Just to give the rope a final twist. Stephane Dion launches a whine offensive;

Asked about the polls, Dion lashed out at Harper for a campaign of character-assassination against him that has misrepresented him and his policies.
“Never has a government spent so much to destroy a person and his policies as Harper has towards me,” Dion said during a campaign event in Stoney Creek, Ont., just outside Hamilton.
He said the leaders’ debates Wednesday and Thursday will allow him to reach out to voters and illustrate that neither he nor his policies bear any resemblance to the picture painted by Harper and his party’s aggressive attack ads.
“I think Canadians are dying to vote Liberal,” he said.

Update! – I was actually joking about this with a friend a few moments before the story came up on the Star, in a “Dion goes Lizzy May” angle… “Liberals urge strategic voting to stop Conservatives”.
Bwaaahaaahaaa!

Via Newsbusters

In addition to the daily tracking poll changes shown earlier today in the Readers Tips, the weekly tracking poll results are now in and here are their effects on ΔVe: Angus Reid 8.68 » 11.59, Ipsos Reid 8.71 » 9.92. Here is the Vitruvius’s Experimental Election Predictor graph updated for the last week:

CBC post-debate panel declares a “draw”, which is your strongest evidence that it was a resounding win for McCain.
Currently at Drudge: WHO WON THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?…

MCCAIN 66% 145,769
OBAMA 32% 71,275
NEITHER 2% 5,001
Total Votes: 222,045

Before his blog was deleted.
Heh. This is so much fun.
Update – Truthers eating each other’s young!

For up-to-date info, I’d suggest The Corner. I’m sure that Glenn Reynolds will have something going on too.
Throw any suggestions for Debate links into the comments. Remember, one beer per “uh…uh” from Obama.
Me? I’m watching football. Go Bombers!
Cheers,
lance

Unveils Vancouver Centre Pilot Project.

And Truther!
More – “She was upfront about her views in a 2002 column headlined Get The Truth. You know, the one where she wrote how the Jews with offices in the World Trade Towers got advance warning of the terrorists attacks. Yeah, that one.”
Jay Currie has this Smoking Gun Update!

Thursday on the 3rd floor of Mondragon (91 Albert street.) for 7:30 PM, featuring Author, Media Critic Barrie Zwicker & Fromer CBC jounalist, Editor of Canadian Dimension (www.canadiandimension.com) Leslie Hughes will be discussing 9/11.
This is a prime location to get together and plan possible actions for the anniversary

…gives you the cold shoulder, you know the dream is dead.

The Hack asks GPC members if they think she’s helping their party.

Political Staples wonders who picked September 24th as the day May would throw her party under the bus.

Now, what about that GPC-LPC alliance that was downplayed, vociferously denied and indignantly shot down by GP bloggers? I guess advocating that your supporters vote for someone else (cough, Dion) doesn’t really count, eh?

Elizabeth May, activist . . . sometimes politician.

Update: Oh and isn’t this just delicious, Why Green is NOT a wasted vote – GPC website.

Cheers,
lance

Update – this didn’t take long.

Rusty Shackleford has turned his attention (and his skills) from bringing down jihadist websites to investigate the origin of the Palin smears;

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.
Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.
It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign.

It’s a long and detailed post. Don’t be surprised to see this story break through to the mainstream.

Since when did “cowboy” become an insult?
h/t

For the last five years I’ve been experimenting with a Canadian Federal election results predictor, a detailed description of which can be found in the Vitruvius’s Experimental Election Predictor essay at The Sagacious Iconoclast blib, and which is defined as follows:

Here is a graph of V_e for the run-up to the 2008 federal election to date, currently showing the Conservative Party of Canada hovering around majority territory. I plan to update this graph from time to time between now and October 14:

Here is a graph of the history of V_e for the last five years:

As the “future of civilization as we know it” goes under the Liberal campaign bus;

“I’m still worried about his dog Kyoto though, will his poor little neck be strong enough to hold up the fake reindeer horns?”

*

“The tape is intact“.
Heh.

“Though I know I should be wary,
Still I venture someplace scary;
Ghostly hauntings I turn loose …
David Orchard! David Orchard! David Orchard!”

Related – This appears somewhat …. unofficial?
h/t maz2

What part of “you have idiots infecting your communications strategy” do they still not understand?

In offering rapid apologies, the Conservatives seem to be attempting to limit damage to the campaign and maintain control of the messages.
That’s a marked difference from Mr. Harper’s first and unsuccessful campaign in 2004, when Tory official Yaroslav Baran issued a news release suggesting that then-prime minister Paul Martin supported child pornography. The release was withdrawn, but Mr. Harper refused to apologize and the issue festered for days.
Mr. Baran was not suspended for that stunt and is now running the Conservatives’ Ottawa war room, where he was Sparrow’s supervisor and is in charge of the team that oversaw the website.

Good grief.
They don’t know their audience. They don’t know the tech side. And they don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.
What on earth are they still drawing paycheques for?
Update – “Fact Check”, in the comments writes;

“Your complaints of immaturity would be more believable IF YOU WEREN’T SOLICITING, AND I QUOTE, “LESS FOREST GUMP, MORE TEAM AMERICA” ON YOUR OWN FRIGGIN’ SITE! The rule is that if you go neg, it has to be believable, and your attack just ain’t believable.”

You know, if this comment hadn’t been posted from a Falun Gong associated IP address, the statement is dumb enough to raise suspicions that it originated in the war room itself.
Do they not understand the difference between an unaffiliated individual and a political party trying to make the case that they deserve majority control of Parliament?
That, in essence is the problem with notaleader.ca
It should not exist at all – it’s juvenile and ridiculous, it taints the brand and suggests that the first letter in CPOC is “clown”. It’s why you leave the “South Park” conservativism to the blogosphere. No one has to answer for us. We’re not running for office.
Meanwhile, how much have they spent on those ads aimed at reinventing the image of Stephen Harper?

Do you get the sense that today we witnessed Stephen Harper whitewash a fence?

(Lots of commentary at The Corner this morning to start you off.)
Watching live now as Obama waits for his intro at an event intended to be about education, arms crossed, looking irritated and tired. puts on a smile at the last moment.
He’s not taking responsibility for ill-chosen words, he’s firing back at the McCain campaign and the news media for a “manufactured controversy”. (Really? He didn’t notice the raucous laughter from his parisan audience when he said it?) Says that “enough is enough”. Cool. Which will ensure it remains high in the news cycle.
Good move, rookie.
Update –

“Keep in mind, technically, had I meant it this way, [Palin] would be the lipstick. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig, just following the logic of this illogical situation,” Obama said.”

The sound you just heard was the wail of Obama campaign advisers plunging their Blackberries into their hearts.
(The ones who survived this, that is.)

It’s a Palin Derangement Disorder epidemic.