“This is a president who needs a vacation,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart
I guess Pete thinks that date nights on Broadway, speeches around the world and talking about things he doesn’t know anything about constitute working.

Regina Leader-Post,

Draude said the right decision was made, even though using caucus funds to pay Lingenfelter wouldn’t have crossed any rules. “I’m really pleased that Dwain Lingenfelter has decided that he shouldn’t take the money, the way that he had suggested that (Hermanson) shouldn’t take it in 1998,” Draude said.

“It’s too bad that we always have to bring it up to his attention before he finally does the right thing.”

Cheers,
lance

RCMP launch criminal investigation.

“The preliminary inquiry has been completed and we have moved into the next stage, a criminal investigation.”

Super happy fun economic analysis here!

Debt is typically the cause of every major recession and depression throughout the history of the world. Through easy credit, people borrow money they can never hope to repay either investing it in foolish things such as Dotcoms or Tulip Bulbs, or perhaps not investing it at all, preferring to do the American thing and buy SUV’s, trips to Europe or degrees in philosophy for their spoiled brat children.
This triggers a recession because the funds borrowed could have been lent to the productive members of society and thusly invested in much wiser and productive things, but since they weren’t, this results in a decrease in production which is the definition of a recession.
Now I caught a lot of flak for my posting Canada might be a better place to live in the near future, but again, to show that this is not just some whim or me being in a foul mood, take a look at who has been abusing their mortgage debt;

It is an obscure statistic, but mortgage debt as a percent of disposable income is a way to measure how much debt different people in different countries take on relative to the only thing that can pay it back; disposable income. Again, surprise, surprise, our Canadian brothers to the north have taken a more conservative stance and is why they will not suffer as much as their southern neighbors.
The scary thing, is mortgage debt isn’t the only kind of debt. There’s government debt, corporate debt, student debt, you name it. And when you add it all up, never has the US had more debt relative to GDP (second chart down). And when you look at what we’re spending this veritable mountain of debt on (the stimulus, propping worthless auto companies, handouts and welfare) what possible semblance of future production can we expect?
Oh, the depression is on like Donkey Kong.

Part of a larger study to ascertain which countries may have a brighter and better future than the US, I found data that allowed me to calculate what percent of students were majoring in engineering or the sciences. The point being of course that “sociology” majors or “journalism” majors don’t really advance society or technology at all and are basically hobbies rich, spoiled suburbanite Americans like to major in thinking somehow they’ll produce the wealth necessary to support themselves throughout their lives (which they won’t).
Alas a good metric to gauge the future productivity of a nation is to measure what percent of the students major in something worthwhile, and thus these statistics from the OECD (2006)

As one would have previously guessed Asian nations score rather high with Korea having over a third of their students majoring in engineering or the sciences. The Scandinavian countries fair rather well, except Iceland which may go a long way in explaining why their country collapsed and others haven’t (engineers tend to have enough math skills to know you can’t spend more than you earn). Mexico beats out Canada by a wide margin, but Canada is not as bad as the US where only 15% of our students major in something worthwhile.
It’s not that difficult to understand that if your country majors in worthless subjects then your future productivity is going to suffer, but the problem you run into is where capitalism has produced so much wealth in the past it affords the masses the LUXURY of majoring in a hobby and not a career.
Alas, fluffy el crapo degrees will be with us for a long time.