A loud and clear NO to the neo-conservative austerity budget 2012

Children and politics

My local PC MLA, Dave Hancock, extensively features the pictures of children in his print materials (to be fair, he has no pictures at all on his website). It is true that Mr. Hancock is the Minister of Human Services (apparently, the other services this government provides are not human...), which does entail working with families and children, but I just wanted to put these questions out there:

• How ethical is it to use involve children in advocating for a particular political party, especially the PCs? 
• Does working in a capacity that has to do with children make it normal for a politician to use include the pictures of these children in campaign materials? 
• How different is this from putting a child's face into alcohol or cigarette advertising?

Let's talk, shall we?

Why become like Tony Blair when we can stay social democrats?

I'm getting really disturbed by the vision of now already dozens of political journalists, advisers and "pundits" claiming that the only way for Canada's New Democrats to move forward is to become a "Third Way" party of the Blair type, thus abandoning effectively their adherence to social democracy per se and becoming an amorphous "big orange tent" party somewhere in the interminable political center. Being actively involved in the executive of an NDP riding association, I have up to now tried to keep my distance from the leadership race, especially when it comes to anything close to an endorsement (or anti-endorsement) of any of the candidates. However, this recent mania of suddenly placing Tony Blair and the likes of him as the symbol and ideal for which to strive is truly upsetting. Just look at where the British Labour Party is now and also look at, say, the German SPD in terms of their stance on major current issues (not necessarily in terms of their declared ideological positions) to see that the so-called "Third Way" is the way into the political oblivion as far as progressive approaches to socio-economic problems are concerned.
We can definitely do better than that.

Disturbing name near similarities

I've been meaning to mention this for a while but other commitments have stopped me from logging in:

• The Assad regime massacre of the Baba Amr district of the city of Homs in 2011-2012 (exact number of casualties unknown, but the area formerly populated by around 100,000 people was found deserted by the Red Cross in early March 2012) really got me thinking of the Nazi massacre of over 100,000 people in Babi Yar, near Kiev, in 1941-1943.
• The same week as Vladimir Putin "won" the presidential "election" in Russia amid widespread fraud, the allegations of fraud in the Canadian federal election of 2011 surfaced, with the nickname Pierre Poutine reportedly used by the perpetrator(s) to make vote-suppressing phone calls throughout the country.

Here is hoping that the similarities end with the names.