Homicide Shmomicide

So what if the number of homicides is down to a 44 year low? What about all of the unreported homicides?

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All That's Wrong WIth The Modern Conservative Movement...

In one short article. Meet Michael Harris and Rob Leone, two shiny, new MPPs from the Waterloo Region. Both are thoroughly orthodox in their views on public finances. Michael Harris states these ideas thus:

“It’s affordable taxes, living within your means. We have to do it in our home budget; we have to do the same (in government).”

Good, wholesome family values, completely devoid of any macroeconomics to back it up. But I digress. Wait, there is more, just a few paragraphs on:

Harris works in sales at Honeywell, so he knows the Toronto drive well. He lives in south Kitchener, near Highway 401. He too, plans to pressure the Liberals to bring at least four trains a day to Kitchener. Liberals must follow through on funding for a Highway 7 expressway between Kitchener and Guelph, he said.

“We are going to makes sure we hold the current government to those promises,” he said of the minority Liberal government. “We’ve got Mr. McGuinty on a short leash.”

Expanding mental-health and suicide-intervention programs is a big issue for Harris, because it’s directly affected his family and friends. He wouldn’t elaborate.

“It’s taking a lot of lives each year. I think its something we are really afraid as a society to talk about,” Harris said.

Long-promised Cambridge Memorial Hospital expansion is atop Leone’s to-do list. All parties support it, so get it started, he said.

“I don’t want to stand in the way, simply because I’m a PC member and it’s a Liberal government.”

Um, ok, so much for living within your means. Unless they mean everyone but those living in their riding should suck it up and cut back, because damnit, they want their pork!

In a nutshell, this is what is wrong with modern so-called conservatism. In theory, they are all for "living within our means" and cuts in taxes. In practice, they are also for, unlimited spending in their own ridings. This is fiscal insanity. This is the black hole that they have sucked us and the rest of the world into. God knows how or when we will be able to escape its deadly grip.

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On Studied Ignorance

As the Conservatives drift off to sleep, after an orgy of self-congratulation, they would do well to look at the following paragraph:

The Canadian middle class is in crisis. Each year, its share of our national income shrinks, relative to that of the richest few. Recent reports show Canada’s wealthiest one per cent accounted for 32 per cent of all income growth between 1997 and 2007 – the most in recorded history. Thanks to skyrocketing executive compensation levels and an aggressive attack on well-paid, family-supporting jobs, the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows ever wider.

Pat yourselves on the back all you want, but the reality is, people are suffering out here. You are choosing to ignore this fact, but the opposition, you can be sure, is paying attention.

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Conservative

If you are a conservative, all you need to do to swat away any rational opposition is to use the following sentence: "While the facts may support X (climate change, gun control, the census) that does not change my belief in Y ( that climate change is a hoax, the gun registry is useless, the a voluntary census is just as good as a mandatory one)". It is simple and it does not need any evidence to support it.

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Money, Hate And Data Based Policy

The Conservative government is giving money to help combat hate crimes against organizations. I have two questions. How do they know this is a problem and how will they measure success? My guesses, given how the Conservatives roll, a) Peter Kent's neighbor saw a story on Global about hate crimes and b) Vic Toews will wait a few weeks and then ask a cab driver in Winnipeg if he's heard anything lately about hate crimes.

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California Dreaming

Shorter Harper: Canadians and especially our Olympic athletes can continue to enjoy the benefits of government spending. But, Canadians should not be taxed, to enjoy these benefits.

In other words, the same infantile message from a modern conservative movement that has made California the paradise it is today. Government is not free, but you will be dead before the bills come due, so enjoy!

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What News From Yon Sherwood Forest?

Atrios has it right:

They could've released a complicated plan which appeared to have controls and oversight but which would be hard to decipher from the language. Instead they made it plain for all to see that what they want is to be able to take money from you and give it to Wall Street firms.

This going to be the biggest reverse Robin Hood exercise in history. The American taxpayer is going to be screwed, badly and then the Republicans will go back to singing the praises of a "free market". The Dems will just do whatever the Republicans tell them to do.

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The Twenty First Century Bourbons

Paul Krugman lays out the situation this morning:

There’s only one bright spot in the picture: interest rates on mortgages have come down sharply since the federal government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and guaranteed their debt. And there’s a lesson there for those ready to hear it: government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.

Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.

Influential members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, have been making similar arguments. And on Thursday, Charles Schumer, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (and an advocate of creating a new agency to resolve the financial crisis) told reporters that “the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are realizing that we need a more comprehensive solution.” Sure enough, Thursday night Ben Bernanke and Mr. Paulson met with Congressional leaders to discuss a “comprehensive approach” to the problem.

We don’t know yet what that “comprehensive approach” will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system. It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control. And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed. (emphasis mine)

That is my concern also. The Republicans and their ideological counterparts in Canada see any government action as evil. So, they may dump a trillion dollars into the waiting hands of the fools who created this mess, with no strings attached, no additional regulation and no lessons learned, just so they can continue living in a fantasy world where the private sector can do no wrong and the public sector no right.

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Connecting The Dots

From the guys who brought you bad meat comes the near world economic collapse. It is the same mentality at work.

The government is seen as a parasitic organism sucking the life's blood from the superior private sector. In conservatives, there is almost a child-like trust that "If only the government did not exist, the private sector could regulate itself."

Well, forgive this old Hobbesian, but humans are terrible at self regulation. Unbound by any rules, we succumb to the basest instincts of our character, greed, lust and pathological selfishness. You don't have to believe me. Look around you. At least 16 dead, because a Conservative government decided to move meat inspectors out of the meat industry's way. Billions of dollars spent trying to save a world economy corrupted by an ideology that didn't believe in government regulation.

Canadians are in the middle of an election and the party that believes that no government regulation is good regulation, is leading in the polls. If they do manage to hang on to form a government, Canadians can expect more of the same from them. That means more dead people and more lost billions. And please note, it isn't that conservatives and Conservatives are bad people. Rather, it is because they have a misguided belief that humans, left to their own devices, are saints and not humans. Canadians would be wise not to encourage their delusions, by rewarding them with a continued grasp on power.

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Harper Channels His Inner Gipper

Doesn't it seem strange that this statement:

"This is the same story as before," Mr. Harper said. "Elections Canada's view is that some of our local spending should count as national spending. We have a different view. We looked into this at the time and that's the view we've taken."

Is bizarrely reminiscent of this one:

"I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart tells me that's true, but the facts tell me it is not."

It is just another example of how conservatives don't let facts cloud what is, for them, a wonderful fantasy life -- until confronted by the law. Even then reality is just another option, one that conservatives are forced to accept, rather than acknowledging it is, in fact, reality.

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