Remember their names

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:57 AM - 3 Comments

Iranian democratic activist Kianoosh Sanjari, whom I met in Tehran in 2004 and who has since escaped the country, has compiled a partial list of those murdered and detained since Iran’s June 12 presidential “election.”

Killed by Government Forces:

The government has admitted to at least 27 fatalities in Tehran but the true numbers are most probably much higher. The Campaign has been able to identify only the names of four persons killed in Tehran during recent protests because of the extreme restrictions imposed by the government. There are also reports of fatalities in other cities but the Campaign has not been able to collect any reliable information.

1)  Neda Aghasoltan, student, was murdered at the demonstration in Tehran on 20 June 2009

List continues after the break …. Continue…

Réal and Farewell

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:23 AM - 3 Comments

Réal Ménard, who has represented Montreal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve riding since 1993, is running for Montreal city council on mayoral candidate Louise Harel’s slate. This will open up an iron-clad Bloc riding for a by-election, and I think it’s safe to assume the NDP candidate in the riding will campaign against the Conservatives while the Conservative candidate campaigns against Michael Ignatieff or, if he or she is particularly slow-witted, against Stéphane Dion.

Montrealers are all aflutter over the Harel candidacy because she’s a long-time Parti Québécois cabinet minister (responsible for the mega-city fusions that created the sprawling heffalump that is today’s Montreal) and she essentially doesn’t speak English. So a lot of anglophones don’t like her, and many people who get upset when anglophones express emotions are angry in return. I can’t get too fussed over any of this. Anyway, Ménard has been around Ottawa forever, he’s a pleasant fellow and a strong public speaker, and we’ll miss him.

Liberal MP Bob Rae recommends 'Three Day Road' by Joseph Boyden

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:19 AM - 2 Comments

“Twenty years ago I travelled to the James Bay coast and visited each of the aboriginal communities from Moosonee to Fort Severn.  It was an unforgettable experience which has stayed with me. Joseph Boyden, whose Through Black Spruce won the Giller Prize, is the chronicler par excellence of the James Bay Cree. Three Day Road is a brilliant story—of courage in the trenches of the First World War, of a young man’s last journey home, of a woman’s memories of her life in the bush. It is a book I have enjoyed re-reading. Boyden understands that this is Canada’s rendezvous not with destiny, but with ourselves. It’s wonderfully written, evocative, elegeiac, with moments of great humour and passion.”

Murderers wed, now one's dead

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

As lovingly chronicled in today’s Vancouver Sun, 54-year-old Tom Elton has been charged with murder after his 59-year-old wife, Brenda Blondell, was found stabbed to death in Surrey, B.C. Here’s the twist: both were convicted murderers—him for the 1975 killing of a fellow prison inmate and her for the drowning of a 21-year-old drug addict back in 1987. Not what you’d call a match made in heaven, but the two got married after Blondell got out on parole, and they both became prisoners’ rights activists, speaking at events dedicated to the cause. If Elton is convicted, the parole board will once again have some explaining to do, as he appeared to be a serial violator of his conditions.

The Vancouver Sun

"Every day I hear of my friends being taken away"

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

An Iranian student activist, now in hiding in Tehran, writes about the ongoing brutality in Iran and his wish that the West would react more forcefully: “But what do they do about it in the West? Some of the politicians behave as if nothing special has happened. One says the nuclear negotiation is the priority and another one politely asks the masters to deal better with the people. And some apologists pretend to speak on behalf of the people of Iran and ask the Western governments not to get involved in the condemnation of killings, calling it ‘interference.’ ”

The Times of London

Jong-un one step closer to leadership

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

In preparation for his inheritance of North Korea’s leadership, Kim Jong Il’s youngest son, Jong Un, has been given control of the country’s spy agency. The move is seen as another assertion of power from Jong Il to prevent any backlash over his son’s succession. Jong Un, 26, has been taking on an increasing amount of responsibility in his country’s governance, with some information suggesting he oversaw the sentencing of two US journalists to 12 years in prison this month. Taking over the State Security Agency means Jong Un will have control of North Korea’s own version of George Orwell’s “big brother”—the agency maintains a watch over government agencies, the military, and watches for dissent among ordinary citizens. It is also expected to take charge of North Korea’s 100,000 strong border guard under its new leadership.

Associated Press

Ikea cuts off Russia

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

Ikea operates successfully in dozens of countries around the world, but it recently decided it won’t invest any more money in a country as corrupt as Russia. In a rare interview, the company’s founder told a Swedish radio station that Ikea refuses to solve problems in Russia by paying bribes. He noted that the company’s refusal to slip money under the table there has resulted in millions of dollars in overcharging for electricity. Ikea’s stores in Russia have been shut down several times by inspectors on their opening day for random reasons. In one case, an official said the store had not been built to withstand hurricane-force winds. Ikea pointed out that that part of Russia has never had winds of that magnitude. Ikea’s rebuke is an embarrassing blow to Russia, which has made cutting corruption a national priority. The concern now is that other major Western companies could follow Ikea’s lead.

The New York Times

Mark Sanford: The Most Awesome Movie Musical Ever!

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 11:12 AM - 0 Comments

Okay, here’s the plot: There’s a conservative, button-down, suit-wearin’ governor of a mid-sized state, and he’s tired of all the fighting and legislating and taking orders from Washington. So he decides he needs to get away from it all. Using subterfuge, wacky scheming, and changing cars and planes, he manages to slip away from the job and run away without anyone knowing where he’s gone. He escapes to beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina (land of castanets, partying and romance!), ready for a week of partying and fun before he has to return to his dull life in Columbia, South Carolina.

Cast Don Ameche as Mark Sanford and have him meet Betty Grable on his trip, and then go make a movie. Because we now know what’s going on with Governor Mark Sanford: he’s living out the plot of an escapist ’40s musical. His whole trip was simply a way of fulfiling the Good Neighbour Policy.

Update: When I wrote the above, I figured (like many people) that this movie had a romantic angle to it, but now it’s been confirmed.

Out with a bang

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:59 AM - 5 Comments

Inky Mark walks away angry.

“There is no check and balance,” Mr. Mark told the National Post. “The tone of the country is based on the leadership of the political parties. The way the leaders operate sets the mood of the politics in Parliament. And until we establish some checks and balances in the system so that people actually do have a say in the House, there really [are] free votes and that people can really represent the people who send them to Ottawa, nothing will change.”

O Canada, full of drugs

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:24 AM - 1 Comment

There has been a steady increase in Canada’s meth and ecstacy export business since 2003 and it’s now a major player in the international drug trade, according to a recent UN report. The increase is mostly due to demand from the US, but Canada also supplies up to 83 per cent of Australia’s and 62 per cent of Japan’s meth, and is the largest producer of ecstasy in North America. The UN attributes the rise of the drug trade to an increase of Asian organized crime rings in Canada. The report says the government needs to better its drug prevention and treatment programs to reduce demand for illegal substances nationally.

CBC News

Eat, sleep, swim, repeat

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:23 AM - 0 Comments

Noel Marrow is returning to Sydney Australia to revisit her gold-winning race at the 1938 British Empire Games in Sydney. At a spry age of 90, Marrow is competing at the 2009 Masters Games, set for October 10 in Sydney, Australia. Her daughter says that her mom, who is hard of hearing, just couldn’t pass up the chance to revisit the city where she enjoyed her peak performances.

The London Free Press

Comedian Rick Mercer recommends ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’ by Robert Evans

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

“It’s probably my favourite show business autobiography. Robert Evans was a film producer—he did The Sun Also Rises, Chinatown and The Godfather series. He was a bad B-actor who ended up running a studio and changed Hollywood completely. He was also a huge ladies man. He was power hungry and power mad. And he hung out with the likes of Kissinger. He liked to pretend all these people did his bidding. He took a very bad turn with cocaine. Eventually, he was thrown out of Hollywood in disgrace, and managed to crawl his way back. He’s a larger than life character with a fascinating story–all of which, I think, has probably a 50 per cent bulls–t ratio. I would not take his side of the story for gospel. But still, it’s a fun, fun picture. It’s candy, you know? It’s a junky book with lots of anecdotes that are amusing and outrageous. He collected powerful friends and beautiful women and also was responsible for producing some of the greatest movies of an era.”

Debt and taxes: a bit of German perspective

By John Geddes - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9:54 AM - 12 Comments

This morning, a little international perspective on Canada’s federal deficit, and the inevitable debate Canadians must have about taxes.

News from Germany is that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet has approved a budget plan today that would see Europe’s biggest national economy take on US$121 billion in debt this year, US$436 billion from 2010 to 2013.

By my arithmetic, Canada’s projected deficit of C$50.2 billion (or around US$46 billion) is a little less than 40 per cent of Germany’s, about in line with the size of the Canadian gross domestic product compared to German GDP.

Continue…

When you can’t rely on the wind and the sun

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9:48 AM - 0 Comments

One of the major challenges with introducing mass wind- and solar-generated electricity is that nobody can be sure when the wind will blow and the sun shine. So the electrical grid needs a way to store power from peak-generation hours for use when there’s less being churned out. Now a British scientist proposes a centralized system for coordinating millions of ordinary household water heaters: they would be switched on to store heat at peak production hours for use in showers or washing machines whenever needed. Don’t laugh: in New Zealand, Florida and South Africa, versions of the scheme have already proven highly effective.

The Guardian

Step away from the centuries-old voting method, and nobody gets hurt.

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9:15 AM - 54 Comments

ITQ is off today — Happy SJBD, everyone! — but before she heads off down the river, she just had to post her thoughts on the following helpful suggestion from the usually entirely sensible Bob Rae, in response to that age old question, “How can we make the House of Commons at least a little less of a horrible experience for everyone involved?”

Via Canadian Press:

Rae also proposes ditching the centuries-old voting method in the Commons.

He wants to see an electronic system that could let MPs vote within seconds – and use their time more productively than spending 90 minutes each day standing up and sitting down for votes the old-fashioned way.

Dear Bob Rae,

No.  Just — no. Don’t even try it. ITQ doesn’t want to have to chain herself to the Speaker’s chair to protest the dismantling of one of the few procedural mechanisms that even the most dysfunctional of  parliaments can’t screw up.

ITQ was in the House on June 28, 2005, for the vote on same-sex marriage, counting along with the table officers, waiting to see how many Liberal backbenchers would fail to rise when their leader stood up in support of his bill, and which Conservative MPs would get to their feet to join him while the rest of their caucus remained seated. When the clerk read out the result, the public gallery exploded into applause. The guards didn’t know what to make of it.  She was there the night that Bill Casey voted against the budget — hanging over the railing so she could watch as he rose in his place, fully aware that this single act would be his last as a member of the Conservative caucus. His colleagues sat in silence; from the other side of the aisle, all three opposition parties cheered him on. She was there when Chuck Cadman’s vote saved the Martin government from defeat, and she was there when that same government eventually fell.

Continue…

Ranking Mike Duffy on the Scale of Dubiousness™

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 8:39 AM - 44 Comments

Wherry linked to this article yesterday, but I didn’t get a chance to give it a read until this morning. Classic. Just classic. I haven’t seen this many suspect assertions come together since Larry King last recited his marriage vows.

In the interests of science, let’s rank Senator Mike Duffy’s statements on the Scale of Dubiousness™ – with 1.0 being a straightforward claim easily supported by abundant factual evidence and 10.0 being Bill Clinton denying having tapped that.

1.2 “I’m still learning about those secret handshakes, and the wink wink, nudge nudge,” Duffy said. The experience [of becoming a senator] can be surreal at times, he said. “There are games within games and you’re never really sure who your friends are,” he said.

This all makes sense. Becoming a senator is like joining a club – not a cool club like the Friars Club or even a useful club like the Hair Club for Men, but a club whose proceedings go almost entirely unnoticed by society at large. Think of it as Fight Club but with naps instead of punches.

5.7 Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Dean Del Mastro [the area’s MP] are working day and night, Duffy said, leaving no stone unturned or even taking summer vacations.

Although it scores only modestly high on the scale of dubiousness, this statement single-handedly Continue…

The phone call came from inside the house

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 1:36 AM - 8 Comments

Mike Blanchfield reads a government website. Possibly violating national security in the process.

The Treasury Board says that the cost of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan for the next two years will be $1.35 billion higher than projected a year ago by the Defence Department.

Those revised estimates of the incremental costs of the Canadian Forces mission in Afghanistan are posted on the Treasury Board website. The Defence Department, citing national security provisions, censored an Access to Information request by the federal NDP that asked for those figures three weeks ago.

Iran: Obama changes his tune, chides those who wanted him to change his tune

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:54 PM - 30 Comments

Discussing the presidency of Barack Obama at this stage is, frankly, not a very rewarding enterprise. The engaged, politics-wonk audience, perhaps especially in Canada, seems basically divided between an oh-thank-God-he’s-not-Bush-and-how-dare-you-question-him majority and a smaller, even more vocal rump who believe he’s destroying the great Bush legacy. (Call the latter group the Cheney Junior Achievers.) It may still be early to suggest the truth lies somewhere in between: that the U.S. president is acting in good faith with considerable skill, but that after all he’s human and sometimes fallible.

Which is the long way around to saying I was relieved to see John Dickerson in Slate had much the same reaction I had to Obama’s far tougher language on Iran today. Come on: the toughening in Obama’s language has been obvious; it has gone in the direction his most vocal critics have urged; and his denials are disingenuous.

“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” he told CBS on Friday. “We shouldn’t be playing into that.” Yet by today the White House was posting the opening statement from his news conference on the White House website in Persian. Dickerson’s piece, which comes across as gentle chiding instead of the greatly preferred polar havens of breathless hagiography or rote character assassination, pretty much nails, it seems to me, the evolution of Obama’s discourse on the matter.

Afghanistan: no more commuting?

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 11:34 PM - 5 Comments

For a reporter, I get on fairly well with the Privy Council Office’s Afghan Task Force, but as a generalist (dilettante?) I don’t follow their work from day to day. So I was surprised to get an email this afternoon from their press shop bearing a complete sound file of a news conference that was held this morning in the south of Kandahar. Clearly this is something Canada’s Afghanistan shop views as important.

The voices on the recording, which you can listen to if you have a lot of spare time or interest, are: Kandahar governor Tooryalai Wesa, speaking in Pashto and then English; Ben Rowswell, Chargé d’affaires at the Canadian embassy in Kabul; Ken Lewis, the civilian Representative of Canada in Kandahar (or RoCK); and Brig.-Gen. John Vance. So you have the Afghan, Canadian civil, and Canadian military leadership in the province, all gathered in the little mud-hut town of Deh-e-Begh.

The short version: Dar-e-Begh, a pretty nondescript town, has been a pilot project for a more concentrated Canadian development effort — one that focuses less on megaprojects (though those continue) and less on military confrontation (though that does too) and more on local, small-scale projects to provide immediate tangible differences to local Afghans’ lives.

“This is a logical turning point in Canadian operations,” Gen. Vance says. Continue…

'I can't point to any risks'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 9:23 PM - 12 Comments

An odd start to the government’s appeal of the federal court order to seek Omar Khadr’s repatriation. More from the Star and Globe.

The Truthiness Is, Stephen Harper Is a Madman

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 6:29 PM - 6 Comments

I don’t quite understand the obsession Stephen Colbert, or one of his writers, has with Prime Minister Harper. Though since the real point of the jokes is that he has no idea who Harper is or what Harper has ever done, it might be just another running joke about U.S. ignorance of Canada. Nevertheless, Canada shout-outs are always fun to see:

I think Harper should consider calling up Busboy productions and volunteering to be on the show — if the Mayor of Oshawa could do it…

'Common Sense' by Glenn Beck

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:54 PM - 16 Comments

Glenn Beck’s new book Common Sense is literally two books for the price of one. Sure, it’s a diatribe of Beck’s conservative rants, but almost half of the short volume is given over to a re-print of Thomas Paine’s famous Revolutionary pamphlet of the same name. This is meant to bolster Beck’s argument that his crusade against Obama Socialism is just like the American Revolution; he’s already made the argument on his Fox News show, The Glenn Beck Program, by having a guy dressed up as Paine (apparently Ben Franklin impersonators cost too much) as a recurring character. And, as an added benefits, it pads a very short book out with material that you can find for free on the Internet.

Most of the book is based on the standard theme of any Fox News show, not just Beck’s. Anything he doesn’t like is “tyranny.” Anything he likes is an example of “freedom.” Among the threats to freedom are government debt, Social Security (“a legal Ponzi scheme”), medicare, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To restore freedom, he demands term limits for all politicians, and a recognition that “Capitalism isn’t only about money, it’s about freedom.” And the book is full of his trademark nostalgia for the day after September 11, 2001, when for one brief shining moment everybody was terrified and jingoistic: “we began to remember our heritage and the power of sacrifice.”

The idea of the book, and it’s one that is clearly shared by many people, is that government services interfere with freedom to a greater extent than anything else in the world. (You will not, for example, find Beck considering the notion that universal health care promotes freedom by increasing mobility and personal security.) And all attempts to provide services through government are anti-freedom and slightly scary: “The environment is just a vehicle toward the Progressive ideal of total government rule.”

The blogger “Digby” recently summed up the message being delivered to Fox News viewers: “the tangible, real life benefits they receive for their tax dollars in the form of social security and food safety and roads and schools and health care are called ‘entitlements’ or ‘government waste’ and they believe that their tax dollars go into a black hole of special interests in ‘the fleecing of America.’ ” Add in a dash of religiosity, in the form of Beck’s lament that we now “have plenty of room for everything—except God,” and it’s a book whose vision of an ideal society is a Megachurch.

Still, the book is less over-the-top and hysterical than you would expect if you’ve watched Beck’s show. Instead he tries to appeal to history to give weight to his argument; that’s part of the point of linking his text to Tom Paine’s. Over and over again, Beck invokes history as a way of backing up whatever he’s saying, or drawing a straight line from the bad things in the past to the—we’re led to assume—equally bad things in the present. He reminds us that “in 1913 the income tax was applied only to the wealthiest 1 percent,” and uses this as proof that tax increases on the rich will surely be applied to his non-rich readers as well. The public school system is comparable to Robespierre and Hitler, who “wanted all children to be nurtured and taught by the state.” He even draws an overwrought parallel between those who are inconvenienced by gun-control laws and “the victims of Presidential Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible relocation of 150,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes to internment camps.”

So after informing us that every tyrannical act in the history of the world is exactly the same as gun control, health-care programs and deficit spending, Beck doesn’t even attempt to explain why British colonialism and American democracy are exactly the same. They just are. We can read Paine’s famous pamphlet in the right/Beck frame of mind: as a warning against carbon offsets, “class warfare,” and the martyrdom of Joe the Plumber.

Who is this guy?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:32 PM - 35 Comments

Craig Oliver talks to Michael Ignatieff.

Unpack your bags, Karlheinz – you're staying in Ottawa! (For July, anyway.)

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:18 PM - 10 Comments

Fresh off the Oliphant newswire:

Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant has recommended that Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber be entitled to remain in Canada until the completion of the Inquiry, which is scheduled to end on July 28th. At that time there will be an additional Round-Table Meeting. As Justice Oliphant indicated on his previous request, he remains of the view that Mr. Schreiber should be available to provide instructions to his Counsel and to be available for final submissions of all Parties.