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I'm trying to write a story about US war resisters living in Canada, and the Canadians who help them - who are often former Vietnam war resisters themselves, now Canadian citizens. To that end, I read a lot about GI resistance to the immoral war in Iraq. There's a lot more of it than most people realize. Active US servicepeople have petitioned their government with an Appeal for Redress , asking for a withdrawal from Iraq. This petition simply states: As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home. Hundreds of active GIs have already signed. Read more about the Appeal For Redress and the rights of active servicepeople here. One good place to find out about war resistance is Courage To Resist . Through their mailing list, I'v...

Another perspective on ex-pat voting, a response to my post here . My reply is in comments. I'm not advocating my choice for anyone else. It's just what I have to do. Many thanks to James for bringing this to my attention, off-topic or not.

When we were in New York in September, out with our friends Alan With One L and Frederick, we got to talking about (big surprise) the differences between Canada and the US, and conjecturing on what those differences stem from. Alan asked if Canada had a "Wild West" in its history like the US did. I thought of that conversation when I read this on the train this morning. From Pierre Berton's introduction to Klondike : It has often been said (usually by Americans) that there is no great difference between those who live south of the forty-ninth parallel and those of us who live on the Canadian side; but the Klondike experience supplies a good deal of evidence to support the theory that our history and our geography have helped to make us a distinct people - not better and not worse - but different in style, background, attitude, and temperament from our neighbours. Our national character has not been tempered in the crucible of violence, and our attitudes during the stamped...

Much was made this week of Toronto losing the opportunity to bid for the 2015 Expo, or as it is still called here, "The World's Fair". So much ink was dedicated to this massive blow to tourism and ego that I wondered if I was the only person who found the whole idea a silly anachronism. In the 19th Century, the World's Fair brought inventions and innovations to a public who had never seen such wonders. In those days, the fairs displayed the world itself - "exotic" plants, animals and even humans. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London (the "Crystal Palace"), African people were displayed in cages. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, people from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and even cowboys from not so very far away wandered through the midway wearing "native costumes". (A good book about a murder mystery and that World's fair is Devil In The White City , by Erik Larson.) The symbol of that World's Fair was the Great Wheel...

I am an object of pity! This is a banned commenter who reappears on wmtc now and again. Could anyone be more clueless? He doesn't even get the name of this blog right, never mind anything about us or our politics - or Canadian politics, for that matter! Found in my Statcounter, via Liblogs.ca .

I just finished reading The Known World , by Edward P. Jones. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (among other awards), this is an unusual and extraordinary novel. It's about slavery in the American South, but with a twist: some of the slave owners are black. I never knew there were black slave owners. They were African-Americans who were able to secure their own freedom, and then bought slaves. Think about it. Although I had never realized it, I was accustomed to thinking of slavery in simplistic terms of racism. The white slave owners were oppressors, the slaves were victims, and they wanted to be free. Here, good and evil line up neatly with race. But is life ever so simple? By exploring slavery across and within colour lines, Jones lets us think about it in terms other than racism: he brings us the power dynamic behind the arrangement. And as I thought about it, it made all the sense in the world. Of course there were free blacks who risked their lives to help others reac...

This is sure to make many Americans happy. I can just hear the angry glee from the wingnuts and freepers. Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid , Bush administration officials said Thursday. Doctors and hospitals said the policy change would make it more difficult for such infants, who are United States citizens , to obtain health care needed in the first year of life. Illegal immigrants are generally barred from Medicaid but can get coverage for treatment of emergency medical conditions, including labor and delivery. In the past, once a woman received emergency care under Medicaid for the birth of a baby, the child was deemed eligible for coverage as well, and states had to cover the children for one year from the date of birth. Under the new policy, an application must be filed for the child, and the parents must provide documents to prove the ...