More embarrassment for Helena Guergis

Not only does Ms. Guergis have rather poor manners at airports, it seems her executive assistant has been astroturfing for her:

Simcoe-Grey MP Helena Guergis's executive assistant has apologized for sending letters to several Ontario newspapers, written under a different name, and highly complimentary of her boss.

After being questioned about the letters on Tuesday, Jessica Craven first tried to deflect questions from the Enterprise-Bulletin. Hours later, she admitted to writing them, and then offered a formal apology to "anyone that may have been offended."

That apology extended to her boss, who Craven said did not know she was writing letters to newspapers, or that she signed them Jessica Morgan, which is Craven's married name.

From the Collingwood Enterprise-Bulletin. Of all people, she ought to know better, given that her husband ran into trouble some years back for his creative use of staffers.

Rubin: Expect a new peak for oil next year

They aren't making any more of it, so this should come as no surprise:

What does $80-per-barrel oil say to you?

Three years ago, it would have told you that global oil markets were at record tightness. Back then, the U.S. president was making a personal pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to vainly plead for more production. And economists were worrying about the implications for global economic growth.

Today, it seems the goalposts have suddenly moved. After filling up on $4-per-gallon gasoline only two Memorial Day weekends ago, today’s $2.20-per-gallon average gasoline price doesn’t seem so expensive to American motorists anymore.

And suddenly, $80-per-barrel oil is no longer seen by the Saudis as threatening global oil demand, but is instead viewed as a minimum price for their nation to invest in new supply. And as far as my fellow economists are concerned, we’ve heard not even a peep from them about what these types of oil prices may mean for the global economy in the days ahead.

But how much longer can the world pretend that it won’t soon be facing another energy shock, one every bit as challenging as the one it faced two years ago?

From the Globe.

Religious extremists arrested in Michigan terrorist plot

And guess which religion this time? Hint -- it's not Islam:

Nine members of the Christian militia group Hutaree have been indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. Attorney in Michigan announced this morning.

"Six Michigan residents, along with two residents of Ohio and a resident of Indiana, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence," according to the government's press release, which you can read in full below.

Source (h/t Blaque). It should be noted that the "weapons of mass destruction" referred to are "Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles", which seems bit of a stretch (it's a far cry from nuclear or biological weapons). Still, this is serious business, and requires serious action on the part of the authorities.

Spectacular high altitude photos taken with homemade balloon

Amazing:

Robert Harrison used his ingenuity and a collection of cheap parts worth just £500 to take the spectacular shots using a Canon camera which he launched 35km above the planet's surface.

The 38-year-old father-of-three has launched 12 High Altitude Balloons since his hobby started in October 2008.

From the Telegraph, via DailyKos.

Manitoba NDP back on top: poll

A new Probe Research/Free Press poll puts the NDP back at the top of the polls by a narrow margin:

NDP 42 per cent

Tories 39 per cent

Liberals 11 per cent

The province-wide omnibus telephone survey was taken between March 8 to 25 among a random and representative sampling of 1,003 Manitoba adults. The results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

Thing is, the margin of error appears to be greater than the gap between the parties (though rounding might figure in the published results), so the NDP can't rest easy just yet. And another thing stands out:

Probe found that outside Winnipeg, fully one-half of rural voters back the PCs (51 per cent, up from 49 per cent in December), while support for the NDP has slipped from 39 per cent to 32 per cent.

In vote-rich Winnipeg, the NDP continues to have the support of 49 per cent of decided voters (down slightly from 52 per cent in December), while the PCs now sit at 32 per cent support (up two per cent from December) and the Liberals remain unchanged at 13 per cent. There are 57 seats in the Manitoba legislature: The NDP has 36 seats, the PCs 19 and the Liberals two.

In the short term, this is good news for the NDP, since a decline in rural support won't cost them very many seats (they don't hold very many of those seats anyway). However, if the Liberals start to surge back, things could change considerably. Fortunately, I doubt Jon Gerrard is the guy to do that.

Also, the timing of the poll is unfortunate, since it straddles last Tuesday's budget. I'd be interested to see the results of a poll conducted entirely after the budget came down, to see if it had an impact on public opinion.

Detainee scandal update

While we're waiting for a retired judge hired by the Tories to determine if the documents that a majority of Parliament has demanded can be safely released, the Cons have released 2600 highly redacted pages of material. A few interesting things have emerged:

The newly disclosed reports include an incident in 2006 in which an Afghan soldier strikes a bound prisoner in the back of the head with a rocket launcher; a nudge-and-wink admission by one Canadian soldier that Afghan counterparts “don’t necessarily follow our policies on detainee handling if you know what I mean”; and allegations by one soldier being treated for post-traumatic stress that detainees handed over to Afghan authorities were taken behind a building and executed.

All of the incidents are deemed unfounded by military investigators, but the documents also show a disturbing trend of front-line soldiers and senior military officials keeping their own police investigators in the dark and even threatening them at a time when sensitivity to how Canadians treat and handle their Afghan detainees was at its highest.

In January 2008, for example, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall reports that a military policewoman was grabbed by two unknown assailants at Kandahar Airfield as she was leaving the shower one night. They “grabbed her arms, pushed her against the shower wall and told her: ‘MPs mind your own business.’“

Even after the troubled Canadian detainee transfer system was first exposed in mid-2007, there was a “preference to keep MP (military police) from advising and investigating rather than adopting a transparent and proactive approach,” according to a Feb. 27, 2008 report by Provost Marshall Capt. Steve Moore.

From the Star. Nothing to see here, move along. Equally interesting is this:

An apparent slipup in the federal government’s censoring of Afghan detainee documents shows Ottawa is using its black marker to hide potentially embarrassing information, a military and information law expert says.

Under pressure from opposition parties, the Harper government made public 2,600 pages of heavily censored records on the detainee controversy this week. It insisted that civil servants, not Conservative staff, decided what to keep secret – only withholding information judged to be injurious to national security.

But in one instance, a description of rebellious activity by detainees is apparently blacked out in one portion of the 2,600 documents but inadvertently disclosed in another section. It’s presumably the result of diverging censorship decisions by separate officials.

The sentences in question describe how detainees began testing and challenging their Canadian captors in early 2008. Prisoners are held in a short-term Forces detention facility before being transferred to Afghan authorities.

Oopsie. What's interesting about this is that it's pretty hard to see why this should have been redacted; it's not going to help your average Taliban dude. In other words, to nobody's surprise, stuff is being redacted that doesn't relate directly to matters of security (except perhaps Stephen Harper's job security).

Still more right wing madness

It's escalated:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A Nashville man says he and his 10-year-old daughter were victims of road rage Thursday afternoon, all because of a political bumper sticker on his car.

Mark Duren told News 2 the incident happened around 4:30p.m., while he was driving on Blair Boulevard, not far from Belmont University.

He said Harry Weisiger gave him the bird and rammed into his vehicle, after noticing an Obama-Biden sticker on his car bumper.

Source. No information on whether the alleged assailant has any direct connection to teabaggers, but I bet he's a fan of the same media that they are, at the very least.

Incidentally, there's an update in the story of the bullet that broke a window at the office of a Republican member of Congress:

Police said a first floor window was struck by a bullet at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday. The building was not occupied, police said. A preliminary investigation determined that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window at a downward direction, landing about a foot from the window. The bullet had enough force to break the windowpane but not penetrate the window blinds, according to a news release.

From here, via bluicebank in this DailyKos thread. As someone else points out further down that thread, it's really difficult to target a bullet that's fired into the air like that, which makes it much less likely that Cantor's office was targetted. Then, still further down, we find this:

As you say, that's one hell of a shot -- if done with a firearm. I'd like to know if there is powder residue or rifling on the bullet, because this is not so difficult to do with a direct shot from a wrist-rocket.

Actually, the presence of powder residue or rifling might not prove anything either, because it's not too hard to fire a bullet and then pick it up and fire it with a slingshot... and that could conceivably have been done by someone on either side (Dems wanting to send a message, or Repubs wanting to make it look like the Dems were in on the bad behaviour too). More likely than either of those, though, is a stray bullet; that happens a lot in many American cities.

One thing that some people have pointed out is that an awful lot of the teabaggers you see at those rallies are quite old, which reduces the likelyhood of them being at serious risk of becoming violent (James Wenneker von Brunn notwithstanding). However, they're making an active effort to recruit folks who carry guns professionally. The Oath Keepers are soldiers and police officers who have vowed to resist orders that they consider to be unconstitutional, and that could be really dangerous. Think of all the shell-shocked veterans who are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq; a lot of them are going to be very disgruntled with the government, and they know how to shoot. While a military coup and/or civil war is far from certain, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility...