Free Advice

From The Star:

Tim Hortons bans man for dissing its decaf

Don’t like our coffee? Take your business elsewhere.

That’s Tim Hortons’ advice a day after the story of a New Brunswick man getting slapped with a lifetime ban for complaining about “bad coffee” went viral and elicited hundreds of comments online.

FPinfomart offer number 138207291199

FPinfomart Offer Number 138207291199

From last night’s At Issue:

Chantal Hebert: I’d say the vanishing Elizabeth May. Remember the Green Party, this time last year, Stephane Dion was hinting he might let her in to a coalition cabinet. Now byelections came and went, and the Green Party barely made a dent in all four seats.

It’s hard to see how she will recapture the dynamics that gave her prominence and brought her to the leaders’ debate in the last election.

Peter Mansbridge: And it will be interesting to see whether or not she can get back in to a leaders’ debate. She only got in to that one because they had one seat technically.

In Canada, neoconservative is a dirty word, and when used as an accusation, is difficult to refute since most folks can’t say what it means. In other words, “I know it when I see it”.

The best known definition may be Irving Kristol’s: “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

James Q. Wilson, in a remembrance of Kristol, coins another definition:

I chaired a White House task force on crime for the president. It was a distinguished panel but after much effort we made very few useful recommendations. It slowly dawned on me that, important as the rising crime rate was, nobody knew how to make it a lot smaller. We assumed, of course, that the right policy was to eliminate the “root causes” of crime, but scholars disagreed about what many of those causes were and where they did agree they pointed to things, such as abusive families, about which a democratic government can do very little.

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers, myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter’s presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.

…

(And now, for no apparent reason, here is FPinfomart offer number 138207291199 .)

Is this thing on?

This is just a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Sitemap identifier 138207291199 CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)

John Ibbitson ($) on the war on terror, and Canada’s role in the Anglosphere:

Our advantage over them lies in our unity. The various Muslim terrorist organizations would probably be fighting each other if they weren’t fighting us. But Western nations see things the same way. We share our intelligence. We jointly preserve our liberties despite tough anti-terrorism legislation, and keep our borders open to each other despite all the new security measures.

That is why those who accuse the Prime Minister of tying Canada too closely to the United States are so dangerously deluded. Winning the war on terror depends on solidarity among the allies. It depends on those morning security briefings being as comprehensive as possible, based on mutual trust.

The worst thing we could do would be to distance ourselves, to search for a more “nuanced” stand. It would erode the trust of those whose trust we need, while doing nothing to protect us from attack.

Chronic wars last a very long time. But they do end. Twenty years ago, no one would have predicted the end of the Cold War, the end of apartheid, an end to the Troubles. But they’re in the past, and the good guys won. The good guys will win this one, too, as long as we keep our heads and stick together, like we always have before.

Somedays I think about giving up on the Globe entirely. Not today, though.