Pandering is the word used to label the retail sales tax/gas holiday by Mr. Obama, especially because it hasn’t worked, but apparently raging against oil companies full-time and calling for winfall profit taxes that in the past have been no only not working but destructive is not pandering. It’s apparently noble. No one is pandering to anyone there by attacking oil companies, no, of course not.
Someone asked what Mrs. Obama was like. Let’s strip away the colour of her skin and consider her for what she and her husband are: they are about as liberal in outlook, instinct and attitude as any other Democrat. If you vote for them, you are going to get people who are that way. If you want more government, if you want more government in more things and in control of more things, if you want more government regulation, more taxes and more costs, then vote for them. They won’t put US interests first in dealing in international relations.
Bill O’Reilly said he didn’t know what Mrs. Obama’s attitude was towards life, liberty and happiness. Life s fine, but she’s for abortion. Liberty is great unless it’s for guns. Happiness is also fine, as long as it doesn’t involved excessive profits that should then be confiscated.
There are reasons to vote for Mr. Obama that are positive. If you’re very concerned about global warming, vote for him. But if you don’t like ethanol because of its effects on food prices, then don’t. If you want out of Iraq stat and you think that’s sane and appropriate, vote for him. Though he thinks "stat" is 18 months.
The fundamental problem the Democrats have is their track record. They haven’t won a presidential election against a sitting Republican president since 1976. They haven’t won a majority of the vote since then either. Ford wasn’t even elected to the presidency. Why should we think that the Obama campaign will do any better? Has higher voter registration meant a victory for any party? I don’t know. Statistically, as much as 25% might not vote for Obama because of disappointment over Clinton losing the nomination.
A number of registered voters might not vote at all. This is especially important in light of the fact that many of these new voters are young people who don’t vote. Campus voters are traditionally unlikely to because they’re not residents. It’s an interesting conundrum. We won’t be able to tell until there is an actual election. Three million new registrants is an interesting figure because that was the margin of victory in the popular vote of Bush over Kerry in the last election.
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In Britain, it comes out that the closed circuit cameras they have around the country, 50,000 of them, may not be very useful for crime fighting. At best, they do serve as a deterrent. It’s hard to use them for prosecutions and maybe even impossible because of how much footage there is.
Don’t expect them to come down anytime soon or for even the Conservatives, for instance, to get rid them or the scary warrants act they have over there that allows local town counsels to go out and investigate you and tap you and do surveillance on you to see if you are letting you dog poop in the park and other "criminal matter". If George Orwell was alive today, he’d be shocked but also, perhaps, bemused.
Britons may never be slaves, but they sure as hell are being watched.
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Why doesn’t anyone say the obvious about this fringe element out there that voted against Ms. Clinton because she’s a woman and voting for Mr. Obama because he’s a man. There are probably some women who are doing that too. How many times have we heard about those surveys about news anchors who lost their jobs because they were getting older and especially because they were getting bad ratings even among female viewers.
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I’m struck during this Burmese crisis how no one says "where’s China?". This is another example of how lucky that government is. Time after time there is an episode that occurs, often involving another country, that highlights China’s bankruptcy as a regional statesman and leader. This country has said nothing and done nothing about this crisis when its influence would be enormous. It could have easily persuaded this regime to back down and allow the aid in. It doesn’t bode well for the Olympics.
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The latest person that I’ve decided it’s my sacred sovereign duty to despise and completely ignore is Céline Dion, Eurovision winner for… Switzerland. These people go to Davos, tell us we’re not paying enough taxes and we have to sacrifice and fight climate change while they sit in their tax shelters so they can get a Eurogong from their neighbours.
This is like our Governor-General who tells us we’re racist. We’re so racist that we send out best and brightest to fight and die for the rights of people all over the world who aren’t Canadian.
An old news segment on Canadian tv brought up an old Canadian political issue. This was the Coyne affair which is mostly forgotten now by most Canadians. This was the show-down between the Diefenbaker government and the governor of the Bank of Canada over monetary policy which resulted in the governor being forced to step down and the government being notoriously attacked for enacting the "Diefendollar" which at the time was a scandalous 92.5 cents on the American dollar. One of the economists on the panel was Jacques Parizeau. He seemed to think that Coyne had the right policy: the tightwad approach.
It’s fascinating that at the time, the Star men were viciously attacking Diefenbaker for having a defence and foreign policy that was not aggressive and militaristic enough and not strongly enough in favour of the US policy. The country’s fiscal house was not in order and relied to highly on economic stimulus. Five years later, they were singing the praises of a Liberal government that did exactly the same thing. Lament indeed.
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