NS Liberal AGM

I'm on my way to the Lower Deck right now, for the opening kitchen party before the NS Liberal party AGM this weekend. Updates to follow.

Busy month ahead

Liberal Party workshop this Saturday, riding association meeting this Sunday, NS Liberal AGM next weekend and a policy conference on Nov. 5th. I'm glad to be getting out of armchair political analysis and actually getting involved.

Great article on the approach Liberals need to take.

DEAN BAKER: Do Liberals Have to Be Losers?: via HuffPost

Really?!?

I'm not going to comment on the cabinet appointments made today. Generally speaking, I don't care about the 'who', I care about what they do. This also applies to scandals involving politicians' personal lives. It's none of my business, frankly.

However, when I heard that Harper had appointed three defeated candidates from the last election to the Senate, the cognitive dissonance nearly knocked me over. I can forgive crony appointments; it's a dirty part of the game, but it's part of the game. But for someone who has historically, repeatedly, called for an elected Senate, to appoint people who faced the electorate AND LOST is a display of such mind-blowing hypocrisy that I still can't believe it's true.

Step one in getting out of Afghanistan

Thankfully good ideas never die. To summarize (although I highly recommend reading the article), instead of trying to stop farmers in Afghanistan from growing poppies for the illegal opium trade, we should licence the poppy growers as suppliers to make medical grade morphine. This would turn the Afghan farmers into our partners, deny the Taliban a big source of their funds and popular support (they provide security for the poppy fields), establish a legal, lucrative industry for the Afghan economy, and it's estimated to only cost approximately $4 billion a year which is a bargain compared to the costs of the allied military action there.

Or we can continue the war on drugs in concert with the war on terror. They've both been such smashing successes to date.

My mother, the political barometer

First, a confession...I'm that guy who brings up politics whenever the opportunity arises, especially at family dinners. I'm sorry. In my defense I'm not the over-bearing, "Those @$$holes in the Conservative/Liberal/NDP/Republican/Democratic/etc party are wrong again, and they're destroying the country!!!!" type of person. I've never started a phrase with "Guess what I just heard on the internet?". I don't spend much time talking at all, actually; what I enjoy is listening to what other people think, and why. It's not that I don't have strong opinions, or that I don't feel comfortable supporting what I believe. I'm just humble enough to know that opinions aren't facts, and I have been wrong before. So I ask other people what they think. And one thing I've learned is that my mother is the perfect average voter.

In 2006, she thought the Liberals had been in power too long. In 2008 she didn't understand the Green Shift but "knew" it would cost her money, and besides Harper wasn't the boogeyman people made him out to be. She never liked Ignatieff, or even pronounced his name properly. She doesn't know anything about how parliament works, and she doesn't pay any attention to anything anyone in Ottawa says unless it's going to affect her directly or it's an election. In short, her opinions tend to almost always perfectly match the public at large.

I was at her house this past Mother's day with the whole family, and after talking about Bin Laden's death and laughing at how Obama interrupted The Apprentice to announce it, talk turned to last week's election. She asked me what I thought the Liberals were going to do now (I'm a Liberal party member), and I told her I had no idea, that it was going to take a while before the party figured out what the next steps were. Then she asked me who I wanted the new leader to be. I told her I liked Scott Brison, I didn't like Bob Rae, and that whoever it was it was more important that the party decides what it wants to be before it picks a new leader. Her response? "You need to get Justin Trudeau in as the party leader".

I thought he might still be a little too young, and making him leader after only a few years in the House of Commons might like look we're desperate to return to the glory years with the Trudeau name.

But, then again, I liked Ignatieff. She liked Jack Layton. Just something to consider.

Let's try this again

I haven't posted anything here in a while (looks like 5 years...surprised it still exists!) I will be updating this site more regularly, with comments mostly on Canadian politics, American politics, world events, and anything else that interests me on any given day. And forgive the blah look of this page, I'm working on it.