Wednesday digest

- I'm very disappointed in my boy Kid Rock today. It's obvious from her comments that his two-time fiancée Pamela Anderson is still pining for ex-husband Tommy Lee. Pam and Rock were already engaged once, without a wedding date, either, prior to their first break-up three years ago. I think that Rock should have realized then that if a wedding date isn't set at most a couple of weeks after proposing, one of you probably doesn't really want to get married (and in this case, I doubt it was Rock). I give this one two years, tops. And Rock, after you find her in bed with Tommy enjoying a backsliding booty call, you better not disappoint me with some coffee house recording talking about how broken-hearted you are. You should have known better.

- Ottawa mayoral candidate Terry Kilrea promises to sweep the streets of panhandlers, drug dealers and other vagrants if he's elected mayor this fall. No doubt the poverty industry types are already preparing their legal arguments stating that the right to harass and intimidate passersby is guaranteed under the Charter should Kilrea get in (a dubious proposition at best).

- In another political masterstroke, the PM is taking a detour home from France and stopping on the island of Cyprus to pick up stranded Canadians displaced by the Middle East conflict. Harper's acumen is really amazing me lately. After eyebrows were raised when Dubya referred to him as "Steve" (you know where that would have played most poorly - Quebec), he went on a Calgary radion station and declared that French was Canada's first language. Then, he gets a hard time for supporting Israel, but goes out of his way to assist Canadians of primarily Arabic descent. The guy is just smart.

- According to this poll. John McCain is more popular among Republicans than Howard Dean is among Democrats when asked about potential nominees for '08.

That could mean one of two things: either Dems don't care for Dean that much, period, or perhaps they like him as chair, just not as a nominee. (On the other side, Dick "Big Time" Cheney is acceptable as a nominee to just over one in three (34%) of respondents, but you can't tell me he's not a rock star in GOP circles.) One thing's for sure - we can expect a tough, ideas-driven campaign from this guy.

- W. is going to veto federal funding of embryonic stem cell research because he says that it doesn't respect human life, which he considers embryos to be. I generally agree with that opinion, but I think he's wrong on this because a bill was passed which would ban "fetus farming", thereby preventing the creation and subsequent destruction of embyros for scientific purposes. It's true that there are other ways to conduct stem cell research - through the use of umbilical cords, for example - but my understanding of this is that only those embyros created through the in-vitro fertilization process, which are not expected to survive, would be used for research purposes. So yes, while the embryos would be willfully destroyed to perform potentially life-saving research, they would not have lived anyways.

If I have it right, this is a sop to pro-life extremists, plain and simple, and is a perfect example of politics getting in the way of good public policy.

- In the Middle East, one theory is that the US is letting Israel slam southern Lebanon for one week before stepping in to impose a ceasefire. Plausible, but I hope not. Terror networks need to be destroyed. Look at Iran, for instance. Months of weak-kneed diplomacy have only emboldened Ahmadinejad. One positive development, which would bode well for the long-term future, is that even the Saudis are speaking out against Hezbollah.