoconservatives emphasize a connection with the past. Like neoconservatives, paleoconservatives tend to be family-oriented, religious-minded and opposed to the vulgarity permeating modern culture. They are also opposed to mass immigration and believe in the complete withdrawal of US military troops from foreign countries. Paleoconservatives claim author Russell Kirk as their own, as well as political ideologues Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. Paleoconservatives believe they are the true heirs to the US conservative movement and are critical of other "brands" of conservatism.
6. Social Conservative
Social conservatives adhere strictly to a moral ideology based on family-values and religious traditions. For US social conservatives, Christianity -- often Evangelical Christianity -- guides all political positions on social issues. US social conservatives are mostly right-wing and hold firmly to a pro-life, pro-family and pro-religion agenda. Thus, abortion and gay rights are often lightning rod issues for social conservatives. Social conservatives are the most recognized group of conservatives on this list due to their strong ties to the Republican Party.
So this is obviously written with an American take but I think it is pretty easy to project this on Canadians as well.
But I would like to add another group!
7. Closeted Conservative (or the CloCon) - A CloCon is an average sort of Canadian who really doesn't get very involved in politics - they are not ideologues. They are just folk who want to keep more of their pay cheques, keep criminals off their streets, make sure that kids are fed and the roads are safe. They have solid Conservative values but they are kind of embarrassed to admit they have conservative values because they are afraid that their friends will think that they are religious fanatics or cold heartless SOBs.
I know many CloCons. Acquaintances who come up to me after a dinner party or some other gathering and tell me that they agree with me but could never say what I say because of the backlash they would get with their other friends or coworkers.
Seriously.
I think that is one of the reasons I spend a lot of time criticizing SoCons when it comes to matters of abortion, gay marriage, sex education, contraception and prostitution. SoCons are driven by religious zealotism. A CloCon is not. They tend to be live and let live sorts. Follow the rules of society and mind your manners.
I think there are more CloCons than any other group. In fact I am pretty sure of it. Take a look at membership numbers in each of the EDAs. At election time the CPC candidate always gets more votes than there are official members in the EDA. What does that tell you?
It tells me that many conservatives are only willing to admit their political allegiance behind a sheet of corrugated cardboard on a sheet of paper that is folded and can't be traced back to them.
Classic CloCon behaviour.
So what kind of conservative are you?
Here's what I found from Justin Quinn,
There is wide debate within the conservative movement over how differing ideologies can fall under one common category. Certain conservatives may doubt the legitimacy of others, but there are arguments for each view. The following list attempts to clarify the discussion, focusing on conservative politics in the US. Some may feel the list falls short because conservatives can find themselves divided when attempting to describe themselves using these definitions. Admittedly, categories and definitions are subjective, but these are the most widely accepted.
1. Crunchy Conservative
National Review commentator Rod Dreher first coined the term "crunchy conservative" in 2006 to describe his personal ideology, according to NPR.org. Dreher says "crunchy cons" are conservatives “who stand outside the conservative mainstream,” and tend to focus more on family-oriented, culturally conservative concepts such as being good stewards of the natural world and avoiding materialism in everyday life. Dreher describes crunchy cons as those “who embrace a counter-cultural, yet traditional conservative lifestyle." On his blog, Dreher says crunchy cons are as mistrustful of big business as they are big government.
2. Cultural Conservative
Politically, cultural conservatism is often confused with social conservatism. In the US, the term often incorrectly describes members of the religious right because the two share ideologies on social issues. Christian conservatives tend to like being described as cultural conservatives, because it implies that America is a Christian nation. True cultural conservatives worry less about religion in government and more about using politics to prevent fundamental changes to US culture. The goal of cultural conservatives is to preserve and maintain the American way-of-life both at home and abroad.
3. Fiscal Conservative
Libertarians and Constitutionalists are natural fiscal conservatives due to their desire to reduce government spending, pay off the national debt and shrink the size and scope of government. Nevertheless, the Republican Party is most often credited with creating the fiscal conservative ideal, despite the big-spending tendencies of the most recent GOP administrations. Fiscal conservatives seek to deregulate the economy and lower taxes. Fiscal conservative politics has little or nothing to do with social issues, and it is therefore not uncommon for other conservatives to identify themselves as fiscal conservatives.
4. Neoconservative
The neoconservative movement sprouted in the 1960s in response to the counter-culture movement. It was later bolstered by disillusioned liberal intellectuals of the 1970s. Neoconservatives believe in a diplomatic foreign policy, stimulating economic growth by lowering taxes and finding alternative ways to deliver public welfare services. Culturally, neoconservatives tend to identify with traditional conservatives, but stop short of providing guidance on social issues. Irving Kristol, co-founder of Encounter magazine is largely credited with founding the neoconservative movement.
5. Paleoconservative
As the name suggests, paleoconservatives emphasize a connection with the past. Like neoconservatives, paleoconservatives tend to be family-oriented, religious-minded and opposed to the vulgarity permeating modern culture. They are also opposed to mass immigration and believe in the complete withdrawal of US military troops from foreign countries. Paleoconservatives claim author Russell Kirk as their own, as well as political ideologues Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. Paleoconservatives believe they are the true heirs to the US conservative movement and are critical of other "brands" of conservatism.
6. Social Conservative
Social conservatives adhere strictly to a moral ideology based on family-values and religious traditions. For US social conservatives, Christianity -- often Evangelical Christianity -- guides all political positions on social issues. US social conservatives are mostly right-wing and hold firmly to a pro-life, pro-family and pro-religion agenda. Thus, abortion and gay rights are often lightning rod issues for social conservatives. Social conservatives are the most recognized group of conservatives on this list due to their strong ties to the Republican Party.
So this is obviously written with an American take but I think it is pretty easy to project this on Canadians as well.
But I would like to add another group!
7. Closeted Conservative (or the CloCon) - A CloCon is an average sort of Canadian who really doesn't get very involved in politics - they are not ideologues. They are just folk who want to keep more of their pay cheques, keep criminals off their streets, make sure that kids are fed and the roads are safe. They have solid Conservative values but they are kind of embarrassed to admit they have conservative values because they are afraid that their friends will think that they are religious fanatics or cold heartless SOBs.
I know many CloCons. Acquaintances who come up to me after a dinner party or some other gathering and tell me that they agree with me but could never say what I say because of the backlash they would get with their other friends or coworkers.
Seriously.
I think that is one of the reasons I spend a lot of time criticizing SoCons when it comes to matters of abortion, gay marriage, sex education, contraception and prostitution. SoCons are driven by religious zealotism. A CloCon is not. They tend to be live and let live sorts. Follow the rules of society and mind your manners.
I think there are more CloCons than any other group. In fact I am pretty sure of it. Take a look at membership numbers in each of the EDAs. At election time the CPC candidate always gets more votes than there are official members in the EDA. What does that tell you?
It tells me that many conservatives are only willing to admit their political allegiance behind a sheet of corrugated cardboard on a sheet of paper that is folded and can't be traced back to them.
Classic CloCon behaviour.
So what kind of conservative are you?
Friday, November 5, 2010
Shine
What are you doing tomorrow night?
If you live in Ottawa you should come down to The Elmdale Tavern (Laurier's favourite drinking hole) and listen to Tom Wilson and his new band Lee Harvey Osmond.
If you can't, then enjoy this gem of Tom's from 1997!
If you live in Ottawa you should come down to The Elmdale Tavern (Laurier's favourite drinking hole) and listen to Tom Wilson and his new band Lee Harvey Osmond.
If you can't, then enjoy this gem of Tom's from 1997!
Some call it honor..
Something very interesting from The Jerusalem Post
Some call it ‘honor’
By LARRY DERFNER
11/05/2010 16:33
One woman is risking all to break the conspiracy of silence surrounding so-called honor killings, and thus, hopefully, bring some honor back to Lod.
Samah Salaime Egbariya, the leading Arab women’s activist in Lod, the country’s most dangerous city for Arab women, is quietly giving advice to a beautiful ninthgrade girl wearing a hijab, or Muslim head scarf, and tight black slacks. It’s dark outside and they’re in a local high-school classroom where Egbariya’s after-school discussion group on “human skills” has just let out. At a glance, the girl looks like she’s trying to bridge two dissonant worlds. She also looks like a girl who could find herself in trouble in a place like Lod.
Egbariya had a girl like that in a youth group she led a couple of years ago in Ramle – 16, pretty, eager for freedom. Her family punished her, kept her home and Egbariya didn’t hear from her. A year or so later, she ran into the girl in town. “She told me her family had married her off to a much older man. It was a payoff to settle a family dispute. About a year after that she was murdered,” says Egbariya, 35, a social worker who now heads the local NGO Arab Women in the Center.
“These teenagers want so badly to be free. They see me as a role model,” she says after the girl leaves the classroom.
She shows me pictures from the march in Lod two weeks ago attended by some 1,000 local Arabs, including Islamic religious leaders, against the recent killings of women that have made the city infamous. The march focused the blame on Lod politicians and police for treating the problem with malign neglect, but it also faulted – in diplomatic terms – the violent, tyrannical strain of male chauvinism in many extended Muslim families, or hamulot.
“Most of the women at the rally were devout Muslims, and they were chanting, ‘Allahu akbar, God is great,’ and denouncing ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators’ and the police. We, the secular feminists, a few dozen of us, were chanting against the killing of women, against the orphaning of children. It became almost a competition and the religious women didn’t like it, and I said we have to stop competing and come together, so we agreed to chant, ‘By God, stop killing Muslim women,’” she says.
Egbariya organized the pupils in the after-school class to hand out leaflets for the march, and many attended. She explains why the class is so topheavy with boys: “I lost about 10 girls in the last couple of weeks because their fathers said it was too dangerous for them to come home in the dark.”
Among the topics she discusses with the kids is honor killings – the murder of a woman by male blood relations – cousins, uncles, brothers, the father – for “dishonoring” the hamula by acting “immodestly,” thus giving rise to suspicions or false accusations that she is having extramarital sex.
Asked if the kids in class know that honor killing is wrong, she replies, “Of course they know,” noting that teenage girls are the most common victims. “They talk against it in class. But not all of them feel safe enough to talk against it outside.”
IN THE LAST MONTH, two Muslim women (as well as an Arab man) have been murdered in Lod, bringing the total this year to four. In Lod and adjacent Ramle – “many of the hamulot are spread out across both cities,” Egbariya notes – 20 Muslim women have been murdered in the last five years.
Police have generally written them off as honor killings, which incenses the Arab community – both because it’s not true and because it stigmatizes the family of the victim, especially the family’s unmarried girls.
Neither of the two Lod women shot to death in the last month, Abeer Abu Khatifan and Amal Khalili, were killed by blood relations, says Egbariya. With other activists in her NGO, funded by the Connecticut-based “social entrepreneurship” fund Echoing Green, she keeps in close touch with the families of victims, follows the police investigations and stays tuned to the local grapevine.
Abu Khatifan, 33, a mother of four, was shot by a masked man at her home. Afterward, her husband and other relatives grieved openly – not the typical public behavior of a family whose members have carried out an honor killing. Egbariya says the family suspects she was killed by a relative over a property dispute, not “honor.”
Khalili, 27, a divorced mother of three, was shot to death by a masked man while sitting in her car with her brother and little daughter, who were left unharmed except for scratches from broken glass. In this case, suspicion has fallen on Khalili’s ex-husband and his family, who reportedly had harassed the victim since the court awarded her the couple’s house. If true, she was killed over an economic dispute fueled by divorce, not family “honor.”
Going over a list of the 20 Arab women in Lod and Ramle killed in the last five years, Egbariya says that to the best of her knowledge, nine were honor killings, usually of unmarried adolescent girls. In only two of these nine cases did family members testify against the killers. In the overwhelming majority of these murders, no one was convicted or went to jail.
Whether the motive was “honor,” economics or anything else, what links these killings is that in every case, says Egbariya, “a woman was doing something that a man disapproved of, that challenged his power.”
WE’RE DRIVING through some of the Arab neighborhoods of Lod: Ramat Eshkol (“This used to be a Jewish neighborhood, but now it’s only Arabs and Ethiopians,” she says), Neveh Yerek, or Green Fields (“I don’t see a lot of green here,” she notes), and Rakevet, near the railroad tracks, as poor a shantytown – dotted, though, with drug dealers’ villas – as can be found in any Israeli city. “You see the spikes on top of all the gates? Self-protection is the name of the game around here,” she says.
Egbariya is a tall, quietly charismatic woman who, when describing harsh realities, often resorts to ironic humor. But when we drive up to the community center she ran when she first came to Lod in 2000, she is in plain distress, covering her face with her hand. “I haven’t been back here in nearly seven years, since I left.”
In 2004, months after she left, the center was torched by some unknown assailant for an unknown unreason. Now it is a dark, cavernous squat for junkies. The floor is black with accumulated trash and filth, mocking the murals that were painted on the walls in more hopeful times.
This was where Egbariya’s work with local Arab women victims began. After a little while on the job, she saw that a lot of the women coming to the center were tense, crying, afraid to leave the house. They told her the source of their “inner terror” – the violence and threats from some of the men in their hamulot. Egbariya decided it was necessary to end the “conspiracy of silence” and she organized a conference at the center for Arab women, public figures and religious leaders.
“A short time before,” she recalls, “a man from Lod killed his 15-year-old niece. He’d been beating his divorced sister and his niece threatened to call the police on him, and one afternoon the girl was sleeping and he put a pillow over her face and shot her dead. The mother was going to speak at the conference – in ‘disguise,’ but everyone would know from her words who she was. A few hours before the conference, the man comes to the community center – he was walking around free – and told me he wanted to make a sulha, a truce, with his sister – which wasn’t true – but that if she spoke at the conference, he would make a balagan, a ruckus. I asked him what he meant by balagan, and he said he would bring an M-16 into the center and start shooting.
“I called the police and they told me to cancel the conference, and so did a lot of the people planning to attend. But I said if we do that, we’ve lost and this guy and all the others like him have won, and a lot of people backed me up. So the police planted some officers in the audience. About 120 people showed up. The mother told her story, the audience knew who she was. People were crying. The father didn’t show up that night – and I’ve never seen him since.”
Some 40 regulars at the community center went on to become activists in the city, she notes.
Egbariya left after four years when some local Arabs plugged in to the municipality decided they wanted “one of theirs” to run it, she says.
They tried bribing her to quit, without success, and one day a young married man showed up in her office and started coming on to her. “When all else fails, they go after a woman’s honor – it’s where she’s most vulnerable. I told the man, ‘You want to catch me in a fadiha, a shameful act? I’ll call your wife right now and we’ll see whose fadiha it is.’ There was a video camera in the office and I started filming him.
“He left, but when I got home, my husband told me that’s it, if they’re willing to go to such lengths to get rid of you, then this is too dangerous. So I resigned.”
Living with her husband, who is a teacher, and their three sons in the Jewish-Arab village Neveh Shalom, she was first exposed to the phenomenon of honor killings – and the conspiracy of silence – as an adolescent in the Galilee village of Turan. A village girl just a little older than herself was poisoned by her father. Egbariya asked the men in her family why, and was told that the girl had “made a mistake.” She asked her older sister what sort of mistake could lead a girl to be killed by her father, and was told, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
EGBARIYA MENTIONED that 20-year-old killing in a lecture to some 120 police officers in the North, which was arranged through the Abraham Fund. “A policeman in the audience said he remembered it,” she says. “The father was released from prison after five or six years. The head of the Arab local authorities was his main character witness.”
She went on to get her master’s degree in social work at the Hebrew University, starting her career in Jerusalem’s Old City, where “the families live one on top of another, seven to a room. There’s incest, sexual molestation in the alleys, and if the women report it to the authorities, they’re considered traitors.” But she didn’t have to deal with murder until coming to Lod.
The streets in the city’s Arab neighborhoods are an assault on the senses – here and there sewage runs openly along the curb, the smell of animal carcasses hangs in the air, heaps of trash and rubble seem to be everywhere, and in the roughest parts of town, such as Pardess Snir and the Dahamesh enclave, residents say they hear gunfire through the night.
We stop at the entrance to the Muslim cemetery. “When a woman is murdered over family ‘honor,’ there’s no funeral, no gravestone, somebody just comes at night, digs a grave, throws the body in and covers it up,” Egbariya says, then tells the story of an Arab mother from Ramle who stood up against this on behalf of her murdered daughter, who is buried in the cemetery.
“Her daughter was 17 and she was killed a few years ago by her son. He didn’t want to do it, but men in the hamula kept pressuring him, until one night they drugged him and he killed his sister, then they threw the body into a hole and covered it up. The mother went to the police, she testified against her son and he was convicted and imprisoned. This is unique. The mother put up a gravestone on her daughter’s burial place, and had it inscribed with a saying from the Koran, ‘On Judgment Day, God will ask: ‘For what crime were you killed?’ The hamula didn’t like this, so they destroyed the gravestone. Since then, the mother has lost her mind, she goes around talking to herself.”
BREAKING THE CONSPIRACY of silence around honor killings requires relatives of victims to go to the police and testify, but this means either death or exile from Israeli Arab society. Egbariya recommends the creation of a witness protection program, but it’s hard to imagine people coming forward in any but the rarest cases when the consequences are so dire. Still, she blames police and other municipal authorities for taking an attitude of “as long as the Jewish population isn’t being hurt, it’s not our problem.”
Honor killings take place in Muslim communities across the Middle East, and occasionally in the West; the reason usually given why Lod ranks No. 1 in Israel’s Arab sector is because of the extent of violent crime and guns, which are also controlled by hamulot.
With police notorious for refusing to intervene until after a crime has been committed, Egbariya has even found herself turning to the hamulot themselves for justice and protection for her charges. Once a teenage girl in Ramle was being hounded by her parents and relatives for being too “free,” and one day she was reported to have passed what looked like a note to a man in the shouk, and the rumor went around that it was a love note to her boyfriend. Shots were fired at her family’s house; the girl was in immediate danger.
“Her brother was a drug dealer under house arrest, and the girl told me he beat her up until she agreed to sell drugs for him. The man she met in the shouk was a buyer and the ‘note’ she gave him was a packet of drugs in exchange for money for her brother,” says Egbariya. “I went to the heads of her hamula and told them the story. Next thing I heard, they’d sent men to beat up the brother.”
A girl’s life was saved. A murder of surpassing dishonor was prevented. In Egbariya’s words, this was a rare winning battle “in a long, terrible war.”
Some call it ‘honor’
By LARRY DERFNER
11/05/2010 16:33
One woman is risking all to break the conspiracy of silence surrounding so-called honor killings, and thus, hopefully, bring some honor back to Lod.
Samah Salaime Egbariya, the leading Arab women’s activist in Lod, the country’s most dangerous city for Arab women, is quietly giving advice to a beautiful ninthgrade girl wearing a hijab, or Muslim head scarf, and tight black slacks. It’s dark outside and they’re in a local high-school classroom where Egbariya’s after-school discussion group on “human skills” has just let out. At a glance, the girl looks like she’s trying to bridge two dissonant worlds. She also looks like a girl who could find herself in trouble in a place like Lod.
Egbariya had a girl like that in a youth group she led a couple of years ago in Ramle – 16, pretty, eager for freedom. Her family punished her, kept her home and Egbariya didn’t hear from her. A year or so later, she ran into the girl in town. “She told me her family had married her off to a much older man. It was a payoff to settle a family dispute. About a year after that she was murdered,” says Egbariya, 35, a social worker who now heads the local NGO Arab Women in the Center.
“These teenagers want so badly to be free. They see me as a role model,” she says after the girl leaves the classroom.
She shows me pictures from the march in Lod two weeks ago attended by some 1,000 local Arabs, including Islamic religious leaders, against the recent killings of women that have made the city infamous. The march focused the blame on Lod politicians and police for treating the problem with malign neglect, but it also faulted – in diplomatic terms – the violent, tyrannical strain of male chauvinism in many extended Muslim families, or hamulot.
“Most of the women at the rally were devout Muslims, and they were chanting, ‘Allahu akbar, God is great,’ and denouncing ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators’ and the police. We, the secular feminists, a few dozen of us, were chanting against the killing of women, against the orphaning of children. It became almost a competition and the religious women didn’t like it, and I said we have to stop competing and come together, so we agreed to chant, ‘By God, stop killing Muslim women,’” she says.
Egbariya organized the pupils in the after-school class to hand out leaflets for the march, and many attended. She explains why the class is so topheavy with boys: “I lost about 10 girls in the last couple of weeks because their fathers said it was too dangerous for them to come home in the dark.”
Among the topics she discusses with the kids is honor killings – the murder of a woman by male blood relations – cousins, uncles, brothers, the father – for “dishonoring” the hamula by acting “immodestly,” thus giving rise to suspicions or false accusations that she is having extramarital sex.
Asked if the kids in class know that honor killing is wrong, she replies, “Of course they know,” noting that teenage girls are the most common victims. “They talk against it in class. But not all of them feel safe enough to talk against it outside.”
IN THE LAST MONTH, two Muslim women (as well as an Arab man) have been murdered in Lod, bringing the total this year to four. In Lod and adjacent Ramle – “many of the hamulot are spread out across both cities,” Egbariya notes – 20 Muslim women have been murdered in the last five years.
Police have generally written them off as honor killings, which incenses the Arab community – both because it’s not true and because it stigmatizes the family of the victim, especially the family’s unmarried girls.
Neither of the two Lod women shot to death in the last month, Abeer Abu Khatifan and Amal Khalili, were killed by blood relations, says Egbariya. With other activists in her NGO, funded by the Connecticut-based “social entrepreneurship” fund Echoing Green, she keeps in close touch with the families of victims, follows the police investigations and stays tuned to the local grapevine.
Abu Khatifan, 33, a mother of four, was shot by a masked man at her home. Afterward, her husband and other relatives grieved openly – not the typical public behavior of a family whose members have carried out an honor killing. Egbariya says the family suspects she was killed by a relative over a property dispute, not “honor.”
Khalili, 27, a divorced mother of three, was shot to death by a masked man while sitting in her car with her brother and little daughter, who were left unharmed except for scratches from broken glass. In this case, suspicion has fallen on Khalili’s ex-husband and his family, who reportedly had harassed the victim since the court awarded her the couple’s house. If true, she was killed over an economic dispute fueled by divorce, not family “honor.”
Going over a list of the 20 Arab women in Lod and Ramle killed in the last five years, Egbariya says that to the best of her knowledge, nine were honor killings, usually of unmarried adolescent girls. In only two of these nine cases did family members testify against the killers. In the overwhelming majority of these murders, no one was convicted or went to jail.
Whether the motive was “honor,” economics or anything else, what links these killings is that in every case, says Egbariya, “a woman was doing something that a man disapproved of, that challenged his power.”
WE’RE DRIVING through some of the Arab neighborhoods of Lod: Ramat Eshkol (“This used to be a Jewish neighborhood, but now it’s only Arabs and Ethiopians,” she says), Neveh Yerek, or Green Fields (“I don’t see a lot of green here,” she notes), and Rakevet, near the railroad tracks, as poor a shantytown – dotted, though, with drug dealers’ villas – as can be found in any Israeli city. “You see the spikes on top of all the gates? Self-protection is the name of the game around here,” she says.
Egbariya is a tall, quietly charismatic woman who, when describing harsh realities, often resorts to ironic humor. But when we drive up to the community center she ran when she first came to Lod in 2000, she is in plain distress, covering her face with her hand. “I haven’t been back here in nearly seven years, since I left.”
In 2004, months after she left, the center was torched by some unknown assailant for an unknown unreason. Now it is a dark, cavernous squat for junkies. The floor is black with accumulated trash and filth, mocking the murals that were painted on the walls in more hopeful times.
This was where Egbariya’s work with local Arab women victims began. After a little while on the job, she saw that a lot of the women coming to the center were tense, crying, afraid to leave the house. They told her the source of their “inner terror” – the violence and threats from some of the men in their hamulot. Egbariya decided it was necessary to end the “conspiracy of silence” and she organized a conference at the center for Arab women, public figures and religious leaders.
“A short time before,” she recalls, “a man from Lod killed his 15-year-old niece. He’d been beating his divorced sister and his niece threatened to call the police on him, and one afternoon the girl was sleeping and he put a pillow over her face and shot her dead. The mother was going to speak at the conference – in ‘disguise,’ but everyone would know from her words who she was. A few hours before the conference, the man comes to the community center – he was walking around free – and told me he wanted to make a sulha, a truce, with his sister – which wasn’t true – but that if she spoke at the conference, he would make a balagan, a ruckus. I asked him what he meant by balagan, and he said he would bring an M-16 into the center and start shooting.
“I called the police and they told me to cancel the conference, and so did a lot of the people planning to attend. But I said if we do that, we’ve lost and this guy and all the others like him have won, and a lot of people backed me up. So the police planted some officers in the audience. About 120 people showed up. The mother told her story, the audience knew who she was. People were crying. The father didn’t show up that night – and I’ve never seen him since.”
Some 40 regulars at the community center went on to become activists in the city, she notes.
Egbariya left after four years when some local Arabs plugged in to the municipality decided they wanted “one of theirs” to run it, she says.
They tried bribing her to quit, without success, and one day a young married man showed up in her office and started coming on to her. “When all else fails, they go after a woman’s honor – it’s where she’s most vulnerable. I told the man, ‘You want to catch me in a fadiha, a shameful act? I’ll call your wife right now and we’ll see whose fadiha it is.’ There was a video camera in the office and I started filming him.
“He left, but when I got home, my husband told me that’s it, if they’re willing to go to such lengths to get rid of you, then this is too dangerous. So I resigned.”
Living with her husband, who is a teacher, and their three sons in the Jewish-Arab village Neveh Shalom, she was first exposed to the phenomenon of honor killings – and the conspiracy of silence – as an adolescent in the Galilee village of Turan. A village girl just a little older than herself was poisoned by her father. Egbariya asked the men in her family why, and was told that the girl had “made a mistake.” She asked her older sister what sort of mistake could lead a girl to be killed by her father, and was told, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
EGBARIYA MENTIONED that 20-year-old killing in a lecture to some 120 police officers in the North, which was arranged through the Abraham Fund. “A policeman in the audience said he remembered it,” she says. “The father was released from prison after five or six years. The head of the Arab local authorities was his main character witness.”
She went on to get her master’s degree in social work at the Hebrew University, starting her career in Jerusalem’s Old City, where “the families live one on top of another, seven to a room. There’s incest, sexual molestation in the alleys, and if the women report it to the authorities, they’re considered traitors.” But she didn’t have to deal with murder until coming to Lod.
The streets in the city’s Arab neighborhoods are an assault on the senses – here and there sewage runs openly along the curb, the smell of animal carcasses hangs in the air, heaps of trash and rubble seem to be everywhere, and in the roughest parts of town, such as Pardess Snir and the Dahamesh enclave, residents say they hear gunfire through the night.
We stop at the entrance to the Muslim cemetery. “When a woman is murdered over family ‘honor,’ there’s no funeral, no gravestone, somebody just comes at night, digs a grave, throws the body in and covers it up,” Egbariya says, then tells the story of an Arab mother from Ramle who stood up against this on behalf of her murdered daughter, who is buried in the cemetery.
“Her daughter was 17 and she was killed a few years ago by her son. He didn’t want to do it, but men in the hamula kept pressuring him, until one night they drugged him and he killed his sister, then they threw the body into a hole and covered it up. The mother went to the police, she testified against her son and he was convicted and imprisoned. This is unique. The mother put up a gravestone on her daughter’s burial place, and had it inscribed with a saying from the Koran, ‘On Judgment Day, God will ask: ‘For what crime were you killed?’ The hamula didn’t like this, so they destroyed the gravestone. Since then, the mother has lost her mind, she goes around talking to herself.”
BREAKING THE CONSPIRACY of silence around honor killings requires relatives of victims to go to the police and testify, but this means either death or exile from Israeli Arab society. Egbariya recommends the creation of a witness protection program, but it’s hard to imagine people coming forward in any but the rarest cases when the consequences are so dire. Still, she blames police and other municipal authorities for taking an attitude of “as long as the Jewish population isn’t being hurt, it’s not our problem.”
Honor killings take place in Muslim communities across the Middle East, and occasionally in the West; the reason usually given why Lod ranks No. 1 in Israel’s Arab sector is because of the extent of violent crime and guns, which are also controlled by hamulot.
With police notorious for refusing to intervene until after a crime has been committed, Egbariya has even found herself turning to the hamulot themselves for justice and protection for her charges. Once a teenage girl in Ramle was being hounded by her parents and relatives for being too “free,” and one day she was reported to have passed what looked like a note to a man in the shouk, and the rumor went around that it was a love note to her boyfriend. Shots were fired at her family’s house; the girl was in immediate danger.
“Her brother was a drug dealer under house arrest, and the girl told me he beat her up until she agreed to sell drugs for him. The man she met in the shouk was a buyer and the ‘note’ she gave him was a packet of drugs in exchange for money for her brother,” says Egbariya. “I went to the heads of her hamula and told them the story. Next thing I heard, they’d sent men to beat up the brother.”
A girl’s life was saved. A murder of surpassing dishonor was prevented. In Egbariya’s words, this was a rare winning battle “in a long, terrible war.”
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