Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was born on this day (October 28 – same day as Bill Gates, by the way) in 1956, has never exactly been a friend of the Jews (he has vowed to wipe Zionism off the map, and has come very close to denying the Holocaust, among other things), so there seemed to be an imminent irony overload in the making when it was alleged that Ahmadinejad was part-Jew himself. After the jump, we trace the controversy, and reveal the authority that has settled the question for good.

Read More

The Associated Press reports that Lebanon has fired the latest salvo in the ongoing battle with Israel over which country can lay claim to hummus, that delicious  and oh-so addictive chick pea-and-tahini spread/dip:

Lebanese chefs prepared a massive plate of hummus weighing over two tons Saturday that broke a world record organizers said was previously held by Israel — a bid to reaffirm proprietorship over the popular Middle Eastern dip.

“Come and fight for your bite, you know you’re right!” was the slogan for the event — part of a simmering war over regional cuisine between Lebanon and Israel, which have had tense political relations for decades.

Lebanese businessmen accuse Israel of stealing a host of traditional Middle Eastern dishes, particularly hummus, and marketing them worldwide as Israeli.

This is all sufficiently absurd, but wait for the punchline:

Read More

According to former CAW chief Buzz Hargrove’s new memoir, our prime minister has a little trouble when it comes to demonstrate his “regular guy” bonafides:

Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers at the time, says in his book Laying it on the Line that he joined union economist Jim Stanford in talking to Harper for about half an hour in November 2007.

But Hargrove says the Prime Minister’s behavior “bordered on bizarre.”

“In an effort, I assume, to suggest he was just one of the boys, a guy who could relate to blue-collar workers despite his political record, Harper managed to say `f—’ two or three `times, none of them in what might be called a normal context,” Hargrove writes.

Hargrove, no slouch at swearing during years of contract bargaining with automakers, adds that as he and Stanford left the meeting, they looked at each other and asked: “What the heck was that all about?”

And so for your reading enjoyment, I present a one-act play entitled “Harper Hangs Out With Buzz”…

Read More

Since it was announced that Barack Obama would be awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the reaction has been furious on both sides of the imaginary political divide. Naomi Klein called the jury “delusional,” while Rush Limbaugh said that “the Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves.” Of course, right-wingers have, as usual, put their leftist peers in the dust when it comes to shamelessness, hyperbole, and offensiveness, with one online commentator actually positing that next year’s winner will be a raccoon. (Get it? Think vile racist slang…)

Probably the best take is cartoonist Tom Tomorrow’s, in which he posits that it is the idea of Obama that won the award, not the man himself.

Here are a few things about the prize, however. No, Obama doesn’t really deserve it. He’s only been president for less than a year, and all of his major initiatives have yet to bear fruit, peaceful or otherwise. He also intends to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, and has made it clear he will continue – and even enhance – Bush-era policies on detainees.

But really, it’s the Nobel Peace Prize we’re talking about here. And if you look at a list of previous winners, one thing that becomes clear is that the prize has always been more than a little screwy. After all, Henry Kissinger won the thing, and Ghandi never did.

[Peace image by bitzi.]

Remember the recession? That is, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, otherwise known as The Great Downturn, The Great Slump, and The Worst Economic Crisis Since the 1930s? Those of you who were there know it was a difficult time — there were layoffs and plant closures across the board, job sharing and wage clawbacks became the norm. We watched, helpless, as whole industries — automotive manufacture, banking, pornography — teetered on the edge of collapse.

It may be hard to imagine, in these heady post-recession days, but the very culture changed. Elaborate travel plans got downgraded to “staycations,” luxury items were suddenly seen as, well, luxuries. To keep warm, musicians and hipsters were forced to grow beards that would have shamed a Russian novelist. Things got so tense, even music video award ceremonies were interrupted by cries of  “injustice!”

But those days are, thankfully, behind us…

Read More

Just over a year ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended his government’s cuts to arts and culture funding by saying that, “when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”

It was the kind of AM radio-ready, faux-populist red meat that Tories are very good at tossing out. Who wanted to be on the side of a bunch of rich, spoilt artists? (That rich corporate executives enjoy their own heavily subsidized spoils and come back demanding more, usually successfully, rarely gets mentioned.)

But Harper is a slippery guy. He knows that this year (and the possible coming election) is not about red meat. He has managed — thanks, in part, to the inability of the opposition to come up with a defining counter-narrative that sticks — to portray himself as a rational, steady-as-she-goes centrist, the perfect person to be at the tiller in these turbulent times.

Which is why he does things like this:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper tickled the ivories to the tune of The Beatles Saturday night at the sold-out NAC Gala held at the National Arts Centre in support of Canada’s next generation of performing artists.

Harper got by with a little help from cellist Yo-Yo Ma taking to the stage just prior to the intermission to sing and play the piano. He performed a classic Beatles tune - “With a Little Help from My Friends” - accompanied by Ma, one of the greatest classical musicians of our time, and members of the Ottawa band, Herringbone.

In other words, “what do you mean I hate the arts? I just played a Beatles song with Yo Yo Ma! And he played at Obama’s inauguration!”

Watch the video here.

[Top image is web editor's metaphorical interpretation of the encounter between PM Harper and Mr. Ma]

David Miller, Toronto’s high-profile mayor, made the surprise announcement last Friday that he would not run for a third term next year. Miller says he had made the decision not to run back in 2007, and only just got around to letting everyone know, but that’s a little hard to believe, given that, according to some stories, many of his closest political backers only heard about Friday morning, just before he went public. There were even some people on the inside who only heard when Miller went in front of the mikes.

So why’d he do it?

Read More

After Johnny Caspar takes over as the ruling crime boss in Miller’s Crossing, acquiring new money and power, but also a whole lot of new headaches, he complains: “Runnin’ things… it ain’t all gravy.”

Caspar was only expressing something that all those in charge eventually discover, something that Kublai Khan, who was born on this day in 1215, would have been very familiar with.

Khan, grandson to Ghenghis, fought off all pretenders to the throne — including his younger brother — and expanded the Mongol empire until it encompassed a fifth of the planet’s inhabited territory.

Read More

The American system of government is a shockingly messy and complicated one, but the way it gets covered –- with glitzy, big-money races for the presidency every four years, a narrative that elides congressional and Senate races, the electoral college, the actual responsibilities of the three branches, etc. — makes it seem like a simple war between two roughly equal opposing camps. Even the players like to pretend that there are two “benches,” thus encouraging all kinds of pointless armchair quarterbacking.

In comparison, parliamentary democracies at least have the decency to keep a lot of their complications right out in the open. All the same, here in Canada, because we were so used to majority governments mostly being passed back and forth between two parties, with one (the NDP) acting as spoiler, we saw our government as essentially simple, too.

The recent string of minority governments should have taught us all a lesson, but it hasn’t.

Read More