Just Visiting Watch

By Andrew Potter - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 14 Comments

From last week’s Sunday Times (London):

The Sunday Times can disclose the eclectic mix of candidates who answered the Conservative leader’s appeal for people with no previous involvement in politics to stand for parliament.

The 70 names who have recently been added to the approved list of Tory candidates include Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor who set up a charity in Afghanistan and once taught the princes William and Harry.

This is where Stewart is currently working.

'That's the difference between Stephen Harper and me'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:51 PM - 150 Comments

The prepared text for Michael Ignatieff’s speech in Toronto this afternoon.

Humber College is in my riding of Etobicoke—Lakeshore. President John Davies and some students from Humber are here today. Thanks for the great work you do.

I’m going to talk about what Canada’s been through, the challenges we’re facing, and where we should be going. And I’ll present a Liberal alternative.

Before I do, I want to reflect on the last week in Ottawa.

I was watching a game on television the other night, and in the break I caught one of those Conservative attack ads, saying that I was only in it for myself and that I was going to create this scary coalition with the “socialists” and the “separatists.”

Well, by the end of last week, those “socialists” and “separatists” were propping up Stephen Harper.

As they say, a week is a long time in politics.

At the end of that week, our party stood up and voted no confidence in Stephen Harper’s government.

It was a question of principle.

Continue…

Olympic officials: stay off our turf!

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:33 PM - 2 Comments

It’s our home field advantage, and Olympic officials want to keep it that way. Citing rules of access to competition sites, Canadian officials have denied foreign athletes the ability to train on the grounds of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. “I guess I can intellectually say I understand,” says Ron Rossi, who directs USA Luge. “But as an honourable thing, I don’t support it, and I think it shows a lack of sportsmanship.” For decades, an open-access agreement between the U.S. and Canada allowed athletes from each country to train on the other’s competition sites. Now, American athletes are arguing that Canada should honour that practice. “They’re playing nasty,” charges American speedskater Catherine Raney. But committee rules allow Canada to bar foreign athletes from practicing on Olympic grounds and some say we must exercise that right if we hope to excel in 2010. “We’re the only country to host two Olympic Games and never have won a gold medal at our Games,” explains Cathy Priestner Allinger, executive V.P for sports at the Vancouver Organizing Committee.

The New York Times

Australian man exercises right to die

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 0 Comments

An Australian man who won a landmark right to die case passed away on Monday. Christian Rossiter, 49, broke his spine in 2004 and became a spastic quadriplegic after falling last year. But after a drawn-out courtroom fight, the Western Australian state Supreme Court ruled in August that the nursing home where Rossiter was living must respect his right to refuse food and water, which he was being given through tubes. On Monday, he died of a chest infection, apparently after refusing medical treatment. “Death I suspect comes as quite a relief for Christian,” said John Hammond, the lawyer who represented Rossiter in court. “I think Christian will be remembered as someone who was very brave and took up a fight which will give a lot of people comfort.” Rossiter’s case underscores an apparent gap in Australian law: while patients have a right to refuse treatment, helping another to commit suicide is a crime.

CBC News

Afghanistan is suddenly an election issue in Germany

By Michael Petrou - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:31 PM - 0 Comments

German Col. Georg Klein sat in the Tactical Operations Centre of the German field camp in Kunduz, Afghanistan, earlier this month. He stared at grainy images, being relayed by an American B-1B bomber, of two gas-filled trucks parked several kilometres away. An Afghan source had tipped him off that the trucks had been hijacked and assured him there were no civilians nearby. On screen, Klein could make out the trucks and people swarming around them. But it was impossible to tell who among them were armed. Continue…

If Canada’s democracy is indeed broken, as Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne suggest, would mandatory voting help fix it?

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:12 PM - 109 Comments

Take me to your leader

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 8 Comments

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE QUIZ

Wal-Mart of the Internet

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:56 AM - 1 Comment

Fifteen years after Jeff Bezos founded the company as an online bookstore, Amazon is set to cross a significant threshold. Sometime later this year, if current trends continue, worldwide sales of media products—the books, movies, and music that Amazon started with—will be surpassed for the first time by sales of other merchandise on the site. (That transition already occurred this year in its North American business.) In other words, in an increasingly Digital Age, Amazon is quickly becoming a general store. Alongside the books and CDs and DVDs are diapers, Legos and power drills, not to mention replacement car clutches and more arcane items like the Jackalope Buck taxidermy mount ($69.97). “Amazon has gone from “that bookstore” in people’s mind to a general online retailer, and that is a great place to be,” said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, an eBay-backed company that helps stores like Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney sell online.

The New York Times

'Flat, stunted and ugly': The brotherhood of bestsellers

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:55 AM - 2 Comments

After novelist Phillip Pullman took a shot at Brown’s “flat, stunted and ugly” prose, John Grisham—who has sold more than 250 million copies of his legal thrillers such as The Pelican Brief and The Firm—came to the defence of the author of The Lost Symbol. “I know that what I do is not literature,” says Grisham. “Of course, I’ve read literature in the classic sense. We’ve all got those type of books on the shelves at home. They made me read them at school and I admit that I didn’t like them much. I couldn’t understand why they were said to be so good.”

The Telegraph

Obama to slash nukes

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

President Barack Obama is calling for a radical reduction in the number of his country’s nuclear weapons. He wants to cut the stockpile from about 2,100 to less then 1,000, narrow the range of conditions for when nukes can be used, and explore ways to keep the bombs reliable without testing or creating any new weapons. This comes as a lead up to a UN Security Council session aimed at nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear proliferation which Obama is set to chair.

The Guardian

This week’s travel news

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:43 AM - 0 Comments

This Week’s Take offers you a capsule summary of the high and low lights of TakeOffeh.com’s Daily Dispatches from the past seven days.

Will Airport Nudity Become Mandatory?
It took an Access To Information Act request made by Sun Media to obtain the results of a passenger x-ray scanner test project at Kelowna Airport. Using something called “backscatter x-ray,’ the technology enables screeners to see you in all your naked perfection, looking right through your clothes. “If you are a suicide bomber and have a vest on, that would appear as clear as day in an image,” a company spokesman told the Scientific American. Unfortunately, your naughty bits appear clear as day too, pierced or otherwise. According to Sun Media columnist Greg Weston, there’s little wonder the feds didn’t want to release the results of the study of 32,000 passengers. It states that the goal of the technology is to lessen “metal and non-metal body-worn threats.” Over 70% of the 32,000 travellers set off an alarm that prompted further inspection, yet not one piece of contraband was found as a result. Another troublesome finding: faces and genitals were supposed to be blurred by the scanner as a nod towards privacy and decency, but the machine was not always accurate in the placement of the blurring, leaving some areas uncovered that should have been, and others blurred in places where items could be concealed. As Weston sums it up: “The scanners have the capacity to protect neither airline security nor a person’s privacy.”

Are We Any Safer?
It is eight years after 9/11. On top of the senseless slaughter of thousands of innocents, the actions of a few have resulted in hundreds of millions of air travellers moving through airports in an oppressive climate of fear and suspicion. A very expensive climate of fear: National Public Radio’s Brian Naylor reports that the U.S. alone has spent $45-billion on airport security since 2001. That money has paid for new people, new equipment and improved technology. According to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, there’s now a 20-layer approach to security, which includes a full body image scanner at some airports. But the big question remains: Is airport security terrorist-proof? Naylor found many doubters, calling the whole process “security theatre.” He quotes blogging pilot Patrick Smith, who says immense amounts of time and manpower are being wasted confiscating drinks and searching passengers for pointy objects. “That doesn’t make us safer,” he says. Continue…

A master friend

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:28 AM - 17 Comments

Bruce Anderson makes a case for Brian Mulroney.

Mr. Mulroney built friendships like Tiger Woods plays golf: with incredible discipline, study and practice – but also with evident joy and occasionally crushing pain.

The city of Ottawa is full of people who feel lousy about the Karlheinz Schreiber relationship but can’t help but remember a Mulroney gesture that touched them – a call expressing friendship, a note of consolation, a thoughtful invitation, a kindness offered without condition. And lest anyone think these gestures were limited to Tories, lots of people in all corners of our political spectrum know better.

Canadians on Afghanistan: Turns out they may have been right all along.

By kadyomalley - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:28 AM - 52 Comments

When, in the course of her usual morning newsblitz, ITQ finds herself confronted with headlines like this, and this, and this — and especially this (that last one, the latest dispatch from Esprit de Corps’ Scott Taylor, provides a must-read counterpoint to the nearly universally fawning coverage of a certain Conservative star candidate in waiting that surfaced last week) — she can’t help but recall that April 2007 day that the NDP teamed up with the Conservatives to defeat a Liberal motion — introduced by Denis Coderre, and seconded by one Michael Ignatieff —  that would have seen Canada’s military role end, as originally scheduled, in February 2009.

At the time, the NDP argued that two more years was too years too long — a position that was, to be fair, consistent with the party’s longstanding position on Afghanistan. But how, one can’t help but wonder, might subsequent events have unfolded had they decided to vote with the other opposition parties, and the motion was passed by the House?

Continue…

Send help

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:09 AM - 6 Comments

In a confidential assessment of the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in the country, says that without the deployment of additional forces and the implementation of a new counterinsurgency strategy, the conflict “will likely result in failure.” According to McChrystal: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” McChrystal’s report was delivered to Defence Secretary Robert Gates last month and is being reviewed by President Barack Obama. The Washington Post has obtained a copy.

The Washington Post

'The choice before New Democrats is simple'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:07 AM - 38 Comments

Jack Layton explains himself.

This new reform falls far short in many ways. It doesn’t cut waiting periods, increase benefits or create uniform access across the country. We are under no illusions that this bill fixes the major problems in the EI system. We will continue to work for further changes to EI. In fact, we have a dozen proposed laws before the House that would improve other elements of the existing system.

But my party cannot, in good conscience, vote down legislation that is a step in the right direction.

No tax hikes in Narnia

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

“Growth, green jobs, a role for the government in the economy”—but no new taxes. According to the Toronto Star‘s Susan Delacourt, those are the three pillars that underlie the Liberal economic platform, the broad strokes of which will be revealed by Michael Ignatieff in front of a Toronto business audience later today. Specific proposals will include “an aggressive effort to find markets in India and China; investments in plant machinery, green-energy solutions, more research-and-development spending and programs to help firms hire new workers”—although as the Star points out in the final line of the story, Ignatieff has yet to explain just how he would manage to do all that—plus pay down the deficit, without raising taxes.

Toronto Star

All the right moves

By John Intini - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

Toronto Argonaut slotback Andre Durie spiced up his off-season workout routine this year. Instead of hitting the weights on Thursdays, the five-foot-nine-inch 192-lb. athlete took salsa lessons at Toronto’s Spanish Centre. “It’s a lot of hip work, a lot of foot work, and it helps with coordination,” says Durie, who was also looking to get a bit of his “rhythm” back after being sidelined by a serious knee injury. Turns out, the dance lessons connected more to his day job than expected. For one thing, Durie found that the signals sent between him and his dance partner—there are certain cues to let her know which way he was going to spin her, for instance—were much like those shared between a couple of receivers working together on a passing route. Durie also credits his gridiron training for making it easier to pick up some of the quicker, complicated footwork in the studio. “We’re always doing different drills with our feet [at football practice],” says Durie, 28. “So it’s almost second nature.”

Maybe that’s why no other sport has been as well represented on Dancing with the Stars as football. Over the years, the show has featured a basketball player, a handful of Olympians, and a couple of boxers, but when season nine debuts on ABC and CTV on Sept. 21, former Dallas Cowboy Michael Irvin will be the sixth pro football player to trade his cleats for a pair of dancing shoes. But the hall-of-fame receiver better have his game face on if he hopes to leave a bigger mark than the gridiron greats who have preceded him. Running back Emmitt Smith, Irvin’s former teammate and Durie’s boyhood hero, was the big winner of season three. And San Francisco 49ers receiver Jerry Rice (season two) and Miami Dolphins linebacker Jason Taylor (season six) waltzed and cha-chaed their way to second-place finishes. So did Warren Sapp, a 300-lb. all-pro lineman, who earned the respect of the judges (one said the long-time Tampa Bay Buccaneer moved like a “Lamborghini taking on the freeway”) and the voting audience by exhibiting the grace of a man literally half his size. Continue…

Neurotic writer turns romantic P.I.

By Sarah Weinman - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 10:35 AM - 0 Comments

Ever since he burst onto the book scene two decades ago with I Pass Like Night, the story of a young college grad’s descent into New York’s sleaziest corners, Jonathan Ames has been one of the city’s quirkiest—and most autobiographically minded—literary fixtures. Comic novels such as The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir!, essay collections like this summer’s The Double Life is Twice as Good, graphic novels like The Alcoholic, and occasional ventures into one-man shows, stand-up comedy and bizarre performance art, all tap into Ames’s primary obsessions: neurosis, masculinity (or lack thereof) and situations that would be embarrassing to most, but when Ames or his fictional alter-egos experience them, come off as endearing. How else to explain the standing-room-only crowd packed into a Brooklyn gym two years ago to see Ames engage Canadian writer Craig Davidson in a boxing match—and win?

But now the 45-year-old Brooklyn-based writer is about to reach a much broader audience. A film adaptation of The Extra Man, featuring Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly and Katie Holmes, has just wrapped production. And as of Sept. 20, TV viewers will get to know Jonathan Ames—or rather, his fictional counterpart “Jonathan Ames,” as played by Jason Schwartzman—in HBO Canada’s new eight-episode comedy series Bored to Death, created, produced and mostly written by Ames and based on the darker short story of the same name. Continue…

Stimulus for the mind

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 2:57 AM - 83 Comments

Canadian Press looks into just how much you’re paying to have the use of your tax dollars promoted back to you.

The Conservative government is spending more than five times as many taxpayer dollars on promoting its economic plan as it is on raising public awareness about the flu pandemic…

Television viewers may have noticed the latest feel-good government ads about stimulus spending, including the Conservative-friendly, anti-election pitch: “We can’t stop now,” and “We have to stay on track.”

All the ads direct viewers to a Tory-blue government web site that includes more than 40 different photos of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and refers repeatedly to “the Harper government” – apparently in direct contravention of Treasury Board communications policy.

The TV spots are just the latest $5-million salvo in a $34-million media blitz trumpeting the Conservative’s recession-fighting budget.

The Jon Cryer Upset Factor

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 9:20 PM - 5 Comments

I didn’t have a chance for an Emmy live-blog (which would boil down in any case to “somebody just won something” over and over, especially since I’m not very good at writing about the important thing: clothes). I’ll have some thoughts after the full list of winners is available. I will say that the Hairspray songwriting team, which wrote Neil Patrick Harris’s song material for the Tonys and Emmys, should just write special material for him all the time. Harris is fun, though he seems to have a sore throat at times and isn’t always great at thinking on his feet and coming up with a “saver” or a response to an unexpected audience reaction; that’s what professional comedians are good at doing, but I think it’s worth trading that off to get Harris’s likability.

The other thing NPH-related was that, with Jeremy Piven out of the running, a lot of us thought it would finally be Harris’s year to win for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy. Instead the voters used the category for Jon Cryer from Two and a Half Men, as a sort of consolation-prize category for a very popular show that isn’t going to (and doesn’t deserve to) win any of the bigger categories. It’s kind of depressing to see Cryer win for playing a character who has gotten more pathetic every year, in a show that demands less and less of him and Charlie Sheen every year (not just in terms of characterization, but physical movement, which they barely have to do at all any more apart from moving to the couch from the kitchen). He still deserves it more than the other supporting-actor nominees, particularly the two guys from 30 Rock (McBrayer does well with a small gift part, Tracy Morgan does not very well with a character that should be less annoying than he is). Still, if multi-camera was going to get its consolation prize tonight, Harris or Jim Parsons would have been a better choice.

Update: After I wrote that I realized (and comments rightly beat me to it) that it sounds bizarre to talk as if Jon Cryer deserves to beat out Rainn Wilson. So here’s the thing: Rainn Wilson is great. I just tend to prefer it when the supporting-actor Emmy doesn’t go to the guy who plays the Token Weirdo on the show. Wilson has a much more interesting character to play than Jack McBrayer on 30 Rock, but they’re somewhat similar parts. And ever since Michael Richards took home multiple Emmys while Jason Alexander got none, I’ve always had a built-in bias against giving the award to the guy who plays the craziest person on the show. (NPH also plays the craziest person , but his role is bigger than that. Dwight on The Office has the same function Dale Gribble did on “King of the Hill” from the same team — the guy who is in outer space and can get big laughs in otherwise heavy scenes.) But if you want to argue that Wilson got robbed as badly as NPH did, I won’t argue the point strenuously.

Also, Ken Howard won. Which is always good, not only because he made a good joke, but because it gets more people searching the YouTubes for this:

Harper must act now to protect free speech

By The Editors - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 4:24 PM - 118 Comments

Stephen Harper used to have very clear—and colourful—ideas on human rights commissions and what should be done about them.

“Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society,” he said in a 1999 interview with Terry O’Neill of BC Report newsmagazine.“ It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.” He went on to complain about the “bastardization” of the entire concept of rights in modern society.

Of course, that was back when Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition. Today he’s Canada’s 22nd Prime Minister. And he appears to have lost his fear of totalitarianism.

In an interview this past January with Maclean’s, the Prime Minister was asked what, if anything, he intended to do to halt the encroachment on individual freedom by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in the name of regulating hate speech.

It is an issue of crucial importance to this country and our strongly held traditions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Continue…

Compromising positions: Ignatieff and the HST

By kadyomalley - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 1:54 PM - 106 Comments

It came at the tail end of the scrum, which is probably why it garnered relatively little media coverage. But even in mid-liveblog mode, an ITQ eyebrow went up when Michael Ignatieff was asked about his party’s seemingly contradictory position on the GST/PST harmonization plans in British Columbia and Ontario.

Instead of simply answering the question, he reminded reporters that he’s the leader of the opposition, not the government, and, as such, “doesn’t have to have a position” — which, as far as he is concerned, meant that he didn’t have to clarify it.

Which, of course, is true: No one held a gun to his head and forced him to pick a side in the Great HST Debate of 2009.  Unfortunately for Ignatieff, however, not only did he take a position, but for a while, there, he seems to been have holding both of them — at the same time. Continue…

'Precious' wins Oscar's Toronto primary

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 1:19 PM - 0 Comments

'Precious' star Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe

It was wrap yesterday for the Toronto International Film Festival, as it staged its awards ceremony at a hotel brunch. This is always a low-key affair. Unlike the othe major festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance—Toronto prides itself on being a non-competitive event. Which is why a lot of filmmakers feel comfortable unveiling their work here. There are no losers. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t winners. Although there’s no formal competition, awards are given out, and this year there were more than ever. Juries honoured three categories of Canadian films with cash prizes—Ruba Nadda’s lush and delicate romance, Cairo Time, won $30,000 for best Canadian feature, Alexandre Franchi’s The Wild Hunt, about role-playing games, won $15,000 for best Canadian first feature, and Pedro Pires’s Dance Macabre, a dark ballet conceived by Robert Lepage, won $10,000 for best Canadian short. But the prize that has taken on more and more significance over the years is the People’s Choice Award, which is voted by audiences—and has come to serve as a bell-weather for Oscar success. Past winners have included Chariots of Fire, American Beauty, Crash and Slumdog Millionaire. To no one’s surprise, at least not mine, the 2009 winner was Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. By turns harrowing and inspirational, this tale of an abused, obese, illiterate Harlem teen is this year’s Slumdog. Continue…

Rap vs Talk Radio

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 12:34 PM - 12 Comments

David Segal has a fun piece in today’s NYT about the parallels between right wing talk-radio and gangsta rap. It seems to me that the analogy is more illuminating in what it reveals about rap than it does about talk radio, maybe because the motivations and ideological structure of talk radio is much cruder:

Even beyond simple matters of style, rap and conservative talk radio share some DNA. Once you subtract gangsta rap’s enthusiasm for lawlessness — a major subtraction, to be sure — rap is among the most conservative genres of pop music. It exalts capitalism and entrepreneurship with a brio that is typically considered Republican. (Admiring references to Bill Gates are common in hip-hop.)

Rappers tend to be fans of the Second Amendment, though they rarely frame their affection for guns in constitutional terms. And rap has an opinion about human nature that is deeply conservative — namely, that criminals cannot be reformed. The difference is that gangsta rappers often identify themselves as the criminals, and are proud of their unreformability.

UPDATE: Gawker is less impressed with these ‘nilla musings.