Revolving door for Alex Hundert

I'm waiting to see what caused Canada's scariest criminal mastermind™ AKA Alex Hundert to be arrested again on Saturday but of course it must have been something truly heinous.
Like getting into an argument with someone. How awful.
Or maybe he spit on the sidewalk? Awfuller still!
I just hope he didn't take the crown prosecutor seriously and actually speak to a reporter.
The Canadian justice system appears to be a revolving door for Hundert now, with previous accusations justifying new incarcerations.

Neat II

Neat!

Martha Mitchell lives!

This whole Ginny Thomas-Anita Hill-Lillian McEwen story is hilarious, actually -- an only-in-Washington breakfastini moment becomes a cautionary tale which bites the biter in the end or in the ass or whatever.
Somewhere, Martha Mitchell is laughing...

Second envelope

The three-envelope joke goes like this:

A new manager takes over and finds on his desk three envelopes from his predecessor, with instructions to open them in order whenever he gets into trouble.
Well, things go along OK at first and then he starts having trouble. So he opens the first envelope and it says "blame your predecessor."
That works for a while, but then problems build up again. So he opens the second envelope and it says "reorganize".
That works for a while, too, but then he gets into trouble again. So he opens the third envelope.
It says "prepare three envelopes."

RCMP Commissioner William Elliott has opened the second envelope.

Lessons learned?

Orwell's Bastard flags this posting about the G20 police riot from the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition:

. . . While sleeping on the floor of a University of Toronto building, [Quebec students] were woken by a police raid. About 110 students were arrested and taken to the Eastern Street detention centre where they were strip-searched, charged with conspiracy, and then kept for 36 - 48 hours before being given bail and released. They were required to return to Toronto three times for procedural matters before the court, On October 13, three and one half months after being charged, the students were told that all charges would be dropped.
This seems similar to strategies used in other parts of the world against students threaten them with the humiliation of strip-searches and jail, then leave them dangling for a while before announcing that there were no grounds for arresting them in the first place. The might be contrary to the Charter or Rights and Freedom, but once the police have used these tactics in Canada and emerged without consequence, other police might decide this is the way to behave.

O.B. concludes

As things stand currently, there doesn't seem to be any effective institutional remedy, even in the face of massive and egregious violations of the Charter. In other words, the cops know perfectly well that they can use the highest law of the land for toilet paper, and nobody's going to call them on it.

Brad Who?

Spike tells Chester Ah, shadupp!

What a series

The ALCS and NLCS series are getting really interesting. TSN's poll says that 51 per cent thought the World Series will be between the Yanks and the Phillies, while only 10 percent thought it will be Rangers vs. Giants. Well, but what do us fans know anyway?
Its great ball.

Good for you, Hilary

Wear purple.

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.