Starting with this excellent counter attack asking, “What type of leader is Stephen Harper?”

One by Cherniak.

Below the fold is one of the best anti-Con ads I have seen on YouTube, and it was made by an ordinary Canadian who just got screwed by the Conservatives. Not paid for by a party desperate for power.

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Due to complaints I adjusted the CSS so it didn’t use such fancy schmancy CSS 3.0 code and instead used ancient code, and now it works fine in Opera.

Unfortunately, it is still rendering funny in KHTML based browsers. I will likely look into that sometime after I finish my presentation and assignments and paper and everything else I need to do these days for school.

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In their attack on Dion for the old Liberal’s environmental record under Chretien and Martin they neglect to say a simple thing. See if you can tell what it is before you read the text under the video.

They neglected to point out whether they were planning on doing anything about it. At least the Liberals gave it a shot and created the Kyoto accord even though the Conservatives fought them tooth and nail every step of the way during it’s implementation. Which, while it failed, was at least an attempt to do something to reduce greenhouse gases.

Now, Harper, who is noted as ridiculing the Kyoto Accord as “a money-sucking socialist scheme and promised he would battle to defeat it.” And even gave out a party pamphlet stating:

“Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,” says the letter, signed by Harper.

“Implementing Kyoto will cripple the oil and gas industry, which is essential to the economies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia . . .

“Workers and consumers everywhere in Canada will lose. THERE ARE NO CANADIAN WINNERS UNDER THE KYOTO ACCORD.”

…

“But we can’t do it alone. It will take an army of Canadians to beat Kyoto, just as it did to beat (the) Charlottetown (constitutional accord),” he wrote.

The Conservatives did not give a darn about the environment then and made it as difficult as they possibly could for the Liberals to implement environmental policy. Now that the Liberals have a leader who is willing to implement environmental policy, and the public support to implement said policy is incredibly high, they are scared. They do not want these policies implemented, but at the same time the primary thing in Harper’s mind is getting a majority government. At all costs.

That’s why the Cons are attacking the Liberals rather than presenting a positive strategy on the environment. They do not want environmental policy to be passed and do not want to argue based on that policy. By attacking Dion rather than doing anything themselves they can avoid the obvious lie which they would be caught in.

While the Liberals were very unsuccessful with environmental policies, the Conservatives actively do not want any environmental policies implemented and upon reaching office in 2006 shut down everything they could that dealt with environmental strategy.

Re: Jack Layton’s strategy to sleep with Harper in the hope that he will get some environmental pittance out of this government. I, personally at this point, believe that it is the wrong strategy to hold for a party which commonly has the best environmental policy out of all elected parties. Not because he may not be successful, but because he will be playing directly into the Conservative’s hand with respect to putting on a facade of environmentalism… until they win the next majority. They undid most of the Liberal’s environmental strategy in a year, they would undo any NDP/Con environmental strategy in less time than that. I hope the NDP is smart enough to realize this.

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OH NOES!

A clip of Stephane Dion saying that he wants his party elected as soon as possible repeated over and over again is supposed to convince people to vote for the Conservatives? I would have thought the Cons could hire a much better smear merchant than this.

<sarcasm>I’m so glad the Cons are doing such a great job with keeping maturity in politics in Canada.</sarcasm>

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Now that the VLWC has reached 9 completely different nations, and over 150 members, 90+ from Canada. I have been trying to decide on ways to improve it. First and foremost, there should be a major website update and adjustment to improve the look and perhaps even improve the load times a bit. Secondly, I was debating adding party affiliations to the VLWC for people who wished to add them, the new design will allow for extra information about each user to show up.

Finally, I am debating making it possible for users to modify their own settings. I have avoided this for a long time because it naturally could lead to a ton of spam and garbage which I would have to sift through. However, if members believe this could lead to a better community and such feel free to let me know.

Does anyone else have other features/look/ideas to add to things regarding VLWC that should be done?

Thanks

1337hax0r

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to American-style swiftboat politics. Harper and Co. have decided that doing a blatant attack ad just when parliament starts would be a good idea. The sad thing is that they are not even really good ads. They are just attack ads, plain and simple.

It’s funny, I did not realize there was an election going on.

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So, I finally cracked and decided to update 1337hax0r to accomplish two goals; One, to use the features of wordpress more effectively (I still need to figure out how to make that sidebar look a bit less cluttered. Currently I am thinking iframes.) Two, to update the look since I have been using that old look since I worked at Niti a long long time ago. So after looking at a few designs and chatting with a few people I have come up with the current look. Note: I have more or less given up entirely on making the look backwards compatible for people who don’t upgrade their browsers or use garbage browsers, so if it looks funny to you that’s probably why.

The look works in IE and Firefox, so I am happy. I hope everyone else likes it.

There will be some minor changes done to the sidebar to make it less cluttered as soon as I can figure out a nice way to do them.

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Are you guys idiots, or have some sort of sick political death wish? Do you never want to get elected again? Perhaps having the sponsorship scandal lead to the Conservatives winning a minority parliament was not enough? Perhaps it would be smart to give the Conservatives some more golden sponsorship fodder so they can wipe out the Liberals once and for all during the next election? If you guys want any chance in hell of being elected again in this country, keep the life-time ban on each and every person indicted by the sponsorship scandal and do not let their type of scummy political behaviour back into the fold. Regardless of how you feel, if they are connected to the sponsorship scandal then keep them out of the party or basically permanently have the party smeared with the black mark of the scandal.

With the election of Dion, they finally have the opportunity to escape from that quagmire of crap that those members brought your party into. The quagmire that ensured the minority under Martin, and the recent loss of government to Harper Conservatives. A party which consistently appeals to less than about 1/3 of Canadians.

So to put it bluntly: DO NOT LET THEM BACK INTO THE PARTY, KICK THEM OUT UNCEREMONIOUSLY AND BE DONE WITH IT, ONCE AND FOR ALL. START A NEW FUTURE FOR THE LIBERALS WITH DION/KENNEDY/IGGY/RAE AND FORGET ABOUT THOSE WHO MESSED IT UP FOR YOU GUYS IN THE FIRST PLACE! KICK THEM TO THE CURB AND LEAVE THEM THERE.

That is, of course, unless the Liberal party is actively interested in never winning another election in Canada for a long time, especially in Quebec?

Bugger, it’s like the Liberals do not even want to be elected anymore. In that case they should just outright step down and let the Green and NDP take their seats.

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When I was in high school there was an okay (not great, but enjoyable) movie about a man who had evidence that a senator illegally killed another senator to advance his plans to wiretap and spy on Americans. It was pretty clear in how it showed that a government with too many powers could easily be abused by one or two members to their own illegal ends. Sure the senator in the movie claimed that what he was doing was for the good of America, and that privacy is oldhat. Yet, in the end someone was labelled as an enemy of the state, not because they actually attacked the states in any way, but because they were a threat to one government members agenda. An agenda which, as the movie tries to present it was obviously wrong.

What was the name of this movie? Enemy of the State.

Now, Hannit has taken the unique idea of an Enemy of the State, and is using it to attack political foes on the opposite side of the spectrum from himself. Which, is an interesting tact to take. However, while the people on the left side of his “Enemy of the State” background could legitimately be described as being potential militaristic threats to Americans (Regardless of whether they are right-wing or left). The ones on the right are just people Hannity disagrees with politically, and thus he feels a need to label as “Enemies of the State”. Especially, I guess, since now more centrist elements are running the show in the house and senate, and that threatens Hannity’s political stance. Oh yeah, and there is the 26% approval rating of the president as well.

What surprised me is that when he attacked this weeks enemy of the state, Sean Penn. He basically said that Sean Penn disagreed with Bush and then proceeded to attack him entirely based on ad-hominem attacks on his character. It all ended up being kinda disappointing really, like a really poor ripoff of Olbermann’s Worst Person in the World routine he does regularly.

Either way though, the point of this short post is that calling someone an Enemy of the State should not be taken lightly. Calling someone a “worst person in the world” is just an insult, to put it bluntly. Yet, claiming someone is an enemy of the state, especially if all they do is differ from you politically (and this goes to both left and right wingers equally) is inches away from totalitarianism. If you were in power, and anyone who disagreed with you was an enemy of the state, you are essentially threatening to arrest your entire opposition and throwing them in jail.

Now, hopefully Hannity will come up with a better enemy of the state next week that does not rely so entirely on ad-hominem attacks and based on the fact that the person simply disagrees with Bush. I don’t know, maybe a real enemy of the state… like one the right seems to be ignoring lately… like, I don’t know, Osama?

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