Wednesday digest

- Sadly, it looks like a husband's love of professional rasslin' may have claimed yet another marriage.

- Christopher Walken as Ozzy?

Val Kilmer as David Lee Roth?

Now THAT is metal.

- Great article right here on economic fundamentals.

- Bloc and Liberal MPs in the House of Commons yesterday protested the Speaker's recognizance of hockey commentator Don Cherry in the House of Commons because of his history of picking on francophone hockey players. Meanwhile, the leader of the party of Quebec nationalists, Gilles Duceppe, marched alongside Hezbollah apologists like Quebec Liberal loudmouth Denis Coderre this summer during a so-called peace rally in Montreal, and anyone who dared criticize them for doing so was dismissed as intolerant and immoderate.

Canadian politics is such a farce. An uneducated blowhard like Cherry picks on francophone hockey players and that's beyond the pale while elected, national leaders like Duceppe and Coderre truck in trade with sympathizers of terror groups and it gets shrugged off as unimportant.

What a joke.

- And as for the US Congressional elections, instead of blaming the media, engaging in conspiracies about voting irregularities or crying foul, Republicans seem to be taking their losses in stride, properly recognizing that despite a high-octane economy, the triumvirate of big government, sloppy leadership and a seemingly never-ending war along with the six-year itch was enough for the 2 in 5 eligible Americans who bothered to vote to hand them a fairly stiff rebuke. At the local level, I'd say that the Democrats pretty much crushed last night, winning a clear majority in the House. However, the more national-issue oriented Senate is going to be divided fairly evenly between the two parties regardless of the outcome of the recounts in states like Virginia and Montana, with Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy James Webb poised to win in the former and the folksy Jon Tester the latter, both for the Democrats. They should have done better in the Senate.

Lessons? Republicans need to get back to basics. As this article states, it wasn't conservatism that lost. It was Republicanism. The two are not necessarily synonymous. Witness the number of "blue dog" Dems that new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to have to deal with, as well as some of the left-wing ballot initiatives that went down to defeat (such as those on bilingualism, marriage and hiring quotas, if not the minimum wage). Even liberal states like California and Oregon voted to enforce parental notifications for minors having abortion.

As for the winners? They better start articulating an agenda if they want to solidify these gains, and keep the far Left out of it. Michael Moore, Al Franken and Cindy Sheehan were all very quiet this election season as compared to last time, and it helped, big-time. Moreover, Joe Lieberman beat the crap out of regurgitated hippie and darling of the Deaniac set Ned Lamont in Connecticut. I also think they will have to resist the urge to go on any witch-hunts because the public isn't interested in petty, mud-slinging "investigations" into alleged Republican wrongdoing will be no substitute for a positive agenda for change.

Historic times, indeed.