DM

Important Things with Demetri MartinWed 10:30pm / 9:30c

Brains - Preview - Some Data

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games
More Funny Videos

Is Jim Flarity our Rumsfeld?

By that I mean an official who stays on far too long and the demands of the job are a little too much for him to handle.

Native group urges hate charges against CBC

Neat issue to keep in mind in future about comments on blogs.

PATRICK WHITE

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

February 11, 2009 at 9:30 PM EST

WINNIPEG — A group of Manitoba native chiefs is urging that hate charges be filed against the CBC for what it called “racist and hateful” comments posted on the broadcaster's website.

The Southern Chiefs Organization, which represents dozens of bands in Manitoba, made the allegations yesterday after a year-long study of several online news sites.

While the chiefs are targeting CBC, their charges have potentially far-reaching implications.

The issue of who is responsible for comments posted on online message boards remains a legal grey area in Canada and affects virtually every media outlet in the country.

The group has not made any formal complaint against the CBC and legal experts doubt that charges would ever be laid.

Generally, site hosts are not held legally responsible for user comments unless they refuse to remove disputed comments.

The CBC has removed all posts in question and has a policy of blocking commentators who repeatedly write anything offensive.

Still, the broadcaster says it sympathizes with some the chiefs' concerns.

“We are interested in doing a better job of ensuring that the stuff that crosses the line is dealt with appropriately,” said CBC spokesman Jeff Keay, adding that Cecil Rosner, managing editor of CBC Manitoba, has apologized to anyone offended by the site's contents.

The chiefs decided to publicize their grievances after online CBC Manitoba news stories about an aboriginal girl who died in a house fire attracted a string of racist comments from anonymous web posters.

Those comments included the following:

“Native people do not have the knowledge to look after a house. Build them a teepee seeing they were better off 300 years ago.”

“No one reports that the house went up completely in 15 minutes due to the large amount of alcohol in the building.”

In all, the SCO identified 25 comments on the CBC site dating back to April 2008 they deemed to be hateful.

Grand Chief Morris Swan Shannacappo called on the Manitoba government to launch an investigation into CBC and said “charges should be laid.”

Acting Attorney-General Steven Ashton called the posts “racist and offensive,” but said the claims lie outside provincial jurisdiction.

He advised the chiefs to take their case to the RCMP and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Winnipeg-based ICUC Moderation Services moderates the roughly 200,000 online comments that the CBC receives every month.

One media law professor said that by moderating the comments, CBC could be liable for all posts on its website.

“If you are screening the comments, you are responsible,” said Dean Jobb, assistant professor of Journalism at King's College in Halifax and author of Media Law for Journalists.

Other legal experts said odds were long that the allegations would ever see a court, but couldn't predict a legal outcome with any certainty.

“Crystal ball-gazing is very difficult in terms of hate cases,” said Michael Geist, professor of e-commerce and Internet law at the University of Ottawa.

Campbell's record on reform falls far short of his ambitious agenda

An excellent piece on what has and hasn't worked out with the Campbell government's promises - most have not, and he's not being called on it.

By Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun January 31, 2009

When Gordon Campbell entered provincial politics a decade and a half ago, he brought with him an ambitious agenda of reform.

Reform, in the sense of opening up the workings of government to the public and making public institutions more accountable.

Reform in the "big R" sense, too. Many of Campbell's ideas overlapped with the federal and provincial Reform parties, with their then in-vogue campaigns for more transparent government and direct democracy.

The agenda helped Campbell round up support between his losing bid for office in 1996 and the winning one in 2001. And perhaps that was the main objective.

Since talking office in 2001, Campbell's interest in the reform theme has waned. He's abandoned some items and reversed others, until not much is left of the original agenda.

Herewith a rundown on the fate of Campbell's promises to make government more open, transparent and accountable, starting with the few pluses, proceeding to the many minuses.

- Establish a fixed election date. Done.

- Appoint a citizens' assembly on electoral reform. Done.

- Put the assembly's recommendation on electoral reform to the voters in a referendum. Done. Twice.

- Deliver truth-in-budgeting legislation. Kept in part. Government books are now maintained on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) as opposed to earlier inclinations toward commonly-rejected accounting principles (CR... oh, never mind.) But many of the long-term contractual obligations associated with public-private partnerships ($55 billion and counting) are buried in fine print in the public accounts (bottom of p. 72) where you could easily miss them.

- Free votes in the legislature on all matters not specifically identified as a vote of confidence. Almost never. The Liberals have held party line votes on virtually every bill. Dissent has been confined to the closed debates of the Liberal caucus room.

- Establish a Waste Buster website. Launched in 2001, shut down two years later.

- Ministers who exceed their budgets to face a salary cut. Never enforced. Every time ministries were in danger of missing their targets, the government has exempted the ministers via legislation. When the premier faced an overrun on his office budget, the Liberals moved the offending programs to another part of the government.

- Set a fixed parliamentary calendar, with sittings in the spring and fall. Adopted in 2001. But the government abandons the schedule at whim, any time it wants to avoid a fall session.

- Eliminate MLA pensions. MLA pensions had already been abolished by the previous New Democratic Party government when Campbell took office. His B.C. Liberal government restored a revised, albeit less-lucrative version of the MLA pension plan in 2007.

- Repeal the NDP gag law on third-party election advertising. Done. But replaced with a more restrictive Liberal gag law last year.

- Enact workable recall legislation. Nope. "Not a priority," the Liberals say.

- Make it easier for you to have a direct vote on issues, via workable initiative legislation. Nothing done on that one, either.

- Hold an open cabinet meeting every month. Done throughout first term. Not since 2005.

- All major capital spending and land use decisions to be decided by cabinet publicly, in open meetings. Seldom done in the first term, never since.

- Improve access to information. Pretty much betrayed.

The promise, according to Campbell himself: "Government information belongs to the people, not government. All citizens must have timely, effective and affordable access to documents which governments make and keep. Governments should facilitate access, not obstruct it. "

The practice, according to a survey reported earlier this month: "The B.C. government is the second-worst province in Canada after Ontario for responding to freedom of information requests, according to a national audit commissioned by the Canadian Newspaper Association . . . . Overall, B.C. received a C-, just slightly ahead of Ontario."

- Pass legislation requiring balanced budgets every year. Legislation making B.C. a "deficit-free zone" took effect in 2004. But with the law facing its first real test in this economic downturn, the government gives every sign of preparing to repeal or suspend the legislated ban on deficit budgets.

So, there's 16 hard and fast commitments to openness, transparency and accountability. Three kept, two others in the maybe category. Ten abandoned, reversed or outright ignored, with one more (the balanced budget commitment) apparently on life support.

Not an impressive scorecard. But let's give the last word on this disappointing performance to Campbell, from one of his many pious lectures on open and accountable government: "Openness builds trust and integrity. Secrecy feeds distrust and dishonesty."

He said that when he was in Opposition and promising to do better. It is no less true now that he is in government and responsible.

Important Things with Demetri MartinWed 10:30pm / 9:30c

Rookie Cop

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

Get Funny Ringtones
More Funny Videos

Patrick Brazeau Steven Segal

Patrick Brazeau physically resembles Steven Segal a bit but probably more so the villain in kindergarten cop.

Being Erica & Sigur Ros

This show is not bad.

This music, good in parts, pretentious crap in others.

Liberal Opposition Critics

Ones I like in Blue, ones I don't like in Green

Michael Ignatieff - Intergovernmental Affairs
John McCallum - Finance
Bob Rae - Foreign Affairs
Denis Coderre - Defence and Quebec Lieutenant
David McGuinty - Environment & Energy
Carolyn Bennett - Health
Marc Garneau - Industry, Science & Technology
Mark Holland - Public Safety & National Security
Geoff Regan - Natural Resources
Dominic LeBlanc - Justice and Attorney-General
Scott Brison - International Trade
Martha Hall Findlay - Public Works and Government Services
Todd Russell - Indian Affairs
Larry Bagnell - Arctic Issues & Northern Development
Joe Volpe - Transport
Gerard Kennedy - Infrastructure, Communities and Cities
Maurizio Bevilacqua - Citizenship & Immigration
Judy Sgro - Veterans Affairs, Seniors & Pensions
Yasmin Ratansi - National Revenue
Gerry Byrne - Fisheries & Oceans
Jean-Claude D'Amours - Atlantic Gateway and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
Pablo Rodriguez - Canadian Heritage & Official Languages
Maria Minna - Labour
Dan McTeague - Treasury Board, Consumer Affairs and Consular Affairs
Mike Savage - Human Resources & Skills Development
Anita Neville - Status of Women
Wayne Easter - Agriculture, Agri-food and Canadian Wheat Board
Sukh Dhaliwal - Asia-Pacific Gateway & Western Economic Development
Ruby Dhalla - Youth & Multiculturalism
Keith Martin - Amateur Sport, Health Promotion and the Vancouver Olympics
Alexandra Mendes - Economic Development Agency for Regions of Quebec
Glen Pearson - International Cooperation
Raymonde Folco - La Francophonie
Ken Dryden - National Outreach Advisor, Working Families & Poverty
Special Liason, National Fundraising

Joe the Plumber Gets Called out

Vancouver Sun: Reduce Pay for Senators

The Vancouver Sun is totally correct. It'd be best to just get rid of this bastard institution already, however at least this suggestion is an improvement on the present situation.

Pay senators a part-time wage for a part-time job

With no one showing any appetite to reform the Senate, the government should change the pay to reflect the duties

December 30, 2008

After 17 years in the provincial legislature, including a long stint as the minister of energy, Richard Neufeld is due a gesture of appreciation from the public he served.

It's also understandable that at 64, an age when most Canadians are contemplating retirement, he looks forward to slowing down from the sometimes grueling pace of a cabinet minister.

So for his sake, it's nice to see that he was able to land one of the lucrative and not too taxing seats in the Senate that Prime Minister Stephen Harper handed out as early Christmas presents to 18 more-or-less deserving Canadians.

The two other British Columbians who were similarly blessed have also demonstrated public spirit and are no doubt worthy of some recognition.

Still, their appointment to a part-time job with a salary that would comfortably support the families of two unemployed forestry workers does nothing to elevate the low esteem in which the Senate is held by most Canadians.

Nancy Greene Raine, who became a national hero 40 years ago when she won two skiing gold medals at the Grenoble Olympics says she'll be able to continue with her current positions as chancellor of Thompson Rivers University and director of skiing at Sun Peaks Resort.

Yonah Martin will likely only be known across the country to Canadians who read the agate pages following national elections to see who lost. She was the Conservative candidate for New Westminster-Coquitlam and lost the Oct. 14 election by almost 1,500 votes to the NDP's Dawn Black. Despite her record of local community service, Martin's appointment reeks the most of old-school patronage and at her relatively tender age of 43, she can legally collect her senatorial salary -- currently about $130,000, for another three decades before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75.

The political spin around Harper's appointments -- the most in a single day since Confederation -- is that they are somehow less odious that those made by the Liberals because first, he tried without success to make Senate reforms including elections and term limits, and second because the people he appointed are committed to those reforms.

True though these process arguments may be, they don't change the result. The women and men sworn in as Harper appointments will still be senators, part of an institution that exists at great expense but little purpose.

The problem with the Senate is not even that it couldn't be useful, but there is no appetite by any governing party for it to do anything other than rubber stamp the work of the House of Commons.

So the Senate exists primarily as a monument to the failure of Canadians to amend our own constitution, which is the only way it can be reformed or abolished.

What we can do without a constitutional amendment is revise the pay grid to reflect the service being performed.

Rather than a set annual salary, senators could be paid $1,000 a day for the days the Senate actually sits -- which averages around 70 a year.

That would still be enough to attract qualified candidates looking for a cushy part time job on their way to retirement, but not so much as to continue to scandalize taxpayers concerned about getting value for their money.

Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech

Excerpt:

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time....

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour.

Sage Words

From Jean Vanier:

"Now, I'm free to do what I like, and what I like is to announce the message: That people who are weak have something to bring us, that they are important people and it's important to listen to them. In some mysterious way, they change us. Being in a world of the strong and powerful, you collect attitudes of power and hardness and invulnerability."... "It is vulnerability that brings us together."

Movies to See of 2008

Milk
Ghost Town (check, not bad)
Chop Shop
A Christmas Tale
Happy-Go-Lucky
Cadillac Records -- Darnell Martin's story of the founding and flowering of the legendary Chicago label Chess Records elides some of the facts -- and yet gets the spirit exactly right. It doesn't hurt that the performances -- from the likes of Eamonn Walker, Columbus Short, Mos Def, Jeffrey Wright and, especially, Beyoncé Knowles (as Etta James) -- are superb. This is what it means to make a picture that's alive.

"The Class" -- Since Laurent Cantet's "The Class" took the top prize at Cannes earlier in the year, I've heard a surprising number of my fellow critics talk about it as a typical "triumph over adversity in the classroom" story, a highbrow "To Sir, With Love." But Cantet's drama, which stars real-life teachers and students and takes place over the course of one year in the classroom of a tough Paris suburb, is less about the big victories of teaching than it is about the frustrating imperfection of even the small ones. In "The Class," the classroom isn't a safe place isolated from the outside world, but a miniature universe where disparate people from that outside world come together, with all the conflicts and revelations that that kind of messy mingling implies. It's a hopeful movie -- but not a smug one.

"The Visitor" -- Because marketing campaigns and marquee names are always jockeying for our attention in the movie universe, sometimes we forget that acting and filmmaking are two of the things we go to the movies for in the first place. Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor" -- in which veteran character actor Richard Jenkins gives a marvelous performance as a 60-ish widowed professor who befriends two illegal immigrants living in New York -- helps put everything back in perspective. Eloquent and unassuming, "The Visitor" hits home precisely because it doesn't overreach its grasp.

"Before I Forget" -- In "Before I Forget," Jacques Nolot (the French actor who is both director and star here) plays Pierre, a 60-ish former hustler living alone in Paris who's been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He's survived many of his friends, but what does it mean to be a "survivor" when, in the end, the aging body you live in is going to betray you anyway? Pierre faces that inevitability with grace and good humor, but also with a realistic dose of mournfulness. Nolot has made one of the loveliest and most unflinching films about aging -- and about makeshift families -- I've ever seen.

"Trouble the Water" -- Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal went to New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, to make a film about the National Guard. They found an even greater subject when they ran into Kim and Scott Roberts, two self-described "street hustlers" from the Ninth Ward. Kim, an ebullient aspiring rap artist, had captured the hurricane's before, during and after with her video camera. Deal and Lessin helped shape the footage into a document that explains, without spelling it out in so many words, what it means -- or what it ought to mean -- to be an American.

"Sparrow" -- Maybe it's cheating to put an unreleased movie on a 10-best list, but in this case, I think it's justified cheating: Johnnie To's "Sparrow" didn't get a theatrical release in the United States, but at least you can watch it at home -- the DVD is available from DVDAsian.com and other vendors, and it's also available on Blu-Ray. More a musical than an action movie, "Sparrow" -- which details the adventures of a glam but broke gang of pickpockets -- borrows the mood, color and vitality of pictures like "Singin' in the Rain," "The Band Wagon," "An American in Paris" and even Jacques Demy's "The Young Girls of Rochefort." And its finale, a ballet of twirling umbrellas and graceful sleight-of-hand pirouettes, is one of the most gorgeous dance numbers I've ever seen.

Flipping Out

By virtue of being forced to watch TV with my family I have seen the show Flipping Out and "everyone's favorite obsessive-compulsive house-flipper, Jeff Lewis" is actually pretty funny.

Abolish the Canadian Senate

The Vancouver Sun hits the mark here.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Pill of Rights

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Word of the Day - Trenchant

1: keen , sharp
2: vigorously effective and articulate ; also : caustic
3 a: sharply perceptive : penetrating b: clear-cut , distinct

Gary Goodyear Pseudoscience Practioner Running Canadian Science and Technology

Great comment here:

Gary Goodyear is a chiropractor. Not only that, but he's an acupuncturist, too. Nothing like putting someone who believes in pseudoscience in charge of science and technology. I wonder how that will work out.

Quote of the Day

"When philosophers follow where argument leads, too often they are led to doctrines indistinguishable from sheer lunacy."
-philosopher David Lewis