Monthly Archive: December 2007

There has been no news or announcement as far as I can tell.  Another NDP candidate, Arif Jinha, has quit.

Why?  That would be hard to know, since his blog has been erased, but thanks to the Google cache, we know what Jack Layton and the NDP would like to keep quiet.

Arif Jinha did not enjoy being treated as what he termed as an "advertising rep" for Jack Layton.

In Europe, new emissions rules are coming into effect, and no one is happy.

The automakers are upset because the rules are too stringent.

The environmentalists are upset because the rules are not stringent enough.

Regular people are upset because the cost of a car will go up significantly.

And rich people?  Oh, they're fine.  Their cars are exempt from the rules.

Joyce Murray is the Liberal Party candidate fighting for the seat of Vancouver Quadra.  It is a strong Liberal seat, and no one would be surprised to see it go Liberal again.

Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion would be especially pleased.  Not only would the Liberals retain a seat, Joyce Murray would bolster the Liberal reputation on the environment.  As an MLA in the BC legislature, Murray was the Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection in Gordon Campbell's cabinet.

Like Stephane Dion, she didn't actually do much for the environment.  And that's a good thing for Stephane Dion should she win in Vancouver Quadra.  Stephane Dion does not need another MP in his caucus quietly doubting Dion's commitment to the environment.  Another pseudo-environmentalist would no doubt tell Stephane Dion just how much of a great environmental leader he is, without bringing up any uncomfortable facts.

The story of former NDP candidate Francis Chartrand continues to amuse me.  In particular, his blog seems to be the focus of weird happenings, with Chartrand posting and deleting posts in rapid succession as a result of his candidacy being spiked by the NDP brass. 

On top of his political career being nipped in the bud, now it seems like Chartrand's blog has been hacked.

Or has it?

In my piece on the need of the NDP to perform well in the upcoming by-elections, I made some general comments about the by-election in Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River.  Several people commented on David Orchard, who is running for the Liberal nomination, but who might not be given the chance to win.  There are reports that Liberal Party Stephane Dion is about to install a nominee, Saskatchewan MLA Joan Beatty, who currently belongs to the NDP. 

Some people seemed dismissive of David Orchard, but a letter posted on a Liberal blog suggests that David Orchard could have the last laugh if his campaign is terminated by the Liberal Party leadership.

Four by-elections have been called -- two in Toronto, one in Saskatchewan, and one in British Columbia.  These are ridings held by Liberals who have resigned, and so Stephane Dion's Liberals have to fight to hold on to them again.

Three ridings are probably safe, but the Saskatchewan riding might revert back to the Conservative Party.  If so, it is a net loss for the Liberal Party.

But I'm much more interested in seeing how the NDP figures in these fights.

Apologies for the crude title, but it is the title of a thread on the Pakistani Defence Forum at PakistaniDefence.com concerning the news that Benazir Bhutto has been killed today.  There is a poll there that is very revealing.  Though we might count supporters of Pervez Musharraf or elements of the Pakistani Security Services in the ranks of suspects, it is interesting to see the world's number one villain bubbling to the top of the list in this unscientific survey.

The United States.  Of course.  It's so obvious when you think about it. 

Presumably Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are cackling in neocon glee.

I've always avoided calling Deputy Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff "Iggy".  It seemed too familiar, and I wasn't even sure if Michael Ignatieff liked to be called "Iggy".

If he doesn't like it, then it would seem childishly provocative to use that nickname.

I then read a reference to Michael Ignatieff not liking to be called "Iggy".  Fine.  But then if that's the case, why does his website use "iggy" in the substructure?

Disgraced former Liberal MP Blair Wilson has not given up the fight.  Embroiled in a controversy over allegations of election spending irregularities, he has been told by the Liberal Party that he will not be allowed to run in the next election for the Liberals.

The justification?  Though Wilson has yet to have had any of the charges against him tested in a court, the Liberal Party has concluded that Wilson was not forthcoming on his applications to run as an MP.

Blair Wilson has promised to fight this decision, and has retained Jay Straith, the same lawyer who represented David Oliver in his fight against the NDP.

Looking over the rules, I think Blair Wilson has a fighting chance.

How can three people take the same flight to the same place to complete the same task, and still two people can each spend full 33% more to do the task?

I don't have an answer for that.  It's just one of those things that shows how Liberals and NDP folks are more subtle and complex than Conservatives.

Stephane Dion believes Canada cannot meet the Kyoto targets.

Stephane Dion believes Canada can meet the Kyoto targets.

Who knows what Stephane Dion believes?  Who knows who tells Stephane Dion what to believe?

Does Stephane Dion believe in anything?

Maybe he believes in fairies.

News is breaking on disgraced former Liberal MP Blair Wilson.  The MP forced to quit the Liberal caucus over allegations that he committed egregious violations of the Elections Canada Act has been told by Stephane Dion that he will not be allowed to stand as a Liberal candidate in the next general election.

A new poll shows that...well...nothing much has changed.  So perhaps the excitement from last week's poll will fade away.

Francis Chartrand was the former NDP candidate for Riviere-des-Mille-Iles in Quebec.  He was dumped as the candidate, and I posted on the shifting story as it appeared on his blog.  Well, guess what.  It has shifted yet again!

Fed up with this nonsense, I did a post-by-post walkthrough of his blog.  And boy, would he have made one find candidate for the NDP!  Nothing like having one of your candidates demanding the nationalization of everything and espousing an East German model for Canada to follow.

Jack Layton is in charge of the NDP.

You notice that I didn't say he is in charge only when he's in the room, or within earshot, or when he's had a good two hours notice of what is about to happen.

When pressed about the Irene Mathyssen case, Jack Layton is quick to mention that he had nothing to do with it.

And here I thought that as leader, Jack Layton is always responsible for what his caucus members say and do.

It's not fair, but then being leader sucks sometimes.

So how does the CBC report on ethical lapses?

Not surprisingly, it depends on who has allegedly suffer a lapse in judgment.

But then it seems like the media establishment as a whole in this country is guilty of pulling its punches on the CBC-Liberal collusion story.

The allegation is that Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez colluded with the CBC, asking questions of Brian Mulroney written by a CBC reporter.  If you read blogs, you know all about it.  If you get your news from TV, radio, and newspapers, you might not.  That's not a surprise because professional courtesy makes news organizations loathe to accuse each other of wrongdoing.

It took less than 24 hours for bloggers to discover that Dan Rather and CBS had serious problems with the Killian Memo report in 2004, but it took a week before other networks in the United States dared to suggest that CBS had used faked documents to smear George W Bush.

In the same way, there is little reporting of the allegation of collusion between CBC news and the Liberal Party to embarrass or trap Brian Mulroney.

The National Post has broken that silence with a gutsy column by L. Ian Macdonald.  He makes the case that when Pablo Rodriguez asked his questions of Brian Mulroney during the Commons ethics committee hearing, it should have been immediately obvious that something was amiss.

Pablo Rodriguez rarely mutters a word in English, and yet there he was, asking  meticulously worded questions en Anglais.

I say gutsy because the column touches on two tricky issues.

The first is whether Pablo Rodriguez is even capable of functioning in English at that level.

The second follows from the first.  If you have doubts as to whether he can string that many English words together with that sophistication, then you have to conclude that Pablo Rodriguez was merely a sock puppet for the CBC.

But there is a third element not covered in Macdonald's column, and that is the conclusion that Pablo Rodriguez was looking out for Pablo Rodriguez, and the Liberal Party is now paying the price.

We're all guilty of it.  We all think Stephane Dion has the power to call an election.  We're all wrong.

He can only do it if Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton are on board with the idea.  We're all assuming that the two of them are locked in election mode, just waiting on Stephane Dion.  An interesting article points out that this might not be true.

Stephane Dion wants to appoint a woman candidate in the Saskatchewan riding of Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River, which is fine, except for one thing.  Joan Beatty hasn't agreed to switch to the Liberals from the NDP.

It might seem like a small thing, but it suggests confusion and poor communication.  What's worse is this is not the first time the Liberals announced appointing someone as a nominee only to find out that the person had no intention to run, and worse, had never even been consulted.

In both of these cases, the potential candidates were women.  Stephane Dion thinks he is doing them a favour by handing them ridings without having to go through the trouble of a nomination battle.  He'd be doing them a bigger favour if he actually asked them first.

It comes off as rather patronizing, otherwise.

Stephane Dion, who is threatening to force an election in a matter of weeks, is dramatically re-arranging his core team.  Right, sounds like a man ready to go to the polls.  In any case, communications director Nicolas Ruszkowski is on his way out.  Personal reasons.  Of course.

Ousted NDP candidate Francis Chartrand has been playing games with his blog.  First he posted an angry challenge aimed at the NDP in response to his candidacy being terminated.  Then he posted a conciliatory post that gave a different view of the same events.

Then both posts disappeared.

That was this morning.

This evening, the blog changed again.  The angry post is still gone, but the conciliatory post has returned.

It's as if Francis Chartrand is playing whack-a-mole with the truth.

I've appended screenshots and some discussion to my original post about Francis Chartrand's terminated candidacy.

Aaron Wudrick has received an email from a VP at the CBC in which it appears that a decision has been reached concerning allegations that a CBC reporter was acting in collusion with the Liberal Party to frame questions to ask of Brian Mulroney at the Commons ethics committee hearings into the Karlheinz Schreiber affair.

With the news of transgendered NDP candidate Micheline Montreuil's ejection as a candidate for the NDP, not much notice has been given to Francis Chartrand, the other NDP candidate in Quebec who was also told he would no longer be able to stand for office on behalf of the NDP.

Given Chartrand's unambiguous gender, the story seemed less interesting.

It might not be as salacious as Montreuil's, but Chartrand's story is far from uninteresting.

Update: Not to be satisfied with deleting posts, Francis Chartrand now adds posts back in.  Fortunately I have the screenshots to show the changes.

Thanks to Liberals who decided not to listen to the people who run the party, the Suzan Pawlak story is coming to an end with little political fallout.

A phishing email popped up in my inbox, and just for fun, I decided to study the links and domains associated with it.  I would never have guessed what names and addresses popped up in relation to this bit of spam.

The Conservatives are not satisfied with what has been said to date on the allegations of collusion between the Liberal Party and the CBC.  It seems that the CBC fed questions to Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez to ask of Brian Mulroney who was appearing in front of the Commons ethics committee to answer questions raised by Karlheinz Schreiber.  The questions asked by Rodriguez did not seem to have anything to do with Schreiber.

It's bad enough that the Liberals sometimes seem to be fishing, but to be fishing on behalf of the CBC, and doing it on the sly?

The NDP has not had a good few weeks.  The latest is the news that transgendered candidate Micheline Montreuil has been dropped by the NDP.  It was not a friendly parting of the ways.  Instead we have conflicting stories and threats of legal action.

A Toronto firm is in trouble for allegedly trying to crack open Facebook's data files.  Given the reputation of the holding companies in this porn empire, it seems like they were looking for email addresses.  I wonder if an interest in Al Qaeda four years ago was also just an attempt to get email addresses.

The NDP has a problem.  The party is eager to build on the success of Thomas Mulcair to make a real breakthrough in Quebec.  But transgendered candidate Micheline Montreuil was problematic.  Depending on who you listen to, she was not a team player, or her gender status was considered to be a liability.

The NDP has dropped her as a candidate.

And now it looks like the NDP is going to learn what it feels like to be worked over by the Human Rights Tribunal.

Asbestos is the miracle mineral.  It can be woven like cloth and it is fireproof.  Unfortunately, those same fibres are highly toxic, killing people who are exposed to those fibres, even in small amounts, over a period of time.  Throughout the world, the use of asbestos is banned, except in some countries like India, where asbestos continues to be used in construction, and where workers will cut into asbestos sheets at the work site, exposing first themselves, and then the future occupants, to the fibres. 

And much of that asbestos comes from Canada.  This should come to an end.

When the Liberals insisted on an inquiry on the Karlheinz Schreiber allegations, their hope was to dig up dirt on the current Conservative government.  So far, lots of money spent, and nothing to show for it.

When the Conservatives assigned Daniel Paille to report on polling practises during Paul Martin's time as finance minister, their hope was to dig up dirt on the Liberals.  A bunch of money was spent, nothing new was reveal about the Liberals, but the report did point out that though the Conservatives are doing some things better, they need to be better organized.

Well, that was unexpected and a bit embarrassing.  But time to make lemonade from this lemon and implement the suggested improvements.  So money well spent, I'd say.

Going forward, there are going to be a few subtle changes to the blog presentation.  I take a break from regular blogging to describe these changes since I think they might inspire other bloggers never to be satisfied, but to always try to make things better.

Glancing at the Wikipedia entry for Liberal MP Garth Turner, I noticed an interesting edit that came and went in the space of two hours yesterday.  And the identity of the person making the edit is doubly interesting.

The Canadian Press is reporting that the CBC plans to investigate allegations that a CBC reporter and a Liberal MP worked together to frame questions to ask Brian Mulroney during his appearance in front of the Commons ethics committee.

There is no startling revelation. But there might have been one. If Brian Mulroney had given a different answer to the question posed by Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez, but actually written by the CBC, did the CBC have a headline and a story ready to go? Was all that was needed a "break"?

If the break was not forthcoming, was the CBC prepared to manufacture one by having Pablo Rodriguez act as a proxy reporter? And were the Liberals only too happy to help out?

One of the strangest things to come out of the Karlheinz Schreiber hearings is the allegation that the CBC and the Liberals have cooperated on designing questions for Liberal MPs to pose during the hearings.

Is the CBC trying to manufacturer the news, and guide the direction of the events? There is a name for this sort of thing -- yellow journalism.

John Mark Karr is famous for having masterfully played the American justice system. Picked up in Thailand on charges related to sex with children, Karr immediately confessed to some ill-defined connection to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado. Karr, who fled the United States when he was picked up on child pornography charges in California, was deported by American authorities eager to close this high profile case.

This despite growing concerns that Karr was making the entire thing up, something I suggested the very day the story broke of John Mark Karr's arrest and confession.

As it turned out, Karr was making the entire thing up. Once he was safely out of Thailand, Karr could only laugh when the Ramsey charges were dropped when the evidence clearly showed Karr had nothing to do with the murder. As for the charges in California, those were dropped too, as it was revealed that in the years that had passed, the evidence was lost.

So John Mark Karr is a free man. And with no criminal convictions or outstanding charges, he can apply for any job he likes.

A list of names of baseball players that are going to appear on the report has been leaked to WNBC. The report is, of course, the George Mitchell report on steroid use in major league baseball. The players on this list are alleged to have used performance enhancing drugs.

Presumably the list has been secured in a lead-lined box, buried six feet underground, covered over by concrete, and marked by a sign that says "List? What list?"

The NDP is tabling a bill to ban racial and religious profiling. It is aimed at law enforcement agencies. The NDP is particularly proud that the bill includes CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The problem is that CSIS is not a law enforcement agency.

Using the easily abused Human Rights Commission, a group of offended Muslims is taking Maclean's to court for allowing them to be offended. Jason Kenney correctly speaks out against the action.

Words are nice, but maybe one day the Conservatives will be in a position to take action.

The isotope crisis has passed, and the government has dealt with it. But in dealing with it, I felt acutely embarrassed. The Conservatives must resist the urge to use the word "Liberal" like a smear. They didn't resist that urge this time around, and it was just wrong.

As far as the RCMP is concerned, the Taser is a snazzy 21st century version of a club.

In August, York Regional Police Constable Robert Plunkett was killed while trying to arrest Nadeem Jiwa and Baseer Mohammed Yousafzai, who were allegedly removing airbags from a stolen car. Jiwa is alleged to have killed Plunkett by pinning him against a tree with the car while trying to make a getaway.

Nadeem Jiwa has been charged with first-degree murder, and he is supposed to make a court appearance today.

Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, has found religion.

Well, not really.

He wants to keep religion out of Quebec. In order to do that, he wants to fill the void with the trappings of religion devoid of faith. I call it styroform religion -- it fills the space, keeps everything else out, but when you actually take a moment to study it, there really isn't anything there.

The NDP has delivered a fake apology for smearing Liberal candidate David Oliver during the 2006 election. I call it a fake apology because it doesn't actually name who is responsible for the decision to hide an Elections Canada letter that would have exonerated Oliver before voting day. The Liberals dropped Oliver as a candidate, and Paul Martin has personally apologized for that decision, a decision that he was responsible for.

The NDP has not identified who is responsible. That person's culpability remains hidden behind an apology that says that the "NDP" was sorry. I can only assume that the NDP wants to protect this person from any fallout that might come from being directly named as the person who hid the letter.

And that makes me think that the person is still an important, and possibly a senior, member of the NDP. Why else would the NDP care to protect him? Since we don't know who that person is, we can't be certain that he is being held to account, or or certain that the NDP can keep a promise that this sort of thing won't happen again.

It would be helpful to hear this person promise not to do this sort of thing again.

I've always maintained that the point of this blog is to encourage my readers to explore as many different points of view as possible. That's one of the reasons I've always displayed the blogrolls of all the major political groupings in Canada.

Blogs rolls, however, have limited utility. After a lot of procastination, I've finally added a cross-linking facility to the bottom of each post.

This is a piece about the flexibility of Chris Benedetti. He is simultaneously a Liberal Party supporter, a head of several environmental organizations, a consultant encouraging companies to work hard to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, and a lobbyist for a Washington-based bromine industry front group dedicated to keeping the earth-warming chemical compounds that drive their profits from being subjected to further regulation in Canada.

Yeah, that last one is the one that is supposed to make you do a double take.

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are protecting the world against Chinese bullying rooted in the chronic Chinese gripe about being the victim of humiliation. The Chinese have made it clear that environmental treaties are a tool for punishing the West. Stephen Harper figures any environmental treaty designed around that premise will not be good for Canada or for the environment.

And for that, Stephane Dion and Jack Layton have labelled Stephen Harper the enemy.

No smoking!

Not just in a room. Not just in your own car. But anywhere where people can see you.

Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, is on the verge of banning smoking outdoors. It's a dumb law. It is a dumb law not just because it solves a problem that doesn't exist (the notion that people are getting ill from transient second-hand smoke), but because it is a divisive law.

In Calabasas, California, a similar law is taken to the obvious next level, where enforcement is the responsibility of non-smoking citizens. Given that Bridgewater police have already said they're not interested in enforcing this by-law with any enthusiasm, that might be the next step.

One last post on the Irene Mathyssen issue. NDP MP Irene Mathyssen claimed that Conservative MP James Moore was looking at pornography. Though she was wrong and reluctantly offered an apology of questionable sincerity, there is no doubt that the NDP is dedicated to protecting women from being "objectified" by men.

Well, protecting some women from some men. Really, just those women who as a whole have enough political and economic clout to protect themselves from just those men who as a whole are no threat at all.

Women with no protection threatened by men who literally see them as objects, well, they're someone else's problem.

Irene Mathyssen was told in no uncertain terms that she had to apologize and without any conditions or qualifications. That was not her plan. Indeed, after the NDP MP accused Conservative MP James Moore of looking at pornography in the House of Commons, an accusation that was quickly shown to be baseless, Mathyssen made it clear she intended to get an apology from Moore!

At least one reporter is saying that the NDP decided this was too absurd, even for them.

The Ontario government will begin entering homes looking for evidence of laws being broken.

In order to ease the people of this province into this new reality, the process will be done in phases.

First, only elderly gun owners will be expected to submit to a search.

After that? Who knows? Once we've established that public safety trumps individual rights, it won't be too hard to extend this principle to anything that the government deems dangerous or risky. Or for that matter, to anything that runs counter to the public interest.

As a police spokesperson said, any steps should be welcome by the public.

And here I was only welcoming constitutionally legal steps.

We're often too simplistic in our allocation of blame. Most of us think that when one person wrongs another, the first person should be doing the apologizing.

That might work with children and mature adults, but for people invested in a culture of victimization, they are always owed an apology, even when they made the mistake.

You see, professional full-time victims are never totally at fault for anything they do.

Consider the story of James Moore. Conservative MP James Moore is showing pictures of an outing at the beach, and in the frame of a picture of his dog is his girlfriend in a bikini. NDP MP Irene Mathyssen sees the picture from afar, jumps to the conclusion that Moore was looking at pornography, and publicly accuses Moore both on the floor of the House of Commons and to the press. Moore denies the allegations, and the truth comes out.

Irene Mathyssen, therefore, demands an apology from James Moore.

See, you thought Mathyssen was going to do the all the apologizing, didn't you? But Irene Mathyssen is the NDP critic for the Status of Women. As we all know, women are victimized by men who are looking at pornography. Mathyssen is demanding that Moore apologize to her for that.

I've received a dionesque threat delivered by email.

Irony of ironies. After the brutal backlash against the Liberal Party in the 2006 election over the so-called military ad, which claimed the Conservatives had plans to turn Canada into a police state with soldier patrolling the streets, we have a politician today calling for soldiers to patrol the streets.

But if you happen to be a Conservative who attacked the Liberals over the ad in 2006, don't worry about having to eat crow. The politician who is asking that soldiers be allowed to take over, Toronto Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, is a Liberal.

I've done a bit of tweaking with the social bookmarks you'll find in the upper right-hand corner of the blog pages.

NDP MP Irene Mathyssen has deeply wounded and humiliated Conservative MP James Moore, publicly accusing him of leering at soft porn while he was seated in the House of Commons.

Turns out she was wrong.

She has since apologized. I don't think that's enough. Not by a long shot.

Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion would like to be prime minister one day. If he wants the job, he needs to convince Canadians that, among other things, he can be trusted to manage the country's finances.

Liberals have a particular problem in that regard, given the baggage of the Sponsorship Scandal.

A note to Stephane Dion. If you want to be trusted with our money, show us you can manage something as simple as a lunch tab. Running up a $2,000 bill with portions running over 90 days past due is not a promising sign.

Hey, regular folks pay for their lunch. It ain't some sort of entitlement.

Stephane Dion must be very grateful for the Karlheinz Schreiber story.

Since the Schreiber thing exploded, the Tories continue to do well in the polls, while the Liberals have never polled so poorly.

So why would Stephane Dion be grateful? I have no doubt the polls would be telling us exactly the same thing had Karlheinz Schreiber never uttered a word and was quietly extradited to Germany. Schreiber has not hurt the Conservatives, nor is he helping the Liberals.

But it is keeping Liberal woes out of the limelight. The story has turned out to be a nice hole in which the Liberal Party can hide. Losing is still losing, but it's nice not to have to keep talking about it.

Normally, I would have no concerns whatsoever that Stephane Dion will embarrass the Canadian government in Bali, where there is a major UN conference is taking place concerning climate change. The leader of the Liberal Party has taken it upon himself to go to Bali, though it is not clear why. As the leader of the opposition, Stephane Dion cannot speak on behalf of the government or explain government policy. He has promised in the past never to criticize the Canadian government in front of foreign dignitaries.

Indeed, in a recent incident, Stephane Dion had an opportunity to criticize Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a foreign official, and yet he was very careful to avoid doing so.

At the time, I congratulated him on it, and based on that incident, I have every confidence Stephane Dion will not disappoint me this time.

And yet...I'm nervous. There are signs that Stephane Dion is planning to embarrass all of us.

Karlheinz Schreiber has told the Commons ethics committee that there was nothing to his story. Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber never discussed money while Mulroney was still in office. Mulroney certainly never took any money. And in any case, the money that later paid (after Mulroney returned to private life) had nothing to do with the Airbus Affair, which essentially means Brian Mulroney was correctly paid the $2.1 million in 1997 when he sued the Liberal government for libel.

Now thanks the inability of certain members of the Liberal Party to recognize when they were being played for fools, Karlheinz Schreiber might very well spend the rest of his life in Canada, and never face charges in Germany for fraud.

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson is out on bail, facing charges related to an art project in which he planted a fake bomb in the Royal Ontario Museum. Unfortunately for Jonnson, he seems to be surrounded by "friends" who seem to want Jonnson to think he did nothing wrong.

Stephane Dion has set his sights on the left of Canada's political spectrum. He says he's doing this in order to instigate a collision with the Conservatives. But that's not what a collision is. He's in conflict with the Conservatives because the two parties are vying for the same limited resource, that is, votes, which they need to accomplish very different goals.

The collision is with the NDP, because Stephane Dion is trying to occupy the same space at the same time as the NDP currently occupy. Liberals ought to recognize the difference between these two concepts before they vote to force an election.

How will environmentalists succeed at terrifying people into following them by threatening death at the hands of planetary weather when the evidence shows a steady and dramatic decline in weather-related deaths?

The first thing, of course, is to point out that Big Oil is somewhere in the picture. That way the environmentalists can skip trying to actually refute the data.

Compared to Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson and his art project, involving putting a pipe bomb facsimile in the Royal Ontario Musem in order for it to be recontextualized, the story of Clint Westwood seems tame.

This Missoula, Montana college student filmed himself assaulting a mall Santa to include in a film he was making.

Police caught him as he waited to convince Santa to sign a release form.

Do an analysis of the spread of Liberal Party nominations, and you realize that Stephane Dion has a problem. In all likelihood, he is going to have to personally appoint nominees in many ridings in order to achieve the Liberal Party goal of fielding 33% women candidates in the next general election. But as things stand, most of those appoinments are going to have to happen in Quebec.

And that is seriously bad news for Stephane Dion.

Stephen Harper and Danny Williams are talking. The news really doesn't get any better than that.