Readers will hopefully forgive me indulging in a little reminiscing... I was reminded today to do a little post about how Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP representing Islington South (my constituency) is running against Bridget Fox, her Lib Dem opponent from 2005, once again this year.

This causes me to chuckle a little.  Neither lady will of course get my vote, but Bridget Fox reprising the role of the Lib Dem candidate in Islington South is of particular interest to me because, well, when she was up for re-election as a councillor in 2006, she lost-- probably in part due to some bad information dug up and highlighted by-- ahem-- local Conservatives, and which I wonder if Emily Thornberry might try to remind people of over the next couple of weeks.

Here's the deal.  Bridget Fox used to be the Executive Member for Sustainability on Islington's Council.  That meant that she oversaw a bunch of environmental initiatives, including things like recycling.  So it wasn't good news for her when it was discovered that a bunch of Islington's recyclable waste was not, in fact, recycled, but rather sent to a Third World toxic waste dump which, if memory serves, was located pretty much right next to a primary (elementary) school.

Oops.

Awesome job of promoting "sustainability" there, Bridget.  Very green.

This is, apparently, the Lib Dems' strongest contender to beat Thornberry.

To be fair, it looks like she just might do it.

Which probably says something about Thornberry, too. [intro]

I haven't done much blogging or tweeting on the UK general election, due to take place in less than a month.

But today, I'm prompted to do some by this bit of ridiculousness, courtesy of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband:

Where to start?

First off, it's a bad sign for Labour that they're having to send out such an important guy in the Cabinet to campaign in Islington. I feel empowered to opine on this because, conveniently, Islington was the borough where I lived for several years, where I vote (Islington South constituency, baby!) and where I ran a race for three Council candidates back in 2005. I can tell you that it's philosophically on a par with Cambridge, Massachusetts (it's casually known as "the People's Republic," it hosts the Karl Marx memorial library, you get the idea)-- so there's no danger of a Tory pickup there. But the Liberal Democrats have typically been competitive throughout the borough-- and I guess they must be again this year if Miliband is being deployed to campaign up there....

Jaime Herrera's campaign notes that "during last Saturday’s Clark County Democratic Convention, [Denny] Heck declared to delegates that Washington’s 3rd Congressional seat 'is our seat, and we’re going to keep it in November!'"

Herrera's Scott Brown-esque response to Heck: “That’s a basic problem with Washington DC today.  We have members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who are so wrapped up in their partisanship that they believe the seats belong to their political party... This seat in Congress belongs to the people – not a political party." (my emphasis added)

If only she'd added a "with all due respect," right?

The snarky side of me feels compelled to add, especially for the benefit of this blog's liberal readers, that maybe Denny Heck didn't mean that the seat belonged to a political party per se, just a supposed progressive who couldn't get it together to explicitly, definitively voice support for Obamacare until, well, the weekend of the vote. I'd conjecture that's how the dudes over at Horse's Ass might have read his comments, anyway. [intro]