Caption Challenge: Special “If I lose my job as PM I'm a shoo-in for the Rockettes” Edition

By Scott Feschuk - Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 65 Comments

There are times when I make the decision to hold a Caption Challenge. And then there are times when the decision is made for me – in this case by Stephen Harper, who really left me no choice the instant his right foot left the ground. At this rate, the next time Harper drops his kid off at school for the cameras, he’ll do so not with a handshake but a Busby Berkeley musical number.

In a spirit of nonpartisanship, permit me to acknowledge the Prime Minister’s remarkable range of motion and straightness of leg. Deeply impressive, and I’m not even kidding. Turns out it’s not just his political ideology that’s completely flexible.

So make with the captions already. This challenge closes Monday afternoon, at which time a winner will be declared by a jury of me. Prizery will ensue.

That speech is so money… Washington baby, Washington!

By Scott Feschuk - Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 5:57 AM - 1 Comment

Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, the man who helped craft the new President’s memorable inaugural address, has been described in the press as a 27-year-old “baby-faced wunderkind.” But what if Obama’s inauguration speech had been written by the Jon Favreau from Swingers?

America, my name is Barack Obama. We met over the course of the past few years, and I just wanted to let you know that I had a really great time. It would be really great if we could stay in touch. And I love America and – [Applause].

You know what, there was some applause there and I’m not sure you heard what I said just now, so let me repeat – had a great time, great if we could stay in touch. Anyway, sorry to drone on and everything. But like I say, I love Ameri— [Applause].

IloveAmerica! There – just wanted to get that in to be sure you heard it. And I know you love America too. So we should hang out together and see where it goes. Where it takes us, you know. No expectations, no pressure. Let’s just see what happens. OK? Great. Thanks a lot. That’s it.

[Obama begins to walk from the podium, then turns and races back.]

I’ve just got out of a two-year primary race and Continue…

Weekend Flop Viewing: ANGIE

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 11:36 PM - 5 Comments

Here’s a show that’s fairly well-known and well-remembered for something that only ran a season and a half. If you’ve never seen it, you may still be familiar with the theme song, which became a pop hit at the time (“Different Worlds,” written by Gimbel and Fox and sung by Maureen McGovern), and you’ll certainly be familiar with some of the stars: Donna Pescow (just after Saturday Night Fever), Robert Hays (just before Airplane) and Doris Roberts (in her first role as a full-time regular on a series). But the reason it’s better-known than most flops is that for half a season, when it arrived as a midseason replacement, it was actually a hit, and a pretty solid hit at that.

The concept for the show — a Cinderella story about a waitress (Pescow) who gets engaged to a blueblood (Hays) — is credited to Garry Marshall (though he was not involved with the actual series) and his Mork and Mindy co-creator Dale McRaven. The series itself was developed by the team of Alan Eisenstock and Larry Mintz and the showrunner was Bob Ellison, one of the writers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was a big project for producers Tom Miller, Ed Milkis, and their newest producing partner, Bob Boyett, but it tried to be more upscale and adult-skewing than their usual product, probably because ABC had just started Taxi at the time, and for the first time in years, the network was looking for shows aimed at grown-ups.

When the show started its second (and first full) season, it fell victim to the kind of panicky, pointless re-tooling that also destroyed Mork and Mindy at the same time. So not only were Angie and her Prince Charming married off more quickly than originally intended, but Angie got a new place to work; two characters were dropped; and Ellison was replaced as showrunner. The show was also moved to an uncongenial time slot, reportedly because the network wanted to save the faltering Laverne and Shirley by putting it in Angie‘s more desirable slot. Angie‘s first full season was its last.

It still has a strong reputation among those who watched it in its half-season of success. This is the first episode, and it’s hard to tell from first episodes, but I find the mix of styles to be very awkward: it wants to be a smart comedy like Mary Tyler Moore, but it also wants to be a Miller-Milkis-Boyett type of show with broad punchlines and big swathes of orchestral music at the big moments. But the cast is excellent: Pescow and Hays are good together and both should have had bigger careers than they did, and they’re well-supported by Roberts, Sharon Spelman, and the late Debralee Scott (Welcome Back, Kotter). Incidentally, Hays was the only non-female regular on this show.

Theme song and Part 1:

Part 2 (note that the “I’ll have what he/she’s having” joke was already old by this time, and is way older than When Harry Met Sally):

Part 3 (which for some reason carries over half of the part 2 clip; the new scene starts at 2:34):

Fortune and Finance Minister at Dragon Ball

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 10:38 PM - 5 Comments

The 20^th annual Dragon Ball in Toronto celebrated the year of the ox. The proceeds from this gala went to the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care.

Jim Flaherty chats with Michael Igantieff.

Flaherty and Christine Elliott, his wife and and an Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP.

Continue…

Random Thoughts On Upcoming Episodes I Haven't Seen Yet

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 10:37 PM - 0 Comments

Just some thoughts that come to mind while browsing next week’s TV listings at the invaluable Futon Critic:

- The Futon Critic himself has a review of the post-Super-Bowl The Office episode.

- I still don’t get why Lie To Me feels a need to have two mysteries per episode. (This episode is a replacement for the actual third episode, which got delayed, and which also has two mysteries.) They’re just going to double the risk of running out of plausible mysteries, all the while jamming every episode so full of mystery-solving that there’s no time for character moments. House may be formulaic, but the “meanwhile” from its upcoming 100th episode is a character-based subplot, not a slightly lighter version of the main mystery.

- What does Damages have in common with Two and a Half Men? They both title every episode after a line of dialogue from the episode that only makes sense when you hear it in context. (Damages‘ next episode is called “I Agree, It Wasn’t Funny”; Men‘s next episode is called “David Copperfield Slipped Me a Roofie.”)

- Speaking of Two and a Half Men, next time you watch one of Chuck Lorre’s shows, note that his shows use writing credits differently from almost any other prime-time show. Every episode of his two shows has both a “story by” and “teleplay by” credit (except for the pilots) distributed among different members of the writing staff. Apparently Lorre decided to more or less eliminate the first draft and the corresponding “written by” credit; the episodes are almost entirely written in the room, and then the episode assigns story and teleplay credit (and therefore royalties) to several writers. NewsRadio used that system too in some of its episodes, but not all.

- I know Knight Rider is going to be canceled and deserves to be, but plot descriptions like next week’s make me wish that they’d done the retool (dropping the terrorist-fighting stuff and getting back to cheesy ’80s-style stories) earlier. This story, you’ve got to admit, is a real Knight Rider story in every way:

Mike’s old Army friend recruits his help to investigate the suspicious death of a tough-as-nails drill sergeant Jack Burber. Mike learns that the drill sergeant was participating in an underground fight club for military veterans for extra money. In order to find out what really happened, Mike has to infiltrate the fight club and try not to get himself killed in the ring.

Why couldn’t they have done stories like that in the first place? Then they might actually have become a (cheesy but entertaining) success.

- I look forward to any How I Met Your Mother episode that offers the opportunity for more Canada jokes.

Thank You, Oprah (Three Words I Never Thought I'd Say)

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 7:01 PM - 0 Comments

After Oprah Winfrey held a Mary Tyler Moore Show reunion last year and gave her audience copies of the four seasons that had been released on DVD up to that point, Fox announced that, due to the newfound Oprah-generated interest in the show, they were finally planning to release the rest of the series. And now TV Shows on DVD have learned that a complete Mary Tyler Moore series box will be released on May 5.

Yes, it is annoying that people who have already bought the first four seasons (or even Oprah audience members who got them for free) will have to buy them all over again if they want the last three, but I don’t think anybody believes at this point that Fox treats its fans well when it comes to its TV catalogue properties. It’s just a relief to have the series finished, particularly since the final three seasons include some, if not most, of the best episodes. (Mary Tyler Moore is an unusual case of a show that took a big creative leap forward after it had already been on for a while. After a great first episode, the first two seasons were very uneven and have a surprising number of episodes that either don’t hold up or don’t work very well in structural terms. The third season unveiled a smarter, sharper style of writing and storytelling, and the writing kept getting better for several years thereafter, with maybe a slight falling-off in the final season. The departures of Rhoda and Phyllis for their own spinoffs didn’t really hurt much, because it just shifted the focus more to the ensemble workplace stuff, which was always more interesting than Mary’s home life and non-work-related friendships.)

What the budget means for Quebec

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 6:09 PM - 48 Comments

Budget day brought mostly bad news for the province: The cap on equalization stayed in, the boost in EI benefits was meagre, and the feds said they would forge ahead with a national securities regulator. Granted, there was some cash doled out to the forestry sector and Quebec will benefit from some of programs to shore up manufacturing. But the real winner at the end of budget day is Ontario. Whereas Quebec was once the object of Ottawa’s affection, Dalton “small man of Confederation” McGuinty (a.k.a. Premier Dad) is finally getting a bit of love from the Tories.

Continue…

Today in the Senate: Let's undo what we never did in the first place

By Andrew Potter - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 5:58 PM - 13 Comments

Lowell Murray wants to repeal the fixed election date law:

Therefore, honourable senators, I conclude — and some of us concluded in advance, when Bill C-16 was before us — that the law supposedly establishing fixed election dates in this country is literally “non sense;” it is a nullity. To borrow the memorable words of Mr. Bumble from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist: “The law” — that law — “is an ass.”

…

The bill that we passed into law is a facade. It is misleading; I would almost say it was intended to mislead. In any case, it is of no force or effect.

link

Some of us made this point at the time:

In the end, what this bill amounts to is a promise by a majority government not to engineer an election for four years, unless circumstances make it necessary to do so. As far as I can tell, this is not a departure from current practice, but an endorsement of it. In which case, all Harper is proposing to do is shorten the standard term from five years to four.

(Thanks to Stephen MacLean for the heads up)

MUSIC: Nézet-Séguin. It rhymes with "busy"

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 5:52 PM - 1 Comment

We here offer one of our periodic updates on the peripatetic Montreal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who’s doing a residence in Scotland. The guy at The Herald is smitten — “utterly charming… a giant… phenomenal… a natural” — and he updates us on YNS’s schedule: Rotterdam, London, Salzburg, Philadelphia, Boston, LA (an orchestra that favours young hotshots), Vienna — a mighty orchestra whose musicians decide which conductors to invite, and which will follow YNS through Mozart’s Requiem — Berlin, Chicago, Cleveland, Zurich…

There aren’t a lot of Canadians who’ve reached this level of international prominence at this age (he’s 33) in any field. (Here‘s his website.) I’ve seen him conduct only once so far, with the National Arts Centre Orchestra last spring. He conducted Brahms, Linda Bouchard and Gershwin — the Concerto in F with Marc-André Hamelin, surprisingly the first time the two had shared a stage. It was the Brahms Fourth Symphony that was most surprising and impressive to my ears, because he took the opening at a slower tempo than I’m used to hearing it — revelling in melody and texture instead of fireworks. A most un-showoff-y stance for a guy with a wunderkind reputation. In this piece for La Presse (warning: it is written in a language other than English), the Rotterdam musicians say they’re looking forward to his discipline and attention to detail after several years under the baton of Valery Gergiev, whose many virtues do not include a fondness for rehearsing.

He still gets back to Montreal to direct the Orchestre Métropolitain, which started as a community orchestra and which he has pushed further than anyone could have expected.

All politics is personal

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 4:58 PM - 7 Comments

Reading over a Carleton paper—previously cited here for failing to reference Omar Khadr—on how we might best ingratiate ourselves to the American administration and the most interesting point might be the one that ignores all matters of serious policy.

To wit. Continue…

Sikhs and hard hats: let freedom reign

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 4:41 PM - 49 Comments

Here’s a brave prediction: Deepinder Loomba will win his case at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The Sikh security guard evidently hit a wall of refusal (and ridicule) when he advised the folks at a Home Depot construction site in Milton, Ont., that he couldn’t trade his turban for a hard hat. If there’s one thing the courts have been clear on in this country, it’s that an employer has to try—that’s what the loaded phrase “reasonable accommodation” means. The bosses must make a sincere attempt to reconcile religious requirements with the other laws they’re required to follow.

Still, the 50-year-old has plunged us back into the bramble patch of safety versus religious freedom. And his case may well force us to consider our responsibility to each other in new ways. What onus, it implicitly asks, do we have to stop someone from exposing himself to risk? If, as courts seem increasingly disposed to rule, religious freedom outweighs the potential costs to society, what’s an employer to say? The answer in many such cases in the future may be: “Suit yourself.”

To be clear, we’re not there yet. “Across the entire country, hard hats are required not only for safety but insurance reasons,” notes Bill Ferreira, who speaks for the Canadian Construction Association. “In this case, safety trumps religious freedom.” Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1985 that a Sikh railway worker named Karnail Singh Bhinder was required to wear a hard hat on the job, apparently putting the matter to rest.

Then, as more such cases arose, a funny thing happened. The legal community took a harder look at the real implications of exempting people from helmet or hard-hat laws. The revision was prompted by a dissent to Bhinder written by then-Chief Justice Brian Dickson. In it, he noted that there was negligible risk to Karnail Bhinder, no cost to the employer and, most important, no risk to anyone else. “The dissent is considered in legal circles to be more persuasive,” says Bruce Ryder, a professor at Osgoode Hall law school who has studied human rights and religious freedom. “He concluded that it was an easy case for reasonable accommodation,” because there was no undue hardship on the employer or Bhinder’s co-workers.

By 1990, the high court had turned 180 degrees, concluding that the reasoning in Bhinder was “no longer representative of the law,” (though they stopped short of actually reversing Bhinder’s hard-hat requirement). The door was officially opened. Challenges to motorcycle helmet laws would follow—B.C. and Manitoba created exemptions for religious headwear, while an Ontario judge recently upheld a ticket to a Sikh man caught riding helmetless; his case is now under appeal. Workers at a B.C. sawmill, meanwhile, have challenged hard-hat requirements in that province, and have a good chance of having the occupational safety laws in that province rewritten.

This new wave of thinking hangs on an intriguing—and more libertarian—take on religious freedom as it pertains to safety. “Not wearing a hard hat doesn’t jeopardize anyone else’s safety, ” says Ryder. “If risk to others [in the workplace] is very low, the right answer may be to say this is a matter of individual choice.” To understand how this is possible, it’s important to remember that human rights decisions supersede other laws. That means a Sikh who wins an exemption from hard-hat rules will not be able to sue due to the absence of his hard hat. His decision should not, therefore, dramatically inflate employers’ insurance premiums, and the standard concern about these exemptions creating “undue hardship” on employers will be moot.

The costs to the rest of society are another matter. As the provincial court judge hearing the Ontario motorcycle helmet case noted, the cost of treating devastating brain injuries is enormous. So too is the burden on family members who lose a loved one to head injury. The state, therefore, has a legitimate interest in keeping people safe. Moreover, how does one assess the potential risks and expenses on a site-by-site, worker-by-worker basis? What are the risks on, say, a construction site, where a worker may split his time between an office trailer and a yard of swinging I-beams? Making the calculation itself could become a hardship.

By comparison, Loomba’s case seems fairly clear-cut. He had what amounted to a desk job outside the entrance to the main construction zone, watching other employees walk by to pick up their hard hats. How often he ventured into an area where nail guns were sounding is in dispute. The real question, though, is whether we should bother to dispute it. If an employee wants to wear a turban, and is made aware of the risks, why not let him make the call?

Michael Ignatieff Maverick Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:56 PM - 8 Comments

There seems to be some gnashing of teeth over Michael Ignatieff’s apparent efforts to enforce discipline on his Liberal side.

But then he would seem to be proving a rather tolerant authoritarian, wouldn’t he? What with two rookies MPs now freely talking of voting in contradiction of the leader’s stated position, and Glen Pearson still possessing access to WordPress.

From Pearson’s latest post. Continue…

Networks Really Don't Want Long Title Sequences

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:51 PM - 7 Comments

One thing about Fox’s experiment with longer running times (and shorter commercial breaks) is that it’s given us a chance to see that the shortening of main title sequences is not just due to the ridiculously short running times: networks really don’t seem to want full-length title sequences. Even with 49-50 minutes to fill, Fringe has a main title that runs under 30 seconds. And while the main title of Dollhouse has not been completed yet, the screener DVD has a caption in the appropriate place that says “30 second title sequence” — meaning that the amount of time they’re planning to devote to the main title is less than the sequences for Buffy or Angel, which had much shorter running times to worth with. These shows have enough time to fill that a traditional main title, of a minute or more, would actually help save money and perhaps cut down on redundancy in the episodes themselves — Fringe episodes could stand to be a little tighter — but they don’t. Which suggests that the network genuinely prefers short title sequences, regardless of how much commercial time they need to sell.

If networks really do want short titles, the most obvious explanation is fear that viewers will change the channel during a long main title. (This is also one of the reasons why no show has the main title at the beginning followed by commercials, which used to be standard practice.) It’s short-sighted, though. You can get a good title sequence in a short space of time — The Dick Van Dyke Show‘s is only 20 seconds — but it’s harder, and it’s especially hard to develop a good theme song in that amount of time. A longer title sequence can do one of three things: it can give the show an epic, movie-like feel, the way HBO’s titles do; it can make the theme song a hit; or it can introduce the new viewer to the characters, actors and highlights from the show without the boredom of a “previously on…”. All this, and it saves some money on the amount of footage you have to shoot for the episode proper. If Fox continues its experiment, and I hope it does, I hope some producer talks them into giving him a minute’s worth of theme music and clips. It’s worth it.

British Columbia's long provincial nightmare is over

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:27 PM - 5 Comments

Surely to the relief of the Globe’s Vancouver bureau, Michael Ignatieff has given Ujjal Dosanjh a fancy new title.

Let this gaping wound in our national unity now begin to heal.

Hey, look

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:15 PM - 5 Comments

New Wells column.

NFL Picks: The Super Bowl of football games

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:13 PM - 5 Comments

Scott Feschuk
Two weeks ago: 2-0
Playoffs: 4-6

Scott Reid
Two weeks ago: 1-1
Playoffs: 6-4

Scott Feschuk: So it all comes down to this – the championship of the 2008 National Football League season, the Super Bowl of football games, the annual event that through threat of lawsuit humiliates its non-sponsors into using vague expressions like “The Big Game,” “The Big One in Tampa” or “That Thing With the Fat Guys In It” in their advertising.

How big an occasion is this? NBC’s pregame show will feature an 11-man studio panel – the biggest in league history if you don’t count Brent Musburger’s multiple personalities. That’s right, eleven! Bob Costas will be joined Sunday by Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis, Tiki Barber, Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, Peter King, Matt Millen, Mike Holmgren, Tony Dungy and, I believe, Blitzen.

(As an aside: remind me why I should ever believe a word of analysis that comes out of the mouth of Continue…

Budget '09: This ain't Right

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 1:55 PM - 17 Comments

How’s this for a Conservative nightmare? Billions to new regional-development programs, failing industries, employment insurance, social housing, and, ahem, the arts? Millions for a train to nowhere in northern Manitoba? Another $12 million for Quebec cruise ships? In B.C. and Alberta, mayors and premiers also went home happy. In fact, in western Canada, some of the loudest complaints about Stephen Harper’s budget are coming from within the fold. “The Conservatives escaped to fight another day, but what are they fighting for?” former Tory Cabinet minister Monte Solberg wondered yesterday in Vancouver. The Conservative stalwart, who likened Harper’s “dripping red” budget to a “terrible phantasm,” unleashed to “torment” conservatives, worries that Harper has “sacrificed balanced budgets on the alter of political expediency.” Continue…

Our secretly Irish anthem

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 1:54 PM - 65 Comments

The Conservatives made a minor fuss today about the New Brunswick school principal who decided—a year ago, mind you—to stop playing the national anthem before class each day. 

“It is a song that belongs to each and every Canadian,” proclaimed Mike Allen in the House.

“I was very saddened to hear that the principal of a New Brunswick school has banned the singing of O Canada,” moped Tilly O’Neill-Gordon.

“As a Canadian and a proud Canadian I believe that we should celebrate our country,” Keith Ashfield explained to reporters.

All of which is very edifying. Although, it would perhaps be easier to take their noble defense of our national song seriously if the party hadn’t just dispatched a press release that inserts a previously undisclosed apostrophe into the anthem’s title. Continue…

Why this stimulus stuff will all soon be forgotten

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 79 Comments

Hello? I am here to lodge a complaint on behalf of the Campaign Reporters’ Guild under Section 2. (a) of the Grievance Manual, “Time Utterly Wasted on the Campaign Trail.”

I will have you know I was there in Winnipeg. I was there at the vegetable distribution plant. I was not alone. There had to be two dozen fully accredited campaign reporters there, on that sunny morning in the second week of September. We got up early. We dressed warmly because a vegetable distribution plant is basically a big refrigerator. We stood around with our cameras and our digital recorders, amid the carrots and the turnips, and waited for nearly an hour for Stephen Harper to show up and make precisely one promise.

Continue…

Haitian nightmare

By Michael Petrou - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 12:55 PM - 7 Comments

Brenda Martin’s two years and two months at the Puente Grande women’s prison near Guadalajara, Mexico, were no doubt a punishing and emotionally damaging ordeal. She was placed on suicide watch last March, and her despair was apparent to anyone who listened to her speak to the media from prison.

But Martin, who was charged and eventually convicted of money laundering by Mexican authorities, was also the subject of an unprecedented and highly publicized campaign by Canadian politicians to have her released. Liberal MP Dan McTeague repeatedly called for government intervention in Martin’s case. Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism, twice visited Martin in jail. Conservative MP Rick Norlock joined him on one of those trips. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Mexican President Felipe Calderón to ask for his help on the case. Even Paul Martin, the former prime minister, visited Martin while he was in Mexico for a conference. When a deal was eventually negotiated for Martin’s transfer to a Canadian prison, the government sent a private jet to retrieve her, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $80,000. The Canadian government also agreed to pay her $3,441 fine. She was released on parole from Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., last May, about a week after arriving, and is now free.

Continue…

Christopher Plummer time capsule

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 12:45 PM - 1 Comment

“I’ve always refused to have cameras come into the theatre,” says Christopher Plummer. “You can’t meddle with one medium, mixing it with another. But this time I thought I would let it go.” On Jan. 31, selected Cineplex movie theatres around the country will be showing the high-definition film of Plummer and Nikki M. James in Shaw’s comedy Caesar and Cleopatra, shot at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2008. That was a big year for Plummer, since it also saw the publication of his autobiography, In Spite of Myself, the story of his 50-plus-year career as one of the most famous actors Canada has ever produced. But what he’s most famous for isn’t Shakespeare or Shaw. As the 79-year-old star told Maclean’s: “The Sound of Music still gets me good tables in restaurants, but otherwise, it’s not my most noble moment.”

That’s where Caesar and Cleopatra comes in. It’s a stage-to-film transcription patterned after the Metropolitan Opera’s series of opera screenings, where a live stage production is recorded with multiple high-definition cameras and then shown to a multiplex audience. The film’s producer, Barry Avrich, enthuses that this is the way to preserve a great performance for posterity in a form that’s actually watchable: “It takes a lost art, makes it a brilliant treasure forever.” And it might introduce larger audiences to the kind of acting that made Plummer a major star.
Continue…

What Would Be Better, An ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT movie or a TAXI movie?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 12:33 PM - 2 Comments

I’m happy that Michael Cera appears to have dropped his opposition to doing an Arrested Development movie (I can’t be the only one who got the impression that this was all a bit of Kabuki to call attention to himself or the project; it never really seemed likely that he wouldn’t come back), but even though this is less likely, it actually intrigues me more:

DANNY DEVITO is hailing a cab all the way to the movies – he wants his hit TV show TAXI to be revamped as a reunion film.
Continue…

UPDATED: One of Those Periodic ITQ Polls: If you were Liberal leader, what would you do?

By kadyomalley - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 12:18 PM - 65 Comments

About the  Newfoundlandian uprising apparently underway in caucus, that is.

UPDATE – From Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale’s post-QP scrum:

Question:       Mr. Goodale, will there be punishment for two Newfoundland MP’s or perhaps more?

Ralph Goodale:  We’re, we’re discussing those issues in our, in our caucus at the moment.  The, the issue affecting Newfoundland and Labrador is a, is a serious issue.  Our Members of Parliament are very vigorous in representing their, their constituents and the issue is, is being thorough discussed internally at the moment and there’s nothing really further to say at this time.

Question:       Well can, can they vote against the budget?  Yes or no?

Ralph Goodale:  The issue is being discussed internally within our caucus.  You saw today from Question Period that the, the government seemed to be a little bit nonplussed about the exact nature of the issue that’s being raised here.  They kept giving answers with respect to equalization where the, the issue is related to the Atlantic Accord, and the two are separate.  I have a bit of a history on that file so I understand the distinction here and, and the government I think is being, is being a little bit cute with the language, trying to answer a question that wasn’t asked.

Mr. Byrne was very clear today.  He was talking about the natural resources exclusion rate and the effect of that on the accord arithmetic not on the equalization arithmetic.  And the government, now it was the Parliamentary Secretary that was answering, perhaps he didn’t understand that subtle distinction.  It is an important distinction and it may be that the, the government has some further homework to do here.  Our MP’s are, are doing their job and they’re representing their constituents and all other matters are being discussed internally within our caucus. [...]

Question:       Mr. Goodale, this question of Newfoundland and you were saying there even there, they’re not answering the question and all that says.  So what kind of a bind are Newfoundland and Labrador MP’s in if there’s no change?

Ralph Goodale:  Well, this is, this is a serious issue.  We’re not going to cross bridges till we come to them.  The point is what appears to be a, a mistake has been identified.  We’re going to go to work on that and do our very best to, to represent the public interest in this country.  Our MP’s have been, have been very vigorous and we expect them to do their job.  We’ll cross further bridges when we come to it, but the point is, and let me go back to our broad amendment about, about accountability, one of the, one of the tests that is in that amendment is fairness to all regions of the country.  That’s explicitly written in our amendment.

So if the, if the government, in addressing this issue, and bear in mind the source of this information is not the budget documents per se so far.  The source of this information is a financial briefing given by Finance officials to the officials in Premier Danny Williams’s office.  It’s, this is where this controversy has arisen.  So if, if, if the briefing is accurate or if Danny Williams is interpreting it accurately, the place where we will see the hard information would be in the budget implementation bill.  So let’s, let’s see what the government actually tables in terms of that bill.

Question:       But you call it a mistake.  You don’t want to endorse a mistake, do you?

Ralph Goodale:  No.  No, obviously we would expect them to, to correct a mistake, but going back to the issue of fairness, if overall, as this, as this process moves forward over the next several weeks, if the government does not deliver on the, the test that we’ve established, protecting the vulnerable, protecting jobs, creating new jobs for the future, being fair to all regions, then we have the opportunity on future confidence motions to send them packing and that’s what that, that’s what that accountability amendment to the budget is intended to accomplish.

Travel as a second language

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments