Canadians are dying so why not crack a few jokes?

Can I get sued for wondering what Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz was smoking on that Sunday morning two weeks ago, when he decided that the civil servants and scientists discussing the deaths of Canadians due to listeria needed to hear him crack a few jokes:

Sources who took notes during the call said Ritz fretted about the political dangers of the crisis, before quipping:
"This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts."
The disease was linked to cold cuts from Maple Leaf Meats.
And when told about a new death in Prince Edward Island, Ritz said:
"Please tell me it's (Liberal MP) Wayne Easter."
Easter is the Liberal critic shadowing Ritz's Agriculture Department.
...The conversation on Aug. 30 began with talk of the mounting death toll and trends in the spread of the disease.
Sources say Ritz began the call by asking: "Are there any more bombs out there?" - implying any politically damaging news.
But discussion soon shifted to communications and how best to frame the government's message.

So I see he's got the government's priorities front and centre.
The Canadian press story also says

Ritz was not the only cabinet minister to quip about the food crisis.

But they didn't say who the others were, and I guess its up to us to figure out what is wrong with these people.

UPDATE: Oh, yes, it was the Health minister.

What will China do?

Ian Welsh looks east:

China holds a ton of mortgage backed securities. AIG insures many of them. Freddie and Fannie guarantee many of them. Failing to bail those firms out, failing to guarantee that paper, meant that China would be stuck with cents on the dollar. And after taking a loss like that, they might not be willing to keep extending the US what amounts to loans. And if that happens, the dollar crashes, or interest rates have to go through the roof.
And that's the barrel of the gun that Bernanke and Paulson are looking down.

Fire department vs bucket brigade

Atrios, who is an economist, provides an excellent analogy:

. . . I have no idea if this bailout was a good thing or a bad thing. I don't have enough information to make that determination.
The real issue is that you need a sensible regulatory framework to prevent financial crises from happening in the first place, and criteria and practices for dealing with them when they do, along with a sensible and consistent broad social safety net for individuals and families for when crises happen to them.
It might have been the right thing to run down to the river with buckets to collect water to throw on the burning building, but it would have been much better to have better fire codes and a functioning fire department.

Me, I would prefer fire codes and a fire department.

Cheer up!

My new favorite blog, Calculated Risk sums up the financial news:

With the DOW off over 500 points yesterday, Lehman in bankruptcy, the Fed rescuing A.I.G. tonight, the viability of WaMu and others institutions in doubt, Fannie and Freddie placed in conservatorship, a major money market fund halting redemptions, it might seem like the credit crisis is spiraling out of control.
And there are definitely more problems to come.
Many banks will fail - especially small and regional banks with excessive concentrations in construction & development (C&D) and commercial real estate (CRE) loans. And the recession is getting worse with rising unemployment, declining personal consumption expenditures, declining industrial production and falling business investment. Economies of many other countries are in or close to recession. The Fed even cautioned on slowing U.S. exports today for the first time.
Foreign stock markets are crashing: the Russian stock market was halted today after declining 17%. The Shanghai composite index is off about 2/3 from the peak.

But even after all that, CR concludes

...unlike observers that believe this only marks the end of the beginning, I believe there is a chance that these events mark the beginning of the end of the crisis.

OK, works for me.

Great line of the day

From Stephane Dion:

Mr. Harper, he speaks better English than me, OK. But I speak the truth better than him in English and in French

Why would the Bush administration be right this time?

Business writer Joe Nocera at the New York Times looks on the bright side, sort of:

With the government refusing to prop up Wall Street anymore, maybe now mortgage-backed derivatives will find their natural bottom. Something to look forward to, I guess.

The thing that worries me is this -- if there is one thing the last eight years has taught us, it is that the Bush administration is just about always wrong about just about everything.
So why would they be right about how they are handling the market meltdown?

Great line of the day

Over at Dawg's Blawg, Marie Eve contrasts Harper's $19 billion spending extravaganza with his recent statement about the importance of fiscal prudence, and concludes:

If Harper keeps spinning at that rate, by October 14th he should have spun a hole for himself all the way to China.

Not helpful

Cue the trolls, just as Dion starts to trend upward. But trolls are so cute, aren't they, especially the ones who are pretending to be Liberals.

Be careful what you wish for

I've been working almost constantly for the last 40 years, and in that time I have paid tens of thousands of dollars into the Employment Insurance fund.
I have collected on these benefits for two stints of maternity leave and a few weeks of actual unemployment. But there is no way that I ever got back, or ever will get back, anything near what I have contributed into that fund, both directly from my salary and indirectly from my employers. All of us working stiffs have to keep paying into it, year after year after year, whether we use the benefits or not.
[For the last twenty years or so, mostly not -- which only increases my resentment, because I would much prefer that my involuntary contribution to the social compact at least be used to benefit jobless Canadians rather than just disappearing into the government's general revenues.]
But getting back to my point, so now Harper is promising to make self-employed people eligible for maternity leave benefits because this is what business people are asking for, Harper says.
I can understand their resentment -- its like driving around the mall on a cold winter's day and seeing the empty handicapped parking places and thinking gee wouldn't it be nice to park so close.
But you need to think this through, people.
Once you become "eligible" for EI benefits, you won't have a choice about whether to pay them or not and it won't matter whether you are young or old or male or female. A percentage of every dollar you earn will go into the EI fund and you'll just have to pay it, and maybe you'll have to pay the "employers" contribution as well -- and you'll keep paying and paying, now and forever, amen.

Dion trending up

As I understand it with daily tracking polls, its' not so much the numbers or the gap, its the trendline that's important. In this Canadian Press Harris/Decima poll, Harper is trending down while Dion is trending up.
And over at the Canoe blog, Paul Turenne has some questions about that gas price spike:

It is remarkably bad luck for the Liberals and their Green Shift that gas prices spiked the way they did across Canada last Friday,. . .
Anyway, who would benefit more than the Tories, and be hurt more than the Liberals, when Canadians are reminded right in the middle of a campaign just how much gas costs already? Price of crude goes down, price of gas jumps through the roof. Even with a hurricane, that's tough to explain. . . I'm just sayin' ...

Questions for Candidates

Dan Froomkin writes a piece titled Fact Checking Is So 20 Minutes Ago about the increasing conservative tendency not to care about facts. Its being dished higher and deeper in the States, but Canadian Cons are increasingly slinging the BS, too. So maybe we need to stop wringing our hands about refuting every lie every day, and instead expect the press to start "meta-fact-checking", as Froomkin suggests:

~ ...How reality-based is the candidate? Does he acknowledge unpleasant realities? Does he think he makes his own reality, and that asserting something that isn't true will sort of make it true? ...
~Does the candidate say things that the people covering him know he doesn't believe? For instance, is it obvious to everyone in the traveling press corps that he is repeating a line his speechwriters or pollsters have written for him, even though he knows full well it's not true.
~Is the candidate exposed to dissenting views - either in public or within his campaign? Does he encourage dissenting views? How hard does the campaign work to keep dissenters out of his way?
~Is the candidate ever willing to try to make his case in front of people who don't already agree with him? Is he willing to engage them? Does he tailor his speeches to specific audiences in order so that they will like what they hear? Or so that they will open their minds to views they may not initially share?
~How does he respond to people who don't share his views? Does he dismiss them? Does he try to persuade them? Does he listen?

I like this line, too

Andrew Potter, Ottawa Citizen national editor explains why the Conservative war room is so juvenile:

A friend of mine has a theory, that the left is made up of a coalition of socialists and social workers, while the right is made up of a coalition of economists and jerks.

Who got us into this mess anyway?

The Gazetteer is absolutely correct:

Stephen Harper turned a $12 billion dollar surplus into a deficit in the BEST of times.
And now that things are going sideways and he's telling us that, in these times of 'uncertainty', that he's the best man for the job?

Great line of the day

From Chet at Vanity Press:

At some point, this election will start to be about something.

But actually, of course, its about the future of the country -- no biggie!

Tories blow it again

So the Conservatives are using a photo of a California family in their most recent ad. I guess they couldn't be bothered to search for a Canadian family who supports them. Or they couldn't find one...