The "Toronto Street Gangs" Pander

Several bloggers and other critics have noticed that Harper's so-called crackdown on teenage criminals doesn't really make sense because the crime statistics show that crime is down.
So when something doesn't make sense, then you have to look for the story behind the story. And in this case, I think it's recent Toronto street gang shootings. I think the Conservatives are just trying to give their Toronto candidates something they can promote when they're campaigning -- so they don't have to answer questions about income trusts and crumbling city infrastructure.
Christie Blatchford's column is actually sort of a test case that the Conservative strategy may work.

Stephen disses Laureen

Stephen, if you're tired of looking after the kids, you should really just talk to Laureen about it instead of getting mad at the whole Canadian arts community.
Yes, its true. While Stephen is trying to score cheap political points by promoting division and distrust between all us so-called "ordinary folk" and all those supposed arty snobs with their elitist "galas", Laureen is gallivanting around:

. . .to the National Arts Centre gala on Oct. 4. (Singer Tony Bennett is the big draw this year.) In fact, she's the gala's honourary chair and has been for several years. And she really gets into it, helping to personally decorate the NAC foyer for the event. She's always dressed beautifully and once again, John Baird, a Tory incumbent candidate from Ottawa and the Environment Minister, has agreed to be her date. Her husband never goes; he stays home and looks after the kids at their taxpayer-subsidized mansion on Sussex Drive

Philistine!

It's our duty

In the Hinzman war dodger court case, the Crown attorney argued:

"It is not really for us to pass judgment on a military code in a foreign country"

What? But of course it is. If Canada doesn't do this, who will?
It is the duty of Canadians to make exactly this judgment before we send anyone back to a country where, it was claimed, he will be treated more harshly by the military because it was the Iraq War he spoke out against.
I'm glad that the judge did not agree with the Crown attorney. Hinzman and his family are staying, at least for now.

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.