Garth Turner is declining the invitation to join the Green Party.

MP Garth Turner says he won’t be going Green — at least not for now. Turner mused about switching to the Greens and becoming the environmental party’s first-ever MP after being dumped by the Conservatives last week.

But he said Tuesday that he will be sitting as an Independent for the foreseeable future - although he hasn’t ruled out joining the Greens at some point.

I think Mr. Turner has helped the Greens dodge what could have been a nasty self inflicted wound. While there would have been some benefits to having their first MP sitting in Parliament, that MP would have undoubtably defined the Canadian public’s perception of the Green Party. Rightly or wrongly, Garth Turner’s positions would have become synonymous with the Green Party itself.

By the way, I for one am shocked that some anonymous guy with a website and his anonymous sources got it wrong.

Did I call it or what? Right on cue the Conservatives have adopted yet another tactic from their Republican brethren; disenfranchising voters.

The federal government is introducing legislation to protect against voter fraud in federal elections, including requirements for picture identification or some other form of identity confirmation to vote.

Under the proposed legislation, voters would be required to provide one piece of government-issued identification with a photograph and residential address - such as a driver’s licence - before they are allowed to vote.

Forcing voters to jump through hoops in order to vote will just be the first of many tricks the Conservatives adopt from the Republicans to rig the game.

Two supposed instances of liberal media bias that aren’t.

Proud to be Stupid thinks that the media’s failure to report on a poll is evidence of liberal media bias. Okay, if that’s the case then how does he explain the failure of the conservative media (National Post, Sun Media, CanWest) to report on it also? Are these obviously conservative media outlets part of the liberal media too? If so one has to wonder just how far right mainstream conservatism is if the National Post isn’t conservative enough for them?

The second item is this report that the BBC now admits they’re too liberal and biased against Christians. Of course the evidence presented is so buffoonish that only a right whinger would think it validates their lunacy. Consider this bit.

A truly shocking revelation to come out of the summit was expected to invoke a storm in Britain, which has already reached the boiling point with regards to the treatment of Muslims and the issue of the veil.

For the purpose of illustration, the executives were given a scenario in which Jewish Comedian Sasha Baron Cohen would participate in a program titled ‘Room 101’, a studio program where guests would be asked for their opinions on different issues, and allowed to symbolically throw things they hated in a garbage bin.

The executives were asked what they would do if Cohen decided to throw ‘Kosher food’, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible, and the Quran in the garbage bin.

The executives said they would allow everything to be thrown in the garbage bin, save the Quran, for fear of offending the British Muslim community.

The items they’ve chosen to compare are laughably invalid. The fact that they weren’t asked whether they’d throw the Torah or the Quran–two comparable items–into the garbage bin exposes the invalidity of this thought excercise.

This fact escapes the right whingers who truly believe throwing a Kosher hotdog into the garbage is comparable to tossing the Muslim holy book–believed by Muslims to be the literal word of the Prophet Mohammed–into the garbage.

While the list does include the Bible, Christians have not placed the same importance on it that Muslims have in their written word. In fact, most Christians are rather lackadaisical about the significance of icons to their religion. The bottom line is that throwing the Quran into the garbage is insulting to the beliefs of most Muslims while throwing the Bible into the garbage isn’t insulting to the beliefs of most Christians.

The rest of this smoking gun evidence against the BBC is equally silly.

For more on the subject, Crawl Across the Ocean has yet another excellent post on media bias.

Harper Bizarro raises an interesting point. Is it common for our ministers of defence to interfere in the operational decisions of the Canadian Armed Forces?