Saturday, November 10, 2012

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Andrew Jackson takes a look at the UK's strong movement for a living wage, and notes that it's long past time for a similar push in Canada.

- The most remarkable part of this week's revelations about the Cons' cuts to refugee health is their apparent position that they're required to slash funding without consultation in the name of "budget secrecy", rather than talking to anybody to determine what programs are needed.

- And one has to figure that if the Cons thought they could talk to anybody rather than imposing decisions from on high, they'd know better than to waste some of the money they're burning on self-promotion and other questionable priorities.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' determination to make policy without adequate information is all the more obvious as they insist on unregulated tar-sands development while recognizing that we're starting from scratch in studying the cumulative impact of the industry.

- Finally, Tabatha Southey observes that if U.S. Republicans want to survive as a viable contender for power, they may need to both accept evolution and facilitate its application to their own development:
But the increasingly emaciated Republican Party remains maladapted to this new environment. Not all that enthusiastic about sex, able to dine on only a single and declining resource, the GOP faithful basically just amble about in this changed ecosystem, like so many political pandas cursed to live in an era of not very much bamboo.

The response from Republican supporters to their party’s plight is almost heartwarming. Many of the GOP have spent hours painstakingly bottle-feeding abandoned Republicans until they’re ready to restate their skepticism about climate change – sometimes washing oil into the feathers of conservative congressmen, in the hopes of making them more appealing to voters.
...
Some days, it’s hard not to feel for Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers are the Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall of endangered conservatives. But by attempting to turn America into a giant Republican Party preservation park, they may be standing in the way of actual evolution – a process that involves natural selection, change compatible with reality, and letting go.

(Right now, the Republican Party has vestigial birthers, for example, and that is a problem for them.)

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