A few tid-bits from here and there..

–Stephen Taylor has an interview up with Paul Wells on his site. I must say, I’m on tenterhooks in anticipation of Paul’s book which will also chronicle Martin and Harper taking over their own parties. Wells also talks about what he perceives to be a very strong Ignatieff-Rae feud.

-There’s a fun recap up on the OC from Gerard Kennedy’s Saskatchewan Youth co-chair of the annual Western Young Liberal camp. Scroll down to the end for a delicious picture of Scott Brison lifting up Hedy Fry.

-Buried in the “Tories sense coming of Harper led majority” in the Liberal-biased Globe & Mail, is the news that the CPC will be opening up nominations in all 308 ridings. Opening up backbench MPs to a challenge makes sense and might help flush out a few guys like Rob Anders who are certain to be challenged. It will be very interesting to see if any Cabinet Minister are challenged, since it could force them to spend more time on their nomination meetings than they’d like to.

-Bob Rae is talking about the Liberals forcing a fall election on the Softwood Lumber Deal. To me, this is a bad idea – mainly because the Liberals would lose. The Softwood Lumber deal may be a bad deal, but it’s certainly not bad enough for a party-less leader to win an election over nine months after the last election.

-I’m sure everyone has taken a look at Belinda’s suggestions for Democratic Reform. I guess we now know why the Liberal Caucus Paul Martin felt the need to make her his fifth Minister of Democratic Reform when she crossed the floor. Regardless of what she said, it’s nice to see people suggesting ways to reform the Liberal Party at a time when the party certainly needs to be reformed.

There are some good ideas in there like uniform membership rules and the end of out of riding memberships. There are some bad ideas in there like 1$ memberships and a one-member-one-vote convention. And then, there are some head scratching ideas in there like shares in the Liberal Party and having caucus elect Cabinet Ministers. And I don’t really feel the need to go into why having Caucus elect Cabinet Ministers is a bad idea, since it should be fairly self-evident.