Putin Drives Sarko to Drink?!

According to Paul Wells, that's what Belgian TV says here about the French President's state in this clip:

Drinking with Putin, eh? I'd be careful if I were you, Nicholas. You don't want this to be from his "Litvinenko" collection.

What I learned at the G8 (about our leader)

Well, I didn't actually go there, but wow, Harper comes off as a total bush-league politician (pun semi-intended). What a petulant, small-minded, anti-social man we have to lead our country. Ideological fellow-traveler Nicholas Sarkozy goes for a stroll with Harper and starts shaking hands with the public. Harper will do no such thing because some of the people in the crowds might be *gasp* media.

Now it's not like Sarkozy is Mr. Warmth, he looks like a character actor who tends to play grim detectives - Law & Order Paris if you will, and yet Harper makes him look like Bill Clinton when it comes to working a crowd.

Harper played the petulant child part when the matter of carbon emissions came up. All of his posturing was essentially "We are different, Alberta Canada needs special treatment!" One doubts that he would similarly demand special treatment for Ontario's manufacturing sector or the East Coast fisheries.

Now it comes out that he will not meet with Bono. Apparently this is in part because Bono has had the audacity in the past to meet with Liberal governments. Maybe they should send in The Edge instead?

Never play poker with this man

Sarkozy has won the French presidency. What a poker face this man has. This is his "I won the election" face. I'm not sure if anyone else in politics is quite this emotionally opaque.

Does his election, along with Mario Dumont's popularity in Quebec, signal some kind of neo-liberal moment in la francophonie. I suppose it will take time to figure that out, but it may indicate something akin to Thatcher and Reagan 25 years ago. Or it may not.