Trudeau government’s approach displays unprecedented arrogance.

Trudeau government’s approach displays unprecedented arrogance. (Thestar).

The throne speech delivered to Parliament on Friday featured the usual platitudes and vague commitments. However, it made one very specific engagement, a crystal-clear commitment: “To make sure that every vote counts,” it declared, “the government will undertake consultations on electoral reform, and will take action to ensure that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

More importantly, the government declares that regardless of consultations, it will end the voting system that has been in use in Canada since democracy was introduced here in 1791 and which has anchored our political culture.

What is the point of promising consultations if the government has already made up its mind to proceed?

Remarkably, this voting system is not enshrined in our Constitution. The Constitution Act specifies that Members of Parliament must be “elected” but says nothing about what system is to be used to choose who will sit in the House of Commons. There is no constitutional amending formula that applies to any changes made to how Canadians vote. In other words, the government can do what it wants.

But the Trudeau government’s approach displays unprecedented arrogance.

The government of Canada simply cannot assume the powers of unilaterally changing the way in which we vote. It must conduct true consultations — rigorous and comprehensive consultations that are not simply driven by the self-appointed advocates of reform.

Regardless of its quality, however, the consultation process must also include a referendum, no matter how much it costs. And if that referendum rejects reform, the government must abide by the result. One thing is for sure: the electoral process is not Ottawa’s to change unilaterally. No government has the moral right to alter the precious process of elections without the approval of the people. Hmmmm.....As i warned The Canuck version of Obama on Steroids. Read the full story here.

Congress's ObamaCare Exemption - The President intervenes to give Members and staff an 'Illegal' break.

Picture HT : Carl In Jerusalem.

Congress's ObamaCare Exemption - The President intervenes to give Members and staff an 'Illegal' break.HT: WhiteHouseDossier.By Keith Koffler.

By what authority did President Obama decide to exempt members of Congress and their staffs from a provision of Obamacare that would deny them their federal subsidy and and make them buy insurance on the exchanges like everyone else?

Obama, as has been widely reported, promised Congress the other day that he would personally see to it that the federal benefit, which pays 75 percent of premiums, would be preserved even after Congress is forced onto the exchanges.
Lawmakers were complaining of a potential “brain drain” as high quality staffers left Capitol Hill instead of ponying up thousands more for health insurance.
Let’s be clear. Other brains would certainly have replaced the parting brains on Capitol Hill. It’s a cool job – makin’ laws for the rest of us – that others would have done before cashing in their padded resumes and scoring tons of dough in the private sector. The problem wasn’t a brain drain. The problem was a money drain.
And so, lo and behold, the administration’s Office of Personnel Management has dutifully determined that Congress will keep its taxpayer-funded health care gift.
According to the Wall Street Journal, OPM has no authority to pay for plans on the exchanges, which are not part of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President.

The White House, the WSJ notes, was eager to issue a decree instead of pursuing a legislative fix that would have uncomfortably opened up the Obamacare can of worms and invited Republican mischief.
So, as it has so often done when the law is inconvenient, the Obama administration has decided the laws are for stupid people.

Your government has unlawfully decided to take action to financially benefit the ruling class, those who WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE LAWS. Democrats took the lead on this, but Republicans are complicit too.Hmmm......" L'Etat C'est Moi" - Louis XIV.Read the full story here.

IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any cabinet member.

IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any cabinet member.(DC).Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet. Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.

By contrast, Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration and compared the IRS’s remoteness from the president to “Siberia.” But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of cabinet members.

An analysis by The Daily Caller of the White House’s public “visitor access records” showed that every current and former member of President Obama’s Cabinet would have had to rack up at least 60 more public visits to the president’s home to catch up with “Douglas Shulman.”

The visitor logs do not give a complete picture of White House access. Some high-level officials get cleared for access and do not have to sign in during visits. A Washington Post database of visitor log records cautions, “The log may include some scheduled visits that did not take place and exclude visits by members of Congress, top officials and others who are not required to sign in at security gates.”

The White House press office declined to comment on which visits by high-ranking officials do and do not get recorded in the visitor log, but it is probable that the vast majority of visits by major cabinet members do not end up in the public record.

Nevertheless, many visits by current and former cabinet members are in the logs, and the record depicts an IRS chief uniquely at home in the White House.

Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s friend and loyal lieutenant, logged 62 publicly known White House visits, not even half as many as Shulman’s 157.

Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to whom Shulman reported, clocked in at just 48 publicly known visits.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned a cool 43 public visits, and current Secretary of State John Kerry logged 49 known White House visits in the same timeframe, when he was still a U.S. senator.

Shulman has more recorded visits to the White House than HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (48), DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano (34), Education Secretary Arne Duncan (31), former Energy Secretary Steven Chu (22) and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates (17) combined.Hmmmm.........Internal Revenge Service?Read the full story here.

Talking Turkey!

Talking Turkey ! By Daniel Pipes.National Review Online.December 26, 2012.

The menu for meals on my Turkish Airlines flight earlier this month assured passengers that food selections "do not contain pork." The menu also offered a serious selection of alcoholic drinks, including champagne, whiskey, gin, vodka, rakı, wine, beer, liqueur, and cognac. This oddity of simultaneously adhering to and ignoring Islamic law, the Shari'a, symbolizes the uniquely complex public role of Islam in today's Turkey, as well as the challenge of understanding the Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish abbreviation, AKP) which has dominated the country's national government since 2002.
Political discussions about Turkey tend to dwell on whether the AKP is Islamist or not: In 2007, for example, I asked "what are the AKP leadership's intentions? Did it ... retain a secret Islamist program and simply learn to disguise its Islamist goals? Or did it actually give up on those goals and accept secularism?"
During recent discussions in Istanbul, I learned that Turks of many viewpoints have reached a consensus about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: they worry less about his Islamic aspirations than his nationalist and dictatorial tendencies.
Applying the Shari'a in full, they say, is not a feasible goal in Turkey because of the country's secular and democratic nature, something distinguishing it from other Muslim-majority countries (except Albania, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzia). Accepting this reality, the AKP wins ever-greater electoral support by softly coercing the population to be more virtuous, traditional, pious, religious, conservative, and moral. Thus, it encourages fasting during Ramadan and female modesty, discourages alcohol consumption, attempted to criminalize adultery, indicted an anti-Islamist artist, increased the number of religious schools, added Islam to the public school curriculum, and introduced questions about Islam to university entrance exams. Put in terms of Turkish Airlines, pork is already gone and it's a matter of time until the alcohol also disappears.

Turkish Airlines bans pork but serves alcohol. (View full size image)

Islamic practice, not Islamic law, is the goal, my interlocutors told me. Hand chopping, burqas, slavery, and jihad are not in the picture, and all the less so after the past decade's economic growth which empowered an Islamically-oriented middle class that rejects Saudi-style Islam. An opposition leader noted that five districts of Istanbul "look like Afghanistan," but these are the exception. I heard that the AKP seeks to reverse the anti-religiousness of Atatürk's state without undermining that state, aspiring to create a post-Atatürk order more than an anti-Atatürk order. It seeks, for example, to dominate the existing legal system rather than create an Islamic one. The columnist Mustafa Akyol even holds the AKP is not trying to abolish secularism but that it "argues for a more liberal interpretation of secularism." The AKP, they say, emulates the 623-year-old Ottoman state Atatürk terminated in 1922, admiring both its Islamic orientation and its dominance of the Balkans and the Middle East.

Mohamed Morsi could learn a thing or two from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This neo-Ottoman orientation can be seen in the prime minister's aspiration to serve as informal caliph, by his change in emphasis from Europe to the Middle East (where he is an unlikely hero of the Arab street), and his offering the AKP's political and economic formula to other Muslim countries, notably Egypt. (Erdoğan staunchly argued for secularism during a visit there, to the Muslim Brotherhood's dismay, and looks askance at Mohamed Morsi's ramming Shari'a down Egyptians' throats.) In addition, Ankara helps the Iranian regime avoid sanctions, sponsors the Sunni opposition against Syria's Bashar al-Assad, picked a noisy, gratuitous fight with Israel, threatened Cyprus over its underwater gas finds, and even intervened in the trial of a Bangladeshi Islamist leader.

Like much else in Turkey, the headscarf can have subtle qualities.

Having outmaneuvered the "deep state," especially the military officer corps, in mid-2011, the AKP adopted an increasingly authoritarian cast, to the point that many Turks fear dictatorship more than Islamization. They watch as an Erdoğan, "intoxicated with power," imprisons opponents on the basis of conspiracy theories and wiretaps, stages show trials, threatens to suppress a costume television soap opera, seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country, fosters antisemitism, suppresses political criticism, justifies forceful measures against students protesting him, manipulates media companies, leans on the judiciary, and blasts the concept of the separation of powers. Columnist Burak Bekdil ridicules him as "Turkey's elected chief social engineer." More darkly, others see him becoming Turkey's answer to Vladimir Putin, an arrogant semi-democrat who remains in power for decades.
Freed of the military's oversight only in mid-2011, I see Erdoğan possibly winning enough dictatorial power for him (or a successor) to achieve his dream and fully implement the Shari'a.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Dec. 26, 2012 update: Some extra facts about Turkish Airlines (abbreviation: THY):

• It offers kosher, Hindu, and Jain meals.
• It did not serve pork products even before the AKP era began.
• It takes pride in being "Europe's Best Airline" as judged by Skytrax, a British consultancy group.
• It boasts of a network that goes to more countries than any other airline, 91 countries vs. Air France's 88.
• Its main business class lounge, at Istanbul Atatürk Airport, is (in this traveler's view) by far the world's most outstanding, what with its innovative design, its children's play area, library, billiard table, television panel, movie theater, piano bar, mosque, showers, sleeping suites, and the range and quality of foods. It has a capacity of 2,000 guests.
• The Turkish government owns 49 percent of THY's stock and, according to Orçun Selçuk, writing in Today's Zaman, the airline "is openly used by the government as a tool to buttress the expansion of its foreign policy." In addition, he writes, it serves "as a tool of soft power aimed at increasing the attraction of Turkey among foreign publics."

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Obama Threatens Boehner: I’ll Use Inaugural Address And State Of The Union Speech To Bash Republicans.

Obama Threatens Boehner: I’ll Use Inaugural Address And State Of The Union Speech To Bash Republicans.(WSJ). Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.
 At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?” “You get nothing,” the president said. “I get that for free.”
The president repeatedly reminded Mr. Boehner of the election results: "You're asking me to accept Mitt Romney's tax plan. Why would I do that?" At another point, the speaker noted his GOP majority would also return next year.Hmmmm....."L'etat C'est moi"Read the full story here.