Is Rick Santorum a threat, and if so, to which party, especially given his weak Wednesday debate? That's the $1 question. To read more click here.
Premier Dalton McGuinty is getting pseudo-tough on spending. He even paid Don Drummond $1,500 a day to chair a Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services, whose 362 sensible recommendations delivered Wednesday won't help. Click here to read more.
Everybody talks about empowering backbench MPs. But nobody seems to mean what they say. At any rate, in today's Globe and Mail Brian Laghi and Jane Taber report that Michael Ignatieff has announced that he'll protect sitting Liberal MPs from primary challenges provided they turn up enough members and enough donors to the party's coffers. Not that we're using centralized control mechanisms to reduce MPs to servants of the Leader's Office, you understand. It's just that if you simply hold your seat your way, well, shucks, see ya later buddy. Know what I mean?
The Canadian Taxpayers' Federation has relaunched its federal debt clock. It doesn't come with an alarm... it is one.
Remember the jokes about medicine in the bad old days where they'd bleed the patient and he'd get weaker so they'd bleed him some more until, for instance, George Washington lay dead? Well, today's news from the New York Times is that the financial firms and car companies that have slurped tens of billions of dollars out of the healthy economy now desperately need to slurp down tens of billions more or the economy will get sicker.
Is it not curious that Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, should have a series of cabinet appointees in trouble over laws they didn't bother to obey? It seems paradoxical that those most eager to make rules for other people should be so casual about following rules themselves, especially when the new President campaigned so aggressively on improving ethics in Washington... unless of course they think they're a genuinely superior type of person liberated by their awesome responsibilities and talents from the tiresome, mundane moral standards that apply to ordinary folks.
I've always treasured a crack by Rose Friedman about the illusion of precision in economics. Her husband Milton was half-way through declaring that if you can't measure something you don't really understand it when she interrupted with "If you can't measure it, measure it anyway". Which brings me to Michael Ignatieff's latest swaggering statement that he and his party will support the Tory budget provided they get quarterly updates including how many jobs it is creating. The trouble is, you can only know how many jobs it created if you know exactly what would have happened in employment markets if the budget had been different or absent. And since we can't run history two different ways we can't even if we have really fast computers that let us pretend we've somehow created a spreadsheet that completely accurately captures every interrelationship in the economy and accounts for chance as well. (To test this proposition, plug 1980 data into the spreadsheet and see if it predicts 1985.) On the plus side, this approach lets talking heads sound wise and politicians talk tough while acting weak. If you think that's good.