This year has 15 sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

The fifteen most-read sketches for 2011.

1. Mourning Jack, August 24
2. Rise up, April 16
3. The daring Mr. Harper, April 26
4. The tiny, perfect Conservative, December 8
5. That’s enough, December 14
6. On the passing of a politician, August 22
7. The last night, May 3
8. Uncontrollable democracy, March 23
9. Who’s laughing now?, March 21
10. Grumpy old men, November 24
11. John Baird will not be distracted by your democracy, March 10
12. Take your pick, April 12
13. Anything is possible, April 30
14. Tragedy of numbers, November 30
15. Tony Clement’s bike racks, streetlights and boulevards, June 9

RCMP may face class action suit over harassment

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments

Dozens of current and former female members of the RCMP are coming forward to file a class action lawsuit against the national police force, alleging harassment and bullying. A legal team of seven lawyers from B.C. and Ontario will file the suit in B.C. Supreme Court “any day,” said Alexander Zaitzeff, a Thunder Bay lawyer working on the case, speaking with The Globe and Mail. Zaitzeff added that he has been receiving a steady stream of calls and emails from members of the RCMP detailing harassment and bullying since Corporal Catherine Galliford came forward with allegations of long-term sexual harassment within the police force. “The stories are common in terms of harassment, bullying, and oftentimes, sexual issues,” he told The Globe and Mail. “The calls are sad, hugely sad.”

The Globe and Mail

China hackers breach U.S. Chamber of Commerce

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

Hackers in China gained access to information about the operations of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its three million members, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The report says hackers may have enjoyed access to Chamber information for a whole year before being uncovered and shut down in May 2010. Quoting unidentified sources familiar with the incident, the Journal says the group behind the hacking is suspected of having ties to the Chinese government and that the FBI alerted the Chamber of Commerce about the breach. The Chamber is the top American business lobbying group, whose members includes most of the U.S. largest corporations. A spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry dismissed the report, calling it baseless.

Reuters

Thanks

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 0 Comments

This blog is going to take a break while I finish up a story for the print edition and then luxuriate in two weeks of vacation. And on that note, and with another year now nearly over, I want to say thanks.

So, thanks.

This little adventure started four years ago and when the final numbers are sorted out, the pageview total for 2011 will be nearly four times what it was in 2008, our first full year of The Commons and this blog. Indeed, each year has been bigger and better than the previous one and 2011 set another new high for pageviews. This was an incredible year to be where I was and I’m glad and thankful and humbled that so many were here to share it.

Earlier this month, under this post, a regular reader joked that he had finally figured out my agenda—it is a hazard of writing about politics, or really being in any way remotely associated with the business, that one’s agenda will periodically become the subject of speculation. In this case, the reader figured that he’d busted me as a dupe of Big Parliament. I suppose that’s true. I’m not sure that I had any such intent when I got here, but I’ve become very fond of the place. It’s an honour every time I step inside the House of Commons. And no matter how often I’ve come away confused or troubled or tempted to take up smoking, I have tried to remember where I am and what the place stands for. For the sake of maintaining one’s respect it surely helps that you have to wear a jacket and tie to sit in the good seats. And I thank the sergeant-at-arms for consequently compelling me to improve my wardrobe.

I hope that respect been evident. I also hope it’s been clear how fascinating I find it all: the people, the ideas, the theatre, the reality, the things people say and the things people do. At its best, politics is transcendent. At its worst, it still matters. It is all so much wondrous stuff.

So thanks to all the readers, commenters, fans, dissenters, tweeters and mystified onlookers. And thanks to my editors. And thanks, while we’re at it, to my Grandpa Wherry for buying me my first magazine subscription. A toast to 2011 and best wishes for 2012.

Ottawa cuts strings from federal health cash

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

Canadian provinces can do what they please with future federal health care dollars, although Ottawa will continue to encourage them to work together to establish national benchmarks for delivery the Globe and Mail reports. Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq sent a letter to her provincial counterparts on Tuesday urging them to move beyond the “divisive issue of funding.” That’s a reference to the government’s decision, announced on Monday, to tie future health transfers to inflation and GDP growth. Under the current formula, which has been extended to 2017, the provinces were guaranteed an annual six per cent increase in health transfers. Some provinces have reacted with fury to the new offer, which Ottawa says it will not negotiate. But by announcing on Tuesday that the new money comes, essentially, with few strings, Ottawa has left the provinces with little leverage to force further talks.

Globe and Mail

Quebec to allow prison guards to wear headscarves

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:23 AM - 0 Comments

After reaching a deal that stemmed from a complaint made four years ago, the Quebec government has agreed to allow female prison guards to wear headscarves on the job, Postmedia News reports. The decision stems from an incident in 2007, when a woman quit her training to become a Quebec prison guard when she was forced to remove her hijab for safety reasons. She challenged the ban and filed a complaint with the human rights commission. The government has decided to enforce an “accommodation” instead of taking the issue all the way to the provincial human rights tribunal. The opposition remains critic of the decision, saying it is “completely unacceptable” to allow government workers to wear conspicuous religious symbols, especially in a jail where “the neutrality of the state should be obvious.” In order to comply with safety regulations, the hijab will have Velcro fasteners, and those who wish to wear it must make a formal request first.

Postmedia News

Amazon’s secret weapon: you

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Are you a store owner, paranoid that Amazon is sending people to spy on and destroy you? It might not be paranoia. During the Christmas sales season, the online giant offered a one-day discount to people who use a smartphone “price check” app to let them know what brick-and-mortar stores are selling, and for how much. “With every in-store price you share,” Amazon’s U.S. website chirped, “you help ensure our prices remain competitive for our customers.” It also encourages people to go into a store, use their phone to get the bar code information, and then buy the same product for less online. And as a bonus, it could help Amazon cut down on its workforce. “We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round,” Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile, told All Things Digital. Why pay people to do that, when you can give them a $5 discount and have them do it for you?

Amped up in toyland

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Daniel Janossy on his souped-up stilts.

Daniel Janossy is running down his Toronto street at full speed on what look like bionic feet, his every airborne stride attracting stares. Dogs cock their heads as he lopes by on the flashy futuristic aluminum frames. The jumping stilts look nothing like the simple sticks with two triangles of wood that you may remember from your childhood. Welcome to toys 2.0, where jumping stilts can propel you over cars, scooters are made for tricks, not travel, skateboards wiggle on two wheels and kids do flips on amped-up pogo sticks.

Children are moving in new and extraordinary ways these days, and although there is an element of danger, the exercise benefits are not to be dismissed. But what makes these intense toys so popular? “I think there’s a drive for the extreme in our culture that wasn’t there 50 years ago,” says 22-year-old Nick Ryan, co-founder of Xpogo and Pogopalooza, two U.S.-based organizations devoted to extreme pogoing. “It’s a way for younger people to make their own sport and—to the horror of their parents—test the limits of their surroundings.”

At Pogopalooza, for example, 18-year-old Daniel Mahoney from Truro, N.S., managed a record-breaking nine-foot, six-inch high jump at the 2010 competition in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year, James Roumeliotis managed the most consecutive jumps on a pogo stick: 206,684. And Fred Grybowski holds the record for the most consecutive backflips on a pogo stick with 11.

Continue…

Amazon considered RIM takeover

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Amazon considered buying Research in Motion, but the BlackBerry maker rejected takeover overtures because it believes it can fix itself on its own, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Informal talks between the two companies don’t seem to have led to a formal offer or even discussions of a price tag for the takeover, according to anonymous sources. RIM’s board believes the company can regain ground in the crowded mobile market by launching new phones, restructuring, and using its assets more efficiently, the sources said.

Reuters

Trans-border crossings

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

Nothing is simple in the post-9/11 world of border security. That’s especially so in an era when a person boarding a plane might refuse to be identified as a man or a woman. Given that, the Canada Border Services Agency has developed a new strip search guideline. But now it’s a question of whether they’ve made things even more complicated.

Released in August, the protocol applies to “transsexual or intersexed” individuals; people who strongly identify or seek to live as a member of the opposite sex, have undergone surgery to physically change their sex, or were born with a mix of male and female reproductive parts. Such people can now choose from three options when faced with a strip search at the border: they can be searched by male border officers or female border officers—or receive a “split search.” That’s where things get interesting.

Two groups of officers perform the search. The person being examined strips the clothes from their upper body, and a team of officers from one sex perform the search. Then, the person puts their top back on and strips off the bottom half of their clothing before a second group of officers of the other sex scrutinizes down there. The whole process is observed by at least one non-participating officer to ensure everything is on the level. For those counting, that’s at least five officers for every split search.

Continue…

Don’t get on that motorbike!

By Jane Switzer - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

As Mexican drug cartels encroach and homicide rates climb, lawmakers in Honduras approved an unusual plan to curb violent crime: banning motorcyclists from riding with passengers. The law, passed on Dec. 7, temporarily bans pillion passengers for the next six months following two high-profile drive-by murders involving gunmen on motorbikes. On Dec. 6, radio show host Luz Marina Paz Villalobos and her driver were shot dead outside her home in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. The next day, former government security adviser Alfredo Landaverde met the same fate while driving with his wife. According to the United Nations, Honduras has the world’s highest homicide rate at 82 murders per 100,000 people a year—the by-product of drug-related slayings as cartels use the country as a trafficking hub for transporting cocaine from South America to the U.S.

Despite protests that the law punishes low-income citizens who rely on the popular motorbikes for transportation, Tegucigalpa Mayor Ricardo Álvarez told La Tribuna newspaper that in addition to the existing military presence on the streets, the city may need international support to fight violent crime, and that the ban on motorcycle passengers could still be “part of the solution to Honduras’s plight.”

The shape-shifting Meryl Streep

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady

In the opening scene of The Iron Lady, an elderly woman walks into a London convenience store, dithers in front of the dairy rack, then buys a pint of milk. The sight of her comes as a shock that never wears off. Though old and frail and addled by dementia, it is unmistakably Margaret Thatcher. Part of the surprise is seeing a legendary icon so enfeebled by age; the other part is seeing her so eerily incarnated by the shape-shifting Meryl Streep. By the end of the film, after watching Streep play the former British prime minister over four decades of her life, the likeness—from the imperious look to the mellifluous diction—is uncanny.

Looking not at all like Thatcher, Streep is holding court in a luxury two-storey suite with a fireplace, cathedral ceiling, and a vast bank of windows overlooking Manhattan’s Tribeca district. Her silky hair framing a unlined complexion, the 62-year-old actress looks casually stylish in a long purple jacket cinched with broad belt, black pants and sensible black boots with chunky heels. The suite belongs to the Greenwich Hotel, which is owned by Robert De Niro, who co-starred with Streep in The Deer Hunter, for which she received her first Oscar nomination 33 years ago. After a record 16 nominations, the woman who is routinely called The World’s Greatest Living Actress has won just two Oscars, and has been shut out since Sophie’s Choice (1982). She is overdue. Her tour de force in The Iron Lady, the crowning performance of her career, may be destined to break the losing streak.

But at this point does winning a third Oscar really matter? You expect Streep to demur with some modest words about art being its own reward. Instead, her Mona Lisa smile dissolves into a girlish laugh: “I’m very greedy!” she says.

Continue…

Narwhals: the new baby seals

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Stock/WWF-Canada

Narwhals made a surprise appearance this year at Cambridge Bay, on the south coast of Victoria Island in Canada’s High Arctic. The whales, famous for the single, spiralling tusk sported by the adult males, don’t usually venture that far west. So when dozens of them showed up offshore in late August, the mostly Inuit community of about 1,500 rejoiced. Hunters took to their boats with rifles and harpoons, and landed about 10. Fresh muktuk—the vitamin-rich outer layer of skin and blubber—was, as old ways dictate, widely shared. And photos of smiling hunters posing by dead narwhals were, as contemporary culture demands, posted on Facebook.

That social-media celebration of hunter-gatherer tradition might suggest that narwhal hunting is fitting in surprisingly well in the 21st century. But Inuit groups and federal officials are bracing for international scrutiny of the killing of about 500 of these photogenic marine mammals every year. Unless Canada can prove they are being protected, outcry from abroad is all but certain to become an issue. “Things may not have changed for the people living in the North,” says Steve Ferguson, a federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientist, “but there’s a lot more worldwide attention being given to Arctic mammals.”

The key reason for that concern is climate change. As Arctic sea ice shrinks, attention has focused on the fate of polar bears. But a study in the journal Ecological Adaptations, which rated the risk of global warming to 11 Arctic mammals, argued narwhals are more vulnerable. Ferguson, a co-author of that 2008 report, says the narwhal’s unique adaptation to living under the ice makes it especially vulnerable to its disappearance.

Continue…

Who’s suing whom

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

P.E.I: A woman is suing a Charlottetown hotel for $100,000 after she fell victim to the danger that every pool operator is at pains to point out: the poolside is slippery when wet. The woman alleges she slipped and fell on the wet pool deck after walking down a carpeted staircase. She claims that injuries to her left foot have forced her to overuse her right foot, leading to knee and back injuries.

Quebec: The family of a Montreal man crushed to death in a parking garage three years ago is suing the owner of the building. The man, 36, was killed when he suffocated under a massive chunk of concrete that broke off the ceiling. His family contends the building’s owner neglected obvious signs of disrepair: cracks, falling concrete fragments, and corrosion caused by de-icing salt.

Ontario: Three migrant workers from Mexico are suing an Ontario company and the federal government, claiming they were kicked off the job and sent packing for no apparent reason. They were hired to work on a family-owned strawberry farm in Vineland, Ont., through the federal migrant worker program. They’re each seeking $50,000 for breach of contract, and claim their Charter right to a fair hearing was breached.

Alberta: The City of Lethbridge is suing a 43-year-old man for $45,000 in damages after he shot a photo radar box that caught him driving over the speed limit. Of the three shots he fired, one narrowly missed a little boy sitting in a passing truck. The man was recently sentenced to three years in jail.

British Columbia: A woman is suing Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital after a stroke she suffered on the operating table gave her cognitive impairment and physical disabilities. She contends that the negligence of doctors and nurses performing her open-heart surgery allowed an embolism to travel to her brain, triggering the stroke. Her ability to enjoy life, she claims, has been reduced.

How MOSE(s) will save Venice

By Jonathan Hiltz - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:02 AM - 0 Comments

Crystian Cruz/Flickr

There are a number of reasons to visit Venice in the winter. For one, the weather is pleasantly cool—though not cold—and you won’t smell the canals, which tend to reek like stagnant water does in the summer heat. Most importantly, though, you might get a chance to splash around in your rubber boots in one of the enormous puddles that form around the city streets during what the locals call “acqua alta” (or, “high water”). Kids just love it.

Hurry up, though, for the puddles may soon be gone. Italians are putting in place a new system that will protect the city from recurrent flooding, sheltering this gorgeous living museum of classic architecture, art and ancient European culture that’s been subsiding at a rate of about seven centimetres every 100 years.

The phenomenon, of course, is nothing new–archaeologist Albert Ammerman of Colgate University notes it’s been happening for about 1,000 years,–but in the last century alone the city has gone under by a whopping 24 cm. It’s not just that water levels globally are rising, repeated seasonal flooding and increased motorboat activity have also shifted the somewhat unstable ground underneath the city, aggravating the problem.

Ideas to slow Venice’s descent into the sea have ranged from bizarre to brutal. One 2005 proposal, for example, envisioned pumping loads of salt water underneath the sandy ground on which Venice is built.  In theory, the earth would expand and raise the city by an estimated 30 cm. Another, rather barbarous, way of dealing with the problem–and one which has been actually put to use in certain instances–consists of tearing down old Venetian buildings that become too waterlogged and submerged, and replacing them with new structures built on solid stone foundations. The practice, unsurprisingly, has proven highly controversial.

Then Venetians turned to Moses. Well, not quite. MOSE, which means Moses in Italian, is the emblematic acronym for what in English translates to Experimental Electromechanical Module. The project, scheduled to become operational in 2014, consists of building rows of underwater flood gates that will cut off the Venetian lagoon from the surrounding Adriatic Sea, protecting it from flooding.

The Biblical  reference hasn’t been enough to save MOSE from controversy–even in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. The project has come under significant fire for its epic price tag, which is currently estimated at $6.3 billion. The Netherlands and low-lying communities in England, critics say, have found more cost-effective ways of protecting themselves form rising seawaters. Environmentalists have also voiced concern about–and taken legal action against–the amount of construction MOSE requires, particularly the need to level parts of the sea bed in order to accommodate the gates. And yet, builders and politicians assure work is going to be finished on time.

But if MOSE will deliver collective salvation to Venetians, it will also likely put an end to one of their city’s iconic mainstays: acqua alta.

REVIEW: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs so swiftly attract our inner muse. Confronted by their mystery we fill in the blanks, devising the most satisfying narratives, imbuing the blankest of faces with the knowingest of smiles. Few faces, though, are as blank or as knowing as Maier’s, a nanny whose first book of photographs has arrived posthumously, decades after they were taken.

It’s a treasure of over 100 black and white images, shot mainly in the ’50s and ’60s in New York and Chicago, a paean to vernacular life. A boy carries a blur of pigeons. Kids in an alley take a scolding from a burly white-haired man. Some convey the directness of an icon: a black man rides a massive draft horse bareback, with rope reins, through the city. There are dead horses in the gutters and panhandling men in well-kept suits. Buttoned-up cops cart off bloodied drunks. The long shots contain the warmth of Bruegel: in the corner of a schoolyard, a priest in a cassock drills a ball at an adolescent boy.

Little is known of Maier—as Dyer, a novelist, observes, she “exists entirely in terms of what she saw.” She grew up in France, moved to New York in 1951, then turned to nannying in Chicago. When free, she roamed the streets shooting, showing the results to no one. It’s said she was briefly homeless in old age, but children she’d cared for learned of it and intervened. She died in 2009, at 83. No one knew of her work, which surfaced only in 2007, when Maloof, a Chicago entrepreneur, bought a bundle of her negatives, sight unseen, at an auction held after she failed to pay for a storage locker. (The book’s failure is that it lacks much of this backstory.)

Who was she? In self-portraits she holds her Rolleiflex like a talisman against her chest—a boyish face with a frank, blank expression. In the final print, captured unawares in a mirror fleetingly held aloft in a workman’s gloved hands, she’s suddenly smiling in her truest account of herself.

REVIEW: Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

At the outbreak of the Second World War, neutral Portugal was an impoverished authoritarian state on the fringe of global events. Then, almost overnight, its capital, Lisbon, became the place where Allies and Axis kept an eye on each other. That suited the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar, who knew the risks of joining either the Allies (German or Spanish invasion) or the Axis (losing Portugal’s colonies to Britain). The belligerents also accepted the status quo. The Allies in particular desired an escape hatch from the Nazi-dominated continent, and thousands of refugees passed through Lisbon. Toss in the spies (including Ian Fleming, who based Casino Royale on Lisbon’s chic seaside casino in Estoril) and the exiled royalty (including the duke and duchess of Windsor) and Lochery is right: Lisbon was “like Casablanca, only 20 times more.”

And then there was the wolfram, the rare hard metal vital to modern armaments. Portugal was its main European source. Just as the Allies took over an Azores island for an air base (the price of Portuguese neutrality), the Germans made it clear that peace depended upon access to wolfram. That too suited Salazar, who played, in Lochery’s retelling, his limited cards skilfully. The tungsten was forthcoming, but only in exchange for gold, which the Nazis obtained by looting Europe. Portugal ended the war with at least 124 tonnes of German-paid gold (and almost certainly much more), three-quarters of which U.S. negotiators believed was looted.

But those negotiators, who succeded in forcing the return of stolen gold by other neutral nations, were hamstrung by their own government’s desire to keep the Azores base for the new Cold War. In the end, the Portuguese returned just four tonnes. The rest remained as an integral part of Portugal’s slow transition to a modern economy, and as one more of the war’s still-open wounds.

Whither Egypt?

By Peter Fragiskatos - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 7:34 AM - 0 Comments

In early December, the future of post-Mubarak Egypt became a little clearer after the results of the first round of parliamentary elections were announced. Islamist factions—led by the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—dominated with 60 percent of the vote.

The second round of the process was held last week. Although the outcome has yet to be announced, early reports indicate that the FJP will again come out on top. The third stage will take place in January and if the rural provinces continue to vote as expected—efforts to blend Islam and politics find more sympathy here than in the cities—Islamism will have quickly secured a place for itself.

On the surface, the implications of this seem obvious. The Sharia (Islamic law) is bound to be introduced. The status of women and Christians, who make up around 10 percent of the total population, will be threatened. And, because Islam is apparently hostile to democracy, the demands for liberty and human rights that continue to be voiced in Tahrir Square will fall on deaf ears. In short, Mubarak’s tyranny will simply be replaced by an uncompromising fundamentalism. Continue…

The doge of Des Moines

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 5:32 AM - 0 Comments

What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, ‘What do you think about Dr. Paul?’ These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- and 60-second ads. If you ask Iowans if they’re for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they’d say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that’s OK. But people don’t all know that.

I’m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed by the reaction of Iowa Republicans like Andy Cable to the suddenly-real possibility that Ron Paul might win—and thereby discredit!—the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses. The anomalous importance of Iowa within the U.S. election system has traditionally been defended on two major grounds: (a), that the state is pretty representative of the American “middle” in both geographic and demographic senses, and (b), that a small state like Iowa (or New Hampshire) can scrutinize candidates with a salutary close-up intensity, given a long pre-election period in which to do it.

There is no doubt something to these arguments. (Along with obvious rebuttals to both.) But how can a major party have its cake and eat it too? Specifically, how can the concept of Iowa’s special mission as a testing range for candidates be reconciled with Mr. Cable’s panicky Yuletide talk of uninformed goon voters flying off the handle? Cable’s state has benefited significantly from being a political bellwether, both from the quadrennial media activity and attention and from the political pork that follows. (Ethanol accounts for 9% of the state’s GDP.) Yet Cable is not even waiting for Paul to be nominated before undermining the whole basis for taking Iowa seriously.

Maybe it should be taken seriously; it would be hard to argue, at any rate, that Ron Paul is doing well in Iowa just because he’s so friendly to federal ethanol subsidies. Iowans have taken a good look at Paul, with his anti-Drug-War stance and his isolationist foreign policy and his constitutional literalism, and they appear to have tentatively decided that they like what they see. The response from the “elites”–specifically described as such in Jonathan Burns and Alexander Martin’s story for Politico—seems very much like Brecht’s line about dissolving the people and electing a new one.

You say the party’s insanely elaborate nominating procedure is threatening to deliver a frontrunner who doesn’t want to bung dope-smokers into jail or garrison the lunar surface? In that case, the governor of Iowa warns, “People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third.” This is not, I hasten to add, how Iowa chooses a governor.

Most people don’t realize just how far removed the “Iowa caucuses” are removed from any actual end-result in the form of a delegate count. It is not especially easy even to find out this information, though you will have a sense of it if you have ever viewed the chaos on C-SPAN. The marquee event is actually a process of selecting delegates from each precinct for county-level Republican conventions; after some free-form canvassing, voters in any individual precinct may be given a preprinted ballot, may be handed a blank scrap of paper, or may simply be asked to participate in a show of hands. There is no requirement that delegates even represent a specific presidential candidate.

Nonetheless, by some shockingly vague and opaque procedure, the state Republican Party manages to immediately generate and publicize a tally of notional “votes” for each nominee. But the precinct delegates to the county conventions don’t actually get together until March, at which time they assemble to select delegates to the congressional district conventions (which happen in April) and the statewide convention (in June). Iowa’s ultimate national delegation consists of three representatives each from the four congressional districts; 13 at-large delegates representing the entire state; and three state party mucky-mucks.

The whole system captures the arbitrariness, the ceremoniousness, and the rampant bargaining of the infamous electoral system of the pre-Napoleonic Venetian Republic. The Venetians used ten unsummarizable, half-daft rounds of lot-drawing and delegation to select their chief magistrate, the doge. For five centuries, nearly everybody in Europe, including the Venetians themselves, found this system incomprehensible. But it had virtues. In particular, it made the identities of the ultimate electors so difficult to predict that it was inefficient to target any person in particular for corruption or for what we now call “lobbying”. At the same time, it promised a clear and objective result if the procedures, which themselves acquired a charming patina of sacredness over time, were followed religiously.

Today’s U.S. party nominating process has the same totemistic quality, but without any of the benefits to democracy. The reported “outcome” of the January precinct caucuses may not reflect the reality of voter will, and it usually takes the form of a subjective “message” anyway. The perceived winner, as the governor says, might be the fellow who finished third—as long as he was expected beforehand to finish sixth. (Who creates these expectations? Don’t ask!) And far from dispersing and concealing the potential targets of “lobbying”, the Iowa caucuses make the whole state a focus of lavish promises by candidates for the national executive. If Ron Paul really does win, and thus turn Iowa into a sideshow, it may actually end up counting as the most consequential accomplishment in a long lifetime of public service.

HBO Cancels Stuff Now

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 5:49 PM - 0 Comments

I was glad to see Enlightened get picked up for a second season even as HBO canceled most of its other half-hours: Hung, Bored to Death, and How to Make It In America. (I praised Enlightened on this blog a few weeks back, but I admit that this is pure correlation, not causation.) Enlightened didn’t get any viewers, but its reviews were very good once people realized that it had improved on the pilot, and Laura Dern is likely to get some Emmy attention. So for a network that is willing to renew a low-rated show, at least for two or three years, if it’s a “brand enhancer,” this may not have been a tough call – especially since none of its half-hour shows are getting a lot of viewers.

That’s where HBO is in a weak position, even as it has shored up its position in hour-long drama (with at least three successful shows – Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and, one must reluctantly admit, True Blood). It used to have half-hours that attracted a lot of people to the network: first Larry Sanders, then especially Sex and the City, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and then the first few years of Entourage. But all the half-hours after Entourage have been shows that are there, and sometimes very good, but not a lot of people know they’re there, and there’s nothing much HBO’s promotional machine can do to make them the centre of attention. The good and bad half-hours alike have been small, quirky shows that get lost on a network that specializes in epic melodrama. (Treme isn’t a half-hour, but it has the same problem: it is basically small, and HBO is a network for big shows.) Hung managed to get some attention because of its central gimmick, which made it easier to publicize than Eastbound & Down or even Flight of the Conchords, but by the end, it was hard to be particularly aware that it was around.

The thing about half-hour shows, especially now that more people consume TV whenever they like, is that it’s easier to consume than an hour-long show – it takes half as much time, obviously, and doesn’t have as many subplots and twists (even if it has a serialized plot, and some of them, like Curb, have only a whisper of that). Most half-hours require less commitment than an hour, and are perfect for watching when you want something fun or interesting. (People watch a Curb for some laughs, and a Louie to be intrigued or dazzled, but they don’t watch these shows on the edge of their seats wondering what will happen next week.) For a network like FX, half-hour shows work because they’re cheap, they’re well-received, they’re fun, and they appeal to a young audience. HBO has had trouble developing “fun” half-hours, and has instead focused a lot of its attention on using the half-hour format as an outlet for smaller stories than it could tell in dramas. Bored to Death could have been done as a one-hour show, but it would have been too small in scale and episodic to work on HBO as it currently stands. Now it’s gone, and HBO is left looking for a successor to Sex and the City and Entourage – shows that, whatever their problems, offered audiences something they wanted to believe in and couldn’t see in that exact form outside of HBO. Escapist shows, basically. Maybe the rise of escapist half-hours on the networks has cut off that avenue for HBO, but I doubt it. I think they just wanted to do some different things with their half-hours, and sometimes it worked artistically, but it left them without a real hit in that form. For the moment at least, the network is doing best with shows that demand a complete and total investment, namely hour-long serialized dramas. Half-hour shows can get passionate investment too, but in a different way, the Louie sort of way where people want to see what he’s up to this week.

The EU’s mess seen from Canada (bonus: fresh Mark Carney quotes)

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 5:48 PM - 0 Comments

For any Canadians trying to keep track of the scramble to solve the European debt crisis (good overview here), certain elements of the story have to keep reminding us of our own economic situation. Two particular points of stark contrast stand out:

Firstly, Canada has kept its own currency, despite sharing a free-trade zone with the United States, something the eurozone countries gave up in order to gain the apparent advantages of the euro and monetary union.

Secondly, Canada is a highly decentralized federation, not altogether unlike the European Union is some (but obviously not all) respects, yet the EU hasn’t adopted anything similar to the Canadian system for automatically transferring wealth from richer to poorer parts of the federation.

Continue…

Tax break bill with Keystone clause dies in Congress

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 3:26 PM - 0 Comments

The U.S. House of Representatives killed on Tuesday a bipartisan bill that combined a two-month payroll tax break with provisions forcing the Obama administration to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project. The Republican-led House rejected the bill, calling on the Senate to start negotiations for a full-year extension of the tax exemption instead. The provisions related to the Keystone XL were inserted into the bill as part of a package deal struck in the Senate over the weekend to attract votes from Republican representatives who support the project. If the tax exemption is not extended, taxes are set to raise next month for 160 million American workers. Without the legislation forcing a decision by the Obama administration on the $7-billion project, the TransCanada pipeline will have to wait for a State Department review set to be completed by 2013.

The Vancouver Sun

Candidate for sale

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 3:04 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Dewar pitches the future.

Merrill Lynch warns of Canada housing bubble

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Canada’s housing market is showing all the “classic signs” of a bubble, according to a report released Monday by Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch. “We estimate housing prices nationwide are about 10 per cent over valued,” the report says. Even so, the bank doesn’t expect Canada to go through a large-scale housing crash as the U.S. did during the recent recession. The report, however, does predict housing prices will dip five per cent in 2012. This drop will be spurred by increasing household debt in Canada, as well as potential jumps in joblessness as the global economy flirts with recession, according to the report. Much of the “over valuation, speculation and over supply” cited in the report relates to the condo industry, which has been booming in cities like Toronto. Once the investment surge in condos cools off, there will be an oversupply of units, and some people who purchased condos “will be left holding vacant units,” says the report. As a worst-case scenario, the report points to a housing price drop of 10 per cent nationwide in 2012 alongside soaring household debt and job losses.

The Globe and Mail