Isn't Fidel great?

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 5 Comments

On Oct. 16, 1953, while on trial for leading the attack on the Moncada Barracks—which laid the groundwork for the Cuban Revolution—a young Fidel Castro famously told the court, “Condemn me. It doesn’t matter. History will absolve me.” Apparently, the Cuban government can’t wait that long. Amid continuing reports of the now-retired leader’s frailty, the regime has bankrolled a documentary that seeks to portray Castro as just short of divine. He Who Must Live, a miniseries that began airing on Cuban TV last month, remembers the 83-year-old, who served as Comandante en Jefe for nearly 50 years, as a man who did so under constant threat, surviving an alleged 638 assassination attempts, largely perpetrated by the U.S. Says Ann Louise Bardach, an American journalist and author of the 2009 book Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington, “This is the kind of pre-emptive eulogy for the Maximum Leader.”

A joint undertaking of the Interior Ministry, Institute of Police Sciences and state-approved filmmakers, He Who Must Live is the culmination of millions of dollars, some 240 actors, 800 extras and reams of archival footage. The eight one-hour-long episodes took three years to complete. “There’s no question this is the biggest television blockbuster they’ve ever done,” says Bardach. It’s a tribute, says Dalhousie University professor and Cuba expert John Kirk, that’s fitting of a man who is “seen as the Nelson Mandela of Cuba, but multiplied by a factor of three or four.” To others, however, it’s a calculated attempt to spin Fidelismo at a time when the government, now headed by Castro’s younger brother Raúl, is becoming increasingly unpopular. In a country where free speech is limited, says Ismael Sambra, a former Cuban journalist who spent five years in jail before being exiled to Canada in 1997, the government “knows how to manage the media to inspire compassion . . . to justify their position against the enemy and the opposition.”

In filming the series, director Rafael Ruiz Benítez says he used a variety of genres to “give the viewer more information about the facts.” One problem, however, is that the central “fact”—that Castro survived a staggering 638 attempts on his life—is being dismissed by many as fallacy. To be sure, there have been more than a few efforts to off the Comandante. In 1975, a U.S. Senate committee report found “concrete evidence” of at least eight CIA-led plots, which include Mafia figures, Cuban dissidents, and everything from high-powered rifles to poison pens. As recently as 2000, Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born ex-CIA operative, was arrested in Panama City with 200 lb. of explosives, apparently planning to kill Castro while he delivered a speech. Cuba expert Robert Wright, who teaches history at Trent University, says Cuban ministries are completely closed to researchers, making it “well nigh impossible to get Cuban documents”—or verify the film’s bold claim. (It’s also made in the 2006 British documentary 638 Ways To Kill Castro.) But according to Bardach, who has done extensive research on the subject, the true figure is likely in the “double digits, not triple digits.”

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Throwing a perfect game in a Third World prison

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 8:14 AM - 9 Comments

While most everyone was paying attention to other matters across the hall, our former ambassador in Kabul appeared in Centre Block’s other grand committee room yesterday afternoon and neatly summed up Canada’s position on torture in Afghanistan.

“Our reports for several years indicated that there was a high likelihood that torture was going on in Afghanistan detention facilities. However, we were confident that, based on information we had, that no Canadian transfer detainees had been abused or mistreated,” said David Sproule, Canada’s ambassador in Kabul from October, 2005, to April, 2007.

Meanwhile, the Military Police Complaints Commission has decided upon a novel response to the delayed delivery of detainee documents: it’s called the officials responsible for such documents to testify.

Ontario’s sex offender registry has another shocking loophole

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 7:49 AM - 41 Comments

Bill Herriot/ The Calgary Herald/ CP

Wherever he’s hiding these days, serial molester Graham James is surely reading about himself in the headlines, no doubt furious his predatory past is once again front-page news. The latest revelation—that the National Parole Board quietly pardoned the notorious pedophile hockey coach three years ago—has triggered as much outrage as the original charges, and exposed a long list of confusing truths about how our criminal justice system deals with dangerous sex offenders.

Thanks to Graham James, Canadians now know just how simple it is for a man who preys on teenage boys to have his criminal record wiped clean. Over the past two years, 1,554 sex offenders applied for a pardon; only 41 were rejected. Thanks to Graham James, Canadians also now know that a standard criminal background check doesn’t disclose the fact that a potential volunteer might be a pardoned predator. Those details only turn up in what’s known as a Vulnerable Sector Search (VSS), a much more exhaustive screening tool that requires fingerprints and weeks of waiting—and that many volunteer organizations don’t bother demanding.

The Harper government is already promising an overhaul. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has vowed to make it tougher for men like James to secure pardons, and his office is listening to suggestions that would ensure Boy Scout leaders and minor hockey coaches are thoroughly screened. But the James case has revealed another frightening loophole: pardoned sex offenders are automatically erased from the Ontario Sex Offender Registry.

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The truth about Cleopatra

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 7:45 AM - 8 Comments

When Shakespeare wrote about how “age cannot wither” the “infinite variety” of Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, he meant to invoke the fascination she exerted over all who met her, but he could as easily been describing her enduring afterlife. For 2,000 years the Western world has loved, or at least loved to hate, its Eastern beauty, whether as doomed lover or immoral seductress. Dante put her in the second circle of Hell with the other “carnal sinners,” while Chaucer thought her a virtuous woman steadfast in love. Pascal believed her beauty was one of the accidental details upon which the axis of history turns: “Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the face of the world would have changed.’’

The broad sweep of her story is well known, and many of its details almost universally so: her seduction of Julius Caesar (to whom she had herself smuggled wrapped in a rug and unrolled before his feet); her fateful choice between the two men vying for the assassinated Caesar’s mantle (allying with Marc Antony rather than the eventual victor, Octavian, later Augustus Caesar); the conspicuous consumption (once taking a pearl valued at 10 million sesterces—enough to maintain 10,000 Roman soldiers for a year—dissolving it in a cup of vinegar and drinking it down, merely to display her wealth); and, of course, suicide by asp bite.

The intense theatricality of it all is why, despite considerable literary portrayal, Cleopatra’s presence in the Western imagination has always been primarily a matter of spectacle. There are dozens of paintings (with the pearl and the deathbed as favourite scenes) and ballets, plays and films, with Shakespeare’s endlessly revived Antony and Cleopatra—Kim Cattrall has just signed on for a fall run in England—and the 1963 film Cleopatra standing at the apex as twin icons. Best known for the scandalous public affair between stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that seemed to mirror onscreen events, Joseph Mankiewicz’s cinematic hymn to wretched excess offers Cleopatra’s single most potent modern image.

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Don’t joke in Little Stasi-on-Avon

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 7:45 AM - 212 Comments

Getty Images

Not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I chanced to be in Hungary making a TV film co-produced by the BBC and MTV. Not the MTV of caterwauling rockers but MTV as in “Magyar Televízió”—their version of the CBC, although obviously nowhere near as monolithically left-wing. We spent the first few days in Budapest meeting our local contacts—producers, fixers, interviewees, all of whom were urbane Mitteleuropean charmers, and delightful company. We’d then go on to the next meeting, at which we’d be assured by György that, while József may seem urbane and charming on the surface, he’d spent the previous 30 years as an informant for the Ministry of the Interior. Moving on to our appointment with Gábor, we’d be told that it was the eminently civilized and amusing György who’d been the state informer for the past several decades. Needless to say, Viktor had much the same to say about Gábor, and Imre about Viktor.

The BBC lads found this most disquieting. They had no objection to commies per se, being mostly the usual bunch of university Trots and Marxists themselves. But they disliked the idea of snitches, of never being able to be sure whether your neighbour or workmate wasn’t sneaking to the authorities on your every casual aside. It offended against their sense of fair play; it wasn’t cricket. I took a more relaxed view, having been on the receiving end of the famous British sense of fair play, not least in my dealings with the duplicitous bastards at the BBC. I figured sure, Gábor and Viktor and József and Imre and György and pretty much everyone else we ran into in that post-Soviet spring doubtless had their dark secrets, but under a totalitarian regime the state can apply all kinds of pressure those of us in free societies can scarce imagine. Who are we to judge?

Less than two decades later, something very odd has happened. The United Kingdom is not (yet) a totalitarian regime, yet huge numbers of Britons have in effect signed on as informers to a politically correct Stasi, and with far greater enthusiasm than Gábor and György ever did. Last year, David Booker was suspended from his job at a hostel for the homeless in Southampton after a late-night chat with a colleague, Fiona Vardy, in which he happened to reveal that he did not believe in same-sex marriage or in vicars being allowed to wed their gay partners. Miss Vardy raised no objection at the time, but the following day mentioned the conversation to her superiors. They immediately suspended Mr. Booker from his job, and then announced that “this action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff.”

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Today in things that unite everyone in disappointment

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:50 PM - 15 Comments

Here, again, is what I saw when I wasn’t covering my eyes with my hands. And here is how the Canadian Press, Star, Sun, Globe, CBC and Canwest saw it.

The Globe details some of the projects Mr. Jaffer’s company pursued with the government. CTV reports that one of the proposals was related to Green Rite Solutions, which is the sales arm of Wright Tech Systems, which is both the company Ms. Guergis wrote about in a letter to a her cousin, at the time a Simcoe municipal official, and the company that was reportedly the subject of a dinner attended by Nazim Gillani and Mr. Jaffer. Oh, and Wright Tech’s website features a government of Canada logo, apparently much to the confusion of Treasury Board officials.

Mercy or murder? Or neither?

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 10:25 PM - 7 Comments

Despite the headlines (ours included), the murder trial of Capt. Robert Semrau is not a debate about the ethics of mercy killing. Not yet, at least. Yes, military prosecutors claim the 36-year-old officer encountered a severely wounded Taliban fighter on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and ended his agony with a pair of bullets to the heart. But Semrau himself has said only two words: “Not guilty.” He has never conceded that he killed out of compassion, and not once have his lawyers floated such an excuse. That is the government’s theory, not Semrau’s defence.

If the captain did choose to confess—and try to convince a jury that he did the humane thing—it’s hard to imagine a happy ending. Mercy killing, no matter the circumstances, is against the law, and second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence with zero chance of parole for ten years. In other words, Semrau’s two young daughters—including a new baby girl born just last week—would have to visit their father in a federal penitentiary.

Semrau’s lead lawyer, Maj. Steven Turner, refuses to discuss courtroom tactics with reporters. But if Wednesday’s cross-examination was any indication, his strategy is clear: attack every witness, and plant the seeds of reasonable doubt.

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The Commons: ‘I’m sorry if there’s been any confusion’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 7:38 PM - 51 Comments

The Scene. The Prime Minister seemed in a rather foul mood. Perhaps he was disappointed in himself. Perhaps he was merely upset with just about everyone around him.

With the first opportunity in Question Period, Michael Ignatieff stood and demanded the Prime Minister apologize, on behalf of the government, for a Conservative backbencher’s press release that likened the nation’s police chiefs to cult leaders and accused them of corruption.

“Will he condemn these disgraceful remarks?” the Liberal leader wondered.

Stephen Harper would not. He would instead note that the backbencher had apologized, that the assistant who had put those words in the backbencher’s mouth had resigned and that, anyway, the real problem here was the Liberal leader’s position on the gun registry.

Mr. Ignatieff came back with an accusatory finger, demanding the Prime Minister answer the question. And so here came the Prime Minister, yelling and pointing and carrying on. “Of course we all agree with that apology,” he offered of his backbencher’s retraction, “and we accept that apology.” And then he again turned on the Liberal leader, upon whom said backbencher had wished metaphorical violence. Continue…

It's a small world after all

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 5 Comments

I’d normally use the words “delicious” and “irony” to describe this, but Marty kinda ruined them for me the other day:

The lawyer Lu Chan Khuong, the associate and spouse of Marc Bellemare, will become the next president of the Quebec Bar Association May 6… It’s worth noting the president of the bar has a say when it comes to judicial nominations and that the job of president can sometimes lead to an eventual nomination to the judiciary.

Khuong was apparently the only person vying for the job.

[via La clique]

The Return of the Return of the Return of Looney Tunes

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 5:30 PM - 5 Comments

Lots of TV stuff going on: Like, what’s happening on Lost? Answer: I honestly have no idea, but I’m having fun watching it happen. (One TV Trope I was particularly aware of last night is the rule that if Guy X is about to kill another character, and the scene cuts away before the shooting takes place, and Guy later says he carried out the killing, no such killing actually took place. If Lost really wanted to surprise us they’d reveal that the guy really is dead.) Does the increased sophistication of the musical numbers on Glee make up for the continually unsophisticated plots? Did South Park just bring back the Mohammed thing because nothing else they did was getting them into the news lately?

And in the “future shows that don’t sound like very good ideas” category, there’s this bit of news from Cartoon Network’s development slate. I guess the fact that they’re actually still producing cartoons, after a period when it looked like they were going to re-brand as something else, is mildly surprising, but the big news is that they are going to produce shows based on two collapsing franchises. One is an animated sketch comedy based on characters from Mad magazine — if they have a Dave Berg “Lighter Side” segment you will hear the sound of channels being changed all over the world — and the other is the latest in a literally endless line of attempts to revive the Looney Tunes franchise. At least it sounds like a relatively harmless attempt, certainly nothing to compare in horror with Baby Looney Tunes or Loonatics.

‘Looney Tunes’ will present a digital age spin on such decades-old characters as Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam, who will now all be suburban neighbors. Instead of the traditional seven-minute ‘Looney Tunes’ shorts that were a staple of movie theater programming and Saturday morning television for generations, the new episodes will be half-hour-long stories, though they’ll be interrupted by cartoons within the cartoon. There will be two-minute ‘Merrie Melodies’ music videos — original songs sung by such characters as the Tasmanian Devil, Speedy Gonzalez, and Marvin the Martian – and two and a half minute Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote shorts, which will be computer-animated.

Nearly all new Looney Tunes projects turn out to be bad, and this doesn’t sound very different, but at least it sounds bad in a traditional sort of way: putting these characters into longer formats, making them do “hip” music videos, computer-animating them; all of these are the normal things that companies do with old cartoon characters. It does strike me that Warners should have learned by now that putting these characters together, making them act like some kind of extended family, is not a very good idea. When these cartoons were being made, there were a select few characters who teamed up regularly (Daffy and Porky), an occasional Daffy-Bugs crossover, and other than that, most of these characters stayed in their separate series, except for the purposes of quick cameo jokes.

Putting all the characters in the same neighbourhood is kind of pointless. This isn’t Tiny Toons, where the characters were written and created to be at the same school and complement each other. These characters were created to star in cartoons which, due to budgetary issues, weren’t usually supposed to have more than two or three major characters in them. That’s how the classic format of predator vs. prey developed; the typical cartoon has predator, prey, and maybe one other character like Tweety’s owner Granny, plus a few very minor characters. Tweety was never meant to interact with a wide range of characters; his only clear relationships are with the cats who are trying to eat him. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t fun to watch Daffy Duck meet Foghorn Leghorn — but it was fun because it only happened once.

Well, Warner Brothers has been making bad new Looney Tunes projects literally since the original cartoon studio shut down in 1964. Their degree of badness ranges from the depths of Daffy/Speedy and the Larry Doyle shorts to the merely mediocre, like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng’s returns to the franchise. (And there have been a few, very few, cartoons that weren’t bad, like “Blooper Bunny,” which the company refused to release to theatres.) Almost 50 years of terrible cartoons haven’t ruined the reputation of the original studio’s products, so I doubt if this show will; it should be considered pointless, but harmless.

As to why WB keeps making new cartoons when there is a huge library of great old cartoons that are better than any new show they could make, the answer is simple: the public is more interested in new stuff. To keep characters in the public eye, the company has to come up with new cartoons, no matter how little they add to the original. With Looney Tunes, there was a period when this wasn’t the case, when the studio could re-package the original cartoons and sell them to TV, though even then, the demand for something new was always strong. (Hence the bad linking material in the specials and feature films, when aesthetically, a festival of uncut original cartoons would have been far more satisfying.) There were several reasons they can no longer do that, one of which is that the new cartoons on the schedule don’t look anything like the classics, whereas in the ’70s and ’80s, they were simply better-drawn, better-made versions of the same “look” that many Saturday Morning cartoon makers were going for. (The look of Hanna-Barbera cartoons obviously had things in common with their classic Tom and Jerry cartoons, so a package of Tom and Jerry cartoons would not instantly scream “old” to a little kid, until he or she noticed how much better they were than new material.) Things have changed, meaning that the marketability of the characters depends on their having new content, even though nobody — I hope — thinks that the new content is a better viewing experience than a half-hour’s worth of the originals. Such is life, I guess.

Speaking of disguising old cartoons as new product, this has been going on almost as long as animation has existed; the “cheater” short film (bits of new animation linking clips from old cartoons) was the predecessor of the TV clip show. On the bright side, the WB “cheaters” were — back when the cartoon library was owned by two different companies — our only chance to see bits of the pre-1948 cartoons on Saturday morning.

[vodpod id=Video.3469967&w=425&h=350&fv=]

The information panopticon cometh pt XVII

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 3:49 PM - 16 Comments

What happens when your ad network knows you are gay but your co-workers don’t?

This strikes me as a fairly important question.

Sarko saute le requin

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 3:14 PM - 30 Comments

It’s  embarrassing for me to remember that there was a time when I had great hopes for Nicholas Sarkozy. But with today’s announcement of a forthcoming bill that will ban Islamic veils in all public spaces (i.e., not just in locations where public services are being provided), his presidency has officiellement sauté le requin.

It is hard to stomach the utter dishonesty of it all. As Jacob Levy argued last year when this was first mooted, the government’s gambit has been to frame this as a matter of women’s liberty, pure and simple, while any suggestion that it is a matter of religious freedom is dismissed out of hand. While clearly false, it enables the officials to portray what is clearly a reactionary policy aimed at preserving some atavistic notion of “French identity” as somehow serving the fundamental values of the republic. It also avoids the unpleasantness of having to concede that there might be competing principles at work, which might have to be balanced or — as one might say — reasonably accommodated.

Even if the stability and identity of the republic were at issue, how big a problem is it? Last year, Le Monde reported that under 400 women in France wear the full veil; I’ve heard other figures that put it as high as 2000. And about half of those are converts, many of whom are probably kids who thirty years ago would have put safety pins in their noses if they were living in Camden Town,  but have today found a better way of sticking a thumb in the eye of the establishment in France.

And all of this doesn’t even begin to deal with the utter impracticality of the proposal. This is my favourite comment so far: “Je ne sais pas comment on va faire avec les Saoudiennes qui viennent acheter sur les Champs-Elysées, par exemple”.

Tehran's Toronto front: The Canadian government responds

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 3:05 PM - 3 Comments

The Iranian chargé d’affaires was called in by Foreign Affairs today to discuss the “Center for Iranian Studies,” an institution in Toronto that describes itself as a non-governmental organization promoting Iranian culture and scholarship.

As reported here last week, the centre was founded by a former Iranian diplomat and is still funded by the Iranian embassy. According to a letter signed by eight Iranian academics at Toronto universities, the institution has been contacting Iranian students in Toronto to offer Farsi classes and funding for cultural activities. Continue…

Why won't Breitkreuz let Breitkreuz be Breitkreuz?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 3:01 PM - 88 Comments

Garry Breitkreuz says the language in yesterday’s embarrassing press release “is not me.” Well, gee, Garry, it may not have been you, but as a longtime observer of your career I thought it was an excellent likeness. If you ask me, you picked a pretty bad moment to disavow the self-portrait.

Joan Bryden’s wire story for CP says that Breitkreuz’s statement “compared Canadian police chiefs to a cult and urged Liberals to beat their leader, Michael Ignatieff, ‘black and blue’.” On count one of the indictment, Breitkreuz must be judged not guilty. He actually compared the opposition in the Commons to a cult, and said it was being “led by organizations of police chiefs”—i.e., political advocacy groups that claim to represent police chiefs, and that have a strong interest in the naïve citizen (or the naïve reporter) confusing them with the police qua police.

Breitkreuz has always worked hard to emphasize this distinction, and it was highlighted rather intensely a year ago when John Jones, an ethics advisor to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, quit because of the association’s incorrigible addiction to questionable corporate donations. As Christie Blatchford wrote in the Globe at the time:

Dr. Jones and the members of the ethics committee were in Montreal in August for two days of meetings around the CACP’s annual conference when they learned about Taser’s sponsorship and that of others, including a joint Bell Mobility-CGI Group-Techna donation of $115,000, which went toward the purchase of 1,000 tickets at $215 each to a Celine Dion concert on Aug. 25.

CGI Group Inc. is a major, long-term firearms-registry contractor. In the odious press release, Breitkreuz, or his evil twin, asked “Could it be that CACP support for the registry is financially motivated?” Why the pussyfooting? Seems like he could have just said flat-out that when it comes to the gun registry, the CACP has an obvious conflict of interest and cannot be considered an uncompromised source of policy advice.

As for the charge that Evil Garry called for Ignatieff to be beaten…well, the world will always have its thick-as-a-plank literalists, won’t it? The press release didn’t even refer explicitly to a beating, but said that “[Ignatieff's] true colours are showing, and if his caucus has any integrity, those colours should be black and blue.” If Breitkreuz thinks that this rough-and-tumble metaphor is an offence worth apologizing for, fine; standards, after all, are ever-evolving in this area.

His real problem is that his rather careful statement about the CACP’s conflict of interest would have been easy for the opposition to strip of its context and twist into an anti-cop sound bite. In the wild-and-woolly Reform days, when the party’s base consisted of half-anarchist and heavily-armed rural Westerners, this kind of tension was not a major problem. Old Reformers readily recognize a implicit distinction between lawfulness and regimentation, between policing and the police state. But this philosophical razor is naturally a little blunter in a federal party that is trying to straddle multiple regions and political traditions. Reform’s passion for old-fashioned, demotic criminal justice seems to have been diverted into the task of elevating the police into a species of untouchable philosopher-king. And in the Ignatieff era, this is a contest in which the Liberals no longer have any compunctions about competing.

That puts someone like Breitkreuz in an awkward position, since he is dedicated to the destruction of a gun-registry program that many police really might like—not because it is in the public interest, but because it gives them another pretext for arrests, searches, and horse-trading with the bad guys. The registry self-evidently gives the police more power, but it is difficult to imagine that it protects anyone from personal harm. You can build all the databases you like, but no properly trained officer of the law will ever enter a premises or stop a suspect without accounting for the possibility of a weapon coming into play. If one were to take the CACP at its word, and accept that the registry with all its inaccuracies is routinely used to “check for the presence of firearms” in homes being visited by police, one would be forced to consider the possibility that the damn thing is nothing but a digital Petri dish of overconfidence and carelessness—well worth consigning to oblivion in the name of safety and common sense alone.

Who's the boss?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 2:32 PM - 11 Comments

MPs in Ottawa are gearing up for a historic ruling. As early as Thursday, House Speaker Peter Milliken will decide whether or not Stephen Harper’s government is in contempt of Parliament, as the opposition parties allege. The claim concerns thousands of pages of heavily censored documents which likely reveal how much federal officials knew about Afghan detainee abuse – but which Conservatives refuse to release to Parliament. “It’s huge,” said Errol Mendes, law professor at the University of Ottawa. Mendes explained: “If the Speaker rules against the opposition motions, it would not be too hyperbolic to say that we have changed our system of governance [since] the executive would no longer be accountable to the House of Commons.” Even if Milliken rules against the Conservatives, however, it’s possible that the documents in question will remain under lock and key. Rather than remove the black ink, the Tories could simply force an election.

The Globe and Mail

As to the study of renewable energy projects funded by the government

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 2:10 PM - 12 Comments

Today’s meeting of the government operations and estimates committee commences at 3:30pm. Two witnesses are scheduled to testify, one of them someone by the name of Rahim Jaffer. No doubt a very informative and nuanced discussion of environmental policy and government subsidization will ensue.

If you should be so interested in such matters, the meeting will be televised online, the relevant links found here under the section marked “Meeting 11.”

There will probably be some degree of breathless play-by-play on the “Twitter.” And I, given my long-standing and oft-stated interest in the economics and public policy of renewable energy, will be by sometime after with a sober and reasoned sketch of the proceedings.

The enduring allure of the written word

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:49 PM - 59 Comments

And so it turns out that the assistant who sent out Garry Breitkreuz’s colourful press release also wrote a letter to the editor of a smalltown newspaper without identifying his professional association.

The press release was sent to reporters by Breitkreuz’s parliamentary assistant Brant Scott. Scott, last fall, sent a letter to the editor of an Ottawa-area newspaper arguing against the gun registry but did not identify himself in that letter as a member of Breitkreuz’s staff … Scott’s letter does not mention Breitkreuz and, in the letter, he makes the case to dismantle the registry using several arguments Breitkreuz has often used.

Scott, on Wednesday, said he was acting “as a private citizen” when he wrote the letter and “did not see the connection” that he ought to have identified himself as Breitkreuz’s employee.

That letter is here. And since the press release, strangely, seems to have disappeared from Mr. Breitkreuz’s website, we’ve made it available here.

Iran could have long-range nukes by 2015

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:16 PM - 15 Comments

A new security assessment prepared by the Pentagon suggests Iran could have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States by 2015. James Miller, a senior Pentagon official, warned a congressional committee that “both Iran and North Korea present a significant regional missile threat” and that “the ballistic missile threat today is increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively.” Iran and North Korea are known to have collaborated on missile development, a fact that was reinforced Tuesday with the the announcement of a visit to Tehran by Kim Yong-nam, the head of the North Korean parliament.

The Telegraph

Law & Order: UK

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:11 PM - 5 Comments

The Times and Guardian review revelations in Britain’s burgeoning Afghan detainee controversy. The Canadian experience is not going unnoticed and Doug Saunders helpfully puts things in perspective for a Canadian audience. Doug has also graciously uploaded what UK documents he has obtained.

X marks the spot

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

Transit users in Atlanta are getting a very visible reminder of what proposed cuts to service might mean to them—giant red Xs painted across buses that are due to be taken out of service. The city’s MARTA system is under severe financial stress and may have to cut 30 per cent of its routes. But what this will mean to the city’s working poor? Almost 50 per cent of the systems 100,000 daily users say they have no other form of transportation. Sadly, the cuts are part of a much wider recession-driven trend: a recent survey found that 80 per cent of US transit systems are in the midst of raising fares, cutting services, or both, in an effort to balance the books.

New York Times

Best. Interview. Ever.

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 12:48 PM - 4 Comments

You’ve probably never heard of Amos Masondo. He’s the Mayor of Johannesburg, and we’re guessing he regrets ever sitting down with Chris Barron of the Jo’burg Sunday Times to discuss the city’s preparations for the World Cup. In a monument to conversational minimalism, Barron interrogates the hapless pol with ruthless efficiency, adducing evidence that—even as it prepares to welcome the world—Jo’burg is devolving into a pot-holed dump plagued by poor public transit and political cronyism. Our favourite exchange begins with Barron grilling Masondo over his purported plans to lift Johannesburg to “world class” status:

Q: “Do you know of any other world-class city where an unelected mayor has been in office for 10 years?”
A: “Unelected? What do you mean by that?”
Q: “That you haven’t been elected.”

Johannesburg Sunday Times

Chrysler loses $4 billion

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Chrysler reported that it lost $4 billion since exiting bankruptcy protection last summer, but CEO Sergio Marchionne says the company did turn a profit in the first quarter of 2010 and could break even this year. Market share in both Canada and the U.S. were also up from the last quarter. A big chunk of the loss ($2.1 billion) was attributed to a payment to the United Auto Workers’ health care fund. Chrysler still faces a tough road as it continues to reposition itself and merge operations with partner Fiat SpA.
Marchionne, who also acts as CEO of Fiat, said the company plans to market the Jeep brand globally, integrate the Lancia and Chrysler brands with 18 new models and launch an Alpha Romeo branded SUV in North America in 2012. The first Fiat car under the partnership, the 500, is slated to go on sale in the U.S. later this year.

Wall Street Journal

You Write For the Locations You Have

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

Ken Levine has a post about the process of plotting out a M*A*S*H story, which is a very good read for anyone interested in exactly how, mechanically, TV scripts come together. (This is a particularly tricky process for a show that uses multiple stories in every episode, like middle-period M*A*S*H, since the writers and producers must select two or more stories that complement each other, and figure out when the right “beats” should occur for each story in the script.) In particular, the post deals with an important factor in the writing of any show: where you can shoot, and when. In the case of M*A*S*H, which couldn’t go out on location, the only exterior shots they could do were at Fox’s ranch in Malibu, and as Levine explains, they didn’t always have access to that ranch. So they needed to incorporate that restriction into their scripts, limiting the number of exteriors called for, and — later in the season — eliminating exteriors altogether.

And then we had a rather major restriction: We could only shoot outside at the Malibu ranch for one day each episode. So no more than 8 pages (approximately a third of the show). And that was in the summer when there was the most light. By September and October we could devote 6 pages to exteriors. And once Daylight Savings was over that was it for the ranch for the season. All exteriors were shot on the stage. So if we wanted to do a show where the camp is overrun by oxen we better schedule it for very early in the summer. Those 20th guards never let oxen onto the lot without proper ID.

That description of the production process is familiar to anyone who’s read about how old B-movies were made: they were written around the tight shooting restrictions and, in particular, around the sets and locations that they had access to. The TV series is the descendant of the B-movie — literally; that’s where a lot of the B-movie production crews went in the ’50s — and it, too, has traditionally worked the same way. The writers can’t usually demand that some expensive set be built; they can’t even get the kind of access to the studio facilities that a cheap feature film has (like the M*A*S*H movie, which was shot on the Fox lot but at least was able to include more outdoor scenes). They may make use of sets, locations and costumes left over from previous movies, and write their stories around what sets, locations and costumes are available. And it all has to be done fast.

It’s a bit different today, because shows are more expensive to make, have longer shooting schedules, and do more extensive location work. (Also they have access to bad green-screen technology like you see on Parenthood when they want to fake a location.) But it’s still true that a TV episode costs less than most feature films from the same studio, and the writers have to ask, when they’re writing a show, what they can do with the time and money available. And that’s a big unseen influence on the story of any episode.

Balancing act or pivotal choice

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:45 AM - 38 Comments

John Ibbitson and Susan Delacourt preview the Speaker’s decision on detainee documents. Gentle reminders that something like the very foundation of our democracy hangs in the balance. Not that that should distract you from Mr. Jaffer’s testimony this afternoon.