Could Lanny Cardow Be the TCFlogger?

An anonymous commenter has made the suggestion that the TCFlogger is a guy named Lanny Cardow.

Since the commenter left no e-mail or website to home in on, I'm inclined to take this one with a very large grain of Dead Sea salt. However, judging from his blog Lanny looks to be a pretty good candidate.

The ominous sign, of course, is the Nov. 23 blog entry:

OK folks. Here's the scoop - As of this weekend, I'm heading back to Canada for a long while. Nothing bad, just some old political scores to settle with the Liberal Party ...

Not enough to go to court on, of course, but extremely suggestive.


The suggestion gets reinforced by the fact that Mr. Cardow has indulged in some photoblogging. Check out those galleries in the right-side column. Looking at some of his landscape photos, he does have the same eye for focal-perspective shots that the TCFlogger has in this photo of Stephen Harper.

Is there any other evidence? Possibly. Mr. Cardow has been a research assistant at the Institute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet at George Washington University. Here's what his profile says:

Lanny Cardow is a Research Assistant for the Institute and a Masters student at the Graduate School of Political Management. After completing his undergraduate degree at Queen's University (Ontario, Canada) in 2002, Lanny served a one year term as VP (operations) of the Queen's University student government. Lanny then moved to Ottawa to work for Stephen Harper, the opposition leader in the Canadian House of Commons, where he managed outreach operations. A native of Guelph, Ontario, Lanny was first introduced to politics by working for his local member of provincial parliament.

So. We have a politically active young man, who's personally worked for Stephen Harper, who knows how to blog and likes to use photos in his work. And who left, a week before the government fell, to "settle some old political scores."

Is this enough to positively identify Lanny Cardow as the TCFlogger? Not for a courtroom, but it might be enough for the denouement scene of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. If anyone out there's good at text analysis, they could compare the texts of the Flog and Cardow's old blog, and come up with a more definite conclusion, but for now, we can consider Lanny the prime suspect.

Of course someone could always ask him at his blog's e-mail address ...