You should guess once this campaign starts that some of our blogger acquaintances on the other side of the political spectrum would try to find some information out that they hope would cause Dion and the Liberals some embarrassment. Chief among those is Steve Janke, who’s been attempting to be a Blogging Tory super sleuth the past couple of years and hoping to find a story he can fling mud at the Liberals in the hope it will stick - the Garth Turner emails to folks inviting them to attend the Town Hall with Dion in Halton a couple of weeks ago and Steve trying to claim Mr. Turner was doing something not within the rules being the most recent example.

So his latest attempt at this is trying to embarrass the Liberals by saying they’re going to be flying an aircraft that is releasing more GHG then their political rivals.

I sent in a note to some folks at the LPC, and the reply was that they are buying carbon offsets for all campaign travel to neutralize the associated emissions. The company they are using to do that, in case Mr Janke was wondering, is CarbonZero, a Canadian carbon offsets company that helps consumers and businesses neutralize their emissions through offset projects located primarily in Canada.

Travelling by airplane is a necessary evil in Canada during a political campaign. The Liberals have recognized that and are doing their bit to offset that pollution. What would be interesting to know is if the Conservatives are buying their own carbon offsets for THEIR GHG pollution.

Maybe Mr. Janke can use his investigative skills and get back to all of us with an answer on that.

(H/T Stageleft for pointing out the Janke post)

UPDATE @ 10:25 am: Red Tory provides a link to Carbon Zerio if you wish to check them out.

Christian Conservative, better known now as Andrew Prescott, riding president of the Guelph Conservative Party, has finally resurfaced a week or so after his cover was blown, with a blogpost bemoaning “gotcha politics”.

I find it rather ironic he’s moaning about gotcha politics when he engaged in it first. You might remember he got ticked off at a post done at Far and Wide and decided to blurt across the internet Steve V’s identity. Actually, let me change my first sentence: I find him extremely hypocritical.

Not only that; he’s missing the point entirely. First, he hid or tried to hide his association with the Guelph Conservative Party. Even on Gloria Kovach’s picture site, he was listed as a mere “volunteer”, rather then that he was a bigwig in the Conservative Party.

Secondly, you’ll note he protests in that blogpost of his about his disclaimer where it says his views don’t necessarily represent those of the Conservative Party. Again, He’s missing the point; The point is not whether his views represent the CPC’s views or not - the fact is he threw a big stone when he lived in an even bigger glass house. I might also add it just shows once again that Conservatives love flinging and smearing the mud around, but when it gets thrown back in their face, they cry and whine about it.

UPDATE@5:08pm: Jeff over at Where’d That Bug Go also responds to Andrew’s hypocritical blogpost, with his own take.

I’m not going to get into a detailed synopsis of Stephen’s blogpiece like Red Tory did - more like a rant - but I’ll say more or less the same thing that RT did:

There’s nothing “emotional” amongst the “left-wing” about calling for due process to be followed and insisting that rules of evidence and constitutional rights to be respected.  I didn’t realize those concepts are alien and foreign to Conservatives, but apparently, thats the case. Quite frankly, it shouldn’t have anything to do with “left vs right”. If Conservatives claim they are for the rule of law, then they too should be calling for Khadr’s return to Canada, as Jonathan Kay just did in the National Post recently. Stephen claims to be a libertarian Conservative; I see no evidence of libertarianism in anything he’s written on the Khadr topic so far.

On a side-note, I also get a chuckle out of his article where he claims that conservatives act on what they know to be true. Right - their inactivity on global warming in the face of all scientific consensus - even to outright denunciation of those scientific facts - plus claiming that statistics showing crime going down isn’t right because they “feel” its a problem, shows real-time evidence on that, eh Stephen? Those are 2 examples I can use - among several others. That claim is laughable; I can only presume he put that line in there in order to make his Blogging Tory readership feel good about themselves.

The bottom line is this: we in Canada are the only Western country left in the world that refuses to repatriate its citizens from Guantanamo and still laughably claim that Khadr is being treated well and that the legal process down there is fair - this is still being claimed by the Conservative government and its supporters even after the US Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise. Harper and his bunch are being shown for what they are - Bush clones for their attempting to ignore constitutional rights and human rights.  I’ve no doubt if he thought he could get away with it, that Harper would be trying to set up military tribunals up here and remove Canadian constitutional protection from people accused of these offences - all in the name of national security. Their attitude with Guantanamo and more or less claiming they believe the tribunals down there could handle things better then the Canadian court system up here (in essence, being afraid Khadr would be found innocent) is direct evidence of that.

The only thing I can say for Stephen’s piece is he’s writing it mainly for his Conservative Kool-Aid crowd’s benefit. It befits a blog article on the Blogging Tory site - it would be insulting the intelligence of Canadians if it were appearing in a mainstream media newspaper article.

UPDATE@6:10 pm: Red Tory in a new blogpost goes after the specific arguments of Taylor against repatriating Omar Khadr.

Ok, I’m not sure what makes me more worried - the fact that there are Blogging Tories going around photographing reporters and trying to use who they socialize with in their off-time as proof there is a “liberal bias” in the media, or that the majority of the conservative commentators on the said blog are congratulating the blogger for doing what they did and bravely asserting this proves the liberal media bias (most from folks who decided to bravely remain anonymous, I might note).

At least Stephen Taylor to his credit got on there and said this was rather unsettling and didn’t show any proof at all of this supposed bias. I’m thinking though he may have more of these folks with like mind running around on his blogroll then he would care to admit. You might wanna tighten up the membership requirements over there, Stephen.

UPDATE@11:43 pm: Red Tory discovers more evidence of the sinister plot by the MSM to infiltrate Conservative ranks and become moles - they hang out with known Conservatives!  I expect we’ll hear calls from the horrified Conservative bloggers for a Royal Commission on blogger/journalist ethics.

The server I’m on had a bit of a hiccup yesterday, meaning I was offline til sometime this AM. Anyhow, once back up, I took the opportunity to upgrade the blog to Wordpress 2.6, which is out a month early. Mostly administrative improvements, but I like the changes they’ve done, which you can watch a demonstration of via Youtube video.

UPDATE: I think I’ve discovered what’s causing the excessive spam capturing of Wp-Spam Free from trying to apply it to Vijay Sappani’s blog, where I help him with admin. stuff. It seems to not like anyone who is not a registered user on here leaving comments. If you’re registered (or if I’ve forced it to take comments by adding them from the admin menu) then it has no issues. So, for now, I’m disabling that plugin at his site and at mine and informing the WP Spam-Free plug-in author that this might be the cause of the issues we’ve had with overzealous spam blocking.

Who says nothing happens on a Sunday?

- Zytaruk’s audio tape on Harper over Cadman gets more publicity, with another audio expert seeming to contradict the Cons 2 paid experts that doctoring as conclusive (he says it isn’t).

- Even the right-wing press out in Calgary are calling for Omar Khadr to be repatriated.

- We find out that it seems it’s the Cons. who are spending all the money on the East in an effort to win seats and votes, with hardly any money going to the West (do you see that, John Murney, and Grumpy Voter? I expect blogposts full of outrage from you comparable to the stuff I see from both of you regarding the supposed evil money-stealing Green Shift, when we have actual documentation of the Cons. doing the EXACT thing you decry right now).

So, LOTS went on today. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I was away to Turkey Point enjoying some boating with my parents and my aunt and uncle and speanding some quality time at their cottage.. so I missed all that til tonight.

Oh.. and as I said in my last post’s update… posting seems to have worked fine with just the anti-spam plugin turned on.. so I’ve turned on the cache plugin, and will continue to turn on new plugins each post until I get complaints from someone saying they get an error posting a comment, and I can try to isolate what plugin is conflicting with the anti-spam one. So again, if you try posting a comment and get an error of some sort or a rejection from wp-spam free (even if cookie and javascript are on or get turned on) email me and let me know.

My spam-free plugin is still being very erratic with allowing comments on here. Some people it gives no trouble with,others it does, and it doesnt seem to matter if they have cookies and javascript on or not; it still wont let them post. The next day though on a new blogpost I do, sometimes it gives them no issue and they can post stuff with no trouble. So, I’m turning off ALL other plugins on here as has been suggested to me in the spam-free docs, and I want to see if I can isolate which other plugin is causing a conflict, which is what I believe it is.

Please leave some “test” comments here and see if the thing allows you to post. If it doesnt.. give me an email. If we go thru a period where things are being allowed to post comments on here without difficulty.. I’ll start turning on my other plugins, 1 plugin at a time and try to isolate the conflict.

UPDATE@10:54pm, Sunday July 13: We seem to have had no problems with posts being rejected by legit folk, as I’ve received no complaints and I’ve seen a lot of posts. So, I’m turning on the cache plugin first to speed up the site and also to see if all is well with that plugin.

I thought I’d point out this article by David Graham who resides in Guelph and is also the Liblogs blogging aggregate coder. He was on hand in person to watch Stephane Dion’s appearance in Guelph yesterday, where he drew a very nice crowd and from what David says, a pretty good response. That would seem to be backed up by Steve V who also witnessed the event and came away suitably impressed by what he called “Dion’s authenticity”.

You might also note in David’s blog article the rather dismissive tone the local newspaper, the Guelph Mercury, did on Dion’s event, and which continues at their local blog, which is here. Steve over at his blog also felt the Mercury reporter there was a bit hostile at Dion, which is why Steve made the amusing remark that she seemed to have read the National Post’s drivel and then re-asked the question to Dion.

Regardless, some good blog reporting of the event by 2 bloggers who were there. (I should also note that Joseph Angolano, my sometimes guest blogger at this site, was also there and came away suitably impressed by Dion’s performance).

Hi folks.. on a rather unsettled Sunday weatherwise, I thought I’d do some testing of a specific plugin I use called Wp-Spamfree, whose button you may have noticed at the bottom of my my 3rd sidepanel where I keep my buttons/logos.

It apparently has been overzealous in preventing some of you from posting even when you turn on cookies and javascript as it requests. The author of this plugin believe there is a conflict with another of my plugins, and the main suspect right now is the AJAX Edit comments plugin, which allows users to edit their comments up to a specific time limit. It uses Ajax as it says, which is a derivative of javascript, and hence the main reason it’s the prime suspect for conflict.

So.. if any of you are bored, leave a comment here at this posting or at some of my other postings prior to this one, where you may have tried to leave something and had it zapped. Let me know if turning off the Edit comments plugin is all of a sudden allowing you to post comments again if it wasn’t before.

If it’s still refusing you, or gives you an error even with your javascript and cookies on, send me an email.

UPDATE - June 30, 2008@12:59pm: It appears I’ve had other users trying to leave comments getting the same problem of the site not allowing them to post even with Javascript and cookies on - and this with Edit Comments still turned off.. so I dont think that is the problem. I have seen a new update for the spam plugin come out.. so I’ve upgraded to that one, and I’ve discovered a plugin in my list that also uses Javascript, so I’ve turned it off and we’ll see if that combo means legit users get the same problem.

I’m only posting this here because not everyone reads the announcements box at Prog Blog’s webpage and because not all affiliates are on Facebook to receive the invitation. After some lengthy discussion and feedback, we have set a date for the 3rd Annual Progressive Bloggers get-together/BBQ for Saturday September 13 starting at 2 pm in Unionville Ontario, at Vijay Sappani’s place, who kindly offered to host the event again this year. When it ends is an open question - I believe it was well into the night last year before everyone left. If the event is like last year, you’ll be well fed and well taken care of by Vijay, who received very good reviews as a host (particularly for his spicy chicken he served).

Along with the Prog Blog affiliates who are invited, there may be some special guests dropping by as well - we’ll see. If you’re interested in attending, but aren’t on Facebook to have received those directions, please drop me an email, and I’ll be happy to give you directions to Vijay’s place. You can also drop Vijay a note to ask him for directions or if you have any questions by heading over to his blog and leaving him an email there.