Diane Watts and Christy Clark are both in the news defiantly defending their expenses. Recently the media reported that after Dianne Watts said policing for the George Bush and Bill Clinton Investment Fraud Summit wouldn’t cost taxpayers anything, it was reported that policing alone cost $45,000 and that speaker fees cost $300,000.
$300,000 for such high profile speakers is not surprising to me. What is surprising is the claim they raised that money solely from ticket sales. The Surrey Leader reported the cost break down to be $324,000 spent bringing former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton ($102,453) and George Bush ($221,847) to Surrey’s Regional Economic Summit, but those costs were recouped through ticket sales.
So $324,00 dived by $600 a plate makes 540 paying guests. Did they have 540 paying guests? I don’t know. Perhaps. I doubt Dianne Watts, Christy Clark or Kevin Falcon paid that. I’m not sure how many other free tickets they handed out. Yet the whole concern is that Bill Clinton was deeply involved in money laundering out of Mena, AK that helped crash the BCCI. The Bush family have a long history of being directly involved with investment fraud. Paying those clowns that much money to speak at an economic summit was an offense to the residents of Surrey.
Dianne Watt's defiant response was "As mayor, I'm proud of hosting high-profile summits." Gag.
George Bush vetoed the bill to stop torture. That makes him a war criminal. End of discussion. Inviting him here to speak in Surrey was a slap in the face of all of us. A lot of people have a hate for Dianne Watts now. Like Martin Luther King, I’ve seen too much hate, to want to hate and every time I see it I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. Yet when I look at what Dianne Watts has done, I feel sad and hurt. We had hoped for something very different.
Sure Dianne is a lot smarter than Christy but the hidden agenda is very concerning. Ross Buchanan has brought a few serious concerns to the public’s attention yet most of the public don’t have a clue about these concerns. Like the garbage incineration plant and that conflict of interest development corporation that is public but accounts are secret.
My main concern is finances. Huge expenses. The Surrey Leader reported that Surrey council and staff expenses have increased. Then we have this smug attitude that this is the cost of doing business. That’s what Christy says. It just reminds me of a youtube video the Georgia Straight took of Christy Clark inside the George Bush Summit in Surrey. She just had that airhead ear to ear grin while she refused to give them an interview.
It makes me wonder why Dianne Watts is so comfortable with people like Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell. It’s the smugness that saddens me. It’s not what I envision for Canada let alone Surrey. What I envision for Canada is people like General Romeo Dallaire: humble, passionate and filled with compassion. That’s a real soldier. The guy who gives his all, not the guy who robs from the poor and the elderly to give to the rich the laughs about it.
Christy Clark recently took some more heat for her defiant and smug attitude about her Gordon Campbell like expenses. Understandably so. I will admit that I agree with her pulling the plug on Enbridge if she does in fact walk the walk. I will also agree that her position on Enbridge, although it’s supported by the public, isn’t enough to save her or her political party. Yet I will point out one thing. Christy Clark was their best attempt at spin to resurrect Gordon Campbell’s defiant arrogance.
Pulling the plug on Enbridge is the right thing to do. Gordon Campbell would simply defiantly rage forward against public opinion just to screw the public one more time while he had the power to do so. Then spend millions on advertizing trying to convince us it was the right thing to do. Christy Clark may not have been enough to hide or spin Gordon Campbell’s heartless arrogance, yet she is better than Gordon Campbell. I will say that much. It’s sadly unfortunate that the rest of her political party are not. Except for Dave Hayer. He was a good man but he’s not running again.
More gang news on the way. I just had to get the last two posts off my chest first.
As you say, such high speaking fees are not unusual, but...Why is that, to a discerning person? What do they expect, great wisdom?
ReplyDeleteWhat could George Bush conceivably say, that would be intelligent or perceptive...?
Indeed. What's he going to tell us, how to put the country trillions in debt?
DeleteK, I know you don't like Bush (any of them) but water boarding is not torture. If it was, everyone who under goes SERE training at the elite unit level would have been tortured by their instructors. Having your life made unpleasant by being sleep/food deprived and having your mind fucked with is not torture, and no one in American custody is having their finger nails torn out, their genitals cut off, or various body parts smashed with a hammer. You know, real torture.....
ReplyDelete"Surf's up."
Surf's up? That is messed up. Jesse Ventura says water boarding is torture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoqmH49VBC0
DeleteEither way, I do not approve of that practice. In Afghanistan they had hoods and electric wires. They did a lot more than water boarding and Obama is charging the whistleblower on water boarding to boot. Obama's problem isn't that he wants affordable medical. Obama's problem is that he isn't different enough than Bush.
Come on over o my place. I got a pool, a hose, and a chair I would like to tie you down to while submerging you in the pool til you can't breathe and let's then see if your opinion changes as to whether these methods are indeed not torture. Asshole
DeleteJesse Ventura says a lot of things.....he has claimed on occasions to have been a SEAL....while he DID graduate from BUDS, he was assigned to a UDT Team in the Philippines, never serving in VN in combat as a SEAL as he once alluded to when he said, "Until you have hunted men, you haven't hunted yet." He had to come clean about that eventually.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't talk much these days about having been a 1%'er Mongol Sergeant at Arms though. Just conspiracies he has little/no proof for or how he's gonna take out Mexican citizenship because he's so ashamed of America. I know he's your hero, but fuck him and the Harley he rode in on.
Yeah he’s my hero. He says he was water boarded in training and he says it’s torture. Either way I don’t support water boarding. I certainly don’t support the black hood and electric wires they used either.
ReplyDeleteAll well and good.
ReplyDeleteWhere you and I seem to disagree on this is that you feel bad people should have the same rights as good people, due process and all that. I however, while supporting that for domestic circumstances (mostly) in North America, have no problem with, when obvious circumstances/evidence establishes their badness in the playing field that constitutes the rest of the planet, doing bad things to bad people. Especially if there is a reasonable chance that we can thwart their activities by so doing. Ok, any chance. Come on, they're bad guys, payback's a bitch, etc. I'm not saying we start out there, it's a line of progression. Never hurts to ask nicely first and all that.
It's no big deal, I'm sure neither of us likes terrorists, we just disagree on the etiquette of how to treat our guests. ;)
Neither of us like terrorists. I just think the CIA are the biggest terrorists out there. It's not just a matter of me thinking bad guys should have rights, it's a matter of due process. You can't prove a bad guy is a bad guy without a fair trial. Case in point that guy that was tortured in Guantanamo bay who was innocent. The CIA whistleblower who tortured him wrote a book about it. Having said that, you're right. I don't think bad guys should be tortured even if they are found to be bad guys. I think we should be better than that.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree that there have been some times where the amount of evidence that someone was a bad guy that had info we wanted was not sufficient to hook him up. That would appear to be the case with the guy you reference. Also, I am not saying we "torture" (water board, sensory/sleep/food deprivation, etc.) right off the bat. If a guy will tell us all he knows for a T-bone steak, a bottle of JD and a hooker, fine.
ReplyDeleteI urge you in read up on the case of Kalid Sheik Mohammed for an excellent example of the process. There was no doubt about who he was, and therefore how much information he had. That guy took the dive something like 120 times before he broke, and he even told his interrogators when he was about to break, interestingly enough. A few more times after that got it done.
The information obtained from him saved lives. There is no doubt about that. SAVED LIVES. I understand your misgivings and I agree there needs to be checks/balances/oversights to make sure that the wrong people aren't subjected to enhanced measures but at the end of the day, I'm about saving innocent peoples lives. If a bad guy, or someone who has chosen to associate extensively with bad guys has to suffer in ways that do not resemble the more medieval definitions of torture, I'm OK with that, just as I'd be OK with loading a bunch of gangsters on a leaky boat and turning them into an artificial reef/marine food source. After we water board them for information of course.
"It's a hardball world out there".
You may well be all about saving lives but the problem is that Guantanamo is controlled by the CIA and they are clearly not all about saving lives. They are clearly about making money through arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and investment fraud. Iran Contra wasn't all about selling Iran arms to release some hostages. It was about selling Iran arms to raise money for the contra rebels in Nicaragua. Selling Iran arms had nothing to do with saving lives. Selling Iraq chemical weapons had nothing to do with saving lives. Operations Fast and Furious had nothing to do with saving lives.
ReplyDeleteSome rationalize torture against "terrorists" so they can save lives. That argument desperately fails when we see who's really using that argument and why. Labelling anyone in the Occupy movement as domestic terrorists so they can remove their rights to a fair trial and due process is really something Hitler would do. Arresting people and torturing them for their political affiliation. MI6 and the CIA lied about Iraq's WMD. They can't be trusted with anything let alone the right to torture whoever they want because they might save lives. The CIA don't care about saving lives. Operation Northwoods proves that.
Let's stop for one minute and think about the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers and the purpose of the Constitution. Sure taxation without representation started it off, but it was much deeper than that. The whole idea behind the right to bear arms is the thought that an armed population is harder to take over by a Communist or a Fascist dictatorship than a disarmed one. The whole point behind due process and the right to a fair trial is to bind the government and make them accountable to the people. When good people argue in support of using torture on terrorists to save lives and remove their right to due process, that opens the door wide open for a corrupt government to take over and oppress the people just like Hitler did. Hitler used false flag attacks to gain power. It is quite possible 9/11 was an inside job. At this point it is irresponsible to not consider that possibility. Either way, arguing that torturing terrorists can save lives is arguing against everything the founding fathers stood and fought for. It erodes the Constitution which is the sacred measuring stick that preserves and protects a democratic society.
One wonders when the CIA has time to actually do intelligence work...... :rolleyes:
ReplyDeleteDude, without bothering to address all this stuff about the CIA which has been beat to death by you on this site, do you truly believe that (if true) is ALL they do? No intelligence work whatsoever? And what they do do as far as intell gathering/analysis goes, they are always wrong or lying?
Really? I notice you didn't bother to address the KSM example....
There won't be any corrupt government taking over and oppressing the people as long as there is a Second Amendment. That's the point. Google "The Battle of Athens".
The term CIA intelligence is an oxymoron. Sure they spy on people. All kinds of people. Not just terrorists. They also spy on whistleblowers and their drug trafficking competition. I addressed the KSA example by reiterating my support of the constitution and my opposition of using any excuse to erode and violate it.
DeleteThe Battle of Athens Tennessee
ReplyDeletehttp://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/athens.htm
Re: The Battle of Athens, Tennessee
DeleteWow. Sounds like the voter fraud in Florida is nothing new.
Voter fraud ANYWHERE is nothing new. As you should well know. Robo-calling anyone? :)
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I guess I'm just naive. I really didn't think that would happen in North America.
ReplyDeleteWell, we tend to think we are different from the rest of the world....and while we are, ;) we are still subject to the vagaries of human nature....and, we get the government/people in it that we are willing to tolerate. If we were more willing to hold the government and their agents feet to the fire, I'm sure improvement could be gained....at the same time, there's only so many hours in a day and we all have individual responsibilities.
ReplyDeleteIf public corruption and police misconduct were easily solved with little expenditure of time and effort, we'd be there already. It all comes down to the underlying ethos of the culture and the people who make it up, and that changes neither easily nor without either great effort or terrible circumstance.
"The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle." - Robert Cooper, "The Post-Modern State"
ReplyDelete“Among ourselves, we keep the law?” Holy White Supremacy Batman I can’t believe you actually said that. I thought we agreed to disagree on torture. I oppose torture on anyone regardless of race, colour or creed. Especially knowing that the CIA are a criminal organization intensely involved in drug trafficking and have gone on record to propose false flag attacks on it’s own people.
ReplyDeleteOrlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven. Wonderful movie. There are good and bad Christians just like everywhere else. In that movie there were some very bad Christians and some very good Muslims. God is not a respecter of persons but in every nation that fears him and worketh righteousness is accepted of him. Saladin was accepted of God.
“Safeguard the helpless. That is your oath.” Including helpless Muslims. Murdering Muslims isn’t doing God any favours. “In as much as ye have done it unto on of the least of these Muslims, ye have done it unto me.”
A Kingdom of Conscience means we have a conscience. We don’t use legal tricks to avoid what we know is right and wrong. The movie Kingdom of Heaven has an epic conclusion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsVg80YEhkQ
First of all, I DIDN'T say it. Robert Cooper did.
ReplyDeleteSecond, "White Supremacy"? Really? LOL WTF did that come from?
We also agreed to disagree on whether non US citizens like some terrorist in (pick a country) has constitutional rights. (they don't) And that is what Cooper is speaking to from what I can tell.
I realize you were quoting someone else but you did say it in the sense that you did cite the quote. I just find Robert Cooper’s statement to be really racist. I understand the intent. The intent is to rationalize torture of non US citizens outside of the US. The whole idea of among ourselves we keep the law is rather disturbing. Eric Prince is known for his twisted delusions of a modern day crusade. It you’re going to imply he meant simply non US citizens I still can’t swallow the ideology. Among ourselves we keep the law but when we’re dealing with others we don’t. I just think it diminishes us. I realize that technically, non US citizens outside of the US don’t have constitutional rights. The point is they should. The point is the American Revolution and providing for the common defense was supposed to mean all people not just all US citizens.
ReplyDelete