Apolitical Staples

So, can someone please explain the symbolism of the horses to me?

And 10km on the bike and a 2.5km run took quite a bit less time than I thought. It took me 20:21 on the bike and 15:30 for the run for a total of 35:51. I am pretty confident that I can bring that time down pretty quickly as well since this is the first time I was on a bike, stationary though it was, since the fall and my legs weren't liking it too much. It shouldn't be too hard to shave at least a minute off of that time in the next week or two. The running can be improved marginally as well. When I do running only my typical pace is about 11 km/h where I was closer to 9.7 km/h last night - that should improve.
Another positive note is that I am not too sore this morning. I certainly can't try it again tonight but tomorrow I should be ready to get back on the bike.

Training for a Super Sprint Triathlon. That would be a 400m swim, 10km on the bike and a 2.5km run. Now that I can consistently do a 27 minute 5K (without fear of heart attack) it is time to push things a bit. I am not much of a swimmer so naturally I won't start there (in my twisted mind there is logic to that - well that and my gym doesn't have a pool) but I see how hard it is to do 10km on a stationary bike and then 2.5km on the treadmill. I have no frame of reference for this kind of thing so I really have no idea how long it will take. I am guessing it will take somewhere around 45 minutes but I'll find out soon enough.

So I haven't actually ran on the treadmill for a couple of weeks due to a pulled gluteal muscle (in laymans terms I had a pain in the ass) and I've opted for the elliptical in the meantime. I got brave last night and gave the full-on running a go. 27:28 - that would be a new personal best thank you very much. It goes without saying that my legs aren't very happy with me today.

BTW, let me dip my toe in the water. If I were a democrat I would be supporting Hillary Clinton. There is not much to choose between her, Obama and Edwards in what they say but the Clintons have a way of triangulation that moves them to the centre. Edwards drives me crazy with his class-warfare B.S. and Obama time is coming but it is not now. I hope all their protectionism is just for party consumption because even though Canadians seem to love Democrats their anti-trade positions would be bad for us.

If I were a Republican I would be supporting Mitt Romney. The guy has tonnes of executive experience. In the private sector through Bain Capital, through bailing out the Salt Lake City Olympics and his being the Governor of Massachusetts. I can't stand John McCain - George Will said it best on an ABC panel, McCain is an angry man. See the above on the Democrats for why I don't like Huckabee. Fred Thomson has not lived up to his promise and there is something about Guliani that rubs me the wrong way.

But I am not American so everything I've jsut written is irrelevant. But that is nothing new for me.

And it ends with a wimper.
As you can already tell, I have nothing to say. Politics is dead to me.
The time I used to spend blogging I now spend at the gym. As I said to some friends on the weekend - both you and I will be healthier for it.
Who knows the future will hold but for now I am far more focused on my new personal best on the 5K treadmill (28:21, I know, not great but I've shaved off 6 minutes in 6 weeks) than anything going on in Ottawa.
So, for now, I am now Apolitical Staples.

Here are the latest numbers from Strategic Counsel.

Conservatives: 32 per cent (-2)
Liberals: 29 per cent (-2)
NDP: 16 per cent (same)
Green Party: 13 per cent (+5)
Bloc Quebecois: 10 per cent (-1)

Ms. May is doing cartwheels this morning.

As you can tell from my lack of postings, nothing is really getting me going right now on the political front. The whole Schreiber-Mulroney thing leaves me pretty cold and I just don't feel compelled to pay attention to it.
This, on the other hand, does get me going,

...Karlheinz Schreiber confirmed for the first time Tuesday that foreign interests and money were involved in the campaign to unseat Tory leader Joe Clark at the 1983 Progressive Conservative convention.
Mr. Schreiber told the House of Commons ethics committee that the money he used to help arrange and pay for jets that transported anti-Clark delegates from Quebec to the convention in Winnipeg came from himself, the chairman of Airbus Industrie, the late Franz Josef Strauss, and Mr. Strauss's party, the Christian Social Union.
At that historic convention, Mr. Clark did not receive the support he was looking for in a leadership review, opening the door to a leadership race, which was won by Mr. Mulroney.
“The money came from myself, and from the Strauss family and probably from the [Christian] Social Union,” said Mr. Schreiber, adding the amount he contributed was about $25,000.

This fall Stephane Dion claimed that Canadians did not want an election and, as such, the Liberals abstained from voting against the government. This week he claimed that Canadians would probably want an election in early 2008. With the latest from Harris-Decima, which the Canadian Press' Rob Russo characterized as firming support for the Conservatives and softening support for the Liberals (on CBC Politics last night) one wonders if Dion's magic eight-ball is telling him the Canadians don't want an election, again?

Conservatives: 36%
Liberals: 28%
New Democrats: 16%
Greens: 11%
Bloc Quebecois: 8% (I am guessing)

And the Liberals just two points up in Ontario. Remember folks, this is Harris-Decima, the firm that has consistently provides the lowest number for the Conservatives.

then I would signing up on this project on the pronto. A leadership review in the Ontario PC party is required after how poorly John Tory faired in the last campaign. I don't have anything against John Tory on a personal front, he seems like a pretty good guy to me, but that is not enough. This was the person responsible for the disastrous Kim Campbell campaign, lost in a mayoral bid to David Miller in Toronto and has not lost to Dalton McGuinty. Three strikes and your out. Or at least if I was a Progressive Conservative...

Check out these leadership numbers from the newly renamed Nanos Research (good for Nik Nanos, by the way).

The most trustworthy leader
Stephen Harper - 31% (-4)
Jack Layton - 14% (-4)
Stephane Dion - 12% (-8)
Gilles Duceppe - 6% (-2)
Elizabeth May - 4% (-4)
UNPROMPTED
None of them/Undecided - 33% (+21)

The most competent leader
Stephen Harper - 39% (-2)
Jack Layton - 13% (NC)
Stephane Dion - 11% (-11)
Gilles Duceppe - 6% (-2)
Elizabeth May - 3% (-1)
UNPROMPTED
None of them/Undecided - 27% (+16)

The leader with the best vision for Canada's future
Stephen Harper - 35% (-4)
Jack Layton - 15% (-1)
Stephane Dion - 15% (-6)
Gilles Duceppe - 3% (-2)
Elizabeth May - 5% (-2)
UNPROMPTED
None of them/Undecided- 28% (+15)

With numbers like those it is no wonder that Stephane Dion wants an immediate election (and as a blogging note, what is the sarcasm font anyway?).

And I all have to say about this was expressed so well in the chorus of Cake's, Nugget. Search it out, it is worth it.

Why was Mulroney so broke? The excuse for him taking the $300,000 (could have been up to $500,000) was that he was in a desparate financial situation upon leaving the PMO. But here is a guy who a significant six-figure salary for 9-10 years, who had his house and meals paid for while he was Prime Minister (even while he was Opposition Leader for crying out loud), so he would have made somewhere in the range of a million-and-a-half dollars over the decade in power without any significant expenses. How did he lose all that money?

This whole Mulroney-Schreiber affair remains an "inside the Queensway" fascination which is illiciting little more than a shrug from people who are not paid to care about these things. Here are the latest polling numbers from Ipsos-Reid.

Conservatives: 39%
Liberals: 29%
New Democrats: 15%
Greens: 8%
Bloc Quebecois: ~8% (guessing from the total above)

This is funny.

Not coming up with the strategy to bring down the government before the next budget.

...Stéphane Dion's federal Liberals are constructing an election scenario in which they would try to defeat the government in February, before the Conservatives can deliver another budget, according to party strategists, officials and MPs.

...According to some of his advisers, Mr. Dion believes his best hope of defeating Mr. Harper will come in a head-to-head contest when the two are likely to garner relatively equal media attention and have the same campaign funds at their disposal.

Sorry but I find this pretty amusing.

Conservatives: 36%
Liberals: 28%
New Democrats: 17%
Greens: 11%
Bloc Quebecois: 8%

..."I think what we're really seeing this week is that the efforts of the opposition parties to really kind of reset the agenda away from those initiatives and on the Mulroney-Schreiber hasn't really taken."
Anderson said the poll found that Canadians aren't convinced that the Harper Conservatives are the same as the Mulroney Conservatives, and voters don't connect Harper with the scandal.
Asked whether the Conservative party today "is essentially the same as the Conservative party led by Brian Mulroney or pretty different," 60 per cent of respondents said pretty different.

via CTV (h/t NationalNewswatch)

...Scientists have made a startling breakthrough that allows them to "reprogram" ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells.
Stem cells are considered the body's ultimate master cell, able to become almost any other kind of cell, such as heart or lung cells. They have thus been called "pluripotent," meaning they have the ability to differentiate into other cell types.
Until now, the best source of stem cells has been from cloning cells from discarded human embryos. But the use of embryos has been fraught with ethical questions. Now, two new studies suggest there may be an easier way.
Laboratory teams working on two continents have both been able to publish landmark studies on the use of skin cells to create pluripotent stem cells that look and act like embryonic stem cells.

So I've been fooling around at the Political Compass website and little to my surprise, being in the Libertarian Right quadrent, I've discovered that I'm politically homeless. I am as right as the Conservative Party on the economic scale but pretty far from them on the social scale. And since there is no major Canadian political party on the Libertarian Right it comes to down to which scale is more important to me, the economic one or social one. On the social scale I am a bit of a contradiction - I live my life in a style that most would call socially conservative but I don't believe that the government has a role on the social scale so I am not in the same camp as social conservatives. I share their views on certian issues - mainly abortion. It may be splitting hairs but I come at it from a different angle. I fundamentally believe in the libertarian aphorism "your right to swing your fist stops at my face" and since I believe that fetus is a human being it follows that abortion is a radical swinging fist. By the same token the aphorism puts me in the whatever two people agree to is none of my business hence I am on the Libertarian side of the social scale.
Being a individualistic kind of guy I think the government can do more damage to me and my family on the economic scale so when weighing the social vs. the economic the economic scale comes out on top.
When I look at the political compass of other western democracies I see I would have a home in other countries. If the authors of the website are to be believes the Danish government is pretty much where I am and in the UK I would be a Liberal Democrat though I would be just as much in the wilderness ;)

Aside: Some in my family believe that Stephen Harper is evil and that Hillary Clinton is a godsend. Funny thing is that they occupy almost exactly the same political space. By the same token maybe that means I should be a bigger fan of Hillary Clinton than I am ;)