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Sheldon Alberts: The candidate from Ubeki-beki-b

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:08:04 +0900

Sheldon Alberts: The candidate from Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan
If Herman Cain has proven one thing in his quixotic bid to become the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, it's that he has mastered the art of the folksy one liner.

Here's Cain, in Iowa over the weekend, brushing aside questions about his staying power as a top-tier White House candidate:

"When people get on the Cain Train, they don't get off."

Eleven words, delivered with impeccable timing and a self-referential rhyme, to boot.
Is it any wonder Cain has become the GOP's latest overnight sensation? Well, yes, it is.

Let's rewind.

As recently as mid-September, Herman Cain was being dismissed as an also-ran in a crowded field of Republican underachievers - a largely unknown former pizza chain executive who has never held elected office and seemed interested in running nothing so much as a vanity campaign .

Instead of building competent ground organizations in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, Cain has devoted substantial time to a book tour promoting his emphatically-titled autobiography: 'This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House.'

A CNN / Opinion Research poll, conducted in early September, found the 65-year-old businessman wallowing at 5% support.
Two developments turned Cain's fortunes around - Texas governor Rick Perry's self-destruction and New Jersey governor Chris Christie's decision to stay out of the 2012 race.

With Tea Party conservatives desperate to find an alternative to default Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney, Cain stepped capably into the breach.

His ability in recent GOP debates to distil Tea Party anger over big government into pithy sound bites and catchy-sounding policy plans paid immediate dividends.

Don't like America's complicated tax system? Cain has an easy answer: A '9 -9-9 plan 'to impose a flat corporate, income and sales tax on the nation. "Government must get off our backs, out of our pockets and out of our way. "

Simplicity sells.

tied former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in three of the last six national Republican polls. On Friday, he won a straw poll among Republicans in Nevada.">Cain led or tied former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in three of the last six national Republican polls. On Friday, he won a straw poll among Republicans in Nevada.

But is this where the Herman Cain fairy tale ends?

For all his unscripted authenticity and rough-edged conservative charm, Cain is withering under the scrutiny that attends presidential frontrunners.

First, he has made unforced errors that suggest a surprising lack of discipline.

Discussing a plan to build a fence along the US border with Mexico, Cain said the barrier "is going to be electrified, and there's going to be a sign on the other side saying, 'It will kill you.'" He subsequently apologized " if I offended anyone. "

Aiming at Occupy Wall Street protesters, Cain's Miles Austin Jerseys scattershot rhetorical fire instead hit 14 million unemployed Americans.

"Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself," he said.

On foreign policy, Cain revels in his own inexperience. He blithely says he doesn't know - and doesn't care - who "the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" is.

"Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world - I don't think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going."

He confessed to Meet the Press host David Gregory that he was "not familiar with the neoconservative movement," having apparently been asleep during the eight years of the Bush administration.

These are not the remarks of a serious presidential candidate.

But in a Republican primary where lack of experience in government is seen as a plus, neither are they necessarily life-threatening to his campaign.

Unfortunately for Cain, his problems extend to areas that Republican primary voters do care deeply about - tax and social policy.
His 9-9-9 plan has been eviscerated as a regressive form of taxation that would hit the poor and middle class hardest, forcing him to make adjustments to exclude people living in poverty.

Cain's Republican opponents have predicted, reasonably, that anti-tax conservatives would rebel at the idea of a national sales tax being added to existing state sales taxes.

But Cain's biggest blunder has been on abortion.

Though he describes himself as "100 per cent pro-life," Cain became confused when asked last week what that means.

Would Cain oppose abortion in circumstances where a woman was raped? "That's her choice. That is not government's choice," Cain told Fox News.

He dug the hole deeper on CNN: "Ultimately it gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president. Not some politician."

That one word - "choice" - is a red flag for pro-life Republicans. Understanding the damage he'd done to himself, Cain now defines his position as "no abortions, no exceptions."

Unless Rick Perry rallies, or anti-Romney Republicans take another look at Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich, the former Godfather Pizza boss's campaign still has an opportunity to flourish.

Canada's Worst Driver: Fools of the road

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:07:26 +0900

Canada's Worst Driver: Fools of the road
There's a case to be made that the only reason anyone watches much of the programming that falls into the reality television genre is to delight in the misfortune of others. From Survivor to the Real Housewives to Jersey Shore, there's an element of I'm- glad-I'm-not-that-person going on. Also a little I'm-better-than-that-person.

There's schadenfreude aplenty to be found in watching Canada's Worst Driver, which begins its seventh season on Discovery Canada Monday night. Aside from the somewhat suspect premise of the title - how many "worst" drivers can there be? - It's a show that seems limited in its appeal. People are bad drivers. We get it.

And yet, it is the top-rated specialty program in the country, according to Discovery, reaching a total of 3.8 million viewers weekly (in all its airings). There is undoubtedly a bit of guilty pleasure to be had in watching these unfortunate souls make such a hash of the basics of driving.
Shirley, a pleasant Cape Bretoner, admits to being frightened of driving on highways. She doesn't at all like going to the big city, which in this case is Halifax. And she has the troubling habit of, when uncertain behind the wheel, which is often, of just stopping to Miles Austin Jerseys sort things out. "Go, go, GO! Just drive!," her daughter Janis pleads, before adding some words that would make the cast of Jersey Shore proud.

Afiya, a young woman from Montreal, asserts that her friends and family who say she is a bad driver are simply wrong. The host, Andrew, asks when she was last in an accident. "Four days ago," she replies. And then she manages to hit something while leaving the parking garage.

The "contestants" are all disasters in their own ways. If you enjoy watching others fail, this is the show for you.

Speaking of cars ...

... Steve Unger is no longer living in one, which means the title of Living in Your Car is also now a bit suspect. The HBO Canada comedy is back for Season 2, with corporate criminal Unger (John Ralston) under house arrest after he was framed for hiding money from his former company. (He was properly convicted in the first place, but the subsequent money-hiding was a frame job. If you follow.) He has few friends and not even many relatives like him, but by the end of the premiere most of his crises are resolved and he sets out to find redemption.

It has its clever moments, but lacks the satire of corporate greed that drove Season 1. The challenge will be finding enough humour in Unger's new, hopeful life. Failure is often funnier.

The return of Cornholio: Mike Judge on bringing

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:04:52 +0900

The return of Cornholio: Mike Judge on bringing back Beavis and Butt-Head
A lot has changed since Beavis and Butt-Head last chortled in stoner stupidity at the state of the world, back in November 1997. When the animated duo Beavis and Butt-Head return, mumbling and grumbling, to MTV on Oct. 27, they 'll be entering a post-South Park, post-Family Guy world of prime-time animation, where their particular brand of stoner stupidity and dude bonding will seem downright quaint.

There will be little mention of how much time has passed since the last time Beavis and Butt-Head forced their inane laugh on a willing audience, says Beavis creator, head writer and voice-actor Mike Judge.

Some things just don't change, in any event. Scoring, for example.

"They have not scored," Judge said. "And we'll try not to talk about how long it's been."
The "new" Beavis and Butt-Head will find plenty new to complain about, though, especially the state of programming on MTV. Dim-witted, inarticulate - and once the bane of TV-content pressure groups on both sides of the continental divide - Beavis and Butt-Head will find themselves in a world of Kardashians, bitchy housewives and a tanned, gelled, dysfunctional clan of chowderheads in Jersey idolized by millions.

Some might say Beavis and Butt-Head's candid commentary has never been needed more. Others may simply despair that social commentary is being left, once again, to a pair of animated cretins.

Either way, Judge felt the time was right. King of the Hill, which Judge created and helped write, came and went Miles Austin Jerseys in the time since Beavis and Butt-Head last spoke.

"I had just done King of the Hill, and I realized I enjoy doing this," Judge explained. "A number of factors came together. I've been through a lot of development on animated shows; I've seen a lot of animated shows being developed. I realized I had a couple of good characters there, and maybe I should just do it again while I still can. It still works, I think. It feels that way to me, anyway. I'm a better director than I was back then. We have better resources. It felt right. "

It was a no-brainer, in other words.

Speaking of which ... MTV. No-brainer. Plenty there to trash.

"[MTV President] Van Toffler called me and said, 'Hey, you should watch Jersey Shore,'" Judge recalled. "I was a little skeptical at first, because we had tried The Real World back in the day, and for some reason it didn't click.

"I don't know why, but at some point, I watched Jersey Shore. And then I watched a lot of Jersey Shore. Now I'm hooked on it."

Beavis and Butt-Head will trash Jersey Shore, Judge promised: You can take that to the bank.

"It's pay dirt," Judge explained.

There are plenty more MTV horrors where that came from.

"16 and Pregnant," Judge said. "We're doing that, too."

Inevitably, Beavis and Butt-Head will find themselves in a brave new world of social media, where Twitter and Facebook are all the rage and MySpace, well, isn't. Not that they will give the Twitterverse much thought.

"They will probably have as few thoughts about that as they had about anything else," Judge said. "We do have to look at it, though. The world is different now. People have cellphones. People watch stuff online. We deal with that a little bit, but, to be honest I didn't want to consciously force all these modern things on them all at once, but do it only when it's funny. There's an episode where they work in tech support. That one came out pretty well, I think. "

"We do an episode where they see Twilight, and see all these girls are into vampires .... They try to become undead. That's topical, sure, but I didn't want anything to be too forced. I want it to be as seamless as it was, however many years ago. "

If Judge created Beavis and Butt-Head today, would it look any different?

"Actually, they weren't really much of their time to begin with," Judge suggested. "I remember people saying, 'AC / DC, Metallica? Shouldn't it be Pearl Jam, or something that was contemporary and popular then? 'Their hairdos aren't really of a particular time. They weren't using any hip lingo of the time, or anything like that. AC / DC, Metallica - I still see teens wearing those T-shirts. I have teenage daughters. I was already pushing 30, myself, at the time.

"If I started Beavis and Butt-Head now, at my age, there would probably be something wrong with me."

Mayor Rob Ford calls police after ambush by 22 M

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:04:12 +0900

Mayor Rob Ford calls police after ambush by 22 Minutes actress Mary Walsh
Mr. Ford described the encounter as "two people who didn't identify themselves" running up and trying to get into his car. After his daughter got scared and retreated into the house, Mr. Ford followed her and called 911, he said Monday evening. "I'm open to games ... and I'm open to the media," said Mr. Ford, noting he has received death threats in the past. "But when you come to my private house early in the morning and ambush me I think that crosses the line. "

NATIONAL POST STAFF PHOTO
Emergency call: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sports a Hamilton Tiger Cats jersey during a city council meeting at Toronto's city hall, Monday afternoon. He had Miles Austin Jerseys earlier called police after being 'ambushed' by the CBC's Mary Walsh
. The mayor added that he would do "anything" to protect his family. "So, I just hope someone else doesn't do that again because I just don't want anything serious to happen," he said.

Mr. Donovan says 22 Minutes planned the ambush after Mr. Ford turned down requests for a formal interview. "Almost always, we try to set up something more formal and more staged, but if that doesn't work ... we'll sometimes stage an ambush. "

In 2009, 22 Minutes was criticized by the Ontario NDP after actress Geri Hall ambushed Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty while Mr. McGuinty was discussing US Steel's decision to shut down former Stelco mills in Ontario. "I don't think we'll stop doing ambushes , "then-executive producer Mark Farrell told CBC News at the time.

Mr. Donovan took a similar position. "We see it as critical to the process of being a parody show,"

The segment is scheduled to air Tuesday night at 8:30.

Simon Toyne cracks the Code with Sanctus

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:03:48 +0900

Simon Toyne cracks the Code with Sanctus
"I thought if I can't do it, if I can't write a book, if it fails, if I hate it or come up with rubbish, at least we'll have had a nice family holiday," he says.

By the end of the first month he'd sketched out three ideas. When his relatives visited at Christmas, Toyne shared his outlines and asked them to choose the most promising of the three. Two were standard police procedurals ("Harlan Coben-esque, "he calls them." Normal guy gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances ") while the third was a relatively new, and ambitious, idea he describes as an" operative, good vs. evil, historical, big, high-concept thriller. "

"They all went, 'That one's the best,'" he says, tapping a copy of his debut novel, Sanctus.
While he never wrote the Coben knock-off, the 43-year-old Toyne now finds himself in rather extraordinary circumstances. Sanctus, which came out in the UK this past spring and was recently released in North America, will be published in more than 50 countries around the world and translated into 28 languages. "The book is coming out somewhere practically every week," says Toyne, who will appear at various events at this week's International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

The novel, a spiderweb of plots and characters that spans the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to New Jersey to Turkey, Miles Austin Jerseys centres on Liv Adamsen, a young journalist still haunted by the disappearance of her twin brother, Samuel, years ago. Not long after the novel begins, she learns that Samuel recently committed suicide by jumping off the giant citadel in the historic, albeit fictitious, Turkish city of Ruin. The citadel is home to an ancient order of monks, the Sancti, who, as ancient orders of monks tend to do, guard a deep, dark secret that Samuel hoped to share with the world. When Liv arrives in Turkey she teams up with a local cop named Arkadian and a shadowy group that has long sought to uncover what lies hidden inside the citadel's walls , while the Sancti, as evil orders of monks tend to do, stop at nothing to ensure the secret remains, er, secret.

Although not a fan of organized religion, Toyne is also "not really church-bashing." Instead, Sanctus "is really a book about one woman's search for identity."

Before writing the novel, Toyne was a successful television writer, producer, and director (his shows include How Not to Decorate and the Japanese gameshow spoof, Banzai). When he left the TV industry, he gave himself five years to write a book. "If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture."

The inspiration for Sanctus came while driving through France; Toyne passed the cathedral in Rouen, "where in the pre-dawn light, I saw the twisted spires of the cathedral rising up into the lightening sky, and a new idea started to form," he writes on his website. The next day, in a van with a broken radio and an eight-hour drive ahead of him, he began plotting the novel. "By the time I got to the end of that drive, I had the ending of the book, "he says.

He only wrote a third of the book while living in France but it was enough to interest a literary agent and later HarperCollins, which eventually signed him to a three-book deal.

"The shadow of Dan Brown, of course, was hanging over this," Toyne admits. Ah yes, Brown, author of the bestselling English novel of the past decade. Toyne, however, did not read The Da Vinci Code until he was halfway through writing Sanctus. "I wish I hadn't," he says, explaining he was worried no one would publish another conspiracy-laden religious thriller. He's now grown used to the comparison. "If I'd written a legal thriller, I 'd have been compared to [John] Grisham, "he says." A lot of people like those books. There are worse people you could be compared to. "

While The Da Vinci Code didn't inspire him, Toyne is more than willing to discuss the books that did influence his writing. He read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to learn about the inner workings of a monastery; Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth to see how one handles a sprawling cast of characters; Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs for a master class on how to build suspense; and Lee Child's One Shot for tips on staging action. "I looked at all these books forensically, "he explains.

Toyne recently finished his second book, The Key, which will be published next year; he agrees that the second volume is the most important part in any trilogy.

"Don't think Matrix Reloaded," he says. "Think Empire Strikes Back."

Team Canada unveils throwback world-junior jerse

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:02:08 +0900

Team Canada unveils throwback world-junior jersey
Hockey Canada revealed a special edition third jersey for the 2012 IIHF world junior championship on Tuesday at their brand-new home arena at Calgary's Canada Olympic Park.

The sweater boasts some good luck, too.
It was inspired by two gold medal-winning Canadian teams - the 1982 junior team that won gold in Minnesota and the 1994 edition that captured gold in the Czech Republic. The jersey - which is mostly red with white stripes around the arms and the base - has been updated, however, with three maple leaves on the front to celebrate Hockey Canada's Program of Excellence. Started in 1981, it now includes the under-17, under-18, and under-20 teams.

"Looking back over 30 years, this is the jersey that started it," said Hockey Canada president and chief executive Bob Nicholson. "We've won a lot of gold medals with it ... we think it'll be Miles Austin Jerseys special for the players that put on the jersey this year. "

Modelling the jersey, which also has the traditional Hockey Canada and IIHF world junior emblems sewn in, was former Calgary Flame and 1989 Canadian world junior alumnus Martin Gélinas.

These days, Gélinas is the director of player development for the NHL's Nashville Predators but he still feels nostalgic when the conversation turns to the national junior team.

"You're proud of what this country has accomplished," he said. "It's an honour to be a part of this program. Some great memories ... it was incredible.

"Now, watching, with Nashville, we've got a lot of good, young players that have been a part of the program ... a lot of tradition. It's all about the team with Team Canada. It's nice to be a part of it . "

The jerseys hit the shelves Nov. 1 in Nike stores, Sport Chek, and Team Canada retailers across the country and will be available online at hockeycanada.ca for $ 140.

Adopting the motto, "I Was There," Hockey Canada is embracing the theme of tradition.

"We've got the greatest fans in the world, here," Nicholson added. "Millions of fans watch it on TV. You look at radio and newsprint, everyone's just glued. It's become a tradition in our country for these players to put on that jersey.

"When you talk about hockey, so many people talk about the world junior championship. Whether you're in hockey day-to-day or you're just an everyday Canadian walking on the street, you want to watch these games."

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