Passing Strange

It seems passing strange to see the congruence of criticism of the NDP by Progressive Bloggers, Liberal bloggers and Blogging Tories who all see Jack Laytons pragmatic politics of the possible as being somehow out of step with their classic liberal ideologies.

And of course for the right wing it was Bismark after all who said; Politics is the art of the possible. For Liberals and liberals John Rawls is embraced yet he advocates this very notion. And for the left there is the ex Frankfurt School philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

In order to remedy the difficulties arising from his lifeworld/system distinction, such as the inability of his theory to account for the possibility of legitimate political power, Jürgen Habermas' attention turned toward greater abstraction through an appeal to legal theory as the basis of political consensus in the face of problems of diversity, complexity and pluralism in the modern world. This turn is made possible by an appropriation of some concepts of liberal theory, specifically John Rawls's ideas of "overlapping consensus" and "reflective equilibrium."

What Jack and the NDP are doing around the environment is no different than they did around the Liberal Budget. They are standing above the partisans politics of both the Liberals and Conservatives, and the narrow selfishness of the Bloc, and calling for a made in Canada environmental policy that does address Kyoto targets.

But this is somehow seen as getting in bed with Harper complette with sniggering comments from the pundits.

The latest rant is that somehow the NDP is abandoning Kyoto, which it is not. It just not barking about it at every opportunity.

Rather they have been extremely practical about getting the work done that would actually meet Canada's committments to Kyoto. And that of course was saving the Clean Air Act by creating for the first time ever in Parliamentary history an all party committee to rewrite the Governments flawed Hot Air Act.

And they forced the Tories to fund the rainforest reserve in B.C.

Some folks get it, the rest would like to continue the partisan attacks.

But the NDP will keep on keepin on until there is a parliamentary bill on the environment with teeth that will benefit us all. And thats not about getting votes or proping up the Tories its about the politics of the possible.

See

Jack Layton

NDP

Environment




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BT Climate Change Denial

Well this proves that in order to be a true card carrying conservative in Canada you must, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to deny the scientific evidence of Global Warming. Not because you don't believe it but because it's the rigorous (as in rigor mortus) position you MUST hold or all is lost.

As evidenced by the following Blogging Tory posts:
PCC Report Doesn't Prove Causality
By the Numbers
"The best CTV push-poll yet..."
A Voice of Sanity at the Globe
From the people who brought you...
"The semantics of climate change"
The forecast calls for pain
National Post reinforces my point
"Global Cooling" ?
It?s very likely, said the groundhog
It is VERY LIKELY!

etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The irony is that like their Great Leaders denial of the science of climate change/Global Warming back in 2002 when he called Kyoto a 'money sucking socialist' scheme, these poor deluded folks don't get it.

Kyoto is meant to save capitalism from itself. It has to do with ameliorating the worst excesses of the market by creating a market to exchange carbon credits, thus producing a new form of stock market. That is capitalism in action. Nothing socialist about it. Well except for government regulations, which even capitalists agree are needed to keep the playing field level.

Of course these folks are correct in pointing out Kyoto doesn't work, nor can capitalism when it comes to changing the course of its own inherent crisis as the result of its creation of self sustaining technology.

See:

Environment

Kyoto

A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

Socialism

industrial ecology

Social Ecology

Green Capitalism

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Helium For Health

It helps you you with smokers cough and you get to sound like Donald Duck

Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada have discovered that by combining helium with 40 per cent oxygen allowed patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to increase their exercise capacity by an average of 245 per cent. COPD is a disease of the lungs caused by smoking and includes the conditions of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.



See

Smoking



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Feds Attack Alberta Again

Repeat after me Income Trusts are the New NEP.

Klein calls on PM to withdraw trust tax

Then there is Harpers musing of including natural resources as part of his fix for the fiscal imbalance. Which is NEP2.

Is this Harpers real hidden agenda? To promote Alberta Separatism.

Get out the guns and the survival gear, let's build that firewall around the Republic of Alberta.

See:

NEP

Alberta Separatism

Income Trusts

Ralph Klein



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Ed Stelmach Hires Scab

Paul Stanway editor and columnist with the Edmonton Sun and former Edmonton Sun reporter Tom Olson the political affairs columnist for the Calgary Herald are Premier Fast Eddie Stelmachs new media mouthpieces.

Several other Edmonton Sun legislative affairs reporters graduated to become media flacks under the Klein government too.

To their credit bloggers Daveberta covers it, and Mark Wells exposes Tom Olson as a scab during the heated and controversial Calgary Herald Strike.

Something none of the other columnists in the MSM bother to mention. Water under the bridge and all that.

Except for the reporters who fought the good fight and lost to Conrad Black's union busting efforts in an anti union province. In the home of the neo-con movement in Canada, in the city which gave birth to that movement. This was a major strike in the history of the province and in the fight for workers rights in Alberta and journalists rights across Canada.

The same Conrad Black who is now facing criminal charges in the U.S. for embezzlement of Hollinger funds.

‘Hollinger went from being an expanding business to becoming a company whose sole preoccupation was generating current cash for the controlling shareholders, with no concern for building future enterprise value or wealth for all shareholders,’ the committee found. ‘Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described proprietors, Black and Radler (former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times) made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise.’

Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, as well as the Radler family used Hollinger as a ‘piggy bank’ for personal expenses, the panel said. The company bought a Challenger aircraft for Radler for $11.6 million and leased a Gulfstream IV jet at $3 million to $4 million a year for the Blacks. Hollinger allowed the Blacks to ‘swap’ Park Avenue apartments with the company, which ‘rigged’ the transaction so the Blacks could obtain Hollinger’s apartment for $2.5 million below its market value, the report said.

The Herald strike cost Edmonton Journal columnist Linda Goyette her job, because she would not post her column in a scab paper, the Herald.

Catherine Ford says "delicate mental gymnastics" helped her decide to scab for the Herald from the comfort of home. I'm not sure what kind of gymnastics she's talking about for, despite having portrayed herself in her first post-strike column as the only brave journalist left in the free world, it takes no courage at all to cross a picket line via computer from the coziness of Mount Royal. Ford is entitled to her opinions but her refusal to back up her convictions, face the pickets and physically cross that line shows that she is thinking not for herself, but only of herself. By accusing other journalists of being little more than ciphers for the unions they belong to, Ford casts vile aspersions on her Southam colleagues working at other unionized papers in the chain - and on journalists at unionized papers everywhere. Do you want to see real conviction, Catherine? Linda Goyette gave up her Edmonton Journal column rather than have it published in Calgary's scab-run newspaper. That's courage.

As another example, Linda Goyette, an NNA winner, got the unionization bug at the Edmonton Journal about shortly after the Calgary Herald types did. The Journal had some management problems of its own. The unionization drive failed, but some of the Journal's problem issues were resolved.

As for the highly respected writer Goyette? As I understand the story, her job description changed somewhat after the union threat abated. Some of those rumours had her basically doing glorified file clerk work.

She eventually left the paper. Other ringleaders also drifted away.

It was a long an ugly strike and it sowed the seeds for the end of editorial independence in Canadas newspaper industry.

The combination of Black's editorial agenda, reportedly forced upon his papers, his heavy-handedness with which he is alleged to deal with employees, his purported obsession with the 'bottom line' over editorial content, his alleged intolerance of opposing viewpoints in a profession which is supposed to hold opposing ideas paramount, and his critics' perception of Black as possessing disregard for the fundamental concepts behind the 'free-press', give many cause for alarm.

With the birth of Blacks right wing booster rag for the Canadian Alliance; The National Post, Southam/Hollinger bled red ink. But it was all for a good cause.
The reconstruction of Canadian newspapers from being the voice of an urban liberal middle class to being the political arm of the new right.

The strike coincided with Conrad Black hiring former Alberta Report righwingnutbar Lorne Gunter to give balance to the supposedly liberal Edmonton Journal. As he would begin to populate not just the National Post but all his papers with Canadian Alliance stalwarts and former reporters from the Alberta Report as editorial board members and columnists.

Soon after leaving parliament, Harper and Tom Flanagan co-authored an opinion piece entitled "Our Benign Dictatorship", also commended Conrad Black's purchase of the Southam newspaper chain, arguing that his stewardship would provide for a "pluralistic" editorial view to counter the "monolithically liberal and feminist" approach of the previous management.

This was not the only strike to hit the chain after Black bought it out, and they eventually led to Hollinger selling the papers to CanWest a year later.

Canwest/Global proceeded to further concentrate media ownership in Canada and undermine editorial independence and fire editors and layoff workers at a record pace. Ironically Canwest/Global continues to bleed red ink with the National Post.

Problems at the Herald surfaced under former publisher Ken King, a local go-getter who ran the city's popular and efficient Winter Olympics in 1988. The Herald had managed for more than a century without a union when King was named publisher in 1996, following Hollinger's takeover of the Southam chain. King came along with a new idea: Fairness, Accuracy and Balance. Nothing wrong with that, until senior writers and editors realized the FAB dictum had an unspoken meaning. No more muckraking. No more jabs at friends of the publisher -- who was, it turned out, friends with everyone who counted. No more being mean to the provincial government. The Herald under King was to stop picking on Calgary's problems and pay more attention to events arranged by and for the leisure class.

What's Conrad angry about now?

Despite Mr. Black's insistence that the strike at the Calgary Herald is not affecting his profits, his stock continues to plummet, his readership is down and advertisers are looking elsewhere to place their ads.
Last Thursday, Andy Marshall, striker and President of CEP Local 115A met face-to-face with a finger-wagging Conrad Black. When asked about returning to the bargaining table Black said: "We're amputating gangrenous limbs. If they have the grace of conversion and want to function as employees instead of staging an NDP coup d'etat in the newsroom, they'll be welcome." He also suggested the dispute will end one of two ways: decertification or come back to work with no agreement on such basic clauses as seniority and wage grids! Andy Marshall said no thanks.

And why should we care that Tom Olson was a scab, or that media in Canada is concentrated in the hands of a few private interests? Because now that same right wing is in power in Ottawa, as well as in Alberta, and they dominate the mainstream media in Canada.

See

Labour

Unions

Media Bias

Media

Alberta

Ed Stelmach

Conrad Black

Paul Stanway

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media, Alberta, Canada, politics, Edmonton Journal, union, CEP, labour, labor

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

The New Flat Earth Society is officially meeting in London England to respond to the UN Global Warming report issued by the IPCC in Paris.

And its all paid for by Exxon Mobil.

And it is a tax write off because they are a registered as a charity in Canada and the United States. Yep your tax dollars help pay for this right wing drivel.

Their sypmathisers at the National Pest round up the usual suspects to be 'objective' in their reporting on global warming. If being objective means quoting folks about why the world is flat.

These guys are the grass roots base of the Harper government so the fact the New Canadian Government opposes Kyoto should come as no surprise.

And just because they have scientists on their side don't forget so did these guys;

The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society, as a successor to the 19th century Universal Zetetic Society. The Flat Earth Society devised detailed arguments, based on scientific observations and references to the Bible, to support their claim that the Earth is a motionless disc not an orbiting globe.


A tip o the blog to Buckdog, Far and Wide and Mike Marin

See

John Baird In Exxons Pocket?

Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

Fraser Institute

Environment

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Baby Fat

Talk about thin skined. The Tories are all in a huff over Liberal Leader Stephane Dions references to their Glorious Leader being called Fat.

And interestingly the sturm and drang over this began with the Blogging Tories , you know those senstive types who refer to their opponents as moonbats, and then the whole gang at the PMO got involved.

Being an average Alberta male The Glorious Leader's paunch could be dismissed as a traditional Molson Six Pack.

I think what the Conservatives are upset about is that their Glorious Leader looks like he still has baby fat.

Well at least he doesn't suck his thumb.



And even with the baby fat he is still not as cuddly as Mike Duffy.


But just in case the PMO is worried about the Glorious Leaders paunch here is a solution.



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Israeli Rabbi Says Wipe Out Arabs

I wonder if this comment will generate the same world wide outrage and denounciation as comments made by the President of Iran.

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs."It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers".

And while there are apologists attempting to excuse his comments let us not forget that in Israel the law is too stike ones enemies first.

The Iranian nuclear threat is uppermost in the minds of many Israelis and Jews around the world who care for their coreligionists living in Israel . However, it seems that the case for a preemptive strike against Iran has not been properly made. From a Jewish legal standpoint it is clear according to Halacha (Jewish law) one must rise first and strike a person who clearly intends to deliver one a fatal blow.

Even if that threat is only 'percieved' and not a real one. Such was the case of Israels attack in the past on Iraq. An act that was a violation of international law.

And with the ramping up of politics of fear, which is what the War on Terror really is, Israelis are getting an itchy trigger finger.

Israel’s powerful deterrent is continually being downplayed by those who insist that the Israeli state is essentially as vulnerable as the Jews of Europe were in 1939.

Of the dozens of articles and speeches which express that fear, one stands out. It is by Benny Morris, one of Israel's top historians who made his name by exploring the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. He is no right-winger (although he has moved rightward lately) which makes his words especially significant.

In an essay in the "Jerusalem Post," called "This Holocaust Will Be Different," Morris offers this prediction.

"One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

"The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases….

"With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. “

The most distressing part of Morris's analysis (or prophecy) is its utter fatalism. “America will do nothing. Iran will get the bomb. Iran will use it on Israel. Israel will be destroyed. It's all inevitable.”

But Israel may not have to go it alone as the United States has ramped up its rhetorical hysteria over Iran in preparation for a potential attack, either by it or Israel.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Like WMD the evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq is also suspect.

Evidence is still inconclusive on Iran involvement in Iraq

Bush administration officials acknowledged Friday that they had yet to compile evidence strong enough to back up publicly their claims that Iran is fomenting violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release — most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.

As far as Tehran's involvement in Iraq is concerned, Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote Wednesday that " enormous controversy" still swirls around the issue of Iranian influence.

...much of the evidence the United States cites as proof of Iranian involvement remains secret and in some cases is disputed by the Iraqi government, too. This has created an uncomfortable analogy to the period before the Iraq invasion, when secret intelligence ultimately discredited pushed the United States toward war.

With the Real Politick of Fear, evidence does not matter to Israel of the United States, the mere use of pompous rhetoric and inflamatory statements by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being used as an excuse to prepare for war with Iran by chicken hawks in both countries.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week at the Herzliya conference that Israel could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Iran – that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel. The internal assessment by the Israeli national security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate. Since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear weapons. But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of the Israeli national security officials. -antiwar

As usual what is forgotten is that the President of Iran does not run Iran, like the President of the United States runs America. He is only one voice which is controled by the Mullahs and their councils.

The Baltimore Sun, in an editorial : "Iran is hardly a monolithic, march-in-step country; everything Iranian is not evil. But that's a hard sell to make in Washington...Iran's interests, in fact, are in some ways parallel to America's. Iran would not benefit from an Iraqi collapse into total anarchy, or from a wider sectarian war. Right now, Iran and the Sunni regime of Saudi Arabia, one of America's traditional allies in the region, have been trying to mediate a settlement in Lebanon.

The fact that this whole issue arose from Irans need to develop nuclear energy, not a bomb, in order to expand its infrastructure is completely lost in the whole chicken little reaction that nuclear energy = nuclear weapon. It is a deliberate obfustication of what Iran wants, which is nuclear power contracts like Pakistan and India have, not weapons, but access to nucelar technology and uranium.

They need an alternative energy source to grow their capitalist infrastructure since their domestic reliance on gas and oil is now restricted because of export demand.

At the meeting with Secretary of the Russian Security Council Igor Ivanov in Tehran over the past weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: "Our countries could set up an OPEC-type organization on gas cooperation."

Judging from the initial response, the majority of analysts think that this proposal is rooted in politics rather than economics.

This is not the first time the idea has been put forward. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Shanghai in June 2006 to establish what he described as cooperation "in fixing gas prices, and major flows in the interests of global stability."

Indicatively, the same idea was discussed during the recent Algerian visit of Viktor Khristenko, Minister of Industry and Energy: Algeria and Qatar could join the two countries. The resources of this potential cartel are very impressive - they account for more than 30% of the world's gas production, and their aggregate proven reserves exceed 60% of the total, which is comparable to OPEC's respective share in the global oil reserves - about 68%. The would-be cartel could include other members as well.

Malaysia has warned it will drop free trade talks with the US if it is asked to scrap a multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Iran, a news report said yesterday.

US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos has urged the suspension of negotiations to forge a free trade agreement with Malaysia until it halts a US$16 billion deal to develop gas fields in southern Iran.

The proposition of war with Iran is saber rattling by Israel and America, because their very visible military failures in Lebanon and Iraq have given strength to their regional enemies, which have increased not decreased thanks to Bush's War On Terror.

Now they must strike back, at least rhetorially, ramping up the threat that they will take unilateral action. Whether that threat will come to pass is another question. But it bodes ill for any resolution to the crisis of Middle East. Chickens, home, roost.

See:

Oil the New Silk Road

US Declares Economic War On Iran

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Damn Accurate

Gee them groundhogs sure are accurate, or damn close. They predict that Spring will be in six weeks. Gosh that just so happens to be March 16.

Thus spring will be early, since it is only five days prior to the official first day of Spring March 21st the Vernal Equinox.

Shows that the pagan tradition of popular prestidigitation by pests is almost as accurate as science.

Groundhog Day or Groundhog's Day is a traditional festival celebrated in the United States and Canada on February 2. It is a cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox.



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Gay Marriage and Adoption

Diogenes Borealis, a Blogging Tory, has an excellent Libertarian, yes libertarian, post on the controversy over gay rights in Britain and Canada. In which he correctly points out the difference between public services, and publicly funded organizations and those of privately funded organizations. Gay marriage & adoption - some libertarian thoughts

Which reminded me of the Delwin Vriend affair in Alberta, where the Christian Reform Church Kings University College, fired him because he was gay. Kings College accepted public funding for students and state accreditation as a post secondary institution. Despite their claims that they were a 'private' institution,and claiming they were firing him for religious reasons.
Can't have it both ways as Diogenes points out.

And of course it should never have gone to the Supreme Court, because it was a violation of his rights, and the Alberta Government failed to represent those rights (his case was against the Government not the College), but Social Conservatives are NOT libertarians.


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