It seemed like an innocuous remark. During question period on Wednesday, Environment Minister John Baird gave a little shout-out to an aboriginal delegation in the spectators’ gallery, who had been on hand earlier in the day at the announcement of a big conservation project in Canada’s North.
But that’s a big no-no. Only the Commons Speaker can recognize visitors in the gallery, and MPs who have done the same in the past have been banned from speaking in question period for 30 days. Baird got off with a warning, though.
Even more extraordinary, however, was how that remark provoked Stéphane Dion. The Liberal leader started wildly waving to the aboriginal delegation, pointing to his own chest with both hands and arguing that Baird was trying to take credit for something he himself had done when he was environment minister. “It was me,” he shouted upward to the aboriginal leaders, who looked a bit perplexed by all the gesturing. Then Dion started barking at Baird, saying all the work on the conservation project had been done before Conservatives came to office and “you only had to sign your name.” Observers on both sides of the House averted their eyes at the outburst.

It’s not often that one witnesses a lapdog turn on a Liberal. That was the Toronto Star.
h/t reader Sammy

NY Sun;

President Sarkozy of France is on the verge of a breakthrough in his ambitious plan to wean his country off the restrictive working practices he believes stand in the way of national prosperity.
Yesterday, the strike of rail and subway workers that has crippled France for nine days was clearly crumbling, as workers began returning to work in large numbers and union branches conceded that support for the dispute is collapsing.
“We think a dynamic of return to work has begun,” Julie Vion, a spokeswoman for France’s state-owned railroad network, SNCF, said.
Union leaders began to concede defeat yesterday. “We have to face reality. Since yesterday’s negotiations, things have changed. The strike is no longer the solution. The strike strategy is no longer winning,” a leader of the Sud union representing Paris underground railway workers, Philippe Touzet, said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

More at Captains Quarters and Powerline – “the right man at the right moment.”

It’s hard to think of something that could top the trashed offices in the Saskatchewan Legislature left behind by a departing NDP administration – unless it was the stuffed wolf/coyote that incoming Premier Brad Wall found waiting to greet him.
Let that sink in for a moment, while I try to find photos.
(SDA Flashback: As I once said – the apple doesn’t fall far from … the apple.)

You think you know poverty? Let me tell you about poverty;

“We were the last in our neighbourhood to get a TV, the last to get a
car. My parents had headaches about how to pay for the house.

There only two choices for a young threadbare Stéphane – the coal mines or four years in Paris.

In Liberal hope bubble news…

Fallout from the Brian Mulroney, Karlheinz Schreiber affair does not appear to have hurt Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, a new poll suggests.

And this as a Decima poll.

Give me a sec – I’ll think of something.

“CNN ran out of time and used me to “close” the debate with the pearls/diamonds question. Seconds later this girl comes up to me and says, “you gave our school a bad reputation.’ Well, I had to explain to her that every question from the audience was pre-planned and censored. That’s what the media does. See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That’s politics; that’s reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America–and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question.”

RTWT at Gateway Pundit.
They call it the Clinton News Network for a reason.
More here and here – digging deep for those undecided voters!

Dan Baril asks a pretty good question;

Mr. Schreiber can’t have it both ways. On the Fifth Estate, the $300K is reportedly in connection with Mr. Mulroney’s alleged role in greasing the Airbus wheels, yet in Mr. Schreiber’s most recent Affidavit it’s for greasing the wheels of light armoured vehicles and pasta processes. Which is it?
If the $300K is for Mr. Mulroney’s role in greasing Airbus, why is Mr. Schreiber asking for that money back in paragraph 41 of his Affidavit? Did the Airbus deal not proceed as planned, with some $20 Million in additional commission payouts?

Read it for yourself here.
h/t to reader Rich.

The Godmother gets.

This may turn out to be worth the price of admission:

Only this time there would be no settlement on the courthouse steps, as in 1997, when the government apologized to Mulroney and his family for calling him a criminal in a letter to Swiss authorities, and acknowledged there had been no case against him in the first place. As for “the settlement,” as in the $2.1 million, that’s just one more example of shoddy journalism in this case. The settlement consisted of the apology; the $2.1 million was in costs ordered by an arbitrator, the late judge Alan B. Gold, to cover Mulroney’s legal and public-relations fees. He never saw a nickel of it. (When Liberal whip Karen Redman accused him of lining his pockets with public money, she was fortunate to have said it in the House, under immunity from a libel suit. Were she ever to repeat it in the foyer, he would sue her down to her socks.)
In rolling the Airbus tape all the way back to Air Canada’s acquisition of the A-320s back in 1988, Mulroney knows perfectly well there is no problem in it. He was never involved in the file. And the Air Canada procurement process was transparent and clean. All the airline executives, who would have testified to that in 1997 are still alive, and would be happy to do so again.
No, the story gets interesting in 1995, with the letter to the Swiss, with journalist Stevie Cameron being a confidential informant for the Mounties, with the first exposé on the Fifth Estate.
Here’s where the tape stops. Mulroney wants to add new players, “elected officials … as well as journalists.”
Now there’s something for everyone in the political village to think about.
Elected officials. That would be Jean Chrétien and his chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, and his senior advise,r Eddie Goldenberg, and his director of communications, Peter Donolo, and the clerk of the Privy Council, Jocelyne Bourgon, and the then-Solicitor- General Herb Gray, and the former justice minister, Allan Rock, and all their officials.
What did they know about the Airbus hoax, and when did they know it. What were their motives, then and later? Was it a diversion from the fact they had almost lost the country in the 1995 referendum? How about Shawinigate, the Auberge Grand Mère loan files, and the naked abuse of power by Chrétien in the case of François Beaudoin?
But here’s the kicker: “as well as journalists,” meaning all the journalists, particularly from the Globe and Mail and the CBC’s Fifth Estate, who have been working this story for the last 12 years, not just the reporters but their bosses. Mulroney would put them all in the box, and journalists and editors aren’t allowed to protect their sources at commissions of inquiry.

And then there’s the strange circumstance of former Trudeau cabinet minister Marc LaLonde ponying up bail for Karlheinz Schreiber. Curioser and curiouser.

The Mulroney – Schreiber media frenzy is less a scandal in waiting than it is a speculation-driven Liberal hope bubble. It’s too old, the basis too flimsy, the source too compromised, too little money is alleged to be involved, but most important of all – it’s already been investigated.
And then there’s the involvement of journalist/police informant Stevie Cameron. If ever a scandal had an Achilles in heels…
But I do like Mulroney’s idea.;

After a tough and lengthy battle against these false and horrendously libellous accusations, the government of the day had to admit that they had absolutely no evidence to support them, and apologized to me and my family. In addition, they had to reimburse me of all my legal and other expenses.
Twelve years later, the same people at the CBC and at certain other media organizations who were at the origin of the 1995 accusations are still conducting their vendetta. Last Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that he needed the counsel of an independent third party to advise him on the course of action to follow after new allegations were made in an affidavit filed by Karlheinz Schreiber from his prison cell where he is detained pending the execution of an extradition order confirmed twice by the Supreme Court of Canada.
I will fully co-operate with the special adviser soon to be appointed by the Prime Minister, but I have come to the conclusion that in order to finally put this matter to rest and expose all the facts and the role played by all the people involved, from public servants to elected officials, from lobbyists to the police authorities, as well as journalists, the only solution is for the government to launch a full-fledged public commission of inquiry which would cover the period from 1988 to today.

(Caveat – so long as the Globe, the CBC, CTV, and the Liberal Party of Canada are presented with the bill should he again be cleared.)
But, whatever. I come not to praise Mulroney – my fondness for everything Progressive Conservative finally evaporated with the Bristol Aerospace CF-18 contract – but to provide you a dedicated thread.
Stay on topic.

Via Jim Bobby Sez

From the comments;

Dion was on TVO tonight, Paiken’s show, and said something like: ‘I was in PEI when things were looking bad for Premier Graham against Bernard Lord’.

Pelosi to the rescue;

… introducing a bill which would essentially cripple the surge—which is having success—have an arbitrary date of withdrawal, regardless of how close America is to achieving success, and doing it in a way which is sort of ignoring reality. She’s operating as if this is November ’06, when she wins the House and the war is going badly, and not November ’07, when everything has changed on the ground. There was a report in the New York Times today that al-Qaeda’s been driven out of Baghdad. That’s a big story, completely ignored by Democrats who have only one mantra, which is Defeat and Withdrawal.

And not a moment too soon!

An important sheik from an Iraqi province had a reunion on Thursday with some Vermont soldiers at the state National Guard headquarters.
[…]
“We would like to express our appreciation to the National Guard and to the state of Vermont.’’ […] “Today in this state … we present this victory … to the families of the victims of the soldiers in Iraq … and specifically express our appreciation to the state of Vermont.’’

This is how campaign ads are done.

h/t

It was a moment that crystallized Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggles in Tuesday night’s debate. Questioned about a plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, Mrs. Clinton at first seemed to defend it, then suggested she was against it, until finally, pressed for a direct answer, she accused the moderator, Tim Russert, of playing “gotcha.”

Heh. “Mulls Supporting Illegal Alien Pilot License”.
Fallout on Hillary’s bad night.

Calgary Herald;

Premier Ed Stelmach faces either his “finest hour or his final hour” beginning today as the Tory chief embarks on a strategy for Alberta’s oil and gas royalties, one of the most important public policy decisions confronting government in years.
It starts tonight when the rookie premier appears in his first recorded television address, laying out his vision for the province and briefly touching on the royalty review that has sparked an emotional debate across the province.
Stelmach will then unveil Thursday afternoon in Calgary the government’s much-anticipated royalties strategy, released more than a month after an expert panel proposed hiking royalties to ensure Albertans get a “fair share” from the development of publicly owned energy resources.

I’ll bet we have oil industry readers who have opinions/predictions/observations to share. They’re welcome in the comments.

Michael McCullough;

After the fundraising scandals of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, the dangers of vacuuming cash from a politically inexperienced immigrant community should have been obvious. But Ms. Clinton’s money machine seized on a new source of cash in Chinatown and environs. As the Times reported, a single Chinatown fundraiser in April brought in $380,000. By contrast, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry raised $24,000 from Chinatown in the course of his entire campaign.
Oh, it starts off very, very well. But by the end of the story, the Washington Post demonstrated its editorial-by-committee policy and allows Hillary to play the race card: The alternative, the campaign says, would be to prevent those with foreign-sounding names from participating in the political process.

Foreign names like “Charlie Trie”, a Chinese busboy from Little Rock;

[…] able to tap into millions of People’s Republic of China dollars for Clinton’s defense fund and even brought in a major Chinese arms dealer, Wang Jun, as a guest to the White House. Only four days before Wang Jun’s White House visit, the Clinton Administration granted an import permit for a Chinese military front company, Poly Technologies, to allow them to import over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition to a Detroit company, China Jiang An. China Jiang An also had close ties to the Chinese military.

More – Somebody’s trying to keep Hillary from winning the nomination. And it’s not a Republican.

Swallow like a man.
That’s my prediction.
Open thread on the throne speech.
I’m in a deliciously mean-spirited mood, so watching a CBC alumnus read this is sweet, though I swear I just saw her husband try to claw fabric off the arm of that chair.
Reaction from Liberal leader Stephane Dion:

This is one great campaign ad.

(Well, except for the spelling error on “Camsack”. There went the election….)