Tories want more election debates to capitalize on Justin Trudeau's stupidity

Conservatives are quietly considering a proposal to hold up to five regional televised debates in the upcoming federal election to contrast Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s experience with rookie Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau....

The dilemma of Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders going off the deep end

There's no coming back from being in bed with a hard-core, no-bones-about-it neo-fascist party. You can't do that as a credible adult in the 21st Century and say you didn't really know how bad fascism is.

Amazingly, Marxists and other contemporary communists get away with it, and they shouldn't. As ideologies in theory and practice, both  are political manifestations of pure evil. Suppression of the free exchange of ideas and the repression of any individual or groups that conflict with the will of the rulers are inherent features of these totalitarian movements. Though they use the language of liberty and justice, they do so only as empty words to manipulate the gullible; and as tools to reach the power they plan to clutch without ever intending to release it.

That's why among many, there were high hopes for what was represented by Geert Wilders' Dutch Party for Freedom. Despite being characterized as "far-right" by the media, his platform that favored women's rights, including pro-choice policies as well as gay rights and free speech, were actually reflective of classic liberalism. The "far-right" appellation came from a culturally relativist media that was enraged by Wilders' extreme criticisms of Islam. But were those criticisms justified?

Ancient kings claimed divine power so their authority could not be challenged by the inferior reasoning of mortal men. Similarly, in our time political Islam, with its Imams and leaders claiming divine authority as the temporal interpreters of Allah and Mohammed, brooks no real dissent. And woe to those who would dare try. In the Netherlands, Theo Van Gogh tried and he was stabbed to death on the street. Ayyan Hirsi Ali tried, and has spent the life under threat of death, with the unending need for security precautions.

There are critics of Catholicism who are just as harsh as those who criticize Islam. But Catholicism's critics do not have to live in constant fear of being murdered, while Islam's do not enjoy that privilege.

So while it seems Willders has not changed his Party for Freedom's platforms, his willingness to form an alliance with France's crypto-fascist National Front has plunged him into an abyss from which he will probably never emerge.  The National Front's current leader, Marine Le Pen, has tried to rehabilitate the image of the party she inherited from its founder, her Nazi-sympathising father, Jean-Marie.  But the National Front remains what it is, a genuinely far-right party, using thoughtless demonization of all Muslims and fervent opposition to gay marriage as a means to achieving their ends.

Wilders is first and foremost a politician, and seeing the increased popularity of Europe's far-right political parties, he must have seen an opportunity worth exploiting by allying with them for the upcoming European parliamentary elections.  Even if he does achieve a temporary measure of success by that alliance, the irrevocable long-term damage it will inflict on his and his party's credibility show that he is someone who lacks the wisdom to lead a nation.

The one silver lining to this sad development is the rift this has caused between Wilders' party and Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party and its firebrand leader Nigel Farage. Despite uninformed claims by Wilders that UKIP would join the alliance of the far-right, Farage has made it abundantly clear the Dutchman is talking out of his hat.

Farage has made it plain that he would have nothing to do with any multi-party union that involved the National Front, leading Marine Le Pen to lash out at him this week, like a spurned lover.

I can't say that I know Farage, but did meet him briefly and chatted with him while we were ordering drinks at the bar at an event where he spoke. It was a speech in which his firm commitment to human rights, liberty and individual freedom was passionately and abundantly clear.  His rejection of any cooperation with France's National Front, despite the immediate political gain that could come with it, reiterate Farage's commitment to those principles.

It is a very sad development for the Netherlands and Europe that Geert Wilders capitulation to expediency shows he lacks that same wisdom.

The Robocalls "scandal" that never was

There are 525,600 minutes in a year.

And there have been 3,581 news stories written about the Robocall scandal, according to the Infomart database.

Except last week, we found out it was fake. There was no conspiracy to use automated phone calls to dupe voters in the 2011 election into going to the wrong place to vote.

After three years and millions of wasted tax dollars, Elections Canada – possibly the most anti-Conservative government agency in Canada, other than the CBC – concluded the whole thing was a myth, like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster.

It’s not just that the Conservatives didn’t do anything wrong. It’s that no one did anything wrong. As Yves Cote, the Commissioner of Canada Elections, put it: “the evidence uncovered in the investigation is not sufficient to give me reasonable grounds to believe that an offence was committed.”

The real "shame and embarrassment" of being a Torontonian

Olivia Chow, a Member of Parliament for a downtown Toronto riding and a presumed candidate for the position of mayor in the city's next election, spoke recently of the "embarrassment" that Rob Ford had brought upon her by his antics. "We are being embarrassed" she professed at a recent media scrum. This is the same Olivia Chow who is the widow of Jack Layton, who led the New Democratic Party from 2003 until his death, and about whom it was revealed that during their marriage he was caught by police in a dingy Chinatown brothel after receiving a hand-job (at the least) from a hooker.

I don't recall Ms Chow professing her embarrassment about that, just as she did not proclaim her "shame" about being exposed for taking advantage of subsidized housing while she and her husband were making a combined six-figure salary.

But because of the current Toronto mayor's occasional drug use and his intemperate remarks, now, finally, Olivia Chow has come to learn what it is to be humiliated.

If you say so, Olivia...

Toronto Ward 21 Councillor "Fiasco" Joe Mihevc sent out an email to his constituents a couple of weeks ago in which he bemoaned "the shame and embarrassment Mayor Ford has brought upon us."

The very same Mihevic whose advocacy for, and bumbling oversight of an unnecessary dedicated streetcar lane along St. Clair Avenue in Toronto became the exemplar of how not to do a civics project. Disruption from the lengthy construction, which went more than twice the planned time at almost three times the cost to taxpayers, caused some local businesses to go bust. The resulting lane divided the neighborhood, created a nightmare of traffic congestion, made a number of intersections death-traps for pedestrians, and resulted in only a minimal reduction in travel time for public transit patrons.

I haven't been able to locate any expression of "shame and embarrassment" for his role in causing that fiasco. Last time I checked, Mihevc was still praising himself in the face of his incompetence.

But now, because of Rob Ford, a man for whom Mihevc has frequently and very publicly expressed his detestation, suddenly, a grotesque, enormous blot of shame has enshrouded "Fiasco" Joe.

A couple of days ago, I had a long conversation with an old friend in Los Angeles who is a film producer who has worked with people such as Steven Spielberg and Michael Mann. He asked me about Toronto and rather than shame, there was quite a bit of laughter in recounting the recent goings-on in my city's municipal politics.

One thing that did seem to surprise him was the increase in support for Ford since his confirmation of having smoked crack cocaine. It's easy to understand how someone not familiar with Toronto politics would find that unusual, and to explain that, I had to describe the Rob Ford phenomenon.

Despite the obvious problematic components, Rob Ford, at least in his role as a public servant and politician, is completely forthright, which places him in stark contrast with his opponents. He may tell stupid lies about his personal behavior, but when he says he wants to do something in the political arena, you know he means it and isn't saying it just for public consumption as is so often the case with his rivals. Ford may me prone to bizarre outbursts, but he is genuinely passionate about his concern for the average citizen.

After years of the city's being run by a wasteful nanny-statist, Ford was in large measure a reaction to the paternalism and deceit coming from our city's "mainstream" politicians.

Conrad Black put it well earlier in the week in an editorial for the National Post when he wrote that the people who support Ford "are not scandalized by obesity, occasional cocaine use, occasional drunkenness, or the odd whirl at the wheel of a car when a breathalyzer, if applied, could be problematical. They are, however, scandalized by rank hypocrisy from mouthy journalists and gimcrack municipal politicians, and by the confected and inflated sanctimony of prigs and twits."

Ford`s supporters are frequently portrayed by some of the stupider pundits and political prognosticators as only being concerned with keeping taxes down. If that were the case, then that fails to explain why Ford`s support held firm despite the need for a tax increase to help pay for a much-needed subway expansion in Scarborough. What those ideological enemies of Ford fail to grasp is that the mayor`s support is not based from people who hate taxes, but those who hate seeing taxes used wastefully, as they are so often by Toronto politicians who want to double as social engineers.

Last week, in what some have described as a palace coup, Toronto`s City Council stripped Ford of most of his mayoral authority, even though the excuse was little more than that they dislike and claim to be embarrassed by him. Ford has neither been charged with nor convicted of a crime while in office.

Then, as if on cue, only a couple of days later, the idiots on City Council started talking about imposing a property tax increase well above the limit Ford would have ever proposed. The backlash was swift and immediate. Ford`s opponents fell right into his hands, playing to his strength as a champion of taxpayers and his narrative that the rebellion was motivated entirely by ideology.

Ford is now rising even more in the polls, with him being favored more than any other candidate to be best qualified to manage Toronto`s budget.

Explaining Ford`s rise in popularity to my LA friend, I said, given the pathetic alternatives we have among municipal politicians here, the idea of a guy who takes the occasional puff of crack and goes on weird drunken tirades is still a lot more attractive than anyone else we have on offer.

"Wow," he replied, "things must be really bad there."

It was then that I felt a tinge of embarrassment. "Yeah," I said back, "they are."

Plus : No comment on this

"St. Clair Fiasco" Joe Mihevc and other sleazeball responses to the Ford situation

The sleaziness and hypocrisy would be astounding if it weren't so predicable. 

Today I received emails from Toronto City Councillors Joe Mihevic and Josh Matlow dripping with sanctimony and reeking of self-promoting hypocrisy.

The one from Mihevc, the bumbler whose vastly overpriced St. Clair Streetcar fiasco is still used as an example throughout Ontario of how not do to a civics project, is particularly cretinous. As he has before, while professing sympathy and concern for Rob Ford, Mihevc takes every opportunity to insult the mayor while putting on the proverbial hairshirt of " pain for our City and the shame and embarrassment that Mayor Ford has brought upon us."

No sane person who isn't Rob Ford or an immediate family member of the embattled mayor is walking around feeling shame or embarrassment for anything Rob Ford has done. Only one of the notoriously asinine Toronto leftists whose personal self-esteem is tied to municipal politics would be stupid enough to profess anything like that. But that doesn't mean that sleazy municipal politicians can't sink so low as to try to milk as much advantage as they can from another person's personal tragedy.

The tone of these releases from the likes of Mihevic and Matlow is that character matters. Indeed it does. In their current statements, the hypocrites Mihevc and Matlow are demonstrating how their own character is far more reprehensible than Rob Ford's.

When City Councillor Ana Bailao was charged with (and later plead guilty) to drunk driving, Rob Ford didn't call for her head, but said "everybody makes mistakes" and offered her support.

Ironically, now with the tables turned Bailao, who is a convicted criminal, is calling for Rob Ford, who is not, to step down.

Clearly Ana Bailao is not the sort of person you want standing behind you if you don't want to find a knife in your back.

It's also worth mentioning that Matlow himself is somewhat dodgy about his own history of impaired driving.

There are a pack of braying hyenas on Toronto's City Council. While Ford has done a good job of pushing his agenda through and righting the course of the economic disaster upon which David Miller had set Toronto, some on Council think Ford's current perceived vulnerability is a chance to advance their own ambitions or those of their special interest friends.Those would include the union CUPE, which is still resentful about the last agreement that Ford managed to force them to accept and which has a number of Ford's more outspoken opponents in its pocket.

The public will have a choice a year from now. They can choose a flawed but devoted public servant trying to do his best for Toronto's citizens. Or they can choose one of the detestable hypocrites who aren't even trying to hide their glee that Ford's personal issues are hurting him.

When that choice is made, it won't be a choice to decide who is running their personal life best. It's a choice about whom the citizens of Toronto trust most to take care of the public interest. And with politicians like "St. Clair fiasco" Joe, whose ineptness wasted tens of millions of tax dollars leading the charge against Ford, that choice will be an easy one.

From Ward 22 Councillor Josh Matlow's email today

Toronto mayor Ford admits having smoked crack cocaine

Speaking to reporters outside his office, Ford asked the media to repeat a question asked to him in May.

“Do you smoke crack cocaine?” a reporter said. 

“Exactly. Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine,” Ford said. “I’ve made mistakes… all I can do is apologize and move on.”

“But, no, do I? Am I an addict? No.”

“Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.”

After five months of avoiding comment on the crack cocaine scandal, the mayor suggested he was just wasn’t asked about it.

“I wasn’t lying, you didn’t ask the correct question,” Ford said.

More at NATIONAL POST

And for those curious, I don't really care all that much for reasons delineated here 

UPDATE: Flouting all decency and regard for the electoral process, some City Councillors are trying to remove both Ford and the Deputy Mayor

Rob Ford's support numbers means something his obsessive opponents haven't figured out

The recent Forum Research poll, taken after Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair disclosed the existence of a video in which Toronto Mayor Rob Ford puffs on a glass pipe, shows some pretty good approval ratings for the embattled civic leader.

Particularly noteworthy is that Ford's highest approval rating, 55%, comes from Scarborough, for which Ford successfully managed to get funding for subway expansion from Kathleen Wynne's heel-dragging Provincial government.

Ford opponents in politics and government have been insisting how unnecessary the Scarborough subway is and how the eastern borough would be so much better served by what would have been a fully-funded Light Rail Transit system. Much of that attitude is illustrated by The Toronto Star's Urban Affairs columnist Christopher Hume, when he bravely, and obviously painfully, ventured out of his elitist downtown enclave to Scarborough recently to assess the surroundings and reiterate his preformed conclusion about Scarborough's transit needs.

Here's the funny thing, though. Why is it that the people who actually live in and know the Scarborough area best are the ones most supportive of Rob Ford?

Therein lies a clue to much of Ford's success, and why the media and his obsessive detractors have such little success is swaying support away from him.

It's because Ford actually listens to his constituents and tries to give them what they ask for, rather than condescendingly and paternalistically deciding what is best for them, whether they want it or not.

Weird, isn't it, that the public will loyally support a politician who listens to and seems to care about them, even though their intellectual betters and moral superiors in the media and politics tell them they shouldn't?

More public masturbation by the Toronto Star over Rob Ford

CBC radio's Q had a panel with three of Toronto's media personalities, including Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank gloating about the Rob Ford video.

More interesting is the obsessive hate and sanctimony that has him in in a ridiculous denial of the obvious vendetta his paper has had against Ford for the last 3 years.

My buddy Jon Kay makes some good points on the panel, but I would add to an important observation he made. Jon says, in essence, that there is a crisis in conservative thought reflected in the election of Rob Ford and his like in a single-minded focus on low taxes and reducing government spending.

There is a lot more to it than just that.

Ford is also a reaction to the paternalistic, sanctimonious social engineering foisted by incompetent politicians on a public outraged by a lack of their ability to simply provide competent management.

We have an incompetent provincial government that has wasted, and for all intents and purposes stolen billions in public funds, while imposing radical nanny-state social policies.

Ford has not wasted any public funds and is someone who is genuinely concerned with the wishes of his constituents, in contrast to wanting to impose a "vision" on them.

Yet The Star is, as it has been, primarily concerned with the superficiality of image. Which is why as a media source, they still have little credibility and as Kay astutely notes, Ford may indeed get reelected.

You can watch and hear the panel below:

We live in a time of the most corrupt, incompetent provincial government in Ontario`s history

It would be hard to imagine a report more damaging to the credibility of Ontario's Liberal government than the one released Tuesday by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk on its decision to cancel the Oakville gas plant.

First under former premier Dalton McGuinty, and later, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals estimated the cost of cancelling this plant was $40 million.

Lysyk found it will cost up to $1.112 billion, with the most likely final figure being $815 million, after future savings and cost add-ons are factored in.

Even more devastating to Liberal credibility, Lysyk found that despite McGuinty's insistence he had no idea of the costs of cancelling the Oakville plant, his office was directly responsible for decisions that dramatically increased those costs.

"On cancelling the Oakville plant, the Premier's Office assured TCE (TransCanada Energy Ltd.) that it would be compensated for the full financial value of its contract for the Oakville plant," Lysyk found, "instead of relying on protections in that contract that could have minimized the damages paid to the builder following cancellation."

In other words, the Liberals were so desperate to cancel the politically unpopular Oakville plant leading up to the 2011 election, they wasted hundreds of millions of public dollars in order to do so.

More HERE 

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford: “If you don’t want to vote Conservative, vote NDP. We cannot reward these Liberals with this corrupt behaviour, enough is enough."

During a stop in Scarborough Tuesday, Ford said that voting Liberal was like “just giving a bank robber another gun and saying, ‘Go rob another bank.’”

There are 5 by-elections in Ontario today.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Provincial Liberal candidate Milczyn enraged by Ford support for Doug Holyday

...Milczyn — a member of Ford’s executive committee — confirmed Monday he is firing back at the mayor and “his political machine” who have entered the byelection “in a very unusual way.”

“They have endorsed Holyday, made media statements in his support, campaigned for him and attended his public events — this is not typical behaviour for a mayor,” Milczyn said in an e-mail statement to the Toronto Sun.

“The Fords have made this byelection about themselves, and are attempting to use this vote for their own personal validation.

Ford's full support for Doug Holyday comes as no surprise. When I interviewed Rob Ford while he was running for mayor in 2010, I asked him who he admired  most in politics and next to his father, who was a Progressive Conservative MPP, Doug Holyday was the man for whom the then candidate expressed the most admiration.

He's not very smart, he's been lining his pocket while an MP, and he is high in the polls

My guess is that when we get closer to a federal election, Justin "le Dauphin" Trudeau's standings will plummet.  

Your guide to Iran's upcoming presidential "election"

Next week, voters in the Islamic Republic of Iran will be allowed to choose from one of eight candidates, all of whom had to be approved by its dictatorial Guardian Council.

These sham elections will result in Iran having a new president who has pre-committed to towing the line of Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Ali Khameini.

As ex-patriot Iranian democracy activist Sayeh Hassan notes, "not one eligible candidate has advocated for an end to the stoning of women and the public hanging of homosexuals...None have called for an independent investigation into the arrest, torture and murder of scores of Iranian political protestors in the wake of the last election. "

Mohammad-Reza Aref

Nonetheless, there are differences between the Iranian presidential candidates. Essentially, despite there being eight of them, the choices boil down to two. Seven of the candidates are essentially identical, all hardcore Islamist acolytes of Ali Khameini.

The one who stands apart from the rest is Mohammad-Reza Aref.  He was a minister in the disappointing government of Mohammad Khatami, who was supposed to be the reformer who would bring a new liberalism to Iran. That, of course, never happened. Khatami was no liberal in the western sense of the word, and those efforts he made at alleviating the repressive rule of the Islamic dictatorship was stymied by the ruling Ayatollahs of the Guardian Council through their vicious enforcers, the Revolutionary Guard, along with their urban militia of thugs, the Basij.

Aref too is no liberal democrat, but he is not pathologically hostile to the West, nor ideologically committed to terrorism, like his predecessor, the lunatic Holocaust-denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What happens following next week's election will not likely make a huge difference in how the west deals with Iran in the near future. No matter who has the most votes, the election is a meaningless pretense at democracy that will leave Ali Khameini and his Guardian Council still pulling the strings of power in the Islamic Republic.

But if, by some chance, Aref is elected, it may serve as a catalyst for a popular uprising against the totalitarian Ayatollahs. Let us hope that should that happen, US President Obama does not betray democracy by failing to support them as he failed them in Iran's last attempt at a "green revolution."

Will the NDP/Liberal cat fight end up as a sell-out of Ontario's taxpayers?

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath is behaving like a deliciously sadistic political manipulator.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is showing a palpable desperation to avoid an election in the wake of a Gas Plant cancellation scandal that cost Ontario taxpayers over half a billion dollars. The Having the Provincial NDP sign off on Wynne's budget is the only way the Liberals can hold on to power and Horvath seems to be reveling in that.

Taking full advantage of the Premier's weakness, Horvath is making Wynne contort and publicly prostrate herself, both committing to adopt just about every NDP demand in their budget and today offer a humiliating apology before the press corps. The latter stuck hard in Wynne's craw, in which she said she was sorry about a dozen times, but with typical Liberal insincerity, did not actually admit any culpability on behalf of her or her political party.

But Horwath has still not publicly committed to supporting the government in an upcoming vote, which if lost will result in a provincial election. The question now is whether after all that, Horwath pulls the rug out from under Wynne, leaving the Premier vulnerable and looking ridiculous, or will the NDP sell out Ontario's taxpayers fearing that an election may not do the 3rd party much good?

In either case, this has been an informative week about the character of Ontario's two most prominent political women.

Brain damage is not a prerequisite for being a member of the Liberal Party of Canada

But the son of Liberal leadership candidate Joyce Murray is doing his best to convince us otherwise.



More on this rather old and pasty-looking "rap artist" at Blazing Cat Fur

Benjamin Netanyahu gets Chuck Norris endorsement for today's election in Israel

he also picked up the Donald Trump endorsement, for what that's worth

The importance of attack ads in our political process

A silly debate that never disappears from the political scene is whether "attack ads" should be allowed.

Aside from the free speech component of the matter that make attack ads constitutionally protected, the motives of people opposed to them is rather transparent. It's because the candidates they support are vulnerable to them. The previous two Liberal leaders were particularly harmed by attack ads in Canada's last two national elections.

Stephane Dion was the target of a very effective Conservative ad campaign leading up to the 2008 election that portrayed him as "not up to the job" of being a leader. Michael Ignatieff was similarly harmed in the 2011 election by being successfully characterized as an elitist who was "just visiting" Canada for the sake of  personal ambition.



The raucous nature of political campaigns are really about pointing out not just the advantages of one side, but the deficits of the other. This relatively minor test of fire is an important element of the election process for a very basic and obvious reason. If a candidate who wants to lead a country is incapable of dealing with an attack ad from a fairly benign domestic political rival, how could they possibly function as a leader on the world stage, dealing with potentially hostile foreign interests?

In that sense, attack ads are the most basic test someone who wants to be put in a position of power and responsibility should be able to overcome. If they can't, they have no busness asking millions of Canadians to entrust them with that responsibility.