The Acquittal of David Chen and the Dangers Ahead

Earlier this month I wrote about the trial of Toronto grocer David Chen and took a solidly unpopular position on it. I feel sorry for the man and understand the frustration of virtually everyone in the city who supports him.

However, the law exists for a reason. It goes a long way in preventing false arrests, which I saw my share of even with the current law, and it minimizes the chances of someone getting hurt.

Mr. Justice Ramez Khaw saw things differently and almost incomprehensibly acquitted Mr. Chen this afternoon, saying “It is impossible for me to say that I am satisfied that I know what happened that day. My verdict would be 'not proven' were it available to me.” The only problem with the ruling is that the facts in the case aren't in dispute. Under the Criminal Code, a citizen's arrest may only be affected during the commission of a crime or while in hot pursuit, not an hour afterward as happened here. The law couldn't be clearer on that. Whether Mr. Chen was ignorant of the law or not is immaterial. He broke the law and didn't really argue otherwise.

It was never my wish to see Mr. Chen jailed or even have a criminal record, but the unintended consequences of this are going to be appalling in the near and long terms. Mr. Justice Khaw has essentially nullified the law. The police are going to be extremely reluctant to press charges in situations like this in the future, regardless of what happens with Olivia Chow's wrongheaded private member's bill to make citizen's arrests easier.

If that bill passes - and perhaps even if it doesn't - I can almost guarantee you that retailers are going to make the pursuit and apprehension of shoplifters a mandatory part of their employee's duties. The only thing that prevents that from happening now is the current law. As I understand it, there isn't anything in the Chow proposal that involves mandatory training in powers of arrest and the proper use of force, nor any indication of who would pay for that training if it is mandated.

Another private member's bill, proposed by Liberal MP Joe Volpe, expands the power of citizen's arrest to "reasonable grounds", which only the police currently enjoy. Essentially, that will make everyone a cop, only without the necessary training. And I don't see how any good comes of that.

The first thing that will happen is that the number of false arrests are going to skyrocket. As it is now, wrongful arrest lawsuits against retailers never go to court because there's no way to defend against them. The store just gives the person - who more often than not is guilty, but manages to drop the merchandise before being arrested - a couple of thousand dollars to go away. At some point that isn't going to be practical anymore and insurance companies are going to have to get involved, causing premiums to go up. Make no mistake, this is going to cost a fortune.

More importantly, people are going to get hurt. Someone will get killed sooner or later. Chances are that it won't be the criminal. Some kid at a checkout counter cannot be reasonably expected to know who's crazy, who's armed and who just wants to hurt somebody.

From everything that I've read, David Chen seems like a very nice man who did something stupid. However, the widespread support for him is based on populist nonsense from people who have blatantly refused to consider the consequences of what's likely to result from this.

The number of lawsuits, violent assaults and murders in this city are going to go up in a significant way in the very near future. And it'll happen because of $72 dollars worth of houseplants.


Links lovingly shoplifted from Mike Brock at The Volunteer

Jean Schmidt is Good With Kids

I hate social conservatives because they're really only liberals with worse attitudes. It's actually difficult to consider them conservatives at all, given the size of the government that would be required to enact their agenda. You'd be surprised how many bureaucrats it takes to properly regulate your genitals.

However, I do agree with Team Jesus on one point: That sex education for pre-teens is wrong for a number of reasons. The first priority of an educational establishment is that the little bastards enrolled therein be able to read, write and perform basic arithmetic. Test anyone on the street who looks to be under thirty. See what a good job the schools have done? Now imagine that they took a class devoted to fucking.

Second, there's no good reason for the educational system to be involved with sex when there's all that more great pornography free available than at any time in human history. Most school teachers are dowdy looking and might creep the children out. Everyone would be much better off learning about sex from, say, Carmel Moore.

Chances are that the U.S Representative of the Second District of Ohio, Jean Schmidt isn't a particularly big fan of sex education, either. But don't let that fool you. She's bringing SexyBack for the kids in her own special way.

A Republican Congresswoman shocked teachers and students alike this month when she decided to talk about abortion to a classroom of 6-year-olds.

Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) ventured into the age-inappropriate territory during a speech at a Cincinnati Catholic school, where she addressed a room of students ranging from first to eighth graders.

"Unexpectedly, towards the end of her address, Congresswoman Schmidt brought up the topic of abortion," Prinicipal Dan Teller wrote in a letter to parents, obtained by Cincinnati's WLWT.com. "Your children may come home with questions, especially if this is a topic that has not been broached in your home."

Though the abortion-related portion of the speech was reported to last under two minutes, it may be the only part anyone will remember.

“She defined abortion as the taking of a child's life in the mother's womb,” Teller wrote in the letter. "She indicated that abortion involves the killing of a child before it is born."

Noting that Schmidt "was not invited to further any political agenda,” he apologized to parents "for any confusion or fear that this may elicit on the part of your child, and for the awkward position this may put you in of introducing a difficult issue at a time that may be premature for you."

Abortion was not originally included in her speech, but Schmidt reportedly decided to address the issue in the question-and-answer period after her talk.

While speaking about the connection between moral issues and legislation, she used abortion as an example to illustrate her point.

This woman is my hero! In fact, I'd probably marry her if she wasn't old, ugly and bouncing off the fucking walls crazy.

Just imagine the level of difficulty in describing how a mother murders her baby in the womb to people too young to know how the baby got there in the first place. That's practically an Olympic feat and Congresswoman Schmidt should be congratulated for pulling it off so flawlessly. Psychically scarring young children just weeks before their parents are going to vote also requires a level of political skill that really shouldn't be overlooked.

I think I know who the Secretary of Education in the next Republican administration is going to be ....

Fuck Congress

I've never done a whole lot of protesting about the U.S detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In fact, it might be one of the few things that Bush administration did that was in strict accordance with American treaties, domestic law and the international laws of war. After all, you have to hold these people somewhere.

I certainly don't support the plans of President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, to try the detainees in civilian court. If that were to happen, and the trials were actually fair, almost all of them would be acquitted on Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment violations. There would also be evidence and witness tampering issues.

Which brings us to the Canadian Omar Khadr, who was fifteen years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002. While he doesn't meet the legal criteria of being a child soldier under international law, he was certainly close enough. Regardless of the law, the West doesn't traditionally try combatants that young. As far as I'm aware, the Hitler Youth that were deployed in the final defense of Germany weren't prosecuted by the non-Soviet allies.

I'll grant you that Khadr was raised to be a dangerous little bastard, but he's something more important than that: He's a political embarrassment to the United States. The Bush and Obama administrations have been trying to get young Mr. Khadr off of their hands for years now. The only problem is that the Canadian government, rightly or wrongly, hasn't been biting. That has left him as not only the youngest detainee, but the only Westerner still residing in Gitmo.

Apparently, that's been resolved by Khadr's guilty plea in exchange for his serving most of his eight year sentence in Canada.

However, once he's on Canadian soil, he's subject to Canadian law and will almost certainly not stay in prison very long. The Globe and Mail's Norman Spector has some concerns about this.

If Mr. Khadr agrees to a plea bargain, the announcement would be coming a week before Americans head to the polls in their mid-term elections. In these elections, the Democrats could end up losing control of one of both houses of Congress. Unless they can fire up their base, that is – a base that has been discouraged, among other things, by Mr. Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo and by his continuation, with some modifications, of George W. Bush’s trials by military commissions – the President is looking at an erosion of power and harassment by congressional subpoena power in the second half of his mandate.

At the same time, a week before the elections, Mr. Obama will be concerned not to alienate Independent voters overly. He will be conscious of criticism that will come from the direction of the family and colleagues of the medic Mr. Khadr is alleged to have killed. And he will be most concerned that these criticisms will be jumped on by Republicans and their Tea Party allies, who as always will find an echo chamber on Fox News.

Mr. Obama has an interest, therefore, in presenting the plea bargain deal in as harsh terms as possible; as the New York Times reported earlier this week, even he is not above shading the truth in an election campaign, as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have been pointing out for some time.

Perhaps it is true that Mr. Khadr will spend seven years in prison in Canada – though it seems unlikely given our parole system. However, if the government of Canada allows this statement to pass without any caveat, we run the risk of being looked upon as skunks down the road by Americans if and when Mr. Khadr is granted an early parole. And, if and when that perception emerges, there would be no shortage of Congressmen and women to hold hearings on the affair even if it means damaging the bilateral relationship – as the British and Scottish governments are now discovering to their chagrin in the case of the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

I understand Mr. Spector's concern about the precious sensitivities of a grandstanding Republican Congress, I just happen to think that they're utterly immaterial.

Firstly, Omar Khadr's crimes were committed against Americans in Afghanistan. Few, if any, Canadian laws (as the Criminal Code of Canada was applied at the time) were violated by him. Subsequent laws have been passed, but they cannot be constitutionally be applied to Khadr. Moreover, any of his acts when he was fifteen would have been tried under the then-applicable Young Offenders Act, which only allowed for a maximum sentence of ten years.

Also, under Canadian law at the time, a prisoner was given "two for one" time, which meant that any time spent in pre-trial custody is subtracted from the sentence. Khadr has already spent more time in custody than his sentence is expected to be.

It seems likely that the National Parole Board will take the above into consideration. And it probably should be. You cannot apply post-facto laws onto defendants detained years ago, at least not constitutionally.

Next year's Republican House of Representatives probably won't like that, but fuck 'em. They can hold all the hearings they want. Hopefully, they'll even subpoena officials from the Bush State Department and National Security Council and ask about their attempts to send Khadr home.

While I hold no brief for Omar Khadr and I'm not a fan of Canadian criminal law in most instances, this is about something far more important. A sovereign Canada passed its laws democratically and under the umbrella of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The U.S Congress, contrary to popular opinion, doesn't get a godamned vote here.

Canada isn't taking Khadr back because we want him. The Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were conspicuously silent on the matter and the Conservative Harper government actively opposed his repatriation. Whether that was moral, legal or constitutional is another argument entirely. He's coming home because two successive American administrations asked us to bring him home. We're taking their international embarrassment off of their hands for them.

Besides, it doesn't matter what we do, American politicians are always going to find a reason to bitch, moan and even lie about Canada when it serves their purposes. Pituitary retards like Sharron Angle, Janet Napolitano and Hillary Clinton, among dozens of others, have insisted that the 9/11 hijackers entered the United States from Canada. Is that ever going to stop? Fuck no, it won't. It's too politically expedient a way to defect responsibility from themselves and whip voters who don't know any better into a frenzy.

Norman Spector's protestations aside, if an international incident is going to arise from this, it will be because American politicians are never happy. If they don't like our laws, Congress is free to override the deal with the military commission and keep Khadr. Most Canadians would probably be okay with that. The Americans can deal with world opinion on their own, which is also fine with us.

But if the nutless wonders in the Canadian government are going to let some hillbilly freshman from fucking Chattanooga dictate the application of our laws to us, not only will Canada no longer be sovereign, it won't deserve to be.

The Tea Party Stomp

I've said a lot of things about Tea Party supporters, but not that they were violent psychopaths. The Tea Party's candidates are belligerently crazy enough for everyone, what with Sharron Angle and her "Second Amendment remedies" to virtually all of life's complaints.

Having said that, I inherently distrust the judgement of elderly white people who wear tricorner hats in public. When I see shit like that, I understand where their economic positions (see "Government hands off of Medicare") actually come from. They're little more than Trekkies without the sex appeal of someone who waits in line for hours to get Walter Koenig's autograph, but their world view is every bit as demented.

They don't have any easily recognizable beliefs. They want to cut spending on everything but Social Security, Medicare (two hugely socialistic programs that they benefit from more than most) and defense without recognizing that Social Security, Medicare and defense pretty much is everything. If they can be categorized as anything, it would be the childish wing of the Republican Party. I'm sure that they mean well, but they have no earthly idea of what they're talking about. They aren't exactly conservatives and they certainly aren't libertarians, they just ... are, which is what populism historically has been.

The Tea Party has spent over a year fighting off the impression that they're punchy retards, only to see all of that hard work pissed away on Tuesday night in Kentucky. Some hyperliberal harpie from Moveon.org stormed Rand Paul's motorcade, causing two of his supporters to wrestle her to the ground and Dr. Paul's county coordinator to step on her shoulder and head.

If you overlook the humorous aspect of a young woman requiring three adult male Tea Partiers to take her down, it looks pretty bad. After all, a head stomping is a good way to get someone pretty seriously hurt. Then, of course, are the optics of having three men beating up a girl, which rarely reflects well on a political movement.

It was really only a matter of time before something like happened. Anger and stupidity are a combustible combination, and American politics has an abundance of both of late.

I've grown to heartily distrust most political bloggers in the last few years because they've proven themselves to be full of shit over and over again. Republican bloggers go apoplectic when Obama does something that they were fine with Bush doing, and liberals are fine with Obama continuing the policies that made them howl under Bush. Not only are they liars, they're unforgivably bad ones.

That's why I wasn't particularly surprised when I started reading about the story in the Teapublican blogosphere and found that they were active apologists for Captain Stompy, Tim Proffitt. When they aren't actually saying that Lauren Valle was asking for it, they're saying that it's only a big deal because "it's a slow news day." My personal favorite is "What about the SEIU?", which ignores the fact that they might want to consider themselves intellectually and morally superior to some mobbed-up union thug.

Assholes. They're all assholes. If you've ever wondered why I have always maintained that you shouldn't get your news from fucking bloggers, now you know. The overwhelming majority of them aren't merely partisan hacks, they're remorseless fucking liars that justify the very worst aspects of the human spirit, so long as they're associated with their party label. They're no different from the gang over at the Daily Kos and they're not even pretending to be, anymore.

In a lot of ways, I'm glad that we're getting to see it now.


h/t to RightGirl.

Looka Me!

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (78% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Keep in mind that this is an American test and judged under American political standards, which are increasingly - how do I put this delicately? - fucking stupid.

Here's one example: "The life of one American is worth the lives of several foreigners." Seeing that I am one of those several foreigners, I'd be a moron to agree with that. But my answer makes me a liberal, as opposed to just smart.

Almost every "social" question in the survey had to do with religious observance or practices, which is fine for countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia, but not so much anywhere else. The overwhelming majority of modern democracies, including Canada, are secular.

I also don't like tests that offer "strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree" as answers because those are simple and life is not.

An example of that is this: "Practical considerations aside, a person who doesn't use many government services should pay less in taxes."

If thinking isn't your strong suit, you'd probably strongly agree with that. But that doesn't address things like national defense, which the United States spends more on than the rest of the world combined. Who "uses" that government service? Soldiers use all kinds of government services, including even subsidized travel to exotic locales. And wounded soldiers use even more. Should they pay more in taxes than, say, Donald Trump?

How about tax breaks themselves, which have recently been shown to cost a fucking boatload of money and are an inheritance tax on your kids? If you've gotten through the last decade without seeing that American political economics are actually insane, you haven't been paying attention. You certainly don't remember that it wasn't that long ago (as recently as 1976) that most Republicans opposed tax cuts because they drove deficits.

The quiz is full of stupid questions like that. Oddly enough, my categorization is pretty accurate in the American context. I'm just sad that it didn't notice that I'm 100% adorable.

Quizzie ruthlessly stolen from The Tiger on Politics

Help a Kitty Out Today

I don't write about Canada's Human Rights Commissions very often, if only because most of the Canadian blogosphere does it far better than I could. But that shouldn't hide the fact that I'm against quasi-governmental race pimps and professional grievance hucksters quashing free speech as much as I can be against anything.

Under the Human Rights Act that allows for the existence of the commissions, private citizens personally unconnected with any "hate speech" can file a complaint and be awarded damages under Section 13 (1), which makes the exercise an even more twisted joke and perverts the surrounding legislation as a whole.

Several such complaints were filed by one Richard Warman, who has quite a reputation in this country. Until very recently, he didn't lose a single one and when he did it was a national story.

This is Mr. Warman's basic philosophy;

I’ve come to the conclusion that I can be most effective by using what I like to describe as a “maximum Disruption” approach … I’ll look at all the potential targets and file complaints against them starting on a “worst offender” basis, although sometimes if I just find people to be particularly annoying this may move them up the list a bit. The “maximum disruption” part comes in because wherever I think it will be most helpful, or even if I just feel it will be the most fun, I strongly believe in hitting on as many of these fronts as possible either at the same time or one after the other. I say this because it keeps them off-balance and forces them to respond to things that focus their energies on defending themselves.

Oh, and he sues bloggers. A lot.

One of those being sued by Warman is my friend Blazing Cat Fur. Arnie's been an awfully good guy to me over the last two years and if he needs a hand, I intend to give it to him. I would encourage you all to do the same.

You don't have to agree with everything he says, but BCF has done exceptional work exposing the curse of Section 13 (1) and the incredible damage it causes to both free speech and the rule of law in this country. Although the Supreme Court of Canada has recently placed some restrictions on libel and defamation suits, our laws are still far too loose and open to abuse by people with money and enemies.

It's an ugly and expensive process, and Arnie could use your help. If you've got a few bucks lying around and want to do the right thing with it, I'd ask you to consider sending it his way. For details on how, please go here.

Rob Ford Uber Alles ... For the Moment

So, it turns out that when I'm wrong about something, I'm really wrong. My great consolation is that so was everybody else. This is turning out to be an incredibly strange year in electoral politics and it's hard to take anyone's predictions seriously anymore, including mine.

As my out of town and foreign readers might not know, Rob Ford was elected Toronto's 64th mayor on Monday, winning by a huge and unexpected margin of 12 points. Exactly none of the polls were predicting anything like that in the campaign's last week. One poll had him up by 8 late last week, but most people thought it was an outlier. Most polls had it at about a three point race.

As much as I don't like the guy, I have to congratulate him for running the only smart and disciplined campaign out there. When people like me were kicking Team Ford in the balls, they studiously ignored the sniping and stayed on their message, regardless of how ridiculous it was. The spread was so massive that you can't blame it on Joe Pantalone staying in the race. The people of Toronto clearly elected Rob Ford.

Of course, there's always the reason of why we did that. Ford's platform was so short on concrete details and long on wishful thinking and outright lies that it's hard to believe that his ideas were endorsed on Monday night. By early spring, we should start seeing that.

First, the election was an overt repudiation of the status quo. Not only was Ford elected, but nine members of council retired and another six were defeated. Those are unusually high numbers in a city where City Council is as close to a career gig as you're likely to find.

Second, everybody else ran such terrible campaigns. Pantalone was the only one who didn't run as a populist to some degree, and he was campaigning for the deeply unpopular David Miller's third term. George Smitherman took a huge early lead and basically threw it away. The incompetence of the Smitherman campaign is certain to be studied by future generations of political junkies everywhere. Rocco Rossi tried running as "Rob Ford with a human face" and looked truly silly in the process.

I also think Furious George's stellar ass-kicking was, in part, Toronto's distant early warning to Smitherman's former boss, Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. I don't think that McGuinty is in serious trouble next year, but if there are growing holes in his 416 firewall, there are huge reasons for him to worry. It's hard to imagine an amateur like Tim Hudak beating even an unpopular McGuinty, but no one seriously thought Ford would be elected mayor a year ago, either. And I would be willing to wager that most of Ford's campaign team is talking to the Ontario Conservatives about jobs right now.

Of course, the main force behind the victory of Rob Ford is John Tory. Had Tory run, Ford wouldn't have, nor probably would Smitherman. While Tory has a long and storied history of losing to lesser people like David Miller and Dalton McGuinty, it would have been almost mathematically impossible for Rocco Rossi or Joe Pantalone to beat him.

Now Ford gets to govern, which is going to be endlessly entertaining to watch. He never did much of anything during his ten years on Council and almost everyone there hates him.

Given the size of his victory, Ford will have a honeymoon that stretches into the spring, and the fifteen new councilors are a wild card. That means that he'll get the easy stuff done - like car registration tax - done right away. However, things like reforming Council and Ford's fairy tale of a transit plan are going to come up just as his political support evaporates. He doesn't have the broad legislative base that Barack Obama did in Congress to steamroll things through, and a lot of Ford's platform just doesn't make sense.

In the end, Toronto is going to wind up with three and a half years of gridlock, which is probably the best thing that any real conservative can hope for. The tax and spenders won't pass anything substantial, but neither will Ford because his financing schemes are insane Bush Republicanism. Too many of Ford's promises are premised with McGuinty riding in to save the day with provincial money, which ignores the fact that McGuinty has about $25 billion of his own debt to contend with and absolutely no political motive to help Rob Ford look good.

So let's hear it for nothing getting done!


Editor's Note: I meant to write this up sooner, but I had a wisdom tooth yanked out of my noggin early yesterday morning and I've been drugged up to the tits. Thanks for your patience.

It Gets Better, I Suppose

I guess that it's time that I came out of the closet. I'm not gay. But before you pass judgement on me, you should know that I really, really like watching girls kissing one another. There are lots of folks that don't, but I doubt that they even know what their genitals are for. As my adult readers already know, those people are commonly referred to as assholes.

If you're a gay teenager, I have no idea what you're doing reading my blog. Not because you're gay, but because I write about all manner of boring adult shit here. Christ, I don't even read my blog all that often, but that's mostly because I have the misfortune of having written it in the first place.

However, if you have been reading me for any length of time, you'll know that I've been pretty friendly to you on the issues. I've spoken out strongly in favor of gay marriage and opposed the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell.

I didn't take those positions because I'm expecting my own float at next year's Pride parade (although I wouldn't necessarily turn it down), I took them because I couldn't think of a way not to without feeling like an inbred yahoo. Trust me, the jokes against those things are far easier to write than the ones in favor of them, although the idea of writing an "Adam and Steve" punchline might have caused me to kill myself. Those jokes are never funny and haven't been since 1955.

Mostly, I know that we're in desperate and dangerous times and we need all of the help that we can get. If you're talented and smart, we need you around. God knows, the world is lacking in both right now. Who you want to fuck really isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Let's say that you're good with numbers or languages. Well, you might not have noticed it yet, but the economy is fucked and we're at war with people with strange accents. You don't want either of those things to hurt your loved ones, do you?

The President of the United States had a few things to say about your predicament this morning.



I'd be careful listening to him, as I'm sure a lot of Democrats will tell you in a couple of weeks. Besides, if adults have given up on anything that President Obama has to say, I don't expect gay teenagers to be paying rapt attention to him.

But he's sort of right. Kids, as I'm sure you know, are snot-nosed, arrogant little assholes, They'll pick on anything or anyone that they perceive as being weaker than they are. They're sort of like Republicans that way. Or, come to think of it, the Obama administration.

There are now twelve and thirteen year old kids out there right now who are killing themselves over what other little assholes think of them. You don't want to be one of them. You want to be stronger than they are. You want to be tougher. You're going to grow up and show those little pricks what time it is.

Besides, if you're a kid, why go through the agonizing part of being gay and give up the opportunity of experiencing the fun part? From what I've heard, the opportunities are endless! I'm here to tell you that sex is the most fun that you'll ever have. Why would you quit before you get the chance to at least enjoy it properly? If half the shit I've heard about bathhouses is true, I resent being straight!

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that life gets better. It's a huge pain in the ass now, and it's only going to get worse. These are the most challenging times we've faced in a century. Being a fatalist these days only proves that you're smart.

But topping yourself off because some shithead of a kid calls you a fairy isn't a reason to give up. If anything, it proves that you're an even bigger asshole than he is. And you don't want to be a bigger asshole than that guy, do you?

See? The goth chick from NCIS agrees with me and I'd love to do horribly erotic things to her, even though she's far, far older than I thought that she was.



For the rest of us, we should really think about throwing a few bucks to the Trevor Project. No matter what you think of the gay lifestyle, I don't think that anyone wants to hear about children hanging themselves or blowing their heads off. These are, after all , children. Give them someone to talk to.

For Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Eric Mohah, Sladjana Vidovic, Jennifer Eyring and Meredith Rezak - all of whom were under 18 years old, and some as young as 12, and took their own lives - this is for you.

On Rove & Why Everybody's Wrong

Karl Rove is a smart guy who has a gift for pissing everybody off. For a college dropout, he's incredibly knowledgeable about political history (he often rhapsodizes about the presidential election of 1896 and President McKinley's political strategist, Mark Hannah, for example.)

On the other hand, he pretends to be something that he's not, notably a conservative. Rove is a ward-heeler. An awfully bright one, but a ward-heeler nonetheless. His job was to get his guy elected, not to be an ideological mandarin. Of course, Karl would have you believe differently, hence the subtitle of his memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight

To be fair, there much in the book besides its title to arouse furious hatred in almost every living person. He insists on relentlessly lying about history, despite the fact that he's not very good at it. That's what makes the audiobook of Courage and Consequence such a treasure; you can actually hear the man's utter and total lack of shame. It's a stunning, if highly informative look into the inner darkness of the human condition. His book is almost a modern equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

As a fiscal and foreign policy conservative, I was a pretty lonely guy attacking the Bush White House in 2004. There were several instances where I predicted America's current economic situation, based solely on Bush's spending. Remember, Barack Obama hadn't even been elected to the Senate then. My longtime readers will remember those tirades and some of the rather pointed responses I received from Republicans at the time.

Rove was as responsible as anyone when it came to things like Medicare Part D and doubling the budget of the Department of Education. No one was more committed to selling the wrongheaded 2003 tax cut than Karl. But the overwhelming majority of Republicans were waiting in line to kiss his ass as the res of them were fitting him for a cape. I was pretty vocal about these things in '04, and I became much more so in '05 and '06.

That's why I find the Tea Party vitriol toward Rove these days so incredibly hilarious.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, this effort comes as an increasing number of conservatives—from Rush to Palin to scores of activists and high-level veterans of the Reagan Revolution—view Rove as part of the GOP’s unfortunate recent past. Indeed, they are even beginning to conclude that the oft-repeated belief that Rove is the savior of the GOP may be one of the biggest political hoaxes in American political history. At best, the man President Bush called “Turdblossom” has had a decidedly mixed record on the national level—losing the popular vote in 2000; barely beating a liberal aristocrat from Massachusetts in 2004; and, with the aid of Gillespie, presiding over the loss of both houses of Congress in 2006, and the White House in 2008. Rove and his crew, one influential conservative put it later, “left a smoking hole where the Republican Party once stood.”

“We screwed up,” says party Chairman Michael Steele. Conservatives were “bamboozled,” says former Texas GOP Chairman Tom Pauken. “Betrayed” and “hijacked,” says veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie. The administration was a conservative “impostor,” writes commentator Bruce Bartlett. Bush operatives “were afraid of ideas,” Newt Gingrich charges. “Tokyo Rove” was a recent entry on Michelle Malkin’s website.

All of those people are lying, stupid or both. And I'm sure that if you did a Google search on all of them in relation to Rove, you'd be surprised by what they were saying at the time about Bush and Rove. None of them - Gingrich in particular - are conservatives. They're frauds and electioneering assholes. Their disloyalty shocks even me, and I pride myself in knowing exactly how swinish most politicos and bloggers actually are.

Let's look at the facts for a second. The historical metrics of peace and prosperity dictated that Bush should have been destroyed by Al Gore in 2000. Bush won because of Gore's schizophrenic campaign and Bill Clinton's penis. Regardless of the popular vote, it was a remarkable defiance of history. Karl Rove had a lot to do with that.

That John Kerry was the worst candidate on earth is immaterial. By the summer of 2004, it was evident to anyone who was paying attention what a disaster the Bush presidency was turning out to be. 9/11 hadn't been avenged, Iraq had already gone south, and the administration was throwing away money like it was on fucking fire. From a historical perspective, Bush should have had his ass kicked by pretty much anyone. The fact that he only barely beat "a liberal aristocrat from Massachusetts" doesn't change the fact that he did beat him and it doesn't erase the memory of pituitary retards like Michael Steele, Richard Viguerie, Newt Gingrich and Michele Malkin celebrating the fact that he did.

Matt Latimer, a Bush-in-exile flack and a Daily Beast columnist goes even further into depraved dishonesty.

As an adviser and gadfly, Rove served a useful purpose. That changed after he was named deputy chief of staff in early 2005 and tried to assume absolute control of, well, practically everything. Once his portfolio was extended from political strategy to policy oversight to personnel, hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the administration in some way reported to him. The results were notorious: the botched Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court (when even conservatives abandoned the administration); the abrupt abandonment of Social Security reform (which was supposed to have been the centerpiece of Bush’s second term), and the failure to get a single major piece of conservative legislation through the Republican-led Congress.

It should be remembered that Latimer began his tenure in the administration by writing some of some of the silliest things that Donald Rumsfeld ever said about Iraq and left the Pentagon only after Rummy was thrown out on his ass.

More importantly, he ignores the slightly important fact that most disastrous decisions of the Bush administration were made in the first term, not the second. It was the combination of the tax cuts, the wars and the frivolous social spending that doomed Bush. Did Rove have a lot to do with all three? Yes, but they are all what got the President reelected when he shouldn't have been. Mr. Latimer makes it sound as though Bush turned over the keys to his deputy chief of staff in the second term, which is scary in and of itself and says much more about Bush than it does Rove.

No, what the the Tea Party "conservatives" have taken exception to is the fact that Rove is a political professional in an age where political professionals aren't all that popular.

This is about Christine O'Donnell, who the Tea Party loves in spite of the fact that she's truly crazy and more than a little stupid - or worse, because she's those things. Moronic bloggers like Malkin and Dan Riehl can be expected to fall head over heels in love with a cute girls with mental problems, but professionals who want to form a governing majority can't.

Rove was right when he said that the Tea Party threw away a perfectly good GOP Senate majority when it elected O'Donnell. All you need to do is look at the math, which neither Republicans or Tea Partiers are very good at.

If nothing else, at least Karl Rove was honest enough to make his criticisms of people like O'Donnell in real time, which his current critics weren't. No one that Latimer quotes in his repugnant little article -including Latimer himself - did that when Rove was running the show. They were the first ones on the Rove gravy train and the last ones off.

Six years ago, I thought it was almost impossible for humanity to produce a more tawdry, dishonest hack than Karl Rove. But the Tea Party continues to prove me wrong.

The real tragedy is that I know something that I think Rove does, too: When the Tea Party inevitably disintegrates, Karl Rove is going to be the only person left standing to pick up the pieces. And that, more than anything, is why Republicanism is fucking doomed.

Welcome The Volunteer

If you're like me, whenever you find a smart, well-written blog with an independent point of view, you want to hold it close and never let go. As you might have noticed, they're fewer and further between than ever before.

That's why I encourage you all to go take a look at The Volunteer. You'll love it so much that you'll bookmark it and check on it several times a day. I only found out about it from the great Dr. Dawg last weekend, and it's already one of my favorites. The writers there are everything I want to be when I grow up.

And I'm honoured that they've already put me on their blogroll. I'll add them just as soon as I figure out how I damaged my template so badly.

Do yourselves a favour and head on over. You'll be glad you did. They're way smarter than I am and I'm in a period where I'm sickened by my own blog and hate everything that I write.


Update: The problem with my template is that I can't add new links. Thankfully, there were a few dead ones there, so The Volunteer and Dawg have both been added.

A Question of Seriousness

Just for giggles, compare this with this. Then we can discuss who the real fiscal conservatives are.

Republicans and Canadian Conservatives have been making all the right noises about fiscal conservatism for decades now. The only problem is that it has been just that, noise. The governments of George W. Bush and Stephen Harper both spent far more than their Democratic and Liberal predecessors and had less to show for it. That's not an opinion, it's fact, available for anyone who bothers to care about such things.

Even the previously helpless Liberals under Michael Ignatieff are making proposals to tame Canada's bewildering deficits that are far and away more serious than anything that has come from the Harper government. In just four short years, the Tories magically took the $13 billion surplus that they inherited from Paul Martin and turned it into a $55.6 billion deficit, the largest in Canadian history. Moreover, no one with any sense of how mathematics works is taking Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's deficit reduction strategy seriously, which is good because the plan is fundamentally silly.

The Republican-Tea Party is almost certain to win the House of Representatives in two weeks and make huge gains in the United States Senate, and their going to do it with nothing more than a cartoonish version of "conservative" policy proposals.

If there is a single message unifying Republican candidates this year, it is a call to grab hold of the federal checkbook, slam it closed and begin to slash spending. To bolster their case that action is needed, Republicans are citing major legislation over the four years that Democrats have controlled Congress, notably the financial system bailout, the economic stimulus and the new health care law.

But while polls show that the Republicans’ message is succeeding politically, Republican candidates and party leaders are offering few specifics about how they would tackle the nation’s $13.7 trillion debt, and budget analysts said the party was glossing over the difficulty of carrying out its ideas, especially when sharp spending cuts could impede an already weak economic recovery.

“On the actual campaign trail, you are hearing virtually none of the kind of blatant honesty that we need about what changes would fix this situation,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group in Washington that promotes fiscal restraint.

The parties share blame for the current fiscal situation, but federal budget statistics show that Republican policies over the last decade, and the cost of the two wars, added far more to the deficit than initiatives approved by the Democratic Congress since 2006, giving voters reason to be skeptical of campaign promises.

Not being specific is just smart politics because the GOP is lying in almost breathtaking ways. Because its constituency of old white folks feels even more entitled than the average American, the Teapubilcans have specifically exempted entitlement spending from any cuts. Representative Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" is serious - if politically unrealistic - about entitlements, hasn't been heard from in months. And because launching poorly planned and dreadfully executed wars is a central tenant of modern republicanism, serious cuts at the Pentagon are nothing more than a pipe dream.

The cuts that the GOP and Tea Party candidates are proposing - what they're actually saying, as opposed to what their mindless acolytes think that they're saying - aren't even enough to cover the $3.7 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for another decade, let alone reduce the deficit.

And no, the tax cuts aren't going to expand the economy enough to pay for the tax cuts. How do I know that? The fact that they didn't in their first ten years is a pretty good indication of what the second ten years will bring. Even if there was that much economic growth, it would be swallowed alive by steadily increasing federal deficits. The only real non-political competition between Democrats and Republicans seems to be which can bankrupt the country the fastest.

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana is the only elected official in America who has made serious proposals in deficit reduction and all that he's gotten for his trouble is scumbags like Grover Norquist comparing him to Nazi reenactors.

In my opinion, Norquist is easily the most dangerous man in America and the most destructive force in the Republican party. Before Norquist's unholy rise, the GOP was a somewhat principled party of fiscal conservatism. In the last 35 years, Norquist and his demented Americans for Tax Reform has made them addicted to deficits because that the only thing that continuous pressures for tax cuts has been known to produce. Grover Norquist is about as credible on the subject of macro economics as Hugo Chavez, if not less so.

If the Republican party was halfway serious about anything, they would throw Norquist and his twisted ideology off of the highest bridge they can find. Americans for Tax Reform would be as thoroughly repudiated as the John Birch Society was half a century ago.

Which brings me back to what's happening in London. The budget cuts and tax increases introduced yesterday by the Cameron government are truly staggering in their boldness. They could very well prove to be politically suicidal and they're going to hurt the British economy badly in the short term. But they are necessary.

Yet from the minute his coalition government was sworn in, the American commentariat and its amen choir in the moron blogosphere have lampooned it as whatever the British version of a RINO would be. They don't have any alternative to offer except the repeatedly discredited offerings of supply-side tax cuts and wishful thinking on future economic growth, but that never stopped most of those assholes from criticizing real conservatives before and I doubt that it ever will.

I invite everyone to look at what Cameron did yesterday and compare it to what the Teapublicans and their reality-challenged bloggers are planning. Then ask yourself who is looking more realistically at the long-term survival and prosperity of the economy. Who is doing more to actually reduce the size of government and the welfare state and who is just mouthing platitudes?

Who's doing something and who's just making noise?

The Lonesome Death of Bob Guccione

There are two interesting stories behind the magazine pictured to the left. The first involves Vanessa Williams.

Williams is now an internationally famous singer, actress and acne medicine pitch woman. But in 1984, she was the first black Miss America. Because of Penthouse magazine, she would also be the first Miss America to be forced to resign the title.

In 1982 Miss Williams had participated in a nude, lesbian themed photo shoot that she had apparently thought would never see the light of day. She was wrong. After Playboy refused to publish the photos because Williams had never signed a release and the magazines disinclination to disgrace the first black Miss America, Bob Guccione of Penthouse bought and published them in the September 1984 issue. Ultimately, the Vanessa Williams issue became the biggest selling in the magazine's history, grossing $14 million.

The second story about the September 1984 issue of Penthouse involves why it's illegal for you to own it: a small matter involving child pornography.

That issue's Pet of the Month was porno star Traci Lords, who happened to be only 15 years old at the time of the shoot. However, her true age would not be revealed for nearly two years afterward, causing a scandal that very nearly brought down the multi-billion American pornography industry.

Since the magazine was in my house, that was my one and only experience with child pornography, although I didn't know it at the time and six million other people were also so ensnared. Besides, I was only fourteen myself at the time. But I would strongly caution you against trying to get a copy of the September '84 issue of Penthouse today.

My father loved Penthouse, and through him, I learned to love it, too. It was mandatory bathroom reading in my home and it provided the seeds of the compulsive, frenzied onanism that I'm internationally famous for today. My first experience in wallpapering was covering the walls of my bedroom with Penthouse centerfolds when I was about fifteen. In many ways, Bob Guccione shaped the man I am today.

Started with a $1,700 loan in England, Penthouse largely accomplished its goal of being bolder than its main competitor, Playboy, both sexually and editorially. It was the first major mainstream publication to show "pink" and later, graphic intercourse, in its pages. It was also far more politically in-your-face at a time when Hugh Hefner's empire was comfortably becoming part of the establishment.

While Playboy was interviewing and endorsing presidential candidates, Penthouse was running explicit photos of two presidential paramours, Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, both of whom looked far better naked than you would think. Penthouse was also more strident in its battles against both censorship and the federal government, particularly during the Reagan era and its most threatening by-product, the twisted, evil and factually incorrect Messe Commission Report on Pornography.

In the end, Bob Guccione lost everything, including his company. Time and technology had passed him by, and the velocity of his fall was compounded by bad and very often insane business decisions.

The last twenty years weren't kind to Guccione, who died yesterday at 79. The Internet was already destroying print pornography, just as it's annihilating home video sales today. Unfortunately, Penthouse tried to compete with online porn's ever more graphic content and, by the mid-1990s, entered its horrible and wrong "pee period," which is when the magazine lost its charm for all but the most thoroughly dedicated perverts.

In 2002, General Media, Penthouse's parent company, went into bankruptcy and in 2004, the magazine itself was sold to a Florida hedge fund. Guccione's own personal financial situation forced him to sell his Manhattan mansion, the largest private residence in the city, and his $59 million collection of fine art. His final years were spent battling both creditors and lung cancer.

But Guccione was a cultural pioneer, but in public sexuality and publishing generally. He was an important crusader in the battle for free speech and should be remembered that way. His stellar rise preceded an equally cataclysmic fall and he died a lonely death in Plano, Texas yesterday.

Could Sarah Palin Be Right?

I haven't said this in a while and I'm afraid that some of you might have forgotten it: Sarah Palin is an idiot. Yes, she's savvy, but that's an entirely different animal than smart. If you ask her a question that requires either knowledge or thought, she responds with a wink and an incomprehensible platitude.

Nor is she conservative. As a matter of fact, I defy any of you to list five conservative things that she's ever said or done. Instituting a windfall profits tax on the oil companies and distributing the proceeds to every man, woman and child in Alaska at $1,300 increments, while Alaska continues to receive nearly five dollars from Washington for every dollar it sends there is a lot of things, but conservative isn't one of them.

A couple of weeks ago, two of Palin's moron proteges, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell, caused quite a shitstorm when they refused to answer whether she's qualified to be president or not.

Miller later said that the former governor is constitutionally qualified, but that isn't saying a whole lot. All that means is that she's a born citizen that has attained the age of thirty-five and has been a resident of the United States for fourteen years. That would make well over half of all Americans qualified for the presidency. The only people in that demographic specifically disqualified are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and they wouldn't have been prior to February 27, 1951. Of Course Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, but by that metric, so is Charles Manson.

Governor Palin is a plausible candidate in most people's minds for exactly two reasons: She's good on television and a lot of people want to fuck her. And after the Clinton, second Bush and Obama presidencies, I can't say that that's necessarily unfair or unusual. Americans don't elect statesmen or heads of state anymore, they elect game show hosts - and that's only when they're lucky.

That said, Palin made what might be her first good point in 26 months yesterday and Steve Schmidt didn't even write it down for her.

"We know that the impact is going to be even greater, come November 3, because people then will be focused on the 2012 election, and the need then for an even more aggressive movement to stop what President Obama is doing to this country."

(...)

"Some in the GOP -- it's their last shot. It's their last chance. We will lose faith, and we will be disappointed and disenchanted from them if they start straying from the bedrock principles.... if they start straying, then why not a 3rd party?"

That sort of undercuts the premise that Palin will be running for the Republican nomination any time soon, unless she's planning on a blackmail strategy in the primaries. But I think that she's fundamentally right, while still managing to be wrong, which is impressive when you think about it.

There is going to be a third party or an independent president soon. Maybe as soon as 2016. But it ain't going to be a Tea Party president.

As I've said before, wave elections and populism are temporary things and neither has a history of long-term consequences. The last time it did was in 1932 and that only lasted for 20 years, with the Democrats managing to lose Congress in 1946. Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide and had massive coattails in 1964 and was ruined by '68. The GOP won a huge wave election in 1994 and managed to reelect Bill Clinton just two years later.

Well, the Tea Partiers that have essentially overrun the Republican Party and scare the survivors into submission are well to the "right" of the Class of '94 freshmen and they don't know as much about history or politics. They're also exposing themselves as dangerously dumb social conservatives with economic ideas almost as insane as Obama's. I've already predicted that Obama is going to roll right over them in 2012 and the GOP will tear itself apart in the process.

This has been going on for a long time in the American conservative movement, and I think that the final, fatal fracture in it is upon us.

It began in the 50's, with the growth of McCarthy and the John Birch Society. The only reason that they didn't overwhelm the party outright was because the nationally revered figure of Dwight Eisenhower stopped them. He was the face of the Republican party to most Americans. Ike also outmaneuvered the Birchers legislatively, by having the Democrats pass most of his agenda. That isn't possible now because of the death of congressional bipartisanship.

After Eisenhower's retirement and the defeat of Nixon to Kennedy, the right of the party took control of the party and nominated Barry Goldwater, who was destroyed by Johnson in 1964. That defeat marked the rise of the Reagan wing of the party, which was held back for far longer than than anyone currently wants to admit.

Reagan, however, was a professional politician and understood that party unity was an important and necessary exercise. First he invited his mortal enemy, Former President Ford, to run with him in 1980 and when that failed, he nominated George H.W Bush. During his presidency, Reagan made all the right rhetorical noises to his base, but he did very little for them in concrete terms. In fact, he repeatedly raised taxes and signed arms reduction treaties with the hated Soviets.

When Reagan left office, the "right" turned on the senior Bush and, with an assist from Ross Perot, elected Bill Clinton. They then moved further and further to the right until they stopped being conservative at all. Supply-side economics (which was first attempted by the Kennedy administration) and religious right ideology are not historically conservative ideas, but they came to define the GOP by the time George W. Bush was elected and continue to to this day. They are revolutionary ideas, and a "conservative revolution" is an oxymoron and always has been.

It's surprising just how little of Bush 43's platform the Tea movement has actually repudiated. They were against the bailouts, but have no realistic idea what they would have done if they were in office. They still encourage foreign adventurism and in some cases think that Bush didn't go far enough. And their stated positions on spending cuts and the economy (as opposed to the wishful thinking of their supporters) won't even pay for the extension of any of the Bush tax cuts, let alone reduce the deficit or the size of government.

Let's assume that they win control of the House in a few weeks. If they're serious (which I don't think that they are) and don't get played by the Republican leadership (which I think that they will), they'll either grow the deficit or shut down the government. However, that won't be enough to destroy them before the 2012 primaries, where they'll line up behind a candidate so unacceptable to traditional conservatives that it will split the party and reelect Obama, such as happened in '64.

The only problem then is that there isn't a figure like Eisenhower or Reagan out there to pick up the pieces and reunify the traditionalists with the revolutionaries. In this, Sarah Palin's right: There will be a third party, it just won't be her or the Tea movement heading it.

During his second term, President Nixon spoke frequently to his staff about starting his own third party that consisted of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans and had John Connally as its 1976 nominee. There are several reasons that wasn't practical then, Watergate foremost among them, but that isn't true now.

The primary system in both parties has essentially wiped out moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, leaving the fringes on both sides pretending to be mainstream. Voters really haven't felt that they've had any place else to go, mostly because they haven't. Some of the more conservative Democrats became Republicans after 1980 and 1994, but many of them either lost in Republican primaries or retired.

Other than Perot in 1992, there hasn't been a serious challenge to what the parties have become, but that could change quickly. Both the Bush administration and the Tea Party movement have increasingly alienated traditional foreign policy and fiscal conservatives, who are still a large part of the Republican coalition. Conservative Democrats are furious at the direction of the Obama administration, which isn't likely to change much after November but will only improve its communications strategy and have the Teapublicans to run against.

After 2012, when it becomes clear that neither can govern effectively, both will almost certainly be looking for an alternative. And that's where you'll see an independent rise and very possibly win. It could either be a self-financing candidate like Michael Bloomberg or a revered military figure like David Petreaus, but the opening will be there and the Citizens United decision that Republicans now think is a godsend for them provides endless financing opportunities.

As Perot demonstrated 18 years ago, ballot access isn't an issue when you have money and real grassroots support. When you have the right candidate, a party can easily be built around him or her, which is sort of how the Republican Party came to power in the first place.

Before you ask, the right candidate could also split the Republican Party and still win. Harry Truman did something very similar within the Democratic party in 1948, when his foreign policy and commitment to desegregation created the candidacies of Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. The Democrats were split three ways, and Truman still beat the Dewey Republicans handily, defying all kinds of conventional wisdom.

In my opinion, the circumstances for that happening with a traditional conservative candidate are coming into focus as I write this. I'll grant you that there are number of variables involved for it to happen, but there's a better chance of it now than there ever has been.

If I were Sarah Palin, I'd be careful what I wish for.

When Amateurs Run

One of the prevailing myths that Republicans have built up around Ronald Reagan was that he was some kind of citizen-politician that just appeared from the mists to save freedom in 1980. The post-1994 "Reagan Restoration Project" has been particularly effective in this regard, but it doesn't change the fact that that myth, like so many others, is a lie.

Reagan was involved in politics for years. He was president of the highly political Screen Actors Guild during the McCarthy era. He was one of the leading campaigners for the Goldwater-Miller ticket in 1964. He was a two-term governor of California. He wrote political commentary for several years in the 1970s. He ran for the Republican nomination three times (1968, '76 and '80) before becoming president.

Foremost among those who have bought into the Reagan Restoration Project are the Tea Party movement. Not being particularly schooled in history, they believe that if they can come out of nowhere to be elected to high office, so can they. Of course, that overlooks the fact that Reagan wasn't a simpleton and many of the Tea Party candidates are.

Take the case of Joe Miller, for example. He took time off from his regular employment on the Brawny paper towel packaging to run for Alaska's U.S Senate seat. He impressively defeated the heavily favored incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, in the Republican primary and is now learning that general elections are very different from primaries.

Winning a primary isn't all that difficult, particularly in an anti-incumbent year. Increasingly, primaries are dominated by the crazy and/or stupid, and primary voters aren't famous for caring all that much what the general electorate thinks. The current primary system is, in my opinion, going to be the main breeding ground for a successful third party or independent campaign for that very reason, but that's another story for another day.

Joe Miller's problem, which we're seeing in races throughout America, is that when crazy and stupid people are nominated, they tend to say crazy and stupid things.

Alaska GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller thinks the United States should use the former Soviet-controlled East Germany as an example in border security.

“East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow,” Miller said at a town hall event Sunday, as recorded by an Anchorage-based blogger.

“Now, obviously, other things there were involved,” Miller added. “We have the capacity, as a great nation, obviously, to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could.”

Miller did not note that the purpose of the Berlin Wall and East German security was to keep large numbers of people from emigrating to the West.

Firstly, the only thing funnier than Alaskans talking about fiscal austerity is Alaskans talking about border security. Are they really concerned about Canadian Eskimos coming in and taking jobs from American Eskimos? Has that been a major problem that I've been blissfully unaware of?

Second, East Germany? Is Miller actually serious? Who in the name of God actually says something like that?

One thing that the Tea movement may have missed when they skipped history class is that bringing down the Berlin Wall was one of the central symbolic goals of the Cold War and something that Republicans brag about to this day, although the policies that accomplished it actually originated with Harry Truman.

As Mr. Miller has noted, the wall was erected to keep East Germans in, rather than West Germans out. That's sort of key. As a matter of fact, 136 people were confirmed to have been killed by the East German border guards trying to escape in the Wall's 28 year history. No one knows how many were wounded and imprisoned. The "Death Strip" that laid between the actual Wall and the fence that sat 100 meters behind it were fortified by barbed wire, sniper towers and landmines.

Yet Joe is running on a platform of all the neat things that the United States can learn from the former East Germany. No wonder he's tied with Murkowski, who's not even on the friggin' ballot.

This, friends, is why serious political movements avoid nominating amateurs.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Let's Get Physical

Get your workout gear on, ladies. Science is talking to you. Are you listening?

"You Know What Would be a Great Idea? Printing Money."

I wasn't one of those folks that flipped the fuck out over the 2008 bank bailouts for the simple reason that no one has ever properly explained to me how you maintain a modern society without a financial system. By September of '08, the banks' indebtedness to one another was so interconnected through AIG, and the lack of liquidity so all-encompassing that you wouldn't have had one or two of the big banks go down (as most Republicans now say that they would have preferred), they all would have collapsed and they would have done so rapidly.

That's the legacy of the deregulation of the late '90s that repealed Glass-Stegall, left derivatives unregulated and led to the securitization of everything. When you create an atmosphere where people can do whatever they want - regardless of how reckless or stupid it may be - they usually will, especially if there's short-term profit involved.

It is my considered opinion that, given the situation that they faced, combined with the fact that they acted counter to their ideological instincts, that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will be remembered by history as Legends of the Fall. President Bush's acceptance of the resulting political damage may be the smartest and bravest thing thing he did in his eight years in office.

Here in Canada, people like me went insane when the Chretien government denied our banks the permission to merge because we thought it would hamper international competition. Well, it turns out that people like me were wrong. Because Canada maintained traditional banking regulation, our institutions stayed healthy as those in the United States and Western Europe veered dangerously close to insolvency.

Consequently, the Canadian econmy is in much better shape than most. There's an informative article about that in last month's issue of Esquire. Our economy is projected to grow at 3% next year, compared to America's 2.3% and Europe's 1.8%. Our dollar is currently at parity with its American counterpart and I expect it surpass it significantly in the coming months, although I'm hardly an expert on these things.

Over the last several months, I've become an admirer of the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson whose book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, I heartily recommend to everyone. Mr. Samuelson's latest column, dated Monday October 11, deals with the coming austerity that most Western countries are going face.
While Samuelson doesn't come right and say that debt reduction should take priority over economic recovery, he implies it to the point that he doesn't really need to.

Clearly, most European nations waited too long to overhaul their welfare states. (The same is true of the United States.) The added costs of the global recession have now forced them to do the politically unthinkable: chop social spending and raise taxes in trying economic times. They have little choice, but it may be a mission impossible.

On the one hand, huge deficits and debts -- the sum of past deficits -- mean some countries can no longer borrow at reasonable interest rates. Last week, rates were about 10 percent on Greek 10-year government bonds and more than 6 percent on Irish and Portuguese bonds. Even these rates would be higher if these countries hadn't acted to cut long-term budget deficits. By contrast, rates are about 2.3 percent on 10-year German government bonds and 2.4 percent on 10-year U.S. Treasuries.

On the other hand, abrupt tax increases and spending cuts threaten deeper recessions. In Greece, the value-added tax (a national sales tax) was increased four percentage points; the normal retirement age is also being raised. Portugal approved a VAT increase of two percentage points. In Ireland, government workers' salaries were cut an average of 7 percent. In Spain, grants for new children are being abolished. Unemployment rates are already about 11 percent in Portugal, 12 percent in Greece and 14 percent in Ireland.

To some economists, this is folly. Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute foresees a futile downward economic spiral. As recessions worsen, losses in tax revenue and higher jobless spending will offset some projected improvements to budget deficits. So, more tax increases and spending cuts will be needed.

That's a helluva bad choice, but the more adult countries of the world have already made their decision. The English government of David Cameron will soon be presenting an austerity budget far more radical than anything ever envisioned by Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. Most government departments, including national defense, are facing cuts of between 20-30% and taxes are going to rise in painful ways. Cameron is also expected to propose a major decentralization of authority from London to the lower levels of government.

The British plan, if enacted by Parliament, is going to be nothing less than brutal on the English economy in the short term. But so will continued stimulus spending, or merely maintaining the status quo, which will widen already terrifying deficits and nudge London ever closer to the Greek dilemma. However, it is the only rational way to ensure Great Britain's long-term survival as a major economy. Chemotherapy and radiation are almost as bad as cancer, but there are no other realistic ways to treat an aggressively malignant cancer, which the debt crisis is fast becoming.

Granted, Cameron's Conservatives have the cover of their coalition partners, the leftist Liberal Democrats, that will make austerity a far more politically acceptable choice. That consensus doesn't exist in Washington, where the Tea Party Republicans and the Obama administration both want to destroy the U.S economy, only in different ways. Neither is facing reality or even making the feeblest attempts at seriousness. The Tea Party Republicans are pretending this is 1980 and the Democrats are pretending it's 1993.

And the Federal Reserve under Bernanke is about to make things indescribably worse.

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, appeared to remove any lingering doubt Friday that the central bank would take new actions to fortify the torpid recovery and fight low inflation and high unemployment.

The impact of the Fed’s most likely action – resuming vast purchases of government debt to lower long-term interest rates – would ripple far beyond American shores. The new actions could contribute to the weakening of the dollar and complicate a festering currency dispute that threatens to disrupt global trade relations.

For most Americans, additional Fed action will likely mean that already low 30-year mortgage rates will fall even further. The action will not help savers, as yields on certificates of deposit and savings bonds will probably fall. But the Fed hopes that by making credit even cheaper it will encourage businesses and consumers to borrow and spend, a move that could eventually bring relief to jobless workers.

The Fed's "purchasing government debt" is a cute way of saying that it's going to start printing money. That's incredibly inflationary and, once inflation starts, it's extremely hard to contain, as anyone who lived through the 1970s can tell you. Inflation, while it reduces the real cost of the debt by devaluing the dollar, also discourages saving, which precipitates further inflation, to say nothing of the personal debt brought on by unrealistic standards of living. As inflation accelerates, it also drives everyone into higher tax brackets without bringing the government increased revenue in real terms.

And none of that factors in the inflationary pressures that the tax cuts a Republican House majority are almost certain to demand to avoid a government shutdown. President Obama is going to want to spend on further stimulus, the GOP is going to demand spending on tax cuts and Bernanke is going start printing money.

While all of this happens, no one in the government is thinking of cutting spending in any real way. Remember, the current Republican pledge only brings spending down to 2008 levels, which still had large deficits, and they don't even explain how they intend to accomplish that because they're almost certainly lying. If the GOP can't maintain a consistent line in something as insignificant as earmarks, they can't be believed about anything.

Worse, if the inflation fails to spur the economy enough, you wind up with the stagflation of the Carter years combined with the massive deficits of the Reagan, Bush 43 and Obama administrations. As President Reagan's first term teaches us, the only way to stop stagflation is by intentionally inflicting an even worse recession than the one the United States is in now.

No one is laying the political groundwork for any of this by explaining to the voters what the consequences of either massive government debt or runaway inflation are. And they certainly aren't explaining the virtues or dangers of austerity budgeting because both parties and the Tea movement are burying their heads in the sand as deeply as they possibly can.

I'm not sure that the American political system can withstand that. If you think that the rioting in Greece is bad, consider that Greeks don't have very many guns and Americans do. A fiscal and economic Katrina might be visiting the most heavily armed country in the industrialized world.

Folks, we just might be witness the beginning of the self-destruction of the American economy.

The Punches That Were Never Thrown

I wasn't planning on writing a sniping post-mortem of Rocco Rossi's mayoral campaign, despite the invitation of some people to do so. I don't personally dislike him and I thought very seriously about voting for him before he decided to run a full-bore populist campaign.

If there's one thing I truly despise in politics, it's populism. Every populist campaign in North American history has been built on one of two premises: either that the candidate is stupid, or he thinks that the voters are. Furthermore, populism is premised on the lie that life is full of simple solutions, which it isn't when all the money is gone.

I inherently distrust anyone who refuses to address the complexity of the problems that we face, which is why I would never support Rob Ford or the American Tea Party movement. It's also why I was so tough on Mr. Rossi, who is smart enough to know better. Turning Toronto into California will only give Toronto California's problems on top of the ones that we already have.

While I wanted to leave the Rossi for Mayor campaign the dignity of dying in peace, there's a fascinating article in this morning's Toronto Sun that changed my mind.

Rocco Rossi was about to throw some punches.

Had he not pulled the plug on his campaign Wednesday, Rossi was just days away from launching an aggressive TV advertising blitz that would have attacked both frontrunners for their personal and professional missteps and highlighted six of his policy planks.

Rough cuts of the ads obtained by the Toronto Sun show Rossi was going to stick to his policies and in at least one ad, cast himself as the candidate without George Smitherman’s $1 billion eHealth scandal baggage or Rob Ford’s drunken incident at the ACC and his Florida arrest and guilty plea to a DUI.

In the scathing anecdote ad, Rossi — front and centre in all the ads and surrounded by a stark, white background — recounts a tongue-in-cheek conversation he had with his mother where she apologized to him for raising him a certain way.

“We told you not to get drunk in public and get kicked out of the ACC,” Rossi says, recalling his mother’s words while a photo of Ford comes on the screen along with a quote about his infamous hockey night. “We told you not to get arrested and then lie about it.”

“And I think we probably told you not be involved in a billion-dollar scandal,” Rossi continues as a photo of Smitherman comes on the screen.

“It seems that those are the things you need to do to be a frontrunner in this campaign,” Rossi says.

He ends the ad by saying, “On Oct. 25, vote for someone you can really believe in.”

That ad would have been nothing less than suicidal and it probably would have destroyed any prospect of a future career in politics that Rocco had. The only thing that he had going for him toward the end was his reputation a good man, more concerned with policy than personalities.

An unprovoked negative barrage would have annihilated that forever. It also would have reeked of desperation, coming as it would have from a candidate that was being studiously ignored by the two frontrunners. If Team Rossi's silly and offensive "Goomba" series of adds didn't drive Rocco's numbers to below zero, going negative surely would have.

Worse than being ridiculous and pathetic, it would have been utterly ineffective. Pretty much everyone in the city already knows about George Smitherman's e-Health boondoggle and Rob Ford's propensity to humiliate himself and everyone around him at the drop of a hat. That's why a quarter of the vote in every single poll out there remains undecided with just ten days to go.

Would it have gotten Mr. Rossi all kinds of attention? Yes. Would have gotten him any votes? No. Desperation never does. If he was responding to an attack on him, going negative might have helped, although not enough to win, but throwing the first punch never swings undecideds to you. It might suppress the other guy's turnout, but that doesn't do you a lot of good when you're only at four percent. At four percent, it doesn't even fire up your base because you don't have a base.

Moreover, it would have ruined Rocco's "nice guy" image and crippled him in any future run for office. The only thing worse than winning ugly in politics is losing ugly and having that reputation is another hurdle Rossi would have to overcome.

The interesting question is who released the ads to the Sun and why? They had to have come from within the Rossi campaign, unless there's a production company out there that really wants to get sued out of existence. If I were to guess, I would say that it has a lot to do with several former staffers auditioning for jobs with the Ford campaign.

It's too bad that they couldn't have done that without tarnishing their former boss.