Shorter Benjamin Netanyahu:

Our peace plan proposal involves everyone else surrendering.

Why does Stephen Harper hate farmers?

It's been clear for a long time that Conservatives hate the Canada Wheat Board. They've been trying to break the single-desk marketing board since they first formed government, but up until now, they've only really tried through the board itself, to convince the farmer-members to eliminate the Board, or the board's monopsony. Farmers have consistently elected pro-monopsony members to the board, frustrating the CPC. Of course, they argue that "real" farmers want open marketing options, just as they're sure that all workers feel enslaved by their unions.

If you want to see how the Conservative Party ignores democracy when the people don't produce the results the CPC wants, their behavior toward the Canada Wheat Board is an excellent example. Sure enough, they'll break the single desk from above, if the farmers won't do it themselves. The only question is if Harper will try to wait until the SCC is also leaning in his favour, because that's where this fight will end.

A Tory majority is good for the market

The TSX Composite is down 450 points since the close of business on May 2. I wonder if I need to create a gadget to track this for others to put on their websites.

I don't remember that promise from the campaign

A CPC member backpedals comments about an eventually completely voluntary census. Now that I mention it, I don't remember the destruction of the long-form census being discussed before it happened, either. Does the Secret Agenda begin to rear its head?

Goody

Thomas Mulcair shows up to Ottawa smelling of truther.

Ruth Brosseau (NDP - Las Vegas) may have sketchy nomination papers.

Can we get all this shit out of the way now? A year of this, and we can invite the Liberals back to Stornaway.

And the winner is...

Dan Arnold, the Calgary Grit himself, has won the 2011 gaffe pool, with an entry of CPC 16 / LPC 8 / NDP 8 / BQ 2. Two remarkable things about this guess - hitting a record high score for the Conservatives on the nose, and forecasting a reasonably low-gaffe election generally. At just eleven points from correct, it appears I'll be making another donation to a Liberal candidate come 2015.

Edited to add the final scores of the parties, because it's time to take the picture from the top of the page.

Dear economists:

If Harper's so fking good for the market, why is the TSX down 180 points in 90 minutes?

Edited to add: 242.14 at close. I'm not saying this is all, or even partly, caused by Conservative majority government. But I guarantee that had there been any other election result, the business media would be talking about the effect of uncertainty (or of socialism) on the market.

Moods

I guess I should be relieved that the Prime Minister no longer needs to tear up the constitution to rule like a dictator.

I suppose I should be thrilled about the historic NDP breakthrough.

I know I'm supposed to be happy that the BQ has essentially disappeared from the political map.

I feel I should be happy that Stephen Harper is going to be holding the bag when Vancouver's housing market takes much of Canada's housing market, and eventually consumer spending, down with it. When interest rates expose the problem of unsustainable consumer debt, no one will be able to blame socialism for the problem, and that can't be bad, right?

But I'm not happy, for a single clear reason: Stephen Harper is not going to be less dangerous with more power. The next few years are going to be about watching this man like a hawk.

I suppose I'm supposed to be saying something about "the people have spoken, blahdy-blahdy-blah." But I'm not the leader of a political party, I'm not a representative of a political party, and I'm not a member of the paid media. So I can just say it - what a terrible mistake for Canada.

Smear

It looks increasingly like Sun Media's Layton smear (I couldn't be bothered to link it) has backfired, so that makes for one essential ingredient of a gaffe. The other requires a source from a political party, and I think the chance of that is near zero, because I think this was probably Sun Media on their own. So, congratulations, Ezra Levant, on finally collecting some payback from Stephen Harper for his callous treatment of you in Calgary Southwest way back when. I'd like to believe the entire Western Standard / Sun News Network right-wing media nonsense has been part of your plan for this moment, when you could take something from Stephen Harper that he wanted as badly as you wanted that seat. Revenge is a dish best served with a side of Mohammad cartoons, I hear.