My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

A new post from me at TheCourt on Lake v. Canada (Minister of Justice), which is primarily an example of judicial deference to federal exercise of powers, but I threw in some stuff about American mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses to keep it interesting.

Might be NSFW, although only barely.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

If you took the writers at NRO’s “the Corner” to Iceland, they would spontaneously combust.

I had a “Movies You Should See But Have Not Seen (Because They Are Good)” in the queue for next week, and now I have to write something else, because Pajiba went ahead and did an excellent column about the merits of Sneakers.

BASTARDS!

This week’s contribution from me at TheCourt.ca is a bit on Loving v. Virginia and its influence on high-level Canadian jurisprudence.

Fafblog interviews Hillary Clinton.

CLINTON: Ha haaa! Well you know, anyone off the street with a scary black pastor can talk about change, but it takes a fighter to fight for change. And I’m a fighter. I’m tough. And if you lived my life you’d be pretty darn tough too. I mean, I had to go to Wellesley. That was my safety school. But I was strong anyway and I endured. And as president I’ll fight the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry, just as soon as they stop giving me millions of dollars!

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Professional photographers recreate children’s drawings.

I continue to spawn and recreate myself elsewhere on the internets; now and for the foreseeable future, I’m a senior contributing editor at TheCourt.ca, Osgoode Hall Law School’s group blog covering the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, where I’ll be posting once a week (at least for the summer).

Granted, my writing there will have a lot less swears than my audience here has come to expect from me, and the topics may not be of interest to all and sundry, and needless to say there’s no Photoshopping, and that’s all fine – but it’s important stuff, and I’m glad to be writing it.

Sad to say, I just missed all the discussion of the drug sniffer dog cases the week prior, so my first piece for the site is a brief summary of R. v. Mathieu, which is about whether trial custody can count towards a jail sentence (see? Thrilling).

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Photobombing.

A new thing by me and fellow Torontoist-ist Patrick Metzger, debating the properness of Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Barbara Hall’s condemnation of Maclean’s for publishing an excerpt of Mark Steyn’s shitpile book America Alone is up at Torontoist.

For those interested in more background information, Johann Hari’s excellent review goes into more depth on the book, Barbara Hall’s statement is here, and Maclean’s diatribe is here.

As regards Steyn, I will say this:

Maclean’s calls Steyn “one of Canada’s most celebrated journalists.” If I was going to compile a list of Canada’s most celebrated journalists, Steyn doesn’t even make top ten, for starters. Let’s be blunt, here: Mark Steyn is a creature of the right wing who owes much of his success to their patronage. (In fairness, Steyn does indeed possess a natural talent for comic writing, but sadly lacks any skill at analysis whatsoever, making his work read much like a dumbed-down version of P.J. O’Rourke.)

America Alone spent one week on the New York Times bestseller list (week of November 5th – it placed fourteenth). It is worth noting that Steyn’s book was published by Regnery Publishing, which routinely all but gives away its books to conservative book clubs (including the Conservative Book Club, owned by Eagle Publishing, the same conservative media group which owns Regnery) in order to both evangelically spread the right-wing message and to inflate sales of the book (only one dollar at the Conservative Book Club, by the way). Steyn of course is predictably against subsidizing culture, at least when it’s government doing it. (Warning: Steyn’s column on C-50 is, much like his larger body of work, witty without actually being knowledgeable about the situation at hand.)

Of course, even if we ignore the papering of the sales of Steyn’s book, his “bestselling book” got one week at a low position on the NYT bestseller list, two months after its release, which frequently implies a release of all collected sales figures by the publisher to the list.

In short: calling Mark Steyn a bestselling author is kind of like calling Mario Mendoza a professional baseball player: it’s true, but if you’re gonna brag, there are better ways to do it.

Did you know you can run your car on water? It’s true! Just send me $500 and I will send you a kit explaining the miracle of oxyhydrogen, also known as “Brown’s Gas,” and you will never again have to worry about fueling up! This miracle fuel which in no way violates the laws of thermodynamics will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Ha, ha, just kidding! You’re too smart to fall for something like that, and if you send me $25 I will send you a pamphlet explaining exactly why you were so right and smart to immediately dismiss this as a scam, despite the little talking model person in the bottom of the screen.

If you send me an additional fifty dollars, I will also explain why oil prices will not drop significantly until it no longer matters to you that they have dropped. These are bargains, people!