Politics

Paul Martin Luther King [via]

I’m not sure who he’s insulting more – Paul Martin or Martin Luther King.

Oh wait there’s more.

Personally I never realized that spending tax dollars responsibily (or irresponsibly) was a fundamental human right. I learn new things every day!

Bonus Conservative link: here’s a list of the party consitution points up for voting at their conference coming up later this month.

Missile Counter-Attack [via]

You have to love Lloyd Axworthy’s frankness in this open letter to Condoleeza Rice. This is the kind of diplomacy we need sometimes.

I think this nicely summarizes my feelings these days:

A slippery slope that isn’t

If we were to pass a law stating that anyone with blue eyes is forbidden to marry his or her sibling, but everyone else can, we’d have a minority rights issue on our hands. We’d be discriminating against a particular group based on a physical characteristic.

But if we pass a law stating that no one can marry his or her sibling, whatever else it might be it’s not discrimination because the law applies equally to everyone.

Preventing gays from marrying discriminates against a group because of sexual orientation. It’s a minority rights issue. But the argument that allowing gays to marry is some kind of slippery slope that leads to polygamous marriages, incestuous marriages and the possibility that the weird guy on the next block will claim the right to marry his pet parrot Polly is bogus. It’s not the same thing.

So just cut it out.

And from one of the comments:

I think the point that’s evading everyone is this:

Marriage is not rooted in any one religious set of beliefs.
As soon as it was opened up for heathens like myself to get married (not belonging, not wanting to belong to, any organized religion), THAT was the only this ’slippery slope’ argument would be even considered valid.

The fact that straight people outside of (because it’s obvious, and easy) the Christian religion can get legally married without protest from the Pope (or anyone else, really), means that the Christian faith has given up all rights to the concept of marriage (at least in Canada).

So we’ve been on this ’slippery slope’ for GENERATIONS now, and we’re not all evil yet.

The commenter makes a good point – you can’t claim something as religiously sacrosanct when you allow people who have no religious persuasion to engage in this practice. The Slippery Slope is not only an argument technique, it’s also a fallacy.

The current top headline on CBC News?

Canada urged to sign on to Bush’s crusade

Bush was in Halifax this morning to thank those in Atlantic Canada who helped out on September 11th handling the thousands of airline passengers who were rerouted while airspace in the U.S. was closed. Yes it was more than 3 years ago. But I suppose in an effort to “warm” relations he’s made this goodwill gesture.

He also took the opportunity to quote one of our longest-serving Prime Ministers, William Lyon Mackenzie King (born in Kitchener!).

[Bush] quoted King’s words directly: “We cannot defend our country and save our homes and families by waiting for our enemies to attack us. To remain on the defensive is the surest way to bring the war to Canada.”

The president added: “Mackenzie King was correct then and we must always remember his words today… There is only one way to deal with enemies who plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting. We must take the fight to them.”

King may have realized the necessity to go to war but he still didn’t officially declare war on Germany until September 10th, after Britain had already done so. It’s not like King went out and fought the war on his own days, months or years before anyone else. And let’s not forget that the U.S. didn’t officially enter World War II until 1941. The United States wasn’t exactly actively pursuing a campaign to get rid of the Nazis before that point. I have to give credit to Bush’s speechwriters for using King though; shows that they’re able to do a little bit of research.

We might as well criticize the U.N. while we’re at it:

Bush also took the opportunity to deliver a rebuke to the United Nations, and suggest it and other multinational institutions should be reformed.

“The objective of the UN and other institutions must be collective security, not endless debate,” said the American president. “For the sake of peace, when those bodies promise serious consequences, serious consequences must follow.”

Yes, global security is one of the goals of the U.N. charter but there are other goals in there as well like global human progress, human rights observations and having international cooperation for dealing with problems. There’s bound to be a debate on these issues and perhaps at times there is too much discussion but that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the United Nations model altogether. It has proven effective in a number of situations.

I read Scott Rosenberg’s blog. He’s the managing editor at Salon. It’s no secret where Salon stands on the election – they’re terribly disappointed. They’ve received a lot of mail from people angry, depressed, any other emotion under the sun. Today’s entry in Scott’s blog had a wonderful letter written by the writer Sue Halpern:

Yesterday, looking at the map of the United States, the visual metaphor was hard to miss: those of us who voted Democratic, who oppose the war, who support gay marriage, who value civil liberties, who believe in due process, who are concerned about jobs and health care and education and the environment, were relegated to the margins of our country. If we didn’t already understand that our point of view was marginal, that map showed us.

But the map is deceptive, and reading it that way is the equivalent to Dick Cheney’s arrogant declaration that the people of this country had delivered a resounding mandate to George Bush. We did no such thing. Even in states like Wyoming and Idaho and Georgia and Tennessee there are tens of thousands of people who did not stand with the majority, just as there were plenty of people in our own home states who stood with George Bush. Such is the nature of democracy, even a democracy as broken as ours.

So the other metaphor from the election is the one about the glass being half-empty or half-full. About half the people in this country appear to support the politics of George Bush, and about half are with and among us. For the purposes of the election, the glass was half-empty and we lost. For the purposes of going forward it is half-full, and it is from that that we must take our solace, and from there begin. The solace, such that it is, is that despite the lies, the willful deceptions, the cheating, the abject meanness, the subversion of reality, half the people heard the truth. And many of them live in places where the noise machine is a lot louder than it is here in Vermont, or in New York or Berkeley or Cambridge.

The solace is that we know each other and that we found each other — that friends urged friends to send checks to ACT or Run Against Bush or Band of Sisters and they did; that neighbors called upon neighbors to sign petitions and visit legislators and they did; that strangers from Duluth, Minnesota and Spokane, Washington met on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio going door-to-door to turn out the vote. True, it didn’t exactly work as we wanted it to work, and as we thought that it would work, but it did work. We raised a lot of money, we raised our voices, we raised a ruckus, we raised consciousness, and we learned that our point of view does not consign us to loneliness. This may have been the most divisive campaign ever, and the country may be divided, but we are not alone. This is important, because the agenda of the other side works best if we think we are.

I am not simply suggesting that if we think we are alone we will be less likely to stand up and be counted, though that no doubt is true. Rather, that if we think we are alone, we might start to believe that the only way to regroup is to embrace the ideas and rhetoric of the other side. The Democratic party has already done that, of course, in many areas, which is why its economic platform sounded remarkably conservative, why it articulated no serious opposition to the war in Iraq, why both John Kerry and Howard Dean were quick to state that marriage should be reserved for the union of a man and a woman. This last is crucial, because it represents the beginning of the values “creep” that some believe will allow us to cast our net wider — wide enough perhaps to capture that crucial three percent of voters who, next time, will send us over the top. It’s a brilliant strategy — but it’s not our brilliant strategy. It’s theirs.

How best to advance the faith-based theocracy that underlies the current discussion of “values” than by having us believe that the only way to “win” next time is by changing the language of the debate to make “our” side more palatable to some of “them?” But once you start changing the language, you start changing the content, and who wins then? We have to be clear: There is no such thing as a faith-based democracy. Democratic values are purposefully agnostic so that democracies can embrace people of all faiths.

It is possible that as soon as the Supreme Court changes hands, this point will be moot. We have to be prepared for this. That is why the lesson of the past year or two — the lessons we learned from Moveon and the blogs and the Deaniacs and National Voice and ACT, and from our friends and neighbors, and from people all over the country whom we now consider our friends and neighbors — must be this: That while we can act we will act; that while we can speak out, we will speak out; that while we can organize, we will organize; and that while we can stand, we will stand together.

Very powerful words indeed.

I saw this article on Boing Boing yesterday:

President Bush accidentally allowed to be interviewed by a real journalist
The President’s handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (requires RealPlayer, interview starts about 20:40 into the stream) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish public national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had “overstepped the bounds of politeness.”

Coleman is a mainstream European journalist who has conducted interviews with top officials from a number of countries – her January interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently solid enough to merit posting on the State Department’s Web site.

Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader.

She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps – at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” – she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.

The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups – “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

Mark’s note: I haven’t been able to see the video interview, but I read the White House’s transcript of the interview, and I think the description above, by John Nichols of The Capital Times, is misleading. President Bush said more than just “My job is to do my job;” he said “My job is to do my job and make the decisions that I think are important for our country and for the world.” And President Bush wasn’t asking the interviewer to “go easy on him;” he was asking her to allow him to finish answering her questions. That said, Bush’s answers weren’t satisfactory. Link

Vidiot sez: The White House complained later that Coleman was disrespectful and didn’t ask the “suggested question” about what Irish PM Ahern was wearing that day.

Coleman has responded to White House criticism, noting that she submitted her questions three days in advance.

Andrew sez: “Since I get on with RealPlayer about as well as a house on fire, I wasn’t able to watch the link given. I have been pointed here, though; even assuming it’s been, ah, tactfully clarified by a White House aide, the transcript is still pretty atrocious – the lines you quoted are still in.

The interview is also available as an MP3.

I just finished watching the video and I have to say that the reporter is pretty tough on Bush (as she should be). It’s kind of funny to see how frustrated Bush gets when the reporter tries to ask follow-up questions before he’s finished speaking. Reading the transcript does not do the interview justice. You really have to see (or hear for that matter) the flow of the interview to truly appreciate it. I doubt that the White House will be allowing an personal interview with that television station again.

I’ve hosted the video here if you wanted to see it for yourself (people have had troubles with the streaming link above).

I’ve been enjoying reading the pro-Conservative blogs this morning, particularly the ones that had called for a very strong Conservative minority government win in last night’s Federal Election.

I was caught off-guard by this statement:

I think we will see that the women vote killed the Tories. They were scared by the Grits’ fearmongering.

To me that’s very reminiscent of Jacques Parizeau’s comment after the 1995 referendum that sovereignty was lost because of “money and the ethnic vote“. Perhaps Adam thinks that “womenfolk” shouldn’t be voting because they get in the way of the “man’s” party. What an idiot.

Though I’m pleased with the election results (my local candidate won), I’m still hesitant about what is going to happen in the next couple of years. Minority governments don’t last (the average is 1.5 years) and it seems the sovereignty issue has returned to Quebec (judging by Duceppe’s speech last night). The people who voted Conservative out west won’t be pleased with the results. National unity, bridging gaps and general cooperation are going to be incredibly important over the next little while.

I think the best result has been the vote count of the Green Party. They’ve qualified for federal funding and hopefully in the next election (which will be sooner rather than later), they might even get a seat.

This was one of the first elections where I didn’t watch much television coverage at all. I saw Darren Barefoot’s post early after the polls closed and checked out the live results on the Web. The CBC’s results page required manual refreshing but offered more up-to-date results. CTV and The Toronto Star’s results were built by the same company but I found that they either didn’t update (The Star) or offered incorrect results (CTV – they showed the Green Party candidate in Kitchener-Conestoga winning the seat). I remember the insanity at the returning office in 1997, fielding calls from the different polling stations and reporting the results to the national returning office in Ottawa. It’s amazing the elections run so smoothly in Canada.

James, as usual, writes a wonderful piece about minority governments and what the protocol is after a minority government has been decided at the polls. With a minority government here in Canada looking ever more imminent, political science professors will be having a field day answering questions from the news media outlets about what happens next.

Edit: I should clarify that James doesn’t usually write about minority governments. What I meant there was that when he does write he writes wonderful posts that are informative and interesting to read.