This Day In The Debasement of Canadian Democracy

Our top story: A federal judge ruled yesterday that fraud definitely occurred in the six riding elections where the results were challenged citizens supported by the Council of Canadians. The judge also ruled that the fraud and voter suppression was almost definitely carried out with the harpercon party's CIMS voter database. The judge did not, however, assign guilt for the fraud to anyone. Nor did the judge overturn the six election results.

harpercon scum and their scuzzball loyalists are claiming that they have been vindicated.

Add this to the treasonous Supreme Court of Canada ruling on Etobicoke-Centre, wherein the majority on the court ruled that votes in excess of the number of voters must be presumed as legitimate and that deliberate fraud must be proven before they can be overturned, we can basically say that the Judiciary in Canada has just shit its pants and disgraced itself.

Perhaps if the CoC's case had been heard before the challenge to Etobicoke-Centre, the corrupted Justices in the majority would have been forced to mitigate their asinine reasoning by accepting the reality that the 2011 federal election was rife with unprecedented fraud and vote-suppression efforts.

Following that: Senator Mike Duffy, who is a resident of Ontario, but who unconstitutionally represents PEI in the Senate, and who fraudulently billed the taxpayers for both the costs of his Ontario home (as if his cottage in PEI is his primary residence) and for his expenses on the road campaigning for the Conservative Party of Canada (as if that was his Senate work), and who was ordered to pay back $90,000 of fraudulently obtained taxpayers' money, but who was bailed-out by the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff (for reasons unknown), and who then neglected to report this gift, and who is now sitting as the "independent" Senator for PEI, is now calling for a public inquiry so that the people of Canada can hear the whole story. (He himself, instead of telling reporters the whole story, chose to hide in restaurant kitchens and is now holed-up in his PEI cottage, making it, for the first time, his primary residence.)

Finally: Rob Ford, the mayor of Canada's largest city, is embattled by recent allegations that he has been video-recorded smoking goddamned crack cocaine with gangsters. I will add that the goddamned gangsters who the mayor is allegedly smoking goddamned crack cocaine with are Somalian, because the goddamned mayor who allegedly is on video smoking goddamned crack cocaine with them was always going on about "deporting" the goddamned drug dealers who were bringing violence and death to Toronto neighbourhoods, including the downtown shopping district.

Normally, when told that the mayor of a major city, a "world class city" has been found smoking crack, the response of most of the general public would be something like: "I don't believe it!" In the case of Rob Ford however, the response has been: "Oh my god! Really???"

Toronto is now an international laughing stock. I must admit that I'm laughing too. It's comedy gold. It's entertaining. That having been said, politics and government shouldn't be entertaining in this day-and-age. It should either be inspiring (as is the case when traditional injustices are overcome by hard work, dedication and idealism) or boring (as when intelligent, honest people respectfully disagree as to which necessary thing gets priority and which necessary things get attended to in a reasonable amount of time).

A city like Toronto shouldn't be sitting on the edge waiting to find out if their drunken, absentee mayor has actually been smoking crack with the reviled gangsters.

Anyhoo, Mayor Ford just fired his Chief of Staff for his having told him that he needs to get help. Mark Towhey was actually escorted out of the building by security.

Speculation: Mayor Rob Ford is the hardest-working mayor Toronto has ever had. He's held the line on spending, including intimidating the unions into settling contract negotiations on taxpayer-friendly terms, and he's privatized city garbage collection west of Yonge Street (though whether the latter achievement is of any great benefit hasn't been established yet). These drug-dealers (who have gone to ground) have a fake video and the three journalists who saw it have only been duped. Rob Ford is a simple man. He has said the video allegations are "ridiculous" and untrue. He genuinely wonders how many times he's supposed to go in front of a camera and repeat the same thing to these scandal-mongering media parasites. Sure he drinks to excess on occasion. He isn't perfect. But he cares. HE IS THE HARDEST WORKING MAYOR TORONTO HAS EVER HAD!!!!!

All that having been said; why was the response of his chief of staff, ... a man who should know that Ford is busy 18 hours a day working for his constituents, when told of this ridiculous video slander, to tell Ford to go to rehab? What? If somebody, somewhere told him that Rob Ford was trafficking in sex workers, would Towhey report him to the RCMP???

Or is it the case that the allegations are true? And that the mayor's office is starting to seem more and more like the bunker scene in the film "Downfall"? (Especially as the Gawker crowd-sourcing fundraiser gets closer to the magical $200,000 that the gangsters are asking for the video?)

Even more speculation: The video allegations are true and the gangsters first tried to extort Ford, and went to the media afterwards. The video allegations are true and Rob Ford is hiding out and saying nothing, until Chief Bill Blair (who no doubt extracted a hefty price of future promises) has the Toronto Police Service out looking for these drug-dealers (one of whom was shot dead in a drive-by shooting since being photographed with Ford) and, when all the loose ends are cleared up, Ford will reappear, knowing that the crisis is truly behind him and he can go back to business as usual.

When Right-Wingers Vote

 Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a democrat, through-and-through. "Democracy is the worst form of government; except for all the others that have been tried" and all that.

But thinking about the train-wreck that is Rob Ford; "Is the mayor of the largest city in Canada (and the fourth-largest city in North America .... [okay, I recall hearing that on the news, but fourth? Mexico City, NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, ... at least? Oh well.]) going to have his crack smoking video bought by "Gawker"? Seriously, ... that's the question on my mind this morning: How much of the $200,000 has Gawker raised to buy the video that allegedly shows Mayor Ford smoking crack cocaine?

Who'd a thunk it?

Rob Ford, George W. Bush, stephen harper, John Baird, Vic Toews, Tony Clement, Helena Guergis, Patrick Brazeau, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Grant Devine, etc., etc., ...

Even when the Liberal Party of Canada is acting like a bunch of entitled, arrogant, corrupt eltists, ... they tend not to embarrass us to the world. (Except in the fervid brains of right-wing shit-heads who get enraged at things like "umbrella-gate." Fucking morons.)

These right-wing idiots elect "law and order, family values, fiscally responsible" candidates only to have them turn out to be lying, corrupt, sexually adventurous (but tortured) spendthrifts who make their city, province, country, and international laughing-stock.

Crack Cocaine & Child Pornography

Scene from the 2013 Sun Media Celebrity Weekend

If things keep going on as they've been going, ... are we going to end up hearing about how Rob Ford is going to appear on "To Catch a Predator: Canadian Edition"? Inquiring minds want to know.

Given the moral caliber of our "conservative" overlords, is it possible that Ford, harper, Flanagan and the Duffmeister General (and whatever harpercon/Con scumbag you care to think of) are all hiding out at Duffy's cottage smoking crack and watching child pornography?

I'm just asking here.

Rob Ford's latest Chief of Staff takes a question.

Obamabots: Lessons For Canada

Let's all remember that it was the Liberal Party of Canada, under Jean Chretien and then Paul Martin, who helped bring us to our present sorry state. Chretien and Martin began the process of tax cuts (ostensibly to "spur growth" and we all know how well that's worked out) and austerity (in the name of "deficit reduction" but actually in the cause of class warfare). In this, they were similar to the other North American "liberal" who dominated the 1990s: President Clinton.

It was under the lovely Liberal Party of Canada that our disgrace in Afghanistan began. It was under them that Maher Arar, Abullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin's torture began. If not for Chretien's street smarts, Canada would have been dragged into the cauldron of Iraq as well as Afghanistan. It was the brainless Paul Martin who agreed to overthrow President Aristide of Haiti and to return that country to the cabal of kleptocratic scum who later reduced their fellow citizens to eating dirt to fill their bellies.

My fear is that just as bush II was worse than Clinton and now Obama is worse than bush II, so will it be the case that as harper is worse than Chretien and Martin, Justin Trudeau will be worse than harper. Justin Trudeau has been described (sometimes mockingly) as a blank slate. There are ominous hints of atrocities to come however. Chillingly, the same was said of Obama; that he was a blank slate upon whom people could project whatever they wanted. There were hints of the disaster to come though. It is for that reason that I'll bother to write about US-American insanity even though this is a Canadian blog.

They Never Figured On stephen harper

Should the Governor General dissolve  Parliament and call a new election based on the blatant criminality of the harper regime? Technically it's possible. But the exercise of such raw power would be considered monarchical and the story of the Westminster Parliamentary System is of the gradual diminution of the monarch's power before the rising power of the people's representatives.

But to tolerate a cabal of fraudsters, installed by fraud and contemptuous of the entire system they base their authority on, it actually makes people willing to resuscitate the monarchy's power. harper has realized that the people who made the rules for our system never really considered that someone as amoral, cynical and contemptuous of democracy would ever be prime minister.

Conservatives on Crack

You know, I've said elsewhere that given the fact that US-American right-wingers have embraced draft-dodging, adopted daughter banging, brood of abandoned children spawning, intellectual and moral degenerate Ted Nugent as one of their own, simply for his gun-loving, vegetarian-loving, chickenhawk ways, ... it seems entirely plausible that Canadian "conservatives" would stand by their boy Rob Ford even if the alleged crack smoking video was released and played for them on a giant IMAX screen.

But just for the record (not like it matters given their hypocrisy and stubborn loyalty to their own) but I think it's officially time for these drooling half-wits to retire their whole "corrupt Liberals" meme.

Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy, Rob Ford, Bruce [Paul?] Carson [the old dude with the 20-something wife who tried to extort the First Nations]; and on and on: Tony Clement, ... ah, the whole gang of shit. They're now "The Corrupt Conservatives."

More Books

 Reading Susan George's book Another World Is Possible If ... , Susan George has been writing great, readable stuff since the 1970s. I've read A Fate Worse Than Debt and How the Other Half Dies. If you want a good introduction to the political-economic history of the postwar period and how we've found ourselves in this sorry state, I'd recommend giving her books a try.

What makes this work a little depressing is that it's from 2004, and in it, George makes the entirely reasonable argument that if there's to be any hope for social justice in the world, then the population of Europe must stand up to the USA's neoliberal onslaught and expand their welfare states and their environmental regulations and all the other things that we embattled leftists in North America recognize as the source of Europeans' generally better living standards (all things considered).

Alas, the neoliberals are in the driver's seat in Europe now as well, and are succeeding in their divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy the European welfare state and bring on the inequalities of wealth and the resultant financialization of the European economy that has so benefitted North American elites.

I also picked up the paperback version of the fourth volume of Robert Caro's awesome biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson; The Passage of Power. I'm afraid that I haven't actually read the first two. I've only read Master of the Senate, but it was fan-fucking-tastic. I've only just started The Passage of Power but the writing is top-notch. I'd curl up with it for a few days and read it cover-to-cover but I'm so behind in everything else in my life that it'd have terrible consequences.

Also, a while ago I mentioned that I was reading The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth. I can't say enough about it. It's a sweeping survey of what has become a fairly neglected portion of political history: The story of anarchism, terrorism, and the state's response to it. Butterworth writes as a principled liberal. He's critical of the anarchists but he's more critical of the hypocrisies and corruptions of the system they rebelled against. He paints the anarchists he describes as flawed human beings, but nonetheless, human beings inspired by noble, humanist ideals. Furthermore, he shows how the police apparatus of provocateurs, double-agents, international law-breaking, was, in the final analysis, more dangerous than the anarchist bomb-throwers it was designed to combat. That is the focus of the book. It's not intended to be a history of anarchist thought or philosophy.