Your Political Earth

Counting up to the teens (you know …10,11,12,13…) is something most adults can do, and have done, quite well for a number of years.

Presumably, this would be of particular skill to those teaching young children to do the same.

In an Edmonton daycare which forgot a 3 year oldinside after locking up for the day, I’m imagining a scene like this:

Daycare worker: If you have 10 kids in the morning…
Child: Uh-huh…
Daycare worker: …and you have 9 at home time…
Child: Uh-huh…
Daycare worker: …how many are gone?
Child: None?
Daycare worker: Hmmm…Sounds good to me!

To be fair to the daycare, Granny hadn’t picked up the child by the daycare’s 6pm closing time. Bad Granny! She should know that custodians don’t pick up their children by closing time that they become the property of the daycare!

Edmonton Child and Family Services issued an order for the daycare to change policies and be monitored. That’s it! Might as well give’m a stern look too!

In probably the worst kept secret in the world, Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan says that Vancouver’s East Side has a serious drug problem.

Really? Who knew?

It seems that after years of herding the most addicted users into downtown Vancouver’s East Side, the mayor is now concerned about the impact that this area will have on the overall impression of Vancouver come the 2010 Olympics.

Maybe the mayor hasn’t had time in the last, oh, 40 YEARS! to drop down around that end of Vancouver and see for himself! In case he’s forgotten what most of the residents of East Hastings see, I’ve included a recent picture:

But possibly Mayor Sullivan hasn’t the inclination to see in person just what’s going on in Canada’s bowery. I understand that the Mayor’s time is probably better spent elsewhere, so to see the many fine and internationally acclaimed documentaries on the matter, just follow the links:

Five Ring Circus - The Untold Story Of The Vancouver 2010 Games

Flipping The World

Through A Blue Lens

Mayor Sullivan is certainly buying into the new “Jail’em all and let God sort them out” approach that the Federal Tories are selling. On Thursday at a news conference in Winnipeg, Stephen “Give’em Hell” Harper promoted mandatory sentences for serious drug crimes, but did not elaborate on just which or how many drug offences would fall into this catagory.

Mayor Sullivan is probably just hoping that the jail terms are at least until the end of the Olympics.

My dear readers, I feel I have short-changed you. After the lazy days of summer passed, I should have hopped right on my site and started to look at the candidates. But I did not. I probably missed the timely things they said.

But take heart! Along comes Fred Thompson and he makes it all worthwhile!

Fred has managed to do what was previously thought to be utterly impossible: he kinda makes Bush look smart. But how, my dear readers, can this be? You surely must be joking! Oh no, my friends, I could not be more serious.

After months and years, after countless inspections, thousands of pages of reports, firings, scrutiny of testimony, and the making public of international findings to the contrary, Fred Thompson tells the people of the US that it could not be more clear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“We can’t forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD…”

Huh? So Fred, the facts don’t really follow you down this road. It wasn’t really “at a particular time” that you never found WMD’s, there was actually NO particular time that anyone found WMDs.

What color is the sky in Fred’s world and why, as a late starter to the presidential race, would he possibly think this is the point to begin with? Look, there’s always spin doctors in the background that can subtley alter the point of a statement, sometimes bending it to the limit of what is believable, but Fred ain’t it.

I’ve held it in long enough. The truths I have secreted away for so long are just too much to bear by myself any longer. I have to share.

I was there 3 days before Britney Spears was wedded to Kevin “K-Fed” Federline. If you don’t already know him, he’s that “other” white rapper. We were hanging out enjoying one of her most secret pleasures, Frankie Yankovic. Yes, Britney is a closet polka addict.

Suddenly a light from the sky shone down and Brit-Brit was gone. Three days later, Brit was getting married to K-Fed . Coincidence? I think not…

It was Kevin who convinced Britney that once you go Pagan, you never go back. Deer antlers, animal sacrifice, and midnight dances around a pentagram listening to Tony Bennett Live cd’s were just the beginning. I just had to stop hanging with them when they wanted to make the centre of their worship a life size statue of Colonel Sanders hugging the Burger King.

I hear now that Britney’s converted her double-wide into a church. She was fattening up Sean Preston and Jayden James for Halloween and some devious rituals. K-Fed needed them out of there fast…so he can sacrifice them himself to Dr. Dre in hopes of a rap career, but that’s another story.

If any of the above really surprises you, you haven’t been reading the tabloids.

So back to reality, MAKE IT STOP about Britney! Her and Kevin Federline should both be up for Darwin Awards this year. She’s screwed up and he’s a loser. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Do we really have to continuously rehash it all, and then have other news “wanna-be’s” on entertainment news shows, actually pretend to analyze it all?

The real tragedy is that both the little kids might as well join DannieLynn (Anna Nicole Smith’s little girl) in the “what the hell happened to my life” club.

Tragic.

If you stick your unprotected hand into a fire, you will get burned.
If you whack your unprotected head with a hammer, it will hurt.
If you tell your wife “yes honey, that dress does make you look fat”, you’ll get killed.

There are certain absolutes in this world that just don’t need great education to understand. Case in point: if you invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, to your campus, the fallout just isn’t worth it.

No kids, the “land of the free” and the birthplace of the US First Amendment doesn’t seem to like the tenets that it was built upon. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States reads like this:

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Now, I believe that the First Amendment applies to citizens of the United States. So technically Ahmadinejad probably isn’t normally covered. At the same time, he was invited to speak at Columbia. Presumably, Columbia knew what types of things the Iranian President was going to say and state as his beliefs. I mean, Columbia has a couple or two really bright guys there. They probably have the latest newspapers and stuff, not to mention that they could always do like G-dubbya and use “the google” on “the internets”. And afterall, Bollinger is the university President, so he probably has his name on the newspaper subscription.

This entire fiasco that, after they invite Ahmadinejad to speak, has Bollinger ramping up the rhetoric and openly insulting a foreign dignitary by saying “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator”.

Mr. Bollinger: what the hell were you thinking? Who the hell do you think you are? When trying to justify why you were bringing Mr. Ahmadinejad in to the campus, you actually had the unbridled ego to say that you were going to “challenge” him on many points. But who are you to challenge him? And when you do “challenge” him, what then? Did you really think an epiphany was going to occur for Mr. Ahmadinejad and he was going to go running into the street to hug a Rabbi?

I’m sorry to seem oblivious to the obvious power Mr. Bollinger wields as the “mighty” head of an educational institution, but Ahmadinejad is the head of a country. And I’m guessing it will take just a little longer to break Iran than it would to break Columbia.

This was a disaster on so many levels. Outside of the downright silly statements made by Ahmadinejad such as there are no homosexuals in Iran or that the holocaust wasn’t really as bad as is being made out, the Iranian leader gained a forum to spin previous statements. In regard to previous statements Ahmadinejad has made about the holocaust, he was able to add that his questioning of the Holocaust was based on his concern that it was used to justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

“Granted that the Holocaust is a reality … Why is it that the Palestinian people should be displaced?” he said. “Why are they paying the damage by giving up their land?”

Ahmadinejad also said he did not agree with the way the US tries to police the world.

All Bollinger did was encourage the waaaaay right wing groups to continue their conspiracy theories about Zionism by creating a forum where protestors were from predominantly Jewish groups.

As a footnote, not everyone besides Bollinger thought this whole affair was a bad idea. Bollinger was supported by another guy with great ideas, President George Bush. “If the (Columbia) president thinks it’s a good idea to have the leader from Iran come and talk to the students as an educational experience, I guess it’s OK with me,” Bush told Fox News.

With backup like this, how can you argue?

Wow. I mean, really, wow.
Alan Greenspan, the 18 year veteran at the head of the Federal Treasury, called a spade a spade.
In his new book “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World”, Greenspan notes:

Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy.

I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.

The important thing here is that Alan Greenspan is a real person. A real person in the sense that he has nothing to gain from making comments like this except to irritate or downright anger those that kept him in the Chairman’s seat for so long.

Is the quote in his new book to encourage sales and cause some stir? Probably. But a statement like this is not just a cute bit of cheekiness to titilate the readers. This is a political statement on the aims of the administration that has been running things for close to a decade. It also doesn’t say much for the Republicans as a whole that have, for the most part until things really fell apart, supported the War in Iraq as something noble and forthright.

It is also a statement that Greenspan cannot back up on. There shouldn’t be anybody wondering what Greenspan means. This would suggest that Greenspan, who is not known to say what he cannot back-up or what he does not mean, would also be willing to press his point of view with someone willing to joust with him.

This is perhaps what will, most realistically, cause changes in the course of the GOP and their direction of the Iraq war. People with the credentials to back them up not questioning the war in Iraq but stating the dirty facts behind why the war in Iraq started and why it continues today.

The various new media using retired generals as analysts doesn’t lend much. Retired generals are like Monday-morning quarterbacks. They all seem to think they would have done things differently and in some cases better. In the press conferences with the new generals in command, does anyone think these guys are going to give up the president and say that G-dubbya is wrong?

In the harsh light of day, I, like many and in fact the majority of Americans, don’t believe what Bush is selling and the American people will have a chance to voice this disapproval very soon. At issue is whether or not the sprin-doctors will be able to sculpt a new face for the Republican party by then.

It’s not always ‘justice’ that is served by the courts. Sometimes it’s just enough to help the general public sleep at night and in some rare cases, the victim and their family can get some condolence at a punitive measure taken against a perpetrator.
We all understand that the term justice is somewhat subjective and that what I would consider justice may be different from what you consider it to be.

That said…

Peter Whitmore is a convicted pedophile. Now for anyone that is not clear, when I say ‘pedophile’, I mean that, as stated on the Duhaime Law website:

Pedophile
A person afflicted with “pedophilia”, a sexual perversion in which children are preferred as sexual partner.

Peter Whitmore has been convicted in the past of sexual acts with children.
Whitmore is currently 36 years old. His latest victims were 10 and 14. He assaulted them, abducted them, and was captured after a 10 hour standoff with police. It is unclear whether he ever presented the police with threats of harming himself or the boys when the standoff occurred, or if this was something they were concerned with in the event they stormed his position.

His convictions against other children date as far back at 1993, although in most cases, though possibly not Whitmore’s, pedophiles are seldom caught after their first assault on a child. I hope you excuse my confusion upon finding that Whitmore has never served more than a six year sentence, made more confusing when coupled with comments from officials that he has a “100% possibility of re-offending”.

Parents of victims and parents in general have expressed “outrage” at the possibility that Whitmore has, even after his latest crimes and his entire story coming to light, escaped the “dangerous offender” label by cutting a deal with the Crown.

Murray Brown, the director of Saskatchewan’s public prosecutions, when pressed about the deal, was quoted as saying:

“[I would] be hard pressed to explain to the public why I would spend the resources to pursue a dangerous offender proceeding”

Mr. Brown, if this human excrement does not deserve that label, then who, I would ask you, does? Exactly what do you see your position as being, if not to defend the public exactly by labeling this pig what he is and simply removing him from the societal equation? And what type of message does this send to the public, and for that matter other sexual predators such as Whitmore, whose belief that there is nothing wrong with his behavior, when even a multiple offender with no rehabilitation in site, can avoid such a title?

Mr. Brown seems to be equating pursuing such a designation with a waste of taxpayer money. If this indeed what Mr. Brown thinks, then I would ask him to leave his keys and his id card at the front desk and please, oh please, if not for the public then for the children, leave his position.

I simply cannot come to grips with any logic that would let Mr. Brown off the hook for possibly the biggest bungle of any public servants career. I don’t care how much money Grant Devine’s government absconded with. I don’t care if Conrad Black and his cronies stole millions of dollars; ripped off widows…I don’t care if Conrad himself cruised up and down the streets stealing false teeth from the elderly or tin cups from the blind. In both of these cases, thieves will likely spend more time behind bars than Whitmore.

They have stated that his sentence will be 7 years, but there’s a chance that he will serve longer. Longer is not the point. Forever is the point. Here, Mr. Brown, I’ll start you off with the first $10 donation in order to pay for the proceedings. It is time for the public to stand up and say what they mean and give it some teeth.

The prosecution believes their case is solid. They believe that a dangerous offender label is justified and applicable.

And after all this, Brown hides behind the victims by saying “Oh, they won’t have to testify”, as if this is a situation that will scar them worse than the assault that has already taken place.
This is yet another damning judgment on not only Mr. Brown, who by the way probably did not make this decision entirely on his own so there are more people bound for the 7th ring of hell, but on society for allowing a set of laws and guidelines to be set in place that simply value material items more than the fact or quality of human life.

Sleep well, Mr. Brown, and go to sleep knowing you have protected the public coffers and not wasted any resources. I’m sure there are tax offences that will better use your slim “resources”.

If you have never commented on any blog you have ever read on this site, comment on this one. I’ll leave it open to a 1 week window and I’d like to forward comments off to the Leader Post in Regina as well as to John Gormley. Multiple media will be necessary to pressure those who have abused the public trust. All too often, the outrage flames out too quickly. Don’t let it happen here.

The chaos in the markets caused by the ARM mortgages in the last 3-4 years was foreseeable by anyone with eyes.

Like ‘kiting cheques’, ARM mortgages essentially allowed people without the means to buy into properties that they just shouldn’t have been in. And as short-sighted as this may seem to some, as well as being a personal choice issue for the mortgagee, the sheer number of people that took up this offer is now threatening the US economy in a very public way.

To my understanding, the adjustable rate mortgages in the US worked like this: An introductory rate, usually over the first 2 -3 years, was offered by mortgage brokers to encourage house buying. After the initial couple of years, your rate was adjusted to now make up the shortfall due to the introductory rate.

The problem is, normally, unless one wins the lottery or is the benefactor of an incredible raise in pay in the workplace; people don’t find that their income increases substantially in 2-3 years. Unless you could afford the increase of the mortgage rate when it goes up after the introductory rate, to make up for the first 2 or 3 years of reduced rate, you couldn’t really afford the ARM mortgage. For example, 2 percent in an introductory rate have translated into as much as a 6% jump or 8% mortgage rate in the 3rd year.

To make things worse, ARM mortgage companies didn’t target prospective homebuyers who could afford it, they targeted those whose cash flow and ability to buy a home was marginal at best.

Yesterday, Ben Bernanke, the US Federal Reserve chairman, made comments that should chill markets for the next few months.

“Rising delinquencies and foreclosures are creating personal, economic, and social distress for many homeowners and communities—problems that will likely get worse before they get better”

Really. You sure about that, Ben?

I don’t know if anyone that has the kind of money that the people Bernanke speaks to can even fathom the chaos of personal bankruptcy or walking away from ones’ home. I find it unlikely that Bernanke is ever that close to the ground.

Losing a house is an emotional nail in your head. Uncertainty, self-doubt, stress, depression, anger, broken relationships, marital damage, not to mention the ‘real-world’ effects of losing one’s home (try and apply for a job with “no fixed address” or “back of my car” on your application).
It really speaks volumes about his position when Mr. Bernanke spouts phrases such as:

“Declines in residential construction will likely continue to weigh on economic growth over coming quarters”

Now, I’m obviously not an economist. I didn’t take it in school and I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs, even at some lay peoples level. But some fundamentals are obvious.
Increased housing builds equal increased number of jobs and decreased unemployment. The opposite then must also be true i.e. decreased number of housing builds equals a decreased number of jobs and increased unemployment.

Unemployed people often spend less than employed people (that was a joke). How many spinoffs can you name. How about this: No job leads to no money; no money leads to no house; no house leads to less spending on household items; less household expenses lead to less spending in retail; less retail spending leads to less retail employees needed to sell it to you; less employees needed equals higher unemployment…and the circle goes round and round.

I love it when people that have no chance of ever being in an impoverished position talk in lofty terms about “inflation and eroding incomes” as being “unwelcome developments”.

The tragedy in much of this is that the drop in the housing industry may not be truly felt in the unemployment numbers because much of that work is done by illegal immigrants in the US. Since these folks don’t show up on the books, nobody notices if they are unemployed. But as a workforce, they spend just as much as anyone else. Therefore, it is still one of the lowest common denominators, the retail and service sectors, who will continue to feel the brunt of weakened financial markets.

I won’t shy away from a rebuke if I’m wrong. In fact, I’ll be glad if I am. So someone prove me wrong, won’t cha?

Music videos on YouTube. Wow.

So this is the way that Hillary and Obama wish to conduct themselves as they quest to become the leaders of the free world? They see this as a good thing? A confidence builder in them that the voting public can grab on to? Well I for one am worried beyond belief if they are right.

Sure, the American people have voted in actors before. Ronald “Ronny Raygun” Reagan and Arnold “The Governator” Schwarzenegger are testament to that. But the platforms that each of these men stood on was, to their defense, built upon their views and personal charisma. Such is the nature of politics.

But the very thought that Clinton and Obama are willing to grab votes from that portion of the voting public that is so feeble-minded as to be swayed by videos-gone-viral such as Hot For Hillary and I Got A Crush…On Obama on the net brings their interest in that public to a new level of contempt.

Voter apathy? Gee, I wonder why?…

In Alberta, owning land seldom means having control of it. You can own the top, or the bottom, but seldom does it happen that you own both. And control in this case means owning the subsurface rights.

You see, under Alberta law, if you own the surface rights, you have to give the owner of the subsurface rights a means to get to the subsurface. If you don’t negotiate a price for access, the subsurface owner can simply enforce their position with a court order.

Now, most landowners I’m sure would be fine with negotiating a price for this access, especially for the methane in the drought-affected southern half of Alberta. But like many things, people lack either negotiating skills or they don’t have enough information to negotiate a fair price. So people seek advice. Advice from people like Ray Strom.

Strom spent over 20 years in the Oil and Gas Industry and saw that too many landowners were going into negotiations alone. He decided to help. Read about Ray’s fight here.

The real stakes in Alberta are not only David vs. Goliath situations such as those that Ray looks to help with, but the greater issue of who will support the land after Oil and Gas companies take what they need.

By using surface water to pump down and force methane to the surface, the ground water is contaminated and is rendered unusable. And since Alberta simply does not have an inexhaustible supply of such water, what comes next? Without water, cattle-ranching becomes a non issue. No water, no cattle. I find this pretty easy to understand.

So why don’t the oil and gas companies feel some obligation to find a solution. It would seem that they aren’t even being asked. In Alberta’s past and current zeal to get every dollar it can for oil, the short sightedness of the situation may have already started the death knell of the cattle industry in Alberta.

Outside investment from European nations fund many of the largest feedlots in Alberta. Much of the investment has historically had large yields and a high degree of certainty for high quality Alberta beef. But with many factors affecting the quality of beef, aside from the mad cow crisis, the water shortage in much of the pastureland just isn’t needed.

As much as the province of Alberta has diversified, a couple of constants still drive the economy, and agriculture and the beef industry are 2 of the 3.

Increased foreign investment is causing a crisis of conscience and in the not so far flung future may leave Alberta hollow as profits move elsewhere as markets yield shrinking profits.