Wikileaks reveals mentally ill Canadian held in Afghan jail

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:23 AM - 1 Comment

Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks have revealed the bizarre story of a mentally ill Canadian man kept in a U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan for more than 18 months. Khaled Samy Abdallah Ismail was born in Egypt but came to Canada in 1995. He worked as a computer engineer in Ontario before losing his job and launching a series of unsuccessful human rights complaints. Ismail fell off the radar before resurfacing in Kandahar in 2006, where he was arrested outside the governor’s mansion with a suspicious bag full of electronics. Afghan police handed Ismail over to the Americans, who eventually diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. After more than a year and a half in custody, Ismail was apparently transferred back to Canada. A CBC investigation could not determine his current location.

CBC News

Police blanket Parliament as oilsands protestors gather

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 2 Comments

Hundreds of police officers crowded Parliament Hill Monday ahead of a planned protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Greenpeace and other environmental groups oppose to the $7 billion project, which would pipe bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to refineries in Texas. Police set up temporary fences on the hill ahead of the demonstration, which was expected to draw hundreds opposed to continued oilsands development. The protest comes after a similar demonstration in Washington, D.C., led to dozens of arrests.

CTV

The anonymous senior Conservative endorsement

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 18 Comments

Paul Dewar picks up a coveted nod.

One senior Conservative said he is not concerned by Mr. Topp, calling him “wooden” and lacking in charisma. Nor is he worried by the prospect of Mr. Mulcair winning, calling him “very wedge-able.” But Mr. Dewar does make him nervous. “He’s young, bilingual, telegenic and has political geneology [his mother was mayor of Ottawa]. He has good parliamentary experience and people seem to like him. He’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a young Bob Rae.”

There are three ways to read these comments. Continue…

Saudi Arabia women given right to vote, seek office

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 6 Comments

Women in Saudi Arabia have been given the right to vote, run for office and be appointed to governing councils by King Abdullah, the country’s 86-year-old ruler. Abdullah made the announcement on Sunday in a speech that was broadcast live on state television. Manal al-Sharif, the 32-year-old figurehead of a contingent of women who have openly defied Saudi Arabia’s much-discussed driving-ban for women, welcomed the move to extend the franchise. She called Abdullah a “reformer” and said the decision was “historic and courageous.” Men in Saudi Arabia, an ultra-conservative Muslim country existing under a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, were first able to vote in municipal elections in 2005. Women will join them on their second trip to the polls Thursday, but since the nomination process is already closed, and no women will be on the ballot. The winners of the election fill half the seats in the country’s 285 municipal councils. The rest are appointed.

AFP

Libyan rebels fight their way into Gadhafi’s hometown

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

Militias belonging to Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) government continue to fight against Gadhafi loyalists in the coastal city of Sirte, Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown, as NATO warplanes offer support from the air. Reuters reports that NTC forces were closing in on Sirte from the west and the east, but were facing resistance from Gadhafi snipers. On Sunday, NATO planes dropped bombs on the city. Humanitarian organizations working in the area are expressing concerns for the civilians living in Sirte. According to Reuters, witnesses who have been able to get out of the city have reported that Gadhafi forces are not allowing residents to flee the violence, effectively using them as human shields. There are also reports that Sirte and the city of Bani Walid—another pocket of resistance to the NTC—are quickly running out of food and medical supplies.

Reuters

Why Bob Dechert kept his job

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 11 Comments

Meet the press: Dechert is parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird

Firing him would have been easy. Few people outside of Mississauga, Ont., had heard of Bob Dechert before he rolled the dice on his career by trading amorous emails with a correspondent with the Xinhua news agency, Communist China’s official mouthpiece. Thanks in no small part to the 53-year-old MP’s own giddy prose—“I really like the picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed” fits nicely into a single tweet—the story quickly found legs: by the middle of last week, the reporter, Shi Rong, was on front pages across the country.

Dechert downplayed the exchanges as “flirtatious.” “The friendship remained innocent and simply that—a friendship,” he said on his personal website, which also features a picture of him with his long-time wife, Ruth Clark. But the image of a middle-aged man in the throes of a grade-school crush has stuck, overshadowing Dechert’s little-known status as a party fixer that insiders believe may have spared him relegation to the backbenches. Messages sent from Shi’s inbox—apparently by her angry husband—revealed not only that the married MP had professed his love for the journalist, but that Shi had sought a divorce to pursue her new relationship. “To continue her love affair with this member of Parliament,” the jilted man typed in a message sent to all 240 of his wife’s contacts, “Shi Rong pitilessly asked to end her marriage while stationed overseas.”

For a Conservative government that once talked tough about Beijing’s espionage program, it was more than a bit of domestic unpleasantness. Xinhua is a state-owned news agency whose foreign bureaus have in the past served as less-than-convincing cover for Chinese spies. “It’s an open secret that many of the Chinese reporters stationed overseas actually work for Beijing’s Ministry of State Security,” says Li Ding, deputy editor-in-chief at Chinascope, a Washington-based agency that monitors and analyzes Chinese media. “Westerners think of Xinhua as a news service. In fact, it is a government agency.”

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Women don’t have to push so much

By Kate Fillion - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 10 Comments

Photography by Jean-Marc Giboux/Getty Images

Dr. Aaron Caughey is the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Oregon Health and Sciences University, director of its Center for Women’s Health, and a researcher with an interest in diabetes in pregnancy. He recently addressed the pushing question at the Birth World Congress in Chicago.

Q: What attracted you to obstetrics?

A: I’m a labour-floor junkie. As a third-year medical student doing an obstetrics rotation, it was immediate for me, like a crush. The process of birth, the intensity of the experience, the potential for it to be many people’s best days mixed with a small percentage of people’s worst days, and the challenge of how to make the outcomes better—it’s extremely compelling.

Q: Let’s start with a brief refresher course on labour.

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The brilliant John A. biopic

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 19 Comments

Steve Wilkie/CBC

Chances are you missed it, but something quite significant happened on the CBC Monday night. Indeed, I may say it was an event of some importance in the life of the nation: the historical drama John A: Birth of a Country. It is rare enough to see any Canadian history on Canadian television, and rarer still something of this quality. There have been subtler dramas, there have been more exact histories, but this is the finest historical drama to appear on the CBC since The National Dream almost 40 years ago.

Explaining the road to Confederation through the personal and political battle between Sir John A. Macdonald and George Brown, it should dispel forever a pernicious myth: that Canada’s founding, like much of its history, was a dry bit of horse-trading, devoid of interest or excitement. On the contrary, as any viewer of John A will be convinced, it was the creation of men of extraordinary passion and conviction, driven by personal ambition but guided by their own greatness toward an end much larger than themselves. The last half-hour, in particular, is simply riveting: the scene where Macdonald seeks to persuade Brown to join his cabinet—on his terms—is a study in psychological and political acuity.

That the show brings Macdonald so vividly to life (Shawn Doyle is marvellous in the part, wobbly accent notwithstanding) is an achievement, though not entirely surprising: he remains one of the richest, most colourful subjects in all of political history, a brawling, drunken, cheerfully unscrupulous rebuke to the whole “Peace, Order and Good Government” theory of Canada’s development, which has bored two generations of Canadian schoolchildren.

But we know Macdonald was great. Of much more significance is the treatment of Brown, at last restored to his true position in the historical firmament, second only to Macdonald among the Fathers of Confederation, and perhaps not even second. It is to Brown that we owe much of the design of the country: not only his famous insistence on “rep by pop,” or representation by population (apparently still a controversial idea), but the very principle of federalism, against the unitary state that was Macdonald’s dream. And it was his momentous decision to cross the floor, joining Macdonald in the grand coalition that would pursue federation with the other scattered colonies of British North America, that made the whole enterprise possible. All that we are, everything this country has become, can be traced to that supreme act of statesmanship.

Yet in popular terms at least, he remains very much the forgotten man of Canadian history. There are no highways or airports named for him, as there are for Macdonald and his Quebec lieutenant, George-Étienne Cartier. The last major biography him was J. M. Careless’s—52 years ago. He simply does not fit into the dominant, Macdonald-centred view of Canadian history as an orderly series of public works projects. He was a Victorian liberal: reform-minded, pro free trade, skeptical of government, with unfortunate (though by no means unusual for his time) views of Catholics and the French. As such he was an inconvenience, and so was made largely to disappear. With any luck, John A, and Peter Outerbridge’s doughty performance as George Brown, will begin to change that.

Good as it is, I do not see John A as an argument for public broadcasting (the question is not whether I like a particular show, but whether I can justify forcing others to pay for my pleasures; the subscription model, à la HBO, has more to recommend it, both on artistic and philosophical grounds). But if we are going to have public broadcasting, surely this is exactly the sort of thing it should be doing. Which makes it a mystery why the CBC should seem so intent on burying it. It’s bad enough that it has taken the corporation decades to produce a show on this, the single most important event in our history, but it has thus far committed only to this first instalment in what I gather was planned to be a four-part series on Macdonald’s life (drawing on Richard J. Gwyn’s shrewd biography, John A: The Man Who Made Us). For goodness sake, we’re only up to 1864: the adventure has barely begun.

What’s truly unforgiveable, however, is the lack of promotion. At a time when the network is blanketing the airwaves with ads for Battle of the Blades and other bilge, you’d think it could spare some of its PR budget for a project as important as this. Yet people working at the CBC were unaware it existed until a week ago. If the corporation were in any doubt of what it had on its hands (it shouldn’t: the producer, Bernard Zukerman, has a proven track record, as does director Jerry Ciccoritti and writer Bruce Smith) it cannot be now.

It is just too much like the CBC to turn what ought to have been a moment of triumph into a fiasco. Fortunately, there is a remedy. We’ve seen the pilot. Now green-light the rest of the series. Give it a decent time slot. And maybe tell the odd person it’s on.

Africville can’t escape racial divide

By Richard Warnica - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

The Africville Church Museum, a memorial to the bulldozed Nova Scotia town, will open to the public for the first time on Sunday, Sept. 25. The event is the culmination of years of lobbying by African-Canadians. But it comes as members of the community in Nova Scotia are stuck in a sudden and unexpected feud.

The Africville Historical Trust, which oversees the museum, recently hired Carole Nixon as its new executive director. Nixon is an Anglican priest with a university certificate in black studies. She is also, in the words of her detractors, “a Caucasian, British woman from Ontario,” a fact that does not sit well with some black Nova Scotians.

After the hiring was announced, Veronica Marsman, president of the Association of Black Social Workers, and Burnley “Rocky” Jones, a human rights lawyer, wrote a letter to the trust decrying the fact that a black candidate wasn’t found for the job. The letter called Nixon’s appointment “detrimental to the survival and growth of the African Nova Scotia community” and urged the trust to reconsider the appointment. “It really baffles me to think there wasn’t an African-Canadian person in this entire country who could fill this role,” Marsman says.

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Pray—but not outside

By Alex Derry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

Franck Prevel/Getty Images

Just as Muslims throughout France prepared for their Friday prayers, the government passed a ban on Sept. 16 outlawing the increasingly common practice of praying in the street. Despite the ban being seen by some as an example of Nicolas Sarkozy’s government kowtowing to right-wing voters seven months before an election, and a small group of worshippers protesting the new measure in Paris, many among France’s five-million-strong Muslim population welcome the prospect of getting off the streets, provided they have somewhere else to pray.

France has enforced the separation of church and state since 1905, but a growing tide of anti-Muslim sentiment among the country’s more right-leaning groups has put pressure on Sarkozy to crack down on religious displays in public spaces. Particularly in cities, such as Paris and Marseilles, mosques are located in small buildings and storefronts with little space, leaving many worshippers no other option but to face Mecca in the street. Marine le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, has equated Muslims praying in Paris’s streets to the Nazi invasion of France in the Second World War, albeit “without the tanks or soldiers,” but instead with fundamentalist displays in a proudly secular society. “Praying in the street is not dignified for religious practice and violates the principles of secularism,” Interior Minister Claude Guéant told Le Figaro. “All Muslim leaders are in agreement.”

Mohammed Salah Hamza is one of those leaders. As the imam who leads some 2,000 Muslims at a makeshift mosque in a vacant fire station in northern Paris, which opened on the day the ban became law, he says that moving worshippers into an actual place of worship is “the beginning of a solution.” But Hamza called on the government to be more accommodating to France’s Muslim population—the biggest in Western Europe—and opposed being herded into makeshift spaces. “We are not cattle,” Hamza told France’s TF1 News. The 2,000-sq.-metre fire station was only handed over to worshippers under a three-year lease two days before the deadline, after an uneasy accord was reached with municipal authorities. In Marseilles, a disused hangar was set aside as a temporary mosque in a similar deal, but is in a state of such disrepair that it was unusable for the Sept. 16 deadline. Guéant estimates that half of the country’s 2,000 mosques have been built in the last decade.

Continue…

“Captain bulls–t”

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:03 AM - 3 Comments

Example number 437 of why Quebec satire kicks the bejesus out of its English counterpart. In English Canada, they get at the likes of Harper, Duceppe, etc by way of caricature. Jean Chrétien: he can’t talk properly, in either Official Language! That’s hilarious! Harper: cold, heartless and humourless! It’s funny cuz it’s true!

Meanwhile, here in Quebec: faced with the news that Jean Charest has once again refused to call a public inquiry into the province’s construction industry, Jean-René Dufort of Radio-Canada’s Infoman cuts to the chase and baptizes our fair Premier “Captain Bullshit.” Much more satisfying, no?

Swedish for recession

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Swedish home furnishing giant Ikea recently made waves when it redesigned its iconic Billy bookcase to make the shelves deeper. The Economist magazine was quick to declare the move an omen for traditional books, suggesting that Ikea expects Billy “customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.”

Perhaps. But keeping the Billy relevant is not just good news for consumers, but economists too. Three years ago, Bloomberg News unveiled its Ikea Index, which seeks to measure the purchasing power of consumers around the world by comparing the prices of the ubiquitous, flat-packed particleboard bookshelves in different countries—specifically the plain white model that measures 80 cm by 202 cm.

And, as one might expect, the most recent data shows a world in economic turmoil. The price of the shelving units fell 17 per cent over the past year to US$49.99 in the United States, which is still struggling with a weak housing market and soft consumer spending. Meanwhile, the lowest-priced Billy bookcases were found in Europe (a Billy unit cost just US$42.82 in the Netherlands), where the euro zone debt crisis continues to deepen. And China posted the biggest overall drop in prices, a full 27 per cent, as the country’s once blistering growth has slowed considerably. By contrast, the highest prices were found in the Dominican Republic (US$111.54) and Israel (US$96.87).

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It’s time for the truth about taxing the rich

By the editors - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 23 Comments

Jake Wright/CP

President Barack Obama’s endorsement of the “Buffett rule” for taxation has Republican legislators crying “class warfare” this week. Warren Buffett, the super-rich sage stock-picker of Omaha, Neb., has taken centre stage on the U.S. political scene by pointing out how outrageous it is that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. “Last year my federal tax bill—the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf—was $6,938,744,” Buffett wrote in the New York Times in August.

“That sounds like a lot of money,” he added. (It certainly does to us.) “But what I paid was only 17.4 per cent of my taxable income—and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office.” Like most Americans in his elite income category, Buffett pays little more than 15 per cent on what he makes because most of it takes the form of capital gains, which the U.S. taxes at that low rate.

Buffett takes glee in telling the American masses what they want to hear in a time of frighteningly high unemployment that looks increasingly invulnerable to the everyday tools of U.S. fiscal and monetary policy. Rich folks like me, Buffett says explicitly, really are avoiding sacrifice. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” he wrote in the Times. He wants rates on income from all sources increased for individuals with million-dollar incomes, and still more for those raking in $10 million.

Continue…

The first day back, and two MPs’ ‘messy breakup’

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Mitchel Raphael

Jack Layton’s chair to go to his family

MPs arriving back on the Hill for the first day of Parliament were greeted by black coffins covered in cut-out, pastel-coloured butterflies on which were written the names of murdered and missing Aboriginal women. It was part of an awareness campaign coordinated by Walk4Justice. That morning, there were tributes for Jack Layton, and his green House of Commons chair was left empty for the day. NDP MP Peter Stoffer says his caucus is buying the chair Layton sat in for $950 and presenting to the late leader’s family. MPs wore orange ribbons in honour of Layton, though at question period it was mostly NDP, Liberal and Bloc parliamentarians wearing them. That included both interim Liberal leader Bob Rae and interim Bloc leader Louis Plamondon. On the Hill for the tribute was former NDP leader Alexa McDonough. The day before, she had helped with the orientation sessions for new MPs from all parties, covering issues ranging from office management to how to avoid temptations like the endless supply of booze at Hill functions. Question period started with interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel reading her questions from her papers, which lessened the impact. She was followed by NDP finance critic Peggy Nash, whose voice boomed out. “I’m used to speaking at rallies,” quipped Nash, who is seen as a strong potential NDP leader candidate.

MPs call it splits

Liberal MPs Mark Eyking and Rodger Cuzner were both elected in 2000 and until Parliament resumed on Monday they were also roommates. “It’s a messy breakup,” jokes Cuzner. “Eyking wants visitation rights for the clock radio.” In reality, two of Eyking’s sons have moved to the capital. One sells real estate and the other is at university. That means Eyking’s wife is in the capital more often too. Cuzner jokes he was “tripping over” Eykings at their place. So he moved out and is now living with his nephew.

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The wrong medicine

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 9:46 AM - 4 Comments

Douglas Porter quibbles with the Prime Minister’s prescription for economic woe.

“We could be making some of the same mistakes. Certainly, there are echoes of 1937,” agreed Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at the Bank of Montreal. Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister formed an unusual alliance of debt hawks, coming down firmly on the side of stricter austerity as the way out of the crisis – at least in Europe … 

Mr. Porter said Mr. Harper’s call for global austerity is “precisely the wrong medicine at this time.” Government bond yields in Canada, and in most other countries, have sunk to multi-year lows in recent days. That’s a sign that financial markets are stressed about economic growth prospects, not government deficits or inflation, according to Mr. Porter. “Governments shouldn’t be aggressively cutting spending when the economy is gasping for air,” he said. “That’s certainly the wrong prescription.”

‘This is totally unacceptable’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 4 Comments

The NDP turns up new emails related to the G8 Legacy Fund.

On June 22, Infrastructure Canada official Naomi Hirshberg emailed Huntsville officials to inform them that the cheques would be delayed six to eight weeks so that Carol Beal, an assistant deputy minister, could look into the payments. “The ADM of program operations has asked that Infrastructure Canada withhold all claims for review,” she wrote.

Huntsville Mayor Claude Doughty forwarded the email to Clement. “This is totally unacceptable,” he wrote. “I am sure you agree.”

Clement responded: “I agree. I’m working on it.”

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Libby Davies and Megan Leslie counted themselves out of the NDP leadership race. Paul Dewar thought about getting in. Peter Julian picked up two more endorsements. Thomas Mulcair lamented for his lot. Brian Topp challenged Stephen Harper, considered the Middle East and won two endorsements.

Bob Dechert was mocked. Lisa Raitt threatened back-to-work legislation. The government tabled its omnibus crime legislation, which the Liberals offered to amend. Charlie Angus chided Tony Clement, whose arse was covered by Deepak Obhrai. The Prime Minister rejected the Palestinian gambit and posed with the Benjamin Netanyahu. Peter MacKay exited a fishing trip and travelled to a lobster carnival in style. Planned Parenthood received government funding. David Cameron addressed Parliament. Vic Toews predicted the crime rate’s continued decline. We learned that Abousfian Abdelrazik nearly ended up in Guantanamo. And Don Davies took on Dick Cheney.

Paul Martin mused on fixing the world economy. Brian Brown looked forward to localist government. Chantal Hebert challenged MPs. Munir Sheikh considered the demise of the long-form census. Rob Silver proposed an end to the war on drugs. John Geddes tested the government’s crime legislation against reality. Mike Moffatt weighed the value of a vote. Alex Himelfarb measured our inequality. Scott Clark and Peter DeVries took stock of the tax code. And the Agenda compared political rhetoric and economic reality.

‘Having engaged in acts of torture’

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 12:09 AM - 39 Comments

NDP immigration critic Don Davies has written to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney asking that Mr. Kenney deny Mr. Cheney entry to the country (the former vice president is scheduled to visit Vancouver on Monday as part of his book tour).

Minister, may I remind you of your own government’s initiatives this summer in which you called on the public to assist your government in removing from Canada those individuals who had engaged in serious criminality, war crimes or crimes against humanity. May I also remind you of your own government’s actions in denying entry to British MP George Galloway. At that time you stated that: ”It’s not about words. It’s about deeds.”

… Minister, the essence of just application of the law is that it is applied evenly and consistently. I would therefore respectfully request that you deny entry to Mr. Cheney on grounds of inadmissibility under IRPA for having engaged in acts of torture. In the event that you do not do so, I would respectfully request that a report be prepared setting out the relevant facts, and that you refer same to the Immigration Division for an admissibility hearing with a view to issuing a removal order against Mr. Cheney, all pursuant to section 44 of IRPA.

Politics and reality

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 4 Comments

This Agenda panel was convened to consider the Ontario election, but the discussion is relevant to the federal situation as well.

Planes and accountability

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:42 PM - 19 Comments

The latest development in our national crisis of official air travel protocol involves the Defence Minister using a Challenger jet to fly to a lobster-related celebration (the Pictou Lobster Carnival perhaps?) in his riding. Peter MacKay continued to take questions from the opposition this morning in regards to the use of a search-and-rescue helicopter to pick him up from a fishing trip, but questions about the lobster festival were handled by House leader Peter Van Loan. Mr. Van Loan’s first response to the NDP’s Christine Moore was as follows.

Mr. Speaker, taxpayers expect government officials to conduct the nation’s business at a reasonable cost. It is something that our government takes very seriously. I want to be clear. Our use of government aircraft by our ministers is always in compliance with policy. We do follow the policies. And we have reduced the use of government aircraft significantly, as we have said. When we look at Challenger use by the Liberals who spoke earlier about this issue, we have reduced our use 80% since they abused them as personal limousines constantly. We only use them for government business.

More Palin-tology

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 7 Comments

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Finally, conclusive proof that good fences do not in fact make good neighbours. Even 14-foot high ones, like the monstrosity Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, and his buddies hastily erected on the edge of the couple’s Wasilla, Alaska, property in the spring of 2010. What the Palins were famously trying to block, of course, were the prying eyes of author Joe McGinniss, who had rented the house next door while researching a book about the Republican party’s foremost shopper. Having a writer best known for his critical take on politics and politicians in such close proximity was a “creepy” infringement on her family’s rights and privacy, the former vice-presidential candidate complained. It was a desperate attempt to gather dirt for a “hit piece,” she said.

McGinniss’s newly published tome, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, proves that his target’s instincts were correct. But she needn’t have gone to such trouble to obscure the sightlines. However close the author’s view, it wasn’t all that perspicacious.

Sure, there are some titillating bits of gossip, like the tale of Palin snorting lines of coke off the bottom of an overturned oil drum during a snowmobiling expedition, at some unspecified point before she became governor. (An anonymously sourced allegation that first surfaced on a blog in 2007.) Or the revelation that she slept with Glen Rice, a college basketball player who went on to play for the NBA’s Miami Heat, back before she married Todd. (A one-night stand that McGinniss uses to advance the thesis that Palin had a “fetish for black guys,” just four paragraphs after suggesting she transferred from Hawaii Pacific University to a small Idaho college because of her discomfort with “people of colour.”) The self-described “Hockey Mom” is also, apparently, an indifferent parent who hardly ever goes to games, has a loveless marriage, and is a completely hopeless housekeeper. “She couldn’t do grilled cheese. She’d burn water,” quoth someone described as “an old friend.”

Continue…

The real festival stars

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images; Courtesy of TIFF

It was celebrity gridlock. Each year the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival seems bigger than ever, but with its 36th edition (Sept. 8-18), it turned a corner. Anchored by its grand new headquarters, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival finally moved fully downtown. As black SUV limos lined the streets, disgorging stars into the red-carpet blaze of cameras, the city’s entertainment district turned into a glass-and-concrete answer to Cannes—with some surreal moments worthy of Fellini.

Counter-spinning tabloid gossip, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wrapped their arms around each other in a regal show of marital bliss at the premiere of Moneyball—for which Pitt earned up to $15 million as a hero who reinvents baseball by casting low-rent players instead of high-priced stars. Fresh from her hydrangea-bashing faux pas with a fan in Venice, Madonna ran a gauntlet of critical scorn for W.E., her risible take on Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, then denied reports that her goons told festival volunteers to avert their eyes when the Queen Mother of Pop came into view. Impresario Garth Drabinsky, on the eve of going to prison for fraud, took a hubris-heavy perp walk down the red carpet with Christopher Plummer for the premiere of Barrymore. Bono introduced a U2 documentary by comparing songwriting to sausage-making. And Neil Young did a double take when a grey-haired lady introduced herself at the premiere of his concert film—he confessed he had a crush on her in the fourth grade.

Now that the stardust has settled, and the circus has left town, all that remains of the festival are the movies. Some of them we’ll still be talking about in February. Each year TIFF launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree films, and as the buzz merchants tried to sniff out the next King’s Speech or Slumdog Millionaire from 268 feature titles, there was no obvious champ. But some clear contenders stood out. It was above all a festival of stellar male performances—Clooney, Pitt, Gosling, Fassbender, Harrelson—even if the audience prize went to Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?, a feel-good fable of female liberation from Lebanon.

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Palestinians submit application for U.N. membership

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:16 PM - 0 Comments

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas formally requested UN membership from the Security Council on Friday, despite protestations from Israel and the U.S. that such status would be symbolic and would not substitute for Middle East peace negotiations. Abbas said UN membership is a crucial stepping stone towards Palestinian statehood, which he called “the realization of the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke following Abbas at the UN General Assembly in New York, called the UN a “theatre of the absurd,” and accused Palestinians of seeking “a state without peace.” The Security Council is expected to vote on the issue next week.

The New York Times

This week has four sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 2:44 PM - 0 Comments

Monday. Carry on
Tuesday. Jim Flaherty against the world
Wednesday. The Finance Minister goes rogue
Thursday. A fishing story