Will Spike listen to Chester this time?

Saskatchewan probably is going to ask Ottawa to block the potash corp sale to BHP Billinton but "some Conservative MPs" don't seem to care very much what Saskatchewan wants.

Some Conservative MPs feel potash is a strategic resource that must be kept in Canadian hands, but they can’t see overwhelming opposition to a deal. “This, frankly, isn’t a great commercial deal,” the senior Tory MP said. “There’s a lot of people who say, ‘I’m not sure I’d stop this deal, but I am not sure I am a big fan of it.’
“Unless there's something else in the works [another deal], it’s kind of hard to see Ottawa saying no. I think a lot of people in government would like to see Canadian champions, but there don’t seem to be many Canadian players willing to step forward,” the former official said.

Brad Wall has made a big deal about how important he thinks it is for Saskatchewan to get along well with Stephen Harper, and in the past Wall's willingness to go along with what Harper wants has cost Saskatchewan a lot of money. Now I wonder whether this Spike-and-Chester relationship will cost Saskatchewan its potash?

Killing the goose

The Progressive Economics Forum explains the recession:

The real cause of the Great Recession is the fact that workers, consumers and the middle class are simply too broke to buy the goods necessary to stimulate the global economy and get people back to work. They no longer earn enough disposable income and are swimming in too much debt to accomplish this.

This articulates a feeling I have had that people in our society who complain about their unionized friends and neighbours and relatives getting paid "too much" just haven't realized where their own best interests really lie -- nobody buys a house or a car or sends their kids to university or builds their community on minimum wage.
HT POGGE

Music to drive by

Booman alerts us to the 885 Ultimate Road Trip Songs contest. Here's number one:

Hundert is now Canada's Own Invisible Man

Canada's scariest criminal mastermind™ Alex Hundert has now become Canada's Invisible Man due to the ‘silent’ bail conditions that he accepted this week.
It was the prohibition from speaking to the press that finally got the national media to notice the Hundert case -- if there is one thing reporters hate, its when someone won't, or can't, talk to them.
UPDATE: Alison posts an interview with Mr. Invisible.

Tinker Bell houses

Bloggers in the States have been writing for years about the looming economic disaster of the housing meltdown, but I don't think anyone predicted the unfolding mortgage disaster now underway.
In my adult lifetime, housing markets have always had a Tinker Bell component to them -- what a house is "worth" has much less to do with reality than with fantasy -- how much more can you get if everyone keeps clapping louder and louder about buying now! now! now! before the prices go up! up! up!
A three-bedroom bungalow "worth" $20,000 in 1970 is now "worth" $300,000, and that's in Saskatoon. In Vancouver, the same house is, or was, "worth" three-quarters of a million.
But if no one can figure out who owns the house, and if no one can figure out how to register a legal sale of the house, and if the company trying to lend money to a buyer to buy the house cannot register its mortgage against the title, THEN how much is that house "worth"?
Hell if I know!
And this goes way beyond ideology or whether a blogger hates Obama or Hank Paulson. Booman writes:

. . . it's easy to call for creative destruction from the sidelines but the people who have to actually make these decisions have a very weighty responsibility. As a matter of justice and political survival, they should absolutely start putting some people in prison. But as for how they should clean up this mess so that it both fixes the problem and doesn't cause another wave of mass unemployment? Well, hell if I know. . . . we need a financial services industry to keep credit flowing and, therefore, keep the economy growing. Lazy snark about 'extend and pretend' might feel good, but the gravity of the problem is large and the potential consequences so grave, that calls to lance the wound and take the pain all at once are far too smug.
In the big picture, the moratorium is small potatoes. The real issue is how the document trail issue is resolved. If it is resolved in a way that forces the banks to eat their shitpile in one sudden burst, and there is no will to bail them out again, then we're back September 2008. But, this time, the ship goes down to the bottom of the sea. So, I guess what I am saying is, be careful what you wish for and don't be so quick to judge the people who are responsible for keeping us out of a true Depression.

Great line of the day

From Gin and Tacos

Anti-tax zealots are the Harlem Globetrotters of politics. Having mastered the arts of deception and loaded their repertoire with all kinds of sleight-of-hand tricks, they can magically turn any argument about taxes into a series of bewildering hypotheticals that collapse under the slightest hint of scrutiny.

Emphasis mine.

Meeting Iggy

I think this is great

Picturing Africa

From Calabar Boy via Balloon Juice, here is a map showing the true size of Africa:

Right wing vs wingnut

Here's a new dividing line in Canada between the "right wing" and the "wing nut":
Canada's right wing, though they generally support the Harper Conservatives, also know that, first, it was important for Canada to get a seat on the UN Security Council, and second, it was Harper's own fault that Canada didn't get it -- for example, this commentary in the Calgary Herald, this Star Phoenix editorial, this Economist story.
Canada's wingnuts, on the other hand, are sticking out their tongues at the UN and crying "Nyaah nyaah! We're better than you are and we never wanted to be in your crummy Security Council anyway so there!"
UPDATE: Link updated.

Alex Hundert update

This is a sad day for Canadian justice. G20 protester Alex Hundert declines bail because he refuses to shut up about his political beliefs:

According to a release by his allies, if he were to have accepted bail yesterday, Hundert would have been faced with "additional conditions of non association with Harsha Walia, Dan Kellar, AW@L, SOAR, NOII, no planning/participating/planning public meetings or marches, and no expressing political views including in the media, amongst others."
But regardless of his ongoing incarceration, Hundert insists that his supporters need to continue organizing, and not focus on his plight.
"Too much attention has been paid to a small number of cases of repression, particularly my own, when people need to be focused on and fighting back against broader patterns of oppression that flow from the racist capitalist system propagated by the G20 states, their corporations, their militaries, and their police," he told an ally in a phone call from jail on October 11.

Rabble reporter Krystalline Kraus has more.
UPDATE on the update:
POGGE makes a very important point about the bail condition that would have prevented Hundert from speaking to the media:

That's real censorship. That's the state, in this case the province of Ontario, forbidding someone from publicly expressing political opinion. It doesn't sound like it's any particular opinion that concerns them. It's obviously not hate speech that they're worried about because they wouldn't have to include that in bail conditions. This is the state telling a citizen who hasn't yet been found guilty of a crime that his views are already regarded as illegitimate before he's even expressed them.

Great line of the day

Disaffected Lib, the Mound of Sound, writes about how a dictatorial Harper cut MacKay, Ritz and Van Loan out of the UAE negotiations:

There's a man with some serious emotional problems. Cutting your defence minister, agricultural minister and international trade minister out of negotiations with an Arab country that, for nine years, has allowed you to use their territory for a vital forward base? Captain Queeg to the bridge. Captain Queeg to the bridge.

Emphasis mine.

Freeway blogging for Alex Hundert

Activists hung a banner on a Toronto highway to protest the continued detention of Alex Hundert and there were protests scheduled across the country in support of Canada's scariest criminal mastermind™.
You know, this isn't going to stop. We're going to keep on covering the story of the G20 police riot as the puffed-up legal cases against the protesters collapse and the inquiries pick up steam.
Toronto authorities are dropping more charges daily -- remember those Quebec students who were hauled out of the U of T gym on that Sunday morning and marched to jail in their pajamas? Those charges were all quietly dropped last Friday.

Photo ops with Sergeant Preston?

Tell me the Harper Cons didn't actually think that United Nations diplomats would vote for a Canadian seat on the Security Council if they got a photo op with Sergeant Preston?

In the final days of Tuesday's bid, Canada wined and dined diplomats, offering them gifts of Canadian beer and maple syrup.
Canada even had a Mountie in red serge as a prop flown in so the 192 foreign diplomats who were casting ballots could get a photo with him.

I'm just, like, totally surprised the UN didn't think Canada would be a serious contributor.

The Map

xkcd's map of online communities is brilliant and fascinating. Be sure to embiggen it (on the source page) to see the details.

In jail for Thanksgiving

Canada's scariest criminal mastermind™ Alex Hundert will be spending Thanksgiving in jail.
Because he went to a meeting.
The conclusion we are supposed to draw, I guess, is that speaking at meetings can be dangerous.

And by the way, why is a Justice of the Peace making such an important bail decision, rather than a judge?