As was to be expected, few here are impressed with my call to forget all the major grievances this day. I sympathize a little bit, because contrary to some people's belief I am pretty sure I'm not a "crazed Obama-lover", but that doesn't mean that I care for the political trend that opposes him. Read more…

I've had a lot to say about the election, but for various reasons not said most of it. This may have been a relief to some of you, but I'm going to take a moment briefly to say my peace in the last minute.

If you are one of those who are deliberately planning not to vote, fine. It's actually a choice I respect. Someone convinced me a while back that there are cogent reasons for checking out. But if you're going to vote, vote Obama. And if you're going to abstain out of anger at Obama, vote Obama. Read more…

Here are the five parties with seats in the Canadian House of Commons. I'm including the Green Party because they technically got one shortly before the election due to "crossing the floor" (an MP declared his affiliation with them but was elected under another platform).

• Bloc Québecois


• Conservative Party --- incumbent minority government


• Green Party


• Liberal Party --- incumbent official opposition
  
• New Democratic Party

Today, when most of you get to work, the Canadian polls will open. Aux urnes! as they say in French. So, I've been in Canada for the past week or so, and I had grand plans of not only finishing off some posts which I owe some people, but writing a sort of last-days political travelogue of the Canadian election, as I've been wandering around southern and eastern Ontario. But not least due to the surprising spottiness of Internet access, I have failed. *hangs head* Read more…

Lambert de-front-paged my post about the Confluence's response to the whole quoting-Liebowitz-on-the-mortgage-meltdown brouhaha, and I understand why he did it even if I don't at all agree, and it is his site. So I hope he'll leave me the liberty of linking to a version of the post that I've put on my own personal blog, where I used to do this sort of thing on a more regular basis. (But now just post tourism photos from my handheld, mostly.)

Please take your comments there.

[Welcome, Conflucians! For two other perspectives, see here and here -- lambert] Read more…

For a good long while before the 30s, some people thought they could create wealth while not paying anybody, and it all came crashing down. Then they were made to pay people, for their own good. Years later, they tried to realize the dream of not paying anybody a second time around, with even cleverer not paying anybody techniques. Needless to say, it still didn't work, but they'll get to try again. And they got rich anyway.

There's lots for me to criticize in this Confluence post about the relationship between race and the subprime market, including a certain amount of PC policemanism which I am not at all averse to inflicting. Let's just say that it's pretty much well known around both here and there that my threshold for a racism accusation is a lot lower than theirs, and for that reason, the PUMA phenomenon as a movement seems rather tone-deaf to me about race issues. Read more…

US bloggers still bandy about the idea that they'll run away to Canada if things get worse in the USA. This week, it appears that this is less justified than ever.

Despite campaign gaffes, the Conservative Party is still on the train to a majority government in Canada. Thus saith Nik Nanos, who is apparently the most trusted Canadian pollster. They are at 40% in the polls with a 15% gap between them and the Liberal Party. Another couple of points, and assuming that the poll results would hold at the ballot box, and they would have more than half the seats in the Canadian House of Commons, and full control of the levers of government.

So why is the Liberal Party doing so badly? Read more…

Another video from the Canadian election whose overall lesson is quite applicable to the American situation. Rick Mercer is the host of the CBC comedy Monday Report, which is a weekly Daily Show-type thing. Mercer is a very popular comedian in Canada, but IMO he became less funny when he left the endlessly hilarious This Hour Has 22 Minutes team. This video is from several months ago:  Read more…

My favorite political ad of the past ten years is actually this ad/campaign theme song music video of the sovereigntist Bloc Québecois in the 2004 Canadian election: Read more…

So the first polls of the Canadian campaign are out, and despite a number of gaffes, the Harper neocons are gaining ground, apparently with some warm, fluffy advertising. They've been gaining ground among women, who have been a particularly difficult constituency to crack, gaining ground despite a known tendency of some of their members for...fetal rights activism, which is never popular in Canada. Read more…

So, I've been wracking my brains attempting to come up with a way to introduce what the issues are in this Canadian election, including calling up family currently living in Canada and asking them, but I still haven't found the right approach. I mean, not only am I writing for a USAmerican audience, which means a different national context, but I do believe that for a country so small in population compared to the USA, the politics are much harder to describe.

Perhaps this isn't fair, but I have an easier time discussing US politics with Canadians than Canadian politics with Canadians. Maybe it's just easier to paper over the real complexity in US politics, but I really do feel that Canadian politics are just more convoluted. Read more…

So now that, due to my loose fingers and Corrente's illiberal policy towards the back button, you will not see my post on Canadian vice-Queens and their electoral meaning, I will salvage my pride with a short post on what just happened on the Canadian electoral front. ie, an election was recently called. Read more…

Mourn for my lost post by accidentally clicking the back button. Most interfaces allow me to click the back button and yet return to my post. Correntewire.com does not. It was a pithy take on Canadian electoral procedural history. It was almost done. And now it is gone forever.

...as we say in Canada.

So, in other words, us Canadians will have voted in a new government before you USians have voted in yours.

The stakes are high. Canadians have to decide whether they can get over Stéphane Dion's personality issues enough to stop Stephen Harper from dismantling the country, basically. So far, the most likely outcome in my opinion is that Canada will have another Conservative minority. But I'm terrified of the fact that they are in majority territory. Read more…

Some of you know that I am an, er, critic of Israel, but I am a big fan of parts of its English media, especially the newspaper Ha'aretz, and not just on its Mideast coverage. Here's an intriguing column by Bradley Burston on the US election. He's basically written Obama off.

Take a long walk in this land of dreams and all you'll see is Obama. Obama lawn signs, Obama bumper stickers, window placards, lapel buttons, anklets. In souvenir stores, Obama t-shirts compete successfully with longtime best-sellers touting Bourbon Street and carousing alligators. Read more…

Very recently, this thread on Clinton Derangement Syndrome erupted into flame over Bill Clinton's famous Sister Souljah Moment when I mentioned it as a possible cause of dissatisfaction with him felt by some people (me included) during his presidency. You know, things were different then, and we never imagined things could get this bad. Ah, the memories. Read more…

So apparently this dude named John Edwards has had an affair, and even ran for teh presidential nomination knowing that there was this little skeleton in his closet.

Colour me shocked. Tall, telegenic politician running for national office has a secret affair? How can this be?

All jokulating aside, obviously we all know that cheating on your wife is probably not a good thing, especially when she's recovering from cancer. But we also all know from, um, previous experience, that it's not wise to speculate about the peculiarities of relationships between the rich and famous.

It's also probably not wise to have an affair when running for president. Read more…

It has been kindly pointed out to me that there is an error (in good faith, based on not checking the facts on another post and/or misreading the post) in my last post on flags. I feel obliged to correct this with another post, because I feel the content of my post still stands even after the factual error has been corrected.

Hillary Clinton did not participate in the attempt at adding a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution. She instead attempted to defuse it by proposing a non-amendment that very narrowly fit the Constitution as interpreted generally by the courts. Consequently, this paragraph, Read more…

There are reasons to prefer Clinton to Obama. There are easily arguable reasons to be angry that Clinton is not presently likely to be a Presidential candidate in the general election. You can even make a case for not voting for Barack Obama. You can make an even better case for not voting at all.

But there are a few moderately popular reasons for preferring Clinton to Obama that disturb me. A variant of one of these is present in this post at The Confluence. Read more…

[Much shortened version of a much longer post I accidentally destroyed by hitting a wrong key but am too lazy to rewrite.]

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a Canadian Prime Minister named Jean Chrétien from the Liberal Party who took over when the Conservative Party was weakest and proceeded to hold his political enemies at bay for more than a decade. He did so because he had no compunction about seeing politics as war, and never accomodated his opponents for high-fallutin' reasons of unity. No Unity Ponies for him! Read more…

Mighty Corrente Building Manager Lambert brought something up in the comments to this post by bringiton that I thought deserved its own, entirely new thread. Maybe; it's part of the "What To Do With The OFB" issue that I think is a fairly important matter.

Anyway, Lambert quoth:

How about they go fuck themselves? Read more…

It's become a political cliché in this election season that Obama and his campaign have been largely about process issues ("politics, not policy") and that there is a large segment of the Democratic Party that is surprisingly passionate about process issues and see in Obama a way to bring process issues to the fore. This attitude towards process issues stretches back to the Dean campaign. Whether this attitude is justified is another matter, but it's becoming clear that it's not an issue that is likely to win a general election, and that the Obama campaign's focus on meta issues has been at the expense of issues that matter to another important voting bloc, and this might even cost him a nomination that for a time seemed to be practically his. Read more…

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe---what you or I might call "reality"---but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one's hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!"   Read more…