Say Anything Blog

Don’t try this at home.

Pretty cool though.

via Rumproast

While I am a proud Canadian I have to recognise the genius of America’s “Two Holidays in Cold January” strategy. I continue to lobby for a Gordie Howe Day but I remain up against it.

Enjoy.

According to Harper’s Ken Silverstein, that’s the number of Illinois governors charged with criminal conduct since 1960. I also got a chuckle out of Jeffery Toobin’s post at the New Yorker which contains the delicious anecdote of the racetrack owner who tried to deduct her bribe payments on her income tax.

It seems we have our very own constitutional crisis and it’s on a full boil. The condensed version is that the minority Conservative government doesn’t want a Parliamentary vote on a recent economic statement because it’s likely to lose and thus will have to resign. The Liberal and New Democratic parties have agreed to form a coalition with the support of the Quebec separatist BQ party. The Conservatives would obviously rather hold another election but the opposition parties may be asked to govern by the Governor General if they can demonstrate that they enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. Prime Minister Harper will be meeting with the GG on Friday in an attempt to persuade her to reject the coalition’s proposal.

I’m of two minds on the issue. On the one hand, Mr. Harper is a bully who roused the opposition’s ire with some ill considered tactics and I’d like nothing better than to see him and his party given the boot. OTOH, we just had an election two months ago, the opposition Liberal party is in disarray, we’re facing the same economic downturn that every other nation is facing and I think that this is the time for the parties to work together rather than slug it out. I was hoping that calmer and saner heads would prevail eventually but Mr. Harper doesn’t appear interested in conciliation if his recent remarks are to be believed.

It should make for an interesting weekend if nothing else.

These guys in India just did…good for them.

I’ve involved myself in more “what’s a lefty and what’s a righty” discussions at SA than I can remember and it seems like the Republican party will be going through its own debate as the Obama years commence. Most of us seem comfortable identifying recent Republican governance as something other than traditional conservatism…it’s really “conservative” only in a relative sense compared to the “liberal” opposition which is now assuming government.

There are, generally speaking, two ways to view the conservative/liberal dichotomy: in terms relative to each other and as abiding organising and philosophical principles. In the case of the former, the entire political spectrum can shift right or left but we’ll still have conservatives and liberals. In the latter, conservatives still emphasise individual self reliance while the liberals emphasise an interventionist State. There can be no doubt that the political spectrum has moved left over time as “conservative” and “liberal” governments both use the State in a manner undreamed of in the 18th century. Differences today are really matters of degree and thus the terms “conservative” and “liberal” truly have become relative.

Will this be the case forever? Probably not but likely until society passes through the next transformation and upheaval which history shows to be the rule. This leaves the Republican party in a bit of a quandry, as Sean Scallon illustrates in a thoughtful article at The American Conservative. His concluding paragraph:

The way to recovery for the Grand Old Party lies down one of two paths: 1). They can start honestly saying they are right-socialists and govern like an old European Christian Democratic Party or Tory Party and drop any pretensions they are “conservative” so they can be truer to themselves or 2). They can reject socialism altogether steer back to a traditional, honest, conservatism and hope to find a politician and the wonks that can make both the politics and the policy work for them instead retreating to right-wing socialism for electoral survival. Of all the discussions and debates going on now as to what future course the GOP may take, this fork in the road, more than better organization or better tactics or upping their count of the white vote to 70 percent, is more relevant to their future course.

The tension between political principle and electoral politics has been with us for a long time and it won’t disappear any time soon.

He may have been the son of Malcolm X and he apparently uses hypnotism to gain converts.

h/t balloon juice

Canada once had a Prime Minister who relied on his dog for advice and consulted with the spirit of his departed mother so we know all about political leaders and their more unusual powers.

Is it just me or is the election campaign becoming almost too surreal for words? Maybe I’m reading the blogs too much or maybe as a Canadian I just don’t get it but it’s turned into a freaking cartoon…IMO of course.

Not the late endorsement he was looking for, I’m sure but there it is. The jihadists have never demonstrated much strength at the polling stations so I doubt this will have much real impact although I’m confident that the machiavellians and their conspiracy oriented cousins will provide an entertaining interpretation.

h/t balloon juice

Thomas Jefferson comments on the credit crisis.

h/t Infectious Greed

Also in this morning WSJ, Thomas Frank rebuts the “blame the CRA and Fanny” meme which is all the rage these days. I swear I can him him laughing as I read it but the important part is that he gets the facts right.

Nobel Prize winner Edmund S. Phelps penned an excellent opinion piece in the WSJ this morning in which he addresses the nature of the credit crisis in a very straight forward manner and proposes that an injection of capital into worthy banks is preferable to buying toxic debt. Do read it.

The Paulson Bailout Plan proposes that the government buy the banks’ toxic mortgages thus increasing their appeal as destinations for capital investment. Axel Merk of Merk Funds wonders why the government doesn’t just invest $700b in the banks and avoid the risk of assuming bad investments.

Makes sense to me.