You promise a tax freeze for a year,

What will be cut that we hold dear?

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Burning books is a fad of bigots everywhere,

If the media ignored it, would anybody care?

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Some think the Toronto Star is liberal. It is not. The Toronto Star is elitist and its founder, poor old Joe Atkinson, is spinning in his grave. In coming out of the closet to support toll roads, the Toronto Star proved itself narrow in scope, elitist by nature and self-serving by design. The Toronto Star wants what is best for the Toronto Star.
To stretch the imagination, the editorial writers at the Star say that we are currently using the public highways around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for free. They choose to ignore that we paid to build those highways ten times over with our gasoline taxes, that we could maintain them much better if the engineers just had better access to the pool of money created by our gasoline taxes and we could build more subways and bus lanes if our gasoline taxes were used for that purpose.
The need is not for toll roads as such. What we do need is commercial-only roads. These routes would be used to move trucks, vans and specialized equipment to where they are needed. We need to deliver the goods and services that keep our cities moving, fed, clothed and entertained. It would save us millions of dollars every day in the cost of getting goods and services to where they are needed. The Toronto Star might even find these commercial–only routes useful to deliver a more up-to-date newspaper in a more timely fashion.
Once we have optimized routes for our commercial needs, we can turn our attention to moving people. We know that the private automobile is hugely inefficient as a mover of people to their place of employment. We also know the mothers’ van is hugely inefficient to ferry children to music lessons, doctors’ appointments and hockey games. As much as we know this, we are hardly about to resolve the issue by making personal automobile ownership and use prohibitively expensive so that only the rich can afford to use them.
Who will benefit from these toll roads the Toronto Star proposes? The Star writers see them as a a disincentive to highway driving and a revenue producer for the province. Obviously these writers know nothing about Highway 407—the highway former Premier Mike Harris sold. Highway 407 works for its investors and for people in a hurry. It does nothing for anyone else.
The Highway 407 solution does not work for everybody. It does not connect well with trains or subways. It does not go downtown. It was originally designed as the Toronto bypass and fails in that as the GTA has overgrown it. It is just another road across the top of Toronto. It acts as a barrier to the city, not an access. If it was used as part of the grid, it would offer better solutions. As it stands, it is as elitist as a gated community.
The Toronto Star thinks that Metrolinx, the regional transportation authority should come up with some answers. They will not. Metrolinx is a transportation group trying to link our disparate transportation needs throughout the GTA. They do not even understand the problem.

Neither does the Toronto Star.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Mr. Harper offers the politics of hate and fear,

His getting a majority is what we already fear.

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Fed docs won’t fund trials of the Zamboni MS claim,

But why cannot they do more if a cure is their aim.

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Canada’s long gun registry now hangs by a thread,

NDPs getting in on the kill is Jack Layton’s dread.

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Harper’s F-35 deal is becoming clear,

The deal is to cause the Liberals fear.

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It is getting ridiculous. It has been suggested that we be more proactive about this matter. It is like using hot compresses to draw a boil. There is a definite similarity to that analogy. We really need to let the bad out. The foolishness with Ma Bell has festered long enough.

In blog entry number 67 of July 31, the situation was described in detail. We had been seduced by Ma Bell again. We went back to Bell Canada for telephone, Internet and television services. That was a gutsy move and we knew better but we wanted to believe. We had demanded a written quote, which we got, but Ma Bell does not believe in keeping any kind of promise. The system does not allow it. And you, you fool, even while she is abusing you, you make excuses for her.

Bell executives must live in a very strange world. They have been dumping employees for a long time. Today, the company has many thousands of retirees yet seems to have few, if any, real employees. The executives must sit in a darkened, climate conditioned, sound-proofed room somewhere and write their own rules on how to do business. They must pass these rules out under the door to workers provided by a temp firm who then distribute them to the various out-sourced workers in call centres, sweat shops or contracted to drive a Bell (leased) van. These contract people read these rules to customers and then try to enforce them.

If this approach to doing business gets the call centre people shouted at by angry customers, what do Bell executives care. The company wins back a few new customers every week or so to keep a reasonable cash flow going. The Bell executives know that the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission will keep the regulated services safe and profitable for them and Bell’s millions of miles of copper wires will always bring them revenue.

They also have advertising agencies that will entice new customers for them. They do not call it lying. They prefer to call their advertised offers hyperbole and cover their asses with small print. A recent letter from Bell, signed by a ‘Steve Bickley, senior vice-president, residential services,’ is a good example of the enticement. It promises consumers Bell TV for $30 per month. It sounds like one hell of an offer until you read the small print the says “from” $30 per month “in the Bell Bundle.” There are another eight lines of tiny type on the back of the letter that few people would understand.

But nowhere in that tiny type does it tell you that further rules will be written as needed by the Bell executives at their pleasure. And you may be quite sure that none of their rules will be of assistance to the consumer.

To-date, there have been eight telephone conversations (number eight came in as I entered this blog) with people with a range of accents and one frustrating argument with a clerk at the Bell store in the Barrie Power Centre. The clerk refused to refund a bill of $99 plus HST of $12.87 for a receiver box that did not work as we had cancelled the service two weeks after connecting the box. It appears that Bell Canada does not have a money back warrantee for suckers.

Of all the communication with Bell Canada in regards to our recent foray into Bell services, we have not had the opportunity to speak to anyone who could understand that we had a contract and that we had no intention of paying three times the contracted price for Bell services. Contracted-out call centres hardly care.

The big surprise is that Bell Canada also seems to have contracted out its collection services. That used to be one of the better jobs at Bell. The last three calls have informed us that we owe amounts of either $192, $332 and $700 and something. Each caller has been politely informed that Bell Canada is more than welcome to take the claim to small claims court. That might just be the one place in Canada where contracts are still being honoured.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Oh, what a wonderful summer it has been,

The sun, the water, the whole damn scene.

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It is interesting how right wing speakers in the United States such as Sarah Palin try to invoke an image of a ‘kinder, gentler America.’ Big-lie advocate Joseph Goebbels would have been so proud of her. The America that Palin pictures is such an outrageous lie that it tears deeply at your viscera. What she is invoking, in reality, is an America of guns and lawlessness, of war and retribution without justice, of hatreds and intolerance, of capitalism built on exploitation and thievery, of a white-bread America where nobody dares to be different.

Palin would have been a big fan of Doris Day/Gordon MacRae movies in the 1950s. They were the pure schmaltz that she would have loved if she had not been born in 1964, too late to believe Doris was still a virgin and her male friends in her films all respected her. John McCain could have explained that to Palin if he had not been busy trying to become President at the time they were running mates.

Palin has become the pit bull for the National Rifle Association, the poster girl for the blatantly right-wing Fox News and the darling of the Tea Party. Like Wonder Woman in her disguise, she is ever ready to take off the glasses, shake the bun out of her hair and strip to her magic bracelets that can bounce off the shots from thinking voters.

It amazes people that this woman could have her sights set on the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. What is even more horrifying is that it is there for her to take. The ‘thinking republican’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one) has already written off the nomination situation for that year. And, while people are not taking her seriously, there is unlikely to be any serious competition. You can count on the Republican convention that year to be a very colourful zoo.

And speaking of color, her presidential campaign will be a holy war against having a black in the White House. Despite the fact he has accomplished more than any other president in the first half of his term, she and the rest of the pack of mad dogs will ravage him, using his middle name “Hussein” to feed on the dual bigotries against Islam and blacks. He will have to use all his powers of persuasion to save the presidency from her.

He can hardly count on his accomplishments alone. He was the guy who, in face of one of the most serious recessions in history, took over General Motors, brought Wall Street to heel, brought medical services to another 27 million Americans, brought the combat troops home from Iraq and took a message of hope to the American people. These are meaningless accomplishments to Tea Party advocates.

To really understand the ‘kinder, gentler America’ of Sarah Palin, you only need to imagine if she had been President for the past two years instead of Barack Obama. What would be the condition of America today? It is something for a Stephen King novel.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]