JWhiting.com

A comedian buddy of mine recently launched a monthly themed storytelling event at Le Cagibi.

The inaugural storytelling theme was “the law” and I got on board both because I’ve been I’ve been buried for a long time in solitary writing and because the topic hit a nerve. The extent to which modern conservative governments are flagrantly breaking the law really upsets me.

I originally wanted to do a bunch of short stories about the scandals that are linked to up above, but time got the better of me. I only managed to bang out one before the June 26th reading.

The event was, I think, a big success. There was some comedy, some drama and some dramedy.

I thought it’d be fun to post up the story that I read that night along with a song that I think works well with the theme.

Hope you like it…

Six Four Two One Short Stories About The Law

Once upon a time a young woman fell in love. The woman’s name was America and she was smart and beautiful and practically virginal. She graduated near the top of her high school class and went away to college to study biology.

America had an easy lyrical laugh and a sprinkling of adorable freckles. Her hair was long and healthy and as golden as the sun-drenched wheat belt that stretched from Siskiyou County in the north all the way to Imperial County in the south in her home state of California.

On the first day of her undergraduate Molecular Embryology class, America met a young man named Vigor. Vigor was smart and strong and practically virginal. Vigor was a high school track-and-field champ and had gone away to college to study agriculture. Vigor was tall and broad shouldered. He had kind eyes. His hair was thick and neat and as dark as the seam of ebony marble that wound through the Cascade Mountain Range in his home state of California.

Vigor and America became lab partners, then study partners, then tennis partners. Eventually Vigor asked America if she would become his life partner as well.

Despite the fact that America and Vigor were raised in large tight-knit families, they were determined that their wedding would not be a slavish imitation of ancestral traditions. The ceremony would, above all else, be a true reflection of their green and matchless love. So even though America had been raised Roman Catholic and although Vigor had grown up Southern Baptist, in the spirit of ecumenical harmony the young couple decided that their marriage would take place on the neutral ground of the Kern County Courthouse in Bakersfield, California.

America and Vigor had arranged for their solemnizing ceremony to take place on Friday the 27th of June 2008. It would be the perfect day for a summer wedding, they thought. The spring planting and first cycle of weeding would be long-completed and school would be out for the tow-headed army of nieces and nephews who’d be pouring in from all over the state. If Vigor’s well-thumbed almanac was right, they would exchange their vows on a warm and cloudless day with temperatures dropping low enough in the evening to allow for the use of fashionable wraps and dinner jackets.

When there were only two weeks remaining before the big day, America allowed herself to enjoy a brief moment of self-congratulatory calm. She’d inherited her meticulous nature from her mother and had dutifully dug to the bottom of a highly detailed to do list. There was only one last item to attend to.

America popped open her laptop and surfed over to the Kern County Courthouse Web site. A few additional out of town guests had asked to attend the ceremony and she wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t tip the scales on the wedding hall’s fire regulations.

America was floored by what she found online.

The note was written on the Kern County Clerk’s Web page under the heading, “Marriage Licenses”. America read through it several times until tears of frustration and anger welled up in the corners of her clear blue eyes.

The note said:

The County Clerk’s office will not solemnize weddings after June 13, 2008. We will not have the staff or space to deal with an increase in both licenses and ceremonies. Because of long-term administrative plans, budgetary reasons, and the need to increase security for elections, the Clerk’s office will cease solemnizing weddings, which is discretionary on the part of the County Clerk. As done in other counties, information necessary to solemnize marriages will be made available to those acquiring licenses.

America was shocked. How could this be possible? She’d planned for every contingency. The tents were ordered, the caterers were booked. The Byzantine seating arrangement had been hammered down for over a month. And now, suddenly, the county clerk wouldn’t be performing marriages anymore?

The young woman turned her attention back to the Internet, conducted a flurry of probing research and then picked up the phone. She dialed the Kern County Clerk, a woman named Ann Barnett.

“Hello Ann,” America said as cheerfully as she could manage, “It’s America.”

America listened patiently as the older woman spoke.

“Yes, I see,” America said, “And that’s exactly what’s up on the Web site, but I have a few questions. I mean you say that you don’t have the staff or space to deal with the ceremonies but…”

She took a deep breath and charged ahead.

“I did some research and learned that you and your predecessors typically perform over 40% of Kern County marriages. And I know for a fact that the Kern County Courthouse has two huge rooms dedicated specifically for marriages because as you’re no doubt aware, I had one booked.

“Yes Ann, yes…”

America listened again.

“Yes, but Ann, as to the financial argument, as I’m sure you know the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election officials was recently quoted by Reuters saying that contrary to your claim, marriage ceremonies actually make money. In fact, according to the Bakersfield Califonian newspaper, Kern County civil ceremonies pull in an average of $50,000 a year. And as for staffing, those ceremonies take, on average, seven minutes to perform by staff who are paid less than $20 an hour.”

America listened to one final burst from the County Clerk. She sighed.

“To be honest Ann, the security issue seems like the weakest argument of all,” she said. “If it wasn’t a problem for the past two decades, why would it suddenly become one now?”

“Look Ann,” America said, “Let’s level with each other. Woman to woman.”

She chose an even tone and spoke clearly and calmly into the receiver.

“Ann are you sure that your decision doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that California’s Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage on May 15th in a broadly worded decision that would invalidate any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation that comes into effect two days from now on June 15th?

“And isn’t it true that you requested that the County Counsel file a brief with the California Supreme Court opposing implementation of the May 15th ruling allowing gay marriage and that you subsequently made the decision to shut down all marriages when that same counsel advised that it would be illegal for you to only marry couples of your own choosing?

“And don’t you find it bit too ironic, Ann, that each of the five Californian counties who have decided to stop performing any marriages in the face of this decision have all voted staunchly Republican for over 40 years? I mean I know Republicans have said that gay marriage would ruin traditional marriage but I’m not sure this is what they had–”

But she didn’t get to finish her sentence. The line went dead.

Ann Barnett had hung up on America.

(Click to play song…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

. . .

Here’s my little coda: if history has taught us anything it’s that people who line up against equality and love have been proven to be on the wrong side of the issue again and again and again.

As of right now, five four Republican-leaning counties in California have stopped solemnizing any marriages, gay or straight, fulfilling that age-old conservative adage, “If you can have it, no-one can.”

The counties are:

Merced County – strongly Republican (reversed its decision under intense pressure)
Claveras County – Republican since 1964
Kern County – Republican since 1964
Butte County – Republican since 1964
Kings County – Republican since 1964

You can contact the Kern County Clerk at the following co-ordinates:

Ann K. Barnett
1115 Truxtun Avenue
Bakersfield, CA 93301-4639
Regular Office Hours 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Mon-Fri
Open To The Public 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM Mon-Fri
(661) 868-3588

Conan O’Brien casts his fake made-for-TV movie about the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Some really priceless choices in there (Bea Arthur’s is my fav. Knowing a bit about her temperament, she’ll probably sh*t a kitten.)

Leave it to the superior state-side political blogs to take up this issue with such focused clarity…

I learned quite a few things by reading this post and hope you do to. It’s all about debunking some common American (and frankly, Canadian) myths about the Canadian health care system.

1. Canada’s health care system is “socialized medicine.”
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is “single-payer insurance.” In talking to Americans about it, the better phrase is “Medicare for all.”

There’s also a part II to this post here.

Heath care is shaping up to be a major knock-down drag-’em-out issue in the upcoming U.S. federal elections. Exciting times ahead.

Well that didn’t take long…

Canada’s Department of National Defence has suddenly backed down and released their ’secret’ files on the amount of ammo used in the Afghan mission. (Guess it wasn’t such a big secret after all.)

But even though this particular issue wasn’t really an important secret, Canada’s top brass want you to know that you Canadians shouldn’t expect to know too much about what’s going on over there. Check out this best paragraph and mental image from the Canwest article:

[…] a top general warns that Taliban insurgents based in the mountains around Kandahar are reading articles in the [Ottawa] Citizen on a regular basis and the military has to be careful about what details it can release.

This would be hilarious if Harper’s government wasn’t so deadly serious about it.

The Canwest News Service is reporting that the Canadian military is refusing to tell Canadians how many bullets it fired in Afghanistan in 2007 because it considers the information to be a military secret. Uh… OK… Why is it secret? Well, apparently, that’s also secret.

From the Canwest piece (found on the Ottawa Citizen’s site here):

The Canadian Forces has deemed the number of bullets it fired in Afghanistan over the past year a military secret.

But in an explanation worthy of a scene from Joseph Heller’s classic satirical novel Catch-22, defence officials are claiming the reasons for that secrecy are secret.

The Brits and Americans always release this type of information. I wonder what’s so special about Canadian bullets?

Yet again, more proof that Stephen Harper’s minority government is doing the exact opposite of what it said it would do. Their “We came to clean up government” mantra is rapidly turning into, “We came to clean up”…

From today’s Montreal Gazette , page A9 (not linkable online because CanWest still doesn’t understand the Internets):

Robert Marleau, the information commissioner of Canada, says that contrary to Harper’s election pledge to make transparency a hallmark of his administration, a “fog over information” has crept across the government’s activities.

Marleau said complaints to the commissioner’s office about lack of access to government information have doubled in the past year.

Brutal. I can’t wait for that springtime election…

In the spirit of ‘Wintersolsticetime’, I thought I’d tell a quick story about cross-border shopping.

The Wire: Season 4 was just delivered to my door from Amazon.com.

Checking my Visa statement, the purchase, including shipping, cost me $36.40.

If I was to have bought this item at Amazon.ca, it looks like I would have paid, uh, $62.59!

Canadian retailers better get in line. Consumers aren’t stupid.

Happy Yule!

J.

I hope that the MSM keep close tabs on this one, “What’s our oil doing under their sand?” mentality at work…

reportonbusiness.com: Oil giants taking Canada to court

I’m still beavering away on this book that I’m writing, but I haven’t laughed this hard at an online video in some time. Science bless Bill Maher. Can’t wait for the new Real Time season to start.

Katrna VandenHeuvel, editor of The Nation magazine did a great job on The Colbert Report the other night, but I still walk away from this clip marvelling at the performance of Stephen Colbert.

(Ever wonder what he’s gonna do when/if this character-based gig of his ever ends?)

I’m not sure if it’s because their budget has been slashed by 1/3 since 1990, but our national broadcaster is leading the charge into the 1800s.

On November 28th, I sent the e-mail below to the CBC radio show The House. They just got back to me today… Over three weeks later. Wow. That’s sub Pony Express type speed…

11/28/06 10:50 AM
To: thehouse@cbc.ca
From: me
Subject: Justice Minister Vic Toews’ interview.

Justice Minister Vic Toews’ push for harsher impaired driving legislation smacks of “truthiness”.

Toews failed to mention how many accidents on Canadian roads are the result of recreational drug use. Do these numbers justify the time, cost, energy and encroachment of Charter rights that would be required to enforce the new legislation?

Sure, it feels like a good idea to crack down on drug-impaired driving, but “from the gut” legislation results in laws that are more based on partisan optics than on genuine problem solving.

Jason Whiting (rhymes with “lighting”)
Montreal

22 days later I received this in my inbox.

12/20/06 04:52 PM
To: me
From: thehouse@cbc.ca
Subject: Re: Justice Minister Vic Toews’ interview.

Dear Jason Whiting:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and your interest in our programme.

Your feedback helps to shape our thinking for each and every show. Our listeners define the program and we appreciate the time you have taken to respond to what you have heard.

Thanks for listening!

Best regards,

Althia Raj
Associate Producer
The House

Maybe the CBC is too busy chasing down “news” stories like why serial killers target prostitutes. Brutal.

Stéphane Dion was large and in charge during his Peter Mansbridge interview on The National last night (follow the video link before CBC takes it down). UPDATE: CBC took it down — I’m trying to find a copy. This guy is on a roll, already way up in the polls and fresh off a decisive same-
sex marriage win in the House.

But before I go any further, I’d like to say that for a publicly owned institution, CBC News does a bad job of enabling users to share its content (and they’re not alone, I’m looking at you CTV and Global ).

CBC News: you’re not a movie studio or musician. You’re a taxpayer funded democracy-enabler and you should be doing everything in your power to give Canadians the ability to easily share your material with each other and the rest of the world. (Go make a deal with your unions & advertisers and then make your news always available on the Web please in an easy-to-link-to way.)

OK. Now on to the Dion interview… and here’s the thing: I don’t have much to say. You just gotta watch it. UPDATE: CBC removed the link.
It has been so long (never?) since I’ve felt inspired like this by anyone, never mind a politician. You get the sense that Dion is not only deeply informed, knowledgeable and vision-driven, but that he genuinely cares about Canada and Canadians. He’s purposeful and honest and even displays a gentle sense of humour.

What more can I say? I want him to lead this country. Hell, I want him to lead me. I literally got choked up at one point while he was talking about the future of Canada. If Dion can maintain even a fraction of this momentum, Stephen Harper is fucked.

(more…)

For those of you not living in Montreal/not reading Montreal’s alt-weeklies, the Montreal Mirror’s cover story last week does a good job of summing up how I feel about Justice Minister Rick Toews’ proposed new anti-impaired driving legislation.

Marc-Boris St-Maurice, the founder of Bloc Pot, current Liberal Party member and executive director of NORML Canada is quoted as saying:

Looks to me like a sneaky way to modify the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It’s a roundabout way to increase penalties without opening up the debate on drugs…. [The legislation] is a little premature and half-cocked.

Read the article here.

Like I said in an earlier post, I went out on Monday night to see Jeanne play some songs with her dad at the Wheel Club’s Hillbilly Night.

A friend of Jeanne’s from Toronto, Richard Ferren, is staying with us and he came along sporting a Stephane Dion pin that he picked up at the Liberal convention. (Richard is a card-carrying Liberal who was supporting Dion from the very beginning.)

When we got to the Wheel Club, Richard’s pin caught the eye of a fiery middle-aged woman who, it turns out, works in Stepane Dion’s office, which until recently was a very intimate affair (4 or 5 people).

This politically passionate woman sat down at our table and Richard and I proceeded to ask her questions for the rest of the night. (I was so engrossed in the conversation, Jeanne was worried that I’d miss her set.)

So what did the Liberal lady say? Well, a lot. And all of it positive. And why am I excited about it? Because she was so genuine. A “low” level staffer who was inspired and gave us a privileged glimpse behind-the-scenes of someone who is suddenly one of Canada’s most powerful political leaders.

So, again, what did she say?

First of all, some stuff that everyone already knows…

(more…)

Alright, is it just me or were Barack Obama and The Rock separated at birth? Has anyone ever seen these two together? The Democratic Party darling and the WWF WWE superstar seem to share the same smile, charm, and ambiguous racial make-up…

Check out Obama’s appearance on Leno below, and then compare to this YouTube interview with Dwane Johnson.

Video WMP | Video MOV

Meanwhile, up here in the land of the bland and the boring, the new leader of the Liberal Party had “such a surprise win, [he] may well have written his victory speech on the way to the podium.

Truthiness seems to be a hallmark of conservative governments and that’s certainly also true up here in snowy Canada.

Canadian Conservative Justice Minister Rick Toews (pronounced “Taves” or similar) was on CBC Radio’s The House on Sunday, pushing his latest bill that calls for harsher penalties for impaired driving legislation, with a special focus on busting drug-impaired driving.

Sounds like a good idea right? Yeah, sorta. But, conveniently, Toews failed to mention how many accidents on Canadian roads are the result of recreational drug use. And do these suspiciously absent numbers justify the time, cost, energy and encroachment of Charter rights that would be required to enforce the new legislation? (Based on hunches and subjective tests, cops would be able to “demand […] bodily fluid”.)

Sure, it feels like a good idea to crack down on drug-impaired driving, but “from the gut” legislation results in laws that are more based on partisan optics than on genuine problem solving…

According to the exhaustive timeline that’s available here, it was on this day in 1963 that Lenny Bruce stepped out onto the stage of New York’s Village Theatre (which later became the famous rock and roll incubator, The Fillmore East).

It was a Friday and Bruce was set to kick off four packed-out shows — 11,000 tickets had been sold, and for good reason.

Only one week earlier JFK had been gunned down in Dallas and the country was in a state of shock.

Bruce already had a well-deserved reputation for straying beyond the boundaries of what was considered “decent” and New Yorkers were both giddy and anxious to see what the famously blue comedian would have to say about the assassination.

Bruce’s opening line has been called the greatest current events joke ever told.

But first a bit of backstory.

In 1962 Vaughn Meader, a one-time singer and piano player, got together with some writing and performing buddies to record The First Family, a comedy album that took advantage of Meader’s newfound ability to faithfully mimic the popular U.S. President.

Against all odds Meader’s album, released at the end of October, went platinum before Christmas and one year later had sold an astonishing 7.5 million copies. It even won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1963. In short, it was off-the-charts massive. (More info at Wikipeeds.)

Vaughn Meader gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine where he said:

I was in Detroit the day the album started selling like wildfire. That day “The Ed Sullivan Show” called me, Time Magazine, The New York Times. So I went back to New York, and I was walking past Sam Goody’s and there was a big crowd, all the way out to the middle of Broadway. And when I got closer I heard that they were listening to me — it was mind-boggling. Then it got totally crazy. Just gone. It was just a whirlwind, going here, going there, going here, going there. And playing the game — the star game. It was a blur, you know? I thought I was having the time of my life. Who wouldn’t? Just wine, women and song, you know? But it doesn’t last. And nobody knows when you’re down and out.

And yeah, it didn’t last.

When Lenny Bruce stepped onto the Village Theatre stage, he accomplished the impossible, summing up all the nation’s angst and heartbreak to deliver a JFK joke that was both genuinely funny and touching at the same time. Bruce’s line?

Poor Vaughn Meader.

And Bruce was right. Vaughn Meader never worked as a comedian again.

Happy Anniversary Lenny, Vaughn and JFK. (Thanks to Pete Radomski for telling me about it.)

Yesterday, Laurie David, global warming activist, wife of Larry David and one of the producers of An Inconvenient Truth had an article printed in the Washington Post.

It seems that David and other folks who financed Al Gore’s film wanted to donate 50,000 DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). The NSTA said, no thanks, because among other “concerns”, accepting the DVDs would:

[place] unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.

As Laurie David points out, one of those supporters is Exxon Mobil.

We’ve got big problems when a science teachers’ association starts to favor money over science.

Read the article, called “Science a la Joe Camel” here. (Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the heads-up.)

Today’s featured article at Wikipeeds is a minute dissection of Stephen Colbert’s talk at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner back in April.

Colbert is, of course, one of the English world’s greatest living satirists, consistently speaking “truthiness” to power. His talk at the Correspondents’ Dinner was hilarious, historical satire.

Initially, major news organizations failed to do any reporting on the event while the talk blew up huge online, causing a virtual YouTube meltdown and leaving news organisations scrambling to explain why they had suddenly gone silent. (A popular excuse seemed to be that the talk “just wasn’t funny” — a strange barometer for newsworthiness, but there you go.)

As the Widipedia article says, Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik thought that Colbert’s critics missed the point:

Colbert wasn’t playing to the room, I suspect, but to the wide audience of people who would later watch on the Internet. If anything, he was playing against the room.

Keep on keepin’ on S.C. You’re #1 in my books.

I stumbled across a September article in the Toledo Blade about Republican dirtbag Tom Noe getting sent to jail. I like stories where people who mess with democracy get slapped down by the law.

What struck me most about the article, however, were the Crayon-ific stylings of Toledo Blade courtroom sketch artist, Wes Booher.

I’ll give you a moment to soak in all the gritty legal realism.

(It looks like on this particular day in court, a red-eyed woman’s head emerged from a computer monitor while Judge George Burns looked on stoically… Great work Wes!)