Canada’s government has experienced shrinkage?

At least according to the Wall Street Journal.

 

“Why Canada is beating America” is a concept I imagine is rarely pondered south of the border, primarily because in that neck of the woods the prevailing opinion is that nobody beats them at anything, ever.  But the Wall Street Journal boldly goes there, and I can’t help being reminded of Rick Mercer’s “Talking To Americans”.  Really, eh?:

 

While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.

And how did we manage this?  Because we apparently “shrank government”.  Yep, and we have a National Igloo and a 65-minute hour!

But the WSJ is missing part of the story.  Canada’s *real* unemployment is a lot higher than 7.4%, since those who’ve run out their EI benefits (and they are legion) aren’t included in the statistics.  Our banks weren’t going hat in hand to the government because financial regulations that many Americans would consider unacceptably intrusive prevented them from engaging in the kind of kamikaze casino capitalism that sunk a few US investment banks and set off a worldwide economic cataclysm in 2008.  (And besides, the banks own this place.)

“Shrank government”… really!?  As far as I can see, government under the Conservatives is just as obscenely bloated as it was under their Liberal predecessors. As the population ages and civil servants wander out to pasture there may be some attrition, but for now we’ve still got big fat greasy, slow-moving, dull-witted government in the fine old Canuckistanian tradition.  AND a Prime Minister who spends like a drunken sailor (my apologies to drunken sailors), on all kinds of dumb shit nobody wants or needs.

The Cons might dream of turning Canada’s government into a highly-functioning, lean mean austerity machine, but the notion that they’ve already done so and are reaping the rewards of their fiscal responsibility (Ha! Hahaha!) is so goofy it makes me wonder if the source material for this article was some Harper Government-approved propaganda from the Canadian Embassy.

Imagine…

…a world where Democrats didn’t always fold like cheap card tables at a trailer park bingo hall.

Housekeeping Note: Commenting

Yo, FYI:

I’ve changed the commenting format to “threaded”, so commenters may reply directly to each other.  If you want to reply to a specific comment, just click on the “Reply” link found in the bottom right corner of that comment.  So far, I have sometimes used it and sometimes not… admittedly not a very auspicious beginning, so from now on I will start replying in “threaded” format.

I seem to recall trying this before and it was rejected as too confusing, but that was when commenters were used to doing things a certain way around here.  Now that I’m making a “Clean Start”, this is the time to try new things.

Any other suggestions for making this thing more wonderful are welcome & encouraged!

Love,

Your Hostess

T(bag)-minus 3 days til Debtmageddon

I knew this day would come, and finally, it’s arrived… but incredibly, it’s much worse than I ever anticipated.

I refer to the furious fracas going on south of the border over raising the US Debt Ceiling:  that  wholly self-inflicted hemorrhaging scalp wound in the American economic psyche also known as “The Debt Crisis”.

As even my dog knows by now, raising the Debt Ceiling is a peculiar little process the US government uses to stay afloat on borrowed money.   It’s generally a simple matter of congressional housekeeping, almost a rubber-stamp process, so  hideous is the prospect of not raising it.  Ronaldus Maximus raised it 18 times, Georgie raised it 7 times (yes, they did!), and it was never a problem for teabaggers or anyone else until the Black Guy took over — just a coincidence, no doubt.  (Of course, there were no teabaggers until the Black Guy took over — another one of those coinkydinks, I’m sure.)  But I digress…

I said above that it’s “so much worse than I anticipated” because at that time I totally expected the GOP to do what they always do when confronted with raising the Debt Ceiling: vote to raise it.  Then do an amusing little soft shoe routine to explain the vote to their fiscally-illiterate teabagger contingent, who’d no doubt be livid.  But I underestimated the GOP establishment’s fear of the teabagger’s white-hot wrath, and the size of the teabagger tidal wave that swept Congress last November.  Republicans now find  their power over Congress compromised by “T.M.T. Syndrome”.

Yep:  Too Many Teabaggers.  At least half the GOP congress are baggers,  a toxic , sweaty combination of dumbness and jabbering batshit insanity… so much so that they won’t even vote for a Debt Ceiling bill from one of their own.  They think blowing up the economy sounds like it might be kinda fun, maybe have a tailgate party or something.

On the mini-TV in my office, CNBC is interviewing one teabagging congresscritter after another, and they become increasingly belligerent with every sound bite.  The market’s finally reacting to the possibility that the US might actually default — stocks are down, the price of gold is on fire: an ominous portent of something hideous on the horizon.

There’s no doubt that the US debt is nauseatingly, obscenely massive, Debt On Steroids, after a violent 10-year spree of psychotic spending.  That something needs to be done about it is indisputable.  But it didn’t get that way overnight, so trying to fix it overnight is probably a Bad Idea.  A scalpel and a surgeon’s delicate touch are probably what’s called for, not some rube swinging a chainsaw with one hand and a bottle of cheap whiskey with the other.

UPDATE:  Boner Bill passed the House, now proceeds to the Senate to be Terminated with Extreme Prejudice.  (All that this cute little drama accomplished was to save Boehner’s ass.)

Ten years later

…former Preznit Georgie W Bush finally explains the embarrassingly protracted 7-minute-long brain fart that was his response to the news that New York City and the Pentagon were in utter devastation and the nation was under attack:

Former U.S. President George W. Bush says his apparent lack of reaction to the first news of the Sept. 11 2001 attacks was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm in a crisis.

At last.  After ten long years we can finally close the book, so to speak, on Georgie’s inexplicable “My Pet Goat” moment.  And to think we assumed it was the predictable performance of a degenerate brain rotted out with Everclear and syphilis.

Still, ten years makes 7 minutes look like a split-nanosecond.  What took ya?

Trucknutz!

When I saw the story via Tweeter I “LOL’d” and planned to blog about it.  But something that slipped my mind while on vacay was the need for speed in the pursuit and capture of blogging material.  It’s not good enough to file an amusing story somewhere in the Cabinets of Your Mind (in the section labeled “Shirts”) for future reference — it must be Blogged with Extreme Prejudice immediately, lest someone else get there first.

Which brings me to the part where I link to DammitJanet’s post about the South Carolina woman who was charged with the rare and exotic crime of Driving While Trucknutted.

Trucknutz, yo.  Available in a kaleidoscopic range of colours, for added diversity:

Obviously a popular item, though I can’t say I understand the allure. As a longtime pickup truck driver, Trucknutz make me feel guilty and confused… like when someone tells a joke and everyone in the room laughs but me.  I understand why some people put things like racing stripes and even steer horns on their vehicles, but bolting Nutz to the trailer hitch seems a little humiliating for both the truck and driver.  Who knows what message is conveyed by Trucknutz??  I shudder to think.

Trucknutz: just add them to the burgeoning list of things I find utterly incomprehensible, right up there with Facebook.

Let’s see… how to start… um… *ahem*… okay… It was a dark & stormy night…

…and fern hill was kicking ass all over the place!  W00t!

DJ has the links that tell the entire tawdry tale.

And while we’re giving props to those who deserve, how about an honourary scoop of freshly-minted dogpoop to the Toronto Star, supposedly Canada’s Flaming Liberal Newspaper of Record, for refusing to publish even a Letter to the Editor (let alone an equal-space rebuttal) without a real name from “The Blogger” who drove the entire Penninga article.  Since Penninga referred to fern hill only as “a blogger”, her response to his brainless swill shouldn’t require any name more explicit than “The Blogger Who Made Tim Hudak’s Abortion Stance an Election Issue and Made Mark Penninga Cry”.

Whoops!  Bonus solidarity track: The Good Doctor weighs in.

(Okay, time to hit “publish”… psyching up… come on, this won’t hurt a bit… aaaccckk!!)

~Test~

♥ Just wanted to see if this old thang will still fire up and run, or if its piston rings are so rusted out from lack of use that they’re permanently cemented to its bloggy cylinder walls…

W00T!  So far so good… now let’s road test the audiovisual capability with this astonishing vid of me bungee jumping a few weeks ago:

I think that nice young man from the Bungy Zone was surprised at how fast the old girl jumped — most people have to be talked over the edge (or even pushed).  Ha!

But never mind that.  All systems appear to be “GO”… pressure’s rising… stand back!… ♥