The corporate climate crusaders

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 4 Comments

In the lead-up to last month’s vote on the massive Waxman-Markey clean energy bill, American TV viewers were treated to an odd sight. There, during commercial breaks, was Jim Rogers, CEO of the country’s third-largest energy company, calling for tough new climate change rules. In a polished, 30-second spot, the chief executive of Duke Energy asked: “Why would the head of one of America’s largest coal-burning utilities support a cap on carbon emissions?” With dozens of huge corporations voicing support for the monumental climate change bill, which narrowly passed a vote in the House of Representatives on June 26, it’s a question being asked a lot lately.

For most of the last 40 years, the battle lines were clearly drawn between two diametrically opposed groups—environmental activists on one side, big business on the other, and a yawning chasm in between, filled with billions of dollars and enough bile to poison the atmosphere for generations. On almost any issue, from air quality to the ban on ozone- depleting CFCs, they were constantly at each others’ throats. But the climate change issue is different, so different that it’s fast changing everything that we know about the way business interacts with the environment. Continue…

Mitchel Raphael on three rain miracles

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Bow if they bow
Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko arrived in Ottawa last week and were greeted at the airport by International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda and Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon. Oda, the first Japanese-Canadian ever elected as an MP, joked to Cannon before the royals’ plane landed that in ancient times no one’s head could be higher than the emperor’s, “so you better lean down.” Oda said Canadian officials explained that the protocol with the Japanese royals was to take your cue from them. Bow if they bow or shake their hand if they extend it. Oda noted the rain stopped just as the emperor and empress got off the plane and did not start again until they were in their car. Both royals spoke English but at times the emperor would turn to the empress for the right English word. Oda speaks a little Japanese and understands most of it from having her Japanese-speaking grandparents living with her while growing up. At a special reception for the royal couple on Tuesday, the minister was allowed to bring a guest. She chose her 86-year-old mother Kaye Oda as her date. Continue…

This Week: Good news/Bad news

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Face of the week
Actress Emma Watson (a.k.a. Hermione Granger) at last week’s New York premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

A week in the life of Stephen Harper
The PM earned kudos from Sir Bob Geldof for his stand on African aid. But his good work at the G8 summit in Italy was overshadowed by gaffes and controversies. First Harper was accused of palming a communion wafer at a state funeral. Then he publicly attacked Michael Ignatieff for something he never said, sparred with the parliamentary budget officer, changed tack on the deficit and almost missed the photo call (again). Who says Canadian politics is boring? Continue…

C’mon, defraud me like you mean it

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Most people think of email spam as annoying, but I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s like getting a tiny novella delivered to my inbox for free—an exotic fiction designed to grab my attention, my imagination and, should 78 of my IQ points happen to stage a wildcat strike, my money. But I’m worried about what the recession is doing to spammers. They appear to have lost their creative spark.

This past week, I received from “DHL Delivery Service” the following message: “When do you want your Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars to be delivered to you?” That was it. That was the entire con. Earlier, an equally imaginative proposal had arrived: “I am Mr. Vincent Cheng, GBS, JP Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. I have a transaction of 22.5 Million USD for you.” Continue…

Pipeline bombs fuel fear

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 1 Comment

One morning last June, a handful of villagers in Tomslake, B.C., a rural community just south of Dawson Creek, gathered on a road not far from where EnCana Corp. planned to sink a new natural gas well. The residents, worried about the health and safety impacts of the development, didn’t so much block workers from the job site as they did serve them coffee and doughnuts. They did the same when security arrived and, later, when media came to report on the day’s events, which ended as peacefully as they’d begun.
Today, many of those who participated in the get-together fear they’re now on an RCMP list of suspects in six EnCana pipeline bombings that began in October, went dormant in January, and started again last week with two new explosions—one on Canada Day, the other on American Independence Day. “The major people that are on that list, every single one of them was on that line,” one told Maclean’s in a telephone interview. “It wouldn’t surprise me right now if you and I weren’t being listened to.”

The mystery surrounding the bombings, which have targeted mainly sour gas installations in northeast B.C.—the gas is “sour” because it contains toxic hydrogen sulfide—has only deepened since the first blast. That explosion was preceded by handwritten letters sent to EnCana and two local news outlets demanding energy companies active in the Tomslake area shutter their operations and adding: “We will no longer negotiate with terrorists, which you are as you keep endangering our families with crazy expansion of deadly gas wells in our homelands.” Continue…

Ekos-ting on fumes: Hey, at least the stuff about the Afghanistan mission is interesting!

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:31 AM - 51 Comments

Just as ITQ feared, the latest numbers for Ekos show virtually no movement in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of what Frank Graves describes as a “mainly indifferent public”.

The Conservatives are back in front place, with 34.1% – up from 31.8% last week, which, at just over 2%, represents the most substantial change for any of the parties, which ought to tell you something about the rest of the results. The Liberals creep up a teeny tiny twentieth of a percent, and now sit at 32.4% as the NDP drop by .8, from 16 to 15.2%, and in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois falls from 37.1 to 34%. With the exception of the Conservative uptick, every single change is — say it with me, now — Within The Margin of Error (1.9%).

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s the interesting part of this week’s release:

Canadians have turned decisively against Canada’s participation in the military mission in Afghanistan, according to the latest weekly poll conducted by EKOS Research Associates exclusively for release on CBC.ca.

“We have been polling on this question since the mission began,” said EKOS President Frank Graves. “The public outlook on Afghanistan has undergone a steady and radical transformation. From overwhelming public support at the outset of the mission we have seen an inexorable reversal to overwhelming public opposition. Opposition has grown from a trivial mid-teen level to nearly well over 50 percent. Support has collapsed from more than 2 in 3 at the outset to just 1 in 3 now. And none of this is an ephemeral, excited response to news headlines; it has been a steady and gradual shift in public judgment of the mission.”

In Quebec, where support for the mission has never been strong, it is now only barely above single digits. In this poll, opponents outnumber supporters in every region except Manitoba/Saskatchewan, where the sample size is too small to be conclusive.

“Nonetheless, there is little reason to suspect that the Afghanistan mission is an especially heavy load on the Conservative government, since it has already agreed with the opposition Liberals to bring the mission to a close in 2011 and the debate has largely fallen out of the media discourse,” said Graves.

You know, usually when ITQ finds herself trapped by someone who goes on and on and on and on and on about All The Stuff The Media Should Be Covering, she rolls her eyes and points out that, actually, we are covering most of it, just not in the way that the speaker seems to think it should be covered. That’s not the case when it comes to Afghanistan — or, more specifically, that “steady and gradual  shift” in public opinion on the mission — which, notwithstanding today’s pollblitz, is probably the most consistently underreported story in Canadian politics today, and there’s really no satisfactory explanation for it, so she won’t try to fob one off on you.

Mel Gibson's hand puppet, Dave Carroll's broken guitar, and "Shannon Tweed Day" in Oshawa

By Lianne George - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

Kim Jong Ill?
So much mystery attends North Korea, Asia’s only Communist dynasty, and so fraught are the geopolitics of the region, that the merest sign of health trouble for its Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, sets off international alarms. So it was this week when South Korea’s YTN television, citing Korean and Chinese intelligence sources, reported that the 67-year-old has pancreatic cancer and, at best, five years to live. In his recent appearances, Kim has looked gaunt, with thinning hair, a limp and an asymmetrical bent to his mouth, indications he’s not entirely recovered from a stroke last year. Renewed fear that Kim is not long for this world caused Seoul’s main stock index to plummet, so vexed are the markets by what his death could mean. Though he is said to have named his youngest son, the Swiss-educated Kim Jong Un, as his successor, there’s concern the installation of a weak leader still in his mid-20s will destabilize the regime and the region.

What’s wrong with being sexy?
Shannon Tweed, the Canadian adult-film star, has been denied recognition for such contributions to world cinema as Hard Vice and Indecent Behavior 3. But the acting mayor of Ottawa, Doug Thompson, issued a proclamation that this Wednesday would be “Shannon Tweed Day,” to celebrate the blond bombshell’s visit to the city where she lived in the 1970s. He soon rescinded the proclamation, however, admitting sheepishly that he “spoke to the media before the item had been fully vetted.” Tweed told the Ottawa Citizen that she had “no hard feelings” about the rejection, but bristled at a councilwoman’s suggestion that she is a porn actress: “I’ve done movies with love scenes,” said the star of Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, “but I’ve never had real sex on camera.” Oshawa, which recently finished first in an online contest hosted by KISS, doesn’t care either way. Oshawa city councillor Robert Lutczyk, who headed up the spring contest effort, promised a “Shannon Tweed Day” in Oshawa if she and the band come through town this fall. “I’ll be there,” said Tweed. “I’ll be there.” Continue…

What the right hook-up can get you

By Sarah Elton - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 17 Comments

The customers arrived one by one on a rainy Saturday morning at the secret meeting spot, a parking lot tucked behind a video store in a suburb of Toronto. There were 30 families in all: the mother of six, wearing a hijab, who made the three-hour round trip in her minivan to collect 30 litres of milk ($60 plus $20 for delivery), the middle-aged man in a red Nissan Versa, a couple of young urbanites who rose at 7:30 to get there in time. They’d made the trek, as they do every other week, for the big glass jars of raw milk—and whatever other illegal treats their supplier might have for them that day.

The farmer selling the contraband, a woman in her 30s wearing purple nail polish and a jean jacket with rhinestones, brings the milk in the bed of her pickup truck, along with small jars of raw-milk cream, unpasteurized cheese curdled in her kitchen and un-graded eggs she sells on a neighbour’s behalf. Continue…

Emmy Nominations: Meaningful In a Meaningless Sort of Way

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:01 AM - 8 Comments

It’s always hard to know what to say about award nominations. (If you say awards are meaningless, that’s a cliché, and if you say awards are meaningful, that’s obviously false.) But now that the Emmy nominations have been announced (like the Oscars, the Emmys have expanded the number of nominees in the biggest categories) I can make observations, and sidestep the question of whether How I Met Your Mother magically became a better show this past season just because it was nominated for the first time.

Well, I’ll start with that show, now that I’ve mentioned it. It’s good that How I Met Your Mother got the nomination. This was far from its best season — weighed down by too much Stella and two, count ‘em, two pregnancies — but an Emmy nomination validates the idea that it’s respected in the business, in effect announcing that it’s OK to go out and imitate it. And since it would be a good idea for more shows to imitate some aspects of HIMYM (the hybrid of multi-camera shooting and single-camera style, the unabashed sentimentality), the nomination is valuable as sort of a green light: this show is officially Respected now, and can be used as an example. (Even better: No nomination for Jeremy Piven. That leaves the field clear for Neil Patrick Harris to be unfairly beaten by someone else.)

That’s one thing that is valuable about awards presented by the industry, as opposed to journalists. Emmy and Oscar nominations offer an indication of what is respected in the industry, which may be a little different from what gains the respect of the critics or the audience (though there’s always lots of overlap). We can all agree, for example, that 30 Rock (22 nominations this year following up its multiple wins in previous years) has the respect of the industry like no other comedy in the world, and that Mad Men, with 16 nominations, is the most respected drama. These preferences overlap with critical preferences, though not audience preferences. But it’s more interesting to know what the people who actually make TV are interested in.

Now, it’s not an exact science, since if the nominations were arrived at by pure popular vote, the way they used to be, the list might be different. The nominating committees tend to pick shows that the Academy as a whole might not know that well. Still, to get on the list, you have to be in the top 10 of popular choices, so any show that gets nominated is obviously a favourite with the industry at large. (Update: Todd VDW says in comments that “the blue-ribbon panels have mostly been ditched.”)

The most obvious window into the mind of the TV-maker is the dominance of a certain kind of cable drama in the Emmy nominations. Broadcast network shows don’t do well; the only ones that got nominated were House and Lost. And cable dramas that are science-fiction (Battlestar Galactica) or light action-comedy (Burn Notice) don’t get much love either. The Academy members lean heavily toward “Good-Good” dramas (see below), dramas that deal with ambitious subject-matter and do things you couldn’t get away with on network TV. They are the shows that the average TV person dreams of making.

Sometimes shows are rewarded more for aspiration than achievement. The nominations of Dexter and Damages, both of which went through disappointing seasons, are like that; there are several dramas that deserved to be nominated more than those two, but they are both essentially higher-class, higher-risk versions of typical network shows (the forensics mystery and the lawyer drama) and therefore reflect the ambitions of the voters — in this case, the full Academy membership as well as the people who sit on the nominating committees. Their deepest desires are, arguably, to make the same shows they’re making now, only with less censorship and interference. It also helps if the show is somewhat high-class in terms of production values; The Shield, a deliberately gritty and cheap-looking show, doesn’t ring the Academy’s bells the way a nicer-looking show does.

With comedy, it’s a bit different. The voters and the winnowers on the Blue Ribbon Panel lean toward non-traditional comedies: of the seven nominees, there’s not a single show that is shot before a studio audience. (HIMYM adds audience reactions/laugh track after the shooting is finished.) This seems a little misguided at a time when the multi-camera sitcom is making a comeback, and after a season when The Big Bang Theory should have earned a place in at least the top 7.  But it’s what the voters want to be making. But there are two different streams of Emmy preferences when it comes to comedy. One is the half-hour prestige cable show, like Weeds, Entourage or even Flight of the Conchords. The other is the network comedy that is seen as being subversive or getting away with things that My Show (whatever show the voter happens to be working on) couldn’t.

This, I think, helps to explain the industry love for Family Guy. Now apart from the point that Family Guy isn’t even the best Seth MacFarlane show — American Dad doesn’t suck, whereas FG does — it has gotten progressively more self-indulgent since Fox brought it back. But the self-indulgence may be what has made it the first animated show to be nominated for Best Comedy. It’s allowed to make political jokes, scatalogical jokes, and jokes at the expense of its own parent corporation; most of those jokes may not be very good or biting, but people on other shows dream of being allowed to make them. That’s why 30 Rock hits the sweet spot: it, too, is allowed to get away with those things, including many jokes about the corporation that owns it, and it’s also a very funny show. Oh, and it’s filmed in New York, which is a plus (self-hating Los Angelenos have a thing for shows shot in New York). It will probably win, and it will come close to deserving it — I think The Office had the best season of the seven nominees.

Oh, there was an opera singer in the ’50s named “Emmy Loose,” but I’m not entirely sure how to make that relevant to this discussion. I’ll think of something eventually.

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of July 14th, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Econowatch

By Steve Maich - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Almost from the beginning of this economic downturn, experts have been rushing to tell us how different this one is from all others that have gone before. Yes, we’ve had stock market bubbles pop, we’ve seen the real estate market crash, we’ve seen Wall Street paralyzed by fear, and governments printing money in an effort to avert catastrophe. But never quite like this.

This is unsettling for many reasons. Human beings look to history to make sense of the future. The Great Depression was a catastrophe, but we understand it. We know essentially what caused it, what policies failed, and which ones eventually worked. Japan’s lost decade is another cautionary tale that provides useful lessons and context. Continue…

And a good metamorning to y'all, too.

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 8:38 AM - 19 Comments

While we wait not so patiently for Ekos to release this week’s tracking poll — oh please, please, please let there be some sort of movement to wildly overanalyse, if only so ITQ doesn’t have to hit the thesaurus to come up with more ways to describe utter stasis — a few notes from the morning newswanderings:

• The Globe and Mail would seem to agree that the recent race to the very bottom of the political barrel in Barrie was, indeed, just plain awful, which, somewhat counterintuitively, actually makes ITQ  feel the teeniest bit better about the whole appalling interlude,  simply because … hey, everyone! Look! We found The Line! Or a line, at least. Baby steps, right?
• Now that Stephen Taylor has officially denied any involvement in Republicans For Ignatieff, can we move on to the other, no less intriguing theories behind its origins? I knows, I know: Why expend so much mental energy on an anonymously-created site? Because it’s going to drive ITQ quietly — or not so quietly — crazy until she, or someone else, finally figures it out, that’s why — and yes, to answer the question posed to her by press gallery colleague — and fellow Hot Room Denizen — Deborah Gyapong on her blog, we would be just as freakishly obsessed by “astroturfing on the progressive or liberal side of the spectrum”. In fact, if she had read what we’ve actually written about R4I so far, she’d know that, at the moment, ITQ’s best guess is still that the site is, in fact, a jab from the left, not the right.
• On the other hand, notwithstanding what certain prime ministers have suggested, ITQ just isn’t buying the claim that Wafergate was a sinister plot to sow dissent between Catholics and Protestants, and finds the evidence assembled to back it up to be somewhat wanting. The prime minister was in the frame for the Communion shot because he’s the prime minister, for heaven’s sake — and the camera didn’t even stay on him for more than a few seconds.

Oh, and coming later today, ITQ reveals deep, dark journalistic secrets in her far-too-long-and-indulgent-to-inflict-on-the-comment-thread response to yesterday’s post on Memetracker. Whee!

Swim class for the truly terrified

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

Phyllis Lear never learned to swim and nearly drowned when she was eight. The scare left her with a lifelong fear of water and a stubborn will to conquer the problem. She doggedly took beginner swim lessons. “I failed every single time,” she says from her home in California. “You’d think it’s not so hard, but for me it was hard. You’d go for an hour, get in the pool and it’s freezing, and nobody ever worked on my strokes.”

Then Lear spotted an ad for a swim clinic specifically for aquaphobic adults. It’s run by Paul Lennon, a former competitive swimmer who uses exposure therapy to treat aquaphobia. Lennon holds his Adult Aquaphobia Swim Centre workshops (beafish@mac.com) all over the world, renting swimming facilities such as the YMCA, and acclimatizes his clients in warm water for six hours straight on the first lesson. His clinics, for which he charges US$995, run for six hours a day, five days in a row. Lear, who was then 64 and “in pretty good shape,” had signed up. But when she learned about the exposure therapy, she thought, “Who in their right mind can go swimming for six hours? I’m cancelling.” She told her husband. “My husband said, ‘Go and when you get tired, come home.’ ” Continue…

Canada’s best and worst run cities

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

CORRECTION:
The Maclean’s survey of Canada’s Best and Worst Run Cities, published in our July 27th issue, misstated the residential tax burden for the city of Longueuil, Quebec. The original figure, as compiled for Maclean’s by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, put the average tax burden per residence at $666. The city of Longueuil has now revealed its own estimate is $1241 per residence. The published figure was calculated using only those taxes directly assessed by the City of Longueuil and failed to include the taxes paid by city residents to cover services provided to the entire Longueuil Urban Agglomeration (of which the city forms a part).

The adjustment means Longueuil’s grade for taxation efficiency falls from an A+ to a C+, or from 1st to 14th among the municipal governments surveyed. Accordingly, it drops from fifth place to seventh in the overall rankings.

Maclean’s regrets the error.

This survey, the first of its kind in Canada, provides citizens in 31 cities across the country with comparative data on how well—or poorly—their city is run, measured by the cost and quality of the public services it delivers. (Why 31? We took the 30 largest cities in Canada, added whatever provincial capitals were not on the list, then subtracted a few cities from the Greater Toronto Area for better regional balance. Somehow that left 31.)

Though the overall results—Burnaby, Saskatoon and Surrey, B.C. lead the pack; Charlottetown, Kingston, Ont., and Fredericton trail—will be of particular interest, they are less important than the process this is intended to kick off. We aim not merely to start some good barroom arguments, but to help voters to hold their representatives to better account, and indeed to help city governments themselves. For without some sort of yardstick to measure their performance, either against other cities or against their own past record, how can they hope to know whether they are succeeding?

To compile the survey, Maclean’s commissioned the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, expanding on the institute’s earlier work measuring the performance of municipalities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Unlike other studies, this does not try to measure quality of life, or which city is the “best place to live.” Rather, it focuses on the contribution of local governments to this end.

RELATED ARTICLES:
How Burnaby earned the top spot — What’s wrong in Charlottetown — Andrew Coyne’s analysis

This survey looks at a city’s efficiency—the cost of producing results—and the effectiveness of its services, including how well each city does when it comes to things like maintaining roads and parks, picking up garbage and putting out fires. Click below to see how the numbers break down. Continue…

Demanding times

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 11:40 PM - 90 Comments

The three-week-old strike by municipal workers in Toronto has spawned mountains of stinking garbage, left public swimming pools empty and wreaked havoc for working parents who rely on city-run daycares. But the strike has also brought with it something else: the sudden realization that not all jobs in Canada are created equal.

In what many would call the real world, an economic earthquake has shattered lives, erased nearly 400,000 jobs, and obliterated a lifetime of retirement savings, hopes and dreams. Yet despite that, public sector workers with iron-clad pensions and rock-solid job security have opted to wage a battle for pay hikes and the type of arcane perks that were almost unheard of in the private sector, even when times were good. “Everyone who works within a large apparatus like the government believes the whole world works that way, when in fact it doesn’t,” says Ted Mallett, chief economist with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). “There’s a distinct lack of appreciation for what’s changed outside in the real world.” Continue…

Your tax dollars on the move

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:09 PM - 51 Comments

CBC correspondents move all around the circle. I’ve been a fan of Evan Solomon’s since Shift magazine. He will do well here if both he and the network see his show as a chance to dig deeply into all the ways Canadians are actually governed, or could be, and not — as too many people saw his Sunday show — as an excuse to cover something, anything, please God anything, except Ottawa politics. The CBC sometimes has a hard time with this, so: You have a lot of other shows that don’t cover Ottawa politics. Your Ottawa politics show should probably cover Ottawa politics.

Terry Milewski, in the meantime, is a blessing. He cannot be bullied by Conservative or Liberal — ask Peter Donolo — and one underappreciated thing he has done again and again and again in Vancouver is to jump onto the back of a complex, significant story; sink his teeth in up to the gums; and cover the damned thing with passion, humour, and a sense of justice, for years. I would say, as a parallel to Evan’s case, that Terry will do well here if his bosses let him follow stories here in the same way, but I do believe they couldn’t stop him if they tried.

And hey, David Common: Get in one last dinner at Le Procope before they haul you out of there.

Sonia Sotomayor, Pop-Culture Maven

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:35 PM - 9 Comments

I never thought the Sonia Sotomayor hearings would be a source of film and TV references, but yesterday we had the Annie Hall moment, and today we got this:

An episode of the television show “Perry Mason” influenced a young Sonia Sotomayor to become a prosecutor, she testified Wednesday at her confirmation hearing to become the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice…

“No, my job as a prosecutor is to do justice, and justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not,” she quoted the prosecutor as saying.

“That TV character said something that motivated my choices in life,” Sotomayor said.

I guess that’s plausible enough, but really — being inspired to become a defense attorney by Perry Mason is one thing, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of Hamilton Burger, the losingest prosecutor in the history of the criminal justice system, inspiring someone to become a prosecutor. Though as someone pointed out, Burger would probably be more likely to get appointed to the Supreme Court than Mason. The fact that he lost almost every case doesn’t stand in the way of his nomination, whereas Perry has all kinds of skeletons in his closet.

For those who are wondering, like Senator Franken, about the episode where Perry lost a case, I refer you to the Perry Mason Show Book. The episode in question is “The Case of the Deadly Verdict,” which was a pure ratings-stunt kind of thing: the trial takes place at the beginning of the episode, and though Perry comes out on top in the end, the episode is set up so the network could promote the hell out of it (“Perry Mason loses a case!”). As you can see from the above discussion, the promotion worked.

A lesson in objectivity

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:09 PM - 4 Comments

The Iranian regime is proposing a simple solution to the problem of widespread reports of government misbehaviour: stamp out the reports. Iranian officials have proposed a new set of media guidelines that would require future criticism of the country’s institutions to be “constructive and presented in a non-judgmental manner,” according to a state media report. The new law is intended to prevent the country’s media from once again becoming “awash with provocative, insulting, derogatory and defamatory reports,” as it apparently did following the June 12 election and during the subsequent protests. “When it comes to rules and regulations,” says the head of Iran’s General Investigation Organization, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, “each and every individual is duty-bound to go by the book.”

Tehran Times

Real theme of Harry Potter lost in all that snogging

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 3:48 PM - 3 Comments

Forget that Harry Potter snogs Ginny Weasley in the sixth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The most interesting part of the film occurs at the beginning and revolves around the overwhelming idiocy of Muggles, those unfortunate folk who possess no ability to stun, charm or otherwise commit magical acts. They see acts that defy the laws of physics and logic yet never ask, “Hey, who are you? “Why are you wearing those bizarre clothes? What’s that stick for? What’s going on?”

Sure enough, humans are oblivious as three Evil Death Eaters swoop through the skies of  London, leaving black entrails in their wake. There is only mild curiosity before Lord Foster’s streamlined elegant Millennium Bridge is pulled and twisted apart. Finally it collapses, plunging hapless Muggle pedestrians into the Thames River. Similarly, pedestrians in London’s busy subway system pay no attention to Dumbledore—and his floor-length satin robes and long grey hair and beard.

The message is clear: Muggles are totally reliant on good wizards and witches to keep them safe from Lord Voldemort and his minions. And this theme isn’t just a big-screen liberty. Muggles are idiots in the books too. For example, the Minister of Magic enters 10 Downing Street at his leisure to update the befuddled PM on all the chaos in the magical world. And the supercilious wizard doesn’t even think to ask for Muggle help.

So while the series is about good magical folk battling evil, the subtext is that Muggles just aren’t up to the task. The Harry Potter moral may be that every one can chose their own path and must decide what side they are on, but Muggles are denied that opportunity. They just aren’t worthy.

High-speed railroading

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 2:27 PM - 115 Comments

From the print edition, Andrew Coyne says a lot of really mean things about my high-speed rail dream. And yet I rather like where his argument ends up.

For your consideration

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 2:11 PM - 39 Comments

The National Post takes this whole Chrétien Order of Merit news badly. Conrad Black has other things on his mind these days, but eventually he might think about suing the Post editorial writer for a really bad attempt at stylistic voice appropriation:

So perhaps one cannot quarrel too loudly with his appointment to the Order of Merit. But if one happened to be Lord Black of Crossharbour — a figure admittedly never too far from our thoughts — one might be sorely tempted to try. Hypocrisy played a large role in Mr. Chretien’s particular genius, so should anyone be surprised that there is a certain distinct flavour of it haunting what may be the supreme moment of his life?

Bouquet toss sends man to hospital

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 2:03 PM - 1 Comment

The bride’s biggest mistake was trying to add a modern twist to an age-old custom: the bouquet toss. At a wedding in the Tuscan countryside, the bride decided she wanted to do something special with her bouquet—instead of simply tossing it into the crowd of gathered single ladies, like every other newly wed. So she asked Isidoro Pensieri to fly an ultra-light aircraft over the party, casting the flowers into the eager arms of an unmarried guest. Unfortunately for the pilot, no sooner were the flashy flowers tossed than they disappeared into the plane’s tail rotor, causing a motor explosion and pitching the aircraft into a downward dive. After just missing a hostel, the plane crashed to the ground. Pensiere is now recovering in a hospital in Pisa from serious facial and head injuries, as well as two broken legs.

The Guardian

Unnecessary at any speed

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 84 Comments

It is a special kind of boondoggle that even a politician can resist. People who spend other people’s money for a living aren’t in the habit of asking too many questions at the best of times, still less when even the most colossal waste of funds can be justified as “stimulus.” But when a project promises not only the usual thousands of jobs and billions in spinoff benefits, but to save the earth in the bargain, you’d think they’d be falling over themselves to sign on. But some ideas, it seems, are just too insane.

Hence the latest act in the ongoing, 30-year farce known as high-speed rail. The setting this time is Alberta, but the action is always the same. A consulting firm reports, after many months and millions of dollars, that the latest scheme to link city A to city B by high-speed rail—in this case, Calgary and Edmonton—will cost billions of dollars, in fact billions more than was previously estimated. The politicians take a look at the numbers, blanch, and thank the consultants for their work. The project does not proceed. It never does. Continue…

Perhaps-not-ideal political metaphor of the day

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 1:45 PM - 9 Comments

Former Liberal defence minister David Pratt has a hard time telling the difference between a democratic challenge for a riding nomination and a deadly attack by Iraqi insurgents:

“When I arrived in Baghdad, they took me through what to do and not do when you are ambushed, and now I’ve been ambushed in Ottawa.”