SUMMER 2006

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

BEATEN LIEBERMAN'S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
VOWS TO CARRY ON

The Internet is a wonderful thing. I was able to tune in to the election night coverage from Hartford from the local stations there, pretty good stuff from seasoned TV professionals in a market that has sent name reporters to the networks in recent years (ie. Natalie Morales). Anyhow, I watched Senator Joe Lieberman go on stage in Hartford to concede--- sort of.

What Lieberman actually said was that he was going to carry on anyway, even though he lost the primary, and he will file his papers to register as an independent Democrat and run against Ned Lamont in the November election. Interesting stuff. Lieberman is hoping plenty of Republicans will join his Democratic supporters in his independent bid to stop the anti-war, left-wing Lamont.

He might get his wish. Lamont looks to a lot of Republicans like, like...another Howard Dean. So a lot of Republicans will vote for Lieberman to stop Lamont. And a lot of Democrats are hoping the Republicans and whatever is left of the Lieberman supporters split their votes so that Lamont comes up the middle and wins. I dunno, Lieberman only lost the primary by 4%. He could well win a fall runoff with Republican backing. This looks to me like a situation where Lamont wins the battle but may lose the war.

Pardon the puns tonight, folks.
// posted by John Cairns @ 9:36 PM 0 comments


ELECTION RESULTS
EARLY CONNECTICUT RETURNS:
DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY
LAMONT 53%
LIEBERMAN 46%
ROUGHLY 1/3 OF THE VOTES COUNTED SO FAR. WINNER NOT OFFICIALLY DECLARED AS OF YET.
Rep. CYNTHIA MCKINNEY lost her primary race in Georgia.
STAY TUNED FOR ELECTION COVERAGE. I love election nights!
// posted by John Cairns @ 6:35 PM 0 comments

PRIMARY NIGHT IN CONNECTICUT
Every so often a big state primary or state election comes along that attracts the attention of the nation. I remember this was the case with Ahhhnold winning California. Tonight all attention is on the Democrats in Connecticut, in the fight between incumbent Joe Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont. Lamont is running as the anti-Iraq War candidate as far as I can tell and has picked up a lot of support. I find it incredible that voters in Connecticut may be ready to throw out Lieberman. A lot has been made about him being pro-war and too close to President Bush. But I don't know why people would think that he's a big Bush supporter. Heck, he ran against him in 2000, for VP! But anyway, Lieberman is in trouble and you might as well check out that race and find out what is going on.Here are the key links for Connecticut primary coverage:
http://www.wtic.com/ - Hartford.
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.drudgereport.com/
http://www.cspan.org/
I'm sure there are others. Back with more news, when it happens.
// posted by John Cairns @ 4:52 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 01, 2006
MEL GIBSON

Well, get this. Fidel Castro is going to go under the knife for intestinal surgery and is being forced to temporarily relinquish power in Cuba while he does that. North Korea is sabre-rattling again and firing shots, and the Israelis called off their 48-hour moratorium on air strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon. All these big stories; the world is basically coming to an end.

And yet, in spite of all this doom and gloom, what's the story everyone is talking about? As usual, it's none of the above, folks. It's Mel Gibson.His drunken DUI arrest in California and his drunken anti-Semitic comments, and the allegations of preferential treatment by the police and an alleged cover-up- why, this is the type of story that makes the day of any LA-based news reporter. This is why being a reporter in LA is a great job, because you get to go nuts covering a silly story like this. Barbara Walters was on The View the other day saying she wasn't going to go to any Mel Gibson movies any time soon. Gibson's name is mud.

Anyway, the folks at http://www.tmz.com/ have owned the story since the start, and you may as well check out what they are doing because they are killing everyone on this story. (TMZ is run by the same people who brought you Celebrity Justice on TV a while back. Too bad that show was cancelled, they would have gone nuts over the Mel Gibson story, that's for sure. )
// posted by John Cairns @ 8:44 AM 0 comments

Thursday, July 27, 2006
THE JOE VOLPE CAMPAIGN: THE BEST ENTERTAINMENT IN CANADIAN POLITICS

A long-overdue Liberal leadership post coming up. Things have happened this week that have been pretty big. What's basically happened is that the wheels have completely fallen off the comical Joe Volpe leadership campaign.

Really, is there a bigger train wreck of a campaign out there than this one? I can't recall a leadership campaign in the history of this country that has been a more complete disaster than this one. I mean, there are campaigns that went badly where people lost, but at least those candidates went down honorably. They were people who fought the good fight and came up short. But these guys, these fools--- the Volpe campaign has been the biggest laughingstock in Canadian history. Stories about Volpe have dominated the race and all the news coverage. His campaign is so bad that it's a joke.

I've never seen anything like it at the national level, with campaign managers quitting and people fighting over who should get access to the list of people recruited to the party, and kids getting recruited to the party and so on. I've seen lots of campaigns and lots of craziness in Canadian politics. This ranks down there with all that floor-crossing nonsense from last year, with Belinda and everything else. I've also seen craziness from across the border, too, from the likes of Howard Dean, Gary Hart, and these other jokers in American politics. But this Volpe business takes the cake, it really does. All that's missing is Volpe doing the "scream" speech.

The first thing the Volpe campaign did wrong was sell a bunch of memberships to 11-year olds. They had to return $27,000 that they raised and Volpe was roasted in the press for what had happened. He should have quit the race right then and there, but Volpe pressed on. Of course, his campaign manager up until now was none other than M.P. Jim Karygiannis of Scarborough-Agincourt, and he's been the key guy recruiting supporters for Volpe in a ton of ridings.

Then came the July 4 membership deadline for new recruits for the party and it turned out that Volpe had recruited over 30,000 new members, including reportedly a large number in Quebec. The Toronto Star was going around saying that Gerard Kennedy had shocked the party, too, and was supposed to be ahead, based on his excellent totals as well. But these new recruits were clearly a boost for Volpe.

Now, in the space of a couple of weeks, Volpe's campaign has completely imploded. Seems that the whole problem sprang from the contentious issue of the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Volpe, quite rightly in my view, came out defending Israel's actions and Israel's right to defend itself. He represents a heavily-Jewish riding from what I understand, so he's reflecting what his constituents want. But that stance didn't sit well with Jim Karygiannis. He quit last weekend as the campaign manager for Volpe! This was really bad news for this reason: Karygiannis had recruited all these people for Volpe. And it was well known that most of the people Karygiannis had recruited came from ethnic communities that, ahem, do not agree with Volpe's pro-Israel position. So if Karygiannis walked, the fear was he'd take this bloc of supporters with him.

Now comes this strange news. It seems that Karygiannis may be thinking of mounting a leadership bid of his own! You know that list of 36,000-odd new Liberal recruits signed up by Karygiannis for Volpe? Well, seems that instead of handing this list over to the Volpe campaign that he just quit, it's alleged that Karygiannis has decided to keep this list of 36,000 or so recruits for himself. Well, this is highway robbery, isn't it!? Talk about stealing another candidate's supporters. I'll bet the Volpe people feel they've been completely double-crossed by Karygiannis.

In fact, the Toronto Star reported that Karygiannis even had to call the police to prevent a Volpe campaign official from seizing the computers that stored all these lists of names on them. And for the record, Karygiannis is denying that he took anyone's lists. I think he probably thinks this list was his to begin with. Anyway, there's a big fight over this list, and I don't see how in hell Volpe expects to win if he doesn't even have access to the list of new members who were recruited for him in his name. He needs to contact them all to get them out to vote in late September for slates of delegates! But if he doesn't have these names how can he do that? Talk about a campaign in chaos.

Truth be told, though, these recruits were never really Joe Volpe people to begin with. These were actually Jim Karygiannis people; their first loyalty was to Karygiannis, not Volpe. And in all likelihood all these folks that Karygiannis recruited to the party probably don't agree with Volpe's Israel stance anyway. In fact I'll bet that Karygiannis took a lot of grief from a lot of his own supporters over Volpe's position. I'll bet Karygiannis wants to stay in good graces with these people; after all, they're his power base! So the bottom line is the Volpe campaign has been reduced to rubble as far as I'm concerned. All these Karygiannis folks have quit the Volpe campaign. They are all going to take their marching orders from Karygiannis and these community leaders telling them how to vote, and will allow themselves to be herded in whatever direction Karygiannis wants them to go: in all likelihood, to himself. Or at least so goes the plan.

This kind of stuff looks really bad. Karygiannis looks like Boss Tweed or somebody like that by doing this, with all these reports out there of him looking to be the big kingmaker and horse-trade all these "votes" he has in his back pocket to the highest bidder. He's going to apparently try and deliver them to somebody who opposes what Israel is doing in Lebanon: definitely not Michael Ignatieff. So these votes will all be hand-delivered to whoever will stop Ignatieff at the convention. Good grief, this is machine politics at its worst! These new recruits look like people being herded around like cattle! I saw this kind of stuff go on at leadership conventions in the past. This sort of reminds me of the 2003 PC convention where David Orchard had his delegates, and he was able to play power-broker and order his people around on the floor so he could be the big kingmaker. It was disgraceful machine politics and a disgrace to the old PC party. It was a big reason why the merger ultimately went through with the Canadian Alliance, because PC party members were angry and embarrassed at all the horse-trading that went on at that convention and the deals being cut behind closed doors without their input. Me, I hate when it happens in any political party, Conservative or Liberal.

If I were one of these new Liberal recruits, I'd be pretty insulted by the way all these supposed "bosses" are acting. These guys - Volpe's people, Karygiannis's people, all of them- are fighting over membership lists as if these votes are a captive audience. How dare they take people's votes for granted and then try and put them up for auction on the convention floor! These new Liberal recruits need to know that they're free to do whatever they want, that they can go ahead and vote for someone else. They aren't bound to cast their votes based on what Jim Karygiannis or anyone else thinks, the rules allow them to vote in a secret ballot! In fact, I'll bet you they don't even show up at the delegate selection meetings, many of them.

Anyway, bottom line is the Joe Volpe campaign has grabbed all the headlines early on in this Liberal leadership race, and for all the wrong reasons. I don't think Karygiannis has a hope in heck of doing well in the leadership race, if he runs. (I believe he has until September 30th to file his papers.) I'm sure many of these "recruits" won't even bother to show up to vote, or will vote instead for Gerard Kennedy or Bob Rae or somebody else. But regardless of what happens Karygiannis will still be able to get quite a few of his "people" elected as delegates all over Scarborough, and he'll be able to order them around at the convention in December! I know how some of these Scarborough ridings operate and boy oh boy, it's a bad scene there. We're talking about too many local players involved in politics in order to wield power and herd people around like cattle--- and not just in the Liberal party, either. It's terrible. Which is why I agree with Belinda Stronach's desire to have these leadership races decided by one-person-one-vote, it cuts down on all this machine-politics nonsense. Though it does increase the instant-Liberal problem. But overall it's still better.

If I sound cynical and bitter about what I see going on in the Liberal leadership race with this Karygiannis membership list nonsense, know that I've seen this kind of stuff first-hand from my side of the fence, too. I've seen the exact same membership recruiting nonsense, with these phony bosses and supposed bigshots behind the scenes trying to order people around and make deals behind closed doors. It's a big reason why I'm cynical about politics. This isn't what politics is supposed to be about. This is not the type of thing that will attract good people to public life.

Anyway that's the latest on the Liberal leadership race. It should really heat up come September as the race for delegates comes to a head. Expect more political coverage as the American election races heat up and the Ontario municipal vote comes up as well.
// posted by John Cairns @ 7:16 PM 0 comments

Saturday, June 03, 2006
TERROR PLOT FOILED
Here's the story in the Toronto Star about the arrests of seventeen lowlives who were plotting terrorist attacks on Toronto. In fact all the papers have screaming headlines about this story today: the only paper that didn't was the Globe. They totally missed the boat and came out with a headline that deemed a vote on same-sex marriage more important. No way that could be more important than this threat to the city.

Among other things, these folks had gotten their hands on three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, possible ingredients to build an explosive. The amount is roughly three times the amount that was used to blow up that building in Oklahoma City. If they had carried out their plot, these terrorists, who knows what would have happened. They could have blown up a building! There's been a lot of concern in this town about attempts on the subway system and the like. But this sounds really bad, far worse than something like that.I think the RCMP and CSIS deserve a lot of credit for bringing these thugs into custody. Now I want these creeps to stay in custody and go to jail, hopefully forever. I just hope these judges have the guts to put these people away and make sure they aren't set free to do damage to this country.

The thing I wonder about is, how the heck could this have happened, in Canada? It's one thing when you have these people from outside the country coming to Canada and using it as a base to inflict attacks on the USA. But apparently these were Canadians doing this! They were plotting attacks in Canada, upon Canada! And they had gone to these terrorist training camps and done all that training, apparently. This is a really sorry state of affairs when a country has to start worrying about terror attacks from its own citizens.
// posted by John Cairns @ 10:28 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 01, 2006
FED UP WITH AIR POLLUTION
Well, this week I've been reminded how much I hate Toronto. I'm sick of the smog, sick of the air pollution! This week we sweltered under all the heat and humidity, and the whole metropolis was blanketed with smog. I already have enough trouble breathing as it is with my lousy lungs, but usually I'm OK when the air is clear. But this air, this week, was garbage! It wasn't just smoggy, it was humid, too. So you felt like you were drowning from all the thick air! It was terrible!

Now, our local politicians are doing a bunch of high-minded things this week about the bad air in Ontario. For instance, they turned Ontario into a smoke-free province this week. Well, it's great that the air inside is going to be so good. What about the air outside?! It's not just a problem here in Toronto, this smog, it's a problem across southern Ontario. When I lived in southwestern Ontario you couldn't breathe there, either, because of all the pollution from these plants in Michigan and Ohio. You aren't going to change the situation until all these plants in the USA are shut down, and that will never happen. And they can't shut them down for another reason: people need to eat.

Thank heavens we had a big thunderstorm yesterday and that cleared out of here most of this bleeping smog. But that's the problem: the weather in Ontario is always bad. In the winter it's too cold, it rains too much in the spring, and summers get ruined by all the smog. And you also get lots of severe thunderstorms. In fact, yesterday was the 21st anniversary of the big tornado that levelled Barrie. People celebrated that anniversary by hiding in their basements, again, thanks to the weather warnings. So even here, in Toronto, you have to worry about tornadoes and things like that. What a place.

I know there are places around the world where the air is even worse than this: Asia in particular. Apparently there's a blanket of bad air that smothers the southern portion of Asia. But here, even a couple of days feels like way too much. I'm now seriously looking into moving somewhere where I don't have to put up with this air pollution any longer. You don't have this kind of pollution out West, that's for sure. Even Ottawa would be better than this.This is almost enough to turn me into a Green Party supporter--- well maybe not. But still---I'm sick of air pollution!
// posted by John Cairns @ 3:09 PM 0 comments

Friday, May 26, 2006
POLITICAL RANTING
Below, check out a long-pent up political rant about the press corps and their big dispute with Stephen Harper. It's been a long time since I've ranted and raved about Canadian politics- largely because, well, there's been a change of government and I'm very happy with what this government is doing. They're actually keeping promises and getting things done in Ottawa, for a change! The difference from that awful former Liberal government is so stark that it's not even worth ranting about. But this press corps spat- well, that's worth a big rant.I'll get back to commenting about TV and entertainment again this weekend, probably.
// posted by John Cairns @ 10:40 PM 0 comments


STEPHEN HARPER VERSUS THE PRESS
Well, by now everyone in Canada knows about this silly feud between Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the national media. And of course I feel compelled to weigh in on all this, since this spat is getting so ridiculous.

I mean really, about the only dirt the press corps has been able to dig up about this government has been this lack of media access. That's the big scandal du jour in Ottawa these days. Compare this spat to the olden days, of course, when the government would rob taxpayers of their own money and give it to ad agencies in Quebec. What a joke this is. Matters came to a head in Ottawa earlier this week when Harper had a big press announcement to make, and the press walked out in protest of new rules where the communications people got to pick and choose who asked the questions. I suppose what the Harper gang were trying to do was cut down on all the unruliness and run these press conferences in a manner similar to what the Americans do. Well, the media is having none of that, they're being petulant and walking out of media events, and they're ranting and raving all the time about how this government is micromanaging its own press conferences.

The press is also complaining about how secretive this government is and how the cabinet ministers are all being muzzled, and not allowed to talk to the press. For instance, there's a ridiculous story out there now about how Harper has ordered all his ministers not to comment to reporters about this big gay wedding of these two RCMP officers- because it might get all of them in trouble. Well, what do you expect him to do--- tell his ministers to talk about it?! That's exactly what I mean.

Now, I don't like the fact that Harper's government feels it has to run from the press all the time and not come in contact with reporters. They ought to be able to be accountable and take the heat from time to time. But let's face it, man, the media in this country is absolutely irresponsible! They think they own the world!

The problem is not so much that they are biased. The problem is that the press corps is arrogant. Everyone in the Conservative Party believes it's the former: that the media is biased in favor of the Liberals, and out to twist the Tories' every word and make them out to be a bunch of abortion-hating, right wing lunatics. But reporters say the Paul Martin Liberals were mad at the press gallery, too, because he supposedly complained about the beating he took from them during the election. Which leads me to believe that the press is more arrogant and full of themselves than biased.

They are arrogant, in the sense they feel they have every right to twist every word the government says, and lie and misrepresent what actually goes on on Parliament Hill. If the Tories cannot deal with all that, then too bad, they say, because it proves how incompetent they are at managing the media. According to this group of reporters, the mark of real leadership is the ability of the politicians to effectively deal with all of them, the press corps. If you can't manage the media, then you aren't worthy of managing and running an entire country. That's the mentality of these people in the press gallery.The Conservatives have had pretty dismal experiences dealing with this sort of attitude from the press. During the merger process, the media played up stories about discontent among disgruntled Progressive Conservatives like Joe Clark and David Orchard, all supposedly angry at the merger. You would have thought from the coverage that the merger wasn't going to happen, that the right was going to tear itself apart. But the media were hell-bent on trying to drum up knife-the-leader and party disunity stories--- from both the Conservative end and from the Liberals. They even played up those stories of disunity during the policy convention in Montreal in 2005. There were screaming headlines about the merger being in jeopardy, which was absolute rubbish. Conservatives were justifiably angry and upset at how dismally they were being portrayed in the national media at that convention.

During the notorious 2004 federal election campaign, the press were on the loose rummaging around for rogue Tories spouting off on abortion and same sex marriage, while totally ignoring what the Conservative platform was actually offering. The public got a totally distorted image of what the party stood for thanks to the national media, who were often reporting Liberal press handouts and propaganda as news. The media played into the Liberals' hands as they made the Tories look as if they had some hidden agenda, like they were out to gut the Supreme Court. Total irresponsibility on the part of the press.

The media were at it again in the 2006 race. They had a cow, claiming Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay contradicted themselves on the independent prosecutor issue, among other things. They were also rummaging around in the last week of the campaign, twisting what Harper had to say at a press conference bout the judiciary to make it seem as if Harper was anti-judiciary. Luckiliy, the press corps decided to turn on the Liberals' media relations team for the "leaks" and the other messes from that war room. The Liberals' inability to manage the media was a big issue with the press in that election campaign. If it hadn't been for the "Liberal mole", who knows what the press corps would have done. They could just as easily savaged the Conservatives again.

So why should Conservatives ever trust the media to truthfully report what is going on in the government? Especially after seeing how this group of piranhas reacted during these campaigns!? No wonder they won't take questions impromptu from reporters these days. They're justifiably afraid these press people will twist their comments out of joint and create a big scandal out of a simple press statement, and make the government look like a bunch of crooks and hypocrites no different from the Liberals. Already the CBC and the Toronto Star and these other places are trying to make it look as if the Conservatives are going back on all their policies and prior statements. They're digging up quotes from years earlier where they showed Harper making some statement about what ought to be done, trying to show that he's flip flopped.

The truth is that this Harper government has been hard at work in Ottawa, cutting the GST and bringing in all the legislation they promised during the election. Everyone sees that they're keeping their campaign promises, that they aren't being a bunch of hypocrites most of the time! But you'd never know that watching the CBC.

I think the media should get used to the fact that the Tories simply do not trust them to report fairly or even truthfully about what is going on in Ottawa. That's the reason nobody will talk to them. Frankly, I am no fan of limited access, either; it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that a government committed to accountability would do. But what do you expect this government to do after the shabby way it's been treated by these reporters?! This press corps is getting exactly the treatment it deserves after all the misreporting and knife-the-leader stories they have done, and with their macho attitudes toward twisting what all these political parties have to say. That sort of "we'll show the government who's boss" type of attitude.

They asked for it! They should quit whining about their treatment, these journalists, and get back to accurate reporting. Only then will the Tories change their minds in Ottawa and start granting access to them again.
// posted by John Cairns @ 9:08 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 03, 2006
POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS
Why do I hang around politics? Usually for culinary reasons; the food is usually good. Speaking of which, there's a big political event tonight in Toronto. Jane Pitfield is launching her campaign for mayor of Toronto tonight and I think I'm going to head out there and see what's happening and see whether any bigshots show up. Probably there will be. I know some political aides at City Hall who are supporting Pitfield who should be there for the launch.Hope there's food there too, and I also hope the press people there don't eat it all first.

In other municipal political news, 85-year-old Mayor Hazel McCallion of Mississauga was fined $110 for running her car into a stop sign. She now says she will allow a chauffeur to drive her around. Many mayors would have demanded chauffeurs a long time ago; not Hazel. She should be applauded for refusing to be "above the rabble" and for driving a car back and forth to work, just like the commoners do. But really, at her age, she really does need a driver.

Back later.
// posted by John Cairns @ 11:55 AM 0 comments