Lesson #43: Notes


Notes

 * The Senate will vote on Wednesday whether to suspend Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy without pay. The Conservative majority in the Upper House will work to fast track the vote and thus clear the way for the Conservative convention scheduled for next weekend in Calgary. (That’s in Alberta.)

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Note: The Gazette refused to pubish this Aislin (Terry Mosher) cartoon. Since Aislin is contracted to produce a certain number of cartoons, it is up to the newspaper to find a replacement for the rejected cartoon. In other words, it is not Aislin’s responsibility to produce another cartoon for that day’s paper.

* Thanks very much Edward Snowden for revealing so much that the average person did not know regarding spying by the American N.S.A. (National Security Agency). Apologists for the U.S. government are arguing that it’s just doing what everybody else does. That dick, David Cameron the British Prime Minister, has come out in support of the U.S. surveillance activity in relation to allies of the U.S.A. including Germany, Spain and France. Angela Merkel, Germany’s President, was not too happy when she discovered that the N.S.A. had tapped her cell phone even before she was elected Chancellor.

What kind of argument is that – “everybody else does it” so it’s ok?

* In Santa Rosa, thirteen year old Andy Lopez was shot seven times by sheriff’s deputies last Tuesday, dying on the very block on which he grew up. Lopez was apparently carrying a replica assault rifle. This is indeed a tragedy but it’s understandable given the school and other mass murders carried out by kids in the United States over the past four or five years. The cops obviously felt threatened and reacted. However, shooting the kid seven times seems like too much, way too much.

Reminds me of what happened in Toronto this past August where eighteen year old Sammy Yatim died in a hail of bullets fired by a policeman. Yatim, who had pulled a knife on passengers on crowded streetcar, was shot nine times by a Toronto police officer. After having been shot, the young man was tasered by the same officer for some inexplicable reason. Constable James Forcillo has been charged with murder in the death of the Toronto teen. Forcillo is the second Toronto cop (constable on patrol) to charged with murder since the inception of the Special Investigations Unit (S.I.U.) in 1990.

Both of these cases are results of a police attitude which dictates a policy of shoot first, ask questions later.

* Lou Reed, the leader of the rock group Velvet Underground, passed away Sunday at the age of seventy-one. Reed a self confessed heavy smoker and drinker had undergone a liver transplant in May of this year. R.I.P. Lou.

* Municipal elections for Montreal are to be held next Sunday, November 3rd. Candidates for mayor include Melanie Joly, Marcel Côte, Denis Corderre, and Richard Bergeron. I won’t be voting.

PEACE OUT


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