Archives for 2009

Finally, a long weekend Canadians and Americans can share! (If only we could learn to spell things the same way, too, eh?)

Personally, I’ll be busy puttering and trying to finish various small-scale building projects around the place, and that’s just the way I like my long weekends. Busy with fun, non-policy-related, real-life stuff. Here’s hoping you all have a fun and safe Labo(u)r Day weekend.

An excellent reminder that academic success is a team sport. Four of my six children are in school (grade 8, 7, 4 and 3) and I stand by each one of her 16 tips.

I find much comfort in this piece. You?

Abortion advocates have got to be scratching their heads.

For the first time in decades, they have staunch allies in the top echelons of government and the left-wing majorities needed to advance their agenda. No legislative roadblocks impede their way — not a president’s veto pen, not hostile committee chairs, not unfriendly leadership in the House and Senate.

They also have a president who promised to make the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that would overturn all state-level abortion restrictions, his first priority as the nation’s chief executive. More importantly, with Obama the pro-abortion movement has the luxury of claiming the implicit support of the American people, 70 million of whom voted for him last year.

Yet during the first eight months of his administration, abortion has been far down the president’s list of priorities. Even worse for abortion advocates, the issue is trending away from them even as they’ve gained more power.

I have been taking the bus a bit more lately, don’t ask me why. Recently, I sat next to a dapper-looking young man, who was talking loudly on his cell phone.

This is a post about relationships. Sometimes relationships break up, and we just don’t know why. I know I have a tendency to blame myself.

But something tells me that when a relationship breaks up for this young man on the bus (and trust me, it will happen) he should blame himself, but won’t.

Here we go—overheard on an Ottawa bus:

Did you really check the web site? … Did you check the web site? …No really check it. I don’t believe you. …Did you type in “Sri Lanka”? …S-R-I-L-A-N-K-A. It’s not coming up?… “Sri Lanka” is two words, stupid. … (longer pause)…Wow, that was, like, totally unnecessary. You shouldn’t talk to me like that … ok, so go to Bloomberg.com… Bloomberg.com… are you there? I need you to read me that article. … Well how am I supposed to know it if you don’t read it to me? …I really need to know this. … (long pause as apparently she reads him an article) … What do I think of you? We’re good friends … ya, we’re good friends. …Oh no no no. I won’t categorize. … we won’t be categorized. …

Best wishes to you, my friend, in your future romantic endeavours.

Government health-care guidelines have no other purposes than looking after our best interests, right? Or maybe not.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

[…]

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Not to be overly flip about this, but yes, indeed, death has a way of reducing patient suffering. But honestly, if you don’t see the slippery slope here, it’s probably because you’re already at the bottom of it.

And he’ll probably be out in no time:

OTTAWA — A 21-year-old man who beat his pregnant girlfriend to make her unattractive to other men was sentenced to a year in jail Wednesday.

Marcel Mario Vien struck his pregnant girlfriend three times in the stomach and scratched her chest five or six times, causing bruising over a two-month period in August and September 2008, according to an agreed statement of facts.

Vien also grabbed the neck area and strangled the woman, dug his fingers into her mouth and inflicted bloody scratches that were so deep they left permanent scars on her back and side.

The story doesn’t say what, if anything, happened to the baby she was carrying. Maybe they forgot that detail?

As a former fulltime factchecker, I enjoyed this analysis of the ongoing feud between the Obama administration’s health care plans and pro-life groups.

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Brigitte would like to bring some inside baseball into the mix and warn anyone not to ask Andrea to fact-check your stuff. She’ll find plenty of mistakes and other inconsistencies, and then you’ll have to work way harder and longer than you thought just to make sure you have your facts straight. It’s a pain… But hey, when she fact-checks other people’s stuff? That’s just grand.

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Andrea adds: I am sorry for how, er, fastidious I was about that. But fact checking can be brutal work, tedious and boring, and the only way I could think of to make it interesting was to challenge myself to really find errors. (Talk about poor incentives, a successful fact check was one where I actually corrected something.) Fact checking Miss Brigitte rarely uncovered errors, I might add. Very disappointing!