A superior Winnipeg judge has stepped down after pictures of her engaged in sexual acts surfaced on the internet. Worse, the pictures of Justice Lori Douglas were apparently posted by her lawyer husband to lure one of his black male clients into a sexual scenario that would satisfy his fetish for an interracial threesome. Surprise, surprise, our judges do naughty things when they’re not on the bench. Should we care?

Absolutely, says the Winnipeg Free Press. The scandal “raises legitimate concerns about her appointment” argues today’s editorial. “Aside from being held to a higher standard, judges -- like anyone wielding power or influence in public office -- cannot be seen to be vulnerable to extortion or bribes” and “federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson needs to launch an independent review of Judge Douglas' judicial appointment” forthwith.

Not so fast, writes Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star, “We are all naked beneath our clothes.” And in case you’re unclear on that point, Mallick assures us “I checked.” She suggests that Douglas’s alleged quest for a non-white mate would have gone smoother if she had been living in that latter-day Sodom on the shores of Lake Ontario. “Toronto’s very multicultural, your chances on the subway alone are excellent,” she writes, and no scandal would have ensued because “(w)hat Toronto considers homespun is thought of as wildly exotic in a Prairie city.” Anyway, this was probably all her husband’s idea; after all, “men are weird.”

One of the “august pointy heads” serving as CBC television’s legal expert “stopped just short of saying that lawyers, particularly those with ambitions for the bench, should simply stop screwing altogether” according to the Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford. This shouldn’t matter because a judge’s “credibility depends on legal knowledge, fairness, experience and courtroom manners, not what he does with his member, or what she does with it,” Blatchford argues in a most off-putting fashion. But have pity for Douglas, she “is but another woman … done in either by the actions of a man she trusted or by her own sexuality or by both.”

Middle East peace talks are like dating your ex-girlfriend. Just when you think everything’s back on track, it all ends in heartbreak. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are in Washington today for the first direct talks between the two sides in 20 months, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they won’t amount to much.

The National Post is finding optimism in unlikely places however. Their editorial today notes that while Hamas (who weren’t invited to talks) murdered four Israeli settlers this week in an attempt to derail the talks, neither side is folding. Abbas and other PA officials strongly denounced the violence, because unlike their previous Palestinian leaders they’re “driven by a pragmatic desire to create a real Palestinian state under their own stewardship.” The “least that can be said for the current round of negotiations is that the Israelis truly do have a legitimate partner for peace,” says the Post, and the Israelis seem to recognize that.

Recent statements from Brack Obama also bode well for the success of the talks, according to the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui. After years of failed U.S.-brokered talks, Obama is “is working on a fundamental shift of American policy.” He’s rightly realized “that what’s in Israel’s interest is not necessarily in the interests of the U.S.” As a result of internationally unpopular actions like the current blockade of Gaza and the recent flotilla incident “Israel is more isolated than ever,” which will put pressure on Netanyahu to make needed concessions.

Writing in The Mark, Mira Sucharov outlines the logic behind the two-state solution, the goal of the current talks. Working towards a two-state plan “would mean neither continuing to prop up the inhumane Israeli occupation, nor pushing for the other alternative,” a joint Arab-Jewish country that would infringe on Israel’s need to remain a Jewish state. Unfortunately Sucharov, and for that matter Abbas and Netanyahu, don’t know what a two-state solution would mean for Gaza, where 2 million refugees live under both a Hamas dictatorship and an Israeli blockade, and are without representation in Washington today.

On July 1, the harmonized sales tax came into effect in Ontario and British Columbia. In Ontario the new tax was met with a shrug of resignation, but in British Columbia it’s sparked a huge backlash that threatens to topple the provincial Liberal government. Part of the anger stems from the fact during the 2009 election the Liberals said they had no plans to introduce the HST, only to instate it two months after being elected. Now, internal documents reveal the party was actually discussing the tax two months before the election took place.

The “backlash in this province has always been partly about perceptions of dishonesty, recklessness and arrogance in the way the new tax was introduced” says an editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist. In Ontario the government announced the tax, and the people grumbled. But the perception that the B.C. Liberals tried to deceive the public is “dealing a huge blow to the party and its future prospects” says the paper. “None of this suggests the Liberals had decided to introduce the HST. But it does all undermine the claim the tax was "not on our radar" before the election.

Indeed the cache of emails “shows the HST was on the radar, the sonar and the GPS — and probably written on the bathroom wall at the legislature,” says Michael Smyth in the Province, calling Finance Minister “Colin Hansen's insistence that he did not remember reading an 11-page briefing note on the HST” before the election “downright comical.” At this point neither the Liberals nor voters are laughing.

The government’s handling of the HST has been so atrocious according to Vancouver Sun blogger Don Cayo, that even people who think the tax is a good idea have been silenced. Many economists say it’s good policy, but the Liberals “have been disingenuous beyond belief in pretending this is an idea that suddenly surfaced just as the election campaign ended” Cayo says, and “government ineptitude has made (the HST), in my view, no longer defensible.”