Canadian Politics 2007 – Page 6

Election 2007 Watch: What Sport!

The Globe is all a flutter this morning that we may be days or weeks away from an early Federal election call. Seeing as I love elections of any sort this would be a great thing. Sure we would only have another minority government of some kind but apparently that is all Canadians are still comfortable with. Here is my summation of where we are at:

I particularly welcome a referendum on the leaders and an opportunity for the Greens to see if they can get a seat or two.
Even though I think some policies have been flip-flops, wasteful, silly or worse at least the Conservatives have broken the soap opera cycle of the Grits interior battles between the Jeans and the Pauls. The year has been one of a certain stolid dignity as well as some advancement by the government of good ideas among the odd so pretty good – as long as you don’t actually have to work, say, for a member of cabinet or anything and have to put up with the PMO control freaks.
The anti-Dion ads have only bolstered his position and I think in retrospect they may be seen as a foolish error. Arguing about things Liberals did in 1995-2003 will not work now either. They may be back on track to recreate themselves. Having Mr. Rae stick around as a policy geek is going to be very handy. I wonder if he will run for a seat.
My estimation of Mr. Layton has fallen since Ed Broadbent has not been in caucus to shout “SUCK IT UP!” at him every six minutes. The NDP will have to do something extraordinary to reclaim my vote of habit.
Elizabeth May should be in the TV debates. I am quite pleased with the change in the Green Party since Mr. Last Guy left – and it is one I have voted for in the past.
Bloc? There is a chance that they will get a lower percentage of votes in Quebec than Harper will outside of Alberta. That will be a bit of a change.

What do you think? Have anything so seriously changed that you would change your vote? I am very much thinking of moving my wee “X” this time around. But I have no idea where. Persuade me.

First Friday of February Chat

Another gentle dawn. Another month.

Friday this week finds us in a full fledged debate on who is most green. I have no idea why as I have resigned myself to ecological disaster a few short centuries after I am gone, sometime after the Venusians get us all and align themselves with our cats.

Green is Canada’s new story on the global scene – forget what was said a few weeks ago, please. And it makes strange bed fellows – forget the labour management divisions of the past. I still can’t figure out why our Prime Minister’s conversion on the road to Damascus or at least the next election is not being called a flop-a-rama of the highest order.
It is extraordinary in this day that people in leadership positions can say such dumb things.
I am not one to reach for the Attends every time the twits at BoingBoing announce the GroupThink of the day but no doubt there is much foaming over the embarrassment that is the NFL’s demands that churches limit the screens they show TV shows on to 55 inches, as the ever excellent Deadspin cuts and pastes:

Initially, the league objected to the church’s plan to charge partygoers a fee to attend and that the church used the license-protected words “Super Bowl” in its promotions. Newland told the NFL his church would not charge partygoers — the fee had been intended only to pay for snacks — and that it would drop the use of the forbidden words. But the NFL wouldn’t bite. It objected to the church’s plans to use a projector to show the game on what effectively was a 12-foot-wide screen. It said the law limits the church to one TV no bigger than 55 inches.

The law? What law? The license between the NFL and the calbe network perhaps but show me the red hand with the pointy finger next to “55 inches” please in the terms and conditions of my cable TV agreement. I declare Sunday group projection TV night. Fight the power! Fight the power that restricts us to 55 inch TV screens!
Hilarious to see the end of podcasting coming decidedly unbangily but with the whimperiest of whimpers as the 2007 bloggies cut the category for best podcast of a weblog. Remember when people podcasted? That was cool.
I still haven’t got the story right about the Space Invaders rip off images being shown in Boston as reported Thursday in this article:

…yesterday, a subway worker less attuned to the latest in underground marketing techniques called the police after spotting one of the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” cartoon characters on an overpass in Charlestown. The terrorism scare that followed touched off a massive response from police. When it was discovered that the electronic boards were only ads for a cartoon, serious condemnation flowed from Washington and Boston.

What generation gap? Space Invaders was 28 years ago. Who in the work force who does not recognize this sort of character?

There. It is done. Soon there will be a week of February behind us, then it will be mid-month. Before long, we will meet March and this farce of a winter will be gone.

Friday Bullets For Shane

When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.

Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:

Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.

Right?

You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.

US College baseball season has begun.
Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.

Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.

Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.

A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?

That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.

Friday The Bulletteenth

Friday is the new Saturday in the work world. Remembering working Saturdays in the years of schlepverk, retail wages funding weekends reminds me of dressdowns and finishing the afternoon ending with the Beat Authority:

Make a flake. Go ahead. You know you want to. Post them on the fridge in the coffee room after.
Baseball owners told not to spoil their monopoly for fear of the imposition of fairness.
I knew I liked Vermont and Vermonters but now I have a favorite one, Senator Patrick Leahy who lead the good fight in the cause of Mr. Arar yesterday:

“We knew damn well if he went back to Canada he wouldn’t be tortured. He would be held and he would be investigated,” Leahy thundered, wagging his finger at Gonzales. “We also knew damn well if he went to Syria he would be tortured. And it’s beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. It’s a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies.”
The Globe is telling iLies. These are iLies as I know the world is better with more expensive future junk that does nothing more for me than a walkman did in 1985.
I have concerns. We should all have concerns. This year’s center of the infield is no 2006 center of the infield:

“He’s very athletic,” Epstein said. “He has great range at the position. He’ll make his share of errors, but we think that’s more than compensated for by his fantastic range. He gets to as many balls as anybody at that position. He’s definitely a plus offensive player for the position. He’s a tough out. He can handle all different kinds of pitching.” Though Lugo probably won’t measure up to Alex Gonzalez from a defensive standpoint — who does? — he has the ability to make up for it in other ways…Lugo, who used to be a pest for the Red Sox when he played in Tampa Bay, will make his DP flips to rookie Dustin Pedroia. The Sox opted not to bring classy free-agent veteran Mark Loretta back for a second season. This will be the first time the Red Sox open the season with a rookie position player since 2001…

I am thinking these days that not signing Loretta is going to be the Achilles heel of the team. In addition to more errors and shortstop, Pedroia was weak at bat last year batting under .200 in September when he was given some late games. What is wrong with having a solid defense and decent bats in the middle?
US Senate ethics changes v. the actual CPC Accountability Act. Compare and contrast.

The Friday Chat That Made The Internet What It Is

If I didn’t do Friday chat, the Internet would stop. That is what the voices tell me.

How Canadian are you? What a dumb question to pose in relation to immigration? What is the benchmark? If they asked a group of Haligonians when I was young the answer would be “not much”. We didn’t think much of Upper Canada, the US or New Brunswick for that matter – PEI was “queer Island” but a useful place to get beer when you were 18. We were Nova Scotians first and Canadians administratively. And enough with “visible minority” Only Canadians uses the term and it is stunned.
It is getting so close, people are starting to get nutty:

“I like it, man,” Papelbon said. “I went to the Celtics [team stats] game (Wednesday night) and some guy came running up to me when I was sitting courtside and said, “We’re going to get 20 wins out of you next year!” I like that. I like the pressure.’

It is an incredible line up they have accumulated over the winter. But that is what I said about last year. I still do not really know why you take a closer and make him a starter but I suppose it is all in the percentages, twenty wins is better than 35 saves.
Oh dear: “NDP plotting strategy to out-green its rivals“. You know what? I don’t care that much about green. What I mean is I am all for good stewardship and maximizing sustainability but I think that is a matter of prudence not a core political theory. A core political election platforms should be about change to justice, pervasive wealth creation, international security, that sort of stuff. In an election where green battles green, essentially a battle of filing cabinet arrangement techniques, I may stay home.
I take it the Central Committee never thought of this at the time.
I work with privacy law but even I am having a hard (pre-coffee) time translating this concept:

It is likely that people wishing to take advantage of public information will still be required to apply for licences. “The reason we require licensing is to ensure that government information is not misrepresented or used to mislead the public,” said Mr Wretham. The Statute Law Database, an obscure if fascinating resource, is perhaps an unlikely candidate to have kick-started such a revolution but it will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the UK’s legal history.

Those of you with more contemporary British legal experience will have a better handle on this but it sounds like the UK may be making not only access to information free but use of government data free. This would be sort of huge in that there are massive of mapping, statistical and scientific knowledge in the hands of the state as a consequence or even intentional result of public sector activity.

That is it – maybe more later.