Ho-Hum! ..Dog-Day News "Sips".. Summer, 2010

In one of the more hot and humid "dog days" of summer, Ignatieff drinks "light" from a can, rides a bus to backyard barbecues, and lets his members like Marc Garneau carry the ball in those committee hearings on the census fiasco. Harper remains silent, digging in his heels, and digging the hole for his political casket.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks dumps 92,000 classified documents on the Afghan war, casting doubt about the loyalty of "ally" Pakistan and the U.S. and South Korea conduct military manoeuvres in the South China Sea to the military delight of the North Koreans, always looking for ways to bait the U.S.
Iran quietly agrees to "talk" about its nuclear ambitions, perhaps scaling them a little, (don't hold your breath)while austerity budgets capture headlines in Britain, Greece and who knows which other countries as the dominoes continue to fall.
Arizona's brutal immigration law is so flawed, a District Court Judge rules much of it "out of bounds" while Sarah Palin and the Tea Party/Republicans (hopefully) use this "dull news cycle" to continue to self-destruct.
Tony Hayward is going to Russia, to BP Venture, on a well-deserved adventure in oilpolitik where he can do less damage to the company's reputation, because no news organization even covers BP in Russia, at least not yet. Enbridge, the Canadian energy company, dumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, where the (Canadian-born) governor, Janet Granholm, asks the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency to take charge of the clean-up because Enbridge is moving without adequate urgency and haste.
Oh, and by the way, Wall Street stocks are continuing to climb back into a respectable trading zone, while millions of workers wander into new, and often suspect, "entrepreneurial ventures," as is the case in Windsor where the General Motors plant closed, after ninety years of operation, yesterday.
But there is really not much going on in world affairs, this long hot and stormy summer in eastern Ontario and Canada, to keep our attention from wandering into the waters of the nearest pool.
Kindle's price has dropped from $259 to $189 amid rumours of a new and updated version from Amazon; and Hydro bills are going up a staggering 16% in the next few weeks, with increased costs of production, added taxes and a summer of guzzling by air conditioners and fans, not to mention a string of thunder-and-lightning storms that make the lights flicker on those audio systems, announcing power-failures.
Fareed Zakaria's GPS on CNN has become "appointment television" while media pundits ponder the adviseability of having "all white" anchors and hosts on primetime news. Meanwhile, former Nixon advisor, Diane Sawyer,puts her own platinum stamp on the nightly news at ABC, following a long tradition established by Canadian Peter Jennings, and ABC's Sunday talk show gets a new host from CNN, Christiane Amanpour, adding another "international" dimension to U.S. news coverage. Too bad, CBC does not penetrate the U.S. market, the population needs a stiff shot of international "caffeine" by way of realpolitik, globally, to bring them down a peg or two.
Don Cherry, on the other hand, dumps on "gutless" politicians for not doing something about cormorants, thereby reducing the "bass" population, at the annual Bass Derby for fishers. How important is that, when radioactive, redundant generators ply their way through Great Lakes waters and the St. Lawrence on their way to Sweden for retrofits? And when Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, announces the Climate Change Bill is dead, because of Republican opposition?
Oh, yeh, have another Coors Light, drink up a few rays and then grab your Harley/Honda/Yamaha/Kawasaki/Suzuki/BMW...and head off into another Tim's for a coffee...there's really nothing going on "to worry about." Eh?