Reply #10: hahahahaha!

[iverglas]

Are there a lot of people in Canada that follow U.S. politics closely?

Was it TV Nation where Michael Moore interviewed people on both sides of the border -- somewhere where people live close to the border on both sides -- and the Canadians got more answers about the US right than the people south of the border did?

We get all the US TV you do, except for speciality cable/digital/satellite channels, for which we have our own.

NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS, CNBC (?) are on on our basic cable lineup. We (i.e. my household) pay for digital MSNBC. We don't pay for digital Fox.

It gets boring watching the same news over and over in the morning or on a Saturday or Sunday as we read the papers, so we flick between the US news channels and the Cdn ones (CBC Newsworld and CTV Newsnet), and we also get BBC World on basic or slightly enhanced cable (we used to pay for it on digital until it was switched over). I occasionally watch TV5, the Canadian version of the France channel.

And you must never have heard Pierre Trudeau's otherwise famous quip:

http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/hist/canada9-en.asp

"Living next to you," Trudeau told an American audience in a speech to the National Press Club in 1969, "is like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."


So ... yes. ;)

Obviously, I and the Canadians at DU do much more so than most others; we also pay more attention to Cdn politics!

I watched the Clarence Thomas hearings back in the day (they must have been broadcast on network TV in the US, I don't remember) because I was a lawyer (and had been a political candidate myself) and so took some interest in US Supreme Court and government goings on. The outcome was obviously a foregone conclusion, so I just watched for the sheer joy of seeing Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues be the hugely smart guys they are (and the ones on the other side were no dummies either, so the interplay was fascinating). I just remember sitting there saying "Ask them __, Joe, ask them __!" And he would, although he'd lead up to it a little more circuitously than I would have.

I'm a social democrat, which I recently described as being "as socialist as possible in the circumstances" (alluding to the winner of the contest to find a Cdn counterpart for "as American as apple pie": as Canadian as possible under the circumstances).

Socialism will be nice, when it comes to be, long after I'm dead undoubtedly. In the meantime, we make progress.

Public ownership of many things would be lovely -- health insurance being one of them. But public regulation of the private owners' activities is progress, in the meantime. Regulation is the mechanism used in "mixed economies" to ensure that the public interest is protected in activities that have significant public impacts.

Biden is essentially talking about regulating the activities of private insurers much more tightly than at present -- exercising public control to curb the excesses -- while at the same time expanding what public ownership already exists, for those who need it or want to opt in, as the process proceeds.

Of course, this runs contrary to the whole deregulation process that has been going on for a couple of decades. Deregulation of the airwaves in the US, for instance. In the past, the public didn't own the broadcasters, but it did exercise considerable control over their activities. Look at things now.

Re-regulating broadcasting in terms of things like balanced programming would have an enormous effect on public life in the US, without any change of ownership. Regulating the health insurance market in the ways Biden is proposing would also have very significant effects.

I'm sure Biden could hold forth at fascinating length about the whole concept of regulation in a mixed mainly free-market economy. And I'd love to hear him. ;)

Meanwhile, he's pretty much an unknown up here, I'd say. I started a poll in the Canada forum here; I'm the lone Biden vote, but then only about 6 people voted. Three for Kucinich. Obviously Kucinich is closer to my own ideals, and to what my own party here represents, and I think it's tremendous that he's in the race to bring those ideals to the public arena. I just think that Biden is all-round more likely to succeed -- including in the sense of getting the right jobs done right if he's elected.

Also, when asked in that one-on-one interview where he'd like to live if he couldn't live in the US, he answered "Canada" without a moment's hesitation. Joe Biden ist ein Canadian, I think.