Hitting the reset button

If you are trying to follow the financial news but are totally confused about what is going on and why, just read Billmon:

The broad story is well known, even to the cable TV pinheads: Housing Bubble + Subprime Mortgage Lending + Derivatives = Armageddon.. . .
But even now I’m not sure if many people fully understand just how insanely reckless the carnival was, to the point where future historians will speak of "structured finance" in much the same the way we talk about the bubonic plague.
The carriers (fleas and rats) of this particular epidemic were the bright young Wall Street things who invented the concept of securitized lending . . .
So here we are: The banks are sitting on paper originally valued at 100 cents on the dollar (or even more) which is now worth 20 or 10 or 0 cents. If they sell the stuff at those prices, most of the capital they’ve put behind those assets will be erased, leaving them insolvent, technically and perhaps literally – as in, unable to cover their current liabilities. On the other hand, if they don’t sell their pieces of Big Shitpile, all their capital (including what Uncle Sam has already thrown into the till) will remain frozen in place, blocking them from doing any new lending. Without new lending, they can’t earn the profits they need to make good the losses they are sitting on. Zombies. Night of the Living Dead Banks.
The banks know this, investors know this, Geithner and Co. know this. And everybody knows that the others know. So the only way to get private investors (many of whom have already lost a few pounds of their own flesh to the bear) to bid on Big Shitpile is to make them offers they can’t refuse – and I’m not talking about leaving a horse’s head in their beds, although I suppose it could come to that.

The Sunday talk shows seem to agree that the only way out now is for the US government to take over the banks.
Just reset everything to zero and start again. Well, that ought to go over well with Glenn Beck's viewers.

Helpful advice about torture

"If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong."

What the Gitmo interrogators were told in 2002 about how to recognize that they had violated the Geneva conventions against torture.

"Plug and play interoperability"

Alison reports on the newest terminology for what used to be called "deep integration" and before that was called, I think, "customs union" with the United States.
I guess as Canadians begin to understand each term, and it starts to poll worse, they have to change it.

Shooting themselves in the foot

This is why I have come to believe the United States will never introduce government-paid medical care at the national level -- can you imagine how many rants would be heard about how awful it would be to "reward" all those "losers" -- ie, women having too many babies and young people getting addicted to drugs and men shooting each other up.
You know, poor people.
The same people who obviously caused the economic meltdown by buying houses.

Soon

As my husband put it, the calendar is on our side now.

Talking about "Canadian" names

One of the best things about Canada, I believe, is that we aren't a melting pot where people congeal together into some bland homogeneous "Canadian" soup. Rather, we continue to strive to be a multi-cultural country where we all can maintain our distinctiveness. Je me souviens applies to all of us.
Over at Dawg's Blawg they're having a fascinating discussion about what makes a name "Canadian". Sprinkled among some wingnut anti-immigrant rantings there are some great comments -- like this one from Cameron:

. . . here's my checklist:
Passed the criminal background check? Got a passport? Know not to put your tongue or damp hand on metal objects during the winter?
Canadian.

Brendan adds

Omar Khadr is a Canadian name, though not many seem to believe it.

So is Mahar Arar. And North of 49 shares a story:

For my kids' generation (in a big cosmopolitan city, anyway), a name is just a name. Some are a little trickier to pronounce (teacher Mrs Abousaffi told the kids to just call her "Mrs A", for example), and while the kids are always aware of and curious about the name's origins, it isn't an "other" thing, like a tribal label; it's a personal thing, like the colour of someone's hair. For these kids, Mohammed or Ali or Jamshyd or Puran are already as unremarkable as Tom, Dick or Harriet. . . . At the dealership where my Filipino friend works, there's only one "white" salesman, the rest are first-generation immigrants from various places that have nothing in common except that there's no hockey. Yet during the playoffs, when there are no customers anyway because they're all watching the Canucks on TV, all five of these guys are crowded around the one small TV in the sales manager's office, whooping like cowhands on payday.

Dawg quotes a comment from a friend of his

. . . my mother married a Roma, and her twin sister a Cree, my grandfather on my father's side was a Hassidic Russian Jew whose family fled Russia to escape the pogroms. He married a Romani woman, one of my younger cousins just married a Mohawk man, and another aMexican man, I married an Italian, a Jamaican, and than a Jamaican Chinese man, my other cousin married a Chinese man, my best friends are Metis, Jamaicans, Jews and Vietnamese. I sent my son out West to go live with the Metis and he spent the last week spent fishing and hunting with the Blackfoot and he now he doesn't want ever want to come to Toronto. My daughter's closest friends are Iranian, Vietnamese, Ghanian, and Russian in origin.

Dawg says "That sums up Canada for me in microcosm, and it's one of the reasons I love the place."
Yes, indeed.

Great planning, guys

So in 2001 the announced plan for the Afghanistan War was for NATO to help the United States knock the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan because it had harboured Al Quaeda and Bin Laden.
Fast forward to 2009.
Far too many of the scary terrorists turned out to be malnourished Afghans, Australian adventurers, and violent children. Not only have the Taliban taken back huge swaths of Afghanistan, it appears now they are taking over huge swaths of nuclear-armed Pakistan as well.
As Bill Murray said when Danny Aykroyd thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, "Great thinking, Ray!"

Why would anyone want to hear Bush?

They seem to expect 1,500 people will attend George Bush's speech in Calgary, but why they don't say -- I can't imagine why anyone in Calgary or anywhere else would care what Bush has to say anymore.

Sneaky

The Toronto Star reports that Harper -- the guy who presented himself to Canadians in October as Mr. Sweater, the Kitten Whisperer -- is trying to use the economic crisis to sneak some right-wing pandering into the budget bill.
He just can't stop himself, can he?

So let them chatter

They're pitching a fit in the US about whether Obama will reinstate the old "fairness doctrine". The Politico finger-wags:

[President Obama] stating [opposition to reinstatement] clearly would quickly silence a lot of conservative critics who assume the Democratic president is going to push to reinstate the defunct policy. Otherwise, the Fairness Doctrine chatter on the airwaves isn't likely to die down.

But what the Politico doesn't understand is this: They're going to chatter about something, so it actually doesn't matter whether Obama wants to reinstate this or not, as long as right-wing radio remains afraid that he might. And the more they emote and weep and wail about it, the more they are admitting to their listeners that they AREN"T actually fair.

The War Nerd on Gaza

The War Nerd finally writes about the January war in Gaza. And what he says isn't pretty. Here's the gist of it:

The lowdown on Gaza is simple: in the short run, Israel did a decent job of killing Hamas’s cadre. Gaza’s a small place, and it was pretty much shooting fish with headscarves in a sandy barrel. They blew up the place real good, made themselves feel better after getting roughed up by Hezbollah a couple years ago. OK, so you’re a Hell of a counterpuncher; so what?. . . what happens five years from now when all those dead Hamas guys’ little brothers are ready to graduate from the rebuilt Gaza I-Hate-the-Jews Academy.

He concludes that Israel is going destroy itself in the long run if it doesn't start making better decisions:

. . . what a lot of people don’t get about war is there comes a time when there ain’t no smart moves any more. . . . And Israel, in the long term…well, they’ve got those 200 nukes, and the US Congress…and that’s about all. They won’t get driven into the sea like Arafat used to screech, but they’ll get meaner and smaller until all the smart people, the ones who can, will get out, and what’s left will be another scrappy desert fort making deals with the locals. A lot of Crusader kingdoms went out that way, just one decision away from getting re-absorbed into the Muslim soup. If they’d made a deal with the Mongols, maybe we could’ve done something with this. But nooooooo, they were too snotty. Nope, doesn’t look good, and worse yet it’s going to be some ugly maintenance wars, where you have to blast a lot of schools and hospitals, and still don’t get anywhere. Like that scene in Fight Club where he bleeds all over the Mafia guy, till the wise guy screams he can use the basement. “Lou! Lou! You don’t know where I’ve been!”

Great comment of the day

In Marcy Wheeler's latest post about the developing investigation against the Bush administration torture memo lawyers, commenter "Scribe" writes:

I work as a lawyer. I’ve been one for about 20 years. Addington, Yoo, and the rest of those thugs with bar admissions have given me every reason to rage at, and every reason to hate, both them and their use of my profession. Liars, cheaters, thieves, deadbeats, busted marriages, cops and all the rest are the daily flow of lawyering. But the one group who deserve nothing but to be rooted out of the profession and their careers ended are those who use the law and their skill in it to destroy the law. The lawyer who steals from a client is bad enough. But he steals only money. The lawyer who uses the law to destroy the law steals not from a client, but from both everyone in the future - who will have to live under a system he perverted - and from those in the past who sacrificed their lives for the ideal of law. And he steals something more precious than money. He steals liberty from the future, and shits on the sacrifice of the past.

Oops

I just pulled a post from yesterday because it was based on a news story that was 18 months old -- can't remember now how exactly I found it, or why I thought it was actually new.
Don't you hate it when that happens?

Not outrageous

So Wolfe won and Montcalm lost and ever since we've been singing one of the most xenophobic songs ever written.
Now I like history. But I just can't work up any outrage over this -- it looks like we are not going to reenact some battle from 250 years ago because said reenactment would be needlessly provocative and insulting to many Canadians in Quebec. Good decision.

Wow

Just wow!