Thursday, December 31, 2009

Should Old Betrayers Be Forgot, And Never Brought In Line?

At last! We can ring out the old and say goodbye to a miserable year, a miserable decade, and a degenerate half-century, all at the same time. Let’s celebrate the right way, with Guy Lombardo and indefatigable Times Square reporter Ben Grauer, enjoying what would be for both of them their last New Year's Eve..
Happy New Year 2010!

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Best of What's My Line #1: "Are You the Mother or Daughter of Dorothy Kilgallen?"

In 1954, while Dorothy Kilgallen was away from the show after the birth of her third child Kerry, her other two children, Dickie, 13, and Jill, 11 appeared on the show as mystery guests. It’s obvious that Dorothy and her husband Richard let Dickie and Jill stay up till 11 P.M. on Sunday nights because their game play and voice disguise were excellent. They alternated answering questions, further confusing the issue. Typically, Bennett Cerf was the first to hone in, asking whether the guest had any connection with Dorothy’s new baby. (I fully expect a revelation some day that Cerf had some way of seeing through his mask.) The kids’ voices hadn’t given them away (Allen: are you the baby’s godmother or something?) Then Arlene Francis shows her facility for intuitive insight followed by a horrible guess....
Watch the kids greet the panel on the way out.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Just Say No to Absurdity

It looks like Mickey Kaus was the first to get on record with my quick reaction -- the best way for Obama to get out of this without setting himself up as a joke is to turn it down, saying that he appreciates the thought and hopes to achieve things for world peace that will justify the committee's faith in him.

As they note on NRO's the Corner, Nobel nominations were due February 1 -- so Obama was nominated on his accomplishments for less than a month in office.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Electing a New People

A note of triumphalism led President Clinton to be unintentionally revealing about the Left's long-term strategery for political domination on Meet the Press on Sunday .
MR. GREGORY: Your wife famously talked about the vast right wing conspiracy targeting you. As you look at this opposition on the right to President Obama, is it still there?
PRES. CLINTON: Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was.
MR. GREGORY: But do you worry about a repeat of '94 politically?
PRES. CLINTON: It, it--there's no way they can make it that bad, for several reasons. Number one, the country is more diverse and more interested in positive action.

To paraphrase Brecht: if the government is dissatisfied with the people, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one. In the United States that is exactly what the government has been doing, in slow motion, and Bill Clinton has let us know why the Democrats are so happy about it..
So just what is the demographic change that Clinton says prevents a repeat of 1994? What kind of diversity is it that automatically leads it to support the leftist agenda?
In 1994 there were 27 million Hispanics in the United States, representing about 10% of the population. Because of illegal immigration and high birth rates, the census bureau projected that by 2050, the Hispanic population would be 88 million, about 25% of the population.
In 2008 there were 47 million Hispanics, about 15% of the population.
In 2050 it is now projected that there will be 133 million Hispanics representing about 30% of the population. There will be about 204 million non-Hispanic whites -- not much higher than the 200 million there were in 2008.
Nobody has ever said that Bill Clinton wasn't a smart politician. If he believes that demographic change in itself is inevitably weakening opposition to the Left agenda, Republicans ought to take notice. The growth of the Hispanic population doesn't just make things harder for Republicans; it skews the whole political spectrum to the left.
That's why Republicans must make it their first priority to ensure that uncontrolled illegal immigration is stopped. They had a chance between 2000 and 2006 and blew it, largely owing to President's Bush's muddleheadedness, sentimentalism and defeatism. They may never have another chance. But they need to operate under the assumption that victory is still possible some day, until it becomes demonstrable that it isn't.
Border control, particularly real border control as a precondition to any immigration reform, has to become a Republican litmus test. It's the one part of the immigration control package that commands the support of a clear majority of the American people, including many who support generous measures for those here illegally. A country that cannot defend its own borders against a slow-motion invasion is a country with no future. Once the border is secure, we can consider measures to regularize the presence of the illegal aliens here, preferably something short of citizenship.
What we have here is election fraud. The current ongoing election of a new people is being conducted unfairly. Republicans need to remember how much Bill Clinton likes it that way.

Friday, July 10, 2009

So When Did You Stop Beating Your Spouse, Judge Obama -- I Mean Sotomayor?

Steve Sailer wants the GOP to go after Judge Sonia Sotomayor by hammering her on her decision denying promotion to the white firefighter plaintiffs in Ricci and her longtime aggressive support for racial preferences for Hispanics and affirmative action generally.

Sotomayor can extricate herself on Ricci quite easily by stating that she was simply applying the precedents in force at the time as she was required to do, that the majority decision in the Supreme Court chose to alter legal doctrine as they alone have the right to do, and that she herself as a 2nd circuit judge would not have had the power to alter legal doctrine that way even if she wanted to. (GOP Senators and witnesses may say otherwise but the interchanges will degenerate into an inconclusive and dull debate on the state of existing precedent before Ricci). When asked if she agrees with the majority decision in Ricci she need only repeat the formula: she cannot prejudge questions that may come for her if she is so blessed by God as to be confirmed to the position of justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She'll need to talk her way out of the (repeated) wise Latina statements. She may take the line of least resistance which is to say that she believes that a bench that is more representative of the diversity of the population will provide better justice to everyone than a bench that is not. This is not of course what she said in the Wise Latina statements but may be her first option for defusing the situation. If pressed she may retreat to the position that she was referring to discrimination cases where it may be useful to have judges who have experienced discrimination or at least seen it up close and first hand. The GOP will have to keep after her and point out that most of the times she made the comment there was no connecrion at all with discrimination cases. I suspect that Sotomayor will be able to play rope-a-dope on this one for as long as she needs to.

But Sotomayor is going to be confirmed and it doesn't particularly matter that the GOP can turn the public against her position on affirmative action. She's never going to have to run for re-confirmation. And besides, even if she could be defeated and filibustered it's not in the Republican interest to do so. Her replacement nominee would likely be a more effective advocate for liberalism and thus more dangerous. For the GOP there is a more important purpose to the hearings:
Will they forego their best opportunity to point out that Obama not the post-racial uniter of David Axelrod’s imagination, but is merely Sotomayor with a more oleaginous prose style ?

The objectionable effects of Sotomayor's legal philosophy need to be pinned where they belong: right on the collar of Barack Obama. Don't ask her what she thinks of racial preferences. Ask her what she thinks of the Obama Administration's mandated racial preferences. Don't ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by "disparate effect" doctrine; ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by the Obama-administration-supported disparate effect doctrine. When discussing the Wise Latina comment, pause to generously acknowledge that the statement is a fair reflection of the Obama Administration's judicial philosophy.

I expect not so much a grilling next week as a light toasting.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Tim Hudak, the OHRC, and the Virtue of Courage

So the Ontario Human Rights Commission is tormenting the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party again. It was over 25 years ago that internal party dissatisfaction with the OHRC first bubbled to a boil. I was at the OPCCA Annual Meeting in my capacity as Past President, soon to be Past Past President, innocently minding my own business listening to a typical policy session. Suddenly democracy broke out, and there was a motion on the floor deploring the latest power grab of the Human Rights Establishment as manifested in a package of amendments being put forth by the Bill Davis government. The motion called for the abolition of the OHRC and it looked like it was going to pass. Tom Long, incoming president, grabbed me and asked me to get up and ask that the motion be withdrawn and that a committee be appointed to investigate the amendments and the Code and come forth with recommendations to be made to the government. It was a honour back then, to be someone who was able to stand off and get the hard men to back off a bit when the leadership wanted it done but not to do it itself. In the great tradition of Past President as sometime doer of dirty work and hatchetman.

That committee turned out to be, aside from me, quite a collection of talent, kind of like when in baseball you have one of these minor league teams that turns out 25 years later to have a passel of Hall of Famers. Tom, Tony Clement, Alister Campbell and Lynn Golding for starters.

The discontent with the OHRC became quite substantial. Tony Clement later asked me to debate Tom on the question of whether the OHRC should be abolished entirely at the OPCYA Annual Meeting, with me taking the pro-retention side. I gave a very flat performance, partly because I wasn't sure I was debating on the right side.

It turned out that nothing could deter the government from its course. How the OHRC survived the Harris years unscathed I do not know, but that it did was a major mistake. The contents of the Common Sense Revolution were the entire store of the party's intellectual capital under Harris, and it spent its time in government depleting it.

The current debate over OHRC in the leadership contest, like previous ones, seems to pit the virtues of courage and prudence against each other. Like the National Post editorial board
when it first discussed the issue (it has since endorsed Tim Hudak), I am of two minds about this. Political parties need to be elected in order to implement their social visions, and they should think very hard before adopting policies that threaten to blast away their support. The London Free Press poll being disseminated by Christine Elliott is a very effective weapon. On the other hand if political parties have no social vision there is no point electing them. And make no mistake, anyone who approves of the current human rights regime is not a conservative and Ontario would be better off defeating a party led by such a person.

The crucial facts are these: Ontario's human rights regime is not a neutral and fair mechanism to promote am objective conception of human rights and fairly adjudicate claims that these rights have been violated. It is an entrenched and potent adjunct of left-wing political ideology, striving to pull the province's politics and discourse steadily to the left, changing its legal norms constantly without the inconvenient necessity of gathering the public support to change the law in the direction it wants by amendment.

Just look at the stated policy of the Liberals' supposed attempt to bring the OHRC in line, the new Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Its mission
commits it to "strive [to] remain responsive to an evolving understanding of human rights and discrimination". That is an open commitment to a constantly changing law without parliamentary sanction. To a world where behaviour that is legal today gets you dragged into court tomorrow, because the law has "evolved" and you never got the memo. It makes the OHRT a continuing constitutional convention, populated overwhelmingly by delegates from the Left human rights establishment. The great majority of its members have resumes showing they have been saturated and steeped in Left human rights ideology.

On the other hand...although as a Fort Erie boy myself I have a home team attachment to Tim Hudak, there's no doubt his human rights policy is half-baked. In particular he's 180 degrees off with the suggestion of a specialized court of "specially trained" judges. Specially trained by whom, in what? Any training that is likely to take place in the foreseeable future would be conducted by the same human rights establishment that is the cause of our present problems. What we need is a specially untrained tribunal, so that human rights matters are heard by people with expertise in the law generally just as contract cases are heard by courts not specially trained in the law of contract, tort cases are heard by courts not specially trained in the law of tort, and constitutional cases are heard by judges not specially trained in the law of the constitution. We need for human rights decisions to be made by professional adjudicators, not professional ideologues. Eliminating the OHRT would also put a crimp in the lifestyle of the human rights establishment, which has long had the ability to sustain and compensate itself by getting its members appointed as human rights adjudicators. The OHRT at the moment is a kind of human rights establishment Senate. And its new members are appointed from among people nominated by -- themselves. What a wonderful way of perpetuating an ideology.

A half-baked policy doesn't need to be discarded; it just needs to be put back into the oven.

Conservatives are going to need to develop an uninstitutionalized human rights intelligentsia. This will require Tories to do something they are normally averse to do -- first immerse themselves in the current human rights culture, so as to better know one's enemy. Conservatives are used to have their experience with HRCs come through being hauled before them to be asked to grovel and apologize for saying that adherents of Islam are Muslims, or some similarly outrageous statement of hatred. But in the United States conservatives like Abigail Thernstrom and Peter Kirsanow, members of the U. S. commission on civil rights, have become credentialed human rights experts. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

I won't predetermine the conclusions of this hypothetical project of mine that is going to reenvision human rights policy for the twenty-first century. But I'll throw out a few ideas. The Code needs to be rewritten from top to bottom, with all its language carefully designed to rein in wandering tribunals, be they administrative or judicial. Right from the Preamble, where our human rights law needs to be decoupled from the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights and its other fatuities and reattached to our own Anglo-Canadian traditional understandings of rights. When we're in power, human rights reform can't be something we undertake once a generation or so. Conservative governments need to monitor human rights decisions constantly, moving immediately to amend legislation as soon as an outrageous decision occurs. Ideally the amending legislation should be ready to be introduced the day after the period for appeal of an outrageous decision is over.

And a way out of our dilemma might be the creation of a statutory tort of discrimination, something that was on its way to evolving at common law before the proliferation of HRCs choked off its growth. A tort of discrimination would fit into the judicial system like any other tort. It would treat breaches of civil rights like other breaches of rights, to be remedied through ordinary actions in tort or contract, rather than making rights breaches objects of continual human-rights-establishment fuelled waves of hysteria. It would place the issue of compensation for such things as mental distress within a pre-existing legal framework.

Back to courage versus prudence -- despite Christine Elliott's boughten poll, I believe that human rights reform can be part of a winning progressive conservative platform. It won't be a major part of it, but it needn't be the rotten plank through which our leader falls to a gruesome electoral death. The problem with Christine Elliott's winnability argument is that professional moderates such as herself who share the attitudes and beliefs of the liberal establishment, with an occasional zany idea like a flat tax thrown in to rope in gullible conservatives, tend not to win elections despite their oh-so-carefully-preserved moderation. Think Stanfield and Clark and Grossman and Tory. It feels terrible to sell your soul when picking a candidate and be rewarded with another four years in opposition.

Tim Hudak is the best choice for Ontario P.C. leader.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Dodging a Bullet

Conservatives are staking out positions in their latest internecine battle: how hard to go after SCOTUS nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

My take: in this match we take a dive.

What the smart liberals wanted was to find a leftist Scalia, an intellectual heavyweight and lucid writer who could not just vote the right way, but set out principles of substance in a way that impresses and persuades the uncertain and undecided. A figure the liberals haven’t had for over 50 years, since Louis Brandeis left the court. And oh yes, and someone nice and collegial, who, unlike Justice Scalia, does not frequently alienate centrist judges by pointing out how dumb their opinions are.

Sonia Sotomayor is not such a person. 2 women who might have been the person liberals were looking for, Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan, didn’t make the final cut. Either of 2 of the final 4, Elena Kagan or Judge Diane Wood, might possibly have been that person. Although in the case of Wood I find it unlikely that someone who declares from the bench that because the Christian Law Society by excluding practicing homosexuals, its members do not regard them as full human beings is a very collegial person who is likely to win over centrists. Unless she also has superb acting skills.

Jeff Rosen, searching for that liberal Scalia, wrote an article that quickly became (in)famous detailing Sotomayor's inadequacy for the role of liberal saviour: Sotomayor, although an able lawyer,

was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue." (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, "Will you please stop talking and let them talk?")....

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It's customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn't distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions--fixing typos and the like--rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

It’s not that Sotomayor is dumb or unqualified. She’s obviously not. It’s that she’s not Brandeis or Warren. At best, she’s an Alito, not a Roberts. She’s no more liberal than Obama’s next nominee would be, if she were defeated. And is the fact that she’s the first Hispanic nominated to the court relevant? Sure. Why did the Democrats let Scalia sail through 96-0? Well, the fact that he was the first Italian-American ever appointed to the court didn’t hurt. The Democrats gave Clarence Thomas a good roughing up, but in the end let him through.

Mind you the GOP ought to pit up a bit of a fight for a few rounds. It’s fine to bring to the public attention her statement that a Latina woman is likely to make better decisions than a white male, and the couple other Kinsleyian gaffes that she has committed. But she’s smart enough to talk herself out of trouble for those statements at the hearings. Although she’s been the front runner for the next SCOTUS opening since Obama was elected, the GOP doesn’t seem to have much on her. There’s no point in the GOP copying the Kennedys and Leahys in hysterical and irrational opposition. It didn’t help their public image any.

So let’s spar for a few rounds and then throw in the towel. It coulda been a lot worse.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Really Big Shew

There's something of a consensus that all the leading candidates to replace Justice Souter on the United States Supreme Court are essentially interchangeable, and the appointment will exchange a liberal for a liberal and not make a difference. What the smart liberals want, however, is to find someone who could become a real intellectual leader for liberalism on the court. Someone who could make arguments for judicial liberalism that hang together, someone whose opinions could make law students say "that's what a judge should be". Through a combination of bad luck and missed opportunities, liberal jurisprudence hasn't had such a person since the early 50s with Brandeis and the younger Frankfurter.

I think the left may have their candidate in Professor Kathleen Sullivan of the Stanford Constitutional Law Centre, former dean of Stanford Law School. Laurence Tribe described her as the most brilliant student he ever had. Sullivan has an uncanny ability to write about law with analytical rigour but in a way that can be easily understood — she thinks like a lawyer but writes like a human being. In public appearances she is soft-spoken, genial — and cute, which never hurts. Republicans trying to beat her up in the hearings will look bad — which is reverse sexism but why not take advantage?

Sullivan is the Bizarro Scalia, different in gender, judicial philosophy, and temperament. While Scalia's belligerence often turned off so-called moderates like O'Connor and Kennedy, Sullivan's charm might help reel in the types who don't know what they really believe.

The kicker is that Kathleen Sullivan is a lesbian. Should that stop Obama? I would say no. That might work, when the political gains and losses are computed, to the benefit of the Democrats. Some conservatives are sure to say some intemperate and inappropriate things about her sexual orientation. That will only assist Democrats in their attempt to portray the GOP as nothing more than a collection of bigots.

I don't know if Obama is willing to throw the long bomb or not. My sense is that Sullivan's biggest obstacle will be Obama's preference to go with people he knows from Harvard or Chicago. Tribe-Sullivan-Obama may not be close enuf.

She has one embarrassing negative: she failed the California bar exam the first time she took it when she moved out there. I imagine this will provide some good clean fun for Republicans but don't see it as a dealbreaker.

Further reason for Sullivan: Jeff Rosen has a story up in The New Republic suggesting that the woman on the top of most lists, Judge Sonya Sotomayor, just isn't smart enough.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Canada's Not Returning the Favour

In view of transnationalist law professor Harold Koh’s controversial nomination to the position of State Department legal adviser, and Justice Ginsburg’s recent comment that the Supreme Court of Canada commands more respect in foreign courts than does the Supreme Court of the United States because the SCC listens more to other countries’ high courts’ jurisprudence than does SCOTUS, it seems appropriate to ask — does Canada return the favour? Koh believes SCOTUS should construe the U. S. constitution “in light of” foreign law when that foreign law contains roughly parallel provisions. So would Canada return the favour when its constitution contains provisions roughly comparable to those of other countries — like, say, the United States?

We found out the answer to that in one of the most important early cases interpreting Canada’s new-as-of-1982 Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms in a case that has to be in consideration for the title of worst reasoned Charter decision of all time. In Reference Re Motor Vehicle Act [1985] 2 S.C.R 486. the Court had its first opportunity to resolve the most crucial question about the interpretation of Section 7 of the Charter, which reads as follows:
7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
If you're an American, does that look familiar? The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Now there is a vast jurisprudence and scholarly literature concerning the appropriate scope of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, with a particularly notable debate about the appropriateness of "substantive due process", a doctrine which has animated such notable American decisions as Lochner and Roe v. Wade.
Now the language in the two jurisdictions is not identical, but the similarities suggest that the SCC might at least have referred to the American experience to help it understand the immense implications of the choice of interpretation they were about to make.
The Court didn't see it that way. The majority opinion, written by Lamer J. entirely rejected the idea of consulting American law, rejecting
the characterization of the issue in a narrow and restrictive fashion, i.e., whether the term "principles of fundamental justice" has a substantive or merely procedural content. In my view, the characterization of the issue in such fashion preempts an open-minded approach to determining the meaning of "principles of fundamental justice".
18. The substantive/procedural dichotomy narrows the issue almost to an all or nothing proposition. Moreover, it is largely bound up in the American experience with substantive and procedural due process. It imports into the Canadian context American concepts, terminology and jurisprudence, all of which are inextricably linked to problems concerning the nature and legitimacy of adjudication under the U.S. Constitution.
Got that? Substantive Due Process and Procedural Due Process are (Gasp!) "American concepts". Not only don't we care how the Yanks reason about things, but we're not even going to let our reasoning be tainted by use of these foreign concepts.
Needless to say, after rejecting this distinction the Court went on to affirm full substantive due process, without using the barbarian words. Oh, and this was by the way the case which also at one stroke killed the doctrine of originalism in Charter jurisprudence. More is known about the original intent of Section 7 than about any other part of the Charter. The words "due process" were specifically avoided to prevent the possibility of the importation of American substantive due process to Canada. The words "fundamental justice" were intended to mean no more than procedural "natural justice". Lamer J. ignored the indisputable evidence of this intent, considering it to be "of little weight".
So if the Americans follow the advice of Dean Koh and other transnationalists and start using Canadian experience to help interpret their Constitution, don't expect Canada to be returning the favour.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Hail Franz, King of Canada!

It's pretty clear that the monarchy will not survive here long after Queen Elizabeth leaves the throne. There must be a powerful republican, nationalist, egalitarian sentiment that would like to ditch the monarchy. Its size can't be estimated because there's a tacit agreement among everyone not to bring up the question while Good Queen Elizabeth is on the throne. Prince Charles however just won't do as monarch. The monarchy can't last as long as 25 years once Elizabeth leaves. It will be abolished the instant a Liberal Government in power determines that abolition would be to its electoral advantage.

If we could ditch Charles, the institution might have a fighting chance.

The recasting of our institutions to conform with notions of political correctness is one of the more annoying irritants of our time. But occasionally the process can have unanticipated consequences that are desirable to conservatives. We need to make the most of these moments.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is thinking of ending the three-century long ban on Roman Catholics becoming monarch. Historic as it is, the ban grates against modern notions of religious freedom. And as the Telegraph notes,
One of the complexities of any change would the question of whether or not to make it retrospective - a step which would move the Princess Royal ahead of the Duke of York in the line of succession.
If we're righting a historic wrong though, why stop there? If disallowance of Roman Catholics is illegitimate then the ousting of King James II was illegitimate in the first place, and the legitimate heir of the throne is whoever's at the top of the Stuart Succession. The division of Tories over whether to support James, or support the new monarch in order to protect the Church and England's independence divided both the Tory party and the church, and the divisions therein were a major contributor to the bleak generations of exile the Tories suffered after 1715.

We'll grandmother Elizabeth and let her stay on because everyone likes her.

The heir presumptive to the throne of England and Canada is Franz, Duke of Bavaria. He seems to be an accomplished and honourable fellow and his family has a distinguished history:
The Wittelsbachs were opposed to the Nazi regime in Germany, and in 1939 Franz's father Albrecht took his family to Hungary. They lived in Budapest for four years before moving to Somlovar Castle in late 1943. In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. On October 6, the entire family including Franz, then aged 11, were arrested. They were sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps including Oranienburg and Dachau . At the end of April 1945 they were liberated by the United States Third Army.

We play this up to Roman Catholics, puffing the monarchy as a powerful symbol of the end of discrimination against them. The law of primogeniture is being tossed aside too, so we hail this as a giant step for women's equality. Is it just a coincidence that people want to abolish the monarchy just after women and Catholics have become equal, we will ask.
Buying support from women and Catholics the monarchy's survival might be extended by 50 years. And one of Toryism's most disastrous defeats will have been avenged.

Monday, March 23, 2009

AshleyMadison.com: See You In Tort

Maggie Gallagher over on NR Online started a bit of discussion a while back when she suggest reviving the tort of adultery (which had been "criminal conversation" in Canada). Funny, the very day before I read that I had been feeling nostalgic for those grand old torts that had been abolished over the years, the last of which were cut down by "law reform" in the 1960s. There was the tort of seduction, a cause of action for a father whose daughter had been seduced. There was breach of promise of marriage. There was alienation of affections. These old torts recognized that the damaging and sundering of covenanted personal relationships did real harm worthy of legal recognition and compensation. Although these old torts are now taken as hopelessly old-fashioned and repressed, recent times have seen the development of torts like intentional infliction of emotional distress, and this development is seen as constructive and progressive. The Family Law Reform Act of 1978 finished off the last of these "heartbalm" torts in Ontario.

Maggie's thoughts about reviving the historic tort came in response to a callout of social conservatives by NR Online's Deroy Murdock. Murdock alleged that social conservatives' interest in preserving marriage seemed to be strictly confined to fighting same-sex marriage. He noted that a Google search had shown no evidence of social conservatives denouncing AshleyMadison.com, a dating site designed, it advertises itself, to help married people cheat on their spouses. None of the outspoken claimants to the title of defenders of marriage were on record as denouncing this for-profit enterprise aimed at its subversion. As I skimmed through Murdock's article I found myself wondering where such an iniquitous website could be located. Way offshore in some country with no extradition treaty, perhaps. Or maybe they would dare to operate from as close as Tijuana.. Perhaps they would even be bold enough to quarter themselves in Las Vegas. But no:
"We made tens of millions of dollars" last year, company president Noel Biderman says from its Toronto base. We are very profitable and successful."
Whoa! The City of Churches has now become Ground Zero in the war against the family. Hopeless as it may be, it behooves conservatives to try to do something about this. If the ship of decency must go down, it should go down with all flags flying.

Practical considerations suggest that a revival of the simple tort of adultery is unlikely to be a winner in Ontario. A counter-attack against the advancing anti- family armies needs to find a weaker section of the front.

But a law supporting creation of a tort of intentional third party promotion and facilitation of adultery, perhaps limited to commercial enterprises, should be something doable. And it just so happens that the law of tort is a provincial matter, and the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is entering into a leadership campaign.

Let's find out how many PC leadership aspirants will support the creation of a tort of commercial inducement of adultery. At a minimum, their responses will show us where they stand in the war against the family.

Monday, February 23, 2009

And the Award for Most Sociopathic Sociopath in a Leading Role Goes to...

Sean Penn!

In this category there's rarely a shortage of worthy nominees at the annual awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sean Penn though has already compiled a body of work worthy of many Lifetime Achievement awards. Between Madonna, Hugo Chavez, the Government of Iran, Raul Castro and Johnny Depp, Penn has had association with more creepy and sleazy people than the whole executive of the federal wing of the Quebec Liberal Party. The convicted wifebeater's bizarre and convoluted speech proved once again that anything intelligent he ever says has been handed to him some time before written in large capital letters:
For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight,
Those were investors in All the King's Men, Sean.
I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.
Why is it only the liberals? You never hear normal people making soppyeyed speeches about the need for abstinence-based sex education or halving the capital gains tax.
And there are these last 2 things.
2? There's hope for this night yet.
I’m very, very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man President,
An elegant man? Doesn't Lyndon Johnson count? I know that's what I look for in my leaders. You know Barack Obama was praying that Sean didn't say anything too crazy that people might associate with him.
and a country who, for all its toughness, creates courageous artists, and this is in great due respect to all the nominees, creates courageous artists who despite sensitivity that sometimes has brought enormous challenges, Mickey Rourke rises again, and he is my brother
And people said Mickey Rourke was punchdrunk.

There was one powerful consolation for the evening, one so important you should mark it down right now on your calendar for next year. That was the liveblog at Big Hollywood, the conservative entertainment blog started earlier thus year by Andrew Breitbart. As Hollywood deteriorates further into a war between paganism and primitivism, following this live blog is the only thing that will make the Oscars watchable in the future.

Friday, February 20, 2009

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

I’m still working on what may be my great composition, a set of theses explaining Barack Obama and all the mysteries surrounding him. Is he a hard-line progressive or a closet centrist? Does he really dream of a new post-partisan commitment to consensus or is this just a ruse to sneal behiud the city gates a legion of standard left-liberal politics?

Tony Blankley examines Obama’s early blunders and sets out their possible causes. Obama took the fall for the inept vetting of Cabinet nominees, saying that he “screwed up”.
But from a management perspective, the unanswered question is: How did he "screw up"? Did he actively design the failed vetting process and actively assess the various negative pieces of information and fail to see their significance? Or did he "screw up" by letting others design the failed system and assess the data inflow? The former would show poor substantive judgment. The latter would show he wasn't paying sufficient attention to a presumably vital matter.
Then we have the preening display of signing an executive order closing Gitmo -- not now, but within one year. And what is to be done with those present inhabitants too dangerous or unwanted by other countries to be released, but not susceptible to conviction through the mechanism of the criminal law, which is designed to regulate offenses between members of the same community who have committed themselves to upholding the same set of social values?
Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn't know how -- or even whether -- his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.
President Obama: "And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. ... Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?"
White House counsel Greg Craig: "We'll set up a process."
To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

But the critical clues must be found in Obama's handling of his stimulus package. Here is a mystery packed with satifactorily intriguing puzzles. Was Obama's desire to reach a genuine consensus with a substantial number of Republicans real or charade? Was the decision to delegate preparation of the package to Speaker Pelosi and her minions an inevitable byproduct of Obama's newness to office, a sign of irresolution and weakness, or a clever ploy to ensure that his fingerprints would not appear on a package full of social liberalism and plain silliness that was desired by Obama but known by him to be unacceptable to Republicans? FWIW, I believe that Obama's desire for post-partisan consensus, if arrogant and ill-considered, is sincere. It's arrogant because Obama's belief is that everyone should abandon their petty grievances, outworn notions and unthinking allegiances. Republucans and Democrats should sit down and think things through practically, whereupon they will come to the same conclusions that Obama does, which also happen to be the conclusions of standard fossilized progressive ideology 98.7% of the time. Republicans accepting the conclusions in principle are welcome to toss in a few ideas -- for example if they had had a few ludicrous projects for which they desired excessive government funding, those ideas would have been welcome. Everyone then votes for what Obama wants; that's what's called "postpartisan consensus".

Blankley:
I can think of four possible explanations for this almost unprecedented presidential detachment from the decision making of policies the president publicly declared to be vital to the country and his presidency:
1) He is a very, very big-picture man, and he delegates decisions even on the central points of vital issues.
2) For tactical reasons, he decided these matters were not worth using up political chits.
3) He is either hesitant or unskilled at management, and he let matters drift until it seemed too late to intervene personally.
4) Or his personality type leaves him surprisingly uninterested in things that aren't personally about him.

I'll eliminate #2. Tactically this was the perfect time both to make it clear to congressional Democrats that he would be doing the producing and directing on matters important to him, and to make cooperation with him as attractive as possible to Republicans .
There's no doubt truth in #1, but it doesn't explain Obama's non-decisions on the stimulus package. The necessity of insisting on absolute unity of purpose in items in a bipartisan emergency stimulus package is big-picture enough for the most visionary leader to isolate and insist on.
#4 can't be discounted wholly. A man who writes two memoirs and compares himself favourably to Lincoln has an very healthy sense of self-esteem even for a politician. It is this type of personality also which sees itself as rising above the pettiness and self-interest that afflict everyone else.
But I say #3 is the winner. Obama was quite skilful or lucky in selecting a campaign team and setting a campaign tone, but the quantity, urgency and importance of the policy and personnel decisions to be made now overwhelm him.
This should ensure for Americans a very entertaining if perhaps somewhat painful presidency. The President's stated goals of civility, practicality and bipartisanship will be subverted and sabotaged at every stage not only by congressional Democrats but by his own appointees. Obama's rhetoric and style will ensure that his approval rating remains high despite an unending series of unpopular and disastrous policy ventures. Public anger will be continually directed not at the king, but at his counsellors, whose heads will roll regularly in response to repeated failures of judgment, achievement and ethics.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Rod Dreher Working on Discovering Fire

Chief CrunchyCon Rod Dreher likes occasionally to mull over things and make "discoveries" which are utterly obvious to anyone who has thought about social conservatism for more than the last hour or so. He asks whether his readers have ever wondered why the poor and working classes tend to adopt the more conservative forms of religion. Why yes, I wondered about that back when I was an undergraduate and so no doubt has everyone else who has ever had conservative instincts and the slightest interest in political theory or philosophy. I suspect that this manner of approaching this stuff fulfils a didactic function for Rod; for some reason he has and has retained a large number of liberal commenters who have never thought seriously about these things and is trying to break them in gently. Sure enuf there were a few commenters who seemed to be transmogrified by this brilliantly original line of thought.

Rod buries the lede further by launching into a digression about the superior personal appeal of charismatic varieties of religion over liturgical ones to the most poor and oppressed. He finally gets to the answer to the question: the poor and marginalized are drawn to religions with rules and moral structures because they have the most to lose through moral dissoluteness. If you descend into the depths through drugs, promiscuity and self-indulgence, and you are wealthy, dad and mom are always around to subsidize you in university for a few extra years until you can get your head together and straightened out. The poor have no such cushion. If you as a young man get in hock to bookies you can always get dad to bail you out at least one more time before the legbreakers pay you a visit. If you're struggling when starting out in the workplace, dad has contacts; later on if life just hasn't gone the right way you can at least look forward to inheriting the family's property when they pass on to give you one more chance or spree, however you decide. The wealthy and powerful have a larger margin of error.

There are other reasons as well, looking at the question from the obverse side. Why do the wealthy tend towards the liberal forms of religion? Well, what's distinctive about conservative religion? It counsels and demands self-restraint, restraint on one's use of power. Who has the most power to be restrained? The wealthy. Therefore they have the most to give up by adherence to conservative religion, and can be more easily assuaged by liberal religion which puts its restraints on others, demanding they refrain from cutting down trees or contributing to global warming.

Rod cites James Poulos over at the American Scene who, discussing the appeal of the odd new sect known as liberaltarians, refers to the Sex Vote, that segment of "people who are generally willing or even eager to trade away political and economic freedoms for broad (in terms of scope, variety, protection and enforcement) social and cultural freedoms". I think Poulos misunderstands what these people want, though. The cultural and sexual freedoms these people want they already have, and have had without threat for decades now. What they want now is to achieve cultural hegemony for the libertine approach to life and marginalize those who oppose it, through their control of mass media and elite institutions plus the occasional unbaring of the heavy hand through boycotts, firings, and the ministrations of the Human Rights Commission.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

So How Much Political Advantage Does $34 Billion Buy, Anyway?

The world moves fast nowadays. What with all these pre-budget announcements, it's now possible to feel buyer's remorse before the transaction has been completed. I've been saying that the Tories had no option but to accept the Keynesian stimulus argument and produce a budget designed to rope in Liberal support. And I stand by that — as I've been saying the Conservative Party of Canada simply afford to hand over power to the Liberals, be stigmatized as the "party that doesn't do anything for the ordinary guy" in hard times, and run the risk of being out of power for 20 years as a result.

It's understandable that a government would act the way that this one has, as successful politicians have a strong survival interest. The Government slashed it's own throat with the economic statement last fall. The instinctive response is to staunch the blood, wipe up the mess, stitch up the wound and apply bandages to the wounds. Today's budget is the result. But is reasonable to ask how much political capital $34 billion buys. Well, it's not really $34 billion; just the natural effects of the downturn are estimated to produce a $12 billion deficit anyway. So what does $22 billion in stimulus/infrastructure/assistance to the unemployed buy, politically?

This package of outcomes isn't all good. There's some discontent within the party; just peruse my fellow Blogging Tories to sense the signs of mutiny in the ranks. Unambiguously Ambidextrous has managed to get these views a place on the front page of the National Post website. I'm disturbed and sad at the total rejection of the party which some conservatives seem to be contemplating. There's a danger of saying of these discontented, "So what. Where are they going to go?" The Conservative Left used to think that regularly, and say that occasionally, wearing a triumphant smirk, and one of the results was the Reform Party of Canada. Conservative activists are principled and often ornery sorts, so organizing them in support of a necessary political compromise is like herding cats. Stephen Harper is going to spend some of the political capital he has accumulated with the conservative base on this. At the same time it can't let it's policies be dictated by people who don't understand that it's necessary to win power to enact any part of the conservative agenda, so it's self-destructive to demand that a government enact all of it.

The arguments from supposed conservative principle aren't definitive here; there's nothing wrong with running deficits in bad times so long as they are paid for with surpluses in the good. That's something we have to insist that government does, when the time comes. And when that time comes it would be nice if we had a conservative government to try to hold accountable, rather than a Liberal one.

There are better arguments against these tactics. They are, like the arguments for this approach, based on politics. The case would be that this $22 billion just doesn't buy any political advantage nearly worth the expenditure. What has this $22 billion plan bought? 6 to 9 months. Things are going to get worse economically this year, maybe a lot worse. Michael Ignatieff can take 6 months, 9 months, more if he thinks it better, to organize himself, to replenish Grit coffers, and then defeat the Government when he thinks the economy is at its lowest point, with every chance of beating the Conservatives. There better be an awful lot of good things done by the Government during the next 6 or 9 months for this Keynesian adventure to be worth it. One might go further and argue that in the current circumstances, no one can know whether it is, in the long term, the better position for the Conservatives to be, next week, in Government, in Opposition, or in the midst of an election campaign. The best political outcome for the Conservatives might be if the Government was defeated, the Governor General refused a dissolution, and the Leader of the Opposition was invited to form a government. Then the anger of Conservative voters at this "undemocratic" activity might energize the base all the way to the next election, whenever it is.

But I think this argument misses a few things. If the Government had publicly renounced Keynesian stimulus theory, and brought in a $12 billion deficit budget, or worse, a budget cutting services and/or raising taxes to produce a balanced budget, make no mistake, it would have been defeated in an election campaign. It would have the wind behind it at the start, being able to denounce the Opposition for forcing an unnecessary election in a time of crisis, delaying any action to resolve it. It could take some advantage of the distaste with which English Canadians regard the entering into a coalition containing the separatists as a key component. But it would face sensationalized MSM coverage of the job losses that are now occurring every day. It would face the public preference for parties promising to do something in midst of a crisis to those proposing nothing. The conservative economists who oppose Keynesian stimulus would be overwhelmed by the MSM coverage of the plurality of economists who support it in some form. It would face the spillover effects of Obamamania in the States, which has created an appetite for change that Michael Ignatieff could take advantage of. Worst of all, it would face an Opposition that would be led by the inexorable logic of its public positions to effectively band together, promising that another Harper minority government would be defeated on the Speech for the Throne and replaced with a government that would introduce a stimulus program, an infrastructure program, and additional aid for the unemployed. And if Stephen Harper couldn't win a majority against Stephane Dion, he can't win a majority government, at least right now, against Michael Ignatieff.

The recession fighting weapons authorized in the budget won't really be worth the $22 billion they cost, marked as they are with all the inefficiencies attached to government endeavours. But they buy the time necessary to stay alive and to craft a strategy that will prevent a Liberal takeover of power that could last for generations. The difference between their actual value to the public and their real value is thus well worth the cost, even if we have to borrow to pay for them.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Welcome, Disabled Workers, to the University of Mars

I've long suspected that government job training programs, especially those forcibly attached to a government subsidy, may be among the most useless and inefficient ways that government uses its money. These programs train people who don't want to be there in skills they aren't really interested in having to help them get jobs that don't exist. Well thanks to the Toronto Star for heaping up evidence for my thesis. It seems that many injured workers have been required by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board as a condition of receiving compensation to enrol in the University of Mars
Let us gather the testimonies of the grateful beneficiaries of the government's concern for their career future:

Carlos Aviles:
"It was a waste of time," he said. "So much money wasted. It's all garbage. The training was inadequate. This is not real school. It's for kids. (But) I have to go there."

Gladys Canelas:
"Someone has to stop this stupid thing," said Canelas, who quit her program in frustration and is now unemployed. "Money, money, money for nothing."

Of course teaching of new skills and skill upgrading for our modern hitech economy is very difficult considering the way our social service budgets are so severely constrained in how much they can spend to l'arn recipients in these marketable new skills. Being able to afford to pay out a mere $33,000 over a 18 months to prepare one for data entry and shelf stocking, or $21,000 to prepare one to be a "customer service clerk" -- how can one expect results when our social service programs are so starved for resources?

You know of course that it would be a lot more effective to let the recipients pick a new trade and an institution to teach it themselves and just give them the money to enroll. But they're much better off deploying the whole long-assembled wisdom of the Government of Ontario in a decision that may determine the whole course of their future life.

I've been thinking of course about the budget. There will be money for job training, Jim Flaherty has said. It's a shibboleth, a panacea, a totem. Not spending money on job training is considered equivalent to saying "We don't care about people losing jobs; they probably deserved it anyway. Let them deliver advertising flyers."

About all we can hope for from the Conservatives is that they take the time and trouble to ensure that their training programs will achieve something, but that's not something I really expect to see. Expect a Star expose of useless new training programs finded in the budget by the conservatives later this year, just about the time that Michael Ignatieff decides that he wants to force an election.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

David Frum's NewMajority.com

This week brings the launch of David Frum's new website NewMajority.com. If you haven't read Frum's 2008 book Comeback, the new venture's statement of purpose will leave you in doubt about just what these people are up to. The key words are these which sum up the basic attitude expressed in Comeback:
Our party has now taken two bad beatings in two consecutive cycles. It looks very likely we are heading for a third. It's not a sign of lack of commitment to our party or our movement to acknowledge these hard facts.

Our goal here at NewMajority.com is to renew and reform our Republican party and the conservative philosophy so that we can again earn the confidence of the American people and govern responsibly and effectively. We don't claim to have all the answers. We are sure that we are asking the right questions.

Comeback ruffled some feathers in the conservative aviary. There are three components to the worldview expressed in Comeback; at least two if not three of them challenge the default position, or at least the default for-public-consumption position, of the conservative establishment. First is an assessment of the future prospects of the Republican Party as they appear at the moment. Frum's is bleak. Significant portions of the electorate, portions that are growing, seem to becoming increasingly hostile to the party. Aversion to Republicans by Hispanics, women, suburbanites, the college-educated -- these things are not going to magically melt away. Many of the GOP's signature issues have exhausted their appeal. For example, income tax cuts? Further significant middle class tax cuts are unsustainable economically; almost 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all and have no need of reductions; 80% of American workers now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.

The second issue is what to about all this. Here's where the participants take off their coats and the brawling begins. Much of the movement believes that all that is needed is to return to true conservative principles, to march as in days of yore behind banners of bold colours not pale pastels, to be the party of Ronald Reagan again. Frum isn't buying it, and neither am I. Ronald Reagan didn't prevail by urging his party to ask "What would Barry Goldwater have said? What would Robert Taft have done?" The retrenchment purists are people whose plan if they could redo the Charge of the Light Brigade would be to try to think of a way to make the horses run faster. Frum urges a full, ruthless, corner to corner and ceiling to floor review of the policies the GOP has been running on. This is where Frum is right, and Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and the official voices of the conservative movement are wrong. Why do we laugh at the way Democrats acted during the Reagan years? Because they refused to look at and think about their now vote-losing positions and kept on losing as a result, always unwilling to believe that their ideas had been rejected again because the public didn't agree with them. There's a chasm here between those who want to be or at least look thoroughly orthodox and those who want to win elections.

The third component of the approach is a grab bag of new policies and strategic revision of old ones to recapture the public imagination. This isn't the place to go through them. I'll just say that Frum certainly used his imagination. I would never have thought of prison reform as a big vote-winning issue, and a government led "war against obesity" seems likely to be effective only in giving Letterman, Leno and every other comedian in the land a free joke every day of the week. I probably disagree with two-thirds of Frum's policy prescriptions, but that's not the point. I think that he's got the right attitude, the willingness to strip down the whole machine and reevaluate the design of every part, and that's what matters. Since the book Frum has gotten into issues that conservatives never touch such as income equality and the failure of the middle class to gain anything from the income growth of the Bush years, even before the meltdown.

About the future of Frum's new website and movement I have no prediction. I confess to know nothing about Frum's stable of opinioners and journalists or whence they have been rounded up. Frum has closed it up at NR and it looks like he's going to be prolific here so the site will always be worth looking at for that alone. Skimming the titles and summaries of the hefty pile of opinion pieces in the first week there might be some danger that the website become something of a nest of social liberals, malcontents and defeatists. In the worst case scenario Frum could be written off as someone who's "gone over to the liberals", and marginalized and ignored.

But I'm wishing the New Majority good health. A lot of the next 4 years is going to be a defensive trench war. It's nice to have someone thinking about new weapons for when we can go on the offensive again.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Fence and Wall Infrastructure

It seems the greens, the unions, the left interest groups have a terrible problem. Asked to come up for ideas for stuff that the President-elect can blow money on, not even all their ingenuity can help them come up with enough projects that can with any plausibility be considered as economic stimulus ramping up jobs and economic demand in anything like the near future. The greens have looked hard but even they cannot come up with their share of the swag. The governors and mayors don't have enough highways, bridges and tunnels, or even mobster museums and waterslides and to blow on the shovel-ready cash that is soon to be heaped on them.

But I have an idea. Highways, tunnels, and bridges — they create construction jobs, jobs that aren't there because the private sector isn't building anything. Well let's think: what other kinds of things can be constructed? Well...hydro poles maybe. Barns and rail tracks and baseball fields.... Hey fences and walls! Like for example the border fence that would allow the U.S. to regain control of its borders but which the Left say can't be done, among other reasons because it costs a zillion dollars and would take forever to complete. Well those are features, not bugs now. We're in a state of economic emergency now and need stuff to spend money on. Many of the plans have already made and could be proceeded with pedal to the floor once those annoying environmental impact studies are thrown overboard in this time of emergency. Now we can make this a national priority and get construction going 24/7.

And the President-elect wants immigration reform. The whole package won't be ready till next year, if ever, but here's a great start — a sign of good faith to those cynical Republicans who do not believe that Democrats really want border control, despite protestations to the contrary. Obama is said to want 80 Senate votes for this package and serious acceleration of border fencing might bring over a few GOP waverers. And an all-out effort at border control would convince many Republicans that giving illegal immigrants a break is acceptable, that for the first time the promise "this is the last amnesty" would be fulfilled.

There's been dispute in the past about how much a border fence would cost. Some say something like $5 billion, opponents say more like $50 billion. But now who cares? The more the better. Where there's dispute what kind of fence should be built, let's get going on both of them.

Barack Obama says he's in favour of border control. Some people don't believe him. The GOP should jump in with ideas, which Obama has solicited, and with amendments to the stimulus package that get this fence going on a priority basis.

Well if you seriously want construction jobs and stimulus I'm just saying....

Friday, January 9, 2009

Artificial Stimulation

It's frigid winter in Canada but happily whatever bleak near-Arctic conditions that led to Prime Minister Harper's brain freeze in December seem to have abated. The provocative and disingenuous economic statement issued by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in December looked to be the biggest political blunder since the accursed regime of Joe Clark. But the evidence is that the master tactician Stephen Harper that we used to know has retaken occupation of his body. There's evidence of that in the Prime Minister's interview with Maclean's which deserves a close reading.

The Conservative Party's current danger is that if this recession turns out to be severe enough to cause people to start using the D-word, there are only two roles cast for the governing party to audition for: Saviour Of The People Who Protected The Average Canadian and Cold-Hearted Bastard Who Let The Country Go To Hell To Let Big Business Make More Money. F.D.R. or Herbert Hoover. R. B. Bennett starred in the latter role, while Mackenzie King, being very versatile, got to play both parts, the latter in 1929-30, and the former 1935-on.

In order to avoid being cast as the villain in this morality play, the Conservatives need some method acting. They must think, react, and act as if they were people who genuinely believe that a giant "economic stimulus" is what is needed to ameliorate this recession. This is made difficult by the fact that our conservative comrades to the south of the border are vigourously decrying, by radio, television, Internet and all manner of printed word, the uselessness and inefficacy of Barack Obama's forthcoming stimulus program, plus the evidence that FDR's New Deal did nothing to end the Depression and probably exacerbated it. Not to mention the humongous resultant deficits of a huge stimulant injection, which have led Michelle Malkin to name the promised legislation the Intergenerational Theft Act.

Stephen Harper seems to realize the Conservatives' position. From the Macleans interview:
A...I still think the underlying reality is that Canada enters this recession in a pretty strong position compared to most Western industrialized countries. We're entering the recession later; all the indications are it will not be as deep here and we should be able to come out of it sooner. If you look around the world at what other countries are now doing, they're things that Canada did over a year, year and a half ago, particularly some of the big tax reductions they're talking about in the United States, and the sales tax cuts that Prime Minister Brown has bought in Britain.
Q: So why do we need all this stimulus spending, and $30-billion deficits, if we'll be able to ride this out in six months?
A: Well, the reality is that the situation is, notwithstanding all of that, still worse than forecasters were indicating three, four months ago, and we've got to make sure we don't have a deep and prolonged drop in economic activity. So in our judgment, that is going to require fiscal stimulus. Obviously large-scale spending and deficits—even short-term deficits—are not something I particularly relish.
Q: Then why do them?
A: They are what is necessary for the economy now.

Do you sense a certain coherence and conviction in this defence? "They are what is necessary for the economy now" -- not a stirring call to action, is it. Not something likely to win over skeptics and disbelievers, were there to be any. But in his position the Prime Minister unfortunately cannot let himself be fully candid. Later in the interview Harper reminds us that his survival in the last election, despite an economic meltdown in the middle of it, is something of a marvel itself. And now the stimulus package is necessary to avoid a "deep and prolonged drop" not in "economic activity" but in "the Conservative Party's standing in the polls."
There's a chess game going on now between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff and the two are circling each other warily. (Wait -- that's before a boxing match isn't it. Anyway....) Stephen Harper wants to avoid being defeated over the budget because of the possibility that the G-G will deny him a dissolution and the Liberals will take over (probably renouncing any full coalition with the NDP) and never be crowbarred out of power. And another election doesn't look like much fun either even though the Tories are ahead in the polls. So there will be money for infrastructure, both for "shovel-ready" projects and longer term enterprises. (At a minimum the Conservatives can serve the country be ensuring that infrastructure money goes for genuine infrastructure projects, not fixing roofs of municipal hockey rinks in Liberal-held ridings, where a lot of Jean Chretien's "infrastructure" money seemed to end up.) There will be tax cuts, skewed at least somewhat toward the lower and middle classes, despite the evidence that in times like these tax savings are used to reduce debt or saved and not for stimulative spending. And there will be at least some changes to EI to evidence specific concern for the unemployed. (The Government could do worse than to take the Grits' advice and eliminate the two-week waiting period between unemployment and eligibility for EI benefits. That has always struck be as one of the most purposeless and illogical features of welfare policy.) It seems uncertain what Ignatieff's designs are, although the tea leaves seem to say that he is not anxious to take a chance at doing anything that might trigger an immediate election.
Harper's moves may have helped him to recover from the seeming disaster of the December economic statement. His stated plans to avoid making secondary legislation matters of confidence may indicate a desire for a Commons that is stable at least into the fall. But now he must face the consequences of compromise: if the government must budget like Liberals to survive, and must allow the Left to defeat conservative measures without risking dissolution, what do conservatives actually get out of being in government at all? I guess we do have to wait for the budget and Ignatieff's reaction before planning our moves too far ahead. It would be nice if we could be sure that Harper the Chess Master is back in full control of himself again.