The Winnipeg Sun from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada • 93

SUNDAY DECEMBER 1 1 2005 WINNIPEG SUN C23 HOMY Comment it Layftomi beware bearing gate Ob I $139000 for fish harvester's skills promotion for the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters in Halifax This is just mar ginally better than the $276000 announced for the the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto! CIOSME 2004 "stepped for Ignatieff Within a day of her decision being announced nominations closed in the riding and Ignatieff was as the candidate despite attempts by two local members to contest the nomination Larry Zolf in a Canadian timely warning socialists bed with the like having with a shark" true in 1975 is in 2005 IgnatiefT background record and reputation can agree to run for the Liberals under such circumstances certainly does not speak well of him It is all part of the failure of moral authority by Martin which prompted the three opposition parties to gather together and withdraw support for his government The current fed-I eral election campaign was sparked when Jack Layton's NDP agreed with die other opposition parties that PM Paul Liberals longer had the moral authority to Then we witnessed union boss Buzz Hargrove undercutting Layton by calling for a Liberal minority government to be returned to office in numbers and advising union members to vote strategically It would seem moral authority or corruption or patronage or entitlement or fraudulent activities in providing government ser-vices or diverting public funds to the Liberal Party are of little concern to Buzz Layton may want Buzz to buzz oft but dare not offend the auto workers' leader The late Noel Coward once wrote trust a man with short legs their brains are too near their Could Buzz be thinking this about Jack? The Martin plethora of pre-campaign promises totalled $245 billion over 23 Federation which called it the pre-election spending spree in Canadian history" Martin certainly should be described as Churchill once described Lloyd George: happy warrior of squandermania" Canadian philosopher Larry Zolf in 1975 gave Canadian socialists a timely warning socialists to bed with the Liberals is having oral sex with a What was true in 1975 is even truer in 2005 so I pass this warning on to Jack Layton before he gets any cozier with mendacilo-quent Martin Voters in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia believe the fishery of great importance They should look closely at die $245-billion spree Lo and behold there are almost no spending promises in the fishery resource area There appear two items allocating fisheries spending one to Newfoundland and Labrador of $301923 for fish productivity to go to the Fishermen's Resource Centre at St John's the other is Martin's promised to eliminate the "democratic deficit" Yet consider the scurvy and authoritarian way in which the Toronto-bom Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff was forced on the Liberal riding association of Etobicoke-Lakeshore in Toronto Pundit Warren Kinsella (a Chretienite Liberal anti outspoken critic of Martin) points out that in 1993 Jean Chretien appointed Jean Augustine as the candidate for that same riding This was an example of the democratic deficit Paul Martin vowed to change! Augustine the incumbent re-elected in Philosopher 1975 gave socialists a "For going to Liberals is oral sex What was even truer These kinds of activities justify the old warning shaking hands with a Liberal count your fingers Buzz start counting! John Crosbie is a Sun columnist ToiffiMe deserves Duel off obscurity courts and judges had to say The class discussion rambled around a bit making pit stops to bash President Bush and criticize California Gov Arnold language skills before Faucher left with 29 letters petition- right question to ask is not whether capital punishment is an appropriate ora moral response to murders Cannon wrote is whether the government should be in the business of executing people convicted of murder knowing to a certainty that some of them are innocenL" That certainty has been established by DNA tests showing that many death row inmates did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted Case dosed The painful part of this position is that we who oppose capital punishment on these grounds have to breathe the same air as the celebrities political panderers and other hankie-twisters who materialize every time a runs out of options and faces a far more humane death than that which he delivered to others Yet Williams' defenders insist he is reformed and point to books he has written in prison uiging kids to stay away from gangs They also point to his 1997 statement apologizing for his role in glamorizing the gang life though he never apologized for his crimes Usual suspects The usual suspects have mobilized in his behalfr induding Susan Sarandon Tim Robbins Danny Glover Jesse Jackson Blanca Jagger Snoop Dogg (a fellow former Crip) Anjdica Huston Desmond Tutu '60s radical Tom Hayden and Mario Cuomo to name a few Perhaps some of these celebrities share the same concerns expressed But others induding an activist visiting California schools in recent days to enlist children in a Tookie" campaign make it difficult to steady hands and stick to convictions Stefanie Faucher projects director for the grassroots group Death Penalty Focus made one of her stops several days ago at an Oakland high school where she told students there was little evidence to convict Williams despite what all those The celebrity rush to save the life of convicted murderer and gang founder Tookie Williams maybe me best argument yet for eliminat' in theUnited States Dead a martyr Alive and confined for life just another nobody I have no wish to further elevate Williams in the public eye but the circus surrounding his Dec 13 execution date forces reflection I I First my bias and other disclaimers: I'm a relatively recent convert from die slow-gas-leak solution to death row crowding to a reluctant capital punishment opponent I oppose tbe death penalty for one reason: The state makes mistakes and one innocent murdered by the state is too many Do I diink Tookie is innocent of four jreople as the case against him No I All appeals to higher courts including the reliably liberal ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals i hisverdk i US Circuit Court of confirm that his trial was fair and i verdict just To those who skipped Snoop Dogg's Tookie" rally it seems dear that the courts have done their job and that Williams is guilty But it is also abundantly clear that his death and the dramas surrounding such executions grant celebrity status to the least deserving among us Our first principle should be never to kill an innocent person and thus err on the side of life As recompense for delaying the dark gratification of revenge we liberate ourselves from involuntary servitude as audience to those for whom death row has become a stage Finally killers such as Tookie Williams condemned to life without parole vanish into the hell of obscurity where they belong Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist with the Orlando SentmeL She appears Sunday and Tuesday Tookie who founded the notoriously vicious Los Angeles gang foe Crips was convicted of killing four people during a murder-and-robbery spree in 1979 that netted him roughly $250 His first victim was Albert Owens a store derk in Whittier Calif whom Tookie murdered to eliminate witnesses and "because he was white" The others were an elderly Chinese couple and their daughter whom Williams referred to as All were shot at dose range with a 12-gauge shotgun At this point most normal people are entertaining uncivilized thoughts about how best to dispose of such an person Does he deserve to live? My emotions say My reason skips to a different question one that National Journal White House correspondent Carl Cannon posed in the National Review (June 19 2000) article that helped shift my thinking: Sunday Sun columnist Eric Margolis is on vacation He will return in the New Year.