Weekly Highlights from our Conservative Overlords

Weekly Highlights from our Conservative Overlords

Monday, November 26, 2012

Hooray for Wal-Mart! And Exclamation Marks - Week 82 - Nov 19-26

Let's start the week by revisiting the 1%.  The Wal-Mart heirs - 6 people - have the equivalent wealth of the bottom 41% of America - Roughly 49 Million Households!  As well, somebody has compiled an interesting theorem.  Wal-Mart is essentially subsidized to the tune of 2.7 Billion per year due to government support of its ill-paid workers.

Here's a fantastic article about Gary Bettman.  It contains this fantastic analogy - Imagine your neighbor knocking down his house, then rebuilding it from scratch as his family lived in a hotel. You had to listen to the construction guys hammering, sawing and banging for a solid year. Finally the house goes up, the family moves back in … and seven years later, suddenly they're knocking the house down again. You ask the neighbor what happened and he says, "Yeah, sorry about that — we screwed up when we rebuilt the house, had too many flaws, we needed to do it over again."  Fantastic

An interesting defence has been raised by the Conservatives over robo-calls.  They're now claiming that everything is fine because there's no direct evidence that anybody was actually deceived by their misleading calls.  Goodness.  Basically "You can't prove that we did something.  But even if we did do it...it didn't really work, so there's no problem here."

And, just to prove that they aren't one trick election fraud ponies, a bunch of people in Quebec have shown up on the Conservative donors list.  The problem?  They claim then never made a donation.  And, I love this...to defend themselves, the Conservatives have produced cheques from some of the individuals who claim they didn't donate.  Except, the values of the cheques they've produced don't necessarily correspond with the values claimed!

Doesn't this whole system seem a little arbitrary?  So, a person deemed not responsible for a murder based on reasons of mental defect has their case analyzed once per year to see if they are healthy enough to be released.  That will now become once every three years...Why is there a timeline on this in the first place?  Shouldn't this be based on whether or not a person is "cured" and the opinion of medically trained individuals?  I know it sounds a bit crazy when you say something like "these people stand a chance of getting out every year."  But another way to look at it, maybe, is "once a year we take a look at their case to see if they've made enough progress to be released."  It feels like locking mentally ill killers up for longer is a cheap target.

Ummm...Call me crazy, but I don't exactly see anything terribly wrong with what David McGuinty says here about MP's "Going Back to Alberta".  Okay, for a backbench MP, yes, they do represent their riding and should be able to take a regional point of view.  But the government as a whole is supposed to represent the country, right?  Is it not reasonable to question the government on whether or not it has the entire countries interests in mind?

The Conservative candidate the Calgary center by-election skipped out on a debate.  This prompted a pretty amazing comment from the NDP candidate in the riding - "We don’t see them between elections. In fact, we don’t even see them during elections either".  Sadly, only 200 people were there to hear it.


What exactly does this bozo Brazeau do and how did he get appointed to the Senate?  It looks like he may falsely be claiming a Senate housing allowance.

This would only be better if it had been Bain Capital that had done the buyout.  It looks like Hostess had been subject to a past Romneyesque takeover that resulted in huge amounts of debt that ate away at profits.  The unions already rolled their salaries back once, several years ago.  One guys wages had gone from 48,000 per year, down to $34,000 and under the new proposal would be $25,000.  Yikes.  The executives?  Yep.  Bonuses and pay raises.

Justin Trudeau thinks that we should let China buy our companies because the USA is dieing and trade with Asia is our salvation.  Oh brother.  That's okay though.  Once the Chinese FIPA is in place, we probably won't even be able to decide this on our own.

This article says - Federal health minister Leona Aglukkaq (I think I may have spelled this wrong) says she is compelled by law — specifically, Canada’s Food and Drugs Act — not to withhold approval for a drug that is otherwise considered safe and effective for its intended use.  There are just so many holes in this argument.  First up, the only thing that we need to consider when approving drugs is whether or not it is safe for its intended use?  Even if there's drugs out there that do the same thing with a lower chance of addiction, we still have to approve it because it's "safe for its intended use"?  And what about marijuana then?  It could probably be argued that marijuana would be safe for a whole number of medical uses.  Why has it been a crazy political shitstorm to make any sort of progress with medical marijuana if the government is so against politicizing drug approval?

Sigh.  This is a story about how the average global temperature - i.e. the temperature of the entire planet, taken as a whole - has been higher than average for the last 332 months.  I will admit that there is some information missing here and it's not particularly well written.  What exactly is the average temperature that we're comparing this too?  Over what time period was that taken? (of course, you could click through the link and see that the temperatures have been taken since 1880)  But read through the comments and you realize what sort of battle we're up against.  There's one guy saying that of course it's rising, it always rises between ice ages.  And another guy that points out that Australia has experienced many cooler than average months so this is bogus.  Hey fuckface!  He didn't say that every point on the entire planet experienced higher than average temperatures!  He said that the earth as a whole did!  Anyhow.  There's numerous excuses for ignoring science, I guess.

Here's a good round-up of US Election stories from Slate.

Did Vic Toews actually do something productive and not step in it for once?

Time to go out and buy!  It only takes 42% of your pre-tax income to own that house of your dreams.  Bargain!

Why won't Harper attend a Premiere's meeting?

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