1. Driving around with a yellow decal on your car and wearing red on Fridays has no effect on the mission in Afghanistan.
2. Jack Layton understands the current situation in Afghanistan as well as does Hamid Karzai which is much better than does the current New Conservative Government of Canada under the leadership of Stephen Harper which is still not really very well at all:
KarzaiMakesAnOfferTheTalibanCanRefuse
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“The Taliban will never negotiate with the Afghan government in the presence of foreign forces,” Ahmadi told the Associated Press. “Even if Karzai gives up his presidency, it’s not possible that Mullah Omar would agree to negotiations.”
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3. Peter Mackay is a dork.

Well… what do MEN want?
All I know is, I like being respected, appreciated, wanted – for being who I am. And, unfortunately (or fortunately – depending on your point of view), many women (my age, anyway) come to that realization during marriage. I mean, many of us married whomever we were hooked up with in our late teens and early 20s and, well, women can be pretty fake about who they are at that age. It takes years of fakery practice, but we can even fake out ourselves to make those relationships last for years – certainly long enough to have children.
Until suddenly – we can’t keep up the fakey anymore and it all comes crashing down.
And really, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
Oh – and society, of course. Which brings me to my point that the real enemy of marriage is a society that encourages women to hide who they really are because society simply can’t handle the truth that women aren’t the nurturing forces of nature our own propaganda has led us to believe we are.
I mean, just look at Obama and Hillary. Obama gets to go out there and be real, while Hillary STILL has to be the woman – even though… well… c’mon. Oprah being black has nothing to do with why she isn’t running. It’s because she’s single and childless and the Mother of all Career Women.
Meanwhile, in Canada, female politicians have to act like men or they don’t get anywhere. And they aren’t anywhere, are they. We’re so afraid of women in this society that it’s still an issue in the year 2007 that women are under-represented in Parliament.
But simply increasing their numbers won’t make a difference because if women are just going to act like men, then what’s the point? And they won’t get elected if they don’t, anyway, because our society is afraid of women being themselves. Look at all the fear and loathing expressed by the Right about women choosing to not have babies, to not get married, to go after careers instead. Women doing what they actually want is seen as a massive threat to social stability – not progress – by all our pundits on the right – you know, the ones that appear daily in the MSM.
We’re still having a debate that young women aren’t a part of because they’re too busy being themselves to engage in it. It’s so beyond relevant to their lives that it really is an anachronism. Of course, they don’t read the MSM anyway, so I suppose it won’t stunt their growth any to know that all these middle-aged and beyond pundits are desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle. For reasons I cannot fathom, but – whatever.
Look at all these studies that read like warnings about women not getting married, women putting off childbirth, GIRLS DOING BETTER IN SCHOOL THAN BOYS, FERCHRISSAKES! It is the stuff of a society that is afraid of women ditching the fakery in favour of doing what they want and being themselves – instead of hooking up to complete some young fellow and playing the role of wife, then mother.
As far as I can tell, there is no real sense coming from established society that the more women are ourselves, the better society will be for it. It’s all alarm bells and red alerts that we are on the slippery slope to something bad/wrong/evil.
Really, we still aren’t very far from Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in our thinking, are we.

Well, we knew it was coming, I suppose:
AccursedInvadersVsUngratefulBastards
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Hundreds of enraged Afghans chanting “death to Canada” blocked a highway Wednesday following a raid by foreign troops that left two religious leaders dead.
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Gawd. And we can’t even say, “But it wasn’t us! It was the other foreign troops!” Or we could, but, I guess it isn’t done. Nope. We’ll just have to suck it up, carry on up the mountain pass, deliver them from evil.
Or deliver them to paradise, whatever the case may be. I notice the two dead are described as “religious leaders”, at least.
But I won’t even argue about the Afghanistan mission with its supporters anymore. The other side always gets to act all Jesus-like with this, “Forgive them, they know not what they do”, crap when we’ve lost soldiers to roadside bombs planted by whoever (I mean, they can’t ALL be Taliban – can they? Or who’s gonna take over when all the Taliban are dead?) and then all Betty Crocker-like with this, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” crap when Afghan civilians are killed in the fighting, cross-fire, house to house searches.

I’m not a supporter of euthanasia for a couple of reasons:
1. I don’t like the slippery slope idea introduced by the expression “Death with Dignity”. I think it puts just that much more pressure on all of us to “behave” right up to and including death. Take your death with dignity and shove it. I’ll squawk and ballyhoo as much as I want. Turn politely away, if you don’t want to watch me go kicking and screaming.
2. Until the countries that have groups agitating for legalized euthanasia also have legalized marijuana and mandatory publicly funded universal healthcare, forget it. They need to meet those two Sooey conditions first – before even a discussion of legalizing euthanasia can take place.
Because that’s just it, isn’t it. I mean, read this article stating there is no slippery slope to legalizing euthanasia:
NoSlipperySlope
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In Oregon, people without health insurance – in theory a far greater burden on their families – were not more likely to be helped to die.
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Sure, but I bet they were a lot more likely to die poor, too.
I mean, what the hell is a society without publicly funded universal healthcare doing arguing about assisted suicide, anyway? First things first, people. That’s how you make sure people aren’t offing themselves just because they’re sick AND poor. Geez Louise. Of course there’s a moral dilemma if you’ve got this officially legalized free for the asking doctor assisted suicide program and sick and dying people who can’t afford medical treatment.
Gawd. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
And for disabled people and their families and friends? Well, yeah. Before any talk of assisted suicide, how about we make sure people of all degrees of mobility and ability are looked after, their needs met, their pain managed AND that doctors aren’t going to any extraordinary bordering on frankensteinian methods of PROLONGING painful and degenerating lives – first – before we start talking about legalizing euthanasia – for anybody.
Tracy Latimer’s father didn’t do what he did because he was a big ol’ meanie. He killed his daughter because doctors had done nothing but prolong and intensify her suffering and he couldn’t stand it anymore. He was driven to a point of such despair that he took matters into his own hands because the system that was designed to do no harm has been so compromised that we actually have to have a public discussion about legalizing something that… well… let’s face it – it used to be that terminally ill cancer patients could count on a goodly dose of morphine to help them shuffle off this mortal coil.
Anyway, my point is, there would be no need for the discussion if the care systems we have were better and the care systems we don’t have we did. And until those systems are both improved and new (depending on where you live) I say we hold off on any discussion of legalized euthanasia.
Just in case we get it.

Apparently, Liberal MP Raymond Chan has filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission over what he calls discriminatory remarks made by a top music promoter.
Bruce Allen, who represents singers Michael Buble and Bryan Adams (Sooey fact: I don’t actually know who Michael Buble is, except that he’s Canadian and has hit the big-time) – during a daily editorial (no good EVER comes of daily editorials) said the usual bigoted things doofii say on hate radio during their daily editorials, essentially that “immigrants should stop seeking special treatment in Canada or not move here”.
Oh – and Mr. Allen, super-agent to the Canadian stars, is also on the team that will organize the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
His rant mostly focused on the usual target out West – Sikhs and Turbans – with a more up-to-date doofii-at-large inclusiveness that also tagged Muslim women and THE VEIL!!
Seriously, do you ever wonder if bigotry in Canada could be eliminated altogether if only these new-fangled religions that aren’t Christian would can the foreign-looking headgear and switch to something Her Majesty the Queen would wear on a day out meeting the mourners outside Buckingham Palace or the Masai in Africa or perhaps even on one of her anonymous excursions to the Dollar Store for cheap underwear and glow-in-the-dark candy?
Anyway, Mr. Allen led into his bit of immigrant bashing with this head’s up: “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there has been a lot of immigrant-bashing going on in recent months,” before proceeding to damn the torpedoes.
And remember – this was all on the radio. It’s not like Mr. Allen, Olympic Organizatian, went into his closet to say this stuff. He said it on the radio for all and sundry – including the alluded to much bashed immigrants – to hear and be so apprised of his gratuitous bigotry.
He went on about immigration officials refusing to admit Sikh immigrants who used only Singh as their last names “to avoid administrative mistakes,” (a policy that has already been reversed), and, of course, to attack the oh-so-done turban-wearing Mounties, etc etc (you know, because that signature dork hat is so effective in fighting crime).
But by way of updating his bigotry, he then carried on about Elections Canada allowing VEILED WOMEN!! to vote in elections, yaddayaddablahblah. (Sometimes I think if there weren’t VEILED WOMEN!! trying to vote in elections, the New Conservative Government of Canada would have to invent them to deflect attention away from its election advertising irregularities.)
But this somewhat incredible bit, given that it’s the year 2007 and it was said in Canada on the radio, is what caught my eye when I read it on my forum courtesy one of the posters there:
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“This is all very simple,” he said. “We have laws in this country. They are spelled out and they’re easy to get a hold of. If you’re immigrating to this country and you don’t like the rules that are in place then you have the right to choose not to live here.
“But it seems more and more that we are being pilloried by special interest groups that just want to make special rules for themselves. This is easy to solve: these are the rules, there’s the door. If you don’t like the rules, hit it. We don’t need you here. You have another place to go – it’s called home. See ya.”
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Okay. That, Dear Reader, is typical of the pointless bigotry that passes for political commentary on hate radio. Because, in fact, when one is Canadian, if one doesn’t like the rules, one has every right to challenge them. It’s part and parcel of being Canadian – no matter when you got here or how you arrived. That’s how women’s rights were advanced in this country – by Canadians challenging existing rules. It’s the same thing with our laws. Laws can be challenged in court – that’s how we became the democracy that we are.
Discriminatory rules and laws can be challenged and defeated and we are the better society for it.
It’s called progress.
And the very fact that someone like Bruce Allen has a voice in this country – on the radio, no less, and not to mention being on the organizing team for the 2010 Olympics when he isn’t also representing Canadian pop stars – tells me that, in fact, we DO need recent immigrants to challenge our rules and laws – or whatever word you want to use for the status quo. If we aren’t accommodating new Canadians because we have discriminatory rules and laws in place, then those rules and laws need to be canned. There simply is no place for discrimination in this country – anymore.
It was previous generations of Canadians who got the ball rolling and it’s not up to Bruce Allen or anyone other Canadian to stop it just because he already has all his rights now, thank you very much.
We evolve. It’s what we do best.
The 2007 fact is, Canadians cannot have one system for people already here and another system for all the people who will come here. Democracy and the right to freedom from discrimination are for everybody, not just Judeo-Christians.
So yeah, those days are over and Mr. Allen will be censured for his opinions, not because he has them, but because he splattered them all over the airwaves.