Nothing to see here

You will have noticed ... shall we say 'light' posting here lately, as a gang of armed deadlines took me out back in the alley, roughed me up and threw me in the dumpster. This process expected to be repeated for the next week or so, after which I shall have a lovely holiday and recuperate my shattered nerves. In the meantime:

The loonies at the BBC have devised a series on the afterlives of Enid Blyton characters: George speaks! (And I cannot recommend Radio 7 too highly - they have the Goon Show too!)

Michael Phelps has only been dumped by Kellogg's, and you can join the Kellogg's boycott in return. Smarmy gits.

And just for the heck of it, those links you know you want but are ashamed to bookmark:

for all your US political needs

and to calm your shattered nerves after.

Expect a triumphant return at the end of February, with fresh new snark, tall tales of this 'California' they speak of, and long-awaited deep thoughts on Michael Ignatieff. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves...

Slow News Day

And if there's anything duller than the annual round of 'Many People Do Christmas Shopping' articles it's 'City That Rarely Gets Snow Confounded By Snow'.

So instead, why not take time to enjoy Virgil on Facebook, courtesy of our New Brunswick Correspondent?

Post Blago Blog Post

Not that I didn't enjoy the Rod Blagojevich Untergang media circus, but I've yet to find a piece addressing the really interesting question here, namely: how did this guy manage to function as Governor of a major state?

I mean, I understand that Illinois expects corruption from her politicians, no problem there. But this guy is nutty -- delusional, narcissistic, histrionic, incapable of normal self-presentation. So what are the expectations of a United States Governor, such that Rod Blagojevich was able to (more or less) meet them for almost five years? And what's next? Are we going to find out that Arnie Schwarzenegger never bothered learning to read or write? That David Paterson is exactly like that Peter Sellers character? That Janet Napolitano is just some kind of Internet hoax? How did the quality controls manage to totally vanish all at once?

Wall St. welfare

What Paul Krugman said. 

Some of Krugman's commentators are pretty good too. Most resonant with me, I fear, was the one who began (roughly): 'This is why I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries...'. Obama is a transformative figure symbolically and stylistically, and his being good rather than evil is a pretty radical change in context. But none of that entails that he's even going to attempt to change the culture of kleptocracy which has now sunk the American economy. My hope is that his current deference to the right and the rich (hiring Summers et al., not really trying to fix TARP) is an elaborate Plan A which he will be able to ditch in a year or so when everyone's been given enough rope and things have only gotten much worse. My fear is that he's a hardcore Rubinomics man himself, and just doesn't grasp how broken the system is or see what's fundamentally wrong with taxpayer-funded robber baronry. 

And actually, I have an even deeper fear. This is that Obama does understand the problem, but seriously believes he can change the self-interested behaviour of bad agents through the magical power of his personal moral authority, whether that means being generous and responsive to House Republicans or speaking mighty Words of Chastisement to bonus-taking bankers. In which case he's delusional, and there may be no Plan B at all. 

UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.

Front page follies

That's one slow news day out there, but I still have to say that the Globe's front page story (with sub-Facebook photo) about Michael Phelps and a bong represents everything I hate about journalism today. The only honest headline would be: "Trivial Act of Uninteresting Person Prompts Cynical Corporate Pseudo-Scandal", and that doesn't really describe a story that belongs on the front page, does it? If Phelps' sponsors do dump him, there's a case to be made for a story in the Business section, and certainly for an editorial pointing out how silly and corrupt the whole sponsorship racket is. But they haven't done it yet. No doubt the Globe is proud of itself for being ahead of the story here, but what it amounts to is that they're egging on the mindless festival of hypocrisy they're predicting. Ugh.  

 

Once again, the on-line edition turns out to be a bit more grown-up: there the story is last on the list under Sports.