welcome back Olaf, it's good to see you!
Alternate voting is my preference: it's simple, easy to understand and implement, and is entirely consistent with the way we have traditionally run elections and parties (everyone still votes the same way, whether for their MP or their Party of choice, they just also get the option of indicating their second, third, etc. choices, if they have them -- don't forget that one always has the option of not indicating alternate choices).
Anyway going by the results above, AV would have produced a Parliament comprising a fairly accruate representation of the results of the election campaignn: the Conservatives winning a small increase in their mandate, while being held to account under the threat of the *possibility* of NDP-Liberal cooperation to either bring down or replace them if the CPC failed to maintain the confidence of the House (and/or failed lure two handfuls of Liberals to side with them, either by crossing the floor outright, or by supporting them in confidence votes as a rump "Blue Liberal Caucus" from the opposition benches, a plausible outcome, in such an alternate universe, I think ).
mercifully, no one cares what the Liberal Party thinks anymore.
yes, Harper's position was quite clear in 2003, my point was that "ever since that position became politically inconvenient" Harper refuses to discuss what his position was or is. I think that's cowardly. Ignatieff may have only changed his position once his former position became politically inconvenient, as you suggest* but to do so at the very least required acknowledging the existence of his previous statements. This isn't much on the scale of courage, but not much is still more than 0.
*or he might have changed his mind, I don't really care either way. Ignatieff's never been a "consistent" thinker, even from one paragraph to the next, and I don't worry much about his reasons for changing his mind.
can't decide whether this is classy or just kind of sad. I guess because it is both.
it's not about "doesn't publicize it," he "has never really reneged his position on the Iraq war" because he flat-out refuses to discuss what his position was, or what his position is now, ever since that position became politically inconvenient. We have no idea what his position is today on the Iraq War.
honest q: how is it better to have voted for a party led by a man who refuses to acknowledge his position on the Iraq war for political expediency? (assuming you voted CPC, which is suggested by your comments in this place)
I think you've misread. I think MP was saying that "the Left has a much nobler tradition" in foreign affairs than those policies/positions currently promoted by the NDP as the model of Left foreign policy in Canada. MP contrasts a time when Canadian socialists and social democrats joined in the Spanish Civil against the Fascists with the view that today's NDP would appease the contemporary equivalents of fascists in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. I find the latter point slightly caricatured, but yours is a far worse caricature.
at least on the matter of torture, from what I've read, everyone who would know (i.e. those with more knowledge of these things than can be gleaned from a couple of seasons of 24) is being pretty consistent that torture didn't catch bin Laden. I wish we could finally put this question to bed: torture is morally repugnant, dubiously effective, and strategically counterproductive in a counterinsurgency/hearts and minds fight.
not just current White House officials pushing back on those claims either, says here that even "Rumsfeld himself has denied that torture played any role in finding bin Laden: “It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”"
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/t...
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