Apparently, I am the Honourable Madam Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dub?©. But it’s only a 68.0% match, so giving up my day job probably isn’t an option.

Born: 1927, Ville de Québec, Québec
Appointed: 1987
Retired: 2002
Key word: “opinion“

Your opinions on our sample cases reflect consistent respect for the rule of law, with the Supreme Court as highest authority. You were always willing to express an opinion on how things should be resolved, instead of leaving it to other bodies to decide. Sometimes your colleagues agreed with you, as in Harvard College; more often not, as in Trinity Western.

Which Canadian Supreme Court Justice are you? v0.1 by mskala

Feeling happy? Cheerful? Optimistic?

Then clearly you haven’t read the Knight Foundation’s First Amendment study. University of Connecticut researchers interviewed over 100,000 high school students, and found that only half of them believed newspapers should publish articles without government approval. (Oddly, 58% believe that student newspapers should be able to publish without the principal looking over their shoulders.)

There’s other wonderfully depressing news — including the fact that only two-thirds of students who hadn’t taken courses about the media or free speech believe that people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.

Leaders and voters of tomorrow, folks. Where could they be getting these ideas?

Maybe the 57% of school principals who did not agree that musicians should be allowed to sing songs with potentially offensive lyrics.

Like, say, “teach the children well.”

You hear about media conspiracies, but boy, you never really expect to see one.

We’re now up to three conservative journalists and columnists who wrote their pieces while on George Bush’s payroll — an arrangement they failed to disclose to their readers.

The president has announced he is shocked, shocked by the practice of buying good press. “All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet,” Bush said on Wednesday.

Fortunately, it won’t have to. Just in case FOX News isn’t sycophantic enough, the Republicans can also turn to Talon News, and its White House correspondent Jeff Gannon.

Here’s a sample of the kind of hardball questions Gannon asks in news conferences (cited by MediaMatters):

Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

If MediaMatters’ analysis is to be believed, Gannon’s primary newsgathering tools appear to be Republican news releases and his computer’s CTRL, C and V keys. They cite one article where 54 per cent of the content was lifted verbatim from an RNC news release.

The beauty of this, for the Bush administration, has little to do with Talon News’ media empire; Gannon’s articles have an extremely limited distribution outside the right-wing echo chamber. It’s more knowing that, whenever one of their number is under fire in a news conference, they just have to throw the next question to Jeff Gannon and they’re home free.

Better yet, it doesn’t cost them a dime.

From CBC News coverage of the equalization deal:

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams, who had earlier stated he wanted his province to keep all federalization payments, told a news conference, that this deal gives him everything he wanted.

Consider Newfoundland and Labrador federalized.

Politics is a funny business, where politicians often find themselves passionately defending positions in public that they privately admit are deeply flawed compromises. But the events of the past few months are setting a new high-water mark for doublethink at 24 Sussex Drive.

Paul Martin used same-sex marriage as a line in the sand in the last election. On the one side were bigots unfit for public office; on the other were those who held high the torch of human rights. Stephen Harper’s opposition to equality was proof he was too extreme to lead the country.

I don’t happen to disagree with that assessment of Mr. Harper’s suitability to lead. But as I’ve said before, I’ve been less than impressed by Mr. Martin’s consistency on the issue.

Now, with a vote on the issue looming in the House of Commons, a commitment to equality is no longer the engine and drive train of justice, but merely the passenger-operated climate controls and back-seat DVD player of justice. MPs who oppose same-sex marriage are no longer labelled “raging paleoconservatives” but — provided they’re Liberals — “valued colleagues”. Yet Martin is still happy to slag Harper for playing politics with the issue.

How does he do it? Do the Liberal-boosting and Conservative-bashing sides of his brain talk to each other any more, or does he live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance?

Jack Layton makes this point forcefully in a Toronto Star op-ed today:

After all, Martin spent a good part of June saying how vital it was to stop Harper’s attack on the Charter. He did not tell people that a third of the Liberals elected would agree with Harper. Martin now has an obligation to ensure Liberal MPs vote in accordance with the values he portrayed, wrongly, as theirs.

Within the Liberal caucus are MPs who call for the notwithstanding clause to be invoked, and who voted against including sexual orientation in the Human Rights Act. They have fought lesbian and gay equality for a decade.

During that time, a Liberal majority government did not see Charter rights as sacred. It consistently appealed court rulings on such basic issues as allowing pension rights to same-sex couples. Given this history and a caucus packed with MPs opposed to equality, Martin owes us more than hyperbole about human rights.

Incidentally, James Dobson of Focus on the Family is calling on (far) right-thinking Canadians to empty their wallets into the blazing fiscal furnace that powers Mr. Harper’s supporters in the evangelical right. If you think that deserves a little pushback, you might want to consider donating to the very good people at Canadians for Equal Marriage.

(If that headline doesn’t get us bumped off Google’s “Safe Search” list, nothing will.)

My friend Denise Blinn’s comedy short The Porcelain Pussy has been criss-crossing Canada and will finally come home to Toronto — before jetting off again to such exotic locales as Argentina.

Catch it if you can — it’s hilarious:

• It will anchor the opening night gala of the World of Comedy International Film Festival on February 9th at 7 pm at the Royal Cinema on College St in Toronto. Opening night tickets include admittance to the gala party after and are available at the Toronto International Film Festival website and box office or at the theatre on the night.
• The film will screen again on February 12th at 7 p.m. at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.
• Then it’s off to Winnipeg for March 5th and the National Screen Institute film festival.
• And then March 10th to 20th at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina.

Go. See. Laugh. You’ll thank me.

It’s been days since Bush’s inauguration, and yet the aftertaste persists. (Kind of a mix of sulfur and that waxy taste you get when someone’s been spraying pesticides nearby.)

For some, it was the grotesque spectacle of dropping $40 million on a lavish party in the midst of war and tragedy.

For others, it was the thought of that poor, sobbing speechwriter three hours before the swearing-in, pleading “Mr. Rove, I can’t fit another ‘freedom’ reference in. The speech will collapse in on itself like a black hole. The entire inaugural party will be crushed in its gravitational field! In God’s name, don’t make me do it!”

Whatever the cause, if you just can’t shake that I-just-swallowed-a-bucket-of-sewage effect, ifilm has the mouthwash you’re looking for: a three-minute clip from some of the TV coverage of the parade.

If you’re the kind of person who nods vigorously while reading ODTAA rather than putting your fist through the monitor, chances are you missed this the first time it ran. Because — are you sitting down? — the source is FOX TV.

The FOX host is none too pleased when guest Judy Bahrach goes off-script and instead of emitting feelgood Pablum, starts juxtaposing the spare-no-expense approach to the inauguration to the spare-no-soldier approach to (not) armouring Humvees in Iraq.

Have a look. It’s wildly uncomfortable television. No wonder it’s the number one clip at ifilm.

IFILM – Television: Fair and Balanced Inauguration

Back in the winter of 1984, Steve Jobs got up on a stage and pulled a little miracle out of a bag: the Apple Macintosh.

The event was preserved for posterity by Scott Kastner, and ODTAA is (or, rather, was) pleased to mirror the video here.

Twenty-one days (one for each year of Macintoshy goodness!) and a chunk of bandwidth later, it’s time to put the video file into cold storage again (and free up some disk space on the server). See you again in 2026!