How has the recession affected your view of workers’ strikes?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 3:36 PM - 23 Comments

Neo Conservatives Are Dead Wrong

By John Parisella - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 3:24 PM - 59 Comments

The Neda video and the many other disturbing photos coming out of Iran show the protest movement there will continue to take on a life of its own, with courageous dissenters facing repression in the form of bullets and sticks. Pressure is now mounting on President Obama to take a more aggressive stand against the Iranian regime and do what is necessary to ensure its downfall. This approach has its origins with the same bunch of neoconservative   stalwarts in the Republican Party who hijacked President George W. Bush ‘s presidency shortly after 9-11 to push back against the new axis of evil of the day—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

It was not long before the US was engaged in the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. To this day, the mission in Iraq is inconclusive, Afghanistan is still a dangerous place with no end to the war in sight, and Osama Bin Laden is still making tapes! We now know that much of the build-up to the Iraq war was based on faulty intelligence and, in some cases, fabricated evidence. Now, many of the same observers—like Paul Wolfowitz—are calling for Obama to take the U.S. on a path that can only lead to a more direct intervention. Obama must not listen to the neoconservatives on Iran. They are dead wrong.

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This land is my land

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 8 Comments

Frank Meyers lives on Meyers Creek Road. That’s what happens when your family farms the same plot of land for 2½ centuries. They name the street after you. “This is heritage property,” says the 81-year-old, pointing at his freshly plowed fields in Quinte West, Ont. “This is the property that was given to my forefathers when they fought for the British army against the Americans. This land was designated for us.”

Today, the Meyers land is designated for something else: a new headquarters for Joint Task Force 2, the Canadian military’s top-secret special operations squad.

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Bizarro world

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM - 39 Comments

Scott Reid has some advice for the Prime Minister.

The fourth and final tactic is to make a high-profile beau geste: Mr. Harper should apologize to Quebec. He should go to Quebec City and tell voters in that province he was wrong. He was wrong to attack the arts when they are so critical to Quebec’s heritage, to imply culture is an indulgence rather than an integral component of identity, and above all to attack the coalition in the way he did, insofar as it left the impression that he equates Quebec pride and nationalism with a separatist impulse to destroy the country. And then he should explain, contritely, what Quebec means to him as a Prime Minster, why he moved to respond to the fiscal imbalance argument and above all why he formally recognized Quebeckers as a nation in the federal Parliament.

Axis of petty

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 2:17 PM - 15 Comments

Those Iranian soccer players who wore green on the field in solidarity with the protesters? Banned for life.

Nokia Siemens Networks aquires Nortels wireless assets

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 2:11 PM - 0 Comments

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) took over Nortel’s wireless assets on Monday with little fanfare, paying $650 million for the fallen telecom giant’s wireless assets. Out of the currently employed workforce of 5,000, NSN predicts that it will hire 800 Nortel employees in Canada—contributing to a total of 2,500 across Dallas, Ottawa, Mexico and China. The remaining unhired exployees will not be compensated by NSN for their under funded pension plans or diminished severance pay. NSN chief executive Simon Beresford-Wylie said Ottawa operations will become “the heart of advanced wireless research” for NSN, however critics remain skeptical of the acquisition pointing out that the strategic time for wireless acquisition has passed.

Ottawa Citizen

Canadian study calls “healthy weight” into question

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 4 Comments

Overweight people live longer than those of normal weight, a new Canadian study shows. The study, published online in the journal Obesity, looked at the relationship between body mass index (a ratio of weight and height) and death among 11,326 adults in Canada, over a 12-year period. Reserachers found that underweight people had the highest risk of dying; the extremely obese had the second highest risk. Meanwhile, overweight people had the lowest risk of all. This is the first large-scale Canadian study to show the overweight might actually live longer than normal weight people, although an earlier U.S. study (published in 2005) reached a similar conclusion. “It’s not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage,” said co-author Dr. David Feeny, Ph.D. of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research (the team imcluded researchers from McGill University and Statistics Canada). Added Dr. Mark Kaplan of Portland State University, “It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn’t mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds. Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.”

Golin/Harris International

The man in the mirror

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 1:08 PM - 3 Comments

Susan Delacourt looks to the press gallery.

It’s often said that people get the government they deserve, but in the bubble of Ottawa, where daily developments resemble a rough-and-tumble sports match, it may be more correct to say that the media get the government they deserve.

Iran's election numbers don't add up

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:53 PM - 8 Comments

Humans aren’t very good at coming up with numbers off the top of their head—and Iranian officials are apparently no exception according to two academics who looked at the country’s recent election results. The problem? Too many of numbers end with the digit 7 and too few end with the digit 5 to be believable. Under perfectly random conditions, which secret-ballot returns should evince, every digit from 0 to 10 should come up about 10 per cent of the time at the end of a number. (It’s just as likely that an election result from a given province ends in a 2 than it does in a 9.) Iran’s results, on the other hand, show no such distribution. Rather, the numbers end with digit 7 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Furthermore, the last two digits are non-adjacent in only 62 per cent of cases, when they should be non-adjacent in 70 per cent of cases. Together, the results point to one of two things occurring: Iran’s election was either a 1-in-200 long shot mathematical oddity, or the figures were manipulated.

The Washington Post

Bubonic plague in Libya

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:52 PM - 1 Comment

Libyan officials reported a new outbreak of bubonic plague near the Egyptian border. They say that at least one person has died from the disease, and that several more have been infected in the town of Tubruq. In response to a request from Libya, the World Health Organization (WHO) will send an expert to study the suspected cases, a WHO spokewoman announced. The disease—which was known as the Black Death in medieval Europe—is spread to humans by flea bites; it can be treated with antibiotics, if diagnosed early. A small number of cases have also been reported in some Asian countries and in the U.S. in recent years.

BBC News

When Vince Vaughn made Gretzky bleed

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

In honour of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Premiere.com has compiled a top-10 list of hockey scenes in non-hockey movies. Inevitably a couple involve psychos in goalie masks, notably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—featuring Canada’s Elias Koteas as a high-sticking Casey Jones—and Friday the 13th Part III, in which Jason finally figures out a better disguise than putting a bag over his head. But the best clip shows a manic Vince Vaughn playing an NHL video game in Swingers, and making good on his promise to “bitch-slap” Wayne Gretzky until his head bleeds. The Americans always did appreciate the finer points of our game. (Note: scroll to the bottom of the web page to mute the pop-up video commercial.)

Premiere.com

The Expository Party

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:44 PM - 0 Comments

One thing about the pilot of Accidentally On Purpose, which has been mentioned by others including Myles McNutt, is that this pilot tries to do the equivalent of a movie’s worth of storytelling in one episode. It’s a “premise pilot,” where you have to show the characters before the premise is set in motion, and then get them to what will become the status quo of the series. But since this show is a Knocked Up knockoff, that means giving us most of the story of a 140 minute movie in 20 minutes. No wonder none of the relationships in the episode seem remotely plausible: the writer is completely focused on the mechanics of setting up every single plot point that will be used in the series. There’s no time for it to make sense.

When doing a very high-concept show, particularly a half-hour show, it’s often a good idea to leave some breathing room in the pilot and let at least some of the exposition spill over into subsequent episodes (if any). And it used to happen fairly often; strangely enough, that method of setting up a show was more common in the days before serialization. Shows ranging from The Beverly Hillbillies to Frank’s Place to My Two Dads (yes, really, My Two Dads) while telling complete stories in the pilots, would end the pilot without the status quo being fully formed, so to speak. Once the show was picked up, the first episode proper would be used as sort of a second pilot, to fill in the elements of the show that the pilot didn’t get around to. In Frank’s Place, for example, the pilot ends with title character being warned that a voodoo curse will compel him to move to New Orleans and run the restaurant his father left him. In the second episode, he actually moves back to Boston, only to return to New Orleans when a run of bad luck convinces him that the curse is working; the episode then shows him getting used to the city and the life of a small-time restauranteur.

But a lot of high-concept shows today seem to want to set up absolutely everything in episode one, leaving nothing for episode 2. Part of this may be that there’s so much riding on pilots these days: they’re the episodes that get reviewed, the episodes that get the hype, the episodes that decide whether or not the show will be a hit. It used to be common for shows to make changes after the pilot, based on what didn’t work in what was, after all, only a test episode; new characters, new sets, new plot points would emerge in the second episode as the show built a following and decided what it was going to be. But now the changes are made to the pilot, with new characters and scenes quasi-routinely added, and the show usually needs to be, in the pilot, what it’s going to be from that point on: if the pilot isn’t perfect, nobody’s going to stick around for episode # 2.

Coming this fall to Parliament Hill, a new reality series: "Who Wants To Be The Next Embattled Officer of Parliament?"

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:35 PM - 12 Comments

Because really, who wouldn’t want to fill the Robert Marleau-shaped hole over at the Information Commissioner’s office? I mean, if you somehow end up in the government’s bad books with your stubborn insistence on applying the ATI laws as written, you know the opposition has your back, right? Just ask Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Speaking of which, not that anyone has asked ITQ — well, actually, a few of you have, and she apologizes, cartoon Ringo Starr-style,  for the lateness of her reply — but she is utterly baffled by the recommendations of the long-awaited report from the Library of Parliament committee on the even-longer-running battle between Page and Parliamentary Librarian William Young for control of the PBOverse. It isn’t that she disagrees with main conclusion — that the reporting relationship between the two officers has to be straightened out — but the complete absence of any acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that it’s not Page or Young who is ultimately to blame for the bad blood between their respective microbureaucracies, but a badly drafted law.

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Twist my arm

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 24 Comments

The last thing Mike Duffy wanted to be was a Conservative senator.

At first he said he wasn’t interested in the Senate, he said. But he had watched a round of layoffs take place at CTV, he said, and knew more were on the way. ”I thought, do I want to be around the office when it happens again?” Duffy said.

He reconsidered, and said he’d accept if he was offered a seat, he said.

He also said he wanted to sit as an independent, because he wasn’t a Conservative. ”I was always a journalist,” Duffy said. But Conservative senators were in the minority, he said, and Prime Minister Harper told him he needed him to sit as one. ”And I thought, well, OK,” Duffy said.

McMahon's Last Laugh

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 12:22 PM - 3 Comments

I didn’t watch The Tonight Show when Ed McMahon was on; I mostly knew him from Super Bloopers and Practical Jokes (meaning I thought of him as Dick Clark’s sidekick rather than Johnny Carson’s) and those American Family commercials that everybody seems to confuse with Publisher’s Clearing House.

Johnny’s jokes about McMahon’s drinking — a staple of the show — were like a throwback to an older era of show business (since they were holdovers from that era), where over-indulgence in social drinking was considered funny. As Carson pointed out, it was a throwback to Jack Benny making jokes about Phil Harris’s drinking. A host would not normally do that today, because alcoholism isn’t considered a laughing matter, and because entertainers no longer want to be thought of as people who drink too much; but back then, you’d have entertainers who actually pretended to drink more than they did — Dean Martin, most obviously — because being thought of as a drunk was good for your image and good for comedy.

I couldn’t find any clips of Ed’s role in Butterfly with Pia Zadora, but here’s a trailer for one of the two most insanely stupid films of the ’80s (the other being Pia Zadora’s The Lonely Lady). Joe Queenan commented that McMahon was cast as Pia’s father-in-law, as well as one of the few people in the movie she doesn’t sleep with, because he was the only person in the world who would be “credible as a man who would welcome Pia Zadora into his family.”

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2792356&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

Stop the shovels

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:55 AM - 50 Comments

If, by the time you read this, Canada has not been plunged into another election, it will be a blow to lexicographers everywhere. At one point there was serious prospect of an entire campaign being fought on the question of whether billions of federal dollars had been “committed,” “approved,” “announced” or, in fact, spent. Ah, the semantic might-have-beens.

To be sure, the government’s second report on “Canada’s Economic Action Plan,” the proximate cause of this silliness, uses all of these terms and more, in an effort to impress the public with how much spending has been rushed “out the door” since January’s hurry-up budget. The effect is quite dizzying, even without the commingling of spending programs with similar names on wholly different timetables with which the government further obscures its intentions.

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Canadians breed cows to burp less

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

Canadian scientists are working to breed a special kind of cow that will burp less, an effort to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. According to Environment Canada, cows are behind nearly 75 per cent of total methane emissions, most of which come from their burps—20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. At the University of Alberta, Stephen Moore, professor of agricultural, food and nutritional science, is looking at genes behind the methane produced in cow’s four stomachs to make them more environmentally friendly. To make cows “greener,” ranchers could breed cattle that grow faster, thereby reducing the time they’re in the field and getting them to market sooner. Through breeding, they could also be made more efficient at converting feed into muscle, producing less methane and waste, Moore told Reuters. Already, farmers are feeding livestock a diet higher in energy and edible oils, which ferment less than grass or low-quality feed, thus reducing methane emissions. In Alberta, those who follow this method can earn carbon credits that range from $1 to $10 per head.

Reuters

Scientists urge an end to religious animal slaughter

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

Religious slaughter techniques practised by Jews and Muslims are cruel and should be ended, says a scientific assessment from the British government’s animal welfare advisers. The Farm Animal Welfare Council says that slitting the throats of the animals such as chickens, without first stunning them, results in “significant pain and distress.” The committee, which includes scientific, agricultural and veterinary experts, is calling for the government to launch a debate with Muslim and Jewish communities to end the practice. One Muslim organization, the Halal Food Authority, already insists on stunning animals—in the slaughterhouses it regulates—as long as they are still alive when their throats are slit. But in other halal and almost all kosher slaughterhouses, which together kill more than 100 million animals a year in Britain, animals have their throats slit without rendering them insensible to the pain. Religious groups say that doing so would be against their interpretation of religious texts. Massood Khawaja, president of the Halal Food Authority, doesn’t understand the other religious groups’ problem: “The Koran says use your brain, ponder about things and that’s what we are doing,” he said. “It’s a question of animal welfare.”

The Independent

So long, loyal sidekick

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Ed McMahon, the most famous sidekick in the history of late night TV, died this morning at the age of 86. As Johnny Carson’s second banana on The Tonight Show for almost 30 years, McMahon became famous for his obsequious laughing at Carson’s jokes, many of which were at McMahon’s own expense. And if you were too young to stay up and watch him on Carson, you might have seen him as the host of shows like Super Bloopers and Practical Jokes and Star Search, as well as the countless business ventures to which he lent his image—most famously, the American Family Sweepstakes, which told us that we might already have won millions of dollars.

The New York Times

Iran won't annul election results

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:38 AM - 3 Comments

Iranian authorities have ruled out nullifying the results of the past presidential election despite announcing one day earlier that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters. ” “Fortunately, in the recent presidential election we found no witness of major fraud or breach in the election,” Guardian Council spokesperson Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei said Monday night. “Therefore, there is no possibility of an annulment taking place.” Meanwhile, reports suggest the showdown between protesters and Iranian officials could end up costing some of Iran’s most powerful people their jobs. According to Al Arabiya, secret meetings have apparently been taking place in Qom, where members of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that oversees the Supreme Leader, and the Expediency Council, which is charged with resolving disputes between the Parliament and the Guardian Council, have discussed removing the Supreme Leader altogether and forcing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to resign.

The New York Times

International Business Times

Oliphant Extra Extra – If you thought Tom Flanagan had harsh words for Team Oliphant's research efforts …

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:27 AM - 6 Comments

(Note: The following post will probably make a lot more sense if you read this one first. )

Check out the official PMO response to the Thomas report on prime ministerial communication. Submitted under the virtually illegible signature of The Legendary Guy Giorno (tm Colleague Wells), it describes the paper as “a heavily flawed document that contains numerous errors” and “not based on input from anyone with actual knowledge of how the current PMO works and operates”, and advises the commission that “the many shortcomings” — which are painstakingly detailed throughout the subsequent eighteen pages — “hardly make it a basis on which the Commission should found recommendations.” Later, it accuses the author of making “serious allegations about Canadian public servants” based on “nothing more than Wiki-scholarship and American commentary.”

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Run the option

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 4 Comments

Glen Pearson asks the Prime Minister to come up with a Plan B.

My issue is really one of timing – and flexibility. In moments like those, when the House is elevated above its usual schoolyard antics, surely some direction can be signaled to the person who would normally make the last statement to choose another subject, one more fitting to the occasion. The Conservatives pride themselves on their discipline in the House, so surely that shouldn’t be much of a task for them. It’s a slight thing but easily doable.

It is mostly Kady's fault

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:01 AM - 18 Comments

Canadian Press talks to three rookie MPs about their first impressions of Ottawa. All are shocked and appalled. Conservative Shelly Glover suggests we’d be better off if Parliament could be allowed to do more of its business in private.

Glover, a former police officer from Manitoba, has a few ideas about how to improve elements of the parliamentary experience that she calls “disappointing” and “disturbing.” She wishes question period could be cancelled altogether. She also says more committee meetings should be held behind closed doors, without media present, because politicians spend less time grandstanding and more time working on solutions in the absence of cameras.

“I was shocked. We spend an awful lot of time in Ottawa participating in theatre,” Glover said. ”And I call it theatre because much of it is orchestrated – and that’s unfortunate because I could be doing much better work for my constituents on the ground . . . and unfortunately I’m here playing the game of politics.”

Is the last bit an admission that she regrets moments such as this and this?

From the chaos of Tehran, one woman’s death becomes a symbol

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

From among the many pieces of outlaw video streamed out of Iran these days, perhaps the most heart-wrenching is the cellphone clip of a young woman bleeding to death as a companion shouts “Neda, Neda!” This feature article tells the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, who was shot dead Saturday near a clash between pro-government militias and demonstrators protesting the allegedly fraudulent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So potent is Neda’s image in Tehran that security forces told her family not to hold memorial services and to remove black mourning banners in front of their house. Witnesses said she was shot by a plainclothes security official or militiamen, rather than a uniformed police officer or soldier.

Los Angeles Times