You might very well think that…
New Name For Torture: “The Bush System”
John Yoo, a former member of the Justice Department who wrote the first rationalization that torture is legal, said in the Wall Street Journal that the United States must torture people and referred to it as the Bush system.
Here’s kind of a far out idea that was in the last part of the CBC documentary Fly Me to the Moon.
David R. Criswell (Director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston), proposes the construction of large-scale solar collectors on the moon’s surface, using local lunar materials. The solar energy would then be converted to microwave energy and transmitted to Earth. Criswell estimates that the entire lunar-solar power generation system could be built over a 10-year period for approximately $50 billion. Imagine that!
The now infamous letter of complaint to the chairman of Virgin Airlines regarding the food (if it can be called that) on a recent flight from Mumbai to Heathrow. Not quite the image Virgin wants to present in connection with its 25 year anniversary.
Well, the political freak show is finally over — at least for a while. The Illinois state senate voted unanimously this afternoon to impeach now former Governor Rod Blagojevich, with officials using words like “corrupt,” “hypocrite,” “devious,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” and “a stain on the state.” Impeachment prosecutor David Ellis said, “He has a Constitutional right not to thrown in jail without a fair trial, but he does not have a Constitutional right to be governor. That is not a right; it’s a privilege and he forfeited that right. He has abused the power of his office.”
Kind of makes this old clip almost poignant in a way.
So what happens if he’s proven not guilty of the criminal charges against him? Stranger things have happened…
Someone asked me this morning why the Liberals are supporting the government’s budget. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good answer. When I heard yesterday that the Liberals would be proposing amendments to the budget I didn’t think that “putting the government on probation” (to use Ignatieff’s expression) would be sum total of demands that would be made. Really… is that it? How utterly disappointing.
Thomas Walkom nails it:
Ignatieff understands what’s wrong with the budget. Yesterday, he detailed some of its main defects – its failure to address the fact that most jobless people don’t qualify for employment insurance, its refusal to deal with child care, the strings attached to its infrastructure spending proposals, its gratuitous attack on the principle of paying men and women equally for work of equal value.
Then, having listed the budget’s flaws, he said his party would support it anyway.
“We are in the opposition,” he explained. “We are not the government. It is the responsibility of the government to govern.”
This political science 101 argument might make sense if the opposition Liberals were planning to oppose. But they are not. They plan to keep this government alive.
Even so, they could use their influence – as others have done in minority parliaments – to persuade Harper to compromise.
Where the government needs to compromise most is in the area of employment insurance. All employees pay into this fund. But only 42 per cent of the jobless qualify for benefits. In bad times, this discrepancy promises disaster.
A solution might cost $500 million a year. But for a government willing to spend $750,000 on a Lake Huron yachting pier, that’s small beer.
Or the Liberals could have focused on the budget’s less expensive but more ideological elements. These include temporary suspension of union rights in the public service and a frontal attack on the principle of pay equity, under which men and women are paid equally for work of equal value.
Had Ignatieff’s Liberals cared enough, they almost certainly could have forced the government to back down here. But clearly they did not.
It’s bad enough that we’re stuck with a government that’s more intent on playing cheap political games than it is in taking care of the nation’s business, the last thing in the world we need is an official Opposition similarly focused that continues to support Tories against the wishes of its own membership.
Update: It seems the media is supportive of the Liberals decision to prop up the government. Need I say more? Speaking of Kinsella — Heh.
Update2: Brent Fullard from the Canadian Association of Income Trust Investors (CAITI) weighs in with a detailed critique of just how “flawed” the Conservative budget is, and more germane to our purposes here, how it specifically fails to meet any of the conditions set out by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s so-called “litmus test” that he had said was essential to gaining support of the official Opposition.
Update3: Here’s the latest on the webpoll from SDA — 84% hate the budget and want the spending madness to stop. Only 15% feel that the budget basically gets things right. On our little poll here, 68% of people didn’t want the Liberals to support the budget.
President Barack Obama signed an equal pay bill into law today, declaring that it’s a family issue, not just a women’s issue.
Meanwhile, here in Canada: “The Conservative government (like its Liberal and Conservative predecessors) apparently doesn’t believe in either pay equity or the need to enforce its own regulations.”
The budget says the Tories will “identify government holdings that could be developed by the private sector to stimulate local economic development…In some cases, it may be concluded that selling an asset to a private-sector entity may generate more economic activity and deliver greater value to taxpayers.”
But apparently, Flaherty is already padding the books to the tune of $2 billion when not only haven’t the sales been made yet, the assets under consideration haven’t even been identified.
Why do Conservatives hate science?
Former Republican congressman Vagina Coastguard Dick Armey to Joan Walsh the editor-in-chief of Salon.com on last night’s Hardball with Chris Matthews: “I am so damned glad that you can never be my wife, ‘cause I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.”
Astounding.
Update: Chet at Vanity Press has a very good take on this.
After years of excoriating the Liberals for being obsessed with power, we now learn that “principles” be damned, for the Conservatives… It’s all about just desperately holding onto POWER at any cost. Golly, what a surprise!
Now, our own side wants us to put it all on the line on behalf of so-called “principles” and piss it all down the toilet.
This has absolutely nothing to do with “principles”. Come on!
But uh-oh, just several weeks ago “Trusty” said this:
If the opposition, namely Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals, are intent on defeating the Tories over the budget, then let’s go to the polls. But for the love of God, don’t agree to giving everything but the shirts off our backs just to appease the conspirators.
That would be irresponsible.
I could fill pages and pages with such glaring contradictions, but since when did hypocritical “Conservatives” ever make even the feeblest attempt to be consistent, let alone coherent?
Red Tory v.3.0.3