Tuesday, September 04, 2007

He's not gay, he wasn't looking for sex...

...he's just so mentally incompetent that he shouldn't be allowed out of the house without legal representation!!!

If you can believe it, Senator Larry Craig is considering trying to challenge his guilty plea, and go back in time to fight his recent conviction. In Minnesota, you can challenge a plea after the fact on the grounds of either coercion (which this wasn't) or incompetence.

So, apparently, a sitting U.S. Senator may be about to argue that he should be allowed to withdraw a guilty plea because he was too incompetent to have legally pled guilty to an everyday misdemeanor several weeks after the incident (in case you thought he pled guilty right there in the airport to get out of an uncomfortable situation, he didn't; he was arrested June 11th, and pled guilty in August 1st).

I swear, the Democrats must be thanking God for this guy.

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Friday, August 31, 2007

Mark thinks we should start converting the people of Afghanistan...

I never thought a Canadian would write something like this!

Wow.

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Vote for MMP! Newspaper Editorial Edition...

Over at democraticspace.com there is a list of newspaper editorials discussing electoral reform in Ontario, and MMP specifically.

Check them out!

Oh, and...

Vote for MMP!

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The War on Drugs continues... (sigh)

Good news everyone!

Seems the WAR on Drugs (TM) is getting back on track in Canada!

I haven't seen Tony Clement in so long that I had naturally assumed that he had died. Turns out though that he's actually still Minister of Health, and he's determined to teach us all the evils of drugs!

This ought to go well.

Mr. Clement "decried the fact that, in Canada, there are nearly as many people who smoke marijuana as ones who smoke tobacco, and blamed vague, ambiguous messaging from politicians and public-health officials". So apparently, Canadians smoke pot because our politicians and public-health officials forgot to tell us not to!

It's humourous to me that Clement thinks that rates of pot-smoking are high because the anti-drug message hasn't gotten out. It seems to have never occured to him that the anti-drug message has gotten out, and that when it comes to pot, people aren't dumb enough to fall for its disingenuous arguments. It's not that Clement's message isn't out there, it's just that no one's falling for it. It also never seems to have occured to the Minister that politicians haven't been making anti-marijuana arguments because the people don't want them to make anti-marijuana arguments. In this area of public policy, the public thinks X, and the Minister thinks Y. The Minister's entitled to try to change the public's mind of course, but I sure will miss having a government that follows the will of the people on this file.

I can't believe that 35 years after the LeDain Commission people like Clement are still trying to peddle this silliness. Well, I too am concerned that "there are nearly as many people who smoke marijuana as ones who smoke tobacco" but my concern lies with the fact that there are still so many people smoking the much more harmful tobacco.

If the Health Minister wants to focus on priorities that are totally different from those of the Canadian people, that's fine. I do wish at the very least he'd choose something that's a priority to SOMEONE.

After 18 months of being AWOL, I don't want to hear from the Minister of Health that he's going to crack down on illegal drug use, with advertising. It's depressing, because it makes me think that not only does he have no idea what's going on, but that he doesn't even really CARE that he has no idea what's going on.

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