Who does Canada think it is?

Well, prognostication is a fool's game, so I won't claim to know.
I think people don't realize how promising things are now between Israel and the Palestinians. Gaza, of course, is for the moment a write-off, but there is real will on the part of the residents of the West Bank and the Israelis to see a two-state solution.
Bush's attempt, through the Annapolis Conference of last November, to get the Road Map going again, is bearing fruit.
Basically, two states do already exist, one formally sovereign and one merely autonomous. But a few signatures on a piece of paper can change all that.
The Palestinians, on the West Bank at least, have ministries, a huge civil service, a public that is moderate and secular and is tired of war, and finally a realization that they can not return, even psychologically, to the cities they lost six decades ago that have since become very thoroughly Jewish in character and tone.
Businesses in Israel and on the West Bank are cooperating in ways that we don't begin to know about.
Olmert and Abbas are meeting biweekly to expedite any points of discussion that have had rough sledding between lower-level negotiators.
Some people think an agreement could occur by November. The spirit and sense of inevitability, this time round, are simply different than has been the case in the many failed attempts of the past.
And you have to remember that in Camp David, in 2000, there virtually was an agreement, one that fell apart at the last moment. So they're not so much reinventing the wheel as taking a familiar process that one percent further that would have wrought a crowning success in 2000.
Gaza, under Hamas, will not move quickly to statehood. But Gazans will notice the incomparably richer life that their brothers and sisters in the West Bank will be enjoying (are already enjoying, truth to tell), and their already withering support for fundamentalism will likely fade quickly.
The Israels will likely also be granting land contiguous to Gaza in return for certain land on the West Bank that Israel has occupied and does not wish to give up (though much of that land they will give up).
The existence of extensions of their own territory that will be theirs only if they join the already existent Palestinian state will be an additional reason for Gazans to throw in the towel on fundamentalism.
Resolution of this problem may have huge reverberations throughout the Arab world
There may even be improvements in Iraq that we cannot now imagine.
Certainly, Iraq was a huge misstep on the part of the Bush administration.
But in the long term, there just might be a slow accretion of democratic impulse throughout the region.
Before the Iraq war, many observers had written of a perceptible impulse towards the establishment of democracy.
Incompatible with Islam? Not in Indonesia. Not in Malaysia. Not in Turkey. (Not to say that democracy works easily in any of those places ... but it works.)
What I'm saying so indirectly is that if democracy starts to find increased footing in the Islamic world, the real motive of the Bush administration in going into Iraq -- which was to kick start a democratic wave throughout the region, for the ultimate protection of the American populace -- will come to seem prophetic.

I'm not sure McCain won't be a quantum leap ahead of Bush (though his militarism worries me). I think he's far more in contact with reality than the Bushites.
In any case, these problems won't blemish the image of the U.S. before the world so much as continue the already daunting withering of unity within the country.
So you'll have to deal with it.
You will somehow.
You are hardwired to spring back.
The current divisions have not a patch on the dissension and hatreds of, say, the Vietnam era.
And who thinks of those now?

So watch out for the Canadians.

Too much justice, not enough mercy.
We are meant to be merciful beings.
Those who believe in God say his mercy knows no limits.
Justice is easy; mercy is hard.

Justice does not require that we kill those who offend. Other forms of punishment may serve.
Mercy requires that we not kill.
So we can have both justice and mercy while stopping short of killing.
And if rehabilitation can bring people back to use to society, we have won in every corner.

I am proud to be an American, however, I think in the issue Canada is certainly correct in the enlightened views of our legal system and it's ultimate penalty.
If they do not wish to return to us an American citizen who has fled justice because he could conceivably be put to death in accordance with our laws; we should respect that right to deny us the return of said citizen.
Let's go one step further, since the Canadian government and it's peoples are so horrified by the "horrific crime of execution", I say we round up all the scum taking up space on our death rows across the nation, and transport them just over the Canadian border for the people of Canada to see fit to do what they may with them.
Immediately afterwards, perhaps we should then build a fence across the border to repel the former death row guests from trying to escape the open and loving arms of their new Canadian hosts and return here to the land of executions.
Maybe we could then make a monthly transport of all convicts sentenced to death to the border and drop them off with a pat on their behinds and a bottle of Molsen to celebrate their new-found homeland.
We could then use the money we save from supporting said criminals for the many years they sit on death row being supported by our tax dollars, on some serious overhaul of our social programs like, say, a national healthcare system for all Americans.
Thank you Canada, for showing us the error of our ways. We really appreciate it!!!

oh, BTW, was not including Canada in my list of designated 3rd and 4th rate nations ... was thinking of continental Europe, particularly Danes and other Scandinavians who can e-mail to Texas lecturing on the death penalty while munching on pizza sprinkled with whale meat

or lowlanders like the Belgians or French who likewise attempt to issue their lectures after having returned from a restaurant meal that included Chimpanzee or Mountain Gorilla meat, or other bushmeat

while I don't agree with the the "more civilized" distinction (since I am not a humanist), I see you acknowledge the distinction between "murder" and "execution"

Ha ha.
Hard to tell where you really sit on this, but your post certainly reveals the possession of balls a plenty, ballsaplenty.
I'm not so sure the current government in Canada is horrified by the death penalty.
This is the Conservative Party, which is an amalgamation of the former Progressive Conservative Party and the Reform Party.
The Reformers, the larger grouping in the new party, actually liked capital punishment and supported a binding national referendum on the subject.
However, since becoming part of the larger Conservative Party and actually winning power, they seem to have put the idea on the back burner.
I'm astonished to have just discovered that in 2007, the government commissioned a poll that showed that just one in five Canadians supported the death penalty. Support was highest in Alberta, the heartland of the former Reform Party, and lowest in Newfoundland, where only 17 percent was registered.
This is far lower than the support of seen in any other poll, most of which were from several years ago.
The Conservatives know which side of their bread is buttered, so I would say it's a dead issue.
But this is a tactical decision and likely doesn't reflect the feeling in their hearts.

We might accept your scum if you didn't have, on your own account, so much of it.
You have the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, by some reports, with more than one percent of your citizenry behind bars.
If this policy worked, you wouldn't have so much 'crime' that puts people behind bars.
You spend $60 billion a year on corrections.
Something isn't working.
Just sayin', ballsaplenty.

I've not spent much time in Belgium - but I live in France and have travelled around a bit - I've never seen bushmeat in restaurants, I don't know anyone who has ever eaten bushmeat here and I'm really not sure what makes you think it is endemic.

But your off-hand and deliberate (it seems) ignorance is really immaterial when compared to the fact that you seem to think eating animal meat of certain species is a crime equal to or surpassing killing human beings.

I wonder how many Scandinavians eat pizza sprinkled with whale meat? How many Belgians or French eat bushmeat in restaurants? Very very few, I dare say. (For that matter, I don't have any idea if the plates you're mentioning are available ... but of course, they may well be.)
Maybe some LPSGers can give us some views.
But why do you mention the killing of animals as though it is, ethically, on a plane with killing humans?
It might indeed be so ... but that needs some argument.
A great deal of argument, I would say.

The offence given to the sanctity of life could be quite the same.
So there would be, arguably, significant overlap between execution and murder.
But no, I don't say there is no distinction.
You say you are not a humanist. I assume you are religious.
Certainly, most church-going people in the States support capital punishment.
But the official positions their churches take may be quite different.
The Methodist Church in Texas opposes the death penalty.
Ditto for the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas.
The American Baptist Church is opposed.
The Mormon Church neither promotes nor opposes capital punishment.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church is opposed.
The Orthodox Church in America is opposed.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops calls for abolition of the death penalty.
These are opinions expressed on a website that deals with the death penalty.
I haven't cherry picked them ... just opened links at random, and the opposition to the death penalty seems remarkably consistent. However, opening other links might change the picture a bit.

We might accept your scum if you didn't have, on your own account, so much of it.
You have the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, by some reports, with more than one percent of your citizenry behind bars.
If this policy worked, you wouldn't have so much 'crime' that puts people behind bars.
You spend $60 billion a year on corrections.
Something isn't working.
Just sayin', ballsaplenty.

Rubi your right. The system is designed to act as deturrent for those who consider crime and its not working. Unfortunately when you look at the overall make up of the current prision population you will see over half were not born here and many of those entered illegally. That points directly to the problem of those who enter and live in our country illegally. Yes we do have the highest rate of imprisonment in the world but we also have had he highest rate immigration in the world. In my life time, and I'm not that old, our population is up 100million people. Any solution?

60billion is a massive figure but given the problem we are faced with it is an investment we are forced to make. When taken into account that our (legal) population is roughly ten times that of Canada that figure may appear more relative.
Also I found it interesting that the prison population of Canada is growing to the point that an additional 107mil was invested in new prisons and infrasture of existing one during 07/08.
As the face of Canada changes you would be wise to learn from the U.S.
Rubi have you been to the far NW side of Toronto lately? A friendly word of advice. Your going to need more prisons.

I can see both sides of the death penalty argument, though I myself do not believe any government should have the right to take the lives of its constituents.

The moral situation here is that the people of Canada do not wish to contribute to the taking of a life of someone who is within their sovereign territory. It may be easy to say that Canada should just return the person, but our laws have no bearing once the border starts. As we wish to be free and sovereign within our borders, so do the people of Canada wish to be within theirs. We may not like some of their laws as they may not like some of ours.

However, it was the US that allowed this man to slip over the border. We dropped the ball. His escape is our fault. Had the border been properly guarded, this would not have happened. Canada is not in the habit of harboring murderers. Had this man been known for what he had done, they would not have permitted him entry. They did and so, they fucked-up too. Given the nature of our shared border, it's vastly more convenient to suffer occasional problems like this one than lock down all 3,000 miles of the border behind a Great Wall of North America. Events like this are rare.

This whole argument reminds me of something that happened not too long ago. It seems there was a country suffering a great deal of unrest and the American-backed government collapsed causing the people of that country to create their own government with their laws. One of those laws was that no American government officials could be quartered within the country. They all had to be turned over to the central government to be held hostage by the government. Some folks over at the Canadian embassy got wind of this and decided that following the law of their host country was immoral. At enormous personal risk the Canadian embassy took in as many Americans as they could, hiding them in the basement to avoid detection. For months, the Americans were hidden away, and the Canadian embassy personnel brought food from their own homes to help feed the Americans. At any moment they could have been discovered, would have been arrested, and possibly even face the death penalty for what they were doing. Over time, the Canadians were able to give the Americans Canadian passports and smuggle them out of the country before Canada too had to leave.

Had Canada obeyed the laws of the country, which demanded they do so, more Americans would have been kidnapped, held as hostages, and, many thought, put to death by a legal government acting within its own sovereign territory.

A good post, Jason.
I remember my mother, alive at that time, being amused by news reports of how the Americans were smuggled out "disguised as Canadians."
Now, that would take an ultimate triumph of the makeup and costuming arts.

So what right does a constituent have to take the life of another constituent??

Do unto others as they do unto you!

Don't push my good graces .

Yeah, there's an entire society of people who believe that and they happen to inhabit a very sandy stretch of land with a lot of oil beneath it. Look what that belief has done for them.

The only times one person has the right to take the life of another, imho, is in self-defense.

That didn't answer my question did it.