Trying to save money? Wanna just stay home with your dog and watch TV? Well, if you live in Britain, it’s going to cost you. Since 1946 there’s been a television tax levied on each TV you own that receives a signal; today, the license costs $220 per year. As for that 12-year old Basset Hound of yours who sleeps all day, never leaves the house, and whose most aggressive action involves sighing and blinking once every twelve hours, he’s going to cost you even more: under proposed new measures unveiled today by the Labour government all dog owners would be required to get dog insurance that would cost up to £500 – approx. $770 Canadian – per year.
No matter where you go or what you do, the bony finger of the British state will find you. In Watford, parents who want to play with their children in recreation areas must first go through criminal record checks. Staying home won’t necessarily help you escape the intrusion of the state: several years ago the Labour government’s Children’s Minister, Beverly Hughes, proposed forcing parents to attend special classes where they would learn to sing nursery rhymes to their children. Without Labour’s policies, the Minister pointed out helpfully, “We could be on the road to ruin.”
Not everyone appreciates the help. When the mother of a five year old girl received a letter detailing a litany of health risks her daughter would face in the future because her body mass index was one-percent outside the recommended limit, mom was appalled, and its no wonder: take a look at the child in question. Actually, take a close look, because she might be following you: various local Councils recruit “environment volunteers” as young as seven to report people for offenses ranging from littering to making too much noise to putting out their trash on the wrong day. The little recruits “are given information packs about how to collect evidence….which could later be used in criminal prosecutions.”
In an essay titled Nanny State Britain is Killing Common Sense, Dr. Eamonn Butler writes:

“The organisers of a Christmas party in Embsay village hall were told they needed a full risk assessment, and nut allergy warnings on the mince pies. Schools have banned playground football. Clowns in Zippo’s circus couldn’t use trumpets in a three-minute sketch because they’d need a music licence. Manchester taxi drivers cancelled their annual outing for needy kids because each cab would need a risk assessment, each child would have to be accompanied by an adult, and each adult would need a six-week criminal record check.” (emph. mine)

If you think jettisoning your worldly possessions will put you in the clear, think again: an unemployed man who accidentally dropped a ten pound note was fined £50 for littering.

… but a temporary caretaker of a vast left-wing bureaucracy:

So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
[…]
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
[…]
Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

… if you look hard enough, you can always find a Thatcher.

Joe Settler’s suggestion:

And as we get closer to “Peace Talks”, Abbas and the PA raise their rhetoric, incitement, and violence.
Meanwhile it seems that Israel simply doesn’t know how to respond to these threats at all. I mean, not at all.
Well here is one idea.
Israel should announce a new policy of reciprocity.
Anytime the PA praises, awards or promotes a terrorist, a new outpost should be built.

Expelling the Jews from Gaza didn’t work. It can’t hurt to try something else.

Peer … Review

(The Taliban) has brutally repressed half its population. Women have been stripped of virtually all rights, denied the opportunity for schooling, the right to work or to freely move about. Women doctors, lawyers and tradespeople cannot practice their craft. The windows of their homes must be covered. They can travel outside the home only in the company of a male relative. They have effectively been blocked from receiving health care. For violating these rules, they are beaten in public by Taliban soldiers….

Here in Canada our public broadcaster is greatly concerned about this situation in Afghanistan, and continues to campaign tirelessly on behalf of the men who who wish to impose a brutal, misogynistic theocracy in Afghanistan. Friday’s lead story on The National was exemplary: “Right from the start the opposition has been claiming that government officials turned a blind eye to the torture of Afghan prisoners. But what we’re learning now is a suspicion that those hidden documents may reveal much worse that that: that the Canadians intended some prisoners to be tortured so as to gather intelligence. If true, that would be a war crime.”
As Milewski uttered the words “war crime” an Ottawa academic appeared onscreen. “This is ugly,” he said, grinning oddly as if he was about to laugh, or like he was getting away with something. “This makes Somalia look very small.”
Milewski introduced the vaunted expert – “Amir Attaran is a law professor who’s been digging deep into the Afghan file” – but he neglected to mention one niggling detail: Attaran is Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s friend. When Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center at Harvard where Attaran was a research fellow, Ignatieff “directly intervened in order to save Mr. Attaran’s job” after a dispute with some faculty members, and “gave him office space and mentoring support until he could find another academic home.” On another occasion, Ignatieff stood up on Attaran’s behalf to defy a lawyer’s strongly-worded piece of advice that the “secret anonymous” funding of Attaran’s research must be revealed in order to avoid a conflict of interest; Ignatieff told the lawyer that he’d already looked into it privately and found no conflict, so there was absolutely no need to reveal the source of the funding to anyone – a quintessentially Liberal response, when you think about it, and surely eye-opening to Attaran; it might even explain his oddly eager on-air grin.
A mere two weeks before his on-air accusations – which neither he nor Milewski provided a shred of evidence for – were used by the CBC as the centerpiece of an all-out anti-Conservative smear story, Attaran wrote: “Politicians, such as our Prime Minister….should be dismissed as dangerous ideologues.” In another essay, titled The Ugly Canadian, the American-born Attaran – an Ignatieff donor who recently spoke at a Liberal-organized forum on consular issues – wrote that, although he “probably…could live elsewhere,”

“….I was attracted to this very Pearsonian country in the 1990s…while I love this country, learning it through its laws has also shown me a dark side….Today’s Canada would not please Pearson, and he would find the country’s outlook on foreign people and international obligations oddly picayune and ignorant.”

Take that, you toothless conservative proles. Oh, and too bad you get to choose your representatives:

“Pearson was an Oxford-educated university professor with a hyperactive work ethic. If finding a comparable candidate requires the prime minister bypassing elected members of Parliament to appoint an outsider by way of the Senate, that is a lesser evil than entrusting a diffident poseur like Maxime Bernier with the job of picturing Canada to the world.”

It’s unprofessional and highly unethical for the CBC to not disclose Attaran’s highly-partisan pronouncements and his longstanding personal and professional relationship with Michael Ignatieff, but that’s just business as usual at the CBC’s parliamentary bureau. It can’t be stopped. Every time a spectacularly biased practitioner like Keith Boag or Susan Bonner is shipped out, he or she will be seamlessly replaced by an equally biased reporter like Terry Milewski or Leslie MacKinnon. Up and coming reporters at the CBC surely know the drill by now: treat anti-Conservative “analysis” by various academics and unidentified Liberal-supporting experts as “news”, assert to Canadians, on the taxpayers’ dime, that these negative views of the Conservatives are widely-held and growing among Canadians, and conclude reports with a warning that the “issue” raised in the report isn’t going away.
They’re right about the last one: it never really does go away, does it?