Someone on Cix posted a passage from Garrison Keillor, who summed up the credit crises and the Republican responsibility in these words in the International Herald Tribune:

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn’t their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that’s why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, “This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon.”

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand Americans trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

Find the whole article here. And because of US syndication, if you google any of the key, well-honed phrases, you’ll find the same piece in a dozen US subregionals.

An interesting post from Norfolk Blogger as he goes off on one assuming that Lib Dem Blogs hates him.

I thought that this was fairly unlikely (although, to be fair, if I was going to ban anyone…) so dropped LibDemBlogs key genius Ryan a line to see if he knew about the issue and the allegation.

And got a fairly robust response.

Somehow, it seems quite a lot of people expect sites like this to be omniscient. It’s not that dissimilar from some of my casework, where people wail “Why hasn’t the Council done something about problem X?” First step is to make sure that the Council know about the problem in the first place. There have been plenty of times when the reason the Council hasn’t done anything is that it didn’t know there was a problem. Everyone assumes Council omniscience, or Council indifference, and few people pick up a phone and ask.

There are, of course, plenty more cases where the Council bloody has been told, and still hasn’t fixed it. These can be for a number of reasons.

Some problems can’t be fixed. No, really.

Sometimes it’s a communication issue, and just because Department A has been told of a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that Dept B knows. This shouldn’t happen, but inevitably does in organisations the size of councils. With 20,000 employees, things will occasionally fall between cracks.

Quite often, the problem is “It’s more complicated than it looks!” EG: why hasn’t the Council mown this bit of grass? Actually, the Council is not responsible for that bit of estate. The developer who built it is, even though they left town ten years ago and went bust shortly after. The Council will eventually be responsible, but first has to adopt the estate – and it’s not going to do that until its standards have been met, otherwise it will end up responsible for shoddy roads and bad workmanship and have to spend a small fortune putting it right.

Sometimes, the problem is that the requested fix is too expensive. More accurately, since the Council’s annual budget was £1.4billion last year, apparently, which technically means we could afford almost anything, the problem is usually allocation of money. Quite a lot of that money is tied up, so the £350million for schools is not going to be spent repairing fences. And the repairing fences budget, like the fixing pavements budget, is finite, and both ran out ages ago this financial year, and already have significant calls on them for the following year.