murraysovereign

Except that right after the follow up ends, the next election campaign starts. The initial stages of "XX vs YY in 2012" will begin some time in February or March.

How about calling up your new poster boy Stephen Harper, and asking him about some of his pledges? Start with his position on taxing income trusts; then maybe see how he feels about prime ministers playing manipulative games with election timing rather than, say, setting fixed dates for elections and sticking to them? Ask him how he feels about prime ministers offering high profile opposition MPs inducements to cross the floor - in exchange for cabinet posts, particularly. He feels really strongly about that one, or at least he did, for a short time. In fact, your new poster boy is a two-faced, lying hypocrite who never met a principle he wouldn't discard in a heartbeat in favour of blatant expediency. But then, two-faced, lying hypocrites will always get a free pass from you, as long as their biographies identify them as "conservative" two-faced, lying hypocrites, won't they?

Sooner. Probably much sooner. Both the reasons you cite are also good reasons for Harper to call a snap election while the Liberals are still broke and rudderless, in order to finally claim his coveted majority. So watch for an election call within a few days or weeks of a Liberal leadership convention (assuming Dion doesn't survive the leadership review, which must occur within the next year). Harper has no interest in allowing the Liberal party to regroup to the point where they can challenge him at the polls. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he called an election for before the convention.

Congratulations? Really? A minority government derived from less than 40% of the popular vote, against virtually non-existent opposition, in an election that saw the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history is all it takes to earn Fairweather's congratulations? Wow, that guy's easy to impress.

No, unfortunately, they're ours. Maybe so, but I wouldn't worry too much. I mean, it's not like they'd be allowed to vote or anything, right?

You kind of mangled his metaphor. I heard his intro this morning, and what The Enright said was something to the effect that reading War and Peace is the literary equivalent of climbing Everest. Maybe later in the program he picked up that metaphor and ran with it a bit further, and it might not have made sense if you'd missed the intro. We now return to regular programming...

http://mattsteinglass.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/vietnam-war-killed-38-million-vietnamese-not-21-million/ if you mean vietnam the u.s. lost approximately 58,000. check out how many vietnam lost. i'd say the u.s. kicked their ass. Yeah, as English is apparently not your first language, we have these things called tenses. Present tense means it's happening right now. Over 1 million Vietnamese died during Vietnam; the vast majority of them were unarmed civilians. It's pretty easy to kick the ass of a rice farmer when he's got a spade and you've got a B 52 full of 500 pound bombs. Hardly something to celebrate; it was a human tragedy on both sides. And we lost. Completely. Totally. Unambiguously. The North Vietnamese were Saigon as our last choppers were leaving, as you may recall (or not). The country is still under the very same government they established shortly after we were gone. Okay so even if we call that "majority" a bizarre number like 3 million (total guess), that still leaves 800 thousand soldiers versus 58,000. I'm giving that majority the benefit of the doubt. You're confusing "killing more people" with "winning the war". They're not the same. Vietnam is a shining example of this: the US killed far, far more Vietnamese than were lost in US casualties. But did the US "win" the Vietnam War in any meaningful sense of the word? I would say not. The US bailed out of Vietnam when it became clear that the war was, in fact, lost. The Viet Cong had over-run Saigon, and the last remnants of the American presence were flow out of the embassy compound by helicopter as the VC were taking control of the city. But the US "won" the war because they killed more people? Really?

The habits are "nasty', sure, but it's the prohibition that makes those habits so lucrative for the gangs and the drug lords and the terrorist organisations. If recreational drugs were legalised, their use wouldn't necessarily go down, but the criminal activities associated with their use would almost certainly plummet.

One important qualitative difference: the Russian missiles in Cuba (and the corresponding US missiles in Turkey) were offensive weapons, designed to attack targets in the United States and Russia, respectively. The batteries proposed for Poland are defensive, intended to intercept incoming missiles rather than to initiate an attack on Russia or anywhere else. Offensive weapons based in a neighbouring country are justifiable cause for concern, as they leave you vulnerable to attack. Defensive weapons based in a neighbouring country are cause for concern mainly to the extend that they reduce your ability to attack your neighbour.

That's just the currency that's gone down, not the whole country. Americans generally haven't paid much attention to exchange rates and such until recently because you didn't really have to. But you're now learning something that the rest of the world has known about for a long time - currencies fluctuate in value relative to one another. They do it a lot, all the time. Sometimes they go up; sometimes they go down. Sometimes they're going up against some currencies and down against other currencies at the same time. It's what all currencies do, and your currency has, in fact, been doing it all along - you just never noticed before because there was no reason to notice. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. The US dollar will eventually recover, as will the US economy. All you're experiencing right now is a normal economic fluctuation. The economy isn't collapsing, and your country isn't "going down." Things may still get worse before they get better, but they will get better. So cheer up now, and avoid the rush.

BC Highways just announced the road will be opening this evening @ 11 PM. Expect delays initially - probably single lane traffic at first.

They're saying 5 days now - so let's make Monday "Clear Hwy 99 Day" instead. And in the meantime, Squamish Tug is running a ferry service between Squamish and Horseshoe Bay, $40 each way. It should be pretty quiet around here this weekend - the boat ride might be worth it.

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004)

"Mission Accomplished"

Well, let's see... ...doesn't sound to me like anything other than a "don't buy gas on xx/yy/zz" campaign. Nothing in there at all about actually using less gas that day - just don't buy any that day. When I realized I had a drinking problem, I dealt with it by quitting drinking. If I'd decided to deal with it by not buying booze on certain days, I'd still be pissing my life away on a bar stool somewhere, stopping just long enough to fill the fridge to make sure I didn't run out on my "don't buy booze" day. And as for all those secondary sales other than gasoline, they're called "secondary sales" for a reason. People don't go to gas stations to buy milk and cookies - they go there to buy gas. Once they're there, they might also buy milk and cookies, but if they're not stopping to buy gas, you can bet the milk and cookie sales will be pretty slow too. Now, if you wanted to start a "don't burn gas on xx/yy/zz" campaign, then maybe I'd be more supportive, but simply not buying gas on any particular day is just distracting people from what's really necessary to effect meaningful change. Fundamentally, it's encouraging people to persist in their belief that high gas prices are someone else's fault, and that if they could just force someone else to change their ways everything would be better.

These "don't buy gas on xx/yy/zz" campaigns are not just utterly useless; they would actually be counter-productive if they ever worked the way their advocates imagine. Think about it - a nation-wide boycott is announced for June 29th and, miracle of miracles, everyone complies. No gasoline is sold for the entire day. So what? The day before the boycott everyone filled up to make sure they didn't run out on boycott day. And the day after everyone fills up again to replace the gas they burned driving around on boycott day. So what's happened to the gas station? Nothing, really. The staff had one really boring day standing around an empty station, rearranging the winshield fluid display seven or eight times, maybe even cleaning the washrooms. But over the course of three or four days, total sales would be exactly the same as they were over any other three or four day period, for the blindingly simple reason that everyone continued to burn just as much gas as they ever do. Way to stick it to the man. But wait, you say - what if we do it again? Then the oil companies will know we're serious. We'll break their will, by God. We'll keep repeating these boycott days until we bring the bastards to their knees! So another boycott day is announced, this time for, let's say... August 17th. As a gasoline retailer, I can now expect to do zero sales on that day. So what am I going to do? I'm going to close for the day, and tell my staff to stay home. I myself will probably plan to spend the day fishing or golfing or just hangin' at home playing with the kids. I know my total sales for the week will still be the same as they would have been, so I'm not worried. In fact, I'm coming out ahead, because my labour costs are going to be 1/7th lower this week due to the boycott day. So my net profit for the week will be higher by the amount of the labour cost savings. Way to stick it to the man! And who actually gets hurt? Well, the employees of the gas station, that's who. They lose out on a day's work, which means their income for the week will be reduced by 20% - ouch. Way to stick it to the man! And in the end, gasoline prices will stay exactly where they are, because overall demand stays exactly where it is. If people were serious about putting pressure on the oil companies to reduce prices, they'd leave their cars in their driveways one full day each week. That would reduce gasoline consumption by 14%, and gasoline prices would soon start to come down. But - and here's the rub - you'd have to continue leaving the car in the driveway one full day each week even after prices dropped. As soon as you resume driving everywhere every day, gasoline consumption will go back up to previous levels, and so will prices. In other words: if you want to spend less money on gas, it's simple - use less of it.

Personally, I don't feel that having to spend the rest of your life living in Canada is a terribly serious "consequence". Having to stay in some malaria-infested central-American swamp, or the Sahara Desert, Paris - fine, those might be "serious consequences". But these current guys are in, what, Toronto? C'mon. But even if you do feel that's serious, you don't get to pick and choose. If you desert - which is exactly what we're talking about here - you don't get to pick your consequences. And Canada is under no obligation to allow you to stay. Part of your consequences is not that you might "have to" stay in Toronto but rather, that you might not be allowed to stay. You might, in fact, be shipped back home to face the music. Those are the consequences, not some self-imposed exile in a country of your choosing.

I don't have much sympathy for this current batch of AWOLs. Conscientious objection is one thing, draft dodging even, but volunteering for service and then fleeing the country to avoid that service? That's just lame. You knew the rules, you broke the rules, you go home and face the music. People like to describe this sort of thing as civil disobedience, but that's dishonest. True civil disobedience entails a willingness to accept the consequences of your actions - tear gas, police beatings, jail, even execution in extreme cases - but this kid just ran from his obligations and now wants to be sheltered from the consequences of running away.

According to the June 6 trail report from BC Parks, the trail is snow-covered from the 6km point (Taylor Meadows Junction, just beyond the Barrier). Expect the Taylor campsites and Panorama Ridge to be well covered, with the possible exception of some south-facing stuff. For reference, they report 2m of snow at Elfin Lakes, which is at a similar elevation to Taylor Meadows, and Panorama Ridge is a few hundred meters higher than that. Due to our prolonged winter and cool spring, the alpine hiking/camping/backpacking areas are still pretty well buried just about everywhere, I would bet.

I'd suggest a bigger hammer.

How come it's dated July 5? Did Dan Rather write it?

How long will it be before Hillary demands they be seated at the Convention?

Not the same report I cited earlier, but it includes some of the same data regarding vehicle use

There have been a number of transportation studies done for this area, and the commuter rail option always comes up. The two problems are topography and population. There's waayy too much topography, and waayy too little population. The cost of upgrading the line between Squamish and Lonsdale Quay to enable anything like a competitive trip time would be far too high to justify based on the numbers of likely users. And if you don't do the upgrades, it takes far too long to get to North Van, so everyone would just continue driving. And then there's the whole Cheakamus Canyon stretch north of here if you want to run passenger service through to Whistler and beyond - that's got some of the highest maintenance costs per kilometre of the entire BCR line, and upgrades to allow faster trains would be prohibitive. So as long as you're OK with cruising slowly along at "excursion" speed, go ahead and take the train, but don't expect a lot of people to get out of their cars to join you. Now, a fast passenger ferry between Squamish and, say, Canada Place, on the other hand...

Actually, we're not quite there yet. Gas in Squamish is currently around $1.28/litre, or about $5.25/USgallon, and that's only happened very recently - like within the last month or so, so I wouldn't expect it to have transformed our lifestyles just yet. But the early effects are showing - sales of trucks and RVs are hurting badly, and smaller cars and/or hybrids are becoming the vehicles of choice. People are in fact starting to drive less: I saw a report this morning excerpted from a US DOT study that showed Americans' vehicle use has been down each month since Novemeber(?) compared to the same months previous year, a decline that hasn't been recorded since the 70s. There haven't been any seismic shifts in peoples' lifestyles yet, but we may be approaching a tipping point. There was a discussion on CBC Radio last week that I was unable to listen to all of, but the basic question was "at what point do we start to see demand destruction as gasoline gets more expensive?" I think they were talking about $1.50/litre as being an important psychological barrier. That roughly equates to the $6-$7 / gallon that's being discussed for US consumers.