Another US industry in a tail spin

I'll be glad to see this one go, although the consequences could be dire. With the U.S. media fawning over Obama, the anti-Obama merchandise market will likely be unable to pick up the slack.


Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Comparing Harper to Hitler diminishes public discourse...

...but comparing Harper to Darth Vader is OK.

The Toronto Star clarifies its editorial policy:

The Hitler label is regularly attached to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well. A Google search using his name and Hitler's turned up 81,900 hits – many of them from the blogosphere but some in the mainstream media.

Such comparisons – while now apparently legally defensible – insult the memories of the victims of the real Hitler and diminish the quality of public discourse in this country.

How to make the Globe and Mail front page

It helps if the editor has an axe to grind:

Let’s play a game of You Be the Editor. Here’s the deal: the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration forces a local airline to shut down one of its seven return flights each weekday between Toronto and Newark, N.J. News? Yes. Front-page news? Of course not—unless you’re the Globe and Mail. No one has it in for Porter Airlines like the Globe. Ditto for Porter’s landlord, the Toronto Port Authority, a piddling public sector organization that, like the Freemasons, is assumed to nefariously wield much more power and influence than it does and, all told, takes up far more space and time in the city’s public imagination than it deserves.

Bullshit detector

Andrew Potter points to this little gem in the Globe and Mail:

Constitutional expert Errol Mendes of the University of Ottawa said he researched the issue yesterday and could find no similar examples of a confidence motion such as the one the Tories unveiled - one involving the unelected Senate. "This is insane," he said.

In quoting such an expert, it evidently did not occur to the Globe journalists, Brian Laghi and Jane Taber, that Professor Mendes might have a stake in the game:

Professor Errol Mendes was nominated to the Privy Council Office by the Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin.

I guess it also did not occur to them to ask how many times a Liberal-dominated, unelected Senate has blocked the legislation of a minority Conservative government?