brooke&rodney
Conservatives were furious when Premier Donald Cameron quit his Pictou East seat in a huff on election night in June, 1993. So on election night in June 2009, Premier Rodney MacDonald was careful to say he had no plans to resign his Inverness seat. That was then; this is now. Rodney announced this afternoon that he is quitting the seat after all, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is fixing to name some Senators. Throughout the spring, the assumption was that Nova Scotia's next Senate seat would go to Brooke Taylor, Harper's earliest and most ardent leadership acolyte among Nova Scotia Tories—and the only provincial cabinet minister to campaign against Cumberland-Colchester's ousted Tory MP, Bill Casey, in his successful re-election bid as an Independent last fall.
05 August, 2009
At the risk of sounding like a Green Party blog, today's news has to be disheartening for those adherents who have tried to get the party back on track. After the break, an email from Elections Nova Scotia Communications Director Dana Philip Doiron describes the outcome of a meeting this morning in which Chief Electoral Office Christine McCulloch gave outgoing party leader Ryan Watson and official agent Kathryn Herbert one last chance to demonstrate that the party can meet its legal obligations.
05 August, 2009

One of the neat developments of the digital era is the rapid advance of what geeks call the visual presentation of numerical information. Just as word processors revolutionized the mechanics of writing, Photoshop revolutionized image manipulation, and Google Earth revolutionized mapping, new digital tools are giving everyday users the power to produce amazingly useful and instructive interactive graphs. Two online newspapers produced beautiful examples this week: USA Today produced this interactive approval tracker comparing the approval rating for all US presidents since Harry Truman. The crimped screen shot reproduced here doesn't even hint at the power of this tool, so...

05 August, 2009
[caption id="attachment_1736" align="alignwrap" width="550" caption="Mishra's Dream: Rob Scott, Donald MacLennan, Graham Scott, Michael Dalton, and Devin Ryan. The unlikely Antigonish group begins a national tour Thursday night at Stayner"]Mishra's Dream: Rob Scott, Donald MacLennan, Graham Scott, Michael Dalton, and Devin Ryan. The unlikely Antigonish group begins a national tour Thursday night at Stayner's Wharf in Halifax. Photo: Emma Gabriel.[/caption]
Donald MacLennan grew up in Chimney Corner, Inverness County, a tiny place where it's still cool for kids to take up the fiddle. He played Scottish tunes from the age of 12, but at 18, around the time he headed to St. F.X., Donald got bored with the old diddly-diddly, and set aside his violin. A couple of years later, Donald was hanging out at home when he some strange guitar riffs wafted in from the front deck. Mike Dalton and another friend were outide jamming. "What's that you're playing?" asked Donald.
05 August, 2009
Picture 1Oh, how embarrassing! The New York Times, which many regard as the best newspaper in the world, had weeks of warning that Walter Cronkite was gravely ill. Like most large newspapers, the Times routinely prepares advance obits of famous subjects. In this case, it prepared both an obit and an Arts Section appraisal of the anchor's life's work. Two experienced writers and at least seven editors pored over the material. Two days before Cronkite's death, after CBS News discovered errors in the obituary material it had prepared in advance, Cronkite's son Chip emailed a senior Times editor to suggest a similar preemptive review of the paper's advance obit. Despite all this preparation, the Times's July 17, front-page obituary contained two errors, and the Arts Section appraisal fully seven. The result was this embarrassing correction:
02 August, 2009
CopyCon Ministers - cropped
Why is Canada's news media doing such a shoddy job covering the copyright consultations now taking place in select cities across part of Canada? At the heart of the consultations on planned changes Canada's copyright law lies a fundamental question: Should the law protect authors of creative work, or corporate intermediaries who traditionally profited from the massive effort formerly required to reproduce and distribute them? Thanks to digital technology, the cost of copying and distributing works is rapidly approaching zero. Naturally, those who once profited from copying and distributing creative works are frantically trying to stem the flow of creative works, advocating ever-lengthening copyright protection,  and mandatory enforcement of consumer-hostile technologies that prevent all copying, legal or otherwise. In many cases, they have co-opted creator organizations to their cause. Not surprisingly, news organizations tend to view this question through the lens of corporate intermediaries. With exceptions, they frame the debate in terms University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer describes as, "the caricature of toiling creators vs. freeloading pirates."
02 August, 2009
[caption id="attachment_1671" align="alignwrap" width="500" caption="The late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (left) and modern day acolyte Ryan Watson, outgoing leader of Nova Scotia's Green Party"]rinpoche-watson[/caption]
Coast News Editor Tim Bousquet has stirred things up with his report of a festering schism within Halifax's Shambhala Buddhist community, and Green Party gadfly Mike Marshall claims the same breach underlies bizarre behaviour by outgoing party leader Ryan Watson and his executive. Bousquet reports that dissidents, including Mark Szpakowski, Ed Michalik, and Andrew Safer, have set up RadioFreeShambhala, a website to foster discussion they say mainstream Shambhala leadership discourages.
01 August, 2009
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