Canadians sue for right to donate to US campaigns

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 4 Comments

Politico has an interesting story today about a group of Canadians who are challenging a ban on foreigners making contributions to US political campaigns. (Perhaps such a suit was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential race, one would run into Canadians at many rallies and events — usually on the Obama side.)

…The FEC’s lawyers, for instance, predicted in a filing defending the contribution ban, that its reversal “could open the door to millions — or even billions — of dollars of campaign advocacy by foreign corporations,” as well as “attack ads against American candidates” financed by “an individual paid by a foreign government to conduct espionage on the United States and harm American interests.”

And the White House-allied ThinkProgress blog ominously suggested that liberal bogeymen such as Koch Industries and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be secretly funding the suit to further deregulate campaign rules and pave the way for foreign corporations to try to buy U.S. elections.

Those claims are “ludicrous,” said Yaakov Roth, one of the two young lawyers at the elite firm of Jones Day trying the case on a pro-bono basis. Roth – a Canadian who graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, first became interested in the foreign contribution ban when he learned it barred him from making political donations. He contends it stems partly “from hostility and suspicion about the views of aliens. And that’s directly contrary to what the First Amendment is about.”

Roth and Warren Postman – an American who graduated from Harvard Law with Roth and clerked at the same time for then-Justice David Souter, a liberal – brought the lawsuit on behalf of two young foreigners living, working and paying taxes in New York City as legally admitted temporary residents – Benjamin Bluman, a Canadian lawyer who went to law school with Roth and Postman, and Asenath Steiman, a doctor who is a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen doing her medical residency in New York.

According to their lawsuit, Bluman supports same-sex marriage, net neutrality and environmental protection, and would like to contribute $100 a piece to the campaigns of Democrats he believes will advance those positions, including Obama and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.). And Steiman is a free-market conservative and opponent of Obama’s healthcare overhaul who wants to contribute $100 each to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Club for Growth and “her preferred candidate for the Republican (presidential) nomination.”

The full article is here: Lawsuit revives fear of foreign cash [Politico]

Try, try again

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Andreas Krebs considers the electoral history of the 41st Parliament.

In this election, the number of MPs who had previously ran increased to 102, or 33% of the House of Commons … Another way to look at “persistence” is the average number of election defeats per MP. On average, each MP in the House lost a total of 0.48 elections prior to winning their seat. If we break this number down by party, however, the NDP has a higher previous-losses average than other parties.

91-year-old gets 5 years for aiding Holocaust

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

A 91-year-old retired autoworker was convicted on Thursday of helping the Nazis murder at least 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp during World War II. A Munich court has sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison following 18 months of trial. Demjanjuk is believed to have been a Russian prisoner of war in 1942, who was trained as a guard at a camp in Trawniki. He was transferred to Sobibor in 1943, at which point he became known as one of the so-called ‘Trawniki men’, whose job it was to help systematically kill Jews. “Every Trawniki man knew that he was part of a well and smoothly operating apparatus that had no other goal than systematically murdering Jews,” said Ralph Alt, the presiding judge. “They all knew about the barbaric treatment of Jews. And the accused was part of that extermination machinery.” This ruling may be one of Germany’s last major Holocaust trials, Bloomberg reports.

Bloomberg

Tories back away from pledge to cut deficit a year earlier

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 11:18 AM - 6 Comments

Barely a week after the Conservatives were re-elected with a Parliamentary majority, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is backing away from a campaign trail pledge to eliminate the deficit a year earlier than planned. Flaherty now says the revised 2011 budget won’t show a surplus for 2014-15. A spokesperson for Flaherty says the savings promised in the Conservative platform “will get us to balance a year earlier, but [are] not part of the upcoming budget.” The Conservative election platform explicitly promised that “Through accelerated reductions in government spending, a re-elected Stephen Harper government will eliminate the deficit by 2014-15.”

The Globe and Mail

'Everyone is very nice'

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 11:02 AM - 9 Comments

The MP for Berthier-Maskinonge visits her constituents.

According to participants in one meeting, she insisted on struggling along in the language of her constituents — speaking in French even when they addressed her in English. ”It’s not bad — she has an accent but at least she speaks French,” said another resident, Daniel Ringuette. He said he’s just happy she finally visited the riding: “I even invited her to come play tennis with us,” he said…

“She speaks French so well, it’s surprising,” said Louiseville mayor Guy Richard, after their meeting. “I think we will have a very good MP.”

Supreme Court opens hearings into Insite

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 15 Comments

The Supreme Court will open hearings on Thursday to determine the future of Insite, the safe injection facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. At issue is whether authority over the site rests with the provincial or federal government, and whether closing it would constitute a breach of its drug-addicted users’ rights. B.C.’s provincial government has argued Insite is a provincial health care facility that has helped curb overdoses and the spread of diseases like HIV, while the federal government wants it shuttered as part of its tough-on-crime agenda. A 2008 provincial court ruling in B.C. upheld the province’s right to operate the facility, which is entirely funded by the B.C. government.

CTV News

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of May 9th, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

'Good things just may happen'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 10 Comments

The text of Jack Layton’s remarks to the Canadian Labour Congress convention yesterday in Vancouver, his first major speech since the election.

It’s wonderful to see so many of you here this week, reaching out and finding new ways to give working Canadians a voice. And I think we’ve shown, when we reach out and invite people to be a part of something bigger than ourselves—good things just may happen.

I’m so happy to be with you today as we launch a new chapter in Canadian politics. Je suis heureux d’être avec vous aujourd’hui, alors que nous écrivons un nouveau chapitre de l’histoire politique canadienne. Je veux vous remercier pour tout votre travail au cours de la dernière élection.

This was an election in which the Canadian people sent a very strong message to Ottawa. That the way things were isn’t the way things have to be. That Canadians have a positive choice. That change is possible. And that it’s time to get Ottawa working for hard-working families.

Continue…

REVIEW: The immortalization commission: Science and the strange quest to cheat death

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

In the later 19th century, all sorts of people who thought of themselves as sophisticated moderns—and therefore irreligious—explored new and purportedly “scientific” routes to immortality. Gray, in his intriguing take on two of these explorations, examines the era’s mushrooming interest in spiritualism. One British group, which included Arthur Balfour, prime minister from 1902 to 1905, communicated with the dead via cross-correspondence, automatic writing dictated by deceased scientists (and loved ones) presumed to be still active on the other side. In one of their experiments, not made public for a century, the immortalists decided to conceive a messianic child—expected to somehow save our world—fathered by Balfour’s brother, Gerald, with a married woman.

Augustus Henry Coombe-Tennant, born in 1913, and bearing the name of his mother’s husband, was theoretically without imperfection. That’s because he was mysteriously “designed” fault-free from beyond the grave by another Balfour brother, Francis, a Cambridge biologist who had died in a mountain-climbing accident in 1882. Augustus, of course, never did save the world, but he did have an interesting life: after wartime military service, he joined MI6 (working alongside Kim Philby), converted to Catholicism while on spy duty in Iraq, became a monk in 1960 and died in his monastery 29 years later.

But if the Victorian spiritualists were, as Douglas Adams might have described them, mostly harmless, the same can’t be said for Gray’s other subject. The so-called God-builders believed mankind, freed from religious superstition and powered by science, would eventually conquer death. They were well represented in the 1920s Bolshevik regime in Russia, where they were as enthusiastic about slaughtering present humanity, in the name of a more perfect future, as their fellow revolutionaries. But the God-builders’ most noticeable historic trace can be seen in Lenin’s bizarre afterlife.

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REVIEW: Pulse

By Marni Jackson - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

This is a collection of short stories, set in wildly different circumstances, that focus on pivotal moments in love: what makes us choose one person over another, the unpredictable course of mourning, and the trivial gestures that can break or make a new romance.

In the story “Complicity,” it’s the secret exchange of cigarettes and matches behind a partner’s back at a party that lights a spark. In settings that range from a remote Scottish island to 18th-century Brazil, Barnes writes about these small transitional moments that tip us toward happiness or loneliness, with precision and tenderness. And as a palate freshener, three stories consist of nothing more than the unfettered conversations at a dinner party of old friends who overshare about their middle-aged sex lives and joke about the decline of the world. It’s like the real thing, where guests are torn between reaching for their coats or pouring another drink.

There’s an exhilarating sense of freedom in these stories, even the sad ones, because for Barnes, curiosity about human nature seems to trump everything, including literary vanity: he would rather risk boring or offending his readers in order to imagine what X might say next. He likes to create an off-leash zone for his characters, where they can do as they please. In “Trespass,” he observes a young Englishwoman in a new relationship with a single fellow who is obsessive about hiking. They go on carefully calibrated walks, until she decides that there’s more to love than staying on the trail and wearing proper rain gear.

Continue…

This time they got it right

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Dominic Lipinski/Reuters

She wore a tiara borrowed from her new grandmother, and diamond drop earrings, a wedding gift from her beloved parents, and that dress, which so perfectly captured the spirit of the day: a confluence of the modern and the traditional; a sense that the monarchy, the country and the couple were moving forward, with a fond look back. And at the altar of Westminster Abbey her husband-to-be turned, and became what seems like the last person on earth to see his bride in her finery. “You’re beautiful,” he said, as many a nervous groom before him has said. While every aspect of this day—the union of a future king and queen of Britain, Canada and the rest of the realms—would be weighed, debated and analyzed for deeper meaning, there was no arguing that heartfelt statement of fact. And, briefly at that moment, lost in each other’s eyes, this grand spectacle—1,900 guests, and two billion more watching over their shoulders—shrank to a universe of two.

Then, before the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton and William Arthur Philip Louis Wales gave each other their “troth” in the archaic language of the Church of England, to love and to comfort and to forsake all others—pledges honoured more in the breach than the observance by generations of Britain’s royals. But maybe this time they’ll get it right. At least that is the hope of Queen and country. With that they became husband and wife, and, at the behest of their granny, Queen Elizabeth II, they were granted the titles duke and duchess of Cambridge and a mouthful of others.

Like any royal event, the wedding had elements of the absurd: headgear, for example, which Britons of a certain class embrace and treat with such seriousness that even fashion disasters are elevated into art forms. And so it was that Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, the daughters of Prince Andrew and the uninvited Sarah Ferguson, entered the abbey looking as if they’d been dressed by a blind quartermaster of the Ministry of Silly Hats. In this they were not alone. When television cameras in the abbey swept the bonneted crowd, it resembled the haphazard cluster of dishes and jury-rigged antennae you’d find on the rooftops of a Third World slum.

Continue…

David Stewart Arthur Cleverley

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 1 Comment

Illustration by Team Macho

David Stewart Arthur Cleverley was born on March 30, 1985, in Prince George, B.C., the fourth child and only son for Donald, a teacher, and Lori, a bank manager. When David was three, the Cleverleys moved to Ontario. The pulp mill in Prince George had set off David’s sister Megan’s allergies, and Don’s entire family settled in Cambridge. The Cleverleys were a tight-knit bunch and spent summers in their white minivan, criss-crossing North America on road trips and singing Hey Jude and Walking on Broken Glass at the top of their lungs.

When he was four, Lori found David on the roof of the house. “It’s okay, mom! I got my Superman shirt on,” he yelled down. After that, he was known as “Superman” to friends and family. He was “absolutely fearless,” says Lori. On instinct, he’d throw himself into any body of water he came across—lakes, quarries, pools. When visiting his cousin Ben in Vancouver, he’d sneak into UBC’s outdoor pool at night to dive off the 10-m board.

School wasn’t really his thing—which was tough, because his sisters were all straight-A students—but sports sure were. Football was his passion. David, who had a vertical that made coaches drool, was tailor-made for the wide-receiver position. He was supremely confident and, with his larger-than-life personality, became a vocal team leader with the Cambridge Lions, the local under-19 team. He’d started attracting interest from schools in the U.S. and Canada, and his final season with the Lions was his moment to shine. But in the second game of the season, while returning a kick, David was dropped by a brutal hit, ruining his shoulder. In that instant his career was ended, leaving a gaping hole in his life.

Continue…

Subject to change

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 24 Comments

Whatever the Prime Minister said about new savings during the election, the Finance Minister apparently isn’t quite ready to commit to returning to a surplus in 2014.

When asked directly during an appearance on CTV’s Power Play whether he was committing to eliminating the deficit one year earlier, Mr. Flaherty responded that he was not. “No. I think we have to look at all of the data,” he replied. “We use an average of the private sector forecasters, as we have done for years now, to make sure that we’re on the right track, and in sync with the view of the private sector on the economy, so we’ll look at all these things, there’s a couple of platform commitments too that we’ll look at as well, but fundamentally it will be the same budget that was introduced on March 22.”

Whether this is Mr. Flaherty backing off or merely putting off this election pledge, it has already lasted longer than Mr. Harper’s 2008 election deficit pledge, which survived just three days after that year’s vote.

Standing on ceremony

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Alastair Grant/AP

Nothing says courage quite like including six young children in your wedding party, unless it’s choosing as wranglers a young man who’s been called the bad boy of the royal family and a young woman who’s been called the most eligible singleton in the kingdom. With so many wild cards, anything could have gone wrong.

But nothing did. Pippa Middleton made sure of that. After helping her sister exit the car at Westminster Abbey and expertly arranging the train of the wedding dress just so on the red carpet, she took charge of the children, smiling calmly throughout. Walking up the aisle hand in hand with the pair of three-year-old bridesmaids, she summoned memories of Diana’s easy, natural way with children. And yet the impression she created was all her own: while her unobtrusive manner indicated a willingness to fade modestly into the background, Pippa’s form-fitting dress, with buttons up the back and a small train of its own, made that quite impossible. Unusually, it was only a shade or two away from Kate’s own gown, and the cut was substantially more revealing. There were whispers, and within minutes, squawks and tweets: had the maid of honour upstaged the bride? Online, detractors emerged, sniffing about the chestnut hue of Pippa’s fake tan. But in the church, she dispatched her duties serenely and with dignity.

Prince Harry, too, stepped up, which is to say that he was subdued and entirely proper throughout the ceremony, after cracking his brother up with a whispered aside as Kate approached the altar holding her father’s hand. There was nothing inappropriate in that, though: the best man’s job description is to lighten the mood. And after the ceremony, heading to the palace in a carriage with the youngest members of the wedding party, he was impeccably avuncular, reassuring the children and putting them at ease.

Continue…

Mike Huckabee's Masterpiece

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:11 PM - 14 Comments

If this doesn’t become an internet sensation I will be very disappointed. Mike Huckabee’s latest venture is Learnourhistory.com, an attempt to make money by selling cheaply-produced videos enable parents to teach their children the real history of the U.S. without the bias they get in teacher-controlled schools:

Many of our schools and teachers today haven’t found ways to make history for kids fun.  Instead, they’re teaching with political bias that distorts facts for the sake of political correctness.  As a result, our national pride and patriotism are in jeopardy.

The site’s YouTube channel has posted some excerpts, which are almost indescribable. The best I can come up with is “Sherman and Peabody meets Jack Chick.” Here’s the story of the hellish crime-ridden CarterScape that was America before the Reagan Revolution:

And here’s a preview of their history of World War II, which includes this quote: “What we see and hear isn’t always the Continue…

Why electoral reform would hurt Quebec

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 7:05 PM - 44 Comments

Here’s an interesting study that, combined with Andrew’s argument the Conservative victory is rooted in the West and Ontario, bolsters the notion Quebec’s place in the federation could be in decline over the coming years. Under the catchy title “Representation and regional redistribution in federations,” political scientists Tiberiu Dragu and Jonathan Rodden show that over-represented regions in a federation tend to get a greater share of federal funds. So the more politicians a province sends to the central government, the more money it can expect from the federation. Dragu and Rodden give two reasons for this: increased representation “increases a region’s proposal power, and it makes a region a more attractive coalitional partner for other proposers. Both of these effects work unambiguously in the same direction.” Continue…

Assiniboine River will be breached

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

Manitoba will continue with a high-stakes breach of the Assiniboine River at 8 a.m. on Thursday in an effort to prevent massive flooding in the area, unless conditions require more immediate action. Provincial spokesman Rachel Morgan told The Globe and Mail that residents are still being notified about the need to evacuate the area of Hoop and Holler Bend, 90 km west of Winnipeg. The province hopes to achieve a “controlled breach” by cutting a notch in the dike and filling it with a rocky substance that should stem the water flow. “We want to minimize the amount of water that goes out of the controlled breach,” said Morgan. “Above 4,000 [cubic feet per second] is going to be a challenge.” Engineers chose the location based on the hope that water would head towards the LaSalle river. In the worst flooding Manitoba has seen since the 1820s, more than 2,700 people have been evacuated. 700 troops are aiding with relief efforts, which have so far exceeded a cost of $70 million, after the province requested military assistance on Sunday. Prime Minister Harper visited Manitoba on Wednesday and was briefed on the situation by Premier Greg Selinger.

The Globe and Mail

A propos of Twit(ter)

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 5:54 PM - 46 Comments

In honour of Damian Goddard’s 103-character gay marriage faux pas that likely led to his dismissal, I present a timely piece by Slate’s Jack Shafer, who tries to figure out why Twitter makes ostensibly media-savvy people say remarkably stupid things to the world at large.

In the pre-Twitter days, nobody could attract an audience of a hundred or a thousand instantaneously unless they hosted a radio show or commandeered a stage. Even daily newspaper columnists, who mine controversy for a living, had to triple-jump over an editor, a copy desk, and space constraints to deposit a barbed idea in print. Blogs have always had the potential to “offend,” but I don’t recall them having provoked the sort of responses tweets do. Perhaps composing more than 140 characters at a time pushes the id back a little bit [...]

True enough. I’d also add that for some reason—its reach? The fact that its instantaneous?—Twitter has convinced many people (say, certain sportscasters) of the importance of their own brain farts on, say, same sex marriage. Baffling.

'What an honour it was'

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 5:24 PM - 18 Comments

Michael Ignatieff takes his leave.

“The only thing, really, to say is this: Everybody always tells you how tough a game politics is and how brutal it is. What they don’t say enough is how incredibly good the Canadian people are to you even when they don’t vote for you … And, as we take our leave of politics, I just want to express my enormous gratitude to all the people we met as we went along the road, their kindness, their civility, their sense of humour,” he said. “It was a privilege to serve the Canadian people and we leave politics with a sense of what a privilege it was and what an honour it was.”

Earthquake kills 10 in Spain

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:35 PM - 1 Comment

At least 10 people were killed following a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in southern Spain on Wednesday. Local media reports say dozens more are injured. Buildings crumbled and cars were crushed under rubble in the town of Lorca. Spanish TV crews captured dramatic footage of a massive church bell crashing to the ground, landing metres from the cameraman. The quake followed a 4.4 magnitude tremor just two hours earlier.

BBC News

Woody wanted Rachel McAdams "at any cost"

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 1 Comment

Woody Allen and Rachel McAdams at the Cannes press conference for 'Midnight in Paris'/ photo by BDJ

Day One at the Cannes Film Festival is jam-packed. We begin with a press screening for the opening night gala, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, followed by three back-to-back press conferences. The French used to believe in lunch. Hey, it’s a new world. Woody explains how he struggled to come up with a script to match his title, Midnight in Paris; then Bernardo Bertolucci, recipient of an honorary Palme D’Or, mused fondly about Last Tango in Paris; finally we had our ritual audience with the Cannes jury, whose president, Robert De Niro, was about as responsive as a waiter in Paris, as he lived up to his legendary capacity to say absolutely nothing in as few words as possible.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, by the way, didn’t show. The French First Lady, who has a recurring cameo in Allen’s film as an amiable tour guide, sent her regrets. When Allen was asked how he came to cast her, he said, “One morning I was just having breakfast with the Sarkozys and she walked into the room and she was very beautiful and very charming and charismatic. I said ‘Would you like to be in a movie? A small role, just for fun.’ She said I would like to be in one of your movies because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day I was in the movie.’ She was everything I hoped she would be. She’s not a lawyer or a diplomat even though she’s married to a political man. She’s from a show business background. She came in and did the part very gracefully. It was fun. It was a nice experience for her, I’m happy to say. She was very happy with how the film came out and very happy with the way the cameramen filmed her.”

We never got to ask Woody how he just happened to be having breakfast with the Sarkozys.

For Woody Allen, Cannes is by now almost as familiar as Manhattan. Midnight in Paris, his 44^nd movie, is his fifth to open the festival. Like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it’s another postcard-pretty valentine of auteur tourism, with Americans falling into foreign hands, though it lacks the character work (or fireworks) of VCB. But it was warmly received here. With its unabashed francophilia, it could have been made for Cannes, and who knows, maybe it was. Midnight in Paris is, quite proudly, a mere bagatelle, a lightly satirical conjuring of 1920s Paris, set in the context of a crumbling 2010 marriage between two well-heeled American tourists, Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams). Time travel makes it happen.

Wilson’s naturally disingenuous, slightly stammery delivery makes him a perfect Allen surrogate. McAdams, who has a habit of being consistently better than her material, shines in an unsympathetic role as his nagging fiancé—Canada’s sweetheart is cast against type as a Republican who’s overly impressed by their shallow friend, pedantic know-it-all played by Michael Sheen. Wilson plays a familiar Allen protogonist, a frustrated novelist who worships the past and is aching to escape the hackdom of Hollywood screenwriting success. He deserts Inez and her friends each each night to walk the streets of Paris—where at the stroke of midnight he’s magically spirited away into the émigré salon-monde of the ‘20s. He mingles with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Buñuel, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and falls for a dreamy Marion Cotillard, the next best thing to Edith Piaf. Aside from the abrasive chemistry between Wilson and McAdams, the movie’s pleasure lies in its greatest hits parade of coy cameo impersonations, from Alison Pill’s Zelda Fitzgerald to Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali. Around every burnished corner of this closeted period film is a fresh surprise. Welcome to Woody Tussaud’s House of Wax.

Allen has become a casting virtuoso. He can get Oscar winners like Brody, Cotillard and Katherine Bates to fill out minor roles. But at the press conference he positively gushed about landing Owen Wilson: “Owen is the opposite of me. I’m very Manhattan, very East Coast. Owen is very West Coast. He personifies that in his whole demeanour. He’s relaxed and he’s a beach lover and this gives the character an enormous dimension that I could never have given it, nor could I have written it for another actor.”

I asked Allen if Wilson’s rom-com romance with McAdams in Wedding Crashers had anything to do with him pairing them again. “I’d seen Rachel in a film with Owen years ago,” he said, as if the title escaped him, “and I thought she was sensational. She was beautiful and sexy and funny and a wonderful actress, and I wanted to work with her. And the opportunity came up. I didn’t like the fact that they had worked together before. That was a negative to me. I figured people will think, ‘Oh, it’s Owen and Rachel again.’ But I felt there’s nothing I could do about it. They’re both great and I want them both. I wanted to get Rachel at any cost, and I was very lucky to get Owen. I’ve always been lucky with casting. The truth in casting is to hire great people, let them do what they do, don’t interfere with them too much, and then when they’re great, take credit for it. I’ve done this for many years and it works like a charm.”

Down with television repeats

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 5 Comments

Here’s one thing I would like to say before the U.S. networks announce their fall schedules: reruns. Avoid them whenever possible. Except in the summer, and maybe not even then. And especially avoid them near the end of the season, in April and May.

Looking at the viewership numbers for a lot of shows this season, there seems to be a clear overall pattern – when a show takes some time off from airing new episodes, and it’s not for an occasion where nobody shows new episodes, then some viewers don’t come back when the new episodes do. Take Glee, which managed to avoid long stretches of repeats last season because of the split-season format it used. This season, it managed to hold steady for most of the season, even surviving a January hiatus with the help of a major launching pad (the post-Super Bowl episode) that gave it heavy promotion. But then it took some more time off in March and April: after the March 15 episode, it didn’t air another new episode until April 19. And since it’s come back, it’s lost 1-2 million viewers. You can find a similar dip in viewership for many shows around the same time – for example, Community got 4.4 million viewers for its March 24 episode, then had some reruns and pre-emptions, and came back a few weeks later (April 14) with a million viewers gone. It was already airing against Idol, which didn’t take that many viewers away from it – but reruns do what Idol cannot. NCIS took a break between April 12 and May 3, and two million viewers didn’t come back when it did.

It’s probably unwise for me to dwell too much on individual examples, since week-to-week or month-to-month declines have other explanations besides the repeats, and sometimes a show can buck the trend and go up if there are other factors working for it. But it’s a pattern, and it’s a pattern that makes sense. We hear all the time that viewers have more options than ever before. We also know that TV viewers are creatures of habit. If a show doesn’t provide a new episode for a couple of weeks, it may not turn us off the show, but it can break the habit – we may discover another show on cable, or we may just start recording it. The danger of finding another show during repeat weeks was less pronounced during the three-channel era because it was less likely that we could find something to give us exactly the same kind of entertainment at exactly the same time. It’s still not the likeliest thing in the world, but it’s more possible.

Networks realized some time ago that serialized shows don’t repeat well and that they needed to find ways to keep a steady flow of episodes: that’s one of the reasons for Fox’s famous trick of not starting 24 until Continue…

Rajaratnam guilty of insider trading

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 3:07 PM - 1 Comment

The blockbuster trial of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam ended with convictions on all 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy. The guilty verdict marks the end of a court battle that started in early March, and featured 45 recorded calls showing how the hedge-fund manager trafficked in insider tips on America’s top businesses. The successful use of wiretaps, which normally are confined to drug and terrorism cases, likely paves the way for the tactic to become more common in cases revolving around financial wrongdoing. Rajaratnam will be under house arrest with electronic monitoring until he is sentenced on July 29. He faces up to twenty years on each of the nine convictions of securities fraud, and up to five years on each of the five convictions of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

Wall Street Journal

Get in the game

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 2:45 PM - 17 Comments

The Boston Globe suggests—despite the cautionary tale—that more academics should do as Michael Ignatieff did.

Ignatieff deserves a measure of praise for doing something few commentators on public affairs ever do: subject his ideas to scrutiny in legislative chambers and at the ballot box … despite Ignatieff’s defeat, more public intellectuals should do what he did. Just as the political debate would benefit from more thinkers, writers would benefit from having to solicit support for their own ideas and put them into practice.