Yesterday, the parliamentary/prime ministerial calendar was starting to come into focus. It's still a bit blurry but, with the news today that the Prime Minister's Peru trip to attend the annual APEC summit will have him out of the country from Nov. 21 (a Friday) to Nov. 24 (a Monday), ...   more »

The United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Erika Feller (left), gave a speech in Fairfax, Virginia today that contained this remarkable and sad statistic: There are more than 1.6 million children around the world who have become separated from their parents or guardians and, worse, even ...   more »

With the announcement this afternoon that U.S. President George Bush will host leaders of the G20, including Canada, in Washington on Nov.... PMO types are saying sometime in the next two weeks for this although the buzz around Ottawa is that a new cabinet will, in fact, be sworn in at Rideau Hall on Monday, Oct. 27.

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Mr. McCain referenced Mr. Murtha’s comments in his third stop of the day [in Pennsylvania], at Robert Morris University here, when he said, “I think you may have noticed that Senator Obama’s supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately.”... “And you know, I couldn’t agree with them more,” he said, to silence, and then wandered around in a verbal thicket before finally managing to say, “I could not disagree with those critics more; this is a great part of America.”   more »

Here's one that looks interesting -- it's a quick five-week course from Stanford University professor Martin Lewis called "The Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections."... I'm going to check out Donald Kagen's course on early Greek civilization; Ben Polak's introduction to game theory; and John Merriman's history of modern France.

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... and they all are men -- white men -- from famed New York investment bank Goldman Sachs who, for no clear reason, seem to end up playing key roles in central banks and finance departments around the world, a phenomenon which gets a fresh look from Julie Cresswell and ...   more »

Hunter was the dude that put Mott the Hoople on the map and, on this record, released in 1980 and recorded over seven sold-out nights in beautiful, downtown Cleveland, he resurrects Mott the Hoople's most famous track "All the Young Dudes", the David Bowie-penned anthem that speaks to all of us who think we're just too hip to be cool.... Strangely enough, for someone who thinks The Clash is, in fact, the greatest band of all time and prefers, say, the 1980s smart white funk of The Talking Heads or The Gang of Four to, say, long-haired white guys in Grand Funk Railroad and The James Gang, I'm hard pressed to identify a terrific live record that wasn't made by, well, long-haired white guys.

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Based on the preliminary data up at Elections Canada's Web site this morning: 10 MPs with the highest vote totals and highest vote totals for the Libs, BQ, NDP and Greens.    more »

Josée Verner is the Conservative Heritage Minister. She is her party's candidate in the Quebec City riding of Louis St. Laurent. But Verner lives in the riding of Portneuf-Jacques Cartier, the only riding in the country where there is no Conservative candidate and that is where, according to the BQ, ...   more »

I can't remember where I first heard this but it made enough sense to me that I used it in a speech I gave when I was 15-years-old:

"Bad governments are elected by good citizens who don't vote."

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