The foiled British terror threat that put places as far away as northern California “ON ALERT” last week is bound to remind Canadians of their own foiled terror threat only two months back. Yet last summer “Islamist” terrorists of some sort actually did bomb the London transit system. And that, among other things, gives the […]
The best teachers of the 1960s Ontario high-school history course on “Canada and the United States” used to joke that Canadian history was just US history 10 years late. It still seems a good enough joke in the winter of our discontent 20052006. Canada, some would say, has succumbed to the latest continental political pathology, just as the United […]
Will George W. Bush now be a lame-duck president for the next three years? Is that what the Hurricane Katrina trauma finally means for the big framework of world politics? There is of course evidence that Mr. Bush remains quite popular in some places: “With an air of secrecy that would make the Pentagon envious, […]
Those who know the disaster management literature say that there are typically many bitter complaints about initial government responses to major natural disasters. Raw politics get mixed up in such things as well. A Washington Post-ABC poll has reported that 46% of Americans approved of President George W. Bush’s “performance after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast,” […]
[UPDATED Thursday, August 25]. You can be excused if you woke up earlier this week and thought some intelligent designer had turned the clock back 40 years. Last Sunday night veteran Vietnam War protester Joan Baez gave a free concert for “about 500 … gathered …. a couple of miles away” from George W. Bush’s ranch in […]
On Tuesday, March 8, 2005 the Globe and Mail in Toronto reported “Democracy key to beating terror, Bush says.” At this point it also looked as if current events in Lebanon were about to move President Bush’s growing reputation as a stand-up prophet of humanitarian democratic progress in the global village up a few more […]
There were two lead news items on the Philadelphia Inquirer website for Friday, January, 7, 2005 – an account of the latest insurgency action in Iraq, and an update on the South and Southeast Asian tsunami disasters of December 26, 2004. It may have been just a slow-news Friday, at the start of a new […]
The most authentic comic relief for the losing side on the long evening of November 2, 2004 came with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show – starting at 10 PM EST to 7 PM PST, and all points in between. The deepest humour arrived just towards the end of the one-hour program, from the suitably French-surnamed Stephen […]
The online edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail conducted a somewhat surprising opinion poll among its cyberspace readers on Friday, September 3, 2004, in the immediate wake of the Republican Convention in New York. The question was: Who would you most like to see win the U.S. presidential election in November? Canadians still do […]
