Hudak for Ontario ?

If this is the man that uber-right wing Mike Harris wants in order to recreate his little fascist regime in Ontario then everybody who was pillaged and abused by Harris in the 1990's, everyone who was marginalized and made to feel like a second class citizen by the reactionary middle class who supported the kind of economic rapists who just brought down the world economy, should take note. Harris, the demagogue with the worst attendance record at the legislature in the history of Ontario premiers, who obsessed about law and order while ordering the murder of Dudley George, Harris fast tracked an agenda designed to create a conservative police state (it wasn't the fact that communist countries were police states that Cold War-era Conservatives opposed, it was the fact that the Warsaw Pact nations weren't corporatist police states. Pre-Hitler war alliance Mussolini was their model, him and Generalissimo Franco. George w. Bush made that clear. Harris divided the province into haves and have nots and then proceeded to kick the shit out of the have nots, leaving the province a much worse off, embittered place than it was before he took office. The key to the sociopathy that is Harrisite Conservativism was his parting shot: if he had to do over again, "I would consult less." More like Mugabe I would expect, just tell the people what to do, and then kill anyone who disagrees with you. That's where Mike Harris would have gone, if he could have.

Three years for protesting war crimes

The man who threw his shoes at George W Bush got three years for protesting against the most protected war criminal on the planet.

Harper looking for new pimp

The voice of hypocrisy speaks for Stephen.

Sorry Stephen,

but those are rose-coloured economic lenses you've got on. Unless of course you're just lying again.

Liberals going after religious voters

Contrary to this article's contentions, Catholic voters have not always voted Liberal at all. During the pre-second world war period fascism was actively preached by Catholic clergy across Canada. Mussolini's ideology of Corporatism, which was itself rooted in conservative Catholic theology, helped secure the already absolutist position of the Church in Quebec. In the rest of the Catholic congregations of the country - especialy in Italian Churches, Mussolini was a prophet of God: it was a conscious decision derived from the Lateran Agreement in Rome. Quebec was a jurisdiction of extreme right wing politics under clerical control until only after the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960's, when Liberalism deconstructed the facsist state created by the Union Nationale. The history of Liberalism in Canada - in Catholic parts of the country, was historically Rouge, an anti-clerical, Enlightenment-rooted view of individual liberty.
That view culminated in the particularly 'Canadian' funeral of Pierre Trudeau, which, while it was encased within the high pomp and circumstance of Cathedral orthodoxy, was riven through by Trudeau's own Catholic Personalism. Personalism, as a political theology, is the liberal side of Catholicism, in that it is more akin to Protestantism, with it's emphasis on an individual's existentially independent relationship with the divine. Generally speaking, Christianity is by definition personal, and only by practice, does it become conservative, ie hierarchical. The idea of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' is akin to those aspects of Judaism in which one is born into a community of believers, in conservative theology, the community as a people is what is in actual relationship with God. Once "relationship" has been abstracted into that belonging to a "people", rather than that of a person, almost every point of access to the divine can be controlled by those who control the community.
Liberalism's initial success with Protestant voters was rooted in Protestantism's reformed hierarchical structure: Pauline theology not only requires an individual to take responsibility for right and wrong, for making the world a better place, but it expressly posits the idea that a religious community is actually formed by individuals in relation with God, who can only then develop a spiritual relationship with one another. Protestantism has its ebbs and tides, and can become as extreme in its hierarchical control of individual believers as Catholicism, the method of control however, especially in modern times, has become increasingly more obvious. In contemporary fundamentalism, while individual responsibility remains a part of its theology, structurally, the whole basis of the personal religious experience has been twisted away from personalism towards status quo views of power,and the notion that the religious leader knows better than the individual. Thus, the community so formed, flows from the individual to the leader, and not from the individual to the divine. Thus, rather than a genuine spiritual relationship with ones' neighbours, one is left with a religious relationship with a boss.
That's why American evangelicalism is so right wing: the idea of liberty is still espoused, but Liberty actually belongs to the nation, to 'Americans' and not to individuals. The individual fundamentalist does not have to think or feel for themselves, they just have to do what they are told.
The fact that Ignatieff is trying to move Liberalism back into legitimacy as a political theology is not in itself troubling, since Canada was created as a nation designed to heal the fundamentalist religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants that had previously torn apart Europe. A path of personal spirituality is entirely in keeping with the principles of liberalism. What is questionable about Ignatieff however, is that he is essentially a CD Howe Liberal, the follower of an ideology that tried to liberalize conservative corporatism, and failed. Ignatieff has already started espousing a new orthodoxy, in which business, the state and the individual will 'deform' back into a giant pyramid scheme, his comments on the Tar sands make that clear. My guess is that Ignatieff is not after a spiritual renewal of Canadian personalism in order to create a Just Society founded on the Greatest Equal Liberty for all. My guess is that individual concepts of freedom will be reduced to an abstract 'internalism', so that Canadians will be encouraged to identify themselves with the new global heirarchy, and so do its bidding. In fact, it is becoming increasingly obvious from Iggy's management style, that he is in essence, a Fundamentalist Pastor, controlling both the medium and the message. And in that regard, he is not at all unlike Stephen Harper. You can have them both.

Anti-Climate Change "Science"

So the Czech president thinks that efforts to address climate change are really just assaults on freedom. Freedom ? What I want is freedom from an economy that has so completely enmeshed itself into global gangster-corporatism that its proponents have no compunction about lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, raping economies or pillaging the resources of vulnerable peoples. Conservatives really have to find some new ideas, because they are increasingly trapped defending the indefensible. Conserving the freedom of others to treat entire populations like indentured servants is no longer an option. Conserving the privilege of the few over the liberty of the many is no longer an option. There is no reason for Conservativism to be so reactionary. Conservative thought used to have dignity, now it's just the play thing of global thugs.

Yet another war looming

And this war, is going to hit the poor hardest, because the rich will come in and strip them bare: middle-class North America, inured to the misery of others by their own sense of entitlement, will allow it to happen. This will be the logical conclusion of gangster capitalism, the conscienceless pursuit of not just profit, but the grand theft of the planet's remaining resources. Maybe they'll let us die fighting the war for them. Just like a good pyramid scheme should.

Oh yes, with the tar sands Canada is nothing

Now here's a moronic POV from one more right wing 'economist' with his head firmly stuck in the muck. If this nation is so unimaginative, so singularly lacking in the ability to think beyond the corporatist bog, then we we will fail, but not because of an inability to let some big businesses profit off a sandy ooze pool.Can we never get beyond this duplicity and downright dumbness. If a person is what they eat, perhaps a nation is what it consumes: which is fossilized death in this case.

MacKay for Nato ?

Sure, let's give the job to a man whose word is worthless.

Give the money to municipalities

As far as I can tell Canadians live in towns, villages and cities, that's where they work, that's where they eat, sleep and shop. Provinces are abstractions. Even on islands like PEI and Newfoundland, everybody lives in a municipality. It's at the municipal level that you can act locally and think globally. So in order to solve a global economic meltdown created by the merger of gangster and corporate capitalism in America and abroad, the place to re-invest in non-corporatist society is at the local level. It's deeper representation than can be provided by federal ridings, which makes government expenditures less prone to the kind of partisan manipulation so loved by Stephen Harper. The three billion dollar slush fund he wants has only one purpose, because Harper has only one purpose, the destruction of the Liberal Party. What he wants to do with money is to make Conservative ridings healthier and to make everyone else suffer for not voting for him. This budget is such a waste of time, it was designed to do little, and to achieve nothing more than the appearance of doing something. It has no vision, no depth. Let the people we vote for at the local level have the money, they know what's needed where we live.

Mad Dog Baird wants our trust

Minister Baird, who strikes me as a thug more suited to organized crime circles than those of democracy (which may be why he lied so utterly and psychotically about the nature of Canadian democracy before Christmas) now wants us to trust him with 3 billion dollars. I'd rather trust Meyer Lanksy than Baird, because Lansky at least had a genius for money,while all Mad Dog has is a genius for deception and vitriol.

Drawn into the debate with Canadian Jewish leaders

As someone with Jewish blood in me who is not technically a Jew, and who is not a follower of Judaism, except as a Christian who thinks the heart of David is the best thing about the old testament, besides the depth of vision of prophets like Isaiah, I developed a romanticized notion of Jews from having guided canoe trips at a Jewish camp in Algonquin Park way back when and so still love a great many more Jews than I even know Muslims. However, I nonetheless find this whole issue of Israel's treatment of Palestinians both anti-Semitic, and a symptom of the hard-hearted, stiff-necked tendency of Jewish leaders to dam the rivers of justice. There should have been a Jubiliee in 1998-99, justice should have been done to the Palestinians, justice still needs to be done. The idea that conservative Jews can simply ignore the demands of Jubilee is highly offensive to me and to scriptural prophecy. No amount of propaganda can change that fact. And that doesn't make me an Islamist, it makes me just one more voice crying out in the wilderness for Jewish leaders to let justice flow like a river. As for Warren Kinsella, his position is always in opposition to conservative propagandists: the idea that he is somehow promoting anti-Jewish sentiment by railing against reactionary elements in Canadian Judaism is absurd. The idea that he may be a closet Islamist is equally absurd, he's on the same side of the denial of Israelis first, Palestinians last as much of the Jewish leadership is, left or right. By the Rivers of Babylon I sit down and weep when I remember Zion.