In case you missed it (and I’m sure most people did), Canada had elections yesterday. The liberal party won a plurality of the seats in Parliament, but did not win the 155 needed to maintain control. So Canada will have it’s first minority government in 25 years.
I’m not sure what, if any effect this will have outside Canada. Or even if anyone will notice. But I was watching the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation coverage (on C-SPAN) and noted a couple interesting things.
First, the CBC anchor noted that there were several close races which would go to automatic recounts. I sure hope they have a more orderly recount procedure there than we saw in Florida. No mention of Diebold machinery, however. So that’s another thing their election system has going in its favor.
Second, the pre-election polling–or rather the poll-based projections. We often hear complaints about the polling here, but in this case it was way off. In the days leading up to the election some media outlets speculated that the Conservative Party might win a majority of the seats. At this point during the returns they trail the Liberals by 38 seats. Oops.
From the TV analysis I gather that methodology was at fault here. Apparently, the media outlets took polls which showed Conservatives gaining x% of the vote. So they simply added that percentage across the board to some prior data base and accordingly concluded that the the Conservatives would win x more seats. Obviously votes don’t get neatly distributed across districts (or “ridings” as they’re apparently called up there) so that didn’t work.
Another quirky aspect of watching news from the land up north is bilingualism. I was watching a guy give a victory speech, roughly 80-90% of which was in English. But for some reason he sprinkled two or three French sentences every now and then. Why? I believe he was in Calgary, where English is the norm. Did he think that by throwing in a few lines every now and then, it would help keep the French TV audience glued to their sets? Do their translators need to take a breather from time to time? Odd.
Let Freedom Reign
The TV news is all over the “surprise” handover of Iraq two days early (though insiders started preparing for this a week ago). I think they are all miffed because they lost out on some planned programming and nifty graphics they had planned for the event.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the only other people that are really playing this up are U.S. politicians. Interestingly, MSNBC has devoted more attention to Condi sneaking Mr. President a note during his meeting (as if Bush didn’t know this was going to happen) than it has covered the reaction of the newly “sovereign” Iraqi citizens themselves. Apparently, sovereignty isn’t such a big deal when you have car bombs sounding off and 150,000 foriegn troops roaming about your land.
War on Civil Liberties
Details are still emerging, but it appears the just-released U.S. Supreme Court decision does allow those held in concentration camps some access to challange their charges in U.S. courts.
UPDATE: In Rumsfeld v. Padilla, the court did not reach the constitutional issue. It merely ruled that Padilla had pursued his legal claim in the wrong court.
UPDATE: In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the court ruled that due process demands that a combatant be given an opportunity to challange the government in front of a “neutral decisionmaker.
These rulings aren’t a complete victory for individual rights–Congress can authorize the president to hold a narrow class of combatents. But they are, by and large, a blow to the Bush administration’s claim of authority to hold prisoners indefinitely without the right for them to be heard.
UPDATE: Lawrence Solum has a more complete rundown on the detention cases.
Getting Pumped Up on the Bench
No, we’re not talking weight lifting here.
In Thompson’s defense, the Code of Judicial Conduct doesn’t specifically prohibit this. Ha.
Frog-March Countdown
The grand jury inches closer.
Our media is really on top of this, sporadically reporting developments after the fact. I guess they can’t be expected to stay on top of the Scott Peterson, Kobe Bryant trials and this investigation. First things first.
Music Lists
I found a couple unrelated music lists.
MSNBC has a list of “cool” songs for summer. I like a few of them alright but not nearly as much as other people do. If you go over to the list, perhaps you’ll luck out and get one of the annoying ones stuck in your head.
A more interesting list is the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 songs From U.S. movies (scroll down). By my count, 16 of the songs are from the 1950s, but we’ve only had 14 in the past 20 years.
Either the AFI has some nostalgic voters, or they don’t make movie music like they used to.