...in Slate today, where caring industry professional Dr. Sherwin Nuland melts down completely. If "Dr. House is a medical monster who does not and could never exist," why then does the author of Lost in America: A Journey With My Father (blecchh) take the whole thing so very personally? The premise of this piece seems to be that television cannot be allowed to portray morally flawed doctors; since it's been forty years since there was any other kind on television, one wonders why this particular show would enrage him so.

Could it be because Dr. House, while being a distinct antihero, is a genuine threat to all kinds of touchy-feely "wellness" pieties that have attained a mysterious fever pitch even as frontline medical care begins to resemble a Chrysler production line? Doc House's very name is a subliminal reminder that it was controversial when doctors stopped performing house calls--remember when? Unless Dr. Nuland still does them, he should probably shut the fuck up about how oh-so-much-more-caring his business is than it was in the bad old days of Ben Casey. Too many of us have encountered physicians with every ounce of House's laziness and stroppiness and none of his stark good sense. We'll settle for just being made better.

My favourite bit is where Dr. Nuland tells us solemnly of the sacred principle that "Only a good man can be a great doctor." It's very true in a sense--and it's just as true of anything else you might apply it to. Play along at home! "Only a good man can be a great plumber." Exactly so, right? "Only a good man can be a great limousine driver." Who would deny it? Most platitudes are true: it's not their truth-value that determines whether they're platitudes. Everybody be sure to watch House, M.D. tonight. (My original review is here.)

[UPDATE, 9:16 pm: I forgot to mention that the show is also endorsed by Randall Parker. And also that the second episode, last week, unveiled the unimpeachable choice of a main theme song for the first time--"Teardrop" by Massive Attack.]

[UPDATE, December 1: Steve Sailer seems to like House well enough, which should count for something. Eight years ago a sweet-natured G.P. told Sailer that the mysterious lump in his armpit was probably just a muscle pull; it took an asshole to figure out, later, that he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and was right next door to the Big Casino.]

Collective funconscious: everyone seems to be asking one question these days--why does Apple hate Canada? Mike Sugimoto wants to know many things, among which is:

Apple now bundles QuickTime with iTunes. Or do they bundle iTunes with QuickTime? Gee, that's convenient, considering I live in a country where iTunes doesn't work (but it's coming real soon, honest). So far as I can tell, it's impossible to get a copy of QuickTime (the Devil's Own Multimedia Format) without installing iTunes anymore. By all means, I don't mind having my hard drive cluttered with extraneous junk I can't use at all. Thanks, Apple! You knobs.

This comes not too long after correspondent "Terry" was besieging former Apple employee, interface expert, and puzzle designer Bruce Tognazzini about the company's cruelty to Canadians:

If you happen to have an email address for Steve Jobs, or somebody at Apple who could pass it on, maybe you could forward this to him... the population of Canada, except for one province, DOES NOT SPEAK FRENCH!!! ...Why do all Macintosh computers shipped to Canada, year after year after year, default to French? FIX THIS!!! Stop shipping computers to Canada which default to a French keyboard layout, and GIVE NO HINT that selecting Canadian CSA (whatever that is) instead of US, will permanently lock you into a French keyboard layout.

The funny thing here, I guess, is that Apple has perhaps the ultimate blue-state brand amongst American companies; it's the favoured computer of the creative industries, Hollywood, the state of California, that stoned broad from the "Switch" ads... So how come Apple's "foreign policy" seems as morally smarmy and clumsy as Noam Chomsky's wildest caricature of neoconservatism? (Not to mention shockingly ungrateful?)

[UPDATE, 1:01 pm: Prosecutor Nick Taylor adds to the indictment by e-mail:

Don't forget that not a single iPod mini reached Canada within the first eight or nine months of its release, even after they'd unleashed an iPod branding blitz on the Toronto subway.
Canada also has this many Apple Stores: 0. Cities that have Apple Stores: Chandler AZ, Edina MN, Germantown TN, Alpharetta GA, Tukwila WA, Wauwatosa WI.]

[UPDATE, 3:00 pm: Reader Allan Grant says "Well, actually, there is an Apple Store in Atlanta proper--Lenox Plaza, 2nd floor in Buckhead." So it would seem. C'mon, guys, this is a weblog--you're supposed to do the fact-checking for me!]

This seems like a promising guess, but it can't be considered much more than that unless the neuroscientists' software can actually identify the national origins of a tune it's never heard. The Guardian's science correspondent is curiously silent on whether there's an actual experiment anywhere here: the answer would appear to be "nope". Richard Wagner is said to have once commented that the first eight notes of "Rule Britannia" completely embodied, for him, the British character. Perhaps he had the software installed...

Liberal sociologist Nora Jacobson thought Toronto sounded like heaven. It was only when she moved there that she found out how American she really was. (Washington Post registration required.)

One could laugh off this humbling editorial by cracking a joke about how some jackass obviously pointed Dr. Jacobson to the wrong end of the country. Or one could even chip away at it a little by pointing out how powerfully naïve it might have been for an educated person to come to a historically and definitionally anti-American outpost and be surprised by what she found. It wouldn't really make it any less sad, though. (þ: Mark Collins)

"It is possible that both the 'disease' caused by influenza viruses and the preventative vaccine regimes pushed on healthy people are so hyped they border on disease-mongering." Alan Cassels and Jim Wright are wond'rin' where the trials are in today's Globe.

CJC Reloaded: a couple of weeks ago the National Post asked me to provide some Western-made editorial content for a couple of brewing features about the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, a $12B Lougheed-era "rainy day" bank account formerly used to convert oil revenue into permanent cultural and social legacy projects. Today the Heritage Fund is just sort of sitting there, doing nothing. Liberal leader Kevin Taft tried, with some success, to make this an issue in the election campaign just completed here. The short piece I sent the Post--suggesting, more or less, that the only thing sillier than leaving the fund dormant might be reviving it--ended up appearing opposite a piece by Taft himself. I'd had to cut a lot of stuff out of my first draft, and although the article was probably improved as a result--and may not be of much interest to non-Albertans either way--I'm presenting my edit of the long version here. Watch for my latest in the Post's comment section today or tomorrow...

EDMONTON - Albertans have a comical tendency to leave provincial governments in charge forever at home while knocking voters in the rest of Canada for behaving the same way toward federal governments. In truth, we are superstitious and stubborn about some things. The two in particular that come to mind, if you live here, are provincial sales taxes and the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

In the former case, we have always eschewed sales tax as a means of raising income for the treasury. We are annoyed by PST when travelling to other provinces, and we felt doubly victimized by the introduction of the GST, which imposed an unfamiliar nuisance on our retailers and our shopping lives. No politician could win here if he seriously proposed a provincial sales tax, even if income taxes were lowered to make the change revenue-neutral. Yet an overwhelming consensus of economists--especially the conservative ones--holds that such a change would be, on net, fair, sensible, and conducive to economic growth. Consumption taxes punish savings and investment less harshly than income taxes, yet they're no more regressive. The government of free-enterprise, ultracapitalist Alberta should, to all appearances, rely on sales taxes more than its neighbours do.

But--we're agin it. I have no good explanation for this, even though I share the same instinct. Suboptimal or not, that's just our way.

The passion for the Heritage Fund is vaguer, yet perhaps equally intense. The Fund, established in 1976 at the outset of Alberta's champagne-and-cocaine phase, is tied up in our minds with Depression-era thoughts of saving for a "rainy day"; with motherhood notions of diversifying the economy before the oil "runs out"; and, for Albertans of my generation, with the texture of the personal past. I entered university on a Heritage Scholarship, took classes in buildings purchased with Heritage Fund interest, and sampled from libraries whose holdings were stamped with Heritage Fund bookplates.

Much of this spending happened in the 1980s, when a mild summer shower had broken out over Alberta's economy. The Conservative government stopped topping up the Fund in 1987, and has let the principal float, without further contributions, ever since. After a brief spurt of social endowments, the government stopped making showpiece purchases with the interest, and in 1997 formally started ploughing it into the treasury's general revenue stream.

So even though Albertans still express strong support for the Fund--well, what the hell is the thing for at this point, really? If we're saving for that rainy day, spending the income immediately, at a time of whopping huge budget surpluses, seems like a hell of a silly way to go about it. The magic of compound interest is a notion that seems to have eluded our czarist Tory government. As far as diversifying the economy goes, it's hard for me to see how steering capital away from its most high-return uses is anything but a synonym for wasting money. And, anyway, the economic figures suggest that Alberta's economy has diversified markedly away from energy since Ralph Klein got into office and stopped trying so hard to diversify it. (Funny how often that sort of thing happens with governments.)

While I appreciate the visceral terror we all feel about running out of oil and having nothing to do when it's gone, I find the opposing argument--that the oil should be extracted and sold while people are still willing to pay for it--much more convincing. Not that it's ever made, mind you. But for every region that ever ran clean out of a non-renewable resource, there's another that simply found better uses for its capital and labour than resource extraction. England didn't run out of coal--it ran out of people who cared to mine coal for the world price, and ran into a politician (Margaret Thatcher) who wasn't willing to subsidize the business any longer. The long-term trend of real commodity prices is downward, ever downward; the people who have forecast the advent of permanent petroleum shortages have been wrong so many times over, it's a wonder they weren't asked to take their act to the street corner.

Right now the prices of oil and gas have spiked because of a unusual confluence of political events, and because of a ruinous quarter-century taboo about the development of nuclear energy. These things will pass--particularly the latter, as the dopey greens gradually realize that nukes are the most earth-friendly bet, watt for watt. In the meantime, what's wrong with the old proverb "Make hay while the sun shines"? Alberta is sitting on oil reserves approximately the size of Saudi Arabia's, and while they are "non-conventional", that's a distinction which makes less difference all the time. We have, literally, barely scraped the surface of the tar sands.

If people are still willing to pay us $40 a barrel for this stuff when we finally do run out, the last thing we shall have to worry about is money. The real doomsday scenario is the one where some prat in a lab discovers practical cold fusion and the whole hydrocarbon economy goes the way of the candlemaking business. You could be reading about this over tomorrow's breakfast; there has already been one false alarm. For us to be worrying about the alternate scenario, 50 or 100 years down the road, is simply mind-boggling.

Either way, the Heritage Fund should either be liquidated--and Alberta's future left to shift for its own damn self, as its present has largely had to--or it should be made what most Albertans have been deliberately deluded into thinking it still is: a method of retiring future obligations of the provincial government. Unfortunately this gets us into the business of trying to foretell the day-to-day priorities of governments that same 50 or 100 years hence. It is senseless to pretend we can do that. Go back to 1900, and look how grotesquely inaccurate even the best mental images of the year 2000 were. Do we want to endow hospitals for a future in which disease is conquered by genetic engineering, or injury by nanotechnology? Libraries, for a time when one e-book on everyone's shelf contains the entire collected wisdom of humankind? I do not predict; I merely suggest that the future is, in principle, unpredictable.

Ambitious politicians should not necessarily be permitted to throw our good money away on things that may be useless to our grandchildren. If we must spend the money, perhaps we should be biased towards the things we lack which are most valuable by virtue of being "useless": institutions of pure research, notable public buildings, traditional graphic and narrative arts, and the like. Sadly--this being Alberta--the money would inevitably flow into the pockets of local mediocrities, which is, after all, somewhat defensible. Foreign geniuses don't need the help. (November 19, 2004)

Mr. Barrett charges $400 for a haircut, a price he calls "bargain basement." This week-old New York Times story is a amusing but slightly disappointing probe of New York City celebrity hairstylists who charge up to $800 for a haircut. One of these real smart economics writers we have lying around in dozens now, a Surowiecki or a Postrel, could have worked wonders here. Alex Kuczynski entertains, but feels obliged to wallow in the observation that $800 is twice the per-capita annual income of Bangladesh. And it's not exactly news that status-seeking is implicated here. (In what is it not?) What one would really like to know is the distribution of prices for haircuts; that would tell us a lot about the underlying mechanism.

What's comical in talking to women about hairstylists is how little the purely esthetic element figures in. On the whole they seem to recognize, very sensibly, that they can get a decent haircut from plenty of places and that the stylist is ultimately going to have to work with what's there. What the ladies seem to want is to be made comfortable, and to be listened to--and not even necessarily about their hair.

(þ: Kottke, who also has an audio clip of Ken Jennings' not-yet-aired Jeopardy comeuppance.)

It appears that Tommy Douglas is going to win CBC's The Greatest Canadian going away. Having issued a monkey-wrenching plea for people to vote for Don Cherry in the finals, I don't suppose I can go back and gripe about the sheer weirdness of a "Greatest Canadians" list that didn't even include Lord Beaverbrook in top 100. Especially since the Dutch, who conducted a similar exercise earlier this month, arguably made an even worse hash of things: they rejected Leeuwenhoek, Erasmus, and Rembrandt, among other figures from their remarkable history. Under the circumstances, though, you can see what they were thinking.

I hope readers will let me know if the Flickr badge below the blogroll on the sidebar at left is somehow ruining the rendering of the page. I had one complaint from the last individual on earth still using a Netscape-branded Mozilla browser; while I respect those who resist early adoption of new gadgetry, the easiest solution did seem to be for him to get with the Firefox program, which he did. (I switched months ago and can't see myself going back.) Still, complaints are always welcome--browser portability should probably be one of the advantages of a hand-coded site. Just to make things explicit, that badge always displays and links to the latest photo in my personal Flickr "photostream". Flower enthusiasts should check out my sister's visual record of her garden.

Bruce Rolston has a non-trivial observation about Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko--namely, that whatever has ravaged his once-healthy dermal appearance, experts disagree whether it could be poison, and many or most don't think it can be. (A certain Prof. John Henry is often cited in favour of the hypothesis, but he seems to have gone out on a limb somewhat.) Nature magazine's website has a bit of to-and-fro. Whatever made Yushchenko sick, the whole thing certainly smells like some kind of botched Russian spy job--something cooked up by the same ghouls who did in Georgi Markov. And Yushchenko's triumph in the social struggle now underway in the Ukraine would be good news, whatever his ailment. There's a comic note here in the Nature piece for those who remember the environmental dioxin scares of the '70s and '80s--

[Occupational-medicine specialist Marcelo Lotti] adds that he would be surprised if anyone were to select dioxin as a poison. "Dioxins have only modest toxicity and you would need an extremely high dose to get chloracne," he says. "Only kilos of contaminated food, administered over several days, would give you chloracne."

Yushchenko's disfigurement does look like photos I've seen of chloracne. But as I understand it, which (important disclaimer) I probably don't, one's skin takes on that rough pitted appearance in cases of external exposure when the chlorine attacks the pores. Yushchenko, who entered hospital with a mysterious stomach disorder, could have been surreptitiously sprayed with a substance or given contaminated bathwater as well as being poisoned. (This too would be standard Russian-spook procedure.) It's important to remember that it is easy for news agencies to exaggerate changes or oddities in a person's skin colour--in fact, it takes a certain amount of caution for anyone doing four-colour printing not to make an occasional photographic subject look like he has a skin disorder, just by accident.

I guess I'll be the rare brazen bastard who admits to buying a copy of JFK Reloaded, the controversial new assassination simulator from Scotland's Traffic Management. I don't want any angry e-mails unless you can absolutely swear to me that you don't find anything funny about the idea of shooting that god-damned Halston pillbox right off Jackie's head. You can do that in this game! If you like, you can just let the motorcade drive on past and shed a single tear for Camelot. Isn't it worth ten bucks to go back and add a happy ending to the story?

Naturally that's not what I did, but I'm kind of morbid. Moreover I was trained (sort of) as a historian, and with every round you play--indeed, with every bullet--you can spin off bizarre new timelines in the American story. You can let the President's car go by and take leisurely aim at the Vice-President--which, I suspect, is what Oswald would do now if he had it all to do over--or if you're in the mood for a thorough shake-up you can try to bag both, and elevate Congressman John W. McCormack of Massachusetts to the nation's highest office. (Swearing-in ceremony not included.) You can try to improve on Oswald's performance by the simple expedient of shooting the limo driver first as the car approaches the Book Depository, which may be what expertly homicidal co-conspirators would have advised Oswald to do if he'd actually had any. The angle from the window of the sixth floor makes the passengers sitting ducks if you can bring the car to a halt. Of course, in real life, you wouldn't be allowed up to, say, twenty leisurely shots before the army of federal agents and cops on the ground figured out where you were.

With the "chaos level" of the motorcade increased in the game settings, shooting the driver can create what I am obliged to describe as frankly delightful pandemonium; sometimes his weight falls on the gas pedal and the limo shoots off crazily into the distance, hitting a tree or jumping General Lee-fashion over the entrance to the Triple Overpass. Often the passengers end up flying through the air like ragdolls and dying without having even been wounded. (The ballistics report that follows the gameplay is careful to fill you in on stuff like that.)

The fun wears off fast--this is a first-person shooter with exactly one level and one boss. And the "educational tool" defence of its premise won't really stand up to examination. Then again, it is only ten bucks. The world awaits the inevitable sequel, "Abe Lincoln Reloaded". Sic semper tyrannis!

I don't know if the Winnipeg Free Press's Scott Taylor really committed plagiarism--not based on this CBC report, anyway; it sounds rather like his main offence was lifting quotes from another paper rather than original wording, which would be misdemeanour plagiarism as opposed to a full-throttle felony. What annoys me is the CBC's choice of background material:

The incident is the latest in a series of ethical problems Canadian newspapers have weathered this year. Earlier this month, National Post columnist Elizabeth Nickson lost her spot at the paper after failing to attribute parts of a column she wrote to another author at the U.S. magazine The National Review. And in July, Brad Evenson, also of the Post, lost his medical reporting job after accusations he fabricated quotes and sources in several of his stories.

The use of the verb "weathered" makes it sound as though the Post stood by its ethically dodgy employees instead of doing what it did in both instances--dropping them like oven-fresh spuds. The CBC apparently couldn't find any non-Post plagiarism cases to mention, though student journalists don't appear to have any trouble. The most egregious of all these incidents was perpetrated by Prithi Yelaja of the Star, who was defended by her paper's ombudsman, was let off with an apology, and still appears frequently in the Star's pages. I don't want to sound like a prig here, but when you keep a plagiarist around--someone who did not have access to the cut-and-paste defence, having hoisted the whole front end of a fellow journalist's copy--that is an ethical problem. When you catch one and show him the door, that's ethical behaviour.

It's only natural for the CBC not to understand the difference; I trust the Post still does, though it's damned unsettling to see the paper apologizing for printing gossip in a gossip column. Gillian Cosgrove's copy about the Governor-General seemed airtight under the law of defamation, assuming Her Excellency had at least met the handsome, rugged Icelandic ambassador in person, and was certainly lawyered before reaching the page. I don't know how many strings the viceregent had to pull to get the Post to print what amounts to an apology for the filthy minds of its readers, but she must have yanked awfully hard.

[UPDATE, November 25: Darren at Osadchuk.org has the file of evidence in the original matter of Scott Taylor. It's pretty monumental in its sordidness.]

Today I was reporting on a piece for PTR and I phoned an interview subject in Eastern Canada from my home in Alberta. I left a voicemail. He called back, collect, about an hour later. I've been doing telephone interviews for eight or nine years; I've probably left at least 500 such voicemails. This is the first time an interview subject has phoned back collect. Why doesn't this happen more often? I'm a reporter! I'm either placing the call from an office, or I'm a freelancer and I can expense it! I'm already asking for a bunch of unpaid time out of your day!

When I first started in news, I expected people to return calls collect rather a lot. It seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But no one ever does it--I don't even do it myself when people ask me for interviews. This is perhaps less interesting than the question why people ever agree to conduct interviews at all, but are people making a rational (or sub-rational) calculation that there is a positive value to appearing in the press? Or is it just that the institution of the collect call has now become confined to prisons and other tight corners, and carries a stigma? If calling back on your own dime is the "nice" thing to do, why is that?

The Liberal success in last night's Alberta election was less surprising to me than it was to most. But as I peruse the casualty lists this morning, I see still more marginal surprises and occasions for comment. The Liberals took some really startling Conservative scalps; there is nothing very special about their seat count, but the particular chairs they've occupied are weird. Conventional wisdom would probably have suggested that if the Liberals won anywhere in solid-Tory Calgary, it would be in their traditional beachhead, Calgary-Buffalo. Instead they won three Calgary seats--including Murray Smith's old Varsity riding, whose loss Ralph Klein admitted to being baffled by--without winning Buffalo. In retrospect, Klein might have cost the party that Varsity seat by naming retiring pal Smith as Alberta's high-paid official agent in Washington, D.C.

The Liberals also seem to have accidentally run over some high-profile Conservative moderates who were out on the skirmishing lines in Northern Alberta. They are practically apologizing this morning for having trounced former Reform MP Ian McClelland in Edmonton-Rutherford. McClelland had been the author and federalist guiding spirit of the government's lukewarm official response to the "firewall" agenda. Mary O'Neill, one of the reddest Tories in the caucus, also went down to an unexpected defeat in St. Albert. Tony Vandermeer ran openly against Klein's go-slow policy on income support for the disabled* and got edged out in Edmonton's northeast corner. Most importantly, the Liberals snuffed out the career of the most talked-about Edmonton candidate to succeed Klein, Mark Norris.

Norris was never likely to get anywhere in a leadership fight; that anyone was mentioning his name was nothing but a sign of the pathetic Conservative bench strength in northern Alberta. His humiliation leaves Iris Evans as the last semi-papabile northern Conservative, so one supposes it's good, in theory, for her. It's more likely that the ouster of Norris will work in favour of Jim Dinning, who can probably now add the support of Edmonton's Cooper-Mini-sized business elite to his control of Calgary's fleet of Lexuses (Lexi?). The general massacre of Conservative moderates, however, may help the cause of Dinning's most visible potential challenger, firewall theorist Ted Morton. Even if Morton doesn't run this time, the loss of the Edmonton caucus will, overall, reposition the Tory caucus as a more ideological instrument that is tougher on the treasurer (and on tax-hiking nitwits like Health Minister Gary Mar). Right-wing sentiment within the party has been looking for an articulate leader with a separate power base for a long time. That's Morton, even if he's not interested in being premier yet--and everything I've heard suggests he is. The media has largely failed to notice that he is following the same playbook Klein did in 1992.

The New Democrats' doubling of seats from two to four was an embarrassment in disguise; their caucus contains current leader Brian Mason, a former Edmonton alderman and bus driver who is admittedly good at playing the "little guy" card, and two popular former leaders--gentlemanly party mascot Raj Pannu and '80s nostalgia figure Ray Martin. Factor that lot out and you're left with just one guy who actually ran to victory under the party banner proper--David Eggen in my own riding, Edmonton-Calder.

On the opposite side, Alberta Alliance candidate Paul Hinman pulled off an upset in Cardston-Taber-Warner. Canada's Mormon capital was a natural enough place for such an event, seeing as AAP leader Randy Thorsteinson had stormed out of Social Credit claiming that he and his leadership clique were being bullied for their Latter-Day Saint beliefs. But the utterly unknown Hinman doesn't seem to make a very promising candidate for a right-wing flank charge against the Conservatives. This account of a local candidate's debate has him "continually saying the Conservative government serves big business, not the interests of the Albertan people" and proposing what sounds like a stealth nationalization of the beef-packing industry. (The Alliance will at least have the pleasure of wrong-footing the morning papers Truman-Dewey-style: early editions of the Calgary Herald contain the headline "Greens, Alliance upbeat despite coming up empty".)

The papers are also putting forward (as fact) the hypothesis that Klein faces pressure for an early exit, despite his signed promise that he will remain in the saddle for another 3¾ years. I'm not so sure about a quick parachute jump anymore. The race to succeed Klein is the party's ace in the hole; the leadership contest will attract hundreds of thousands of new members, and although some will go away disappointed, the Tories may wish to conduct the convention as close to the next election as they can decently manage. Klein still has a certain amount of political capital to burn, and the Liberals are 25% of the way to being a credible opposition, not 75%. I imagine the Conservatives will watch the weathercock closely, hope oil prices remain high, and try very hard not too move too soon. And for the moment Klein's possible successors are cooperating.

*Incidentally, far, far too much is being made of the "gaffe" Klein committed in complaining of being badgered by "handicapped" welfare recipients who seemed able-bodied and clear-minded. One must revert here to Michael Kinsley's definition of a "gaffe"--it's when a politician says something true that isn't polite to mention. Such "gaffes" are inherent to Ralph's style, and are probably crucial even when they do him minor damage. Klein occasionally drags his ass downtown in Alberta's large cities, into neighbourhoods like mine; I don't know whether most of his critics do the same. Many times I've heard the complaints Ralph has about AISH (Alberta Income Support for the Handicapped) from people who were well enough to, say, spend the day hanging around in an ice-cold bus station bumming cigarettes. (Surely it would be more comfortable behind the counter of a 7-11?) AISH payments are long overdue for an increase for the people who genuinely need them--and a hike is now inevitable, especially with the Tories suffering electoral setbacks in the metro areas--but one cannot entirely escape the suspicion that bureaucrats have used AISH as a waste dump for welfare lifers who could no longer qualify for payments to the able-bodied under Klein's U.S.-style reforms.

The Progressive Conservatives have won their tenth consecutive majority government in Alberta tonight. They came in here the same year I did, and I suppose it's time to start wondering which of us will last longer... the story on the margins is the relative success of the Liberals, who went into the election with seven seats and will come out with around 15, returning Edmonton to a deep-red flush. (American readers: the colours are switched around here.) When it comes to the Liberal revival, I don't think I can improve on the analysis I already did; it was almost bang-on. I still have a radio monologue to write and record, so I'm off...

Boy, I couldn't watch the footage of the Pistons-Pacers brawl often enough--seeing Artest paste that pudgy guy down on the floor was worth the price of season tickets on its own--but I got tired of the ensuing hysteria awful quick. Why don't you sportswriters who are referring to this stuff as "shocking" and "unprecedented" do a Google search for "Heysel Stadium" and get back to us?

I mean, far be it from me to condone violence, but at this point wouldn't it help break up the sheer monotony if someone did? Or if someone pointed out, at least, that the Boston Bruins' 1979 Yuletide foray into the MSG stands was far more horrible and dangerous, did nothing to hurt the "scrappy" reputations of the (white) players or the city responsible, and is never now remembered with anything but fondness.

I must already have seen a hundred different things used by the Outrage Industry (which employs me) to fill in the blank: the brutal and horrifying Pistons-Pacers brawl was inevitable in a league/country that condones ______. The leadership of David Stern? Check! The presence of beer at sporting events? Check! The cultural preeminence of rap music? Check! The adoption of the three-point line? Hey, give us another day or so!

Matt Fenwick makes a good case for holding one's nose and voting for Klein one last time. I'm almost convinced. One guy I do have zero problem endorsing is former Yellowhead MP Cliff Breitkreuz, who is on the Senate ballot as a Progressive Conservative.

You may remember that I was supposed to do CBC Radio One's national Commentary segment the morning after the federal election. The electoral balance shifted slightly in the wee hours of the morning, and the monologue I'd taped was deep-sixed. We're going to give it another shot for the Alberta vote, so if you're up early Tuesday morning and you know what time Commentary runs on your affiliate, you can listen for that.

The Supreme Court of Canada has finally ruled on one of its most important pending cases, Auton v. B.C., in which the parents of four autistic children sued the B.C. government on the grounds that failing to fund a controversial early-childhood treatment for autism violated their kids' Charter rights under s.15(1)--the equal-protection clause. I wrote a long piece about the case for Alberta Report in December 2000, shortly after the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled in favour of the parents (as the B.C. Court of Appeal, the province's highest court, later did too). Here's an excerpt that contains some of the clinical and legal background you probably won't see today.

"Auton et al." are four children with autism and their parents; they sued the province earlier this year because it would not fund a controversial, expensive treatment for the illness. In July, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Marion Allan ruled that the policy was, in effect, discriminating against the children on the basis of their disability, which is forbidden under section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A November hearing followed July's initial ruling, and Justice Allan is currently considering legal remedies, which might include financial reimbursement for the parents in the suit and which will almost certainly include a change of policy for B.C. Health.

The effects of Auton are already being felt in health-administration circles elsewhere. The Eldridge case established the doctrine that patients can use section 15 to ask the courts to determine how their medical care is provided. Auton--unless it is successfully appealed--will raise the stakes much further, allowing the courts to determine what kind of care is provided. Not only that, but it will require B.C. to fund a medical treatment provided by therapists instead of licensed medical practitioners, overturning another pillar of medicare policy.

...The severely autistic cannot handle a normal work environment or take instructions consistently. Often... they can find themselves thrown in among schizophrenics and catatonics, with no therapy for their distinctive condition. It is the hope of avoiding such a life for their children that has attracted thousands of parents to Ivor Lovaas, who now serves as head of the eponymous Lovaas Institute in Los Angeles. In 1963, Dr. Lovaas, a psychiatrist at the University of California-Los Angeles, began to treat autistic children aged between 5 and 12 by institutionalizing them during the day and subjecting them to rigorous learning, 40 hours a week or more, with continual behavioural reinforcement--not the "carrot-and-stick" approach literally, but a system of strong verbal rewards and punishments. Life skills are broken down into tiny steps; there are 11 distinct ones just to put on a pair of pants. The method is expensive, of course, because each child must have his own assigned full-time teacher.

With such one-on-one help, Dr. Lovaas found, a child could learn abstract ideas long thought unteachable to severely autistic kids. Forty-seven percent of the children were eventually able to pass Grade 1 on their own, and by adolescence they were indistinguishable from normal children. The rest relapsed or never showed cognitive gains in the first place, but the cure rate claimed for the Lovaas method is orders of magnitude better than that available with most others.

For a time, Dr. Lovaas's reputation was, nonetheless, in eclipse. Freudian psychology and its offshoots had driven behaviourism from the field, and the influential psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim was claiming to have found the cause of autism. Bettelheim thought cold, distant mothers induced autism in their children as a neurotic reaction to their lack of affection. Even as he was casting an unjust cloud of suspicion over the parents of autistic children, Dr. Bettelheim specifically attacked Dr. Lovaas for "stripping his patients of humanity." Today Dr. Bettelheim is discredited, and Dr. Lovaas is a hero to thousands.

Yet Dr. Lovaas is not without his detractors even now. The original study group of 19 children was not chosen randomly, so no one can be certain the study was unbiased. Many experts are fairly untroubled by this, because years of after-the-fact efforts to find bias in the Lovaas work have turned up nothing. But others have pointed out that there has been little or no effort to reproduce the original Lovaas study.

"Are we going to base our decision on special education for autistic kids on a flawed study, containing 19 children, that has never been replicated?" asks Frank Gresham, a professor of education at the University of California-Riverside. "Thank God physicians don't rely on that kind of sample. If we're talking about a healthcare system being required to pay for a certain type of treatment, I'd like to see better evidence for efficacy." Prof. Gresham testified to this effect in the original Auton hearing, but the plaintiffs had no shortage of experts willing to opine that the Lovaas method is the best in existence.

More unnerving, to some, has been the growth of a quasi-political movement around the Lovaas approach. In interviews, Dr. Lovaas has been known to urge parents to "get political" with Health Maintenance Organizations and government agencies because of his firm conviction that early intervention--and institutionalization--are the right and necessary things to do for autistic kids. As a result, early-intervention lobby groups have grown up in dozens of U.S. states and Canadian provinces. (In Alberta, for example, a child-welfare appeals panel bowed to the arguments of an ad-hoc group and ordered the government to start funding the treatments in August 1996.) The Auton case is the result of the efforts of another group--FEAT B.C. (Families for Early Autism Treatment of British Columbia).

Sabrina Freeman founded FEAT B.C. in 1995. She and her 12-year-old daughter, Michelle Tamir, are one of the four parent-child pairs among the Auton petitioners. "When I returned to B.C. from finishing my Ph.D. [in sociology] at Stanford University, I was quite surprised to find that nobody here was doing any kind of treatment for these children," she recalls. "In the U.S., my child had received the benefit of a bona fide, science-based treatment for autism. What defines Canada is that we have a healthcare system in place to make sure families don't get wiped out by catastrophic illnesses. If you had a child with cancer, and you had to pay for the treatment yourself, it would be obscenely expensive. That is the position parents of autistic children have been in."

Thus began the campaign. "We sent briefs to every single member of the legislature," says Ms. Freeman. "We filed a petition with 8,200 signatures demanding that early intervention be paid for. It was ignored. We got formal endorsements from 63 licensed physicians. We tried to get meetings with MLAs. We held workshops." It was all to no avail. "There's a $13-million [per year] autism industry in B.C., most of it devoted to, basically, babysitting and 'outreach,' which means going to the parents' house to tell them how to cope with their child," says Ms. Freeman. She insists that those care providers' influence on the government, coupled with the usual bureaucratic inertia, forced her and her fellow parents to drag the province into court.

Originally, the suit was supposed to be a class action covering every parent in B.C. who had requested Lovaas treatment, but Canada has much stricter rules about allowing such suits than does the U.S. Justice Allan waived the class action, and the suit was reorganized to cover four representative parents and children. The result, says petitioners' lawyer Birgitta von Krosigk, was an odd procedural hybrid with some cross-examination of witnesses, but not as much as usual, and strong limits on the Auton group's ability to subpoena government documents in the discovery phase.

Nonetheless, the group's lawyers were able to argue that the failure to fund autism treatment was not justifiable on economic grounds, an important part of passing the section 15 test. "It was always our argument that this therapy is expensive up front, but you could save vast sums in the long run," says Ms. von Krosigk. "Quite apart from the human tragedy of not treating a child for a mental illness, there is the fact that most untreated children will become adults in institutional care, which is enormously expensive. Because autism is lumped in with other mental disabilities [by the ministry], it was hard to generate statistics that would allow a cost-benefit analysis, but the judge reached the common-sense conclusion that early intervention will reduce the long-term burden on the system." (B.C. Health refuses to comment on the cost issue.)

...After the B.C. Supreme Court imposes a remedy, the B.C. government will have to decide whether it wants to try to take the case to the B.C. Court of Appeal. And then there will inevitably be other cases involving other illnesses; the Charter possibilities involving cancer treatment alone stagger the imagination. For the moment, Ms. Freeman is confident she has done the right thing.

"We started intervention quite late with [Michelle]--she was almost four," she says. "That may sound early, but to have the best chance, you want to start a child at age two...She was completely non-verbal then, living in her own little world. Now she goes to school and she's performing at her grade level in every subject but Language Arts. She has friends, she goes to birthday parties, she plays in musical ensembles. I'm pretty confident that one day she'll be an adult holding down a job and paying taxes. Our goal is to not have her be a drain on the system. And it's not because I care about the system--it's because I've seen what the system does to autistic people. It's because being happy means being independent."

I'm a little surprised, in retrospect, that I didn't find space to mention the "faciliated communication" fiasco of the early '90s--a case in which a "miracle therapy" for autism proved to be a nest of expensive, cruel delusions.

What happened to the Auton petitioners' case after two B.C. courts concluded that they had, indeed, been discriminated against? The Supreme Court has handed them a surprisingly firm seven-nil loss. Chief Justice McLachlin points out that it's important to make find exactly the right "comparator group" when deciding on a claim of denied equal protection. The B.C. courts had compared the autism sufferers in Auton with other sick people seeking established medical therapies--a very basic mistake, in McLachlin's view.

[T]he appropriate comparator for the petitioners is a non-disabled person or a person suffering a disability other than a mental disability (here autism) seeking or receiving funding for a non-core therapy important for his or her present and future health, which is emergent and only recently becoming recognized as medically required...
The issue... is not whether the government met the gold standard of scientific methodology, but whether it denied autistic people benefits it accorded to others in the same situation, save for mental disability. There is no evidence suggesting that the government's approach to [Lovaas-style] therapy was different than its approach to other comparable, novel therapies for non-disabled persons or persons with a different type of disability. In the absence of such evidence, a finding of discrimination cannot be sustained.

Public medical plans are increasingly willing to fund individualized therapy for autistic children on precisely the preventative grounds that FEAT B.C. has advanced. The importance of the case is that, if the Supreme Court had chiselled away legislators' rights to specify the limits of public-funded medicine (as it's already done somewhat), it might have added another distressing digit or two to the remorseless exponent governing the growth in our health-care costs. Judges are people who have never had to meet a payroll; they've acted here with appropriate restraint, I think, and in the meantime the parents can go on lobbying legislatures and health ministers. You can visit FEAT B.C.'s website; the "Sources of Info" page has tons more background.

Of course I'm the last person who would quarrel with the delightful high-speed ejection of Carolyn Parrish from the Liberal caucus. Paul Wells says rightly that her presence had become an issue of leadership credibility for Paul Martin. I'm just a bit disappointed, I guess, that amongst all Martin's coded warnings to Parrish he never found much time to correct her tertiary-syphilis interpretation of American foreign policy. He keeps wringing his hands over "those kinds of comments"--he did it when he "rebuked" her in August, and he did it today when he showed her the door, emphasizing that her words had been "demeaning" and "disrespectful". So is this an etiquette thing, then? If the American executive branch has the monstrous motives Parrish habitually ascribes to it, surely no amount of catcalling can be truly out of bounds?

I'm not saying Martin needs to come out for a press conference dressed like Hulk Hogan and screaming "Semper fi, dudes!" But how about defining the sensible middle vis-à-vis American hegemony? He could have done a lot to marginalize Parrish before punishing her; and removing her from caucus, while necessary, is a nicety that's going to be lost on the Americans who care about this sort of thing anyway. He could have come out and said something like this: "The United States of America is a great nation and, in most respects, a good neighbour. Having such power as it does, it must be held to the highest moral standards, and we have a role to play in that--the role of a friend, not a childish, obsessive harasser. We must never forget, as Ms. Parrish does when her medication runs out, that criticism is easy for countries that have less onerous military responsibilities. U.S. actions in Iraq have led to the destruction of a fascist regime and the capture of its leader. Was the gain worth the human cost? That's a complicated question, not decidable by means of simple mathematics or brute syllogisms. Our answer as a government was 'No,' and that's an answer people will be reassessing forever. But even when we say 'No,' diplomacy between partners must be informed by a presumption of good intentions and shared values. I'm the one who has been chosen to represent Canada and Canadian Liberal ideals to the world. With due respect to the voters of Mississauga-Erindale, I give thanks to a merciful God every day that Carolyn Parrish is not."

Hey, I'm not even a Liberal--this stuff writes itself. What, is it too controversial? Did I piss anybody off just now? For all I know, maybe Martin--or some Liberal, somewhere--actually did say something like this at some point. But the typical Liberal responses to Parrish's flatulent outbursts we've heard have been either (1) attacks on Conservatives for publicizing the comments, (2) petulant gripes that they are making the work of various diplomats and civil servants harder, (3) mindless finger-waggling, or (4) shame-faced semi-agreement. None of that really cuts the mustard.

There is an Alberta provincial election in four days, if you can believe it: the world arranged itself very nicely this time so as to stick us Albertans with the biggest case of voter fatigue in history. My utter failure to mention any news from the campaign (since just before it officially began) is mostly because there's no news to speak of from the campaign. You can get a good overview of the undercurrents from Edmonton's anonymous Reasonable Tory, who quite appropriately strikes one as sort of hunkered down, brusque, and vaguely embarrassed about the whole exercise, and the Calgary Grit, who symbolizes his party by combining superficial cleverness with gut-bustingly fatuous outbursts and bitter comments about his own home.

Liberal leader Kevin Taft used to have C.G.'s problem--i.e., that his basic pitch to the Alberta voter went something like "I really don't understand why you apathetic authoritarian ignoramuses don't vote against this government already." Calgary Grit will never change, but Taft, to his infinite credit, has--so much so that he can already be evaluated as the most effective Alberta Liberal leader since Laurence Decore. This is, I have to say, a big surprise to me. I appeared on a panel discussion on CBC Radio shortly before the writ was dropped; when I pointed out that Taft seemed to have a lot of condescending crankiness to overcome, over and above a dire lack of funds and the Liberal brand, Calgary Liberal advisor Frank Dabbs went kind of ballistic over the studio phone. I thought Dabbs was just being partisan, but when he sent me Taft's stump speech I was pretty impressed. You could see Taft working to fill in his (still-hazy) personal narrative a little; he had a parcel of real policy ideas instead of just an easily-trashed list of spending plans; and above all he was consciously trying to reposition himself as a crusading reformer of swollen, arrogant, deafmute government in the Preston Manning mould. The rhetoric about Albertans being lucky enough to avoid the consequences of their own eternal stupidity had been expunged from the litany. Somebody--perhaps Dabbs himself--had sat Taft down and explained carefully that you can't win over the voter by insulting him.

As a result, Taft is receiving grudging admiration from people like the Calgary Herald editorial board and Canwest's senior Edmonton conservative columnist Lorne Gunter, both of whom have expressed sentiments to the effect of "Well, we're not going to vote for this guy, but we kind of wish someone would." More importantly, Taft is becoming genuinely popular with the Liberals themselves. Again, he is the first Liberal leader since Decore to accomplish this, and the last guy you'd expect to be able to do it. Grant Mitchell, who replaced Decore, was a poisonous little man who won on the back of an electronic-voting fiasco and never really overcame the stigma; Nancy Macbeth, who replaced Mitchell, was a vindictive old Tory ringer who ended up being the political equivalent of a suicide bomber inside the Liberal perimeter; and Ken Nicol, who was about the only possible leader left at that point, was well-liked on all sides but no fighter. Taft was what was left over after all that. Headline: stone rejected by builder proves unexpectedly useful in tight corner!

All that said, it will be a second great surprise if it makes any discernible difference outside Edmonton, although Taft's performance should help address the party's money problems. Within Edmonton, where there is actual doubt, the three-sided dynamic is still too screwy to reckon with: I suspect many people will vote based on the cut of their local candidate's jib. I don't know whom that will favour, although I will note that the Liberal candidate in my riding is the only one who has visited personally or even left literature. Taft may have made the restoration of a solid Liberal "Redmonton" feasible; I don't see the New Democrats or the Alberta Alliance gaining seats.

It must be remembered that the Conservatives are an adaptable machine: they know that Ralph Klein is now a liability, and are conducting themselves accordingly. Signs that used to say "Ralph's Team" without mentioning the word "Conservative" have now taken the opposite approach for two elections in a row. The implied promise is that Ralph will be out the door in 18 months or so and that he'll naturally be replaced by someone who recognizes your concerns--yes, yours, Mr. Downtown Urbanite, and yours too, Mr. Rural Voter. The Tories are running behind Schrödinger's Leader at this point, a wave function combining elements of Jim Dinning, Ted Morton, Mark Norris, and several strictly imaginary politicians. Voting for the Conservatives isn't so much a way of making a choice in this election as of delaying it until after the provincial centennial in September, which is legitimately tempting.

In sum, I have no endorsement, no personal voting intention yet, and no real prediction. I'm pretty likely to abstain, or perhaps to spoil my Assembly ballot and pick a slate of Senate candidates to make up for all the ninnies who are doing the opposite. I don't think I could make my hand mark a ballot for a Liberal, and I'm not personally enamoured with Taft's program. It's been fine-tuned effectively to appeal to the average Albertan's fondness for procedural reform, citizen participation, and neurosis about the province's long-term economic future. On the whole I still much prefer Klein's boorish refusal to adopt grandiose schemes: I don't like visionaries. (My column for this coming Saturday's Post touches on this.) But I am, if anything, still less likely to march down to the local Catholic school to vote for a governing party that has gleefully sodomized the tobacco user. The other alternatives are all even worse, and there's honestly not much at stake. I can definitely see myself ordering in a couple of submarines and spending the day on the couch watching Sanjuro and Yojimbo.

...is about like tickling yourself; you can go through the motions but you can't ever really succeed. The U.S. election follow-up that I had in the National Post was actually just one idea plucked from a big bundle of notes I took while I was weblogging on the big night. I'm now rather regretting having tossed out this bit.

[If] the [American] electorate really does consist of two bristling, entrenched groups that would be easier to transcend than reconcile, American politics are exceedingly vulnerable to the capture of a major party, or a third-party run, by some charismatic celebrity outsider.
Obviously I do see Arnold Schwarzenegger attempting this, though he's not the only one who could try it. Arnold needs the Constitution changed to allow the foreign-born to be President. But the Democrats might be persuaded to play ball, since they have their own Canadian-born rising star in Jennifer Granholm. Procedural changes to the Constitution aren't as hard to make as it seems. (The most recent amendment was passed as recently as 1992, with very little accompanying fanfare.) Despite having somewhat nebulous principles, Schwarzenegger has built a remarkable personality cult in his time as California governor. California's 55 electoral votes would make a heck of bargaining chip in a party nomination race--and perhaps an even better start for a new (or hitherto neglected) party.

I've had American friends tell me that an amendment just doesn't seem likely. What seems unlikely to me, though, is that anyone with the requisite organizational wattage is going to emerge to stop a celebrity-powered populist movement like this. Who is going to stand athwart the door to the presidency yelling "Stop!" at American immigrant citizens? There are good reasons for the constitutional provision requiring the chief executive to be natural-born, and we shall certainly see clever people emerging to specify them as momentum gathers behind Arnold. Perhaps the Arnold Amendment can be smothered by pure inertia. It will have to be, because these days you're not going to see an unapologetic nativist movement rising up against it.

The Republicans will need to reload for the presidency in 2008 and a socially liberal candidacy may look attractive after four more years of G.W. Bush. Although I have a weird suspicion that if Arnold ever made a serious presidential bid (and lived long enough to do so), it would probably follow a "bridge-building" Damascene conversion to the camp of his in-laws. If there were ever a party lying supine in wait for conquest by a charismatic barbarian leader, it's today's Democrats.

[UPDATE, 10:44 pm: Vigilant reader Michael Jose notes that the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, the most recent one to be passed, may not quite be the best example of an easy Constitutional change--seeing as 203 years elapsed between its initial ratification by Congress and its eventual passage. Most of the legislative work was done in the 1980s--necessarily so, with the growth in the number of states--and the amendment had momentum to spare in the modern-day state houses, but the point is more than fair.]

Wildly-praised Flickr.com is the hot new online photo-sharing service; it's in beta, which I think means they want you to try and break it. I test-drove it with a few photos. Stewart Butterfield's mitts have been busy under the hood of this site, which makes today's theme brilliant Canadians, or something.

A playwright, a reporter, and a psychiatrist meet unexpectedly at the dim-lit corner of Plagiarism Ave. in Malcolm Gladwell's latest for the New Yorker. It's a must-read for IP obsessives and a really-should-read for everyone else. Gladwell, whose own reporting and opinions were lifted in the incident in question, initially felt a burst of indignation when he found out, but soon decided the whole affair wasn't such a big deal. I favour a pretty strict liability standard in penalizing plagiarism, as a matter of incentives more than of justice, but one does notice that the "victims" themselves are rarely, if ever, the ones to raise a stink when plagiarism happens. (The incentives aren't really meant to protect the potential victims per se; they're meant to protect the plagiarist's competitor, the careful writer who works hard to produce original thought, whose interest is perhaps off-topic under Gladwell's victim's-eye-view.) Whether the term even applies when words are being translated intact from journalism to art is another matter.

The new Nirvana box set has its own Quicktime trailer. þ: Buddyhead.

My favourite new network series is the Fox network's House, M.D. Granted--I can't say I've seen any of the others. House premiered on Fox last night, and after seeing the ads for it about 200 times (a conservative estimate) toward the end of the baseball season, I couldn't fail to miss the kickoff. For about ten minutes the show seemed like a by-the-numbers medidrama tarted up with some slick graphics and obtrusive incidental music. And lord knows it still needs to rid itself of some of the more formulaic elements: can we dispense, in the year 2004, with the tight-fisted administrator who feuds with the eccentric genius but still realizes that "He's the best damn doctor we've got"? Still, Hugh Laurie's House, in the end, makes a more than worthy rival to Tony Shalhoub's Monk as the coolest emotionally-damaged Sherlock Holmes descendant on TV.

The show's got a lot going for it: an excellent supporting cast, a redeeming self-consciousness about its genre (episode one ends with Laurie watching actors perform dialogue from earlier in the show on an episode of General Hospital), and an astonishing ability to create "Holy crap, did he just say that?" moments. In its first hour the show urinated freely all over the zillions of Americans who claim to suffer from "chronic fatigue syndrome", let Laurie verbally eviscerate a parent who was risking her son's life with her dopey free-form anxiety about his asthma medication, and concluded with him more or less plunging into the forbidden territory of The Bell Curve as he quizzed a female team member about why she'd mind being hired for her gene-based good looks instead of for her gene-based intellect. Preliminary reports about the show emphasized that House, M.D., is supposed to be kind of an asshole. It's a clever method of getting the punters (and the sponsors) to swallow the tart-tasting material. The critics fell for it, but you don't have to: check out this show.

The Montreal Expos blew their last save on Monday, far from the cameras and the crowds, when a New York arbitration panel asked to deliver a ruling on an attempted injunction against the franchise's planned move to Washington, D.C. ruled in favour of Major League Baseball and former Expos owner Jeffrey Loria. Former minority owners of the team are consequently dropping their racketeering lawsuit against MLB and Loria, and it now seems certain the team will play somewhere else in 2004, though it may not necessarily be the District of Columbia. The history of the Expos franchise can now, I think, officially be drawn to a close.

It's well past time to put my stale election fishwrap from the Post here for readers who didn't catch it in the paper. It's also past time, I guess, to catch you up on where else you can look me up these days... I've got a piece about Howard Stern in the holiday-season issue of The American Spectator. The forthcoming Western Standard should have my analysis of

On the morning of the American election I watched one of the C-SPAN network's live call-in shows where they let Republicans and Democrats spout off alternately. C-SPAN actually maintains separate phone numbers for supporters of both parties, as if they were so hostile that their very voices needed to be kept separate. The hosts are almost comically careful to give both sides equal time, occasionally deigning to let a Nader voter or some other loon be heard. This is all supposed to be in the interest of fairness; and with the electorate actually divided nearly 50/50, it does seem fair.

Unfortunately--and I doubt C-SPAN intends this--its unintended effect is to make a foreign viewer dread and loathe Americans. I speak here as an admirer of the United States--as someone who occasionally wishes that the more strident, opportunistic anti-Americans amongst our political and cultural elite could have been born someplace where they'd never have to see or hear an American, like Iran or North Korea. But the picture on C-SPAN is not pretty. The network's 50-50 concept of equity yields a popular discourse as predictable as the sunrise, and as debased as a Confederate dollar.

Last Tuesday, the Republican callers almost all talked about sharing "moral values" with President Bush, which is what they would go on to tell the exit pollsters after they gave Bush his victory, too. In so doing, they were implicitly consigning Kerry voters to the class of second-rate ethical imaginations. It's impossible, of course, to make and defend any electoral choice without making some sort of normative criticism of one's opponents. But the callers were distressingly nebulous about which "values" really separated Bush from Kerry. Few if any raised specific differences, such as the candidates' positions on abortion. One sensed that many were motivated by pure evangelical chauvinism, and that "moral values" meant reflexive support for a born-again president, but that no one wanted to come out and say it.

The Democrats, though--the Democrats were much worse. Their callers' typical approach was to declared disadvantaged status--"I'm a paraplegic"; I'm a single mother"; "I'm unemployed"--and to peddle some bogus narrative of Republican election thievery, war profiteering, or cruelty and imperiousness. In all your life, you never smelled such a rank swamp of conspiracy theories, urban legends, and mangled newspaper reports, all covered in a scum of monomaniac self-pity. Somehow it wasn't enough for these people that the Bush administration had conducted a war of doubtful utility with questionable strategic competence. They needed the additional moral reassurance of fairy tales.

You got the sense that these groups, the Christians and the victims, could talk to one another for a thousand years and not make a dent. After a while I was recoiling in Pavlovian dread. But that wasn't the really horrible part. The horrible part was staying up through the night Tuesday, watching the election results (or the lack of them), and then switching over to C-SPAN when the main networks abandoned the struggle to declare a winner. The same show was on, with a new host--but the callers hadn't changed! They seemed to be the same people, from to the Granny Who Trusts The President to the Arsenic Regulations Obsessive, arranged in the same monotonous alternating pattern.

My instinctive horror is no doubt somewhat unjust. It's not as though our own elections are free from prejudice, wild overstatements, and implacable bitterness. (Ha!) I suppose part of me expects the American public to do better. There's so much more at stake when they go to the polls--not only the immediate welfare of ten times as many human lives, but the basic terms in which world affairs are conducted for four years. One doesn't like to face the fact that the course taken by history's ultimate hegemon depends on the wisdom of people no more articulate or clear-headed than your average plumber from Moose Jaw.

And the Americans did make the right choice, for my money. But it was an awfully close-run thing, and it will remain that way as long as the Christians and the victims speak entirely different languages. The crucial fact about last week's election was how stubbornly the "red" and "blue" states stayed in place from 2000. Just three of the smallest states, out of 50, changed hands. Unless this is mere coincidence-and I don't think it is--the Iraq war doesn't seem to have made a dime's worth of difference. 9/11, which "changed everything," changed nothing. We heard for years about how foreign policy was the "only issue" in this vote, but if you look at the map you have a hard time believing that it was an issue at all. And that's a little unsettling.

This tongue-in-cheek acrostic assault on SorryEverybody.com seems rather unnecessary: do they really need help mocking themselves? (Don't answer that, Treacher!) (þ: Blair)

Enjoy the offseason, Rider fans! Especially the richly-deserved extra week.

[UPDATE, November 15: I've always heard that Roughrider fans really know their shit, but this story from the late edition of Monday morning's National Post is ridiculous:

REGINA - The wife of Saskatchewan Roughriders kicker Paul McCallum called police yesterday after fans, apparently angry at their team's heartbreaking loss in yesterday's West Division final, threw eggs, dumped manure and left angry notes at their Regina home.
"We actually had three separate incidences there that we're looking at," Staff Sergeant Ron Buddecke of the Regina Police Service said last night. "[Crescent McCallum, Paul's wife] called up around 6 o'clock, saying there's an excess of cars passing her house. Then somebody threw some eggs at her window. While they were out cleaning up the window, a truck drives up on the next-door neighbour's driveway and dumps a load of manure -- with a couple of notes in it, describing Paul. Then another car drove by a little later on and threatened Crescent. We're looking at that as far as an investigation."]

He's been shot, has 13 kids, got into a gunfight with the NYPD and sued them, and been busted for drugs a couple of times. He's also saved a couple of people's lives. He's fucked up, but he's a superhero.

Nothing but life itself, it seems, could kill the Ol' Dirty Bastard: he dropped dead yesterday in a Manhattan studio. Go here and scroll down to Week Thirteen for Jeff Johnson's irresistible anecdote about an American legend.

I have to believe--I have to believe--that Radley Balko's latest correspondent, "Kate", is some sort of agent provocateur whose ultimate goal is to discredit linguistic correctness. Because if I actually believed that someone could write a snippy, bullying, illiterate e-mail like this out of legitimate personal conviction--convictions founded on a conclusion that any half-decent English (or French) dictionary could be used to refute--I would go permanently, incurably, and without doubt violently insane.

Buggy but nifty: Jonathan Harris's Flash presentation of the top 100 words and pictures in the current news. (þ: Ingram)

DJ Sankey drops the needle: the Toronto weblogger/auteur stars in the best. PSA. Ever.

I suppose the Democrats will just take this as another reason to move to Canada: Dennis.ca and a Nikon D70 vs. the aurora borealis.

ITConversations.com has 30 minutes of audio with Malcolm Gladwell--a description that needs no adjoining recommendation. That link comes from BoingBoing, where the electoral fog of war has dispersed, and whence we learn of unpleasant developments in Canada's broadband market and its copyright law.

(Detail from a mildly unsettling 6' free-standing bas-relief that perches outside a restaurant on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton.)

So... I'm not sure I get why there's so much fuss over this strange cartogram of the election results, but as I understand it, the idea is that the Americans could have skipped the whole "voting" part and could have simply consulted an ultrasound picture of John Kerry's prostate tumour? Is that right?

So amazing, it's not amazing anymore: retired CBS drivellist Eric Engberg complains about unsourced exit-poll data being available on the afternoon of the U.S. election to web surfers--while giving absolutely no indication that he remembers what happened in 2000, when TV still had a fairly tight grip on the numbers. Maybe Engberg just missed Dan Rather calling Florida for Gore, then Bush, then nobody in particular as that night went on, all without giving the viewers any indication of what went into the decision process. But he knows it was important, difficult Ph.D. kinda stuff, let him assure you! A few webloggers jokingly "projected a winner" early in the night on this occasion; only CBS could do so with a straight face one year, get the call wrong (in a way that was immediately apparent to a statistically informed viewer), and then attack another medium for being, on the whole, humbler and less niggardly with information the next time around. None of which is to defend the handling of exit-poll data by people like Wonkette; but there are many taps to drink from on the Internet--it's up to you to choose the one without coliforms. And Wonkette, unlike CBS in 2000, didn't report anything that was actually untrue. Nor, come to think of it, did she address the nation in a cultivated Texan patois that would have embarrassed Jethro Bodine. It's official--Kerry has won! Oh wait, no he hasn't! Is this going out live? I'm blushing here like a danged old mule driver who done lost his britches in a tornady!

As an apparent representative of CBS News--which is already under intense bacteriological scrutiny itself--Engberg doesn't help the prestige of his network by treating Andrew Sullivan's opinions about journalism as those of an upstart teenager instead of a former editor of the New Republic. Sullivan is quoted by Engberg as having said that "The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set." Engberg calls this "hubris". Whose bris? Only a privileged thousand-percent asshole who had never practiced journalism with nothing but a telephone would dispute Sullivan's statement--and a telephone is just about what some news outfits give you to start out with, in the print world. You don't get a producer to help you with the big words and carry the file folders. And you're expected to bring the conscience with you.

The dirty little secret of Sullivan's utterance is that it doesn't oversimplify one bit; yet, by mentioning "craft" and "conscience", it actually restores some dignity to a trade whose prestige has been battered by fifty-plus years of broadcaster involvement. Could it be that what Engberg dislikes is not the electronic empowerment of a million clods in pyjamas, but that of people like Sullivan, who were once safely confined to a picturesque, rusting print ghetto?

This website hereby inaugurates Master Chief's Award of Demerit, a special honour reserved for outstanding tonal cluelessness in the field of reporting about console and computer games. It's been--what?--about fifteen years since video gaming could be dismissed as a children's idle-time pursuit or a barroom appliance? By the time Microsoft counts up its receipts, Halo 2's first day yesterday will--despite the game's Mature rating--have blown the doors off of The Incredibles at the box office and all but two or three other motion pictures ever released in the quaint old cinematograph. Gaming is now not only a mature art form, it's a maturer one than the movies in every important respect (or, if you like, not nearly as senescent), and it's embarrassing to even point that out. The first recipient of the Master Chief's Award is therefore the incredibly clueless fogey at the CBC who wrote this lede for his Halo 2 story:

VANCOUVER - A new computer game launched by Microsoft on Tuesday is graphic, violent – and wildly popular.

Video games are sometimes violent--not to mention "graphic"!--is the top line of the story. How old does this writer sound to you? 60 seems way too low, and 50 inconceivable. Hold still for his or her gobsmacked explanation that

the game is interactive; it changes with the decisions players make.

Go on, are you out of your tree? A computer game that changes with the decisions players make? Just one question--what would one that didn't look like? A TV show, I guess.

I submit that whatever your political predisposition, this 250-word article apparently sent in Morse Code from a cave is conclusive proof that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation needs nothing quite so much as to be blasted forward into the late 1980s (start with modest aims, I always say) by a judicious application of Semtex. But perhaps other media outlets were even more condescending and dopey on Halo 2/Everquest 2 day! Send your nominations to the usual e-mail address: we don't have to give out just one award.

Yasser Arafat is dead or very nearly dead, depending on whom you ask; eventually someone's going to have to come clean about what exactly killed him. The trained observers at CodeBlueBlog and RangelMD (both physicians) have been trying to decipher the weird statements coming out of Paris. (They biopsied his what???) Apparently no rigid observers of professional courtesy, the pair is peering hard, very hard, at Arafat's doctors. CBB's best guess:

I think the final diagnosis is going to be hepatitis and iatrogenicide. [Iatros is Greek for "physician": I think you can take it from there. -ed.] He had hepatitis all along (viral illness, flu-like, elevated WBC [white blood count], elevated LFTs [liver function tests], inanition) and they got so crazy flying him to Paris and rushing to rule out leukemia that they killed him in the process.

Thanks to Eric McErlain for sending along the links. [UPDATE, 10:26 am: Here's one Canadian doctor's independent but similar take.]

I've been studying the IIHF's official list of striking NHL players in Europe. One of the things I was curious about was whether there was any European team that was particularly worth following because it had signed more than one idle Edmonton Oiler. But not many teammates from any NHL club have stayed together in the transition to Europe; in fact, there are so few that I wonder if the players weren't discouraged--perhaps by insurers--from going over in groups. The AK Bars of Kazan, for example--a Russian league team apparently run by an unsuccessful version of George Steinbrenner--have signed ten NHLers, including Ilya Kovalchuk and Vinny Lecavalier. But the ten come from ten different NHL teams.

A few teammates have stuck together. The Sedin twins, for example, naturally both went to the same Swedish club, MoDo AIK. The Flames' Steve Reinprecht and Steve Montador, neither of whom have any personal connection to Alsace, were cajoled into joining the Scorpions of Mulhouse in the French Ligue Magnus by a former Saint John Flame buddy. But fans in most NHL cities won't have a reason to "adopt" a particular European club. That seems unfortunate, but I suspect it's just as well: no NHL team wants its future fortunes wiped out by some random bus crash in a Swiss tunnel.

Studying the Edmonton Oilers up close suggests that some players are using the lockout to take quality time with old friends and mentors. In a weird way, the economic dysfunction of the NHL and the consequent labour dispute have left players flee to pursue the kind of personal attachment they've always been accused by fans of lacking any feeling for. (No, fellas--they just don't feel any loyalty to you!) Seven Oilers are playing in Europe during the strike: three, Radek Dvorak (Ceske Budejovice), Alexei Semenov (SKA St. Petersburg), and Ales Hemsky (Pardubice HC) have rejoined clubs they played with as teenagers. (Jani Rita, who used to skate for the Jokers of Helsinki, signed with rival Finnish club HPK Hameenlinna for some reason.) Mike York got a call from best friend and former Michigan State teammate Bryan Adams and ended up with an unlikely new employer--the Roosters of Iserlohn in the German Bundesliga. Native Edmontonian Fernando Pisani joined former Oiler assistant coach Kevin Primeau aboard Langnau of the Swiss League. And Shawn Horcoff--who was probably going to end up in Europe pretty soon anyway, if we're being honest--packaged himself with former Oilers teammate and best friend Dan Cleary and accepted an offer from Swedish team Mora. ("They got us a new bed, dishwasher, washing machine, TV for the apartment," Cleary told the Edmonton Journal. "New cell-phones. We each get the use of an SUV, too.") Only goalie Jussi Markkanen seems to have followed the money, signing with the affluent Russian Lada franchise; and even in that case he's arranged to be fairly close to his native Finland.

When it comes to the stupidest statement yet made about the Palestinian succession crisis--well, I don't suppose anyone's surprised that the BBC takes the cake, but it's not for the usual reasons.

Blonde, convent-educated and with a rumoured penchant for designer suits, Suha Arafat makes an unlikely wife for the leader of the Palestinian resistance.

Since their secret marriage in Tunis more than a decade ago, Mrs Arafat has certainly displayed a gift for undiplomatic outbursts. In 2002, just before her husband condemned "all terrorist acts which target civilians", Suha Arafat seemingly endorsed suicide bombings. If she had a son, there would be "no greater honour" than to sacrifice him for the Palestinian cause, she told a London-based Saudi weekly. "I hate the Israelis," she said in an interview a year earlier. "I oppose normalisation with them... [they] are responsible for the problems our children have."

...many [PLO insiders] regard her as more French than Palestinian. Some have voiced fears in the past that her lifestyle could damage Mr Arafat's "revolutionary credentials" - and since she has no social or political standing in the PLO, her influence is unlikely to outlive her frail husband.

Right! That's exactly what the convent-educated widows of political leaders in the Eastern world normally do--go away quietly and relinquish their influence over party affairs. It's not like there are dozens and dozens of historical predecents--or indeed an entire global tradition--behind what Suha Arafat is trying to accomplish!

Frankly--and this is exceedingly depressing--the smart money here is probably on the Missus. How many cabinet ministers throughout history have uttered words like Shaul Mofaz's, relatively confident that no mere woman could possibly disrupt their careful arrangements for an orderly transfer of power?

"It seems the old guard has taken matters to hand, and it appears they are controlling the situation," Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Sunday during the weekly cabinet meeting, according to Israeli news accounts. "It appears they are calling for a united stance and an end to Hamas terror."

"However," Mofaz wisely adds, "there is no guarantee they will be successful." Not as long as there's a frothing mad, French-schooled blonde at the poker table.

When I saw the lede to Virginia Postrel's latest column in the New York Times--

Have religious issues become more important in politics because too few Americans go to church?

--I thought to myself, interesting--it sounds like Postrel thinks politics are serving as a substitute for religion in comtemporary America. In fact, that's not the idea at all. Her column is about a game-theoretic quirk discovered by a Harvard economist--an interesting wrinkle in the old "median voter" theory. It crops up when you take your model and add more complex assumptions about the multiple variables driving people's votes and the likelihood that they will turn out.

That's where social groups like churches and unions come in. These groups provide friendly forums for candidates' direct or indirect messages. While outsiders may know something about a candidate's more extreme positions, group members know more--because the messages are aimed specifically at them. Those in-group forums work, however, only if the groups are just the right size. They have to be small enough to be homogeneous and big enough to be influential. "The model has this very odd prediction that the power of social groups is most when they're roughly 50 percent of the population," Professor Glaeser said.

If a group is too small, it's not worth courting. But if it's too big, it includes too many of your opponent's supporters, making targeted messages impossible. If everybody goes to church or belongs to a union, membership in either group will not predict voting behavior. "This is exactly what you see in the data," Professor Glaeser said. "The degree of polarization around religious issues is greatest in the places that are in the middle. It's not the Philippines, which are 100 percent religious, and not Scandinavia, where no one has attended a church in 40 years except for a wedding or a funeral."

I still wonder, though, about my original, mistaken interpretation of Postrel's columnar hook. There is definitely an eschatological flavour to the reactions of many Democrats to the outcome of the election. I mean--people fleeing the country because Bush got re-elected? Performing repellent acts of self-abasement as a way of warding off karma? Gay people (and gay-positive people) declaring that they're "frightened" because the word "marriage" eludes their grasp after a stunningly successful 30 years of progress in civil rights? You can't help wondering if we are still talking about a political movement instead of a false god erected to fill a social void.

And I don't discount the possibility that the exact same thing is at work on the other side, when you see "traditional values" suddenly take forms that are in no way traditional. Abortion was, until very recent times, never considered equivalent to murder, and I think gestures like Judge Roy Moore's would have widely and correctly been deemed half-crazy by ordinary religious individuals not so long ago. (Of course, so would the notion that the Ten Commandments were offensive.) Much famval rhetoric is perceptibly the operation of a collective guilty conscience, and in many, many cases one is forced to conclude that there's an individual guilty conscience at work. How else could a glassy-eyed slot-machine junkie become America's most renowned popular ethical arbiter?--isn't it easier, in the end, to acquire a patina of "virtue" by teaching it to others than by practicing it oneself? (Substitute the word "tolerance" for "virtue" and the same question could be asked of the Democrats.)

And what's behind this mantra that Bush is a "good man" who shares our "moral values"? Aren't some of those who chant this possibly people who raised selfish, troubled, aimless children of their own and find hope in the story of Bush's midlife redemption? How many people inspired by his struggle with alcoholism find praising him easier than tackling their own demons?

You can probably tell I'm a little horrified by the U.S. right now, I guess. Look for more on that in Monday morning's National Post...

I'm grabbing an early breakfast down at the all-night diner this morning and I overhear the United Nations of Cabdrivers at the next table talking about their bets on the Sunday football games. Somebody mentions that the Eskimos (actually, he was a Greek guy or something, so it came out "de Etskimos") are 4½-point favourites against the Saskatchewan Roughriders today in the CFL Western Semi-Final. That's the closest I've ever come to doing an honest-to-god spit-take in a restaurant. Four and a half points?

Look, maybe it's just me--normally I don't even give a crap about the point spread. But here's how I see the math working out if you're making a line on this game. Both teams are 9-9. The game's in Edmonton. The Eskimos' season record at home: 7-2. Saskatchewan's season record on the road: 3-6. Saskatchewan's recent record in Commonwealth Stadium: 0-6. So that right there is worth, what, maybe a touchdown?

It gets better. Saskatchewan's star player, RB Kenton Keith, is questionable for the game with the aftereffects of a concussion: even if he suits up, he may not know which way is forward. The Eskimos, meanwhile, have had just about the league's worst rushing attack all year--but taurine RB Troy Mills is returning to the lineup after sitting out the regular season with a broken leg. Saskatchewan's backfield features two fleet-footed evasion-artists, while Edmonton's has always been straight-ahead: as Greg Frers pointed out around midweek, cold weather will favour the Eskimos. Today's forecast high is below freezing, with flurries expected. Are we up to two majors yet? Remember, this is the CFL, where a lot of games get lost 42-14.

Overconfidence is inadvisable, particularly in a public forum like this, but just between us, I think Saskatchewan already lost this game. The Roughrider fans were looking forward to having their first home playoff game since 1988 and to finishing ahead of Edmonton for the first time since 1976 (!). They had Edmonton up against the wall, but as this CBC story summarizes so neatly, they let 'em get away:

The game at Commonwealth Stadium could have easily been staged at Taylor Field... had the Roughriders not shot themselves in the foot (twice!) during the end of the regular season.
Two weeks ago, Saskatchewan beat Edmonton 40-16 but needed to win the game by 25 or more points to cement the second spot and host the West semifinal. The Roughriders led 40-2 entering the fourth quarter, but the Eskimos managed two late touchdowns to secure the tiebreaker if the two teams ended the year tied.
Then last week, the Roughriders needed a tie or win over B.C. to clinch second. But Geroy Simon's 13-yard touchdown catch on the final play of the game earned the Lions a thrilling 40-38 victory and relegated Saskatchewan to the third spot.

Saskatchewan's staff was spluttering with rage about the stolen home playoff contest--it'll cost the franchise nearly half a million dollars in revenue--but they tried to move on. I listened to the Saskatchewan fans on a call-in show afterwards, and they took the same tack, but you could tell it was sheer bravado. "Oh, well, we'll just have to go to Edmonton and beat the Eskimos there! Ha ha ha! That should be easy, right? Ha ha! Ha!" I almost felt sorry for the pathetic bastards, as I've never seen a team screwed quite so badly by officiating. But their perennial whining about playing in Edmonton--specifically, about how it is somehow unpleasant to play on the only natural surface in the league--soon lost me their sympathy. They wake up every morning in Saskatchewan, newly shocked at how Edmonton adjusts the field conditions (and presumably the weather) to suit its passing-dependent attack. You'd almost think that the turf wasn't the same for both teams, or that it would be illegal for Saskatchewan to put grass back in at Taylor Field and use the same tactics. Roughrider fans are generally believed to be the finest and most loyal in football, but sweet Lord do they know how to whine--and they don't believe there's any connection between all the whining and all the losing, either. So I'm looking forward to the brutal beating I believe to be in store for them, starting at 2 p.m. today.

[UPDATE, 6:02 pm: I know what you're thinking--how's he going to spin this one? Look, the Riders scored only 14 points and the Eskies threw for well over 300 yards. Surely the score is just a technicality? Anyway, it's not like any Rider fans have weblogs, literacy being a prerequisite. I believe this was the lowest-scoring CFL playoff game since the 1974 Eastern Final (Montreal 14, Ottawa 4). 2003's championship had made me forget how gutless an Edmonton team could seem.

To top things off, the cops are still interviewing witnesses outside my house here (though, sadly, it's doubtful they intend to arrest Eskimo kicker Sean Fleming). About ten minutes after the final whistle I heard a loud, plasticky "pop" just outside my door followed by a clamour of anxious voices. A car had knocked down a Eskimos fan passing through the neighbourhood on his way home from the stadium. The victim seemed stunned, and was favouring one leg slightly, but was walking and seemed basically all right; the paramedics had to quarrel with him a little to get him into the ambulance. The driver, an older East European gentleman, told me that four young fans had just materialized in front of him on the road, which is slick with new snow. I suspect the quartet was probably a crew of suburbanites who were nauseated by the game and, being unfamiliar with the terrain, didn't notice that they were trying to cross an uncontrolled major intersection after sunset in lousy conditions. So, congrats to the Esks: you played so badly that someone was nearly killed.]

[UPDATE, Nov. 8: Proof emerges of one Roughrider fan's literacy--arguably.]

Sam Mikes, American marooned in Edmonton, had a highly nuanced set of preferences for the outcome of the election. "I'd rather there be a clear winner in a more-or-less landslide victory than any sort of a tight race. If it had to be a tight race, I'd rather see Kerry win because I think it would be better for the country in the long term not to have the Democratic party self-destruct." Oh dear. I think I know what happens in this movie after a highly ironic cue like that.

After a divisive election, a grateful nation full of Republican wargamers finally draws a breath and decides to give John Kerry: The Simulation a fair chance. What actually happened? What was Kerry's role? Did he, in fact, deserve the Navy's lofty Silver Star? Today, in our KumaWar 3D re-creation of this event, we give you the information you need to judge for yourself. No worries, Mom and Dad--it's a way to hose down Charlie educationally!

"The Democrats," writes Reason's Tim Cavanaugh in an uncharacteristically portentous formulation, "need new ideas more than they need new faces." It's been a common enough sentiment this week: I merely chose one pithy version at random. But it seems like we've all forgotten what Republicans and Democrats in the United States understood equally well in the year 2000, and what both sides joked about: what the Democrats really need is a repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment--either that, or a candidate willing to pick Bill Clinton as his running mate and then shoot himself in the head at the Inaugural Ball.

No, Clinton wouldn't really have won again in 2000. Too many Democrats had become tired of trying to defend his twisted personal priorities. I wouldn't have bet against him versus G.W. Bush this year, though. We typists are contorting ourselves awfully hard trying to explain why Al Gore and John Kerry lost despite facing an opponent of meagre attainments. We're massaging exit-polling numbers, never easy for most of us, and we're mapping culture wars while not being quite sure which way the front lines are. How about reaching for a tall foamy glass of the obvious? Gore and Kerry lost because they were Gore and Kerry--schoolmarmish, humourless stiffs who had spent most of their lives preparing consciously for the presidency.

You're probably like me: you like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush a great deal more than you approve of them. Clinton would wear out his welcome awfully fast as, say, a houseguest: after a few days you'd expect to find your wife puzzlingly mussed and the cookie jar where you keep your mad money full of IOUs. Bush, while not remotely the fool he's reflexively made out to be by his opponents, is incurious and grotesquely blokey. What these men possess in common is hard to describe: it's not charisma so much as, I guess, an actual complicated personality like one you'd expect to find in a civilian. They have rough edges; they let their guard down sometimes. Clinton is caught laughing behind his hand at a funeral (to say nothing of Oval Office anilingus): Bush unwisely essays an impression of a condemned Texas criminal in front of a dink with a notebook. We believe in their sincerity the more because we see glimpses of them in their unprogrammed state. The parallel embarrassments in the lives of men like Gore and Kerry turn up when they try to pretend to have souls--Gore theatrically Frenching his wife on a series of daises; Kerry pretending to let reporters "find" his lucky beret from Vietnam in a "secret" compartment of his briefcase.

Clinton and Bush have narratives; Americans like that in a candidate. Clinton's story is familiar--born dirt-poor, after his father's death, in the armpit of America; mean stepdad, defenceless half-brother, big Oedipal confrontation, Rhodes scholarship, draft-dodgery, yadda yadda. Bush was born a Fortunate Son, as the song goes, but created an adversity narrative for himself by taking a side trip through alcoholism. This is not a man who ever planned to be President of the United States until early middle age. Kerry's life plans were already a running joke in Doonesbury before he was even elected to the Senate. Yet we don't really know much about the man before or after he got on the Swift boat--I'm sure the information is available, but none of us have it at our fingertips, is my point--and the picture of his Navy stretch is rashomonous. There is something indefinably enigmatic about Kerry, and I suspect there will be surprising biographical revelations ahead (not necessarily bad ones), though now that the dogs have been called off we may have to wait until he dies to learn of them.

The other side of this, for the Democrats, is that Clinton was free or courageous enough to avail himself of the American public's ability to position him in some sort of mental space. He had the Sister Souljah moment, still an astonishing Bulworthian gesture; he reformed welfare when four-fifths of his party were telling him he'd end up with blood on his hands. Cavanaugh's not wrong about the Democrats needing new ideas, though one might say that what they need is ideas, period, rather than a set of indignant stances and obligations to interest groups. Would it be so hard for a major Democratic politician to tell the teacher trust that American schools are meant to serve students, not their employees? Or declare that black Americans' pervasive sense of grievance is no longer serving their best interests, and that the principle of equality before the law demands colour-blindness in government? Nominating pols driven by a sense of personal entitlement and fear of giving offence, instead of by Clinton's sharper, more Herman Blume-like ambition, doesn't seem to be working too well.

We all know some familiar players won't be back when the NHL returns, but a mid-game death in Europe is a doubly embittering way for it to happen. Ex-Oiler Sergei Zholtok was a star Latvian center who followed Alexei Yashin to the NHL and bounced around the league before finding respect as a two-way forward in the Minnesota Wild's tight-checking system. Zholtok, diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia last year at the age of 30 but cleared to return to hockey, collapsed and died in the tunnel of the arena in Minsk Wednesday night near the end of an away game for his Riga 2000 club.

The oldest known pencil in existence. (þ: Pickover)

Please don't kill me: here's the column I wrote last week about Canadian Islam's occasional imam-bo explosions. Delightfully, it has absolutely nothing to do with the U.S. election just concluded. You're welcome!

I suppose nearly everybody has now seen the comments translated last week from a recent lecture by Vancouver Islamic teacher Sheik Younus Kathrada. They were another icy bath for those of us trying to accept, as we are told so often, that the "religion of peace" side of Islam is truer and more essential to the faith than its warrior-death-cult aspect. Kathrada called Jews "the brothers of the monkeys and the swine," cited Koranic verses that foretell the "good news" of the Jews' cleansing from the planet and described martyrdom as the desire of every good Muslim. The content is too familiar: what gets you is where it's coming from this time around.

Kathrada is not some newly arrived nutbar who shuttles back and forth from downtown Vancouver to mysterious "resorts" in the Afghan mountains. He hails from South Africa, was formerly a Muslim chaplain at the University of Victoria, and has a record of participating in interfaith discussions. Fellow Muslims expressed surprise at his comments; Duan Ismail, president of the B.C. Muslim Association, told the CBC that they were "quite out of character" for a "brother." There is little or nothing in Kathrada's background that would suggest a predisposition to millennial fanaticism. Nothing, that is, except Islam.

Yet there is reason for encouragement as well as dismay. After Kathrada's remarks were reported, it transpired that 20 B.C. Muslims had sent him a furious open letter in August, 2002, calling on him to recant his teachings and apologize for them. A Vancouver Muslim who signed the letter, Rahat Kurd, says that "Kathrada [is] a toxic element in the community and we felt we had to do more than have our silent disagreements; we had a responsibility to confront him." If Islam is going to take the blame for fostering sentiments like Younus Kathrada's, one must be prepared to credit it for a courageous sensibility like Ms. Kurd's.

But did the gesture have any effect? The missive was sent in response to a series of newsletters whose content went unreported in the English-language press at the time. We now know that in 2002, Kathrada's Dal al-Madinah Islamic Society was already churning out anti-Semite verbiage: "Why do we hate the Jews? We hate them for the sake of our Lord." Ms. Kurd says that the B.C. Muslim Association would never endorse such comments, which is doubtless true. But its own president somehow remained unaware there was a problem.

Kathrada's opinions became news earlier this month when one of his students, 26-year-old Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, was killed by Russian special forces in Chechnya. There is no proof he went to Chechnya in search of martyrdom, but it's a damned strange place to end up if you have anything else in mind. Sheik Kathrada, eager to evade responsibility, is now saying that his comments were "taken out of context." His argument appears to be that he didn't actively urge anyone to take up arms -- though, of course, if they happened to do so, they would have an awfully short road to heaven.

We see ever more Canadian Muslims entering the ranks of armed "martyrs," and if that continues, it is going to rebound not only on Muslims, but on Canadians. In that sense, Islamic anti-Semitism and equivocation about the jihad concept are everybody's business. Only Muslims, however, can practically hold their preachers and teachers to account. Those of us ignorant of Arabic, Farsi or Urdu are helpless. It would be useful if the preaching in Canada of revolutionary Islamic nihilism were publicized -- not just resisted intramurally, as if it were a family matter between Muslims -- before it sent young Canadian citizens off to die. Belated police action under the "hate laws," aside from being destructive of the liberal principles of freedom of speech and the press, will only serve to encourage secrecy.

Right now, Canadian Muslims seem to spend more time agitating for "fairness" from the mainstream press than giving it good information about what's happening in their communities. The loudest such voice has been Mohamed Elmasry, the ubiquitous president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. On Oct. 19, Dr. Elmasry appeared on Michael Coren's television talk show and declared that since all adult Israelis serve in the military (which isn't strictly true) they are all legitimate targets for suicide bombing. "They are part of the Israeli army, even if they have civilian clothes," he said, justifying attacks against pizza parlours and discotheques on the apparent ground of permanent total war.

Once again, there has been salutary outrage from Canadian Muslims who don't want to be spoken for in such a manner. Dr. Elmasry will be a useful test case now. If he is permanently discredited, the hope for genuine multicultural coexistence will shine a little brighter. But if he remains at the head of Canada's most influential Islamic political organization, what are non-Muslims to conclude? (October 26, 2004)

--the Bush victory really was bad for the economy! All right, sure, the Republican win touched off a sudden worldwide bacchanal on bourses as relieved traders realized they were going to be spared the effects of John Kerry's protectionist, tax-friendly economic policies. Bush's track record on the public balance sheet, however, drove the U.S. dollar down even further. I'm waiting on a freelance payment in that currency, which I'll then have to exchange for--well, let's be honest: it'll become domestic cigarettes almost immediately, pretty much. So I've seen about C$70 (or eight packs) vanish in two weeks. Is it too late to go back and endorse Kerry?

The Big Media are suffering spasms of inchoate fury right now. The exit polls steered the TV talking heads down a blind alley for endless hours last night, and they just had to keep slogging on into the gloom without a big finish to their coverage. Tom Brokaw was barely able to conceal his rage at the Democrats' attempt to make NBC the fall guy because it correctly perceived the situation in Ohio and gave the state to Bush. The close vote, and Kerry's understandable decision not to concede, embittered the man's farewell to the big stage. Meanwhile every newspaper on the continent has to put morning editions on doorsteps with big, stupid, unhelpful, snoozy headlines that aren't even really true. U.S. Outcome Still Unclear: Hinges On Ohio.

The media's anger, as anger will, is looking for an outlet. And Democratic leadership is not exactly in good odour at the moment with liberal journalists who had pinned their hopes on a Kerry victory. All this is, I think, worth considering for John Edwards, who (a) can be the next president of the U.S. if Giuliani doesn't get up in his grill, and (b) allowed himself to be used to make a rather nasty threat of tedious dilatory litigation last night. I'm sure that, as a trial lawyer, Edwards is eager to be out there fighting. He'll be instinctively hungry for the face time that will come his way with a Democrat scorched-earth policy. (Kerry is expendable now--as a soldier, he ought to understand the brutal calculus well enough--but if the Democrats are going to play this farce through, he will have to keep up the role of cloistered capital-C Candidate.) Edwards' smart play now is to disappear for 24 months without leaving a sour taste in people's mouths. Don't be a patsy, John--get on a plane! Any plane!

In 2000, the United States held a bitterly contested, evenly divided presidential election, which George W. Bush won narrowly.

Not too long thereafter, terrorists annihilated the core of the country's greatest metropolis and murdered 2,800 Americans in a handful of minutes. The executive branch embarked on two foreign wars, one mildly controversial, the other savagely so. 1,000 American troops (and counting) were killed capturing and garrisoning Iraq. The U.S. was accused of torturing prisoners of war and confining "enemy combatants" in inhumane conditions contrary to the Geneva Conventions. The federal budget was steered from a condition of rude health to an apparent state of massive, irreparable deficit, with huge new entitlement programs and hotly-argued tax cuts figuring in the mix. It has been as turbulent a four-year period, by all accounts, as any time in American history outside the confines of world war, civil war, or revolution.

So, riddle me this: how come barely anything changed on the electoral landscape? 9/11 "changed everything", and then the Iraq war transformed the political landscape, and then the Abu Ghraib revelations raped America's innocence, or something like that. And then, in 2004, the United States held a bitterly contested, evenly divided presidential election, which George W. Bush won narrowly. How many states changed hands tonight from the 2000 election? Kerry seems to have won tick-sized New Hampshire by a few thousand votes. Bush captured Iowa and New Mexico, which, combined, have almost the population of the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale metro area. That's it: 47 states of 50 and the District of Columbia held firm. Following tonight's election was like some sick exercise in Nietzschean eternal recurrence, with Ohio cast in the role of Florida. It was the same script with a few minor changes, right down to the disastrously inaccurate exit polls.

Anybody else find this a little weird?

With one day left, the man behind Electoral-Vote.com outs himself. Turns out he's the guy who wrote MINIX!

Meanwhile, over at Zogby International, they've conducted a special SMS poll to find out how those cell-phone users without land lines, long thought to be haunting the polls, break down. The good news for Kerry is that he leads 55%-40% among them. The bad news is that 55%-40% isn't so great when you consider low youth turnouts, even if the Zogby sample were representative--and in fact it isn't; it was taken from subscribers to a mobile service sponsored by Rock the Vote. (Plus, where are the votes for Cobra Commander?)

Over at Reason today, Jeff Taylor dismisses the questions about which camp is underpolled because of new communications technology. Unfortunately, his dismissal seems a tad lazy:

...there has to be some real evidence that the landline-less really are more liberal than their tethered opposites and, most vital of all, some evidence that this subset of potential voters are, in fact, likely voters. There is none.

But the facts should not get in the way of a good story. The cell phone angle morphed down and across technologies to the point where even Caller ID was cited as a potential source of poll-skewing. Surely Caller ID does not skew to the right or left, unless the idea is that the act of refusing to take a pollster's call somehow queers the results.

Most significant datum from the last clump of U.S. election polling: Gallup gives G.W. Bush an eight-point lead, over twice the margin of error, in both Wisconsin and Minnesota.* Wisconsin has long left-wing traditions and backed Dukakis; Minnesota, you'll recall, was the only state to reject Reagan twice. There are reasons to be suspicious of Gallup, but they did invent this game. The same poll has Kerry with slight leads in the big Rust Belt states, but a Democrat should be able to phone in states like WI and MN (and other "new swing states" like New Jersey and Hawaii). Meanwhile, national polling is showing a late swing toward Bush.

I can't tell you categorically that Kerry won't win, but he definitely needs the Goddess of Luck and the cell-phone users to show up. I built a probabilistic model of the swing states, and right now I make Bush about a 5-to-1 favourite, despite giving him only a 1-in-3 chance of winning Minnesota and leaving Florida 50-50. Kerry, as I see it, pretty much has to take Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania together--a big manufacturing-state sweep--and have everything else fall in line for him too. If Bush wins Florida, then Kerry's back in the hole despite having the factory belt in his pocket. In fact, if Bush wins Ohio, he can kiss off Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and still have a slightly better hand in the dinky, culturally Republican swing states.

The word that comes to mind of the Kerry-Edwards campaign when you play with these numbers is "cornered". Though perhaps a better metaphor for Kerry's situation is that of the plate-spinner, hoping that New Jersey and Wisconsin don't fall to the ground behind him and go smashola while he keeps Ohio aloft. Formal Electoral College prediction: Bush, 289-249.

[UPDATE, 1:32 pm: It's Kerry who is ahead by 8 in Minnesota--did I get this wrong or did CNN change it? Doesn't matter much: as you can see in the second paragraph, I didn't really believe Bush was ahead there anyway, although he almost grabbed the state from Gore. Les Jones is rounding everybody's predictions up on the Web. You can go head-to-head with others who are equally confused at Matt Welch's comment thread for predictions.]