CANADIAN PUSHBACK on the anti-oil-sands talk:

Pander to voters at peril, U.S. told
Canada’s energy sector may look for new markets

Big-city U. S. mayors and presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who joined the parade this week of ill-informed, U. S. anti-oil sands policies, should be careful what they wish for.

While the aim is undoubtedly to pander to the electorate in an election year charged with oil and climate-change debate, what they are stoking is an increasingly angry Canadian energy industry that is seriously looking at non-U. S. markets for its oil.

I thought Obama was going to repair our relations with our allies, not ruin them.

ANOTHER NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE scandal.

A HELLER POLL over at Volokh. Meanwhile, by way of background: Here’s a brief piece on the case I wrote a while ago. And here’s a lengthier Second Amendment primer.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: What if nobody recognized Robert Mugabe?

Well, he’s been stripped of his knighthood, which means that Queen Elizabeth has done more than the U.N. and the “human rights” community.

ZIMBABWE UPDATE: “As Zimbabwe’s neighbors urged it to postpone this week’s presidential runoff, hundreds of beaten, newly homeless Zimbabweans gathered Wednesday outside the South African Embassy here in a desperate bid for help during the electoral crisis.”

DISPROPORTIONATE? What Patrick Kennedy actually did.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: How to put the heat on Mugabe.

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: One downside of the Nikon D300 is that the files — especially the RAW files — are huge. Copying them onto my computer was taking a long time, like half an hour. So I got this Firewire card reader and zip! it was done in a couple of minutes.

HMM: Gallup Daily: Obama, McCain Tied at 45%.

CAN THE U.N. BE SUED for its role in the Srebrenica Massacre?

A QUESTION FOR OBAMA AND MCCAIN: Will the Candidates Recognize Morgan Tsvangirai as President of Zimbabwe?

SHIELD LAW: “The Free Flow of Information Act, then, really is an effort to shift control of information from the government to journalists, enhancing the latter’s gatekeeper role at the expense of the former’s.”

HE DOESN’T NEED YOU ANY MORE: “Only weeks into the general election campaign and already a notable tension is beginning to materialize within the Democratic Party. At question is Sen. Barack Obama’s relationship with the progressive netroots, the online community that helped aid the Senator’s rise to the presidential nomination, but has since seemingly played second fiddle in terms of courted constituencies.”

Sorry, guys. You were useful, but now you’re looking like a liability, and liabilities go under the bus with all the other liabilities. Say hello to Jeremiah Wright for me! And Samantha Power! And that fake Presidential seal. And, heck, even Scarlett Johansson!

That’s right. Scarlett Johansson. And you guys think he won’t drop you?

HOW VLADIMIR PUTIN muzzled The Moscow Times.

A TWO-LEGGED PUPPY gets a set of wheels.

Plus, flavored bottled water, for dogs.

UPDATE: Puppy link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

THOUGHTS ON ZIMBABWE VS. RHODESIA. I think the first commenter hits the nail on the head, though.

RALPH NADER ACCUSES OBAMA OF TALKING WHITE:

Nader was asked if Obama is any different than Democrats he has criticized in the past, considering Obama’s pledge to reject campaign contributions from registered lobbyists.

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader said. “Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.” . . . “He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician,” Nader said. “He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he’s coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.”

I always thought of Ralph Nader as extra-white myself. So I guess he should know?

THIS SOUNDS PROMISING: “The development of an economically viable way to extract oil from oil shale would put a ceiling on oil prices and would extend the oil era by decades. It would also increase the odds of significant global warming. Well, in light of all that a variety of media outlets are reporting that Shell Oil thinks it can produce oil from oil shale at $30 per barrel using an in situ process where the shale is cooked without first mining it onto the surface.”

Faster, please.

EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LORE: Extreme Mortman looks at U.S. Attorney firings under Janet Reno.

DREW CAREY ON FREE TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY.

It’s kind of sad, though, to see Drew lapse into the easy robophobic slurs that characterize so much of today’s political discussion.

INSURGENT REPUBLICAN OUSTS INCUMBENT IN PRIMARY: Mickey Kaus wonders if there’s a warning for McCain in that development.

HEH: “I don’t suppose that I could prevail upon the Obama campaign to stop pissing off Canada? . . . It is sometimes startling to see just how unthinkingly indifferent the Obama campaign is towards the sensibilities of our major trading partners.”

UPDATE: More upset Canadians.

WHY SOME FLIP-FLOPS matter more than others.

WHO, EXACTLY, SPEAKS FOR GOD? Obvious idiots, mostly.

IN THE MAIL: Chantal Delsol’s Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law. From the jacket copy: “The contemporary European passion for international law and justice represents a significant example of the contemporary loss of contact with reality . . . . this loss of contact with reality is one of the consequences of an epoch in which comfort and ease have taken away almost all sense of the tragic in life.”