The Prophet of Chalk River

I'd say it would be Harper's brain, Tom Flanagan who last year tipped his hand with these words:

"In times of perceived crisis, a conservative party can win by positioning itself further to the right, as shown by the victories of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris and Gordon Campbell. But Canadians don't perceive themselves in crisis right now." [emphasis mine]

Here's the crisis they need to sell off the AECL to GE or someone else. Convert decades of Canadian taxpayer investment into private profits - that's what Lunn aims to do. It's probably what also drove Lunn into a fit of economic nationalism when he insisted that Ontario buy AECL reactors. Create value for GE, great, that's what will cause the Conservative to worry about the Ontario economy.

How War is Reported

A great quote by John Hockenberry as posted by Jonathan Schwarz:

'I was very happily employed at NBC. I wasn't like, running around, trying to stuff toilet paper into the plumbing and sabotage the place. [...] But I was interested, because we had a lot of meetings at NBC about, you know, if you're doing a story and the person you're doing the story about offers to buy you a drink, you've gotta say no. If you're doing a story and they send you, after they see the story, some napkin rings -- silver napkin rings that are monogrammed "Thank you, Jon, for the story," you've got not only to return those, you've got to report those to the standards people at NBC because there's a whole ethics and conflict-of-interest thing.

So at one of these ethics meetings -- I called them the return-the-napkin-ring kinds of meetings -- I raised my hand and said "You know, isn't it a problem that the contract that GE has with the Coalition Provisional Authority [...] to rebuild the power generation system in Iraq [is] about the size of the entire budget of NBC? Is that kind of like the napkin rings thing?" And the standards people said "Huh. That's interesting. No one's brought that up before."'

Why was it again that the media sort of accepted the party line on Iraq?