Impressions on impending doom

Thoughts on tonight...

1. Best line of the night goes to...Kady O'Malley. It really does look like dementors are about to swarm Parliament Hill behind Mansbridge's head.

2. Dion, despite being 20 minutes late with tape delivery, is out of focus and he's not framed properly, both with too much room to his left and too much space above his head. And I think the white balance is off (all the white stuff in the shot looks yellow). It looks like he had a high school class shoot his address. Seriously, it looks terrible.

3. At 7:31, CBC stays with Dion, CTV goes to...eTalk Daily. Well, networks do have schedules, you know. NewsNet either didn't get the tape or doesn't pick up the feed, however they arranged to do this. They replay Harper's speech and then their anchor takes over the interviewing of talking heads. UPDATE: CBC, as the pool network, didn't switch the feed to be carried to all the networks. That, and the explanation for why Dion's tape was late, here.

I heard a lot during the election campaign about how poorly-run Dion's communications were. His head guy, for example, didn't watch the evening news. The fact that they can't even meet the most basic requirement of being on time is a huge deal. There has been no other time this year that he had access to this many eyeballs, with both cable and main nets ready to air his message. This is a big thing to screw up. And he ends up looking like an amateur.