Good morning, folks! Today's looking rather overcast and cool - a beautiful combination during the summer, assuming rain isn't involved - so I'm gonna get this thing done early and head outside to walk around in the weather. Let's begin!

• Last night, Andrew Coyne pointed out the "diabolical" schemes of Stephen Harper that have just been uncovered by the Liberal Party of Canada's website - and let me tell you, this is downright scary! </sarcasm>
  

  I am not making this up. "Since the beginning of this election," the Liberal press release warns, "Stephen Harper has run a stealth campaign. Mr. Harper is an articulate right-wing, anti-choice candidate who holds radical conservative views and is willing to patiently employ 'an incremental approach' to realize his makeover of Canada and its Government."
  
  An incremental approach? You mean, if we elect this guy Harper, he'll take things slowly, cautiously, one step at a time, not plunge the country into revolutionary chaos? You mean, we might have to elect him again, and again, before he could realize his fiendish master plan? My God! Why weren't we told sooner?

  Need more evidence that the Liberals are falling apart? From Andrew's National Post column:
  

  [T]here is nothing novel or threatening in Mr. Harper's pledge that these issues would be subject to free votes rather than by government legislation. Nor does his position in this regard differ to any great degree from that of the Prime Minister.
  
  What is new, what the media have not yet wrapped their mind around, is that the free vote, until now the exception, is about to become the rule. This is certainly the case if the Conservatives are elected -- as the Liberals constantly remind us, these are the Alliance-Conservatives -- and is alleged to be the position of the Prime Minister. In such a changed institutional setting, individual MPs should not be faulted for sharing their views on these and other points of controversy: They should be expected to do so. I don't much care what Mr. Harper's views on abortion are. I do care what the candidates in my riding feel about it, since if it comes to a vote, it is my MP, and others, whose opinions will count. We had better get used to this, as henceforth it will apply to many other questions as well.
  
  .........
  
  There is one respect, however, in which Mr. Harper and Mr. Martin differ:...Mr. Harper would invoke the notwithstanding clause to uphold the will of Parliament. Mr. Martin says he would not -- although he has also said he would invoke notwithstanding in the event that the Supreme Court were to rule that the same requirement to acknowledge the right of gays to marry should be binding upon the Churches.

  And for this, Harper is accused of being "a threat to the Charter." Right. On these criteria, democracy is a threat to the Charter.


• Again, via Andrew, we've got a very interesting experiment in elections and markets. The Shorcan Index Election Indicator is attempting to use a market-system to predict how Canadian political parties will do in the upcoming election. It's fascinating. As of 12:00PM EDT, the prices are as follows:
  
  
  
  

  Liberals	(Bid) 32.0	(Offer) 33.0
  Conservatives	(Bid) 33.9	(Offer) 34.9
  NDP	(Bid) 16.5	(Offer) 17.0
  Bloc Quebecois	(Bid) 10.2	(Offer) 10.7
  Green Party	(Bid) 4.4	(Offer) 4.9

  
  It'll be interesting to see the results.


• Moving on from Canadian politics, Stephen marked Reagan's wake yesterday with a stirring ode to Dutch. Go read.


• On the same topic as today's earlier post, here's Hindrocket over at PowerLine.
  

  Banned weapons, and the equipment for making them, have been turning up all over--Sudan and Jordan, as well as Iraq. Now it appears that such materials are so plentiful that they are showing up as scrap metal. Yet it is an article of faith in the press that Iraq had no WMD programs. Or "stockpiles," or wherever the goal posts are today. Yet for reasons I can't fathom, the administration appears to be going along with the media spin. I don't get it.

  This is one of those things that is just confusing. Not the presence of WMD - that's undeniable (go ahead, try to deny it...please) - but the Bush administration's apparent lack of interest in clearing its name. I know, I know, the media doesn't help - but for all the vaunted skill of Karl Rove as a 'master political strategist,' he doesn't seem to be going out of his way to take advantage of the gifts that keep falling into his lap.


• Michael J. Totten has a very interesting article up today over at Tech Central Station on the poison that is Political 'Correctness.'
  

  The East Bay Express quotes student Micki Weinberg.
  

  "That's why I came to Berkeley -- because of its strong romantic aura of the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio. Then I got here and discovered that that light seems to have been extinguished. You have this vitriol. You feel it everywhere. Berkeley is now the epicenter of real hatred."

  This isn't only happening in Berkeley. Two years ago Lauri Zoloth wrote about the same climate of hate on the other side of the bay at San Francisco State University.
  

  "I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," past poster after poster calling out "Zionism=Racism" and "Jews=Nazis"...This is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern?"

  Skinheads, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Klansman aren't behind this, as would have been expected before Al Qaeda crashed airplanes into our buildings. Palestinian nationalism is the hot new cause for the cool kids, and the new (or is it old?) anti-Semitism is the handiwork of the far-left and their radical campus friends from the Middle East.
  
  Most of the students who promote a free Palestine don't hate Jews, whatever they think of Israeli counter-terrorism. But they put up with hate in the ranks all the same. Even the more radical and racist Palestinian activists are "allies" in the campus cause du jour
  
  ..........
  
  This is what Political Correctness has become. Mere opponents are falsely denounced as "racists" while virulently racist allies are given a pass by the very same people.
  
  It's bad enough that the torchbearers of Political Correctness compromised their honorable anti-racist principles with expediency and hypocrisy. But what's left of Political Correctness is worse even than that. There's also something implicitly racist about it. White Christians are held to the highest possible standard. They're expected not to have a racist thought in their heads and are called out for the slightest infraction. Culprits who really are racist (and who aren't merely guilty of checking the "wrong" box on their voter registration) deserve all the shellacking they get. Meanwhile, however, ethnic and religious minorities are allowed to behave like skinheads. It looks as though the activist set expects hatemongering anti-social behavior from Muslim immigrants just as they expect a dog to pee on the rug. It's the "soft bigotry of low expectations" with a racial twist.
  
  ...........
  
  Political Correctness is finished. What started out as intolerance of hate has become hatred's enabler. It fails to live up to its own standard and can't possibly become more absurd than it already is. It slid all the way down the slippery slope and annihilated itself.

  Read the whole thing.