I love this quote and only wish I came accross this first. A Pennsylvania pastor said this about those who attack the teaching of Intelligent Design.

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture" 

From http://www.pogge.ca/cgi-bin/mt/foolthem.cgi/754" title="http://www.pogge.ca/cgi-bin/mt/foolthem.cgi/754" target="_blank"http://www.pogge.ca/cgi-bin/m...  Pogge says it all.  "Um, pastor? Think about that." 

In the fall of 2003 there was a buzz surrounding Canada's plans to legalize same sex marriage and to decriminalize pot and not just in the Canada.  Prominent US news organizations wrote glowing articles about Canada being a northern Nirvana.  

the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707t a_talk_hertzberg" title="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707t a_talk_hertzberg" target="_blank"http://www.newyorker.com/talk...

 From the NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/0 6QUESTIONS.html?ex=1061697600&" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/0 6QUESTIONS.html?ex=1061697600&" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/0...;en=5c469e9929ae55fa& ei=5070

 the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&" title="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&" target="_blank"http://www.thenation.com/doc....;s=klein

 From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=a rticle&" title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=a rticle&" target="_blank"http://www.washingtonpost.com...;node=&contentId=A545 02-2003Jun30¬Found=true

 From the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam .html" title="http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam .html" target="_blank"http://www.csmonitor.com/2003...

 From the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a1 0.html" title="http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a1 0.html" target="_blank"http://www.mapinc.org/drugnew...?

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sa m0730p1.asp" title="http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sa m0730p1.asp" target="_blank"http://www.post-gazette.com/c...

 From the Seatle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/200126 2091_ocanada27m" title="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/200126 2091_ocanada27m" target="_blank"http://seattletimes.nwsource.....

From CanWest News Service: http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&a mp" title="http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&a mp" target="_blank"http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/i...;itemID=421

 From Macleans:

http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/arti cle.jsp?content=20031013_6700 3_67003" title="http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/arti cle.jsp?content=20031013_6700 3_67003" target="_blank"http://www.macleans.ca/switch...

In the September 27 2003 edition the Economist also pronounced that Canada was cool, but in order to access that article you have to pay for it.

From the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/internatio nal/americas/02CANA.html?th" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/internatio nal/americas/02CANA.html?th" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/1...

 From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/91154.html" title="http://www.iht.com/articles/91154.html" target="_blank"http://www.iht.com/articles/9...

 From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/119962.html" title="http://www.iht.com/articles/119962.html" target="_blank"http://www.iht.com/articles/1...

Here are some thoughts of National Review’s Labash’s latest gem.  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articl es/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=2" title="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articl es/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=2" target="_blank"http://www.weeklystandard.com...

    & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;   &n bsp;   

"Being bloodthirsty Americans, we have naturally fired a few warning volleys in lieu of slapping them with a restraining order. A few years ago, my friend Jonah Goldberg from National Review wrote a piece elegantly titled "Bomb Canada," http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/i s_22_54/ai_94960947" title="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/i s_22_54/ai_94960947" target="_blank"http://www.findarticles.com/p... encouraging us to smack Soviet Canuckistan, as Pat Buchanan calls it, "out of its shame-spiral" since 'that's what big brothers do.'

Canadians responded as Canadians always will when faced with overt aggression. They wrote inordinate numbers of letters of concern, exercising what Canadian writer Douglas Coupland calls their "almost universal editorial-page need to make disapproving clucks."

You mean to tell me “bomb Canada” went over as well in Canada as man jokingly telling his wife that she would be facing a beating if supper was not waiting for him when he got back from work.   It is no wonder so many Canadian comedians make it big in the states; your home grown comedians leave a little bit to be desired.  I will grant you this, though: Goldberg was right about one thing; In an Orwellian way that is exactly what big brother does.    

Equal outrage was caused when Conan O'Brien showed up to help boost tourism after the SARS crisis. Along for the ride came a Conan staple, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who in dog-on-the-street interviews relentlessly mocked French Canadians.  

One MP from the socialist New Democratic party called the show "vile and vicious," and said it was tantamount to hatemongering. Historians believe this to be the first time a member of parliament has so categorically denounced a hand puppet.

One MP did call the show “vile and vicious” and gained next to nothing in terms of political capital.   Martin also got into the act and received an equally cold shoulder.  In the end, commentators and the public agreed; Quebec is big enough to stand up to a puppet and getting uptight about the incident made us sound like, well, a bunch of Americans going off by Randy Moss’s clothed moon, Janet’s boob, Owens seduction, bob sponge’s homosexuality, buster’s lesbian friends, a cartoon cross dressing shark or anything else having to do with sex.  Besides, the offending party was the Conan O’Brien show and not some actor who gets paid millions to do improvisation on the radio while in the role of a right wing jerk.         

Speaking “family values”, I thought psychoanalysis was dead and buried, but I have been proven wrong.  Psychoanalysis has been reincarnated and has come back as a plague of American fundamentalist Christians, who see evidence of hidden sexual message in every kids show and story.  Hell, they have even mastered to recreate Freud’s theory of sublimation.  In one Texas school district Role reversal day become “camo” day.  Parents of elementary school children have repressed any thought about their children learning about gender norms and how to be tolerate and now channel their offspring’s energies into more socially acceptable activities like learning how to be a soldier, so they can serve under future president Bushs.           

Their legislators have publicly called us "bastards" and stomped on our president in effigy.

Plural?  One backbencher called the Bush administration “bastards”.  As for Parrish’s stomping incident, it occurred on this hour has 22 minutes, a comedy show.  She was making fun of her own reputation as an opponent of the Bush administration, but hey never let facts get in the way of good story.    

One more thing about Parrish, if she was an American she would be making millions doing some kind of talk radio.  Well maybe.  She has to learn not to hold back so much.  She got into it with Tucker Carlson, a comparatively mild mannered conservative, on CNN and came out looking like the voice of reason.  My hat goes off to Carlson; this was a real accomplishment.  Paul Martin and the rest of the Liberal government were never able to reason with her and so fired her. 

To see Canadian progressivism in action, though, I trekked down to the East Side, Vancouver's Compton, where the storefront Supervised Injection Site caters to junkies on the government teat. With the surrounding streets hosting an open-air drug market, the Site was conceived as a way to rid the neighborhood of discarded drug paraphernalia and promote "safe" drug-taking practices. In typical Canadian fashion, it's a long way around the barn to get rid of litter.

If the Site has in fact encouraged addicts to do their drugs off the streets, they still buy them right outside. To reach the place, I have to pass through a herd of about 100 junkies over a four-block radius. They offer to sell me all manner of substances my company won't let me expense. When I make it inside the Site, along with several itchy, twitchy customers in search of free cookers and needles and a clean booth to shoot themselves silly, an attendant tells me that unless I'm there to take drugs, I can't stay without a media relations escort. "What we do here is important, so we try to keep a low profile," he says, perhaps oblivious to the hypodermic needle that's embossed on the door.

The staffers aren't rude, however, and retrieve for me a helpful government brochure called "The Safer Fix" that has made me something of an expert on the proper way to tie off. Though it's a bit mind-blowing to a law-and-order American, this is actually pretty small beer, compared with a new Canadian government-funded study called the North American Opiate Medication Initiative. While the Supervised Injection Site is strictly a bring-your-own-smack affair, the new experiment will study the effects of giving half of the drug-addicted research subjects heroin, while the other half get methadone. As a female attendant describes it to me, we agree that it must really suck for the methadoners. But for the other side? "Dude!" she says, stating the obvious, "free drugs for a year!" 

Renton was right: being a junkie is a full time job.  If you have had your car broken into for 35 cents by a junkie looking to feed his habit, you would know what he means. The thought of giving away free stuff does not sound like such a bad idea; going the American way and declaring war on the stuff certainly has not worked for us.  Still, the amply named American drug Czar begs to differ:  He said that these shooting sites would only make things worse.  However, our mayor knows that there is no Pravada in Czar’s news release or in claims about referrer madness.  He was right to say of the former that it was akin to saying “flies cause garbage”.    & nbsp;      

While Canada is supposedly safer, a 1996 study showed its banks had the highest stick-up rate of any industrialized nation (one in every six was robbed). And while a great deal is made of Americans' passion for firearms, the Edmonton Sun, citing Statistics Canada, reported that Canada has a higher crime rate than we do.

The Sun is a conservative paper and as such must live vicariously through the success of big brother Republicans in the states.  Anyway, take the time to ask a criminologist about the Edmonton Sun. It takes a certain skill to protray a country with a third the murder rate as being more violent.  

During the summer of 2003 Rumsfeld and crew tried to put a positive spin on the escalating violence in Iraq by noting that Baghdad had a lower murder rate than New York; the implication being that New York was a safe big city.  This was obviously aimed at a domestic audience or maybe a South American or South African one.  No one living in Paris, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, Brussels or Toronto would be terribly impressed by a murder rate near 7.  

In all the back slapping about just how “safe” New York has become, due in no small measure to demographic changes, conservatives do not seem to notice that the broken widow approach to crime has an insidious underside.  As PBS notes, “there are now more than two million Americans behind bars.  Add to that another four and a half million on probation or parole and three million ex-convicts.” http://www.pbs.org/now/society/prisons2.html" title="http://www.pbs.org/now/society/prisons2.html" target="_blank"http://www.pbs.org/now/societ...  With numbers like these is it any wonder that a criminal underclass has emerged, a la Soviet Union, with its own unique language, viz., Ebonics.

Finally it should be said that given all this experience handling prisoners, I was surprised the US has not been able to competently manage prisons/ frat houses aboard.   

Will Ferguson is a cockeyed nationalist and brilliant satirist, who calls his country "a nation of associate professors." In his book Why I Hate Canadians, he writes that his countrymen even boast about their Great Canadian Inferiority Complex. While it's difficult to go five minutes without hearing how collectively nice Canadians are, Ferguson says, "what we fail to realize is that self-conscious niceness is not niceness at all; it is a form of smugness. Is there anything more insufferable than someone saying, 'Gosh, I sure am a sweet person, don'tcha think?'"

The title of Ferguson’s book hardly raised an eyebrow.  Canadians understood Ferguson’s point.  One can not incorporate complimentary stereotypes, such “we are the freest nation on earth”, into our own sense of who we are without this becoming a parody.  Only outsiders can claim that we are polite and nice.  We are not free to make this claim.   As result, Ferguson does not walk around with an armed detail, a la Michael Moore and Rushdie.  Which gets me to wondering, how would a book entitled why I hate Americans go off in the States?  I think I will go ask one of the Dixy Chicks.    

"For nearly a decade, the country sat atop the United Nations quality-of-life index, a fact that Canadian schoolchildren could parrot in their sleep. When Canada dropped to eighth, just behind the United States, its collective psyche took a beating. The next year, Canada shot past us again."

Yes we got a whiff of failure and this concerned us.  Apparently the US’s relatively low standing does not concern you.    

A distinction is usually made between “civil marriage” and “religious marriages”.  The two are said to overlap for the most part.  However, not all civil marriages are conducted in a place of worship and not all religious marriages are recognized by civil authorities. 

Now, those who oppose gay marriage do not oppose “religious” gay marriage; they oppose “civil” gay marriage.   Various religious bodies have been “marrying” homosexual couples for awhile now and no one has batted an eyelash.  Come to think of it, I image no one would bat an eyelash if someone married their cat in a religious ceremony.  The reason for this is simple.  Marriage is really no more than the rights and obligations that make up “civil” marriage.  The issue is obscured by the fact that the government has given churches the ability to act as de facto agents of the state. That is, it has given them the power to legally join a couple in whatever type of marriage the state officially sanctions.  The result of this is that various religious bodies have been able to dress marriage up in religious drag.   

The Conservatives have accepted gay marriage, but have insisted, under the guise of “protecting” the “traditional definition of marriage”, gay marriages be called civil unions.  There are many things wrong with such a suggestion and I mentioned them elsewhere.  One thing I have not said, though, is this.  Religious opposition to gay marriage is by no means universal; many main stream churches (e.g., the Anglican Church of Canada) have no religious objection to them and willingly marry gay couples.  The question thus arises is why would the Conservative party give more weight to one religious body than another.  If freedom of religion means anything it all, it means that the State should not play favorites and pick one religious interpretation over another. 

Other groups have suggested that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether.  By this they mean nothing more than all married couples would be deemed to be joined in civil union and not in holy matrimony.  This is nothing more than a bunch of hocus pocus.  At least the conservative party’s suggestion makes sense on a semantic level.  The distinction the Conservatives propose would be akin to the distinction between waiter and waitress.  The straight name change changes nothing at all.  Besides, this would hardly placate the religious groups opposed to gay marriage.  These groups want to be on a different footing than other groups – if only on a semantic level.