A Voice for Freedom

The commission put together to investigate intelligence practices before the beginning of the war in Iraq has recently come back saying there was no evidence that intelligence information had been politically twisted or misused. But as is usual when presented with evidence that contradicts them, the lefties out there have decided that it's meaningless. Confronted with the outcome of this investigation, they point out that it was given such a schedule by the President as to report long after the election. An election that, with this outcome, it wouldn't have affected anyway. But that's not important, of course. This is how liberals have confronted the Bush administration from the beginning: gloss over the important things and dress up the stuff that doesn't matter so it looks like it does. One of the more ridiculous anti-Bush arguments I've heard: "he choked on a pretzel!" Never mind that he managed to capture Saddam Hussein, one of the most evil people alive in the world today. Never mind that he is the first person, in my knowledge, to even approach the issue of radical Social Security reform so as to avoid the collapse of the entire system. Never mind that he's done a brilliant job maintaining the defense of American soil since 9/11, introduced democratic elections in Iraq less than two years after the initial invasion, and done all that while lowering taxes at the same time. The important point is, he got a bit of pretzel lodged in his esophagus.

Please. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a liberal choke while simply talking about Bush, I'd be nearly as rich as John Kerry. The bumper stickers are right: "George W. Bush: Liberal Kryptonite". Liberals have big problems with him, and that's mostly because he makes sense. Luckily, conservatives haven't had that trouble in a while; the last Democratic president that ever made sense was JFK.

That's part of what makes liberals so much fun to mess with these days. Whatever you say to them, it goes through the left-o-filter and comes back out as rhetoric that can be smelled for miles in every direction. It's hard not to laugh in people's faces when they spout such passages as the famous "Bush is a moron because he once mispronounced a word on national TV." Never mind that he went to Yale and Harvard if he can't say "floccinaucinihilipilification" (yes, that's a word).

One might ask the question, "why do people act this way?" Why not simply accept the unavoidable and admit that Bush is a great man who is in the right place at the right time? Is it propaganda? Is it pure unbridled stupidity? Is it simply the unavoidable consequence of inbreeding between residents of the northeastern states, each generation tragically being born with an even lower average aptitude for logical thinking than the last? I, for one, believe it to be simple denial. It's Human nature not to admit when we're wrong, and the more wrong we are, the stronger that urge becomes. That's why Bush has polarized the country the way he has - it's been a long time since so many people were all so very wrong at the same time.

Last time that happened, I think it took on the title of "Glorious Proletariat Revolution".

It is a linguistic irony that "Triple-E" - the term for a senate which is Elected, Equal, and Effective, something Albertans have been after for years - sounds almost exactly like "Tripoli", the site of an 1804 war in which the territory in question was bombarded from sea five times in less than two months. Proposals for a Triple-E senate in Canada continue to take a similar beating.

In Alberta, we have a law, called the Alberta Senate Election Act, which states that only duly elected representatives may speak for our province in the Canadian Senate. In our last provincial election, we elected four candidates - three Conservatives and one independent - to fill upcoming vacancies. Three spots have recently become open, and Paul Martin has decided to appoint three liberally-slanted individuals (one, in fact, a former leader of the provincial Liberal Party) to fill them. Yet another step backwards in fulfilling his promise to end Western alienation.

Objections are threefold on these appointments. First, most importantly, the new senators have not been chosen by anyone other than our Imperious Leader. Second, they are unqualified - Elaine McCoy's shot at Alberta Progressive Conservative Party leadership failed, Grant Mitchell's Alberta Liberal Party leadership was useful to no one, and U of A professor Claudette Tardif has no political experience whatsoever. The third objection is that these three are clearly from the wrong side of the political fence to represent Canada's only conservative province - Tardif is a liberal, Mitchell was a former Liberal Party leader, and McCoy is what's known as a "Red Tory" (basically a liberal infiltrator who attempts to hijack a conservative party and turn it into the same kind of socialistmobile as the Liberal Party).

It's been suggested that McCoy, Mitchell, and Tardif should immediately resign in protest over Martin's refusal to appoint our chosen representatives. The chances they'll do that are about the same as the chances you'll be hit by a meteorite while you read this; the chances Martin would respond by doing anything other than naming three more liberal unknowns to the positions are even smaller.

Thankfully, these three have positions that are basically useless. Elected and Equal mean very little without Effective, so we can rest easy. Our interests are no less protected than they have ever been. What we really need to have happen is for Martin's budget to push him into an election. If Harper gets his time in office, we'll see the Senate change. Martin has routinely given Westerners the royal runaround (not to mention the proverbial finger) on important issues such as this. He may have promised to make our relations with the East better, but he hasn't done much on that front so far. I say we don't give him any more chances.

How would you like $200,000 (Canadian) to take yourself and four friends on a trip to Europe? Sound fun? Wait, there's more: how would you like it if all the money came from the government earmarked for the purpose of investigating brothels? Interest piqued?

Apparently, prostitution laws in Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden are absolutely fascinating to some of our Members of Parliament. Five of them want to go conduct "research" in countries where prostitution is legal. The question is why, when Paul Martin recently gave reporters a strong "no" when asked if he was considering legalizing prostitution. And Martin comes from a long line of honest Liberal Party leaders, so we can be sure he was telling the truth, right?

Since information on how European governments treat the "sex trade" is available to them without actually crossing any oceans, it's easy to assume that these MPs want to "interview" the prostitutes themselves. But to what end? Well, nobody seems to be saying. Far as I can see, other than perhaps exchanging tips on how best to sell themselves, prostitutes and Liberals have very little they can learn from each other at this point. NDP (of course) MP Libby Davies defends the, shall we say, "fact-finding mission" by giving us a bit of information about what they find interesting in each place. She says that Sweden has a "particular model" that decriminalizes prostitutes but criminalizes customers. Make an industry legal but make it illegal for them to have any customers - genius move, that one. It's worked so well with marijuana. Norway, meanwhile, has a "fully operating area for the sex trade, and I think we're very interested to see what the impact of that is from various perspectives". While I fully expect the investigative team to be looking at things from a number of angles, I doubt much will be discovered that is of a useful political nature (unless you're Bill Clinton). As for Britain, Davies says "they actually allow women to work out of their own homes." That, I guess, explains why hotels in Britain are so expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm a proud citizen of the UK (thanks to being a second-generation immigrant to Canada), but some of the laws over there are even more crazy than ours, and that's saying something.

Nobody's saying anything about why the fourth place on their agenda is Reno, Nevada. However, if a member of our crack team of investigators comes back with a mysterious ring, don't ask questions.

We don't need personal accounts of how great life is in these places - we need our government to stay home and do something worthwhile. I can think of a lot of better things to do with $200,000. The best one is probably to switch the tickets to one-way and send twice as many Liberals out of the country.

We have these bits of pond scum floating around in the world today that call themselves "single-party democracies". In other words: dictatorships where people get to throw pretty paper in a box every few years under the watchful eye of a nice man with an AK-47. China, a country in which over a sixth of the world's population lives, is one of these. North Korea is another. With President Musharraf's political bulldogging, Pakistan may as well be. Libya is basically a traditional military dictatorship. So are Burma (or "Myanmar", as they now style themselves in an effort to confuse us all) and the Sudan. Now, could we please stop to notice that this list matches up nearly exactly with the list of countries on even the United Nations' radar when it comes to Human rights development? Not to mention economic troubles, shorter life expectancies...basically, it's the list of countries you don't want to inherit a summer home in.

My point? These dictatorships and dictatorships-in-all-but-name are the countries that would rule the world if the liberals had their way. They're the ones that control the United Nations General Assembly, simply because there are more of them out there than real democracies. That's the same General Assembly, by the way, that put Libya in charge of Human rights a few years ago. Libya's record on such things is something akin to the success record of Da Vinci's flying machines. The United Nations did nothing about the Nazis; they stood by and watched during Stalin's purges; they demanded the cessation of hostile activity against Hussein. They always have been, and always will be, skewed against the interests of any nation that wishes to destroy demons such as these, and any nation that wishes to really do something about the people who deny Human beings their basic rights. What that naturally means is that we as a nation need a serious ambassador in the United Nations - someone who will stand up for America and prevent the morally bankrupt majority from steamrolling right over us.

Which brings us to John Bolton. He's up for the position of new US ambassador to the United Nations. A letter bearing the signatures of 59 former diplomats has shown up urging that he not be given this position. They cite, first of all, his record of opposing arms control. I'm fuzzy on whether "arms control" as they mean it is governmental or personal in nature; in other words, do they want him to promote leaving the country itself defenseless, or are they mad because he supports the second ammendment? Either way, I don't have a problem with the guy. They also say they have a problem with Bolton's "insistence that the UN is valuable only when it directly serves the United States." Excuse me, but this just in: that's what treaties are for! Some people act like the United Nations is the governing body of the world. One moment please, while I think of Kofi Annan in charge of the planet and go have an anaphylactic reaction. The United Nations is a treaty organization, and just like any other treaty organization, it was put into place in order to serve the best interests of its members. It was not formed from the top down; like the United States, it was formed by a group of regions that believed banding together could be to their mutual benefit. If Texas decides it's finally going to cast off its pretences and be the independent nation it may as well already be, America (by the original agreement which brought Texas into the Union) has to let them go. If Quebec decides that Canada is no longer in its best interest, they can go - heck, we'll even pack 'em a bag lunch and throw them a going-away party while we're tearing the French signs out of all our airports. By the same thinking, if the United Nations is no longer in the best interest of one of its members, that member doesn't have any obligation to listen to them or to remain a part of the organization. However, by putting someone who knows all that into the position of being our ambassador to the UN, we just might see something finally coming out of the whole finagle.

America needs strong representation in the UN, not a wishy-washy Kerryite who'll just sit in the Assembly and listen to what any old dictatorial government's whackjob of a mouthpiece tells him. I'm not saying it has to be Bolton, but I have to say that if a man who, back in the day, actually took the job of ambassador to both France and the Soviet Union is against giving him the position, then I'm definitely for it.

Apparently Paul Moron and his Liberal Party cronies are attempting to remove the key word "toxic" from certain legislation about taxes on chemical emissions. This would allow them to tax people for producing greenhouse gases (which are not considered "toxic"), such as carbon dioxide. Hitch one, people: breathing produces carbon dioxide. As if doing your taxes wasn't tough enough, you will now need to keep record of your breaths-per-year rate and multiply it by a coefficient based on your wealth, home region, number of dependents, and hat size, and then take all that, square it, double that, take the cube-root to the power of three, and then throw all that out and add three hundred dollars to your taxes owed. And of course, since the Liberals themselves can claim their breathing as a necessity for government business (even though we'd much rather they all stopped), they naturally can take that tax out of their expense accounts. It's the perfect system.

The other side of this, of course - and the one more people are worried about - is that if this new rule (hidden somewhere in an obscure part of the new budget, by the way) passes, the government will be able to tax any industry producing greenhouse gases. So let's count off just a few of the industries that directly contribute to the production of greenhouse gases:

-Education
-Healthcare
-Recycling
-Food production
-Transportation
-Law enforcement

Any of those sound necessary to you? But then, government-controlled industries will be exempted, you can be sure, which in Canada leaves us with basically nothing left, save the important industry of snow-cone production. And, of course, the evil businessmen of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy [insert ominous sound effect here], namely Albertan owners of companies in the areas of oil, gas, coal, and anything else that actually keeps the entire house of cards from falling to the ground (power and fuel - kind of important).

The way I figure it, it's all a big plot on the part of the Liberals to destroy their only real source of trouble. Alberta will be by far the hardest hit by this thinly veiled attempt to fulfill our "obligations" under the Kyoto Scam...ahem, I mean, "Accord". When Alberta's economy collapses, the already precarious situation in the provincial farming industry will become disastrous. The resulting famine will cause a massive out-migration to other provinces, where former Albertans will be gradually integrated into the brain-stapled socialist majority. "Russification" was what they called it back in the day.

There is one shining glimmer of hope at the end of this constantly-narrowing tunnel, though. The NDP are looking like they might not back the Liberals on their budget. The Conservatives definitely won't. And the Quebequois? Please. Since when do they cooperate with anyone? The point is, Martin's minority government might be called to a vote of no confidence over this. I've always been a firm advocate of abolishing that practice, since I find it a scary idea that a Canadian government can only be removed when it isn't able to do whatever it wants. However, in this case, I've got to say I'm liking how that particular rule might be put into effect. I just hope the Conservatives are ready, because this fight might be the big one.

Take 'em down, Harper.

Paul Martin on a ranch...that I'd pay good money to see. I believe it's what's known as a "sideshow". The President probably just invited him down there to see what would happen. It seems to be going pretty well so far, though – a few kind words, a pair of custom-made cowboy boots (hopefully sans spurs; see Preston Manning's column on the subject), and a really expensive salad bowl (probably made from softwood lumber) have been exchanged. Notably absent from the exchange have been words such as "moron", as well as anything useful. The only source I've been able to find on what they're going to be talking about down there says it's all about trade. NAFTA and the like. Now, don't get me wrong; as an Albertan in Wyoming, I'm glad things like NAFTA are in place. "In place" is the key phrase there, though; some things aren't. Like missile defense maybe.

That's what Bush should be concentrating on with Martin the whole time they're there. Maybe a little demonstration would help make the point to our illiterate...er, illustrious...leader; Dubya could, for example, launch one of his own missiles at Parliament Hill and then shoot it down (or not).

Assuming that all this would simply be beating a dead horse, the issue at hand should become NORAD. It's been suggested by some that the air defense treaty between the US and Canada has been weakened or rendered totally impotent by the missile defense situation. What exactly does "North American Aerospace Defense" mean when – at the brainless request of our Prime Minister – projectiles are to be allowed to fly willy-nilly through our airspace? Missiles are already supposedly included in NORAD's "Deter, Detect, Defend" mission. The contradiction between that co-operation and the Americans-only protection offered by the new missile defense system is obvious. What Martin and Bush need to do is sit down and figure out whether there is actually a direct conflict. It could turn out that in order to function, the NORAD treaty will need a complete rewrite; well, fine. I'd much rather spend my money on the cost of locking a dozen diplomats in a room until the solution pops out, as against spending it on the aforementioned bowl, which was presented to Bush by Martin as a thank-you gift for the invitation to the ranch. Next time, buy him one of those teddy bears in the Mountie uniforms (there are more of them in Banff than there are people anyway), and spend the big money on important things like ensuring that at least we'll have protection from attacks by terrorist flying squirrels invading our airspace. I don't want to see Canadians get the double-suckerpunch of losing out on NORAD when we've just been bamboozled out of protection from incoming SCUDs.

To close, a little advice to Prime Minister Martin while he's visiting with Dubya. First, try to talk about something more important than whether frozen fish will be sent across the border marked in pounds or kilos. And second, remember: you always approach a horse from the right. Really. Honest. Ask anybody.

Note: the flag you see in the title of this post is a new thing; there'll be one in every post from now on, to show whether the topic of the day relates to the USA, Canada, Alberta, or the world at large.

So I've come to the conclusion that the whole Terri Schiavo situation just sucks, for everyone involved. The government's scrambling to make what may be the toughest decision of its term; the family's frantically trying last-ditch efforts to save her; the husband, though you may say he's misguided (some would say even criminally so), has already made the hardest decision of his life; and of course, Terri herself is probably trying desperately to weigh in on the debate, but can't.

Up in Canada we had a similar situation a few years back: a girl named Tracy Latimer was killed in her sleep by intentional carbon monoxide poisoning at the hands of her father. Tracy had cerebral palsy and was quadripalegic, unable to speak, and some say even unable to recognize her own name. Her father was sentenced to life in prison (probably only because Canada has no death penalty) for second-degree murder.

Terri and Tracy's situations were totally different; Michael Schiavo and Robert Latimer's situations, however, were the same. They both watched someone they loved unable to have any semblance of a full or satisfying life. And they both decided that they didn't want to see that anymore, and did what they thought they could. I'm not here to weigh in on whether it was right or wrong in either case; I do, however, have to come out and say something against those who profess hatred for Michael. He knew what would happen; he knew he could even end up getting the death penalty. He didn't do what he did so he could skip off to Hawaii with his new family. He did what he thought was best. He's not a villain, merely an ordinary person trying to deal with an extraordinary situation. And he had the hardest part in all of this.

Like I said, I'm not coming down on one side or the other. Frankly, I don't think anyone has the right to try to understand this situation except the people in it - and that's my major issue here. This whole thing has brought in millions of people on either side clamoring to have their opinions known to the rest of us, who frankly don't give a damn. Most of them, I think, just want to raise their voices and don't really know what they're going to say if anyone surprises them by actually listening.

This conflict is not between ideologies; it's between a woman's well-meaing husband and her well-meaning family. People hold anti-death penalty rallies against the idea, not against one killer getting the needle. Rally, if you must, for one side of the issue or the other, but don't turn an innocent woman and the man who loves her into your poster people. They have enough to worry about, without opportunists circling around them by the thousands. Give them some peace.

Apparently a British Columbia bar was found "50% at fault" for some moron walking in, ordering a boatload of booze, and then deciding to get behind the wheel. The reasoning is that he couldn't have gotten drunk if it hadn't been for the bar, or if one of the bar's employees had been babysitting him to make sure he wasn't drinking too much (our government apparently gets annoyed when their subjects allow anyone but them to make stupid choices). You know, water's a major ingredient in most alcohol. Is my utility company going to get sued if some sap gets blasted on homemade wine? After all, if it weren't for the tap in the kitchen, none of it could've happened.

I've got an idea: apply the same logic to other areas; for example, healthcare. I can see it now - somebody dies in hospital, and the government gets sued because it could never have happened if they hadn't been funding the medical care for that person. The icing on the cake is that enough of these cases might convince our leaders to give up on their crusade against private healthcare facilities.

It doesn't have to stop there, though. Sue the store owners if a five-foot-nothing girl tries to reach a coffee maker on a seven-foot shelf and accidentally gets beaned (no pun intended) on the head by a falling Black & Decker. Sue the city if a man dies trying to navigate his way around a new overpass. Declare a legal war on all makers of steak knives if one happens to be used by an irate chef to make a point with an ornery customer. Pretty soon we'll all be sitting at home with no coffee makers, unable to get to work, trying to use plastic knives to cut through a T-bone. Just because someone abuses something doesn't mean that it's not a useful or pleasant component of life for the rest of us. Some people abuse chocolate, but Snickers keeps going strong. Some spouses abuse each other, but you don't see the government telling preachers to stop performing marriages. They're telling them to perform more of them, actually, but that's for another day.

If you drink too much and then drive, you're at fault. If you can't handle that concept, you shouldn't be drinking. Or even walking. If, on the other hand, you choose to not live in a plastic bubble, you're taking your life into your own hands - not the hands of some poor unsuspecting bartender who's just trying to make a living. YOUR hands.

I know someone who was in a car accident about a year and a half ago; he wound up in a coma. It was suspected alcohol might have been involved. If that's the case, I would love to blame whoever sold it to him. And the government for issuing that guy a liqour license. And the engineers who built the road. And the car company for not building a safer vehicle. And a hundred other people. That's the easy way to handle it. But the truth is, blame usually lies with a very select group of people. That may be difficult to accept, but truth usually is.

(Note: William Morgan invented the game of volleyball.)

Last week, four RCMP officers near the town of Rochfort Bridge in northern Alberta were killed while busting a marijuana grow op. The shooter then killed himself, leaving in his wake thousands of politicians from every corner of the map scrambling to capitalize on the tragedy. Which personally, I don't mind as much as some. There are some good points being made with these events as their trigger. But this kind of thing has happened before, and when the rhetoric dies down, we find nothing has changed. "Judicial reform" - like any phrase that ends in the word "reform" - is an oxymoron under the Liberal government. Some of them are trying to use it as an excuse to legalize pot. I don't really mind that either - if someone wants to screw up his brain, I don't mind so long as I don't have to breathe the stuff. But by taking this tactic here, the Liberals are sending a clear and dangerous message: one maniac with a rifle gunning down four police officers is going to bring about more leniency for his fellow scum-of-the-Universe. Recently, a court in Holland reprimanded police officers for "infringing on a man's livelihood" when they took away an armed robber's gun. Laugh, but we're not far away from that if we legalize narcotics just because someone with a gun wants us to. Pandering to criminals may be the Liberals' traditional style, but the slippery slope will quickly give way to a full-blown mudslide if we let them get away with this one.

The federal Conservatives, meanwhile, are using this opportunity to go after judicial reform in a big way, but the number of complaints they're spouting off about makes me wonder if it's not just Harper blowing wind. When the dust settles, I'd really like to see something as having changed, but I wouldn't count on it. And of course, even if the Conservatives are serious, Emperor Paul really doesn't have to pay any attention to them.

Here in Alberta, however, we do have an option. We can grab the RCMP, throw them on the nearest bus to Ottawa, pin a note to them that says "no thanks, you can keep 'em!", and (if we don't think it's too cliché) yell something about the door hitting them in the butt on the way out. A lot of us have been talking about a provincial police force for years. If Ontario can do it, we can (unfortunately, the same logic does not apply to kissing up to the federal government, or we'd be swimming in cash out here). Now, you might be thinking that one police force is pretty much like another, so there's little reason to spend the extra money. Take a police officer from Orange County and drop him in inner-city Chicago and he'll tell you just how much one police force is like another. Out here in the West, we need different people with different methods operating under a different authority. And that authority needs to be ours. The RCMP are commanded by a government that would have them bust an honest farmer's six-year-old for having an unregistered dollar-store cap gun, and leave the crackhouse next door alone to its own devices (unless of course the officers were asked to go on in and help set up for the NDP caucus meeting). Ralph's people, on the other hand, would tell the Alberta Provincial Police to leave the three million (last year's estimate) unregistered guns in the province alone, drop the Gestapo raids the RCMP have been ordered to conduct occasionally since C-36 came into play, and leave the pepper spray at home. That way they could get around to busting a few more of the real criminals. And we get to decide what that means - for instance, even if pot becomes legal in Canada, we can still tell the provincial cops to find something else to book them for if we want - heck, jaywalking if it comes down to that. As an added bonus, Martin and his ilk might steer clear of Alberta once they found out that real criminals were, in fact, arrested here.

It won't fix all our problems, but at the provincial level, the policing stage is the one we can make a difference in right now. And if we can make a difference, I for one believe we have the duty to do so. It's a no-brainer; all that's really left to think about is designing the uniforms. Brown with blue sound good to you?

The Social Security system is going down the proverbial drain. Why? Because its expenditures are greater than its income. For those not economically inclined, that's known as a "net loss". Key word: "loss". If it continues to pay 100% of benefits, Social Security is going to be in the red before I'm ready to retire, which doesn't sound like much fun to me. How would you like it if you went to the Social Security Office and asked for your money and they told you "sorry, your parents spent it all"? Gee, thanks, Mom and Pop. Buying the houseboat with my grad school savings was really quite enough, and now you pull THIS?

If Social Security keeps going the way it is, I'm going to have to work until there's a third digit in my age just to break even over the course of my life, and that's assuming I don't drop dead at the age of 66 because the government's trying to pay my medical bills in chickens. And speaking of chickens...here come the Democrats. What's their solution to the problem? Do you even need to ask? It's either "Give 'em more money!" or "Problem? What problem? There's no problem! It's all just another fabrication of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy! [insert ominous sound effect here]" Ignoring the latter response, we'll concentrate on the liberal idea of "fixing" Social Security.

First of all, there's the "raise taxes" idea. What a shocker. Sometimes I think that in the event of a catastrophic meteorite impact, the Democrats' first solution would be to raise taxes (only on the rich, of course - and doubly so for rich whites). What proponents of this plan don't seem to realize is that pulling money out of someone's pocket when he's 30 for the purpose of ensuring that you can put it back in when he's 70 is kind of useless. There's also the idea of raising the minimum retirement age. While this might make a certain sense, seeing as the retirement age was set up back when 65 was a "good long life", I still shy away from the concept. Personally, I'd like to retire and buy my Winnebago before I'm so old that they won't let me drive it.

So what's ol' 43's idea for fixing Social Security? Privatize parts of it. Specifically, he wants to privatize retirement funds. The idea is to give people a little control over their own retirement money while at the same time easing the demands on the public system. As an added bonus, the suggested setup would double the amount of interest earned on retirement funds. Now, I'm no economist, but more money sounds like a good thing to me. That's not the most important part of all this, however. The major advancement will be the greater freedom people will be afforded under the new system. With Bush's reforms in place, people will be allowed to manage - within limits designed to minimize risk - their own retirement money. Choice? Freedom? Self-determination? Well that's just crazy talk...next thing you know it'll be "liberty and justice for all".

(Note: My parents never bought a houseboat and Winnebagos aren't particularly in my plans. I was just making points.)

"Syria: get the **** out." That's basically the sentiment the Lebanese and our beloved Pres have been giving the Syrians in the past week or so. Which is great. And Syria says it'll leave...partially. No more occupying force, but not a complete release of political control. Doesn't sound like much to me. And what does the US tell them? That "next steps" may be taken. Which again sounds great. But then we read on, to discover what that means: "diplomatic and economic sanctions and a tougher UN resolution". Sanctions? UN resolutions? What's that bull all about? The UN told Syria to get out of Lebanon 13 years ago. Does it look to you like that worked?

At the same time, we hear from Colin Powell that military action against Iran won't be necessary and that we don't even "need to think about that right now". Again, UN sanctions are being talked about. What's next, inviting the North Koreans in for a wine-and-cheese? (Be sure to call up Chirac and ask him for catering company recommendations.) Looks like our government's going soft. That's why we have term limits, I suppose; but seriously, are we going to have to wait for the Condi Rice 2008 campaign to see an interventionist on the political stage again? Give us back our cowboy! Now, I'm not saying we should skip the negotiations and go straight to the "bomb the bastards" stage, but telling the whole world we're not even thinking about a military intervention makes us look a little weak, don't you think? Saddam knew from the start that there were millions of explosives aimed at his head just in case diplomacy failed. It didn't change his stance at all, but at least we all knew where we stood. Face it, Georgie: you can't get re-elected. You don't NEED the peaceniks to like you anymore. Show some backbone, for God's sake! Some of us are starting to think you've been body-snatched by some kind of slimy, parasitic alien (you know, like Hillary Clinton).

So Canada-US relations continue to progress about as smoothly as Jean Chretien's remedial English classes. Finally the border opening comes and what does our fearless leader, Paul Martin (aka "The Jellyfish"), do about this well-needed rise in goodwill between our government and that of our greatest (and most tolerant) ally? Why, he blows that whole goodwill thing right out of the water, of course. And how did he manage that, you ask? By opting out of a defensive anti-missile system. Yep, you read that right: a program that could possibly save our collective Canadian butts if some chump actually thought we were worth throwing a good missile at, and Mr. Martin decides he'd rather not give up any control of our airspace to our good neighbors to the south. Now, granted, opting out of the system completely is an improvement over his sentiment from a few months ago - "give us equal control please, but we don't feel like paying into the whole thing at all" - but it's still not an idea that's got a whole lot going for it. If the US had never entered our airspace in order to help us out, we'd quite possibly have bona fide Nazis in control instead of just Martin and his posse of Nazi wannabes. And you're kidding yourself if you think they're not going to travel through our airspace again and again if it means protecting both our soil and their own. Is this a violation of our sovereignty? Yes. Is it a violation of the border? Yes. Does it make me feel a whole lot safer? As a very wise woman once said, "Hell, yeah!" And by the way, does anyone else find it strange that the same people who were shouting "unilateral" like it was the ultimate insult back when the Iraq War started are now screaming about "sovereignty" like it's the freaking Holy Grail? Make up your mind, people: do we want independence or co-operation? Fact is, Martin's decision wasn't made based on any kind of grand ideology. It was simple pandering to the anti-American morons who make up the majority of Canada's population and almost all of the Liberal Party's voters. Round and round goes the wheel of Liberal stupidity. "Let's get votes by putting our constituents in danger." Come to think of it, the Nazis used that tactic too.

At least in Alberta, we know we're safe. Nobody planning on invading would risk bombing the place with all the oil, for one. Plus, if I know Ralphie, he and Dubya are working on including Alberta in the deal no matter what the Ottawa invertebrates have to say about it. In fact, I say we do it; heck, we can even chip in a litle. A few of those nice shiny new US nickels with the buffalo on 'em from every Albertan and I'm sure the Americans would be happy to cover us. If nothing else, no self-respecting Texan rancher would let himself lose his country's best source of steak for a second time.