I just want to (more or less) quickly express my deep regret at the disappearance of Keith Olbermann and his path-breaking “Countdown” show on MSNBC – announced quite suddenly and unexpectedly Friday night in the penultimate moments of what will apparently be the last installment of one of the few genuinely interesting political programs on […]
This past Tuesday, January 11, was John A. Macdonald’s birthday (and, intriguingly enough, also Jean Chrétien’s). Macdonald, in case you’ve forgotten (as almost half those Canadians consulted in a 2001 survey had) was the first prime minister of the present confederation in Canada – and remains “the only Canadian Prime Minister to win six majority […]
Apparently George W. Bush’s presidential memoir, Decision Points, only released this past November 9, 2010, has already “sold almost a million and a half copies.” According to one wise observer, it is nonetheless “unlikely that many will ever read Decision Points, and even fewer will finish it … Conservative groups buy these things in bulk […]
I am not a fan of the National Post. But over the 2010 holiday season I think it deserves some credit for contributing to both sides of what is not quite yet an important debate we will be having in Canada, if and when we show serious signs of surviving the 21st century. To kick […]
Julian Assange is now out on bail, living the high life at “Ellingham Hall, a lavish country estate in eastern England, where under the bail conditions he must spend every night.” I have been trying to understand what makes his case as high-minded as it does seem to have become, even though he probably is […]
[UPDATED MARCH 30, 2011]. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to the Kurt Weill tune, “The Saga of Jenny,” from the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, has some appropriate seasonal allusions in 2010: “Jenny made her mind up when she was three / She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree / Christmas Eve she […]
“Many of our national security issues,” Gary Wills wrote recently, in the November 25, 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, “are not meant to deceive the enemy, but to keep Congress and the American people in the dark about what our government is doing in our name.” Given the time lags in […]
UPDATED DECEMBER 4: The big Ottawa mystery this Friday afternoon in early December is whether John Ibbitson was right, when he reported yesterday on the Globe and Mail website (appearing in the print edition this morning), that: “The Harper government and the opposition parties have agreed to quietly sink legislation [aka Bill C-12] that would […]
UPDATE NOVEMBER 30, 2010. 1:15 AM ET. As widely predicted, Robert Sopuck did win the rural Manitoba riding of Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette handily enough for the Conservatives, with “about 58 per cent of the vote.” Elsewhere it now seems clear enough that the Ignatieff Liberals have not fared quite as badly as some had feared (including, […]
At the level of international political soap opera, at any rate, are we or are we not on the verge of some kind of revival of the ancient British monarchy, in an age of resurgent conservatism in the new global village on which the sun still never dares to set? For our particular purposes here, […]
