This just in, thanks to the Toronto Star, the last non-neo-con daily newspaper in Canada: "RCMP implicated in Harper's closed-to-public campaign."

Good Lord! Is this what our beloved "Scarlet Force" has come to? Making potential protesters turn their T-shirts inside out to keep our nutty prime minister from having fits of apoplexy? How the mighty have fallen!

Well, it certainly lends a whole new meaning to the phrase "taking names and kicking ass!" We are left to ponder what humiliations could be next for Canada's beleaguered national police force:

Never mind his communications director, Alberta Liberal Leader Dr. David Swann has now officially shaken things up in his eight-member caucus and not everyone's going to be cheering about it.

Thousands of words have been composed over the past couple of weeks to explain why Villa Caritas, which was approved by the Alberta government in 2009 for development as a 150-bed long-term care facility in West Edmonton, is now opening as a 150-bed geriatric psychiatric facility.

Plenty of literary horsepower has been harnessed to make sense of why what in April 2009 was supposed to be public-private partnership with the Catholic charity Covenant Health that would cost Alberta taxpayers $12 million had by April 2010 turned into a publicly owned geriatric mental hospital that would cost taxpayers $51.4 million.

Could it be that Dr. Raj Sherman is about to jump to the Alberta New Democratic Party after all?

Readers don't need to be particularly alert to realize that Sherman -- once the Conservative MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark, the only physician in Premier Ed Stelmach's caucus and Parliamentary Assistant to Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky -- is now looking for a new political home.

In the Kabuki theatre that is a Canadian federal election during the post-modern era, the Conservative Party appears set to play its traditional role as the Party of Fear.

The policy positions staked out in the past few days and weeks by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper pretty clearly indicate that "scare the beejeepers out of the audience" is the government's stage direction to the Conservative actors about to play their roles the next federal election.

The front page of yesterday's Edmonton Journal -- the obsolete physical newspaper version, that is, not the convenient free website -- encapsulates perfectly the state of Alberta at this moment.

The principal headline -- the one we used to refer to back in the day as "above the fold" -- states, "Emergency ward situation still critical." A subhead adds: "Admitted patients waiting up to 70 hours for beds, despite new plans to relieve pressure on over-stressed hospitals."

Where will Raj Sherman jump? And when?

Until November 22, Sherman was the Conservative MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark, the only physician in the foundering Tory caucus and Parliamentary Assistant to Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky.

On November 22, Premier Ed Stelmach sacked the rebellious Emergency Room physician for his emotional public condemnation six days earlier of the gong show that passes for management of health care in this province.

When in doubt, stall.

There's not a politician on this planet who hasn't tried this one from time to time, for the sensible reason it often works. After all, the media and the public are like a kitten with a string -- they lose interest easily.

So the buzz at the Alberta Legislature today was that the battered and reeling Tory government of Premier Ed Stelmach, coming off a spectacularly bad 2010 and contemplating a fairly iffy 2011, is about to give itself a little extra breather by delaying the spring session of the Legislature until late February.

There is a straight line between comments like University of Calgary Professor Tom Flanagan's assertion that Wikileaks editor Julian Assange should be assassinated and the attempted assassination of Arizona Democratic Party Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday.

In the United States, and sadly in Canada too, evocations of the value and utility of political violence have become a routine part of right-wing discourse.