Except that it is a bad law preventing free speech. Civil disobedience is an appropriate response to this oppressive piece of legislation.

Interesting comment. My experience is the same. I am finding the manifesto very informative about things like historical events. My guess is most people posting do not have nearly as sophisticated a grasp of history as Breivik. (They do not do a very good job of teaching history in North America). Also, much of the document is not original with Breivik and the ideas are an amalgam of important (and controverisal) ideas expressed elsewhere. One of Breiviks complaints is the lack of honest discussion of some of the antagonisms brought on by multi-culturalism. Hopefully no one would equate reading and agreeing with aspects of this document as supporting the outrageous way in which the shooter chose to promote the ideas. It's not the ideas that are dangerous -- it is the the individual holding the ideas when their mental make-up is completely without moral understanding of right and wrong.

Maybe the lesson here is that it is crude and misleading to characterize people as categorically being on the right or left. While there are constellations of beliefs that result in people learning left or leaning right, most of us as individuals (including Breivik) are more complex in our belief systems. The lesson, perhaps, is that we should not resort to analyzing anything based on these crude stereotypes and we should not use events like this to demonize those on the other side of the political spectrum and attempt to earn "brownie points" for being on the right side. It's childish, really. Left/right antagonisms should not be the focus of any attempt to understand this event.

I take it you did not vote Conservative.

Regarding democracy -- I found this piece to offer some good food for thought: http://tinyurl.com/3btyler

Of course Joe Clark would agree with it. He is one very angry man who has never gotten over the amalgamation.

I so agree. Andrew is rewarding nasty partisan behavior perpetrated by Liberals who could not cope with not being in power. The focus of the Parliamentary Committees has been absolutely outrageous, and no party comes out of this recent minority government looking good.

Muzzling MP's and preventing Parliament from seeing documents are incidents that are typically viewed through a partisan lense. Many feel that the Committee's demands for documents went well beyond what is normally requested or expected, and that this was due to obstructionist tactics on the part of Liberals (NDP/Bloc) The Committee system was hyjacked by the Opposition and ended up not investigating actual issues/concerns, but attempting to undermine the government. Why else do we investigate someone who did not even get any money. Why instead of looking at whether or not Karios desered to get funded did we focus narrowly on "who notted the not on an internal document" -- see: http://tinyurl.com/3btyler .
Income Trusts, etc. were political decisions that many supported -- Forier is a non-issue, non-story. It is all political haymaking and smears. The Liberals have contributed greatly to the disfuctionality of the recent Minority Parliaments. And this will be the behaviour that will be rewarded by Andrew and I presume yourself.

Here is the counter to Andrew's perspective: http://tinyurl.com/3btyler . Also very articulate, well reasoned and worth reading.

Nicely put, Andrew. However, I do not agree with your conclusions. I think the "democratic deficit" issue has been much overblown. Perhaps more importantly, my view of the reason for it has to do more with the Liberals being such poor representatives in opposition. Their entire agenda has been to smear Harper with anything they could thing of -- from investigating funding that never was given out (Jaffer) to the largely party-driven fiasco of the second prorogue (most of us understand that the first prorogue was highly unusual, but the second prorogue of three weeks would (and should) have been a non-issue as this type of thing is always done by governments. It was kept alive as a divisive issue by partisan politicking. The latest "contempt" charges is also partisan games playing. Anyone who understands the normal process for providing information to an opposition would realize that there Conservatives had met the normal standard of providing information. So much of the nastiness is directly result of the minority situation and not primarily a reflection of Conservative governance. The Liberals were deceptive and abusive in power -- and cynical, irresponsible and downright vicious in Opposition. I will not be voting for them. Unfortunately, rather than encouraging democracy -- your position will simply reinforce unscrupulous partisanship as a way to undermine whatever government is in power.