BTC: What do you see?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 5:51 PM - 10 Comments

This week’s asbestos thing is probably difficult to get excited about. A little lacking in relevance to your day-to-day life, what with your kids, your spouse, your job, those leaves that need to be raked, the flavoured tobacco your kids are smoking, Stephane Dion’s permanent tax on everything, Angelina Jolie’s marital status, the decline in the housing market, your retirement savings, international terrorism, the socialist who is about to be elected president of the United States, Madonna’s marital status, and the financial crisis that will ultimately leave your children with nothing to eat but flavoured tobacco already demanding so much of your attention.

So here’s another way to look at it. How you feel about asbestos defines how you feel about the fundamental human responsibilities of your government. It’s a political inkblot test. Continue…

BTC: Passive aggression pact

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 5:10 PM - 19 Comments

Let the record show that the non-aggression pact between Messrs. Ignatieff and Rae endured precisely nine days—expiring at approximately 5:05pm EST today when the latter implied to Don Newman that associates of the former were spreading baseless accusations about his interest in the Liberal leadership.

Update. Rae, in conversation with Canadian Press. “I think it’s just a misinformation campaign or a disinformation campaign and I just think it doesn’t speak well of what goes on in our business.”

The (mis)information in question was printed in the Globe this morning. But note who the Globe sourced the (mis)information to. “Mr. Rae, the former Ontario NDP premier, has expressed some hesitation to close friends about whether he will enter the campaign.”

So did the Globe speak to said close friends? Was it indeed close friends who were spreading this misinformation? Does that mean that some of Bob Rae’s close friends are working for Michael Ignatieff?

And is everybody super-excited about seven months of this?

Update II. The Globe follows and the melodrama deepens. Continue…

Will A. J. stay with the Jays? Better open the vault to keep him.

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 4:51 PM - 6 Comments

According to his agent, A. J. Burnett will decide on Monday as to whether or not he will opt out on the two years and US$24 million remaining on his contract. The the big question though isn’t if A. J. will opt out but if the Jays can afford him when he does. It appears on the surface that there is a chance that he might actually want to stay in Toronto. His agent has kept an open dialogue with Jays’ management in recent weeks, and his friendship with ace Roy Halladay appears strong enough that it could play to Toronto’s advantage. Of course his relationship with the fans and media has been tepid at best during his first three seasons, but any hard feelings will most certainly be trumped by dollar signs. And just how much would it take to keep the hard-throwing right-hander in a Jays uniform? Well, put it this way, Barry Zito posted a 10-17 win-loss record last season with a whopping 5.15 ERA and pocketed a cool US$14.5 million. A. J. in comparison was almost unhittable in the second half of the season and won 18 games while striking out an American League-high 231 batters. My guess is that he will be looking for a salary somewhere in the neighbourhood of $16 million per season over a five-year term. Is he worth that much? Maybe not. Do the Jays need him? You bet.

This is what we call the Liberal leadership show

By John Geddes - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 3:46 PM - 14 Comments

Preferring his comfortable balcony view, McWaldorf declines to join in…

Continue…

A Brief History of King of the Hill

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 3:37 PM - 6 Comments

King of the Hill has been canceled again, though a) It’s been brought back at least once before after being canceled, and b) It still has enough episodes left for the rest of this season and probably next season as well. But I think this will probably be it. Mike Judge is no longer working for Fox after the disastrous mishandling of his movie Idiocracy (a film that Fox sat on for ages and then barely released); his new ABC show, The Goode Family, will not be a Fox production. Fox is developing new animated shows with its contractees, like Seth MacFarlane and Mitch Hurwitz, and contract players presumably get preference over people like Judge and Greg Daniels who are mostly working for competitors.

KotH has turned out some good episodes this season — the “McMansion” episode was a lot of fun — but as I’ve said on other occasions, I don’t think it’s ever really gotten back to the level of its early seasons. The recent years of KotH have been very much like the Al Jean years of The Simpsons: fairly consistent, but rarely surprising. But in its early seasons, it was, in my opinion (as Peggy Hill would say) the very best of all the animated sitcoms, exceptionally funny but with a depth and richness that The Simpsons couldn’t quite match.

The key to KotH was the meeting of two compatible but dissimilar talents. Mike Judge came up with the idea for the show, drew the main characters and wrote a pilot, and Fox, as was its usual practice, teamed the cartoonist with an experienced prime-time TV writer. Greg Daniels rewrote the pilot and came up with several important characters who weren’t in Judge’s first draft (Luanne, Cotton) as well as some characterization ideas (making Dale Gribble a wacked-out right-wing conspiracy theorist). Judge gave Daniels full co-creator credit on the show, a generous thing to do (usually the cartoonist gets a “created by” credit while the other writer gets a “developed by” credit, as on The Simpsons and Family Guy). Both Judge and Daniels understood the show as an opportunity to portray the world from the point of view of Hank Hill, the type of uptight middle-class conservative who’s usually the villain. Both of them set up the stories to pit Hank’s common sense against the forces of political correctness and legalism, inspired in part by the book The Death of Common Sense. And both of them wanted to do stories that were smaller and more realistic and obeservational than you’d get on any other animated prime-time show.

But Judge and Daniels were different kinds of comedic talents, and the differences enhanced King of the Hill. Continue…

Feeding the election addiction

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 3:23 PM - 1 Comment

Okay, so if you are obsessed with the presidential election, and need a constantly-refreshed supply of political crack in these final days, here are a few good suppliers:

1) Michael McDonald, who I interviewed in this piece about the chances for more Florida-style voting chaos in this election, is keeping track of all the early voting across the country and constantly updating the party registration of early voters where available.

2) For the latest poll results and latest skirmishes in the pollster-wars — is Obama really up? Is McCain really closing in? Are his internal polls full of it? Who is under-sampling which sub-group? etc. etc. — there’s nothing as addictive as pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com.

3) And if you still can’t get enough, take the macleans.ca election quiz.

Canadian Obama-lovers…

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 3:07 PM - 2 Comments

Not even in the top ten.

Pop goes Montreal, part two

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s my piece on Pop Montreal that appeared in last week’s issue. I meant to link to it before now, but never got around to it. If you’ve never had the chance to go to Pop, I highly recommend checking it out.

Anyway, to make up for my absent-mindedness, I’ve made a mix on Favtape that’s got all my go-to tunes at the moment. Check it out here. (Unfortunately, I can’t embed the thing.)

BTC: Also

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:48 PM - 3 Comments

John Geddes and I have a piece about where Stephen Harper might (must?) go from here.

The most interesting insight contained therein might belong to Tim Powers. To wit.

“What Harper has proven to be is the right character for the drama … And he’s played different roles and played them well.”

That might be the best two-sentence summation of Stephen Harper yet offered. Granted, it might also be the best two-sentence summation of any successful politician.

BTC: Necessary reads

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:39 PM - 0 Comments

Three important pieces from this week’s ole fashioned magazine. (Though obviously every piece in every issue of the magazine is important.)

First, our Michael Petrou visits with the Afghan ambassador and learns that the Prime Minister offered that country no advanced warning of Canada’s latest position on troop withdrawal. (If that shows up on the front page of the Globe in the next few weeks, remember you heard it here first.)

Second, Michael Friscolanti investigates the state of our food safety system. (Will putting it on our cover finally provoke a serious discussion of the matter in Ottawa? Probably not.)

Third, Nick Kohler looks at why we can’t have big political rallies. (While you read, keep in mind the importance some place on these head counts.)

Megapundit: The meaning of Jim Prentice

By selley - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 7 Comments

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on the David Frost trial; Colby Cosh on what to do with murderers; Richard Gwyn on the global economy; Dan Gardner on young jihadis; Lorne Gunter on Tasers; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle.

Brave new world?
With Stephen Harper’s cabinet successfully shuffled, it’s time to play cards.

The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson seems fairly pleased by Harper’s choices, calling Steven Fletcher’s promotion “heartwarming” and well-deserved, appreciating the redeployment of Peter Van Loan and John Baird to less partisan positions and suggesting if anyone can strengthen the Conservatives’ woeful climate change plan, it’s probably Jim Prentice. His one lament is that the cabinet “contains not a single multicultural Canadian, despite the impressive Conservative gains in some of those communities.” (This seems a tad unfair to Bev Oda, we have to say.)

The National Post‘s John Ivison likens the new dream team to “a Volvo—safe and reliable but not particularly sexy,” and designed to instil confidence in its owners (i.e., Canadians). He didn’t promote anyone “beyond their level of competence or experience,” in other words, and “prudence” was the guiding principle for the major portfolios that got shuffled. Ivison doesn’t quite buy the party spin on Prentice’s appointment, however—i.e., that “his reward for having done a good job in a difficult portfolio, is another difficult portfolio.” He’s “said to be unhappy with the move,” for one thing, and “reduce[ing] emissions without harming the energy industry” is less “difficult” than it is “impossible.” Ivison still believes Prentice’s leadership ambitions, or Harper’s perceptions thereof, played a role.

Continue…

Meet Canada's best friend

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:22 PM - 10 Comments

“If you aren’t with us, you are an asshole!”

-Pierre Falardeau, 1996

Last week, Quebec filmmaker Pierre Falardeau used his inaugural column in Ici Magazine to call David Suzuki a “bearded little Jap.” Mr. Suzuki’s alleged transgression was to have said–in Montreal and, horror of horrors, in English–that he was “disappointed” in Quebecers for having voted Conservative in the recent federal election. To wit: “A bearded little Jap, another bothersome shit from the west coast, a veritable Professeur Tournesol of the environmental movement, stopped in Montreal to tell us, in English, that he’s disappointed with Quebecers. Stay at home, you, and leave us be with your colonialist scorn.”

It was pretty a pretty tired, as far as Falardeau goes. The man who used to pursue real colonial types–Le Temps des Bouffons is one of the more eloquent bursts of scalding outrage I have ever seen–is apparently now content with vapid sequels to past glories. In between these non-efforts, he excoriates politicians well after they’re dead (classy, and less lawsuit-prone!) and race baits world renowned environmentalists. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

All of this should be music to Canada’s ears.

Continue…

Another brave Iranian democrat

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 1:41 PM - 5 Comments

I first met Akbar Ganji, one of Iran’s most famous dissidents, two years ago at a vigil outside BBC World Service’s Bush House building in London. He had been recently released from prison in Iran after six years, during which he was often on hunger strike. Ganji made point of voicing his support for Ramin Jahanbegloo, the Iranian-Canadian professor then in an Iranian jail, while cautioning against singling out one man when “the entire Iranian nation is in a prison.” 

Ganji is a prolific writer. While in prison, he smuggled out a “Republican Manifesto” for a democratic Iran, and this April he published his first book in English. His essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs argues that real power in Iran rests with the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. It follows that our obsession with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is misguided, as little will change when he is replaced: 

“Next June, Iran is expected to hold a presidential election. However, given the country’s structure of power and, especially, Khamenei’s hold on power, it is unlikely to significantly change either Iran’s domestic policy or its foreign policy. Real change will come later, and only when Iranians figure out how to move beyond the current sultanistic regime. In systems such as Iran’s, the transition to democracy depends on whether reformists can find enough room to maneuver among the ruler’s relationships with state bodies (especially the military), social elites, and foreign powers so as to create various social movements and then use those to inch the country toward democracy.”

BTC: How much is that cabinet in the window?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 1:00 PM - 12 Comments

Canada’s new ministry is 37 strong. Twenty-four ministers. Twelve ministers of state. One government house leader.

Ministers and ministers of state each make $74,400 in addition to their base salaries as MPs. The official pay scale makes no specific allowance for government house leaders, but as they are listed within the ministry, let’s assume they are entitled to the same bonus. Ministers also receive a $2,122 car allowance.

If our math is correct—and not affording Jay Hill a car allowance—that puts the total tab for this cabinet at $2,803,728.

For the sake of comparison, Stephen Harper’s first cabinet numbered 26. Twenty-four ministers. One leader of the government in the Senate. One President of the Treasury Board. Using this year’s pay scale, that cabinet would have cost the government $1,985,328. 

A difference of $818,400.

In other news, Jim Flaherty is warning public sector employees not to expect large wage increases whenever their next contracts need to be negotiated. “We are confident,” he said this week, “that every stakeholder involved in the process of setting public-sector compensation will show commitment and accountability to act in the public interest and strike the proper balance.”

NDP rabble rousers

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 12:48 PM - 12 Comments

The left wing indie media news site www.rabble.ca held a party at the Steam Whistle brewery in Toronto to launch the redsign of their website. NDP MPs and candidates in the last election were out in force. Below is Toronto NDP candidate Marilyn Churley (left), former MP Peggy Nash (centre), who lost to Liberal Gerard Kennedy, and Montreal’s Anne Lagacé Dowson (right), a CBC radio host, who lost to former astronaut Marc Garneau.

Toronto MP Olivia Chow.

Continue…

War Criminals Old and New

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 11:25 AM - 30 Comments

All things considered, Helmut Oberlander, the 84-year-old veteran of a Second World War Nazi killing squad who has just been stripped of his Canadian citizenship and ordered deported, is extraordinarily lucky to have lived this long.

As a child, he first survived Stalin’s state-manufactured famine that killed more than two million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. Ethnic Germans such as Oberlander living in the Soviet Union were targeted during Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, but Oberlander survived these as well. The odds against his long life grew even longer the moment Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia, where many were worked to death. Oberlander avoided this. He also avoided the fate of the more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died fighting the invading Germans, or under their devastating occupation. Instead, he was drafted by the German army in 1941 and put to work as an interpreter for an Einsatzkommando mobile killing squad, a subgroup of the Einsatzgruppen task forces that murdered hundreds of thousands of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars – usually by shooting the victims into mass graves. Oberlander’s unit was also issued a poison gas van.

How much choice the 17-year-old Oberlander had in his assignment is debatable. Many Ukrainians willingly collaborated with and fought for the Germans, whom they initially saw as liberators from a regime that had intentionally starved so many of them to death. More fought against them, recognizing Nazi Germany as a regime of unmatched genocidal brutality. There is no evidence that Oberlander ever killed anyone himself. The Federal Court judge who upheld his deportation order concluded that hiding his past involvement in a Nazi death squad deprived Oberlander of the right to Canadian citizenship. Continue…

From the magazine: special Halloween edition

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 10:42 AM - 29 Comments

This corner is in receipt of Mr. Paul Martin Jr.’s autobiography, Hell or High Water. Longtime readers will perhaps not be entirely surprised by the review.

Iggymania? Better: Iggy sanity

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 8:44 AM - 56 Comments

One thing Michael Ignatieff needs to do, if he is to have a better convention next spring than in 2006, is to demonstrate that his support has grown. Because in 2006, it hit a medium-high ceiling and didn’t budge past that. So the news that he has lined up new muscle is significant. I like the tidbit that Steve MacKinnon sided with Ignatieff before MacKinnon’s fellow New Brunswicker, Frank McKenna, announced he was out. Among Liberals who knew McKenna wasn’t serious, a disproportionate number were New Brunswickers. Among those who were easily duped, a disproportionate number were David Peterson.

The world is too much with us, like it or not

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 8:32 AM - 51 Comments

In Washington, the staff of two presidential candidates are told the situation is getting worse in Afghanistan; that on the ground, it will be like an eternity waiting for Inauguration Day in January; and that whoever wins had better have a recovery plan ready to execute by then, because it will already be very late by then.

When I visited Afghanistan a year ago, we were given a range of optimistic and pessimistic medium-term possible futures. There was a general sense that NATO and the rest of the international community had waited a perilously long time to deal with some fundamentals, like training the police and judiciary, and the smaller number of pessimists spoke with more conviction than the larger number of optimists. But there was still a lot of hope. Since then, much of what we were told could go wrong has gone wrong.

A housekeeping note: comments are open.

special caption challenge: joe the plumber edition

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 6:47 AM - 40 Comments

For me, Fridays during American football season are typically spent over at the Couch Boys blog, quite possibly the only NFL picks on the Internet to include references to Matthew McConaughey, Tony Randall, Dom DeLuise’s nudity, John Mayer’s crotch and Scott Reid’s incompetence.

But this photograph cannot go uncaptioned upon. Submit your entries below in the comments section. Winner gets something nice – promise. (And while we’re at it, let’s give some credit to John McCain: they say he’s old but the man is still able to simultaneously execute two different hand gestures: the “thumbs-up” and the “hey, look at him.” Your move, Obama).

nfl picks: what the raiders have in common with john mayer’s crotch

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 6:30 AM - 0 Comments

Scott Feschuk
Last week: 8-5-1
Season: 59-52-4

Scott Reid
Last week: 4-9-1
Season: 49-62-4

SR: It’s Halloween. And so far, my season is about as inspiring as Saw VII: The Bloody Stump. So I’ve decided that its time to try something new. To change my system. Three words: No Naked Prognosticating. And so, with an eye to a less chilly but more successful second half to the 2008 regular season, I offer the following thoughts that do not stick to a leather chair.

SF: Golly, you are just awful at this, aren’t you? I mean, I’m no Jimmy the Greek or anything – but you, you couldn’t pick your way out of a walk-in closet. Hmm, should I open the door or run pointlessly and repeatedly into this solid wall? Thwack! Ow! Thwack! Owwww! [Brief break to think things through.] Thwack! OWWWWW! Let’s see how non-great you do this week…

Miami (plus 3.5) at Denver
SF: The big question here is how the Broncos, coming off a bye, will respond to their thrashing two weeks ago at the hands of the Patriots. Will they rise up like characters in a Matthew McConaughey sports movie or will they break down, weep and beg for mercy like people forced to watch a Matthew McConaughey sports movie? Pick: Denver.
SR: We ain’t Marshall. We are Miami. And we are not as good as Denver – especially at Mile High. So break out the bongo drums, nudity and Continue…

Calling Sarah Silverman

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 11:39 PM - 0 Comments

A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

link

h/t

Megapundit Extra: Line of the day

By selley - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 4:52 PM - 7 Comments

…goes to David Menzies over at the National Post Full Comment blog, where he skewers the Toronto District School Board’s impossibly fussbudgety Halloween guidelines—sorry, Black and Orange Day guidelines. One TDSB warning: “The images and icons associated with consumer-oriented Halloween can come into conflict with some students’ and their families’ religious beliefs.”

Menzies asks: “Does dressing up as a zombie mock the resurrection of Christ?”

SCRUBS + FAMILY TIES = SPIN CITY

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 4:49 PM - 1 Comment

One of Tuesday’s big TV-on-DVD releases is Shout! Factory’s set of Spin City: Season 1. This was not the best season of the show (not the worst, either, since it’s not the Charlie Sheen season), but it gets better as it goes along, and Shout! has done a great job on the extras: a long making-of featurette with just about everybody participating, commentaries from most of the main actors, and two separate commentaries on the pilot, one by director Tommy Schlamme and the other by creators Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties) and Bill Lawrence (Scrubs).

I don’t think either of the creators are, or should be, as well known for this show as they are for their better-known solo creations; it was just a solid show from a time when ensemble office comedies were Continue…