Reading between the lines of Michael Ignatieff’s latest speech

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 7:12 AM - 45 Comments

Date: Monday, May 17, 2010.

Title: Speech to Toronto Leader’s Dinner

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We are the big tent at the centre of Canadian politics. And we always will be.

The big tent – that’s where the clowns perform, right?

Our opponents call us names. They throw mud. They send hate mail and attack ads.

They give us wedgies. They steal our lunch money. They ridicule my ascot.

We didn’t end a 25-year consensus on a woman’s right to choose—they did.

We didn’t cut Toronto Pride, and attack the CBC—they did.

We didn’t divide rural and urban Canada over gun control—they did.

We didn’t tell women’s groups to “shut the f— up,” or lose their funding—they did.

We didn’t let the dogs out – they did.

We didn’t start the fire – they did.

We didn’t know the way to San Jose – they did.

We are better than this. We are better than this as a country.

Are we really? I mean, I guess I hope we are – but opposition leaders have Continue…

Everything Got Canceled

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:46 PM - 8 Comments

As the networks tell us how wonderful their new fall pickups are going to be, Lee Goldberg looks at what happened to the last crop of fall dramas:

The only new dramas that have survived the primetime bloodbath are THE GOOD WIFE, THE HUMAN TARGET, NCIS: LOS ANGELES, LIFE UNEXPECTED, GLEE, VAMPIRE DIARIES and V.

There’s at least midseason replacement show that also survived (Parenthood), but the point is just that, as always the flops outnumber the shows that survive, and far outnumber the big hits. The same is likely to happen this year, because it happens every year. And there will be plenty of high-concept shows with much-hyped pilots that crash two weeks after that pilot airs.

Of the dramas that survived, two are on the CW where the standards for survival are somewhat less (though Melrose Place and others couldn’t even meet those standards), so that leaves the big four networks with about half-a-dozen new dramas that didn’t flop.

On the bright side, of the surviving dramas, only two are outright dull — NCIS: LA and V. Considering how hard it is to produce a decent show, six or seven watchable new hour-long dramas isn’t that bad a crop.

Tiger Woods doctor is charged with smuggling, doping

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 6:26 PM - 11 Comments

A prominent sports medicine doctor—whose clients have included Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, and the Toronto Argonauts—faces 20 years in jail. Dr. Anthony Galea of Toronto is well known in the professional sports world for his use of “platelet-rich plasma therapy,” a “blood-spinning technique” which speeds recovery from injuries. Now, authorities allege that Galea smuggled actovegin, a derivative of calf’s blood that is not approved for medical use, across the U.S border for use on professional athletes. He is also accused of practicing in the U.S (on Major League Baseball and National Football League players) without a license. Perhaps most shockingly, he is accused of illegally injecting HGH “drug mixtures” into athletes. The charges follow an eight-month FBI investigation into the Toronto doc. Galeo prescribed anti-inflammatories to Alex Rodrigues last year, in addition to treating Tiger Woods.

Toronto Star

The Commons: A great show of strength

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 6:21 PM - 72 Comments

The Scene. The Prime Minister was, just yesterday, lamenting the tawdriness of this place. ”I’ve been very clear with the Canadian people our number one focus week in and week out remains the economy. When we sit down as a caucus or when we sit down in cabinet, that’s 80 percent of our discussion,” he recounted to a group of young people. “Everything else that often gets so much attention from your former media colleagues, Mike, these are sideshows. The economy is what matters and it’s got to be what matters everywhere and it’s got to be what matters at these meetings in June.”

That the Prime Minister was, at that very moment, participating in an actual sideshow is an irony that seems to have gone uncommented upon by Senator Mike Duffy, the former journalist assigned to host this little infomercial on Parliament Hill. “Prime Minister,” Mr. Duffy is recorded to have assured, “we’ll be watching with great interest.”

Continue…

The law is an ass, but must it bray so loudly?

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 6:01 PM - 17 Comments

Behold the compound stupidity that emerges from ill-made privacy law. There was a terrible murder near the entrance of Edmonton’s Hotel Macdonald early Monday; the Edmonton Journal conducted a careful, sensitive investigation into the background of the victim, who had committed a murder himself in 2001. Because the Journal disclosed that the dead man had once been in foster care and that he had been a young offender, the broadsheet couldn’t report his name for fear of inviting reprisals from multiple levels of government. Meanwhile, every other news organ in town was left free to identify him precisely because they didn’t have, or didn’t tell, the full story. The law, in its infinite wisdom, endowed this lucky brute with privacy rights that did not expire with this death. But for whatever it might be worth, those rights did absolutely nothing to shield his identity from anybody.

It would be lovely if governments decided that concealing information about suspicious deaths, or indeed any deaths at all, is horrible public policy. Privacy provisions in Alberta’s child-welfare laws are particularly awful in this respect; they have repeatedly impeded newsgathering on the quality of foster care in this province—an exercise of the free press that could not possibly be more urgent. I would add that various police forces are rapidly embracing the repugnant habit of concealing the identities of corpses discovered in public places “at the request of their families”. This does not appear to be a matter of law at all; it is just improvised self-regulation. The reporter, presented with a blank wall of sentiment, never has any ready means of confirming that a family has made such a request, or, indeed, been consulted or located at all. If we are prepared to accept this obfuscation as a matter of routine, we might just as well give the cops an explicit license to cover up homicide, or, indeed, to commit it.

[UPDATE, 6:46 pm: the Edmonton Sun has withdrawn the name of the victim from its story, which is linked to above. Here's how it reads now; here's a screenshot from 6 am Eastern time today, courtesy of the Google cache. Note here that general knowledge of the name of the victim might actually, I dunno, help the police solve the crime.]

Will you watch the World Cup?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 5:45 PM - 23 Comments

Debate over Quebec sovereignty irrelevant: poll

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 5:35 PM - 21 Comments

Sovereignty’s dead. Again. Three decades after Quebec’s first referendum, it seems the question of whether Quebec should stay or go has lost it’s heart-clenching urgency in the province itself. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of the province believes the issue is settled, with only 14 percent of Quebecers believe the province will be a république in the next 30 years. Tellingly, though, the support for sovereignty hovers at 40 percent–which is sounding more and more like wishful thinking.

Montreal Gazette

The infomercial era (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 5:32 PM - 25 Comments

A leader of tomorrow comes forward to say she deliberately rewrote her question for the Prime Minister to more likely please him and still didn’t get to ask it.

“The whole sideshow thing, I think that insulted me the most,” Ms. Raimey told The Globe today. “I was really upset by that. I find it extremely insulting because we are Canadians, too, and these issues are important to us. If our Prime Minister thinks they are sideshows – I mean this isn’t a government of one.”

Air Security: Are Liquid Rules Evaporating?

By Takeoffeh.com - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 4:44 PM - 0 Comments

Reports from the U.S. suggest strict rules on liquids in air travellers’ baggage are no longer being enforced, despite no official change in policy. But an informal TakeOffeh.com survey of frequent Canadian travellers found that security officials here are still busy confiscating liquid items that don’t meet the rules.

“The Transportation Security Administration’s unpopular restrictions on liquids, gels and aerosols in carry-on luggage — better known as the 3-1-1 rule — are history,” wrote MSNBC columnist and travel ombudsman Christopher Elliott recently.

There have been no official pronouncements, but Elliott says extensive feedback from readers indicates the TSA has all but stopped screening carry-on bags for liquids. “(Readers) say transportation security officers no longer ask them to remove lotions, shampoos and even water bottles from their luggage, and overlook all manner of liquids packed in their carry-ons during screening,” Elliott writes.

The TSA initially banned liquids and gels from carry-on bags back in 2006 when British authorities intercepted a plot to blow up planes with liquid explosives. Other jurisdictions, including Canada, quickly followed the U.S. lead. The rules were later revised to allow small quantities of liquids in carry-ons.

Elliott has been a vocal critic of the policy since it was put in place and many air travellers agree that the easily-forgotten restriction is one of the most annoying elements of airport security.

U.S. officials have said that liquid rules will be lifted at the end of this year, when screening machines at security checkpoints will be upgraded with technology designed to detect threatening liquids. European officials say new technology will allow prohibitions on liquids in carry-on bags to be lifted by 2013.

Meanwhile, despite Elliott’s reporting on the experiences of his readers, the TSA says nothing has changed: “The policy continues to be enforced,” a spokesperson told Elliott. “Although it is important to note that we empower our workforce with discretion.”

Several frequent travellers canvassed by TakeOffeh report they have seen little change in the way rules are being enforced here in Canada, although some have also seen incidents when officials displayed ‘discretion.’ “I still abide by packing most of my liquids and just taking small items in a see-through Ziploc with me on the plane,” says Vanessa Lee, publisher of Cruise and Travel Lifestyles magazine. “However, I did notice a woman going through security ahead of me who had a decent size bottle of sunscreen in her carry on and they looked at, let her keep it and told her next time to pack it.”

Photo Credit: Devonyu

What I'm reading

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 3:56 PM - 2 Comments

For pleasure, Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson (gripping; occasionally jarring) and Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk, an elegant and book that somehow makes me feel melancholic about a city that previously brought me only joy.

For our purposes here, however, I’m reading How Terrorism Ends by Adurey Kurth Cronin, a professor of strategy at the U.S. National War College.

Cronin examines the histories numerous terror groups, from South Africa to South America to Middle East. The result is an important book. I won’t try to sum it up here, but a few points:

Terrorism does end. The average lifespan of terror groups is eight years, and few achieve their objectives.

This brings up the obvious question: How does terrorism end? Cronin looks at and evaluates several tactics that might speed along a terror groups demise, including killing or arresting its top leadership (decapitation); wider repression directed against it supporters and foot soldiers; and negotiations. Continue…

Let us now discuss who loves criminals most

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 3:37 PM - 42 Comments

There are, it seems, the makings of a serious debate about crime policy in this country.

“We need to contextualize these choices and say, ‘If we are going to spend perhaps tens of billions of dollars on building new prisons, is that the intelligent way to go?’” said Mr. Holland.

“I think [the government] can expect that we are going to be very critical of bills that are going to cost massive amounts of money for very little return, and that we expect the government to be basing decisions on evidence as opposed to playing politics with emotions and trying to bully people into voting for things that don’t work.”

Move over, Mozart!

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 3:22 PM - 3 Comments

Getty Images/ Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

In Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company, a character sings about the pretentious things that alcoholic Manhattan snobs enjoy, including the cryptic plays of Harold Pinter and “perhaps a piece of Mahler’s.” That was the way many music fans saw Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer-conductor who died in 1911: as a creator of bloated 80-minute symphonies that were mostly popular with poseurs. Forty years after Company, as the musical world celebrates the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth (and, next year, the centenary of his death), he is almost as popular as Mozart. The veteran British music critic Michael Kennedy wrote in The Spectator that in 60 years of music criticism, one of the three biggest changes he witnessed was “the emergence of Mahler as a popular composer worldwide.” Nor are musicians shy about placing him with the greatest of musical geniuses. Bramwell Tovey, music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, told Maclean’s that only Beethoven can compare to Mahler’s “unfailing ability to articulate the human condition, the glory of being alive,” while Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, says modern audiences consider Mahler’s music “the ultimate tour de force of orchestral writing.” Those are big statements to make about a composer who wrote an entire symphonic movement based on the tune of Frère Jacques.

Continue…

Security Council reaches agreement on Iran resolution

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 2 Comments

A deal has been struck between the U.S. and other countries, including Russia and China, to impose new sanctions on Iran, the Obama administration announced Tuesday, rebuking a deal offered by Tehran only one day earlier to ship nuclear fuel out of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave no details of the pact, the New York Times reports, but said it would be circulated to the Security Council today. Its five permanent, veto-wielding members, the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China have all agreed, as well as Germany, even though Russia and China had previously resisted U.S.-led efforts to impose sanctions. These would be the fourth round of sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to stop enriching uranium, agree to an inspection of certain locations, and to turn over documents related to suspected weapons research, as well as allowing for the interviewing of Iranian scientists—although all three rounds failed to get Iran to comply. While Iran has said the nuclear program is meant to produce civilian energy, U.S. and European officials have highlighted work that seems unrelated to energy needs, and pointed out that Tehran has not complied with its obligations to allow inspections of its facilities.

New York Times

Coalition of the pundits

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 2:33 PM - 31 Comments

Wells and I debate whether the UK coalition offers any lessons or examples for would-be coalitioners (how dare you suggest we would even consider such a thing?) in Canada. Can you be for one and against the other? Isn’t it “coalition: yes or no”? Only in the hobgoblins of little minds.

Rob Silver offers his response here.

Mr. Bubble

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 2:08 PM - 35 Comments

I honestly don’t care whether the PMO actually rewrote questions to Stephen Harper at yesterday’s whatcha-ma-whosit about whatever-it-was. What difference does it make? Screened them, rewrote them, reimagined them, invented them… it’s all the same. Stage-managing events is part of any leader’s political arsenal, but come on – are we really being led by a man too chicken to answer the genuine, spontaneous queries of a few wonky kids. What a coward. Ooooo, our poor wittle Pwime Minister is soooo afwaid of Continue…

How not to defend the liberal arts

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 62 Comments

Spend long enough studying philosophy, and eventually someone — most likely a member of your family — is going to ask, “what are you going to do with that?” It’s a tough question to answer, since philosophy isn’t really something you do something with, like a screwdriver. It’s more like something you just do — like fly fishing. But academic philosophy, like every other department in the university, is in the selling game, trying to attract customers and the money they bring, money that enables you and your colleagues to keep doing philosophy. Continue…

Game theory

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 12:31 PM - 17 Comments

Ever wanted to know how much each party has spent per vote in the last three federal elections? Eric at threehundredeight.com has an answer.

Ever wanted to know how Parliament would look under a proportional representation system that distributed 340 seats across the country? Eric has an answer for that too.

An Abstinence Video By a Politician and His Mistress

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 9 Comments

U.S. Congressman Mark Souder announced his resignation today after admitting that he’d had an affair with a woman whom Fox News identified as Tracy Jackson, one of his staffers. Justin Elliott discovered that one of the videos on the soon-to-be-ex-Congressman’s channel was a plea for abstinence education, done in the time-honoured fake interview format. The person interviewing him about the importance of abstinence? Tracy Jackson, one of his staffers.

I don’t really know what to add to that. It’s just fun.

Saudi woman fights back. Literally.

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 15 Comments

Here’s how the fight went down. A member of the Saudi religious police—or, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—was on the prowl. His location: an amusement park. His target: unmarried couples. (Unrelated men and women are not allowed to publicly socialize in the Saudi kingdom). But when the cop approached a young couple in their 20s to question them, he probably didn’t expect what came next: being beaten up by the young woman to the point that he needed to be hospitalized—while the woman’s male companion lay collapsed on the ground. “To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” said Saudi rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar. “People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years.” If the young woman is convicted, she could face time in jail as well as lashings.

Media Line

Too Many Cameras? Or Too Few?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 4 Comments

There are a surprising number of worthwhile, “Tolja”-free posts at Deadline Hollywood Daily since Nellie Andreeva (formerly of the Hollywood Reporter) started posting there. Recently she had a post about an interesting phenomenon on the network schedules for this season: except for CBS, all the networks have gone almost 100% single-camera in their comedy pickups. They all — again, except CBS — ordered roughly equal numbers of single-camera and multi-camera pilots, but the only multi-camera pilot they ordered to series was ABC’s Better Together, a Friends clone from a Friends producer. This despite the fact that single-camera shows are more expensive to produce.

Of course, the likeliest reason for this is that the networks had yet another bad development slate of multi-camera shows. Why the networks are so bad at developing multi-camera shows is another question. (Even CBS isn’t that great at it, in my opinion; but because they’re so committed to the form, they have more multi-camera pilots to choose from — plus their relationship with Chuck Lorre has paid off.) There are some suggestions in Andreeva’s comments, ranging from plausible suggestions to dumb ones. The dumb suggestion is that young viewers don’t like multi-camera shows, which would surprise the people who run the Disney Channel. The plausible one is that “When a single-cam show fails, they blame the content. When a multi-cam fails, they now blame the genre.”

Part of what might be going on is that single-camera shows are better equipped to withstand the current system of executive interference, where people from the network hover over every aspect of every episode from beginning to end. (Rather than, as traditionally, stepping in with a few notes and then making the big changes to the “big picture,” i.e. forcing the producers to add a sassy robot or something.) Single-camera shows film all over the place, and the jokes only need to get a laugh at the table read — hard enough, since these reads are often filled with network notes types. Multi-camera shows film everything in the studio, allowing for what we might call “centralized” interference, and they have to adjust jokes for the taste of the executives and the studio audience, possibly even when these tastes contradict each other. I remember hearing complaints in the late ’90s and early ’00s that executives would no longer allow sitcoms the kind of hands-off treatment they’d given to Larry David on Seinfeld; instead, they were constantly suggesting not just general story/emotion points but entire plot twists and jokes. That happens with single-camera, too, but it’s marginally easier to avoid and therefore marginally easier to come up with a pilot that doesn’t feel cookie-cutter.

One result of this is the change in the way multi-camera and single-camera sitcoms are perceived. It used to be that if a comedy had a lot of improvisation, it would be a multi-camera show like Bosom Buddies; if a show had a writing staff that did everything by the seat of its pants and threw in wildly surreal humour, it would be a multi-camera show like NewsRadio. By comparison, single-camera sitcoms seemed stiffer and more formula-ridden, with the actors unable to loosen up the way they could in front of an audience.

Now, it’s the exact opposite. Single-camera directors and producers have found ways to make the actors seem loose and fun — to the point that every single-camera cast is asked, constantly, whether they improvise a lot of their lines. (They don’t and can’t. It’s really, really expensive to let people improvise dialogue while the camera is rolling. That’s why Curb Your Enthusiasm uses cheap video and multiple cameras.) Whereas multi-camera sitcoms have so many pressures on them — including, I think, actors who tend to feel more comfortable without an audience rather than with one — that they come off as “canned” and it’s the single-camera shows that seem “live.” At least comparatively. I still think there’s something about the single-camera format that makes a show feel over-produced and over-thought, which is why the most successful examples of the genre tend to be the ones that are shot quick n’ dirty. (That’s one of the reasons why the mock documentaries work. They don’t have as many fancy setups and lighting decisions as the elaborately-produced shows.) But multi-camera is supposed to provide a fresher, more spontaneous alternative to the normal method of TV filming, and it’s not providing that at the moment.

Like everything that happens in television, artistically or commercially, the dominance of the single-camera sitcom is not a completely new thing. Most filmed sitcoms were single-camera when the format transferred to TV — until Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz popularized the idea of using three film cameras in front of an audience — and in the ’60s, single camera was the default setting for almost any comedy that didn’t have Lucille Ball in it. The difference, I suppose, is that back then there were single-camera sitcoms that were gigantic hits, like The Andy Griffith Show or M*A*S*H. Now it’s very hard for a single-camera half-hour to become a genuine hit, yet the format has taken over anyway. That’s partly a reflection of the current situation, where mega-hits are hard to come by and networks see the value in shows that have strong demographic appeal and lots of replay value in new media. A good single-camera comedy is young-skewing and, at only 20 minutes, is ideal for online viewing.

I’ll add that I still think networks might want to consider reviving the laugh track (the essential component of the single-camera show in its ’50s and ’60s heyday), since this might go some way toward helping some of these shows find a larger audience. However, I realize this is basically impossible; I’ve argued that Cougar Town‘s hobbled comedy rhythms would be stronger with a laugh track, but the bad publicity and reviews from such a move would cancel out any advantages.

How much should we pay and what should we pay for?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:24 AM - 20 Comments

The Agenda convenes a panel—including our Andrew Coyne—to discuss the sorts of questions that should probably be dominating our politics.

Holy condom!

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:21 AM - 3 Comments

A pope-inspired condom has emerged in the Netherlands. The condom wrapper carries the image of a papal figure with an unmistakable general likeness to Pope Benedict, though the figure’s face is removed. It bears the words “I SAID NO! We say YES!” framing the papal depiction. The suggestion of a “pope condom” caused a diplomatic row last month when Britain’s Foreign Office was forced to apologize for a memorandum by a civil servant that suggested Benedict launch a papal-brand condom. Makers of the condom, De Condoomfabriek (The Condom Factory), said they want to make a point about sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and the Vatican’s opposition to contraceptives.

Reuters

'Burka rage' in France

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:15 AM - 13 Comments

French authorities are reporting their first case of “burka rage.” This past weekend, a 60-year-old female lawyer was arrested for allegedly ripping the veil off a 26-year-old Muslim convert. While shopping in a store near Nantes, the younger woman overheard the lawyer comment that she couldn’t wait for a country-wide burka ban to come into effect. Words were exchanged, then blows, with the lawyer’s adult daughter also joining in the fray. The shopkeeper and the veiled woman’s husband eventually had to break up the fight.

Telegraph

Gay marriage in Lisbon

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 3 Comments

Portugal’s conservative president Anibal Cavaco Silva announced Monday he is reluctantly ratifying a law allowing gay marriage in the predominantly Catholic country, making it the sixth European nation to do so, after Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Norway. Five U.S. states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage, as have Canada and South Africa. The Portuguese president said in a nationally televised address he regretted that the country’s political parties had failed to reach a compromise during days of heated debate in Parliament four months ago. Vetoing the bill would only send it back to Parliament where lawmakers would overturn his decision, he said, adding that the country needed to focus on overcoming an economic crisis that has increased unemployment and deepened poverty. Gay rights advocates have said they will continue to fight for gay couples’ parental rights, including adoption, which are not included in the law. Portugal lifted a prohibition on homosexuality in the early 1980s. In 2001, it passed a law allowing “civil unions” between same-sex couples, which granted couples certain legal, tax and property rights. However, it did not allow couples to take a partner’s name, nor inherit his or her possessions or state pension.

Associated Press