Return of the fighter

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Carolyn Kaster/AP

As they argue amongst themselves heading into the first primary votes next month, Republican presidential hopefuls can agree on this much: President Barack Obama has been “absent,” “missing,” “nowhere” and ineffectual on the most pressing issues of the day.

“He’s done nothing” on the debt, said Mitt Romney at a campaign stop last month. “He has completely disengaged from his job,” Michelle Bachmann told Fox News in November. Obama has shown “no leadership” on China, according to Jon Huntsman, and a “lack of leadership” on Syria, according to Rick Perry. On the economy, quipped Bachmann: “It’s been like, Where’s Waldo?”

It’s something of a U-turn from what Republicans argued in the prelude to the mid-term elections in 2010: that a power-hungry Obama was steamrolling America into an unrecognizable socialist state. That line helped sweep Tea Party candidates into Congress and gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives. But all of a sudden, they say, Obama is fiddling his thumbs—particularly in the face of America’s US$15-trillion debt.

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About that border deal between Canada and the U.S.

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:02 AM - 0 Comments

Amid the pageantry of a joint appearance at the White House alongside President Obama, the prime minister on Wednesday touted the new border security agreement in grandiose terms: the “most significant steps forward in Canada-U.S. cooperation since the North American Free Trade Agreement.” The agreement, though, is less a single leap than a series of many incremental gains, say the technocrats who labored in the shadows to put the multifaceted deal together. One Canadian official likened border negotiations to the cliché about football—it’s a “game of inches.” And this agreement covers a lot of inches—including myriad new ways in which the two nations will share data about travelers and cargo, the promise of a single on-line portal for importers and exporters who today have to schlep paper documents to a variety of government agencies, and pilot projects that will allow certain kinds of pre-inspected cargo to cross the border without stopping. It also includes a border wait-time measurement system and an inventory of border fees to help citizens and policy makers understand how well things are working—or not.

There is no doubt that Canadian officials have learned their lesson from years of trilateral “Three Amigos” summitry that resulted in lengthy bureaucratic to-do lists and more controversy than results. This time, they cut out Mexico, instead running a bilateral process focused on a limited number concrete high-impact results that could be implemented in a short period of time. Rather than endlessly negotiating over grand policy changes, they agreed to more modest pilot projects in complicated areas such as land border-preclearance in order to “build confidence” and demonstrate tangible results on the ground. Continue…

Is Obama the winner so far of the GOP nomination race?

By John Parisella - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 5:12 PM - 0 Comments

Once again, a new anybody-but-Mitt-Romney candidate has surged in the Republican polls. This time, it is former Speaker Newt Gingrich. After surviving onslaughts from Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, you would think Mitt Romney might start seeing some daylight and begin to build the support he’ll need to capture the nomination. He is the candidate with the best match-up numbers against Obama, so you would expect the Republican base to begin to see the advantages of Romney as the nominee. Instead, it is becoming evident that while Romney’s support may be steady, his candidacy is not catching fire. He remains the unloved frontrunner.

As with the others before him, Gingrich will now enter the phase of close scrutiny. Can he survive and emerge as the permanent anybody-but-Romney candidate? Or will he fail, as the others did before him, to maintain his momentum?  Continue…

It’s time for Canada to seek other friends besides the U.S.

By the editors - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Charles Dharapak/AP

From no-brainer to brainless in just a few weeks—Canada’s best interests have once again been trumped by American politics.

Just a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was calling the approval by the United States of TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico a “complete no-brainer.” The benefits to both countries in terms of employment, energy security and trade from the $7-billion project were so obvious and manifest that U.S. President Barack Obama’s consent seemed a sure thing.

Then Hollywood got involved. Superannuated stars such as Robert Redford and Daryl Hannah added their names to over-the-top civil disobedience protests against a “tar sands” pipeline from Alberta. Among the few coherent complaints expressed by green groups was concern the pipeline would cross the Ogallala aquifer that provides several Midwest states with drinking water. The project quickly became a test of Obama’s environmental credentials.

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The U.S. and Canada: we used to be friends

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

No one was more surprised than TransCanada PipeLines Ltd. itself by the Obama administration’s decision to impose a fresh year or more delay on a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline—TransCanada’s proposed 2,673-km project that could transport more than 700,000 barrels of crude oil from the oil sands in Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast of Texas. It had been heavily promoted by the governments of Canada and Alberta. And after two years of studies and drafts, the U.S. State Department had issued a final environmental assessment on Aug. 26 that had turned out to be even friendlier to the pipeline than supporters had been hoping for.

Indeed, the State Department concluded that there are “no significant impacts” to the environment along the route of the pipeline. The department also concluded that the pipeline would fill a need: even under a “low demand” outlook for oil, and even if there was increased fuel efficiency and a greater use of alternative energy sources, the hunger for Canadian crude oil would continue to grow among Gulf Coast refineries because supplies from countries such as Mexico and Venezuela are declining. Alternative transportation methods, such as trucking or rail, would add more emissions and run a higher risk of accidents than a pipeline. The project would not increase greenhouse gas emissions, State reasoned, because the oil would be produced for somebody to use in any case. And State also looked at 14 alternative routes and decided that none of them was preferable to the one proposed by TransCanada.

Then, little more than two months later, on Nov. 10, the State Department abruptly balked and declared the need for an additional study—one that would take a year or more—to look at an alternative pipeline route within the state of Nebraska that would avoid the Sand Hills area. That is a region of grass-covered sand dunes that covers a quarter of the state—and also Nebraska’s Ogallala aquifer, one of America’s largest underground sources of fresh water. The study is expected to delay a permit decision, which State had said would come by the end of December, until 2013. Had the project been approved on schedule, it could have started operating by then; the delay will push final approval for the project past the presidential election.

TransCanada was stunned. “We actually found out about it after others did,” company spokesperson Shawn Howard told Maclean’s. “It was a surprise. We thought the conclusions reached in the final environmental impact statement were pretty clear.” The company believed it had picked the best route. “The biggest issue was distance. This was the shortest route through that part of the state, and as a result it had the least amount of land disturbance and affected the fewest land-owners,” he said.

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REVIEW: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

This Bob Woodward-style inside account of President Barack Obama’s economic team is grabbing headlines for one quote. According to Suskind, the warfare between National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers and Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag grew so destructive by mid-2009 that their chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, ordered them to start attending bury-the-hatchet dinners once a week. At the first such meeting, as the pair talked about their Clinton administration pasts, Summers suddenly confided: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would have never made these [Obama’s] mistakes.”

The quote is a sort of miniature allegory for the book, to which the Summers-Orszag battle is fundamental. Summers is Suskind’s Satan—an unrelenting sociopath who wins every argument with fencing tricks, testosterone and bluster. Summers gradually runs so far with the traditionally third-rate NEC job that he ends up with almost as much clout as Emanuel. Orszag, by contrast, is portrayed as a naive, data-driven optimist who lacks Summers’s brutality or savvy. One notices, however, that the dinner dialogue was almost certainly leaked to Suskind by Orszag, who left OMB in August 2010. (There were only two people at that table.)

One also notices that Orszag doesn’t seem to have disagreed with Summers. A lot of people, it seems, are leaving the Obama White House disillusioned. Over and over in Suskind’s narrative, Obama dazzles potential hires with his command of detail and his imagination. And over and over he disappoints—failing to rein in rogues like Summers, tolerating unbelievable insubordination, cultivating sexism, and using instinct to tackle problems that require the incisive reasoning one would expect from a celebrated law professor. Suskind’s portrait of the President is so disconcerting that one is almost forced to take another long, hard look at those Onion jokes about Obama being bipolar. It’s essential reading, especially for Obamaphiles.

Don’t count Obama out just yet

By John Parisella - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 2:19 PM - 0 Comments

At this time next year, American voters will be choosing a president. Current polls suggest a tight election, with President Obama trailing in some crucial swing states. But a year in politics is an eternity.

The Obama people are banking on the appeal of stability. “Don’t compare me with the Almighty,” Obama said in a recent speech, “compare me to the alternative.” The current crop of Republican presidential candidates has indeed been getting mixed reviews ahead of the primaries. Mitt Romney and Herman Cain may be leading the polls, but neither is showing much traction with independent voters. Many of the leading contenders have shown they are vulnerable—Romney fails to generate enthusiasm, Rick Perry has lost his early momentum, and Cain is mired in scandal. Continue…

Obama the hawk

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Barack Obama used U.S. air power to prevent a massacre and facilitate the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. He sent a team of Navy SEALS to conduct a secret surgical strike in Pakistan that took out Osama bin Laden, America’s public enemy number one. He sent a Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, whose extremist preaching was linked to several attempted terrorist attacks against the U.S. All three objectives were achieved without invasion, occupation, or the loss of American lives.

The last decade was dominated by the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” display of U.S. military might, a swagger that descended into a “long war” of occupation and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq that left thousands of Americans dead and wounded, and cost upward of a trillion dollars. But cold, calculating and nimble, Obama has turned a new page on the projection of American power. His emphasis on technology, intelligence, and leaning on allies is leaving a smaller and less costly U.S. military footprint on the globe, but one that is proving to be just as lethal to its adversaries.

In his first days as President, Obama ordered interrogation techniques cleaned up and the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed within a year. Congress objected, and Guantánamo has remained open, but the President has added zero detainees to the inmate population. Indeed, he’s barely taken any prisoners—instead, he has presided over many more drone strikes against terrorist suspects than George W. Bush. He is not waterboarding enemy prisoners who have been removed from the battlefield; he is killing them where they stand. (The administration denies frequent accusations that it is killing militants when capturing them would have been feasible.)

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Billionaires against Obama

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 7, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Canadians in America do a lot of things very well, including Obama-bashing. Real estate and publishing tycoon Mort Zuckerman (New York’s Daily News, U.S. News & World Report) supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, but he’s become the leading spokesman for an aggrieved minority: billionaires who feel Obama is treating them badly. Or, as the Montreal-born Zuckerman put it on the CNBC network: “There is a sense in the business community, not just for big business but for business all over, that this is an anti-business administration.”

Zuckerman, a McGill graduate who moved to the U.S. in 1961, has been worried about Obama since 2009, even while claiming that he “helped write” one of Obama’s speeches (White House speech writers denied they’d ever met Zuckerman). He wrote that Obama was creating “a country of ‘born-again budget hawks’ who will rise up if taxes are boosted to pay for it all,” and commemorated the first year of the administration with an article entitled, “He’s done everything wrong.”

In the last month, the 74-year-old Zuckerman has laid out a harsher case: it’s Obama’s fault the economy isn’t recovering. “Those who might help us escape,” he wrote in the Financial Times, “are now being held back by the anti-business policies of President Barack Obama.” The biggest drag on business, he says, is Obama’s criticism of “fat cats”: “this perceived hostility,” wrote Zuckerman, “saps the animal spirits required for taking risks on expansions and start-ups.”

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Yes we can–give Obama the boot?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

David McNew/Reuters

Twice a year for a decade, John Della Volpe has surveyed thousands of university students across America about their engagement in politics. Lately, he has noticed a striking change.

When he began the survey in 2000, says Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, young people were tuned out. “In 2000 and early 2001, they didn’t vote and weren’t participating because, they told us, politics and government didn’t matter. To make a difference, they told us you had to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself,” he recalls. September 11 and the Iraq war changed all that. Suddenly, the issues were on a greater scale, and the differences between the administration of George W. Bush and the Democrats were often stark. For nearly a decade, the youth vote increased in every federal contest over the previous comparable election.

“Perhaps the only silver lining to 9/11 was that it awoke the political spirit of this generation,” says Volpe. And it mattered. In the 2008 presidential election, more voters were under 30 (18 per cent) than were over 65 (16 per cent). The so-called millennials—sons and daughters of the baby boomers—still don’t turn out to vote proportionally as frequently as older people—but there are enough of them to make an increasing impact.

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Can Romney be stopped?

By John Parisella - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

With Hermain Cain riding high in the polls and former Governor Mitt Romney racking up endorsements, some cracks have started to show in the campaigns of their opponents for the GOP nomination.

In recent days, a prominent Tea Party leader has called on Michelle Bachmann to quit, Rick Perry has floated the idea of skipping some upcoming debates, and Jon Huntsman has retreated to New Hampshire. The rest of the field has so far proven unable to distinguish themselves from the pack. Traditionally, developments like these favour the candidate with the most money, the best organization, and the strongest base of support—in this case, Mitt Romney.

There is a consistent pattern emerging in this race and that is the stability of the support for Romney. It’s not high, and it shows little growth beyond 25 per cent, but it’s steady. His debate performances in this campaign far surpass those of 2008, leading a growing number of people to view him as the one to beat. Despite the buzz about Cain, the pizza magnate’s support could prove volatile once the primary season begins. Continue…

Careful what you wish for, Prof. Mendes

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 4:42 PM - 26 Comments

Rebecca W/Flickr

Political newspaper iPolitics.ca accidentally unearths a breaking story, as liberal law professor Errol Mendes uses its electronic pages to praise the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. In Citizens United SCOTUS ruled that campaign-finance law must treat corporations, unions, and other groups as though they have the same speech rights as the individual people of which they are made up. The American left cannot mention this heinous act of pro-corporate radicalism without ejecting a fount of furious spittle; the “repeal” of corporate personhood is, for example, the first and foremost demand of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their allies elsewhere. President Obama memorably denounced Citizens United from the podium, staring the nine justices right in the eyes, in his 2010 State of the Union address. But Mendes apparently thinks corporate speech is an “important form of political expression” and that it may be protected by our Charter. Damn, Canada really is moving rightward! Continue…

Do the math

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 3 Comments

Nate Silver measures the impact of campaign advertising.

Campaign ads matter more when a candidate can outspend the opponent. This simple fact sometimes gets lost because people fixate on the content of ads. But the volume of ads may matter more. Consider the 2000 presidential election. In the final two weeks of the campaign, residents in battleground state were twice as likely to see a Bush ad as a Gore ad. This cost Gore 4 points among uncommitted voters. The same thing happened in 2008, when Mr. Obama vastly outspent his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.

Whistle stops and tweets

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

Twitter has emerged as a favourite tool of U.S. politicians trying to get their message out, even if that message is former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin telling people to “refudiate” something. And with US$6 billion expected to be spent during the 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign, executives at Twitter have decided it’s a good time to cash in on all of the partisan bickering flying back and forth in 140 characters or less. Twitter recently said it will start selling political ads through its “promoted tweets.” The tweets won’t appear in users’ regular feeds, but will show up during searches. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is said to be one of the politicians included in Twitter’s pilot project. Perhaps he’s hoping to boost his 100,000 Twitter followers—a far cry from Palin’s 655,000, not to mention U.S. President Barack Obama’s 10 million.

Dilma Rousseff: more than just Lula lite

By Jen Cutts - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Pedro Ladeira/AFP/Getty Images

Dilma Rousseff is on a roll. After just nine months in office, Brazil’s president has parlayed a string of corruption scandals into a boost in popularity (87 per cent of Brazilians say she is doing an average, good or excellent job). She is quickly shaking off the expectation that she would quietly serve as a placeholder for former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a man described by Barack Obama as “the most popular politician on Earth” (but prevented by law from seeking a third consecutive term in office). And when the UN General Assembly opened last week, Rousseff delivered the opening address, the first woman ever to do so.

For most heads of state, losing four ministers and dozens of officials to accusations of corruption in under a year would spell trouble. But Rousseff is making it work for her, appearing to Brazilians to be shaking bad apples from government. The latest is Pedro Novais, 81, who resigned on Sept. 14 as tourism minister after a São Paolo newspaper ran a story alleging he used public money to hire a maid and chauffeur for his wife. In August, more than 30 officials from his ministry resigned over similar accusations. Rousseff has also pushed out her chief of staff and transport and agriculture ministers, all over allegations of graft.

The press in Brazil has tried to paint a picture of a president who is “only putting on a show of cleaning house,” says Matthew Taylor, a political scientist at the University of São Paulo, “without engaging the deeper problems of corruption.” But that image isn’t sticking. “It seems she’s managed to convince the public that she had nothing to do with the worst of the problems,” says Taylor, by “discreetly pointing to the fact that she ‘inherited’ much of her cabinet” from Lula, who took more of a wait-and-see approach to releasing scandal-stained ministers.

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Newsmakers: Sept. 22-29

By Colby Cosh, Jaime J. Weinman, and Richard Warnica - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jason DeCrow/AP

No, they didn’t walk home

Two American hikers convicted of espionage in Iran were released after the sultan of Oman posted US$930,000 bail for them. Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, 29-year-old pro-Palestine activists and former Berkeley classmates, were seized along with a female friend while on holiday in 2009; Iran claims they illegally crossed their border on foot. The woman, Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancée, was freed last fall on medical grounds. Bauer and Fattal’s release, with both in apparent good health, is seen as a political victory for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over hardline clerics in the Islamic republic.

Burqa fine

Only in France is having it and not flaunting it a crime. Last week, a court outside Paris fined two women for refusing to show their faces in public. Hind Ahmas and Najate Nait Ali were the first Frenchwomen charged under a law that bans full facial coverings outside the home. Passed last spring, the ban was aimed, rather transparently, at France’s substantial Muslim minority. It may also have been an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to shore up his vulnerable right flank. But if anything, the law has galvanized supporters of the niqab. Ahmas told reporters she intends to challenge her fine in the European Court of Human Rights—while Kenza Drider, who also wears the niqab, now says she intends to run against Sarkozy in the presidential election. “When a woman wants to maintain her freedom she must be bold,” Drider told the Associated Press.

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Yes we can—stop the Keystone XL pipeline

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 17 Comments

One day in early September, some dozen Democratic activists showed up at the Washington state headquarters of Obama for America, the President’s re-election campaign organization in Seattle. They cornered the state director, Dustin Lambro, and called on the President to block TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would bring crude oil from the Alberta oil sands through the U.S. Midwest to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, potentially doubling exports of oil sands crude to the U.S. “It’s not an issue I know much about,” Lambro said. So the activists gave him an earful.

“We want to get the message to President Obama,” said a bearded man in a baseball cap, “that if you want us to vote for you this time around, this is what you’ve got to do.” Added a woman: “If you want us to work for you, that’s more important. We all worked for you.” Said a grey-haired business owner: “I was a campaign donor for Obama. I raised money for him. I raised a lot of money for him. We can’t afford to have Barack Obama keep compromising on the issues and the values that endeared him to his faithful.” By the end of the encounter, Lambro offered: “I’ll call my boss in Chicago. She’ll relay the message to the senior leadership of the campaign.”

The scene, as captured on a YouTube video, is playing out all over the country as anti-pipeline advocates increasingly turn away from the official State Department-run permit process, and turn up the heat on Barack Obama’s political operation. They have been showing up at his speeches and fundraisers, and greet him with chants of “Yes We Can—Stop the Pipeline.” They bird-dog his top campaign manager, Jim Messina. And as a follow-up to the summer’s civil disobedience that saw some 1,200 activists arrested in front of the White House in August, they are planning demonstrations at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago, and bigger operations at his state headquarters. Environmentalists also plan to remind the President of his environmental campaign promises on Nov. 6, one year before the election, by bringing 10,000 people to Washington to form a human ring around the White House.

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Newsmakers: Sept. 15-22

By Alex Ballingall, Jonathon Gatehouse, Cathy Gulli, Nicholas Köhler, Chris Sorensen, and Patricia Treble - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tim Wimborne/Reuters

Siren car swan song

The last of America’s most popular police car, the Ford Crown Victoria, rolled off an assembly line in St. Thomas, Ont., last week. The Ford plant closure, first announced in 2009 at the nadir of North America’s manufacturing doldrums, puts 1,100 people out of work in the rust-belt town, best known as the place where Jumbo, the P.T. Barnum circus elephant, died after being hit by a train in 1885. Big and blocky, the Crown Vic had long been popular with police departments and cab companies for its durability and roominess. Still, it got just 10 km a litre and had sold poorly—yet another dead jumbo in St. Thomas.

A scrumbag

It was just six weeks ago that Mike Tindall married Zara Phillips, the Queen’s granddaughter. But the honeymoon is definitely over for the muscular captain of England’s Rugby World Cup squad. While out celebrating a tournament-opening victory over Argentina this week, Tindall and his teammates got tipsy and scrummed several young ladies in the bar. Good clean fun, until the papers back home got hold of the photos of Tindall canoodling with a “mystery blond.” We are not amused.

Tough assignment

Shortly before U.S. Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for rushing into an Afghan “killing zone” to rescue 36 troops in 2009, the 23-year-old and his family met privately with President Barack Obama. They weren’t alone. João Silva, a New York Times photographer whose legs were blown off by a land mine last October in Afghanistan, was invited by Meyer and Obama to capture the meeting. Silva found the assignment—his first outside the confines of military hospitals where he is undergoing extensive rehabilitation—difficult on prosthetic legs. Though the photographs were deemed “strong” by his paper, Silva said, “I wasn’t getting the shots. I was missing the shots.”

Billionaire boys’ club

RIM’s fall from tech-industry grace has hit a symbolic milestone for Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, co-CEOs of the Waterloo, Ont.-based company, who have lost their status as billionaires. Both Balsillie and Lazaridis own five per cent of the company shares, a chunk that was worth an estimated US$1.9 billion in February. Now their shares are worth about US$640 million, according to Bloomberg estimates. This month, Jaguar Financial even advised RIM to sell itself off. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-based phones chipping away at RIM’s former glory, maybe BlackBerrys just aren’t as sexy anymore.

Wilderness tipoff

Kristoffer Clausen became a folk hero in his native Norway when he spent a year living off the harsh land with just a rifle, fishing rod and a dog for companionship. A book recounting his adventures, which began in 2009, became a bestseller and spawned a TV series and even a sponsorship deal. However, a local newspaper recently revealed the story was just too good to be true. It turns out that he’d supplemented his spartan live-off-the-land lifestyle by shopping in malls, living in a Swedish cottage for a month and even renting a car. “I’m sorry for doing it,” he finally confessed. “I’ve been an idiot.”

Don’t stop believing

If the myth persists that housewives lead boring lives, look to Michaele Salahi for proof of the contrary. The star of the (cancelled) Real Housewives of D.C. was reported missing by her bankrupt wine merchant husband Tareq after she disappeared last week. Six hours later, the rakish blond turned up in Tennessee—where she was romancing Neal Schon, guitarist of the ’80s band Journey, who described their relationship as “intimate and passionate.” This attention-grabbing charade should come as no shock: Salahi and her husband crashed a White House dinner in 2009, claiming they were invited, and she once fibbed about working as a Washington Redskins cheerleader. Why lie when your real life is this unbelievable?

Alberta’s great race

Gary Mar had a good week. The prospective leader of Alberta’s indefatigable Progressive Conservative government handily won the first round of voting in the party’s leadership race, winning 41 per cent of the tally at a convention in Calgary. Just a few days later, Mar gained requisite right-wing “cred” when two fellow leadership candidates—Ted Morton and Rick Orman—emerged from his campaign bus to give him their endorsement. The upstart Wildrose party has threatened to dig into the PCs’ right flank with rhetoric that echoes that of the Tea Party. So it’s little wonder that Mar was all smiles as he and his two big-name supporters spoke of his fiscal conservatism and economic level-headedness. After all, if Mar wins, he’ll immediately become Alberta’s newest PC premier: perennial top dog in the province.

Rehab? No, no, no.

Canada’s youngest multiple killer, who went by the online handle Runaway Devil, has resurfaced as a freshman at a Calgary university. The girl, who can’t be named by law, was just 12 when she convinced her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Allan Steinke, to kill her mother, father and eight-year-old brother inside their Medicine Hat, Alta., home back in 2006. Her 10-year sentence, part of which was spent at an Edmonton psychiatric hospital, will be completed one year after she is scheduled to graduate in 2015. But the girl’s lawyer now says her rehabilitation plan has been derailed after the Calgary Herald revealed details about her studies. A sentencing review has been postponed.

Oh Jackie

Jacqueline Kennedy was just 34 and four months a widow when she submitted to a recorded interview with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and one-time aide to her husband, president John F. Kennedy. The chat is part of an oral history of Camelot released last week that reveals a woman of sharp judgment. Indira Gandhi, later India’s PM, was “pushy” and “bitter.” French president Charles de Gaulle was an “egomaniac.” Martin Luther King Jr., meanwhile, was “a phony” who carried on extramarital affairs. She reserves her harshest criticism for former Canadian PM John Diefenbaker, whom she met during a visit with her husband in May 1961 and calls “painful.” During a lunch, the Dief “insisted on telling all these Churchill stories . . . calling him old Winston or ‘the old boy’ or something.” Boring.

Raccoon love

It took two brothers, Bill and Eric MacDonald, whose lives both revolve around the same street in Stratford, P.E.I., a whole week to realize that each of them had adopted orphaned baby raccoons one day this past summer. Bill, 69, found his outside BJ’s International Truck Centre, the family business, and took him in, buying kitten milk and a small bottle. He and his wife, Joan, named him Rambo because, Bill says, “he destroys everything,” including eating two keys off Joan’s laptop. One day, Eric, 72, who lives across the street, visited Bill’s office and spotted Rambo. “He thought it was his ’coon,” Bill says. Eric had adopted Rambo’s brother the same day and called him Rascal. But Bill and Eric must soon release the animals. Rambo already weighs 10 lb. “After they get a year old they get to be ferocious,” says Bill.

Wives on the bus

When world leaders and dignitaries gather, there is plenty of pomp to the affair: red carpets are rolled out, flags are raised, armoured cars convoy. Unless, perhaps, the politician is a woman. Last week, during a gathering of Pacific nation leaders, Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia, was kicked off the “leaders’ bus” and redirected to the bus for political wives. Gillard’s aide corrected them, and the PM took her hard-earned seat.

Rat castle

Toronto City Hall has long had problems with mice and squirrels—never, you might be surprised to learn, with rats. But last week, a big bruiser of a rodent found its way into budget chief Mike Del Grande’s office, and later bit a city worker sent to remove it. The interloper was just one episode in a whole panoply of goings-on at City Hall, where Mayor Rob Ford—he of “gravy train” fame—has been attempting to push through budget cuts. Quipped left-leaning Coun. Adam Vaughan of the animal: “It was looking for gravy, it didn’t find any so it ate a city worker.” The rat was put down. Even dead, he is likely more popular than the mayor, whose approval ratings have tanked.

Golf’s next great?

Teen golf prodigy Alexis Thompson became the youngest ever LPGA Tour winner last week, stunning the golfing world. The 16-year-old—who, at 12, became the youngest woman to qualify for the U.S. Open—called the win the “best feeling ever.”

Is America in a depression?

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 12 Comments

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Everywhere Darren Enns looks these days he sees the devastation wrought by America’s grinding employment crisis. As the treasurer of a construction union in southern Nevada, the state with the highest unemployment in the country, Enns has watched as friends and colleagues—the bricklayers, electricians and drywallers who thrived during Las Vegas’s housing boom—struggle to move on to other careers. Few succeed. Many have simply given up hope. “When you look at the unemployment rate during the Great Depression, we’re beyond that in the construction industry here in Las Vegas,” he says. “We’ve got close to 70 per cent unemployment, so for us, the economy is extremely depressed.”

When the financial crisis tipped America into a deep recession in 2007, it was tempting to draw comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Those fears subsided once the stock market pulled out of its nosedive and America’s economy began to grow again, albeit at a crawl. It was a brief respite. Four years later, American towns and cities remain overrun with millions of unemployed workers even as the economy risks slipping back into reverse. It raises the question whether the U.S. ever really emerged from recession in the first place. Instead, some are suggesting those early fears may have been justified after all: the United States appears to be in the throes of an outright jobs depression.

Earlier this month, Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at Berkeley and the secretary of labour in the Clinton administration, said the current crisis is an extension of the “depression” that began in December 2007. Meanwhile, Richard Posner, a high-profile judge in the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and regular political and economic commentator, said it’s time for America to give up any false hopes that the economy is on a path to recovery. “If we were being honest with ourselves, we would call this a depression,” he wrote in the New Republic. “That would certainly better convey both the severity of our problems, and the fact that those problems have no evident solutions.”

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A seven-point plan? Please. Mine has nine!

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

This week’s debate among Republican candidates for the U.S. presidency was sponsored by Tea Party Express, which sounds like something you’d find next to the Orange Julius but is in fact an umbrella organization for grassroots groups dedicated to the pursuit of low taxes, small government and—to judge from the debate audience—$8 haircuts.

Broadcast on CNN, the debate began with a display of the gravitas we’ve come to expect from American politics—a snazzy video montage in which each candidate was assigned a cute nickname. Michele Bachmann was introduced as The Firebrand. Newt Gingrich? The Big Thinker! One immediately lamented the absence of Sarah Palin, if only to discover which nickname she’d have been given. (The Little Thinker?)

The frontrunner in the Republican field is Rick Perry, who has the look of a man who’s just returned from hoodwinking J.R. Ewing in an oil deal. The Texas governor scored big with his opening line, in which he vowed to “make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” He should consider hooking up with a specialist in making things inconsequential, such as the person who wrote the final four seasons of Entourage.

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Is Obama finished?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 53 Comments

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Two and a half years into Barack Obama’s presidency, Obamamania has given way to Obamamisery. Fourteen million Americans are out of work. The unemployment rate remains stuck above nine per cent. The net number of new jobs created last month was exactly zero. And nearly one in six Americans live in poverty—the most in 27 years.

Sure, the former Illinois senator was dealt a raw hand—elected in the midst of an economic crisis and two long, costly wars, at the burst of a credit and real estate bubble that would take years to unwind. In his inaugural address, the new President acknowledged “a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable.” But Obama had promised to be the man of hope and change. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America,” he told the millions people who had travelled from around the country and the globe to witness him take office and end the era of George W. Bush.

In January 2009, the unemployment rate was 6.9 per cent and Obama’s approval ratings were over 60 per cent. The question that framed his presidency was whether he would lead the country out of crisis the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the country out of the Great Depression, or whether he would become the next Jimmy Carter—a weak, one-term president done in by economic malaise and failures abroad.

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Rick Perry: number one with a bullet

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 3 Comments

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Barack Obama’s approval ratings of 43 per cent are the lowest of his presidency—as low as George W. Bush’s in his second term. The number of net new jobs the gasping American economy created in August was exactly zero. And on a sunny afternoon in a meticulously manicured suburb of Manchester, N.H., a state that plays a key role in picking presidents, several hundred Republican voters have gathered to hear from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the man who has vaulted to the lead of a raucous race to oust the President. The crowd skews somewhat grey-haired and more than a little country-clubby. Men sport khakis and button-downs, the women tailored dresses and high heels. Tidy white golf carts shuttle guests from their cars to a white tent that has been set up on grounds studded with American flags.

Even among this well-heeled group there is fear about where the country is headed—financially, politically, and even metaphysically. “The country, the people have lost their faith,” says Joyce Gardiner, a 68-year-old retired marketer from Londonderry. “Obama,” she purses her lips, “is inept.” James Shephard, 57, who says he lost his job at a plant that manufactured bomb-disposal equipment, is here to take pictures of the event for a Tea Party group he recently joined. “The vice is squeezing tighter and tighter,” he says. “People say they have to do something before the boat goes over the cliff.”

A murmur of excitement runs through the crowd as the governor arrives. Perry is tanned, square-jawed and sporting the salt-and-pepper mane that gave him the nickname Governor Goodhair. Along with his blue shirt and khakis, he sports some Texas flair: black ostrich leather shoes and a gold-tipped belt bearing a buckle embossed with a large “R.” Perry smiles broadly with a wink here, a thumbs-up there, as a glowing introduction is read out: the son of tenant farmers, Air Force veteran, still married to his high school sweetheart, and governor of the state that created 40 per cent of all the new jobs in America since 2009. “A person of action,” sums up the host. Perry takes the podium with the swagger of a man who has been governor for a decade (he took over when George W. Bush moved to the White House), who has never lost an election (he switched his affiliation from the Democrats to Republicans in the 1980s as they ascended in Texas), and who carries a concealed weapon (the .380 laser-sighted Ruger came in handy last year when, while jogging, he shot and killed a coyote who threatened the family dog.)

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Ten years later (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 4:51 PM - 3 Comments

Following the President’s letter, the Prime Minister writes to Mr. Obama on the anniversary of 9/11.

The Liberal press office has sent out the following statement from interim leader Bob Rae.

“Ten years ago, the September 11^th terrorist attacks shook the world. And as we extend our thoughts and sympathies to those families affected by this senseless attack, including the families of the Canadian victims, we also remember the strength, compassion and resolve exemplified by Canadians across the country as we responded to this disaster.

We remember the empathy, love and support that poured out from the more than 100,000 people who gathered on Parliament Hill for a national day of mourning.

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Ten years later

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 2:12 PM - 3 Comments

President Barack Obama has written a letter to the Prime Minister to thank Canadians for their efforts on 9/11.

Mr. Harper has declared September 11 to be a national day of service.