If you are a fan of politics, you’ve probably come across some of the discussions regarding the phenomena of people voting against their interests, going so far as to vote for someone who would damage their standing in the community or their livelihood in order to placate some belief that they have held since they were a child.
Nuances of stance and benefit appear to be lost on some folks who will vote for some political ideology regardless of the outcome. Lois Lane, a military brat and wife of the world’s most famous republican probably voted for Lex Luthor (even though he has sworn Blood Death oaths on her Husband, simply because of his stance on military funding (which Luthor Industries Benefits from) and lax taxes (natch).
I wonder if Superman Voted Luthor too?
All of that aside, the idea of politics in comics being more than just Hawkman and Green Arrow calling each other names isn’t exactly new, but DC has bright it front and center with “DC Universe: Decisions” which is kind of poorly timed amongst all of the other DC crossovers going on right now. It’s not even kinda smart, it’s just Democrats and Republicans… D’oh.
I’m not really interested in a Political Drama that involves Green Arrow and Batman, because, in the end, it ascribes Real World beliefs onto characters that may not have Universal Appeal, they are somewhat apolitical, allowing the readers to place whatever labels on them that they want.
Just like the real world, I want my heroes to have secret ballots in the end.
It looks like Judd Winnick and Bill Willingham are going to take that from us.
Carney confronted Mayor Palin at a City Council hearing, and was shocked by her response.
“I braced her about it,” he said. “I told her it was against the law to make such a large expenditure without the council taking a vote. She said, ‘I’m the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.'”
“I’ll never forget it — it’s one of the few times in my life I’ve been speechless,” Carney added. “It would have been easier for her to finesse it. She had the votes on the council by then, she controlled it. But she just pushed forward. That’s Sarah. She just has no respect for rules and regulations.”
This will somehow become yet another example of Sarah Palin being a Maverick, which means stubborn and willful to the point of illegality in this case. Doesn’t it remind you of “If the President does it, it isn’t a crime”? If the people who were so enamored, but now are not so in Love with their BFF Bushie Junior, cannnot see the same arc here that was in place with Dubya, they really do need their heads examined.
The company also said today that it would create a new position – chief food safety officer – among other measures it’s taking to restore consumer confidence in its brands.
Maple Leaf Foods Announces that they didn’t have an official in charge of caring for food safety until now. –September 17, 2008.
Food safety concerns are as old as fire-baked ham. Some societies had so much trouble with food safety that they placed cultural taboos on food that was difficult to handle safely in their enviornment (I’m looking at the middle east here). In the “modern and western” world food taboos run more towards comfort than cleanliness; Westerners don’t eat “pet” animals like Dogs or Hamsters; where some societies do. The actual safety of the food is expected to be sacrosanct, that food producers would act in their own best interests to ensure food cleanliness and safety. If there is any lesson to take from the BES and Listeria crises, it is that food producers don’t really take more than a passing interest in food safety that can’t be done for cheap and that the governments don’t take it any more seriously.
If there is any evidence of the latter it is the utter lack of head rolling at Maple Leaf foods due to massive fines. People have died due to the [in]action[s] of the company and yet I have not seen a negligent homicide or manslaughter charge appear in the news headlines. No Maple Leaf Food execs in handcuffs. No real outcome save the loss of money. The Federal Governmentappears to be so far in bed with industry that they simply can’t bring themselves to prosecute their friends, for fear of looking tough on corporations. This is the standard falacy of modern governments, corporations exists to simplify relations between governments and business, instead it seems to make Governments fear to act towards the same with the same strength as they would against another individual.
During a late-August conference call with members of the Prime Minister’s Office and Health Minister Tony Clement’s office, Ritz made quips about the potential political impact of the tragic outbreak traced to a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto.
“This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts,” Ritz said.
And when told about a new death from listeriosis on Prince Edward Island, the Minister said: “Please tell me it’s (Liberal MP) Wayne Easter.”
Gerry Ritz demonstrating the level of candor one expects from the Tories
Once again Jack Layton & his Crystal ball say’s “Not the kind of change Canadians were looking for”.
Of course layton is refering to the cabinet shuffle, So once again Jack has stated that he knows what we are thinking. Unfortantly for jack he was not able to read my mind, & that is not what iam thinking of him this very moment.(One word begins with A ends with E, or is it 2)
Viewed on CanadaAm can be seen at CTV.ca
Gerry Ritz is typical of the type of Government Functionary that leads to these kinds of problems, more concerned with “sticking it” to the “lazy, welfare addicted” farmers than with actual governance. This kind of thinking is part of the cause of the current economic downturn that the whole world is experiencing and appears to be an outgrowth of the Business over Governance mentality that has become pervasive in the Conservative movement since the sixties.
However, I think that the statement that I opened with sums up the problem with poor government oversight, there wasn’t already a person or persons responsible for food safety at Maple Leaf foods and one would imagine that food safety should have been job number one for a food production plant.
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?
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.
Exciting, being a relative term. What makes me get all lathered up in anticipation may not exactly turn your dials to eleven. In this case it’s the prospect that Steven Harper gets out the Trash Talk Thesaurus and lays it on the table in front of him, looking for synonyms of pansy.
“He is certainly the Liberal leader who’s taken his party furthest to the left, at least since [former prime minister] Pierre Trudeau,” Mr. Harper said in Inuvik.
“I think this is not a time to go back to Trudeau-style economic policies,” said the Conservative Leader, who invoked Mr. Trudeau’s name three times in unfavorable comparisons with Mr. Dion. Harper uses Trudeau’s name to slam Dion
Who knew that Pierre Trudeau was an insult? Almost universally beloved and the scion of a semi-independent Canada? Nice. Celine could only hope to be so beloved. Pierre was a rock-n-roll Prime Minister if there ever was one and stood Canada out there on the International stage like the prize winning pig that it is. Let’s hope that the Liberals can front a face as audacious and raucous.
The most common definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of shrinking economic output, but Mr. Harper said this wouldn’t worry him because it would only be a “technical recession,” while Canada’s outlook is strong.
–Stephen Harper on the looming global recession.
I’m still trying to find my way here in Canada; faced with the choice of working two jobs or cutting back spending to my post-college levels to get myself back on track. There are luxuries that I simply can’t afford, like new shirts for work and gas, and I make a decent wage, well above that of some of my peers. The Job market is terrible for somone with my skill set and it only seems to get worse as time goes on. I guess the “fundamentals” are okay in the Tories eyes, profits at their friend’s businessess are up, right?
It’s startling to see how far the Canadian public is willing to let the Tory government get before they start to realize that the Cut Taxes and Spend method of Fiscal Conservatives always leads to trouble that the Liberals end up cleaning up. Taxes always climb in the wake of the Conservative misadventures (see post-Vietnam, Post-Cold-War, Post Bush America for proof) because the “Conservatives” only believe in spending and cutting taxes, not shoring up for the future. They can’t even plan a full year in advance (look at the Tories previous push for “set” election dates and their current push for a fall election, a full year early).
The Canadian government strongly opposed tougher U.S. rules to prevent listeria and lobbied the United States to accept Canada’s more lenient standards, internal documents reveal.
Briefing notes prepared by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for an April 7, 2006, meeting with the board of directors of the Canadian Meat Council outline how both industry and the Canadian government were frustrated with the increased precautions the United States was demanding.
Specifically, Canada opposed daily inspection visits and the testing of finished products for Listeria monocytogenes.
For your notes at home, The Harper Tories took over in February 6 2006.
What's that? Is Dennis Kucinich gonna have to Pocket Constitution on you?
After his firey speech at the DNC in August 2008, Dennis Kucinich has regained some of the stature that his supporters felt he deserved; he’s the *real* liberal left wing of the Democrats, but he is also something else. Dennis Kucinich is a Bad-ass Mutha-‘Effer.
3. He’s a Sexy Mutha-‘Effer
She loves him for his mind. That’s what you keep telling yourself. It’s because of his liberal policies and strong political opinions. His stance on Women’s rights and Abortion are what attracted her, sure. It was the fact that he’s smoother than airgel and harder than steel that keeps the ladies on him. Kucinich has the prowess of John Holmes and the Mind of a Savant. Even Dolomite can’t hang in Kucinich’s ‘hood.
Special Note: His Pimp Juice is a nice tea. His love engine runs on righteousness and awesome.
2. Aliens Fear and Revere Him
Aliens for Dennis
“The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him,” she wrote. “It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn’t comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind.”
Shirley MacLaine
What Miss MacLaine wasn’t aware of is that for those 10 minutes, Dennis was transported invisibly into the ship and taken to the home planet of those Aliens. They wanted to study the Man, (they had seen his wife on news broadcasts and wanted to study the man in person). The only problem being that while Dennis isn’t violent, he is fully capable of whipping some grey ass when the need is there. After hours of ongoing psychic combat and a series of acrobatic and violent fist fights, Dennis Subdued the leader of the Greys and convinced them that he wasn’t going to take over their planet in a violent coup, instead he left them a copy of the consitution and asked politely to be taken back to earth. 9 minutes and 30 seconds after they appeared, the aliens left Dennis on Earth in approximately 14.3 years the denizens of a future earth will see the new constellation “Dennis Kucinich” in the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri, home of the nearest inhabited planet it takes 10 years to build new stars you know.
1. Dennis Kucinich had a Mafia Hit on him, and the Mafia had to abandon it.
Is this man about to put a Hit on Someone?
During his tenure as Mayor of Cleveland, the Mafia put a hit out on “The Boy Mayor” (Dennis was 31). The official story is that Dennis was in hospital the day the hit was planned and so it was called off, the truth is something a great deal darker; and the reason Dennis refuses to ever pick up a gun again. The fact of the matter is that Dennis Kucinich is the inspiration for “The Killer” and “The Punisher”
That fateful Columbus Day, the major crime families in Cleveland suffered under the twin pistols of “El Morte Diabalous” the horribly misspelled “Death Devil” who stalked the streets of Cleveland, murdering the evil drug pushing, murdering, leg-breakers that he found. All totaled Dennis sent 25 men to their maker and spent the rest of the day in hospital for burns on his hands. Dennis vowed from that day forth to hone his mind into a weapon so that he would never kill another person, with a gun.
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.
US Politics are Sexy: So Wrong that 'nuts will love her
Published by NiteMayr on September 18, 2008Carney confronted Mayor Palin at a City Council hearing, and was shocked by her response.
“I braced her about it,” he said. “I told her it was against the law to make such a large expenditure without the council taking a vote. She said, ‘I’m the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.'”
“I’ll never forget it — it’s one of the few times in my life I’ve been speechless,” Carney added. “It would have been easier for her to finesse it. She had the votes on the council by then, she controlled it. But she just pushed forward. That’s Sarah. She just has no respect for rules and regulations.”
Sarah Palin’s Wasteful Ways
This will somehow become yet another example of Sarah Palin being a Maverick, which means stubborn and willful to the point of illegality in this case. Doesn’t it remind you of “If the President does it, it isn’t a crime”? If the people who were so enamored, but now are not so in Love with their BFF Bushie Junior, cannnot see the same arc here that was in place with Dubya, they really do need their heads examined.