The only royal wedding picture you need to see

Somebody obviously loves a man in uniform!

Photo sexily stolen from Big Beautiful Boobs, which is so NSFW that you could actually lose an eye going there from the office.

"I got another confession to make" : The continuing saga of Jack Layton and one desperate blogger's cry of love

I can't stop watching the video of Sun News Network's Krista Erickson talking about the surreptitious and legally questionable handjobs that Jack Layton may or may not have received 15 years ago. No matter how hard I try, I just can't tear myself away from the computer monitor. I was like that when the story broke on television last night, but that only lasted for about 40 minutes before they returned to a re-run of The Source with Ezra Levant, already, as they say in the business, in progress. Ezra's a very nice man and all, but no one can kill a painful erection faster than him.

I haven't been able to sleep during the 13 hours since the the story broke, so haunted am I by Krista talking about it. In my mind's eye I keep visualizing her, with her golden tresses and banging little body, walking away from me, saturated tissue in hand. Perhaps she gives me a smile and a little wink as she turns to leave the room, just before the infernal police ruin everything. I can't even look at the Kleenex box beside my monitor without hearing the distinct sound of rattling coming from my groin. It's as if there are maracas in my jammies and I can't make the sound go away. I think that I'm getting double vision and I have an irresistible compulsion to shave my palms.

As I write this, I am naked and pale, just as Jack was on that good eve in January 1996. But there are no visions of Asian whores dancing through my head, oh no. Not today, brothers and sisters. There is only room for Krista in my head, my heart and my crotch.

All my life, I've heard people discuss how a news story changed their lives forever. Usually, it's the Kennedy assassination. People say that they'll always remember Walter Cronkite tearing up with a quivering voice after he announced that the 35th president of the United States had indeed been murdered in Dallas that November afternoon. I viewed that as sentimental nonsense, but no longer.

Last night was my Cronkite moment and I'm not sure that I'll ever see journalism the same way again. It was transformative, at least below my waist.

For good or ill, I'll forevermore associate Krista Erickson with socialist groins and moist tissues. And you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. That's not too kinky, is it? I think my feelings are actually a good deal more romantic than they probably sound.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go dig up my copy of Das Kapital. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.

Video sensuously stolen from Blazing Cat Fur

Well, that's done: How the Liberals dodged a bullet

Remember how George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000? Everybody in the campaign along with anyone with common sense attributed that to the revelation that he had been arrested in Maine for drunk driving. the story broke on the Friday night before the election and may have been responsible for keeping as many as three million evangelical voters home.

Funny how that works, innit? Amazingly, it never happens to a campaign that isn't doing well. You only ever see it happen with very credible candidates. Well, something very similar happened with the last hour. Jack Layton's career just ended.

Sun News Network is on the air as I speak reporting that NDP leader Jack Layton was found naked by Toronto police in a rub and tug back in 1996. Layton wasn't arrested and no charges were filed. None of the major newspapers have anything online yet. Sun News is citing an anonymous retired cop as their source.

Of course, that's horseshit. Retired cops aren't usually noted for their political or media savvy. This is political and I'm pretty sure that everybody knows it. This was leaked by an opposing campaign. The officer didn't just go to Sun Media, somebody sent him. I know this because stories like this are always leaked by an opposing campaign, especially when they make the news on the closing weekend of an election and you have no time or resources to properly respond.

The way to properly analyze stories like this is too very calmly and cynically ask who benefits the most from the story. Not only will it lead you to the truth 99% of the time, it's almost always a great deal of fun.

It's really easy to conclude that, because Sun News is a Tory echo chamber, the story came from them. I don't buy it because Layton isn't a particular threat to Harper. The Conservatives aren't in any danger of losing any more than five or six seats at best to the NDP. Moreover, the NDP surge potentially divided the center-left vote in English Canada and could have let the Tories win more seats than Layton could have take from them.

The Dippers are, of course, completely annihilating the Bloc Quebecois. That's where most of the NDP's support is coming from. It's so bad that two prominent former BQ staffers today endorsed the NDP. But this coming from Duceppe's people makes no sense. First, because they have no history of operating that way that I'm aware of. Second and more important, if they were behind it, they'd leak it to the Quebec French media.

Gee, I wonder who that leaves .... Who benefits? Who has the political infrastructure to capitalize on something like is in a way that works for them?  Where will disasffected or offended women go on Monday if this story plays the way I think it will? Who's known for being so evil that they practically glow in the fucking dark?

Of course, Jack's crying "smear," but that's not going to work, especially in the NDP, which is so reliant on the feminist vote. He's right and everything, but he's not contesting the facts of the story. Not that it matters. The truth isn't going to just pop out over the weekend. And if it does, nobody will hear it. That's why stories like this always break on Fridays.

And that means that he's done. The Layton campaign cannot and will not survive this so late in the day, if only because they won't have the opportunity to respond. This story is going to dominate every political conversation over the weekend, and polling and advertising a legally obligated to go dark at midnight.

I expect that the NDP is still going to do well in Quebec, because the French generally tend to reward politicians that get their dicks wet. But their support in English Canada probably went into free fall an hour ago.

Stephen Harper may yet get his coveted majority. But more importantly, the Liberals live to fight another day. And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this story.

Update 2:53 AM EST:  As I indicated in the comments, I’m reconsidering the impact if the story a little.

I tend to look at these stories as how they play in American politics because there’s really no precedent for it here, especially not this late in a campaign. It’s too late to respond to, and too late to find out who did it before election day. It’s a very effective, very American, tactic. Ask both Presidents Bush.

But this isn’t the United States, and as I was writing and watching Sun News run the story, I didn’t consider the very real possibility of a strong sympathy vote for Jack. Because there’s no further polling before Monday, we won’t know if it’s coming, but this could theorectically drive Layton’s numbers up.

This is easily the weirdest fucking campaign I’ve seen or even read about in this country’s history. Who can say what’s going to happen anymore? But I’m sure the NDP braintrust is thinking this came from exactly the same place I do, which I think kills off a coalition rather nicely.

Uppderdate - Saturday, 8:05 PM EST They called me mad on Twitter! They even called me mad on my own blog! Now we shall see ....

@jonkay


For those who care, someone tried to shop me the Layton-massage story 2 yrs ago (without docs). It was a Liberal fixer

Who's your goddamn Daddy now? Who, I ask you! It is I! I am your Daddy and so I always shall be!

Special thanks to Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet for the tip.

So much for charity ....

For reasons that haven't been explained to me, Google disabled my ad account about 20 minutes ago. My traffic yesterday was over six times higher than average, so I assume that has something to with it.

I've placed an appeal with Google, but don't expect anything to come of it. Even if it does, I'm not sure that I want to go through this with them every time my traffic spikes.

Therefore, unless something very unexpected happens, we can safely say that fundraiser is off.

I do encourage you to give as generously as you can to Global Medical Relief Fund and I'm deeply disappointed that we can't help them the way that I hoped we could.

Regarding Mitch

You know, there used to be a considerable difference between being a Republican and being a moron. Sure, it doesn't seem like it now, but it's true. However, I will grant you that it was a long, long time ago.

Since the first President Bush's re-election defeat some nineteen years ago, the GOP has given its presidential nomination to exactly two people that were willing to admit that they knew anything about anything. Those nominees would be Bob Dole and John McCain, and both of them drove the base insane.

I admired both. Dole remains one of my heroes, but I was deeply disappointed by McCain's political cowardice, both during after the 2008 election. When he was willing to renounce everything he previously believed because he was afraid of a half-witted huckster like J.D Hayworth, I could only conclude that the right guy won that election. It turns out that Ann Coulter was right and I was wrong, although for reasons very different than she gave at the time.

Actually having a working knowledge of how the government works and a realistic sense of the politically possible is actually seen as a detriment among the Republican activist community. That's why they whip themselves into a frenzy over politicians like Pat Buchanan (who I disagreed with vehemently in the 90s, but like and think is a smart cat), Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the goddamn Tea Party.

From time to time, the party's base and the establishment will agree on a candidate like George W. Bush. Bush the Younger was an idea nominee for a party overrun with supply-siders and religious enthusiasts who believe that ignorance is actually a virtue. Of course, the first president with an MBA had a long and storied history of bankrupting everything he touched, yet making himself wealthy in the process.

Look, I'd like to see President Obama beaten next year as much as anyone else. My difference with the populist movement (and populism is rarely ever conservative) is over who can do it. In my opinion, there isn't a Tea Party candidate out there smart enough to go toe to toe with the president without embarrassing him or herself. And Paul Ryan's budget doesn't help, because it's politically toxic.

Obama's probably going to raise a billion dollars, and he's going carpet bomb seniors with ads that will poison them against any politician who wants to "modernize" Medicare while passing even bigger tax cuts than Bush did. How anyone feels about the particulars of the plan is immaterial. That's just how the politics will work. Anyone who doesn't recognize that Obama is smart and politically agile are not only kidding themselves, they're doing the lion's share of the president's work for him.

I think that the only potential Republican candidate that can get anywhere Barack Obama in the Electoral College is Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. He's smart, has an impressive record in office and, most importantly, puts the Midwest in play. Because of changing demographics, the Southwest is lost to the GOP, probably forever. Therefore, so long as Obama holds Indiana and Ohio, he's invincible.

Daniels would almost certainly win those, plus he'd probably put Democratic strongholds like Michigan and Pennsylvania in play. And every nickle that's spent protecting Michigan and Pennsylvania is a nickle that can't be spent on holding Virginia and North Carolina. There's a pretty daunting electoral map that the GOP has to face next year and they'd do well to think of that during the primaries.

So which Republicans are getting all the media juice? Palin, Bachmann and Donald Trump, three people who can't win much of anything, if they even run. Even if any of them did, I don't see the Tea Party getting the nomination because the establishment that actually runs the party would do everything in its power to prevent it. As it is, I think that they'll go with historical trends and all but guarantee the nomination to Mitt Romney, who will lose badly to Obama.

Daniels is somebody, in my opinion, that both the establishment and the various Tea Party factions can agree on. More importantly, he's the only Republican with a serious chance of winning a general election. His biggest problems are name recognition and opposition from parts of the base.

Name recognition isn't as big of a hurdle as one might expect. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were virtually unknown when they entered the Democratic primaries. If a candidate is seen as a sane alternative to an unpopular incumbent, they can be nominated and elected. It doesn't often happen in the GOP, but there's no reason than it can't. Moreover, everyone in the national media at least respects Governor Daniels and knows that he's a serious person, which can't be said of any of the current Tea Party contenders.

Republican governors in the Midwest and Northeast are currently being crushed by public opinion. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Paul LePage of Maine - all elected by fairly wide margins just last November - are all upside down in the polls, with little chance of recovering in the near future. Daniels is almost alone in having reasonably high approval numbers. As of March, he was near 70% approval in Indiana.

The base, which drives Republican primaries, is a much tougher nut to crack. They may stand on their own orthodoxy, even it almost guarantees a debacle on the scale of 1964. I've been debating those people long enough to know that there's no convincing them of anything once their minds are made up.

Taking out an incumbent is a rare phenomenon in U.S politics. In fact, only five - William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W Bush - were denied reelection in the last century. Of the five, only one was a Democrat. And four of the five were beaten because of a divisive primary challenger or a strong third party on the ballot. Only Hoover lost absent one or both of those things, and it took the Great Depression to do that. If Obama loses, it will defy a century's worth of presidential history.

Most Republicans like to laughingly compare Obama to Carter, but they overlook that there will be no Ted Kennedy softening Obama up in the primaries, nor does the GOP have anything approaching a Ronald Reagan waiting for a general election. They also overlook that Obama is a much better natural politician than Taft, Hoover, Ford, Carter or Bush and that he'll likely be the best financed candidate in American history. In all probability, the president will outspend the GOP by ten to one. The American people have also never thrown out an incumbent president during a war, and the U.S is currently involved in three. If people like John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin have their way, there might be thirteen different theatres of war that America is engaged in by the fall of 2012.

Even under ideal Republican conditions, replacing Barack Obama in the White House is going to be much, much tougher than anyone currently thinks it's going to be. If you're wondering why serious Republicans are waiting so long to declare their candidacies, that has a lot to do with it.

The sooner the Tea Party and the GOP base recognizes and understands that history, along with the long odds they face in a general election regardless of who they nominate, the sooner they can decide whether they want a nominee they might with, or a modern Alf Landon or Barry Goldwater.

Stephen Harper thinks you're an idiot

I've explained my political philosophy and my discontent with Stephen Harper's Conservative Party over and over again. But given the response yesterday's little essay about the decline and fall of the Liberals, I have a ton of new readers out there. They haven't been following me through this campaign, or through the last five years of the Harper regime.

Philosophically, I'm really conservative about the things that matter, meaning the economy and foreign policy, and libertarian on the things that don't, which is everything else. For example, I support gay marriage, if only because I can't think of a reason that I shouldn't that doesn't make me feel like a goddamn goober. "Because homos are icky" is hardly a compelling case for the government to do anything other than mind its own friggin' business. A small government does not exist to pat you on the head and give you a cookie you when your precious values feel violated because it would very quickly cease being small.

I couldn't bring myself to vote for the Tories in 2004 and '06 because I had no confidence that Harper would be able to keep his social conservatives in line, which I freely admit that was wrong about. I pointedly refused to support them in 2008 because it had become crystal clear by then that they were Bush Republicans on fiscal policy. Anyone who didn't know that they had already blown through the $13 billion surplus by then just wasn't paying attention or was engaging in factually insupportable wishful thinking.

Once they had held off the then-terrifying specter of an opposition coalition, Harper engaged in stimulus spending that was well to the left of Barack Obama's in the United States and considerably more expensive. If you add up the Conservative deficits from 2009 to today, you find yourself in the neighborhood of about $120 billion dollars - and that assumes that the government is even telling the truth, which is something that they're not famous for when it comes to the economy.

In October of 2008, a full month after the crash of Lehman Brothers precipitated the End Times, Harper publicly stated that he would "never" engage in deficit spending. In fact, he has spent more money in a shorter period than even Pierre Trudeau did at the height of his power and has less to show for it. Brian Mulroney, who I cast my first vote for, spent a lot of money, too, but he also raised more than his share of revenue with the Free Trade Agreement and the GST. Without those things, the deficit wouldn't have been eliminated as easily as it was under Chretien.

Yet many of those who shudder at the memory of Trudeau and Mulroney, and shake their fists at the mere mention of Obama's name want me to reward Stephen Harper for being demonstrably worse than both. Sorry, I've spent far too long establishing my credibility on these matters and I refuse to piss it away just because my favorite colour is blue. And the fact that the Conservative banner matches my eyes is pretty much the only reason I'd have to vote for them.

Worse still, the current Conservative platform is riddled with tens, if not hundreds of billions in new spending and social engineering boutique tax credits (which are basically the same thing) that he has no plausible way of paying for.

And those are just a few of the reasons that I found the most recent Tory ad so entertaining and enraging.



That ad is so riddled with outright lies and willful ignorance that I'm actually impressed that the Tories managed to fit it all in a 30 second spot.

Firstly, Harper didn't "cut taxes," at least not in any real way. What he did do was riddle the tax code with credits, which rewarded you if you spent your money the way the government wanted you to. Oh, and he wanted to give your babysitter a tip. Prior to the Bush-Harper-Obama age, none of these things were considered conservative practices, yet the Tories couldn't be more proud of them. And please don't blame any of that on Harper's minority because all of it was in his 2005-06 platform.

If you ask anyone who knows anything about economics, they'll tell you that consumption taxes are the least productive cuts imaginable. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that you could design a worse tax cut than reducing the GST. It barely saved consumers pennies on the dollar, which helps paying the bills not at all unless you happened to be buying a house or a car with cash.

But it did cost a fortune in government revenue, which is fine if you match the revenue loss with spending cuts. And that's something that the Harper government pointedly refused to do. As a matter of fact, he campaigned on increased spending in both 2005 and '08. Indeed, he grew the government by nearly a quarter, much of it in 2006, when the Liberal Party didn't have a leader to "force" him to do much of anything.

I'll grant you that all of the above were fantastic politics, but spectacularly bad economics. And Harper pursued it even after it had become clear what similar policies had done to the U.S budget. But let us not forget that this was actually how he won government. Fiscal conservative bitching aside, he wasn't lying about spending, nor do I think that he is now.

But the ad is almost supernaturally dishonest about paying for that spending. When the Tories mention paying for stuff at all, they assume that economic growth and attrition in the public service is going to finance his spending sprees, which is ahistorical nonsense in that it assumes a level of growth that we haven't seen since World War II.

Yes, feel free to mock "tax and spend" all you want, but it's good and goddamned time that somebody points out the Harper-Bush-Obama fiscal model of "borrow and spend" is several degrees worse. It is nothing more than a deferred tax on people that didn't get to vote on our moronic priorities and the accumulated interest almost guarantees that it is going to be a significant tax increase which will retard economic growth at some point and limit the options of future governments.

Look, this election isn't about fiscal responsibility, despite the fact that the Tories would like to pretend that it is. It's a contest to see who can blow through the most money the fastest and have the least to show for it. And under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for not only making that possible, but continuing to encourage it.

Both here and elsewhere, I'm getting quite a bit of blowback for announcing my intention to vote for the NDP. Firstly, it doesn't matter given the riding I live in, where the Liberal cannot lose. Secondly, I'm voting specifically to destroy the Liberals forever. Once they're removed as a ballot option, I believe that you greatly moderate the behaviour of both the Conservatives and the NDP, who no longer have to engage in fringe nonsense to separate themselves from the Grits. Third, I'm hoping that a good trip to the woodshed will teach the Conservatives to start acting like conservatives.

Frankly, I'm not pretending to be particularly influential and I'm not trying to convince anyone to do anything that they aren't going to do anyway. If it were up to me, I'd continue my practice of voting for independents and minor party candidates, but that option has been denied to me this time out.

Having said that, I'm not going to pretend that the Harper Conservatives aren't electioneering hacks with a notable ignorance of basic math. Too many conservatives have pretended that the Tories were something other than what they said they were as far back as 2005. And if I had any interest in rewarding that kind of politics, I'd vote for the Liberals who never pretended to be anything else. I simply have no interest in replacing the Liberals with a Conservative Party that acts and governs exactly as they did in the 1970s.

If nothing else, this promises to be the most interesting election this country has had in twenty years.

Presented without comment

Bestie's Night from Tommy Lee

Serenity and denial: Michael Ignatieff and the fall of Berlin

So I got a robocall yesterday evening from Micheal Ignatieff his own self, a first in this campaign. I live in one of the safest Liberal constituencies in all of the Dominion. If my MP loses, the Liberal Party of Canada will be well and truly annihilated. There will be, simply put, nothing left. All will be lost and there will be nothing to rebuild.

Professor Ignatieff was kind enough to invite me to a rally at the Montecassino Hotel in the adjoining riding of York Centre tonight. And he's bringing a friend, the Right Honourable Jean Chretien, 20th Prime minister of Canada and the last guy to secure himself a majority government. That riding is represented by former leadership candidate and legendary goalie Ken Dryden, who is in deep, deep trouble.

Some history might be necessary here for my foreign readers. Chretien owed his reign to a divided Conservative movement that allowed him to dominate Ontario and win roughly half of Quebec's seats. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for him not to win a majority under those circumstances, although he nearly pulled it off in 1997. Even after the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Alliance parties merged under the Conservative Party banner in 2003, the Grits still managed to hold all but two of Toronto's (area code 416) 24 ridings and the majority of the 905 belt surrounding the Center of the Universe.

If nothing else, that kept the Liberals competitive in Ontario. Even the hapless Stephane Dion managed to hold the Greater Toronto Area, which allowed the party to focus its resources elsewhere, although to little effect. Nearly a third of their seats are in 416 and the rest are in 905 and Montreal.

Long story short, if Ignatieff feels it absolutely necessary to bring Chretien into 416, they are fucked beyond repair and they know it. The apocalypse is upon them and there is no escape. Their bones are being crushed into dust nationally and there is little to no chance that they'll even remain as the Official Opposition in the next Parliament. Even when Paul Martin and Dion were busy losing, they kept the le petit gars de Shawinigan as far away from Toronto as possible. Chretien himself rarely campaigned here as prime minister, since his presence was wholly unnecessary and therefore a giant waste of time and resources.

They're fighting for their lives in 416 itself now. Reasonable people fully expect the Grits to lose both Dryden's York Centre seat and the neighboring riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. This is the political equivalent of the final defense of Berlin from marauding Soviet troops in April of 1945 and I now expect it to end about the same way. Once those ridings fall, all that's left is the Hitler's bunker of downtown Toronto, and the NDP Power Twins, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow, already hold two of those seats. Not only do the Grits have to worry about a Tory incursion into the north west of 416, the NDP could very well retake Parkdale-High Park. If that happens, Iggy's own riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore could be at risk. I'm actually shocked that the Ford brothers haven't been working their backyard hard for Harper. That could start a pincer movement that could drive the federal Liberals directly into Lake Ontario in the very near future.

Besides bringing Chretien into Fortress Toronto, Iggy appears to have written off British Columbia, leaving it for the Conservatives and New Democrats to fight over. The map is finally too daunting for anyone to ignore. Worse, Canada's most reliable pollster, Nik Nanos, has (albeit belatedly) confirmed the NDP surge (PDF.) Layton's New Democrat's are ahead of the Liberals nationally and well within the margin of error in Ontario, jumping four points here over the weekend.

So how is the national Liberal campaign responding? By pretending that it isn't happening is how.

Despite a surge of NDP support in Quebec and an apparent decline in Liberal support in Ontario, the head of the national Liberal campaign has informed top strategists the party will execute its original campaign plan even though there are reports of nervous party troops and indications Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff remains unpopular at the doorsteps in some regions of the country.

In the aftermath of two public opinion polls that had by Tuesday found the NDP passing the Liberals nationally and surging past all three main parties to take the lead in voter preference in Quebec, a senior member of the party’s campaign in Ontario told The Hill Times that—other than strategic changes to its arsenal of attack ads and normal adjustments to campaigns in close riding races and swing ridings—national campaign director Gordon Ashworth told top levels of the Liberal team the battle plan remains the same.

“Obviously the campaign team is engaged every day and so there are phone calls, but I can tell you Gordon Ashworth, who is in charge of the campaign, he put very aptly, ‘Some time ago we developed a plan, we put that plan in place and we’ve executed it well and we continue to execute the plan because it really is about bringing forward a platform that addresses the needs of middle-class Canadians, the average Canadian, and we’re not deviating from that,’” Jeff Kehoe, one of the party’s three co-chairs of the Ontario portion of the campaign, quoted Mr. Ashworth as telling the campaign overseers following the stunning events over the past week.

If the Liberal campaign is feeling what The Hill article quotes as a "feeling of serenity on the ground," they're in full-blown denial. Hitler knew that the jig was up by the time he was driven into the bunker, but Gordon Ashworth apparently doesn't.

Mr. Ashworth's strategy was always half-crazed and premised on his perception that voters are even dumber than I  think they are, which happens to be plenty. The strategy, as far as I can determine, was to run against the Harper record, unify the left-leaning vote and peel off enough soft Tory support to deny the Conservatives a majority. If the Conservatives had a reduced minority government and if the Grits picked up a dozen or so seats, they could then defeat the government in a confidence vote this spring and form an accord with the Layton New Democrats.

That was flawed to the point of absurdity because, as I've mentioned before, Harper's record is the Liberal record. Dion and Ignatieff kept the Conservative minority afloat several hundred times in the last five years. It appears that the voters concluded that if they absolutely must unify around an opposition party, it may as well be one that actually opposed something from time to time, which is how the NDP surge was born.

If the NDP displaces the Liberals as the Official Opposition, or even comes close to it, the Liberals are effectively finished. If Ignatieff winds up losing seats, especially in Toronto, he'll be beheaded by his own party on election night next Monday, which leaves the Grits leaderless and in the throes of a leadership campaign.

Assuming that there even is a Conservative minority (which is getting harder to do every day,) defeating them on a confidence motion would require the Governor General to decide whether to invite a coalition or an accord to assume government or to hold yet another election. That would require some kind of assurance that said coalition could hold for at least two years. I don't know how a leaderless Liberal Party can make such an assurance to David Johnston.

There are also large swaths of the Liberal Party that want nothing to do with the NDP, and that segment of the party can be expected to run for the leadership. Or there might be sufficient opposition in caucus to defeat the idea outright.

Barring a coalition or an accord, another election would utterly break a bankrupt Liberal Party and English Canada would be divided up between the NDP and the Tories, almost certainly resulting in a massive Conservative majority.

After spending weeks asking the question, no one has been able to tell me why Jack Layton would even want to get into bed with the Grits. As I've explained before, it isn't in his strategic interest. Harper's fear-mongering about a coalition is adorable, but it assumes that Layton is stupid enough to still be afraid of the Liberals at this point. He pretty clearly isn't, and seems to know that if he just waits a few months, the Grits will collapse all on their own, leaving him as the only credible alternative to the Tories.

Regardless of Monday's outcome, the Liberals won't be able to raise money (which is already a giant problem for them) or recruit halfway serious candidates (which they haven't focused all that much energy on anyway.) By Tuesday morning, anyone with any brains will see the future of the left in this country, and it isn't going to include the Liberals.

The Liberals who were behind or endorsed the merger or strategic cooperation talks last year never really thought through the consequences of what they were suggesting. Strategic cooperation, meaning that the two parties wouldn't run candidates against one another, would ruin both financially because they would be denied millions in the per-vote subsidy from Elections Canada.

Moreover, the merger idea was framed under the almost unbelievably arrogant Grit premise that the NDP would renounce all of their principles just to join a Liberal Party that was incapable of winning an election on their own and only got 28% of the vote in the previous campaign. And for their trouble, Jack Layton might have been named junior minister for dildo training, but only if he promised not to talk about dildos that much. It was such an insulting offer that it only could have come from a Liberal.

No, it had to come to pass this way. Even during their ascendancy, Reform-Canadian Alliance weren't so fucking haughty that they believed that they could merge with Progressive Conservative rump on their own terms. In fact, it was the Alliance that was crumbling, with a dozen of their members sitting as Independents because of Stockwell Day's reign of error. The Grits, on the other hand, honestly believe it is their natural birthright to govern this country, and they only grudgingly tolerate elections. There could never be a working agreement with the NDP so long as the Liberals thought that they had any kind of future at all.

Well, as of Monday, the window closes on that future. The Liberal Party of Canada will be halfway in the grave, and even they won't be so dumb as to not notice it. If these polls hold up for the next five days -  and there's now no reason to believe that they won't - the Grits will enter their final death spiral and likely won't survive the next election.

And you know what? I'm going to help bury them. I live in a riding where it doesn't matter who I vote for, and I've been denied my usual luxury of voting for an independent or minor party. So I'm going to do something that I never seriously thought I would.

I'm going to vote for the NDP.


Update: Welcome Small Dead Animals and Trusty Tory readers. My, but there's a shitload of you out there, isn't there? By seven AM EST, I had already beaten my total daily average of hits, which is certainly not something I expected from a post that I threw together in about half an hour.

And that's what makes me a shitty blogger. I never know what you folks are going to respond to.

One More Global Medical Relief Fund Update

On March 28th, I announced that all monies raised from Google Ads through the end of April would be donated to Global Medical Relief Fund. That's this coming Saturday, and so far we've managed to build up a kitty of $208.25. Not bad for five week's work.

I still haven't received my March payment of $69.01, but I'm told that this isn't unusual. From what I understand, the cheque is cut at the end of the following month, so my March payout should arrive at the end of April or beginning of May, and the April payment is made at the end of May or beginning of June. Assuming that goes accordingly to plan, we should be having our little blog meet in the first or second week of June. I'll let you know more as I received payment from Google.

I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it wasn't an extremely worthy cause. As you probably know by now, Global Medical Relief Fund is one person, Elissa Montanti of Staten Island. She's been rebuilding kids maimed by war or natural disasters pretty much by herself since 1997. She brings them to the United States from all over the world, and arranges for doctors, hospitals and specialists to donate their time and services. If you've been following my fund drive, you likely saw the 60 Minutes profile that I embedded in the post linked above.

I think Ms. Montanti is a real-live hero and her work deserves all the help we can give it. And you folks have been fantastic, exceeding my expectations of how this would work out by a long shot. Thank you for that.

Remember, there are still four days in which we can drive the fund up some. It doesn't take much of your time or effort and it will make all the difference to a child out there. You know what to do.

If you want to contribute to GMRF on your own, you can do so through their website here. I strongly recommend that you do, and would greatly appreciate it. I know that a number of you already have and I thank you again for it.

As an aside, I already have the next charity that I want to help picked out, the only question is the timing. I get that I have to establish some credibility with you so that you know that I'm doing the right thing, so I'll likely launch the next drive around the time of the blog meet.

Bree Olson does the right thing

Cocaine, as Rick James reminds us all from the afterlife on this Easter Sunday, is a hell of a drug. One of its primary effects is to make you want to do more and more cocaine. Everything about it becomes the most fascinating thing you've ever seen and it very quickly becomes the center of your universe. You can sit there and just chop it and cut lines for up to thirteen hours, waiting for precisely the right moment to snort some more.

Or so I have read. I wouldn't want you folks to get the impression that I'm leading anything but a good, clean Christian life, especially today, when we celebrate the most successful death penalty appeal in recorded history.I'm just relating things that I've read or been told about. I'm far too chaste to engage in such hijinks. Besides, I'm too poor for fun.

In small quantities, however, coke can be a mighty, mighty fuck fuel, particularly for women. If the menfolk can resist the overwhelming temptation to cut and snort lines for thirteen hours, it can do wonders for them as well. But only in small quantities.

When too much of Peru's finest is ingested, even the heartiest of modern gentlemen fall to the scourge that is coke dick. Cocaine is such a seductress, however, that a good many men mind not at all that they have a useless cock, so long as they can keep chopping and snorting. It's only afterwards, when the blow has run out, you know that you won't be sleeping anytime soon, and you desperately want to plow yourself through some pussy that the phenomenon becomes problematic. Life, as it happens, is rife with vicious circles.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to Charlie Sheen, modern America's cocaine poster boy.

The Artist Formerly Known as Carlos Estevez is having the best year ever. He really is teaching us all about the glories that come from being effectively unemployable. If you bump into him, even slightly, there's a very real possibility that you would be enveloped in what would at first appear to be the worst cloud of dandruff imaginable. But after breathing in deeply, you'd cease to care and would almost certainly find yourself snorting Charlie Sheen.

Most importantly, he was boning Rachel Oberlin, who I have come to devote my life to as Bree Olson. For my newer readers, I've written about her here, here and here. As I write this, I'm laying the theological groundwork to build my very own church around Miss Oberlin, since she's clearly superior to any other available deity.

Outside of perhaps Hinduism, there are no gods with huge natural jugs and a clear biological imperative to take a giant wang in the dumper. And that just makes my religion better than yours. As the Church of Bree teaches us all, "What's more painful than anal sex? Not getting to have any anal sex. Would someone come fuck me in the ass please?"

Truer and sexier words were never spoken. And it sure beats the tits off of "love thy neighbor." She's devine in all that ways that, say, Jesus or Mohammad aren't. Mine eyes have seen the glory, friends. And I want you to see it, too. I never thought that I'd become so evangelical, but here we are. You can argue the theology with me all you want, but you'll only be proving how much you enjoy being wrong.

Some of you might have noticed that I said that Charlie "was" fucking my beautiful, beautiful Bree. I used that term advisedly, since he isn't anymore, a fact that he felt necessary to share with a couple of thousand of his closet friends in Ft. Lauderdale last night.

Judging by Charlie Sheen's desperate last-ditch efforts to give away free tickets to his Ft. Lauderdale show on Twitter, one might have predicted a bomb along the lines of his Detroit disaster.

However, Sheen's Violent Torpedo of Truth was a surprise hit with the audience at the BankAtlantic Center on Saturday.

Sheen seemed to be in good spirits and, according to one attendee, received a warm welcome from the crowd of about 2,500 as he took the stage wearing a Florida Marlins jersey.

The actor kicked off the show by revealing that one of his goddesses, Rachel "Bree" Olson, had broken up with him via text message. During the Q&A session later, one fan asked Sheen how he handled two women at once without turning to polygamy. He replied, "Not well, because one left."

I'll overlook The Hollywood Reporter's sin against journalism in getting Bree's birth name wrong because that's beside the point. We have bigger fish to fry on this, the holiest of afternoons. If I wrote that badly, I'd refuse a byline, too. For example, I grew up thinking that Detroit was a synonym for disaster.

Being left by Bree Olson is far worse than anything Detroit can throw at you. It's much more like having God His own self turn His back on you because it's precisely that. There are only two things that Chuck and I have in common: we're both irredeemable fuck-ups and neither us have likely seen a woman take a more punish bout of sodomy than Bree and finish up smiling. And neither of us have probably seen a prettier smile from someone who just took a foot of cock in their digestive track.

Did Sheen's love of Colombian marching powder have something to do with this? In my professional opinion as a world-famous scholar of romance, I'd say that it almost certainly did. Lookee, I've not only seen Miss Oberlin's voracious sexual appetite, I have several gigabytes on my computer that I regularly consult as reference materials that document it. Needless to say, they are my pride and joy. I feel the same way about those videos that you do about your children. The only difference is that the videos are never going to want me to pay their college tuition, so my Bree Olson fuck movie collection is clearly better than your kids.

What I've learned from my years of close study is that Rachel needs cock like the rest of us need food and water. She can't survive without it. From what I've seen, this is a woman who can't go on absent an orgasm so powerful that it leaves her a shuddering, quaking mess. These are things that even a cursory glance at It's Huge 6 would tell you. I can't be the only one that knows that, can I?

Now something tells me that someone who does blow by the briefcase won't be able to satisfy the demands of such a goddess, and Charlie's coke-related performance problems are well documented. If he can't satisfy a pig like Kacey Jordan, I'm amazed that a sexual animal like Bree Olson hadn't opened up his chest cavity months ago.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but there always comes a time to put it away. Remember kids, you can't be #Winning with a droopy dick.

Postcriptum: I think it's fitting that the last time that Charlie and Rachel were in a room together was here in Toronto. I like to think that my powerful sexual energy had something to do with it. Now if I could only get Powdergirl in this time zone ...




Update: Sheen continued to display an awesome ignorance of women last night when he was asked about Lindsay Lohan. "Sheen also invited Lindsay Lohan to hang out with him for 24 hours. "I would hug her and let her know it's gonna be ok," he said, when asked if he had words of wisdom for the troubled star."

Oh, for Chist's sake!  The only way to let Lindsay know that it's gonna be ok is to buy her a big drink and wear her like a wristwatch. Hasn't Charlie been paying attention to anything? 

God, the Conservatives are dumb

This might be the strangest Canadian election that I've ever seen. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party is running an almost blindingly shitty, strategy-free campaign. Worse, their main message of stopping a Liberal-NDP coalition supported by Bloc Quebecois, could potentially backfire and actually legitimize a coalition if the Tories fail to win their precious majority. Having said that, watching the fake outrage from every Tory politico and asshole blogger is going to be hilarious if and when it happens.

But the awfulness of the Harper campaign isn't reflected in the polls. The Conservatives have maintained a double-digit lead consistently throughout. Because of the concentration of their vote in western Canada and the lack of any upward movement in Quebec, I still think that they're shy of a majority and could possibly lose seats. But they really have no business doing as well as they are. Of the four elections that the Tories have run with Harper, this is far and away their worst. Oddly, it might also be their most successful.

Michael Ignatieff, as hopeless as he is, is running a far better campaign than anyone believed was possible, as close to fuck-up free as any Liberal campaign in recent memory. However, he's not getting any traction with voters. It's just as likely that he'll lose seats as gain them, regardless of how their popular vote turns out. And the Grits can't afford to lose many seats and remain a credible national force. Their seats are so heavily concentrated in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, that any erosion in those centers calls their continued political viability into serious question.

The real story of this campaign is what makes it truly bizarre. Jack Layton and the NDP are rapidly becoming the heroes of this story. This week, their polling exploded, pulling into second place nationally and actually leading in Quebec, where they've won a grand total of one seat in their entire history. If Jack's numbers hold over the next ten days - and I'm not sure that they will - this race becomes impossible to predict. Depending on where that support is concentrated, they could conceivably become the official Opposition in the next Parliament and effectively destroy the Liberals forever.

Destroying the Liberals forever is something that Stephen Harper has been thinking about his entire adult life. If you can eliminate the Grits from the political equation, the thinking goes, and reduce the influence of the separatist Bloc in Quebec, you wind up with an ideologically binary electorate. Without the Liberals as a factor, both the NDP and the Conservatives move closer to the political center, where most of the country is, to fill the void the Grits leave behind. It's a fine theory, and one that I think is ultimately going to be a reality in this country, regardless of how this election plays out.

Now, if the Tories' long-term goal is to finish off the Liberals and ensure that they never return, they need the NDP to do that. No Conservative, particularly one as personally divisive as Harper is, is going to draw away enough Grits to wipe their party out. But the NDP can. And by the looks of it, they are.

So what is Harper doing? Attacking Jack Layton is fucking what!



Whoever came up with this ad shouldn't just be fired, he or she should be killed. In front of the rest of the staff, so they'll know not to do anything this goddamn dumb in the future. If Harper has any brains at all, he'll round up everyone that had anything to do with this monstrosity, slit their bellies open and feast on their warm innards as the horrified survivors look on and worry about the fate that awaits them as Bruce Carson and his harem of comely whores laugh and cheer from the VIP section. That kind of thing worked in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and there's no reason to believe that it won't work in the Conservative Party of Canada.

The very last thing Team Harper should be doing is going negative on the NDP. First, they're knocking down the Bloc several notches and threatening the very survival of the Liberals. Second, the Dippers don't threaten as many Tory seats as they do the Grits and the Bloc. Third, the county has pretty clearly fallen in love with Jack Layton, and why shouldn't it? He started this campaign three-quarters of a goddamn corpse, both politically and physically, and he's risen to kick ass, take names and save federalism in Quebec. He's become the happy ending in every fucking Bruce Springsteen song you've ever heard.

Harper gains nothing from attacking Layton and reinforces his own negative impressions that he's an angry prick that sold his soul to some Calgary ward-heeler in 1985. This is about as far from Blue Sweater Steve as we're ever gonna get, folks.

Besides, while Harper can go negative on Layton, Ignatieff has no other choice but to. Unless Iggy starts ripping apart Jack's swollen prostate with a sharpened bamboo poles in the next week, he's dead. So for Christ's sake, let Ignatieff do the dirty work and carry the risks of blowback that come with it. As John Ibbitson and Stephen Chase point out in today's Globe, these are as follows;

But Mr. Ignatieff pays a price in three ways by taking on the NDP. First, every minute and dollar spent pointing out the contradictions embedded within the NDP platform is a minute and dollar diverted from the effort to close the yawning gap between the Liberals and the front-running Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

Second, accusing the NDP of making reckless promises that could damage the economy and wreck government finances simply echoes the criticism that the Conservatives level at the Liberals.

Finally, and most importantly, the more Mr. Ignatieff takes on Mr. Layton, the more he renders the NDP chief credible as a potential leader of the official opposition.

An Ignatieff-Layton battle royal is a contest that Iggy was born to lose. More important, it's one that he's completely unprepared for. He went into this race expecting to take on Harper from the left. Finishing the campaign by fending off Layton from the right throws whatever strategic planning the Liberal war room did right out the fucking window. I'll bet you anything that Liberal national headquarters is the very picture of panic, chaos and the scene of even more brutal than usual infighting right now.

If I was soulless and stupid enough to be working for the Conservative national campaign, I'd be telling them to make Stephen Harper Jack Layton's very best friend in the goddamned world. Each and every Harper speech would include a section about how inspiring Jack Layton's story is and how well his political and medical comeback speaks of his character. If Harper actually has functional human tear ducts, I'd see if I could talk him into getting a little misty while doing it. Maybe I can get him to remember how War of the Worlds didn't have the happy ending he was hoping for, but I'd get him to look like a reasonable facsimile of a human being when talking about his pal, Jack.

Sure, I'd let the candidates and some of the sleazier Cabinet ministers assassinate Layton at the constituency level, but nothing negative would come out of Harper's mouth and I sure as fuck wouldn't attack him by name on national television. Unlike our American cousins, Canadians have a long history of voting for vicious bastards, but that's no reason for the Tories to push their luck, particularly when they only make negligible gains for their trouble.

Michael Ignatieff is going to look like a desperate and sleazy son of a bitch going after Layton next week, but he's doing it out of necessity. Harper, on the other hand, wants to look that way because it seems to be his natural default setting.

And from a long-term strategic perspective, that's an almost mechanized form of dumb. For Harper to attack Layton only helps Ignatieff. And the sooner the Liberals get put out of everybody's misery, the sooner the Conservatives come to a long-term, sustainable political realignment in this country that benefits them more than anybody else.

Another special appearence

By Raymi's ass!

Jesus Christ and all the Dwarves in Disneyland, that thing is just spectacular. It takes my breath away every time I see it. It speaks to me in a secret language that only I can understand. It says things to me. It lets me know what it wants, what it needs, in ways that the English language is simply inadequate. You know that something is special when communication transcends language, which is why it's so rare.

Although I've never met Raymi (who is considerably younger than I am), I think her marvellous, marvellous dumper instinctively knows the almost spiritual experience that my mighty. mighty rimjobs bring to everyone that experiences them. There aren't a lot of things that I'm famous for - God knows that that hot girls are endlessly bored by my political pontifications - but when I finally have the good sense to die, I hope that I'm remember for all of the mystical feelings that my mouth has given the women in my life.

It seems only proper that they would go forth and tell the villagers about my gift until it becomes the legend it properly deserves to be. The menfolk that I leave behind should be inspired by my example and learn to slurp on their lady's naughty bits until it changes the way she views life. If my time on this mortal plain has served any purpose at all, I hope that would be it. And Raymi's perfect posterior has a lot to do with that.

I've strived to always avoid being spiritual in public, but things like Miss White's delicate ring piece make that impossible. And you know what? It should! How tragically empty would life be if we simply survived from day to day, never knowing that there was something better out there for each of us? Yes, we make it through the day, but to what end? Why?

As an atheist, Easter has always been a difficult time for me, a sad and tragic period that deprives me of the sense of redemption so freely bestowed upon my theist friends. But this year, I have found something to celebrate, something greater and more powerful than I will ever be. There is nothing false about the idol I worship, oh no! All of life's beauty is contained within it, and few things inspire me to truly evangelize the way it does. Sure, human resurrection is impressive, but let's not get carried away with ourselves.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of Raymi's beautiful butt cheeks and I would freely die for their sins, both real and imagined. After all, how could I not? Just take a gander at how they look in those shorts! That video is nothing short of a revelation, and I hope that you all gather your families around this weekend and see the majesty in it. It might just bring us all closer together as a great family of man and it'll probably be the holiest you do over the holiday.


in the fade from raymi lauren on Vimeo.

Christ, I'm adorable. Is it any wonder that I'm an internationally renowned Lothario?

What I saw at the reformation: Jack Layton's 115th dream

Just for giggles, I decided to check the Elections Canada website last week to take a gander and the independent and minor party candidates running in my riding in next month's federal election. As I've said before, I haven't voted for a major party since 2000. This is because the Conservatives aren't very conservative, I'm genetically incapable of voting for the Liberals because they're swine and I'm not a socialist, which precluded my supporting the NDP.

Small problem. There are no independents or minor parties running in my riding this time out. Not even the Greens. Which means that I'm screwed. Under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for his economic reign of error over the last five years and I'm almost certain that I can't biologically re engineer myself enough to support the Liberals.

That leaves me with the devil's choice of voting for the NDP or not voting at all. And you know what? I'm not as uncomfortable with either option as you might think. I've publicly mused about voting for the Dippers before, if only because I have long thought that they would be the ideal opposition to a Tory government, be it minority or majority. This is because they actually oppose things from time to time. And when they have dealt with Harper, they've usually gotten something out of it, which can't be said of the Grits.

In opposition, the Liberals have been the single most useless motherfuckers ever to walk the earth. For all of Stephen Harper's endless lying about the dangers of a coalition government, he neglects to tell you that there already has been one for the last five years. The Grits under both Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff have voted with the government hundreds of times. They have enabled Harper at almost every turn.

This has turned out to be problematic in that it's hard to run against the record of a government that they've supported so frequently. For all intents and purposes Michael Ignatieff's record is Harper's record. And the fact is that the Grits supported the Tories so often because they were too cowardly to force an election. This was made easier by the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada doesn't actually believe in anything other than political positioning. They're nothing more than an odd hybrid of the Conservatives and the NDP, and they have been for nearly fifty years. They exist only to steal policies from whichever party seems to be polling well at any given time. The Grits are whores, and singularly cheap ones at that.

Historically, that worked out for them because Canada didn't tend to have an ideological electorate. We tend to be far more pragmatic than Americans are, and our elections tend to be more issues-oriented. Canada doesn't often have campaigns built around nonsense like "restoring honor and dignity" or the fucking pledge of allegiance.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, that's less and less true and the electorate has been slowly becoming more rigidly ideological. I don't necessarily like it, but I can't pretend that it isn't happening. The result of that is that the Liberals are being frozen out and the NDP is eating their lunch.

A campaign that has until now been on “auto-pilot” is suddenly turning into an electrifying run to the finish with a change so dramatic for the NDP that it could be in reach of becoming the official opposition, a Forum Research poll done in collaboration with The Hill Times suggests.
The NDP has made its largest gains in Quebec, with an astonishing surge past the Bloc Quebecois in decided and leaning voter support, but the party has also moved up in British Columbia, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where a rise in support can turn into new House of Commons seats for the party.

(...)

Nationally, the survey gave the Conservative Party support from 36 per cent of decided and leaning voters, 25 per cent for the NDP, 23 per cent for the Liberal party, and six per cent each for the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois. A separate Forum Research analysis, based partly on ridings won and lost in the 2008 election, suggest the survey results would give the Conservatives 149 of the 308 Commons seats if an election were held today, with 71 seats for the NDP, 64 for the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois would have 24 seats.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Jack Layton started this campaign with a busted hip and a prostate the size of a canned ham. His political obituary was being written by everyone in both the blogosphere and Serious Journalism. Just two weeks ago, Liberal commentators - admittedly some of the dumbest assholes on the planet - were openly mocking the NDP. From what I've been seeing this afternoon, they're not laughing now.

My instincts still tell me that the Dippers won't overtake the Grits in the next Parliament, but I have nothing solid to base that on. The arc of this campaign since the debates and all of the data indicate that my instincts are wrong. And if I'm wrong and the NDP becomes the Official Opposition in the next Parliament, you're witnessing the beginning of an irreversible trend and the Liberals - the most successful party in the history of democracy - will begin its final death rattle in the very near future.

In a non-ideological electorate of sheep, the Grits won simply because they were seen as winners. And even that was largely an illusion. In the last fifty years, only Pierre Trudeau won in the face of any kind of opposition, and he almost lost to Bob Stanfield and actually was beaten by Joe Clark. Lester Pearson won three minorities because of the collapse of the Diefenbaker government, and Chretien was handed three majorities because of the fracturing of the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell.  Since 1958, the Grits only clearly won under their own power in 1968, 1974 and 1980.
Mulroney reduced the Liberals to forty seats in '84 and Stephen Harper steadily reduced their share of the popular vote for three consecutive elections.

Even with Michael Ignatieff running a much better campaign than anyone expected he would, the Liberals just aren't seen as winners anymore. With that dynamic now clearly evident to anyone that's been paying attention, the progressive vote is shifting to the NDP.

Am I surprised that this is happening? No, I've actually been predicting it for over two years now and most of you thought I was insane for doing it. But I am surprised that it's happening this quickly and that the epicenter for it is in Quebec. Not only has the federalist vote coalesced around the NDP, the socialist wing of the separatist Bloc Quebecois has begun to, as well.

If that trend in Quebec continues, the Liberals are going to die more rapidly than even I previously expected them to. They could form governments by winning roughly half of Quebec's seats and dominating Ontario, with scatterings of seats in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia. Since 2004, they've been ruined in Quebec and lost over half of their Ontario seats. Effectively, they've been reduced to a rump in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. A national NDP surge, combined with Harper's singular focus on the 416 and 905 area codes of the Greater Toronto Area, threatens even those Grit electoral fortresses.

If these numbers hold, and I have no idea if they will because the Dippers could be peaking too early, we could be witnessing a fundamental reformation of Canadian politics. Everything I know about the history of the Liberal Party tells me that they won't be able to rebuild. Their MPs and strategists will all start publicly blaming one another for what happened (and if you look around, you'll see that already happening) and their next leadership campaign will be nothing less than a very public, balls-out, scorched earth bloodbath. The LPC's decades-long civil war will finally bury them in a very public ceremony. There won't be any rebuilding from a debacle like this.

A potential coalition in the event of a defeated Harper minority is going to be even more humiliating for the Grits. Even if they have more seats, the NDP has the momentum and now everybody knows it. The days of the Liberals arrogantly demanding that the Dippers renounce much of anything will be long over. Any coalition or accord will be on Jack Layton's terms or it won't happen at all.

As a matter of fact, it will be in the NDP's long-term strategic interest to let Harper govern and envelop himself in waves of progressively worse scandals while the Liberals destroy themselves in public. If I was leading the NDP in a minority Parliament with an even weaker Liberal Official Opposition, I'd let the Grits continue to support a scandal-ridden Conservative government to highlight the distinction between the progressive parties and swallow gradually greater shares of its support.

In the end, it is much better to be an ever more viable national alternative to the Conservatives than it is for them to be the junior partners in a coalition with a Liberal Party that's busy destroying itself. If the Tories start to crumble under the weight of their own Keynesian spending and obvious corruption, and Liberals are finally destroyed by their own hubris and opportunistic stupidity, who's left?

If the NDP surge splits enough ridings to produce a Conservative majority, Layton will almost certainly be the leader of the Opposition, which will consign the Liberals to eternal irrelevance. Either way, the NDP would be crazy to have anything to do with the Liberals before they're well and truly finished.

Will I vote to hasten that process along? I haven't decided yet, but I just might. This election suddenly got a whole lot more interesting than it had any business being.

And to anyone who thought I was insane to predict the decline and fall of the Liberal Party, which I may have been altogether too conservative about, I guess I should have listened when you said this;




Extra-special shout out to The Tiger on Politcs

Even more deep thoughts on Krista Erickson and Sun News Network

If there's one thing that makes me bouncing-off-the-walls crazy, it's the recent embrace of the cult of victimhood by the conservative movement. People like Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin have built very lucrative careers out of whining about how unfair life is, and their ignorant acolytes in the media and blogosphere can't seem to get enough of it. Problematically, they engage in this very public bedweting as they continue to chide liberals for it.

This is just one example of modern conservatives being no different than the old-timey Left, just a lot more hypocritical about it. If nothing else, liberals have always been up front about being whiny assholes. They're actually rather proud of it and give each other awards for excelling at it. Modern conservatives, especially those in the fucking blogosphere, just seem to be doing it for fun.

And this brings me yet again to Krista Erickson and the Sun News Network. I've been watching Sun News diligently since Monday and, just as I feared, I'm falling in love with it. They're playing up the media hype that they're a conservative alternative to the Goddamn Liberal Media, which is hilarious to me because the news isn't conservative or liberal, it's the fucking news. I'm more than capable of deciding how to interpret it on my own, but I love watching conservatives being as friggin' pretentious as liberals famously are.

I'll say this for the first and last time: if, as a conservative, you feel that you need an entire network to reinforce things that you already believe, chances are that you're too dumb to be a conservative. And God knows that there are already more than enough idiots on the Right these days. Someone like William F. Buckley wouldn't have survived fifteen minutes in this media culture, if only because willful ignorance and herd mentalities are actually celebrated by the modern movement. If Barry Goldwater, easily the most conservative major party presidential nominee in U.S history, were alive today, he'd be revolted by the entire sideshow spectacle.

As I wrote about on Monday, Quebecor decided to make SNN's afternoon anchor (and my current soul mate, Facebook friend, and the object of much furious masturbation) Krista Erickson the face - and smoking hot little body - of the network. And you know what? I'm fine with that. As a matter of fact, I'm more than fine with it. I'd go so far as to say that I'm throbbing with glee. As you might imagine, I support the corporate sexualization of virtually everything.

Not everybody, as it happens, is as cool - or violently turned-on - with that as I am. The Globe and Mail published a particularly snotty column decrying Ms. Erickson's innate ability to get me hard enough to cut diamonds. And "Canada's Jon Stewart," Rick Mercer, tweeted “Just yesterday SUN TV’s studios was full of dry wall, today it is full of silicone," which is actually pretty funny.

The problem is that Krista can't let it roll off of her back and over the curve of her superior, heart-shaped little ass. She's made several snide remarks about both Mercer and the Globe on the air, and now she's putting this on Facebook

Hopeyou enjoyed the world premier of Bob Rae's cover of "Imagine". Another star-studded lineup today. Topics: Is Michael Ignatieff a phony? More on our Sun News exclusive on Iggy's role in the Iraq invasion. Speaking of plastic, Rick Mercer says we're all silicone here at SNN - shall we clear the air once and for all? I think so! Ottawa's celebrity stylist and my BFF weighs in on that and campaign fashion.

Oh God, please tell me that another hot TV chick is going to strip her down and feel her up, looking for silicone. If she's a certified gynecologist or proctologist, that would be even better. Nothing would be "must see TV" quite like that!

Look, Quebecor made the decision to have Krista as the sexy image of the network, primarily because she's a piece of ass. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have made that marketing decision if they hired, say, Helen Thomas as the afternoon anchor. That was a conscious decision and one that she happily went along with.

If Erickson is going to allow herself to marketed primarily as my masturbatory fantasy, she shouldn't be shocked or outraged when someone remarks on it. As much as she'd like to, she can't have it both ways. Sun News can't spotlight her perfect and perky cans and then waste airtime getting indignant about anyone pointing out that her cans are indeed perfect and perky. Being a hot piece of ass doesn't undermine her journalistic credibility (as much as she may or may not have any, I hadn't heard of her before Monday), but constantly whining about it most assuredly does.

If I were to offer Krista any advice at all, it would be to pick a side of the fence and stay on it. Unless, of course, she wants to straddle it, in which case I'd ask only that she take pictures of it and post them on Facebook. Because I'd really dig that.

My friend, the great Mark Bourrie, wrote about Sun News Network in a continuing column that you should really read for Ottawa Magazine.

Much ado about nothing, unless ...

Stephen Harper is running among the very worst campaigns that I've ever seen, and the Goddamn Liberal Media is finally saying what I have been for months now: that if he only wins a minority, he's finished.

But even with an awesomely shitty campaign, Harper's still ahead by nearly ten points. That says more about what nutless wonders the opposition Liberals are than it does about the skill of the Tories. However, that ten point lead doesn't constitute a majority. The fact is that a good share of Harper's support comes from the Prairies, where they already hold most of the seats, meaning that support is effectively wasted. Given that, I don't see how a Tory majority is elected with less than about 43% of the vote, a level they have yet to hit even for a day.

So Harper's doing something so incredibly stupid that I'm amazed that no one in the party tried to stop him. He's running against the uber-scary Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois "coalition." That must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but it isn't working. I've already noted the inherent danger in this strategy. If you make the coalition that ballot question, you essentially legitimize it if you fail to win a majority. Of course, that won't stop the Conservatives from trying to have it both ways after the election, but that's only because they were born without shame.

There's one thing that my international readers need to understand about a parliamentary democracy. The only thing required of the government is that it enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. It matters not at all who won the most votes if that party cannot win that confidence. To Americans, the nearest applicable equivalent would be the Electoral College. As they may or may not know, four presidents lost the popular vote, yet wound up living in the White House.

And because Michael Ignatieff is singularly unserious about actually winning an election, he's now openly talking about that, despite having ruled out a coalition as recently as last week.

Michael Ignatieff is saying clearly for the first time that he could defeat a minority Conservative government and make a case to the Governor-General that his party could govern with the support of others – and without another trip to the polls.

Until now, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has only said the party that wins the most seats on May 2 can “try” to win the confidence of the House of Commons. While the comment carried an obvious implication, he spelled it out for the first time Tuesday.

“Let’s run it right out so we’re all clear,” Mr. Ignatieff said in a live interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

“If [Conservative Leader Stephen] Harper wins the most seats and forms a government but does not secure the confidence of the House, and I’m assuming Parliament comes back, then it goes to the Governor-General. That’s what happens. That’s how the rules work.

“And then, if the Governor-General wants to call on other parties – or myself, for example – to try and form a government, then we try and form a government. That’s exactly how the rules work and what I’m trying to say to Canadians is I understand the rules, I respect the rules, I’ll follow them to the letter and I’m not going to form a coalition,” he said.

Iggy is technically correct, of course, but absent a coalition or an accord, a minority government that holds about 80 out of 308 seats would be vaporized in no time and the party in power would be crushed into dust in the ensuing election. So, he's lying, stupid or both.

The Grits are the most arrogant people ever to walk the Earth. They truly are vicious swine and honestly believe that they are entitled to rule irrespective of how few seats they actually win at the ballot box. And, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, this is what will ultimately blow up any formal arrangement with the NDP until the NDP starts picking the meat off of their corpses.

If you look at the negotiating points from the 2008-09 coalition/merger talks, you quickly notice that the Liberals were demanding huge sacrifices from the New Democrats while refusing to give them real power or responsibility. Since the alternative for the Grits was to vote with Tory minority governments until the end of time, which would annihilate their credibility as an alternative, they Dippers would have to be nuts to agree to that. And the NDP has always suffered every time that it has supported a Liberal minority.

If it comes down to defeating a Throne Speech or a big-spending Flaherty budget this summer, I don't see anything coming from it, simply because it isn't in Jack Layton's political interest. While Ignatieff might be a political neophyte, Layton would need to be borderline retarded to support the Liberals without getting a lot more from them than they're willing to give.

But the Conservatives have set a time-bomb for themselves that could blow them up the minute Parliament resumes sitting. That would be the Auditor General's G8 report, a leaked draft of which alleges that the Tories used summit and border security money to feather the nest of Conservative ridings in the area, particularly that of Industry Minister Tony Clement, and lied to Parliament about it. The Tories political flacks have been running around the country saying that it was only a draft that leaked and the final report will clear them, even though there's no way that they can now that. This is commonly known as lying, maybe you've heard of it.

If that final report is released and says essentially says the same thing as the draft, the Harper government is finished. At that point, you're getting awfully close to violations of the criminal law. The three opposition parties will have little choice but to defeat the government at the earliest opportunity, and I don't think that the country would mind all that much. You would then have a demonstrably criminal government, every bit as bad as the Liberals were in the darkest days of the Sponsorship Scandal.

Under those circumstances, the dynamics change dramatically. If the Grits are ever to win government, that would be their best chance to do it. And that puts Jack Layton in the driver's seat. Ignatieff is half-crazed if he thinks that the Governor General will allow a party with only 80 seats to take power under those circumstances, absent some sort of written guarantee that it could survive longer than a few weeks. Failing that, the GG could opt for an election, which a bankrupt Liberal Party would be destroyed in. At that point, Layton gets whatever he wants.

And you know what? That'll be, despite his obviously dishonest protestations to the contrary, the House that Harper built. He's hoping that if he lies enough to get through the writ period, the G8 report will just go away or he can spin it out of existence. I don't think that he can do that. I think that it will be explosively bad and his allowing his flacks to lie about it makes it even worse.

I've always said that if Harper doesn't win a majority on May 2, he'll announce his intention to resign that night. If his minority is defeated by his G8 shenanigans, he'll be eaten alive by his own party. Everybody in the Cabinet thinks that they're going to be Harper's successor, but none of them wants to wind up like poor Paul Martin did, holding the bag for Jean Chretien's scandal.

In more ways than one, Stephen Harper may wind up being the author of his own political destruction.