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Debates!

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But which debate? Well, the first blog post from your Ottawa-based correspondent would have to be on… Sarah Palin. (Now to be sure, I watched both. At the same time. That’s just the kind of multi-tasking woman I am. But my comments on the Canadian debate largely revolve around what a great moderator Steve Paikin is. Kidding! Sort of.)

Back to Sarah Palin. I thought she did well; it was not a knock out to be sure, but she certainly was not a failure, either. Which leads me to think there simply is no parallel to the hostile media test (the one she previously failed). Any given day, fighting the Taliban may in fact be easier. Furthermore, the hostile media test generally has little bearing on how competent you are. (What’s too bad, is that after you fail the hostile media test, they pull more pundits out of the bag to kick you while you’re already down. By discussing, on repeat.)

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Update: Interesting to read commentary from around the globe. This from South Africa:

If she doesn’t get into the White House now, Palin could be a better contender in 2012. After a few more years of experience and with more time to polish her political skills, Palin might get where she wants to be. For now, I think her entry into this level of politics might be premature.

Plus, she wouldn’t be with McCain, who I believe is very weak indeed. Far weaker than I thought.

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Brigitte cheers Steve: I didn’t watch much of the Canadian debate, choosing instead to watch the U.S. one (I’ve seen the Canadian debate last election, and the one before that; these guys keep repeating the same inane platitudes year in, year out). I would absolutely vote for Steve Paikin. He rocks.

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Andrea: That makes two votes for Steve. Paikin, not Harper.

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Tanya adds: Is it me, or are they trying to make Harper smile more…and at wierd times? BTW, I vote for Paikin, too.

Doctors and abortion: Politicians or scientists?

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Got this article via fax, so no link, sorry. It’s from the September 26 Medical Post. Headline: Abortion access continues to divide Canadian doctors, almost 40 per cent oppose it, but more than 80 per cent offer referrals. There’s a good section I’ll type out in full:

Meanwhile, Dr. Willi Gutowski used to support access to abortion but now thinks it should be curtailed. The retired Chilliwack, B.C., psychiatrist shared his reasoning with the Medical Post:

‘If you think about it as a scientist, instead of a politician, when you are dealing with a pregnancy you are not dealing with just a woman; you are dealing with two genetically distinct individuals. So with doctors, we are human beings, we get influenced by political things just like everybody else, and so we forget our science–that the fetus is a genetically distinct individual. We as scientists should be dealing with the science, not the politics–but it takes us a while to really think the whole thing through.‘” 

A woman in jail because she protests abortion

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Pro-abortion fear mongering often raises the false notion that pro-lifers want women to go to jail for having abortions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let the record stand: For women in jail because of abortion, there’s only one in this country that I know of, and she’s pro-life.

Linda Gibbons is a soft spoken grandmother whose trial is today. Gibbons has spent years in jail because she protests abortion. From a source who has seen her working:

She has been peacefully standing in front of [an abortion clinic] for the past five years handing out pamphlets and talking to women. Often only allowed an hour at a time before a peace officer warns her three times and then calls the police for her disobedience of the injunction [that does not allow protesting within a 60 foot zone outside of abortion clinics.]

Today is her trial, and the results are due out momentarily. My source further tells me:

This is the first time she has legal representation and her argument is being made. All the other times she simply stays silent, even when questioned by the judge, in order to make a political statement that the unborn are voiceless. …She is always charged with  obstruction of the peace officer’s duties (despite the fact that she fully cooperates and listens to his warnings and goes along with the arrest subsequently when he calls the police). But why is this 14-year-old injunction that was intended to be temporary still enforced and used to prosecute a peaceful pro-lifer?

And that is a very good question.

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Brigitte updates: She has been acquitted.

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Andrea adds: The story Brigitte links to quotes one Maria Corsillo. If I’m not mistaken, we were on the same TV program back when Morgentaler got his Order of Canada. And she wouldn’t stop talking. But bygones, this is what she says on this case:

“No one has a Charter right to interfere in another person’s medical care,” said Maria Corsillo, manager of The Scott Clinic, which opened in 1986. “The question every patient asks is, ‘Why is she allowed to do that?’” People are entitled to their beliefs but they should not impose them on others, she said. She used the example of people opposing blood transfusions for religious reasons. “Do you see those people standing and obstructing entrances to blood donor clinics?”

Short answer, and it’s an easy one. First of all, Gibbons doesn’t block entry. She stands quietly by, as the justice who acquitted her highlights. Secondly, if those opposed to blood transfusions want to stand and offer me information outside my very hospital room, I’m not opposed to that. I’d weigh the evidence and decide they’re crazy. Done. Women can, incidentally, as thinking beings, do the same, Ms. Corsillo.

Finally, abortion is but rarely medical treatment, and taking a life to solve a problem constitutes a very callous sort of world, one where it makes sense to protest. When Corsillo and I discussed Morgentaler’s Order of Canada, I recall she opened by saying it was an appointment that everyone could support. Everyone. Interesting. Guess working in a clinic, with a husband who does the abortions means you are by default out of touch with mainstream women’s concerns, which tend not to revolve around “medical treatment” but rather, “I can’t have this baby.” Cutting freedoms, freedom of speech and freedom of information–that’s her MO. Thing is, she’s curtailed her own world so much, she doesn’t even know when she’s doing it.

How do you say “thank you” in Prochoice-ese?

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Many thanks to a reader for highlighting this post over at Feministing. It’s a list of reasons to thank feminism. (Cue soft violin music.) 
The reader’s comments on number 3 (Thank you feminism for “an authentic language to discuss sex, work, and just about everything in between”) can’t be improved upon so I’ll just cut and paste: “Right. Like, ‘right to choose’ and ‘family planning’ and ‘reproductive freedom.’ I don’t think Orwell intended doublespeak to be considered ‘authentic.'”
She doesn’t realize she’s using euphemisms, taking the new double-speak instead as “authentic.” Oh the irony.

The fact massage

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CBC apologizes for Heather Mallick’s Mighty Wind column.

Portions of Ms. Mallick’s column do not meet the standards set out in policy for a point-of-view piece since some of her “facts” are unsupportable. She may, of course, resubmit her column taking account of our editorial standards. The editors are free to, in fact obliged to, exercise appropriate editing standards.

I used to be a fact checker. Yes, magazines usually have a department dedicated to driving ambitious, young journalists to insanity, by having them confirm the facts as written by others.

There could have been no fact check that would have caused this column not to run.

Fact checker: “Having perused many pornographic web sites, I conclude that Palin does not look like a porn star.”  

OR

Fact checker: “Having called some male Republican’s wives… it would seem sexual satisfaction is, er, high.”

This apology from the CBC is grand, except it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They entirely fail, consistently, to note there is another set of views out there and they monopolize the media with their views using my tax dollars.

On that note, if you want more bias…check this most recent “news” report on “women’s rights” and Bill C-484. How’s about interviewing those victims groups that support Bill C-484 instead of claiming there were none? How’s about challenging the opinion that abortion is a “woman’s right”? Yes, I know, it would have required research. And a fact check.

Or maybe the CBC has an official policy–something that goes a little like this: Slander now, apologize later.

Election financing rules and double standards

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Election financing. We have regulated speech, not free speech, in Canada. This means that groups and individuals (“third parties”) cannot spend as much money as they’d like for (or against) candidates in an election. (For more on Canada’s gag law, this Calgary Herald editorial explains.)

This runs contrary to rules of free speech. I am against that law. But it still stands. And if Friends of Science and Barry Cooper can be charged, as the Herald piece explains they were, who else should be?  

Why am I asking these questions? Because I’m curious to know how much money pro-abortion groups are spending telling me not to vote for Harper? Has anyone asked that? Are they registered? Should they be?

Representatives from Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, Canadian Labour Congress, the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women, Federation du Quebec pour le planning des naissances and Action Canada for Population and Development (ACPD) held the press conference, describing themselves as a united front in the mobilization of women voters.

Does spending money telling voters who not to vote for (Harper) qualify under the Elections Spending Act?

Let me be very clear–I think those pro-abortion groups should be allowed to speak freely, and spend as much as they want. But what I’m not keen on is a double standard, whereby groups on the “wrong” side are charged (Friends of Science, National Citizens Coalition to name but two) and groups with elite support (pro-abortion groups) are not.

(Cross-posted to The Shotgun.)

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Brigitte is jumping up and down, clapping her hands: Oh, good one! Any minute now, we should expect the thought police Elections Canada to descend on the gals, right? Right?

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Véronique must start reading more Alberta-based newspapers. Whoa, this is so refreshing to read!

Courageous Canadian students

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A column in today’s Citizen in which ProWomanProLife is mentioned:  

The spirit of the thing is renewed, in Canada today, by, for example, Andrea Mrozek and the girls at the Ottawa website, ProWomanProLife. Just as strident feminism renews itself, by finding a new generation of embittered young women and confused men, attracted to the task of infiltrating our legal and political bureaucracies, so also we find a new generation of women determined to resist them, and to defend common sense with unflappable courage.

But thankfully, there are many more like us at PWPL. I can say I met many great students–both male and female, from New Brunswick all the way to British Columbia this weekend, speaking at UofT and at the National Campus Life Network conference–very courageous, very cool people, working in an environment far more difficult than where I find myself, and doing it at an age where I didn’t give serious issues a serious thought. It’s good to see. (And one of them has put one of the presentations I made on YouTube: should you have absolutely nothing to do, come oh say, mid-winter, feel free to look it up.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B6gvvbpJ5g]

Wooing the female crunchy con

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Kris Sims writes this about “urban aprons” in today’s Post. She makes the claim that there is a fair amount in Harper’s electioneering meant to woo this vote. If you recall “Zoe”–she was the type of urban female voter the Harper government decided they would never win–Sims calls this type of voter Zoe’s older sister, or the “urban apron vote.”

That’s right: the federal Conservatives want the Urban Apron vote — they just aren’t admitting it out loud. The Prime Minister has been making announcements about health, safety and product regulation throughout his extended stay in minority government, often getting his non-threatening Milhouse of a Health Care Minister, Tony Clement, to deliver the feel-good news.

She lists a bunch of things the Conservatives are promising–I admit, I’ve heard of none of them and in my experience, if you are Zoe’s older sister, you’re not listening, either. It is just too “uncool” to vote Conservative for many in this downtown core. (I’m writing from Toronto today. Yesterday I gave a pro-life talk at beautiful Hart House at UofT–just down the way there was some sort of organic food fair, and Mayor Miller was outside. For the organic food, not the pro-life stuff. Sigh.)

Classism (and the inappropriate use of hairspray)

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Like this analysis from George Jonas in today’s Post.  

It isn’t Governor Palin’s sex that bothers them. Nor is it her politics. What they cannot abide is what they see as her class. Europeans and Asians tend to think of America as a classless society. No doubt, compared to old Europe and old Asia it is. But not entirely. The clamour we now hear surrounding Governor Palin’s candidacy for vice-president on the Republican ticket isn’t the sound of gender- but class-warfare. What makes contemporary Western-style class war confusing is that the upper classes are lined up Left and the lower classes Right.

He goes on to say:

Resign yourselves to the next inhabitant of the White House having an atrocious hairdo.

Great piece, one question though. (Here at PWPL we don’t shy away from the tough ones): What is so wrong with Sarah Palin’s hair?

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Brigitte is having palpitations: Aaaargh! It looks like a sticky helmet! I love the woman, but I do wish she let her hair fall nicely on her shoulders instead…

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Andrea defends Sarah’s hair: That’s the thing–I’ve seen plenty of photos where her hair does just that–falls nicely on her shoulders. I’ve also become accustomed to an overuse of hairspray by our female friends south of the border. I classify it as a “cultural difference” of which I should be tolerant.

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Rebecca adds: A lot of the time, her hairdo reminds me of the “twist into ponytail, then leave in a knot so the baby can’t blow his nose in your hair” fashion so popular with, well, me.

 

Since when did the Jonas Brothers care about politics? Oh wait …

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