Abstaining from blogging

Hi blogosphere, I missed you. I finally submitted the thesis (Electoral Reform in PEI: A case study in deliberative democracy, a future classic) last month. Now that I'm looking for honest employment, I suppose I could blog on a more regular basis, but I'm really enjoying the laziness lately.

Just had to come back to hype up this brilliant idea. In that spirit, I may have to abstain from washing the rest of the dishes piling up near the kitchen sink ;)

I've got some thoughts on the Irish referendum, so I'll probably be back with those sometime next week. Over the weekend, I'll be going to this event at Queen's. I understand there still might be spots, so if your in the area and a political dork, maybe I'll see you there!

Confidential to IP, congrats, I think you'll do a stellar job. Let me know if you need any help!

Liberal blogfather: "how dare you disparage the family"

Just had to comment on Liblog founder and charter member of the Dionistas Jason Cherniak's blog post from earlier today where he begs Liberal bloggers to not take out their well-justified frustration over their party's parliamentary caucuses decision to give Stephen Harper the majority he wants so badly.

Other bloggers have chimed in on the absurdity of this far better than I, like my friend Idealistic Pragmatist who points out that Jason is the progressive blogsophere's top partisan bloggers.

Even prominent Libloggers seem taken aback by Jason's call to just shut up and smallow Dion's bitter abstention medicine silently. My friend Scott Tribe has a great post talking about the role of bloggers in the US Democratic Pary and how they should be seen by parties as windows on what the grassroots thinks. Dion seems to be deaf to their pleas, so I'll simplify it for him, your blogging supporters think you need to grow a pair.


All Politics is Local has a good post where he talks about the yawning gap between Liberal rhetoric and action:

If the government is destroying our country, then we need an election. If M. Dion doesn't want an election, fine. Then let's work with the Tories on the budget to try to find some middle ground. Let's drop the fire and brimstone rhetoric. If this government is terrible, M. Dion should be able as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada to convince the Canadian people of this fact and win an election. If the government is bad but workable, let's make it work. M. Dion could demonstrate leadership by working for a better compromise.

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But really, after telling Liberal supporters hysterically for years that a Conservative government would be the end of Canada as we know it, is anyone surprised that their activists are upset that the party leadership is now propping up Harper?

Liberal leadership are now choking on the bitter fruit of what their rhetoric has produced. Who wants to bet that's it's not so easy to recruit Liberal volunteers when Dion finally decides to face voters?