enThrall Promotions

It's no shame to admit that I am a bit of a blogwatcher. Of my Google Reader feed, three sites are webcomics (or comic commentary - a shout out to the Curmudgeon!), three sites are "humour", and four are in the miscellaneous bin: an Edmonton foodie blog, Seth Godin's marketing insights, a guy annotating the downfall of the Sun chain of newspapers, and a friend. The other 11 are political blogs.

They skew quite left. I find the commentary more to my taste, of course, but I also find them without the mean spirit I tend to find in many righter writers. I find them more light-hearted and, at times, downright funny. Impolitical is about as vicious as my lefty choices get, and I enjoy a good double dose of Calgary Grit and Dave Cournoyer. Manufactured News and M n M don't post nearly often enough, and I have given up on Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying. The Grandinite is the most intelligent and insightful blogger I follow, mainly because he has a way of framing economic isuues in a way that this indifferent Econ 101 student from 1991 can grasp.

I also follow Angry in the Great White North (note the emotional indicator in the title). At first, it was to keep some balance in the issues I encountered on the lefty blogs when the Enlightened Savage was on hiatus. However, I was drawn in by his command of pertinent detail. I'll get a righteous cloud of steam up over some latest Conservative folly when AitGWN says, "But what about this?" and I'm forced to stop to reconsider.

AitGWN has Ignatieff in his crosshairs again, as the Liberal Party figurehead. He builds a convincing argument among people who don't know any of the players: Iggy was acclaimed by the Liberal money men without an election among the rank and file, but he seems to fold like Dion in confrontations with Harper and he is refusing to muse over a fall election that the Liberal strategists seem to be planning. He's also having trouble building his brand. (Call me, Warren.)

Does it really matter? AitGWN claims that Rae saw this coming and backed out to let Iggy be the fall guy for this doomed election run. However, Warren Kinsella claims that the Liberals are both ready and willing for a fight, so the wind could blow the other way for AitGWN's beloved Tories. (I wonder if he's aiming for a Senate seat?) The Liberals still has a significant party base in the east, and the Martinites might have been purged by now to let the Chretien-istes to come back and hold up the standard. Wouldn't this failure reflect as poorly on them as it would on the guy at the top? I think the Libs are in it to win it.

I just hope the election isn't fought over a sweater. When you let the Tory war machine define the battle, we get puffin poop and coalition crap. Let the old Liberal war horses do their job to make Iggy palatable to the shaky Ontario and Quebec ridings and keep ignoring the west - they also have the ability to slap back when it gets dirty, which the Harperites excel at and the Martin/Dion people fumbled for years.

We'll just have to wait another ten years or so before the younger guns start talking about "listening" to us again, but it might be worth it. The Chretien years were quite productive for this country, all entitlement scandals aside.