1. Kiss Labrador good-bye, Danny. Anger over the energy plan seems to have galvanized attitudes in Labrador. The Labrador party announced on Friday that it won't be fielding candidates in the two ridings currently held by the DW Team. This will almost certainly guarantee the New Democrats will recapture Labrador West.
Meanwhile in the central district currently held by transportation minister John Hickey, it may become a contest to see if Hickey can stand three weeks of sleepless nights. looks like Chris Montague will be taking Hickey's seat; it will be interesting to watch Montague waving his "broken promise" letter from the Premier for the couple of years before DW retires.
Well, either that or Williams will spend the rest of the campaign in Labrador going door to door by dogsled, skidoo, quad and anything else he can use to get every vote possible.
Will there be any other seats where parties will not field a candidate to defeat an incumbent? Stay tuned.
2. The Fuehrer furor. Campaign 101: read the introductory speech of everybody introducing the party leader and anyone else on the speaking program. Stupid comment handled defensively thereby trebling the impact of the first goof.
3. The People's Campaign? From David Cochrane's campaign notes at cbc.ca/nl:
As I write this I'm on a Provincial Airlines Cessna Citation flying to Happy Valley Goose Bay.
That would be the executive jet - left - used by DW on the first day of the campaign to get to Deer Lake. After you allow for the Premier and a couple of staffers, the rest of the plane is media. The thing only holds eight people.
Wonder how much it costs? Provincial doesn't disclose its lease rates. In the old days, campaigns would lease larger aircraft and pull everyone around in the same airborne cattle car. The per passenger charge worked out pretty well the same for everyone.
Given that the media - like say the Mother Corp - would be or should be paying their own way on the eight seater, the cost for the Premier and his staffers would be pretty light. The media types would actually be the largest number of passengers. Having news media subsidize the campaign travel budget. Interesting concept.
Bond Papers welcomes e-mails clarifying the travel/cost arrangements.
4. Another committee named after a dead racehorse. Both the Liberals and Conservatives like things called secretariats. The Libs created a rural one before they were punted from office in 2003 and the Tories in office continued that along with a bunch of other Liberal policies.
Now the Liberals are talking about a population growth secretariat. Both parties are missing the point. The issue is one of economic development. It has nothing to do with either insufficient motivation ("Would you do him for a grand?") or the lack of recent MUN graduates traveling around the province holding consultations on copulation rites and rituals and producing reports in the time it takes elephant fetuses to gestate.
So far the rural secretariat hasn't produced any more wins than the race horse has lately. It's dead and so is the idea that make-work projects for bureaucrats solve anything.
5. Another reason Danny should regret voting for Harper: Child care. It's not like some us didn't warn about the choice in child care scam either. Bonus would have been getting the feds to pay for it, versus shelling out of your own pocket.
6. The Dan Vinci Code. Do you see the "w" formed by the three figures at the centre of this 
tableau?
And while we're at it, is the similarity to this famous painting just a coincidence?
This is not meant to be a criticism of any party's election platform...?An editorial is the place where a newspaper should take a critical position - if need be - and not have to apologise for it at all. An editorial should criticize the platform of any party if there is a good reason to do so. Being ineffective is as good a basis for criticism as anything else, particularly when the criticism is constructive.
Party supporter Jim Combden, speaking at a rally in the town of New-Wes-Valley, made a crack about how Progressive Conservative cabinet minister John Hickey had threatened to sue critics of his spending.Combden's remarks were over the top and the use of any analogy to Nazi Germany is the certain death of any point. Rather than lamely try to pass the comment off as a joke, Combden ought to apologise unequivocally and immediately withdraw the remark. It was wrong.
"[Hickey] said, 'I will sue you if you speak on the open line programs, if you speak on legitimate airwaves, if you criticize my government, if you criticize my fuehrer, I will sue you,'" Combden told the rally, in the Bonavista North district.
"It's good to have an opposition, but it's important that that opposition be a constructive opposition, it not be a name-calling, mudslinging, personal-attacking type of opposition," Williams said in an interview.
Premier Danny Williams, quoted in a Canadian Press story on the provincial election, September 16, 2007
"Gerry Reid is a capable guy in his own way, but he's got an attitude, and he can't get over it. And everybody in the province is seeing it," Williams said during a rally in Twillingate. "When they look at him, they see him on television, they see the scowl on his face."
Premier Danny Williams, quoted in a Telegram story on the provincial election, September 20, 2007
Slamming a guy for the face God gave him. There's an original Conservative personal attack.
While we're at it, how nice it would be to have a government administration that didn't resort to a name-calling, mudslinging, personal attacking type of government.
-srbp-
Step 1. Google any of the following words:
"danny williams"
"pc party"
"newfoundland"
Step 2: Check the sponsored links, usually on the right hand side.
Hint: Try "pc party" first and see if your search turns up the same result as the one we just did here at Bond.
Step 3: lol or roflyao
Update - Step 4; Google "bob ridgley". You won't find any website for the candidate. The first link that turns up is interesting.-srbp-
Someone picked up on the fact that some campaign signs - in this case for Tory Beth Marshall - don't carry any reference to the "Danny Williams Team."
There are plenty of re-cycled signs around and Marshall appears to have been frugal with her campaign expenses.
Let's hope Bond Papers doesn't get as many comments on Marshall as CBC radio did after her interview yesterday. The server couldn't handle the volume of criticism aimed at the former auditor general
-srbp-
But take this curious situation: Simon Lono, a Liberal candidate in St. John's North, actually attended a Tory nomination meeting in St. John's East and voted for a candidate there, even though he wasn't eligible to vote in the district at all.This comment makes it sound like Lono did something improper or illegal.
The Western Star (Corner Brook)
Opinion, Saturday, January 20, 2007, p. 6
Byelection promises to be interesting
Next month's by election in Port au Port has drawn a slew of candidates lining up for the PC party nomination. The byelection became necessary with the resignation of PC Jim Hodder, who after serving 21 years in the House of Assembly, decided to leave for health reasons.
It's good to see that seven citizens have come forward to offer themselves because it shows there is real interest in the seat and it will be interesting to see who gets the nod when voting takes place Monday.
The Progressive Conservative party has opened nomination voting to the general public and they're to be commended for doing so. A person shouldn't have to be a card-carrying member of the party to help make the decision on who their candidate will be.
Often voters are undecided in an election and tend to vote for the man or the woman rather than along party lines. This open system gives any person the opportunity to be involved at the grassroots level of politics. There are good candidates running for the PC nomination and whoever takes it will likely have a fight on his or her hands since the district was known to be a Liberal one in the past.
That changed in the last election when Hodder took it from incumbent Gerald Smith and it remains to be seen what message voters want to send this time around.
With a general election coming in the fall, this byelection promises to be more interesting than most.
"We can't be a dying race."
Premier Danny Williams
Dog whistle politics is the use of code words that carry specific meanings for specific segments of an audience. The majority may miss them, but for certain segments they have a different meaning than the one most people might assume.
The term originated, according to some accounts, in Australian politics in the 1990s and the ideas of Howard strategist Lynton Crosby. It's based on a theory of voter motivation that is far from controversial in and of itself. As Crosby put it:
"People don't generally vote simply on the basis of issues," he told a conference in Canberra last May [2004]. "They vote as much on the values and motivation of political parties in taking a particular position on an issue... It is the values you communicate, and the motivation you have, that influences the way people vote."
It's hard to escape the idea that there is something of a dog whistle in Danny Williams use of the word race, especially when you see the sort of posturing on the issue that turned up after the remarks. It's code in the local nationalist fringe, just as it would be in Quebec.
The themes in the last throne speech and the campaign song all have a flavour and tone which would appeal across several audience segments. There's the talk of pride of place which most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians feel and its a core value pretty well everyone has.
The bootie call policy itself is a pretty straightforward example of the sort of retail politics that took Stephen Harper to 24 Sussex last year. It also makes it appear to some people that the premier and his crew are trying to do something to stem the tide of outmigration by paying people to stay and have children.
But if you wanted to look at another layer, consider that idea of Newfoundlanders as being a distinct race of people is a notion most common among those who never quite got over their loss in the 1948 referendum. Williams has raised the traditional political theatrical device of the external enemy to a fine art, playing to the insecure and largely xenophobic crowd who thrive on the myths of carpetbaggers and Canadians who pillage the benighted people of God's other Eden. To those people, defending a Newfoundland race beset by a declining birthrate and the loss of their culture to the evils of the mainland is as instinctive as breathing.
But for most of "race' is such an odd word, that it's sudden appearance in public remarks by the Premier would elicit one of two responses. Either people would ask what he meant or, as in this case, the embedded atmosphere of the media on the bus might well lead people to rationalize the word as an unimportant anomaly.
Problem is that things are quite that easy.
Political messaging sometimes comes on layers, with different aspects aimed at different segments of the audience. It takes a sophisticated organization to research and detect how messages are playing in smaller segments of the population and then adjust messages according.
Williams has done it before. The one instance in which such a detailed analysis was conducted occurred in 2004 with polling on the flag controversy. The poll results were obtained by the Telegram under Access to Information laws. Shortly afterward, the Premier's office stopped purchasing polling other than CRA through any publicly accessible means. That doesn't mean the sophisticated polling stopped.
Political messaging in a skilled organization isn't developed on the basis of the simplified and almost simplistic analysis offered in the Corporate Research Associate's quarterly omnibus political questions. Skilled operators would know what messages resonate with specific audiences.
The Premier's race comment might just be a slip of the tongue. But don't bet on it.
Danny Williams is a savvy politician whose has built his success on surrounding himself with a team of capable, sophisticated marketers. He doesn't often drop words out there carelessly, even if occasionally he gets suckered into musing on taking away free speech. those are core to his political agenda.
In this instance, "race" is the word Danny Williams chose without prompting.
It's a word that was on his mind.
There's a reason why the word came up.
Maybe he was whistling a tune intended, in part, for some of his most hard core supporters.
-srbp-
"The Auditor General [John Noseworthy] has no basis to base his opinion on that those expenditures were inappropriate."The AG based his views on the report by Chief Justice Green and his scathing indictment of the practice of donations. When pressed by Jeff Gilhooley on whether or not the donations were inappropriate, given that they came from an allowance that was never intended to include donations, Marshall was unequivocal: "They are appropriate."
Sometimes, though, one gets an uneasy feeling when the same people who scream "no more give-aways" step forward to say "trust me", but then don't release any details of the deal.Fears that Newfoundland came out on the short end of the stick in the agreement to develop Churchill Falls appear to be unfounded.
In fact, Newfoundland fares quite well, although it may appear otherwise on the surface.
...
The $950 million project in Labrador has been a long time coming. However, it probably would have come earlier had it not been for Premier J.R. Smallwood's uncontrolled outbursts of provincialism...
There are references to name calling, of Smallwood referring to keeping the project from the "clutches of Quebec" and things that sound eerily familiar.
And I want people here to know that I am not prepared to leave Labradorians excluded on my watch. Labrador's day has arrived. This is Labrador's time to shine, to flourish and to reap the benefits of growth as our province moves forward, united, toward self-reliance.It's odd to use this sort of phrase a second time, at least under the circumstances.
Washington Profile: Russia is not the only country to attempt to increase birth rates through government policy and incentives. How effective have these kinds of policies been in other countries, for example, in western Europe?A discussion paper from the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Democratic Policy examines fertility policies in western European countries. Note that the paper discusses a range of policies aimed at supporting people raising children, not merely the performance bonus system for producing children.
Eberstadt: Birth incentive plans are almost always ineffective in the long run. The typical history of birth incentive plans in western Europe and elsewhere has been to elicit a small blip in birth rates followed by a bigger slump. The reason for the blip is that some parents “on the fence” about the timing of a second or a third child take advantage of the introduction of these incentives. And the subsequent slump takes place because the bonuses alter parents' timing of desired births, not desired birth totals. If one were to have a serious pronatalist economic plan, you’d be getting into some very big money. You would have to have vastly larger outlays than are currently accorded to social security, healthcare or any other existing programs. Basically, you’d have to be prepared to be hiring women to work as baby ranchers—and in a modern economy, given the opportunity cost of women’s labor, a program like that would be staggeringly expensive. That, I think, explains the limited success of pronatalist efforts in the western historical record. By the way, it also turns out to be very difficult to talk up the birth rate: the bully pulpit and the government usually can’t convince people to have extra children out of patriotism or civic duty.
Washington Profile: Russia has become a country with significant immigration flows. How is this likely to impact on its demographic situation?
Russia has the same problem that other European countries have, with the prospect of population decline, and the question of changing ethnic composition. Many of the prospective migrants to Russia are not of Russian ethnicity, and as you know, the government has increasingly indicated a nationalist, or a nativist, objection to immigration to the Russian Federation. There still are a number of millions of Russians in the near abroad, but the flow of Russian ethnic migration to the Russian Federation has declined almost to a trickle over the past decade. Barring some sort of awful political upheaval, I don’t know how realistic it would be to think that these ethnic Russians in the near abroad might want to pack up and head back to the Russian Federation. So Russia is facing the same kind of issues as the rest of Europe. Throughout Europe, the key question in this regard is: can the newcomers be turned into loyal and productive citizens? Some places have a better track record of this than others.