"Tysonic"

On Talking Points Memo we find a great new word:

Bill Simmons, a sportswriter for ESPN, coined the term "Tysonic". It refers to Mike Tyson, and applies to anyone who has entered a sphere of existence so bizarre, you will believe any news you hear about them, no matter how absurd. Aside from Mike Tyson, Britney Spears is Tysonic. After the turkey interview, I classify Sarah Palin as Tysonic.
As a native Chicagoan, I say Blogo is definitely Tysonic. If someone told me, "Hear about Blogo? He dressed himself up as Elvis, highjacked an Air Yugo flight from O'Hare to Belgrade, and is now living under the protection of Serbia... And he's formed an exploratory committee for 2016."
I'd pause for a moment and say, "Yeah, that sounds right."

Housing bubble

Atrios writes:

. . . all you had to do was look at home prices, look at incomes, and realize that not enough people actually made enough money to afford those mortgages. . .

It is the mantra of our generation that real estate always goes up -- except when it doesn't.
When we would watch those home flip shows over the last couple of years, and we would see somebody pay half a million dollars for a three-bedroom bungalow in Las Vegas or Atlanta or Pittsburg, then flip it for three-quarters of a million, my husband and I would wonder who in the world was buying these ordinary houses for that much money.
In other housing markets we had seen, there was outside buying pressure which raised prices, but this didn't seem to be the case in the States. So we thought maybe Americans must be somehow just so much richer than us Canadians.
Now, of course, we realize it was just people like us who were suckered into some bizarre mortgage scheme, blinded by the belief that they couldn't lose because house prices were going to keep going up forever.

Great post of the day

From Maxwell's House: Everyone give thanks to the coalition:

If you are Canadian you need to get down on a knee and give thanks to the coalition of opposition parties that saved your country . . . The coalition forced Harper and the Conservatives to stop and think about what they were doing. It made them choose between being ousted from power or admitting that the economy had failed on their watch . . . THANK YOU COALITION.

And Senator Elaine McCoy tells us why Harper's new economic stimulus package sounds so familiar.

Great cartoon

Stuart Carlson:

Maybe there's still time

Was this all that I needed to do?:

The government has been inundated with applications for the vacant seats, he said.
"People come up to me on the street and say they want to be a senator," said [Minister of State for Democratic Reform Steven] Fletcher.

I wonder if I still have time to put in my application...

Is this creativity?

This is worrisome. US federal reserve chair Ben Bernanke apparently thinks this economic crisis must be just like the last economic crisis because that's the one he studied. I don't get the sense that he actually knows what's happening in THIS crisis, rather that he is cutting interest rates because that's what he thought might have helped in Japan a decade ago.
And about the US Fed cutting interest rates to zero, Paul Krugman says:

Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

Don't hold your breath. If there is one thing that we can rely on with the Bush administration, it is ideological, rigid, incompetent decision-making.

Half a million jobs

This is terrible -- Auto collapse may cost half-million jobs
I don't know if Canada can even imagine what this scale of job loss would be like.
I heard some ignorant economist hot shot talking today on the radio about how half a million jobs really was an exaggeration and couldn't really happen and even if jobs did disappear, well, them's the breaks.
Ha! Lord save us from 25-year-old "experts".
We lived in Victoria BC when the forest industry shed 30,000+ jobs in a six-month period in 1981-82. Now, coming from the Prairies where we had a "crisis" in agricultural employment for as long as I could remember, we thought we knew what hard times were like. But we didn't. The scale of the economic disaster in BC that year was simply awful.
Whole communities shut down. Hundreds of families lost their homes, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity evaporated as people could not sell because nobody could afford to buy. These were people who had a pretty nice life until then -- there they were, with boats they couldn't sell, and cars that nobody would buy, living in houses which were being foreclosed, owing tens of thousands to the bank for these adult toys and geegaws. There was a joke making the rounds, along the lines of "Please, Lord, send us another boom and we promise not to piss it away this time." But it wasn't funny, not really. People finally had to go on welfare just to feed their children -- the emotional despair was worse than the economic devastation.
Anything that governments can do to prevent this happening again, they should do.

Ashamed

Alison reports on the Dziekanski whitewash and commenter psa says this:

i'm really not used to being ashamed of canada. i hope i don't have to get too good at it.

Notes on the decline and fall

At The War Nerd, Mark Ames analyzes the Georgia-Ossetia war and what is next in the declining American empire:

We have entered a dangerous moment in history — America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Which it does — but not in the old dominant way that America wants or believes itself to be. History shows that it’s at this moment, tipping into decline and humiliation, when the worst decisions are made, so idiotically destructive that they’ll make the Iraq campaign look like a mere training exercise fender-bender by comparison.
Russia, meanwhile, is as high as a Hollywood speedballer from its victory. Putting the two together in the same room — speedballing Russia and violently bad-tripping America — is a recipe for serious disaster. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive the humiliating decline and settle into the new reality without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world. But when that awful moment arrives where the cognitive dissonance snaps hard, it will be an epic struggle to come to our senses in time to prevent the William Kristols, Max Boots and Robert Kagans from leading us into a nuclear holocaust which, they will assure us, we can win against Russia, thanks to our technological superiority. If only we have the will, they’ll tell us, we can win once and for all.

Great line of the day

From Arianna Huffington:

When you look at the elements that were crucial to the creation of each of these debacles [Iraq, Fannie Mae, Citigroup, Madoff] it's amazing how much in common they all have. And not just in how they began but in how they ended: with those responsible being amazed at what happened, because...who could have known? Well, to paraphrase James Inhofe, I'm amazed at the amazement.
In fact, when historians look for a name that sums up the Bush II years, they could do worse than calling them The 'Who Could Have Known?' Era.

Emphasis mine.

Its been a long time since elementary school

The last time I bothered to think about the Canadian "head of state" was in about Grade 6.
All this tut-tutting aboutwoefully ignorant Canadians is silly. We know what's important.
In this survey, 90 per cent knew that the Governor General can turn down a Prime Minister asking for a new election. Now, that's important. But as for the other questions, meh!
Our head of state technically is still the Queen, but in reality it is our Prime Minister.
And as for how our government can be described, well, technically it is a "constitutional monarchy" but in reality its a parliamentary democracy.
And as for whether we elect our prime minister, well, of course we do -- that's why we have political parties. Canadians have been told for a century now to vote for the party, not the person, and the vast majority of the time that is exactly what we do. Our last election was all about Mr. Sweater-Vest vs Mr. Green Shift.

Another thousand cuts

Well, so much for the packaged sliced meat business in Canada -- after the Maple Leaf experience, I would have thought the other companies would have been compulsive about their equipment cleaning processes, but maybe I thought wrong. Now lets see if Gerry Ritz can come up with a few more jokes.

Great line of the day

Steve has a great post up about how the Canadian public mostly hates the idea of having a coalition government and Liberals had better deal with this reality. And in the Comments, Issachar points out another lesson that the Liberals have now had to learn:

Having your funding entirely dependent on the Conservatives NEVER getting a majority is a very bad idea for the Liberal party.

Monster crash

I was reading this story, and this story, and this story -- and then I finally found this, for a little comic relief:

The cu-cu-cu bird

And from across this great province we call Saskatchewan, we hear once again the cry of the cu-cu-cu bird -- "C-C-C-Christ, its c-c-c-cold here!"