Reading the tea leaves

I expect the next few weeks will be rife with election speculation.
While John Baird perishes the thought, Flaherty is busy issuing The Usual Warnings Of Doom.
And if Harper is successful in winning a Canadian seat on the Security Council on Oct. 12, and considering how the Bastarache Inquiry in Quebec is going to echo the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal, and considering how the Harper Cons are hopeful that the long gun registry vote will jeopardize some NDP rural seats, and while the Afghanistan prisoner torture issue is in a lull, and before the Cons have to table a fall fiscal update, and before Sheila Fraser or the Parliamentary Budget Office can publish more critical reports, and before everybody's EI premiums go up, and maybe Harper can go a month or six weeks without firing some long-suffering civil servant, and . . .
Fixed election dates? What a quaint idea.