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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Friesenmania in Winnipeg!

Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but  I have to think that convincing the up-until-yesterday president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture – who was publicly critical of the Green Shift just a few days ago – to run for the Liberals is going to make it a teensy bit trickier for Jason Kenney – who will apparently be acting as the human incarnation of Oily the Splot during the upcoming campaign – to stick to his original script, at least as far as Stephane Dion’s sinister anti-farmer agenda.

Oily the Splot: Terrifying international Svengali

Alert Inkless commenter jwl notes that Barack Obama’s gas-pump political ads, eerily reminiscent of the Conservative Party of Canada’s Oily the Splot™ ads-that-never-ran a couple of months ago, will never run. This is because the U.S. gas-station advertising company, in an eerie repeat of events here in Canada, decided at the last moment that it didn’t want to run political ads, especially ads critical of oil companies. Also probably they realized the safety implications of putting gasoline in such close proximity to hot air. (Thank you! Thank you! Please tip your waiter. I love this town!)

Oily the Splot: FWIW

For what it’s worth, I don’t find anything particularly nefarious or illegitimate with the Conservatives’ wanting to advertise at gas-station pumps. There seem to have been substantial problems in execution, which I intend to continue chuckling over. But where I was brought up, nobody ever told me gas stations were supposed to be sacred havens from political discourse.