This pothole repair brought to you by…

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 5:59 PM - 2 Comments

In an announcement that’s sure to leave many checking their calenders to see if its April Fool’s Day yet, Kentucky Fried Chicken is offering to help cities carry out road repairs, in exchange for stamping the words “Re-freshed by KFC” on the new pavement. The chalk stencil message will wash away with the first heavy downpour. But they’re clearly onto something. With cash-strapped governments touting massive infrastructure spending, why not slap high profile but temporary advertisements on every project. The possibilities are endless: “This bridge span erected by Viagra” or public washrooms paid for by toilet paper companies. Oh, wait a minute, as Advertising Age points out in its story, that one’s already underway in Times Square.

Advertising Age

Sarkozy redesigns Paris

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 5:45 PM - 2 Comments

Last spring, President Nicolas Sarkozy asked teams of notable architects to reimagine Paris as a “world class city.” The teams have now come back with 10 visions for creating a metropolitan area known as Grand Paris—defining the boundaries as they saw fit but incorporating sustainable design techniques and a mix of housing for both rich and poor (one design called for a Parisian “Central Park,” while another called for gardens on five-square miles of rooftops). The last time Paris was redrawn on a large scale was in the 1850s.

Christian Science Monitor

Iggy, circa 1993

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 5:18 PM - 4 Comments

Brian Joseph Davis discovers a long lost zine interview with the Liberal leader.

“I feel my own writing isn’t plain enough yet and isn’t transparent enough yet. There’s too much kind of straining and pretending to be a writer in it. I love writing where it just feels so completely natural. So that makes me a great fan of Richard Ford and Raymond Carver and that school. Very, very fond of Don DeLillo.”

Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan IV: Paper trail

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:59 PM - 5 Comments

The White House releases the White Paper that guided today’s Af-Pak strategy announcements. Canada’s foreign minister responds:

“There are many elements of the plan set out in the review that Canada and Canadians would recognize from our own transformation of the mission in the past year, including an integrated military-civilian strategy complemented by a considerable increase in civilian staffing, a focus on benchmarking and an emphasis on more effectively building capacity of the Afghan Army and Police…

“We have said consistently that success in Afghanistan will never be achieved through military means alone. That is why Canada is investing significant effort on our areas of priority, bringing capacity building to Afghan National Security Forces, promoting governance and the rule of law, increasing access to basic services and supporting economic growth.”

ALSO BY INKLESS WELLS: Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan Part I,  Part II, Part III
ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: An exclusive photo gallery from Pakistan’s dangerous Swat Valley

Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan III: "No."

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:47 PM - 4 Comments

More from Holbrooke’s press briefing:

Q Can I ask about the question of corruption with regard to Pakistan? The President alluded today to some problems in getting Pakistanis to respond when we have high-level intelligence – or have intelligence about high-level terrorists, and he said, “We will insist that action be taken.” Does that mean if the Pakistanis will act we will not, and if they do not, we will?

AMBASSADOR HOLBROOKE: I just don’t think we can answer that question. It’s speculative, it’s hypothetical, and it would be deeply injurious to our national interest to speculate. But I appreciate the importance of the question, and that’s all we’re ready to say.

Q Can you say something about what the President meant by that?

AMBASSADOR HOLBROOKE: No.

ALSO BY INKLESS WELLS: Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan Part I, Part II, Part IV
ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: An exclusive photo gallery from Pakistan’s dangerous Swat Valley

Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan II: "A cancer eating away at the country"

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:30 PM - 16 Comments

From the press briefing that Luiza posted this morning, Richard Holbrooke on corruption:

I would just point you to the fact that no American chief executive has spoken about corruption this way ever before in open. Isn’t that a fair statement, Bruce? And on the way out, a former Assistant Secretary of State, who many of you know, but I better not give his name… he said to me, ‘I’ve been waiting six years to hear a speech like that, and the emphasis on corruption is essential.’ You’ve all been reporting it for years. We view it as a cancer eating away at the country and it has to be dealt with. And obviously we’re not going to lay out how we’re going to deal with it. To some extent, we don’t know yet… Continue…

Why he confessed

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:08 PM - 0 Comments

In his first jailhouse interview, Josef Fritzl, the man who this month pleaded guilty to enslaving his daughter in a basement dungeon, raping her 3,000 times, describes the moment he saw her in court. “I was suddenly so ashamed,” he tells the Austrian magazine News. “I would like to write a sympathetic book,” he adds. “Not for the public, only for her. I will try to explain why I acted in such a horrible way.” Fritzl fathered seven children with his captive daughter; the death of one shortly after birth lead to a murder conviction for the 73-year-old. “I tried to make life in the cellar as pleasant as possible for my second family–and in the course of the years, a partnership between my daughter and myself,” he says. Meanwhile, Fritzl’s wife and eldest son, who lived upstairs, have now been served summonses, with prosecutors saying they must have known of Fritzl’s secret family. “Every housewife, charwoman or curious child would someday find a hidden entrance to a cellar sooner or later, by accident or purposeful curiosity,” one lawyer said.

Telegraph

The Natasha Effect helps save a girl’s life

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 4:05 PM - 0 Comments

The repercussions of Natasha Richardson’s death from a minor fall on a ski hill at Mt. Tremblant, Que., are still being felt. Aside from the donation of her organs, Richardson’s tragedy may have saved a life by example. A seven-year-old Ohio girl seemed unharmed after being hit in the head by a baseball, but her parents—unnerved by the actress’s death—took her to hospital, where she underwent live-saving brain surgery. Meanwhile Richardson remains No. 1 on the Internet Movie Data Base Pro “Starmeter”—which measures online interest in celebrities.

ABC News

Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan I: Parsing the President's speech

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:58 PM - 12 Comments

I’m going to post a bunch of little observations on all of this. First I’m going through Barack Obama’s speech earlier today to pick out what seems important. Blanket observation: what’s been announced looks like a strategy, not just a bunch of moves, and it looks different, in several important ways, from what the U.S. has done until now in Afghanistan. Off we go.

“Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that Al Qaida is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan.”

The language here seems carefully chosen. The suggestion is that the situation in Pakistan is strategically comparable to the situation in Afghanistan in, say, August 2001: Pakistan is an inevitable theatre of operations, of some sort, for any U.S. government that wants to protect “the United States homeland.” The argument is that inaction now would be culpably negligent.

“For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world. But this is not simply an American problem, far from it. It is, instead, international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London, in Bali were tied to Al Qaida and its allies in Pakistan…. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or African city it, too, is likely to have ties to Al Qaida leadership in Pakistan. The safety of people around the world is at stake.”

This piles on the point made earlier, generalizes the threat — not just the U.S. homeland is threatened, Mr. and Mrs. World, but yours too — and, again, shifts the focus several dozen kilometres eastward, to the other side of the notional Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

“And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same. We will defeat you.”

ALSO BY INKLESS WELLS: Obama and Afghanistan/Pakistan Part II, Part III, Part IV
ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: An exclusive photo gallery from Pakistan’s dangerous Swat Valley

A contradiction of Stephen Harper’s assertion that the insurgents can’t be defeated? Not entirely, I think. Harper should have said, as he usually does, that they can’t be defeated militarily; and Obama isn’t claiming that the defeat he plans will be only military in nature. As we see a moment later when he says he wants to “enhance the military, governance, and economic capacity” of Afghanistan. Continue…

Hockey diplomacy

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments

Glen Pearson has lunch with the Russian ambassador.

A fascinating part of the discussion was his functioning relationship with Stephen Harper. Meeting the Prime Minister shortly after his victory in the 2006 election, they somehow wandered into the discussion of hockey and struck an immediate bond.  ”He has an adequate knowledge of Russian hockey and we sometimes just talk on the phone to discuss certain games,” he offered.  One of Mamedov’s prized possessions was an old hockey program from the 1976 series between Canada and Russia. Seeing the Prime Minister’s interest in the game, the ambassador presented the program as a gift to Stephen Harper, much to his delight. They have kept up frequent contact since.

'The most depressing thing you'll read today'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:42 PM - 0 Comments

Adam Radwanski points to John Geddes’ dispatch from Montreal.

Harper in the world

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:35 PM - 25 Comments

In our latest print edition, our man John Geddes explains the Prime Minister’s newfound fondness for going on the road to spread his message. Nut graf:

‘Beyond all the conference tables, watch for Harper to selectively use international media to assert his relevance. “It’s about directly engaging opinion leaders and policy makers,” said a senior government official. It’s also, of course, about finding ways to present Harper as a big-league statesman, at a time when his Conservative party is in trouble in the polls and facing, in Michael Ignatieff, a Liberal rival who’s easy to imagine fitting in comfortably on the international leaders’ circuit.’

David Akin’s Twitter feed from a PMO briefing demonstrates John’s point: “#pmharper in US for 2 days of questions from US media. Cdn media travelling with PM to G20/NATO get only 8 questions only over 4 days.”

The Macleans.ca Weekly News Quiz

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:33 PM - 0 Comments

 Take the quiz: click here.

Man of the world

By John Geddes - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:15 PM - 16 Comments

Remember last fall’s version of Stephen Harper? In campaign mode, his preferred setting was the backyard of an average-looking family. When it came to talking policy, he was all about cutting the tax on diesel, or giving parents a tax break for their kids’ music lessons. But that down-home guy hasn’t been seen lately. In his place, a retooled, internationally oriented Prime Minister has been repeatedly sighted. His favoured backdrop is the CNN set of Fareed Zakaria GPS, required viewing, not for most Canadians, but for foreign affairs buffs everywhere. His policy preoccupations tend toward international financial regulation and the future of NATO.

Harper’s image makeover may be as much a matter of necessity as choice. Last year’s financial meltdown, and the global recession it sparked, radically altered the political game. Suddenly, his playbook—easy-to-grasp tax cuts, always an eye to suburban family concerns—looked mostly irrelevant. So when President Barack Obama came calling in February, Harper was eager to reposition himself. Sharing the spotlight with the politician who personifies a new sort of globalism, he more than held his own. Soon he was in New York City, fielding Zakaria’s earnest questions and projecting a trenchant world view through the Wall Street Journal.

Continue…

Tweet, tweet! David Akin channels a PMO briefing …

By kadyomalley - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 2:37 PM - 7 Comments

It’s just like being there! Or so ITQ imagines, since she’s never actually gone to one of those famous background briefings by A Senior PMO Official.

Transcript: Q & A on details of Obama's Afghanistan plan

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 2:11 PM - 1 Comment

Below is the transcript of a briefing this morning by the chairman of Obama’s Afghanistan policy review, Bruce Riedel, as well as Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, and the undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Fournoy.

Continue…

PBOWatch: All roads lead to the Library Committee? Find a shortcut.

By kadyomalley - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 15 Comments

… if you’re Kevin Page, that is, and still hold out hope that your office might be able to get that budget boost you insist you were promised by the government.

From yesterday’s post-QP scrum with Liberal finance critic John McCallum:

Question:       Mr. McCallum, what do you make of the fact that they’re saying that they’re not cutting (off microphone) they are?

John McCallum:  Well I don’t think this is the first time we hear things that aren’t quite, quite true.  It’s clear that he had been promised a budget of $2.7 million and he was, found out he had $1.8 million.  My understanding is that when he accepted the job, that that was the deal worked out as something reasonable with which he could do the job.  And maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I would it’s a little suspicious that he makes the government forecast look so ridiculous, that they can be thrown into the garbage and simultaneously, the government cuts his budget by 50%, by one third.

So I think he’s being penalized by telling Canadians the truth, he is being penalized for telling Canadians the truth because he’s not out on a limb all by himself.  Just today we heard Don Drummond from TD Bank who was significantly more pessimistic than the Parliamentary Budget Officer, so it’s the government that is the odd one out with its unrealistically rosy forecast.  It’s not the Parliamentary Budget Officer and he has a fine record.  If you look at his forecasts and compare them with what turned out to be the case, he’s got a very good record. [...]

In the total scheme of things for the federal government, an extra $900,000 is not going to break the bank one way or another.  We think that it has nothing to do with money.  When you’re running a, what Don Drummond now says is a deficit of more than $80 billion to increase this man’s budget by $900,000 back to where it was supposed to be is not really the issue of money.  It’s an issue of whether they want him or whether he’s a (inaudible) and I think they’re persecuting him on two fronts.

One, they’re persecuting him by cutting his budget.  He’s going to have to lay people off that he hired on the understanding that he would get what had been promised to him.  And second, they’re depriving him of information.  And those are the two things that economic analysts need.  They need a reasonable budget to hire good people and he has good people, but he can’t keep those good people without the money.  And he needs the oxygen of information with which to do his analysis.

And I believe that the government wants to be the single purveyor of Conservative manipulated numbers through their website and not have any chatter from anywhere else and we believe that the Parliamentary Budget Officer must get the raw data from Treasury Board and other departments so that he can do the analysis and inform parliamentarians about money out the door.  So I think he’s being punished by the government by having his budget cut, and I think he’s being further punished by the government by not getting that information because they want to have a monopoly of the information on the numbers that they give to Canadians.

So I believe that after Stephen Harper used to dress up as God’s gift to accountability, he has an awful nerve to be doing just the opposite these days.

Question:       Now, the Prime Minister said today though that he’s not going to revise, he didn’t pull these budget numbers out of the air and the Finance Minister says he wants (off microphone) his budget numbers.

John McCallum:  Well I think we cannot force him.  I think what we will do, work with other opposition parties.  Mr. Poilievre was talking about the Library Committee.  It’s our intention to get a motion we hope through the Library Committee requesting the government to increase their Estimates to accommodate the budget of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.  We also want the government to give him the information.  But I don’t think there’s a mechanism in the short run whereby we can force the government to do this.  But I think if we, if we bring pressure to bear of the majority in Parliament on this matter, then we hope it may have an effect. [...]  I’m not saying I’m terribly hopeful at this point.

Well, first off, ITQ can’t really fault him for not being “terribly hopeful” — as far as I can tell, even if the committee successfully passed the motion described above, the request would be non-binding, and even if the government acquiesced and boosted the Library’s budget by an additional $900,000, there is still no mechanism — nothing statutory, that is  — that would compel the Library to pass the money along to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

A better approach might be to use one of the upcoming opposition days to call on the government to amend the Federal Accountability Act to make Page a  fully independent Officer of Parliament. Which would, of course, be similarly non-binding – unless in the form of a confidence motion, of course -  but it would at least force the Conservatives to either give in and vote in favour of the motion, or defend the (at this point all but indefensible) status quo while simultaneously attempting to maintain some sort of moral high ground on the accountability front. At the very least, it would get it out of the Library committee and onto the main House agenda.

Cole Porter Writes the AIG Theme Song

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments

For some reason, I was reminded by Jake DeSantis’s already-famous “Dear AIG, I Quit!” op-ed, and even more by some of the online expressions of sympathy, of a song lyric I once read in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter. This was a song Porter wrote for a musical in 1930; in the song, a trio of wealthy people laments that everyone is worried about how the Depression is affecting the poor, and no one cares about the sacrifces the rich have made. The song was cut before the Broadway opening, but Porter later re-worked parts of it into the hit song “Well, Did You Evah!”

I receive every morning
A request or a warning
That I help out some fund for the poor.
I admit that big cities
Have to have such committees,
And they’re all very worthy, I’m sure.
But why don’t they start saying pray’rs
For poor millionaires?

Have you heard that Mrs. Burr
Has had to fire her pet masseur?
And you can believe me, baby, that was some rub.
Have you heard that Billy Boozey
Has given up his favorite floozy
And even stopped shooting craps at the Raquet Club?
Have you heard that Mrs. Pennell
Has auctioned off her kennel
And all that she has left is one bitch?
Oh, darling Mr. Hoover,
Won’t you be a sport and please maneuver
To find a way to help the poor rich.

Have you heard that Mrs. Beale
Has lost so much in Hard-Boiled Steel
She can’t afford to keep a yacht of her own?
Have you heard the Charlie Skinners,
Who always give enormous dinners,
Are so hard up that they have to dine all alone?
Have you heard that Mrs. Baker
Can’t pay her French dressmaker
And fit to wear just hasn’t a single stitch?
Oh, mighty Lord above us,
If you’re not too occupied to love us,
Then try and find a way to help the poor rich.

'Canada's worst MP'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 26 Comments

Don Martin is not a fan of Rob Anders.

“Canada’s worst MP will fight for his political life again this weekend. His dubious stature is obviously a personal judgment call on my behalf, but Calgary West MP Rob Anders is an outsider even inside his own party. Raise his name with Conservative MPs and they wrinkle their nose like they’ve just taken a big whiff of the stuff spring uncovers in an off-leash dog-walking area.”

George Galloway: an odd champion of free speech

By Michael Petrou - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:41 PM - 26 Comments

George Galloway cancelled our interview because he didn’t like my question.

This was during the 2005 British general election. Galloway was campaigning for the Respect Party, which he launched after being kicked out of the Labour Party for, among other things, describing it as “Tony Blair’s lie machine.” I had spent the day in the hardscrabble East London riding Galloway hoped to win away from Labour’s lightweight incumbent Oona King and chatted informally with Galloway a couple of times. He promised me an interview later, after a community meeting where he and King were scheduled to speak.

Galloway wiped the floor with King that night. He is a rhetorical master and was in his element. “If you make war against Muslims abroad, he bellowed to cheers, “you’re going to end up making war against Muslims at home!”

When the speeches were finished, Galloway was mobbed by supporters and a few journalists, including an American woman who had a difficult time asking him anything without cooing. Sick of the softballs she was lobbing at him, I asked Galloway how he felt about the jailing of “your friend Tariq Aziz.” Aziz was Iraq’s deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein and has since been convicted of crimes against humanity. Galloway had indeed described Aziz as his friend, but apparently he didn’t like my tone and growled “I don’t’ want to talk to that guy,” when one of his handlers brought me around for the interview. When another reporter, Johann Hari of The Independent, tried to pose a question, Galloway loudly denounced him as a drug addict.

This is the man who is now bizarrely being hailed as a martyr to free speech, ever since Canada denied him entry to this country because he delivered aid and money to Hamas, which Canada considers a terrorist organization.

To be clear, I think the case against allowing Galloway to come to Canada is paper-thin. Even if the decision follows the letter of the law, it is ridiculous to suggest that he poses any sort of security threat. He should be permitted to come to Canada and speak wherever he wants. Unfortunately, in a country where we’ve grown used cabinet ministers’ incoherent mumblings or refusal to deviate from prepared talking points, Galloway, with his flash and eloquent brogue, would make a positive impression.

But it’s worth remembering the man behind the charm. He reacts to unpleasant questions from journalists with belligerence and insults. He praised Saddam Hussein. And he once described the disappearance of the Soviet Union – one of the most murderous regimes in history – as “the biggest disaster of my life.” I’m confident that Canadians would tire of Galloway once they got to know him. 

Ian Brodie offers a candid case study in politics and policy

By John Geddes - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 116 Comments

Ian Brodie, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, delivered an astonishingly frank explanation today for why the Conservative government cut the Goods and Services Tax, and why he’s glad they did, even though just about every economist and tax expert said it was a terrible bit of public policy.

“Despite economic evidence to the contrary, in my view the GST cut worked,” Brodie said in Montreal at the annual conference of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. “It worked in the sense that by the end of the ’05-’06 campaign, voters identified the Conservative party as the party of lower taxes. It worked in the sense that it helped us to win.”
Continue…

Iggy v. The Carbon Tax v. Russ Hiebert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:09 PM - 7 Comments

The Conservative backbencher asks a question during QP this morning.

“Mr. Speaker, our government has always maintained that the last thing our economy needs is a job-killing carbon tax. Unfortunately, the Liberal Party continues to consider this irresponsible idea. The Liberal leader campaigned on it during his leadership race and vigorously defended it as a priority of a Liberal government just last fall. Can the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry please tell the House how the Liberal leader’s flawed policy ideas risk damaging Canadian industry?”

China stat of the day: subways

By Andrew Potter - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 12:53 PM - 4 Comments

The Times has a good story today about the rush to build new subway systems in China being outpaced by the rush by Chinese to buy automobiles I was struck by this:

The digging in Guangzhou proceeds around the clock, every day. Men like Wang Jiangka, a profusely perspiring engineer in charge of one of the steamy tunnels, endure sweltering temperatures at the tunneling site, where workers put in five 12-hour shifts a week. …

Inexpensive labor — less than $400 a month — and the economies of scale created by completing 20 miles of subway lines a year have driven costs down. Mr. Chan said that it cost about $100 million a mile to build a subway line in Guangzhou, including land acquisition costs for ventilation shafts and station entrances.

By contrast, New York City officials hope to build 1.7 miles of the long-delayed Second Avenue line in eight years at a cost of $3.9 billion, or $2.4 billion a mile. The city expects to use a single tunneling machine.

It looks like the real race in China is to get their infrastructure built before Baumol’s disease really sets in.

Defeat

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 12:42 PM - 7 Comments

Stephen Harper, Feb. 21. “Well, I think a lot of people in the past have been suggesting that, you know, victory is the complete defeat of the insurgency and the replacement of a failed state in Afghanistan with a modern liberal democracy. I don’t think that’s realistic. I think what we should be aiming for in Afghanistan is a viable state that respects, you know, obviously some democratic norms, but I think ultimately the insurgency will last a long time. Afghanistan, through most of its history has been an untamed country. So I think the idea we’re going to wipe out an insurgency is completely unrealistic.”

Stephen Harper, Mar. 1. “We’re not going to win this war just by staying. We’re not going to — in fact, my own judgment, Fareed, is, quite frankly, we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. Afghanistan has probably had — my reading of Afghanistan history, it’s probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind. What has to happen in Afghanistan is, we have to have an Afghan government that is capable of managing that insurgency and improving its own governance.”

Barack Obama, today. “I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you … to defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognize the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan … There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated … we will use all elements of our national power to defeat al Qaeda, and to defend America, our allies, and all who seek a better future.”