Chantal Hébert endorses Trudeau!

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 9:32 AM - 76 Comments

Not quite. But then, around here we like the spicy headlines. Here’s what friend Chantal actually says in her column today about the Cauchon-Coderre hijinx:

Both of them might be better advised to pay more attention to Justin Trudeau, a rare rising Liberal star who actually beat a Bloc incumbent to get to the House of Commons. His stock has quietly been going up since then.

In a future succession battle, Trudeau is at least as likely to be a threat to both Cauchon and Coderre as they are to find each other’s names on the final ballot of a leadership vote.

And now you all get to argue in the comments.

Sponsorship tell-all book disappears

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 7 Comments

For Les Intouchables, a Quebec book publisher specializing in timely and often compromising pro-indépendantiste screeds, the project must have seemed delicious: a book co-written by a former mandarin of the Liberal Party of Canada’s Quebec wing detailing the party’s dark sponsorship scandal secrets. Turns out it may have been too good to be true.

For a short time, Le rouge et le noir: les secrets du Parti libéral du Canada (The Red and the Black: The Secrets of the Liberal Party of Canada), co-authored by Benoît Corbeil (pictured), the former director of the Liberal party’s Quebec wing, was displayed on the publisher’s website, along with a picture of the book’s cover. Then all traces of it mysteriously vanished. Continue…

The Interview: Richard Dawkins

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 153 Comments

British author Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion sold over one million copies and touched off an international debate about the existence of a higher power. Critics denounced him as “Christainophobic” and a “secularist bigot.” In Turkey, the book was banned as “an attack on holy values,” and its publisher was put on trial. Now the evolutionary biologist—the world’s most prominent atheist—has set his sights on creationists and advocates of “intelligent design.” His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, was just released.

Q: Your new book is subtitled The Evidence for Evolution. Why do you think society needs a primer 150 years after Charles Darwin first laid it out in The Origin of Species?

A: It is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life—a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you think about it, before Darwin, we hadn’t the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It’s still such an exciting idea that it is well worth everybody understanding it.

Q: You compare creationists to Holocaust deniers—history deniers is the term you’ve coined. Isn’t that a little over the top?

A: No. They are both very similar—both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of Holocaust deniers it’s more recent history, but in both cases the evidence— in favour of the Holocaust and evolution—is simply overwhelming. That doesn’t mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history. Continue…

Reverse McGinleys

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 12:09 AM - 0 Comments

Not only don’t I care about Heather Locklear appearing on the “new” Melrose Place, I don’t even care enough to write about how much I don’t care.  But it does remind me that Locklear has spent most of her career being added to the casts of shows that already started, and she has one of the better track records on that score. I’ve called her a “reverse Ted McGinley,” which of course is unfair to McGinley. He’s usually been added to long-running shows after a major cast member leaves, so the shows wouldn’t have gotten better with or without him (some would argue that he improved Married With Children). But Aaron Spelling kept adding Locklear midway through the first or second seasons of shows that had potential but weren’t quite there: he added her to Dynasty — though it was the addition of Joan Collins that saved that show – then TJ Hooker, and most importantly Melrose Place. Then she joined Spin City, not exactly improving it but probably giving it the boost it needed to survive the departure of Michael J. Fox.

The lesson appears to be that if the new Melrose could get her as a regular, it would probably survive. It probably can’t, though, and even if she did join the show full time, she could never recapture her greatest moment of crime-fighting glory.

Also, while on the subject, here’s a taste of what Entertainment Tonight was like 25 years ago. By comparison with today’s insider-showbiz shows, it seems kind of serious-minded, in a fluffy/puffy sort of way.

Previously-Mentioned Show, Partly-New Thoughts

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

I already mentioned that the second season of Being Erica demonstrates how early shows start rebooting these days: the second season essentially retools the premise and asks us to see it as a separate unit from the first season. Shows used to do that out of obvious desperation, but nowadays, it’s no longer a sign of desperation or network meddling, or at least it isn’t seen that way. In some ways, the second season of Erica has the signs of a retool, with more of a Lost-style focus on ongoing mysteries and connections, a more aggressive focus on the fantasy setup behind these trips into the past (remember, when the show started, the CBC seemed to be soft-peddling the fact that it was a fantasy ), and shake-ups in the lives and relationships of the characters. All this has the demographic logic of a retool, trying to expand the show’s audience, maybe bring in more male viewers, fantasy/serialization geeks, and so on. But one of the big advantages of the modern season-long serial format, which allows for huge changes from one season to the next, is that it allows a show to reboot without showing a clear lack of confidence in itself.

In the past, when a show revised its premise, we would know for certain that this was a sign that someone didn’t think it was working. Now, we don’t know that for certain. It might be lack of confidence, it might not be; hits retool almost as often as bubble shows, and there are artistic arguments for rebooting, not just economic/ratings arguments. That’s a big help for shows that are still trying to find themselves: they can do an overhaul, maybe get new viewers, without driving away the viewers they already had — because regular viewers are driven away by the perception of unnecessary retools or network meddling, and now we can’t always sense when that’s happened.

This does not, of course, apply to shows like Heroes, which do everything and anything out of an obvious sense of desperation.

Today in oops (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 8:21 PM - 9 Comments

The intrepid reporters at the Globe have the audio.

“Hey there hot stuff, I’ve been waiting for your call,” a breathless female voice proffers. “Are you ready for some tantalizing fun?”

The phone message confounded some fishermen in the region, who have been pressing Ottawa to provide financial support after a dismal season at sea. “That’s supposed to be the line the information’s on?” said Ken Drake of the PEI Fisherman’s Association. “It don’t sound very good.”

China, U.S. tackle climate change. Canada not so much.

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 5:33 PM - 7 Comments

World leaders gathered in New York on Tuesday for a series of high-level meetings aimed at securing a global agreement on how to tackle climate change. The meetings are aimed at laying the groundwork for a post-Kyoto deal on emissions reductions ahead of December’s Copenhagen conference, where it’s hoped the agreement will be finalized.

At least two countries who shunned the Kyoto Accord showed a willingness to re-assess their reluctance to commit to emissions targets: China announced it was working on a package of measures to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, while U.S. President Barack Obama touted his government’s renewed commitment “to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution.”

Canada, which has so far shunned global efforts to cut emissions partly because China and the U.S. were doing the same, didn’t appear willing to budge even after the two recalcitrant countries proved willing to come onboard. Environment Minister Jim Prentice specifically criticized the Chinese proposal as insufficient because it “did not offer binding targets in terms of reductions, but rather targets that are related to specific things that would be done in China relative to energy efficiency, renewable energies and so on.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who declined to attend the climate change meetings but was in New York for a lunch with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said Canada was working alongside the Obama administration on a “truly continental approach to climate change.”

While in New York, Obama hosted a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestiniant President Mahmoud Abbas. Obama urged the two sides to relaunch peace talks on delicate issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the establishment of a Palestinian state, the dismantling of Israeli settlements, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. The White House has requested that Netanyahu and Abbas meet again in Washington next week to kickstart serious negotiations.

Toronto Star

Globe and Mail

New York Times

Today in oops

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:53 PM - 24 Comments

Capping a particularly glorious day for Canadian democracy here at Beyond the Commons… this.

Maritime lobster fishermen in need of financial help are getting a lift of another kind. A toll-free hotline number announced today by federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea for fishermen is actually a sex line.

The hotline is supposed to offer details about a short-term assistance program. But instead, a sultry-sounding woman offers callers “some tantalizing fun” from a bevy of “nasty girls.”

The Coming Pundit Revolt

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:41 PM - 11 Comments

Someone sent me a copy of Glenn Beck’s latest book, meaning I’ve officially crossed over into being Maclean’s designated Professor Emeritus of Beckology or something. Anyway, I wanted to call attention to something that is starting to happen, and which I suspect is going to continue: a split between Beck, who is now on the verge of becoming the definitive Fox News personality, and other conservative pundits. After Beck’s interview with Katie Couric, where he mentioned that he thinks Obama was probably a better choice than McCain (not setting the bar very high, of course), Mark Levin, a popular and insane radio host who is sort of a non-telegenic version of his friend Sean Hannity, attacked Beck (refusing to mention his name, a classic talk-radio technique) as being “incoherent” and “pathetic” and a mere “5 pm-er.” And the day before, Peter Wehner, a former assistant to Karl Rove who was considered kind of the resident intellectual of the Bush White House, wrote that Beck is bad for the conservative movement not only because he pushes crazy conspiracy theories, but because of “his admiration for Ron Paul and his charges of American ‘imperialism.’”

We are probably going to see more of this. Limbaugh already is showing signs that he doesn’t like being overtaken in influence by a self-described “rodeo clown.” Very little of this opposition to Beck is grounded in any clear principles; many of the people who are tut-tutting him for pushing conspiracy theories are the same people who were fine with the even wilder anti-Clinton conspiracy theories of the ’90s. It’s a bit like National Review dropping Ann Coulter’s column when she wrote that America should go to other countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”; it was really just a blunt statement of ideas that were appearing on the magazine’s website all the time.

But there are two problems some conservative pundits have with the rise of Beck, and the ongoing transformation of Fox News into a Beckian network. One is that he’s expressing a sort of old-fashioned ’50s Reds-under-the-Beds conservatism, which is by its nature isolationist. What worried Wehner, who is a “neoconservative” very much in favour of foreign intervention, is that this kind of isolationism will take root and become popular; Beck has already attracted many of the people who were Ron Paul followers last year, and many of these people hold views on foreign policy that are closer to the “left” than the right. Now, when a Republican is in office again, Fox News will switch back. (Again, this is familiar if you followed the Clinton era, when the Kosovo intervention was decried as scary imperialism by many conservative pundits and politicians who supported the Iraq invasion a few years later.) But right now they’re validating a viewpoint that many conservative pundits find dangerous and don’t want to see mainstreamed: the conservatism that is anti-intervention across the board, at home and abroad. Fox News will stop promulgating these views when they’re not convenient, but right now, for the sake of ratings, they’re helping to bring the Paulites into the mainstream of conservatism, and so-called neoconservatives hate the Paulites even more than they hate liberals.

The other problem is that many of the leading pundits and talk-radio personalities take themselves very seriously now, especially Limbaugh, who is good friends with important conservative figures and considers himself (rightly) to be a major force in the conservative movement. Levin is the same way, an author whose latest book, “Liberty and Tyranny,” was a bizarre screed which he seemed to think of as a serious argument. Beck, who frequently changes his views on a dime (from arguing for Wall Street bailouts to anti-Wall-Street populism) and has openly turned his show into a wild clown show, is probably seen by the Limbaughs and Levins as an unserious interloper. I think Bill O’Reilly, who like Beck doesn’t seem to have clear or consistent views and doesn’t claim to be a leader for the conservative movement, seems a little more comfortable with his rise; they have a lot in common, anyway. But it must really burn Limbaugh, and there’s some indication that it does.

None of this means that Beck is suddenly awesome. Some pundits think that being hated by the left and the right means you must be doing a good job, but in reality, it usually means the opposite. And because he’s on Fox News, Beck — like any other Fox News personality — is channeling the current populist anger in a Republican-friendly way. But it is true that some conservatives are a little flummoxed by this phenomenon, particularly those who, like Wehner or Limbaugh, consider themselves to be the leaders of an intellectual movement.

It also means there is arguably something to his claim that his views don’t fit onto a conventional left-right axis; I think they do fit fairly well onto the right (though not necessarily the modern right; his is an old-fashioned show in a lot of ways), but Salon’s Glenn Greenwald argues otherwise, and as he notes, Frank Rich made the same argument in his column this weekend. And that sets up a dynamic which we might see more of in the future: more conservatives denouncing Beck, and more liberals saying that he has a point about some stuff. How that would improve over the status quo? It wouldn’t. I never said that U.S. punditry got better.

Quote; challenge

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:17 PM - 60 Comments

The Quote: From Stephen Harper’s scrum today in front of New York City Hall. Transcript provided by the Prime Minister’s Office.

STEPHEN HARPER: …And tonight, the Secretary General of the United Nations is hosting a dinner on climate change. As you know, our position is very clear. We want to see an effective, a new effective international accord, one that includes all the major emitters of greenhouse gases. And of course we’re working very closely with the Obama Administration on a truly continental approach.

And we think that’s going well but we’ll share those views and those perspectives (inaudible).

QUESTION: The critics are asking if Canada is on the sidelines in climate change.

STEPHEN HARPER: Well, you know, I think Canada’s come a long way from where we were. As you know, the previous government signed an international climate change agreement and then decided it wouldn’t implement it. So that’s the situation we have.

No, I think that Canada is working very closely with the United States, which makes sense because we’re an integrated, we don’t just share an environmental air space, but we’re in an integrated economy. So we think that effective climate change action has to be (inaudible) continentally and we’re working very closely with the Obama Administration on that. We’ve got very similar target, very similar approaches and obviously we’ll be working closely with them as opposed to before and after Copenhagen.

The Challenge:

Can anybody find any record of any official of the Obama administration, in Washington or any U.S. setting, mentioning the U.S. government’s close work with Canada on a continental plan for climate-change action?

Bonus points for any evidence that any American has mentioned this close work in any setting where there was not actually a visiting Canadian standing beside the speaker, smiling expectantly.

Tomorrow in places that apparently actually exist

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:12 PM - 25 Comments

The Prime Minister’s itinerary for tomorrow. No really.

Oakville, Ontario

11:30 a.m. – Prime Minister Stephen Harper will participate in a photo opportunity.

Tim Hortons Innovation Centre
226 Wyecroft Road
Oakville, Ontario
L6K 2Y1

*Photo opportunity (cameras and photographers only)

The Globe and Sun suggest the Prime Minister will be skipping Barack Obama’s address to the general assembly to make the trip to Oakville.

Half-serious questions of the day

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM - 18 Comments

Regarding this picture, how many red sweaters do you think Michael Ignatieff owns now?

Do you suppose there’s a collection of red sweaters that comes with the job? Or you do you imagine people just keep giving him red sweaters on his birthday and at Christmas and he has to keep pretending that each time he’s excited and surprised?

“Oh, wow, a red sweater. Perfect. Just what I needed. Thanks. You’re so right, this will really come in handy. Fantastic. Yeah, because, you know, the party’s colour is red and the sweater is red and, yeah, genius.”

Martin Cauchon, you're not alone

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3:49 PM - 10 Comments

Hélène Buzzetti has the scoop: “According to information gathered by Le Devoir, four Quebec Liberal MPs are being asked by Denis Coderre to leave politics and hand over their safe seats to a star candidate.”

They are: Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds-Dollars), Raymonde Folco (Laval-Les Îles), and Lise Zarac (LaSalle-Émard). Not exactly household names to those who don’t follow federal politics. The real kicker, though, is the last name on the Coderre hitlist: Stéphane Dion.

Of course, it seems doubtful Ignatieff would install Dion in some sort of leading role should the Liberals win the next election, so shedding him isn’t a huge problem as far as the party’s starting lineup is concerned. Neither are the three others for that matter. (Booting Cauchon, on the other hand, may be a riskier proposition.) Still, there’s something unseemly about letting an overgrown Young Liberal like Denis Coderre do the housecleaning—especially when it comes to showing a former party leader the door. You’d think Ignatieff could find a moment to do that himself.

The widespread thinking is that Coderre wants to install a bunch of yes-(wo)men who’ll do his bidding when he decides to take a run at Ignatieff’s job. (Shudder.) With friends like Coderre, Ignatieff hardly needs enemies.

Today in online discourse

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3:36 PM - 14 Comments

Once more, to Twitter.

MinJKSad to see @ujjaldosanjh embarrassed by his own leader on the HST. Ujal’s “against” the HST; his leader’s for it:http://tinyurl.com/msv2nl

ujjaldosanjh@MinJK Sad to see distortion on your part but not surprised. Fed Libs clear, HST dumb move by Cons in deep econ recsn

ujjaldosanjh@minjk Fed Libs also clear that we will not tear up fed-prov agreements, unlike Cons tearing up childcare agreement

powerstim@ujjaldosanjh no on childcare you will just promise something for 13 years and never deliver. Libs suffer from short-term memories.

MinJK@ujjaldosanjh LOL! Ujjal, the fed Liberal govt invented the HST in 1996. Now your party “opposes” it but won’t reverse it? That’s incoherent

powerstim@MinJK Ujjal and his Libs have never been encumbered by the truth or history. Those things are lost in Iggy’s Enchanted Forest of delusion.

Will update as events sort of warrant.

Another facelift for the mother ship

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 30 Comments

This won’t be your grandparents’ The National. At least, that’s what the folks at the CBC are hoping. In its seemingly never-ending bid to attract younger viewers, the public broadcaster is rebranding its newscasts, with new sets, new graphics, new music, new faces—new everything. Never mind that just last March, having made unsuccessful pleas for a bridge loan from the federal government, the CBC announced it was facing a budgetary shortfall worth a staggering $171 million. In all, 800 jobs would be eliminated, along with a host of television and radio shows. And many of the programs that survived the onslaught were facing drastically reduced budgets.

Indeed, The National’s current identity is a mere three years old. “Humming the new five musical notes that now introduce all our major newscasts will soon become a Canadian rite of passage,” Tony Burman, then editor-in-chief of CBC News, had promised when it was revealed. The 2006 overhaul also represented the ushering in of a new philosophy. In Burman’s words, it was “a sweeping, even radical beginning.” The changes were based on a massive study commissioned by the CBC that recommended its newscasts feature longer, more complex items and “fewer forgettable stories tied to contrived or empty news ‘events.’ ” “We needn’t be slaves to an outmoded, commercially driven, old-fashioned news,” Burman wrote in a 2005 memo to senior news staff. But 18 months after the format’s debut, he was gone and CBC News was embarking on another overhaul—this time in the opposite direction. Continue…

Chew, but don’t spit

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

The famous tobacco Camel logo is back, but Joe is not selling cigarettes this time. R.J. Reynolds, which owns the brand, is launching a new product in the United States called Camel Snus. If that sounds gross, well, it kind of is. Snus (sounds like snoose) is being marketed as a “spitless” chewing tobacco. It has less salt than traditional chaw, so there’s less saliva build-up. An ad campaign in the U.S. describes it as “fancy hotel friendly” and “your flight just got cancelled friendly”. Marlboro is also test-marketing snus in the U.S. With cigarette usage on the decline, snus, which is already popular in Sweden, is part of a push by tobacco companies to sell more so-called ‘smokeless’ products. R.J. Reynolds voluntarily stopped advertising cigarettes in magazines last year, but says that this ad campaign doesn’t mark a reversal of that policy.

New York Times

UPDATED: PrenticeWatch: Ten feet from the podium? Canada's back again!

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 2:07 PM - 52 Comments

The Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter managed to catch up with Canada’s curiously elusive environment minister as he went about his full-message-heft-absorbing duties:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in New York today but did not attend the morning sessions. Harper was scheduled to lunch with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and will join up with 25 world leaders tonight for a private dinner at the UN at the behest of Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

Instead, Environment Minister Jim Prentice took Canada’s seat, where he absorbed the full heft of the messages of Obama, Hu, Sarkozy and the other keynote speakers.

“Canada was seated about 10 feet from the speaker’s podium so it came through very clearly,” Prentice told the Star. “I thought the President of the Maldives made a very compelling speech, with a crisp analysis of the challenge we all face.”

Prentice assessed the UN gathering as a “day where the United States and China are under the microscope,” with smaller nations looking for leadership from the two flagship economies.

On the momentum for a meaningful agreement at Copenhagen, Prentice said: “It’s too early to make categorical predctions. We do have 80 days left … we’re in the thick of this and I remain hopeful.”

Behind closed doors, Prentice said Canada is expressing a willingness to take on “economy-wide reduction targets.” But he said that any major deal at Copenhagen will depend on the willingness of the major emerging economies to assume “binding” targets.

“The lion’s share of future emissions will come from China, India and Brazil. We do need to see binding targets” from those countries if a breakthrough is to be achieved, he said.

ITQ wasn’t aware that the impact of a given speaker was so dependent on the proximity of one’s chair to the podium, but on the plus side, at least now we know that Prentice is present and accounted for at today’s session. Who knows — maybe later today, he’ll have some crisp analysis of his own to share with Canadians.

HE’S HERE BUT HE’S NOT IMPRESSED UPDATE:

Continue…

TVs, DVDs, And License Fees

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

Some notes on upcoming catalogue TV-on-DVD releases, most of them having to do with a) Special features and b) cuts.

- Taxi, Season 4 is out today, and the fifth and final season is going to be released just before Christmas. It’s good that one of the great U.S. comedies will have its full run available on DVD, especially since in the last few years it looked like Paramount was going to stop with the third season. However, this being Paramount, it looks like they’ve made the release possible by cutting music-related scenes from several episodes. I don’t have the set yet, so I can’t say yet what’s been cut. It’s still worth it to get the many unedited episodes, like “Mr. Personalities,” perhaps the definitive Taxi episode — not the best, but the most typical combination of surrealism and realistic despair: Latka becomes convinced that he’s Alex, and manages to make it clear just what a complete failure Alex is at being himself.

- Mister Ed, Season 1 (October 6) – If you’re wondering how bad an old show has to be before I can’t find anything interesting in it, this appears to be where I draw the line. I didn’t grow up watching this show; I did grow up watching the Francis the Talking Mule movies, which were better (with Chill Wills as the talking mule and Donald O’Connor as the hapless human, how could they not be?). I have never really been able to understand this show’s popularity, given what a horribly limited idea it was for a show: a show about a horse, taking place nearly entirely indoors and therefore providing no opportunity for the horse to do anything. Don’t get it; maybe it’s the theme song, but for the first season, the song done as an instrumental, so the show doesn’t even have the fun lyrics going for it yet. The show includes some commentaries, but the episodes appear to have some cut syndication episodes mixed in.

- The Patty Duke Show, Season 1 (September 29) – Now this one I get. In watching it, you find yourself mostly fixated on the back of the head of Patty Duke’s stand-in; since Duke was playing “identical cousins,” her stand-in has her back to the camera in all but the split-screen process shots (which, thanks to master editor Ralph Rosenblum, come off pretty well). The show comes off well due to its good cast — including William Schallert, still alive to participate in the special features, as one of the better TV dads of his era — efficient comedy writing by the prolific Sidney Sheldon. But what it mostly has going for it is the truly unforgettable theme song by big-band leader Sid Ramin, and the slightly different atmosphere and collection of guest actors from other shows of its era; it shot in New York because L.A.’s child-labour laws wouldn’t have allowed them to make the show (Duke was only 16, and in L.A. she couldn’t have worked the long hours necessary to play two parts in one show), which means you see some New York theatre people in small parts rather than the familiar collection of California actors. The episodes appear to be uncut, 25 minutes and 30 seconds. Oh, and one more thing: one of the episodes I looked at has a plot that used to be really, really common: a character is told that he/she might be allergic to another character. Does this ever happen on TV any more? Not that it should; it’s such a strange idea for a story that I don’t understand exactly why so many shows did it, except that sneezing fits are considered funny.

- Mr. Belvedere, Season 3 — I have already tried to puzzle out the question of why this show was by far the most popular of the catalogue titles Shout! released this year. The commentaries on this set may provide a partial answer: the cast is strangely acerbic and funny (and this even though Bob Uecker wasn’t able to participate this time around). Actually, these are — surprisingly — some of the better TV-on-DVD commentaries I’ve heard recently; there aren’t a lot of dead spots or “describing what we’re already seeing” moments, and instead the participants give a lot of practical and interesting information about the process of working on a television comedy: costumes, scheduling, warming up the audience, S&P issues, union rules, set layout, the role of the director (in this case Noam Pitlik, whom the producers brought with them from Barney Miller). Still no kind of a great show, but its extreme popularity is easier to understand after the commentaries. Also, the oldest kid does address the Marilyn Manson rumours at one point. However, he denies them. He’s not fooling anybody.

Abbas, Netanyahu and Obama

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. President Barack Obama, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are meeting in New York. The face-to-face is not expected to restart peace talks, however, as Netanyahu has refused to completely halt Israeli settlement construction, a demand Palestinian officials say is crucial for bringing them back to the table. A spokesperson for Abbas says the meeting is aimed at strengthening relationships with the U.S., not finding peace with Israel, and White House officials say they aren’t expecting any breakthroughs.

CBC

There are morals in politics?

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

The PQ managed to keep François Legault’s old seat in a by-election in Rousseau last night. The Liberals haven’t made a dent there since Bourrassa was in power and Legault was nothing if not a party heavyweight, so the result shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. And even though, as Chantal Hébert points out, the ADQ vote appeared to collapse in the Liberals’ direction rather than the PQ’s, the abysmal turnout should preclude anyone from reading too much into a result that was never really in doubt.

Still, despite not being under much of a threat from anyone in the riding, not losing has apparently become reason enough for the PQ to celebrate. Cue Pauline Marois, who delivered the best line of the night: “We’ve had enough of moral victories, so now we have a real victory!”

All those moral victories—they sure get exhausting, don’t they?

'The Man Who Loved Books Too Much,' by Allison Hoover Bartlett

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 12:53 PM - 3 Comments

More than 2,000 years ago the Roman man of letters Marcus Tullius Cicero complained to a friend about how much he suffered from two problems endemic to book lovers: finding the money to buy all the volumes he coveted, and protecting the ones he already had from the rapacious desires of other bibliomaniacs. In the mid-20th, century writer C.S. Lewis noted that there were three categories of objects which even otherwise highly moral people felt no urgent need to return after borrowing: packs of matches, umbrellas and books. And from the opposite perspective, no other loss, save perhaps bicycles, invokes a fury in its victims so seemingly out of proportion to the harm inflicted. Small wonder the curses circulated at the great medieval libraries fervently call down all sorts of harm, physical and spiritual, not just on thieves but on delinquent borrowers. “For him that steals,” growls the malediction of the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, “or borrows and returns not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails. When at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”

That’s the background—bibliomania as it’s called—to Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (Penguin), her tale of John Gilkey, an unrepentant, obsessive book thief, and Ken Sanders, an equally obsessive self-styled “bibliodick,” and their multi-year cat-and-mouse game. Gilkey was a retail clerk who lusted after a wealthy man’s library, so he stole one, about $100,000 worth of rare books from book fairs, stores, and libraries around the U.S. Sanders, a rare book dealer turned amateur detective, first noticed Gilkey’s patterns and then became frustrated that the police had little interest. So he set out to catch Gilkey himself. The ballad of John and Ken is absorbing enough. Rare book theft may be more prevalent than art theft, according to Interpol, but it’s not a crime most busy police forces will devote many resources to. (Unless, of course, you report the case to an unusually literate and historical-minded cop. And even then, Sanders told Hoover Bartlett, it’s the dealer who’s made to feel criminal, or at least criminally foolish. When Sanders accompanied a dealer friend to a New York precinct to report the theft of a Roger Williams book valued at $35,000, the recording sergeant first impressed them by asking, “You talking about one of the guys who founded Rhode island?” and then depressed them with, “You let someone walk away with a first-edition Roger Williams?”) Gilkey, who worked as a sales clerk  at Saks in San Francisco and accomplished his thefts with credit card numbers he stole from clients, was harder to catch than most book thieves, who run the most hazard when they try to sell their loot. Gilkey had no intention of selling “his” library.

And therein lies the true charm of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (and is that Gilkey or Sanders?): the beguiling, mad, Alice-in-Wonderland world of book-collecting, book-dealing, book-loving that Hoover Bartlett falls into. Like all manias there’s something—however faint and innocent—sexual about it. Even Gilkey, an utterly unself-reflective man, touches on it when he tries to explain the attraction of looking at even photographs of well-stacked library shelves. “I’m a man,” he said. “I like to look.” But the dealers at the book fairs Hoover Bartlett visits also sound to her like “aging Lotharios” recalling their youthful conquests when they dredge up tales of fantastic past scores. Bartlett too feels the pull, the seduction rather, exerted by old leather and fragile pages, but eventually shakes off the demon of book coveting that has started to gain a claw-hold on her, and settles instead for being a collector of stories. For the author things couldn’t have come out better than they did, hearing from Sanders, as the book went to press, that Gilkey had been fingered again (though not arrested) for stealing a book from a Canadian dealer. “The story never ends.”

In conversation with Sen. Lindsey Graham

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 12:43 PM - 3 Comments

Last week, Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, swept through Saskatchewan, where he spoke about carbon capture and storage, uranium enrichment and cap and trade with Premier Brad Wall. In a conversation with Maclean’s, Graham sought to assure Canadians, and Albertans in particular, of a growing acceptance among Americans of oil sands energy. Graham also discussed why Canada should stay in Afghanistan after 2011, why it should continue investing in carbon capture and storage technology, and why Saskatchewan should be permitted to enrich its uranium.

Q: What convinced you to make the long trip to Regina?
A: Well, I met Brad, the premier, when he was making his D.C. round. I’m a Republican who believes that climate change is a reality—that CO2 emissions are heating up the planet. But I’m also an energy independence guy, and I want to work with the administration and my colleagues on the Democratic side to find a way forward on energy independence and a reasonable cap-and-trade system. Carbon sequestration is the key to anything you want to do when you talk about getting away from fossil fuels or controlling CO2 emissions. And Saskatchewan is where the action is.

Q: A criticism with regards to carbon capture and storage, among many, is that it’s a pipe dream, it’s going to be very expensive to implement and even when you do, it’s difficult to monitor over the course of many years. What have you seen in Saskatchewan that convinces you that perhaps those naysayers are wrong?
A: Saskatchewan and Alberta are putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to carbon sequestration. Those investments have attracted some of the brightest people in the world, and the governments of the world—including the United States government. Saskatchewan’s successes are encouraging. It’s not a done deal but what’s [being done at the Weyburn-Midale CO2 Project] in Saskatchewan is pretty good evidence that carbon sequestration not only is doable but affordable and practical.

Q: As you know I’m talking to you from Alberta, home of the oil sands.
A: And you’ve got the same problem there.

Q: Maybe a bigger one, because the oil sands have a bad reputation among some Americans, for example.
A: Not for me. Henry Waxman, yes, Lindsey Graham, no. Some people say it’s dirty. Not efficient. It is a source of energy that needs to be explored and the United States should accept it, because every drop of oil that we can receive from our friends in Canada is one less we have to buy from people who don’t like us.

Q: So should Albertans who are involved in developing the oil sands be concerned about legislation like Waxman-Markey?
A: Yes. Because [the Democrats] control the senate. The energy climate has changed at home, people are dying to become more energy independent, and some of the environmentalists have changed their tune a bit. I believe that in 2010 there will be more Republicans [in the Senate] and that the chances of bringing about balance and being able to accept their product is going to go up over time, not down. I think the future’s on your side when it comes to your U.S. neighbours accepting your products.

Q: You don’t see it passing the Senate?
A: You got it. It only narrowly passed the House. And that means that the bill lost a lot of Democrats. But, the administration understands that. They’re working with different groups, Republicans and Democrats, to marry some ideas. I think there are some people in the Senate who are not sold on climate change but really would like to be energy independent. So if you had an aggressive proposal to build more nuclear power plants and to drill offshore, that would get you some votes. The only way to pass a cap-and-trade system is to marry that with energy-independence ideas.

Q: What does all that mean for Canada, specifically Alberta?
A: Whatever technological breakthroughs you have on carbon sequestration, you’re going to get your money back. Because the technology you’re developing we’re going to buy.

Q: One of the worries among Albertans in the oil patch is that whatever legislation comes about, if the Canadian government doesn’t bring in very similar legislation, there’s going to be a problem with tariffs.
A: That’s always a problem. That’s where NAFTA and all these other things hopefully will have some benefit. Is it a concern? I’m sure it is. But I would just say the future’s on your side.

Q: What role does Canada play in the future of carbon-capture and storage in your country?
A: You’re the incubator. You’re the ones testing the waters. And the reason you’re doing [carbon capture and storage] in Saskatchewan and Alberta is because you have to. You have received a burden from your government that we haven’t placed on our coal economy.

Q: You’re in Saskatchewan so I have to ask, what’s the future of uranium in Saskatchewan, do you think you’re going to see us enrich it soon?
A: If you’re serious about trying to solve the climate-change problem, then you have to pursue nuclear power. Isn’t Saskatchewan the leading supplier of uranium to the world? If I had a product like that, I would look at trying to make it even more marketable.

Q: Are there things on the world stage that you would like to see Canada do or do differently? What about Afghanistan?
A: I wish the Canadian people would consider not only staying longer than 2011 but also consider the consequences of what happens if NATO fails. NATO has chosen this fight. And if the alliance breaks, and the will of the NATO nations is seen to be less than that of the enemy, it could be the beginning of the end of NATO as an effective military organization. I would hope that the Canadian government and people would understand the value NATO has provided to the free world for well over 50 years. The reputation and the effectiveness of NATO is at stake in Afghanistan.

Today in unsolicited advice

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 14 Comments

From James Moore’s Twitter feed.

mpjamesmooreDennis Coderre, perhaps, should lead by example with his retirement idea for his colleagues. Just a thought.

‘Til death do them part

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 12:15 PM - 2 Comments

Remember when same-sex couples who live in states that don’t allow gay marriages were coming to Canada to get legally hitched? Predictably, not all of those marriages worked out and, in at least a few states, a divorce is proving hard to come by. The latest case involves a lesbian couple who came to Toronto in 2005 to get married. Originally from Pennsylvania, Larissa Chism and Tara Ranzy eventually found themselves living in Indiana, which doesn’t allow same-sex marriages, when they decided to get a divorce. However, the judge in their case refused to grant it: “As the state of Indiana has chosen to prohibit same-sex marriage as a matter of public policy,” read the decision, “it might logically follow that Indiana would have a policy interest in granting same-sex divorce.” Though it’s been suggested that Chism and Ranzy return to Toronto to file for divorce, that won’t work either. Ontario requires at least one member of a couple to have been living in the province for at least six months in order to grant a divorce.

Indystar.com