Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Real Nuclear Threat In The Middle East

No not Iran.

Not Iraq, no WMD found there.

Not the feuding nuclear power states of India and Pakastan.

Not even Israel, who denies they have the bomb but threatens to use it if attacked.

Not even France.

Nope its none other than the Good Ol'
United Snakes Of America. (as Firesign Theatre would say).



Well who did you expect?

They are the largest Rogue State in the world with WMD.



Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction Seal

Foreign Policy Briefing

The Rogue State Doctrine and National Missile Defense

by Ivan Eland and Daniel Lee

Ivan Eland is director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. Daniel Lee was a research assistant at the Cato Institute.



A Firesign Chat
10/16/2003

Father Corona: That's Reich Marshall Von Rumsfeld to you, Mr. Head!
klokwkdog: such
Mudhead: Herr head to you
Father Corona: Herrod?
klokwkdog: if it wasn't for him, the President of the United States would be named Shickelgruber. Wait a minute...
Mudhead: No my rod is much larger than the Fathers
Father Corona: The President of the United Snakes is named Shcickelgruber!
klokwkdog: it's not the length, it's the quality of the counterpoise!
Mudhead: The govenor is named schwarznegger, not Schicklegrubber
Father Corona: Mein Fuhrer I can walk!
klokwkdog: what you probably meant to say is, "The President of the United Snakes is named Shickelgruber!"

WMD
WMD
WMD

Say it three times and click the heels of your red shoes together and we won't be in Kansas any longer Toto.




My favorite WMD is a real threat to the United Snakes of Amerika.
World Movement for Democracy



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Saturday, February 11, 2006

American Fairy Tale

Linda Kimball is a right wing fundamentalist christian columnist

Kimball writes for Christian News in Maine which is published by these nutbars.
ACP,
The Church for the American Christian
who is a Patriot Pro-Christ, Pro-Life, Pro-Constitution.
34 Duck Pond Road
Harrison, Maine, USA
040440

It's a good thing Linda Kimball begins this column with the classic fairy tale introdution " Once upon a time" otherwise her unsuspecting readers might think she was being factual.

Once upon a time, not too awfully long ago, America was known as the 'shining city on the hill.' America, the most radical experiment in the history of the world, was the only nation to which people oppressed and repressed by old world systems of social classes and castes could be free of the stifling bindings engendered by those man created constraints. She was a Judao-Christian nation where the God of the bible, and not an elite ruling class, was sovereign over all. America was the land of hope, promise and opportunity, where not only all men were equal before God's eyes, but where all human life from conception to natural death, was gifted by God with intrinsic worth.Because our Founders believed in the existence of a transcendent sovereign Creator, they declared that belief in the Declaration of Independence where it is written that our rights are endowed to us from our Creator and thus are inalienable, which means not from man. Under the aegis of the Judao-Christian worldview, Americans were able to work towards a civilization of excellence and virtue wherein natural families and their children could grow and thrive in safety and security. America was also a civilization where individual liberty could be maximized to the fullest in the absence of strangling webs of manmade laws since followers of Judao-Christianity were guided by the Golden Rule and voluntarily exercised self-control over destructive impulses for the common good of all.

Wow what America was this?

It never existed except in the imagination of right wing fundamentalists like Kimball.


The founding fathers were Freemasons and Deist's. They did not espouse or believe in a Christian God but in Natures God, a deist ideal. They believed in a historical Jesus not the Son of God.

Christianity...(has become) the most perverted system that ever shone on man. ...Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.
The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

Thomas Jefferson

In his, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" [1787-1788], John Adams wrote:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

". . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

As I wrote here in December: Secular Democracy

Since its founding in 1776 America has defined in practice the meaning of Democracy, it equates with Secularism. Anti-Theist (though a Quaker and Deist himself) Thomas Paine espoused the belief that the revolutionary nature of Democracy was two fold a recognition of the Rights of Man, and the seperation of Church and State. Paine was there urging on the American Revolution, then a hop skip jump to France to promote his Rights of Man during the French Revolution, and then back home to Britain to promote his ideals of democracy.

In fact Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the new testament removing all the mythology about Jesus, and it ended up being as radical as the current Jesus Project which tries to find the real historical Jesus in the bible. A project which is absolutely abhorrent to evangelical literalists.

The character of Jefferson's religion is one of the most interesting aspects of his intriguing life. Certain evangelicals, who were also his political opponents, tried very hard to make Jefferson's religion a factor in elections. They filled the press with scurrilous attacks on his "deistical" beliefs. He made it his steadfast policy never to respond to any of these attacks or, indeed, to make any public statement at all concerning his faith. Ironically, in spite of the attacks, evangelicals flocked to support Jefferson because they favored the end of tax support for established churches—which meant freedom for their independent churches—as passionately as did he. Today religious conservatives portray Jefferson as a sympathetic figure, unaware of his religious beliefs, his understanding of religious freedom or his criticisms of evangelical religiosity.

These facts about Jefferson's religion are known. He was raised as an Anglican and always maintained some affiliation with the Anglican Church. He was also known to contribute financially, in fair proportion, to every denomination in his town. While a student at William and Mary College, he began to read the Scottish moral philosophers and other authors who had made themselves students of church history. These scholars opened the door for Jefferson's informed criticism of prevailing religious institutions and beliefs. But it was the world renowned English Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley, who had the most profound impact on his thought. According to Priestley's Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782, and many other of his books, the teachings of Jesus and his human character were obscured and obfuscated in the early Christian centuries. As the Church Fathers adapted Christianity to Mediterranean-primarily Greek-forms of thought, they contrived doctrines altogether foreign to Biblical thought, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. Jefferson assumed that a thoroughly reformed Christian faith, true to Jesus' teaching, would be purged of all Greek influence and doctrinal absurdity.


The White House, Washington, D.C. 1804.

Thomas Jefferson was frustrated. It was not the burdens of office that bothered him. It was his Bible.

Jefferson was convinced that the authentic words of Jesus written in the New Testament had been contaminated. Early Christians, overly eager to make their religion appealing to the pagans, had obscured the words of Jesus with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Plato. These "Platonists" had thoroughly muddled Jesus' original message. Jefferson assured his friend and rival, John Adams, that the authentic words of Jesus were still there. The task, as he put it, was one of


abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.

Who was the Jesus that Jefferson found? He was not the familiar figure of the New Testament. In Jefferson's Bible, there is no account of the beginning and the end of the Gospel story. There is no story of the annunciation, the virgin birth or the appearance of the angels to the shepherds. The resurrection is not even mentioned.

Jefferson discovered a Jesus who was a great Teacher of Common Sense. His message was the morality of absolute love and service. Its authenticity was not dependent upon the dogma of the Trinity or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely inspired by God. Jefferson saw Jesus as


a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, (and an) enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.

In short, Mr. Jefferson's Jesus, modeled on the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson himself.


Jesus Without The Miracles

Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas

ERIK REECE / Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1867 1dec2005


Jefferson's tombstone at Monticello does not remind visitors that the deceased was once president of the United States. Rather it states that Jefferson authored the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. So it was fitting that in 1904 the Government Printing Office published 5,000 handsome, leather-bound copies of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time, one hundred years after Jefferson pasted it together.

To read the Gospel story—the "good news"—through Jefferson's lens is instructive in a number of ways, the least of which is its representation of Jesus' "life." Many New Testament scholars agree that the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are pure myth. And no one has solved the mystery of the "missing years"—the two decades between when Jesus supposedly taught in the temple as a precocious child and when he came ambling along the Jordan river, asking to be baptized by the fiery zealot, John the Baptist. From then until his execution a few years later, Jesus' life was a combination of walking, eating with followers and social outcasts, preaching, fishing a little, telling stories that no one seemed to understand, and offering largely unsolicited diatribes against the powers that be. That is to say, the life of Jesus—if unconventional—was nevertheless ordinary enough. Thousands of homeless men and women do pretty much the same thing every day in this country. But to find the historic Jesus within the fabulous accounts of the four Gospel writers is indeed an exercise of looking for diamonds in the compost heap.

Jefferson's gospel could not solve that problem. Nor did it need to. The life of this itinerant preacher was much less important to Jefferson than what he taught. Somebody, after all, spoke the Sermon on the Mount, or on the plain, or wherever it was spoken, and somebody told fascinating parables that explained nothing and left everything up to "he who has ears." What's more, Jefferson's objection to the version of Christianity taught in American churches was precisely that it did put so much more emphasis on Jesus' life and, consequently, his sacrificial death. By excising the Resurrection and Jesus' claims to divinity from his private gospel, Jefferson portrayed an ordinary man with an extraordinary, though improbable, message.


But Jefferson's gospel also leads to an impressive clarification of what those teachings are. One can make a list, and it need not be long.

  • Be just; justice comes from virtue, which comes from the heart.
  • Treat people the way we want them to treat us.
  • Always work for peaceful resolutions, even to the point of returning violence with compassion.
  • Consider valuable the things that have no material value.
  • Do not judge others.
  • Do not bear grudges.
  • Be modest and unpretentious.
  • Give out of true generosity, not because we expect to be repaid. In all of his teachings, the Jesus that Jefferson recovers has one overarching themetheworld's values are all upside down in relation to the kingdom of God. Material riches do not constitute real wealth; those whom we think of as the most powerful, the first in the nation-state, are actually the last in the kingdom of God; being true to one's self is more important than being loyal to one's family; the Sabbath is for men, men are not for the Sabbath; those who think they know the most are the most ignorant; the natural economy followed by birds and lilies is superior to the economy based on Caesar's coinage or bankers who charge interest.

Above all, this Jesus cannot abide hypocrites. He has nothing but contempt for men who would kill a woman because of adultery when they themselves have thought about cheating on their wives, or for temple officials who tithe mint and cumin but would do nothing to help a poor woman with a child. "Stop talking about righteousness," this Jesus is saying, "and be righteous." It sounds simple. But of course nothing could be more difficult, as Jefferson's own life illustrates.

In his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Jefferson urged readers to resist the factory life of large European cities and stay on the land. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," Jefferson wrote in the famous chapter called "Manufactures." Farmers intuit the laws of God within the laws of nature, and so become virtuous, he reasoned. They are, by the nature of their work, resourceful, neighborly, independent. They are the elemental caretakers of the world. Nor do they succumb to the crude opinions of the masses. But the farmer is free-thinking and inquisitive. The manufacturer, by contrast, is a specialist, a cog, a wage slave. "Dependence," Jefferson concluded, "begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." A manufacturer cannot be a citizen of a democracy, only a consumer within an oligarchy.

Four years later, Hamilton submitted to Congress his Report on Manufactures, in which he dismissed Jefferson's agrarian vision in favor of developing industry, division of labor, child labor, protective tariffs, and prohibitions on many imported manufactured goods. Today, fewer than 1 percent of Americans work on farms, and many of those are huge, industrial farms that generate massive amounts of toxic by-products. That Jefferson's self-reliant farmer is so unrecognizable to us today is evidence enough, should we need any, that we have inherited Hamilton's America, not Jefferson's.

The difference between Jefferson and Hamilton is the difference between a version of Christianity based on Jesus' life and death and Resurrection, and one based on his teachings. Or to put it another way, it is a difference between where one locates basileia tou theou—the kingdom of God. Is it, as Luke's gospel says, "in the midst of you" (17:21), or is it, as John's gospel claimed, a reward saved for the sweet hereafter? To live by Jesus' teachings would be to live virtuously as stewards of the land; it would be to create an economy based on compassion, cooperation, and conservation; it would be to preserve the Creation as the kingdom of God. Jefferson was proposing a country of countrysides, a pastorale in which we would want to live; Hamilton was giving us a nation of factories from i which we would want—perhaps in the end need—to be saved.


The People’s Bible Goes to Washington
Thomas Jefferson’s edited version of the New Testament again makes its way into the hands of members of Congress.



Now Linda Kimbal would have us believe that this deism is of course the very historical anti-christ itself. If that is the case then her America is the Anti-Christ not the New Jerusalem.

our Creator had endowed all human beings with a natural right to life, secular militant atheists have taken away that right and very predictably, replaced it with the "right to die." Dostoevsky predicted this would occur when he said, "If God is dead, then all things are permissible." Nietzsche concurred by saying, "[…] God is dead…the heroic individualist is no longer bound to a traditional slave morality, but is creating his own."

Nietzschean secular humanists, socialists, and militant atheists who call themselves 'free thinkers' are shaping our culture and politics, and what they are determined to create is an atheistic America. By definition, free thinkers are people who reject authority and religion in favor of what they refer to as "rational inquiry and speculation based upon science." But they have elevated science to a philosophy and what they call reason is nothing but the constantly changing fickle whims that arise from unbounded self-idolization, selfish desires, and wishful thinking. In this way, as in so many other ways, free thinkers have not risen one inch above their ancient pagan ancestors. The free thinkers sitting on America's Supreme Court have made highhanded rulings based on world law rather than on American law, provide a good example of capricious decision making sans fixed moral ethics.

Publishers note: This is a must read for Christian Homeschooled Children.


Wow militant athiests, socialists and individualists all wrapped up in one. And these Freethinking Athiest Socialists are all sitting on the Bush Reagan Supreme Court. Give your head a shake. This is the kind of thinking that is taught in home schooling America is truly in trouble, and not just failing grade point average. America is going backwards to embrace its small thinking nativist agrarian past. Which is another myth.

The very beast of the biblical revelations that these biblical literalists and evangelicals believe in resides not in Israel or the Middle East, or the Vatican or Russia but in Washington itself. The very home of the freethinking anti-establishment of its day way back when the first Constiutional Congress drafted the American Deist Constitution. A constitution which was the model for many revolutionary movements constitutionz including France and Vietnam.

All of Kimballs complaints about America, are the same as those created as a foil in the 19th Century for the Evangelical Second Great Revival, the Anti-Masonic hysteria and the Knownothing party.

All of this coincided with the crisis in America that Jefferson and Hamilton had predicted in their debate over manufacturer versus farmer,the transformation of America from an agrarian nation into a manufacturing society. From small capitlaist farmers to large scale industrial capitalisn.

These movements occured between 1830-1868 as America went from small scale Artisan production to large scale manufacturing. The death of the small scale native American homecrafts and their replacement with large scale production and factories, with its immigrant and imported labour, situated as it was on the East Coast, led to reactionary movements against the new urban civilization. The Civil War destroyed all that remained of the Jeffersonian agrarian artisan America.


Today the same crisis is upon America as production is destroyed, jobs lost or sent offshore, the new nativist American movement comes from its working class that has embraced evangelism as it once embraced trade unionism. And today the right wing which embraces free trade embraces the very ideology of Hamiltons manufacturers while clinging to the Jeffesonian ideals of small scale agrarian capitalism. That is the real contradiction in the American psyche not Kimballs free-thinking indiviudalist socialism.

And the Republican party in its modern incarnation as the political voice of this Great Revival with its links to Moral Majority and its right wing evangelicals shares more in common with the Knownothings than they do with the great Whig party of Lincoln.

What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt
by James Straub

It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic?

“In twenty-one years of organizing, I’ve never seen anything like this,” former trucker’s union organizer Phil Burress told the New York Times shortly after the election. “It’s a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour wind behind it.” Burress was speaking not of the efforts of unions and community organizations to register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in Ohio to vote against Bush, but of his crusade to mobilize even larger numbers to pass a state constitution amendment prohibiting gay marriage.

The demographics and causes of Bush’s slim victory in Ohio and the country continue to be debated—for instance, while 25 percent of Ohio voters identified themselves as white evangelicals (and 78 percent of them voted for Bush), the Washington Post’s number-crunching later revealed that the percentage of frequent church-goers voting in Ohio actually declined 5 percent in 2004—and Congressman John Conyers has documented evidence of electoral fraud that indicates Ohio my have been this election’s secret Florida. However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A large majority of these Republican evangelicals were blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest, many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage amendment.








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Ted Menzies Demoted

In the dead of the night, with the stroke of a web editor Ted Menzies has been quietly removed from being the unilingal, Enlish only speaking , parlimentary secretary for Le Francphonie, Duh Oh. Because of the outrage over such a blatantly clueless move by Harper.

MP must know how to speak: Godin
CBC New Brunswick, Canada - 10 Feb 2006
An Alberta MP who doesn't speak French has been named parliamentary secretary to the minister for la Francophonie. Ted Menzies will ...
New parliamentary secretary to Francophonie can't speak French
CBC News, Canada - 10 Feb 2006
Francophone groups and opposition MPs are raising concerns about an appointment within Stephen Harper's government after learning the parliametary secretary ...
New parliamentary secretary to Francophonie can't speak French
Vive Le Canada, Canada - 3 hours ago
Francophone groups and opposition MPs are raising concerns about an appointment in Stephen Harper's government after learning the parliametary secretary for la ...
Because of the outrage over such a blatantly clueless move by Harper. Sometime between Feb. 7 and today the PMO just changes their web page as if it never happened.

Shades of the
The Stalin school of falsification! Wow just like that Menzies is no longer Le Francophonie secretary. Just like Stalin had pictures of Lenin and Trotsky together, erased.


Yes its true, here are the links to the PMO press release and the biographies for the parlimentary secretaries as published and revised, with no announcement that they had removed Menizies from his post as Le Francophonie.

Office of the Prime Minister / Cabinet du Premier ministre
Skip first menuSkip all menus

Ministry

Prime Minister announces Parliamentary Secretaries

NEWS RELEASE

February 7, 2006
Ottawa, Ontario


Ted Menzies
Macleod (Alberta)
Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Cooperation

TED MENZIES

Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Cooperation

Macleod (Alberta)

Ted Menzies was first elected to the House of Commons in 2004 and was re-elected in 2006. Most recently, he served as Critic for International Trade. Prior to this, he was the Critic for Inter-Provincial Trade, International Cooperation and the Canadian International Development Agency. Mr. Menzies was also president of the Canadian Agri-Food and Trade Alliance and vice-president of the Grain Growers of Canada. He has owned and operated a farm in Claresholm , Alberta , for over 30 years. Mr. Menzies was born in 1952 in Claresholm. He is married to Sandy and they have two children.


Unfortunately nobody bothered to inform Mr. Menzies of his demotion. So I guess he can cancel his French lessons.

Anglo MP to begin leçons
Toronto Star, Canada - 10 hours ago
OTTAWA—The Conservative government's contentious choice to help represent Canada with the francophonie says he'll get straight to work Monday morning ...

Unilingual anglo Tory says he's up to the job of representing ...
Canada.com, Canada - 23 hours ago
OTTAWA (CP) - A unilingual anglophone tasked by the Conservative government with responsibility for the francophonie says he's starting French lessons on Monday ...
A tip o the blog to Jason Cherniak for pointing this out... Ted Menzies - La Francophonie no longer?





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Medicare is Communist

So our healthcare system which allows for private mediclinics, public hospitals, specialists with direct billing and all that is paid for by a single payer system is now called communist.
Equal access health care slammed

'Fine for people living in communist countries' - fee-based service proponent

Equal access to health care is fine for communists but not Canadians, said a Calgary company pushing round-the-clock, fee-based medical services to those who can afford it.

Stephanie Ross, business manager for the Centre for Preventative Medicine said patients are demanding better service and are willing to pay for it.

"People are tired of waiting," Ross said, adding standard access to health care for everyone is "fine for people living in communist countries. But that's not the country we live in."


Yeah how dare poor people and working people demand the right to the same healthcare as the rich. Damned socialist idea.

Gee I didn't know that Canada was communist. So comrades rally round the red flag in defense of publicly funded healthcare. Cause dem anti-Bolsheviks will be making there stand for freedom in Calgary.

Have you noticed how Calgary is the home of all these right wing types who flourish this kind of red baiting rhetoric around. I know it sells papers like the Sun and the Western Standard, and makes for nifty press releases from the NCC and Fraser Institute, but it's as outdated a model T.

But it cheers the cockles of the hearts of the Party of Calgary (PC) and of course that other party of Calgary under Stephen Harper who now rule's in Ottawa. Even if it is patently ridiculous.

So here we have it, the Alberta Advantage for the advantaged, first-class access to the public system, the beginning of Ralph's Third Way if Ralph had any idea of what the Third Way means.

Those working in this scheme, known by the most stylish handles of concierge medicine and retainer-based health care, admit there are no cost savings to the public purse and no reduction of wait times since the doctors on duty work out of a private clinic.

No matter. The people with an extra $5,400 sure see the benefit. They will be the ones escaping the consequences of the provincial Tory government's decade-long mess up of the medical system. All other unfortunates can take a number at the walk-in clinic and queue up for the chance to be shuffled off after seven minutes with the M.D

"This is what waits for us in the shadows," says Brian Mason, the NDP leader who has been riding herd on this file and doesn't get enough credit for being the top performing MLA on the Opposition benches.

Mason points out Calgary is perfect for the Third Way since there is a market of people with big oilpatch bonuses who will try and bully everyone else into believing this is good for all of us. And Calgary is the city where the health-care system was screwed up the worst because the public played passive. Wealth of ideas

Also see:




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Illegal Private Hospital In Calgary

So it takes a lawyer in private practice to tell us this, Clinic contravenes Canada Health Act: lawyer While the Government of Alberta dithers. Naughty Naughty

Steven Shrybman says the Centre for Preventative Medicine violates the act by allowing people with higher incomes to jump the cue.
"Timely care, is what the Canada Health act exists to ensure everyone has access to, regardless of their ability to pay," said Shrybman. The legality of the clinic has been in dispute since it came to the public's attention following a CBC news story Wednesday.



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Private Healthcare Monopoly

Our friends on the right like to talk about the healthcare monopoly when they refer to medicare in Canada. Well here is an example of how privatized health care is not the alternative.
CHR renews contract with private clinic
The Health Resource Centre is so far the only private facility in southern Alberta licensed to do overnight surgeries, and therefore faces no competition.


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Don't Count On That GST Cut Yet

While the Conservatives plan to roll back the tax cuts the Liberals introduced before the election, they do not plan to, and cannot, implement the GST cut probably until 2007. So while you and I will get our tax cut for 2005 we may face higher taxes in 2006 without a GST cut until a year after that.

Don't expect to get those promised tax cuts right away
But there's a problem with lowering the GST rate right away.The first income tax reductions announced by the Liberals have already passed into law. The Canada Revenue Agency has sent out millions of tax forms, incorporating the changes for the 2005 tax year."Can Harper change the GST rate midway through 2006?" Finn Poschmann, associate research director for the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, asks. "It's unlikely. He may propose looking at it in 2007 instead."The delay makes sense. With the Liberals' income tax measures in place for the first year, the Conservatives may not have the revenue needed to pay for their GST promise.

Which is why the Harper government has been deliberately vague on all of its economic promises, Flaherty promises federal budget after House resumes, except of course the July 1st start for their baby bonus, which is a sop to distract us from the fact they are going to be taxing us in order to pay for their GST cut.


For a good article on how the Tax Cut Tories will become the Tax Canadians "to pay for our promises " Tories see this progressive bloggers take on it: Hey Harper, get your hands out of my pocket!




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State Controlled Day Care

William Stairs propaganda oberfuerher for the Harper Regime in Ottawa denounced State Controled Day Care, on Don Newmans Poltics the other day. WTF is State Controled day care in Canada?

Is he refering to the fact that the Liberals gave provinces funds for their daycare portfolios, which are a hodge podge of programs across Canada. Which is why Harper can offer Quebec a special deal while telling the rest of the provinces to expect funding cuts.
Harper offers Quebec 'extension' on child-care

Premiers want old child-care deals upheld

For instance Alberta has the lowest number of non-profit publicly funded daycares than any other province in Canada. We have more baba's babysitting and a huge private for profit day care industry that benefits from child tax credits.

Heather Forsyth, Alberta's minister for children's services, said she wanted to hear details, adding she had not yet heard from Harper. "We need to know his plan versus our plan," said Forsyth. "We need to know when his money is kicking in and when we're losing our money so that we can start talking to Albertans and getting them ready for the changes."

Oh thats ominous isn't it. What changes? Less spaces? Wage roll backs? Job cuts for day care workers? Who knows what impact the Harper plan will have?

When Oberfuerher Stairs denounces the mythical State controled daycare he must be refering to Israel, not Canada.

But he is not alone in creating mythical beasts to slay. Other Tory apologists in the blogosphere and columnists in the MSM also claim that the Liberal funding did not create any more daycare spaces. Well that also is a lie.


Day-care workers, parents eye future of federal funding

"If we don't have that money, we're going to have to look at what kind of cuts we can make, and that would jeopardize the quality of the programs for the kids we have in the program," she said.Many day-care centres have already received their share of this year's money, and have used the extra funds to boost pay and create more spaces. Now, the centres' managers are left wondering if they'll be able to continue to afford the pay raises and new programming. The money Winnipeg's Beaumont Day Care has received so far has paid for wage increases for staff and 15 new spaces for children. Director Jen Grove says she will refuse to cut back on wages, but she worries that other areas may suffer if the Tories don't honour the Liberal agreement. Vince Stycke, who has a child in day care, worries that it will be impossible to keep quality staff if the recent wage increases are rolled back. "As a parent, we just want to know that if we are leaving our children, that they are being looked after, and the people that are doing that are treating them well, are educated and engaged in their profession," he said. "I just don't know if that's possible if we cut back the pay."Across the province, the new federal money was expected to fund more than 3,000 new day-care spaces; hundreds of them are already in place.

Yep the Tories and their syncophants are practicing Herr Goebels Big Lie on the Day Care issue. So beware of Tories talking about State Controled Day Care. No such creature exists in Canada.

Now on the other hand State Funding for Day Care does exist. And the Tories day care plan is also State Funding for day care, just not direct funding to public non profit day care centres. Which last time I checked were not State controled and were classic liberal capitalist enterprizes for the public good.

For My Day Care Stories Go Here:

Day Care

Defend Public Day Care


Also See:

The Tories Big Lie

Two Tier Alberta


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I Am Shocked

Province taken aback by Wabamun lawsuit
Provincial officials say they're surprised the government has been named in a multi-million dollar lawsuit over a train derailment last summer in Wabamun. The Paul First Nation is suing the Alberta government, CN Rail and the federal government for the disaster, where as much as 1.3 million litres of bunker oil was spilled beside and into the lake.

Because you dolts the Environment is a Provincial jurisdiction.Now how could you forget that little fact? Hmm? Since you make sure Ottawa knows what is Alberta's jurisdictions ad nauseum.

And lets see you didn't have an emergency disaster plan in place. And when the accident occured you threw up your hands and said it wasn't your problem, until the news coverage made you look stupid.

Robert Moyles, a spokesperson for Alberta Environment, says he believes the government took the appropriate action. "Minister Guy Boutilier established the environmental protection commission immediately after the incident to determine how we could develop a better response system," he said. "They've made their recommendations and the government has accepted those."

Yeah after the fact, only when push came to shove and the Minister was embarassed did he call for a study, the Klein Reich's way of dealing with most problems is to study it to death. Like Healthcare. In this case the report said that the Minister and his department weren't prepared with an emergency plan for any kind of predictable disaster like this. Well Duh Oh.

Because despite the clear responsibility of CN for this disaster the Klein governemt didn't sue them, take them to court ion behlaf of the citizens affected or fine them.

The Alberta government conducted an investigation into the derailment, but no charges were ever laid against CN.

Because thats business as ususal in Alberta, regulations and enforcement are just so much damn red tape. And besides they get in the way of business doing business, which is why the Government is out of business.


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Storm Clouds Over The US Economy

The reliance on consumer and government debt to produce and maintain the American economy has put that nation under a veritable storm cloud of trouble. It is the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina, and like Katrina America is ignoring their debt crisis until it actually hits home.

Soaring U.S. trade deficit a cloud over robust economy

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The U.S. trade deficit soared to a record in 2005 for the fourth year in a row, according to a government report released Friday that provided a reminder of the dangers hovering over a generally robust economy.

The United States imported $725.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported last year, the Commerce Department said. That is up 17.5 percent from last year, and it is an all-time high not only in dollar terms but also as a proportion of the economy; the figure is equal to 5.8 percent of gross domestic product.

For December alone, the trade gap increased to $65.7 billion from a revised $64.7 billion the month before. That is the third highest monthly deficit ever.

In some respects, the trade deficit reflects the strength of the U.S. economy, at least relative to other major trading partners.


Ah there is always a silver lining in those economic storm clouds.......but wait till the levee breaks.


Because U.S. economic growth has been rapid in recent years, U.S. consumers are snapping up foreign goods of all kinds — autos, electronics and clothing being some of the biggest categories.

At the same time, relatively sluggish growth in economies such as the European Union and Japan has dampened demand for goods made in the United States. Thus even though U.S. exports rose 10.4 percent last year to $1.27 trillion, imports surged 12.9 percent to nearly $2 trillion.

The gap worries many economists because it means the United States must borrow heavily from overseas.

The dollars that Americans spend on imports are typically invested by foreigners in the bonds of the U.S. Treasury and mortgage agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so the more the trade deficit widens and persists the greater U.S. indebtedness becomes.

That is why some analysts fret about a scenario in which foreigners would sell off U.S. securities en masse, causing interest rates to soar and the global economy to fall into recession.

America's economy is not driven by production, hence the less than devastating economic impact of the Ford and GM layoffs and the companies pending collapse into debt, but by credit card capitalism.

As Herr Dr.Marx formulated it M-C-M (Money-Capital-Money), money is making money in the casino capitalism of the American economy, that is until those who have invested decide to cash in their chips and go home.




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