Optimism is better than despair

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 0 Comments

Greg Fingas finds reason for optimism among New Democrats.

Most leadership races in established political parties take place at a point when a party is generally on a downward trajectory – either after it has fallen from government to opposition or in some other way missed a perceived opportunity to improve its standing, or after it has been in power long enough to face public fatigue even as it tries to renew itself. 

In contrast, the NDP will get to choose its next leader from a position of unprecedented strength and hope, thanks to both Layton’s electoral results and his means of reaching them. 

Montreal is falling down

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 9 Comments

Photo by Roger Lemoyne

When a grapefruit-sized chunk of concrete smashed through the windshield of a 29-year-old man’s car in Montreal last Thursday, city officials quickly scrambled to the scene. Like most Montrealers, they assumed the worst—that it was yet another in a series of mishaps involving the city’s crumbling infrastructure. Their worries turned out to be misplaced. Within a few hours, police had eliminated the possibility that the object was once a part of the overpass above busy Papineau Avenue and were instead investigating whether someone had thrown it. “I want to reassure the people of Montreal: the rock that caused this incident has nothing to do with the structure,” Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay told reporters at the scene, deftly avoiding the very word “concrete.” “Vehicles can pass in total safety.” Still, it’s hard to blame even the most paranoid residents for assuming the contrary. It’s raining concrete in Montreal, it seems, and the situation has people on edge.

The most recent incident occurred in late July, when a 15-m long, 25-tonne chunk of concrete fell onto the busy Ville-Marie expressway in the city’s downtown core. Miraculously, no one was injured. (Transport Québec estimates 100,000 vehicles travel along the expressway daily.) Montrealers were no doubt shocked by the accident but, at this point, it may be a stretch to say they were surprised.

The accident was, after all, a grim reminder of a similar collapse in nearby Laval in 2006. Five people died and six more were seriously injured when the de la Concorde overpass came tumbling down onto cars travelling below. And the de la Concorde collapse was itself reminiscent of an incident in which eight heavy concrete beams fell from the Souvenir Boulevard overpass in Laval in 2000, killing one and injuring two others.

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Motown hitmaker Nick Ashford dies

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

Songwriter Nick Ashford, who penned a string of Motown hits with his wife Valerie Simpson, has died in New York City. Ashford, who was being treated for cancer, was 70 years old. Together, Ashford and Simpson wrote songs including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “I’m Every Woman” and “Solid (As a Rock).” The pair performed as a duo, but their best known hits were recorded by singers including Dianna Ross and Gladys Knight.

Rolling Stone

Boy, 12, delivers baby brother

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

A 12-year-old boy used kitchen scissors to help deliver his baby brother Saturday morning when his mom woke up in advanced labour. Danielle Edwards had planned to deliver the baby in hospital, but was already pushing when she woke up in her Campbell River home. Her son, Gaelen, heard her cries and grabbed his baby brother by the shoulders and pulled him out. Gaelen used kitchen scissors to cut the baby’s umbilical cord and clamped it shut. When asked how he knew what to do, he answered: “I watch a bunch of medical [TV] shows.” The healthy baby weighed seven pounds, nine ounces.

CBC News

Scores killed as Turkey steps up Iraqi bombing campaign

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 0 Comments

Turkish officials claim to have killed nearly 100 Kurdish rebels in a six-day bombing campaign in Northern Iraq. Guerillas from the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) have been using the mountainous district to launch attacks into Turkey, part of an ongoing, 27-year-old conflict. The PKK disputes the Turkish toll, while Iraqi officials claim at least seven civilians were killed during the bombings.

Reuters

What now?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 4 Comments

Alice Funke looks at Jack Layton’s electoral legacy, while Postmedia and the Star consider the political ramifications.

Still, Bricker said Layton’s long-term legacy appears to be the fact that he built a coalition of supporters — from Toronto urbanites to rural Quebecers — who now vote NDP. And that, said Bricker, has sown the seeds for an outcome that appears inevitable — a two-party system.

 ”When you take a look at the people who did cross over and actually decide to vote NDP, they have a lot in common. Both in terms of the way they think — their world view — and what they look like demographically. He’s actually consolidated a fairly cohesive, coherent political coalition on the left.”

Charges against former IMF chief dropped

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:38 AM - 1 Comment

Charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a Manhattan hotel room, have been dropped. Judge Michael J. Obus of the State Supreme Court dropped the charges at the request of prosecutors at the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. In a lengthy legal brief filed Monday, the district attorney’s office said it had no reasonable chance of obtaining a conviction. The case against Strauss-Kahn collapsed after prosecutors grew concerned about the reliability of the alleged victim, Nafissatou Diallo. “In virtually every substantive interview … she has not been truthful,” the brief says. “If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so.” Strauss-Kahn still faces a civil suit launched by Diallo, but he has been released and is now free to return to France.

The New York Times

Woman saves girl from Nunavut plane crash

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

A 23-year-old woman who walked away from Saturday’s plane crash in Resolute Bay, Nunavut rescued a seven-year-old girl who also survived the crash, police say. The RCMP says Nicole Williamson found Gabrielle Pelky on a rock with a broken leg after she heard someone crying. Williamson, Pelky and 48-year-old Robin Wyllie were the only survivors. Investigators haven’t determined the cause of the First Air crash, which killed 12 people.

CTV News

Hurricane Irene expected to hit U.S. this weekend

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

A stronger-than-expected Hurricane Irene is headed northwestward toward the United States and is expected to make landfall this weekend. The southeast coast of the U.S. is expected to bear the brunt of the storm, which became a Category 2 hurricane Monday evening. Meteorologists expect Irene could strengthen to a Category 3 storm. Irene hit the Dominican Republic with 100 mph winds and heavy rain Tuesday, and is projected to reach the Bahamas by early Wednesday.

CNN

Libya’s uneasy uprising

By Ruth Sherlock - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 2 Comments

Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

On July 28, inside the political offices of the Libyan rebels in Benghazi, panicked officials scrambled to find an explanation. Rebel pickup trucks abandoned the front line at the city limits in anger. Inside the rebel capital, simmering tensions gave rise to nighttime gun battles. Gen. Abdul Fattah Younis, the Libyan rebels’ top military leader, was dead. His mysterious assassination last month shattered, at once, the notion that Libya’s rebels are a united front, led by a broadly supported Transitional National Council. The picture emerging in Libya, rather, is of growing factionalism, distrust and deepening political turmoil, which is frustrating efforts to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

Since the killing, insecurity has spread, as gangs of gunmen roam the streets of Benghazi. Last week, after the TNC leadership acknowledged that a group of their own soldiers had killed Younis, chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil took action, dismissing the entire rebel cabinet. The executive committee’s 14 members were sacked for “administrative mistakes” that, Jalil claimed, led to Younis’s assassination.

Younis’s murder came shortly after his release by the TNC, which had summoned him to Benghazi for questioning—allegedly over allegations that the former interior minister, a contentious figure among rebels, was still working with Gadhafi. In the weeks since, unanswered questions surrounding the incident, combined with growing frustration at the lack of military or political progress in the war to oust Gadhafi, have brought criticism of the TNC. “No one knows whether to trust them anymore,” Benghazi resident Osama Doghaim, who recently began training to fight on the front lines, told Maclean’s. As questions over who killed Younis spread, so have rumours surrounding the true allegiance of other leaders and politicians allied with the rebels.

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Fighting continues at Gadhafi compound in Tripoli

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Fighting continued in Tripoli on Tuesday near Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s compound. Machine gun fire and explosions could be heard, and Al-Jazeera reported that rebel forces had surrounded the residential compound and military barracks, known as Bab al-Aziziya. Some rebels had even breached its main gates, the news agency reported. Gadhafi’s whereabouts remain unknown. Both rebels and Gadhafi loyalists claim to control parts of the capital. One rebel spokesperson said pro-Gadhafi forces are positioned on the outskirts of Tripoli, and could make a push back into the city. Gadhafi’s son and rumoured heir, Saif al-Islam, also made a bewildering reappearance a day after reports emerged from the International Criminal Court and the rebel forces that he had been captured. He walked into hotel where foreign journalists are staying and offered a message of defiance, asserting that Gadhafi forces have the support of the people and that they will prevail. Meanwhile, due to continued violence in Tripoli, a ship sponsored by the International Organization for Migration delayed its scheduled rescue of 300 Filipino migrant workers from the capital.

Al Jazeera English

The truth about Ottawa’s missing war criminals

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 77 Comments

Before he snuck into Canada and disappeared, Kiemtor Alidu was a loyal—and ruthless—supporter of Ghana’s military dictatorship. Between 1982 and 1985, Alidu served as vice-chairman of his local “People’s Defence Committee,” a quasi-police force that kept a close eye on political dissidents. By his own admission, more than 100 people were rounded up and murdered because he and his colleagues fingered them as threats to the regime.

“Even a person who is innocent was killed during those incidents,” Alidu testified during an Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) hearing. “A lot of people were killed.”

Foreigners who are found to be complicit in war crimes or other human rights abuses are not welcome in Canada, and in 1993 the IRB unanimously rejected Alidu’s request to remain in Toronto. (How he got into the country remains a mystery). “It is clear to the panel that the claimant was guilty of crime [sic] against humanity,” reads the ruling, obtained by Maclean’s. “The claimant was part of a team that showed no mercy to political dissidents, as well as innocent victims.”

Alidu filed an appeal with the Federal Court (“I am extremely perturbed,” he wrote in one sworn affidavit) but that, too, was turned down. After a second appeal met the same fate, Alidu vanished. He has now lived in Canada for nearly 20 years, all of them illegally.

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REVIEW: Bed

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Coinciding with the London riots that last week pitted the alienated, angry, bored, mischievous youths of middle-class England against the dull, endless monotone of their own recession-weary lives, comes Bed, a novel that elaborates on that same theme of waste, decadence and disaster, but casts the whole into the form, not of an angry mob, but of the world’s fattest man, Malcolm Ede.

Mal, a charismatic young man with everything to live for (including Bed’s love interest, the selfless, beautiful Lou), retires to bed on his 25th birthday, for good, eventually growing so fat that he looks “like an enormous sea monster caught and displayed in a Victorian museum of the grotesque.” That sci-fi obesity makes him the centre of his family’s universe—“our sun, our lives in his orbit.”

Told from the vantage of Mal’s brother, who’s left unnamed, Bed takes place in a similarly blurred suburban England, a beige world described here with striking imagination and energy. This is Whitehouse’s first novel; therefore it is an existential book. “What is the point,” Mal asks his brother, pre-fat. “I work in a chair. I fight on a computer game. When I vote, it changes nothing. What I earn can’t buy anything. Maybe my purpose is to give purpose to others.” And purpose he gives. Mal awakes each morning to “a huge cooked breakfast, all the colours of an artist’s palette as he sits at an easel to paint autumn.” His mother spends her life ministering to stasis—“basting an enormous turkey in the oven, lifting it, turning it and coating its flesh without the reward of a hearty meal.”

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David Cameron rides the riots

By Leah McLaren - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 3 Comments

Martin Rickett/Keystone

Last week, at a youth centre in the village of Witney, Oxfordshire, British Prime Minister David Cameron stood in front of a wall of messy graffiti and pledged to put his country’s “broken society” back to the top of his political agenda. It must have been a vindicating moment for a leader who has been roundly mocked, at times excoriated, for his long-held insistence that British youth are suffering from a moral malaise that would best be cured, not by increased social spending, but a bracing dose of good old-fashioned community involvement. Picking up litter in a local park, perhaps, followed by a vigorous round of neighbourhood pickup soccer.

In fact, in the wake of the recent riots that have shocked Britain, these were just some of the solutions Cameron was laying out in Oxfordshire that Monday, to an anxiously receptive public. It is all part of his planned “national citizen service,” a kind of voluntary-sector answer to Britain’s formerly mandatory military service—which, in the aftermath of the violence, there was some outlandish talk of reinstating. Paired with his carefully scripted tough talk of social and security “fight-back” and a major crackdown on gang crime, Cameron’s obsession with civic engagement, which seemed hopelessly quaint just weeks ago, is starting to look altogether more prescient. Indeed, his much-scoffed-at idea of a Big Society—the Tories’ flagship platform that, among other things, emphasizes smaller government, a bigger voluntary sector and devolution of power from Whitehall to councils—has never seemed more relevant.

After several days of making conciliatory noises, opposition Labour Leader Ed Miliband was back on the attack last week, trying to take hold of the crisis for himself. He mocked the Prime Minister in front of an audience at his alma mater, a public high school in north London, not far from where the riots began. Dismissing as “gimmicks” Cameron’s threats to harass gang leaders in their homes and adopt an American-style “zero tolerance” approach to policing, Miliband tried to paint the new “tough on crime” Cameron as a hypocrite. “A Prime Minister who used to say we ought to ‘hug a hoodie’ now says we ought to reform health and safety laws!” Miliband groused, referring to Cameron’s famous 2006 speech in which he urged an audience, “when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement—think what has brought that child to that moment.”

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Layton to receive state funeral in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:43 AM - 0 Comments

There will be a state funeral for Jack Layton in Toronto this Saturday, party officials confirmed. The funeral, which will be open to the public, will be held at 2 p.m. ET at Roy Thomson Hall. State funerals are automatically given to current and former governors general and prime ministers, and to sitting cabinet ministers. However, prime ministers are able to extend the honour to other “eminent Canadians,” said Dmitri Soudas, spokesperson for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Soudas said Harper made the offer to Layton’s wife on Monday, and she accepted. Layton died early Monday morning less than a month after announcing he had developed a second form of cancer. The late NDP leader had already been diagnosed with prostate cancer. NDP constituency offices across the country are allowing the public to sign books of condolence this week, prior to Saturday’s funeral. Books will also be available at Toronto City Hall and on Parliament Hill. The NDP is also accepting donations in Layton’s memory to the Broadbent Institute, a social democratic think tank affiliated with the NDP.

CBC News

When Mars really attacks

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 11 Comments

Everett Collection; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Economist Paul Krugman has found a novel way to illustrate his view that more stimulus is required to jolt the U.S. economy to life. “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack,” he said on CNN, “and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat . . . this slump would be over in 18 months.”

So it has come to this: the best hope for the U.S. economy is that Independence Day turns out to be a documentary.

But is Krugman right? In a time of unprecedented partisan rancour, how would today’s America really respond to an interstellar invasion?

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A celebration of life

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 6 Comments

From the Globe, details of how Jack Layton will be honoured this week.

Planning now begins in earnest for Mr. Layton’s state funeral, which is to be held Saturday afternoon, likely around 2 p.m., at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. His body will also lie in the foyer of the House of Commons, where he conducted so many scrums with reporters. (The Hall of Honour is where prime ministers and governors-general lie in state.)

The Parliamen Hill visitation will begin at 11 a.m. Wednesday for dignitaries. The doors will open to the public at 12:30 p.m. and stay open until about 8 p.m., depending on the number of people. There will be another visitation on Thursday, which is to end at 2 p.m.

Used cars, new prices

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

When the American housing market collapsed in 2008, another sector of the economy took off: used cars. In the three years since the financial crisis hit, the average price of a late-model used vehicle in the U.S. has grown by over 50 per cent, from US$15,000 in 2008 to over US$23,000 this past July, according to the Kelley Blue Book, an industry indicator.

Even as the economic recovery slowed this year, used cars continued to boom. Sale volumes and dealer profitability both climbed in the first half of 2011, say analysts at Manheim, an auction house. The company’s Used Vehicle Value Index hit a record high over that stretch. Prices haven’t soared for all models, though. Among older vehicles—those between five and 10 years old—there are still bargains to be found, says Dennis DesRosiers, an auto sector analyst. But “once you get into the Mercedes and the BMWs, the prices are just outrageous.” Because of the better financing often available for new cars, some consumers are actually paying more every month today for a high-end used vehicle than they would for a similar new one, DesRosiers says.

The biggest reason for the boom: supply and demand. When the financial crisis hit, credit dried up and new car sales collapsed. Between 2005 and 2007, the U.S. averaged about 15 million new cars sold every year. By 2009, that number had fallen to about 10.5 million. At the same time, many banks stopped offering lease support. Fewer new cars sold three years ago means fewer used cars available today. And with so little supply, “it’s getting harder and harder to find a bargain,” says Alec Gutierrez, the manager of vehicle valuation for the Kelley Blue Book.

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Everyone’s gone mad

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 24 Comments

Reuters/Dylan Martinez

What can explain it? How to account for such a fit of collective madness? Do we blame the schools? The parents? Perhaps it was a cry for help, the bitter fruit of lives without meaning or hope? Whatever may be the cause, we can see the results, the single largest outburst of journalistic nonsense in a generation: swarms of unhinged pundits running wild through the op-ed pages, leaving a trail of broken syllogisms in their wake. Such mindless mindlessness can only be condemned in the strongest terms…

But of course the same thing happens every time, doesn’t it? Wherever and whenever some outrage or atrocity occurs, there is always an army of “root-cause” rationalizers close behind, ready to supply the deeper meaning of it all. And though the explanations vary, the one constant is to shift the blame from those who commit the crime to other, more politically useful villains. Marc Lépine was no mere nutter with a grudge: he was a product, or at least an extreme example, or at any rate a symbol, of a generalized male hatred of women. Jared Loughner was not, as he claimed, chiefly concerned with the power of grammar to control the mind, but rather was the inevitable outgrowth of hot-headed Republican rhetoric. And so on.

With something as widespread as a riot, let alone the cascade of riots that spread across Britain, we are more obviously dealing with a genuinely social phenomenon. Though every individual is ultimately responsible for the choice to do good or to do ill, when so many people make the wrong choices at the same time, there is clearly a wider context to be considered: they can’t all be mad. But there’s a key word in there. Maybe you’ve spotted it: considered. Many of the instant analyses I read expressed a certain peevishness toward dissenters, as if the failure to adopt their own pet theory was a rejection of thinking itself. Well, no. It’s a rejection of simplistic, reductionist thinking. It is one thing to attempt to understand why people do what they do. It is another just to draw up a list of everything that’s been bugging you about society for years, then scrawl QED under it. Thus, if you are on the left: consumerism, individualism, poverty, Thatcher, unemployment, Thatcher. And if you are on the right: gangsta rap, Jamaican patois, multiculturalism, liberal elites.

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Anonymous morphs into a political movement

By Cigdem Iltan - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Reuters/Lisi Niesner

Gone, for Anonymous, are the days of aimless Internet hijinks. The hacker group, once a loosely knit group of cyber-pranksters that formed in 2003, has traded prank pizza deliveries and shock humour for high-profile attacks on authoritarian regimes. The community now attracts both political activists and hackers alike to campaigns targeting everyone from Arab dictatorships to opponents of WikiLeaks.

Last week, Anonymous carried out its latest offensive on an Arab government, when hackers swapped content on the Syrian Ministry of Defence website with a message calling on protesters to take down President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has killed an estimated 1,700 citizens since uprisings began five months ago. In June, the group claimed responsibility for revealing the passwords of hundreds of Bahraini, Egyptian, Moroccan and Jordanian government officials’ email accounts. And during the early stirrings of the Tunisian revolution in January, Anons (as the group’s adherents are known) created care packages that included instructions on how to conceal identities online and developed a script to help bloggers and news sources dodge a government-led phishing campaign. “It is simply impossible to list all countries that need help,” the maturing collective proclaimed on the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account on Aug. 9. “We try our best.”

Other recent targets include businesses that withdrew their services from WikiLeaks when, in December, the organization released secret diplomatic cables, and the Orlando, Fla., Chamber of Commerce, after members of the group Food Not Bombs were arrested for feeding the city’s homeless, against local laws. But the clandestine computer hacking group wasn’t always so interested in altruism. While Anons have maintained that their work is ultimately motivated by freedom of speech and anti-censorship ideals, it grew out of the notorious 4Chan message boards: an Internet repository for lolcats, anime and multiple genres of porn.

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The MP who has to talk about the Senate all summer

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 2 Comments

Mitchel Raphael

Handy having an orthopaedic surgeon

Ontario Conservative MP Patrick Brown’s annual Hockey Night in Barrie continues to grow. Each year, the charity fundraiser for the Royal Victoria Hospital has MPs and NHL players sharing the ice for a game. This year (the fourth) raised almost $200,000 for the hospital’s cancer care centre. Current and retired NHL players this time included Ryan O’Reilly of the Colorado Avalanche, Bryan Little of the Winnipeg Jets, Luke Pither of the Philadelphia Flyers and Darcy Tucker. Also attending was Conservative MP Kellie Leitch (who beat Helena Guergis in the last election). The rookie MP would have been handy in an emergency: Leitch is an orthopaedic surgeon who has sports- injuries training going back to the days when she worked with the Toronto Argonauts.

Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel (who took former cabinet minister Jim Prentice’s old seat in the last election) arrived at the game to support Brown and her fellow MPs. But when she got drafted as one of the coaches, she quickly rose to the challenge. (Last year, Stephen Harper put in an appearance and coached the same team.) Defence Minister Peter MacKay arrived with all his hockey gear but had to borrow one of Patrick Brown’s sticks. Most of the MPs present agreed that Brown is one the Conservatives’ best players.

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Remembering Jack Layton

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star editorial boards eulogize the NDP leader. The Star reviews his contribution to civic politics in Toronto, Libby Davies recalls his contribution to gay rights, the music community pays its respects and The Agenda compiles his television appearances, while Canadians mourn the loss and celebrate the man.

Outside Layton’s home, his neighbour, Ted Hawkins, laid a single red rose on his doorstep. It soon grew into a shrine of sunflowers, orange lilies, with a photo of Layton dressed up for Caribana. “I guess I didn’t expect him to go so fast, I guess I kind of shared his optimism a little bit,” Hawkins said. “It’s kind of infectious.”

Neighbour and friend Bryonny Nichol held back tears as she talked about his sparkling eyes and clear direct look. “Little kids liked him, he remembered them, he talked to them,” she said, “He believed in people.”

Yesterday’s collection of news and remembrances is here.

Proposition Bert and Ernie

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 3 Comments

In 2009, the National Organization for Marriage—America’s foremost opponent of same-sex marriage, civil unions, and gay adoption rights—launched an ad campaign called “Gathering Storm” in an attempt to pass Proposition 8, which would bar the door to legalize same-sex marriage in California. The commercial featured actors of all creeds (because bigotry knows no colour), standing stern against a backdrop of stormy clouds, relaying the following messages: “The winds are strong,” “We—are—afraid,” and “There’s a storm gathering.”

That storm, of course, was gay marriage, and all the evils it would carry with it: (1) the obliteration of the sanctity of marriage, (2) the collapse of the traditional family, and (3) the blatant homosexual indoctrination of “our” children. Statistics have since proven 1 and 2 are non sequiturs (divorce rates are unusually low in states that sanction gay marriage, where, remarkably, traditional God fearing families still abound).  But it’s the latter threat that has anti-marriage folk all hot and bothered these days. Why? Because according to one of NOM’s most recent blog posts, “an online campaign to pressure the producers of Sesame Street into having lovable roommates Bert and Ernie get married is gathering steam.” The big gay Storm, it seems, has gotten steamy—so much so that it threatens to corrupt odd couple Ernie and Bert, all the while predisposing your Sesame Street-watching child to a life of sexual deviance. Continue…

From the archives

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 22, 2011 at 11:10 PM - 0 Comments

Several points on the timeline.

First, a grey morning in March 2007, when Jack Layton starred in a silly little news conference. In its own way, a strange, perfect moment. Next, this sketch from February 2010, as Mr. Layton held forth a week after announcing his prostate cancer diagnosis. Third, this past April, aboard his campaign plane, when it all seemed futile, or at least as futile as it had always seemed. And finally, from earlier this month, an account of what was going on behind the scenes as he turned to face cancer once again: a look at Mr. Layton, who he surrounded himself with and how they and him regarded each other and what they were doing.

Here, again, is John Geddes’ extensive account of Jack Layton’s life. Here, too, is what John wrote as the NDP’s surge unfolded this spring.

After the jump, a number of other links to stories from the Maclean’s archives. Continue…