green-watsonThe Green Party of Nova Scotia, and riding associations for the Greens and two other recognized parties, face imminent deregistration under the Elections Act for failing to publish audited financial statements for the last fiscal year as required by law. Dana Philip Doiron, communications director for Elections Nova Scotia, confirmed that Chief Electoral Officer Christine McCulloch will file her annual report under the Members and Public Employees Disclosure Act (MPED) Tuesday, and deregistration could follow shortly thereafter. "Sometimes [the report's release is] a ho-hum event, and Frank is the only one interested," Doiron said "In this particular case the report will be looking at compliance for reporting, and that report will be interesting."
26 June, 2009

New York artist Mairia Kalman gets a jump on American Independence Day with a visit to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father whose brilliant contributions to democracy are honored mostly in the breech. The New York Times published her multimedia account today.  Hat tip: Sarah Cooper-Ellis. If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous you need to go to his home in Virginia. Monticello...

26 June, 2009

It's an old debate: Does the curveball really bend, or is it just an illusion, like the river that runs uphill at Marshy Hope? Both says Arthur Shapiro, Associate Professor of Psychology at American University in Washington DC. Shapiro's demonstration of the illusory component won the Neural Correlate Society's Best Illusion of the Year Contest. In the game of baseball, a pitcher stands on a mound and throws a 2.9-inch diameter ball in the direction of home plate. The pitcher creates different types of pitches by releasing the ball at different velocities and with different spins. A typical major league “curveball”...

24 June, 2009

Writing in this morning's Toronto Star, retired Ontario Superior Court Justice Daniel Ferguson waxes indignant over the decision by Chronicle-Herald Ottawa reporter Steve Maher to listen to and report on an accidental recording of a private conversation between Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt and her communications director, the recently fired Jasmine MacDonnell. Moneyquote: Does this scenario not merit any comment from his fellow journalists? If his colleague had left her briefcase in the washroom, would he have rummaged through it, too? His comment about MacDonnell leaving it with him for five months sounded like a weak argument that perhaps she had abandoned it....

22 June, 2009

The anonymous senior official inside Transport Canada who responded to contrarian's revelation that the Harper Government steered Infrastructure Stimulus Plan paving projects to federal Tory ridings in Nova Scotia, responds to reader feedback: What your readers may not know is that senior bureaucrats are moved at the behest of the Clerk of the Privy Council and approved by the Prime Minister — a subtle but important distinction.  They (we) are not Liberal appointees any more than the current crop are Conservative appointees. When the Liberals were in power, they were convinced that some deputies were closeted Conservatives (as many were/are).  It doesn't...

21 June, 2009

[caption id="attachment_1057" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Steven Bierfeldt: Flush, iPhone-carrying, libertarian security risk"][/caption] Last March,  Steven Bierfeldt, a 25-year-old libertarian who works for US Congressman Ron Paul, tried to board a plane at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, when a security x-ray machine turned up a metal box in his carry-on baggage containing $4700 in cash, proceeds from the sale of tee-shirts and literature at a Ron Paul event the previous day. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials hauled Bierfeldt out of the lineup and detained him for half an hour, demanding to know the source of the (perfectly legal) money, along with a raft of...

20 June, 2009

This week, the Washington Post, a once great newspaper that has descended deep into neocon territory, fired Dan Froomkin, a blogger whose column on the White House appeared on the Post's website. Post editors and columnists frequently belittled Froomkin as "liberal" or "opinionated," but his real sin was doing what was once thought to be a journalist's main job: challenging the factual assertions underpinning White House policies and pronouncements. He was a rare exception to the craven press corps cheerleading in the run-up to the Iraq war, and he had begun holding Obama's feet to the fire when the Post dropped...

20 June, 2009
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