Michael Byers Shows Uncharacteristic Grit

Tough stance on piracy out of step for Byers

Michael Byers either really doesn't like pirates or really doesn't like Stephen Harper.

Despite having previously made comments that seemed to portray Somali pirates as victims, Byers has recently made some comments that suggest he favours taking a much tougher approach to piracy.

Then again, it may not be the priacy that necessarily bothers Byers.

Byers' comments come after news that the Canadian navy is releasing Somali pirates because the Canadian government feels it doesn't have the authority to prosecute them.

"Its ludicrous for the Harper government to claim that it can't arrest and prosecute pirates,” Byers fumes. “Canada has a legal obligation under the United Nations and international law to bring pirates to justice.”

One does wonder how Byers would have the government weigh this obligation against its obligations to UN-sanctioned state building efforts in Afghanistan -- which involves a war against the Taliban that Michael Byers opposes. But that is off topic.

“Catch and release only encourages pirates to grow bigger and bolder,” says Byers, although he notes that prosecuting teenage pirates doesn't help the issue. He doesn't suggest releasing them -- and in fact doesn't seem to have much to say on how to deal with teenaged pirates.

Byers is certainly right about catch and release, and about the Canadian government's ability to turn captured pirates over to an international tribunal established in Kenya.

But considering Byers' earlier take on piracy and his constant take on the Harper government -- that absolutely nothing the Harper government does can be allowed to seem tolerable -- one has to wonder how much of Byers' recent take on the issue has to do with piracy and how much of it has to do with a simple opportunity to denounce the Harper Conservatives yet again.

At this point it's hard to tell with Michael Byers.

Michael's Choice

Rebuilding the party a necessary step

At the Liberal party national convention in Vancouver, Michael Ignatieff has been provided with a stark choice:

Rebuild the party from the bottom up or rebuild the party from the top down. Not rebuilding the party at all is simply not an option.

Speaking at a meeting of Liberal party riding presidents, former Prime Minister John Turner made his preference on the manner of this rebuilding abundantly clear.


Turner insisted that the Liberal party “will not be rebuilt from the top down. It has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.”

"I don’t want to see any leader-appointed candidates across the country,” he added. “I believe riding-by-riding is how this party should be reconstructed, how this country should be run."

Turner is clearly taking side with the people behind Liberal 308, an enterprising effort to rebuild and renew the Liberal party across the country on a riding-by-riding basis.

Ignatieff responded to Turner by agreeing -- somehwat.

“I believe very strongly and I’ve said since I became leader, I want to open nominations in every [riding] in the country, I want to rebuild the party from the grassroots up," Ignatieff replied. “But I cannot abandon the prerogative of a leader to make those appointments that I deem necessary.”

In other words, Ignatieff will allow individual riding associations to nominate their own candidates so long as its convenient for himself. If Ignatieff has trouble finding a riding for a new star candidate, all bets are likely off.

Many Canadians likely still remember Stephane Dion's star-candidate adventurism when he installed Joan Beatty as a Liberal candidate over David Orchard, the candidate duly elected by that riding's Liberal riding association.

Dion's move came after a promise to use the leader's prerogative to appoint more women as candidates.

Unsurprisingly, National Liberal Women's Commission President Nicole Foster Woollatt was in favour of Ignatieff retaining the power to appoint candidates.

“It’s not something you want to use frequently," he mused. "But it can be important."

Particularly, one supposes, if the Liberal leader is using that power to appoint female candidates, even in ridings were a riding-elected candidate is already in place.

For those supporting the Liberal 308 initiative -- and it certainly deserves support -- Ignatieff's stand on this particular issue is not very promising, but this shouldn't be so surprising.

After all, Ignatieff's abrupt ascension to the Liberal leadership dismembered that renewal process from the leadership campaign -- two things that optimally should have been conducted together.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Jeff Jedras - "John Turner at Council of Presidents"

Challenging the Commonplace - "Telling Early Moment May Top LPC Convention"

Picking an Atheist Battle in Hip Hop

Greydon Square gains traction among atheist crowd on strength of Dawkins endorsement

Seasoned Richard Dawkins watchers may remember "Beware the Believers", a rap video parodying Richard Dawkins.

They may even remember a briefer follow-up to the video in which its creators revealed it as a mutual mockery of both Dawkins and some of his most diligent detractors -- notably Expelled creator Ben Stein.

The video was particularly hilarious due to the hysterical notion of Dawkins being bothered to even look at a rap CD, let alone actually listen to one.

That stodgy impression of Dawkins may not have been entirely accurate. Dawkins has recently taken to promoting a rapper by the name of Greydon Square.

Greydon Square admits freely to having a confrontational style. That naturally has to be a given, considering the aggressive and confrontational nature of hip hop.

"I'm confrontational with people who are, by nature, confrontational with their ideology," he says. "You can't run around and tell people that they're going to hell because they don't believe in the same sky God as you. Are you serious? I will confront you over that."

Greydon Square wants to approach hip hop in a way that's rarely been attempted before. He wants to approach hip hop as a debate -- an interesting take on battle rap, one that's rarely been embraced.

"See, what I did was I looked at hip hop beefs and noticed that it deteriorated when people started calling each other bitches and ho's and basically stopped formulating arguments," he continues. "They stopped showing the ability, the skill, and just started talking shit. I brought it back to presenting a position. Now you can call me whatever you want, but until you argue a position, you're wack."

But Greydon Square's approach has one singular fatal flaw: in hip hop, winners and losers are normally decided not based on who produces the best argument, but based on who is lyrically superior.

Rappers are starkly divided between two main religious camps -- Christianity, and Islam. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam has often sought to establish leadership over the hip hop community. In fact Farrakhan has called hip hop summits and has convened personal meetings between rappers in order to squash potentially violent beefs.

Greydon Square would have a difficult time competing lyrically with many rappers of religious faith. DMX, Kanye West and Reverend Run are not only deeply spiritual Christians, but are also dominant battle rappers.

KRS-One, Common and Mos Def are dominant battle rappers who are Muslim.

Any rapper would have difficulty standing against any of these performers in a battle rap. But even so far as dogmatism goes, Greydon Square is unlikely to find suitable targets among the hip hop community.

Many deeply faithful rappers have come from a background that doesn't grant them the luxury of being self-righteous or dogmatic. Due to the very nature of the lives they've lived, these people are sinners who have sought, and continue to seek, redemption -- the most powerful promise of religion.

As a result, the religious beliefs of rappers by their very nature have to be considerably flexible.

If Greydon Square is itching for an opportunity to promote atheism by beefing with other rappers not only is he not terribly likely to win, but he's unlikely to find a target that suits him.

Whether or not Greydon Square will embrace the atheist tactic of inventing a dogmatic opponent where one may not actually exist remains yet to be seen.

ADQ Leadership Race Heats Up

Gilles Tailon announces leadership bid

Just a few short months ago, the Action Democratique du Quebec were in extremely dire straights.

They had just finished absorbing a whopping defeat in the 2008 Quebec election, their leader, Mario Dumont, had just quit, and no contenders were lining up to bid for his vacated post.

What a difference a few months can make.

As of yesterday, three candidates have declared their candidacy to become the next leader of the ADQ.

Gilles Tailon has formally declared his candidacy. He says he plans to focus on economic issues.

Eric Caire, the National Assembly Member for La Peltrie and another former MNA, Christian Levesque.

At 63 years of age, Tailon is the oldest candidate to join the field. He'd certainly be a significant change from the young, dynamic Dumont. His best asset is a stint as the President of the Conseil du Patronat du Québec, an association of business people. He was the president of the CPQ for eight years between 1998 and 2006.

Caire was first elected in his riding of La Peltrie in 2007 by 51% of the vote. Since then he's advocated the abolition of public school boards and the introduction of a school vouchers program.

Levesque has some international credentials, having previously been President of General Textiles International, which is based in Paris. In a party that has to lead toward French Canadian nationalism, such links to France could be a real asset for both Levesque and the ADQ.

Any of these candidates would be hard-pressed to replace Mario Dumont, but with the sharp turn in the party's electoral fortunes the ADQ is well-poised for the kind of change in direction a new leader could bring.

The Death of an Argument

Key rhetorical flub reveals fatuity of Richard Dawkins' "lying for Jesus" argument

Ever since its inception as an argument in the religion/atheism debate, "lying for Jesus" has become a favoured accusation lobbed by the most zealous atheists.

In fact, accusations of general dishonesty have often been central to the arguments of militant fundamentalist atheists. But in a column appearing on the Spectator website Melanie Phillips chronicles the tale of Dawkins flubbing this argument so badly he may never be able to use it again -- at least not with any trace of credibility.

The tale begins with a debate between Dawkins and Irish mathematician John Lennox in which Dawkins reportedly admitted that belief in God is a defensible belief.

"You can make a respectable case for deism," Dawkins admits. "Not a case that I would accept but I think it is a serious discussion that you could have."

Dawkins would insist that he hadn't really meant his comments as an admission that belief in a god could be respectably defended -- insisting that he was merely being sarcastic. As Lennox and Phillips would both note, Dawkins certainly said nothing at the time to indicate that he was being sarcastic, and had reportedly seemed sincere at the time that he said it.

But Dawkins was not yet finished.

Dawkins would go on to accuse Phillips of misrepresenting him in a column published on the Spectator site. He would even go so far as quoting her in a slide shown at a subsequent debate with Lennox:

"Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins is an evolutionist. But many are now asking whether the dyed-in-the-wool critic of religion may be, well, evolving in his views about God. You see, in a recent debate with theist and Christian John Lennox, he let slip what many would regard as a major blooper: he actually admitted that there might be a case for theism of sorts. This was a worldview change of seismic proportions. It was a most remarkable turnaround. For someone who had spent over five decades championing the atheist cause to all of a sudden renounce it was an incredible achievement."

The problem, as it turns out, is that Phillips never wrote those words.

Those words were actually penned by Culture Watch's Bill Muehlenberg. Oops.

Dawkins would go on to accuse Phillips of "lying for Jesus" based on quotes that he was misrepresenting as hers. But his folly in doing so actually ran deeper than this simple fact.

As it turns out, Phillips is actually Jewish. One clearly pertinent detail is that Jews don't believe in Jesus -- or at least don't believe he was the prophesized Messiah.

Oops.

"Lying for Jesus! Oh dear oh dear. Not only did Dawkins falsely accuse me of distorting his position, but he accused me of doing so because he assumed I was a Christian. Five minutes’ research maximum would have told him that I am a Jew. Either he thought that all the stuff written on Culture Watch by Bill Muehlenberg, who appears to be a devout Christian, was written by me; or he assumed that, since John Lennox is a Christian, anyone who supports John Lennox must also be a Christian. Either way, the man who has made a global reputation out of scorning anyone who makes an assumption not grounded in empirical evidence has assumed to be true something that can easily be ascertained to be totally false – thus suggesting that the mind that is so addled by prejudice it cannot deal with demonstrable reality is none other than his own."

Those words at least actually were written by Phillips.

At the very least, Dawkins most recent flub has demonstrated precisely how eager he is to deploy his vaunted "lying for Jesus" argument, to the extent that he will rush to use it without even stopping to make sure that the words he's quoted were ever written or spoken by the person he's attributed them to.

Considering the high level at which Dawkins has conducted his scientific work it would be hard to believe -- nearly impossible -- that he was unable to tell Bill Muehlenberg' words from Melanie Phillips'.

Then again, considering Dawkins' history of weakly razor-thin arguments -- such as suggesting that astrology is akin to racism -- perhaps there is ample cause for doubt. It's of little surprise that Dawkins isn't nearly as bright as he and his supporters would like to have people believe.

One thing is for certain: Dawkins' "lying for Jesus" argument is now officially dead in the water. That certainly won't stop Dawkins or any of his supporters from using it -- they thrive on the ignorance of those they would convince, and on the alleged ignorance of anyone who believes in religion.

All that can be done is for those who oppose Dawkins and his virulent brand of atheism to remind people that he isn't nearly as bright -- or honest -- as he pretends to be.

Elizabeth May: Political Amnesiac

Green Party leader has peculiar notions of what is "anti-democratic"

According to Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Canadians suffer from a "collective amnesia". Often enough, she's oddly correct -- but in ways that are ironically lost on her.

Her recent book Losing Confidence continues to gain traction in the news media, as various outlets continue to weigh her claims that Canadian democracy is in some kind of trouble.

Yet Elizabeth May herself indulges herself in politically-motivated forgetfulness. She forgets that it was the Canadian citizenry that rejected the coalition. She also forgets that Canadian citizens have different expectations about government than countries where coalition governments are commonplace.

Elizabeth May's biggest problem is that she continues to evaluate Canadian democracy against various European counterpart -- Germany may be the most pertinent example -- without ever taking into account that Canada's political culture and, with it, citizens' expectations of democracy.

"Never in the history of modern parliamentary democracy anywhere in the world had a prime minister sought to shut down the government to avoid losing a confidence vote," she writes.

May continues to complain that she feels the progrogation of Parliament was "breathtakingly anti-democratic".

Yet a clear majority of Canadians had already rejected the proposed Liberal/NDP coalition government. The option of an election -- the traditional political route after a minority Parliament's defeat -- was an election, not the coalition, which was supported by just over a third of Canadians.

Yet an election had just taken place weeks previous. And considering the levels of support the Conservatives enjoyed immediately following the coalition proposal -- careening into majority government territory -- it's unlikely that May would have supported an election.

On that note it's hard to overlook the extent to which May is being politically self-indulgent. As Tom Flanagan noted in a Globe and Mail column, Canadian political culture demands that Canadians decide the government, not the Governor General.

If the Liberals and NDP had run on a coalition government during the 2008 federal election, that would be one thing entirely. But then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion had explicitly ruled that prospect out during the election. So to step up after the election and take the first opportunity to attempt to supplant the government with a coalition that had previously been treated as out of the question was another thing entirely.

Canadians should also never forget that the precipitating event for this coalition was a government move to cut subsidies for political parties. At a time of fiscal crisis, this was the right move to make, but the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois (whom may describes simply as "democratically elected" without mentioning the contextual fact that their purpose is to separate Quebec from the rest of the country) wouldn't stand for the revokation of their entitlements.

Never before, in a democratic state, has an appointed official been called upon to make a decision on whether or not to replace the duly-elected government with a political monstrosity so out-of-step with the citizens' expectations of democracy.

May's attitude clearly indicates that she believes democracy is something to be managed by elites. The rules set clearly advantage elites in decisions regarding who will and will not govern. If Michaelle Jean had been less respectful of Canada's political culture, Elizabeth May could very well have gotten her way -- and an unstable coalition replete with the Canadian government mortgaged to a separatist party founded on a racial ideology.

Only in the mind of a virulently fervent ideologue could such an option, evaulated according to the entirety of its significance, seem appealing. Especially when one considers that it would undermine Canada's citizen-oriented political culture.

Oddly enough, May forgets that her party has no leadership review process. Although rumblings continue that the rank-and-file Green Party membership has no confidence in Elizabeth May's leadership -- and really, who could blame them? -- May continues to enjoy a very comfortable position her party.

But only because the party's rules allow for this -- not because of the democratic will of her party membership.

To Elizabeth May, only the formal rules matter. That's the biggest difference between May and Governor General Michaelle Jean -- Jean understands that the democratic will of the people matter, and May does not.

It's a good reason why Michaelle Jean deserves an opportunity to utilize her talents beyond the meagre venue of the Governor General's office, and Elizabeth May doesn't deserve to ever be elected.

The Political Power of Music

Russel Simmons promotes political power of hip hop

When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele suggested the GOP needed to reenvision itself in a hip hop mold many people assumed he was either crazed or simply delusional.

After all, hip hop and the Republican party could be expected to mix about as well as oil and water.

But hip hop may be the most inherently political genre music has to offer. Because of its uniquely political character, hip hop provides political organizers with invaluable opportunities to mobilize grassroots urban youths -- a demographic that not only is becoming more politically active, but one that Republicans are practically entirely alienated from.

Russel Simmons provides an example of precisely how powerful hip hop can be as a political organizational force. His efforts to mobilize the hip hop community in support of environmental causes, something he plans to accomplish through his America's Greenest Campus campaign, promise to be nothing short of revolutionary.

"[This campaign] is an educational tool and an empowerment vehicle. People don’t understand what it is to lighten their footprint, what steps to take," Simmons explains. "So if we give them the simple steps and we tell them exactly how much it affects the environment if they make certain changes—being a vegetarian, doing other things that make a dramatic difference in how much weight they carry in the world—people want to know that. When they realize that by changing simple things they can make a difference, it’s an empowerment vehicle."

While this is an encouraging idea, Simmons fails to exercise some crucial critical thinking in regards to his own ideas. His intent to utilize hip hop -- which in addition to being music's most inherently political genre has also become music's most inherently materialistic genre -- in favour of environmentalism contradicts hip hop's consumer-driven nature.

But Simmons is also right in noting the impact that hip hop has on consumer culture. Convincing rappers to embrace environmentally-conscious products will go a long way toward improving their marketability.

"The biz is depending on hip-hop to pick which color diamond is popular," Simmons explains. "The only way [the Maybach] beats Phantom Rolls Royce is to get rappers to choose it. Tommy Hilfiger’s praying that hip-hop discovers him again. So is Coca-Cola; [they’re] worried what hip-hop says versus Pepsi."

Simmons admits that he doesn't currently have a big-name rapper he can point to as the franchise player for his environmentalist hip hop movement.

But even if rappers aren't necessarily becoming more environmentally conscious just yet, they are becoming wealthier on an ongoing basis.

The ever-increasing wealth of hip hop artists provides an open window for Republicans to appeal to hip hop artists through fiscally conservative policies -- particularly those promising lower levels of taxation. The biggest barrier remaining to Michael Steele remaking the GOP under a hip hop prototype is the social values projected by many of those currently being allowed to portray themselves as the Republican party's standard bearers.

As politically revolutionary music, one can rest assured that few rappers will publicly support a political party that is at least perceived to promote socially regressive or racially hostile policies.

Michael Steele's plan to infuse a raptivist base within the Republican party will require him to embrace Meghan McCain's plans to moderate the GOP. The potential for growth following such a radical course of action is immense -- but first the party would have to endure significant growing pains.

CAW Has Done the Right Thing

But Chrysler will have to reciprocate in time

Re-negotiating CAW's lucrative labour contract with Chrysler must be the hardest thing CAW President Ken Lewenza imagined he would ever have to do.

Yet that is precisely what Lewenza has done. In doing so, he's saved thousands of jobs for his constituents in the Canadian Autoworkers Union.

In voting to accept a cost-cutting deal with Chrysler that will save thousands of jobs, the CAW have themselves an immense service.

Naturally, not everyone sees it the same way. Especially militant is former CAW President Buzz Hargrove, who blamed the government for the entire affair. "I'm angry as hell," he fumed. "I'm not angry at my union, they've done an incredible job. I'm angry at a government. A government that has used a heavy hand -- Mr. Clement and Mr. Bryant, the provincial government as well -- to force workers to give up things that they've worked hard and gained over the years."

It isn't surprising. Hargrove had already made an appearance on a special episode of CBC's Dragon's Den insisting that the government should extend automakers an unconditional bail out -- adamantly refusing to admit that extending such a bailout without a significant restructuring of the companies' operations would inevitably result in further financial trouble for those companies, and further lost jobs. Possibly even another bail out down the road.

Hargrove's sense of entitlement seems to have not wavered one iota. When he appeared on the Dragon's Den Hargrove showed up with his hands in his pockets, almost entirely unprepared to defend his position, and offering little to persuade anyone that such a bail out should be extended at all.

"It's unprecedented where a government would step in and say: 'You're going to cut your wages by $19 an hour,'" Hargrove grumbled. "You know, there's over 20 countries around the world -- France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand - all of these countries around the world are pumping money into the auto sector because of the worldwide economic crisis we find ourselves in."

Yet Hargrove overlooks the fact that it wasn't the government that demanded Chrysler cut its wage costs by $19 an hour -- that was Fiat, the partner in the merger that will hopefully save that company.

Despite Hargrove's objections, CAW has indeed done the right thing. But this is far from the end of the story.

In time, the onus will eventually fall on Chrysler to also do the right thing and reciprocate CAW's good will. This should come in the form of a structured plan to restore the conceded wages and benefits once the company becomes profitable again.

A situation where a labour union makes concessions to help a struggling company stay afloat shouldn't be tolearted. Having done the right thing for both themselves and Chrysler, CAW shouldn't be betrayed like many other companies have done in the past.

The Puzzle of Foreign Intervention

Michael Byers' simplistic views on foreign intervention rears its head again

Running in the 2008 federal election as a foreign policy expert for a party that continues to hold ambitions of governing Canada, there's little question that Michael Byers has ambitions of being Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It's in the revelation of these ambitions that Byers' simplistic views on foreign policy become so alarming.

In an article published in the Winnipeg Sun, Byers speaks about the issue of Piracy in Somalia, insisting that the end of humanitarian efforts in Somalia has led to a desperate situation which contributes to the increases in piracy.

"The Somali people are desperate for survival, plus they have a vendetta against the developed world which sails off the country's waters and seems to have ignored for too long the problems of the disadvantaged country, leaving millions to their fate and premature deaths," says Byers.

"Partly it's symptomatic of failed states and lawless coastal zones that exist in some parts of the world, and in part the failure of political will on the part of western states to expend the resources and sometimes the military personnel necessary to do the hard work of rebuilding hard states," he continues. "When we abandon countries like Somalia, we will eventually pay a price."

Byers' words tend to ring rather hollow when one considers that he's one of many activists who insists that the western world should abandon Afghanistan, equally a case study in the international peril of ceding state to regimes that foment internal instability and don't respect international law.

But even beyond that, Byers seems to overlook the devil in the details.

For one thing, the humanitarian mission in Somalia had a troubled history. This in part began when the Red Cross refused military escorts in Somalia.

The vulnerability of aid organizations in Somalia has led to a history of them being treated as easy targets by armed bandits in the country. Both the Red Cross and Red Crescent have been the subject of attack in Somalia.

Clearly aid organizations cannot operate in Somalia without armed protection. Somalia was the first example of such a dangerous operation, one that has led to the more muscular and aggressive peacekeeping model and has led to the demise of the Pearsonian model of peacekeeping -- a demise that has left many individuals like Byers evidently confused.

Those familiar with the Somalia peacekeeping mission are well aware that a United States-led, UN-sanctioned task force had to first forcibly establish peace in Somalia before a peacekeeping mission could really begin. When American forces were ambushed in Mogadishu it became obvious that the peace was fragile at best.

The general security environment in Somalia has even led to organizations like the Red Cross rearming, carrying their own armed security with them -- in a war zone this is an act that certainly carries the risk of being mistaken for combatants.

In order for aid missions to be able to safely operate in countries like Somalia requires a muscular and aggressive peacemaking mission to subdue beligerents and enforce peace through armed force afteward. This is precisely the kind of mission that "peace" activists like Michael Byers -- who have demonstrated an awfully bizarre notion of what peace is and is not -- have tended to oppose in recent years.

If Michael Byers expects aid missions in countries like Somalia to continue, he must support providing a safe environment for those missions to operate. By necessity, this means that Byers will have to re-think his attitudes on foreign intervention, and the ideology he has allowed to dominantly influence them.

The Forgotten Phelps

Nate Phelps continues to speak out against the Westboro Baptist Church

When speaking about the Phelps family and the Westboro Baptist Church, it can become all too easy to conclude that each and every member of the Phelps family is nothing more than a homophobic bigot.

Watching Louis Theroux's Most Hated Family in America, one certainly gets that impression.

But there's more to the story that is so often overlooked: the members of the Phelps family who have denounced their father, his church, and the hateful premises on which it was founded.

Nate Phelps is one of three Phelps family members who has done precisely this. Of the three, he is the most active, speaking about his family and their church on a regular basis.

The picture paints is, unsurprisingly, a very, very ugly one.

"At the age of 7, I could recite all 66 books of the Bible in 19 seconds," Phelps explains. "My father insisted on this because he was frustrated at waiting as his children flipped back and forth trying to find the verses he was preaching from. Afterwards, if one of us took to long my father would stop in the middle of his preaching, cast a gimlet eye on the offender and demand that, 'Somebody smack that kid!'"

"For me, the story of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church is a very long and painful one," Phelps continues. "But the first time that the wider community became aware of them was in 1991, when my father led his church in Topeka, Kansas to stage a protest against gays at a local city park."

"The community reacted with outrage at the mean-spirited and hateful nature of the protest, and sentiments on both sides escalated quickly," Phelps explains. "However, far from discouraging my father, this incited him to much greater efforts at publicly protesting all that he decided was wrong."

More than merely base hatred, Phelps is motivated by a tangible sense of megalomania.

"The church was soon staging dozens of protests every week, against local politicians, businesses, and citizens who dared to speak out against him and his church," Phelps says. "But public protests weren’t enough. My father equipped his church with a bank of fax machines, and daily sent faxes to hundreds of machines across the city and state, filled with invective and diatribes against anyone who had offended him."

Having lived within the Phelps household, Nate has a unique perspective on the actions of the WBC, and can place them fully within their horrific context -- a context soaked in the blood and tears of Nate and his family.

"Most people, coming in contact with them for the first time stare in stunned amazement," Phelps acknowledges. "But for me, it is a natural and almost inevitable progression, from the things I was taught and experienced in the Phelps household as a child, to the circumstances we find today."

"On the first anniversary of my father’s suspension, I returned home from school to find my mother weeping in the church vestibule," Phelps says. "My older brother, Mark, was trying to comfort her. She turned to him, her eyes red and swollen, her voice choked with rage. She yanked the stocking cap off her head, revealing that her long dark hair has been coarsely chopped off. 'He cut my hair off', she cried. Looking closer, I could see that in some places her white scalp has been exposed."

"I think everyone here can understand the trauma of such violence, the feeling of violation and abuse. But for my mother, and for our family, there was more to it than that," Phelps explains. "My father had a fascination with 1 Corinthians 11, in which Paul teaches the hierarchal authority from god, to Christ, to Man, to Woman. A sign of a woman’s submission, he argues, is her wearing her hair long. Fred took quite literally the instructions that women should have long hair; and more than that, he determined that the Greek word translated as 'long' in the bible would be more properly translated as 'uncut'. Thus, no woman in the church was allowed to put scissors to her hair. Nor were they allowed to present themselves in church without their heads properly covered."

Witness and subject to Phelps' brutal temper, Nate looked forward to his opportunity to escape. "My 18th birthday is very important, even central to my planning. My brother left after he was 18, and he was successful," he explains. But not all of Phelps' children were so fortunate.

"My oldest sister Kathy, on the other hand, tried to leave before she was 18," Phelps says. "My father tracked her down, and I watched as he physically forced her to return home. The physical and emotional damage that he inflicted on her in those last few months took a terrible toll on her. She was never the same, her spirit was broken."

Ironically, Fred Phelps' incessant demands for rigid adherence to a religious doctrine stripped from its ultimate context -- the love of the creator and a message of compassion and goodwill to humankind -- ruined Nate's ability to partake in any kind of religious observance.

"The next five years marked a struggle for a sense of who I was, while carefully avoiding anything to do with religion," Phelps explains. "In 1981 I moved to southern California to work with my brother Mark in the printing business. From time to time, at the sincere urging of friends, I would attend a church service. But it all seemed so plain and feeble. When they taught about God’s love, I’d hear my father’s voice condemning them for their namby-pamby fag-enabling beliefs."

The doubts originally implanted by his father's horiffic abuses eventually led to Nate embracing atheism. But Phelps notes that he still may have began to doubt religion even without his father's abuse.

The scores upon scores of people who embrace atheism without being subjected to that standard of abuse prove that he is correct. And even though Phelps has embraced the extreme and virulent brand of atheism promoted by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (among others), Phelps continues to retain a healthy respect for the positive aspects of religious belief.

"Certainly there are many aspects to Christianity that are good and desirable," Phelp acknowledges. "But I began to think in terms of those aspects existing outside the framework of God. Why can’t the mosaic code exist outside the notion of a god?"

There certainly is no reason why they can't. The belief in God -- especially in the conventional sense -- is nothing more than a belief regarding the origin of creation. It is not in itself a moral belief.

As Phelps himelf notes, his journey certainly isn't complete. No one -- not even Phelps himself -- knows what the future will hold for him or any of the other forgotten Phelps.

Entering the House of Hate

Produced by the BBC's Louie Theroux, The Most Hated Family in America documents the Westboro Baptist Church.

It follows these unsettlingly-awful people through the course of various protests, one of their church services, and even their day-to-day life. It provides a window into their horrible world that most viewers will find hard to look away from -- much like a car crash.

Yet in a certain way, it makes the hateful gospel preached by the Phelps family almost make sense. Simply put, the alleged American embrace of homosexuality -- which would likely come as a surprise to most American homosexuals -- has allegedly placed that entire country in violation of God's sixth commandment: thou shalt not commit adultery.

Shirley Phelps-Roeper provides an intriguing definition of the word "fag" that isn't restricted to gay men, but rather to anyone engaging in any sex act outside of marriage, any sex act within marriage involving someone from outside the marriage, or any adulterous act.

In fact, she goes on to brand any of these acts as adulterous.

Phelps-Roper puts an extraordinary amount of time into researching the dead soldiers whose funerals they're protesting at. In the film, she not only knows the name of the soldier whose funeral they're picketing, but also very explicit details about the man's death.

The most striking diversion from traditional Christian activism is the purpose of the WBC's protests. According to Phelps-Roeper, the goal of the WBC is not to "win souls for Christ", but to provoke people into revealing what the church interprets as contempt for God through their reaction to what the church presents as God's message.

Phelps-Roper describes her and her fellow parishoners as "evil angels", who prophesize the evils God has planned for the world. When told that God isn't supposed to commit evil, she actually becomes exasperated.

The WBC offers no compromise, even to those who oppose the message of the church while also rejecting homosexuality. They treat rejection of their church -- not even necessarily rejection of its message -- as condonation of homosexuality.

By staging their protests near traffic thoroughfares, the WBC always guarantees themselves the last word. At some point, after all, an indignant motorist has to focus on their driving.

The more one sees of The Most Hated Family in America, the more they appear to fit the most classical definition of a cult. Almost all 70 members of the Church live together in a group of houses conjoined by a shared back yard.

Phelps-Roper's two eldest daughters acknowledged they were hated at school, yet insist that they're nice to everyone. They have a bizarre definition of niceness -- they admit to telling their classmates that they're destined to go to hell when they die because of their lifestyles. They even offer doctrinal justification for their lack of friends outside the church, insisting that "friendship with the world is enmity with God".

It's a little unsettling how happily members of the WBC will tell people they're going to hell -- as if they're actually happy about it. Later in the film, Jennifer Phelps explains that they view people going to hell as vindication of their church's message -- and apparently they need no confirmation that such people actually go to hell in order to enjoy this vindication.

The members of the WBC rarely seem to consider the possibility that they may be wrong, but they do apparently consider the possibility that they may be among the "wicked" that God banishes to hell. Jennifer treats the prospect of personal tragedy befalling herself as a confirmation that she is among the damned, and that she would go to hell if such a thing were to ever happen.

The WBC even maintains one individual whose job it is to disseminate their hate propaganda over the internet -- and apparently produces signs aimed at almost any public figure one can think of, from Bishop Desmond Tutu to the deceased Princess Diana.

The production of video propaganda by the church is actually quite a sophisticated process, complete with teleprompters for Fred Phelps to read off his hate speech.

It's almost physically painful to watch Shirley Phelps-Roper's grandchildren spout the hate propaganda their grandmother has so painstakingly taught them.

The bizarre rationalism of the WBC should be enough to make anyone question their belief in an interventionalist God. Phelps muses that God put the idea of invading Iraq in George W Bush's heart, and did this because Bush "tweaked his nose".

Yet one wonders if Phelps considers the possibility that God prodded Bush to act in the way that Phelps believe has offended him. If that were the case, then no one would fall within Phelps' narrow definition of the "wicked" -- after all, these people would only be acting according to God's will.

The actions that allegedly offend God would have been prompted by God, and thus would fall within the rationale that Jacob Roper offers for his belief that all of the WBC's protests are excellence. "God did this, therefore it's perfect," insists Roper.

A sociopathic rage seems to possess Phelps-Roper. Any appeals to her conscience seem to do about as much good as appealing to any sense of self-doubt -- she denies its very existence.

She often seems so sure that she is right that when she predicts Godly retribution, as if she believes it could happen at any instant.

Sadly, Theroux skips over the most intriguing part of the Phelps family story -- the story of the Phelps family members who have left the church. Fred Phelps has never restricted his abuse to the outside world -- he has also abused his own children, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in a horrifically brutal manner. Nate and Mark Phelps were subjected to physical abuse the likes of which has seldom been accounted for.

Yet Theroux makes little mention of the four Phelps who have left the church, save to ask Fred Phelps how many children he has, just so see if he'll include them. Phelps contemptfully concludes the interview at that point.

At the end of The Most Hated Family in America, it's obvious that Theroux has only been shown what the Phelps family wanted him to see. Quite obligingly, it's all he chooses to show the viewer.

It's the world behind this presentation that would really help people understand the Westboro Baptist Church. But on that note, perhaps it may be better that it is never seen -- there are somethings that defy understanding, and possibly even things that are better not understood.

More Found Documents of the Blogosphere

"Dear baby boy aka Mr. Spoily-Pants (that would be PSA's nickname):

Congratulations on successfully completing your first year of college -- you’re kind of awesome. Considering who raised you, how could you be anything but?"

Yeah, that seems like Lulu's idea of awesome.

No Confidence in Elizabeth May

Green party leader obscures the truth in toxicity complaints

While Elizabeth May's unelectability has certainly rendered her inactive as a politician, she's certainly been very busy as an author.

Hot on the heels of Global Warming for Dummies, May has a new book about to debut, entitled Losing Confidence: Power Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy.

The book argues that Canada needs significant electoral reform in order to restore Canadian faith in electoral politics.

"The health of Canadian democracy just isn't very strong," May complains. "We're seeing decreased voter turnout, incivility in political discourse, a Parliament that can't function because it's seized with toxic levels of partisanship."

Moreover, she blames that toxicity entirely on Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the governing Conservative party.

"In the normal course of democracy, the level of animosity dropped when you were out of an election period. But the Harper government is about taking partisanship to a level where you never stop campaigning, where every issue is an excuse to score points."

Yet it's May herself who has indulged herself in some of the most virulent anti-Conservative partisanship. It was Elizabeth May who has spent the bulk of her time preaching to any Canadian willing to listen to her about the atrocity that is the Harper government, and insisting that the Conservatives had to be defeated as soon as possible.

Her rationale was the government's alleged lack of action on climate change, more specifically the Kyoto protocol. Yet she stumped relentlessly for a party -- the Liberals -- who, while in government, did even less to address climate change.

This toxic level of partisanship preceded the election of the Harper government by years. During the days of the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, left-wing activists demonized Preston Manning and Stockwell Day relentlessly. When the Canadian Alliance merged with the Progressive Conservative party to create the modern Conservative party these individuals demonized Stephen Harper with furious vigour.

The Liberal party gleefully echoed these sentiments. While people like May want to continue to pout over the Conservative party running negative ads about Stephane Dion highlighting his failure to act on the issue that May insists is the basis of the Tories' unsuitability to govern, Canadians also remember the viciousness of the attack ads the Liberal party has run against Stephen Harper.

Elizabeth May can say whatever she wants about Stephen Harper and the alleged incivility of his discourse. His party has never implied that a political opponent was planning a military coup. The Liberal party that she so prefers did.

May's participation in these campaigns of demonization renders her complaints purely hypocritical.

But at the end of the day there's clearly little reason to be alarmed. The Canadian people don't take Elizabeth May seriously enough to elect her, so it's unlikely they'll take her seriously enough to buy her hypocritical arguments at face value.

Canadians have demonstrated that they have no confidence in Elizabeth May.

Actions, Consequences, And the Hypocrisy of the Hateful Left

Canadian Cynic demands Carrie Prejean face the consequences for her opinions

In the Canadian blogosphere, it can be rather amazing how the worm turns. And as an inpid controversy surrounding Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean's comments on same-sex marriage continues to boil, it's amazing how the free speech worm has turned.

See, Canadian Cynic inists that the Prejean controversy has nothing at all do with free speech, and that Prejean is now merely facing the consequences of her "bigoted" comments.

Certainly, no one is obligated to agree with Prejean, who responded to a question by celebrity gossip purveyor Perez Hilton by saying that it was great that Americans could choose between same-sex marriage or "oppoite" marriage, but that she was raised to believe that marriage is best kept between a man and a woman.

No one would give Prejean full marks for eloquence.

But even if one disagrees with Prejean' sentiments -- as this author actually does -- onehas to at least respect her honesty. If Carrie Prejean was really raised to believe that marriage is best restricted to heterosexual couples, saying so is only honest.

To answer otherwise -- as individuals like Cynic and Hilton seem to prefer she would have -- Prejean would have had to sacrifice her integrity.

But flash back to July 2007, when Canadian Cynic parked a controversy of his own when he attacked Wanda Watkins, the grieving mother of a soldier who had recently been killed in Afghanistan, in an incredibly vicious manner:

"With all due respect, Wanda, fuck you and your grief. It's not the job of the rest of Canada to continue to let its soldiers die just so you can sleep better at night. At this point, I don't give a rat's ass about making you feel better for your loss now that I know that the price is other peoples' lives. Fuck you and the politically-motivated, neo-con propaganda train you rode in on."

Canadian Cynic and his follower would vigorously defend his hateful comments under the guise of "freedom of speech". Cynic would even make an ill-conceived assertion that those who objected were simply threatened by his "ideas".

"In my family, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there" hardly compares unfavourably to "fuck you and your grief".

But that the individual who envoked freedom of speech in his own defence would deny that defence to another certainly represents a new pinnalce of hypocrisy for an individual whom, outside of his own limited closed-loop online community, is well known for such hypocrisy.

For one thing, Rejean was walked into this controversy by Perez Hilton, whose clear intent was to politicize a beauty pageant in favour of a cause that he evidently feels passionate about. One cannot fault him for his passionate support of same-sex marriage. But one certainly can favour him for his petulant behaviour in the aftermath of stirring up that controversy.

On the other hand, Canadian Cynic's erruption at Wanda Watkins was actually precipitated by her being quoted by a conservative blogger.

Unlike Prejean, who answered a politically-loaded question by an individual with design and intent to politicize her answer one way or the other, Cynic leaped at the opportunity to attack Watkins. No one had asked him what he thought of Wanda Watkins and her comments about the mission in Afghanitan. He freely offered them, in all their viciousness, unprompted.

Even greater than this, however, is the broad division of integrity between these two individuals. Prejean certainly could have answered Hilton's question differently. She could have cast her true opinion on the matter aside and pandered to Hilton. But she stood by her opinion, and answered the question as honestly as her noted lack of eloquence would allow.

Canadian Cynic, meanwhile, has yet to admit that his attack on Wanda Watkins was wrong -- although he did once offer a pathetic excuse about his cat being run over. (It always merits repeating that Wanda Watkins was mourning her son. Canadian Cynic was mourning his cat.)

At a time when one's country is at war it doesn't take much personal decency to acknowledge that the family of dead soldiers should be considered generally off-limits for attack -- the failure to recognize this is merely one thing that Canadian Cynic has in common with zealots like the Westboro Baptist Church.

Meanwhile, Cynic has rejected the idea that perhaps he should make his identity public so that he may face the consequences of his attack on Wanda Watkins. Yet he insists that Rejean should face the consequences of honestly expressing her opinion.

Yet he insists that actions have conequences -- well, at least if you can't hide behind the anonymity of an online screen name.

No Means No

One thing is certain about Canada's left-wing blogosphere. They don't like Neo Conservative very much.

Neo is far from perfect, and doesn't take criticism very well -- even when it's well-earned.

But a recent episode involving Neo and his criticism of a botched date rape case has led to a bizarre episode in which some of the Canadian blogosphere's most extreme left-wing ideologues are effectively defending a date rapist. It isn't a pretty sight.

The story revolves around a case in which Frank D'Angelo was acquitted of sexually assaulting a woman half his age, whom he'd known since she was a child.

The judge in the case, Justice John Hamilton, concluded that D'Angelo was probably guilty, but said that on a "he said/she said" basis he didn't have enough evidence to convict.

Canadian Cynic wannabe Audrey II concludes that Neo's anger over the verdict means that he "hates Western justice".

Serial troll and Groupthink Temple worshipper liberal supporter had a similar, more blatantly callous take on the matter:

"My own daughter would not have remained in the room while her rapist took a shower.

My own daughter would not have accompanied her rapist out of the hotel after the rape.

My own daughter would not have got in her rapist's car after the rape.

My own daughter would not have waited until a day later after talking with her friends to go to the police.

All these provide plenty of reasonable doubt, in a 'he said-she said' situation with no other evidence."

According to the facts heard in court, D'Angelo's victim did, indeed, go with him to his hotel room. According to the facts heard in court, D'Angelo's victim did, indeed, remain in the room and get dressed while he had a shower.

News stories seem to turn up little validate liberal supporer's insistence that she left the hotel with him, or got in his car afterward.

But what liberal supporter is overlooking is the prevalence of date rape in Canadian society. Date rape, also known as assailant sexual assault, and can utilize numerous forms of coercion to force sex.

One of them is the use of body position to imply a threat, as was the case according to the testimony of D'Angelo's victim.

Moreover, date rape victims can be very confused about the affair, and may never realize they've been sexually assaulted. Many of them, likely expecting to face their assailant again in future, convince themselves that they weren't raped.

Many date rapes remain unreported due to this confusion. Many more remain unreported because victims don't want to face the social stigma that primates like liberal supporter cast upon them -- that, by having allegedly put themselselves in the position they were in, they were responsible for their victimization.

Given the facts surrounding and the prevalence of date rape, it would take either a true mysoginist or an extremely callous individual to cast such aspersions on the veracity of a date rape victim's claim based on these circumstances.

Sadly, it seems that neither liberal supporter nor Audrey II were ever taught that "no means no". It doesn't mean "maybe", and it doesn't mean "hold me down and then we'll talk about it".

No does mean no.

The Liberal Party's New Electoral Strategy: Obama!

Grits want Ignatieff to be Obama's newest best friend

Now that George W Bush has been out of office for three months, the Liberal party has realized they need a better electoral strategy against Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative party than "Bush's best friend".

So the Grits have dreamed up an alternative: "Michael Ignatieff is Barack Obama's best friend".

On Wednesday Ignatieff will have a dinner meeting with Richard Holbrooke, Obama's Afghanistan policy advisor.

Liberal party insiders have reportedly been scrambling to spread the good word on the meeting, and portray it as demonstration that Obama would prefer Ignatieff as Prime Minister.

"Michael Ignatieff is not even prime minister and already the Obama team is reaching out to him for his expertise and because they believe he will be Canada's next prime minister," said an unidentified Liberal.

"This shows how highly regarded Michael Ignatieff is to leading figures in the Obama administration," says another unidentified Liberal.

This tactic is likely meant to remind Canadians of the role John F Kennedy played in the political rivalry between John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson. Kennedy actively sought ways to help Pearson defeat Diefenbaker, whom Kennedy didn't particularly care for -- and the feeling was mutual.

During the 1960s, it was Kennedy who sought to interfere with Canadian politics. This time it's the Liberals who are attempting to drag an American President into Canadian politics, and make it appear as if he's taking partisan sides while he's doing it. It's a common act of Liberal cross-border partisan parochialism, one with particularly hypocritical undertones.

If the Conservative party were making themselves this cozy with an American President, the Liberals would howl bloody murder over it. In fact, they have before.

Even more comical are Liberal claims that Canada has allowed itself to be neglected in the formation of policy on Afghanistan.

"Canada's voice has been muted. We should not simply be a repeat of the US," said another Liberal insider. "We have paid the largest price in the percentage of soldiers killed and we are significant aid donor. We should make sure we have a say in the war against terrorism and the mounting challenge in Pakistan."

Of course this ignores the fact that Canada has been very active in settling multilateral -- not merely bilateral -- policy on Afghanistan, especially through NATO.

This all points to an evident lack of imagination in the Liberal party's strategy. At the earliest opportunity, they'll envoke Obama and one can expect that they'll do it as often as they can.

Action, Not An Election

Jack Layton's priorities uncharacteristically straight

With some Liberals musing about the prospects of a fall election and Conservatives dredging up the spectre of the coalition, it's fair to wonder where the priorities of many federal politicians are.

NDP leader Jack Layton, interestingly enough, seems to be one of the few who has his priorities in order.

In a recent radio interview, Layton has noted that his party is going to focus on reform of Employment Insurance, as opposed to merely defeating the government. "I didn't hear anybody saying that they were hankering after an election," Layton admits.

Instead, Layton says the NDP will be focusing on EI reforms that will help Canadians put out of work during the ongoing recession. "Get moving on it Prime Minister, work with us to implement the changes that must happen and must happen now," Layton said before a recent NDP caucus meeting.

"What I heard [Canadians] say is that they want action," Layton said.

"And they want action now, not off in the future when someone deigns to ordain that something should happen in Canadian politics, months and months away from now," he continued.

Layton has already suggested that work on these measures would occupy his party for the next ten weeks. That's two-and-a-half months in which Michael Ignatieff won't be able to mobilize his party's former coalition partner in order to defeat the government.

It isn't like Jack Layton to have his priorities so straight. Usually his party is quite eager to rattle the sabre, threaten to defeat the government, and dismiss any notion of actually working with them.

But Layton's recently-sraightened sense of priorities means that Canadians should see the action they so desire, provided that the Liberals and Conservatives will put petty politics aside long enough to get some work done.

Picking A Strange Hill to Die On

In a post on his blog today Warren Kinsella is promoting a strange video suggesting that Stephen Harper doesn't like Brian Mulroney very much.

Not a great secret.

Presented in the form of a storybook, replete with "The Dance of the Sugar Plum fairy" playing in the background, the video chronicles Stephen Harper's turn away from the Mulroney-era Progressive Conservatives. Harper had worked for then-Calgary West MP Jim Hawkes as a Parliamentary aide, but would quit over concerns about Mulroney's fiscal policies.

Harper would run unsuccessfully against Hawkes as a Reform party candidate in the 1988 federal election before defeating him in 1993.

After a falling out with Reform party leader Preston Manning, Harper left the party to become the President of the National Citizens Coalition. The video highlights Harper's criticisms of Mulroney and Harper's suggestion that the then-governing Liberal party not settle Mulroney's libel lawsuit out-of-court so the RCMP could continue investigating the matter.

"Not nice," the video muses, complaining that Harper has rarely been there to help Mulroney.

Yet when Kinsella's Liberal party called for a judicial inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber -- who promised startling revelations regarding the Airbus scandal, but only if he wasn't extradited to Germany -- Harper initially refused.

Not exactly the actions of someone pursuing a grudge against a former political opponent.

The video is an interesting exercise in branding and counter-branding. It seeks to brand Brian Mulroney as largely an innocent victim of Stephen Harper's malice and lack of niceties. Meanwhile, it tries to counter-brand Harper as a vindictive and petulant individual for whom personal hatred of Mulroney is motivating his government's actions vis a vis Mulroney, as opposed to the persistent demands of the opposition parties.

It's unsurprising that Warren Kinsella would be so eager to help promote such a piece of online tripe. The video in question banks on the short memories of its viewers, hoping that they'll separate the Oliphant inquiry from its real-world context -- the demands by then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion that Mulroney be investigated.

This is unsurprising from someone who demands that the sponsorship scandal be separated from its context. He has long railed against holding Jean Chretien responsible for the sponsorship scandal, but refuses to acknowledge the simple fact that the sponsorship program was run out of his office, by his personal staff.

Then again, Warren Kinsella has a history of pcking strange hills to die on. One recalls Kinsella's recent accusation that several conservative bloggers covertly receive paycheques from the Conservative party -- an odd accusation from an individual who has, in the past, accepted paycheques from the Liberals.

More Greens Turning Red

Noel Burgon follows Monica Jarabek to Liberal party

When Green party leader Elizabeth May forged her vaunted Red-Green coalition with the Stephane Dion-led Liberal party, she must have imagined the matter would turn out very differently for her party.

Instead her bid to defeat Conservative deputy Prime Minister Peter MacKay led only to her embarrassment, and her party failed to win a single seat in Parliament -- failing even to keep the seat it had, occupied by Liberal defector Blair Wilson.

The vote-splitting between left-wing parties contributed to the Conservatives winning government again, although this was likely mitigated by vote-swapping schemes among these various parties.

To top it all off Monica Jarabek -- who received more votes than any other Green party candidate in the 2008 federal election -- jumped ship to the Liberal party. Now another key Green, Noel Burgon, has left the Greens to become a Grit.

"It's a lot like coming home," remarked Burgon, who formerly led the Young Liberals of Ontario.

"It's something to see two local Green candidates have gone to the Liberals," Burgon notes, but insists that he doesn't see a mass exodus from the Green party to the Liberals.

Burgon seemed to share the opinion that the Green party may be one left-wing party too many. "The left is getting crowded (politically)," he mused.

This is certainly a problem for the Green party. May's steering of the party -- which once held appeal for environmentally-minded conservatives -- inexorably toward the left has limited the party's ability to build an electoral coalition. By devoting the party to a single purpose -- defeating the Tories -- May has left conservatives who favour conservative fiscal policies but would prefer stronger environmental policy stranded with the conservatives.

Meanwhile, May's "non-endorsement" of Stephane Dion as Prime Minister (which actually was an endorsement) undermined the raison d'etre of her party. With no purpose other than to defeat the Conservative party, one wonders precisely what it was May imagines was going to keep promising candidates in her party.

The Liberal party has a better-recognized national brand, can muster greater resources in favour of its candidates, and is better poised to fulfil what May treats as the Green party's singular purpose.

It's only natural that Green candidates would abandon the party for the Liberals, especially when one considers that Elizabeth May has managed to erase any compelling reason for the Green party to even go on existing.

They Still Don't Get It

Liberals complain about cost of income trust investigation

When the Liberal party lost the 2005/06 federal election, many partisans blamed the Income Trust scandal and the RCMP investigation of it for their defeat.

To a certain extent, this is true. And while they continue to insist that the RCMP investigation was inappropriate and (allegedly) politically-motivated, they also conveniently overlook the fact that the Sponsorship Scandal had made the idea that the Liberal party would tip its friends off to a potentially advantageous taxation decision seem incredibly believable. Even likely.

So as documents obtained via the Access to Information act reveal that the RCMP spent $445,000 on the investigation it's only natural that the Liberal party would take this as an opportunity to complain again.

"Not only was the investigation inappropriate and misguided, but now we know it cost a huge bundle of money too," said Liberal MP Mark Holland. "Over $400,000 is a massive expense -- and there are a lot of questions that have to be answered."

Yet Holland overlooks the fact that an investigation into the RCMP's investigation revealed no evidence of wrongdoing on the RCMP's behalf, and that while the RCMP did not find evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of then-Finance Minister Ralph Goodale, it did lay charges against an official working under Goodale's supervision.

As those who remember the matter should recall, a spike in trading in Income Trusts had called attention to the potential for corruption surrounding the affair. Finance department official Serge Nadeau was charged for insider trading after purchasing stock in Income Trusts before the announcement was formally made.

Holland seems to think that the RCMP should wait to investigate suspicious activity that could affect an election until after that election is concluded.

But the RCMP has a duty to investigate suspicious activities regardless of their proximity to a federal election. To delay investigations into known suspicious behaviour until after an election provides those responsible with extra time to conceal evidence, giving them a greater opportunity to go free.

Considering that the RCMP turned up enough evidence to justify charging Nadeau it's hard to accept writing the investigation off as "inappropriate" or "misguided".

It would be inappropriate and misguided to decline to investigate such suspicious occrences. And, as NDP MP Judy Wascylycia-Leis notes, Ralph Goodale himself had plenty of opportunities to investigate the affair on his own.

"I was doing my job as an MP to get to the bottom of something many people were concerned about," said Wascylycia-Leis. "In my view, this whole chapter in our history could have been avoided -- including these costs to the RCMP investigation -- if the minister at the time, Ralph Goodale, had said these concerns were legitimate, we will investigate and get back to you ... I think he could have avoided the financial cost and the political cost."

All of this comes as the Oliphant Inquiry continues into dealings between Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber -- a matter which continues to slide further and further into farce as revelations continue to surface that Schreiber hasn't been truthful about his dealings with Mulroney.

This inquiry was demanded by the Liberal party, and all that has been revealed thus far is how deceptive Schreiber has been in his bid to avoid extradition to Germany.

Perhaps complaining about a perfectly legitimate investigation that cost them politically out of their own negligence and lack of credibility is just the Liberal party's way of deflecting public attention away from this embarrassing debacle in which all that's really being revealed is that party's eagerness to politically capitalize on Karlheinz Schreiber's lies.

Even all this time after the Liberal party's political ouster, this party still doesn't get it. They aren't entitled to take corruption lightly and continue to govern.

Janene Garofalo's Limbic Brain

Is oversized

The recent "Tax Day" protests in the United States have received an incredible surplus of coverage based on their comparative size. Clearly tailored for vulgar sensationalism, the "tea bag the White House" demonstrations were a perfect example of South Park conservatism.

But many people clearly didn't appreciate the calculated nature of these protests. Among them were CNBC's Keith Olbermann and a recent guest on his show, Janeane Garofalo. On a recent Countdown segment, Garofalo insisted that the tea bag protests were about nothing but racism.

"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo mused. "It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is about racism straight-up."

Certainly, some people have managed to find some examples of signs at these protests that are either overly racist, arguably racist, or at least can be conflated into being racist.

But interestingly enough, the Ku Klux Klan -- the American cultural leader in racism -- doesn't seem like they've had anything to do with or say about these tea bag protests. Ever.

If these protests were really just about "racism straight-up", it's interesting that a group that is all about "racism straight-up" seem to have no interest in these protests.

Certainly, it couldn't possibly occur to either Olberman or Garofalo that even if most of those people participating in those protests are due for a tax cut, that this couldn't possibly be about government debt and the future taxes that would be necessary to pay back that debt.

No, like many left-wing ideologues, Garofalo and Olberman seem to have only one angle to play here -- the racism angle, even it is an incredibly ill-fitting frame.

Well, OK. Maybe not quite. Garofalo also took some time out of her interview to play amateur neurologist, and indulge herself in the intellectual folly of trying to write off fiscal conservatism -- even as poorly-conceived as these particular examples of fiscal conservatism are -- as a mental illness.

"The Limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain in much larger in their headspace (Gee, does anyone think that's the technical term for that? -ed) than in a reasonable person and it's pushing against the frontal lobe so their synapses are misfiring," Garofalo muses. "It is a neurological problem we're dealing with."

In the end, Garofalo's conclusion seems to be based on the crowds being mostly- or all white. By almost any standard of evidence this is extremely thin gruel, particularly when these protests are taking place in so many communities that are predominantly caucasian.

It's amusing to witness Olbermann's toadyism in the course of the interview, not stopping once to question or challenge Garofalo on her inflammatory rhetoric. This is nothing new to anyone who's paid so much as passing attention to the American media -- one sees this kind of Toadyism on Fox News quite frequently, especially on shows hosted by arch-conservatives like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

It's just ironic to see this on a CNBC program complaining about the alleged media malpractice of Fox News.

But it's hard to hold this against Keith Olbermann or Janeane Garofalo. Their limbic brains must be oversized.

Poisoning the Well of Freedom

In parts one and two of The Trap, Adam Curtis demonstrates how removing human decision-making from key societal institutions led to a bureaucratized world in which management-by-numbers has made people less free than ever before.

Ironically, the goal of these exercises -- designed to promote negative freedoms -- were part of a "bureaucracy bashing revolution" that, according to Curtis, went horribly awry.

In the concluding chapter of The Trap, Curtis presents the alternative to these notions of negative freedom -- positive freedom, the promotion of which he muses has led to tyranny around the world. The dream of positive freedom, Curtis argues, has at its very heart the goal of transforming people.

Curtis acknowledges the particular dangers of this particular form of freedom, he also notes its strengths -- that it provides hope and inspiration.

To governments, these two things can be dangerous. Of all the things governments believe they can control, they know they cannot control inspiration, and so must account for where that inspiration may lead before they can afford to encourage -- or even discourage -- it.

Hope is actually what often fuels revolutions. Contrary to popular belief, revolutions tend to take place when conditions are improving, and revolution is seen as a method for helping make further hoped-for improvements.

Curtis credits Iasiah Berlin for dreaming up this theory of positive freedom.

Berlin concluded that most people don't understand true freedom, and had to be terrified into freedom. French Jacobin Robespierre is said to have said the same thing, and conducted his famed reign of terror in the name of coercing the French people to muderously and ruthlessly cast off the elite Robespierre believed was oppressing them.

Berlin described negative freedom as a society designed to prevent citizens from impeding upon the freedoms of others. It is essentially the freedom to do as one chooses within throughly-defined boundaries.

Berlin treated the Soviet Union as the epitome of the perils of positive freedom, and proof of the need for the predominance of negative freedom.

There is, however, a key logical flaw in Berlin's theory. If anything, the Soviet Union offered negative freedom -- allegedly, freedom from material want, although history would eventually revoke that offer -- but it never tolerated positive freedoms.

Moreover, revolution is rarely an act of positive freedom exercised by the populace as a whole. Rather, revolution is usually the machination of a select few people -- a new elite, replacing the old elite.

Berlin's belief was that the freedoms of politicians to attempt to improve society should be curtailed, because the efforts of such individuals could only lead to the kinds of tyranny witnessed in the Soviet Union.

American leaders would eventually conclude that the only solution was to counter governments implementing positive freedom was to stage and promote revolutions based on negative freedom. During the Cold War, the goal of this policy would be complete containment of communism, particularly Soviet communism.

According to Curtis, this interventionist mentality essentially poisoned its own well. In the name of containing Soviet tyranny the United States had supported many oppressive regimes, simply because they helped contain communism.

Because the battle against communism was also the battle for freedom, this certainly represented little more or less than the perversion of freedom.

The American neo-conservative movement partially emerged in protest to American support of some of the world's harshest dictatorian regimes. In 1979, the neo-conservative protest was vindicated by the Iranian revolution, in which the Shah, a tyrannical patron of the US government, was overthrown by the equally- or more-oppresive Ayotollah Khomeini.

Ronald Reagan took full advantage of the neo-conservative protest to American support of oppressive regimes by promising to use America's power to spread freedom across the globe.

This particular strain of neoconservative thought led to the rise of ironically-self-dubbed "democratic revolutionaries" like Michael Ledeen.

What these individuals overlooked is that democracy cannot be imposed through a revolution. A revolution, as mentioned before, is by its very nature a mass uprising designed by elites in order to empower themselves. The opportunity to implement democracy can be won through a civil war -- as was the case in the United States and Britain -- but history offers no clear examples of countries wherein democracy was implemented in the wake of a revolution.

Reagan was as good as his word to the democratic revolutionaries, compelling dictators into calling elections and respect the results. The United States embarked on an aggressive democracy-building campaign around the world, teaching politicians to implement democracy.

Reagan's administration did take a very cynical view of democracy in places like Nicaragua, where a democratic victory by the Sandanistas was viewed as tainted.

In order to promote freedom, neoconservatives embraced Leo Strauss' "noble lie", using propaganda inventing a serious threat to justify using coercive force in places where threats did not actually exist, and eventually led the Reagan administration into the famed Iran/Contra scandal.

When the Soviet Union dissolved many viewed it as an opportunity to implement their visions of negative freedom in the land where positive freedom had allegedly reigned.

When economic reforms implementing free-market capitalism through the overnight removal of price controls backfired, Russia collapsed into complete chaos, and eventually to the empowerment of individuals like Vladimir Putin who simply empowered themselves while restoring the old positive freedom-backed status quo.

Even in Iraq the goal of spreading democracy failed when those planning the construction of a post-war democratic order forgot about the whole "democracy" part.

What these individuals have failed to recognize is that one cannot socially engineer societies to be free -- freedom is only truly freedom when it develops organically. To attempt to force freedom and democracy around the world is only to lay the groundwork for tyranny.

All those who wish to spread democracy can truly do is give people who are prepared to embrace democracy the opportunity to do so. In the end, the actual construction of a democratic order must be left to them.

Rayne Summers Has Another Message for PETA

Dr Ignatieff's Coalition

Liberal leader may need to play Dr Frankenstein with coalition

In an op/ed appearing in today's Globe and Mail, Tom Flanagan writes about musings that the Liberal party may attempt to force a fall election.

Flanagan notes that, after his refutal of the Liberal/NDP coalition, defeating the government may require Ignatieff to reassemble and reanimate that very coalition.

"Mr Ignatieff can't force an election by himself," Flanagan rightly notes. "He needs the votes of the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois to defeat the Conservatives on a vote of no-confidence. In other words, he has to reactivate the coalition with the socialists and separatists against which Canadians reacted so strongly last fall."

But because Ignatieff's decision to abandon the proposed coalition so deeply offended Jack Layton and the NDP -- Layton accused Ignatieff of abandoning opposition in favour of simply backing the government -- the NDP and Bloc Quebecois' will to defeat the government has to exceed the diminished good will between themselves and the Liberals.

There are no guarantees.

For one thing, as Flanagan notes, the NDP may not be well-situated financially to wage an election campaign, having nearly matched the Conservative party's expenditures on the past campaign.

And while recent polls show that both the Liberals and NDP are gaining support, those polls can often be deceptive. Swings in support between the Conservatives and Liberals are likely to have the biggest impact in Liberal-NDP swing ridings, where narrow margins of voters opting for the Conservatives over the Liberals have delivered increasing numbers of seats to the NDP.

The noted lack of substantive difference between Harper and Ignatieff on many issues may make an election gamble less tempting for the NDP -- and there's no question Layton would be risking a lot.

"In the six elections starting in 1993, the result has always been the same: When the Liberals go up, the NDP goes down, and vice versa," Flanagan notes. "Jack Layton has worked hard in three campaigns to build up his party's caucus from 13 members when he became leader to 37 after the 2008 election. Will he risk those gains trying to put in power a Liberal leader who mirrors the Conservative leader on so many major issues?"

The Liberals and NDP could, however, skip an election entirely by once again presenting Governor General Michaelle Jean with the option of appointing their coalition in the government's place. This would certainly take the risk off of Layton's shoulders, as they could terminate the coalition at any point if they were unsatisfied with their partner -- as could the Bloc Quebecois.

But then Ignatieff risks doing precisely what the coalition did the last time it was dangled -- energize Conservative party support back into majority territory.

This is all depending on whether or not the Liberals and NDP can find themselves a willing partner in the Bloc Quebecois. But under the previous coalition proposal, the Liberals and NDP treated the Bloc as if would be the coaltion's equivalent of a feral family member, stowed away in the attic and subsisted off of raw fish heads.

While they certainly seemed to enjoy the attention they received the last time the coalition reared its head -- the question of mortgaging Canada's government to a separatist party naturally forced Quebec separatism back into the limelight -- one can legitimately wonder whether they'd be as eager to expose themselves to this treatment again.

Moreover, as Flanagan notes, increased Liberal support poses key dilemmas for the Bloc as well.

"The Bloc may also balk at an early election," he writes. "Money is not the problem; since the Bloquistes operate only in Quebec, their campaign costs are so low that they can live off the federal subsidy without worrying about fundraising. But if the Liberal vote goes up in Quebec, the Bloc could lose seats in the Montreal area. It might compensate by picking up Conservative seats around Quebec City; but that's not a sure thing, because most of those seats are held by well-entrenched incumbents who might win re-election on their individual reputations."

Flanagan goes on to insist that Ignatieff's refutal of the coalition upon becoming Liberal leader is not written in stone.

"There is the little matter of Mr Ignatieff's signature on the coalition agreement, around which a whole suite of Conservative ads could be designed," Flanagan writes.

But here he is in error. After all, it is not Ignatieff's signature on the coalition agreement, but rather Stephane Dion's. And while Ignatieff did conditionally back the coalition -- even agreeing, along with Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc, to suspend the leadership campaign -- he never signed that particular agreement, nor did he volunteer himself to lead any such coalition.

Flanagan is right to note that Ignatieff could have terminated the coalition by opposing it. But in order to do so he would have had to oppose his party at the time when it was most vulnerable. That would have been political suicide not only for his leadership ambitions, but for his party as well.

Real News Has Issues With Reality

When the Conservative party won the 2008 federal election many opponents of the party were disheartened. Others, like Murray Dobbin, were militarized.

Within days Murray Dobbin was on the Real News suggesting that the formation of a coalition government was imminent. As it stood, his prediction was off by a couple of months.

In a recent interview with Liberal party foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, Paul Jay asks him about Michael Ignatieff's abandonment of the Liberal/NDP coalition proposal, noting that it "had quite a bit of support in Canada".

When one calls their network the Real News, one should accept that this level of pretension comes with an obligation that their coverage will closely resemble reality. On this particular occasion, Jay's commentary doesn't.

Polls taken shortly after the formation of the Liberal/NDP coalition, polls revealed that 60% of Canadians opposed the coalition, as opposed to a comparably mere 37% of Canadians that supported it.

Moreover, the Conservative party enjoyed a surge in support after the proposal. Some polls had the Tories polling close to the 50% range.

The consensus among Canadians was clear: if the governing Conservatives were to be defeated, Canadians wanted the opportunity to decide who would govern the country in an election, as opposed to allowing the Liberals and NDP to seize power with a coaltion government that then-leader Stephane Dion had already insisted would never happen.

As a supporter of the Coalition government, Bob Rae certainly cannot afford to admit the extent to which Canadians rejected the proposed coaliton. But deep down, even Rae knows this is true.

Oddly enough, Paul Jay doesn't. This is rather unfortunate from someone who pretends to present the "real" news.

A Sobering Reminder

Rwandan immigrant shares his stories of the 1994 genocide

When the Rwandan genocide began in earnest on April 17, 1994, Eugene Mbonyinshuti was just two days shy of his fifth birthday.

If Rwanda's Hutu militias and Interhamwe had gotten their way, he wouldn't have survived to see it.

Speaking recently about the genocide to his classmates at Welland Ontario's Notre Dame College, Mbonyinshuti provided a sobering reminder of the atrocity that unfolded in that country, much to the indifference of the so-called developed world and the United Nations.

“Local print and radio media fuelled the killings, while the international media either ignored or seriously misinterpreted events that were really happening,” Mbonyinshuti explained. “The local media used names such as exterminate all the cockroaches or kill all the snakes. A baby snake is still a snake. Kill them all.”

The Rwandan genocide was precipitated over ethnic differences that were largely inflated by Belgian colonists, who favoured Tutsis over Hutus because of their moderately lighter skin.

Prior to the arrival of Belgian -- and, previously, German -- colonists, it's generally believed that the Hutus and Tutsis were one people, and that the minor differences between them were exploited so the Tutsis could be used to control the Hutus.

“The two ethnic groups are actually very similar,” Mbonyinshuti continued. “They speak the same language and share the same culture, eat the same foods, worship in the same churches, study in the same classrooms and living in the same neighbourhoods.”

Indeed they did. And when the genocide turned really ugly, Tutsis were butchered in the very churches in which they worshipped alongside Hutus. Alongside the foreign governments and United Nations agencies that failed to substantively intervene in the atrocity was the Catholic Church, who failed to issue an edict condemning the carnage and those perpetrating it.

The general public consensus surrounding the genocide holds that it was largely the result of a mob mentality mobilized by inflammatory radio broadcasts which mixed Rwandan rock and roll music with hate propaganda.

According to Mboyinshuti, the truth is very different.

“The actual genocide was planned for many years, much like Hitler planned the killing of all the Jewish people. It was well planned,” he explained.

And, indeed, it had to be. Hutu militias and Interhamwe had brought weapons into the country and stored them in convenient caches. These weapons varied as widely as semi-automatic assault rifles to machetes.

Furthermore, these weapons were no secret. When UNAMIR commander Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire planned a raid to seize some of these weapons stocks, he was ordered to stand down by UN commanders.

Mboyinshuti expressed his admiration for Dallaire's commitment to trying to halt the carnage. When told to leave the country, Dallaire would not. "He refused. He stayed."

He also paid a tremendously deep personal price for doing what no western government would do: the right thing.

“There were unspeakable horrors,” Mbonyishuti said. “Little babies suffered the most, some of them were my little cousins. The babies were tossed against walls, others barbecued alive ... I know it is hard to believe, but what I don’t understand is why?”

It's difficult to understand how and why a genocide takes place. In his book Get 'Em All! Kill 'Em!, Bruce Wilshire offers a theorem of cultural mortal terror as justification for genocide -- explaining that, in many cases, an ethnic group perpetrating ethnic cleansing or a genocide do so because they perceive their victims as threatening to the ongoing survival of their culture.

Sometimes this kind of terror leads to distinctly irrational actions. In Rwanda, Interhamwe and Hutu mobs attempted to kill Tutsis on their way to being evacuated from the country.

If the genocide were being carried out under rational conditions, one would have expected that Tutsis leaving the country would have served Hutu purposes just as well as annhiliating them. Then again, genocides are rarely carried out under rational pretenses.

Even under the fear of extinction a genocide is difficult to justiy -- one has to remember that justification rests on a foundation of opinion, and thus cannot be accomplished objectively.

Eugene Mbonyishuti and his family arrived in Canada in 2008. It's unlikely that any of them will ever fully leave the Rwandan genocide behind them.

This is unfortunate for them, but very important for the rest of the world. The best way to ensure that horrors such as that which began in Rwanda 15 years ago today is to allow them to be forgotten.

The world needs these sobering reminders.

CAW May Let GM, Chrysler Die

Autoworkers Union unwilling to save workers' jobs

Without receiving bailout dollars, General Motors and Chrysler may both be in bankruptcy within the next 60 days.

If this happens, both companies would likely halt their operations while they are liquidated.

CAW, the Canadian Autoworkers' Union, could help prevent this by making key wage concessions that would allow Fiat to forge ahead with a merger with Chrysler that could save that company.

At $19 per hour, the concession being asked of CAW seems steep. But not when one considers that, between wages and benefits, the average CAW worker receives $76 in total compensation per hour, for a total of $156,000 per year. Under the proposed restructured labour deal, this average total renumeration would be reduced to $57 per hour, for a total of $112,000 per year.

Without these concessions, according to the judgement of nearly any economist, government bail outs of automakers would accomplish nothing in the end -- the companies would continue to be perpetually unprofitable, as they continue to undercut any potential profits by paying for overpriced labour.

While CAW has agreed to negotiate reductions beyond what has already been agreed to, it's unlikely that they will agree to give up the $19 per hour that Fiat is demanding. This makes it all the more likely that the company will be lost within the next month.

Unless GM receives a similar deal, it will likely be in bankruptcy one month after that.

All the jobs of those working on auto assembly lines for these two companies would be lost -- and all because CAW refuses to admit to the economic realities facing these two countries.

The government cannot afford to continually bail out perpetually unprofitable firms.

Only 13% of CAW's 225,000 members work for automakers.

Thus, the government stepping in with a bailout without CAW making the kind of concessions necessary to allow these companies to operate profitably could only really be for the benefit for those working for these companies -- approximately 29,250.

Canadian tax dollars should be spent for the benefit of all Canadians -- all 30 million of them -- whenever possible. Spending billions of dollars in taxpayers' funds to ensure that 29,250 people can continue to earn more than $150,000 a year is nothing more than spending superfluous amounts of government funds to ensure the extravagant material benefit of a tiny portion of Canadian society. Moreover, the government would be doing this only to have to inevitably have to do it again.

Only to CAW, an organization so chronically self-indulgent that only CUPE really compares, would something like this make sense.

Tony Clement's refusal to ride to the rescue in the absence of any realistica attempt by CAW to restructure its labour agreement so GM and Chrysler can afford to continue operating may not be popular with members of that union or their families, or even those who sympathize with organized labour.

But it is the right decision. To continually bail out less than 30,000 people to the expense of 30 million people is simply not an option for any responsible government.

It isn't Tony Clement, the Conservative party, or the Canadian government that are prepared to allow Chrysler or General Motors to slip into bankruptcy. It's the Canadian Auto Workers union that are allowed to let these companies -- and all the jobs they provide -- simply die.

Rayne Summers Has a Message for PETA

Michael Ignatieff: Taxer's Delight

Ignatieff flip-flops incessantly on taxation

Who would have thought Michael Ignatieff is a fan of the Sugar Hill Gang? Or at least the Black Eyed Peas.

When it comes to taxation, Ignatieff has been all about the "flip flip flip" and the "flop flop flop" as he keeps he party's position on taxation "movin' non non non stop".

All this for the political benefit of the LPC.

Speaking in Ottawa today, the Liberal leader tried to undo some damage he did to himself yesterday when he mused about raising taxes.

“We will have to raise taxes,” Ignatieff mused during a stop in Cambridge, Ontario. “I am not going to load a deficit onto your children or mine.”

Today, Ignatieff "clarified" his remarks by noting that his party would do everything it could to avoid raising taxes.

“I was asked a hypothetical question, ‘what if none of that works?' and no honest politician, faced with an $80-billion deficit, can take anything off the table,'” Ignatieff insisted. “I will do anything I can, and any sensible politician will do anything they can to avoid increasing the tax burden on Canadians, especially now, and hopefully later as well.”

This isn't the first time Ignatieff has been at the centre of an embarrassing flip-flop on the issue of taxation.

In January, Ignatieff's Liberals threatened to defeat the government over tax cuts for the middle class.

The trouble was that Ignatieff had previously supported permanent tax cuts for the middle class.

This is how Ignatieff has put himslef in the position he's currently in -- promising that he'll try not to raise taxes, wiping out tax cuts that he was in favour of before he was opposed to.

At least that's the position that he's in right now, at least until he flip flops the flippie the flippie to the flip flip flop.




Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Canadian Sentinel - "Liberals Would Raise Taxes: Ignatieff"

Cameron Holmstrom - "Iggy’s Training To Be A Gymnast In The 2012 Summer Olympics"

Daily Salt Shaker - "Iffy Not Reading the Liberal Playbook"

Witness the New Holocaust Denial

Black Star News denies Rwandan genocide

15 years ago, the Rwandan genocide slowly began to unfold.

The events began on April 6, 1994, and by April 17, 1994 had escalated into the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The atrocities that unfolded during the Rwandan genocide have long stood as an example of why the western world needs to be prepared to intervene in order to prevent such human catastrophes.

But not to individuals like Keith Harmon Snow. Like the various loons who deny -- or at least conflate -- the Holocaust, Snow has a political agenda that is ill-served by the Rwandan genocide. Like Holocaust deniers (and 9/11 "truth"ers), Snow is so intent upon pushing that agenda that he's prepared to revise the history of the Rwandan genocide.

In an article appearing in Black Star News, Snow strings together a convoluted conspiracy theory in which human rights activists colluded against Hutus.

"The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government," Snow writes, "much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan."

According to Snow, not only did no genocide take place in Rwanda, but no genocide is currently taking place in the Sudan. Instead, as it turns out, these genocide charges are part of an American imperialist plot.

"The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label," Snow explains. "To do so might have compromised an ongoing US-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front."

Interestingly, Snow has very little to say about the French involvement in the genocide. France had supplied weapons to the Rwandan government before and during the civil war that took place in accordance with the genocide. Many of those weapons were passed on to the Interhamwe by sympathizers within the Rwandan military's Hutu militias.

Moreover, Snow suggests that the plane crash taht killed Alison Des Forges may have been the work of Paul Kagame.

"According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the US-brokered pact between Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 'earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.'"

But Snow's conspiracy theory makes little sense. Although Des Forges' criticisms of Kagame's deal with Kabila -- -- was damaging, Des Forges' invokation of the genocide label marshalled a surplus of international sympathy for Kagame and the RPF.

Furthermore, Snow accuses Des Forges of helping unjustly indict the Habyanmara government.

"Billed as a 'tireless champion' and 'leading light in African human rights,' there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed," Snow muses. "Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the US government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime."

"Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity," Snow writes. "In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime."

"In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda', and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper US role in the Rwanda 'genocide', and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the US government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region."

All of this, of course, is submitted without evidence.

"Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president 'elected' through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal," Snow continues. "Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their US, UK, Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia."

Snow insists that the events of the Rwandan genocide -- which were not a genocide, despite the perpetrators' intent to kill every single living Tutsi -- were a conspiracy between human rights organizations, the United States, Britain, Begium and Israel.

"In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira," Snow continues. "Unlike the UN's ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents."

Yet much of the evidence that Kagame was responsible for shooting down Habyanmara's plane was actually rejected by a French parliamentary inquiry -- and considering France's bloody hands in relation to the genocide, the French had every motive to point the finger of blame at somebody else.

"But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF tactically and strategically already," Snow continues. "Key to the operation were 'former' Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF, serving the Pentagon interest."

Snow would have done well to look into the circumstance Dallaire and UNAMIR found themselves in during the genocide. If UNAMIR were really a proxy force acting on behalf of the United States in support of the RPF, it was the smallest and most poorly-equipped proxy force in the history of proxy warfare.

Dallaire spent the bulk of his time convening between Rwandan political leaders while attempting to keep himself, his troops, and as many Tutsi refugees as possible, alive.

That meets a very odd definition of outright collaboration.

According to Snow even the news media were part of the conspiracy.

"Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide," Snow insists, "meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer."

This despite the fact that journalists operating in the region secured footage of Hutu militias slaughtering Tutsis, and Red Cross workers active throughout the region shared many of the same stories.

According to Snow, Des Forges was central to the media conspiracy.

"Des Forges constantly influenced the US media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an 'expert' on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company."

"Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency," Snow continues. "The blanket media coverage falsely situated the 'Rwanda genocide' as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the 'highly disciplined' RPF stopping the genocide."

Even on the basis of its most basic arguments -- that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was an external invader -- falls flat in the face of the fact that Paul Kagame and the other members of the RPF were all natives of Rwanda, and were acting against a government that was actively oppressing Tutsis.

Like Holocaust deniers, Snow plays fast and loose with the truth in the course of spinning a conspiracy theory that essentially "invented" the Rwandan genocide, despite the existence of nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsis.

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is most effectively commemorated by the mass graves of its victims. Anyone who cares to examine the evidence of the genocide first-hand can travel to Rwanda and tour the killing fields. In many cases, the bones of the victims remain where they were piled.

Like Holocaust deniers, Rwandan genocide deniers like Keith Harmon Snow have to ignore the strongest evidence for the events -- the corpses of its victims, and the nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans who, in the course of a media-broadcast 100-day slaughter, ceased to be.

One wonders how individuals like Keith Harmon Snow can look themselves in a mirror.

Don't Fall for the Big Con of Religion, Atheism

Intellectual folly, profit motive at the heart of modern religious-atheist intolerance

In an Easter Sunday op/ed article published in Britain's Daily Mail, AN Wilson offers a scathing denunciation of atheism, hyperbolically entitled "The Religion of Hatred".

In the article Wilson complains that most of the public intellectuals in Britain are allegedly atheists, the result of a secular society which has branded religious belief as "uncool" and "unsexy".

Wilson's greatest criticisms are reserved for Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian and President of the British Humanist Association.

"Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?" Toynbee once wrote, as Wilson quotes.

"When absolute God-given righteousness beckons, blood flows and women are in chains," Toynbee is again quoted.

Individuals like Hitchens, Dawkins and Toynbee are treated as evidence that atheists are smug, hateful and intolerant.

It's little secret that this smugness and arrogance is largely the design of these atheists. Many of them enjoy irritating religious believers into passionate denunciations of them, feeling this confirms the allegedly irrational basis on which religious belief is established and held.

When religious believers lash out at atheists in this particular fashion, they tumble into the same pitfall that these most fervent atheists fall into -- the pitfall of being threatened by other peoples' beliefs.

This inevitably leads to all kinds of folly -- including the folly of taking an individual like Christopher Hitchens, who is as committed an atheist as there ever was, on the radio to try to convince him that he should believe in God.

Just as atheists need to accept that there are reasons why the religious believe, religious believers need to accept that there are reasons why atheists do not believe. To fault them for that fails to address the simple fact that religion has evidently not met the spiritual needs of these individuals -- if indeed these individuals feel they have any spiritual needs at all.

There are plenty of atheists who are more than willing to go about their lives, believing as they believe (or rather, don't believe) relatively quietly without demanding that everyone else believe as they do.

While individuals like Hitchens and Richard Dawkins often promote themselves as spokespeople for atheism, many atheists have made public their discomfort with having such individuals represent them.

To hold up individuals such as Hitchens, Dawkins, or the Rational Response Squad as atheism's leading examples is to risk overlooking the vast majority of atheists who are content to mind their own spiritual business -- just as holding up religion's most vigorous proselytizers as leading examples risks to overlook the vast majority of believers who are content to mind theirs.

Of course such moderate views -- by either atheists or the religious -- are far from marketable. Inherent in these broad denunciations of opposing camps is the big con of a self-promoting ideologue out to enrich themselves through the sale of their next book or their next movie.

Many of these people are perfectly content to lead their masses of followers into folly if it will earn them a few extra dollars annually.

April 2009 Book Club Selection - Shake Hands With the Devil, Romeo Dallaire

Dallaire recounts story of Rwandan genocide

As the world stops, hopefully frequently, over the next few months to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, books like Shake Hands With the Devil will continue to be increasingly important.

The film recounts Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire's experiences during the genocide in often-excrutiating and sickening detail. It pulls the reader from cover to cover, forcing them to take note of the atrocities that unfolded in Rwanda and, more importantly, the international community's failure to stop it.

Reading the book, one could only imagine how passionately Dallaire would argue Rwanda's case before the UN general assembly, had he ever been given the opportunity to do so.

Also striking is the generosity of many lower-level officials in both the UN and foreign militaries -- contributing key pieces of equipment to the mission, even when ammunition and fuel were hard to come by. It's marvelous how often the values of ground-level officers, such as the American officer who gave the mission surplus American Armoured Personnel Carriers, fail to match up with their superior officers and leaders (American leaders had noted that 500,000 Rwandans would have to die to justify risking a single American life).

Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly not a book to savour -- it's shocking, and can even be a little dispiriting. But it's an important book to digest, so readers can come to understand how important it is that horrors such as the Rwandan genocide never be allowed to happen again.

The High Road is a Hard Road

Meghan McCain's same-sex marriage appeal likely to win few friends in GOP

In a recent post on the Daily Beast, Meghan McCain has issued some advice to the Republican party that some people in the GOP will almost certainly not like.

She insists that Repblicans need to support same-sex marriage.

"Of all the causes I believe in and speak publicly about, this is one of the ones closest to my heart," McCain writes.

She goes on to note how important the Log Cabin Republicans are to the GOP, re-connecting them with some of their most important values.

"The Log Cabin Republicans’ mission 'is to work within the Republican Party to advocate equal rights for all Americans, including gays and lesbians,'" she continues. "The group is centered on core Republican values, such as limited government, individual liberty and responsibility, an economy based in free markets, and a strong national defense. And in the spirit of the GOP’s founding beliefs—personal freedom and liberty—they are dedicated to securing full equality for gays and lesbians in America to create a stronger, larger, and more-unified GOP."

Even Ronald Reagan, the United States' prototype arch-conservative, was wise enough to recognize how important organizations like the LCR are to the party.

"Yeah, you read that right," McCain continued. "The ultimate Republican rock star bucked the conventional wisdom of his advisers as they were planning his presidential campaign and helped fight the [California] anti-gay proposition because he knew it was wrong. Reagan’s argument centered around the idea that parents already had all the rights they needed to protect their children and that the government did not need to interfere. It was a perfect example of the Great Communicator doing what was right, but not in a way that further divided voters."

Few conservatives have made the case for conservative support for same-sex marriage quite as eloquently as Canadians Adam Daifallah and Tasha Kheiriddin. In Rescuing Canada's Right Daifallah and Kheiriddin argue that conservatives should support same-sex marriage as well as adoption rights for same-sex couples precisely because they're pro-family policies.

Kheiriddin and Daifallah's appeal made them highly suspect to religious conservatives within Canada's conservative movement. Fortunately, religious conservatives have been comparatively marginal within Canadian conservatism.

However, Meghan McCain isn't as fortunate. Her pro-same-sex marriage appeal will likely draw the ire of American religious conservatives, and give her detractors -- individuals such as Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham -- more ammunition to usse against her.

It doesn't change the fact that supporting same-sex marriage is the right thing to do. Certainly, the Republicans could support same-sex marriage for political gain, but this is the wrong reason.

The right reason is to follow the example of Ronald Reagan and support the Log Cabin Republicans because it's right. It's precisely the kind of right thing that ideologues like Coulter, Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh will not allow the party to do, except over its own dead body.

"At the most basic level, sexual orientation should not be a factor in how you are treated," McCain writes. "If the Republican Party has any hope of gaining substantial support from a wider, younger base, we need to get past our anti-gay rhetoric."

What Meghan McCain has done promises to make her life in the GOP extremely difficult. But the high road -- the right road -- is rarely an easy one to follow.

The high road is usually a hard road. Hopefully, Republicans share McCain's courage to walk it.

Ruby's Hot, Hot, Hot

Liberal MP at centre of emerging scandal

Ruby Dhalla is one Liberal MP who turns some heads.

So many, in fact, that Maxim magazine named her the world's third sexiest politician.

But now, Dhalla is at the centre of an ongoing controversy about a Bollywood film in which she starred in 2003. Dhalla has been attempting to block the sale of the DVD, claiming that the film's producers have doctored promotional materials to feature her image. More specifically, she claims that her face has been super-imposed onto another woman's body.

But, as it turns out, there's more afoot in this story than this.

The film, Kyon Kis Liye, received a $13,000 grant from Heritage Canada -- documents CTV obtained from Heritage Canada reveal that the project was judged to "not meet any of the terms and conditions of existing departmental programs," and thus be inelligible to receive such a grant.

At the time Heritage Canada was under the supervision of Sheila Copps, who at that point represented another Hamilton-area riding.

Ruby Dhalla insists that she knows nothing about the grant and Sheila Copps has, to date, not commented.

But with Dhalla working so hard to suppress the film's release on DVD, it's becoming increasingly evident that Dhalla was trying to conceal more than just some allegedly embarrassing promotional materials.

Dhalla's attempt to suppress her own film career doesn't quite pass the sniff test.

If Ever The Twain Shall Meet...

...John McCain and Barack Obama could beat swords into plowshares

In a recent speech delivered in Prague, Barack Obama called for the global elimination of nuclear weapons.

"I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," Obama announced. His stance remains at odds with American nuclear policies that weakly pursue non-proliferation elsewhere in the world -- in places such as Iran and North Korea, while failing in Israel, India and Pakistan -- while continuing to maintain stockpiles of nuclear weapons at home.

Those aresenals have long been maintained under the pretences of deterrence.

In a more reecent speech, John McCain called fof continued work on the US anti-ballistic missile shield.

McCain's comments were made in response to a recent missile launch by North Korea. "I believe there is no more compelling argument for missile defense capability than what just happened with the North Korean launch," McCain explained.

Many intellectuals, such as Freeman Dyson, have long opposed the missile defense shield -- otherwise known as the Strategic Defense Initiative -- because they argue that such counter-measures can only lead to increased proliferation by the United Statess' nuclear opponents.

Under conditions in which the United States continued to maintain nucear weapons, and especially under a doctrine that allows for first use of nuclear weapon, this was certainly true.

But with the Cold War long over, and the American nuclear doctrine that allowed for first use but not first strike -- reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to repel an invasion by the now-non-existent Soviet Union -- clearly outdated, a new possibility has evidently presented itself that was never present during the Cold War: the combination of SDI with complete nuclear disarmament.

Considering that the missile shield has yet to work, and whether or not it ever will work remains questionable, this may be a moot point.

But a successful missile defence shield would allow the United States to wean itself off of what the Plowshares movement calls "the idolatry of nuclear weapons".

The Plowshares movement -- the name given to the largely-Catholic movement that vandalizes nuclear weapons sites and pours their own blood on them as an act of civil disobedience (even if an act of civil disobedience fused with vandalism) argues that nuclear weapons became a false idol when the United States became politically and psychologically dependent upon them. Moreover, they argue this "idolatry of nuclear weapons" has become ecclesiastical, as few American politicians (at least until now) will refute the need for such weapons.

When Plowshares activists damage missile components and missile sites with hammers they are acting to help bring the prophetic events of Isaiah 2:4 to fruition. This passage reads:

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Their spilling of their own blood -- usually drawn for weeks in advance of their protest, and smuggled in bottles -- is meant to symbolize Jesus Christ's self-sacrifice at the time of his crucifixion.

Clearly, the Plowshares movement does this in pursuit of a national redemption -- one similar to the kind that the Biblical Christ offers through his death and resurrection.

Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain have been shy about their Christian religious beliefs. Many of those in the Plowshares movement -- who, if anything, enjoy increased legitimacy in the post-Cold War world -- must feel encouraged by each man's support for nuclear disarmament.

McCain has declared his support for Obama's disarmament agenda, although Obama remains lukewarm to the missile defence shield.

Barack Obama needs to understand that, although costly, a successfully-developed issile defence shield would grant the United States the security necessary to pursue complete disarmament.

The United States unilaterally disarming will not rid the world of nuclear weapons. France, Britain, China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan will continue to have them. Iran and North Korea will continue to pursue them.

While the threat of a nuclear launch against the United States -- or any other western country -- is nearly non-existent today, it cannot be ruled out that there will not be such threats in the future. The United States needs to be prepared to meet them, and nuclear deterrence has clearly become an oudated model.

It's also important to note that, according to Christ's own example, the United States turning its nuclear cheek wouldn't entail passively accepting evil, but rather retaliating nonviolently -- in the case of missile defence, through the destruction of incoming missiles.

Realistically, SDI and nuclear disarmament are policies that can only be pursued together.

With any luck, Barack Obama and John McCain share the wisdom to recognize this.

Too Bad They Can't Outlaw the WBC

Nevada continues move to ban protests at funerals

Unless a small cadre of Nevada lawmakers have their way, the Westboro Baptist Church is about to find protesting at funerals in the state of Nevada to be a good deal more difficult.

The Nevada state Assembly Judiciary Committee recently gave the thumbs-up to a bill that would make it illegal to demonstrate or protest at a funeral with the intention to disrupt it.

As with many of these laws, the Westboro Baptist Church is a direct target of these laws. If outlawed from protesting at funerals, the WBC would find its protest opportunities growing fewer and further between.

Not all the members of the Nevada state legislature are believers in the bill.

"This same group protests outside of family planning clinics," said Las Vegas Assemblyman William Horne, a Democrat. "Why wouldn't we exclude that as well?"

"I find it abhorrent that a white supremacy group can walk down the middle of a black neighborhood," Horne added. "But I will defend their right to do that, despite the ugly history."

Horne's concerns seem to echo that of the American Civil Liberties Association, who are challenging a similar law in Michigan after Lewis Lowden was charged after participating in the funeral procession of a family friend who'd died fighting in Iraq while he had an anti-Bush sign taped in the window of his van.

In the wake of the latter example, it would be foolish to pretend that such laws cannot be abused, and the hate march example raised by Horne raises the question of how far a society should go in order to regulate offensive speech.

But by the same token, most people -- in the United States and elsewhere -- would agree that a funeral is regarded as a special case. It's expected to be a private, solemn time, and people attending funerals have the right to expect that such times will not be invaded by hatemongers looking for any forum to spread their vile message.

The problem could probably be solved by just outlawing the Westboro Baptist Church. It's too bad -- and strange -- that this act would be even more wrong.

Markets or Voters?

In part one of The Trap, Adam Curtis argued that the libertarian shift against bureaucratic authority led to society placing a premium on the elimination of human decision making.

The push to remove human judgement and decision making from important societal institutions -- including psychiatry -- have instead led to a society in which many decisions better left to human judgement have been turned entirely over to bureaucratic stringentness and, often, computers.

In part two, entitled "The Lonely Robot", Curtis addresses the manner in which this has been applied to democratic politics on a broader scale.

In Britain, it was John Major who embraced game theory in order to further prod along what eventually became known as the "bureaucracy bashing revolution". This revolution was intended to free government agencies to pursue their performance targets however they saw fit. Instead, what was eventually thrust upon them was a market-driven model that framed decision making within the so-called invisible hand of the market.

Yet the invisible hand of the market is known to be far from invisible. The market is very visible in the operations of banks, stock traders, and regulatory agencies. All of these organizations are guided by human agency, and are often riddled with bureaucratic structures.

When Bill Clinton arrived in office with a laundry list of promises to fulfil, he was quickly dissuaded by individuals such as Robert Rubin to instead follow the free market consensus that had emerged during the Ronald Reagan Presidency, and been sustained during the administration of George HW Bush.

Clinton had promised to use the power of the President's office to pull the country out of an economic resession.

The market, it was argued, was better able to predict and fulfill the needs and desires of citizens. The free market was regarded by these individuals as superior to democracy.

Yet these particular individuals overlooked -- or, likely, simply omitted -- the fact that the market does not function on a one person, one vote basis. Instead, the market treats citizens unequally based on the resources they have at their disposal -- in other words, what they can buy.

An individual who has no resources has no vote in the market. Likewise, those who don't want to partake in what the market has placed on offer have been given no choice.

Likewise, those who are very weathy, under the Rubin model of democracy, were granted extremely disproportionate influence. Likewise, those who want -- or are even indifferent to -- the choices they are offered enjoy an advantageous position. It doesn't help that any public preference for certain government policies is actually exaggerated by the influence of the wealthiest citizens.

It was, ironically, Irving Kristol -- considered to be one of the god fathers of neoconservatism -- who insisted that, if the market wants to be the primary force in any society, it must accept responsibility for eliminating poverty.

Yet in the absence of democracy -- wherein it is purported and, optimally, demanded that all citizens be treated as equal -- there is no real impetus for the market to tackle poverty. Certainly, the incentive is sorely lacking.

Freedom, as Curtis notes, was cast narrowly in the form of positive freedoms. Citizens had the freedom to consume whatever they wanted. The libertarian focus on negative freedoms -- in this case, freedom from the market -- seemed to have been forgotten.

Game theory meshed with theories such as Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" to undermine notions of human agency. Within this conceptual frame, human beings were reduced to calculating creatures, constantly seeking personal advantage at the behest of one's genes.

Society, in the musings of such individuals, was reduced to the level of sophistification of the most primitive tribal societies -- societies wherein little coherent social order seems to exist.

What was absent from this model was the notion of human choice -- that humans didn't choose to support their friends and families, and that they only did so in return for help surviving. What people would otherwise regard as a complex societal order built on the notion of a collection of social contracts was reduced to base survivalism.

This cynicism is a stark contrast to the optimism on which democracies are ideally based. Democracy teaches us that diverse groups of people, with diverse interests, can forge a mutual societal order based on consensus, even if agreement is never universal.

It's cynicism that leads to a government-by-numbers model that casts aspersions upon human judgement and demand that it be removed from public administration as much as possible.

This kind of mentality, naturally, fell right into the hands of bureaucrats. The "bureaucrat bashing revolution" had instead made bureaucrats more powerful than they ever were.

The medicalization of human emotional states and the introduction of anti-depressent drugs cast a sinister shadow across the issue. Important questions linger about the extent to which modern psychiatry treats ordinary emotional distress as a mental illness best addressed with medication rather than the result of ordinary problems.

Taking the judgement of psychiatrists out of the decision-making process has only made this more distinct. If symptoms were examined to determine their root cause, as opposed to examined based on the mere existence of the symptom, it's extremely likely that many people diagnosed as clinically depressed may be treated otherwise.

Once again, the efforts to detect misdiagnoses within psychiatry instead intensified the problem, and has led to as many misdiagnoses as ever.

By setting performance targets, Tony Blair's Labour Government had subordinated government to this emerging tyranny of numbers. In many cases, indices were designed to measure things that, in many cases, defy numerical measurement.

Bureaucrats aren't given the option of refusing a target. And in cases where targets may have been unattainable by ordinary means, perverse methods of artificually meeting them were used.

Societies that tolerate artificial solutions to their problems are certainly not headed in a positive or progressive direction. Because it relies on numbers, a market number can be fooled with numbers, especially when the ordinary citizens' methods of demanding that societal problems be substantively addressed are being undermined.

The market also gives the wealthiest the opportunity to go outside of the public system to meet their needs. Wealthy people who find it difficult to receive medical aid through public systems artificially meeting their performance targets can receive treatement in private clinics. Wealthy people who are being victimized by crime because their police departments are artificially lowering crime rates can build gated communities and hire their own security.

Instead of brining people together in a manner superior to that democracy can accomplish, these models instead drive people further apart, usually at society's own expense.

When people are driven apart, they are never driven apart at random. They're driven together as they're driven apart -- herded into groups based on ethnicity, religion, language and any number of other tratis, but moreover than any of them, wealth.

The marketization of democracy not only empowers the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, it also separates them from everyone else. They cease to live in the same social reality as their fellow citizens, and instead live in a social reality all their own.

The trap that has emerged out of the removal of human judgement from public management can be overcome, but it requires a more hopeful, more democratic, view of society and the way it should operate.

Believing In a Religion of Ideas

Religion needs to make room for ideas

If someone were to have taken a poll regarding the things that pissed Catholics off the most in 1999, Dogma would have likely topped the list.

Likewise, if someone had taken a poll regarding the things best regarded by disaffected Catholics in that same year, Dogma probably would have topped that list, too. Dogma could have topped the same list in any year.

Dogma was the fourth chapter in Kevin Smith's "View Askew-niverse" in which a series of madcap films were loosely tied together by two characters, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (writer/director/Hollywood's version of Mick Foley, Kevin Smith).

Dogma found the two characters cast as prophets in Bethany Sloan's (Linda Fiorentino) mission to prevent two exiled angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) from undoing existence.

At issue is a New Jersey Cardinal's (the legendary George Carlin) plan to invoke plenary indulgence -- a promise that anyone who walks through the doorway of a Catholic Church will be absolved of all their sins -- to get people excited about Catholicism.

(The now-legendary Buddy Christ is also a creation of the marketing-savvy Cardinal Ignatius Glick.)

Along the way Sloane encounters Rufus (Chris Rock), the black 13th apostle (left out of the bible because he's a black man) and Persephone (Salma Hayek), who impart on her the importance of having ideas over having beliefs.

"You can change an idea," Rufus explains. "Changing a belief is trickier. People kill for them, people die for them."

Lines cut from the film explain Rufus -- actually, Smith's -- point more fully. "Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant."

Smith offers a dichotomy between belief and ideas. Beliefs, he argues, are pig-headed and stubborn. Ideas are the realm of the open-minded and flexible.

To a certain extent, Smith has a point, and to a certain extent is right. Religion needs to become much more open to new ideas -- right now, the Catholic Church needs to open itself up to some not-so-new ideas about birth control and AIDS.

Religion doesn't have a history of getting along well with new ideas. The Catholic Church's reaction to Martin Luther and the religious warfare that would spread across Europe -- particularly the Holy Roman Empire -- attest to this fact. This inflexibility is one of the things that allows fundamentalist atheist ideologues like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher to continue painting all religion as dangerous and anti-progressive.

But Smith also needs to remember that good ideas, once accepted by the faithful, will inevitably become beliefs. Belief is the central principle of religion. Adapting positive ideas -- such as the pursuit of social justice via charity and compassion -- into beliefs doesn't denigrate them. They remain positive and progressive at their very core.

Religions -- especially Catholicism -- need to find ways to expand their beliefs in non-dogmatic ways through the adoption of good ideas. These ideas are often evident based simply on their own merit. They don't need religious doctrine to back them up -- or at least shouldn't.

That is the promise offered by Sloane -- who, at the film's end, is pregnant with the second coming of Jesus Christ -- when she answers Rufus' question about whether or not she believes by saying "I have a good idea."

Many Christians remain distressed with the continuing secularization of society, and decreasing numbers of practicing faithful.

Distress does no one any good. What the religious faithful need is to offer religions more open to new ideas, more flexible, and more able to meet the needs -- spiritual, intellectual, and otherwise -- of those who are turning away from religion.

The religious faithful need to learn to believe in a religion of ideas.

The Politics of Loud Mouthery

The 9/11 "truth" movement has been known to be the refuge of aggressive and obnoxious conspiracy theorists, often searching for any opportunity to push their agenda on anyone at any time.

Their credo seems to be twofold, but rather simple: if someone says something about 9/11, the goal of the 9/11 "truth" movement is to make them regret it. If someone doesn't say something about 9/11, the goal of the 9/11 "truth" movement is to make them regret that, too.

No forum is considered off-limits to the Alex Jones-edifying loons of the 9/11 "truth" movement, and its members are almost always looking for any particular opportunity to strike.

One 9/11 "truth" nut in particular seemed to think he had found an opportunity on the Edmonton LRT yesterday. The opening he thought he'd seen?

I was reading a copy of Vast Left Wing Conspiracy by Byron York.

"Why is it that it's always the left wing that has the conspiracy," he asked, "when it was the right wing that conspired to destroy the World Trade Center, and fake the evidence so they could blame terrorists and go into Afghanistan?"

To which I could only tell him that he's an idiot, and that the US government didn't plan 9/11.

"It's physically impossible for a building like that to collapse in on itself without a planned demolition," the nut attempted to explain.

"Then I guess it's a good thing they didn't," I replied.

"There's 1.6 trillion reasons why they did," he insisted.

To which I could really only offer a dismissive "...ooooookay..."

Interestingly enough, I wasn't even reading this book out of the belief that there is any kind of a left-wing conspiracy. Rather, I was reading it for a chapter on viral politics.

The title was actually an adverse take on Hillary Clinton's speculation that a "vast right-wing conspiracy" had aligned against her husband during the clearly politically-motivated Republican effort to impeach him over the Monica Lewinski scandal.

Overall, the book is about the politically-motivated (duh) attempts to defeat George W Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, and the way many 527 groups (called such because of the tax code that allows them to collect unlimited donations) broke the law in order to contribute to the Democrat campaign (they're forbidden from acting on behalf of any particular political candidate).

Did this particular nut have any idea about that before he jumped on it as an opportunity to spread his 9/11 "truth" nonsense? Probably not. While one cannot pretend that the book's title isn't provacative -- no question it is -- this is clearly an individual who was waiting for what he thought was the perfect opportunity to spread his conspiracy theories.

Not much unlike the individual who was "generous" enough to donate a 9/11 "truth" book to a Raise a Reader event I staffed this past weekend. (I exercised my prerogative to dispose of that particular book appropriately.)

It's impossible to feign patience with the 9/11 "truth" movement. Not when virtually none of their arguments stand up to scrutiny.

It all comes down to minor details -- such as the fact that if the World Trade Center was really a planned demolition, as this particular kook insisted, it was the most poorly-executed planned demolition in history, as the building didn't fall in its own footprint, as planned demolitions are designed to do.

Rather, the debris field extended more than 500 feet in all directions, but not equally in all directions.

Even the "facts" regarding WBC Building 7 they attempt to pass off as evidence of the WTC having been a planned demolition turn out to contradict the accounts of the structural damage taken from firefighters at the scene, and are often based on comically poor-quality video taken of the building's collapse.

Even their claims that the World Trade Center was designed to withdstan the impact of an aircracft are based on smaller and lighter aircraft carrying smaller fuel loads than the planes crashed into the building that day. And conveniently ignoring the fact that, when designing buildings as tall as the World Trade Center, one cannot test the buildings for airplane crash scenarios in the real world, for reasons that are clearly obvious.

Not to mention the entirely contradictory nature of the majority of 9/11 conspiracy theories, ranging from theories that the building owner planned the attacks to collect on the property insurance on the buildings, to theories that the Juice did it (theories to which Alex Jones reacts rather viscerally).

This is, of course, the trouble in dealing with people who consistently cannot be taken seriously. The fact that no one takes them seriously only prods them to become more aggressive and obnoxious with their message. When speaking counter-factually to a room with 10 people in it becomes tiresome they take to the streets and accost anyone who they think offers them an excuse -- such as an individual minding his own business on the train.

But they may be in for a taste of their own medicine. They have a convention in Edmonton coming up, and someone just may be there asking them some uncomfortable questions.

Questions like "how many hijacked airliners have ever been shot down over US territory?" (Answer: zero.)

Questions like "how many real-world examples are there of a Boeing 747 being flown into a 110-story building in order to test its ability to withstand the crash?" (Answer: zero.)

Questions like "how many eyewitness accounts match the accounts of Building 7's collapse that 'experts' have made based on asessment of poor-quality video?" (Answer: zero.)

After all, what's good for the goose has to be good for the gander. If the 9/11 "truth" movement can indulge itself in the politics of loud mouthery, so can anyone else.

Canadian Cynic's Hilarious Hypocrisy For Today - Nudie Pic Edition

Shorter Canadian Cynic:

"It's terrible when people make nude photos of their political opponents publicly avaiable...

...Unless I'm the one doing it."

Harper, Ignatieff and the Morality of Politics

Stephen Harper questions Michael Ignatieff's moral compass

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has seized upon a Conservative party spat over the appointment of the Oliphant Inquiry into dealings between Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schrieber to steal some moral capital away from Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

Harper insists that his currently-troubled relationship with Brian Mulroney proves that his government is concerned with ethics, while Ignatieff is only concerned about garnering political advantage wherever he may find an opportunity.

"Mr Ignatieff and the Liberal party, when the matter first broke, were practically demanding that I throw Mr. Mulroney in prison without a trial," Harper said. "Now they're out there pretending that somehow they're his best friends and they don't agree with any of this."

"Canadians will remember this government had a difficult issue and I think this government handled it in a responsible way," Harper continued. "This is not an easy matter, but I think Canadians understand that the government has taken a matter that is very difficult for ourselves, for our party, and handled it responsibly."

Indeed, the Liberal party -- then under Stephane Dion -- and their partisans milked Karlheinz Schreiber's promised revelations for all they felt it was worth. It was the Liberals themselves who demanded a public inquiry.

"I think what Canadians will see when it comes to a very difficult issue of government conduct and government ethics, this government has behaved responsibly and the other party, the other leader, has absolutely no moral compass," Harper concluded.

It's worth noting that Ignatieff's sin seems to have come in the form of a birthday phone call to Mulroney.

Under nearly any circumstances such a call would be entirely inconsequential. Making that call while Mulroney is the subject of a public inquiry, however, and somehow allowing that call to become public is a blunder, even if a minor blunder that Harper is exaggerating -- and very likely knows it.

This would be a masterful job of twisting the affair to tarnish Ignatieff on Harper's part if Ignatieff hadn't actually done it to himself. Exploiting a scandal is usually the most expedient method of garnering political moral capital at an opponent's expense.

Suddenly shifting gears on the matter is a very fast way to get covered in one's own mud. One would expect that Ignatieff should know better.

Also raked over the coals at a recent caucus meeting were the claims that Mulroney is no longer a member of the Conservative party. Marjory LeBreton, the Tory house leader in the Senate, noted that Mulroney had allowed his party membership to lapse.

Many Conservatives, however, do not believe this was the case, and the appointment of the inquiry seems to have enflamed lingering divisions between Mulroney-era Progressive Conservatives and former Reformers.

Normally, this would be a serious problem for Stephen Harper. But with Michael Ignatieff managing to flip flop spectacularly on the issue, Stephen Harper may have gained more from the matter than he was ever really at risk of losing.

Charley Pride: Class Act

Charley Pride reimburses over-charged fan

When Edmonton resident Jay Cole wrote Charley Pride about a company that had charged his mother, Jacqueline Sharp, $1,200 for a pair of concert tickets worth $133, he didn't expect all that much from the singer.

"Basically I was hoping he would dedicate a song to her or maybe he could meet her after the show or something, then that was it until last week when their office contacted me and it snowballed into this," explained.

Instead, Charley Pride -- whom Big & Rich describe as country music's "real man in black" -- flew into Edmonton to reimburse her personally.

"I didn't do this so that it would snowball into anything, other than I sometimes get tired of being used as an artist in these kind of situations," Pride said. "I've always wanted what I call a fair thing pertaining to me and my fans and how much they charge to come to my shows. I've always stated that to all of my people whom I have worked with."

Cole was angry not with Pride, but with the California-based ticket scalping company that had gouged her.

"It made me mad that someone would charge that much and take advantage of my mom, not knowing that was way too much to pay," Cole explained.

Many musicians today wouldn't give a second thought to someone like Jacqueline Sharp. Not Charley Pride. The man is a true class act, and deserves a very special welcome when he returns to Edmonton to play his concert in June.

So Let's Talk About This "Depressing Regularity" Thing

Either pregnant women and unborn children need protection, or they don't

Those who pay any amount of even passing attention to Unrepentant Old Hippie JJ may recall her response to Bill C-484, also known as the Fetal Homicide Bill, or the Unborn Victims of Crime Bill.

For her own part, JJ was against it. She fell in with a broader movement of pro-abortion advocates insisting that such a bill wasn't necessary. Among some of the arguments offered by that movement was that attacks on pregnant women don't happen often enough to warrant special legal protection.

Fast forward to today, when JJ declared her support for a bill in Oklahoma that would allow women to use deadly force in defense of their unborn children:

"I’m absolutely all for people having the right to self-defend, and I unequivocally support the choice of women to carry their pregnancies to term, and to protect themselves doing it. Though being armed and full of rampaging hormones doesn’t sound like the best possible scenario, this law is clearly meant for at-risk women (ie. in bad relationships) so we’re unlikely to see a 'maternity holster' anytime soon. Although it’s disheartening that there’s even a need for such a law, given the Michigan story and the fact that pregnant women are attacked with such depressing regularity, maybe it’s not such a bad thing."

It's an interesting view on the issue that JJ's taken here.

Certainly, there's no reason in the world why women shouldn't be allowed to decide whether or not they'll carry a pregnancy to term -- at least within reasonable limits based on the unborn child's stage of development. And certainly they should be protected from the uninvited intervention of another person.

But one of the pro-abortion arguing points in opposing bill C-484 was that these attacks don't happen frequently enough to warrant passing a special law.

Apparently, according to JJ, they do happen frequently enough to warrant passing a law that would allow women to kill in defense of their unborn children.

It's a head-scratcher, to be certain -- just another hypocritically self-conflictual intellectual self-indulgence that JJ is rapidly becoming known for (things like supporting abortion legislation that would apply to women south of the 49th parallel while vociferously opposing them ot of principle in Canada). It comes down to a very simple question: do pregnant women need protection or not?

JJ -- unlike many of those who joined her in opposing legal protection for pregnant women -- seems to finally admit that they do.

The base silliness of JJ's support for this particular means of protection over the other -- in which a stronger deterrent is provided by criminalizing assaults on unborn children -- appears fully in its abject silliness when one considers the fact that most pregnant women lack the means to defend themselves physically.

Pregnancy is known to be very physically taxing on women. Many pregnant women have difficulty performing ordinary tasks due to the added burden of carrying their child. Most of them would find it more difficult still to exercise lethal force against an assailant.

Not to mention the fact that some men prove more creative in terminating a pregnancy than resorting to physical violence. Consider the case of Gary Bourgeois, who secretly administered a toxic ulcer medication to his pregnant girlfriend while she slept.

Bourgeois' girlfriend had chosen not to have an abortion. His act -- which his sleeping girlfriend was evidently incapable of responding to, with deadly force or otherwise -- was an act of premeditated murder, for which he got off with a sentence of one year in prison because Canadian law doesn't recognize that men like Bourgeois can premeditate murder on the unborn.

Yet JJ seems to feel comfortable supporting a law that would legalize an option that many pregnant women realistically do not have because "the bill doesn’t seem to make abortion any less legal" (bill C-484 exlplicitly forbade its application in cases of abortion), "doesn’t declare the fetus has any civil rights" (protection from violence isn't a civl right, defined as rights imparted specifically to the citizen, protection from violence is a legal right most societies impart even to inanimate property and animals), and "couldn’t be used as a defense for some anti-abortion nut who shoots a doctor" (nor could Bill C-484).

She goes on to explain that "Unlike the typical 'Unborn Victims of Crime' acts, this bill doesn’t focus on the fetus and allude to it as an individual victim, but rather centers on the mother’s right to protect it."

Yet JJ's support of this law clearly overestimates the average pregnant woman's ability to defend herself or her unborn child. It was largely due to the vulnerability of pregnant women -- and, obviously, their unborn children -- that the additional deterrent was called for.

But god forbid that the law offer protection to pregnant women and their unborn children under any terms other than those approved by the pro-abortion lobby -- even if those terms provide scant protection, before or after the act.

The Perils of Providing a Refuge Amidst Genocide

Paul Rusesabagina provides a model of courage for the entire world

15 years ago today Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down just short of the landing strip at Kigali airport.

The incident sparked the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, in which at least 500,000 people -- mostly, but not limited to, Rwandan Tutsis -- were butchered in an onslaught of racialized hatred.

In 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, UNAMIR commander Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire marked the occasion by returning to Rwanda to meet with survivors of the genocide, and witness the reconciliation taking place in the country.

In the same year the atrocity was also commemorated in Hotel Rwanda.

Directed by Terry George, Hotel Rwanda told the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of a hotel in Kigali who shelters Tutsis amidst the storm of carnage unfolding just outside the hotel gates.

Nick Nolte plays Colonel Oliver, a poor cariacture of Dallaire, who attempts haplessly to keep Rusesabagina and his charges safe from the Hutu militias and Interhamwe killing squads roaming throughout the country.

Rusesabagina places himself at great personal risk in sheltering these would-be victims. At times, Rusesabagina has to resort to bargaining with the militias. At other times, he must resort to blackmail. At the worst of times he must dodge mortar fire from outside of the hotel premises.

As a Hutu himself, Rusesabagina placed himself at extreme peril in the name of providing these individuals with sanctuary. As a Hutu sheltering Tutsis from harm, he often faces the prospect of being labelled a traitor by Hutu extremists.

The risks faced by Rusesabagina appear in their starkly perilous reality when weighed against the options of foreign nationals in the country, who had the option of leaving the country. The manager of Rusesabagina's hotel immediately leaves Rwanda as soon as the trouble begins, leaving him in charge. British journalist Jack Danglish (Joaquin Phoenix) braves the carnage to secure footage that will reveal the extent of the horror to the rest of the world. But even he returns home when given the opportunity.

As the 100-day conflict draws on Rusesabagina's luxurious hotel begins to take on the look of a war zone much more slowly than the rest of the city around it. Yet the daily chores of ensuring his charges' survival forces him to constantly look the spectre of genocide in the face, including when his driver strays down a street covered in dead Tutsis on the way back from a trip fetching supplies.

In Rwanda, the so-called developed world failed to put a stop to the killing. It wasn't due to any lack of courage on the part of our soldiers. General Dallaire served faithfully, admirably and courageously in the face of the carnage.

The western world's failure to intervene in Rwanda was due to the failure of moral courage of the leaders who could find no value in intervening in the conflict. The courage of men like Dallaire and Rusesabagina should shame them.

Particularly, the courage of Paul Rusesabagina. Dallaire's UNAMIR force was underequipped and poorly supplied but at least still had the benefit of their meagre arms to defend them.

Rusesabagina had no such luxury. Rusesabagina faced the perils of building a refuge amongst genocide and did so entirely unarmed and largely undefended.

Any leaders who may think that intervening in atrocities such as that continuing to unfold in the Sudan to be unimportant should remember Paul Rusesabagina and remember the example of courage he set.

And they remember the mantra repeated so often in the aftermath of genocide:

Never again.

Yeah, They Hate Immigrants Too

Westboro Baptist Church promises picket of shooting victims

With all of the people Topeka, Kansas' Westboro Baptist Church hates -- homosexuals, dead soldiers, Britney Spears -- it should be considered unsurprising that they hate immigrants, too.

In the wake of a horrific shooting in Binghampton, New York which targeted an immigrant community centre, the church has announced that it will protest at the funerals of the victims.

"God sent the shooter!" exclaims a press release from the WBC. "Thank God for executing on his promises - dead bodies everywhere!"

"You Turned the World Over to Violent Fags, and you ALL Worship the Filthy Bloody Doomed-american Fag Flag," the release continues. "Now They're Going Home in Body Bags!"

Jiverly Wong, 41, killed 14 people from eight different countries, then killed himself.

Having never encountered a tragedy they didn't love exploiting for the purpose of spreading their religious invective, it's not shocking that the WBC would embrace this opportunity.

The only think shocking is that they didn't follow the Taliban's lead and claim responsibility for the attack.

No Canadian in Brussels

Anders Fogh Rasmussen will be political head of NATO

If political opponents ever attempt to use his failure to win the office of NATO Secretary General against him, at least Peter MacKay can continue to insist that he was never pursuing the job to begin with.

Today current Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen will be his replacement.

The die was officially cast for MacKay yesterday, when Turkey retracted its objection to Rasmussen.

"I look very much forward to continuing the good job done by Secretary-General Scheffer in the transformation of NATO to manage the new challenges of the 21st century," Fogh announced.

MacKay is the second Canadian to come close to winning the job in recent history. Former Liberal deputy Prime Minister John Manley also came awfully close.

And while it is unfortunate that, once again, Canada's ambitions to lead in NATO was thwarted by mere European parochialism -- even after the offer of an important key structural compromise by US Vice President Joe Biden -- NATO's new leadership should be well-poised to move the alliance forward, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

There will be other times, and other offices for Peter MacKay. Some day, almost certainly, Prime Minister of Canada.

If anything, MacKay's failed bid for the NATO leadership has left him free to pursue the agenda that MacKay himself insisted came first -- his duties in Canada.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Can of Contemplation - "NATO Sticks With Old Europe"

Freedom, Where Art Thee?

Adam Curtis is a British filmmaker known for being provocative and controversial. In The Power of Nightmares, Curtis argues that there really is no global terrorist network, and that organizations such as Al Qaida were simply made up in order to empower politicians.

Many viewers can -- and probably should -- find significant cause to disagree with that proposal.

But aside from being provocative, Curtis is also theoretically brilliant.

In The Trap, Curtis examines the impact game theory has had on societal institutions, and the way that government is managed. The overall affect, he reveals, has been anything but positive.

Individual freedom lies at the very soul of libertarianism -- one of the core elements of conservatism.

To the end of favouring individual freedom, many libertarians have used John Nash's game theory to prove that mutual suspicion, distrust and self-interest creates a natural equilibrium which generates an organic, non-coercive public order.

Yet Nash's game theory was not everything it was cracked up to be. Nash himself -- as portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind -- was actually a paranoid schizophrenic, who believed he was surrounded by communist spies, and was a red-fighting secret agent.

This didn't stop theorists from embracing game theory and transforming it into a tool to forward Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's favoured agenda.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher harnessed the emerging theory of free choice economics in order to curb the power of the civil service. The civil service, it was bemused, acted primarily in its own interests. It was surmised that by privatizing public services Thatcher could force these insititutions to be more responsive to public demand and need by way of the profit motive.

American psychologist David Rosenhan -- who wanted to challenge the allegedly elitist nature of psychiatrists -- used these principles to go after American psychiatry. In an experiment in which he planted fake patients in various American psychiatric hospitals Rosenhan exposed the inability of psychiatrists to distinguish the genuinely mentally ill from his plants, who had been admitted on the basis of a single symptom.

In order to recover its credibility after the debacle, a mathematical system was designed that would take human judgement entirely out of the process of diagnosing potential mental illness and replace it with static yes/no evaluations based on combinations of specific symptoms.

In many cases, the diagnoses were completely computerized to the extent that patients could diagnose themselves without the aid of a psychiatrist. While this empowered these particular patients to the extent that they could dictate treatments to their doctors, it also set a precedent for the removal of human judgement.

The removal of human judgement from important issues -- whether this was through the computerization of institutions or through relentless bureaucratization -- has inevitably led to broad reductions in individual human freedom.

The argument was that taking away the options of civil servants to serve their own interests would free British people from the whilms of that civil service. Instead, civil servants and their patrons alike wound up even more tightly bound by convention -- enslaved by bureaucratic or electronic edict.

These constraints bind citizens almost anywhere in the world in any place where they interact with nearly any institution -- at school, at the library, at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Game theory can tell us many interesting things about many interesting facets of social life. But it isn't sufficient to try and build an entire society around it. To build a successful society -- let alone a successful conservative movement -- citizens have to be willing to move beyond mutual suspicion, distrust and self-interest to find a basis for mutual trust and mutual interest. These are things that are generally held within the confines of a successful social contract.

Social contracts exist in various forms -- between individuals, amongst large groups of individuals, and at an institutional level.

The institutional social contract is important to the functioning of government. When that social contract falls lax enough that public servants can refuse to perform their duties with little worry of repercussions a government is obligated to reinforce the boundaries of that social contract.

But to dismantle that social contract and replace it with an entirely artificial social construct only leads to a disempowerment.

If libertarianism is treated as the pursuit of individual freedoms, this is a result that must be considered at odds with it. This kind of disempowerment is a natural result of the pursuit of negative freedoms and the expense of positive freedoms -- whether that expense is intentional or not.

The Litmus Test For the Anti-Abortion Movement

Time for the anti-abortion lobby to embrace moderacy

Regular readers of the Nexus may recall a story about an American group seeking a "third way" debate on abortion.

Calling itself Faith in Public Life, this group has sought to find middle ground for people of various faiths to find middle ground on various topics, including abortion.

The group has aired ads calling on Americans to think about practical solutions to abortion.

Barack Obama's administration -- despite having earned itself a reputation for being in favour of abortion rights -- has embraced this initiative, and tomorrow will host a conference call between religious conservatives and abortion rights advocates.

The call is expected to focus on practical initiatives to reduce the demand for abortion, which will likely straddle two key goals: reducing unplanned pregnancies and providing women with better options should they find themselves with an unplanned pregnancy.

With religious conservatives being given a voice in what may eventually emerge as American abortion program, they must recognize that they have a golden opportunity before them.

In Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again David Frum insists that its liberals, not conservatives, who are extremists on the topic of abortion.

This simply isn't true. For every pro-abortion activist who insists that no constraints on access to abortion -- even constraints on method -- can be tolerated there is a religious conservative who insists that Roe v Wade must be overturned, and abortion criminalized.

There are extremists to be found on both sides of the issue. With the door being opened to a top-level discussion on abortion policy it will be up to religious conservatives to prove that they aren't extreme by pursuing moderate policy reforms.

If religious conservatives begin the process stridently opposing birth control and demanding abstainance-only sex education in schools, this door will rapidly close on them. And rightfully so.

While many religious conservatives may loathe to admit it, coupling their fight against abortion with initiatives that will only lead to more unplanned pregnancies simply will not work, for reasons that are utterly obvious.

Organizations like Feminists for Life -- which counts Sarah Palin as a member -- should come to the table proposing programming that will help young women continue their academic careers.

Catholic leaders should accept programs that will provide high school students with access to and education about birth control.

They should also propose mandatory teachings about abstainance as an option -- as opposed to something taught exclusively -- in sex ed classrooms.

Pro-abortion activists should also soften their position on term limits, and accept that at certain points of a pregnancy -- particularly post-viability -- complete freedom to abort will simply not apply.

They should also drop their objections to bans of inhumane abortion methods, such as partial-birth abortions.

While both sides will have to work together to produce the kind of policy Barack Obama clearly wants, this process will ultimately emerge as a litmus test for the anti-abortion movement.

It can either come to the table with moderate proposals, prepared to negotiate, or it can continue to justify its reputation for extremism. The choice is entirely up to them.

Further Evidence that Heather Mallick is Utterly Crazy

Ideology can make for some strange bedfellows

Many Canadians still remember the embarrassing debacle surrounding Heather Mallick and her her comments about the Palin family during the recent US Presidential Elections.

The extremely anti-feminist undertones of Mallick's comments -- joining the chorus of Sarah Palin's left-wing detractors who proved utterly delighted to denounce her daughter as a tramp -- only served to further reinforce the image of Mallick as someone not altogether comfortable with the principles she espouses, or with reality.

Her most recent piece of commentary to appear on CBC only further demonstrates precisely how out of touch Mallick really is.

In a column entitled "Let Gorgeous George Speak", Mallick gushes enthusiastically over George Galloway, who was recently denied entry into Canada over his financial links to Hamas.

"I could listen to Galloway all night," Mallick writes. "He's practically Shakespearean in his fierceness and perfect phrasing. He's like Tony Benn (another troublesome British politician of the left) whose oratory was so valued that it was actually released on CD with an ambient soundtrack."

"Another clever Brit, the polymath Stephen Fry, calls them the QIs. It stands for Quite Interesting," Mallick continues. "It is a category that includes The Literate, The Talkers, the people with a sense of humour who add gaiety to our increasingly grunted national discussion."

Apparently, in Malick's mind, Galloway's barring from the country has nothing to do with his actions, and it has everything to do with jealousy at "Gorgeous" George Galloway.

"Banning this argumentative, energizing Scot will make Canada look even more like what we are rapidly becoming: a hamster of a country, petting and fattening its dullness, silencing dissent, mocking artists, musicians and anyone who's creative, or odd, or not entirely mainstream," Mallick insists.

Only a resevoir of visine and the lack of sense of most of Mallick's supporters could deaden the sound of 60 million rolling eyes.

Mallick even tries to counter the fact that Galloway donated money to Hamas, listed as a terrorist organization in Canada, by citing Hamas' status as the elected government of Gaza, and by echoing Galloway's claim that he had donated that money for aid purposes.

But by the same token, Galloway could have donated that money to the Red Cross or the Red Crescent and enjoyed further assurances that the money would have actually been used for aid purposes, as opposed to being used to purchase weapons that would be stored in hospitals and schools.

Not to mention Galloway's extremely questionable financial links to Saddam Hussein.

"Free speech does not exist in this hamster country," Mallick complains. "I, for instance, cannot speak about the value of English literature at a university campus in Alberta because anti-abortionists dislike my pro-choice views and promise to riot over my presence, harming donations."

Of course, where Mallick chooses to use the word "riot", anti-abortion advocates had actually promised to protest.

If one could miss the irony of Mallick whining about her freedom of speech being impugned by other people exercising their freedom of speech, it would be difficult to see how.

"Free speech is no longer a cause," Mallick muses. "It is a weapon used against those who wish to speak by those who don't wish to let others hear it."

"I wish to hear Galloway speak and not only because he speaks so well," she continues. "I am ashamed of what this country is turning into, a humourless place that celebrates unreason and the subtraction of ancient freedoms."

It's unsurprising that Mallick would be so desparate to make this issue about freedom of speech. Many Canadians continue -- wrongly -- to insist that Mallick's freedom of speech was curtailed when the CBC removed her atrocious "Mighty Wind" from its website.

Freedom of speech doesn't equate the right to be published by any media outlet -- just as freedom of speech doesn't guarantee freedom of entry.

It isn't surprising Mallick would try to transform Galloway's barring from Canada as a free speech canard. It's just strange that she would do this in a column on the very same day Galloway gave his speech through a video link.

Galloway was clearly no threat to Canadian security. But the law is the law.

No self-respecting Canadian would actually want Galloway in the country. Only someone as out-of-touch with reality as Heather Mallick could actually want him here.

Time to Abolish the Flag

Canada's flag is a disgraceful, exclusionary symbol

As Calgary's Mount Royal College debates whether or not it will fly the Canadian flag, the eyes of many Canadians have been opened to the true nature of Canadian patriotism.

The oversized Canadian flag that used to fly on the roof of Wyckham House, where the Mount Royal College Students' Union operates from, was taken down last year while the building was renovated.

Re-hanging the flag has been delayed after someone submitted an unsigned letter to the Mount Royal Students' Union suggesting that the flag is an exclusionary symbol.

The eyes of many Canadians have surely been opened.

"People may not realize that overt displays of patriotism can also be seen as exclusionary and even sometimes work to undermine democratic ideals," the letter continues.

Certainly, it's true! Democracy is undermined when citizens love their country. Canadians have loved their country for far too long. The only way to build a healthy democracy in this country is for its citizens to stop caring about it. Only when Canadians don't give a shit what happens to this country can we ever have a democratically strong country.

In Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber cautions people against loving their country.

"Your country probably sucks," he suggests. "The best way to attain democratic ideals is to realize that it sucks, and never care enough to make it any better. It'll all work out somehow. I think."

Indeed, the Canadian flag is a shameful, exclusionary symbol. Flying it only serves to isolate those who don't give a shit about this country. Flying large Canadian flags is a disgrace.

In fact, the smaller a Canadian flag is, the better. The government should immediately roll out a new anti-patriotism program wherein we will pay millions of dollars to print and distribute Canadian flags so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye.

It's important symbolically, you see. Not giving a fuck about Canada is how we'll prove we have a tolerant society.