John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Not-so-tough guys

"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try." 
- Peggy Noonan 

In the muck

"I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." 
- Cyrus Ching  

When message track goes off the rails

The photo above shows Tom Osborne and Kathy Dunderdale in ostensibly happier times, on election night in October 2011, when the PCs won their third straight mandate in Newfoundland and Labrador. They actually weren't that close at the time, as both have confirme in the last few days, following Osborne's defection on Thursday to sit as an Independent in the house of assembly.

One of the things we've learned over the last few days is a bit about the communcations strategy inside the provincial government, including the government's move to screen and decide when an MHA can speak publicly on what topic. Osborne cited it as one of the reasons why he's disillusioned with the party to which he had belonged through his adult life.

I wrote a piece for the CBC Newfoundland and Labrador site that was published today, on this and other elements of message track and politics, and the conflicts that come up. Hope you can take the time to have a look.

Tweeting with freedom

This is a very simple yet potent creative for an Amnesty International campaign on digital freedom. I spotted it here. 

Rick Mercer: 'The state has no business in the hard drives of the nation'

Rick Mercer took on the online-privacy uproar in this week's rant. 

 

The in-laws

"Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law."
- Hubert Humphrey

(As funny as I find this remark from the former U.S. vice-president, I'm happy to note that my own mother-in-law and I have defied the stereotypical relationship!)  

 

Pepper spray video involving UC Occupy protesters

This is video posted today by The Associated Press, involving an incident that's all over the news, of police officers using pepper spray on Occupy demonstrators at University of California, Davis. Regardless of views on the Occupy movement and police response, it's compelling video. 

Efficiency

"Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."
- Harry S Truman  

 

An honest thought on politics

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." 
- John Lehman  

 

Another stage

"The view that all actors are undisciplined and self-indulgent is rubbish. If you want to see that kind of behaviour, come to parliament." 
- Glenda Jackson  

 

Debate live blog: What I was up to tonight

The leaders' debate in the provincial election was held tonight. At CBC, we livestreamed the video and added a moderated chatroom alongside. It was a lot of fun; my main role was to chip in with some context of what the leaders were saying. The chat is archived here; feel free to have a look. 

We think too much and feel too little: The great Charlie Chaplin speech

Just days after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Charlie Chaplin was already shooting The Great Dictator, which came out in the following year. Chaplin had been troubled by the rise of Hitler through the Thirties, as well as how other nations dealt with him. His film was not only a broad comic swipe at Hitler and fascism, but a moving message in its own right - particularly for the speech that Chaplin's character, a Jew who is mistaken for a madman, gives at the climax of the film.

The speech, in which Chaplin praises technology as a potential force for good but decries "these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts." The speech has been quoted often (it's in this American Rhetoric collection) and has been making the rounds lately, perhaps in the spirit of the 9/11 anniversary. 

On Canadian unity

"Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity." 
- Kenneth E. Boulding  

 

Rex Murphy on Jack Layton

From The National.

The tricky servant

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
- Charles de Gaulle  

Umbrella

"Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof."
- James Russell Lowell

An animated debate on the Catholic Church

This is interesting: the audio of a debate on the merits (or lack) of the Catholic church between author Stephen Fry and politician Ann Widdecombe, with an animated visual presentation laid over it. 

To get a sense of how the animation affects the content, here's the original video, produced in 2009 for the debating series Intelligence Squared. [The animation, by the way, was released in July.] 

Crocodiles

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."
- Winston Churchill  

 

 

Eloquence in the wake of the Norway attacks

I've been reading with shock over the last day of the attacks in Norway, apparently by a single man whose extreme right-wing vision for his country led him to bomb a government building and then open fire at a youth camp. 

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's immediate response to the violence was eloquent: 

"We are a small country nation, but a proud nation. No one shall bomb us to silence, no one shall shoot us to silence, no one shall scare us out of being Norway."

The AFP/Getty image of Stoltenberg is carried with this report. 

In writing

"Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one."
- John A. Macdonald

Campaign funnies

Well, many of them are funny. David Olive of The Toronto Star rounded up a whack of photos from the campaign trail that are worth a peek, even as all the ballot boxes are put away till next time.

Confederation Building

I'll let you in on a little trade secret: I collect pictures of Confederation Building. It's not a fetish; I use them for what we call a topstory image (also known as a headline image) for a story placed on our regional landing page at CBC. We try to add such an image to every story we produce, largely because of the popularity of how our news run is presented on smartphones like the iPhone. [Click here to get a sense of what I mean.]

Confederation Building is a frequently sought subject, because it's the pre-eminent symbol of the Newfoundland and Labrador government, not to mention the home of the legislature. Hence, I'm always looking for a new angle, a different backdrop, and something seasonally appropriate. I snapped this one myself this week.

 

Poll tracker

This is the fourth federal election campaign since I started this blog, which sounds quasi-impressive to those outside Canada and who probably don't know the first of those campaigns was in 2004. Canada has elections about as frequently as some people have oil changes.

If you're like me, polling data is like catnip. Here's the CBC roundup on Canada Votes, which is now part of my Morning Coffee routine.

Let Obama be clear

Most politicians are fond of familiar phrases, if only because they use them. A lot. As in, all the time.

If you ever transcribed Brian Tobin, for instance, you'd know what I'm talking about.

Tobin, indeed, came to my mind when I read this piece about the phrases Barack Obama is most inclined to use. (Read more about it here on The Daily.)         

#1 “Make no mistake” — 2,924 times

#2 “Win the future” — 1,861 times; 9 times in his 2011 State of the Union address

#3 “Here’s the deal” — 1,450 times

$4 “Let me be clear” — 1,066 times

Are televised debates worth it?

We now officially have a federal election campaign in Canada. We've had an unofficial one for months, but now we're all out in the open. We shall surely have televised debates, too. 

We're used to them in Canada; they're part of the process, part of the political theatre.

In the UK, televised debates are novel, and there's some interesting commentary today from an informed voice. I saw this report in the Guardian:

They were greeted as the most important innovation in television coverage of a general election for a generation. But David Dimbleby, the host of BBC1's flagship political programme Question Time, has questioned whether the hugely popular TV party leader debates were a good thing after all.

Dimbleby, who hosted the BBC's edition of the live head-to-heads between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg last year, used an awards ceremony on Friday to warn that people could "come to regret" the advent of the TV debates, which look set to become a permanent fixture of the UK political landscape.

"The debates certainly were an innovation. They will change the way electoral campaigns are conducted, not necessarily entirely for the better," said Dimbleby in a video message to the Broadcasting Press Guild awards in central London, where the party leader debates won the innovation prize.

"In one way they are odd because we don't have a presidential system in Britain. We have a parliamentary system. We don't elect prime ministers, we elect parliaments and MPs; we have after all got a coalition now," he added.

Read the full report here.