The revolving door to McDonalds...

....where the Political Elite go to work if they can't get jobs at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

Much has been made of the revolving doors in Washington, where important regulatory jobs with the executive branch (sheepdogs) are regularly given to those who are being regulated (wolves).  The sheep are the raw material that keeps both groups in highly paid employment but are otherwise of no consequence.

Prominent examples are listed by The Intercept.

Plus there's my personal favourite, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who has been an Ivy League/Oxbridge shill for McDonald's.

The destruction of Canada's "long gun registry"

...and the inconvenient continuation

 of Australia's

"In the 19 years since the announcement of legislation specifically designed to reduce gun massacres, Australia has seen no mass shootings. As Howard wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times in 2013, "Today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate."

Source:  Australian Institute of Criminology

By now it must be obvious to everybody except the Gun Lobby that military solutions to international disputes make matters worse, not better.  The Gun Lobby clings mysteriously to the belief that violence is very much a reasonable solution to civilian disputes, in the absence of evidence that such is the case.

So the numbers are not obviously up, except for sexual assault.

If you account for the growth in Australian population (to express the rate of violent crime per 100,000 population)

So what seems clear is that during the period that these statistics were collected, all forms of violent crime were lower in 2012 than in 1992, except for sexual assault.

Hard to believe that sexual assault increased because of decreased access to guns.

Fortunately, we have the Federal Court...

A tasteful compromise for Mother Canada

British Parliamentary Democracy

Affirmed.

Strong, stable leadership for Canada

He thinks he was born to be Prime Minister but... 

Canada's 2015 Federal Election

Apologies to Gary Larson 

The Non-Crisis about Canada's Senate

Regarding the Reichstag Fire Option

Following the Auditor-General's report about the Senate's trough feeding, there have been over-excited calls for its utter reform or its total destruction.

Really.

The Senate is a non-problem.  In fact it's a distraction from the disgraceful and disgusting attack on Westminster parliamentary democracy perpetrated by the "conservative party of  Canada" which is about as radical a government as you can get without reverting to a police state.  The fact that this is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta has passed almost unremarked by the Canadian Commentariat who might believe it's a car parts company.

Michael den Tandt appears to advocate the Reichstag Fire option, or perhaps the Guy Fawkes option, which is to destroy the institution entirely.

My response to this is the Glenn Greenwald closely reasoned response which is "Fuck you."

If you have the arrogance to believe you can make over British parliamentary democracy with a single act of destruction then it seems clear to me you have no respect for history or the fragile evolution of government that manages to avoid raw power politics, or feudalism, or totalitarianism, or a police state, or whatever you want to call the simple minded application of a simple minded solution to a complexity that is too painful to bear, which is reality.

Here's Winston Churchill;

Thus we arrive, by our ancient constitutional methods, at practical working arrangements which show that Parliamentary democracy can adapt itself to all situations and can go out in all weathers.

 Here's George Orwell:

In power politics there are no crimes because there are no laws.

 The Senate is the least of  our problems.  Fuck you.

The defeat and vindication of Peter Bryce

D.C. Scott and Crimes Against Humanity

"The Story of a National Crime"

It's all here.