stargeek
Black Watch heads back to IraqBlack Watch heads back to IraqBlack Watch heads back to Iraq 05/27/2004 09:13 AM The Black Watch regiment is heading back to Iraq after Defence Minister Geoff Hoon announced more UK troop deployments. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Black Watch heads back to IraqGrok Headline matches for Black Watch heads back to IraqBlogger Chris Allbritton heads back to
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 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
After a normal flight, we went into a tight, corkscrew dive that sent your stomach up into your throat — and in the case of two passengers, out their mouths and into their laps. It’s a vomit-comet experience. But if you like roller coasters in a sealed container where you can’t really see anything, it’s a lot of fun. Just don’t think about the very real threat of shoulder-mounted SAMs.Link
cayankee.blogs.com/cayankee/2004/07/missles_with_nu.html
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Apologies for my unannounced silence since
last Saturday. The power supply on my Dell failed, draining the
battery
so I couldn't even back up my files to another computer. I just got it
back now. More on this spectacular failure next week. This week has
given me the chance to work on my novel, The
Only Life We Know, and my book Natural Enterprise, as well as a chance to catch
my breath and think about (a) what to blog about next, and (b) what to
do with myself once the three books are finished.Here are some of the things I'm planning on blogging about in the next few weeks. If there's anything else you'd like me to write about, let me know.
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 I hate commercials. They're an insult to the intelligence. They're grating. They're repetitive. They're unimaginative. They're a colossal waste of money that could be spent on something useful to society. Mostly, they're depressing -- they show the low level of intelligence that big corporations can profitably pander to, to hawk their dreadful, overpriced crap. And they show the low level of creativity of Western society -- with untold millions of dollars to spend in a medium that can present almost anything imaginable, this garbage is the best they can come up with. How can these bloated corporations and slimy advertising agencies be surprised that the biggest hit of the last television season was TIVO -- a tool that finally allows us to skip their god-awful tripe permanently? And what can be more pathetic than millions of people watching a football game each year just for the ads, which are mostly for companies that sell third-rate mass-produced beer and other products that are either bad for you or manufactured in third-world sweatshops anyway? Why get so worked up about this? Why don't I just turn them off? Because they're one of the engines of corporatism, the means by which, from a young age, we're brainwashed to believe that our possessions, what we buy and wear and eat, determines our identity, our value and rank in society. And because, just like politicians who bribe us with our own money through 'tax cuts' (which are in reality simply service cuts), corporations in their advertisements are pressuring us to buy their product with our money. The cost of advertising, which can amount to up to 80% of the 'cost' of a brand-name breakfast cereal or sneaker, is passed along to us, the consumers. And we pay it because (a) the ads that we're paying for coerce us into believing that their brand name is somehow worth the hugely inflated price, and (b) the huge market share that this coercion brings allows these brand names to monopolize retailers' shelf space and drive those that produce small, local, reasonably-priced products out of the market. Such oligopolies control every industry in our economy. What's the answer? The usual solutions to deal with this problem are to boycott the overpriced, overhyped brands and the goods of socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations and oligopolies, to educate ourselves on alternatives by belonging to organizations like Consumers Union, and to pledge to buy local. These are good ideas, but they are not enough, by themselves, to reach a tipping point to bust the oligopolies, make expensive and deceptive ads unprofitable, and squeeze the hidden inflationary cost of exhorbitant ads out of the price of the products we buy. What we need to do is to take back the airwaves, to realize that the media bandwidth is a public resource and it should be owned by, and for the interests of, the people, not corporations and advertisers. As the owners of the airwaves, we should allow them to be used only for public purposes. As radical as it may seem to those of us in North America (it's not a radical idea elsewhere in the world), advertising should be prohibited on our airwaves -- it is not in our best interests. How then should programming be funded? Publicly, with the budgets for programs determined by a public foundation with a mandate to support a mix of entertainment, cultural and information programming, and guided within limits by what viewers actually watch, and by a code to be inclusive, politically and culturally balanced and courageous, and to encourage creativity and investigation, and stretch the limits of the media and the minds of the people. Yes, this would be paid for by tax dollars. But remember, we're already paying for it. Not only would public funding of the airwaves let the people, not the advertisers, determine what we can and should watch for our money, but the profligate waste of billions of dollars in advertising could instead be spent on real programming. And the taxes that pay for the programs would be progressive (income taxes), based on ability to pay, instead of regressive (consumption taxes), based on how much you've been duped to buy. Because of the savings on advertising, the cost (and hence price) savings on products would more than offset the cost of publicly funded programming. We'd end up with, almost certainly, better, more varied, commercial-free programming. The cost of many consumer products would plunge. Oligopolies would be unable to sustain their stranglehold, making many industries much more competitive, opening the door to more small, local, entrepreneurial businesses with the commensurate boost in jobs, and rewarding innovation more and brand less, which would benefit the whole economy. To those that find the idea of public ownership of the airwaves too radical, think about information and the arts as a public good -- like education, health, parks and public spaces. The neocons want to 'privatize' all of these things, too -- run them for corporate profit and to hell with what the public wants. Most of us can see that in education, health, parks and public spaces the benefits of public ownership and stewardship in the people's interest far outweigh the 'efficiencies' of private, corporate ownership. We need to fight back against the greedy corporatists -- in the private sector and in government -- who try to bribe us with our own money and denigrate the value of public goods. They're every bit as great a threat to our democracy as terrorists. P.S. Last week CBS refused to carry the Moveon anti-Bush spot. Since those that control the media, our airwaves, won't allow you to see this important message, you'll have to see it here. Too bad tens of millions of others won't have that opportunity. |
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