News roundup, part 2

Don Martin addresses new Quebec policy in the National Post.

Never mind that the ruling Conservatives last week proclaimed their intent-to-legislate on this contrived controversy or that Muslim women already comply with face-revealing requirements to obtain a driver's licence or passport, the risk of a covered female face in a ballot booth was so horrifically galling, two federal parties raced to put their name on its prohibition.

This may be a valid point, were it not for the inconvenient fact that covered "female" faces in the ballet booth is just another avenue for massive voter fraud, as was apparently commonplace amoung Sikhs in BC's lower mainland in 2000. If huge numbers of people are finding ways to vote in elections when they may not even be legally entitled to do so, don't be shocked to find that actual voters take great offense to this.

In the scramble for a purified and cleansed Quebec identity, various politicians are proposing or mulling over a shocking series of democratic limitations on anglophones or "foreign nationals," including newcomers from the other nine provinces.

The right to run for office, vote in any election, even pick a neighbourhood to live in would be limited by a person's French-speaking prowess, if assorted proposals of highly questionable constitutionality come to pass.

And this would just be PQ politicos using the outrage of all citizens to this attack by foreign powers of dubious end-goals in order to further their own 300-year-old quarrel with "the English" who so cruelly failed to murder 70,000 losing Frenchman in 1759 as history now tells us they should have. Again, Martin misses the boat on this entirely.

A recent article in Nature calls to "forego the Kyoto protocol because the United Nations treaty has failed to bring about any significant action on climate change." What, the United Nations being ineffective about something? Quelle surprise! Yet the LIEberals, the Old Undemocratic Party, and the Blocheads all keep pressuring Harper to sign enthusiastically onto Kyoto and Kyoto II and Kyoto III and Kyoto XXVI as they come, damn whatever side-effects may occur. For this, I defer to the Prime Minister:

It is now widely understood that, because of inaction on greenhouse gases over the last decade, Canada's emissions cannot be brought to the level required under the Kyoto Protocol within the compliance period, which begins on Jan. 1, 2008