UPDATED MAY 28. People sometimes ask why Quebec is so important for Canada’s past, present, and future. And every now and then someone like Julie Couillard – who, she has just stressed on TV, is “definitely not a bikers’ chick” – comes along to make the answer clear. Until her dynamic intervention on the evening […]
We know for certain that 44-year-old Richard James Anguish’s life came to a sudden end on the afternoon of Thursday, April 24, 2008, when his grey Pontiac G6 crashed into an oncoming semi-trailer on the Trans Canada Highway just east of Calgary, Alberta. A few hours later police also discovered the body of his 45-year-old […]
UPDATED MARCH 27. One reason politics has such a bad name is that it so often defies rational expectations. There may be voodoo economics and non-voodoo economics. But a part of politics is voodoo almost all the time. And this part is frequently exaggerated for better ratings, or to get on radar screens, or bloody the enemy, or […]
Someone at the office here just told about how his psychic political wife was a big Stephane Dion supporter back at the Liberal Party of Canada’s Montreal leadership convention, late in 2005. But now in early 2008 she has definitively concluded she made a big mistake. Dion’s latest crying wolf on a fresh election, she […]
RICHMOND, VA. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2008. 12 NOON. According to the Washington Post: “Voters in Maryland, Virginia and the District [of Columbia] lined up early this morning to vote in the region’s much-anticipated Potomac Primary,’ eager to cast a ballot in one of the most closely contested and historic [US] presidential races ever.” According to […]
UPDATED JANUARY 29. So … it was, according to the Slate website “the most thorough trouncing of the election season.” The dramatic numbers cannot be denied: 55% Obama, 27% Clinton, 18% Edwards. Say what you like, Obamamania is back. Or, as the Huffington Post tidily explained: “Barack Obama routed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the racially charged South […]
TORONTO. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11. 12:30 PM. Now that the day of Conrad Black’s sentencing is over, and the endless TV coverage up here in Canada has ended, my own most prominent emotion is no emotion. I see that the Globe and Mail is still referring to “Lord Black,” with no apparent satire intended. And I […]
Viewed up close, the Canadian historian Frank Underhill said long ago, the most striking thing about the USA is its almost dazzling variety. And along with all the US citizens who still worship the Grand Canyon, there are those alluded to in a November 13, 2007 Reuters article: “Many Americans are opting for French foie gras instead […]
[UPDATEDÂ MAY 15, 2008.] Istanbul today is the former Constantinople and before that Byzantium, as in W.B. Yeats’s poem: “That is no country for old men, The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees.” It is also the jewel of any eastern Mediterranean sea cruise, of the sort too many North Americans may […]
Especially if you are older, you may remember that August 16, 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley – the king of rock n’ roll, in America and around the world. And this is important enough to prompt a special tribute from Vision TV, “Canada’s multi-faith and multicultural broadcaster, dedicated to […]
