Manitoba Election

Not exactly a buzz of excitement here in Winnipeg about tomorrow’s election (contrary to the Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em Sun News promo).

Both the NDP and PCs have run quite nasty and thoroughly uninspiring campaigns offering slightly different flavours of “more of the same” with the usual promises to selectively cut some taxes and implement a bunch of trivial vote-getting schemes while adding more doctors, nurses and cops. As if this city needs more cops! Seriously, I have never lived in a place that was so heavily (and, evidently, quite pointlessly) policed.

The NDP will inevitably sweep the inner city and almost all of the urban ridings in Winnipeg with the PCs maybe pulling off a few tight victories in the suburbs. The one remaining Liberal enclave is unlikely to survive the night. Meanwhile, out in the smaller cities and towns across the southern half of the province, the PCs will continue to dominate the political landscape, just as the NDP do in the sparsely populated north. The interlake region is, appropriately, a toss-up.

Although the current overall poll numbers are extremely close, because of the lopsided urban-rural split, the result will most probably be another fairly comfortable NDP majority. As for voter turnout, given the choices on offer, it would be a surprise to find it anything but low.

Inequalistan

Chris Hayes dismantles the Republicans’ favourite new talking point that “the top 10 percent of ‘wage earners’ pay 70 percent of the income taxes.”

You have to hand it to the perverse genius of right-wingers sometimes, as in this case of using evidence of inequality to vehemently defend inequality or employing artfully deceitful expressions like “broadening the tax base” when they really mean sticking it to the working poor and middle-class.