As the new National Affairs Correspondent for Canwest News Service (CNS), I will be part of a terrific team of Canwest reporters covering the activities of the federal government for these and other newspapers. And while I’m excited to return to my roots in the world of print journalism, I’m going to continue with my involvement on television by joining Global National’s Kevin Newman in his new Ottawa digs to offer some analysis and context in their coverage of business and economic policy.

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Now, I'm no economist, but if I read the charts in this report correctly , if U.S. federal governments do not either cut spending and/or raise taxes, the United States deficit -- not debt but the current excess of spending compared to revenue -- will hit 5 per cent of US GDP within the decade (it's somewhere around 3 per cent now -- and will hit 10 per cent by 2030.... It couldn't be more different in the U.S. In his recent book, The Age of Turbulence, arch-Republican and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has almost nothing nice to say about the fiscal management abilities of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush, but nice things to say about Democrats.

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"...if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it "banal"—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.... But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing.

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Here in Canada where water, particularly in its 'snow' form, seems to be in overabundance right now, it's worth noting this rather sobering opening paragraph (that's me bolding some parts for emphasis) in that review article: The many problems worldwide associated with the lack of clean, fresh water are well known: 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation, millions of people die annually—3,900 children a day—from diseases transmitted through unsafe water or human excreta1.... In both developing and industrialized nations, a growing number of contaminants are entering water supplies from human activity: from traditional compounds such as heavy metals and distillates to emerging micropollutants such as endocrine disrupters and nitrosoamines.

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As someone whose livelihood has, at times, depended on the number of people who buy and read newspapers, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news: A media monitoring firm says that non-newspaper readers are likely to be younger, and spend more time than others at online news sites.... “That current generations are growing up getting their news online for free is an indicator that print circulations are likely to continue their decline,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of media monitoring firm comScore Inc..

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Luckily, since iTunes 7.1, Apple has been building in more 'Sort' functionality to the application but Apple has never done a great job of explaining how power users might put that new Advanced Sort function to work.... It had the answer to the problem I was trying to solve: Astute readers will have realised this only applies to the track they've selected, and possibly leapt ahead and tried selecting multiple tracks and opening Get Info once more.

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"The decline in the manufacturing sector is in no way unique to Canada. In fact, across the industrialised world there have been similar long-term trends of downward shifts in the size and importance of the manufacturing sector over the past three decades... [but] the Canadian manufacturing sector has been outperformed, by its US. counterpart on the dimension that is most is important for long-term survival. That is labour productivity."   more »

The Canadian Press reports that, since the Cadman affair first surfaced, they've repeatedly asked the Prime Minister's communications staff to answer just six questions. So far: No response.

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If you like politics, well, you’re probably watching what’s going on south of the border. But there’s going to be a little fun up here as well over the next week or so. First up, in a few minutes, the Liberals present their amendment on the budget. Here it is:...   more »

Leslie Swartman, the director of communications for the Leader of the Official Opposition, just distributed the following to newsrooms in the nation’s capital:

Neither Mr. Dion nor any member of the Liberal Party will apologize.  If anyone owes an apology, it is the Prime Minister to the Canadian people.

What ...   more »