… to all my readers and friends.

Stephane Dion’s first public statements to the Bali forum did not mention Canada or the Conservative government by name, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out who he was referring to when he said that those governments who advocate all-or nothing plans on climate change are doing a recipe for failure:

“It’s certainly not enough to say, ‘I will do something only if the others do something,”‘ Dion said. “The good philosophy is to say, ‘I will do the most I can and I ask you to do the same.”‘

Of course, this recipe for failure is designed that way on purpose by the Cons. Their hardliner position is to try to make sure no agreement is able to be agreed to among developing and developed countries. We see that today in their balking at setting goals and targets for the year 2020. The most newsworthy thing Environment Minister John Baird has done since getting to Bali is arguing in quite a physical way with a David Suzuki foundation representative at a party thrown by the environmental groups, and then deciding to stand up at the last second an environment presentation open to the public which he was supposed to be the keynote speaker at, which caused the Canadian youth delegation to walk out in protest. Maybe the fact that actual members of the public would be there to grill Baird on Canada’s stance gave him cold feet.

In other news, this little blog entry by Jason Cherniak is a rather intriguing teaser of a post. I’m curious if Dion has an announcement of his own to make, or if Jason somehow managed to get to Bali. Others in the Liberal/Progressive blogosphere are also wondering what Jason was hinting at, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

This is a few days late after the fact, but an event I didn’t think we’d ever see has come to pass. Warren Kinsella’s site now has permalinks to his blog commentary, so anyone can now directly link to all those musings that seem to get someone into a lather or an uproar on a daily basis. Not only that, he has RSS feeds enabled as well!

The other thing I like is the new spiffy look for his blog. My compliments on the changes.

When the right-wing Sun Media newspaper chain finds Rachel Marsden too extremist even for their tastes, you know there can’t be any other explanation then this (if you’re a fan of hers, that is).

Of course, the other explanation is that even the Sun knows when the line of decency has been crossed.

I said I wasn’t probably posting on here till Sunday unless I saw something that riled me up. Well, something has.

If you were to consider yourself an investigative blogger trying to delve deeper into a story, there are several options you could choose to do right now. You could investigate the Conservative campaign funding issue and see just how many MP’s and candidates were involved in this potentially embarrassing story for the CPC if they’re ruled in the courts to have violated election laws; you could investigate the Surete De Quebec police admitting to have planted agent provocateurs in the protesters at Montebello; you might even take a look at the Camp Okutta video from Warchild Canada and look into the ways children around the world are forced into becoming child soldiers.

Or, you could be like one supposed Blogging Tory sleuth, completely ignore all those and instead rant and rave over whether appropriate safety measures were taken into account in the making of the video, and continue to do so even after you’ve been contacted by the organization and assured all safety measures were in place, and that the gunfire and explosions were CGI animated. (Note: I wont link directly to the blog in question to get it more traffic; I’m linking instead to Red Tory’s withering blogposts on the attempt to make a mountain out of a molehill).

It wouldn’t happen to be a matter of trying to discredit the organization and by extension the President of the organization merely because Dr. Hoskins is a high-profile Liberal candidate running against Diane Finley, now would it? Would I be paranoid in being suspicious of a Blogging Tory masking a partisan attack and suspect a bit of serving self-interest behind what seems a silly exercise on his part?

I do look forward to the expose on the other issues however. I’m sure those will be got on with equal fervor and zeal once this non-event dies out

Professor Greg Elmer of Ryerson University, who is also the Infoscape Director & Bell Globemedia Research Chair at Ryerson, alerted me to this new study seeing just how “partisan” bloggers in the Canadian political landscape are. Greg and I first met at the “Bloggers Room” last December at the Liberal Party Convention - he had been invited to the action partially I think to blog about us bloggers who were covering it and for research into the political blogging phenomenon. He had a few good chats with us, and he was also featured prominently in CPAC’s coverage of us at the Convention as well.

I won’t make any conclusions myself on the report; the only thing I will say is that I questioned Greg about how they came to decide who the “Top 20 Most Influential Bloggers” from each political blogging group looked at was, since that’s who they wanted to look at to be able to narrow it down and to use as research. His answer was that “It was an aggregation of three indicators: 1) total number of posts (over 3 months) 2) total number of comments, and 3) recommendations from other bloggers (partisan blogs: Liblogs, Blogging Tories, etc)”.

Of course, you can probably figure out my reply to him was that the research group should have taken into account blogging site traffic - which would have been the best factor of all in determining who was well-read. His reply is fair - blogging traffic is more or less private info and hard to get unless a blog publicizes it or is willing to give it out. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of bloggers would have given the team those #’s if they knew it was for a research project, and particularly since the report they’ve released don’t even mention the blogs in question that they looked at.

Anyhow, the Infoscapelab report and their findings is here. Feel free to leave feedback, as I’m sure he’d like some input back.