1. Well, apparently Harper is going to take any crap from Danny. I mean, yes, spending tens of thousands of dollars on those ridiculous ads certainly got Danny some attention, just like it did a few years ago. However, unlike the last time he did this:
A. The current prime minister apparently has a spine.
B. The Canadian public has heard this shtick before.
C. Nobody seems all that impressed by this racket.
D. The premier apparently has no game plan on what he wants by doing all of this.
I mean, the budget is passed, the prime minister could give a rat's ass what Williams thinks and has pretty much made it clear that the whole province could vote Liberal in the next election and he wouldn't particularly care, since he'll make up those seats by sucking up to Quebec.
So remind me what the genius strategy here is again? To get reelected by picking a fight to Ottawa? Well, that's more than passing retarded as Williams is going to win the next election. He was going to win the election back in 2003 when they beat up the Liberals.
So again, why is he doing this? I'm honestly not sure if he knows at this point. It just seems silly. And I suspect it's doing far more harm than good at this point.
2. I haven't been following the Hart murder case as closely as most people in Newfoundland have been. The verdict of guilty doesn't strike me as that surprising. And when your defence attorney's closing argument can basically be summed up as, "find my client not guilty because he's a liar." then you know you're in a world of trouble.
But here's the part I found interesting, the howling for his blood on the Globe and Mail's message board. A nice few people wanted to see him executed. I never thought of Canadians as a particularly blood-thirsty people, but reading some of those comments certainly gave me pause.
This is one of these areas where myself and Cathy actually disagree. She has no problem with the death penalty. I, on the other hand, do. And I certainly understand her reasons, that some crimes are so vicious and cruel that the people who commit them deserve to die. Hart may well be such a person (there's actually a case in Georgia right now so reprehensible that it was almost enough to change my mind. Go here if you want to learn more, but it's not for the weak of heart).
But my thing is that there has always been enough examples, just in Newfoundland alone, of the wrong person being sent to jail. And yes, there is a certain grim satisfaction of seeing someone die for their monstrous crime, but I can't imagine how it would feel to execute someone only to discover that you were wrong afterwards.
Hart will spend the rest of his life in jail. It will not be a pleasant life. That's enough for me.
3. Regular blog readers will be happy that there should be nor more curling posts until October or so. I played my final game of the season this evening, a blow-out loss in the A final. Disappointing, really. Still, it was a fun season and I had a good time.
4. This week's weigh-in sees me at 231 pounds, down one pound. Slow and steady, folks...
5 comments:
I'm with Cathy.
OM
So let me try and understand you TB.
1. Harper could care less if Danny Boy gets upset with him. He's written off the Newfoundland seats in favor of Quebec ( and Ontario ) making them up. Plus according to you Harper's got a spine.
And
2. You don't know why Danny is doing this as he is not in any imminent danger of losing electorally in Nfld and Labrador without this hullabaloo with the Feds.
In that case, can it be that he is taking on Harper and Company because it's the right thing to do? Can it be that Harper’s actions are unacceptable? That (at he very least) he misled the people of the Province and at worst lied to them on his position of excluding natural resource revenues from computation of equalization transfers?
Can it be that the Provincial Government is taking a stand because it genuinely believes it is the right thing to do?
How pathetic have we become when we are afraid to speak up because we may incur the wrath of a bully like Harper?
When I see the reaction of some in our Province to the current Federal Provincial flap I am reminded of my youth.
A person dear to me had an abusive father. A bully. A braggart. A man who regularly beat up on my friend's mother.
Strangely, when the abuse started the abused was always the one extolled to not say anything. To let it happen and things wouldn't get worse. To not say anything that would inflame the abuser even more. My friend would overlook anything to get peace in the household. Peace at any price. His mother paid a big price for that.
Well, we the children of Newfoundland and Labrador must refuse to be the abused child in this confederate marriage of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador. We must be brave and speak up even if some of our siblings who are close to the abuser and recipients of his largesse say they can't understand what it is all about and everything would be ok if we would just shut up and keep it all quiet.
Someone once said, “ if you don’t stand up for what you believe in you will fall for anything “.
Harper’s actions to me and many others are unacceptable. If it takes a few ads in the national market to make that point then I support that expenditure.
On the rest of your post today, I agree with you on the curling ( glad it’s over ) and Cathy on the issue of capital punishment.
Don't worry about losing weight slowly. Your body adjusts to your new weight better and, as they say, you keep it off longer.
It took me a long time to really understand why I was against the death penalty. Your argument that the wrong person could be killed is, of course, completely valid - but there's more than that.
Cathy is right in asserting that some people don't deserve to live after what they've done, but do we have the right to kill them? In a very poor country that can't afford a real justice system it's probably the only way, though obviously riddled with problems; without a real justice system how do you avoid mob rule/lynching type street justice? You don't. That sort of thing happens in poor countries, people get beaten to death in the street for theft.
I don't believe that I have the right to shoot a caged human being, no matter how nasty a creature that person is. When the state executes someone, that's what they're doing - on our behalf. So far, the best thing we've come up with is removing nasty creatures from the public so that they can do no further harm, it's inadequate, but so are many of our solutions.
Whenever a terrible crime is committed and the trial makes the papers there's a spike in public opinion in favour of the death penalty. I was rather pissed with the judiciary myself yesterday when I heard a man got only 3 years for raping his toddler (and giving her a serious STD). It makes you think the judges ought to be lynched. Corey and the other lawyers might know a lot more about this, but I think these sorts of judgements are the idiotic exception to the rule and in such cases the best we can hope for is an appeal with a more sensible judge.
The courts of public opinion are swayed with the horrors in the media. Exactly how many people in the US & Canada do you think are against the torture of people in Guantanamo Bay, the jails in Irag and Afghanistan? Hell, there are people Himself works with who think Maher Arar must have been deported to Syria for good reason.
What size tee shirt you want?
Simon's offhand comment is catching on.
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