Great line of the day

Mike Whitney: Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Paulson is to finance capitalism what Rumsfeld is to military strategy.

Via Sideshow.

Liberals closing or widening the gap?

Nanos has the Tories up by five percent, while Harris has the Tories up by 16 per cent.
Nanos has the Liberals closing the gap, while Harris has the Tories increasing their lead.
I agree with what Warren Kinsella says:

I and many other hacks – red, blue and orange – believe CP and MotherCorp are going to be embarrassed, come Election Day, by the Harris-Decima numbers they’re trumpeting day in and day out. The gap is not that huge; there is no bloody way the Tories have that kind of a lead.

Debit cards were nice, weren't they?

Well, debit cards were nice while they lasted, weren't they?
But it seems like there's just too much risk now to keep on using them.
I got a call from my bank one Saturday in June that my debit card had been cut off -- I guess somewhere I had used it, there was a fraud problem. So I had to dash into the bank and get a new one, and a new PIN.
Darned lucky that I wasn't sitting in an airplane that Saturday morning, on my way to somewhere expensive.
So ever since, I've been trying to use more of that other stuff -- oh, you remember that stuff -- whadaya call it....oh yeah, cash!

Making children cry

Great, guys, just great -- now the anti-Olympic protestors are making children cry. That'll sure get Canadians on your side!

Sgt. Ken MacDonald of Port Moody Police said a man and a woman were arrested for assault. They were pulled from the banner-shaking crowd in front of the stage after a woman and her two children were surrounded.
Giving her name only as Gina, the woman said she was trying to take her four-year-old daughter, Parisa, and nine-year-old son, Daniel, to see the band when protesters closed in on them.

I saw this story on CTV News -- the shots of the children being surrounded by screaming protestors were graphic and upsetting. Both children were frightened and crying.
Then instead of just apologizing to the mother and the children, like any normal person would do, one of the protestors had the gall to blame the mother. Somehow, I guess, the mother was supposed to know that a nice little ceremony to launch an innocuous feel-good event like the Spirit Train tour across Canada would turn into a riot.

Cartoon du jour

Found on CalgaryGrit: Week 2 in Review

There's something rotten here

There is something wrong with Paulson's bailout package.
Otherwise, why are they in such a panic to get it passed?
Instead of meeting directly with legislators and bankers,

Paulson made the rounds of the television talk shows to stress the need for speed in getting the bailout package approved.

Talk shows? Who is he trying to scare?
But maybe this is the reason why the Republicans want to assemble this deal so quickly:

Democrats said they understood the need for urgency but insisted that the measure needed to provide help for homeowners threatened with losing their homes, perhaps by changes in bankruptcy laws to allow for mortgages to be modified, and by capping pay and benefit packages for executives at the huge Wall Street firms that will be selling their bad debt to the government.
"I don't want the American taxpayer to get this bad debt and then the guy (whose company once held the bad loans) gets millions of dollars on his way out the door," said House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Darn, got it in one, Barney!

So what else is new?

Here is the Heather Mallick column that is causing all the fuss. And I don't get it -- Mallick didn't say anything about Sarah Palin and her supporters that a thousand progressive bloggers in the United States haven't said already.
Maybe they're just embarrassed that a Canadian thinks so poorly of a vice presidential candidate.

The sky actually is falling, I think

Here's the plan:

[the bailout plan] authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

Does anybody think this is going to work out well?

It ain't over

So now Harper thinks he can quell the Cold Cuts Scandal by ignoring it.
I don't think this will work. Because Canadians are going to keep dying.

You're doing a heck of a job, Henry and Bennie

As I suspected, the Bush administration is apparently now making a series of bad decisions about the market meltdown. Ian Welsh ennumerates:

The SEC is trying to decide if it should .. . . ban all short selling, period
This smells of panic driven decision making. Regulators are in a cold sweat, and they haven't thought this through. . . .
Getting rid of short selling entirely doesn't make market meltdowns less likely. It makes them more likely. Just as letting banks use depositor money to shore up investment banking subsidiaries is throwing good money, your money, after bad. Just as allowing banks to book "good will" as regulatory reserves doesn't actually change how likely they are to be insolvent. Regulators are making decisions in the grip of stark fear and their critical faculties aren't working anymore.

If Ian Welsh knows this, why don't the SEC braniacs know it?
And you know, when the people in charge keep coming up with instant "solutions" to the market panic, and those "solutions" actually make it easier to continue playing with somebody else's money, then I suspect that these aren't actually solutions at all, they're just somebody's pet project -- something that the banks and the Bushies had wanted to do anyway and with the panic they got their chance.

Saskatchewan mourns

The Little General is gone.

Na-na-na-na-na -- I can't hear you!

Gerry Ritz is Harper's problem, but our problem is a little broader than that -- can we trust the Canadian food we are buying?
The Conservatives seem to think that the way to deal with their food inspection responsibilities is to stick their fingers in their ears, shake their heads back and forth, and say "Na-na-na-na-na" as loudly as they can.
Scott directs us to a new Public Service Alliance website called Food Safety First which describes how the federal government is trying to make food safety problems disappear.
First, they're not actual creating or enforcing any actual safety regulations. No,no, that would be too much trouble, plus, of course, it would make the food industry mad, and the Harper Conservatives never want industry to be mad at them.
Instead, what they're doing is much easier, not to mention cheaper.
They're letting food plants inspect themselves, then not publishing the results! Simplicity itself!

The move toward industry self-policing has been done quietly by Ottawa politicians, bureaucrats and food company executives who fear news of the changes would spark a public backlash.
The spotlight of media attention fell on the government’s plans when a secret government document became public that outlines the government’s plans for the: "shift from full-time Canadian Food Inspection Agency meat inspection presence to an oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks," and;"elimination of federal delivery of provincial meat inspection programs" in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.
Meanwhile, Ottawa has quietly killed the publication of audit reports of Canadian meat processing facilities because of complaints from the industry that these reports caused the companies bad press.
Currently, the only source of independent information about safety in Canada meat processing industry comes from the United States. The US Department of Agriculture conducts an annual audit of Canada’s meat, poultry and egg products inspection system. The American audits, including plant visits, have revealed some shocking findings which were reported by the Globe and Mail.
The complete USDA audit is available here.

Steve at Far and Wide sums it up:

When Harper takes to the mic, and defends Ritz, saying he is doing a good job on the file, and that's all that matters, the follow up question should ask about that JOB. Why are you putting the onus on companies to self-police, when their chief concern is profit, sometimes at the expense of public safety? Why are you CUTTING inspection? Canadians need to understand that this government is putting public health at risk because of ideological considerations. The Conservative policies are the bad joke here.

Wall and Harper

Well, I see Chester is still BFF with Spike .
And its sort of humorous, actually, because if Canadians listened to Wall and actually came to believe that Dion's Green Shift is the modern version of Trudeau's National Energy Program, then Dion's popularity in Ontario and Quebec would immediately shoot upwards . . .

No how, no way, no catfight

This was a smart move on Clinton's part -- Clinton avoids Palin faceoff.
Just as Obama avoided raising McCain's profile by appearing with him in townhall meetings, so Clinton avoided a meaningless media circus which would have become a major distraction from the actual presidential campaign.

Mulroney Lite

As Allison points out, Harper says those mean old other "bunch of parties" want to "sabotage" his government because they "don't want our economy to be successful". As if he knew how to do that!
Frances Russell compares Harper to Mulroney -- both turned out to be fiscal disasters:

In less than three years, Harper has squandered a balanced budget and fiscal surplus that Canadians shredded much of their social safety net to achieve.
. . . Last month, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that Canada is slated for the second weakest economic growth among the major industrialized countries -- the worst performance since the last time the Conservatives were in office.
Harper is following Brian Mulroney's footsteps. Between 1984 and 1993, Mulroney ran up nearly two-thirds of the more than half-trillion-dollar national debt accumulated in Canada since Confederation. In his last year in office, his government posted a $42-billion deficit and a half-trillion-dollar national debt.
. . . Canadians need to ask how bad it could get under a second Harper regime . . .
It's unbelievable that the very ideology responsible for the fiscal and financial meltdown is now being marketed as best positioned to address it.

This echoes the Gazetteer's perceptive comment on Sunday.
And the peasants are burying their gold.