Great line of the day

From Ian Welsh in Welcome To A Paper Economy:

. . . welcome to a paper money economy, where the wheelbarrows of virtual cash are trundling straight from the Fed and Treasury to the banks, to disappear into a bottomless hole.

Yes, I had wondered about this, too -- as Welsh points out, all of these supposed billions aren't actually helping the economy stabilize or improve.
I believe we are seeing another Emperor- has- no- clothes situation -- remember when Karl Rove was going to manage the rebuilding of New Orleans? Well, that's about how well Paulson is managing the rebuilding of the economy. I heard Rachel Maddow joke yesterday, "300 billion, 600 billion, gee, soon we're going to be talking about real money!" Yeah, any day now.

Simple answers to simple questions

Is there any difference between an "actual recession" and a "technical recession"?
No, there's not.

This just in

Vatican forgives John Lennon for Jesus quip. Next, they're going to endorse those new-fangled horseless carriages...

I just looked around and he's gone

I was in Grade Nine and I hardly knew who John F. Kennedy was, but I walked into the school and saw an American girl crying her eyes out. And then a boy said "Kennedy has been shot!"
I didn't realize then how much our world had changed, but Taylor Marsh describes what happened next:

Everything was different after President Kennedy died.
The American world that won WWII came apart.
The unraveling led to 50,000 dead in Vietnam, a war begun before J.F.K. that he escalated, but would likely have finished if he'd lived. The illegal bombings of Cambodia and Nixon’s perversion of secret leadership that would be the catapult for Rumsfeld and Cheney's design on the presidency we see today. The coming out of American culture, to Reaganism, Allende, Iran-contra and the secret coups, and the casualties of the culture war: two generations of gay men dead; leading to the Republican fixation with Middle East deliverance, the stalking of a Democrat president, to the attack on 9.11 that led to the rebirth of the notion that we can trust our government, because in the end we must... which led us back to foreign dangers of “urgent” threat and “mushroom clouds,” harking back to THAT TIME, only this time we were led by lies, warnings and threat levels that led us into a preemptive war in which we have lost our national soul.
The national soul embodied in the memory of the image of a youthful, vigorous and valiant J.F.K. Who, even though we now know was merely a mortal man, deathly ill, with addictions and predilections, we still mourn. Because he was the leader with passion, persistence and purpose, who when he spoke inspired us to close our eyes and imagine the impossible. A man who guided this nation at a time in history when war was the easy way out, but who instead found a way to preserve the peace.
Nothing was ever the same after J.F.K. died.

Why Harper called the election

Steve at Far and Wide highlights the story behind the story of coming Canadian deficit budgets:

There is one line from Budget Officer Kevin Page's fiscal report that Liberals should repeat ad nauseum, over and over again:

"The weak fiscal performance to date is largely attributable to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions," the report says.

And that, my friends, is why the Cons rushed to the polls in October. Before the rest of us found out.

Say it ain't so

Someday the Democrats will learn the rules:
Never play cards with any man named "Doc."
Never eat at any place called "Mom's".
And quit dissing your own supporters.
Because, you know, next time they can vote for someone else.

Thanks, Tommy

Well, I just spent an exciting evening in the emergency room with my elderly aunt, who had fallen and they wondered whether she broke a bone -- turns out she didn't, but they are keeping her in hospital for a few days anyway until she can walk better -- and it was worth every penny.
No, I'm not being snarky. There's a popular misconception, of course, that Canadian health care is "free", that we aren't paying anything for it. But of course we ARE paying for it, thousands of dollars a year from our income taxes.
And yes, it actually is worth it. My aunt and the doctors and her family were able to make decisions about her care based on what was best for her, not based on what we could afford or what insurance she had.
The continuing problem hospitals have is bed shortages -- politicians absolutely hate spending money on medicare, a bottomless pit which offers them too few ribbons to cut for the billions spent. So we the public have to keep screaming at them. But other than that, its actually pretty great.
Thank you, Tommy Douglas, for Medicare.

So the Mormons call themselves religious?

So the Mormons refused to sign a letter against torture because it was "too political" and then turned around and spent $20 million in a political fight against gay marriage.
Jesus wept.

Toronto syndrome

You know, if the United States had their own version of Toronto, they'd be better off.
We Canadians know that Toronto is considered by our national media to be the centre of the universe -- the weather is only news when it happens in Toronto -- and so we bring a healthy dose of skepticism to any media types who opine without any evidence on "what Canadians want".
We know that this actually translates to "what Toronto wants", and maybe not even much of Toronto at that -- likely only the people they chatted with at the restaurant last night.
In the United States, their media frequently seems to opine on "what Americans want" based on no evidence at all except restaurant chatter.
But because they don't seem to realise how flimsy this actually is, the rest of their country is at risk of taking it far too seriously.

Greatest post title evah!

From Alison (who else!) at Galloping Beaver and Creekside:
"OK, coffee break's over. Everyone back on your heads!"
Describing, of course, the Con Con.

Yeah, you do that

Columnist Joseph Quesnel is outraged that the Conservative party thinks its own members are just another stakeholder group, and says the Conservative Party should embrace its inner Reform at their convention this week:

Many are not pleased that the party prevented debate on human rights commissions and their growing use in silencing conservatives within Canada.

In an editorial aside, I can only interject: We wish! But back to the column:

By far, social conservatives feel the most marginalized within the party. What seemed like a simple bill to recognize the loss of unborn life in the commission of crimes was lambasted by party leadership.
Many of those who supported this bill still believe that the Conservative Party is a different type of party that respects the will of the membership.
The Conservative Party leadership should not let them down.

And on the sidelines, the Liberals and the NDP are saying, yeah baby, you just do that! Please do demonstrate to women and ethnic minorities across Canada that we should never ever let this bunch of far-right ideological anti-abortion anti-human rights conservatives control a majority government!

Framing Harper

In memoriam for the national portrait gallery, Art Threat announces Framing Harper, a national contest of Harper portraits. Here are some examples:



(ht Drawn -- one of my favorite new links. Check out the rest of my new links on my blogroll and my new section on the economy.)

Rat-f**king Obama, and the Georgia run-off

So someone from Gaza who says he is with Hamas -- AKA the Blue Meanies of the Middle East -- is saying that Hamas met with Obama staff in October.
What a crock! Why would Obama's staff do this ever, much less in October?
I smell rat-fucking, to try to save the Georgia Senate seat.

Did they bang the drum slowly?

I was looking on YouTube to post a reading of In Flanders Fields when I found this song and it expressed better my feelings about war generally -- though it relates particularly World War One: Green Fields of France.

First, learn to say you're sorry

So now Air Canada thinks that smiling at customers will help:

"it's up to each and every one of us to work together to be sure that we're also out in front in the soft attributes such as a ready smile, eagerness to help customers and simply perform jobs well."

Well, yes, that would be nice.
But first, Air Canada has to learn how to apologize to its customers.
Look, its like this. In Canada, things will always go wrong for Air Canada travelers at our airports. An international company like Air Canada is affected whenever American airports screw up, and this is going to happen regularly. Also, we're heading into storm season, when airports in Eastern Canada regularly have to close due to winter weather. Also, Toronto-Pearson is an airport which is so big it is beyond a human scale, yet this is a central airport for Air Canada's operations. Finally, Air Canada seems to have a "just in time" business model where there is no capacity for back up planes or crews or gate staff. The result? Small problems will inevitably become big problems. Flights will leave without the customers who paid to get on them. Or the customers will be there but the flights won't be. Or the customers and the flights will connect but the luggage will go astray.
So, Air Canada, you're going to have to spend a portion of each work week, if not each day, apologizing to people.
Please, learn how to do this right -- I don't want abject misery ("Oh, forgive us!"), nor to I want any non-apology apologies ("I'm sorry if you're upset") or the insult apology ("I'm sorry but would you want to fly in a plane that might crash?").
Rather, I want just a simple, sincere "I'm sorry this happened. Here's what we are going to do about it..."