Why Clinton Looks Like a Winner, and Why It Won’t Matter

This is the second of my series on the three remaining Presidential candidates, the first of which can be found several posts down, on McCain.

Hillary Clinton is currently written off by almost everyone, including me. She will inevitable finish second to Obama in delegates heading into the convention, regardless of how Pennsylvania and Indiana play out. North Carolina is the other remaining state with any considerable number of delegates, and Obama has that one wrapped up, I’d say. She could carry both of them by 60-40, which is the outside limit to how big she could, I think, and still end up behind him. In the end, Obama took a lot of little contests throughout the race that pretty much won it for him.

However, voters are refusing to listen to the numbers, the pundits, and political experts. They’re still turning out in amazing numbers to vote in a race that’s already “decided”. And lately, they’ve been voting in favour of someone who’s “already lost”.

And lots of the places she’s won are big states that the Dems will have to win in order to have a shot in November. She took the popular vote in Michigan, Florida, Texas, California, New York and and Ohio. She’s won many of the more recent primaries, and she claims to have a lead in the “super-delegates”.

Not only that, but she has more of a chance of swaying moderates than Obama does. He may have a monopoly on charisma, but in a long, drawn out election policies will start to come out, and Clinton is far more a middle of the road democrat. Obama is one of the most liberal sitting-Senators, and even a cursory read of “The Audacity of Hope” would make many conservatives shy away. She has the better organization, has an easier time getting donations from corporate America than he does, and is all around a better campaigner.

Still, for her to win the nomination, she’ll need a lot of super delegates. Now, to get a lot of them shouldn’t be hard. They are, after all, politicians. They’ll want to be on the side that chooses the President, so as to get in his, or her, good graces. So I’d expect that many will wait until the last minute, see how the tide is going, and move en masse to the winner’s circle. And they aren’t going to go against the delegate count. They are humans, they are politicians, and they need to be reelected. That won’t happen if they ignore the will of their constituents.

So even though Hillary may look like a winner, it won’t matter, and I’m one conservative who is sad about that. 

  

The Old Media Will Be Replaced by the New Gatekeepers of Information

Small Dead Animals has a post up about how people are starting to grasp how the internet is changing how media is both created and consumed - specifically newsmedia.

While it is true that blogging and other types of electronic dissemination are changing how people get informed, turning the news into something interactive and globalized, but also grouped into special interests, it occurs to me that this will not solve the problem of the overwhelming leftist bias in the news.

This isn’t because reporters will remain leftist. Reporters are becoming irrelevant as everyone gains the ability to “create” news. The broader spectrum of information sources will remain.

It is because the “Mainstream Media” will change form. What we think of now as the monopolists of media, the Ted Turners, the CBC’s, the AOL Time-Warners, the Bell Globemedias, the New York Times, the Toronto Stars, will fall by the wayside. This is inevitable.

What will rise in their stead will be the gatekeepers of information. Those gatekeepers will control what information we are allowed to know, and who we are allowed to know it from. They may or may not create content themselves, but they will permit or deny access to the already created content that they do not wish to have us know.

It occurs to me as I wrote the above, that this sounds very paranoid - even Orwellian. Sorry for the phraseology, but this is already in play. Take a look at how Google behaves. It is already well known and documented that a Chinese citizen utilizing Google within Mainland China will not be permitted to view results for terms like “democracy”. Google is complicit in the censorship of information conducted by the Communist government of China. How many deals will Google strike with governments to permit or deny access to information by citizens? How long will it be before the Canadian Human Rights Commissions find against Google for permitting “hate” speech to be read in searches performed on their systems, since it is obviously within their control to prevent access to it?

It is also borne out in Google’s news aggregators. Now, this one is a little harder to prove as it is based on my personal experience, but having used their aggregator for at least 3 years, I have observed during the last federal election and after, Google News listing press releases from www.liberal.ca as “news”, alongside content from well known liberal message board www.rabble.ca and extremely leftist newspapers like the Georgia Straight. To date, I have never seen content aggregated at Google News from well known right wing news sources like www.lifesitenews.com or www.worldnetdaily.com. You can guess, and you would be correct that they never aggregate press releases from www.conservative.ca.

Just because blogs are winning the battle for information now, friends, doesn’t mean that we will win the war. We need to start standing up for freedom of expression, freedom to communicate, and the freedom of the internet for all.

The Decision to Downgrade - the End of the Dream Truck

For me, gas prices have finally reached the tipping point.

It is no longer even marginally cost-effective to own my truck.

I love my truck, don’t get me wrong.  It has been my goal to own a truck since I got my first car.

My Dad always had a truck.  I grew up with a truck in my family.  I remember back in Prince George in the early 80’s me and my brother sharing the center seatbelt in a ride into town, with my sister in my mom’s lap.  No crew cabs at that time.  It was just a ‘78 GM Sierra, with a whole passel o’people.  3 on the column, so I only had to watch my knees when Dad hit 3rd gear.

I learned to drive in that truck.  I remember at age 14 barrelling down a dirt range road outside of Edmonton with my Dad in the passenger seat, doing about 70, when I realized the road took a hairpin turn to the left.  I slammed on the brakes and made the turn at about 50.  I don’t know to this day how I managed to keep us out of the ditch.  Dad drove the rest of the way home.

We used the thing for everything - hauling garbage, moving stuff.  Camping.  We had an old Okanagan camper, that my brother and I rode all the way to Thunder Bay in, looking out of that little front window.  That truly was the best way to see the country - no seat belts, we could lie on our backs and read comic books or look out the window or whatever.  This was in the days before seatbelt laws were as draconian.  Would I do that now?  I don’t know.  Traffic is 100 times worse now than back then (especially since I live in Metro Vancouver, and I grew up in smaller towns elsewhere), so I think that it is more dangerous not to wear seatbelts.  But I digress.

That truck meant a lot to me growing up, and I figured when I had a family of my own, I’d have one too.  Not from some status thing (though it probably has a small part of my image of an ideal family), but from usefulness standpoint.  The things I knew I wanted to give my kids pretty much required a truck.  From hauling camping gear to hauling bikes to moving garbage to the dump, I couldn’t conceive of life without one.

When I got married though, my wife’s family never had a truck.  In the early years, her folks played a large role in how we spent our money, because they helped us out a lot.  When my wife didn’t support me getting a truck, and her folks didn’t either, and my folks were 2000km away, then I pretty much had to settle.  I did manage to get a 4×4 though - another of my passions.

It would be 8 years later that I was starting to think about something else.  My wife always knew I wanted a truck, so when I mentioned, at a time when we had the money to get something new, that I was thinking about getting a little commuter car and a beater 4×4 for the weekends, she said to me, “I thought you wanted a truck!”

That was July of 2006.  By the end of the month, I had my shiny red Dodge Ram.  I picked Dodge because at the time, they were the only of the full-size truck manufacturers who offered the ability for half the cylinders to be shut off on the highway for cruising, for fuel efficiency.  And it did save me.  I probably got at least 100km more out of a tank than regular trucks.

Since then, I have done everything I envisioned.  I have taken it four-wheeling, hauled at least a dozen loads of garbage, helped many people move stuff, pick up stuff.  I’ve picked up all kinds of building and renovation materials, IKEA furniture, and lots of stuff that no way would have fit in our minivan.  We’ve gone camping with it, loaded the back up with all kids of good stuff and headed off to the hinterlands.  I’ve really used it.

But the problem is primarily, I have used it to commute in.  My work is 30km away from home, and half of that is through the city.  Stop and go, hurry up and wait, idle and burn gas.

When gas was 60 cents a liter, it was no problem.  When gas was 80 cents a liter, it started to hurt how much gas was costing.  When gas broke a buck a liter, I started asking questions of myself, but I still thought  all the benefits I was getting from the truck were worth it.  And I enjoyed being able to help people out with my truck so there was a community benefit too.

But now, with gas holding steady over $1.20 and we aren’t even at the May long weekend yet, I have to reconsider.  When I am commuting in the truck, I will drop nearly $400 per month in gas.  Add to that a $450 lease payment.  Add to that my insurance, already pretty much maxed out in terms of ICBC discount, which when subdivided by the month works out to $210 per month.  That means, not even including maintenance costs, this truck is costing me $1060 per month to run.

Wow.

Now, compare this to a compact commuter car.  I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect half the gas costs - most of them have a 40 liter tank, and my truck’s was 100 liters.  I expect I will get a little more km out of a tank in the car (that was true with my old ‘86 Hyundai Excel, my first car) than I did with the truck, so count on 3 fills a month.  That’s $150, maybe $200 if I have to do 4 fills.  The lease (or financed) monthly cost would be in the neighbourhood of $250.  Insurance will probably be less, though I am not counting on that, so say $175 per month.  TCO/mo = $625.

That means I will save the family $435/mo from a downgrade.  We will still have the van (which I don’t really like to haul stuff in because if things spill, it’s carpet and I can’t just hose it out).  I could always get a utility trailer, or if I need a 4×4 a few times a year (really, I have only gotten to 4×4 3 or 4 times a year for the last couple years), I can rent one.  The savings will still be significant.

If I wasn’t commuting, I could rationalize keeping it.  But given the primary usage, it simply doesn’t make sense anymore.  It sucks, because it represents the death of a dream, an ideal.  It will also effect my whole social network, who may not have relied on me for my truck, but certainly appreciated when I was there for them with it.  Sadly, they did not subsidize my truck (and couldn’t be expected to anyway - its primary use was mine and it only makes sense I should bear the burden for its cost).

Life could change in the future.  If I change jobs to something closer to home, it could become affordable again.  But for now, it seems like the best decision.

Politics and Religion: Why Are We Talking Religion?

Many have wondered why a site called The Politic winds up talking about religion so much. There are very good reasons for this. Firstly, religion drives some of the most significant events occurring in the world around us. The question of Islam is affecting world politics to a level unprecedented. Understanding the difference between various Islamic sects from Sunni to Shi’ite to Ismaili to Wahhabi is critical for the discerning citizen today trying to understand what drives people to terror attacks and fatwas.

But at the same time, Christianity - what it means, what it claims, and how it affects those who follow Jesus - is big news too.  Many people who discuss religious extremism like to compare radical Islam to fundamental Christianity.  But is this a fair comparison?  Is it appropriate for TV shows like Law and Order to product episodes that paint an extremist Christian group stoning people as a conceivable reality?  These types of questions cannot be answered without an understanding of what religions teach and how they differ.

Sadly, religious literacy is becoming rarer and rarer in the 21st Century.  Unless you are an active follower of this or that religion, you may have no idea what they actually believe and how that affects them.  It used to be that Universities, as part of their goal of a “well-rounded” education, would make mandatory comparative religion courses.  Few now do.  Even the options are scarce.  It also used to be that the average citizen knew what the Bible said.  They knew the content, they had memorized passages, they knew the stories, they knew the characters, their virtues and their failings.  They may not have been followers of Christianity, but they knew what it was about.  I am a part of the generation that came after.  I didn’t even know that King Solomon was a Biblical character until I was 16 years old.  I knew the name Jesus, but I couldn’t have named any of his 12 followers.  I had heard the names, Hezekiah, Ezekiel, and Jehosaphat, but I thought they came from tales of the Old West, not from the Kingdom of Israel ca. 1200 BC.

People think they know what Christianity is and stands for, but they know it second, or third hand.  It is something their parents, or grandparents believe, and that’s because they’re old and stuck in their ways.  They’ve probably never even asked them what their faith means to them or why they believe it.  However, now more than ever, a knowledge of what people believe and why they believe it is critical.  What makes today’s situation so concerning for many is that the public thinks they know what Christianity is about, and so makes judgements (incidentally, the exact same judgements they rail against from “Christians” who are thought to be “judgemental”) based on erroneous information or simple ignorance.  If people acknowledged their ignorance, the problem wouldn’t be so bad.  It’s the fact that people think they know but don’t that can and will lead to bigger and bigger problems and conflicts between those who are religious and those who are not.

The reality is, for those many who are religious - whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, their faith doesn’t just play a part in their life, it defines their life.  Their religion informs not only their daily decisions but also governs what issues in the public sphere are important to them.  At first glance, this could look extreme, but take a step back.  What do you believe?  Everyone believes in something.  If you don’t believe in a God or Gods, then you are your own god.  Everything you do, everything you consider important stems from your belief in yourself as the primary purpose and priority in your life.  This is not extremism.  This is internal consistency.  To condemn another for having consistency with their faith is to condemn yourself and your own consistency with what you believe in to be important.

This is a very important concept.  People who are religious have every right both to express their faith informed convictions in public and to hold public office.  To deny them such is to discriminate against people by religion, which is expressly forbidden by the very tenets of freedom this nation was founded upon.  Yet, we have seen in the ridicule of Stockwell Day’s leadership campaign and the more subtle statements made against many politicians of faith in recent elections, that there is an undercurrent of opposition and censorship against those who exercise these fundamental freedoms.   An opinion is an opinion, and it should be irrelevant whether the opinion was arrived at via reading the Bible or via reading Rene Descartes.

Which leads me to my last point.  Debate surrounding abortion, and also surrounding the gay marriage issue has often been framed by leftist writers and speakers as being about the “religious” trying to impose “their morality” on “the rest of us”.  This is a false assertion because there is no such thing as a faith-neutral political position.  We are all informed by our beliefs, and so our political positions all have equal weight.  There are many people who do not believe in the God of the Jews or the God of the Christians or the God of Islam, who were and are opposed to gay marriage, or abortion for that matter.  It is ludicrous to suggest that all arguments against those two issues, or any other issue for that matter, are only founded upon the principle of “imposing your religious belief” on people.

This is not to say that there aren’t people who are Christians, or Jews, or Muslims (I should have said earlier, these are not meant to be taken as an exhaustive list, but just as examples) who seek to impose their morality on everyone.  Sadly it is true that there are traditions in Christianity who have in the past sought to implement “Christendom” (and most Muslims today still appear to ascribe to the belief that Islamic Law or Sharia Law should be the law of all lands).  I believe that this has no place in politics myself.  However, there is a big difference between believing that certain political positions are in fact quantifiably the best for society, and believing it is “God’s Will” to impose certain political positions on everyone regardless of their religion.  The religious have every right to state what they think is best, and vote for what they think is best, regardless of the reason - that is what democracy is all about.

It should also be noted that much of what we here in Canada considers leftist, socialist style government has its foundations not in Marxism but in the social gospel movement of the early 20th Century, where many churches began to support governmental advocacy and service to the poor and the ill.  Previous to this, churches did this work apart from government.  During that period, for the sake of efficiency, advocacy was made to centralize such social programs to prevent redundancy and make it easier on everyone.  Because at the time, church and country were much more synonymous than now, nobody minded giving more in taxes if they didn’t need to give to support the program offered through a church.  The best illustration of this trend is the fact that Tommy Douglas was a baptist preacher.  They believed at that time, that making the government more Christian would make society more Christian - the Christendom idea mentioned above.   The ideals they held of charity and mercy are admirable, but the question about the best means to go about them are political.  Hence, they need to be discussed.

So, what I am trying to say is that while this site is called “The Politic”, I do believe that religion has a place and should have a voice in the political discussion.  We need to make clear for people what is at stake, and also communicate what beliefs are and mean so that the dialogue can be with understanding instead of ignorance.  Discussion is about understanding the other side and finding common ground.  Ruling the other side out of hand simply because your faith is different from theirs only results in alienation, xenophobia and fracturing of the body politic.

Richard Warman Tells Canada’s Top Conservative Bloggers: “SILENCE!”

The rubber has met the road. The game is afoot. Richard Warman, a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who has famously taken the inside knowledge of the workings of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act to create himself a lucrative channel of cash, has taken his hurt feelings to the court system, serving the National Post, Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan, Ezra Levant and Free Dominion with a lawsuit for defamation.

What he is really saying to every single Canadian Conservative who writes anything on the internet is “Shut the hell up!” He wants us silent, so that he can go on extorting funds from libraries, students, and everyone who dares to think differently from his brand of political orthodoxy.

This lawsuit will be won, but the costs are being footed by the defendants in these early stages. Their fight is our fight. Their fight is for every conservative voice in Canada. I for one stand behind them 100%.

If you read this, stand up for freedom of speech. Pick one or all of the defendants, and give through their sites to their paypal, to support their defence. Not all of them have responded on the net, but here is Kathy’s post on the subject - a link to her paypal is at the bottom. Here is Ezra’s. Here is a post from Free Dominion.

Overplayed

You all know the songs that get played endlessly on the radio these days: Paralyzed, Hey There Delilah, songs like those. You can’t listen to a mainstream music station for more than half an hour without hearing one of those two, I can pretty much guarantee it.

It’s the same when it comes to politics. Certain ideas and concepts get repeated over and over, until they become the conventional wisdom. Some of these things can be disproved simply by looking a little, but no matter how untruthful it is, the facts will always be mismangled into an unruly juxtaposition of figures that morphs reality to fit into the “conventional wisdom”.

One of these such fairy tales is thus: The Republicans cannot win in ‘08.

The facts say otherwise. All you have to do is glimpse at a recent Gallup Poll to see that McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, holds a marginal lead over either of the two remaining Dems. While this could very possibly fade once one wins the nomination and memories of the bitter primary battle fades, the fact remains that the decision is far from set in stone. And yet, talk about it in conversation and most people will tell you that George W. ruined any chance the Republicans had at the White House.

Another is that Conservatives have only a slight chance of forming the government here in Canada at any given time. That the left wing is far more powerful, and holds a strangle hold on Canadian politics. While I would have to agree that the left (NDP) and the centre (Liberals) tend to be more powerful combined against the right (Conservatives, PC, Reform, SoCred, etc), you have only to look at history to see that the Liberals are not so dominant when facing a united right. In recent history, they haven’t bested one since Wayne Gretzky’s rookie season.

You can’t just accept the overplayed, conventional wisdom. Even the media can see through it, when they choose to do so.

 

 

Violent Youth

This is an interesting read on “Britain’s Mean Streets.” Wonder how Canadian youths compare?

I’ve noticed that a lot of youths are jaded and cynical, their hellishly asinine cosmion of meaning offering little by way of hope. It seems to me that a lot of urban youth are lacking the interest, the opportunity, to take on some kind of character forming responsibility or challenge; dismissed by too many adults as just stupid kids.

People tend to blame disinterested, or deranged, parents or even lax young offender laws for vicious youth. And while I suppose they are to blame in part, there’s only so much self-pitying contempt to go around before teenagers accrue the pathologies of perpetual victims.

When you consider the rate of obesity among youth today, the constant “noise” of the angry music iPod, video gaming, cell phoning, and celebrity following tv generation, the teenage years appear to be a bitter dawn of nihilism.

More police, aggressively empowered, and more silly welfare schemes for single parents are not necessarily the answer. Initiatives like Big Brothers Big Sisters and The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award seem like a good antidote to me, providing a path toward adulthood, toward some measure confident self-reliance that isn’t feeling sorry for oneself, then terrorizing others.

Schools should promote these initiatives with more enthusiasm, a respite from their constant barrage of tolerance and sensitivity training.

UPDATE: “Does affirmative action hurt kids?”

The Politic Ignores Politics?

One of our most loyal commenters comments:

While this continues, the world seems to pass thepolitic by: Afganistan and military spending on used German tanks for spareparts that don’t really fit the tanks currently in use, candidate nominations in the US, upcoming federal Budget speculations, provincial budgets being passed, introduction of a carbon tax in BC, the impact of the high dollar on Canadian exports - and China now surpassing Canada as the leading exporter to the US, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Those are definitely contemporary  Why haven”t we addressed them?  I’ll take a guess.

I don’t know a lot about tanks, and neither does anyone here, unless I miss my guess. It isn’t surprising that people are reticent to talk about what they don’t know a lot about.

Candidate nominations in the USA frankly, bore me. At work I have a cubicle-mate who loves talking about them, but really, there is so little separating the candidates that I can’t find it in me to be that interested.  Forgive me for not holding my breath from the beginning of primaries to November.

Speculating on the federal budget? Speculations tend to be boring too, especially when everyone and their dog is in on it.

The BC provincial budget was moderately interesting, and the carbon tax issue begs to be discussed, but geez man. It only happened yesterday! Is there a rule amongst blog commenters that they expect all bloggers to comment within 12 hours on any given issue or they are publicly flogged?

The high dollar and Canadian exports - more of an economics question. I can’t claim to be an armchair economist any more than an armchair quarterback for the NFL, so I wouldn’t tackle that one but lightly.

China surpassing Canada as the leading exporter to the USA - I am surprised this is news. I had thought that was the case for decades by now. Heck. I look around my world and I don’t see much of anything not made in China. That does seem to be cause for concern.

So, thanks. I like to think that blogs are a better place because of commenters, and this comment was actually thought-provoking. I can’t speak for everyone here, but as I have time, I will definitely address at least one of these suggestions.  As for the rest, I have read elsewhere that we should be providing more insightful political commentary.  That challenge is appreciated, but asking us to write about subjects that we don’t have any knowledge of seems like a good recipe for bad commentary.  I’d rather stick with subjects I know enough about to defend my positions on.  You may not agree with me, but at least I can take a bash without a second thought.

Howz to Blog Respectabfully

In Weird News, Canadian “I don’t date teh women” Cynic lectures (and lectures and lectures) Matthew and myself for writing mean-spirited, thoughtless posts, like this one. Instead, he’d like for us to write more thoughtful and substantive posts, like this one!

Are we done here? Oh good.

Server Upgrade - Issues Solved

Due to an unavoidable server upgrade that took place over the weekend, the commenting and posting functions for ThePolitic.com where disabled. However, the upgrade is complete, and everything should be operating as it was before.

Sorry for any inconvenience that was caused by this interruption.

Greg F

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