The Conservatives appointed new directors to the board that oversees the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of whom is Brian Mitchell, a Montreal-based lawyer who once ran against Joe Clark for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. Mitchell also ran unsuccessfully in 2005 against Manitoban Don Plett for the leadership of ...   more »

My former colleague Vito Pilieci has a nice little scoop in today's Canwest papers: A musician's group will put forward an idea today that it hopes will solve the illegal music downloading debate: Make every Internet user in Canada pay $5 a month to a musician's fund and, in exchange, you can download all the music you want for free.... "That's a very reasonable amount of money to legally, without fear of any legal repercussions, to be able to download that and share it with [whomever] you want to and as many times as you want," said Eddie Schwartz, president of the songwriters' group.

"The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made. Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the metropolitan West.

Interesting piece in the current edition of The Weekly Standard by Stephen Schwartz who casts a critical eye at the call earlier this week by Rowan Williams, who, because he is the Archbishop of Canterbury is the global leader of the Anglican Communion, for official recognition in Britain of sharia or Islamic religious law: What the archbishop ignored is that British Muslim radicals raise the demand for sharia as an ideological banner.... This requirement is spelled out, for instance, in the sharia volume A Code of Practice for Muslims in the West (1999), which quotes the moderate Iraqi Shia ayatollah Ali Sistani pronouncing that Muslims living in non-Muslim nations must commit themselves "to abide by the laws of that country," as they implicitly promise to do when they sign an immigration form.

"This new process explains why the public is seeing a lot of sentences such as “Defence officials were not available to comment” or “Military officials could not comment” in media reports these days as the PMO/PCO approval process for the emailed statements for reporters can take anywhere between two days and three weeks. Those types of timelines are just not good enough to deal with the rapid pace of the 24-hour news cycle……..and critics of the Canadian Forces have been able to take advantage of the lack of response from DND/CF since they are able to get their points across unchallenged in news stories and broadcasts.

But it's not just Obama's color, it's his appeal - a result of his youth and rhetorical magic - to the so-called millennial generation. In Rich's view, that combination will be too much for Hillary and definitely too much for a "Grumpy Old White Guy" named McCain.

Almost certainly, there will soon be fewer U.S. airlines, as Delta, Northwest and many others, large and small, are driven to combine their businesses as a way to deal with high oil prices, a drooping U.S. dollar, and aggressive European competitors.... Air France, Lufthansa, and British Airways will likely buy a piece of America's biggest airlines and may push U.S. lawmakers to lift limits that restrict foreign control to 25 per cent. BusinessWeek reporter Dean Foust fingers cash-rich Air France as the most likely foreigner now looking at American opportunities.

Corliss blames Oscar's 5,800 voters -- the Academy membership -- who, he says, are insular and aging, live mostly in Los Angeles, and seem to respond all too easily to studio politicking and lobbying. Corliss lists Oscar's biggest failures: Citizen Kane was nearly shut out (winning only best screenplay); no foreign film has ever won best picture; and Martin Scorsese took forever to win his first.

New York Times reporters Matt Richtel and Eric Taub phrase it nicely: HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness.... The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.

House Cards are 1-2 page briefing notes prepared by departmental staff each day on a 'hot' issue that bureaucrats believe the minister may be forced to talk about in the House of Commons during Question Period or in response to a question from a reporter. These cards relate to evacuation of Canadian citizens from Lebanon during the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006: What were the costs for the emergency evacuation of Canadian Citizens from Lebanon in the summer of 2006?