News for Youse: Are Albertans “smug” and “intolerant”? And was Osama trying to kill Obama?

This morning we present one poll, one study, and one fairy tale.

First, the poll: according to data collected in 2008, published in 2009, but not blown up into a CBC news story until yesterday, Albertans are perceived by Vancouverites and Torontonians as smug, narrow-minded, intolerant, and largely bent on reducing the planet to a spinning ball of lifeless black space tar.

Speaking to the CBC, Calgary-based political scientist Duane Bratt said, "Alberta's reputation is probably worse today… The joke that used to unite Canadians was a hatred of Toronto… because it was the biggest, richest, most powerful spot in Canada. Now, that view is going toward Alberta."

Good point (if a little smug); Bratt’s comment in fact seems to confirm the ad hoc poll conducted in my head this morning in which I asked myself, “Does this goofy survey actually reveal more about Vancouverites and Torontonians than it does about Albertans?” to which a whopping 100 percent of those we canvassed responded, “Yes.”

Still, as persuasive as it is, readers might want to balance our findings with those currently being collected by the CBC, which finishes its story about an old irrelevant poll with a poll asking for people's opinion on the poll.

Speaking of polls, voters in Jack Layton’s old Toronto-Danforth riding hit the ballot boxes today, with popular NDP candidate Craig Scott widely thought to be facing “certain victory” in a by-election described as a “two-horse race” between Scott and the Liberals' Grant Gordon. Based on recent developments in Canada’s democratic process, News for Youse is therefore predicting a landslide victory for Conservative candidate Andrew Keyes.

Moving on, in a study that’s sure to overturn conventional thinking on the topic, scientists in the US have determined that meth use during pregnancy is actually harmful to your unborn baby and not the key to producing super-intelligent and physically outstanding super-children like we all thought.

You can read the whole article here in Pediatrics, but only if you think you can handle a dizzying paradigm shift before breakfast.

And finally, according to the Washington Post’s foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius, Osama Bin Laden was conspiring to assassinate Barack Obama and General David Patraeus in the months before his own entirely unsuspicious and photoshopped death.

“The scheme is described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces on May 2, the night he was killed,” writes Ignatius, whose well-known cosiness with the US intelligence community is no reason to go thinking he’s fronting for a bunch of overripe hooey cooked up by some propagandist in Langley.

“I was given an exclusive look at some of these remarkable documents by a senior administration official,” he says. “They have been declassified and will be available soon to the public in their original Arabic texts and translations.”

Interestingly, the article goes on to note that, “The organization lacks the ability to plan, organize and execute complex, catastrophic attacks, but the threat persists.” This might ring a little dissonant considering that these are the same people that hijacked and flew a bunch of planes into the world’s most protected airspace a few years back, but presumably that’s because 9/11 happened before the CIA pulled all of Bin Laden’s funding.

As well as being a prominent journalist, Ignatius is known for an extensive body of fiction. Plus he’s written a bunch of novels.