The Altantic's James Fallows assesses the the Gates-Obama-Crowley Rose Garden pissup from a beer connoisseur's viewpoint and finds it "mainly missed opportunities." But then, it's hard to get Propeller in Washington, D.C....
[UPDATES appended at end] Contrarian reader SL shares our ink-stained correspondent's distaste for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal's malodorous apology to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. She wonders why departing Harper Communications Director Kory Teneycke included the precise timing of his decision to resign so prominently in his resignation talking points. The second paragraph of the CBC story reads: Teneycke said he told Harper just after Canada Day and before the G8 meeting in Italy earlier this month that he was going to step down. That would be, uh, just before the Prime Minister did or did not consume the sacramental Host at Romeo LeBlanc's...
Civil servants are happy with the Dexter Government's methodical approach to policy because ministers are listening carefully to policy advice and deliberating before acting. But the issues keep coming, whether government's ready to act or not. The risk of Dexter's approach is that ministers may fall into reactive mode, moving from crisis to crisis rather than driving the new government's policy agenda. We have already seen Health Minister Maureen MacDonald struggling with the discovery that she cannot wish away the problem of rural emergency room closures, as she and the party assured voters they could during the election. (More on this soon.) Today,...
I find something stinking with the Telegraph-Journal's wafer story. They bent over backwards to apologize and apparently the editor and publisher paid the price. But I haven't seen any reporting that took this any further. Did the Catholic officials cited in the original stories who apparently were so mightily offended by Harper's alleged act change their tunes? Who got the quotes from the church people? What contact was there between the PMO and the TJ? Did higher ups in the church get involved? God (literally) knows.
Jacob and Josh (previously seen here) are on vacation in Calvert, NF, where they played with this kiddie car in the driveway. It didn't roll as well on the grass, but they still enjoyed taking turns with it. More at Jenn's blog, Newfoundland Vacation. ...
Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, a British immigrant to the United States whom I would describe as a principled conservative, chronicles Obama's failure to check the America's slide into a police state. I backed Obama because I believed he wanted to roll some of this back. It increasingly appears that I was wrong. The 9/11 police state is with us. Obama is slowly legitimizing it, despite being elected to unwind it. This country is no longer as free as many others in the world - and unrecognizable compared with the free country I found in 1984. And it's getting less free every...
The Canadian province most deeply committed to clean, renewable energy has been stopped in its tracks by a utilities commission ruling that rejected BC Hydro's plans to acquire clean energy as “not in the public interest.” Moneyquote: The ruling could call into question the viability of the B.C. government's policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020. That promise, and a long term goal of an 80 per cent reduction by 2050, was put into law last year with passage of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act. Green energy stocks fell sharply on...
In a post yesterday Monday, contrarian observed that a little noticed NDP campaign promise would advance Nova Scotia Power's renewable energy targets by five years. Today Tuesday, the new government made that promise official government policy. NSP must generate one quarter of its energy from renewable sources (hydro, wind, tidal, wave, solar, biomass, biofuel, or landfill gas) by 2015. It's certainly a laudable step, but how big a step is it? The answer to that is incredibly complicated. It's complicated because various stages of the renewable energy requirements imposed on NSP define renewable energy three different ways: as overall generation from renewable sources; as...
The Saint John paper that broke the Wafergate scandal now says there is "no credible basis" for its story. Moneyquote:
The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister's Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call 'the host' into his jacket pocket." There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now.
Come on now. The legislature isn't even sitting, and you're taking thinly-veiled jabs at the government-to-be for not doing anything?