Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading...

- The Ottawa Citizen weighs in on the Cons' out-of-control communication costs:

Harper's press secretary Andrew MacDougall defended the increase in communications staff in the Prime Minister's Office, however, by saying government communications are more important than ever because "Canadians are worried about the economy and what their government is doing to address it. So it's important to return every phone call and have the prime minister out there communicating."

Except that is not what the government is doing. Centralizing communications in the PMO does not necessarily mean more communicating; it might just mean that the information that is communicated is more controlled and spun than ever. When it comes to communications, Canadians are getting less for more money and, especially now, that should concern everyone.

- I don't entirely agree with Matt Taibbi's sense of inevitability. But otherwise, it's hard to argue with his take on what's made it more difficult to rally public support behind worthwhile causes:

Common sense sounds great, but if you’re too freaking lazy to penetrate the mysteries of carbon dioxide—if you haven’t mastered the whole concept of breathing by the time you’re old enough to serve in the U.S. Congress—you’re not going to get the credit default swap, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation, the interest rate swap, etc. And understanding these instruments and how they were used (or misused) is the difference between perceiving how Wall Street made its money in the last decades as normal capitalist business and seeing the truth of what it often was instead, which was simple fraud and crime. It’s not an accident that Bachmann emerged in the summer of 2010 (right as she was forming the House of Tea Party Caucus) as one of the fiercest opponents of financial regulatory reform; her primary complaint with the deeply flawed reform bill sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank was that it would "end free checking accounts."

Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power.

- And while the occasional attempt to develop a similar countermessage might be worth a shot, it only makes matters worse to go all out in accepting and even pushing the idea that small, simple, short-term gains in the context of a worsening society are all that really matter. Which brings us to the Libs:

Federal Liberal insiders said on Tuesday the party is shifting strategy in response to the political forces that propelled Mr. Ford into office.
...
(M)ore specifically, insiders said the Liberals will abandon nanny state proposals like universal child care and put forward boutique proposals that would cost relatively little and target areas where many Canadians are hurting – such as their family-care plan, which would give family caregivers a six-month employment-insurance benefit similar to parental leave and a family-care tax benefit for low- and moderate-income earners modelled on the child tax benefit.

And the framing may be even worse than the policy focus: what exactly do the Libs think they have to gain by deriding public programs in wingnut terms like "nanny state"?

- In fairness, though, at least one NDP MP seems to have his eye off the ball as well.

- And finally, the weirdest part of the potash developments over the last couple of days is the Cons' apparent refusal for anybody to take credit for the recommendation to let BHP Billiton take over PCS. While it's true enough that there's a difference between a departmental recommendation and a final decision, it strikes me as highly implausible that the former wasn't based at least in part on political direction as well - and the fact that Stephen Harper is distancing himself from both sides of the picture looks to suggest that he expects plenty of fallout from the outcome.