You're probably right. There is just so much spite involved in this stimulus thing — "You want us to spend money? Got the dagger at our throats, eh? Well, just watch us spend this sucker, baby!" — that I'm impressed they spent anything on Opposition ridings (or at least ones with big Opposition margins).

My word, you Harper apologists are all over the place on this one!

"Nothing to see here, move along!"
"What's the big deal anyway? That's just politics baby!"
"It's the media's fault! The big bad media! They hate us! Waaaaah!"
"Liberals did it too!"

Which one is it? Frankly I've come to expect better message discipline from you guys (perhaps we need to go back and carefully reread our talking points, regroup and come back more focused? Hmm?)

Sincerely,
Disappointed.

"Liberals did it too!"

… and would do it again if they had the chance.

I'll start worrying when instead of investing funds in Canada and Canadians, the party in power starts diverting and misappropriating money to their own party, ie. ADSCAM.

Agreed. It all seems so high schoolish to me.

The Liberals seem to be regressing in more ways than one.

As noted elsewhere, you conservative folks need to get your story straight on all this graft.

We have Tony Clement saying all the money is being distributed equally and Tory ridings are not being favoured.

We have John Baird quoting Jean Chretien as justification for favouring Tory ridings.

We have some in the blogosphere trying to say there reasons for the favouratism, i.e. differing needs of differing ridings.

And then you have the Prime Minister admitting that the money is not spread evenly but justifying it not by the needs of the ridings but by simpley and arrogantly saying Tory MPs worked harder than Liberal MPs to get that pork into their ridings.

I think if the Prime Minister and Baird are admitting that the money is not spread evenly, you can stop trying to convince the world that favouratism isn't happening and start trying to unapologetically excuse Harper's most massive broken promise so far just as the PM does.

Smitherman and the Municipalities are not going to say anything to get them in hot water with this overly partisan bunch that might get the tap shut off for funding… they're just trying to cover their tracks.

They are entitled to their opinions.. but the facts (and more importantly the numbers) speak for themselves; doling out of the stimulus funds is predicated by partisan/porkbarrel considerations and also what helps the Cons get re-elected.. not on the good for the overall country.

As to cooperating with anybody, I presume you are being almost barbarically sarcastic.

Heh… I'll try to be more civilized with my sarcasm, but your instincts are probably right. The Liberals can't have it both ways – either the Tories are ham-fisted clods with all the subtlety of a herd of elephants, or they are cunning manipulators who managed to slip their alleged patronage stealthily past the watchful eyes of the municipalities and provinces.

Speaking of interesting numbers from the CBC, here's this weeks poll.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/10/21/ekos-po…

but the facts (and more importantly the numbers) speak for themselves

Indeed they do. For RinC in Ontario, the subject of the Globe's hit piece, for Toronto there were 130 applications for RinC funding. 118 were approved, over 90%.

Perhaps you could point out where the partisan bias or pork barrelling was when not a single one of these ridings are held by a Conservative.

Definitely a one-two "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" thing. "Mr. Speaker, I ask the Minister this: is he too incompetent to allocate the monies fairly, or is he completely unethical?" I agree with Danby below that these are both paradigmatic critiques of any government and might register with the big public for that reason; seems to me Blamo, above, has probably hit the nail on the head, though to my mind the really big problem is not misallocation of funds but the whole idea of shoveling money out a truck. I don't know who's more to blame for that being the flavour du jour, the parties that insisted on it or the party that embraced it with open arms. It reminds me of the reconstruction of Iraq.

Sorry about the "barbaric sarcasm" line, btw, I just couldn't resist the idea that barbarians (not that you are one) would be more sarcastic than civilised people.

Ted,

I believe that you believe this is "the most massive broken promise!!!" Just as I believed all those partisans believed every other over-hyped faux scandal as being truly scandalous. It comes with the partisan territory.

Just like in "cartoon bird gate", "wafer gate", "wearing too soft looking a sweater gate", "bad black humour gate", "giant ceremonial check gate",

the efforts to elevate, hype, expand every shortcoming, slip , what-have-you, into something that will seriously damage the CPC,

is partisan, not populast.

The public wasn't outraged: a small number of liberal supporters and their friends in the media were outraged, and tried to make the public outraged in story after story. Not saying the CPC is perfect. But the attempt to portray them as political monsters is well past the expiry date.

Wow! A 4 pt swing in favour of the Liberals!

You're right! That IS interesting!!

"Don't feel particularly bad for the unemployed…" ~ Stephen Harper.

Yep, he cares. Deeply.