I’ve been out of town for a few days, so here’s a quick run-down on some Liberal Party goings-on:

1) The Liberals have appointed Mauril Belanger and Navdeep Bains as platform/policy co-chairs. Nav is also heading out the Renewal Committee…or is it the Change Commission? or the Party Growth Group? or the Rejuvenation Task Force? Regardless, the point is that this bright young MP is being used by Ignatieff, despite it initially looking like he was snubbed by Iggy when the shadow cabinet was named.

2) The LPC nomination rules have been changed so that incumbent MPs will only be appointed if they have 400 members in the riding, and 40 Victory Fund donors. I really like this move – it protects incumbents from takeovers and, truth be told, if you can’t sign up a few hundred Liberals and raise 5 grand in a Liberal-held riding, you have no business being handed the party’s nomination. In fact, I wouldn’t even mind it if they raised the fundraising threshold a bit higher.

3) I received my permanent Liberal membership card in the mail today. And, while I hate to sound like a cheerleader for the third straight point, I’ve got to give the party some credit on this one. Once integrated in with a solid database, this should let the party track it’s members better, and it opens up a lot of possibilities for the LPC to use technology more effectively than they currently do.

4) Both the Liberal and Conservative websites currently have pictures of Barack Obama up on their front page, which you can be sure will piss the heck out of Jack Layton. Quite the change from the past few years when George Bush was the photo-op equivalent of a hairnet.