November 2005 Archives

The CBC is reporting that we'll get twice as many televised leaders' debates as we did in the last federal election campaign. Doesn't that just make your day?

Leaders of the Liberals, Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois and NDP have agreed to two English and two French debates to hammer at issues surrounding the Jan. 23 vote.

The first set, in Vancouver, will be broadcast Dec. 15 in French and the following day in English. Each will be broadcast between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST and include videotaped questions for the leaders from voters across the country.

The moderator can ask follow-up questions if necessary.

The second set of debates, in either Gatineau or Montreal, will be Jan. 9 in English and the following day in French, during the same two-hour time slot. In these debates, all the questions will be posed by the moderators.

Tony Burman, editor-in-chief of CBC News, said there have been changes in the format over the last election in 2004.

Those debates were criticized for the cross-chatter and interruptions among the leaders, the result of each candidate's microphone being kept on at the same time.

However, said Burman, "closed mikes" will be used this time out.

My cup runneth over.

My dead tree copy of Maclean's was dropped off in the mail box a few minutes ago and lo and behold, there's NDP leader Jack Layton on the cover. And he's not smiling.

I haven't read the story yet -- it's raining here and the magazine needs to dry out before I tackle it. If you like, you can read the online version here. But on the theory that any publicity is good publicity I think this points to one way in which this campaign differs from the last one: the NDP have a profile they haven't had in recent years. I don't think anyone expects them to be forming a government when the dust settles on Jan. 23rd but they're in the thick of things in a way that wasn't the case the last time around. And we've all been recently reminded that in a minority government situation, a third party can actually influence policy.

It might at least make the campaign -- and even the leaders' debates -- more interesting. I think Layton has more to gain and less to lose than either Martin or Harper. If the NDP doesn't meet expectations in this election I don't think it particularly weakens his position unless he, himself, manages to score high on the Gaffe-o-meter. I'm not sure the same can be said for the Liberal and Conservative leaders.

We've been told to expect a dirty campaign and that'll give Layton the opportunity to continue to position himself as the national leader who's above all that, who wants government to work. It'll be interesting to see how he plays it.

I was outside shutting things down for the night here at the Gopher Ranch when I was treated to a howl off between two packs of neighbourhood coyotes. With the election coming, I guess we better get used to roving packs of predatory varmints each trying to make more noise than the others. Now, if only the politicians were as smart as the coyotes. On second thought, that's probably the wrong thing to wish for. If the politicians were as smart as the coyotes, they would probably steal all of our tax money.

Isn't this sweet? Four years after renouncing his Canadian citizenship so he could accept a British peerage, Lord Tubby has reconsidered and wants to be one of us again.

Conrad Black has asked the federal government to give him back his Canadian citizenship, four years after he called it an "impediment" and renounced it to become a member of Britain's House of Lords.

As things now stand, if Black were convicted and receives a prison sentence, his decision to renounce his citizenship would likely scuttle any chance for him to request a transfer to a Canadian jail. Only Canadian citizens can seek a transfer here from a jail elsewhere.

Black's request of Ottawa is especially curious considering some of his well-publicized criticism of his native country. In November 2001, in his first major speech in Vancouver after he officially became Lord Black of Crossharbour, he called Canada a "one-party federal state with no deliverance in sight," and added, "Most Canadians remain resolutely oblivious to their country's objective decline."

Black attacked Canada's universal health-care system, and "soft-left" policies that he said were driving as many as 100,000 skilled workers a year to the United States. "The head of the Canadian government says they will be replaced by Haitian taxi drivers. They will not," he said at the time.

"To someone just arrived from Haiti or Romania, Canada is a far more satisfying place to be a citizen than it was to me," Black said in his speech.

"Renouncing my citizenship was the last and most consistent act of dissent I could pose against a public policy which I believe is depriving Canada of its right and duty to be one of the world's great countries."

It's unclear how long it might take for the federal government to rule on Black's request.

Damn! He beat me by six minutes.

If you haven't seen this pictorial post at Marginal Notes, it's worth a look. If you have, it's still worth a look.

KU class angers ‘design’ advocates

Creationism and intelligent design are slated to be the subjects of a Kansas University class next semester — but as mythology, not science.

“The KU faculty has had enough,” said Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s religious studies department. He said he planned to teach “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies” next semester.
...
Mirecki said the course would be capped at 120 students, exploring intelligent design as a modern American mythology. Intelligent design is the idea that life is too complex to have evolved without a “designer,” presumably a god or other supernatural being.

The course also will cover the origins of creationism, why it’s an American phenomenon, and why Americans have allowed it to pervade politics and education, Mirecki said. He said several KU faculty have volunteered to be guest lecturers.

“Creationism is mythology,” Mirecki said. “Intelligent design is mythology. It’s not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not.”

“The educational system of Kansas is under attack,” Mirecki said. “All they are is oppressors. They’re not martyrs and victims ... I’m expecting insecure, threatened people to start being more and more vocal. They don’t want their beliefs to be analyzed rationally. That’s what this class is devised to do.”

If you drop in to Revolutionary Moderation you'll find the RevMod Gaffe-o-meter is back up at the top of the page. That was probably the best part of the last election -- which isn't saying much, I know. Don writes that the rules for his contest will be posted later in the week. Now I know an election can't be far behind.

In reaction to the latest brouhaha in the Canadian blogosphere, Scott Tribe has posted a diary at the Progressive Bloggers site in which he urges his fellow progressive bloggers not to let "misleading posts go unchallenged." I can understand where Scott is coming from when he writes this:

The progressive forces south of the border have made the mistake of being too timid in their responses to the conservative rightwing noise-machine.. something they are still trying to fight and recover from. We must not make that same mistake here in Canada.

It is imperative that we take the advice of former president Bill Clinton. He recently urged his more timid Democratic Party members of Congress to either fight Republican fire with fire of their own.. or go home and concede defeat.

With his subsequent posts on the original subject the blogger in question has demonstrated that he has no interest in the truth. He's repeating the same misrepresentation of events even though his error has been pointed out to him and even though the evidence that he got it wrong is pretty much overwhelming. So debate with the gentleman in question is likely a waste of time. How do you debate someone who will ignore the facts?

Now if we were talking about someone who uses a prime piece of media real estate to push propaganda (Marcus Gee comes immediately to mind), or even a top-tier blogger who gets thousands of hits a day, it might be different. But in this case we're talking about a blog that gets less traffic than this one even when we're only posting a couple or three times a week. We're talking about someone who's likely just preaching to the choir, not influencing public opinion. So having satisfied myself as to what we're dealing with here, my own conclusion is that this is a blog I can safely ignore.

What I'm getting at in my own long-winded way is the suggestion that while fighting the good fight is great, shouldn't we pick our battles? God knows I have little enough time for blogging these days as it is. Should I spend it hunting for misleading posts by any blogger, anywhere, no matter how obscure? Or should I spend it trying to deal with real issues? Or at least going after the propagandists who have a serious audience. Like Ezra Levant. (Oh, wait. Jonathan already has that under control.)

I'm not disagreeing with Scott on the overall issue. And I get a kick out watching CC take some piece of wankery or another apart. But isn't there a point where the blog wars become a waste of precious time and resources that might be better spent elsewhere? And in a case like this one, is there a point where paying additional attention to this actually lends legitimacy to a voice that doesn't deserve it and that it might not otherwise have?

I really just want to see how Movable Type handles an HTML table so I'm borrowing some numbers from this site as a test. It looks reasonable in the Preview but I don't trust anything until it's actually published. (And if this gums up the RSS feed, apologies. Please let me know.)

Joel Spolsky is a software developer, former Microsoft employee and founder/CEO of his own company called Fog Creek Software. He's also an entertaining writer and a pretty shrewd observer. His website, Joel on Software, is a popular hangout for programmers where you can find articles and discussion on both the technical aspects and the business side of software development.

But Joel will comment on other issues as well and this morning he offered his thoughts on the recent noises the music industry has been making about abandoning the one-price-fits-all model for music downloads and moving to a variable price model.

...I think the recording industry is lying about why they want different prices.
...
Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are.
...
Here's the dream world for the EMI Group, Sony/BMG, etc.: there are two prices for songs on iTunes, say, $2.49 and $0.99. All the new releases come out at $2.49. Some classic rock (Sweet Home Alabama) is at $2.49. Unwanted, old, crap, like, say, Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) -- the crap we only know because it was pushed on us in the 70s by paid-off disk jockeys -- would be deliberately priced at $0.99 to send a clear message that $0.99 = crap.

And now when a musician gets uppity, all the recording industry has to do is threaten to release their next single straight into the $0.99 category, which will kill it dead no matter how good it is. And suddenly the music industry has a lot more leverage over their artists in negotiations: the kind of leverage they are used to having.

There's been a lot of press in the last week or so about Sony's new copy protection system for music CDs. If you haven't heard, it's nasty stuff and this will bring you up to date:

On Oct. 31, Mark Russinovich broke the story in his blog: Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. This software tool is run without your knowledge or consent -- if it's loaded on your computer with a CD, a hacker can gain and maintain access to your system and you wouldn't know it.

The Sony code modifies Windows so you can't tell it's there, a process called "cloaking" in the hacker world. It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And it can't be removed; trying to get rid of it damages Windows.

I hope somebody sues their asses off.

And that Wired News story linked to at the top describes the rather, um, interesting reaction of the major anti-virus companies to what amounts to the distribution of infected CDs by a major entertainment company: they've done as little as possible.

It also contains this little gem, which seems like a good note on which to close:

The rootkit has even been found on computers run by the Department of Defense, to the Department of Homeland Security's displeasure. While Sony could be prosecuted under U.S. cybercrime law, no one thinks it will be.

The follow-up SES poll contrasting pre and post Gomery party standings has been released. I'm still busy digging out from yesterday's snow storm so it will be at least tomorrow before I get a chance to take a close look at the results. Here is a quick summary by Nik Nanos from this morning's email.

Highlights

The federal Liberals have dropped six points in two weeks (40% to 34%), Tory support is unchanged (28%) while the NDP have picked up five points in the same period (15% to 20%). Green Party support is unchanged (4%). The BQ are up two points nationally (in Quebec BQ 54%, Lib 24%, CP 9%, NDP 8%, GP 4%).

Polling indicates that there have been no major changes in support directly arising from the Gomery report released on November 1st. The results of testing related to the direct impact of the November 1st Gomery report did not change (within the margin of accuracy)....

Analysis

"Polling indicates that the November 1 Gomery report has not been the main driver for shifts in public opinion in the past two weeks. The Layton-led New Democrats have been the main winner. It would seem that Layton taking centre stage on the timing of the next election has positively driven NDP support."

I'll update with the details once I can find my driveway again.

Far be it from me to go with the flow when there is a current to swim against. In this case, the current I have to swim against is the idea, much beloved among my leftish brethren, that Jack Layton has accomplished some kind of brilliant parliamentary maneuver by deciding to ask the Liberals to declare a non-confidence motion in themselves. Martin and Co. are apparently supposed to self destruct on request and call an election for February because no one really wants an election over Christmas.

Personally, I find this whole exercise... how to put it politely... bloody ridiculous. The three opposition parties collectively have shown they have the courage to stand up for their convictions in a manner normally associated with an overcooked lasagna noodle. What they are really saying is that, despite the fact that they claim the government has lost the support of the Commons, they don't want to throw the government out because that would kill all the things on the Liberal agenda they support. You know. Things like heating rebates, an Aboriginal conference and gas tax transfers to municipalities. So, instead of actually defeating the government, they want the Liberals to keep governing for another two months and then commit ritual suicide by calling an election six weeks before they had already committed to calling the election.

Jeebus guys, you can't have it both ways. If the government has lost the confidence of the majority of the House, then move a non-confidence motion and throw the bastards out. Otherwise shut the f--k up and wait until spring. It isn't that no one wants an election over Christmas. It's that no one, including the opposition (Bloc excepted), wants an election until spring. The voters have been making it clear for months that they are generally satisfied with Martin's plans for the timing of an election. After watching their numbers slide almost back to their unspectacular pre Gomery report levels after one whole week, the NDP and the Conservatives don't want an election either. Are they really expecting that Santa Claus is going to bring them ten more points apiece in the polls for January?

The problem here is that the NDP spent too long in bed with the Liberals and now are trying to pretend they didn't get laid. This led to Harper's ludicrous idea that the NDP should prove their virtue by allowing SCRAC to dictate the timing and content of the NDP's non-confidence motion. Layton was stuck with having to show that even though they had sex, he didn't let Martin kiss him on the lips. The end result was a silly non binding request for the the Liberals to commit suicide in January. It's bad enough that Harper insists on trying to make Paul Martin look like something he isn't - a competent Prime MInister. It plumb evades me why Jack Layton would be trying to help him.

Is this three stooges show is the best Layton, Harper and Duceppe can come up with? If it is, when the election is finally called, I may have to get likkered up, stick a rat trap on my nose so as not to notice the stench and go vote Liberal.

Merry early Christmas Paulie. From Larry, Curly and Moe.