Comments by "Darlene" (@darlene2709) on "CBC News"
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SENATE APPOINTMENTS: The Senate has been the source of Harper’s most damaging scandal, one that goes to the heart of his office. Unsuccessful in efforts to reform the upper chamber, Harper began to stack it with Tory loyalists. Several appointments now haunt him.
ELECTION SCANDALS: The Conservatives have found themselves at the centre of multiple investigations over their election activities. In the 2006 “in-and-out” scandal, the Conservative party pled guilty to exceeding national election advertising limits.
MAXIME BERNIER: The debonair Quebec MP showed up at Rideau Hall in 2007 to be sworn into cabinet with girlfriend Julie Couillard on his arm. But she had reported past ties to biker gangs. A year later, Bernier was forced to resign as foreign affairs minister after it was revealed that he had left classified NATO documents at Couillard’s home.
VETERANS AFFAIRS: For a government that boasts of its support of Canada’s military, looking after veterans should have been a no-brainer. Instead, the Tories have been in the crosshairs of veterans, upset that ill and injured soldiers have been short-changed and angry over the closing of regional veterans affairs offices. The Conservatives have repeatedly tinkered with programs, boosted funding and finally installed Erin O’Toole, himself a veteran, as minister in charge of the file, all in hopes of quelling the controversy.
AFGHAN DETAINEES: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin appeared before a parliamentary committee in 2009 and made a bombshell charge — that detainees taken captive by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and transferred to local authorities were almost certainly being tortured and abused.
SUPREME COURT TUSSLE: Harper’s frustration with the courts came to a head in 2014 when his appointment of Marc Nadon to the top bench was rejected because Nadon failed to meet eligibility requirements.
G8 FUNDING: In the lead up to the 2010 G8 meeting in Huntsville, senior cabinet minister Tony Clement personally directed a $50-million “legacy” fund, funneling millions in infrastructure to his Muskoka riding. Municipalities far from the actual summit site were given hundreds of thousands of dollars for sidewalk improvements, parks, and most infamously, a gazebo.
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@TheJusnic82 "The reason presidents can't keep their White House records dates back to Nixon. For the first two centuries of U.S. history, outgoing presidents simply took their documents with them when they left the White House. The materials were considered their personal property.
But for the past four decades, every presidential document — from notebook doodles to top-secret security plans — is supposed to go directly to the National Archives as the material is considered the property of the American people.
The rules changed for one reason: Watergate. When President Nixon resigned amid the 1974 scandal, he wanted to take his documents to his home in California — including his infamous tape recordings.
Congress realized it would not have access to that material, and they also feared it could be destroyed. So legislators passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which made all of Nixon's material public property.
However, that measure applied to Nixon only. In 1978, Congress passed the more sweeping Presidential Records Act that has been the standard ever since.
"Every president, when they leave office, those records that have been created by the president and his staff are presidential records that go to the National Archives," Baron said. "The owner is the American people."
This includes all presidential material, whether it's routine, unclassified notes or top-secret national security documents." NPR
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That was true when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in office. SENATE APPOINTMENTS: The Senate has been the source of Harper’s most damaging scandal, one that goes to the heart of his office. Unsuccessful in efforts to reform the upper chamber, Harper began to stack it with Tory loyalists. Several appointments now haunt him.
ELECTION SCANDALS: The Conservatives have found themselves at the centre of multiple investigations over their election activities. In the 2006 “in-and-out” scandal, the Conservative party pled guilty to exceeding national election advertising limits.
MAXIME BERNIER: The debonair Quebec MP showed up at Rideau Hall in 2007 to be sworn into cabinet with girlfriend Julie Couillard on his arm. But she had reported past ties to biker gangs. A year later, Bernier was forced to resign as foreign affairs minister after it was revealed that he had left classified NATO documents at Couillard’s home.
VETERANS AFFAIRS: For a government that boasts of its support of Canada’s military, looking after veterans should have been a no-brainer. Instead, the Tories have been in the crosshairs of veterans, upset that ill and injured soldiers have been short-changed and angry over the closing of regional veterans affairs offices. The Conservatives have repeatedly tinkered with programs, boosted funding and finally installed Erin O’Toole, himself a veteran, as minister in charge of the file, all in hopes of quelling the controversy.
AFGHAN DETAINEES: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin appeared before a parliamentary committee in 2009 and made a bombshell charge — that detainees taken captive by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and transferred to local authorities were almost certainly being tortured and abused.
SUPREME COURT TUSSLE: Harper’s frustration with the courts came to a head in 2014 when his appointment of Marc Nadon to the top bench was rejected because Nadon failed to meet eligibility requirements.
G8 FUNDING: In the lead up to the 2010 G8 meeting in Huntsville, senior cabinet minister Tony Clement personally directed a $50-million “legacy” fund, funneling millions in infrastructure to his Muskoka riding. Municipalities far from the actual summit site were given hundreds of thousands of dollars for sidewalk improvements, parks, and most infamously, a gazebo.
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@robdavidson2569 "Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws. Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway: All had a culture of gun ownership, and all tightened restrictions anyway. Their violence statistics now diverge sharply from those of the U.S. Only the United States, whose rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel outside of conflict zones, has so consistently refused to answer those events with tightened gun laws. The record is clear, confirmed by reams of studies that have analyzed the effects of policies like Britain’s and Australia’s: When countries tighten gun control laws, it leads to fewer guns in private citizens’ hands, which leads to less gun violence — and to fewer mass shootings." Newsweek
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Trudeau is prime minister because he was elected as such and he broke ethics rules not the law which the ethics commissioner determined any penalties that would be required.
Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister because Canadians (of all political stripes) are sophisticated enough to put this family holiday to Aga Khan’s island into perspective given, as the Dawson’s report notes, that there is no evidence Trudeau actually advanced the private interest of the Aga Khan or any institution he controls. On top of which the Aga Khan is hardly some shadowy Darth Vader character, but rather a community leader of some importance in the Islamic world.
As well the whole thing happened out in the open, and while it certainly demonstrates poor political judgment, this is no backroom deal level corruption, by any means.
Trudeau, has, and will continue to suffer from this scandal for awhile, as so he should, but calls to remove him from office are premature at best.
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"Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad! The predominantly ludicrous lawmaker from Georgia did Biden an unexpected – and surely unplanned – solid this weekend in a speech at the conservative Turning Point Action conference in Florida, telling Republicans the Democratic president is fiendishly attempting to make people’s lives better.
She compared Biden’s "Build Back Better" plan to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s "Great Society," an array of programs from the mid-1960s aimed at combating poverty in America. Those programs included Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As Greene talked about President Johnson, she said, dismissively: “His BIG socialist programs were the Great Society ... big government programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare.”
Greene continued making the case for Biden’s reelection: “Now LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better, and he still is working on it, the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”
As if connecting Biden to popular social programs wasn’t enough, Greene took the high praise a step further by looping in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the most popular presidents in American history.
Greene’s attempt to raise Biden’s profile to that of FDR and the president who launched a war on poverty and created Medicare was clearly appreciated. On Monday morning, the official White House Twitter account retweeted the video of Greene's speech, adding: "Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families." USA Today
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@bigtinnitus6409 "Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws. Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway: All had a culture of gun ownership, and all tightened restrictions anyway. Their violence statistics now diverge sharply from those of the U.S. Only the United States, whose rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel outside of conflict zones, has so consistently refused to answer those events with tightened gun laws. The record is clear, confirmed by reams of studies that have analyzed the effects of policies like Britain’s and Australia’s: When countries tighten gun control laws, it leads to fewer guns in private citizens’ hands, which leads to less gun violence — and to fewer mass shootings." Newsweek
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In October 2017, a gunman shot and killed nearly 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas. While not an exhaustive list of every mass shooting that took place during the Trump administration, here are some of the deadliest incidents while Trump was in office:
In November 2017, 26 people were killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
In February 2018, 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
In May 2018, 10 people were killed at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas.
In October 2018, 11 people were killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In November 2018, 12 people were killed at a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, California.
In May 2019, 12 people were shot and killed at an office building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In August 2019, 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
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@j.barren3738 "Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.
Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was interviewed by Sverige Radio, and admitted there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done.”
Yet in a separate interview with the Dagens Nyheter, he said he still believed the basic strategy had “worked well.” “I do not see what we would have done completely differently,” he said, “Based on the knowledge we had then, we feel we made the appropriate decisions.”
“Other countries started with a lot of measures all at once,” he told Sverige Radio, “The problem with that is that you don’t really know which of the measures you have taken is most effective.”
“If we were to encounter the same disease again, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would settle on doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done.” BMJ
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"Germ theory denialism is alive and well – and taking the nuance out of scientific debate. Back in February 2019, when the pandemic was still far from most people thoughts, the Fox News programme Fox & Friends aired a segment in which contributor Pete Hegseth revealed he had not washed his hands in ten years. Far from being appalled, the show’s hosts burst out laughing.
As it turns out, Hegseth’s poor hand hygiene was not so novel. According to the World Health Organization, only 19% of the pre-COVID world washed their hands after using the toilet. The reasons for this ranged widely, from a basic lack of clean water to forces like peer pressure or overinflated optimism about one’s health. But that wasn’t Hegseth’s reason. He said his decade of hand-washing abstinence was based on his belief that germs did not exist. If he could not see them, he explained, they were not real.
Even pre-pandemic, a pronouncement like this sounded alarm bells. Whether Hegseth realised it or not, and whether he was serious or not, he was reciting the creed of germ theory deniers, a mixed group whose beliefs range from hardline renunciation of germ theory – in which the very notion that germs exist is denied – and the softer disavowal of the significance of germs to explain disease.
What is perhaps most troubling about germ theory denialism is not really the strength of its claims but the tenor of the debate that it inspires. For though deniers’ claims about germ theory are misleading and not well substantiated, the bright line between germ theory deniers and defenders they create sets up a rhetorical opposition that forces upon germ theory – and science more generally – a rigidity and fixity that it does not have." The Conversation
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"Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad! The predominantly ludicrous lawmaker from Georgia did Biden an unexpected – and surely unplanned – solid this weekend in a speech at the conservative Turning Point Action conference in Florida, telling Republicans the Democratic president is fiendishly attempting to make people’s lives better.
She compared Biden’s "Build Back Better" plan to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s "Great Society," an array of programs from the mid-1960s aimed at combating poverty in America. Those programs included Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As Greene talked about President Johnson, she said, dismissively: “His BIG socialist programs were the Great Society ... big government programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare.”
Greene continued making the case for Biden’s reelection: “Now LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better, and he still is working on it, the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”
As if connecting Biden to popular social programs wasn’t enough, Greene took the high praise a step further by looping in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the most popular presidents in American history.
Greene’s attempt to raise Biden’s profile to that of FDR and the president who launched a war on poverty and created Medicare was clearly appreciated. On Monday morning, the official White House Twitter account retweeted the video of Greene's speech, adding: "Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families." USA Today
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It's not actually a law. "As evidence mounts that the omicron variant is less deadly than prior COVID-19 strains, one oft-cited explanation is that viruses always evolve to become less virulent over time.
The problem, experts say, is that this theory has been soundly debunked. The idea that infections tend to become less lethal over time was first proposed by notable bacteriologist Dr. Theobald Smith in the late 1800s. His theory about pathogen evolution was later dubbed the "law of declining virulence."
But over the past 100 years, virologists have learned that virus evolution is more chaotic. Virus evolution is a game of chance, and less about grand design. In some cases, viruses evolve to become more virulent.
Continued virus survival, spread and virulence are all about the evolutionary pressures of multiple factors, including the number of people available to infect, how long humans live after infection, the immune system response and time between infection and symptom onset.
Unfortunately, that means it's nearly impossible to predict the future of the pandemic, because viruses don't always evolve in a predictable pattern." Reuters
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Fox News told its gullible audience one thing publicly while privately knowing that the opposite was true. “He’s acting like an insane person,” Hannity allegedly wrote of Trump in the weeks following the election as the host continued to push the so-called “big lie” during his top-rated prime time show, aided by a succession of election deniers he had on as guests.
Even billionaire Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was dismissive of the former president’s false allegations, the filing alleges, calling them “really crazy stuff” in one memo to a Fox News executive, and criticizing Trump’s scattergun approach of pursuing lawsuits in numerous states to try to overturn his defeat.
It was “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere”, Murdoch wrote, adding in another note that Trump’s obsession with trying to prove fraud was “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.
Meanwhile, Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent and controversial stars, was disdainful of Sidney Powell, a senior Trump attorney who repeatedly claimed Dominion’s machines flipped votes cast for Trump to Joe Biden.
“Sidney Powell is lying,” he wrote to a producer, the Dominion lawsuit alleges. He referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”.
Fellow host Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani. Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second."
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"Trudeau broke ethics rules not the law for which the ethics commissioner determined any penalties that would be required.
Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister because Canadians (of all political stripes) are sophisticated enough to put this family holiday to Aga Khan’s island into perspective given, as the Dawson’s report notes, that there is no evidence Trudeau actually advanced the private interest of the Aga Khan or any institution he controls. On top of which the Aga Khan is hardly some shadowy Darth Vader character, but rather a community leader of some importance in the Islamic world.
As well the whole thing happened out in the open, and while it certainly demonstrates poor political judgment, this is no backroom deal level corruption, by any means. Trudeau, has, and will continue to suffer from this scandal for awhile, as so he should, but calls to remove him from office are premature at best." Reuters
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@casual-og Who told you that? "In the waning days of the campaign, President Donald Trump complained repeatedly about how the United States tracks the number of people who have died from COVID-19, claiming, “This country and its reporting systems are just not doing it right.”
He went on to blame those reporting systems for inflating the number of deaths, pointing a finger at medical professionals, who he said benefit financially. All that feeds into the swirling political doubts that surround the pandemic, and raises questions about how deaths are reported and tallied. We asked experts to explain how it’s done and to discuss whether the current figure — an estimated 231,000 deaths since the pandemic began — is in the ballpark.
Trump’s recent assertions have fueled conspiracy theories on Facebook and elsewhere that doctors and hospitals are fudging numbers to get paid more. They’ve also triggered anger from the medical community. “The suggestion that doctors — in the midst of a public health crisis — are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” Dr. Susan R. Bailey, American Medical Association president, said in a press release.
Hospitals are paid for COVID treatment the same as for any other care, though generally, the more serious the problem, the more hospitals are paid. So, treating a ventilator patient — with COVID-19 or any other illness — would mean higher payment to a hospital than treating one who didn’t require a ventilator, reflecting the extra cost.
Experts say there is simply no evidence that physicians or hospitals are labeling patients as having COVID-19 simply to collect that additional payment. Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, wrote an opinion piece in September addressing what he called the “myths” surrounding the add-on payments. While many hospitals are struggling financially, he wrote, they are not inflating the number of cases — and there are serious disincentives to do so. “The COVID-19 code for Medicare claims is reserved for confirmed cases,” he wrote, and using it inappropriately can result in criminal penalties or a hospital being kicked out of the Medicare program.
Public health officials and others also pushed back. Said Jeff Engel, senior adviser for COVID-19 at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists: “Public health is charged with the duty to collect accurate, timely and complete data. We’re not incentivized to overcount or undercount for any political or funding reason.” And what about medical examiners? Are they part of a concerted effort to overcount deaths to reap financial rewards?
“Medical examiners and coroners in the U.S. are not organized enough to have a conspiracy. There are 2,300 jurisdictions,” said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “That’s not happening." The Conversation
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@ommk9650 No argument there. However, it's important to understand exactly why that was the case. "Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.
Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was interviewed by Sverige Radio, and admitted there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done.”
Yet in a separate interview with the Dagens Nyheter, he said he still believed the basic strategy had “worked well.” “I do not see what we would have done completely differently,” he said, “Based on the knowledge we had then, we feel we made the appropriate decisions.”
“Other countries started with a lot of measures all at once,” he told Sverige Radio, “The problem with that is that you don’t really know which of the measures you have taken is most effective.”
“If we were to encounter the same disease again, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would settle on doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done.” BMJ
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"In November 2021, a rumor started circulating on social media that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was attempting to “hide” data related to the COVID-19 vaccine and that they had requested to delay the release of pertinent information until 2076.
The FDA did not request a delay in the release of its COVID-19 data until 2076. The FDA responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more than 300,000 pages of data related to the licensure of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine by proposing a processing schedule that would see the release of 500 pages every month. While the FDA argues that this is a rather standard processing schedule, if adhered to it would take the FDA more than 50 years, or until 2076, to completely fulfill.
Although Plaintiff takes issue with the amount of time it will take to process 329,000 pages at a rate of 500 pages per month, such a result is due to its own broad FOIA request. Courts do not waiver from the standard 500 page per month processing rate even when a FOIA request would take years to process … FDA has invited Plaintiff to narrow its request by specifying records it no longer wants FDA to process and release, and Plaintiff has declined to do so. If Plaintiff decides to request fewer records, then FDA will be able to complete its processing at an earlier date.
According to Reuters, this scheduling dispute will likely be settled next month: “U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman “has set a scheduling conference for December 14 in Fort Worth to consider the timeline for processing the documents.”
A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the FDA must by the end of this month make public 12,000 pages of the data it used to make decisions about approvals for Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine — and then release 55,000 pages every 30 days after that until all 450,000 requested pages are public." Reuters
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In October 2017, a gunman shot and killed nearly 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas. While not an exhaustive list of every mass shooting that took place during the Trump administration, here are some of the deadliest incidents while Trump was in office:
In November 2017, 26 people were killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
In February 2018, 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
In May 2018, 10 people were killed at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas.
In October 2018, 11 people were killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In November 2018, 12 people were killed at a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, California.
In May 2019, 12 people were shot and killed at an office building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In August 2019, 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
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That's not true. That is a causal fallacy. Media attention is not the cause of mass shootings. "America’s first modern mass shooting never really ended. The 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting remains clouded by myths, including the myth of the “good guy with a gun.” It left too many Americans with only evil to blame — and not our leaders, our policies and ourselves." Texas Tribune
But of all the myths and tropes that were born of fire that first day of August 1966, none has been more durable, or more deadly, than this: the notion that we can counter this unfathomable horror with heavily armed heroes who will rise spontaneously from our midst to save us.
It’s the “good guy with a gun” myth. It was not fashioned out of whole cloth. Built upon our long and dark obsession with firearms, an indispensable part of the myth of Texas and, by extension, the myth of America, it was finally turned into a catchphrase by the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre and marketed ruthlessly in the aftermath of the slaughter at Sandy Hook. And it had its first test at the University of Texas. The results were, to put it bluntly, inconclusive.
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"Trump said more Covid-19 testing ‘creates more cases.’ We did the math. In a June 15 tweet, President Trump said testing “makes us look bad.” At his campaign rally in Tulsa five days later, he said he had asked his “people” to “slow the testing down, please.” At a White House press conference last week, he told reporters, “When you test, you create cases.”
And in an interview with Fox News that aired Sunday, Trump could not have been clearer: “Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.” Basically, the president was arguing that the U.S. had just as many new cases in June and July as it did in May but, with fewer tests being done in May, they weren’t being detected; with more testing now, they are.
A new STAT analysis of testing data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, however, shows with simple-to-understand numbers why Trump’s claim is wrong. In only seven states was the rise in reported cases from mid-May to mid-July driven primarily by increased testing. In the other 26 states — among the 33 that saw cases increase during that period — the case count rose because there was actually more disease.
Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts have disputed the White House claims for weeks, citing rising hospitalization numbers and deaths. It’s hard to argue that extremely sick people, let alone dead people, had been obscured by low levels of testing but suddenly revealed by higher levels." StatNews
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Grow up. If mail in ballots were not allowed, how would Americans who live overseas (soldiers and diplomats) be able to vote? "All states allow voters who have an eligible excuse for not being able to vote on Election Day to request a ballot in advance, and many states allow all voters to request a ballot in advance without requiring a reason. States vary on what extent they offer these options, including some states that deliver ballots to all voters (while maintaining some in-person voting locations for those who prefer to vote in person or may need assistance).
The concept of voting “absentee” first came about during the Civil War as a way for soldiers to cast ballots back in their home states. The idea of allowing military voters to cast a ballot “in absentia” is still one of the driving factors for states allowing absentee ballots. All states, by federal law, are required to send absentee/mail ballots to military and overseas voters for federal elections.
All states permit voters who will be away from their home county to vote by absentee/mail ballot, as well as voters with an illness or disability who know ahead of time that they won’t be able to make it to the polls. It is also common to provide this option for older voters.
Many states also permit voters to request an absentee/mail ballot in case of an emergency, such as an unforeseen illness, confinement to a medical facility or an accident resulting in injury.
Beyond that, there are a variety of acceptable excuses in states, such as working during poll hours, serving as a poll worker or on a jury.
Absentee/mail ballot applications require voters to provide identifying information—name, address, date of birth and often a signature, driver’s license number or the final four digits of the voter’s social security number.
When election officials receive an application from a voter, they use that information to verify the voter’s identity and eligibility before sending out the ballot. This is done in a variety of ways, but most commonly by verifying the applicant’s information in the statewide voter registration database. States may also conduct signature verification at this stage to compare the voter’s signature on the application with the voter registration signature." National Conference of State Legislatures
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In October 2017, a gunman shot and killed nearly 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas. While not an exhaustive list of every mass shooting that took place during the Trump administration, here are some of the deadliest incidents while Trump was in office:
In November 2017, 26 people were killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
In February 2018, 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
In May 2018, 10 people were killed at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas.
In October 2018, 11 people were killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In November 2018, 12 people were killed at a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, California.
In May 2019, 12 people were shot and killed at an office building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In August 2019, 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
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"Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws. Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway: All had a culture of gun ownership, and all tightened restrictions anyway. Their violence statistics now diverge sharply from those of the U.S. Only the United States, whose rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel outside of conflict zones, has so consistently refused to answer those events with tightened gun laws. The record is clear, confirmed by reams of studies that have analyzed the effects of policies like Britain’s and Australia’s: When countries tighten gun control laws, it leads to fewer guns in private citizens’ hands, which leads to less gun violence — and to fewer mass shootings." Newsweek
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"Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws. Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway: All had a culture of gun ownership, and all tightened restrictions anyway. Their violence statistics now diverge sharply from those of the U.S. Only the United States, whose rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel outside of conflict zones, has so consistently refused to answer those events with tightened gun laws. The record is clear, confirmed by reams of studies that have analyzed the effects of policies like Britain’s and Australia’s: When countries tighten gun control laws, it leads to fewer guns in private citizens’ hands, which leads to less gun violence — and to fewer mass shootings." New York Times
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"The majority of social media posts surrounding the topic claim that COVID-19 vaccines violate the code because they are “experimental,” alleging that because the public is not being made aware of this, they are unable to give their informed consent to be a part of a medical experiment.
While the Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted as law by any country, it’s had a massive influence on the development of medical ethics regulations globally, including Canadian ethics guidelines laid out by the Medical Research Council (MRC), now replaced by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Any claims that the COVID-19 vaccines violate the Nuremberg Code are false.
“To take those principles and to apply them to a context where a developing but known scientific procedure was used to develop a vaccine that went through all of the required testing procedures and phases for approval by drug administrations globally, that has been tested on and used on millions of people, in my view, is irresponsible,” said Eliadis.
Paton agreed, noting, “I think it's natural that people are pushing back on some of the things they don't understand or that they are worried about. But if their concern is that there's some sort of mass global forced experimentation on people that is violating the codes of conduct that we have, then they are simply factually wrong.”
The Nuremberg Code is specifically about experimentation, which means its principles are no longer relevant once a vaccine has been through a clinical trial and approved for use.
“It's been very interesting to see people bringing up the Nuremberg trials when, in fact, that time is long gone. These are approved medications that are outside the auspices of the Nuremberg Code,” Dr. Alexis Paton, chair of ethics for the U.K. Royal College of Physicians and trustee of the U.K.-based Institute of Medical Ethics, told CTVNews.ca by phone Tuesday.
“As we've been developing these vaccines, as we've been doing trials, all of that has been in line with the Nuremberg Code. These are not people who were forced to take part in any kind of trial – it is an opt-out situation, there's consent.”
Pearl Eliadis, a Montreal-based human rights lawyer and adjunct professor at McGill University, notes that the code is not a formal international treaty, but rather important guidance for medical ethics." McGill University
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@johnpilon You should be asking a different question. "The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, created to put royalty revenues away for the future, has been so neglected that it is worth less today, at $20-billion, than it was when it launched in 1976-77, after population growth and inflation are accounted for.
The province’s deliberate fiscal choice has instead been to rely on oil and gas royalties in order to have the lowest income and corporate taxes in Canada, and to eschew a provincial sales tax – while also being one of the highest spending provinces on a per-capita basis.
This policy has left the province in dire straits when the price of oil has crashed, as it did in the 1980s, in the late 1990s, in 2001, in 2008, in 2015 and again in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck."
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You need a civics lesson. If mail in ballots were not allowed, how would Americans who live overseas (soldiers and diplomats) be able to vote? "All states allow voters who have an eligible excuse for not being able to vote on Election Day to request a ballot in advance, and many states allow all voters to request a ballot in advance without requiring a reason. States vary on what extent they offer these options, including some states that deliver ballots to all voters (while maintaining some in-person voting locations for those who prefer to vote in person or may need assistance).
The concept of voting “absentee” first came about during the Civil War as a way for soldiers to cast ballots back in their home states. The idea of allowing military voters to cast a ballot “in absentia” is still one of the driving factors for states allowing absentee ballots. All states, by federal law, are required to send absentee/mail ballots to military and overseas voters for federal elections.
All states permit voters who will be away from their home county to vote by absentee/mail ballot, as well as voters with an illness or disability who know ahead of time that they won’t be able to make it to the polls. It is also common to provide this option for older voters.
Many states also permit voters to request an absentee/mail ballot in case of an emergency, such as an unforeseen illness, confinement to a medical facility or an accident resulting in injury.
Beyond that, there are a variety of acceptable excuses in states, such as working during poll hours, serving as a poll worker or on a jury.
Absentee/mail ballot applications require voters to provide identifying information—name, address, date of birth and often a signature, driver’s license number or the final four digits of the voter’s social security number.
When election officials receive an application from a voter, they use that information to verify the voter’s identity and eligibility before sending out the ballot. This is done in a variety of ways, but most commonly by verifying the applicant’s information in the statewide voter registration database. States may also conduct signature verification at this stage to compare the voter’s signature on the application with the voter registration signature." National Conference of State Legislatures
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That is a causal fallacy. Media attention is not the cause of mass shootings. "America’s first modern mass shooting never really ended. The 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting remains clouded by myths, including the myth of the “good guy with a gun.” It left too many Americans with only evil to blame — and not our leaders, our policies and ourselves." Texas Tribune
But of all the myths and tropes that were born of fire that first day of August 1966, none has been more durable, or more deadly, than this: the notion that we can counter this unfathomable horror with heavily armed heroes who will rise spontaneously from our midst to save us.
It’s the “good guy with a gun” myth. It was not fashioned out of whole cloth. Built upon our long and dark obsession with firearms, an indispensable part of the myth of Texas and, by extension, the myth of America, it was finally turned into a catchphrase by the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre and marketed ruthlessly in the aftermath of the slaughter at Sandy Hook. And it had its first test at the University of Texas. The results were, to put it bluntly, inconclusive.
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"The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020.
Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined.
Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
Between 2010 and 2020, even after removing New Orleans and Jackson, Louisiana and Mississippi continued to hold the number one and two spots for highest murder rates. Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Tennessee were still consistently in the top 10 after removing their largest city." Third Way
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How the Cochrane Review went wrong. Report questioning COVID masks blows up, prompts apology. The Cochrane Review has apologized for an evidence review that led many to conclude, inaccurately, that masks don’t work.
The idea that masks don’t help slow COVID is an “inaccurate and misleading interpretation” of the report they published in January, Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library, wrote in an update posted to the their website on Friday. The international organization publishes summaries of evidence on various health topics, and are now blaming a poorly-worded summary of one report for the fact that many people came away with the idea that the face coverings don’t help.
Their analysis was based on a dozen studies that compared people wearing medical masks to their barefaced counterparts, couched inside a broader look at physical pandemic measures. Despite a line cautioning that the shakiness of the data “hampers drawing firm conclusions,” the authors concluded that masking in the community made “little to no difference.”
It was that second part that spread like wildfire, heralded in some circles as a major advance in the increasingly politicized fight over wearing masks. That particular quote — “little to no difference” — was picked up by some news outlets around the world.
Online, some people already aggrieved by pandemic restrictions took it one step further, arguing that it was just further proof that the pandemic response had been based on shaky science.
Scientists and those who write about them need to keep in mind that the communication landscape is hugely different than it used to be, she said. The scientist of the 21st century needs to realize that even academic publications, which used to be for scientists only, are increasingly being blasted out on Twitter and discussed by people.
The Cochrane Review itself seems to be acknowledging that their summary of the review has gotten skewed: “While scientific evidence is never immune to misinterpretation, we take responsibility for not making the wording clearer from the outset.”
The spread of an incorrect idea like masks not working can tip into misinformation, in that it can start to erode faith in public health measures more broadly, Dr. Dalia Hasan, a Ontario-based doctor and founder of COVID Test Finders, wrote in a message to the Star.
“A vicious cycle is then created wherein misinformation creates distrust, which helps misinformation thrive and ultimately sows more distrust.” Toronto Star
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"The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020.
Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined.
Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
Between 2010 and 2020, even after removing New Orleans and Jackson, Louisiana and Mississippi continued to hold the number one and two spots for highest murder rates. Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Tennessee were still consistently in the top 10 after removing their largest city." Third Way
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Conservate scandals include the following. SENATE APPOINTMENTS: The Senate has been the source of Harper’s most damaging scandal, one that goes to the heart of his office. Unsuccessful in efforts to reform the upper chamber, Harper began to stack it with Tory loyalists. Several appointments now haunt him.
ELECTION SCANDALS: The Conservatives have found themselves at the centre of multiple investigations over their election activities. In the 2006 “in-and-out” scandal, the Conservative party pled guilty to exceeding national election advertising limits.
MAXIME BERNIER: The debonair Quebec MP showed up at Rideau Hall in 2007 to be sworn into cabinet with girlfriend Julie Couillard on his arm. But she had reported past ties to biker gangs. A year later, Bernier was forced to resign as foreign affairs minister after it was revealed that he had left classified NATO documents at Couillard’s home.
VETERANS AFFAIRS: For a government that boasts of its support of Canada’s military, looking after veterans should have been a no-brainer. Instead, the Tories have been in the crosshairs of veterans, upset that ill and injured soldiers have been short-changed and angry over the closing of regional veterans affairs offices. The Conservatives have repeatedly tinkered with programs, boosted funding and finally installed Erin O’Toole, himself a veteran, as minister in charge of the file, all in hopes of quelling the controversy.
AFGHAN DETAINEES: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin appeared before a parliamentary committee in 2009 and made a bombshell charge — that detainees taken captive by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and transferred to local authorities were almost certainly being tortured and abused.
SUPREME COURT TUSSLE: Harper’s frustration with the courts came to a head in 2014 when his appointment of Marc Nadon to the top bench was rejected because Nadon failed to meet eligibility requirements.
G8 FUNDING: In the lead up to the 2010 G8 meeting in Huntsville, senior cabinet minister Tony Clement personally directed a $50-million “legacy” fund, funneling millions in infrastructure to his Muskoka riding. Municipalities far from the actual summit site were given hundreds of thousands of dollars for sidewalk improvements, parks, and most infamously, a gazebo.
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Notable Stephen Harper scandals include: SENATE APPOINTMENTS: The Senate has been the source of Harper’s most damaging scandal, one that goes to the heart of his office. Unsuccessful in efforts to reform the upper chamber, Harper began to stack it with Tory loyalists. Several appointments now haunt him.
ELECTION SCANDALS: The Conservatives have found themselves at the centre of multiple investigations over their election activities. In the 2006 “in-and-out” scandal, the Conservative party pled guilty to exceeding national election advertising limits.
MAXIME BERNIER: The debonair Quebec MP showed up at Rideau Hall in 2007 to be sworn into cabinet with girlfriend Julie Couillard on his arm. But she had reported past ties to biker gangs. A year later, Bernier was forced to resign as foreign affairs minister after it was revealed that he had left classified NATO documents at Couillard’s home.
VETERANS AFFAIRS: For a government that boasts of its support of Canada’s military, looking after veterans should have been a no-brainer. Instead, the Tories have been in the crosshairs of veterans, upset that ill and injured soldiers have been short-changed and angry over the closing of regional veterans affairs offices. The Conservatives have repeatedly tinkered with programs, boosted funding and finally installed Erin O’Toole, himself a veteran, as minister in charge of the file, all in hopes of quelling the controversy.
AFGHAN DETAINEES: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin appeared before a parliamentary committee in 2009 and made a bombshell charge — that detainees taken captive by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and transferred to local authorities were almost certainly being tortured and abused.
SUPREME COURT TUSSLE: Harper’s frustration with the courts came to a head in 2014 when his appointment of Marc Nadon to the top bench was rejected because Nadon failed to meet eligibility requirements.
G8 FUNDING: In the lead up to the 2010 G8 meeting in Huntsville, senior cabinet minister Tony Clement personally directed a $50-million “legacy” fund, funneling millions in infrastructure to his Muskoka riding. Municipalities far from the actual summit site were given hundreds of thousands of dollars for sidewalk improvements, parks, and most infamously, a gazebo.
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In October 2017, a gunman shot and killed nearly 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas. While not an exhaustive list of every mass shooting that took place during the Trump administration, here are some of the deadliest incidents while Trump was in office:
In November 2017, 26 people were killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
In February 2018, 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
In May 2018, 10 people were killed at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas.
In October 2018, 11 people were killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In November 2018, 12 people were killed at a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, California.
In May 2019, 12 people were shot and killed at an office building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In August 2019, 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
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Fox News told its gullible audience one thing publicly while privately knowing that the opposite was true. “He’s acting like an insane person,” Hannity allegedly wrote of Trump in the weeks following the election as the host continued to push the so-called “big lie” during his top-rated prime time show, aided by a succession of election deniers he had on as guests.
Even billionaire Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was dismissive of the former president’s false allegations, the filing alleges, calling them “really crazy stuff” in one memo to a Fox News executive, and criticizing Trump’s scattergun approach of pursuing lawsuits in numerous states to try to overturn his defeat.
It was “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere”, Murdoch wrote, adding in another note that Trump’s obsession with trying to prove fraud was “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.
Meanwhile, Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent and controversial stars, was disdainful of Sidney Powell, a senior Trump attorney who repeatedly claimed Dominion’s machines flipped votes cast for Trump to Joe Biden.
“Sidney Powell is lying,” he wrote to a producer, the Dominion lawsuit alleges. He referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”.
Fellow host Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani. Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second."
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"In the waning days of the campaign, President Donald Trump complained repeatedly about how the United States tracks the number of people who have died from COVID-19, claiming, “This country and its reporting systems are just not doing it right.”
He went on to blame those reporting systems for inflating the number of deaths, pointing a finger at medical professionals, who he said benefit financially. All that feeds into the swirling political doubts that surround the pandemic, and raises questions about how deaths are reported and tallied. We asked experts to explain how it’s done and to discuss whether the current figure — an estimated 231,000 deaths since the pandemic began — is in the ballpark.
Trump’s recent assertions have fueled conspiracy theories on Facebook and elsewhere that doctors and hospitals are fudging numbers to get paid more. They’ve also triggered anger from the medical community. “The suggestion that doctors — in the midst of a public health crisis — are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” Dr. Susan R. Bailey, American Medical Association president, said in a press release.
Hospitals are paid for COVID treatment the same as for any other care, though generally, the more serious the problem, the more hospitals are paid. So, treating a ventilator patient — with COVID-19 or any other illness — would mean higher payment to a hospital than treating one who didn’t require a ventilator, reflecting the extra cost.
Experts say there is simply no evidence that physicians or hospitals are labeling patients as having COVID-19 simply to collect that additional payment. Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, wrote an opinion piece in September addressing what he called the “myths” surrounding the add-on payments. While many hospitals are struggling financially, he wrote, they are not inflating the number of cases — and there are serious disincentives to do so. “The COVID-19 code for Medicare claims is reserved for confirmed cases,” he wrote, and using it inappropriately can result in criminal penalties or a hospital being kicked out of the Medicare program.
Public health officials and others also pushed back. Said Jeff Engel, senior adviser for COVID-19 at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists: “Public health is charged with the duty to collect accurate, timely and complete data. We’re not incentivized to overcount or undercount for any political or funding reason.” And what about medical examiners? Are they part of a concerted effort to overcount deaths to reap financial rewards?
“Medical examiners and coroners in the U.S. are not organized enough to have a conspiracy. There are 2,300 jurisdictions,” said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “That’s not happening." The Conversation
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@Barry_dingle69 "Doctor debunks claims that wearing a face mask is more harmful than COVID-19. In response to these claims, Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a family physician and medical researcher in Toronto, described them as “nothing short of frightening.”
Despite public health officials around the world urging individuals to wear face masks to prevent further spread of COVID-19, there have been several claims posted on social media and printed on posters that suggest wearing a face mask is more dangerous to the wearer’s health than contracting the virus. But a Canadian doctor says those claims are easily debunked.
Gorfinkel stressed that wearing a face mask is safe for the vast majority of individuals and should be done to curb the spread of COVID-19. “The data is very, very clear that for countries that have adapted this practice [of wearing face masks] and the people have got into it, they don’t just see lower numbers of diseases, they see fewer hospitalizations, and far less mortality,” she told CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Because there is no risk of decreased oxygen levels and increased inhalation of carbon dioxide or toxins, mask-wearers’ immune systems will not “shut down” as a result." Reuters
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"Canada's federal vote-by-mail system includes several security features. Election Canada uses paper ballots, which are counted by hand and, if required, re-examined and audited. Each returned ballot is kept sealed until mandatory checks are completed.
Enabling electors to vote by mail
The vote-by-mail process has several integrity features.
Electors must apply to vote by mail with proof of identity and address.
Elections Canada reviews the application and checks the ID. If we approve the application, we mail the elector a special ballot voting kit, which includes:
a special ballot
a plain inner envelope
an outer envelope to return the marked ballot
On the outer envelope, the elector signs a declaration saying that they are a qualified elector, have not yet voted, and will not try to vote again during the election. They mail the package back to Elections Canada.
When Elections Canada receives the package, we check that the unique identifier on the outer envelope corresponds to the approved application. We then check that:
the elector's name and electoral district code on the outer envelope match those on the application form;
the elector has signed the declaration on the outer envelope; and
the elector has returned only one ballot.
We update our records to show that this elector's ballot was returned.
To keep the secrecy of the vote, we remove the inner envelope containing the ballot from the outer envelope. By separating the envelopes, it is impossible to associate an elector's identity with their vote.
To make sure electors vote only once, we use various controls. Once we have approved an elector's application to vote by mail, we mark the voters list to show that the elector has already asked for a ballot so they will not be able to vote in another way, for example, at advance polls or on election day."
The Canada Elections Act states when each type of ballot can start to be counted. Local special ballots, including mail-in ballots, can only be counted after polls close. Some checks can be completed as the ballot envelopes are received, but others require information from polls on election night or the day after. While returning officers were able to conduct these checks on election night in previous elections, the volume of local electors who will be casting special ballots, including mail-in ballots, during the election will make it impossible to complete these checks on election night." Elections Canada
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