Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Nationalism

I do not know what to make of this:

Morale plummeted inside the campaign after the remarks and Mr. Ignatieff’s perceived clumsiness in dealing with the fallout from them. But it rebounded after Quebec Liberals received him with enthusiasm and echoed his call for recognizing Quebec as a nation within Canada.

On the one hand, being a Scot, I am well versed in the arguments for nation. It’s in Flower of Scotland, the anthem we hum as we make the coffee in the morning, it’s in Scot Wa Hae the poem we all recite between dinner and our wee bit of pudding. It’s in the very food, which is based as Mike Myers once said, on a dare. Pretty much everyone knows about the claim and call to Scots nation and why and what it is based on. So I have never understood why the details of Quebec’s claim is so not notorious, its Sancho Panzas as well known Bonnie Prince Charlie. What makes it a nation in the way that, say, the Western Sahara is (except no one will fully back them up)?

On the other hand, what is the big deal? If Quebec wants to be a nation within a nation, what do I care. Newfoundland already is for all practical purposes at least on a cultural level – not to mention PEI and Alberta pretend they are. Heck, Nova Scotian led the first separatist movement, right after Confederation. How do I lose out from an asymetrical confederation? Isn’t it pretty much the same argument over same-sex marriage, that “they” will alter something undefinable in relation to “us”? Unevenness abounds as far as I can tell – Rhode Island gets the same two senators that California does. Alberta flukes into boundaries which encase the nation’s oil deposits and plays grumpy child with the only ball in the schoolyard. What makes it so wrong?

Those are a lot of questions. And good questions. And tough questions. I have another. Can Iggy get them all in order, get them under control to pull his campaign up in these last few weeks?

Green Garth?

Amid the gnashing of Tory teeth over their own decision to turf Garth Turner has popped up the delicious idea that our former Finance Minister will now become Canada’s first member of Parliament for the Greens. Sure it came from brother Doug, usually not a hot national news source despite his location, but it is an attractive idea.

  • First, Garth blogs (though as ST notes, he may well also edit.) Tories do not blog – Monty had to quit blogging when he got to sit at the big table. Reasonable policy for an unknown medium run by hobbyists as far as I see but Garth needed to express himself. You can’t fight for the little guy and hide your light under a bush, you know.
  • Second, Garth may find the idea of protecting the environment through “intensity” standards a joke. That may not make him particularized enough to be a Green – as it seems to include most of Quebec again now – but I suspect all Greens fall into that larger category.
  • Third, Garth is a showman. Love it or hate it, he loves the camera and the camera has certain feelings for him. He was a TV investment guru in the 1990s after he was Minister of Finance for, what, a month or so and he found a way to fill an hour before the reruns of Xena on the CHCH Hamilton mid-Saturday afternoon TV schedule.

So go Green, Garth. Become the new Deb Grey before leading your cause into a decade and an half of splintering schismismistic madness. Find a way to forge a sixth party in Parliament and lay the groundwork for the seventh. And maybe co-opt Elsie Wayne to join you. Nobody makes for a great schism as well as Elsie does.

Friday Left Margin Blob Talk Time

Well, that is another week in the books. My halfth birthday is past history now, the Mets are out and there is a bed sheet ghost hanging in the tree out front. What a game that was last night – tied from the first to the ninth 1-1, then the Cards pull ahead in their last at bats and the Mets lose with the bases loaded after a kid…ok, a guy with a beard…smokes one past a multi-millionaire who was fooled and frozed where he stood, only able to watch the curving ball enter the strike zone and then the catcher’s glove. The game featured the greatest double play last night with the Met’s Chavez (a former Expo, portland pointed out) robbing a guy out in left by snabbing the ball way over the wall then having the presence of mind to drill it back in to the relay man who got it to first. WHAMMO!

  • Update: having a good argument here with good folks who think we need a dutiful or responsible press. I think they are being nutty but I side with the rabble in most things.
  • In the impending gap in life called the baseball off season, you should be brushing up on the knowledge you need. The Baseball Hall of Fame has an email newsletter that you can sign up for.
  • Go read Gary’s blog. He is starting to describe the work of potters he admires. It is knowledge sharing time and it is very interesting.
  • The Tories have a green plan. Let me be the first to dub it the Tom Green Plan – hey, I didn’t know he was born in Pembroke. I have to wait longer than I have lived, until 2050, for this policy goal to be achieved. Nothing like an ambitious plan. They wait for a decade to start. Andrew Coyne, looking alarmingly like a man who know he was being an embarassing party lapdog, was on the CBC national last night saying how waiting ten years is just like starting soon and a plan that waits longer than my lifetime to date (and I am an old fart) to kick in is pretty much like one diligently pursued and aggressively implemented. They think we are dopes. They are starting to look like one-termers, history blips, modern-day John Abbotts.
  • Did you know you are wicked and bad? Almost everything is bad:

    While he did not specifically mention gay marriage, thousands of listeners at the fairgrounds in Verona’s outskirts strongly applauded the two parts of his speech about the family and “other forms of unions”. He urged them to fight “with determination … the risk of political and legislative decisions that contradict fundamental values and anthropological and ethical principles rooted in human nature”. The Pope said they had to defend “the family based on matrimony, opposing the introduction of laws on other forms of unions which would only destabilise it and obscure its special character and its social role, which has no substitute”.

    Each and every one of you are going to hell. Especially you!

  • Today is my answering the phone day at NCPR. I even got a confirmation card in the mail. So pledge between 3 to 5 and you will get to talk to me. I am taking the camera so as to have a scrapbook tomorrow, a photo montage as it were, maybe a even a three dimensional mobile of events. Interesting when someone asked how long it would take to go that far south, I got to reply that I am heading north-east to Canton, New York.

Gotta run. I have to remember the border papers. I think I will do the entire border crossing with a Flemish or Maltese accent just to see it that messes them up. Or maybe just answer every question put to me with “how the hell do I know?!?!” in a slightly loud voice. Whaddya think? Maybe include a five dollar bill when I pass over my papers. Just to smooth things out. You know.

Procedure? What Procedure?

I take no position on the decision made. But I find this description of how the decision was made a little odd:

The motion came as a “surprise” to the national caucus this morning, but Jaffer said it was not “unexpected” and the caucus was unanimous in supporting the “democratic” decision of its Ontario arm. The Prime Ministers Office insisted it played no role in the decision.

So if you are leader of a party or the caucus of the party, you take no role in substantively making a decision, relying on the “local arm” to play out the democratic function. I have to ask the good and thoughtful Mr. Taylor, Canada’s nicest ToryTM about the rule used in this instance. Note that Mr. Taylor has already posted excellent and – one might be drawn to suggest – almost insider information.

Kim Freaks

You know he would double dip the chips if you invited Kim Il-sung over. Nick the trinkets and baubles from your bookcase when you weren’t looking, too. Look in the medicine cabinet. Why? Be cause we are all apparently at war with him so he don’t care no more.

Satellite images indicate North Korea appears to be getting ready for a second nuclear test, officials said yesterday, as the defiant Communist regime held huge rallies and proclaimed that UN sanctions amount to a declaration of war.

I say that someone – maybe Belgium – be given the task of storming the palace but do it in a really surreal way to match the nuttiness. Solders dressed up as sad clowns or velvet Elvi. Maybe after a global laugh and point.

Week Seven With Brendan Carney

It was going so well at about nine minutes into the game. I had just secured a source of Unibroue’s Maudite that I can keep to myself and, like many of you, was heading into Loblaws with the hope of finding a morsel of whisky cheddar when I heard on the radio that Syracuse was up 7-0. Later they were only down 17-14.

But soon that was pretty much that. Soon the Orange had lost on the road to West Virginia 41-17. I search for meaning in these times. Apparently Carney is “suffering through his worst statistical season and there hasn’t been anything out of kickoff or punt returns – except no turnovers.” There was maybe a wobbled hold on a field goal, too. Being on the wrong side of your QB getting sacked five times is not going to help either. Yet it was a big game for Carney in the bigger picture:

Senior Brendan Carney became SU’s career punting yardage leader against the Mountaineers. He kicked seven times for 275 yards at West Virginia and now has 10,256 career punting yards, breaking the old mark of 10,073 held by Mike Shafer.

Here are this week’s stats:

Kickoffs
No.
Yds
TB
OB
Avg
CARNEY,Brendan
4
255
1
0
63.8

Punting
No.
Yds
Ave
Long
In 20
TB
CARNEY,Brendan
7
275
39.3
45
1
2

I hadn’t realized when I picked this way of following Syracuse football that Carney was such a BMOC. Actually I had figured the lot of a punter who does not get to kick field goals would be one in the shadows. Interesting to note that we may (theoretically) see the Orange for the first Bowl in 70 years outside of the USA as the Big East is tagged to send a representative to the first International Bowl. But that would mean winning some more games. And the next two at least against Louisville and Cincinnati do not look like likely candidates. Actually all five remaining games look tough.

More on the game here. More Carney here.

Best Time

We live in cycles even as modernity trys to drive them out. With the fall comes the quietening of the FM band so that weak but neighbouring NPR comes in clearly without the irritation of co-channel soft rock stations from Ottawa. With each week comes the end of the week and the end of work if only for a time. In the day there are the three parts of plot: the beginning, middle and end. Some points in these cycles of cyles seem exceedingly good and just like I notice – since the digital clock became common when I was exactly nine – when it is 12:34 pm more than most times, I notice how good 8:21 am on a Saturday is when there isn’t much planned. Cheese toasts!

Ummm…What Was It I Was Going To Do…

Oh yea, watch the Mets. Go bullpen! Woot, let’s see the bullpen in the fourth! After, get the real news from the game at Deadspin. Like the news Alec Baldwin is an utter loser.

I got my hat like Willie’s but I want Tom’s hat, too. And what is that pitch Tom is pitching? You know I’d drop that one on the wind-up.