… but the good people of Surrey–Panorama Ridge have decided to say thanks, but no thanks to Gordon Campbell’s New Era.

It wasn’t just that they threw the Liberals out. It was a rout; the Liberals got nearly exactly the same result the NDP did in 2001 – an election that practically annihilated us Dippers province-wide.

Campbell’s strategy of handing the Liberal Party over to the religious right may have backfired with the nomination of the Talebanesque Mary Polak; she and her book-banning allies on the local school board are the original fringe on top of Surrey.

Meanwhile, Green Party Leader Adriane Carr rolled the dice, ran in the by-election… and came up far short of the expectations she helped fuel. At the very least, she had to improve dramatically on the party’s 2001 showing: partly to show the party could be more than a spoiler, and partly to demonstrate she has some degree of personal appeal. Instead, the Green share of the vote dropped half a point to 8.4%.

Combined with her peremptory rejection of the Citizens Assembly electoral reform proposals, which raised some hackles among more than a few of her members, and the abject failure of her earlier electoral reform initiative, this fiasco just might be enough to unearth some of the discontent roiling beneath the party’s surface. And while a divisive internal leadership battle might be suicidal a few months before an election, well, the last accusation most people would level at the Greens is that they’re too politically calculating…

Ladies and gentlemen south of the border, try, just try to rouse yourself to head to a polling station after this clarion call from actor Wallace Shawn:

“So, you know, for me it’s humiliating to vote for Kerry, because I don’t respect him; but I would — I will — it’s unpleasant, it’s like killing a big rat that is running around your apartment. It must be done. But you’re not proud of it. But you have to do it.”

As a Canadian blogger, I hate to be drawn into the American Ann Coulter quagmire. She’s clearly a few verses short of a sonnet (this metaphor brought to you by Random Acts of Poetry Week), and God knows enough other progressives get themselves into a lather over whatever asinine comment she’s made this week.

But now she’s calling an incident last week where two doofi (doofi: noun, plural; see “doofus”) tried to hit her with pies “an act of terrorism”.

Now, I don’t doubt that Ms. Coulter was frightened. It’s always a little nerve-wracking being in the public eye, and if you’re the kind of person who publicly calls for the invasion of every Islamic country, the execution of their leaders and the mass conversion of the religion’s followers to Christianity, you may well spend more than the usual amount of time looking over your shoulder. (If only to see where the damn voices are coming from.)

And I happen to believe that pie-ing a public figure is dumb. Yeah, I know it’s political theatre and it strips the subject of their undeserved veneer of authority and counterpoints the surrealism of the underlying metaphor, but it also scares the bejeezus out of the victim and may well generate as much sympathy as ridicule.

But terrorism? Terrorism? (Given that these were tofu lemon pies, maybe making her eat them would have qualified. But then, my views on the vegan community’s dessert-making capacity are a little prejudiced.)

Suicide bombers killing commuters: that’s terrorism. Paramilitary gangs murdering nuns in Central America: that’s terrorism. Getting nicked by a pie? That’s a dry-cleaning bill.

Terrorism is a fine, useful and powerful word… and it gains that power because it has a very particular, horrifying meaning: the deliberate use of violence against civilians to achieve political goals.

Misusing a word like terrorism to describe what is, at worst, common assault saps the word of its strength, and leaves our language that much poorer. And it makes it that much harder to talk about an important issue with any kind of clarity and precision.

Then again, this comes from the kind of person who titles one book “Libel” (about how the American left is, sniff, debasing political discussion) and her next book “Treason” (about how the American left is a gang of traitors). So she’s pretty clearly on a one-woman war on the English language as it is.

In fact, it’s almost… terrorism.

Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the ungratefulness of a lowly employee?

The Chicago Sun-Times has reprinted an exchange between Conrad Black and Roger Ebert. The gist of it is unremarkable: Ebert tells his publisher he’ll join his fellow Guild members on the picket line if a strike is called; Black accuses him of ingratitude; Ebert returns fire.

Mundane enough. But readers can take delight in Ebert’s systematic dismembering of Black’s embarrassingly pompous verbiage. It’s a duel between an Ôø?pÔø?e and a cudgel, and Black winds up punctured.

There are some truly fine moments – “I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself” springs to mind.

But the most bizarre bit, and perhaps the most telling, is Black’s complaint that the Sun-Times provided Ebert with “your own Web site at the company’s expense.”

This is like Columbia Pictures bitching to Julia Roberts that they’d paid for the lights, cameras and film for Mona Lisa Smile. Ebert is the single most recognized name at the paper; he’s a huge draw for the site which, judging by the advertising, is not exactly run as a charity.

Black has to know that. So maybe his comment was just gratuitous bombast. But maybe it’s the kind of delusional thinking that made everything else about the man possible: both his inexorable rise to the top, and his rapid, oh-so-welcome descent.

We may never know (although pleading insanity may yet prove to be a useful and necessary strategy, m’lord). What is clear from the exchange is that inevitable oblivion can’t swallow that self-important gasbag quickly enough.

…along comes one of these incidents:

“[NDP MPP Marilyn] Churley was heckling Health Minister George Smitherman during question period and was asked by Speaker Alvin Curling to settle down when Qaadri yelled out, ‘OK, the hot flash is over.’

Churley immediately stood up and demanded an apology.

Qaadri, the member for Etobicoke North, addressed the Speaker and said, ‘Yes, Speaker, I believe you said, ‘I will give the member opportunity to vent.’ ”

That comment was greeted by loud thumping on desks and calls of “shame, shame’ by Conservative and NDP members.

Churley said Qaadri then exacerbated the situation by going over to her to apologize, putting his hand on her arm and saying, ‘I’m sorry, but you have to understand I’m a doctor, and my mother is a gynecologist so we understand these things.”

Just got back from seeing Team America.

Here’s the thing about movies when you have a young child: you don’t go out to see one in the theatre unless you’re damn sure you’re going to like it. Because if you drop the money for a babysitter, movie tickets and – if you recently won a scratch-and-win lottery – popcorn, you’ve made a serious investment. And you want it to pay off in memorable images, quotable lines, great characters, a moving story.

Or at least some decent laughs. At the bare minimum, give me clever.

Team America? None of the above.

I say this as someone who loved the South Park movie and ate up the Airplane!, Naked Gun and Hot Shots! flicks. But there’s hardly a bright spot in the entire movie. Once when black housecats are used as panthers. Another when a puppet vomits repeatedly. (I’m reaching here, in the interests of fairness.) Annnnd that’s about it.

Unlike the South Park movie, where offensiveness was used deftly to make a point about censorship and skewed priorities, here it’s just a way to get cheap laughs… at least, that’s the hope. It’s a mighty weak crutch to lean on, and gave out at about the ten-minute mark.

The puppetry is the movie’s only strength; for someone raised on Gerry Anderson, that aspect of it was a hoot. But they don’t do nearly enough with it, and that’s a symptom of what’s wrong with the movie. Parker and Stone took on two juicy targets – testosterone-driven adventurism, and uninformed political posturing – had a jewel of an opportunity and, instead of skewering, mooned them.

At the end of the day, with a zillion-dollar budget, they had nothing to say. Too bad.

Errol Morris, the film-maker who gave us The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control — and turned Ellen Feiss into an icon for people switching to Apple — has now posted a series of campaign ads for MoveOn.

If you caught Ellen or any of the other switchers, you’ll recognize the style. Real people who voted for Bush in 2000 explain why they’re voting for Kerry in 2004. Quite apart from the politics, there’s something eerily compelling about watching everyday people explain how they came to a particular voting decision.

Not that these folks haven’t been selected for their congruence with the overall Kerry message, of course. But they still have an unrehearsed spontaneity that’s rare in the increasingly stage-managed world of election campaigns. Be sure to have a gander. (All clips are in — you’ll be shocked to hear this — Apple Quicktime format.)

If you’re following the U.S. election blogiverse, you probably already know this. For everyone else, here’s the skinny:

The past week’s online buzz has been dominated, not by the latest focus-tested-to-death charges from the Kerry and Bush campaigns, but by Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire on October 15. Hugely worth watching.

If you missed it, you can find the clip online (here’s one version in RealPlayer, an AVI in BitTorrent and a third in MPEG 4) or read the CNN transcript.

And if you want to know why it touched a nerve, read Alessandra Stanley’s take in the New York Times: “[N]ews programs, particularly on cable, have become echo chambers for political attacks, amplifying the noise instead of parsing the misinformation. Whether the issue is Swift boat ads or Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment suit, shows like ‘Crossfire’ or ‘Hardball’ provide gladiator-style infotainment as journalists clownishly seek to amuse or rile viewers, not inform them.”