Bailout for fraudsters

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 10:35 AM - 1 Comment

Raise your hand if you’re shocked by this: according to a Congressional report to be released later today, a U.S. government watchdog has launched “almost 20″ criminal investigations related to the Treasury Department’s $700 billion bailout program. The probes involve possible public corruption; corporate, stock and tax fraud; insider trading; and mortgage fraud linked to the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The alleged perpetrators have not been identified (not yet, at least) but according to reports, one investigation involves bank officials who were allegedly “cooking their books” to qualify for rescue funds.

USA Today

Earthquakes are good for business

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

It’s been only two weeks since a devastating earthquake rocked the Italian city of L’Aquila, but investigators are already on the lookout for the inevitable aftershock: the mafia. Federal authorities are petrified that organized crime is poised to profit from the hefty rebuilding contracts, believed to be worth more than $16 billion. Franco Roberti, head of the Naples office of investigative magistrates, says the traditional crime clans—Cosa Nostra, ‘ndrangheta and Camorra—have endless connections to cement companies, debris-removal outfits and other businesses that could infiltrate the reconstruction process. Over the weekend, the national Catholic daily L’Avvenire published this front-page warning: “Keep the vigilance high against mafias in construction sites.”

NBC News

Women's razor commercials

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

'Does this help us know you?'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 2:45 AM - 3 Comments

Rounding out his weekend, Michael Ignatieff talks to CBC.ca and CBC Radio 1. The latter, as a commenter here noted earlier, is particularly worth reviewing.

Paging Ari Fleischer (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 2:02 AM - 16 Comments

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano tells the CBC’s Neil Macdonald about the 9/11 terrorists who entered the United States through Canada.

Relevant passage after the jump. Relevant Inkless Wells archival footage here. Continue…

Are we a Metis Nation?

By Andrew Potter - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 10:27 PM - 17 Comments

Ever since he burst onto the philosophical scene in 1992 with Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, a somewhat overdramatic look at the evolution of the western mind, John Ralston Saul has been engaged in two quixotic intellectual projects: bashing the Enlightenment and trying to make sense of Canada. The conceit that buckles these two projects together is the notion that the search for the Canadian identity will come to an end only when we come to see that what justifies Canada, the reason Canada makes any sense at all, is that it is an experiment in counter-modernity…

***

That’s the opening to my review of John Ralston  Saul’s A Fair Country, in the current issue of the LRC. You should probably subscribe the the Review, but if you don’t they’ve put my review online here.

Ignatieff: He's not a dilletante

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 7:05 PM - 41 Comments

Go here and click on the link for the Ignatieff interview video, and see if you enjoy the Liberal leader’s opening few sentences as much as everyone did here at the Maclean’s Ottawa office.

What happened on Flight 918

By Michael Friscolanti and Charlie Gillis - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 6:55 PM - 1 Comment

The obvious question still looms (how did a man with a gun get past airport security?) but this much appears settled: the hostage crisis aboard a Canadian airliner in Jamaica had a happy ending because of the calm, quick-thinking actions of CanJet employees.

As details of the overnight ordeal continue to trickle out, the eight-person crew—two pilots, five flight attendants and a plainclothes “security official”—are being described as heroes. They comforted distraught passengers. They scurried young children to the back of the plane. And they remained composed even after the hijacker fired a bullet through the open cabin door. In fact, it was one of the flight attendants—not a government negotiator—who convinced the agitated gunman to release all the passengers in exchange for their cash and jewelry. “She saved us,” one woman told reporters.

Continue…

Talking (really big) head

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 6:50 PM - 24 Comments

Here’s that segment on TVO’s The Agenda from last Friday night, featuring truly mind-boggling amounts of punditry about the Conservative Party of Canada.
Continue…

The Commons: The House of Comedians

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 6:09 PM - 28 Comments

The Scene. In the 15 minutes between 2 o’clock and the start of Question Period, three different Conservatives were sent up to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause.

“Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party sure loves taxes,” sang Candice Hoeppner.

“This is a very troubling revelation and it should have Canadians worried,” moaned Bruce Stanton.

“The Liberals want to make Canada the most taxed country in the world,” reported Ron Cannan, who took the opportunity to compare some recently reported remarks of Michael Ignatieff’s to an earthquake in Italy this month that killed nearly 300 people and left tens of thousands homeless.

Ignatieff’s side balked and squawked at this last comment. Then their leader stood and offered the day’s first question. “Mr. Speaker, the government is presiding over the worst collapse in employment on record, 300,000 jobs lost in the first three months of 2009. Mayors and municipal councillors I spoke to in southwestern Ontario last week were promised federal help months ago to create jobs. It has not arrived. When will help arrive?” he wondered. ”What additional measures will the minister offer to protect jobs in a recession which the Minister of Finance has finally acknowledged is serious?”

The Prime Minister was away, as were both the Finance Minister and the Finance Minister’s parliamentary secretary. So up came John Baird, who took the opportunity to ignore the question and instead offer a few thoughts on the airplane scare in Montego Bay. Continue…

Pensive Endings vs. Light Joke Endings

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 5:53 PM - 4 Comments

I’m always a little obsessed with the way television has changed during my viewing lifetime (sometimes for the worse, but more often for the better, especially in drama), and one thing I was thinking about lately was the way hour-long episodic dramas typically end. When I started watching television, most hour-long dramas ended on a joke, or some kind of light moment that took the pressure off. Many dramas would actually have a tag before the final credits, the way sitcoms did, where the characters would gather together, tie up whatever plot points had been left unresolved, and then make some kind of lighthearted comment. Even dramas that didn’t have tags would sometimes end light; remember all those Star Trek episodes that ended with Kirk making some wisecrack at Spock’s expense.

Today, most episodic television still follows the old rule that the last minute or so of an episode is a moment when you pull back and relieve some of the pressure. It’s a formula as old as storytelling itself; fairy tales don’t end with the climax, they end by telling you what happened to everybody and how they all lived happily ever after. If the episode wants to leave the audience with a sense of resolution (as opposed to building suspense for the next episode), there usually needs to be a sense that things are winding down a little. But the way today’s shows wind down is different. It strikes me that a lot of the procedural dramas today try to end with a quiet, even pensive moment, where characters either reflect on what’s happened in the episode or on their own lives, or both. Typical tropes involve having the characters share a few cautiously-supportive words, or looking sad while they ponder whether this has all been worth it (often to the accompaniment of a pop song), or reading something, or sitting alone playing music. A recent CSI ended with a character reading something the murder victim wrote while the victim’s voice was heard narrating it for us; another episode ended with Laurence Fishburne getting his own crappy office, near the morgue, and ruefully saying to himself: “I think I’ll be right at home here.” It was sort of a joke, but it wasn’t meant to leave you laughing; it was a pensive little moment that was, like many endings today, intended to humanize the character a little bit. (Sometimes a show will combine these tropes with a bit of suspense; the most recent House ended with House alone in his office, playing music, and getting a cautiously encouraging word from a colleague; except the colleague was dead and he was hallucinating again, so there’s the suspense for the next episode.)

Compare that to the way shows used to end; here is a fairly typical tag featuring 1) a summary of what’s happened in the episode, 2) a goofy joke at the expense of one of the characters, 3) everybody laughing at the end 4) the “home” set.

I sometimes have a feeling that the quiet, pensive modern endings are a reaction against the way hour-long dramas used to end. The light-joke ending is perhaps the most-mocked aspect of old-school TV dramas, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be: in most shows, it really is the hackiest kind of ending you can imagine. Countless comedies have made fun of the moment where someone cracks a bad joke, everybody laughs, and we freeze-frame. So now all of that is gone, including freeze-frames.

Another thing that’s changed is that dramas, unlike comedies, rarely have stand-alone tags these days. The tag is kind of a throwaway scene, so it was inevitably written as a scene where nobody does much and where standing sets are used if at all possible. Today’s dramas want to keep the momentum going until the very end, even as they need to de-pressurize a little, so they need to have something more in terms of lighting, sets and production values for the final scene. (Apart, of course, from the improvement in lighting, set design and production values in hour-long television in general.) And today’s procedural dramas have a lot more continuing storylines and emphasis on the continuing characters than their old-school counterparts, meaning that CSI and House need to end by focusing our attention on the characters, whereas older murder and medicine shows really didn’t.

Prime-Time Cartoons And the Fourth Wall

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

One more thing tangentially related to the premiere of Sit Down, Shut Up: one of the things most commented-upon (apart from the live-action backgrounds) was the fact that the characters on this show actually break the fourth wall at times, saying that they “won’t test well,” or turning to the camera and saying “we’ll be right back.” This is unusual because while comedy cartoon characters have traditionally been very willing to break the fourth wall and admit they’re only fiction, characters in prime-time cartoon comedy are just the opposite. You can count on the fingers of one hand the moments when, outside of Halloween episodes, the Simpsons have talked to the audience or mentioned that they’re on a TV show. (When Homer said “we’ll be right back” before a commercial break in an episode from the 11th season, fans were so shocked that it became a subject of online debate.) Even South Park characters almost never talk to us or otherwise break the fourth wall. You’re more likely to find characters stepping out of the show on a live-action series, like Moonlighting or Boston Legal, than you are on a cartoon.

These cartoons have lots of reflexive, self-referential moments, but they almost always do it without letting the characters acknowledge that we’re watching them. (Futurama went too far with this, having dozens of arch little meta-jokes that the characters themselves didn’t seem to get.) It’s like the writers of prime-time cartoons are concerned about making sure we can believe in the characters and not think of them as “cartoons” — which means, among other things, believing that they can get hurt or die and that their actions have consequences. That means making the characters believe in what they’re doing, and not winking at us.

One exception to this rule was Duckman, where the characters broke that wall with abandon, but that show wasn’t actually a hit, and that might have been one of the reasons why.

I guess Family Guy has more fourth-wall moments now than the other shows do, but I don’t know if that’s an exception that proves the rule or just an example of how the Family Guy writers don’t even pretend to care. Anyway, even FG will usually try to find a substitute for fourth-wall-breaking, like when Brian told Stewie that “if I were someone watching at home,” he’d be very upset about the way a particular adventure ended.

The Red River flood: A look at the damage so far

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

The SAG Thing? Still Going On

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

The unresolved situation with the Screen Actors’ Guild has been going on so long that it’s almost hard to remember a time when they had a collective agreement. The latest twist is that SAG’s Board of Directors voted to accept virtually the same deal they were offered ten months ago, a deal that consists of the same terms that the other showbiz unions accepted last year, only several months later. But because the vote was very close, it is possible (but unlikely) that the union membership could be persuaded to vote down the agreement when it comes up for a full vote next month. Mark Evanier, who has had a lot of good posts on this issue, thinks that “in the end, the contract will pass by a wider margin with the membership than it did at the board level.”

Whether SAG handled this situation well or not is not really for me to say, but their problem for the last few months has been that in a recession, a year after another strike, it would be very hard to get a strike authorized (especially when many of the union’s highest-profile members have been lobbying against a strike). Hence the SAG leadership has been trying to look like it’s considering its options, when everybody knows that it doesn’t really have a whole lot of options at the moment.

Let us watch what we want

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 4:34 PM - 112 Comments

If Canadian broadcasters were capable of producing a decent drama, this would have the makings of a pretty good pilot: “In a world turned upside down . . . as an empire lies in ruins . . . the name of the game is survival. One man has the power . . . to decide who lives, who dies, and who pays. They call him . . . The Commissioner.”

Naturally I’m referring to the industry’s own abundant troubles. By now you will have heard and read a great deal of the losses the networks are suffering, the jobs that have been cut, the stations that have been closed. And, these being broadcasters and this being Canada, it will have been impressed upon you that the solution to the industry’s woes lies in the hands of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and its chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein.

Continue…

You stay classy, Ron Cannan

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 4:23 PM - 48 Comments

The Conservative MP—”The voice of Kelowna-Lake Country in Ottawa“—rose immediately after Liberal Maurizio Bevilacqua had delivered a statement on the earthquake in Italy this afternoon and announced to the House the following.

Mr. Speaker, I too add my condolences to the folks in Italy. Our prayers and thoughts go out to all those folks in Italy.

But there is an earthquake happening in our own country.

I would like to remind Canadians what the Liberal leader said on April 14th, just last week, and I quote, “We will have to raise taxes”. We thank him for honestly revealing the Liberal plan.

While Conservatives work hard for Canadian families, Liberals want to make Canadian families work harder to pay more taxes. Our economic action plan is making Canada a role model for the world in these tough economic times.

The Liberals want to make Canada the most taxed country in the world.

Some questions for him remain: When would he raise their taxes? Which taxes would be raised? How much would they go up? Who would pay? I invite the Liberal leader to stand and answer.

“I thought he wanted to crash the plane, like in New York."

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 3:52 PM - 2 Comments

About 10 p.m. Sunday, an armed Jamaican “of unsound mind” forced his way aboard a CanJet charter at Sangster International Airport, in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Thanks to the actions of a quick-thinking flight attendant, who convinced the gunman, in his early twenties, to accept cash and belongings in exchange for their freedom, 159 passengers and two crew were allowed to exit CanJet Flight 918 after 45 minutes. The remaining six crew members spent seven more hours with the gunman, before being freed by a counter-terrorism squad who stormed the Boeing 737 and disarmed the gunman, who apparently wanted to leave Jamaica. For many passengers, the thought to of Sept. 11 flashed in the minds. “I thought he wanted to crash the plane, like in New York,” said one. “That’s what we were all thinking.”

The Canadian Press

Coca-Cola and friends lose their fizz

By Colin Campbell - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 3:21 PM - 1 Comment

Late last year, Coca-Cola ran a series of ads in Australia as part of a campaign titled “Myths Busted.” In the ads, the company declared that Coke doesn’t make you fat, won’t rot your teeth and isn’t packed with caffeine. Those claims, no doubt, sent Aussie children into the streets on celebratory sugar highs. But the ads didn’t go over well with parents, or with the Australian government. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said the messages “were totally unacceptable” and “had the potential to mislead parents about the potential consequences of consuming Coca-Cola.” Coke, which is being forced to run corrections, plans to clarify its message in new ads.

As Coke’s rather desperate attempt illustrates, all is not well in the world of cola. Soft drink sales have been steadily on the decline in the last several years. Last year, carbonated soft drink sales fell three per cent in the U.S., according to Beverage Digest. That marked the fourth straight year of declines. The consumption of pop is down 10 percent since 2000, and hasn’t been this low since 1992, reports Beverage Digest. Sales in Canada have also been in decline for four of the past five years, says Gary Hemphill, managing director of the New York-based Beverage Marketing Corp.

While the decline has something to do with the bad economy, it is also a reflection of a broader shift towards healthier and more varied drinks, like juices and teas. Sales of bottled water are up, as are sales of energy drinks like Red Bull (which enjoyed a five per cent surge last year).

And while cola giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have diversified their beverage and snack holdings, soft drinks still represent the largest segment of the industry. That’s what makes the decline so worrisome and has soft drink makers scrambling to at least stabilize the category, says Hemphill. Pepsi is trying to reverse the slide with some rebranding and a new U.S. marketing campaign. So is Dr. Pepper. Coke has also launched a new global campaign. Hemphill says companies have also looked to add new flavours, as well as packaging to reduce the costs of drinks during the downturn.

But there are other troubles on the horizon. Coke recently suffered a major setback in its expansion efforts in China. Last week, the government there rejected Coke’s US$2.5 billion takeover of a local fruit juice brand—juices and teas are more popular than soft drinks in China—citing antitrust concerns.

Neither Coke nor Pepsi are in any real danger. Both, after all, are giant, multinational brands and investors are also still content. But the steady volume declines do suggest a subtle anti-cola sentiment. Analysts will be closely watching earnings reports from the companies due out next week. The fizzling volumes aren’t exactly a crisis, but pop’s glory days may well be behind it.

The Taliban: local or international threat (III)

By Michael Petrou - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

I believe the latter. See here and here. John Mueller disagrees:

“Multiple sources, including Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, make clear that the Taliban was a reluctant host to al Qaeda in the 1990s and felt betrayed when the terrorist group repeatedly violated agreements to refrain from issuing inflammatory statements and fomenting violence abroad. Then the al Qaeda-sponsored 9/11 attacks — which the Taliban had nothing to do with — led to the toppling of the Taliban’s regime. Given the Taliban’s limited interest in issues outside the ‘AfPak’ region, if they came to power again now, they would be highly unlikely to host provocative terrorist groups whose actions could lead to another outside intervention. And even if al Qaeda were able to relocate to Afghanistan after a Taliban victory there, it would still have to operate under the same siege situation it presently enjoys in what Obama calls its “safe haven” in Pakistan.

“The very notion that al Qaeda needs a secure geographic base to carry out its terrorist operations, moreover, is questionable. After all, the operational base for 9/11 was in Hamburg, Germany. Conspiracies involving small numbers of people require communication, money, and planning — but not a major protected base camp.”

Alberta government takes major stake in Precision Drilling

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 1:54 PM - 4 Comments

Who’d have thought it, in Alberta of all places, that bastion of the free market system? But there it is: AIMCo, an investment wing of the Alberta government, is to take a 15 per cent stake in Calgary-based Precision Drilling Trust, an oilfield services company, advancing it $380 million in financing that will give the outfit a chance to restructure its debt. “We expect the financing transactions to put the Trust back on path to return to an investment grade credit over the next few years, allow Precision to weather current market challenges and pave the way for future opportunities,” said president and CEO Kevin Neveu. Must be nice.

The Canadian Press

Prime-Time Cartoons That Don't Look The Way They Sound

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 1:33 PM - 2 Comments

I’m not too impressed with Sit Down, Shut Up, and neither are Fox’s viewers, who, like me, still enjoy King of the Hill more even though it’s past its peak. (Which is not to say that Fox is wrong to want to find a fresher animated series to put in the 8:30 slot, just that SD, SU may not be it.) It might get better; it might not; but so far it looks very suspiciously like another example of something I’ve noted before: truly successful prime-time animated sitcoms rarely originate at the writing end alone.

That is, the most successful prime-time cartoons all started with drawings that were developed at the same time as the series idea; instead of coming up with a concept and then seeking out artists to illustrate it, The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Family Guy all had a look to match the concept, with the same person responsible for creating and designing the main characters and setting a visual style that everyone would imitate. (Mike Judge drew the four guys from King of the Hill before he even knew exactly who they were.) This is not to say, as hard-core animation buffs often do, that only artists can create animated shows; these shows all have written scripts and non-drawing showrunners. But it is important that the characters should look the way they act, and that the overall look of the show should be inseparable from the way it’s written; that usually seems to come about when one person has a hand in both aspects. Those three shows have some pretty ugly drawing, but the drawing is inseparable from the writing.

The flop animated prime-time shows often look like somebody had the idea and then hired a crew to draw it for him; with Sit Down, Shut Up, we have a show that was supposed to be live-action (like its Australian predecessor) until Mitch Hurwitz realized he’d have an easier time selling it to Fox if it were a cartoon. (Something similar happened with The Critic, which was intended as a live-action vehicle for Jon Lovitz, and became an animated show when Lovitz wasn’t available to work full-time on it.) I’m not saying that this approach can’t work; it works in comic books, where an Alan Moore can write a comic and then give it to somebody else to draw. But it usually doesn’t work in prime-time TV, where — if the characters are not designed by someone who writes for them — they usually wind up with the sort of generic, bland look the characters have on SD, SU. And bland is way worse than ugly when you’re doing a prime-time cartoon.

You think it's easy to make negative ad campaigns?

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 12:26 PM - 89 Comments

Bourque is pimping this on his website, so probably it’s the soft rollout — the very soft rollout — of the Great Conservative Ignatieff Archival Core Dump strategy. More to come, and probably some of it won’t be nearly as lame as this is, because it’s pretty lame. Watch and tremble, Canadians! He was nervous after the 1995 referendum! How dare such a “man” aspire to lead?!?!?!

To me, the big scandal is the hair. And the obvious excuse — “It was the ’90s” — well, that’s just not good enough.

'There is more to inheritance than romance'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM - 1 Comment

Here is that exclusive excerpt of ours from True Patriot Love.

Change you can believe in, if you believe in really, really small change

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:56 AM - 9 Comments

Day 91: Barack Obama will demand that his cabinet identify $100 million in savings over the next 90 days. Why, that’s fully 5 thousandths of one percent of this year’s budget deficit! Six thousandths, if you round up!