Newsday’s Paul Vitello reports that in a speech President George W. Bush gave to a group of factory workers at Bay Shore, Long Island, the crowd rose to give the President an enthusiastic standing ovation. Bush wove their stories seamlessly into the fabric of his re-election campaign. He engaged in self-deprecating humour that even a detractor might find charming; the crowd loved him.
Only problem is: the Hispanic workers who had gathered to hear him speak, hadn’t understood a word Bush spoke, as they spoke no English. Rather, Bushies’ address to the workers – titled “Strengthening America’s Economy” – was little more than an hour-long infomercial for White House tax cuts. Not that tax cuts would make much difference to workers earning only $6 an hour, as was the case with the cheering crowd in Bay Shore.
A Felon’s Recipe for Martha Stewart: Scrub Toilets With Gusto
R. Foster Winans — who did time for misdeeds while an employee at The Wall Street Journal — advises Martha Stewart not to pay someone else to do her prison tasks. “Immerse yourself in humility. It’s good for the soul.”
Additional advice: “Offer to host or appear on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Your situation, in the context of all the horrible things that can happen to people, is a tempest in a teaspoon. Poke fun at yourself.”
Join the Fast-Paced, Exciting World of Manufacturing
Just yesterday, Statistics Canada released labour force figures for employment (or lack thereof) in British Columbia, and across Canada.
As is the case in the United States, in Canada — and more particularly in British Columbia — the economy is experiencing what is being euphemistically referred to (in Orwellian terms, although politicians have no trouble at all using this doublespeak) as a “jobless recovery”.
This morning, Mark Fiore comments on this so-called “jobless recovery”.
Can’t help but ‘Smile’
In Vancouver, it’s spring break. Some 538,000 children across the province of British Columbia children are off school for the next 9 days, and parents are scrambling to find something with which to keep their children occupied during this period.
How fortunate, then, that Columbia Tri-Star home video has just released Mona Lisa Smile, an engaging and watchable “noble teacher” period drama (think Dead Poet’s Society) about a progressive art-history professor (Julia Roberts) who transports her bohemian West Coast sensibilities to the upper-crust East Coast Wellesley College. On teacher Katherine Watson’s first day in class, she discovers that the student body is all brain and no imagination. The girls are hyperintelligent slaves to the textbook, mere regurgitators of established wisdom — including the widely held belief that the degree they want is just flypaper to attract the husband they need. Exemplary feminist melodrama, Mona Lisa Smile is this week’s VanRamblings.com video / DVD recommendation. And a good one it is, too.
Also, new at your local video store this second weekend in March: Undefeated, a made-for-HBO-TV story about a boxer who rises in rank to be the champion of his weight class only to lose touch with his principles; and, Red Water, the story of a pair of ruthless criminals who search for stolen drug money that’s been dropped in a river (do you think that there might be a man-eating bull shark in that river?).