Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte of Montreal defended seven religious orders implicated in a child abuse scandal involving Catholic-run institutions in Quebec.
“I wholeheartedly defend the devoted religious women who gave 40 to 50 years of their lives working in the institutions. They shouldn’t have to make apologies,” the cardinal said in mid-February.
He spoke after about 150 former residents of the institutions demanded public apologies from the government, religious orders and the medical profession and compensation for lives they say were ruined by a system that falsely labeled them mentally ill.
And more:
The Catholic church and the religious orders that ran the institutions have never agreed to discuss the issue with orphan groups, and has remained reluctant to comment. After several requests for an interview over more than a week, a spokesman for Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, the archbishop of Montreal, said she could not find anyone who was available.
This was from back before he got his promotion, probably for his amazing closing of ranks around the church. The Church has been complicit in a number of serious crimes in Canadian History, population control for the greater good has never been one of them.
I guess what we should be saying is “Oh Wow, he gave back his Order of Canada I think he’s just trying to maintain the herd on principle.”
If the “Near Dead Heat” election in the US can teach Non-Tory politicians anything, it’s that the facts don’t really matter to the electorate. Anyone with a bit of sense can look at John McCain and say “cor, he looks old and he sounds a whole hell of a lot like Pres. Bush, I hate that guy!”
Let me elucidate, I know at least one HARD CORE Bush lover, by hard core, I mean he chose his friends using Love of Bush as a measure. He HATED John McCain until about 2007, when he suddenly gave up on his Bush Bro-mance and took on McCainiacism. The justification being that he finally noticed how awesome John McCain was.
John McCain has always been John McCain, he’s only more OBVIOUSLY John McCain these days and that seems to translate into “Totally Awesome” in the mind of many of the electorate. I do suspect that there is a good 15-20 percent “I’m not voting for a black guy” thing going on, which may have jumped to 25% after Palin was disgorged from the womb of Alaska, but a race this close doesn’t really make any sense.
Pres. Bush is polling somewhere in Reformed Child Molestor range; McCain is pretty much the Daddy of the party that birthed Bush, why do people believe that “more of the same” is really “change”? Because the McCain camp simply says it is so. Whatever the McCain camp says, they say it over and over and never waver, true or not.
That is the lesson the Non-Tory parties need to take; go hard, go again, and again and again. Keep it simple like “Free Health Care and Education” and “Even Lower Taxes” and so on.
Don’t bother with nuance or long term care, the majority of the electorate doesn’t look anywhere beyond Christmas in planning, why should the Election be about the future when all that matters to the electorate is how they are going to feed and clothe themselves next week.
TORONTO — Deere & Co., the world’s largest maker of farm machinery, is blaming the strong loonie for the decision to close its factory in Welland, Ont., costing the Ontario economy 800 manufacturing jobs.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, the fate of the loonie seems to mirror the political futures of the Liberal Politicians of the day; when the Loonie/Liberal is doing well, it is to blame for the decision to destroy lives (look for it to be the liberals fault that American lives were lost in Iraq and Canadian lives were lost in Afghanistan). So; when the Loonie is strong, obviously it is smarter to pull the jobs from the newly empowered Canadain workers and put them in the hands of people with lesser purchasing power; oblivious to the fact that workers with greater purchasing power (and their neighbours) can toss more money into your coffers through actual purchase of goods an services, not to mention the ancilary tax breaks that come from doing business in an affluent area (due in no small part to your proximity as a business and employer)
Communities reward longtime employers with services and perks, recognizing the value their proximity brings (when I worked for Symantec I got breaks on all sorts of stuff just for being an employee, like free transit and so on). However, corporations, like any other hardcore capatalist, looks only at short term benefits and pull out of communities for whatever reason is in vogue; thus the fortunes of the Loonie has “doomed” a few businesses in Canada.
This is of course the time when the Government should re-invest it’s increasing purchasing power in the nationalisation of industries that do not depend upon foreign investment, or if dependant upon foreign purchases, are based upon resources or services unavailable in client nations. Like Oil.
So too are the fortunes of the Liberals, when plants close during the reign of the Liberals, it’s the Liberal politicians fault, but during the reign of the Tories, it’s the Loonies fault. It may be implict that the Tories are at heart the guiding force behind the economy; but the average reader of a newspaper may not make that connection.
I’m not sure any of you people actually know what Ron Paul espouses. He wants to do away with the Fed, the Faa, the department of education, fema, etc… He’s the Grover Norquist candidate…. not the freedom candidate.
Pro-Life Republican all the way, doesn’t really support individual except in the “Get it done yourself” kind of support. Anti-stem cell research, Anti-Social Security, Pro-Bush Tax Cuts.
It seems the only thing Ron Paul breaks with the Republican Party as whole on is the Iraq War and Capital Punishment, given the rest of his stances, I think that may have more to do with Costs than anything else.
It should be clear (by reading his platform) that Ron Paul doesn’t support individual freedom, he supports “Individual Enterprise”, which isn’t really about freedom, it’s about competing with everyone else all the time. That’s not “society”, that’s “business” and society isn’t business. This becomes especially important to note when we are talking about health care, where he espouses that individuals should negotiate with the HMOs (etc) on their own.
Have you ever tried to negotiate with a large corporation who has a monopoly in your area? How do you negotiate when the HMO that services your are is one of two or three that don’t REALLY compete. The Government has moved to allow more competition between HMOs in the US, have health care costs really gone down?
What about self-regulating airports?
How about private police forces?
Toll roads everywhere!
The business of government is to maintain civil society by service and protection, some people have forgotten this; especially the politicians themselves. It seems that people have bought the line that the government is a business, subject to shareholder dividends in the form of actual cash and not services. So, Ron Paul supporter, are you a supporter of Freedom or a supporter of Individual Enteprise?
The US economy is tanking; there is no doubt about it. So why is the Canadian Dollar losing value against the greenback?
At 8:05 a.m. EDT, the Canadian unit was at C$1.0767 to the U.S. dollar, or 92.88 U.S. cents, down from C$1.0686 to the U.S. dollar, or 93.58 U.S. cents, at Tuesday’s close.
Crazy!
The Loonie
Compare that to this:
A Zogby poll on 20 August put Barack Obama five points behind his Republican rival, reversing the seven-point lead the pollster had given him the month before.
Senator McCain 71, now leads Senator Obama by a 46 per cent to 41 per cent margin, according to a latest poll released by Zogby International on Wednesday.
The Canadian Economy is far from faltering (but tottering on the edge) with Canada being a major exporter of Oil and other natural resources. One wonders if perhaps the Tories have not done enough to nationalize the value of said resources? As nominal conservatives; the idea must seem anathema to their ethos of spend and cut instead of tax and spend. Then there is the whole idea of Canada getting involved in the US’s War on Terriers. Canada isn’t a target for international terrorism, it’s hardly even a splash damage candidate, why get involved at all until the shooting is over and Canadian peacekeepers can “keep the peace”
Yet, here we are. Canadians and Americans seem determined to vote in another series of Conservatives, and the eagerness of the timing of Harper’s (broken promise) election is eerily like a coordinated plan to make a solid bloc of Conservative governments in the West (the UK is heading for a Tory victory too) with the Russians getting poked with a sharp stick like they are, we are looking like a return to the Thatcher and Reagan era.
Are people really this stupid?
Obama is no savior, he’s barely (at least rhetorically) a left winger; he’s about 2 degrees from McCain rhetorically; but McCain is the servant of some very sinister paymasters, whereas Obama is more of a stooge for Capatalists.
Wondrously dangerous times indeed.
Look at this dispatch from America; and doubt that the conservative political machine has gone out of control:
The Richland County (S.C.) Sheriff’s Department has acquired an armored personnel carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun for its Special Response Team.
Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named “The Peacemaker,” would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.
“We don’t look at this as a killing machine,” Lott told the paper. “It’s going to keep the peace. We hope the fact that we have this is going to save lives. When something like this rolls up, it’s time to give up.”
The Peacemaker has a top speed of 30 mph.
You see the reasoning there; we have a giant gun and a tank and we are going to use them. This is military hardware in the hands of the police as a response to the “out of control” levels of resistance they are experiencing. Which is of course a fallacy; I haven’t seen a single report of anti-tank weapons used in police firefights (please correct me if I am wrong).
This is the country that is not going to elect Obama, not because he is black (which is probably why 25-35 percent of them won’t), not because he is a Democrat (25 percent of Americans still think Pres. Bush is doing a great job, they will vote for McCain if he eats a Jewish baby on stage, it’s best to just ignore them) the majority of the remaining 40-50 percent are scared. They are scared of the future and think that the rhetoric of the people who have scared them for the past 8 years will come to pass and they will vote a nearly straight Republcian ticket and get the government they deserve.
The same is true for the Canadian dollar, the dollar is a strong alternative to the Greenback, but as Canada is tied so closely to the fate of the American Endeavor (through the strong economic and social ties that have been formed) The loony falls on the whims of the US rhetoric, which is as changeable as the wind and rooted in fear, not hope.
People went looking for a confrontation. They found one and now they want to whine about it. There are designated areas where to protest and where to set up your cameras and do your journalistic duties. It’s all planned out and well orchestrated well before the event. Protest in the designated areas and you’ll be fine [note:emphasis added]. It looks like this person was not in the area and went looking for trouble to get on camera.
Her cries of “please don’t arrest me” before she was cuffed is pure bad acting. This doesn’t impress me much and I don’t weep for her.
Or they were just picked on by the vast Republican conspiracy. You decide.
This is either a great troll or terribly misguided commentary from metafilter (the place for this kind of commentary, even the trolls are literate.)
I’ve covered my theory of how to protest in a previous post, so revisiting my discussions on Freedom Fences and Open Sharing Gulags might be an exercise in futility. I’m collecting the videos of the protests and police action from the RNC 2008, in hopes that I can turn it into something worth posting, not that I’m not proud of my squirrel videos, but I want to make a statement other than “I like rodents”.
As for the protests, I agree that there is a certain amount of “I bet you can’t hit me!” going on among the protesters, I saw a fair bit of it in the videos. That does not change the equation here, the police are in riot gear and firing “bombs” at the protesters, who are at worst throwing rocks and Molotov Cocktails at them (something I haven’t seen on video but will concede appears to be something that may be going on). Does that mean that the “peaceful” protesters should accept being corralled into some sort of designated indignation area? Hell No! They should be allowed to get right up next to the people they are protesting, it seems to me that authoritarians are fine with protests that they support getting right in the face of the people, but not those that they disagree with.
This disparity of standards allows for such things as free speech zones to flourish. The Entire western world is a free speech zone, simple as that. There is no (reasonable) country in the western world that does not enshrine free speech as a right for the people, along with freedom of assembly and freedom of association. These are cornerstones of a free society and the curtailing of these goes a long way to a strong authoritarian and repressive regime taking hold in a society. It’s the responsibility of the people to stand against this repression of speech, even if you don’t agree with said speech.
It may even be possible that President Medvedev wrote these on his own:
A heavy decision weighed on my shoulders. Taking into account the freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples, and based on the principles of the United Nations charter and other documents of international law, I signed a decree on the Russian Federation’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I sincerely hope that the Georgian people, to whom we feel historic friendship and sympathy, will one day have leaders they deserve, who care about their country and who develop mutually respectful relations with all the peoples in the Caucasus. Russia is ready to support the achievement of such a goal.
The western media is full of “New Cold War” talk over the rapidly escalating level of rhetoric between Russia and Nato. Which is a shame, I hate to credit Ronald Reagan with anything, but even he could see the value in an end to the ongoing MAD games that were going on between Russia/USSR and the USA/Nato. Here we are at the end of another 8 year reign of a Conservative and the world is in Flames, almost literally. The incurious and aggressive politics of the Bush administration have led the world right back towards a possible return to ongoing (and very real) fears of a nuclear war (of some form) in our lifetime. Something I had hoped had died in the middle of the Clinton Administration. The madmen of the past, it seems, given the reigns cannot help themselves.
The US election continues to turn on a wheel that maddens me and confuses me all at once. Faced with a choice between a young black guy who (for all intents and purposes) represents little change from the status quo and an Old White Guy who represents more of the same, they choose more of the same. The reasons behind this are fairly clear (crazy as they are) and not the least of which is “Invisible Men”
The folks I’ve posted here are nice people, and I’ve held them up for some ridicule, but only because of their motivations, not their goals. Their goals (though I disagree with them) appear moral on their face: “Saving Babies.”
Cute Baby
Who can honestly argue that babies shouldn’t be saved, babies are so cute, right? They come from their mom and need all the care and comfort in the world just to survive and represent the hope for the future, right?
So there we have the sensible and secular motivation to save babies, they are cute, they have potential and represent the ongoing future of humanity.
That is almost never the face presented by the anti-abortion folks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one protest that used that kind of sane reasoning it’s always the same: “Abortion is Murder, Let’s Pray”
The folks at the DNC are no different. Wrapping yourself in a selpuchure and walking out to say that this or that is moral or immoral because this book written by mushroom addicts in the early centuries says so is kind of crazy. They want to be a political force (and they are) but they want to do so by imposing their belief structure on the world as a whole. They believe that they are moral and upright and that their morals and uprightness are how the reat of us should behave. It’s that imposition that annoys the same about the behavior of extremely liberal people, the extremely liberal or lassiez-faire types would allow everyone to behave as they may (within reason) and of course let anarchy reign (in the markets, etc). Both ends of the spectrum, both axioms of ethos, life.
As we (in the north) watch the elections in the south; we should remember these folks, and how often they team up to do their “best” to impose their beliefs on all of us.
Cambodians are beatnig rising food prices the old fashioned way, choosingalternativefood sources.
As inflation pushes the price of beef beyond the reach of the poor, increased demand for rat meat has pushed up rodent prices. A kilogram of rat meat now costs 5,000 riel (69p) compared with 1,200 riel last year. Spicy field rat dishes with garlic are increasingly on the menu as beef costs 20,000 riel a kilo.
I think that some of our more bizarre foodstuffs must have come from such famines of choice, can you imagine how humans ended up eating crab over cat (at least Europeans)? Lobster seems like an odd choice over, say, rabbit. The spice mentioned in the article must cover up any gamey residue in the meat. If you raise them on the right foods, I bet it could be somewhat tasty, especially after a few generations of selective breeding to breed out the aggression and breed in plumpness.
“What is a car pool?” he asked organizers, who enlightened him. “Oh, that’s good. I’m never alone in my car.”
—Stephan Dion, stumped by the concept. This IS 2008, the concept has been around for about 40 years. Where has Celine been living all this time?
As I’ve said before Celine Dion is going to drag the Liberal party down in the next election; when he ‘blasts’ the Tories for cutting arts funding he says this:
“He (Harper) seems to not understand that we need to be stimulating those programs. We must encourage different arts and culture,” Dion told reporters at the We Are Many (WAM) festival in Diefenbaker Park. “The link between culture and the environment is the way of the future. We are entering a knowledge economy based on innovation and artists are those who bring the creativity and creation.”
Please, someone, get him a few Bill Hicks tapes or Bill Connolly or something, anything. Teach him to breathe fire, get angry, dig deep and find righteous indignation! Celine Dion is pretty much a dead weight and until someone can smack him around and make him into a firebrand for Liberal values, he’s going to lead the Party into irrelevance.
The Prime Minister’s Office has signalled that Canadians will likely be going to the polls this fall unless Liberal Leader Stephane Dion agrees in the next couple of weeks to support the Conservative government’s agenda
Bishop Returns Order of Canada – Keeps on Supporting Child Abuse
Published by NiteMayr on September 11, 2008From 1999:
Canadian cardinal defends seven accused orders
And more:
This was from back before he got his promotion, probably for his amazing closing of ranks around the church. The Church has been complicit in a number of serious crimes in Canadian History, population control for the greater good has never been one of them.
I guess what we should be saying is “Oh Wow, he gave back his Order of Canada I think he’s just trying to maintain the herd on principle.”