Dr. Henry Morgentaler, OC

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:28 PM - 0 Comments

UPDATE: IT’S OFFICIAL. Morgentaler to the Order of Canada, along with Gail Asper, Randy Bachman, and other deserving Canadians. Uh Oh, BUZZ HARGROVE is on the list. Will the Keepers of the Orthodoxy not rest?

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The rumours have been swirling around since the weekend, but at this point no one has been able to confirm Dr. Morgentaler’s appointment to the Order of Canada. We were told to keep our eye on Canada News Wire around 2pm, but that came and went and no confirmation.

There appears to be a certain amount of political intrigue surrounding the appointment, for obvious reasons. But let’s get to it: Does he deserve it?

My answer is: clearly yes. After a three-decade battle in the name of a woman’s right to choose, he won final success in 1988 when the Supreme Court struck down the criminal code provisions against abortion.

Andrew Coyne is right:The abortion regime we have been left with is a disgrace, but that is Parliament’s fault, not Morgentaler’s. Dr. Henry Morgentaler risked his reputation, his freedom, and his life for decades in service of a cause that had no other serious champion in this country.

He is a remarkable man who has lived a remarkable life. He deserves to be a member of the order of Canada, because, more than the vast majority of members of the Order, he has lived his life according to the motto inscribed on the medal: He desired a better country.

Discuss.

BTC: Constructive criticism

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 3:24 PM - 0 Comments

It might’ve been more fun if he’d phrased it like a Page 6 blind item (“Which national columnist hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about?”), but still interesting to see Liberal Glen Pearson, via his blog, call out a representative member of the press gallery. To wit.

“The days following the announcement of Stephane Dion’s Green Shift proposal have been highly illustrative of much of what is wrong in the present political system.  I don’t need to go into the Prime Minister’s demeaning ‘It will screw everybody’ –  the level of rhetoric speaks for itself.

“I’m more intrigued by the pundrity coming out of national media. Continue…

Things that drive journalists (or maybe just me) crazy: First of an occasional series

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments

Yes, this probably does indicate that I have too much time on my hands today, which is why I’m headed out with my trusty BerryCam to snap some pics of the pre-Canada Day preparations on the Hill.

Anyway, if there’s one thing that sends me into a frenzy of rereading, it’s when someone sends out a revised version of a press release without including a note to say what has been changed from the original. That’s what PMO did this morning with Stephen Harper’s Canada Day statement, which led to me wasting more minutes that I’m willing to admit trying to figure out the reason for the revision.

Continue…

Not that anyone asked me, once again, but …

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

Apologies, y’all, for the light posting today — this being Ottawa, home of the it’s-a-long weekend-if-we-all-say-it’s-a-long-weekend philosophy on fixed-date statutory holidays, the city has apparently declared this an honourary holiday – Canada Eve Day, as it were. Don’t worry, the business of governing the country goes on, I’m sure — via BlackBerry, most likely from a sunny back deck, and possibly with a margarita in hand, but governed all the same.

Meanwhile, over at Conservative Party headquarters, the grudge-holding apparently goes on as well, according to the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt:
Continue…

It don't mean a thing

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 2:13 PM - 0 Comments

It was going to be a bit of work to get out to the Montreal International Jazz Festival this year but I vaguely wanted to go, since I’d missed it for a few years running. In 2005 I decided after covering it 17 years in a row, I needed a break. In 2006 I was writing a book. In 2007 I was living out of the country. But an hour with the festival’s schedule pretty nearly cured me of any desire to get back to see it this year. Continue…

Biz Fix

By Colin Campbell - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

In the money: Google’s stock price may not have hit anywhere near the $1,000 a share many analysts were predicting last year. (In fact, it’s been slogging along in the $550 range). But the company is still dreaming up ways to try and boost its online ad revenue. The latest is a deal with Seth MacFarlane, creator of  the television cartoon The Family Guy.  MacFarlane, the New York Times reports, is working on an Internet animation series (called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy”) that will appear on thousands of web sites using Google’s advertising system, AdSense. The short, two-minute episodes will appear with ads, facilitated by Google, attached to the beginning, or somehow worked into the videos. Google seems intent on setting up its own little online television network, not just selling ads but distributing the content.  “We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” Google tells the Times. Unlikely. But Google, to its credit, continues to defy its critics by luring ad dollars that once would have gone to television over to the Internet. 

Trading down: Don’t mess with French fashion. A French court ruled that the online auction site eBay, must pay $61 million to LVMH, a company that makes perfumes and luxury fashion goods. LVMH argued that eBay hasn’t done enough to stamp out the sale of cheap, designer knock-off goods (90 percent of Louis Vuitton bags and Dior perfumes sold on the site are fakes, it argued). This isn’t the beginning or end of eBay’s legal troubles.  Hermes International successfully sued the company in June. Tiffany & Co has also sued.  eBay is appealing the LVMH decision. 

Number cruncher: The $35-billion BCE takeover fracas continues. And it may not be resolved until the end of the year, the Globe and Mail reports today. With the legal issues seemingly put to bed, the issue now is the $42.75 a share purchase price.  The banks that are financing the deal think the number should be as low as $35 a share, according to the Globe.  That’s a big difference from the number the BCE board has settled on. 

Boom or gloom: Surprise, surprise. Statistics Canada reports today that the nation’s GDP actually grew slightly in April, following declines in February and March. So, that was a short lived recession. But with an increase of just 0.4 per cent, we’re inclined to say this is still a bit more gloom than it is boom. 

Ticker tape: We’re transfixed with the price of oil, which moved past $143 a barrel this morning. Where will it stop; nobody knows!  Also on the rise: demand for the new Apple iPhone. An RBC report says it’s unprecedented. 

Samll Balls

By Steve Maich - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:58 AM - 0 Comments

La première étoile: The entire nation of Spain! Viva Espana! Spain Spain Spain! Land of fine hams and lovely weather! Also, really good at soccer! Hurrah!

Two minutes for… Indecision. Really Mats, It’s not that hard. I know that the trendy thing to do, these days, is to go all Niedermayer, and spend the summer on a deck someplace, doing a Hamlet impression. But really…you’re a multi-millionaire athlete, and there’s really only one question to answer: do you want to play or not?  Kindly come up with an answer while there is still one lonely strand of DNA in my being that gives a crap.

Who’s got tickets? Wimbledon. Big day on the grass courts. So big, in fact, even I have heard of several of the players in action: Federer, Nadal, Murry.  And, courtesy of the great sports time machine: The Williams Sisters! I thought they were full time fashion designers by now

Fun police: A swimmer has swum faster than any swimmer before. Splendid. Good for you Michael Phelps. You are the envy of aquatic animals everywhere. But I still share the late, great, George Carlin‘s view.  Swimming is not a sport.  Swimming is a way  to keep  from drowning.

Extra bases:

Kevin Lowe is quietly building an interesting team in Edmonton. Newest addition Lubo Visnovsky from the L.A. Kings gives them some real fire power on the blueline, especially is Souray can find a way to stay healthy…. Chipper Jones is hitting .394 at the end of June, and is heading for a (hopefully-brief) stay on the DL. Get healthy chipper, and make a run for .400….   Let me say that I love Manny Ramirez. But manny is starting to act even crazier than usual. And it’s not that endearing “isn’t Manny so wonderfully strange?!?” kind of crazy. It’s, like, unstable crazy.  If I’m Terry Francona, I want to fix that….  No…No…No…No…Noooo!

Bad medicine

By Steve Maich - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

The bond world’s biggest star, Bill Gross, has posted a controversial open letter to “President Obama” advising on how he can go about fixing W’s mistakes and reigniting the U.S. economy. It makes for entertaining reading, especially when you know that Gross is a card-carrying Republican.

But his advice seems risky to say the least. He advises the soon-to-be-Pres to double the U.S. budget deficit to US$1 trillion a year during his first term, all while holding interest rates relatively low. He knows this will trigger rising inflation (likely not to hit until his second term, he says) but Gross is okay with that. He also seems fine with the idea of much higher taxes for himself and the rest of his super-rich pals.

The spend-spend-spend advice seems like radical economic surgery to me.  Could it be that Gross is laying the groundwork for a massive short-sale on U.S. treasuries? All this seems to me like a recipe for sending the greenback toward parity with the peso.

Penny for your thoughts

By Paul Wells - Sunday, June 29, 2008 at 11:35 PM - 0 Comments

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada will put out an updated report this autumn called “Momentum,” about all the progress Canadian university research is making. But this week, while I was chasing Maxime Bernier all over Southern Quebec, they put out a report showing that “momentum” might not be the best word to describe the total funding picture for Canadian universities. Two of my colleagues reported on the, er, report when it came out, and their stories captured the essential point: that total funding per university student in Canada is thousands of dollars less today than it was 20 years ago, thanks largely to rampant increases in enrolment. The result is a substantial gap between per-student funding in Canada and in the United States. It’s the next major challenge in our post-secondary education system and I’m going to spend a fair bit of time on the report’s findings, complete with fancy charts and graphs, after the jump. Continue…

Blow your horn

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 11:29 PM - 0 Comments

Several weeks ago at a National Arts Centre Orchestra concert that featured Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting and Marc-André Hamelin on piano — yeah, it’s nice to live in Ottawa sometimes — what also stood out during the slow movement of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F was Karen Donnelly, back in the brass section, playing doleful solo passages with her big, radiant trumpet sound.

I first met Karen when she was a grad student at McGill and I was writing about jazz for The Gazette. She began playing with the NACO in the late 1990s and has been their principle trumpeter for 8 years. She is a serious trumpeter, and I have been kicking myself for a long time about missing my chances to hear her occasional turns as a featured soloist around town. Fortunately, tonight at another NAC concert featuring a visiting orchestra I hope to tell you about later, I bought a copy of the new CD by Capital Brassworks, Ottawa’s local brass band. It’s called Gabriel’s Sister, it features Karen as the soloist on a fantastic set of century-old cornet virtuoso tunes and the odd ballad, and it’s a brass fan’s delight. To my ear it ranks close to the classic recordings of the cornet repertoire by Gerard Schwarz and Wynton Marsalis. If you know a serious young student of the trumpet or, indeed, of any brass instrument, you could hardly do better than to get them a copy of this CD.

It all depends on what you know

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 10:53 PM - 0 Comments

Dizzy Gillespie in Zagreb in 1956, with the Yugoslav composer Nikica Kalogjera in the back seat, during a State Department goodwill tour. From a new photo exhibit of U.S. jazzmen as ambassadors of goodwill. Gillespie’s tour is perhaps most fondly remembered by fans, because it allowed his astonishing big band to stay together long after ordinary economics would have put an end to it.

New York Times/ link

Australian rules

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 6:36 PM - 0 Comments

Is this Stéphane Dion?

Some senior Canadian Liberals say the comparison is not too far-fetched.

Now, obviously this business of taking strategic lessons from a country on the other side of the planet can easily go too far. Differences between the two countries’ politics will always outnumber similarities. But it’s interesting, and frankly surprising, to read that the Dionistas are even thinking strategically at all.

Paris Match Oopsie

By Martin Patriquin - Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

France’s Paris Match does a big takeout on the 400th anniversary on Quebec City, thinks it’s actually the 400th of the province itself, fails to talk about Quebec City at all. You know, Maclean’s would never make that mistake.

Pere Sarkozy, Artiste Erotique

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 8:20 PM - 0 Comments

Why I love the French vol. MCXVIII:

Madrid: Pal Sarkozy, 80, father of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is staging a surrealistic and erotic art exhibition in Madrid.

The 35 works on display, many of which combine painting with photomontage, have been made by Sarkozy and his German friend Werner Hornung, 60, with whom he formerly worked in advertising.

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The works on display also include erotic portraits of women, though Sarkozy denied being a “Don Juan,” with the daily El Mundo quoting him as saying: “I have not had that many women.”

The two artists were not “obsessed” with women, Hornung said. “But we like women,” he added.

link

Is there anyone out there who has seen this exhibition? Any pictures, postcards, stills, cellphone fotos, etc. please send them here. I will send a free Sarko-Tee to anyone who can get me decent pictures of Father Sarkozy’s erotic art.

Free speech wins one

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 5:19 PM - 0 Comments

Nine years later, Rafe Mair finally gets the monkey off his back: Supreme Court throws out libel case against outspoken BC talk show host

The judgment includes some uncharacteristically clear language from the Court in defence of free speech:

The traditional elements of the tort of defamation may require modification to provide broader accommodation to the value of freedom of expression,” Mr. Justice Ian Binnie said for the majority today.

“There is concern that matters of public interest go unreported because publishers fear the ballooning cost and disruption of defending a defamation action. Investigative reports get “spiked”, it is contended, because, while true, they are based on facts that are difficult to establish according to rules of evidence.

“When controversies erupt, statements of claim often follow as night follows day, not only in serious claims [as here] but in actions launched simply for the purpose of intimidation.”

There is nothing wrong with laws that ‘chill’ speech which is false and defamatory, Judge Binnie said. “But chilling debate on matters of legitimate public interest raises issues of inappropriate censorship and self-censorship.

“We live in a free country where people have as much right to express outrageous and ridiculous opinions as moderate ones,” Mr. Justice Ian Binnie said, in a spirited defence of free expression in an era when extravagant over-statement is commonplace. Continue…

Small Balls: Friday June 27, 2008

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 4:15 PM - 0 Comments

La première étoile: Everyone wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform. Left for dead by pre-season prognosticators, Justin Morneau and the boys are the hottest team in the majors, with nine straight wins and a chance to take over first place in the AL Central by the end of the night. In the age of Moneyball, nobody, not even the Oakland A’s, tops the Twins when it comes to getting the most out of low-paid talent. Johan Santana is probably wishing he stuck around for one more year.

Two minutes for… cheating like a Bulgarian weightlifter. To the Bulgarian weightlifting team, which was forced to withdraw from the Beijing Olympics after 11 members (eight men and three women) tested positive for steroids. One official said it’s “theoretically possible” that all 11 athletes ingested the illegal substance by accident—or by sabotage—but the country’s weightlifting federation wasn’t taking any chances. They decided it was best to pull the plug before something else got pulled.

Who’s got tickets? To Todd Bertuzzi’s wake. The Anaheim Ducks have placed the glorified thug on unconditional waivers after only one season in sunny California (14 goals, 26 assists in 68 games). Oh, how the mighty duck has fallen. There was a time, not long ago, when every NHL team daydreamed about having big bad Bert in its line-up. Not anymore. Somewhere, Steve Moore is smiling.

Fun police: Despite what the sports pages like to tell us, very few athletes deserve the “hero” label. Jackie Robinson is the rare exception. What he did in 1947—breaking baseball’s colour barrier—was heroic in every sense of the word. But as much as he was a trailblazer for an entire race, when it came to baseball, Jackie wanted nothing more than to be remembered as a great player—not a great black player. And he made that clear to the sportswriters: If you vote me into the Hall of Fame, do it on the basis of my talent, not my colour. When he was later elected, Robinson didn’t even want his official plaque to mention that he was the first African-American major leaguer. The Hall obliged, and it stayed that way for 46 years. Until this week, when Cooperstown unveiled a new bronze plaque complete with this final phrase under Jackie’s face: “Displayed tremendous courage and poise in 1947 when he integrated the modern major leagues in the face of intense adversity.” Robinson’s widow, Rachel, said her late husband would appreciate the change, even though he wanted no such thing when he was still alive. “I don’t think he would object to it,” she said. “I think he would understand it … It’s an evolution.” Robinson’s epic accomplishment is well-documented and well-celebrated. His No. 42 has been retired league-wide, and every April the sport commemorates Jackie Robinson Day. But his plaque should have stayed the way it was. It symbolized the essence of his fight: that any man, black or white, could not only play the game, but be the best at the game.

Extra bases: Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star has a stylish take on the TJ Ford-for-Jermaine O’Neal deal…Thankfully, Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo didn’t trade TJ for Shawn Chacon…And if you were glued to last night’s NBA draft, a friendly reminder that some of those picks will soon disappear.

Weekend Viewing: Looking and Listening

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 3:45 PM - 0 Comments

Will Dixon tagged me with this meme a week ago, and with my usual punctuality, I’m just getting around to it now:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now.”

Jill Golick already did her own variation on this meme, and I’ll also bend the rules just a little in order to get a “weekend viewing” post that’s long enough for the longish weekend (or weekend + day off Tuesday + Monday when not much is likely to get done): here are seven songs, either used on television or otherwise television-related, that I’ve been watching/hearing a lot lately for one reason or another. This is not necessarily meant to endorse all of these clips, just that they’re music-related, they’re TV-related, and I’ve been enjoying them for one reason or another.

1. Peter Sellers doing “A Hard Day’s Night” by The Beatles, followed by the actual Beatles lip-synching to “We Can Work It Out.” Is it any wonder that in the early ’60s, Britain was oftene considered the leader in popular culture? In comedy and music, or comedy about music, they were kicking America’s ass.

2. In the ’40s and ’50s, broadcasting executives not only believed that they had a duty to bring great music to the masses, but they actually figured out how to make it profitable. Seeing NBC’s superstar conductor Auturo Toscanini conduct the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, in a 1952 NBC broadcast, brings back a time when “classical” music really mattered in North American culture, in a way that it probably never will again. I listened to this several times and noticed that even though Toscanini had a reputation for being inflexible and rigid, he actually varies the tempo quite a bit throughout the movement. He just never lets these tempo changes interfere with the relentless drive of what may be the most famous piece of music ever written.

The other 5 are after the jump or the break or whatever it’s called; click on “more” for more songs that are going through the Windmills of my Mind (though thankfully that song is not one of them): Continue…

Strike a pose

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 3:24 PM - 0 Comments

Obama doesn’t stand a chance.

Comedy Blocking

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

CBS’s Monday Night comedy block, whose season premiere is scheduled for September 22, is the closest thing there is to an old-school, strong-down-the-line comedy block. NBC’s Thursday night lineup has certainly made a strong comeback, but the ratings struggles of 30 Rock, the exile of Scrubs to ABC, and the creative struggles of My Name is Earl have left more holes there than NBC probably expected. CBS’s Monday night lineup is very traditional, consisting entirely of multi-camera shows, and it’s anchored by the most popular half-hour comedy on TV, Two and a Half Men. It’s CBS’s comfort-food approach at its best, really — shows like Men and The Big Bang Theory and even How I Met Your Mother (which has always seemed just a tad miscast on CBS because of its mild experiments with form and time) are not shows that seek to change the world or re-define what a comedy is, but they’re entertaining shows with mostly solid casts that you can sit down and enjoy for a painless 21 minutes.

If they would put The New Adventures of Old Christine back on Monday nights, CBS would have something we haven’t seen in many years: four actually-not-bad multi-camera comedies back-to-back. However, they’re not doing that; Christine is going to Wednesday nights, to be followed by another new multi-camera show, Project Gary, and the fourth slot on Monday nights is going to a single-camera Brit adaptation, Worst Week. It’s an interesting gamble — not a big gamble, since CBS doesn’t do big gambles, but a gamble nonetheless — to put a single-camera sitcom in with a block of multi-camera shows. CBS is probably figuring that by putting Worst Week at the end of the comedy block, just before CSI, the transition won’t be as jarring. But still, the modern single-camera style, with no laugh track and a very different comic rhythm from multi-camera, does not mesh very well with the multi-camera shows. (Even HIMYM, which doesn’t use an audience, is shot to look and sound exactly like shows that do use an audience, so that it won’t be out of place on CBS Monday nights.) I’m sure there must have been single-camera, no-laugh-track shows that successfully followed multi-camera hits. But what often happens when you put a show like that after a traditional multi-cam show is that you get Mr. Belvedere before the iconoclastic “dramedy” The Slap Maxwell Story, leading to a quick demise for Slap and promos like this:

Worst Week is a U.S. adaptation of the British hit The Worst Week of My Life, written by Matt Tarses, Scrubs Continue…

hello? roget’s thesaurus? i’d like to cancel my order of 700 synonyms for “miniscule”

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 2:55 PM - 0 Comments

The author of this blog will be “on hiatus” – the English language’s fanciest words for “off loafing” – during the week of June 30. Thus were scores of defenceless readers spared approximately 347 increasingly insensitive references to, and schematic diagrams of, the contents of the Verne Troyer sex tape…

Olbie Addendum

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 2:42 PM - 0 Comments

Lots of good comments on my Keith Olbermann post (plus one that accuses me of hating him for being a strong liberal voice, which strikes me as a very unusual interpretation of what I wrote). One thing I wanted to add, though, is that I don’t think Olbermann’s problem is a failure to be balanced. Pundit shows are primarily about entertainment — they have enormous drawbacks as news programs, but the format does work as entertainment — and part of the entertainment value comes from the fact that the host is picking a side and sticking with it. Of course a successful liberal pundit will never be as hard on a liberal politician; that’s just part of the whole idea of playing for a team. Whenever a Republican is in office, Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News pundits and Glenn Beck have to find something else to be outraged about other than the President. And they usually find it pretty easily.

What I find problematic about Olbermann is that because he never really set himself up as a liberal pundit in the way that Donahue did (with more success than he’s given credit for), or the way that some of the Air America hosts did (with very little success) he has no obvious “team” except the anti-Bush team, which will no longer exist after January 2009. What was interesting about his Obama comments was not so much that Continue…

Megapundit: James Moore, son of Trudeau?

By selley - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 1:48 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin on Gomery’s comeuppance; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle; Richard Gwyn on the Green Shift.

Stuck in the past
Some of us, apparently, haven’t quite gotten past David Emerson’s floor-crossing and the fact that Michael Fortier isn’t an MP.

If Fortier and Emerson awoke today with a burning sensation all over their bodies—less painful than white phosphorous, say, but not by much—it may have something to do with Susan Riley‘s piece in the Ottawa Citizen. She portrays Fortier as an idly rich, over-entitled, unelectable layabout who exacerbates Stephen Harper’s contempt for the democratic process in appointing him with his unconvincing promises to run in an election if and when a riding with a “winning profile” is located. Emerson’s personality fares slightly better, but his CV doesn’t: he stands accused of “negotiat[ing] a flimsy truce on softwood lumber” and, in his previous Liberal life, “putting the brakes on Stéphane Dion’s environmental ambitions” (Aha! So he’s why it’s so difficult to make priorities!) This is all several feet over the top, particularly Riley’s bizarre talk of “class loyalty” affecting the appointments, but we sure loved reading it!

Continue…

Higher gas prices may mean higher salaries

By Duncan Hood - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 1:44 PM - 0 Comments

Looking for a silver lining to those scary gas prices? Here it is, courtesy of an intriguing post on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog. The basic argument is that rising gas prices will result in a higher cost of living, and almost always in the past, our salaries have risen when the cost of living goes up.

If that happens, and you spend as much on gas per year as the average Canadian, there’s no net gain. Your salary will go up, and so will your expenses, because of the higher price of gas. But if you don’t have a car, or you have a very efficient one, your salary will go up more than your expenses, and you’ll actually come out ahead. You’ll have more money in your pocket than you do now.

In way, it’s a bit like Dion’s complicated new carbon tax plan. If it’s implemented effectively, it will be revenue-neutral for typical carbon-based fuel users, but higher than average carbon fuel users will pay a heavy price.

But that makes me wonder whether we need Dion’s “Green Shift” plan at all. It looks very much like our open market could take care of providing the all the incentives we need to cut down on fossil fuels –- all by itself.

Dick Cheney is not Darth Vader, but he may be a marine crustacean.

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

Or so it was proposed in this illuminating exchange from yesterday’s hearing of the House Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, in which Rep. Steve Cohen asks David Addington, the chief of staff and former counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, whether the vice president belongs to the legislative or executive branch. (Because the vice president’s official constitutional role is as president of the Senate, Cheney has argued that he is not a member of the executive branch and therefore he is not covered by certain oversight laws.)

Addington:Sir, perhaps the best that can be said is that the vice president belongs neither to the executive nor to the legislative branch but is “attached by the Constitution to the latter,” closed quote. That’s from two legal opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice dated March 9th, 1961 and April, I believe it’s 18th, 1961…

<snip>

Cohen: So he’s a member of the legislative branch?

Addington: No, I said “attached by the Constitution to the latter.” He is not a member of the legislative branch because the Constitution says that the Congress consists of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The Constitution further says that the Senate consists of senators and the House of Representatives consists of representatives, and he is neither a senator nor–

Cohen: But he’s attached to the legislative branch? Continue…