Iggy... Just try...

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

It is all too obvious... we have a new standard in politics Canadians must put up with!

Blackmail using our children's money... Seperatists holding the balance of power in a signed coalition agreement... to split apart Canada IS NOT TREASON?

THis is a good read... ENJOY!



"Try talking your way out of this
By MICHAEL HARRIS, Ottawa Sun, Fri, December 12, 2008


The Liberal Party has this thing about professors. Having dumped the nutty professor (far too late) and crowned the expatriate professor (far too early), some say the political playing field in Canada is now level. Such Michael Ignatieff enthusiasts are one toke over the party line. In a recent television appearance, Iggy took to talking out of the corner of his mouth -- tough-guy style. By the end of the month, he will be using both sides. In a word, the new Liberal leader's first credibility check will be whether he scuttles the Harper government in late January. Of course, he will not. Bottom line: Ignatieff's word on the coalition manifesto will barely endure for a month. The question: Why did he ever sign it in the first place and what, if anything besides seizing power, does he stand for?


And then there is the pattern of entitlement wedded to a decided preference for not dirtying his hands with working democracy. When he dropped back into the country after a lifetime of living and working abroad, he became a federal candidate by acclamation. Now he has ascended to the leadership of the Liberal Party without the bother of a convention, where normal IQs would have had a chance to express their view of Super Mike. Instead of that, a few hundred party hacks and the Liberal caucus will now impose their man on the party without a single other candidate on the radar screen. Stephane Dion might have been our political Charlie Chaplin, but at least a convention actually voted for him.

Then there is the intellectual baggage that the man some are facetiously referring to as "Our Obama" carries. He is, after all, the man who said of Quebecers, "Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state." This self-styled human rights champion is also the man who needed a presidential order to define exactly what constitutes "acceptable degrees of coercive interrogation." Normal people know that waterboarding, for example, is torture -- presidential order or not. As for Iggy, he suggested that sleep deprivation, keeping prisoners hooded, or stressing them with disinformation, might be thought of as "lesser-evil" territory. Even John McCain knew better than that.

Iggy has developed a handy intellectual reflex for dealing with his published past: He simply changes his mind, usually via half-hearted apologies. The man who said Iraq was one of those occasions when war was necessary as the last hope of democracy, said this four years later: "The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included ..." Then there was his comment about 28 civilians killed in the Israeli bombing in Qana, Lebanon, in 2006. Iggy first said he wasn't "losing sleep about that" because it was, after all, a dirty war. When reminded of his claim that he was supposed to be a human rights champion he replied, "... what happened in Qana was a war crime and I should have said that."

The truth is the Liberal dynasty in this county was based on three closely held pieces of political property: They owned the multicultural vote, they owned finance, (by appointing conservative ministers like Paul Martin), and they owned the national unity file. Today, Jason Kenny has appropriated the multicultural vote, Jim Flaherty has usurped the tradition of conservative finance ministers, and Pierre Trudeau's Liberals under Dion have hopped in bed with the separatists. Even a Harvard dude will have trouble talking his way out of that."

[TOM4CWB]

Interesting... Daimler dumps Chrysler... and buys what?

Russia Today;
"Business
Send to friend | Print version December 12, 2008, 17:50
Daimler shifts into gear for Kamaz stake
As the US Senate rejects the $14 Billion bailout plan for automakers, Germany's Daimler defies the sour mood. It bought a 10% stake in Russia's top truck maker Kamaz for $250 million, which could rise to $300 million depending on how Kamaz performs.
While Global automakers slam the brakes on their investment plans, Germany’s Daimler is stepping on the gas.

On Friday, Andreas Renscher, Head of Daimler Trucks, said the automaking giant will buy a 10% stake in Russian truck maker Kamaz as it seeks to seize the opportunities in the market that could soon become one of the world's largest for trucks.

“This strategic partnership has meant that we are now exploring a lot of different ideas from Kamaz. When you look to different projects, it could be light duty trucks that we can sell through Kamaz, it can up to a big cab for the existing product.”

The deal values Kamaz at $3 Billion, a hefty premium to its current market price of just about $750 million.
The stake’s seller is one of Russia’s top investment banks Troika Dialog. Its chairman Ruben Vardanyan explained the financial details of the deal.

“Daimler will pay $250 million today for 10% of the shares of Kamaz, and we have a special formula which will be accounted during the next 3 years – 2009-2011 - and depending on the results of Kamaz, by profit, by revenue, by EBITDA, we can earn up to $50 million cash to the shareholders who sold the shares today. Basically we can be paid $300 million for 10% of the shares of Kamaz."

Kamaz CEO Sergei Kogogin says that, with his company having a market share of about 30 percent in Russia, the synergy between the two companies is obvious.

“Even in the midst of the crisis, Russia’s market is one of the biggest in Europe, so fighting for its share will only intensify in the future. Daimler is the world’s largest truck maker, and we are the biggest truck producers in the country.”

Daimler is under no future obligation to raise its stake in Kamaz. But it does have the first right of refusal if and when Troika decides to sell the remaining 44 percent.

Russia looks to cut crude production - mulls OPEC membership

MMK posts 3Q 2008 Net Profit of $667 million

Lukoil posts 3Q 2008 Net Profit of $3.47 Billion"

[TOM4CWB]

"A political fiasco of their own making
This is a new low for Canada, and Harper’s Tories aren’t to blame

Andrew Coyne, Maclean’s, December 11, 2008



Something in the Canadian political class, some primeval instinct, requires it to beach itself at regular intervals on the shores of some lunatic misadventure. The ingredients are always the same: immense self-absorption; total strategic blindness; a profound disconnect with, if not contempt for, how its machinations will play outside its own narrow circles; and, as the extent of its miscalculation starts to become clear, panicked, bovine unanimity in support of pressing on with the same strategy. Oh, and some sort of special status for Quebec.

Until now, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown cataclysms were the foremost examples of this seemingly bottomless appetite for self-destruction, this unwavering determination to learn nothing from past mistakes, except how to repeat them over and over again — especially where Quebec is concerned. But nothing in the long catalogue of elite folly quite matches the apparent fit of mass delusion that overcame the opposition parties last week. Never was there a more inept lunge for power, nor one with so little chances of success. As with any failed coup attempt, the long-term consequences are likely to be profound, and dreadful.

I know, I know: we are taught to believe the fault lies with Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. It was their miscalculation that kicked off the whole mess, in the official version — a fall economic statement that so enraged the opposition as to all but guarantee the government’s demise. At best, the media consensus ran, the proposal to reduce public funding for political parties was a reckless provocation, an existential threat to the opposition parties that Harper should have known could only invite one response. The Prime Minister had opted for petty partisanship at a time when the public wanted action on the economy. To his worst critics, it was an attack on democracy, a pathologically partisan attempt to starve the opposition parties of funds, in defiance of civilized democratic norms.

We can dispense with the last point first. While it is true that the opposition parties are more dependent on public funding than the Conservatives, that is only a statement of their relative lack of success in raising funds on their own. Yet absolutely nothing prevents them from doing so. The Tories enjoy no built-in structural advantage — as the Liberals did, in the days when corporations could and did donate unlimited amounts to stay on side with the “natural governing party.” The average Conservative contributor, by contrast, gives just $158. It’s just that there are more of them: five times as many, last year, as the Liberals. There’s nothing “unfair” in this, any more than it is unfair that a party should win an election because it got more votes. Is it so barbaric to suggest that political parties should rely less on the state, more on voluntary donations? Tell it to Sweden, where all party funding is private.

But leave aside the merits of the case: were the Tories motivated by crass partisanship? Of course. Did they misjudge the opposition response? Undoubtedly: the rapid withdrawal of the offending provisions in the days after makes that clear. But did they cause this response? That’s less clear. We have it from Jack Layton’s own mouth — the famous eavesdropped conference call — that the NDP and the Bloc, in particular, were determined to bring the government down, and had prepared plans for a coalition government far in advance. But it is probably true that the economic statement, and the widespread perception that the Conservatives had crossed some sort of line, furnished them with the needed pretext. If Harper did not foresee that, it is perhaps to his discredit. But he may not have imagined anyone could be quite so insane.

The opposition had other options, after all, between abject surrender, on the one hand, and taking the government down, on the other. They had won the initial skirmish over the economic statement: the preponderant media reaction was that the Tories were behaving like bullies. They could have exploited this. They could have moved amendments, proposed compromises, showing statesmanlike reasonableness in the face of Tory intransigence. When these failed, they could have tied up parliamentary business, filibustered, rang bells, all the roster of means an opposition has to register its displeasure. By dragging the debate out, they could have kept the issue in the public eye, allowing the impression of an overbearing and uncooperative government to sink in. They did not have to escalate to nuclear on the first day.

Even then, they had options. Having forced the government to climb down, in quite humiliating fashion, they could have backed off themselves. They would have proved their point, demonstrated resolve, shown unity. The government, and more particularly the Prime Minister, would have been left weakened. But they didn’t. Whether out of maddened ambition, or a desire for revenge, or sheer bloodlust, they pressed on. Almost immediately, media attention turned from Harper’s hubris to the coalition’s unseemly lust for power. And worse was to come. If Harper was guilty of overreaching, the opposition redoubled his error in the other direction. If Harper misjudged the opposition’s reaction, it is clear they misjudged his — and the public’s.

Could they have imagined the plot would succeed? Could they really have supposed the public would meekly accept the replacement of a duly elected government, just six weeks after its election, with a coalition of the parties it defeated — two of whom had explicitly campaigned against the idea? A coalition led by the Liberals, fresh from their worst election showing since Confederation — a party that, with just one quarter of the seats in Parliament, would not even be a majority within its own coalition? Backed by the NDP? And beholden for its very existence to the support of a separatist party? In what parallel universe would the public have swallowed any of this — to say nothing of Prime Minister Stéphane Dion? Did anyone think to ask how this would play in, say, the West? Did anyone care?

There’s no doubt of the legality of what was proposed. As coalition advocates patiently explained, ours is a system of parliamentary government. We elect parliaments, not governments; the ministry is composed of those who have the confidence of the 308 members of the House of Commons. In the wake of the Conservative defeat, the Governor General would have been perfectly within her rights, rather than plunge the country into yet another election, to call upon the coalition to form a government. And there was precedent, of a kind, notably Lord Byng’s decision to call upon Arthur Meighen’s Conservatives in 1926, rather than dissolve the House as Mackenzie King demanded. Apparently, the opposition persuaded themselves these sorts of arguments would impress the public.

It may be, as the historian Michael Bliss argues, that public expectations have changed, that we are no longer inclined to defer to our betters on such questions, but rather insist on deciding them ourselves. Or it may be that the present coalition was the problem: that changing governments without an intervening election might be acceptable in other circumstances, but could not be stretched to cover such an absurd set of facts. Whatever may be the case, the public’s revulsion at what was proposed was palpable, and overwhelming. Polls showed majorities of upwards of 60 per cent opposed to the coalition taking power. Could no one have predicted this? Did no one recall what the result was in 1926 — a resounding defeat for the Conservatives at the next election?

It’s easy to see why the NDP was pushing for it. Had the coalition succeeded, they would have been given seats at the cabinet table, a half-dozen of them, for the first time in their history. No longer could they be marginalized as a protest party, without experience in government. Likewise, the Bloc’s interest was clear. Whatever Gilles Duceppe might have agreed to include in the text of their infamous “accord,” to the effect that the Bloc would not vote against the coalition government on a confidence motion for 18 months, the reality is that a Dion government would be entirely at the mercy of the Bloc for its survival. The “permanent consultative mechanism” envisaged in the accord would either deliver on the Bloc’s demands — effectively conferring veto power, on the Bloc if not Quebec — or would be denounced as a sham, a fraud upon the Quebec “nation.”

What is harder to fathom is why the Liberals would ever have signed on to this. At a stroke, Dion legitimized the NDP, even as he was marginalizing his own party, by association. Worse, by entering into a formal agreement with the Bloc, he threw away the Liberals’ most enduring political strength, their reputation as the party of national unity. It wasn’t that anyone feared that Dion, the passionate separatist-fighter, would conspire in the breakup of the country. But such an unpopular leader, at the head of such a weak party, would be peculiarly vulnerable to the demands of his coalition partners, NDP or Bloc. Indeed, one can only imagine that is how the whole thing got started: the NDP and the Bloc threatened to take down the government, and forced the Liberals to agree to a coalition rather than face an election.

In retrospect, many Grits must be thanking their lucky stars they were spared having to go through with it, the Governor General bowing instead to Harper’s request to prorogue Parliament. (Perhaps some were even counting on this: it seems hard to believe they would not have considered the possibility.) Had the coalition attempted to form a government, it would almost certainly have collapsed in short order: having extracted as much extra spending as they could, the NDP and the Bloc would most likely abandon it in the spring, rather than wait for Dion’s replacement to be elected. Indeed, it might very well have destroyed the Liberal party.

But the damage is considerable as it is. Just the prospect of a coalition takeover prompted a 10- to 15-point swing in public opinion in favour of the Conservatives — from 32 per cent in a Nanos poll just before the economic statement, to an average of 47 per cent in four polls (Ipsos, Strategic Counsel, Ekos and Compas) taken last week. In the West, in particular, where the Liberals desperately need to start building a base if they are to have any hope of winning future elections, the affair may well prove to be a second National Energy Program. But the cost may be even greater in Ontario, once a Liberal fortress, where the Conservatives are now polling in excess of 50 per cent.

Worse, by being seen to get too cozy with the Bloc, they may well have handed Harper a historic strategic opening — to make the Conservatives the Canada Party, replacing the Liberals as the guardians of national unity. To be sure, there were large dollops of humbug in Harper’s attacks on the “separatist coalition,” given his own past flirtations with the Bloc. Unhappily for the Liberals, they remain in the past: whatever Harper may have been willing to do with the Bloc, it never came to anything. Whereas the Liberals’ “accord” with the Bloc is on public display, in photos of Dion, Layton and Duceppe at that remarkably ill-advised signing ceremony that will live in Tory attack ads for years to come. And while his replacement by Michael Ignatieff, with his carefully telegraphed skepticism toward the coalition, may signal the Liberals’ attempts to disentangle themselves from what Dion has wrought, this may not prove so easy as all that. Not only the Conservatives, but the other members of the coalition, will be quick to remind people that Ignatieff’s signature is on that letter to the Governor General formally committing the Liberals to the coalition, along with that of every other member of his caucus. And even if he now renounces the coalition, he must somehow extinguish from public memory not only his own past statements in support of it, but the continuing and highly public enthusiasm of Bob Rae, his nearest rival.

Yet the reality is the coalition is dead. Much as Ignatieff might like to hold it in reserve — “coalition if necessary, but not necessarily coalition” — as a deterrent to future Conservative adventurism, the threat lacks credibility. The public’s reaction has seen to that. When, therefore, the Tories bring down their budget on Jan. 27, there can be only two possible outcomes. Either the budget will pass, or the House will be dissolved and an election called. And as the Liberals cannot possibly face an election at this time — Ignatieff has reportedly been brutally frank about this in caucus — the far greater likelihood is that the budget will pass.

Unless . . . Unless the Tories can find some way to make it impossible for the Liberals to accept it. They have to be careful: they don’t want to lose the public. But suppose they were to spend the next several weeks advertising their willingness to work with the opposition — especially the Liberals. And suppose they were to take on board many of the opposition demands: a massive bailout for the auto industry. Billions more in infrastructure spending, complete with “shovels in the ground” photo-ops. A feel-good meeting with the premiers in mid-January, ending in some sort of agreement to “work together” on the economy. All wrapped up in a budget whose every second word is “stimulus.” And now suppose, having given the Liberals just about everything they could ask for, they also include the party financing proposal.

Bundle up, Grits. It’s going to be a long winter."

[bucket]

The best part of this is that Harper is going to cut funding to the political parties. He should and for good reason - that wasn't the problem with the economic statement - the lack of a stimulus package was the problem ( it came anyway and will be coming more in the budget) according the liberals.

Harper got the opposition off balance now. On the ropes, so to speak, he knows the conservatives won't wear this mess. Waiting to see what happened with the auto industry in the states, he will now show leadership by doing something anyway. Canadians are going to love this crap and Harper knows it.

He also knows if the opposition brings him down he knows the following:

1. The opposition has no plans.
2. The opposition created the unstability not the conservatives.
3. The opposition will spend money without consulting the people.
4. Harper will get the majority.

Its a win win scenario. Too bad iggy isn't that smart for being a professor and all. And thank you to the liberal party for not talking to manley.

[wilagro]

Sic 'em Iggy. Just the kind of Liberal leader we need to smarten Harper up.

I may join the Liberal Party for the first time.

[LWeber]

Willy: .. and abandon Jack Layton?

[winwin]

Iggy will be known as the"absent professor"
Harper spent a generation working in the trenches building a political movement from the ground up.Just like you guys built your farms.He knows the game.He is not afraid to get his hands dirty.
He is 12 years younger.He believes in this country.Harper is determined to make the CPC the truly national party and has a srategy to do it.
Soon we'll start to see the weaknesses in the absent,condescending,untested Liberal leader.

[parsley]

wilagro,

I'da never thought you'd have yen for an American-built president. LOL Pars

[TOM4CWB]

Wilagro,

Goodale's plan IS back fireING!

AS a principal in the coalition... he IS finally beING given his proper footnote in history:

The Honourable Ralph Goodale... the driving force... that stabbed Dion... and theN SLASHED THE Liberals... with a fatal slash across the jugular... for all to watch... with his back to the camera (so no-one would see his face)!

WOW... WHAT A WAY TO END YOU CAReER ralph!!!

gUT THE cwb of practical performance... then TURN THE LIBERALS INTO SEPARATISTS...



WHAT A HERO!

[winwin]

The liberal strategy in the west is to listen to Goodale.2 seats in 3 provinces.Maybe if igghead wants to make gains he should be FOR free markets.
I thought I was going to hurl when he was talking about the wonders of our entrepreneurs.
By the way,Goodale was a Martin backer,a Rae backer AND a cwb backer.If they're smart they'll quit listening to him,but I doubt it.

[cottonpicken]

Iggy has major win-ability.
Dont underestimate him.

[bucket]

how so cotton?

Because he has "...determined determination!".

Where do liberals go to school to learn double talk like that. Chretien was "..proof of a proof of a proof etc" and now iggy with that kind of nonsense.

This is like listening to schoenau about continuous cropping when he in fact farms half and half.

[highwayman]

Iggy or any other gomer pile that the Lieberal party want to put at the helm of their sinking ship will be held accountable for their part in this coalition fiasco by the Canadian people. Don't underestimate that!

[winwin]

That's right,each day that goes on the coalition is King Iggy's.He hasn't abrogated it.He SIGNED IT.
The Libs would love to have all this going out with Dion but iggy is wearing it.Where was the leadership when they all followed Dion into the firesale of their party to the strategy of Layton and the lap of Duceppe?
The Libs will find that they have lost a big part of their right wing AND a big part of their national unity cred.Iggy has changed nothing.

[cottonpicken]

The economic sh#t storm in the east is going to be hung around the conservatives neck.They will not get a single seat past the manitoba boarder.

The old "proof is a proof" comment that chretian made always bothered me.
It bugs me because nobody ever relized the reference he was making was to triganometry.