Saturday, April 30, 2011

PoliticsCanada: 2nd & 3rd parties switch: Conservs still in lead, but chance of majority very shakey

Reuters (Apri30,2k11)



Pollsters have calibrated the prospects of Canada's Conservative Party, now the governing party based on a leading minority status in the House of Commons, the party having inched back into a 38% status 3 days before the May 2 national elections.  This leaves them 2 percentage points short of the 40% threshold that ordinarily results in a majority of seats in the Commons, and thus into stable full term governance.  The Conservs had dipped to 36.4% yesterday.

These minute fluctuations come after an amazing upsurge of voters turning to the New Democrat Party, which had held a perennial 3rd place status in the total national vote and in the Commons.  One outstanding proposal tending toward greater electoral justice in the Canadian federation has been its present leader's advocacy of proportional representation; but another stand registers as on the deficit side of the goal toward stable democracy that has long been advocated by the Conservs -- namely, an elected Senate (instead of simply enduring forever the serious flaw in the repatriated Constitution that provides only for Senators by appointment of the Prime Minister).  The NDP erroneously wants to steer the country into instability by abolishing the Senate.  Still, there's the NDP's advocacy of PropRep; in refWrite's opinion, that's an advance beyond present Constitutional arrangements.

The main surprise of election trends is neither the statistical path in the polling thru-out the campaign toward a minority Conserv govt again (it woud be the third such, each time headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper), nor the upsurge of the NDP (which is more clearly socialist than the other two left parties in the Commons), as startling as that NDP upsurge has been in the polls. But the real shocker is the now obvious degeneration of voter support for the Liberal Party at the federal level.  Two Liberal leaders now have, in succession, failed to capture the imagination of voters sufficiently to carry their party into even a minority-governing status.  Besides the long history of fraud and other scandals attached to the Liberals before the latest phase of that party's leadership by eggheads (Stéphane Dion and presently Michael Ignatieff), motivated by grandiose Green schemes, ever increasing spending and national debt (etc), there has been the recent gaffe by Iggy where he at least attempted to balance his promises of spending splurges with a resolute proposal to increase sales taxes.  He thus set himself off from Jack Layton, the NDP leader, who insists no increase in sales taxes.  The amazing thing is that Layton woud instead increase taxes on "the rich" -- and thus on those among them are the main source of job creation.

Were we only to concentrate on one factor like economic policy, we can now risk saying with reference to the latest polls that voters are leaving the Liberals in large part for New Democrats, and the country is polarizing into a clearer left vs r+t split.  But some nuances of such a judgment and forecast are necessary.  One of them being that the Liberals have always had centrist and mild-r+t tendencies among its "big tent" membership and parliamentary representatives.   Some voters for Liberal candidates are moderates or left-of-center on fiscal policy, but social conservatives on family, r+t to l+f, sexuality/marriage, transgender use of women's washrooms in public places, etc.   These voters may be trending to switch support to the Conservs, who are not the raving ideologues the left parties try to paint them to be -- the main concern of the Conservs has been to stabilize the economy, encourage investment within Canada, job creation, ease the tax burden on all wage-earners, stop the rise in government indebtedness, and actually pay down the debt to free up the oncoming generations.

In  closing, I can only note that the Green Party has not yet found a seat in Parliament.  It's 900,000 segment of the voters in the last federal election was denied representation in the Commons (Canada's constitutional flaw) due to the dispersal of its voters across the country; on the other hand, the Bloc Québecois whose voters are much more densely concentrated in one province and who had less than Greens in total votes gained over 50 seats federally for their separatist cause.  Ironically, the rise of the NDP which peaked this time around at 31.2%, and now has slipped a bit to 29.6%. The separatist Bloc Québecois, on the other hand, does not gain from the federalist Liberals in Québec where Libs are losing voters to the NDP (up to a whopping 39% there!, leading the field) and to a lesser extent to the Conservs.  It's possible that the expected 2nd (NDP) and 3rd (Libs) parties in the federal Commons will unite to try to deny the expected 1st place Conservs the role of forming the new government, altho in the electoral campaigns the NDP and Libs both parties swore each woud never enter a coalition govt with the other.  In 3 days time we'll know where all these mysteries take us.  Long live Canada!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

PoliticsLibya: Abu Sufian Qumu: Guantanamo AlQuaedist exposed by WikiLeaks, leads anti-democrats in Libyan revolution

The Telegraph London, UK (Apr27,2k11)



WikiLeaks


Guantanamo detainee 

is now Libyan rebel leader


A man who spent six years in Guantanamo is now a senior 

figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight against Colonel Gadaffi.







In a newly disclosed file by WikiLeaks that was written in 2005, Abu Sufian 


Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda Bin Qumu was identified as a “probable member 


of Al Qaida and a member of the African Extremist Network”.

The revelation will raise concerns about the range of factions fighting Gadaffi in Libya, some of whom have been associated with Al Qaeda.
Qumu was previously a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, but allegedly left the proscribed group in 1998 to join the Taliban.
In the report, US investigators classified Qumu as a “medium to high” risk because he was “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies”.
Qumu was imprisoned in Libya for ten years for alleged “murder, physical assault, armed assault and 
distributing narcotics”, but escaped in 1993 and fled to Afghanistan.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

refWrite editorial comment:  The intro to the news article above, by Holly Watt, was published by London, England's Telegraph newspaper.  The complete article with related reports deserves wide reading.  To my mind, the import of the Al-Quaeda presence, a leading presence, in the Libyan revolution in no way invalidates the Libyan revolution, but it does confirm what some conservative Christians and others have been warning about all the ongoing revolutions in the MidEast.  There is a risk that AlQuaeda types, even some who were incarcerated in Quantanamo prison for war criminals, will swarm into any given MidEastern revolutionary scene, take over the national revolt, and impose not democracy but theocratic tyranny on the nation.  While I fully synpathize with the situation where the USA, unlike any other Western country, is damned if it supports the previous dictators of those countries, and damned it it doesn't, by opening up the prospect of a potentially worse tyranny emerging.

But there's a matter of judgment involved for all Western countries, indeed for all countries which truly value freedom:   In the case of the USA, it was more than time for Mubarak to be driven from the scene in Egypt; his tyrannies were many, but the Muslim Brotherhood's potential takeover of Egypt was allowed to serve as his excuse to make them the only political opposition with any clout.  We shall see whether the MB takes over the country in the upcoming elections.  Or whether the junta now in control will revert to form and determine the outcome by eonsconcing one of their fellas.  The democratic forces that have emerged in Egypt now deserve the support of all freedom loving regimes thru-out the world.

Likewise in Libya.  Already a clear three-way conflict has come into view with the WikiLeaks documents publicly exposing the leading presence of Abu Sufian Qumu in the country.  Another report says 1,000 AlQuaedists  have swarmed into the country and back Qumu's leadership.  These places the democratic forces, which until now, have had little clear leadership, either military or political.  The Western and other freedom-loving forces must not only render Qadaffi's regime powerless (a big enuff task in itself) but also render extinct the Al Quaeda forces that want to exploit the democratic revolution, substitute their jihadist-Islamicist tyranny for Qadaffi's, and impose a ruthlessly repressive taliban-type Sharia law on Libya's population.

In the meantime, a fourth very major front of the war for democracy in Arab Muslim contries has opened with the uproar that has resounded from Syria.

-- Politicarp

JuridicsJamaica: Constitution: Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms

ComparativeConstitutions.org (Apr27,2k11)







Posted: 24 Apr 2011 01:38 PM PDT
After 17 years of debate and discussion, the Jamaican parliament adopted a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms earlier this month. It will enter into force once signed by the Governor General. The adoption brings the Jamaican Constitution in line with the trend in commonwealth countries, represented by the UK Human Rights Act 1998 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although Chapter III of the 1962 Constitution did have provisions on rights, the new Charter expands the list and adds significant detail. It clearly identifies a state duty to uphold the rights, and to some extent modernizes the previous set of rights by adding a right to a clean environment and specifically enumerating the rights of children. (There are no provisions on the disabled, however.)

The Charter confirms that the death penalty can be utilized, explicitly overruling in Section 13(8) the decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Pratt and Morgan vs Attorney General of Jamaica. That case had held that holding a person on death row for more than five years was cruel and inhumane treatment; backlash against the case had led Jamaica to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Privy Council. (An attempt by Jamaica to replace the Privy Council jurisdiction with that of the Caribbean Court of Justice was later declared unconstitutional by the Privy Council in Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights Limited and Others [2005]).

Jamaica marks yet another step in the global spread of rights, and the decline of absolute notions of parliamentary sovereignty.

--Tony Ginsburg

--  This material posted here by Lawt

refWrite edtorial comment: I have the same problem with the title of this constitution as I do with that of Canada on which said title is modelled.  In this, I follow what reformational social leader Gerald Vandezande, recipient-member of the Order of Canada, maintained some time ago -- namely, that it shoud be / shoud have been designated a charter of rights and responsiblities.  On the other hand, the Canadian charter does not spell out any responsiblities, not with any explicitness, only implied at best.  Likewise, Jamaica's new Charter.  The charters are both good, despite their differences, and the Jamaican developments are here greeted with applause.  One coud say the charters in both cases are modelled on the idea of a Bill of Rights as instituted in the First 10 Amendments to the USA Constitution. The Canadian Constitution's Charter of Rights was created whole-cloth by politicians at record speed as part of the repatriation of the Constitution from the United Kingdom and never resolved certain structural problems (for example, the status of Quebec), while the Jamaican bill of rights has now been adopted after 17 years, as Tony Ginsburg points out.

-- Lawt 

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Easter Morning -- Up from the grave he arose, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ




He arose!  He arose!


Alleluia, Christ arose.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

PoliticsSyria: Revolution: Spontaneously organized protests

BBC News MiddleEast  (Apr22,2k11)

22 April 2011 Last updated at 11:40 ET

Syria's spontaneously 

organised protests





He was crucified, dead, and buried;


he descended into hell ....


Please see our  brief meditation on rW page 2,
also Owlb's further study on his own blog.

Friday, April 22, 2011

DisasterJapan: Technics: American robots examine nuke plant's innards

Nasdaq (Apr17,2k11)



refWrite editorial comment:  The news story introduced below vaguely moves in a counter-direction to the news we hear from Japan since the earthquake, tsunami, flood, and nuclear near-meltdown.  Just in the last few days, another quake hit the Honshu area in Japan.  In the midst of all the disaster news and the rehabilitation efforts of the Japanese people, govt, outside help and support from many nations and organizations, and the work of Christian aid organizations and those of other religions including Buddhists (Japan's majority religion), this infobit regarding the deployment of very advanced robotry creates a precedent for future h+tech solutions.  As in the case of war technology, such developmental deployments will have applications outside the "realm" of nuclear radiation, and also outside the "realm" of natural disaster.  We can't predict where, as the deployment of the iRobot-made technical apparatus utilizes an innovation on a scale for a purpose that simultaneously tests it and in the very utilization/testing stretches the innovation process.

Robotry is being used to do a marvellous thing, and offers promise of further applications to other kinds of problems (God forbid, we shoud have to use it again for runaway nuke radiation).  "Mixed and uneven development" where a good emerges from a horrible vast bad.  The robotry itself can be used for good, but it can also be used for extremely negative purposes; we need to keep reminding ourselves of this mixed actuality.

-- EconoMix



US-made Robots to examine 


inside of Japan nuclear plant



TOKYO (Dow Jones) A U.S.-made robot built for bomb disposal were set to make its way into a reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Sunday to find out whether conditions were safe enough for workers to begin badly needed measures to put the crippled plant under control.
The "Packbot", made by U.S. firm iRobot Corp, will measure radiation and oxygen levels as well as the temperature inside the building, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company  said.
Read the complete article at the Nasdaq webpage, click here.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

EconomicsUSA: Labor: Trading down -- taking a paycut after a layoff

HuffPo (Apr21,2k11)

refWrite editorial: This is a sobering article of "HuffPost readers' stories" about staying in the workforce on a discounted income (how's that for a neck-jerking factoid of rhetoric?).  I strongly recommend you read the Huffington Post article in its entirety (excerpted below).  And, for reformational Christian readers, I recommend you investigate the Christian Labor Association (USA), founded in 1931 and open to all.  Organized labor of other persuasions are not helping workers make adjustments and holding employers to their responsiblities, at the same time.  Strike-maniacal labor movements, stoking the already-existing of down-employed workers, carefully atuning wage and benefit requirements at negotiating time, are not the answer for most workers.  That's another, in many case even a new, reason why CLA-USA needs to experience growth and development, spreading as well to new industries, in these difficult times.  CLA-USA does not fan the flames of social unrest, calculatedly seeks the best possible negotiating package, and seeks as longterm pluralization of labor relations and workers representation so you never have to be a member of a union you don't approve of.

-- Lawt



Trading Down: 


Taking a paycut after a layoff


The general heading at the above link includes several articles.  Here's Huffington Post's  key report of a painful trend of retrenchment for workers regarding the downsizing of their income (if they get re-employment at all), in the bundle of articles:


Laid-off Americans increasingly 


taking paycuts - and kissing 


their old lives goodbye


NEW YORK -- Susan Goscewski spent 30 years climbing the professional ladder. It took little over two years of unemployment for her to tumble back down.
Cast out of the workforce in December 2008 following the financial meltdown, Goscewski, 59, never expected to go for so long without a job. She had three decades of steady employment history and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon, one of America's top business schools. Her last position, as director of development for a nonprofit, paid $90,000 a year.
Last month, she finally found a new job: as a classroom tutor at a bookkeeping training center, working 20 hours a week for $15 per hour. Even if she works 50 of 52 weeks at that rate, she'll make just one-sixth of her 2008 salary.
"In this field, in this particular organization, I will never see what I've made before," Goscewski said quietly. "And I -- have I accepted that? I'm quite angry about it."
The U.S. economy added 216,000 new jobs in March, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, appearing to bolster claims that the labor market recovery is "gaining traction". But Goscewski and many others lucky enough to find work, any work, still find their old standards of living painfully out of reach.
"It makes me feel good that people are giving me work today. It means they trust me, they believe in me," Goscewski said. "But it still seems like a demotion, like I'm back in kindergarten again. What am I doing? I'm really starting all over again."
While the recovery of the labor market and the broader U.S. economy depend critically on job growth, equally important is the quality of those jobs. During the economic downturn, 40 percent of the jobs lost came from high-wage industries -- yet high-wage industries accounted for only 14 percent of the new positions created in the first year of post-downturn job growth, according to a report released in February by the National Employment Law Project.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

PoliticsHungary: Constitution: Law on a new foundation for the still-wounded country

Wall Street Journal (Apr19,2k11)

WSJ keeps this article under lock and key, I tried to logn in by giving my email address and a password, but the newspaper didn't recognize it. So I guess they want even merely occasional vistors to subscribe,like the Financial Times out of England.  But I coud glean the following intro from the tease-page. I'll keep my eyes peeled for futher info on Hungary's post-Communist  constitutional developments. I'm particualrly interested in how it treats the Hungarian communites in Romania, Ukraine, and other areas that belonged to the pre-Sovietization of the country -- but were sliced away by the Communists to "cut Hungary down to size."

-- Lawt

A new constitution for Hungary


Opinion: Locking in the values of the political transition of 1989-90, at last!

Yesterday afternoon, the Hungarian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to adopt a new constitution. In so doing, Hungary became the last formerly communist country in the region to throw off the specter of its recent past and adopt a fundamental law of its own making.


The new constitution has great symbolic and practical significance. It provides a foundation for the spiritual and intellectual renewal of Hungary. It reflects the past, present and future of the nation, and the fundamental values of the Hungarian people.
On a practical level, it will revise and update a legal framework that was formulated under the communists ...


Washington Post (Apr20,2k11)

Hungarian lawmakers approve socially and 


fiscally conservative new constitution


Associated Press (AP)
...conservative new constitution Monday that...contracts.Hungary's political...scurrent...








PoliticsLibya: Gadaffi advances: Tyrant's troops enter city of Brega, France enters ground war, Italy sends 10 military trainers for revolutionaries


This breaking news item just in, on Twitter (Apr20,2k11)



Brega: Reports that the Gaddafi mercenaries retreated from Brega      

                because 






1: They lost communications with Command-&-Control 



2: Trouble in Sirte #libya














New York Times via IndianExpress.com (Apr20,2k11)


French fighter jets enter Libya, 

defiant Gaddafi bombs rebels




Italy's defence minister said there was a clear understanding 
that the rebels had to be trained.

Rebel fighter near the frontline in eastern Libya













Five days ago, escalation against revolutionaries

Daily Telegraph London UK, via Montreal Gazette (Apr16,2k11)


Gadhafi's forces dropping 


cluster bombs 'like rain,'


says  witnesses



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Gadhafi+forces+dropping+cluster+bombs+like+rain+witnesses/4628742/story.html#ixzz1K5Iwz9z6





Four days ago, plans for street war in coastal city became known
Reuters via Montreal Gazette (Apr17,2k0)



Gadhafi's forces fire hail of rockets at rebels

Libyan fighters 'ready for street war' in Ajdabiyah



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Gadhafi+forces+fire+hail+rockets+rebels/4631056/story.html#ixzz1K5KvSFnI

-- all materials plus additional semiotics posted by Politicarp