Great line of the day

From Saskboy, wondering why Canadians aren't questioning Harper's lack of an economic plan:

People should be asking themselves if they can afford to stick with the party and leader who still denies that Canada is headed for the same economic problems as the United States

Yes, that pretty well sums it up, doesn't it.

Cry me a river

An innocent man spends 23 years in jail and now we're supposed to feel sorry for the hurt feelings of the prosecutor and the lead detective when the prisoner's mother got mad at them.
Yeah, really.
The lengthy Inquiry into the David Milgaard conviction for the 1969 murder of Gail Miller has concluded there was no coverup, just a series of unfortunate mistakes.

Wall Street Underpants Gnomes

Turns out that Wall Street was actually populated by Underpants Gnomes in nice suits. Here's the Underpants Gnomes business plan:
1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
Maybe step two will turn out to be the $700 billion American government bailout.
No wonder Atrios has been calling all this the big shitpile. Here's an example of the kind of crap that was happening, from Good Math, Bad Math : Economic Disasters and Stupid Evil People:

It gets quite a bit stupider when you look at the details of some of these deals....[such as] one loan package issued by UBS. They had one bundle of about 20 billion dollars of loans that they resold as bonds. They bought 'insurance' on it from a much smaller investment firm, whose total assets (that is, every bit of money that they had any plausible claim to be able to raise) was 200 million dollars. Think about what that means: the guys insuring those 20 billion dollars of loans had absolutely no way of covering them: the insurer couldn't possibly ever pay off the loans they were insuring if they failed. But on the paper that got the loans their high-quality rating, it said that they were fully insured. So there's no way in hell that if those loans failed, the insurers would be able to pay up, and the folks selling the insurance knew it, and the folks buying the insurance knew it. But they just assumed that somehow, this would all work out.

And thanks to the Republican bail out plan, it may.

Great line of the day

At Canadian Cynic, psa writes Big Steve, Working Stiff:

Stephen Harper, plump and soft as a double roll of Cottonelle. A man who has spent his entire adult life, after leaving school with a degree in economics, either as a spoiled politician or as a spoiled ideologue in the loving embrace of a right wing think tank. Stephen Harper. A man who is unlikely to ever develop a callus on his hands unless it comes from clutching pennies. This twee, over-fed poofter has the little salted nuts to look into the lens of the camera and portray himself as one of the "ordinary, working people".

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?