Newstocks

Hypocrite

Alex Scott is criticising Ewart Brown for wasting time and money on the gambling issue when he believes it's already clear the public don't want gaming.

Hmm, you mean like when you wasted time and money on the independence issue when it was clear the public didn't want that, Mr. Scott? Perhaps they just need to be "educated"?

Speeding

From today's Royal Gazette:

All those caught on Saturday will have to go before the courts as Police can only give on-the-spot fines for motorists speeding up to 54 kph.

"The majority of these have court dates in December and January," said Chief Insp. Pedro. "The courts don't have the capacity to deal with our ability to issue tickets."

From a previous Royal Gazette:

Senior Magistrate Will Francis is calling for a change in the law to help free up congested traffic courts...

Mr. Francis claimed that while anyone who is clocked at more than 60 kph could be banned from driving and therefore has to go to court, speeders doing less than 60 kph will only be fined -- and should therefore not have to appear.

"As the law stands at the moment people don't have to appear for speeds up to 54 kph,'' he said.

"What we would like to see is that limit increased for anyone speeding up to 59 kph. We want legislators to amend the law to enable people to just pay the fine without having to come to court.

When was this latter appeal made? June 18, 1999, over ten years ago.

The uselessness of Bermuda's legislators makes you weep.

Why Ewart Brown must go

A useful reminder, in advance of tomorrow’s vote on the no confidence motion:

• He failed to involve the UK in the discussions with the US over the transfer of the Guantanamo detainees, in violation of section 62 of Bermuda’s Constitution.
• With the exception of David Burch, he failed to tell his own Cabinet what he was doing. Because of collective responsibility, this meant members of Cabinet had to publicly support his decision without having been given any opportunity to change it.
• He failed to get a security assessment of the men done prior to their arrival in Bermuda. Instead, he chose to rely on the assessment of the Americans, which could not be assumed to be impartial.
• He told parliament that the Commissioner of Police had concluded that the detainees posed absolutely no risk to Bermuda. The Commissioner later contradicted him, saying he had not been given sufficient information to make any judgment. So either the Premier lied to parliament, or he failed to verify that a security assessment had been done. The former would be gross dishonesty, the latter would be gross negligence.

And those are just the reasons relating to the Guantanamo detainees.

Every Bermudian (and spouse of a Bermudian) who thinks Ewart Brown is bad for Bermuda needs to be at the protest at the House at noon tomorrow. The PLP backbenchers are wavering, tempted to put personal interest before the good of Bermuda, and the erratic Wayne Furbert can hardly be relied upon either.

The vote on the no confidence motion isn’t expected until the afternoon or early evening. A large, mixed race crowd at the protest could really make a difference to how this turns out.

If you could be at the protest tomorrow, but choose not to go, perhaps because you can’t be bothered, perhaps because you’re worried about what you friends or family might say about you, you will bear partial responsibility if the Premier succeeds in clinging on to power.

The Premier is getting bolder with every successive power play. First he was just refusing to answer questions because they were “plantation questions”. Then he spent taxpayers’ money going to the Privy Council in a vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to prevent the press revealing potentially damaging information about his role in the BHC affair. Then he stopped all Government advertising in the Royal Gazette. Then he announced he would be reducing contact with them. Now he has broken Bermuda’s Constitution, damaged our relationship with the UK, and behaved in a cavalier fashion with our national security. How is he going to top that? When will Bermuda say “enough is enough”?

Unnecessary humanitarianism?

The Premier and his supporters are playing up the acceptance of the Gitmo detainees as an act of humanitarianism. The implication being that if we hadn't intervened, these men would have been condemned to a life of statelessness in Guantanamo Bay.

But an article in the Australian suggests that the US may have had to release them there anyway:

About 50 other detainees face the same Catch-22 with a critical bloc of US lawmakers refusing to allow them on US soil and authorities fearing they will face torture if transferred to their home countries.

The Obama administration could nonetheless be ordered to free remaining Uighurs in the US if it does not resolve their case before a Supreme Court decision by the end of June.

I don't mind the detainees coming here, and being granted status, if they are decent men and if there is no prospect of them being allowed to stay in the US. However the first question has yet to be answered satisfactorily, and now it seems the second is still unresolved too.

"No quid pro quo"

According to our Premier, there was no quid pro quo for accepting the Guantanamo detainees from the US. He said it like that was a good thing.

But for helping the US evade their responsibilities there bloody well should have been a quid pro quo. Something concrete too, not just the vague hope that maybe Obama will be nicer to us now as a result of us helping him out.