Here’s the problem: the 700 billion dollars is to be used to buy the “toxic” (well, worthless, actually) assets of a variety of banks. These assets will be bought for prices greater than the current market price and, in principle, that will “drain the swamp” and bring back “business as usual”. However, to stretch the metaphor, no one really knows how big the swamp is. And no one really knows how many swamps there are.

Right now the focus is on unwinding the securitized sub-prime mortgages. But there is plenty of other consumer debt which has been securitized including credit card debt. How much? Well about $2.6 trillion dollars of which 37% is revolving credit ie. credit cards. (The rest are things like car loans.) How much of that will turn out to be toxic?

For a bailout to be effective it needed to address the full reality of the debt mountain consumers in the US (and Europe) have built up. And it would have had to do that in a structured, orderly, way.

Tossing money at toxic assets and raising the FDIC limits, makes it pretty clear that the great minds in Washington are at a lose as to how to do anything but crisis management. One crisis at a time.

There are a number of things which the US government could do to address the sources of the crisis. One would be to streamline the marking to market and sale of the 3 million foreclosed houses in the US. A second would be to aggressively unwind as many of the toxic assets as can be found including the non-mortgage credit assets. A third would be to significantly reduce the government’s own deficit. A fourth would be to actively participate in the creation of a value (read gold) backed world reserve currency. A fifth would be to levy taxes on credit card balances carried more than one month. A sixth would be to levy sumptuary taxes on things like TVs with greater than 40 inch screens and cars costing more than $40,000.00 and houses larger than 4000 square feet. A sixth would be a deficit reduction supercharge on incomes (from all sources) greater than 1 million dollars. A seventh would be the outlawing of earmarks. An eight would be a tax on college tuition greater than $25,000 per year.

None of these measures need be excessive and all should be a transparent as possible. The objective should be to bring personal and governmental expenditures more into line with real income.

Reality is biting.

I cannot express my delight! To be tagged as a person pushing a Zionist agenda really does make my day. And just to be clear, I really do love the State of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East. I believe that state and its people, Jewish and Muslim, should be defended against the terrorists, theocrats and anti-Semites which surround it.

Anything I can do to help I will.

And that includes defending the right of the whackjob at the radicalpress to call me a Zionist.

“If you want childcare, if you want real action on the environment, if you want justice for aboriginal Canadians, if you want a government that partners with municipalities and provinces instead of attacking them, you got to vote Liberal,” he said.

“If you don’t vote Liberal, Canada will go into a major economic crisis,” said Ignatieff, who joined with Liberal Leader Stephane Dion at a morning campaign stop in Stoney Creek.

His appeal comes as a new Toronto Star/Angus Reid poll put the Liberals at 21 per cent, tied with the NDP, with the Green Party at 7 per cent.
Michael Ignatieff toronto star

Well Mike, the thing is that:

a) we take care of our own children,
b) it’s getting colder and the Green Shift won’t change that,
c)aboriginal Canadians have had about as much “justice” as they can take and are in huge trouble as the direct result of a hundred years of useless, albeit expensive, paternalism,
d) the municipalities and provinces need the tax room a smaller and less intrusive federal government will create,
e) Canada is on the way to a 10 billion dollar surplus, has sound banks, a reduced national deficit and a rational (if not ideal) fiscal policy - think of us as Switzerland.
f) All of the above means you guys are tied with the NDP - you are going to lose. The only question is how badly.

To quote the Lying Jackal, “We are not Afraid”.

Demonstrate an understanding of the need to undertake informed action while at the same time not necessarily waiting until having “all the information.”

Oddly (though hardly surprisingly), this particular phrase was amended to an almost opposite meaning (”demonstrate an understanding of the need to undertake informed action”), as were a couple of the other more blatantly terrifying of the course’s expectations. But see what remains:

… Identify and describe specific practices of solving conflict and promoting social justice, including … coups [and] revolutions …

… Identify a range of ways in which social injustice is manifested (e.g. … reduced self-worth) …

… Demonstrate an understanding of the role of language in oppression (e.g. non-gender inclusive language, use of euphemism) … edward michael george

Occasionally I am asked why we home school our boys. Well, frankly, I would prefer they take decisions when they have “all the information” and I would hope that their exposure to lunatics like the people who wrote up this curriculum will consist of meetings in which they say, “Miss Sirianni, you’re fired.”

Sadly I doubt that will happen so, instead, the best I can do is make sure my own children are isolated from this infection.

MORE: What’s particularly galling is that every one of the players who made this entirely self-interested decision are funded in whole or in part on the public dime: the political parties, the CBC and Radio-Canada, but also Global, CTV and TVA, who make off with massive implicit and explicit subsidies. They’re conspiring against the public interest, on the public’s dime!

MORER: So as things stand, if you did hold a Greens-included debate, you’d pull Elizabeth May, Stephane Dion, and Gilles Duceppe. If Jack Layton could be prevailed upon to come, then the only remaining holdout would be Stephen Harper. (I know he’s nervy, but could he really duck the debate?) andrew coyne via the dawg

As I wrote over at the Dawgs, this blackmail by the old line parties pretty much forces me to vote Green in my riding provided the Green candidate is not a complete loon or anti-semite. For those of us in ridings where the Federal Election is unlikely to be decided - and frankly the CPC has zero chance in Victoria - piling up Green votes simply as a protest and to ensure that the Greens are included in the next electoral debate may make a lot of sense.

Voting for democracy and against blackmail is a position I can get behind.

Sex is where babies come from. It doesn’t matter that you “didn’t mean to get pregnant” and only wanted the fun parts. An extreme skateboarder doesn’t “mean” to break a leg in eight places, but guess what?

I’m glad she’s not getting an abortion. I’m less thrilled that she’s getting married, but she probably isn’t thrilled either. If it works out, great. It’s been known to happen. But she should have planned her life better. It really isn’t that hard to do. Call it “delayed gratification.” Just control your damn self. five feet of fury

As various lefty commentators have pointed out, now that we are past the disgusting Trig inventions, socons are not down with seventeen year olds getting knocked up. Just say no and all that. My pal Kathy is leading the unreconstructed charge.

Couple of things. First, sex without contraception leads to babies as I know to my delight. Second, telling young ladies to “keep their legs closed” tends to be less effective than the Pill, condoms or, Hell, even the rhythm method.

Young women - and 17 is not 13 - have sex. Mama Palin, apparently (and I have yet to see the quote but it would make sense) is opposed to “explicit sex education” in the schools. So am I ’cause I think explicit sex education needs to happen at home. In the Palin household apparently this did not happen.

Does this make Mrs. Palin unfit to be Vice President. Hell no. It makes her far better able to understand the realities which are faced by families all over the world. It makes her capable of at least having the chance to rethink a rule against sex education in school because, let’s face it, she did not get the job done at home.

At the same time this will illustrate an essential difference between a broad spectrum of righties and lefties.

Obama stated - and I can’t be arsed to get the link - that if one of his daughters was knocked up he would not “want her punished with a baby”. Mrs. Palin has said:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said. ann althouse

And for the lefties who are shocked or who want to cry hypocrisy one of Ann’s commentors notes:

Remember, your wonder boy Barack was born to a teen age mother who was impregnated out of wedlock by the 24 year old married black African Muslim father when she was only 17 (actually 18 ed’s note) years old. althouse

Kathy, Bristol apparently did not keep her legs closed…which means that Mrs. Palin and her family will be welcoming a grandchild about the time she takes the oath of office. It would be nice if it had worked out differently; but it didn’t. A new little person will be born. And we will all be better off for it.

Possibly the hardest job in the world is to be a good parent. On the one hand you want your kids to grow, to be confident, to have a spine; on the other your want them to pay attention, to mind what you say, to actually listen.

No child should ever experience random violence from his mother or father. However, the idea of consequences, verbal, physical or at some other level needs to be ingrained from the go. Children are very basic: from a very early age they are aware of right and wrong. Which does not mean they cleave to the right. Rather it means that they test the rules their parents make. And a rule without consequence is no rule at all.

Go read the whole post.

Indeed.

Seen from this perspective, needle exchanges and safe injection sites are relatively minor attempts to reduce a harm created by prohibition.

But people don’t see it from that perspective because all they hear about is harm reduction. The news stories. The research. The politics. The debates. The noise about harm reduction is deafening. It dominates public discussion of drug policy.

As a result, perception is totally out of line with reality. Most Canadians, I suspect, would assume Margaret Wente is right in calling harm reduction “the philosophy that has come to dominate drug policy.” But to say that harm reduction dominates drug policy is to focus on the housefly while ignoring the elephant on whose rump it sits. Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen

The headline on the Wente piece is “Legalization in disguise”. Some chance. As Gardner points out the safe injection sites are the fly on the elephant of drug prohibition. Do they work? Do they reduce harm? Perhaps. But compared to the harm inflicted needlessly by the current drug laws in Canada the entire concept of safe injection sites is trivial.

I had business in downtown Victoria today and it took me down Pandora Street. There are handy receptacles for “used sharps” which is a good thing as I sure as Hell don’t want one sticking in my foot or my children’s. There were a lot of people who were clearly “on something”. And there were street workers out checking to see how the people they know were doing.

Gardner advocates an end to the drug prohibition, so do I; but that end has to be managed very carefully lest it turn out like the influx of Residential Schools settlements or resource money on Indian Reserves.

Part of that management may well be the creation of a quasi-criminal space where, for their own benefit, substance addicts can be taken off the street for a period of time. And, yes, this is exactly opposite to my libertarian views and to my skepticism about the State’s ability to do good; but the tragic fact is that there are concentrations of two or three thousand people in various cities in Canada for whom full legalization of drugs with the attendant 95% (or 70% or whatever) drop in price would be fatal.

Drug prohibition must end and end soon; but we will have to deal with the consequences of 50 years of this misguided policy. They are people and they are citizens - and they might just be your brother or your child.

Update: Excellent rebutal of Wente from Rebecca Jesserman in today’s Globe.

But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. the new republic

What has always struck me about Ms. Klein is that her world view admits no possibility of doubt, much less error. She knows the truth and sets out to find the facts that back her up. Chait, a rather more nuanced thinker, finds more than a few facts which shoot her down. Not that it matters: to the sort of people who read Klein, “truthiness” is more important than actual fact. And much more interesting.