Shorter

Shorter Jack Layton to Stephen Harper

Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.

Sending a message

Just as the Wilson leak was a message to the CIA from the Bush administration that agents' careers could be ruined overnight if they were disloyal, now so the Harman expose is a message to Congress from the CIA that political careers can be ruined overnight if they start investigating what was really going on during the Bush administration.

Final exam

When you heard this news

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

was your first response "Oh My God!" or "Fuck, yeah"?
Putting aside the cruelty, illegality and futility of what the CIA was doing in the name of protecting America, the torture memos are also a personal test for all of us of just how civilized, humane, moral and decent we really are.

Off the record

Glenn Greenwald writes about the sycophantic practices of Washington journalist Mike Allen in letting an anonymous Bush smear-merchant trash Obama "off the record". About the same incident, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?
And how much lower can he sink in craving buzz and traffic?

And here's another anecdote about a Washington villager who thought he could stop reporters from attributing remarks he made in a public forum to a thousand people merely by retroactively declaring his public appearance "off the record".
It reminds me of George M. Cohan's song about FDR, "Off the Record", as sung by Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Check the price tag

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has produced a very interesting report on how much we benefit from public services.
And the answer is that we each benefit to the tune of about $17,000 a year, plus or minus. This is the value of all of the public services provided to each of us by Canadian governments at the federal, provincial and municipal levels -- that's schools, hospitals, medicare, cleaning snow off the streets, and all the other stuff that governments do for people.
Poor people benefita little more, rich people a little less, but the range isn't that large.
Two of the results I found most interesting.
First, when ideologues try to pit Canadians against each other by implying that our social welfare system gives disproportionate and unfair benefits poor people or brown people or immigrants or disabled people or people with children, well, this just isn't true. Over our lifetimes, we all benefit relatively equally:

. . . seniors derive significant benefit from personal transfer payments like Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans. As they age further, they realize increasing benefits from the health care system.
Families with young children will tend to benefit relatively more from the health care system, whereas families with older children will tend to benefit from the public education system to a greater extent than other types of families.. . .
Canadians draw remarkably similar levels of benefit from public services in the aggregate over their lifetimes, although the specific types of public services that are the source of that benefit vary over their lifetime.

So much for wedge issues.
And second, we've got to stop slobbering like Pavlov's dogs every time a politician waves a tax decrease our way.

. . . public policy debate over taxes without reference to the public services impact of tax cuts is like shopping without looking at the price tags. Just as some Canadians can afford to shop without looking at price tags, some Canadians’ incomes are high enough that they can buy into tax cuts and remain confident that their private gains will be greater than their public services losses. But the vast majority of Canadians can’t or shouldn’t shop without looking at the tags.

Strange days indeed

Somebody told me there'd be days like these.
The Indians scored 14 runs -- in the second inning!
The pitcher now has an earned run average of 34.5. He said "I'm going to keep trying to work things out in the bullpen." Yeah...

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century!

I wonder if Gerry Ritz will crack a few jokes?

In spite of an apparently gratuitous swipe at his federal counterpart, the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health clearly lays the blame for the deaths of two dozen Canadians last summer on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency:

July 16.. . two residents of a nursing home in Toronto became ill with listeriosis. One died. The listeriosis outbreak was traced to deli meats from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. But the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not tell health officials until Aug. 14 that meats contaminated with the listeria bacteria might also have been distributed to grocery stores and deli counters. . . The public did not become aware of the problem until Aug. 19, when the CFIA announced a broad recall of Maple Leaf products.

The CFIA report, which as the Globe reports, was also "quietly posted" today on "a government website", also contains what I think is something of a bombshell.
Buried in section 4.2 of the report, we read that Maple Leaf Foods apparently had found listeria bacteria on surfaces in the problem plant repeatedly between May and August. But they didn't tell CFIA about it until after the scandal broke.

Subsequent to the outbreak, Est. 97B {the Maple Leaf Foods plant] staff provided the CFIA with documentation that the environmental sampling program for Est. 97B had identified positive results for Listeria spp. on a number of occasions between May - August.

Now, they hadn't been finding it in the products they were testing, but they weren't actually testing very many products, only one batch a month. Maple Leaf Food's procedure, when they did find listeria on surfaces, was to clean and retest:

The MLF Directive for Environmental Listeria spp. Swab Monitoring, outlines the corrective actions to be followed when a positive result is found, including additional sanitation action and retesting to verify that the site sampled no longer had Listeria.

So when the listeria bacteria kept on showing up, why didn't anyone think there might be a problem?

Need a lift?

Watch

Thanks

Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me at the F-Word Blog awards -- I am honoured and humbled to report that I made it into the finalist round in the "Best Political blog" category. Here are the other fine blogs also in this finalist round:

Challenging the Commonplace
Womanist Musings
Alison at Creekside

And this is an extremely impressive group of bloggers.
Final voting is this weekend, April 18 and 19.
And thanks again, Alison, for nominating me.

"Party like its 1773"? Huh?

Here are some of the suggestions for protest signs from a tea party event listed on the Pajamas TV website:

Party like it's 1773
Home ownership is not an entitlement
Cut Taxes, Not Deals
Next Time, Read the Bill Before You Sign It
You Can't Borrow to Prosperity
Don't Mortgage the Future
Solve Problems, Don't Sweep Them Under the Table
220 Years to Build the Republic, 1 Month to Destroy It

Pretty incoherent and not particularly snappy -- and what the heck is "Party like its 1773" all about anyway?
"Make Love, Not War" and "No War for Oil" were a lot better, I think, but then those were for protests that actually made sense. The so-called "tea parties" are astroturfed.

Here's your shot of pessimism for this week

Digby refers us to two articles today:
First one by Stirling Newbery says don't look for the American economy because you won't find it:

Taking out the defense and financial sectors, and the unemployment rate in the United States isn't the headline 8.5%, but is, in fact, closer to 15% and marching upwards. There is no domestic economy for all practical purposes at this point, other than what is needed to extract every loose dime from the American public to pay off debts.

And Numerian at the Agonist says this isn't going to end well

. . . When the financing tap is finally shut off by the bond markets, we’ll start making our first interest payments on this new debt. It will come in the form of much higher long term interest rates, a weaker U.S. dollar, an inability to import cheap Chinese goods, and declining living standards. All this will happen because the U.S. will have eaten its seed corn. Its businesses will have been shorn of their retained earnings. Consumers will have depleted the equity in their homes. The ability of the federal government to raise taxes and protect the good faith and credit of the U.S. will be shot . . .
The U.S. will be approaching peak oil and water shortages at the very moment it runs out of financial equity and taxing power. It will be an ugly situation . . .

So what do we do, cash out the pension and head for the hills? Well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a little more self-sufficient...

Great line of the day

The War Nerd writes about why there are still aircraft carriers and I think this may also be the reason why it was so damned important in Washington to save Citibank and AIG and all the rest of the financial dinosaurs on Wall Street:

. . . whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

Emphasis mine.

Canadian unity

So at least this recession will be good for something -- Alberta is finally joining the rest of us in bitching at Ottawa for better treatment.

Great line of the day

As quoted by the Freeway blogger

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." - H. L. Mencken