Puppies or Kittens?

Vanity Fair's Q&A is interesting journalism to me. Most of the writing about celebrities today is tabloid and decidedly superficial. This Q&A doesn't challenge Ellen in any way, and I am not sure that is good journalism. I find it so interesting, that in the US where there is this HUGE obsession with training gay and lesbian people to be straight or to at least just shut up about it, Ellen gets a free pass, even in the press!

I mean, it's just weird. I can find out what Lindsay Lohan ate and then purged last night for dinner, but there is NO DIRT on Ellen. Don't get me wrong, I like Ellen. Just like everyone else does. So I had to ask myself ... do I really want to know what Ellen's cellulite looks like? Do I want to know that she used to mainline heroin when she was in college? Not really. I like to like Ellen, and I guess everyone else does too.

I don't watch much daytime tv but I have seen Ellen's show a couple of times, and she interviews her guests just like Vanity Fair interviewed her. "Do you like puppies?" is the hardest hitting question she puts to people. Anyone who needs some good PR just has to have their agent get them on the Ellen show. Hmm. Maybe we could get Dalton McGuinty some face time.

In the Land of Cheap Beer and Hot Girls

I am not a fan of The National Post. This article is a great illustration of some of the reasons for my opinion, aside from the fact that I think, on the whole, that the articles are poorly written. Graeme Hamilton is openly delighted about the way in which the Conservatives were jeering Gilles Duceppe in the House of Commons. My first question for Mr Hamilton is, "Why should I care about the grade 3 level of insults?" and my second question is, "Don't you have anything better to do?"

Hamilton goes on to paint Duceppe as a traitor to the Bloc Quebecois and I categorize that as entirely as spin. That is not a fact, it is an opinion and opinions are like bellybuttons. Everyone has one. Hamilton also supposes that this gives the Conservatives an advantage in Quebec. So what if Hamilton thinks Duceppe made a grave mistake? Do I? Do other journalists? Does Duceppe? Do you?

Here is Duceppe and his biggest fan:

Punch Buggy Yellow

I love minority governments. Not only are they usually more effective, it's just so damn entertaining to watch the ensuing brouhaha, namecalling, and general buffoonery. I found this article about Jean-Pierre Blackburn defending his spending, also written by Bruce Cheadle.

This week, Conservatives come under fire because the NDP did a "Freedom of Information" search on departmental spending. At first, it seems kind of petty. But think about that. They had to do a FOI search and those are a huge pain. For all the Conservative talk about transparent spending and how evil those nasty Liberals were with the Adscam fiasco, they've got a lot of nerve.

Let's have a look at some of that nerve. Here is Jean-Pierre Blackburn in the House:



Okay, that really looks more constipated than nervy, but I digress.

And the defense offered? "We're not as bad as the Liberals." That's like Saddam Hussein saying he wasn't as bad as Hitler. I'm glad Layton got a laugh out of that, but he's one to talk. His entire shtick is making fun of whoever happens to be under fire. He's like the court Jester of the House of Commons. Not an admirable position. Layton shot, “They campaigned on accountability but they're governing like the Liberals” and Van Loan countered with a shot about Layton being busted riding in a limo when he was a city councillor in Toronto. PUNCH BUGGY BLUE!! NO PUNCH BACKS!!

So then a couple of days later, this article is written, with Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon being raked over the coals.



A picture really is worth a thousand words, isn't it?

Enter the Communications Professional

Catherine Loubier, Mr. Cannon's communications director, confirmed there is no distinction between “program-related business” and departmental business.

But she said the minister can't claim for costs incurred by the department. If the Transport Canada flight was the only expense for the minister's trip, he has nothing to declare, said Ms. Loubier.

Dear Ms. Loubier. Everything that comes after "but" is bullshit. That makes no sense whatsoever.

Jim Meek, of that Halifax Chronicle Herald wrote:

If you have expenses as a minister of the Crown, you needn’t go to all the fuss and bother of telling people about them.

You can just dump your groceries in someone else’s shopping cart and get him to pay at the cash.

And there’s no need to worry about all that disclosure nonsense.

This probably explains how cabinet ministers have been dining for free at fancy restaurants in Ottawa.

The high-flying Cannon has got this one figured out as well.

In the three months or so ending in early March, he filed zero dollars worth of hospitality claims.

The job of spending taxpayers’ money was left instead to civil servants and others – including his chief of staff, who billed the government for $557 for a Dec. 13 event that included the minister.

In fact, the impulse to get minions to buy the drinks and the canapés has spread like a fast-acting virus in the federal cabinet. Of Harper’s 25 cabinet ministers, 13 filed hospitality expenses totalling a big fat zero in the first few months of 2007.

So the message in the Harper cabinet seems to be: it’s alright if you have expenses – as long as you hide them.

Meek's article is less biased. Cheadle writes very little about the Liberals, the Gomery Inquiry and "Adscam" but that is a crucial part of the whole debacle. Many people voted for the Conservatives because they promised transparency in spending and they did a great attack job on the Liberals because of Adscam. Neither the Conservatives or the Liberals (or Layton in his limo) are beyond reproach here. I want to nip this in the bud, so I'll just end by saying that the voters are not idiots. We get that Ministers have to travel and they have to eat. We just want some accountability. After all, we're accountable to them when we all get our T4's.

Cool cool blogs

I was sitting in a cultural studies tutorial not too long ago and the topic of blogs came up. I was really excited and looking forward to a great discussion because I've been on the internet since forever (I'm a bit of a dinosaur - I've had my hotmail account for at least 11 years) and I've managed to do a number of things, including moderating Michael Moore's message board before he shut it down. (A team of eight moderators could not stem the tide of death threats and other utterances.) In any case, I'm sitting in class prepared to discuss the wonders (and evils) of the net when the TA (who shall remain nameless and blameless) announced that blogs are silly, lame and naive and basically an exercise in navel-gazing. My mouth fell open.

I raised my hand and started explaining the Jeff Gannon phenomenon. I was, and still am, in possession of only a rudimentary knowledge of the whole debacle as it took a lot of people a lot of time to uncover the story. It involves the uncovering of Valerie Plame as a spy, and hints and speculation all revolved around the White House administration, namely Karl Rove. Plame's husband Joe Wilson had written an article for the New York Times that stated there was no evidence of WMD's in Iraq. Not long after that, Plame was outed by another journalist named Robert Novak. People make a lot of noise, and demand to know how the information got out.

At a press briefing, Jeff Gannon shows up and basically says that Plame is a household name, as if spies are commonly discussed at every dinner table. Bloggers at Daily Kos and World O'Crap got really curious because nobody knew who the guy was. I mean, really curious. As a collective, they looked into him, find out that he went to "journalism school" for two whole days and has never really had a real job before, yet managed to get a press pass every day from the White House. Over time they reveal that he had been a male escort, amongst other things. I remember reading about this at the time, being riveted, and the MAINSTREAM PRESS had absolutely nothing to say about it. Zip. Zilch. De nada.

This article explains how the blogosphere really does act as a public sphere, engaging the public in developing the news, rather than relying on a one way system. It brings McLuhan's Hot and Cool medium theory to mind. The mainstream press is hot and blogs are cool. Or at least cooler.

So I failed to impress the TA and ... well, who cares? I still think the blogosphere is underestimated in its ability to inform. For those of us who are tired of reading about what Britney ate for breakfast or what orphan Brangelina is adopting next, blogs are an excellent alternative.