'A confident new Parliament'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 41 Comments

The other love story

By Nicholas Köhler and Patricia Treble - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

David and Rupert Hartley/Rex Features/CP

Few remember it, but it was an instant that captured the whole story. It happened at Buckingham Palace after the 1986 wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson—a great beginning to a sad union. William, four years old and dressed as a 19th-century sailor for the occasion, had run after the newlyweds, tottering dangerously close to their carriage’s big rear wheels. Then the Queen spotted him and scrambled after her grandson, running for several metres before pulling him back. “It was an incredible sight,” one palace employee later said. “Many of us have worked here for years and we have never seen the Queen run before.”

In the tightly scripted world of the British royals, such rare unstudied moments—a brief sprint to collect a beloved boy in danger—are all we have to go on. Everything else lies rich and hidden. And so it is with that most private of relationships, the one between William and Elizabeth II—the second in line to the throne and the Queen herself. The pair are said to be close, yet we have just the slightest of hints to suggest that that’s the case: unlike the pyrotechnics of his mother Diana, princess of Wales, William has somehow managed to lead a life largely sheltered from the prying eyes of the press, and the Queen is a study in circumspection.

Although it’s often Diana who’s cited as the main proponent behind giving William and his younger brother Harry as normal a childhood as possible—lunches at McDonald’s, visits to Disney World—the Queen also encouraged the boys to behave as normal boys do, but in her own way: against the rustic backdrop of her beloved Balmoral Castle, in rugged northeastern Scotland. There, William was free to explore the private 20,000-hectare estate and, under his gruff grandfather’s tutorship, learn to fish for salmon.

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How to get that perfect wedding waist

By Leah McLaren - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 1 Comment

Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images

When Carole and Michael Middleton were spotted having shooting lessons on the Queen’s Scottish estate of Balmoral last October, the British media flew into a tizzy: surely news of a royal engagement could not be far behind? In fact, a rather more obvious clue may have popped up earlier, when Kate’s mother reportedly let slip to an interviewer that she was on a diet and pleased with the results. “I’ve been doing it four days and I’ve lost four pounds!” she was quoted as crowing.

While there was no official confirmation she was on a diet, the already slim 56-year-old former flight attendant had every reason to want to look her best—she was about to become the most scrutinized mother of the bride in modern British history. Her crash regimen of choice, according to British sources, was the Dukan diet, by French nutritionist Pierre Dukan. This was followed by a frenzy of unsubstantiated speculation that Kate herself might also be on the diet—despite her naturally thin physique.

The extreme low-carb plan, in the vein of Atkins, Montignac or South Beach, has swept Europe and Britain, where The Dukan Diet is currently the top-selling diet book in the country, sitting at number five on Amazon.co.uk. It has recently hopped the pond to Canada and the United States, where The Dukan Diet was published earlier this month. And in Britain, rarely does a week pass these days without some new Dukan story making headlines. Earlier this year, the nation learned that Jenni Murray, the host of Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4’s venerable morning show, had been on the diet since September and lost 40 lb. and counting. She has chronicled her journey in a bimonthly newspaper column, in which she recounted her struggle to give up chocolate and wine in favour of prawns and low-fat yogourt. “Any fantasies I may have had about a Frenchman being sympathetic toward the odd glass or three of wine were quickly dispelled,” she grumbled.

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Berkshire comes clean on Sokolgate

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 6:37 PM - 1 Comment

Warren Buffett got a lot of things seriously wrong about the David Sokol-insider trading affair, starting with this: When Buffett announced the resignation of Sokol, one of his top-lieutenants, amid questionable stock trades, he declared it would be his last comments on the matter. Turns out, not so much.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Audit Committee authorized Buffett to release an in-depth report today which states in no uncertain terms that Sokol breached the company’s insider trading policies. (See our original story, Say It Ain’t So, Warren, for background.)

From the report:

His purchases of Lubrizol shares while serving as a representative of Berkshire Hathaway in connection with a possible business combination with Lubrizol violated company policies, includingBerkshire Hathaway’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and its Insider Trading Policies and Procedures. … By engaging in such questionable conduct, Mr. Sokol threatened Berkshire Hathaway’s reputation–or would have done so had he remained with the Company.

Given the huge uproar over Sokol’s actions, this report is an important first step to repairing the damage to Berkshire’s cherished reputation. The question is, will it be enough? The release comes just three days before Berkshire’s annual general meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, and a lot will depend on how Buffett handles the matter there. The key being whether he apologizes. While it was Sokol who placed the trades and kept information from his boss, Buffett trusted him and did not probe deeper into the matter. And as chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is ultimately responsible for any actions by his employees that damage the company’s reputation. Buffett has a long history of saying sorry, but this could be the most important apology of his career.

Anyway, on to the report. There’s a lot that’s fascinating in the plainly-worded disclosure:

-Berkshire is contemplating legal action against Sokol “to recover any damage the Company has sustained, or his trading profits, or both.” The company says will also cooperate with any government investigation into the matter, though it doesn’t come out and say that there is an investigation.

-Last October investment bankers at Citi brought a list of 18 chemical companies to Sokol as possible takeover targets. It was Sokol who narrowed the list down to one name, Lubrizol. That was two months before Sokol made his first purchase of Lubrizol shares.

-On March 14, after Berkshire announced the takeover of Lubrizol, a banker from Citi congratulated Buffett on the deal and took credit for bringing it to Berkshire’s attention. Until then Buffett had just assumed that Sokol had owned his shares in the company for some time and thought it was a great company Berkshire could buy. Suddenly, on the day of the big announcement, Buffett gets sideswiped by the revelation the deal had been cooked up by investment bankers. One can only imagine what was going throug his head at that point.

-The statement Buffett issued at the end of March announcing Sokol’s resignation was absent a passage Sokol had objected to, but which makes it clear Buffett knew Sokol’s actions stunk to high heaven.

Mr. Buffett deleted from the release the one passage Mr. Sokol said was inaccurate: a passage that implied that Mr. Sokol had resigned because he must have known the Lubrizol trades would likely hurt his chances of being Mr. Buffett’s successor. Mr. Sokol told Mr. Buffett that he had not hoped to be Mr. Buffett’s successor, and was resigning for reasons unrelated to those trades.

-The Audit committee all but calls Sokol a liar. It notes that Sokol “left unchanged” key points in the draft version of Buffett’s statement about his resignation that were untrue. The final version of the statement said Sokol ”did not know what Lubrizol’s reaction would be” when in fact he knew full well the company was keen to be acquired by Berkshire.

-The report is also notable for what it doesn’t discuss. After Sokol resigned, he appeared on CNBC. In the interview he said he’d done nothing wrong, and that Charlie Munger, Buffett’s investing partner, had owned shares in Chinese electric car company BYD before Berkshire acquired it at Munger’s suggestion. The Audit committee doesn’t go into this trade at all. Having said that, the circumstance are much different. Munger had owned his shares for a couple of years, fully disclosed his shareholdings to Buffett and was in no way involved in the deal to buy BYD.

BTW, for what it’s worth, I see the latest episode of Warren Buffett’s Secret Millionaire’s Club, an Internet cartoon that aims to teach kids about business and investing, is all about the importance of keeping a good reputation. It’s oh-so-appropriately titled “Cancel My Reputation.”

Andrew Coyne on the slipping prospects of a Conservative majority

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 6:08 PM - 57 Comments

(Still) Searching for a new Liberalism

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 5:39 PM - 82 Comments

A few days ago, I asked my twitter followers if anyone could say what the Liberal party’s campaign slogan is. It drew a handful of jokeysnarky responses, but no one actually managed to produce an answer as to what the slogan actually is.

It was a trick question, anyway, because the Liberal party doesn’t have a campaign slogan. Continue…

Second choices

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 4:57 PM - 36 Comments

Matthew Yglesias catches a Conservative ad and ponders the ramifications in multi-party politics.

The interesting thing is that in a multi-party system it’s difficult for the party behind an attack ad like this to reap all the benefits. This makes Ignatieff and the Liberals look terrible, but depending on your ex ante political preferences thinking worse of Ignatieff could turn you into a voter for the separatist Bloc Québécois or the social democratic NDP rather than the center-right Conservatives. And, indeed, over the past week we’ve been seeing a surge in support for the NDP.

On that point, make what you will of the latest second-choice numbers from Ekos. Among those Conservative, Liberal, Green and Bloc voters who have a second choice, the NDP is the leading back-up plan.

Trump casts a long shadow over the Republican party

By John Parisella - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 17 Comments

Donald Trump leaves no one indifferent. Call it ego or insatiable narcissism, but no one outside the political ring can command this much attention. Not even a ranting Charlie Sheen.

Establishment GOP luminaries like Karl Rove, George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer have variously characterized Trump’s potential candidacy in a presidential election as a “joke” and “not serious.” More recently, in discussing Trump, conservative columnist David Brooks wrote that he admired his country’s tolerance for blowhards and crackpots. This was hardly an endorsement. Few experienced campaigners think he can win and many are out to prevent him from running. Yet some Republican operatives are facing up to the possibility Trump will make a go of it. Continue…

UN mission looks for human rights abuses in Libya

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 4:21 PM - 1 Comment

Members of a UN fact-finding mission arrived in Triopli on Wednesday to search for evidence of alleged human rights abuses, including “indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, civilian casualties, torture, the use of mercenaries and other questions of the sort,” the delegation’s leader, Cherif Bassiouni, told reporters. Meanwhile, pressure on the rebel stronghold of Misrata has increased as pro-Gaddafi forces began mortar attacks on the western side of the port city. Before this week, only the eastern side of the had been attacked. Hospital records from last week show that at least 300 people have been killed in Misrata from fighting in the past two months, though locals suggest the number is higher. In other news, Italy has reversed its decision not to participate in NATO air strikes and says it will now send four Tornado jet fighters to support the coalition.

BBC News

CBC News

Where did the idealists go?

By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 31 Comments

Photograph by Cole Carside

Every election campaign season, experts suggest that the best way for political parties to rock the youth vote is to focus on “the student issues”—often defined as tuition and the environment. Omeed Asadi, a third-year communications student at York University, hears it all the time. “In Vari Hall, which you have to cross to get to pretty much every class, there’s always the York Federation of Students rallying against high tuition, or green activists against pollution,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. I respect those issues. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it.” Asadi also cares about health care, the tenor of parliamentary discourse and fiscal responsibility.

He’s not the only young Canadian who thinks there’s more at stake in this election than tuition hikes and the health of the planet, according to an exclusive new poll from the Historica-Dominion Institute. The survey asked 831 youth between the ages of 18 to 24 what issues concerned them. Participants were given 10 statements, each capturing a different election issue, and asked to rank them from most to least concerning. Turns out the average young voter is a lot more like Asadi than the student activists making all the noise. “They’re certainly thinking of longer-term issues earlier in their lives than we would have thought,” says Jeremy Diamond, a director at Historica-Dominion.

The most common concern for youth? “That my standard of living will be lower than my parents,” which 63 per cent ranked in their top three concerns. This was consistent across party lines and from coast to coast, although it was significantly more common among young people in the economically stagnant Atlantic region (75 per cent). “We tend to think of students as idealistic,” says Diamond, “but this shows an overriding worry that they won’t be as successful as their parents.”

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What it looks and sounds like

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 15 Comments

Stephen Harper’s remarks to an audience in Windsor on Monday night.

High praise

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 3:39 PM - 34 Comments

Stephen Gordon considers the comparative ramifications of the NDP platform.

The party that wins the election will be forced to face that fact that the federal deficit is not going to go away on its own, and that the measures in its platform would make it worse. This election is the first in which the prospect that this government might be formed by the NDP would change comparatively little.

The royal pecking order

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Reuters; Getty Images

Just before the wedding starts, the royal family will arrive at Westminster Abbey. As they always do at such glittering events, members of the house of Windsor will automatically recreate the line of succession in reverse for the long walk to their grade-A seats. The supporting cast of lesser royals—the Kents and the Gloucesters and children of the late Princess Margaret—go first followed by the Queen’s immediate family, also in backwards order of importance—Anne, Edward, Andrew and Charles with their spouses and children. Elizabeth II, with Prince Philip, takes the best spot, at the end. “The star of the show comes last,” explains Brian Hoey, an author with an encyclopedic knowledge of royal protocol. Once the service is over, the family leaves, this time with the Queen in the lead with everyone else following.

Precedence is a carefully observed royal rite that can be a minefield for the uninitiated. And part of the confusion is of the Queen’s making. In 2005, Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, which automatically placed his former mistress, now wife of the heir to the throne, ahead of all other royal women except the Queen on the royal pecking order. “Technically, the other ladies below [Camilla], when she’s with her husband, should curtsy to her,” Hoey explained. Courtiers reported that the two senior princesses, Anne and Alexandra of Kent, the Queen’s cousin, staged a mini revolt. “Anne? She is never going to curtsy to her,” Hoey said. “That’s not going to happen.”

To calm the waters, the Queen changed an internal household document called “Precedence of the Royal Family to be Observed at Court.” While male precedence remained that of the line of succession, the ladies’ rules were upended to put those born royal ahead of Charles’s wife. Now, when Camilla attends communal royal events with her husband, she gets the customary No. 2 spot, behind the Queen. But if she’s solo, then the female rules kick in and she plummets to No. 6, behind Anne, then Beatrice and Eugenie—daughters of Andrew, duke of York—and next Alexandra of Kent.

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Captivity: 118 days in Iraq and the struggle for a world without war

By Dafna Izenberg - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

To die for peace. This is one of the founding principles of Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group that sends delegations to places such as Hebron, Colombia and Iraq to “get in the way” of violence—through street patrols, recording volatile situations, even stepping in front of armed soldiers. Five years ago, Canadian CPT member James Loney got in the way and nearly did die.

Loney—along with fellow CPT delegates Harmeet Singh (Canadian), Norman Kember (British) and Tom Fox (American)—was kidnapped in Baghdad in November 2005. The men were held for 118 days—minus a few for Fox, who was killed shortly before the other three were rescued by U.S. and British forces. Canada devoted a team of RCMP officers to the mission and ensured that Loney’s homosexuality was not made public lest it be used against him by his captors.

Loney recounts his experiences in exhaustive detail—what he ate, the order in which hostages used the hamam (bathroom), inane exchanges with the captors—bringing to life the bizarre blend of terror and boredom the men endured. They suffered from Stockholm syndrome, scrambling to please their captors—Loney regularly gave one massages. They kept their own conflict to a minimum, but when it did happen, it proved “the occasion of some of the most intense emotional pain” for Loney. Guilt hangs heavy in his telling of the time he confronted Fox and Singh for taking more than their share of food.

When one of his rescuers angrily asks Loney to consider how many people risked their lives to save his, Loney is taken aback. “You are the reason I came here,” he thinks. “So you no longer have to do this.” Though Loney’s position on war never shifts, his value of freedom grows ferocious. “Let me go let me go let me go!” he writes. “A cry capable of blasting down walls and breaking chains. It burned within me like a fire…militantly, continuously, irresistibly.”

This woman seems very concerned

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 2:43 PM - 158 Comments

The Conservative spot that seems in highest rotation at the moment.

Pollster predicts Liberals' urban strongholds will turn NDP

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 2:35 PM - 61 Comments

Figures from a new poll conducted by Forum Research and The Hill Times show large cracks in the former Liberal fortresses of downtown Toronto and Montreal. The survey of 3,150 Canadians puts the Conservatives at 34 per cent support, the NDP at 31 per cent and the Liberals down to just 22 per cent. In light of the poll, Forum Research’s Lorne Bozinoff projects a weakened Conservative minority of 137 seats, with 108 going to the NDP, 60 for the Liberals and just three for the Bloc Québécois. Among the Liberal incumbents projected to lose their seats are one-time leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy of Parkdale-High Park, former astronaut Marc Garneau of Westmount-Ville Marie and Marlene Jennings, who has held Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine for 14 years. The poll also predicts a loss for prominent Québec Conservative and Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon.

The Hill Times

'Stability and growth'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 17 Comments

The Windsor Star endorses a Conservative majority.

As you prepare to cast your ballots, consider what the Conservatives have provided in terms of economic stability and growth. Assess how having Tory MPs in Ottawa can strengthen our region even more. We believe the choice is clear. A majority Conservative government works for Windsor and Essex County.

The End | Father George Olsen | 1942-2011

By Tom Henheffer - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 1 Comment

Illustration by Andrea Wan

George Olsen was born in Kirkland Lake, Ont., on May 2, 1942. The second child of Cliff, a plumber, and Susie, a nurse and homemaker, he was a quiet child, but one who took charge. “If we played army, he would always be the general,” says his younger brother Cliff. The family was staunchly Catholic, and the Church fascinated George. As a kid, his favourite game was mass: he’d deliver the sermon and enlist Brenda, his older sister, and Cliff, as altar servers.

When George was six the family moved to Susie’s hometown of Killaloe, Ont., two hours west of Ottawa. They took root in the local church, and George and Cliff served as altar boys. Cliff was never particularly interested, but the parish priest noticed George’s enthusiasm and took the boy under his wing. “George showed all signs of wanting to be a priest,” says Cliff.

In fact, George had decided to enter the clergy before he even graduated from elementary school. But while he was unusually well-behaved and attentive toward his schoolwork, he was a typical child. He’d spend afternoons wrestling with Cliff or playing shinny on the creek that bisects Killaloe, and delivered papers to save money for clothes or to buy gifts for his mother. When he got a bit older, a neighbour taught him to dance. George was a natural, and spent many nights of his teenage years driving girls crazy at a nearby pavilion. “He was so smooth,” says Cliff.

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Will Jack Layton usurp Michael Ignatieff?

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 17 Comments

Thanks to a late-campaign surge, the NDP has a real shot at replacing the Liberals as the main alternative to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Jack Layton’s party is arguably closer to forming a government than it’s ever been. But that doesn’t mean the party is actually contending for power. There are clear limits emerging to just how far the party’s sudden popularity might take it.

According to an Innovative Research poll conducted for Maclean’s and L’actualité between April 21 and April 25, the New Democrats are now very close to leapfrogging the Liberals for second place among decided voters. The NDP’s popularity sits at 23.9 per cent, just a point behind the Liberals’ 24.9 per cent. Despite their stagnating fortunes, the Conservatives remain in the driver’s seat going into the final week of campaigning with 38.4 per cent of the vote. Support for the Bloc, meanwhile, has dipped to 6.4 per cent nationally and 27.7 per cent in Quebec, while the Greens sit at 5.3 per cent.

Indeed, the NDP’s rush toward the spotlight from its usual place at the margins of Canadian politics has been the story of the campaign so far. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Quebec, where the party has supplanted the Bloc Québécois as the first choice among province’s prickly voters. The NDP now has 36 per cent support in Quebec, nearly nine points more than the Bloc. Perhaps most significantly, Layton’s party is far ahead of its federalist opponents in the province, with nearly double the support of the Conservatives (18.3 per cent) and an even heftier lead over the Liberals, who are now solidly fourth in voter intentions with a paltry 13.6 per cent support.

“It looks like Layton has created a ‘third option’ in Quebec,” says pollster Greg Lyle, the managing director of Innovative Research. “While hard federalists and especially hard sovereigntists have resisted his appeal, soft federalists and sovereigntists have really gravitated to the NDP.” Among those who describe themselves as “somewhat favourable” to Quebec’s independence, the NDP was the first choice of 53 per cent. Meanwhile, 49 per cent of those who say they’re “somewhat opposed” to Quebec sovereignty say they too will cast their lot with Layton. That push toward the mushy middle of the constitutional divide has left the Conservatives (39.8 per cent) and the Liberals (19.5 per cent) fighting over the hard federalist vote, while the Bloc Québécois takes home the overwhelming majority of (77.1 per cent) of militant sovereigntist votes.

Though less dramatic than in Quebec, the NDP’s popularity in B.C. has seen a similar upward swing. At 29.4 per cent support, the NDP still trails the Conservatives (41.7 per cent) by a significant margin, but it may have seized enough ground to disrupt the Conservatives’ designs on a handful of ridings out west. “The Conservatives may end up breaking even, depending on how hard the NDP surge goes,” Lyle says. “But that’s a big difference—from between four and six pickups to zero. You’ve gone from half the gains you needed for a majority to none. If this is going to be a game of inches on election night—which it might be—then this surge cost them a lot of inches.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s in his home province of Ontario that Layton’s popularity has been most stubbornly stagnant. At 17 per cent, his party trails far behind both the Liberals (36.1 per cent) and the Conservatives (41.4 per cent). Their breakthroughs elsewhere simply haven’t carried over into the one province anointed the key battleground at the start of this election, a situation Lyle attributes partly to a wariness among centre-left voters outside Quebec that voting NDP might clear the path for a Harper majority. “English Canadians are a lot more likely to say this election is a two horse race than Quebecers,” Lyle says. “This may be the reason behind the NDP failure to break through in Ontario.”

Regardless, though Layton’s popularity may end up hitting a wall in Canada’s most populous province come election night, he’ll have at least succeeded in positioning himself at the centre of a post-election coalition scenario—a role even the Conservatives had never imagined could be filled by anyone but Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. That scenario, says Lyle, is now dependent on Layton’s success at wooing those Quebecers who for years have cast their lot with the Bloc Québécois, but are now legitimately intrigued by the NDP. “How far can Layton take this? He could say to Quebecers, ‘Look we may not be able to get into government in one shot, but you can make us number two and set the stage for a progressive coalition that will end the Conservative government’,” Lyle says. “There’s real excitement in Quebec at the idea of a Jack Layton-led minority.”

The online survey was conducted among current members of INNOVATIVE’s Canada 20/20 panel from April 21st to April 25th, 2011. The Canada 20/20 Panel is recruited from a wide variety of sources to be representative of the known distribution of Canadians by age, gender, region and language. The weighted total sample included 1543 responses eligible for inclusion in our analysis including 363 in Quebec. An unweighted probability sample of 1543 would have an estimated margin of error of ±2.49 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Dearest Quebec

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:44 PM - 41 Comments

Michael Ignatieff pens an open letter to la belle province.

During this campaign, and for more than two years, I have travelled across Quebec and met Quebecers in every region who are proud of their culture and identity and concerned about their children’s future. The vast majority of Quebecers want to get rid of the Stephen Harper regime. This government does not represent them, nor does it share their values or priorities.

By its own admission, the Bloc does not seek to govern. The NDP, meanwhile, has neither the team nor the experience to govern. Mr. Duceppe and Mr. Layton cannot become Prime Minister; they can only oppose Mr. Harper. That is not good enough. The time has come to replace him.

Stephen Harper is now winning a lot less

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:48 AM - 170 Comments

I’m glad I took pains to say trends can change when I gladdened the hearts of Conservatives everywhere with this blog post only two days ago. Just about all the trends have changed. Nanos now has the Conservative top-line national vote down to essentially where it was in 2008; other national polls put that vote lower. In Ontario, Nanos has the NDP vote above its 2008 level on an upward trend. Other polls I’ve seen put Conservative vote in that province lower than Nanos does. The NDP vote is entering territory where it starts to endanger Conservatives in some place, where before it mostly helped them by splitting the anti-Conservative vote with the Liberals. I won’t guess about where this is going, because I have no reason to believe support for every party is done shifting radically.

Trump wins

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 35 Comments

The big winner of the Obama birth certificate follies (and I do mean follies) is, of course, Donald Trump. Whether or not he even runs for President, let alone gets the nomination, he managed to make this “issue” so huge that the President of the United States felt he had to respond to it.

Trump played on one of the oldest vulnerabilities of media, the “some say” rule. If a prominent public figure is saying something, it is treated with respect. So if one Serious Person is saying something true, and the other is saying something false, many outlets – particularly cable news – will treat both statements as equally valid. (No, I don’t know who decides who and who isn’t a Serious Person, let alone why Trump counts. But he does, apparently, given the tone of much of the coverage on TV.) As ABC’s Jake Tapper just put it, “too many in the media have treated this crap as if it’s subject for debate and not just a a falsehood.” CNN provided the ultimate reducto ad absurdum of this principle recently with the announcement: “Trump says Obama wasn’t born here. We’ll show you the evidence and let you decide.”

Obviously, this announcement won’t change much. Those who are committed to believing that Obama was not born in the U.S. will continue to believe it, and point to today’s event as further evidence of the theory: Obama must be hiding something if he was worried enough to produce an elaborately faked birth certificate. The first rule of a conspiracy theory is that once you believe in it, everything is evidence for the theory – the fact that it can never be disproven is one of the things that separates conspiracy theories from regular theories anyway.

The real question is whether this is a tactical mistake by Obama when it comes to dealing with what we might call the birther-curious. These are people who don’t accept the theory that Obama was part of some 40-odd year conspiracy to install him in the White House, but just think that he’s “hiding something.” No real reason for it, just the old idea that where there’s smoke there’s fire, or that it wouldn’t be in the news all the time if there weren’t something to it. Another frequent tack is to argue that birtherism may or may not be true, but Obama was the one making it an issue for his own nefarious purposes.

My own cynical instincts are to think that today’s events make the issue worse in that sense, even if most birther-curious people believe that the certificate exists. Because the point of birtherism doesn’t have much to do with certificates; it has to do with defining Obama as a cultural alien and un-American – something that is believed and seriously argued by people who reject the literal theory of birtherism. So today just gives extra fuel to the idea that Obama is hiding his past, that he’s not One Of Us, and so on. Andrew Sullivan showed us how it’s done today by blaming Obama for “waiting so long,” and blaming the media for “piling on the Birthers.” You see? It wasn’t the Birthers who were really at fault here. Obama and the “MSM” were the ones keeping this issue alive. And when it continues to be alive, presumably it’ll still be their fault.

In other words, those email forwards you’ve been getting? Expect to get more of them. Not only that, expect them to be more elaborate than ever. Or as the headline on Fox News’s website put it today:

So yeah. Expect more of that.

Did a former PMO insider try to dupe Sun Media?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 13 Comments

A photo of soldiers in Kuwait, with one of the men falsely identified as Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, was passed to Sun Media as a part of a false “scoop,” according to Sun Media president and chief executive Pierre Karl Péladeau. Mr. Péladeau said the photo was part of a package handed to Sun Media executive Kory Teneycke by Patrick Muttart, the former deputy chief of staff in the Prime Minister’s Office. In an article published in the Sun papers, Péladeau writes: “[Muttart] claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a ‘U.S. source’ outlining the activities and whereabouts of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.” The allegation was that Mr. Ignatieff played a larger role in the planning for the Iraq war than he has previous admitted. “This is about politics as war by other means,” Péladeau adds, “and a lie that might have claimed our company as a casualty.”

Globe and Mail

Canoe.ca

Does technology speed up human evolution?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 10 Comments

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel has spent three decades researching the size and shape of human bodies over the years, spawning a new branch of historical study and a controversial theory that technology has sped up human evolution in an unprecedented way over the past 100 years, the New York Times reports. According to Fogel, advances in food production and public health has totally outpaced traditional evolution, so people today are apart from other species, and even from our own previous generations. For example, the average American adult man in 1850 was 5 feet 7 inches, weighed 146 pounds, and had a life expectancy of 45 years. In the 1980s, a man in his early thirties was 5 feet 10 inches, weighed 174 pounds and was expected to live to 75. At the time of the French Revolution, the average man in his thirties weighed 110 pounds, compared to 170 pounds today. The exact impact of technology on evolution is still a controversial scientific subject. Next month, a book that sums up Fogel’s theories, The Changing Body, will be published.

The New York Times