When a British soldier was slaughtered in London in broad daylight by people shouting Allahu Akbar, the British government typically threatened to crack down on illegal hate speech that is, in fact, already punished from anyone except Muslim extremists, while insisting there is no problem of Muslim extremism. It will not do. Click here to read the rest.
The Stephen Harper administration is stonewalling the Nigel Wright-Mike Duffy scandal with typical icy contempt. But their non-response invites a series of questions they not only cannot answer but, fatally, seem not to have asked. Click here to read the rest.
On Wednesday Globe and Mail arch-pundit Jeffrey Simpson called the Harper administration "a government of salesmen, not statesmen" who "don't let facts stand in the way of the pitch" because they've replaced good old broad-minded Red Toryism with a "narrower ideology". This deft rendering of the conventional wisdom managed, remarkably, to insult both salesman and ideologues while being exactly backwards. Click here to read the rest.
The B.C. NDP face plant was so bad they'll be getting sympathy cards from the Toronto Maple Leafs. Almost the only consolation is they fell on the pollsters and pundits confident they'd win. So what went wrong? Click here to read the rest.
If someone in the PMO paid off a big chunk of my mortgage, how much would you trust my coverage of politics? Now, what if they did it for a legislator? It's wrong, totally wrong. And dangerous to our Constitution. Click here to read the rest.
Now the opposition are having fits over the Harper administration ... Not really necessary to complete that sentence, is it? But I'm thinking about them being shocked and appalled at Tory MPs wondering how history is taught in Canada. Click here to read the rest.
Despite its laid-back, progressive reputation as the environmentalist 'left coast', full of hippies and unionists and aboriginal activists and public servants, British Columbia is Tory territory federally. And not Red Tory either. Just one more way the province is different, and alienated from the Canadian mainstream. Click here to read the rest.
You know what I hate about politics? OK, that could be a well with no bottom. But a bucket borrowed from the late Daniel Boorstin just helped me haul up an especially slimy lump from way down deep. Specifically, Raymond Betts and Lyz Bly’s A History of Popular Culture describes a term Boorstin coined in the 1960s, “pseudo-event,” meaning something enacted for the sole purpose of being reported. Click here to read the rest.