The father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted pictures of herself on a dating site. Then after fighting with her stepmother, the father told her she couldn’t go on a school trip. The girl took the matter to court and — be afraid — seems to have won her case.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn’t discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip.
…
Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment.

She said the girl has already been forbidden to use the Internet and her father also punished her by canceling her participation in an extracurricular event.

Please, please don’t let this foolishness come to the States.

I really do love the show and, in their defense, many times they have great human interest stories about people caught in strange situations or funny circumstances. The narrators are very good at drawing you into the characters so that you feel sympathy, empathy or pity for the folks the stories are about and the situations they find themselves in.

Tonight’s show was, I am guessing, supposed to make us feel sympathy (or perhaps indignation) about the way Hemant Lakhani was treated. You see, Hemant was convicted of trying to sell shoulder-launched missiles to what he believed was a terrorist group, by a New Jersey court in April of this year.

The way TAL framed the story, Hemant was simply an inept real-life Willie Loman who was incapable of being a real threat to our country’s security. He was a clothing salesman who would promise a prospective client anything, even missiles (or plutonium!), but who was, in reality, unable to actually deliver any of these items on his own. It wasn’t until he was set up by our government (the word "entrapment" was used several times through the story) that anyone was able to build a case against him.

Perhaps he was truly inept at being an arms dealer and I suspect he was. Maybe he really is just a clown. But he was convicted, not because he was a good arms dealer, but that he was a willing arms dealer, even though the purchasers wanted to the missile for the expressed purpose of blowing a commercial airline out of the sky, on our own soil.

I feel no sympathy for this guy. Even though he is 70+ years old, he cannot be trusted to be loose in our country and should spend the rest of his life locked up. If you are willing to betray our country, then you have no business being free in it.

And don’t even get me started about the juror TAL interviewed. Hey lady, you are a librarian, not a "liberry-an".

But then, I started thinking about it. Wouldn’t it be great if all the vitriolic liberals did haul themselves off to Canada? And why shouldn’t they? I mean, Canada has got all the great stuff they love — socialized medicine, high taxes and bloated government.

I bet they don’t allow any elections to be stolen up there. <grin> Oh, wait, wasn’t it the 2000 election that liberals claimed was stolen by Bush? Or is it this year, too?

And after reading so many liberal’s comments like "Is the country really this stupid?" I just want to say, what do you think conservatives were saying after both Clinton elections?

How telling is that? It appears that Bush really does have them "running scared." Too bad most folks probably won’t hear this until after they have voted.

References: National Review

My question is this: Shouldn’t this also apply to Michael Moore and his flick? Would this mean that everyone who has seen this movie should have their contribution revealed so that everyone can know who is supporting Mr. Moore’s campaign to unseat President Bush?

Liberals are just such kind and forgiving folk.

As we watched the program, it was very interesting to hear about his humble beginnings, how he became a lifeguard in his youth. It was revealing to consider how his work as a lifeguard may have affected his later political decisions.

The story progressed through his acting career, his marriage to Jane Wyman and through the communist trials in Hollywood. The "Gipper" worked hard at exposing the undercurrent of leftist propaganda that was beginning to infiltrate the movie industry. This led Jane Wyman to divorce him because she disagreed with his stance.

As his movie career began to wane, he took a lucrative job as spokesman for the weekly General Electric Theater. He also began to explore the world of politics by speaking to crowds as a General Electric representative. He would speak about the need for America to believe in itself again, and a need for our country to return to traditional values and to elevate our standing among the nations.

It was really quite inspirational. Penny and I were both getting very nostalgic for those days, politically speaking anyways.

The program continued through his election and work as governor of California through two terms.

Then, finally, it got to the point where Reagan was elected President of the United States. A comparison was made between Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, both being great communicators and both being buoyant optimists. Both came to Washington in times of great economic distress.

To quote Richard Norton Smith, Former Director, Reagan Library: "But, there’s a major, major difference, apart from one being a liberal, one being a conservative. FDR was a great improviser. He made up the New Deal, almost day by day. Reagan came to office with a very fixed set of beliefs and an agenda to try and implement those beliefs."

Penny turned to me and said (in a mock surprise) "Imagine that!" The nerve of a president having fixed beliefs that are communicated before being elected and being elected on the basis of expressing those beliefs! (Actually, much like George W. Bush, but quite unlike George Bush senior and don’t even get me started on Bill Clinton.)

We were on the edge of our seats, ready to relive some of the glory days of President Reagan’s presidency when all of a sudden, the local PBS affiliate, AETN, literally interrupted the narrator mid-sentence and began airing notices of local sponsors (not commercials, because public television doesn’t have commercials, does it?) of the program. Then, instead of returning to the Reagan profile, they proceeded to air "The Carters: A Conversation"

Talk about your anti-climax. It was as if someone had jerked the rug out from under us. In fact, we just stared open mouthed at each other until I stammered "Do you think this is their shot at equal time?" We kept looking from each other to the TV, hoping that the Reagan biography would come back on, but of course it did not.

I called the station and told the young lady who answered the program that I would like to register my complaint and their programming choice and that I really couldn’t even understand why someone had decided to interrupt any program in mid-sentence.

Still, I did find the transcript and was able to find out what else was going to be said.