News Bits (originally posted 12 Feb 2007)

The Conservative Party, the party of fair politics, the party that wants an elected Senate so as to remove partisan appointments, is making some telling appointments in other areas. According to the Globe and Mail, the Harper government is filling the judicial advisory committees with Tories - failed MP candidates, riding executives, ministerial aides, former politicians. The committees were created "to take partisan politics out of the appointment of judges." Your Prime Minister is taking what is supposed to be a non-partisan body and making it very Conservative. Even many of those appointees who do not show Conservative connections "seem to share Prime Minister Stephen Harper's oft-expressed desire to change the face of Canada's judiciary." Instead of non-partisan bodies designed to keep the judiciary uncorrupted by party politics, Harper is turning the judicial advisory committees into tools for change - specifically changes desired by the Tory government. I guess Harper's promise of ethical governance had an expiry date.

Conservatives are calling Liberals hypocrits. Ho-hum. Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova) is accusing the Liberals of wrongly criticizing the government's action on the Celil case. The Tories are pointing towards the Liberal execution of the Arar case as evidence that the Liberals are hypocrits. Funny thing is that while the Liberals were working to bring Arar home, the Conservatives were suggesting publicly that Arar was a serious terror suspect. Sounds like the Tories don't have a leg to stand on either.

Global Warming can't come too soon for some areas of New York. Oswego County has received up to 10 feet of snow in the past 8 days, and more is coming. Says the New York Times, "First the fire hydrants vanished. Then the tombstones. Then went the mailboxes, parked cars, front doors, stop signs and the bottoms of roadside billboards." Sounds like heaven.

Talks with North Korea have hit a roadblock. It seems the Koreans want fuel oil and electricity shipments before they will begin turning over their nuclear weapons and fuel. I guess the oil to run the North's tanks and Kim Jong-Il's Bentleys are more valuable than the state's stumbling nuclear program. Perhaps more likely however is that Kim knows once he gets his shipments he can simply renig on his end of the bargain...like always.