After a fun sojourn across Hungary, I have returned to cowtown, so you can expect posting to resume at it’s usual pace. It should be a busy September with a crowded fall agenda on the Parliamentary horizon and the Liberal leadership race heating up. In the coming days, I’ll get some house cleaning posts out of the way, including a recap of the Greatest PM We Never Had contest, an update of my first ballot projections, results from the month old “who will run” pool, and another special post which I think a few people might find somewhat interesting.

For right now, here are a few interesting news stories from recent days:

1. Another bad weekend in Afghanistan.

2. A great article on the Afghanistan situation which echoes a lot of what Kennedy has said on the way we should be going about rebuilding that country.

3. Speaking of which, there was a good discussion between Scott Brison and Gerard Kennedy on Afghanistan on QP Sunday. It was reassuring to see that the two could find a lot of common ground, despite their different opinions on the mission.

4. The Senate will be stalling on the ethics bill. Good on them. I really like the accountability act, but there are still a lot of problems in it which need to be ironed out.

5. Two weeks to go in the New Brunswick election.

6. This is an interesting poll, but the CTV story completely misses the point. Here’s the conclusion:

Concern seems to have reached a tipping point and the Conservatives neglect the issue at their peril, said Angus McAllister, president of the company which does research for government agencies, corporations and non-profit groups.

The federal government has been promising to release a major environmental plan this fall, but it is not clear whether the package will include a plan for climate change, or just a promise of consultations.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international pact to cut greenhouse emissions that cause global warming, and federal officials suggest their top priority is air and water quality, not climate.

Now, here are the poll results:

In the poll, the most frequently named environmental issues were air quality (35 per cent), global warming (20 per cent), water quality (12 per cent) and nature conservation (six per cent).

Don’t get me wrong – I think climate change is important. But, looking at the poll numbers, it seems to me that a plan which focuses on air and water quality (47% between them) would be more popular than one which focuses on climate change (20%).

7. This is the first real road bump in the Stephane Dion campaign to date. If nothing else, it does finally give us an answer to the age old riddle: “what do Ralph Klein and Stephane Dion have in common?”.

This is far from fatal but it will probably mark the end of the Dion media honeymoon. It will probably also overshadow what was a very thorough environmental platform.

8. How big is your Canada? Ken Dryden has released his “Big Canada” platform (click here to read the full platform). It doesn’t have a ton of specifics but I do really like the key priorities he identifies for Canada. As I’ve always said, Ken Dryden understands Canada better than most politicians and it shows in this document.