They stab it with their steely knives…

The government, the three justices ruled, had the right to order the CWB to pretty well do whatever it wanted, under Section 18(1) of the Canadian Wheat Board Act, which states that “the Governor in Council may, by order, direct the Corporation with respect to the manner in which any of its operations, powers and duties under this Act shall be conducted, exercised or performed.” Directors must consider these orders, whatever their own opinions, to be in the “best interest” of the board. The Board, they added, “is a creature of statute and, as such, it has no powers, rights and duties save those bestowed on it by the Act.” As much as the CWB may claim to be a farmer-run, independent agency, unanswerable to Ottawa, this is, according to the high court’s ruling, a delusion on the part of directors who apparently repeated it to themselves so often that they came to believe it. According to the law, the CWB is the official property of the agricultural ministry.
Not surprisingly, the CWB, even today, insists differently. And it now says it will to use the revenues it takes from selling Western farmers’ wheat and barley to battle the government again, having pledged recently to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada—so it can argue in favour of using Western farmers’ wheat and barley to continue to fight against allowing farmers the freedom to sell their grains independently.

Unless her name is “Terry Schiavo” …

That controversy was an unsettling one: the issue was what to do about a woman who had no medically realistic prospects for recovery, was consuming expensive healthcare dollars, and had left no reliable instructions on what her wishes would be in that situation, and a lot of people were very uncomfortable with either option, continuing to pay for her care or depriving her of nourishment. Public opinion at the time was hardly unanimous on what should be done (indeed, even some high-profile left-wingers sided with those who opposed removing Schiavo’s feeding tube). The conventional wisdom in the pundit class was that the damage done was all to one side – that the flap revealed the GOP to be in the thrall of religious extremists. I don’t doubt that some such damage was indeed done. But little attention was paid to the fact that the Right vs Left narrative of the Schiavo episode – one willingly stoked by Democrats eager to capitalize on precisely the “Religious Right overreach” angle – painted the Left as the advocates of ‘pulling the plug’ on Terri Schiavo. Another anecdote had been added to the public’s collective memory of what the two sides stand for – an anecdote, I should add, that is consistent with other pieces of the puzzle, as the Left has clashed with the same pro-lifers again and again on abortion, assisted suicide, and the destruction of embryos for stem cell research. Sarah Palin’s invocation of her Down’s Syndrome son Trig is another flashpoint: it is the Left that insists that it is appropriate to abort a child when prenatal testing reveals such a condition, and it was from the Left that we heard crude jibes suggesting that Palin should have done just that. A coherent pattern emerges, forms itself and takes root in the public’s mind.

An excellent read.
h/t Ben D.