The Battle for Okinawa

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Shizuo Kambayashi/ Associated Press

It’s tradition to celebrate 50 years of marriage with gold. But in January, the golden anniversary of the U.S.-Japan military nuptials—the landmark 1960 Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security that united the two nations in holy (armed) matrimony—was celebrated not with precious metals or affectionate toasts, but with mounting tension and a growing unease about the future of the U.S.-Japan security alliance.

It’s all come to a head in Okinawa, a southern Japanese prefecture made up of dozens of tiny islands. Ever since the area fell to the Allies in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the U.S. military has used the islands as a stronghold in the Pacific. Today, about half of the almost 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are concentrated here, in an area that represents just one per cent of Japan’s land mass. It is also here that the pugnacious new Japanese PM is making his first stand: threatening, with broad Japanese support behind him, to boot the Americans off the island.

Calls for the U.S. to reduce its military footprint in Japan have been building. In 2006, the U.S. answered those calls head-on: signing a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) deal with Tokyo that would relocate some 8,000 troops to Guam by 2014 and move the bustling Futenma air base to a less populated part of Okinawa. For a while, the situation calmed. But last September, Japan held a general election—and the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled the country for 54 of the last 55 years, lost. Now, Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, who ran in part on a platform of distancing Japan from the U.S., is at the helm. And while his wife steals headlines with bizarre claims that her “soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Hatoyama has been working more quietly to erode Japan’s relationship with the U.S.

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Why American Idol needs Haeley Vaughn

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 4:42 PM - 3 Comments

Could Hillary Clinton win American Idol? This is not an entirely facetious question.

As Idol debuted its Top 24 this week, the women’s half of the competition breaks down like a Democratic presidential primary: one obvious and seemingly inevitable front-runner (think Hillary), several intriguing prospects who could be brilliant or disastrous (Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas or Barack Obama) and a few unremarkable candidates who will soon be forgotten (Dick Gephardt).

The last group is not particularly worth dwelling upon. Two—Janell and Ashley—were eliminated in the competition’s first viewer vote. The rest (Lacey, Michelle Paige and Didi) will probably be gone in short order.

The middle group is both the most interesting, albeit least likely to succeed. Of this year’s 12 final girls, at least five qualify here. Lilly is a punky former busker with platinum blond bangs who sang a relatively obscure Beatles song (Fixing a Hole) this week. Katelyn is this season’s temptress, all big eyes and curly hair, who performed the Beatles’ Oh! Darling this week, while wearing a black leather skirt and bright red lipstick. Siobhan is a glass-blowing apprentice from Cape Cod who sang Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game in an surprisingly deep voice. Crystal is a dreadlocked mum with one of those chin piercings who sang an Alanis Morrisette song while playing guitar and harmonica.

Most intriguing is Haeley Vaughn, a 16-year-old, black, female country singer and guitarist with a way of singing that can only be described as odd-sounding. She turned I Want To Hold Your Hand into something almost reggae. Kara said she was “very pure,” Ellen said she shone, Simon said she was “a complete and utter mess.” Ellen countered that if she was a mess, she was a “hot mess.” It is difficult to express just how wildly divergent the possibilities are here. Haeley could be one of the most intriguing and unique performers in Idol history. She could end up being responsible for one of most excruciating performances in the history of American television. She could be Bill Clinton, she might be Howard Dean.

The clear and unquestionable favourite is Katie Stevens, a savvy 17-year-old who swaggered her way through a Michael Buble song this week. She is pretty and cute and blessed of a big voice. She has an endearing story: her quest for stardom set up as a race against the time and memory of her ailing grandmother. She seems somehow descended from the most successful Idols: Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Jordin Sparks, pleasingly and unostentatiously talented and attractive.

If a woman is to win this year’s Idol—Simon Cowell is on record as saying this year’s winner is most likely to be female—it should be Katie Stevens. And maybe that’s a problem.

It is, for one thing, harder to impress when you’re expected to be great. Katie was more or less fine this week, but she was scolded for seeming too contrived and not acting her age. For another, it is harder to be motivated if unchallenged. The unrivalled front-runner tempts doom (see Al Gore or John Kerry).

Cowell has said he wants to find the next Taylor Swift, someone “relevant.” That, right now, isn’t Katie Stevens. And that’s why Idol might need Haeley Vaughn.

A president and his famous nemesis

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

The impeachment trial of U.S. President Bill Clinton 11 years ago now seems an oh-so-last-century drama in ways more profound than the merely chronological. Before 9/11, before the financial meltdown of 2008—and the new set of American obsessions they spawned—politics in an at-peace and prosperous U.S. turned on a crisis that unfolded as political theatre. Slow moving, long running, and—for most Americans—pain-in-the-frontal-lobes-inducing, the epic battle between Clinton and his nemesis, independent counsel Ken Starr, had something to appall everyone. Key components ran the gamut from the incomprehensible (the murky Whitewater land deal), to the tragic (the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster) to the tawdry (the semen-stained blue dress) to the farcical (the chief executive’s alleged genital peculiarity) to the bewilderingly existential: in the end, it all depended, as Clinton once desperately tried to explain, on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

But however ancient the story now appears, The Death of American Virtue, law professor Ken Gormley’s massive reconstruction of events, demonstrates how the impeachment saga created crucial fault lines in U.S. life that still reverberate, notably the venomously personal tone of American politics. Three separate freight trains had to smash into one another to propel Clinton to trial: Whitewater, the private lawsuit filed by Paula Jones alleging sexual harassment by Clinton when he was still Arkansas governor (it was Jones who swore his penis was “crooked”), and the president’s dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. As Gormley sets out, in almost mind-numbing detail, it required a barely credible series of coincidences and poor ad hoc decisions on both sides to permit those trains to collide.

Starr’s investigation of Whitewater was petering out by 1997, at least in terms of pinning something on a Clinton (Bill or Hillary), and he announced in February that he was stepping down. But Starr’s own staff rose in revolt, and what Hillary Clinton later called “the vast right-wing conspiracy” swung into action, as conservatives in the media lambasted the prosecutor for cowardice and lack of moral fibre. Starr retracted his resignation, and set his investigation on a new track, into a search for women who had had affairs with Clinton. Clinton and his supporters viewed the new tack as a politically motivated witch hunt into his private life, while Starr defended it as an attempt to leave no stone unturned.

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The politics of disaster (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 25, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 48 Comments

The Globe considers the day’s optics.

Today is the day Stephen Harper’s decision to shut down Parliament should have come back to haunt him, as opposition parties gather in Ottawa to draw attention to what would have been a back-to-work Monday for MPs. Instead, the eyes of the world will be drawn to Montreal, where global dignitaries including Hillary Clinton and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner are gathering as guests of Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Lawrence Cannon, to plan the rebuilding of earthquake-ravaged Haiti…

“It has allowed the Prime Minister to remind [Canadians] of how strong a leader he is, how decisive he can be when it comes to doing something,” Conservative strategist Goldy Hyder said, adding that “Quebeckers particularly like decisive leadership … even if they disagree with it.

“From that old Chinese proverb, which I use with the greatest of respect, crises can be opportunities as well,” he said.

Why Hillary Clinton deserves more respect

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, August 17, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 6 Comments

In some ways, Hillary Rodham Clinton hasn’t changed. When the U.S. secretary of state gears up for her major diplomatic forays, she does it the same way she prepared to run for the Senate seat from New York, and for her presidential bid: with a listening tour. The former senator who used to nod earnestly and have her aides take copious notes at county fairs as farmers in upstate New York waxed on about the complexities of the local apple trade, prefaced her 11-day trip across Africa this month with a similar bout of listening. Shortly before leaving, she brought together some 15 Africa specialists from in and out of Washington to a ceremonial room on the eighth floor of the State Department headquarters. “It was extremely well organized, a very pleasant dinner in which she did most of the listening and had a number of questions,” recalled attendee Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa under presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Lyman said he was surprised by how little Clinton interrupted. “She did not moderate the meeting and that allowed her to be a real listener. She seemed to want to hear what people thought,” he told Maclean’s. “Interestingly, she is not flashy. She is very organized and substantive.”

But that lack of flash has been a big change for a woman who only recently stood on the brink of a historic presidential nomination, and whose every move made news. The focused, nose-to-the-grindstone approach she has brought to the job after the centre-stage political rivalry with Barack Obama caught many observers off guard. Those looking for good political theatre were almost disappointed by the absence of a clash-of-titans power struggle, complete with gender politics, psychodrama and embittered aides leaking stories of backstabbing-on-high. To some, it could only mean one thing: Clinton had been muzzled. No less a student of power and celebrity than former New Yorker editor Tina Brown kicked off rounds of chatter in July, when Clinton was absent from Obama’s meetings at the Kremlin (she cancelled several trips due to a broken elbow) and seemed to be sidelined by a clutch of special presidential envoys assigned to top hot-spots like South Asia and the Middle East. “It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burka,” wrote Brown, in a critique that apparently got under Clinton’s skin. “I broke my elbow, not my larynx,” was Clinton’s tart retort to reporters who asked whether she was lacking a voice in the administration’s foreign policy. “I have been deeply involved in the shaping and implementation of our foreign policy,” she said, defensively. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed the discussion as “silly Washington games.” Continue…

Sarah and Hillary: A study in contrasts

By John Parisella - Friday, July 31, 2009 at 3:55 PM - 28 Comments

Aside from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, the respective campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin remain the highlights of the last political season. Clinton got 18 million votes in the Democratic primaries and nearly became the nominee. Palin came out of nowhere to energize a lackluster McCain bid, and, for a couple weeks in September at least, helped him take a lead in the polls. Since then, she has easily become the most sought after personality in the GOP.

Last Sunday, both Clinton and Palin were in the news, albeit for different reasons, and made it clear why both fascinate the media and the American public. The Secretary of State  was on Meet The Press doing a one-hour interview. Meanwhile, Palin was delivering her farewell address to the people of Alaska. Events dealing with health care reform and yesterday’s ‘Beer Summit’ limited the interventions of the two politicians to one-day news stories. I might add regrettably because both these political figures will continue to play a vital role in the public life of the United States. Continue…

Sarah Palin is no Hillary

By John Parisella - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 5:50 PM - 29 Comments

When Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama last June, she said her campaign was responsible for 18 million cracks in the ceiling—one for every vote she obtained in the primaries. Sarah Palin would later make reference to Clinton’s concession speech when she was selected by John McCain to be his nominee, seemingly viewing herself as Clinton’s successor. Since the November election, Governor Palin has often been mentioned as a contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 and her constant presence in the media has only served to fuel that speculation.

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Clinton and Biden make Obama stronger

By John Parisella - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 3 Comments

When Barack Obama was choosing his cabinet, some pundits referenced Lincoln’s “team of rivals” in commenting his choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and his decision to keep Defense Secretary Bob Gates, a Republican. When he selected Tim Geithner, Steven Chu and Eric Holder, others said that, just like JFK, Obama was selecting the “best and the brightest.” After close to six months in office, it is more accurate to say that Obama carefully chose the consummate team players. By this, I am referring to Hillary Clinton and Vice-President Joe Biden. Together, they make Obama look stronger.

Outside of Obama, Hillary Clinton has been the star of this administration. And it is not because she is dominating the news cycle—she has, in fact, been low key. Rather, it is because she has been focused, determined and effective. She also seems to be enjoying her new role and that only reinforces the notion of the team player. After years of being the team player in husband Bill Clinton’s political career, she is now performing a similar service for Barack Obama.

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Newsmakers

By Lianne George - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Indecent proposal

Friends of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have devised a number of creative solutions to help her pay off the remaining US$2.3 million she owes in campaign debts. Her former campaign manager James Carville sent out an email to supporters asking them to contribute $5 in exchange for an opportunity to win great prizes, including tickets to the American Idol finale or a day in New York with Bill Clinton. Later, during the taping of an online radio show sponsored by Go Daddy—a Web-hosting company known for its racy commercials—Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons told Carville he would contribute US$1 million to help Clinton if the secretary of state would appear as a “Go Daddy Girl” in one of his ads. “Look, I’d be all for it, but I wouldn’t write the check just yet,” Carville replied, noting that lawyers in the State Department tend to “piss on every fire.”

After Lolita

Thirty-two years after Vladimir Nabokov’s death, the Lolita author’s final novel, locked in a Swiss bank vault since 1977, will see the light of day. The Original of Laura was written on a series of 138 index cards. Nabokov had instructed that the incomplete work be destroyed upon his death. His son Dmitri, who’d kept it for all these years, opted to sell the rights to Penguin Classics for an undisclosed six-figure sum. “It was quite emotional for Dmitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades,” Alexis Kirschbaum, editor at Penguin Classics, told the BBC. The novel, due this fall, is the story of a man obsessed with his promiscuous wife. “[It’s] not necessarily extremely polished,” she said, “but you can still see kernels of genius in everything he wrote.”

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"We are scrubbing every single civilian program"

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 30, 2009 at 7:53 PM - 20 Comments

Hillary Clinton declares that most of the money the U.S. has spent on aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years was wasted. They’re starting all over again.

It’s worth noting that new governments sometimes do this sort of thing, to persuade everyone — including themselves — that they’re not the old government. It would not be unheard-of if Clinton and the Obama administration ended up reintroducing large chunks of their predecessors’ aid framework under catchy new names. Still, this is one of those moments when Canadian authorities can wait for the Americans to ask for us to fill a new role, or move quickly into the current policy vacuum and tailor a new role for Canadian aid. Policy makers or policy takers. It’ll be interesting to see which way Canada goes.

The gender-specific adjective

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:22 PM - 25 Comments

Rob Silver considers the curious case of Karen Stintz.

I can find hundreds of examples of female politicians from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin and now Karen Stintz being described as “shrill.” Can you find a single example of a male politician being called shrill? First commenter to post an example gets an autographed Tim Powers sweater vest (in baby blue, needless to say).

A Globe commenter claims to have found one example in Germany.

In general, the male equivalent of shrill might be blustery. Or buffoonish. I would wonder if the difference is merely a matter of what octave the nonsense is delivered in.

Can the PM keep Barack Obama’s attention?

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 9, 2009 at 10:21 AM - 43 Comments

When Hillary Clinton welcomed Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, in Washington in late February, she probably wanted to keep an eye on a separatist leader who’s been making new noises about taking his nation out of the U.K. But Scotland will never be high on a secretary of state’s list of worries, and in the meantime there is business to transact. So Salmond pitched wind turbines from successful Scottish manufacturers as a ready source of clean energy. Barack Obama’s first budget offers lots of money for clean energy, and lots of suppliers are lining up to get some.

For her own first trip abroad, Clinton considered several destinations and issues before settling on Asia and climate change. She brought her climate change envoy Todd Stern to Beijing, and she didn’t bring along her lieutenants for arms control or high finance.

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Keeping pace with the French

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 7:08 PM - 11 Comments

Lawrence Cannon comments after his meeting with Hillary Clinton.

Cannon also said he brought up the case of Canadian Omar Khadr — accused of murder in the death of a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002 — and being held at the naval prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He said the case was raised in the context of Obama’s directive to shut down the prison within a year. ”I wanted to get an idea from Secretary Clinton as to what the steps forward were to be, and secretary Clinton gave me a brief description of where this process was probably going to lead in the coming months,” he said, without elaborating.

In other news, Khadr’s legal situation seems to have gotten somehow even more complicated.

Cannon to meet Clinton, and the post-presidential visit agenda

By John Geddes - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment

There’s news this morning that Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon plans to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next week. This casts the story of Barack Obama’s visit to Ottawa ahead, even before the President sets foot on Parliament Hill.

The real impact of Obama’s visit will only begin to be understood when we start to get a sense of what comes next, like Cannon meeting Clinton, and how the Canadian government builds on these opportunities. The obvious starting point for any Canadian strategy would be to assess and exploit the Obama administration’s shift to multilateralism, or what Clinton calls “smart power.”

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France is back

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 1:56 PM - 34 Comments

French Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner meets with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And you’ll never guess what he wanted to talk about.

During their first official meeting, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Bernard Kouchner had a wide-ranging discussion of the major global challenges, and most particularly, important international issues such as the Mideast, on which they issued a joint call for the opening of crossing points. They also discussed Afghanistan, Iran, certain African subjects such as Darfur, and the closing of Guantanamo.

Mr. Kouchner also drew Ms. Clinton’s attention to the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian child who, as you know, was enrolled by al-Qaeda as a pre-teen. We wanted to draw the attention of the American and Canadian authorities to his case.

The dream job from hell

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 7:12 PM - 3 Comments

The most memorable television ad that Hillary Rodham Clinton ran during the Democratic primary campaign against Barack Obama was the one with the red telephone that rings at 3 a.m. “While your children are safely sleeping,” the announcer intoned, “something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.” That Obama was dangerously unprepared to deal with a foreign crisis was a key Clinton campaign theme. She pronounced herself and Republican candidate John McCain as passing the “commander-in-chief threshold”—and pointedly refused to say the same of Obama.

Their fiercest campaign clashes involved foreign policy: Obama wanted to sit down with leaders of rogue nations such as Cuba, North Korea or Iran “without preconditions,” an idea Clinton dismissed as “irresponsible and frankly naive.” She voted for a Senate resolution asking the Bush administration to designate the Iranian Quds force a terrorist organization—something Obama said was playing into a Bush administration ploy to lay the groundwork for war against Iran. And Obama boasted of superior judgment in opposing the Iraq invasion (she voted to authorize the use of force), while implying Clinton’s foreign policy experience as first lady consisted of having tea with ambassadors. “What exactly is this foreign policy experience?” Obama said mockingly of the New York senator. “Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no.”

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Compare/contrast

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 1:46 PM - 25 Comments

This is the prepared text for Hillary Clinton’s opening statement at today’s confirmation hearings. She’s spent the subsequent two hours expanding on those points and defending herself.

Silly question. How many months—years?—will Lawrence Cannon be the Foreign Affairs Minister before he commits as much to the record?

Update. Maybe I’m being hard on Larry, who I actually find sort of endearing.

Nonetheless. He’s been Foreign Affairs Minister since the end of October. By the count of the Ministry website, he’s delivered three speeches—see here, here and here. He has put his name to statements on India, Maldives, the Congo, Burma, Darfur, APEC, Iran, Thailand, Mumbai, Mumbai, Mumbai, Mumbai, Mumbai, Mumbai, Thailand, Thailand, Mongolia, Greece, Niger, Zimbabwe, Middle East peace, holiday travel, Iran, Guinea, Israel, Iran, Bangladesh, Ghana, Israel and the Boundary Waters Treaty.

So maybe he has actually committed as many words to the record. Just in snack size. Foreign policy fit for the back of a postcard.

Does all of this equal that? Good question.

2008: What A Year!

By John Parisella - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 11:01 AM - 2 Comments

How else can you describe it? Thanks to Maclean’s for giving me the opportunity to share with readers in the blogosphere my impressions about the US presidential race from the perspective of a challenger who was 22 percent behind in the national polls at this stage last year. Thanks, too, to the readers and responders along the way. Many disagreed with me but were not disagreeable. While it may not always show, the more conservative, pro-Republican responders made me think and I am grateful. I still believe conservatism is a vital and essential part of American political thought. Just like liberalism needed to rethink its basic tenets from the 70′s on, I believe 2008 is the beginning of the next conservative revolution. This is just the way America works—checks and balances on its institutions and, more importantly, on its political thinking.

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Sweet Caroline

By John Parisella - Friday, December 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM - 10 Comments

Baby boomers will fondly recall the photos of Caroline Kennedy with her father, and who can forget the heart-wrenching photo of her taken the day of JFK’s funeral? Kennedy is now thrust in the public eye for reasons unassociated with nostalgia or sweetness: she wants to become the next senator of New York. For the first time in her life, she is at the centre of a controversy, with questions swirling over her qualifications to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat. Welcome to the world of politics.

At first glance, the detractors have a point. She may have a magic name, but her credentials appear to be rather thin when compared with some less-famous pretenders. Her appearances in the media in recent days have done little to dissipate the doubts or the opposition. Her latest claim to fame has much to do with her pivotal support of Barack Obama’s candidacy. Of course, this did nothing to endear her to Clinton Democrats. My guess is that Governor David Patterson will select Caroline anyway.

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"A time for grown-ups"

By selley - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 1:29 PM - 11 Comments

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on women in Afghanistan; Jeffrey Simpson on fixing the fisheries; Dan Gardner on “broken windows”; Jim Coyle on Premier Dad.

Tightening the belt; opening the wallet
The pundits weigh in on deficits, stimuli, spending, and fish.

Stephen Harper must act quickly not just on our economic fundamentals, L. Ian MacDonald argues in the Montreal Gazette, but to assure Canadians that despite all appearances during the election campaign, he’s on top of the situation. “Harper’s initial response, that the fundamentals of the Canadian economy were strong, was as disconnected from reality as John McCain when he made the same comment in the middle of the stock market crash,” MacDonald observes, and he says Harper was lucky to escape the fallout with his political life. Now, he says, Harper must “level with the Canadian people about the size of the storm we are facing. This is a time for grown-ups, not playing silly games about whether we can run a deficit.”

Meanwhile, the Calgary Herald’s Don Martin reports, the government’s optics gurus will be busy enforcing austerity on politicians and civil servants. Tomorrow’s fiscal update will feature pay freezes, cuts to “discretionary spending and a clampdown on travel and assorted parliamentary perks” for our elected MPs and “top bureaucrats,” we learn. Junkets, friend-and-family travel, health benefits—all slashed, potentially. The combined effect of this will amount to “pennies” against the “megacuts needed to keep a large deficit at bay,” says Martin—but, monkeys that we are, the PMO presumes we will clap appreciatively and stamp our feet to see the bad times spread around a little.

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What smells fishy?

By selley - Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 1:45 PM - 12 Comments

Must-reads: John Ivison on abandoning Senate reform; Don Martin on embracing deficits; Jonathan Kay on the Bush legacy; Vaughn Palmer on the B.C. budget.

The federal miscellany
Deficits, unelected senators, anti-Semites, etc.

The Toronto Star’s James Travers fingers the “brainy, focused and tough” Kevin Lynch, clerk of the Privy Council, as a good candidate to replace Michael Wilson as ambassador to Washington. But he notes there are “flies in this ointment.” One fly: “renewing the civil service, the Sisyphean task that drew Lynch home [from a position at the IMF], remains a work in progress.” (Indeed, being a Sisyphean task, it could hardly be anything but “in progress.” But we really must stop parsing Travers’ metaphors so closely; it leads only to heartache.) Two flies: Lynch led the “usefully inconclusive investigation” into the NAFTA disasta, which is ostensibly why Wilson has to leave in the first place. And three flies: successor boulder-pushers at the PCO “are in short, surprisingly reluctant, supply.”

The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson + fisheries quotas = barnburner! We kid. It’s a very sober and actually fairly interesting look at the benefits of switching from the “common property resource fishery” model—in which “the government establishes an elaborate system of allocations to fishermen and companies, all under the watchful (?) eye of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans”—to one in which “fishermen, communities, co-operatives or companies” are directly given “ownership rights to certain amounts of fish.” It’s better suited to sustainable fishing, we learn, because it takes politics largely out of the equation in establishing quotas. As it stands, “since people speak, and fish are silent, the minister usually heeds people/constituents and opens fisheries that should remain closed or raises allocations that should remain low.”

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Megapundit: Yes we can (do our best)

By selley - Monday, November 10, 2008 at 1:49 PM - 14 Comments

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on child abductions; Scott Taylor tours the Caucasus.

Down to business
In which the audacity of hope meets reality, and a bunch of know-it-all newspaper pundits. Phooey!

The Globe and Mail‘s John Ibbitson looks at the delicate politics of dealing with the ongoing financial crisis when only Barack Obama’s plans really matter, but George W. Bush is still president, and Obama wants nothing less than to be seen to be cozying up to Dubya. “It is the president-elect who has a clear agenda to solve an economic crisis”—i.e., a stimulus package likely costing $100 billion or thereabouts, coupled with bailouts for crappy American automakers—”and who must convince a lame-duck Congress to pass it, and a lame-duck President not to veto it,” Ibbitson observes. And thus far, he says Obama has looked very “presidential” in handling the crisis. But events will dictate whether he’s able to use the recession “to justify strong measures in energy conservation, infrastructure renewal, reform of financial regulations and improvements to health care and education,” or whether he gets swallowed by it whole.

Obama faces much the same economic situation Bill Clinton did when he became president-elect, Terence Corcoran argues in the National Post. “Harold Poling, then chairman of Ford, called on Washington to bail the auto industry out of its health care costs by setting up a national health care system;” some economists demanded a stimulus package, while others urged restraint; and “environmental activists called for strategic taxes on investment to encourage capital to flow into energy efficient and waste-reducing activities.” What happened instead during the Bush-Clinton interregnum was that simple messages and solutions became burdened with complexity, doubt and conflict amongst experts. It “drown[ed] out any Yes We Can belief that solutions are simple and at hand and all that’s needed is a decisive can-do attitude,” says Corcoran. And he sees much the same fate befalling Obama.

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Does your hair have what it takes to lead?

By Lianne George - Friday, September 19, 2008 at 2:34 PM - 2 Comments

Americans may be growing weary of Sarah Palin, but her hairstyle continues to amaze and inspire. According to a Wall Street Journal article, WigSalon.com says demand for wigs “that reflect the new looks made popular by Sarah Palin” has surged. Women can’t seem to get enough of her chestnut shade and swept-back do. The Journal writes: 

In the past week, the company has sold about 25 Palin-esque wigs, ranging in price from $100 to the “Bargain Sarah Palin” wig for $46…Early next week, [WigSalon.com's] Mr. Aronesty plans to send a newsletter to his 25,000 subscribers highlighting Palin wig options and styling tips.

If at first the wig-frenzy claim seems a little dubious—25 is really not very many—wait until you see the merchandise. I found the Bargain Sarah Palin wig on the site, and I can’t say it looks a whole lot like her hair. It’s a little Susan Lucci—although that could just be the peignoir talking. But it’s a whole lot better than the very sad looking Bargain Hillary Clinton wig on Wilshirewigs.com ($19.50). Zelda Fitzgerald meets Olive Oyl. 

For the last time, people, she's nothing like Hillary—or Michelle Obama

By Sarmishta Subramanian - Friday, September 5, 2008 at 9:25 AM - 18 Comments

Why do people keep assuming that just because Sarah Palin can theoretically wear a pantsuit, she’s part of Hillary’s sisterhood? Or—even more desperate reach here—of Michelle Obama’s?

Much more accurate to compare her with Dubya, as Salon has done, with this excellent quiz, a list of cowboy quotes from Palin and George W. Bush. Which ones are Palin and which ones Bush? It’s pretty damn hard to tell.