The Greens prepare for battle

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 5:28 PM - 5 Comments

Elizabeth May’s party picks up an enforcer off the waiver wire.

Hockey tough guy Georges Laraque has a history of pummelling opponents until they’re black and blue … Newly released by the Montreal Canadiens, the longtime hockey scrapper is now putting his efforts in service of the Green Party of Canada. Laraque will announce his plans to get involved with the environmental party at an event in Montreal on Saturday. A Green party official said he would not be announcing plans Saturday to run for the party in an election, but would be discussing other ways he will contribute.

Mr. Laraque has a well-won reputation as an aggressive partisan.

Ontario's $7-billion green energy investment upsets enviros

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 19 Comments

Last week, when Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a new $7 billion investment in the province’s green energy sector—perhaps the largest such investment in the world—he earned himself an unlikely adversary: the Green Party of Ontario. “We’d like to see the provincial government scrap this deal,” said Mike Schreiner, the Green leader, in an interview with Maclean’s.

The province signed its deal with a South Korean consortium, which includes Samsung. And at first glance, it seems like an environmentalist’s dream come true. The consortium is committed to developing 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power across the province (about enough to light 580,000 Canadian homes). In the process, it will create an estimated 16,000 jobs, 4,000 of which will be permanent. The goal is to make Ontario “the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America,” McGuinty explained.

That’s all well and good, says Schreiner, whose party celebrated the passing of the Green Energy Act last year. But “this deal essentially throws [Ontario companies] under the bus.” Ontario-based projects are shovel ready, he insists. “So why are we offering special deals to multinational corporations?” The Association of Power Producers of Ontario is equally upset. David Butters, the group’s president, says it’s not Samsung’s presence that bothers him so much as the preferential treatment that the South Korean behemouth is getting. Ontario has guaranteed Samsung a higher-than-market value for its energy and  priority access to the power grid. “Now we have two kinds of developers in Ontario,” laments Butters. “Samsung and everybody else.”

Consumers, at least, can take solace in the fact that the power they’re getting will be clean and green. But at a cost, say various critics. The province will shell out $437 million to the consortium, who in turn are investing the $7 billion. At the household level, that amounts to $1.60 a year, for the next 20 years.

'I'm mildly curious about my future'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 1:03 AM - 24 Comments

The phone rings 10 minutes past the allotted time and Elizabeth May apologizes. Seems she lost track of time after getting in late the night before after a weekend in Whitehorse. There she delivered a speech—to an overflow crowd, she says—and signed copies of her new book, Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy. She met with Yukon native leaders and took part in a fundraising dinner of Jamaican cuisine. And she held a press conference and conducted a workshop with young people on “water issues” and visited a community BBQ and invited locals to meet her for coffee at a bakery. “And I got to church,” she says.

And, in case you were wondering, carbon offsets were purchased—twice the necessary amount in fact—to counter any damage to the environment resulting from her travel. Continue…

The season in politics: a cheat sheet

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 13 Comments

Admit it—you haven’t paid close attention to federal politics over the summer. You’re so clued out that I could make some ridiculous claim, like saying the Liberal party’s boldest initiative of the season was sending its national director from Kingston to Ottawa in a canoe for some reason, and you might even believe me—which is absurd, because he was actually in a kayak. Sorry, Conservative Party of Canada: you had a good run but there’s no competing with that.

Autumn approaches. Let’s get you up to date. First things first: Stephen Harper is still our Prime Minister. You can tell because the country’s colour-coded Partisan Tirade Threat Alert remains set to Red. Continue…

Green Party Blues

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 10:51 PM - 14 Comments

Does Liz May really need this sort of hassle? Are these the battles the Greens should be fighting?

***

NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 1st, 2009

GREEN ACTIVIST AUTHORISED TO RUN AGAINST ELIZABETH MAY

VICTORIA — Today the Green Party of Canada officially authorised grassroots activist Stuart Hertzog to stand as a nomination candidate against party leader Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

“I’m pleased that the party’s Campaign Committee has bowed to the inevitable and allowed me to challenge their preferred candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands,” Hertzog said today.

The federal Council of the Green Party of Canada had decided that it would make getting the party leader Elizabeth May elected as an MP the primary goal of its upcoming election strategy.

Hertzog believes that this policy not only is strategically short-sighted, it also goes against the party’s consitutionally-protected principle of Participatory Democracy, in which those most directly affected by an issue must have a vote in any decision about it.

Continue…

'For the first time ever, the Green party of Canada has written a campaign plan that is fully detailed'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 8:35 PM - 34 Comments

And on the off chance that’s enough for you to take Elizabeth May seriously now, there’s more.

To upgrade her standing as a federal candidate May has been addressing other non-environmental issues by filing releases on her website, commenting on issues like Wafer-gate — when a New Brunswick newspaper alleged the prime minister slid a communion wafer into his pocket during a memorial service for a former governor general, in June.

Harper maintained that he ate the wafer, and the newspaper that ran the story has since retracted it and apologized, but not before May weighed in on the issue. While it might have been a matter of little interest to Green voters focused on environmental issues, Carr said it’s important that the party shows they aren’t a one-song band.

“Comments have to be made, and Elizabeth is great … she follows and tracks all the issues, and what’s really important is that people understand that the Green party is not a one-issue party, that we actually have comments and solutions to the full range of issues.”

Dear Andrew Coyne, not in my backyard

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 4:04 PM - 12 Comments

Dear Andrew Coyne,

Thank you for your column urging British Columbians to “light a candle for electoral reformers everywhere” by voting for the Single Transferable Vote, better known as STV. It was a riveting read, though the fact that it took almost three pages of the magazine to explain the concept gives one pause, don’t you think? And, no, we don’t think it an intrusion that you “being from another province and all” would wish to offer us advice. We’re quite used to that.

In fact, ‘I’m from Central Canada and I’m here to help’ is a sentence we hear quite often. We tend to respond thusly: “La-la-la-la your lips are moving but I can’t hear you!”

Resent your exhortation? Not a bit. But ignore it, that’s a whole other matter.

And ignore it we did.

Continue…

A vote that really counts

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 138 Comments

Dear British Columbia:

I know you’re kind of busy right now, and maybe it’s not my place, being from another province and all, but could I just ask you, on behalf of the rest of the country, to please vote Yes in the May 12 electoral reform referendum? I wouldn’t intrude, except it’s terribly important—important not just for B.C., but for all of us.

Because politics is broken in Canada, and electoral reform—changing the way we vote—may just be the key to fixing it.

Continue…

Oops?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 13, 2009 at 10:52 AM - 20 Comments

Someone I know on the Hill has been agitating for this to be flagged. I post it now both to bring an end to his incessant emails and to explain why I am otherwise hesitant to draw your attention to the latest poll numbers.

From some numbers released earlier this week.

Quebec voters, meanwhile, appear to be abandoning the Bloc since the last election while the Greens have seen a huge surge in the province (difference in brackets):

Bloc Quebecois: 22 per cent (-16)
Liberals: 24 per cent (0)
Conservatives: 17 per cent (-5)
NDP: 12 per cent (0)
Green Party: 26 per cent (22 per cent)

Elizabeth May held her last Ottawa house party

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 7:15 PM - 7 Comments

Green Leader Elizabeth May held her last annual Epiphany Party on January 6th in Ottawa. She is selling her home in the capital and will be living in New Glasgow, N.S., popping back to O-Town as needed.

May with CTV’s Rosemary Thompson (right).

Ottawa Citizen columnist Susan Riley.

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Megapundit: Where's our Obama?

By selley - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 1:25 PM - 15 Comments

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on race statistics; Lawrence Martin on finding a new Speaker; Doug Saunders on waiting for a European Obama; Greg Weston on Jim Prentice’s new job; Jeffrey Simpson on bailing out the Detroit Three; David Frum on the GOP’s bleak future; Don Martin on Elizabeth May.

Change we don’t believe in
Sure, the Liberal party will soon “change.” But neither it nor Canada, the pundits lament, will Change.

Ignatieff vs. Rae vs. LeBlanc is precisely the leadership race the Liberals needed, L. Ian MacDonald opines in the Montreal Gazette. For one thing, he says, “it will keep costs down at a time when the party is broke.” But more to the point, it means “amateur hour is over.” The only two legitimate candidates understand their goal is to “unite the party, fill its campaign coffers, and win the next election,” and nothing else. No young people; no new ideas; no funny business.

The Gazette‘s Don Macpherson also handicaps the race for the leadership, suggesting—weirdly, in our view—that “because of the unfortunate timing of the current leadership race, Ignatieff starts off his second run risking unfavourable comparison with the charismatic [Barack] Obama.” This is particularly true in Quebec, he argues, where election fatigue has set in and there’s nothing remotely novel about Charest vs. Marois vs. Dumont. Fair enough, but who’s Ignatieff up against? Rae and LeBlanc, and then Harper? Which of those three juggernauts is going to out-Obama Iggy?

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It's all about May

By Anne Kingston - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 6 Comments

For a glimpse of factions roiling within the Green Party of Canada, the events of Oct. 19 tell the story. That night, the party’s 26-person federal council sent out a release stating it had unanimously passed a motion confirming its full support for leader Elizabeth May. Only hours earlier, a petition calling for a special meeting to review May’s leadership had begun circulating among the 202 officers of election district associations, or EDAs. Meanwhile, another group was working on a plan code-named “Project June,” as in, “What comes after May?”

Much of this dissent stems from the election, a campaign May rightly calls a “watershed” for the party: the former activist muscled into the leaders’ debates, established the Greens as the fourth national party and upped electoral support by 41 per cent. Yet the true measure of political success—seats—didn’t materialize. May’s bold attempt to usurp Peter MacKay in Central Nova, N.S., proved quixotic. The party’s share of the popular vote, at 6.8 per cent, fell far below the 11 per cent that polls had been predicting a week earlier.

May expresses disappointment that seats weren’t won but frames the outcome more positively: “We’re the only federal party that actually received more votes in 2008 than in 2006,” she says. She boasts that the Greens bested the Conservatives in drawing an uptick in voters: “Mr. Harper won more seats [than in 2006] but had 150,000 fewer voters; we had 270,000 more people voting Green [than in 2006].” Ironically, such talk, with its focus on Harper, is precisely what has Greens signing performance-review petitions.

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Megapundit: Begin the wooing of Frank McKenna

By selley - Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 19 Comments

Must-reads: None. Okay, maybe James Travers.

Did somebody order a hero?
It will take more than bellyfire to lead the Liberal party.

Stéphane Dion’s decision to stay on pending a leadership convention is “a gobsmackingly bad move,” Don Martin declares in the Calgary Herald, predicting he’ll make an easy target for “gloating Conservatives across the Commons aisle while economic issues, which are hardly his forte, dominate parliamentary debate.” Dion may finally realize that “federal politics makes mincemeat of honest, high-road sincerity,” but he doesn’t yet seem to accept his own culpability in the Liberal collapse, says Martin. Given two years to “invigorate the Liberal fundraising operation,” “gel with his caucus and install a solid staff organization,” and “frame the Liberals in the centre with rational mainstream policies,” he did none of those things. The idea that he could help them do so as a “lameduck loser” is, therefore, laughable.

The Montreal Gazette‘s Don Macpherson speculates that Dion may be hanging on in anticipation of pulling a Trudeau—i.e., announcing his impending departure, engineering the defeat of the government and then marching to an improbable victory in the 41st general election. If that is indeed his intention, Macpherson advises he be disavowed of it at the party’s earliest convenience. His caucus has neither the money nor the patience to brook such shenanigans, and the various contenders for the crown—Macpherson has Michael Ignatieff as the favourite—would surely lead their troops in revolt.

Continue…

It's a fast train

By selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 6:32 PM - 7 Comments

Elizabeth May on our Green, glorious, incredibly fast future:

“When we really make history is when we get to Parliament, and we are able to change transportation policy in this country to ensure we have access to modern, high-speed trains,” she said in Kamloops.

“If we had access to Canadian-made Bombardier trains that people do in China and Spain and other advanced countries … the trip from coast to coast would be 18 hours instead of five days.”

You won’t find a bigger fan of high-speed rail than me. It’s the tops—the bees’ knees. A true high-speed line between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal would put the airlines out of business in two weeks, and we’d all wonder why the hell we hadn’t done it years earlier. And the Greens, to their great credit, are avid proponents such ideas.

But an 18-hour trip from Vancouver to Halifax? Well, It’s ambitious, I’ll give them that. May’s vision, assuming it followed the same route she’s taking on her whistlestop tour, would necessitate a coast-to-coast average speed of 353 km/h—a world record, and not just by a little. The current A-to-B speed record for conventional high-speed rail, according to the Railway Gazette‘s 2007 survey, is 279.3 km/h over a distance of 167.6 km. Vancouver to Halifax, on VIA Rail’s current route, is 6,531 km. I’m all for thinking big, but maybe we should start out in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal and see how it goes.

Megapundit: Tell another one, Uncle Gerry!

By selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 14 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on Gerry Ritz; Doug Saunders on the Eurabia hypothesis; David Olive on uniting the left; John Ivison in northern Ontario; Rosie DiManno and Peter Worthington on Afghanistan; Scott Taylor on Canada and the Caucasus; Konrad Yakabuski on Justin Trudeau; L. Ian MacDonald on what Jean Charest’s up to.

On the issues
Behold: all the things we’re not talking about!

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington is not impressed by the “tomb of silence” in which the Harperites have sealed all matters military: notably, committing to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 and replacing the outspoken Rick Hillier with Walter Natynczyk, who seems more shy about vocally “standing up for soldiers and reviving our combat character”—both of which, in Worthington’s view, seem to make the Prime Minister “nervous.” The army needs at least “an additional brigade,” he argues, and ideally to double in size, but recent events lead him to fear that “lethargy is again taking over before the military rebuilding job is done.”

“The yearning for peace in Afghanistan hasn’t dwindled,” the Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno assures us, but “there is growing disenchantment with NATO, which clearly can’t contend with a resurgent Taliban.” American troops redeployed from Iraq might be able to do the job, she argues, but “the whole point of NATO taking over responsibility of Afghanistan—besides justifying its existence post Cold War—was to put a multinational face, earnest and humanitarian, on the mission.” Due to many factors including the component nations’ inability or unwillingness to commit enough troops to combat duty, DiManno seems more or less ready to call that mission a failure.

Continue…

Megapundit: Begin the thawing of Paul Martin

By selley - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM - 3 Comments

Must-reads: Jeffrey Simpson on Canada’s place in the world; Don Martin on neglecting Alberta; Greg Weston on Stephen Harper’s RCMP detail; Dan Gardner on cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax; Rosie DiManno on Sarah Palin.

It’s the economy, Mr. Dion
To hell with carbon emissions, the pundits declare, as their stock portfolios emit a descending slide-whistle sound effect.

This campaign is quickly shaping up to be about the economy first and everything else last, Chantal Hébert writes in the Toronto Star. Thus, she argues—apparently in earnest—”if the Liberals were serious about reversing the tide of the election campaign,” they would rubbish the “original game plan,” send Bob Rae and the lingering stench of his term of Ontario premier back to Rosedale and “pull Paul Martin from obscurity.” Not the Paul Martin who’s the “failed prime minister,” you understand—he can stay retired—but the Paul Martin who’s “the most successful finance minister of his political generation.” We’re sure Canadians, and especially the opposition parties, would respect the distinction.

“Canadians now face the worst of worlds,” Thomas Walkom intones, also in the Star: “stubbornly high retail gas prices (bad for consumers); declining wholesale oil prices (bad for Alberta) and a dollar that, while falling against Asian and European currencies, is still high relative to its American counterpart (bad for Ontario).” And that’s before world financial markets go pear-shaped, he notes, which they may well in the near future. What we need in these uncertain times is “a government willing to use the levers of the state (including, but not limited to, deficit financing) to shelter Canadians from the destructive savagery of capitalism’s dark side,” Walkom concludes. Instead, we have Harper’s “blithe” approach, which is, he says, “singularly unnerving.”

The issue of whether to tax carbon and/or energy consumption and cut taxes elsewhere to compensate or to institute a cap-and-trade system “shouldn’t be cast as [a] left versus right” issue, Dan Gardner writes in the Ottawa Citizen, but rather, according to Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, as “experts versus laypeople.” So why does Stephen Harper, with his master’s degree in economics, find himself amongst the latter? Politics, says Gardner—the same reason, incidentally, that Dion’s Green Shift exempts gasoline. The consumer foots the bill under either system, he explains, but carbon taxation is much more efficient at properly allocating the costs. The sole advantage of cap-and-trade schemes, meanwhile, is that gas stations don’t advertise the direct cost to the consumer on giant signposts.

Continue…

These things always happen in threes …

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 9:20 AM - 5 Comments

First the Liberal plane was grounded in Montreal, now the Green Party has to cool its heels in Ottawa for a few unplanned hours: 

Media Advisory

September 16, 2008

 NOTE TIME CHANGE: Green Party leader Elizabeth May to unveil election platform in Halifax

 NOTE: The time of the news conference has been changed to Noon (originally scheduled for 10:00 AM) due to a security breach and canceled flights at the Ottawa airport.

So, NDP and Conservative tours — y’all feeling lucky?

A sorry shade of Green

By kadyomalley - Friday, September 12, 2008 at 3:59 PM - 15 Comments

From TVO’s suddenly hypertopical Agenda Blog:

UPDATE: I have spoken with Green Party Press Secretary Camille Labchuk. She says the party intends to issue an apology to the blogger known as Buckdog, who had been threatened with a lawsuit by Green Party communications director John Bennett for posting a link to Stephen Taylor’s YouTube video.

Labchuk said the incident “was a misunderstanding on John Bennett’s part about the way that YouTube works”. The Greens do not intend to pursue any legal actions against any blogger, Labchuk says.

There, was that so hard? Although honestly, I’m not sure what to make of the explanation behind Bennett’s initial overreaction to the clip, which was as bizarre as it was over-the-top . If he doesn’t understand how Youtube works, it might be best not to let him loose in Outer Bloglandia without supervision — and he shouldn’t be sending cryptic threats on behalf of his party without, you know, checking with someone first.

Canadian politics just cracked

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 5:05 PM - 37 Comments

Open, I mean. A little. First the Bloc, then the NDP, and at last the Conservatives have buckled, and now the Greens are in the debate(s). It’s not much, but it’s a start: the sight of the Green Party leader in the debates is going to give them instant legitimacy, of a kind they have never had before. A whole lot of people who had previously never considered voting Green are going to give them a thought. I don’t mean that everyone’s going to see Elizabeth May and be blown away by her: I agree with those pundits who say she might turn off as many people as she turns on. But just by standing on the stage with the other leaders, she and her party ascend to a whole new level. We are no longer in a three- or four-party system. We are now, and for the foreseeable future, in a five-party system.

As it was, more than 660,000 people trudged to the polls to vote Green at the last election. I say trudged, because every one of them went through the exercise of casting their vote in the certain knowledge that they would not elect a single MP — such is the ludicrous unfairness of our first-past-the-post electoral system. (A refresher course: Tories 5.37 million votes/124 seats=43,000 votes per seat; Bloc 1.55-million votes/51 seats=30K votes per seat; NDP 2.59-million votes/29 seats=89K votes per seat; Greens 664-thousand votes/0 seats=Infinity…) With the lift they will get out of the debates, and given where they are in the polls already, it is possible, even probable, that the Greens will pull more than a million votes this time out. Indeed, they may even outpoll the Bloc.

Which raises a couple of interesting scenarios. 1. Suppose the Greens manage to win a few seats. And suppose they have the balance of power in a tight parliament. The Greens are on record as supporting proportional representation. (So are some other parties, but the Greens appear to mean it.) Could this be the price of Green support? 

Or 2. Suppose the Greens, despite outpolling the Bloc, win no seats, while the Bloc comes home with — worst-case scenario — 30 or more. Could this absurd situation be maintained for long? A system that shuts out a party with more than a million votes — and particularly strong representation among younger voters — while handing a bushel of seats to a party dedicated to the country’s destruction?

It’s not quite a Green Revolution, but this may go down as a historic day in Canadian politics.

Green Party, Andrew Coyne, Joe Clark, 66% of Canadian people: 1 – Shadowy Broadcasting Consortium: 0!

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 2:46 PM - 16 Comments

Colleague Wells has the deets.

The Gang of Three is dead! Long live the Menage a Cinq!

LetElizabethSpeak.ca

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 9:24 PM - 16 Comments

The inevitable website. And petition.

First we take Central Nova—Liveblogging Elizabeth May's press conference

By kadyomalley - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 4:26 PM - 17 Comments

4:26:15 PM
Yikes, that was almost – but not quite – a liveblogging fiasco: I accidentally showed up at the National Press Theatre instead of the Charles Lynch, which may sound like a fine distinction to the rest of you, but was a two-block rain-soaked run for me. In bad shoes. With wolves after me.

Luckily, I made it just in the nick, so let’s get started, shall we?

Continue…

Democracy takes a beating

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 4:02 PM - 99 Comments

“Here we are, day two of the Canadian election, and democracy is already taking a beating!”

– Elizabeth May, a few minutes ago

Just when you think Canadian democracy has plumbed the depths, just when you think it can’t possibly get any more Third World-ish: we now hear that the Green Party leader is to be excluded from the televised debates. What regulatory body decided that she should be barred from participating in the single most important event of the campaign? Those peerless arbiters of the public interest, the broadcast networks. Well, they had help: they consulted with the other party leaders.

Got that? The right of the Greens to put their case before the people — and more important, the right of the people to hear their case — is to be decided by the very people with the most obvious vested interest in excluding them: the competition. At the same time, a vital question of electoral fairness has been, effectively, privatized, hostage to the networks’ calculations of what would make for “good TV.”

There are two conclusions that should be drawn from this. One, as a matter of immediate alarm: one way or another, the cozy little broadcaster-major party cartel has to be cracked open — the Greens have already announced their intention to take the matter to court. And two, it is long since past time this matter was taken out of the hands of the networks, and entrenched in the election laws. Continue…

Megapundit: Governor, you're no Dan Quayle

By selley - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 2:28 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner and John Ibbitson on Sarah Palin; Don Martin on the election trail.

When’s the next bus back to Juneau?
The pundits continue to make moosemeat… sorry, mincemeat, of the would-be vice-president.

“Presidents who can find places on maps are a mixed blessing,” George Jonas writes in the National Post, and presumably vice-presidents too—i.e., because they might accidentally invade the place in question. And all this talk of lack of inexperience on Barack Obama’s and Sarah Palin’s part betrays a woefully naïve understanding of how politics works, Jonas argues. “Dental hygienists need experience. Presidents and tycoons learn on the job. … What you want to be is a quick study.”

Palin “wasn’t picked for her foreign-policy resumé, she was chosen for her narrative, for her story,” L. Ian MacDonald writes in the Montreal Gazette: beauty queen “marries high-school sweetheart, has five kids,” the last with Down’s syndrome, thus buttressing her pro-life credentials; becomes mayor of small town, then “takes down the sitting governor from her own party in a primary, and sweeps the state in a general election,” shortly thereafter cancelling “bridge to nowhere” that John McCain “often cites as the worst example of political pork in Washington” (an oversimplified chapter but a compelling one, MacDonald says). We’re pretty sure everybody already knew this.

Also from the Department of the Painfully Obvious, The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson explains that McCain chose Palin to bulwark support among leery social conservatives and women, and that so far it’s been a more successful gambit among the former than the latter.

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