Willy Loman

Recessions are depressing and the depression has finally gotten to me I know some old soul or some astute young turk will come along and tell me don’t worry, Willy, it’s not the end of the world. Recessions do not last forever, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Hell, we’ve all been through these before. Of course we have and each time, the way we do business, the way we make a living, and the resulting way we are forced, coerced or resign to living our lives, changes. To our governments, the power brokers, or those that dabble in the lives of workers as investments, recessions are considered to be part of the normal business cycle, a sort of cleansing, you could say, an opportunity for the economy to retool, implement new technologies, restructure or realign the work force. Unfortunately being a worker that has gone through three of these opportunities and whose role far too often was to perform those restructures and implement those new technologies, it starts ...

New ad from immigration Canada. Possibly part of the new branding message from team Harper:D JAWL

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy This is the video of Janeane Garofalo on Olbermann calling the tea baggers racists> Let’s be very honest about what this is about, Garofalo began. It’s not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. … This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. It is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks and there is no way around that. Good for her, it is racism straight up. JAWL From Raw Story here .

Harper gave his views on the upcoming Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad in an exclusive Canwest interview. Possibly a personal attempt on his part to increase the listenership and readership of the beleaguered conservative broadcaster and publisher. From the report of the interview here , it sounds like Steve is quite excited about coming face to face with Venezuela's socialist leader Hugo Chavez and Boliva's Evo Morales or as the Post claims two of the strongest left-wing political leaders Harper has ever encountered on the international stage, I guess Harper and the Post think China, Saudi Arabia, Putin’s Russia are flourishing democracies. Harper and the Post are positioning our prime ministers role at the Summit as the defender of the North American free enterprise system. Mr. Harper noted he is prepared to hear plenty of rhetoric at the summit about how the global financial crisis has discredited the free-market economic system. But he said Canada, which h...

Today is tax day in the US when all good tax paying citizens file their tax returns. There is lot of noise coming from the Fox News Tea Bag crowd (GOP holdouts, former neocons, racists and the like) about a yet unverified number of Tea Bagging Parties happening across America. It is also a day where more economists are joining Krugman in questioning the wisdom and in some cases the honesty of Obamas bail out plan for the banks. However the best critique I have, at least today, since it is written in plain english and I can understand it, is from Zach Carter at Mother Jones . Carter explains how under Treasury Secretary Geithners plan, the US banks are being granted carte blanche to claim their assets are worth more than they really are worth. A sort of trust me accounting principle. Then as part of the federally funded buyout to bring stability back to the financial systems, the banks can sell those assets at the inflated prices. The alternative according to Carter and Krug...

Although he has not brought forth any changes to our immigration laws yet, our immigration minister Jason Kenny is out stumping across the country testing the waters for his plans to reform our immigration and citizenship rules. Where his predecessor brought in new immigration rules to bypass the queue if the immigrant had a value to the Canadian economy, be it low skilled temporary workers to fill vacant service industry jobs in Fort McMurray or highly trained professionals that could fill a shortage of engineers and the like, Jason is more concerned with the assimilation of immigrants into our Canadian culture. With his first proposal immigrants must be fluent in English or French , which is not necessarily an insurmountable requirement depending upon the definition of fluent, Jason is now proposing that people becoming Canadian citizens have a full appreciation of the country's values. We want to make sure that when people become Canadians, they totally understand that Can...

In a Globe and Mail Opinion piece, this morning, Preston Manning is urging Ontario to lead the way by introducing two tier health care. He must be loosing his patience with Harper for not making healthcare reform part of an economic recovery program and decided to jump in himself and run one up the flag pole, test the waters, get the ball rolling, so to speak. Either that or he just a fucking idiot that can't get over the fact that universal healthcare works and that it is free enterprise that is now broken. JAWL h/t Buckdog here .

With the help of powerfully talented Rachel Maddow I am trying to get my site visits up on a slow Sunday, by attracting either more right wing republicans or those interested in gay porn. Wait maybe that is the same group. Definitions: Teabagging and M4M JAWL

Worth a watch especially on a slow Sunday. More on Susan Boyle here. JAWL Video might get pulled down soon.

From bewarethecheese.com You really think you know yourself... Well I doubt that very much. For years people have been searching for a way to look inside and see the inner person. Well search no longer, bellow is the perfect test for you to look at yourself in a whole new light. go here and simply click on the part of the bunny that you would eat first, to try again hit the back button. Live, learn, but most importantly, eat chocolate. Happy chocolate bunny day. JAWL

The Harper conservative party will absolutely continue to accept former progressive conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney as a member, provided that he ponies up the $35 for a five-year membership card. This confirmation by the Harper conservative party president Don Plett came about after intervention by Harpers defense minister Peter MacKay. A staunch supporter and personal, friend of the former prime minister, MacKay thought Mulroney should be granted a lifetime membership, similar to the ones issued by the former progressive conservative party. Unfortunately he did not offer to pay the thirty-five bucks on Mulroney’s behalf or state whether he would renew his own membership in the future. Maybe we need to get a fund started to keep Mulroney an active member of Harpers conservatives. JAWL Reference: CBC here

The CIA announced this week that they are no longer operating the secret prisons that they never had and will be decommissioning the remaining sites that were run under third party contracts which of course they also didn’t use. No list of sites, identity of prisoners held, or related number of deaths was provided. Nor whether the prison population will be released or continue to be retained, by the now independently run torture chambers. Apparently no verification process seems necessary since it is impossible to verify something that never existed, no longer exists. JAWL Reference: RAW STORY

JAWL

This is quite touching. Funeral is a new TV commerical launched by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) in Singapore which looks at relationships in a different light, through a woman at her husband's funeral. Ultimately, the TVC celebrates the beautiful imperfections that make a relationship perfect. This is fresh off MCYS latest Viewers' Choice 2008 win for last year's Family TVC which promotes the importance and value of family bonding. JAWL

I am starting to feel like Number Six, trapped on island where my days are filled by government run festivals designed to prevent me from uncovering their hidden ideology. For some reason or another the Harper government continues to believe that refurbishing hockey arenas and investing in festivals is the best use of our infrastructure dollars. Today the government announced another $100 million for festivals across the country. They believe money invested in these events will help tourism, maintaining the current number of visits to Canada. Although the various festivals are obviously happy for the additional funding, it is rather questionable how many tourists be they Americans or Canadians will travel to another city to attend these events. We are talking about close 10% unemployment in both countries , but hey who knows, maybe the conservatives believe that the unemployed will have a lot more free time on the hands and festivals will keep them busy. If the conservatives ...

Big lessons to be learned in America today. As the majority of Americans, through either fear or ignorance, sat back during the Bush years and either quietly or patriotically accepted the loss of their personal freedoms, they were warned by the ranting few that the losses could be permanent. Personal freedoms cannot be placed on hold. Once surrendered they are at risk of being permanently lost. Today Obama, invoked the state secrets act to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warrant-less wiretapping program, A San Fransisco court is trying to review documents relating to the NSA program that was expanded by the Bush Administration to include wiretapping of telephone conversations between US citizens. The case is following up on allegations made by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein. He revealed that AT&T allowed the agency to install network monitoring hardware to spy on American citizens. Public reports have also implicate...

The first CD I ever bought was Muddy Waters Greatest Hits. It wasn’t because I was a great blues fan, (I wasn’t reading pogge back then), I had bought my first car with a CD player, and my kids said I should start buying CDs. The cheapest one I could find with the most songs on it was Muddy Waters Greatest hits. For the next six months or so I listened to Muddy Waters every day. Not a bad way to start on the blues. Muddy Waters was born in the Mississippi Delta on April 4, 1915. When Muddy was in his teens the Delta blues was dominated by Son House then in his early thirties and Robert Johnston in his early twenties. The story goes that Son House taught Robert Johnson to play the guitar or as House said, just a couple notes. If it is true that the music gets passed down then Muddy Waters learned from both of them. He had the voice of House and the guitar styling of Johnson. It wasn’t until age 25 that he made his first trip to Chicago, playing with the Silas Green Minstrel Sho...

In 1967 Frank Zappa was hired for $2,000 to do a sound track for this animated TV commercial. It won a CLIO award for best use of sound. JAWL:

If our initial two solitudes, taught us anything, it was that our acceptance of our diversity of culture, ethnicity, customs and language is what has made us Canadian. Something our minister of immigration and multiculturalism has somehow forgotten or possibly never knew. Jason Kenny is continuing to push his insulting rhetoric about the purification of our immigration process with the recommendation that immigrants not only be able to fluently communicate in English or French , but that our existing ethic communities need to further embrace Canadian values. Kenny believes that Canadians should not be naive about the very real dangers of radicalization, of extremism. He is concerned some communities are not actively integrating with mainstream society. He is pushing an integration agenda. Kenny then adds that there are people who come to Canada or are born in Canada that have very illiberal views, who believe that their religious dogma or their ethnic grievance justifies violen...

...and our government has been duplicitous in having us arrested and tortured. Our government has lied, broken promises and now rebranded us a terrorist threat, in a nefarious effort to hide their duplicity in our torture. We are Canadian citizens. JAWL

French president Sarkozy rolled out all the pomp possible, with a red carpet arrival for US president Obama, with full military honors from a company of soldiers at the majestic 18th-century Rohan Palace, once home to the bishops of Alsac. The visit will be much watched, especially for the encounter between their wives, Carla and Michelle, who were to share a sumptuous lunch prepared by a two-star chef while the presidents met. Obama will use a U.S.-style town hall meeting with French and German youths in Strasbourg later today to appeal directly to the European public for support for the Afghan mission after which Obama will be heading to Germany to meet with Chancellor Merkel who is co-hosting the 60th NATO meeting with Sarkozy. . Canada’s prime minister will arrive later in the day and would, I expect be given an agenda of when the official photo opportunities will take place and a map showing where the various facilities are located. JAWL

The traditional photo of the G20 leaders will be reshot after Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed his opportunity Thursday to be in the first snap. The BBC is reporting that Harper was in the bathroom while the photo was being taken. The other leaders initially waited for Harper but then went ahead with the photo without him. In a sincere effort to assist the prime minister and possibly save time at these very important G20 meetings (after all the world is falling a part) I have taken the liberty of photoshopping the prime minister in next to the German Chancellor where he was originally scheduled to stand, using one of his more popular images from the web. There everyone back to work. JAWL Reference CBC here .

BBC telecast from April 1, 1957 JAWL