Bonus karma?

I've been pretty buried through the last couple weeks, and have been lax about keeping up with the news of my to-be-adopted country. Stephane Dion's lack of charisma and innate leadership ability is, to me, the prime reason that the Harper government was returned to minority power. (Sort of an echo of the "WTF??!?!" anyone with two brain cells to rub together should have been thinking in Nov. 2004.) But maybe, just maybe, the "Bush Lite" league has overreached itself.

Using fiscal conservatism as an excuse to eliminate equal pay guarantees for women?!?! That reeks of Shock Doctrine, Northern Style. Flaherty should be keelhauled and what remains of him should be sacked. If the Canadians don't wake up to the reactionary Tory agenda after this, then they deserve no less than what we've had for the last eight years.

Let's get it straight this time:

1. "Compassionate Conservatism" is an Orwellian lie--compassion requires empathy in its pantheon of values. Deregulation does not protect the Have-nots, only the Haves.
2. Zygotes are not babies.
3. Blowing the $#!+ out of a nation does not normalize its political system.
4. Freedom of religion is less than pointless without freedom from it.
5. Companies are never too big to fail--most especially when their bad behaviour is so handsomely rewarded.
6. If consenting adults are involved, there is no "moral" dimension to sex--let's just call the "social conservatives" out for the voyeuristic perverts they truly are. (Geeze people, just get creative with that shower massage and loosen the heck up!)
7. Neither Wal-Mart nor Wall Street would be considered "capitalism" by Adam Smith any more than Vietnam would be considered "communist" by Marx. & Engels.
8. Oh, and telling you to shut up and stop running me off the road is not an abridgment of your freedom of speech.

But anyway, I'm very much hoping that the rebellion succeeds, if nothing else, in rattling the minority government for the rest of its term. I don't think that Harper's run out of tactics just yet. I doubt that he's working from an abridged version of the Karl Rove playbook, after all. So I'm not holding my breath for a successful coup. Hopefully, though, it signals the beginning of the end for Canada's reactionary relapse. And, by the grace of His Noodliness, hopefully the Liberals will finally scrounge up something better than a relative figurehead like Dion.