A drinking life:The ballad of Bob Ryan and Rob Ford

I drink my share. As a matter of fact, I drink your share, too. It used to be that folks with my hobbies would be forcefully precluded from public office, lest I become something of a national embarrassment.

Well, no longer, good people. The times, they done changed, just like Bob Dylan warned us they would, lo those many years ago. These days, I'd be barred from office for the simple reason that my copious drinking and fucking hasn't resulted in a lengthy arrest record. Damn my ability to handle my high. It keeps holding me back.

Meet Sheboygan, Wisconsin mayor Bob Ryan. Mayor Ryan clearly knows how to have a good time.

Mayor Bob Ryan has big plans for this little city. He wants to dredge the Sheboygan River to lure bigger recreational boats, build a green corporate park and bring high-end housing to the sleepy downtown.

But before he gets to any of that he has to deal with a problem. Mr. Ryan is an alcoholic, and since taking office two years ago, he has fallen off the wagon four times. His sobriety slip-ups, including a bar fight, have been documented in a police report and a YouTube video, making this small-city mayor the butt of late-night television jokes and international news coverage.

(...)

In his office lined with photos of his favorite Green Bay Packers, the 48-year-old said he has been a binge drinker since he was 12. At 42, he concluded he was an alcoholic and entered a 12-step recovery program.

He sold his oil distribution business a couple of years after he ran successfully for city council in 2006 and, even though he was in a lot of bars while he campaigned, he said the discipline and focus of the election was good for his sobriety. But after the race "it was all kind of stored up," he said.

One night, after becoming mayor in April 2009, he went drinking with the city's human resources director, who later alleged he made a pass at her. After he fired her a few months later, she sued and eventually won a settlement from the city's insurance company for $310,000. The mayor admitted no wrongdoing.

That was followed by an off-color declaration about his sister-in-law at Brennan's in July of 2009 that was filmed and posted on YouTube. The incident was incorporated into one of Jay Leno's monologues. Mr. Ryan apologized and publicly admitted he had a drinking problem. In July 2010, he was seen drinking at a local bar. And then, this past July, he went on a three-day bender culminating in a bar fight. When police arrived, his watch had been stolen and he was sitting quietly on a curb.

"It wasn't good," he said.

Because he likes to have a good time, and because Wisconsin is historically a hotbed of populist nonsense, there is a drive to recall him which seems unlikely to succeed.

As my long-time readers know, I forcefully reject populist horseshit notions like recalls because they serve only to absolve voters of their own bad decisions. The greatness of the American system of seperation of powers is that it allows other branches of government to remove the executive, but only for truly egregious conduct. Recalls mean that elections are never final, the voters never have to really make up their minds, and the much celebrated "permanent campaign" mentality that has destroyed government is cemented.

Moreover, recall serves to absolve legislators of their constitutional, if difficult and often unpopular, responsibility to check the executive. They can hide behind meaningless "will of the people" horseshit rhetoic that the very idea of impeachment was created to circumvent. Indeed, the concept of a republic is built around the fact that governing is hard and the people are not infrequently very stupid. There are no good reasons for recall that impeachment doesn't address.

Populism is fantastic is you're beheading Louis XIV or storming the fucking Winter Palace, neither of which ended particularly well. Otherwise, it's just another example of retarded and irresponsible voters getting played by demagogues and scumbag spin doctors.

But if the dice don't roll Bob Ryan's way in Wisconsin, he can always move to Toronto and run for mayor here. Rob Ford was elected Last October, even though it was widely known that his love of booze has led to him being in handcuffs more often since 1991 than Axl Rose. Having said that, Hizzoner currently cuts a more slender figure than the aforementioned Mr. Rose.

Among Ford's more celebrated sins was driving drunk, as a foreign national, with marijuana on his person in downright medieval jurisdictions, like Florida. He was also ejected from a hockey game for drunkenly attempting to provoke violence.

The mayor's drunken antics are known far and wide, and they didn'y stop him from being elected. Neither, for the record, did his hallucinatory campaign promise to "stop the gravy train" by cutting taxes and fees in a huge way, while maintaining and expanding social services and subway construction, and paying for it by cutting essentially $75,000 in gardening fees at City Hall.

One presumes that he did all of that shit stone-sober, which presumes that the city of Toronto is either drunk, stupid or both. Which we apparently are. Ford won the mayorality with nearly half the vote in field of a half dozen serious candidates. What passes for the conservative movemement these days remains four-square behind Ford because the he embodies everything the modern conservative movement is built upon - drunken bellicosity, stupidity, and a proud ignorance of the laws of mathematics. They see him as a badass in the face of the godless liberal Intelligenstia.

Until, of course, he isn't. When he's confronted as something as awful and menacing as an unfunny 60 year old woman in a Xena suit and a plastic sword, he stopsbeing a badass pretty quickly.

Mayor Rob Ford had a rough start to the week.

He called 911 after being accosted outside his Etobicoke home around 8 a.m. on Monday as he was leaving for a council meeting at City Hall.

The attackers turned out to be from the CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which specializes in catching politicians unaware. By the time police arrived, the TV crew and Ford had gone.

According to a neighbour, a woman brandishing a microphone jumped out of a dark blue Jeep and ran yelling toward Ford’s driveway with a cameraman in tow.

The woman was 22 Minutes alumna Mary Walsh, in character as her alter ego Marg Delahunty and dressed outlandishly as Marg, Warrior Princess, CBC spokesman Chris Ball confirmed.

Ford, who has received death threats in recent months, was furious at the ambush, saying he had no idea who was coming at him.

Look, I don't doubt that Rob has had his share of death threats. But I have my suspicions that none of them involved female seniors with professional camera crews. I'm a cynical prick that way.

But let's look at what the "fair and balanced" media has to say about all of this, shall we?



Hackish 14 year-old Brian Lilley has Sun Media resident dickhead Mark Bonokowski admit that he's ambushed politicians at home .. but never as a prank. Which is apparently important, because your odds of being assissinated by a sixty-year old woman with a Xenu suit, a plastic sword and a camera crew are much greater than being murdered by a middle-aged white guy in black clothes, coke-bottle glasses, a political agenda and a creepy mustache. Look at your fucking history, people!

Again, Lilley and Bonokowski apparently have no issue with the media ambushing folks at home. Bonokowski admits to doing it himself, while simeltaneously condeming it. And neither has mentioned The O'Reilly Factor - which is Sun News' operational model - regularly doing exactly the same thing.

However, I can see how Rob Ford, Brian Lilley and Mark Bonokowski missed the joke, because I did, too. This Hour Has 22 Minutes has never been funny, and the CBC has lacked a sense of humour since the Kids in the Hall went off the air.

Having said that, the incredibly selective "conservative" outrage machine is a fucking scream. Most of these assholes seems to have stopped even knowing when they were lying years ago. They soak their fucking panties over Bill O'Reilly's intern and James O'Keefe, but can't contain their indignance over someone who calls herself "Marg, Warrior Princess" on a show that no one watches.

Look, Mary Walsh - or anyone on her fucking show - wouldn't know a joke if it bent them over and stuffed a vodka bottle in their asses. But in making allegedly conservative dickheads twist themselves into hypocritical pretzels of almost awesome stupidity, they made this sorry spectacle one of the funniest goddamned things I've ever seen.

And it convinces me that we need someone like Bob Ryan as mayor. Our pal Bob would just punch Xenu in the side of the head, admit he was drunk, and not rely on a bunch of journalistic hacks and amatuer crybaby fucking bloggers to clean up his mess.

If nothing else, Bob Ryan carries with him a sense of personal responsibility that Rob Ford, Sun News and 99% of the asshole blogosphere never will. At least he's ashamed of being a lout, and I think we all need more of that.

Video ruthlessly ripped off from Blazing Cat Fur

For the love of Lindsay

I've spent the better part of a decade dreaming about seeing Lindsay Lohan in handcuffs, but never like this. My wish to se her physically restrained involved her humiliation, to be sure, but I always wanted that to be a private matter, just between the two of us. Unless she actually wanted TMZ cameras recording the tawdry spectacle for the world to see, which I also wouldn't object to. Women say that I'm a giving lover for a reason, you know. But it was always a sexual thing with me, as opposed to a pernicious fiat by the judiciary.

I've written endlessly about the state of California's persecution of La Lohan and the wrongness thereof. The courts, lo these many years later, just don't seem to understand that she really is better than the rest of us. This is amazing, in that they've spent as much time looking at her tits as the rest of us have.

I always thought that anyone with jugs as spectacular as Lindsay's has the constitutional right to give the finger to the judicial system.The fact that this apparently isn't taught in America's law schools says, more than anything, that America ignores God's Natural Law. Maybe Fred Phelps was right after all, and Kevin Smith's majestic Red State was more of a documentary than anyone is willing to admit.

For the record, I'm not predisposed to defending drunk driving. I don't drive precisely because I enjoy spending the majority of my life inebriated. I'm a much better person when I'm drunk. I help the homeless, which is the kind of shit that I would never do sober. But drunk driving has the annoying habit of killing people who are just going about their daily business. which makes it indefensible.

That, however, is entirely beside the point. Lindsay hasn't driven drunk in something like two years. That's gotta be worth something, right?

No, she's being continually being fucked over by The Man over probation violations. Which makes sense until you recognize that probation is a stupid fucking concept to begin with.

If you break the law, you should go directly to fucking jail. The problem is that they're are so goddamned many stupid fucking laws against horseshit that taxpayers can't afford the necessary jail space. The concept of probation allows idiots to think that the system is still working, when it does no such thing.

Let's get over the idea that Lohan is being raked over the coals for drunk driving, okay? She isn't. She being raked over the coals for violating her probation, the terms of which were retarded to begin with, and have nothing at all to do with her original crime.

One of the conditions of Lindsay's probation was that she work in an abused women's shelter. Apparently, she found this to be "not fulfilling," which is the source of her current legal dilemma.

This has driven everyone that isn't me all out of sorts, mostly because I've dated women who claim to have been abused and found them to be a huge pain in the ass. Neither was physically abused, but both were so bitchy and crazy that that fact speaks to the restraint of their respective husbands more than anything else.

I've been in Lindsay Lohan's position. And I'd prefer jail , too.

.gif ruthlessly stolen from What Would Tyler Durden Do

Written at the behest of our Maximum Leader.

A conservative quandry

At this point, you needn't be a liberal or a libertarian to recognize that the War on drugs is little more than a failed, extraordinarily expensive exercise in deliberate obliviousness. You just have to be paying attention.

Drugs are even more available and cheaper than they were 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon first launched the retarded endeavor. The more the government spends in suppressing drugs, the richer the traffickers and local dealers become

Moreover, just as was true during Prohibition, the prohibition of drugs have made them a worse public hazard than they were before. Drugs, in and of themselves, kill or seriously harm very few people. The fact that they're completely unregulated, however, has had savage consequences for millions of people. People overdose for the simple reason that they have no idea what the purity of the drug they're consuming is. Instead, they have to rely on criminals to tell them, which is almost never wise.

The foreign policy ramifications of the War on Drugs is easy to see. Countries around the world have been torn to pieces, not because their citizens like doing Tony Montana-sized mountains of blow, but because Americans do. It's almost like the Opium Wars in reverse, except the Opium Wars made economic sense, if only in the most perversely inhuman way. The American drug war is ruining other countries simply because the U.S government has decided to deny the American people what they want. It's almost as if the laws of supply and demand don't exist at all.

The War on Drugs has accomplished nothing other than create a prison industry that is the envy of every country that isn't North Korea or China. That Prime Minister Harper campaigned on bringing those same demonstrably retarded policies to Canada is one of the reasons I voted against the Conservatives this past May.

The cost of the drug war to individual freedom in America has been astronomical. Under asset forfeiture laws - which were designed as a military measure during the Civil War - the government can relieve you of you property, including your house or car, without even charging you with a crime, let alone doing the fairly easy work of obtaining a conviction. Almost all of the most constitutionally egregious anti-terror policies in the last decade have their origins in the drug war in some way. In fact, measures like the USA Patriot Act is almost never used to fight terrorism, but it is used in drug and money laundering cases quite a bit. Square that with what was said during what passed for a debate when it was proposed.

Now the War on Drugs is going to further deny the people their constitutional rights, but this time in ways that should outrage conservatives and Republicans everywhere, although it probably won't.

If my fellow conservatives were even halfway honest federalists, they would repeal federal drug laws that don't involve importation, and leave them to the states. That's what they say they would do with abortion in the event that Roe v Wade was overturned, except that they're lying about that, as evidenced by the continued Republican support for a constitutional amendment barring the procedure.

Republican support for "the will of the people" is undercut by their continued support of the drug war. They love referendums when they deny people the right to marry or make it effectively  impossible for legislatures to impose taxes, but when it comes to drugs, the rhetoric changes dramatically. 17 states - comprising over 25% of the American public - affirmed ballot measures legalizing medical marijuana, effectively decriminalizing the substance.

And Republicans - the very same people who were driven to distraction over Rush Limbaugh's "persecution" for just wanting to be Keith Richards - were indignant. The Bush administration instructed the Drug Enforcement Agency to continue prosecuting federal drug laws in states that had popularly passed medical marijuana laws, and Republicans cheered.

Well, the Obama administration is kicking it up a notch. Enjoy.

Michigan's medical-marijuana users can't catch a break.

Three major state appeals court decisions have gone against them in the last month. Now, federal authorities have issued an order that licensed medical-marijuana users nationwide can't possess a gun.

That means no hunting, no target shooting, no gun collecting and no guns for personal protection -- even by patients who legally cultivate marijuana crops -- according to a Sept. 21 directive to prosecutors nationwide from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The Second Amendment aside, there is a certain logic to this measure. If you consume marijuana - a Schedule One narcotic (which goes a long way in proving that the U.S government doesn't even know what narcotics are) - you're guilty of a federal felony. And felons are subject to a lifetime ban on gun ownership.

I happen to think that this is constitutional nonsense. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a clause that allows for the lifetime surrender of guaranteed rights. Even Antonin Scalia's celebrated opinion in District of Columbia v Heller, which affirmed that gun ownership is a fundamental right of citizenship, cut several giant holes in that right which weren't addressed or anticipated by the Constitution, such as bans on possession by felons, the mentally ill, and near schools and federal buildings. Heller might in fact be the least originalist decision in Supreme Court history precisely because of those unenumerated exceptions.

If you combine Heller exceptions with with the even more dramatically wrong-headed decision in Gonzales v Raich, which extended the interstate commerce clause in ways that can't avoid making ObamaCare constitutional, you have the perfect predicate for potentially denying Second Amendment rights to over a quarter of the American people.

The most odious part of this measure is that it is an ATF directive, which carries absolutely no force of law. The ATF, for the uninitiated, isn't Congress. It is an enforcement agency, not a legislative one. It's a lot like the Environmental Protection Agency, which the GOP has spent the last two years blowing several gaskets over proposed administrative standards that amount to passing Cap and Trade.

Remember, just as the case with asset forfeiture, no conviction or even charging document is necessary. Under DOJ's hyper-stupid letter "Any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes ... is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition." Just possessing a medical marijuana card, which in most cases was ratified in state ballot measures, is enough to deny you your Second Amendment rights under the federal Constitution.

And, as expected, no major Republican or Tea Partier has spoken out against this. Not one. This isn't like President Reagan imposing a national 21 drinking age by threatening to withdraw federal highway funds to non-compliant states. This is the DEA, ATF and DOJ saying "because we says so" to the states. There's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees Federal highway money, after all.

If you sense that I'm a little celebratory about this, I commend you on your powers of perception. As I've alluded to over the years, I've been waiting for this day with bated breath. This is because it forces stupid people into a corner of their own twisted logic and just might bring some honesty into the debate.

Among the questions this issue might force some answers out of are;

• Drugs, which actually existed in 1789 (despite the popular Republican perception that they were invented by the Beatles during a break from recording Revolver ), aren't among the enumerated powers of the federal government. Doesn't that make them a state issue under the Tenth Amendment?
• Do popular referendums in the states always mean something, or just when it fits your ideology?
• Why should the ATF have extra-legislative powers when the EPA shouldn't? Is one more special than than the other? If so, under what legislative or constitutional authority?
• Can enforcement agencies circumvent constitutional amendments even with a vote of Congress, let alone without one?
• If a decision by an enforcement agency can deprive medical marijuana users that haven't been charged or convicted of anything of their gun rights, can the same apply to voting rights? How about First Amendment rights? If not, why not?
• If, in 2014, you refuse to buy medical insurance - which will be mandatory under federal law - can you be stripped of your Second Amendment rights, irrespective of what your governor or state legislature says about the Affordable Care Act?
• If medical marijuana users can be denied gun rights by administrative fiat, why can't they also be denied Medicare and Social Security benefits by Treasury and HHS?
• Why are adjudicated prescription drug "users or addicts", like Rush Limbaugh not subject to lifetime gun bans, particularly when they violate both state and federal laws in obtaining their high? Is a state prescribed card or license really worse than doctor shopping?
• If so, can that be enacted by a letter to state and local prosecutors by a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, absent an act of Congress?

I really look forward to Republican answers to this questions, although I'm not expecting them. At least not sensible ones.

No Mo', No Mo': Notes on monster fightin'

Today is a day for Republicans everywhere to point out that President Reagan spent about six months calling the recently departed Moammar Gadhafi "the mad dog of the Middle East." But at exactly the same time, Reagan was also selling anti-tank missiles to the real mad dogs of Iran's Revolutionary Guard in a ridiculous bid to free American hostages in Beirut. I mention that only to point out that Republicans lie or are wildly ignorant about any number of things.

Gadhafi went out this morning in the most predictable way possible in his neighborhood - he was whacked by his own people. Folks keep telling me that the "Arab Spring" is changing the game, but it's living up to its history in deposing leaders. And you know what? That's the way it should be!

The popular view out there is that Gadhafi was one of history's great monsters, which is all the proof you need that the popular view is made almost entirely of stupid.

Ole Mo' was, for the most part, a ridiculous little man - a caricature of what a great dictator is supposed to be. By his final years, he even started looking ridiculous, so addled by plastic surgery and megalomania that he looked like Muhammad Ali and dressed like Michael Jackson. Yes, he would blow up discos and airliners full of innocent people from time to time, but he was largely a joke. A hilarious joke, to be sure, but a joke, nonetheless. Any guy who surrounds himself with chick bodyguards usually is.

And jokes were a useful resource to American foreign policy during the Reagan years, and even today. Libya was never a major player in international terrorism. But the Soviet Union and Iran were. And you know what they were dished out by the White House? The Soviets got state dinners and treaties, while Tehran got fairly advanced weaponry and a personally autographed bible from the president of the United States. Shit, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were Ronald Reagan's best friends, until they weren't.

Libya, being a piss-ant little country that most Americans can't find on a map and led by a silly cartoon character in grandiose costumes, got bombed. Moammar Gadhafi was demonized because he was easy to demonize. And he was even easier to fucking bomb.

That's still true today, and it says a whole lot about the much ballyhooed War on Terror than pretty much anyone wants to admit. Iran killed more Americans in the 80's than Gadhafi did, but Iran could fight back and had oil, so Libya got the tits blown off of it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provide the lion's share of money, muscle and ideology to the modern jihadi movement, but Afghanistan and Iraq get blown into even bigger shitholes than they already were.

That's not to say that I'm a proponent of attacking Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Those motherfuckers are rich, well-armed, will to fight and generally crazy. An America that's used to fighting idiots like Moammar Gadhaffi and Saddam Hussein isn't anywhere near ready to punch in the weight division of International Terror's real badasses. Iraq and Afghanistan have broken the United States military, maybe past the point of no return, and the shit only got serious in both places after the original villains were tossed out on their asses. Given that very real history, what do you suppose an attack on Pakistan or Iran would bring?

The correct geostrategic answer is that no one wants to find out, other than grotesquely unserious Tea Party fucks and Fox News blowhards.

Lookee, I'm as glad as the next asshole that Gadhaffi's finally croaked. The man was a monster to live under. However, that hasn't historically been the metric under which leaders are deposed with foreign support. You know how I know that? Because Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile and a long, long list of other countries were America's favoured dance parters when they were headed by far more monstrous folks that Boy Mo was on his worst fucking day.Pinochet killed political opponents in downtown D.C, and that didn't stop him from being feted by at least three successive presidents.

The scary thing is that the world's real monsters know that as well as I do. And they also know another important piece of recent history that escapes most Americans. That is that taking out a comic book villian, more often than not, creates a vacuum that real villains quickly fill. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, where demonic communism was banished by psychopathic militant Islam. Even in the best case scenario, you get Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega was eventually replaced with ... Daniel Ortega.

Let's get real for a second, shall we? Without NATO air support, Libya's "freedom fighters" would have accidentally killed more of one another than Gadhafi would've, which is why NATO air support was given in the first fucking place. Sure, President Obama said otherwise, but President Obama was consciously lying. He does that sometimes.

As the great Dan Carlin has often said, "When you depose Mossedegh to bring back the Shah, you get Khomeini." The fact is that we don't know the first goddamned thing about the leaders of "democratic Libya." But that isn't stopping us bringing out our political blowjob machines to welcome them to power. And if they turn out to be monsters, by Christ, they're gonna be our monsters. And I hope we don't forget that after we stop congratualting ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzche didn't live in the Oprah-friendly 12-step world of today. If he did, he famous quote

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." would read more like "Whoever dutifully avoids fighting real monsters should see to it that in the process he does not enable greater monsters where only minor ones exist today." You neer know if the streetcorner corner is shooting up to supress the urge to rape kids. And where I come from, it's the better part of wisdom not to find out.

On Stephen Harper, the Death of the Liberal Party, Richard Nixon and pie!

Historical revisionists on the left have been dodging the truth what precipitated the so-called "coalition crisis" of November 2008 - March 2009 ever since it started. It's pretty funny to see, although it's good to see liberals maintaining their natural level of dishonesty.

They like to tell you that the notion of banding together to oust the recently reelected Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government came from shitheel Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's economic statement that essentially said that everything was fine. Revisionists on the right like to pretend that that didn't happen, either. But it did.

Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th and the End of the World began right in the middle of a Canadian federal election campaign. Flaherty and Harper spent September and October pretending that it wasn't happening and trying to distract everyone from the fact that they had pissed away a $13 billion surplus on socialist electioneering bullshit, like babysitters and hockey sticks. Conservative Party partisans like to pretend that Harper pissed away the surplus on his subseequent economic stimulus, but they lie about a lot of things, such as not being Keynesians in the first fucking place.

Flaherty did in fact deliver an economic statemement that November that basically said, in a soothingly Tracy Bonham-esque way, that "everything's fine." But that's not all that was in it. To deal with a deficit that Flaherty insisted didn't exist, he proposed abolishing the then $1.75 per vote public subsidy to the political parties.

That was what launched the Liberals and the NDP into a proposed coalition that would be supported by the Bloc Quebecois. In fact, they barely mentioned the economic crisis at all during those first few weeks. They were determined, more than anything else, to stop Harper and Flaherty's "undemocratic" dirty tricks, and they said so repeatedly. Harper responded by whipping up an idiotic constitutional crisis and destroying his chances of ever winning anything Quebec again.

The incessant lying on both sides of the political spectrum over the last three years has been nothing short of adorable, but the preceding five paragraphs of this little essay are about as an impartial and honest history of what happened as you're likely going to see anywhere. And it didn't even take me 700 pages to explain, like Peter Newman and his retarded Greek fishing hat would have.

Well, Harper has his precious majority now, he's still a Keynesian, and he brought back his plan to end the political subsidy. In fact, legislation was introduced on Tuesday, which will almost certainly pass.

Wanna hear a secret? I'm fine with killing the political subsidy. I oppose most campaign finance regulations precisely because the political parties are private entities, no different than corner stores or rub and tugs. Most folks who support campaign finance laws and regulations wrong-headedly insist they do so to prevent bribery and corruption. What they fail to see, or are too stupid to admit, is that bribery and corruption are already against the law.

Moreover, almost everyone supports keeping the revolving door between politics and lobbying, the single most destructive thing in democracy and government, well oiled. What no one seems to understand is that complex campaign and political regulations lock the scumbag lobbyists in place, since almost no one else can understand or navigate them. As I've said before, I'm not against lobbying, per se. I'm against otherwise unemployable people using public or political service to enrich themselves by corrupting everything that government is supposed to do. And I despise conservative politico lobbyists as much, or more, as I do their liberal cousins. To have anything approaching a representative government, they all need to be destroyed because they're all walking conflicts of interest.

Because I feel that political parties are private groups that should be free of government oversight and regulation, I also feel that they shouldn't be the beneneficies of government charity. If I think that they should be able to spend their money however they see fit, it's incumbent on me to demand that they raise it on their fucking own and stay out of the taxpayer's pocket. I see belonging to (or working for) a party as something of a charcter defect, and I'm outraged that those cocksuckers get a nickle of my loot, pathetically small though it is.

I'd love to support Harper's abolition of the public subsidy, but I can't because he isn't serious. It's almost impossible to believe that the prime minister is acting on principle, if only because he never has before.

For example, let's look at what Stephen Harper's is deciding to keep in the system and is rather dilligent in not mentioning at all.

Federal parties will still enjoy tax deductibility for the donations they receive that is 3-1/2 times more generous than the writeoffs available to registered charities. Four hundred dollars given to the Tories, Liberals or NDP will yield a tax credit of $300, while $400 given to a charity will lead to a deduction of just $88.

The message that sends is that our elected representatives believe they and their activities are more than three times as valuable to Canada as the work of the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Canadian Cancer Society.

And at election time, individual candidates and national parties can count on refunds, too, of around one-half of their campaign expenses, totalling tens of millions of dollars. This enables national and local campaigns to fundraise only about half of the money they intend to spend. It permits them to count on taxpayers for the rest.

So even after the direct subsidies (which are worth $27 million a year) are gone, politicians in this country will still be receiving an average of more than $80 million in help - directly and indirectly - annually from taxpayers.

My strategic vote for the NDP this past spring marked the first time in over a decade that I voted for a major political party at any level in over a decade. In last fall's mayoral election, I voted for a candidate that had dropped out of the race weeks earlier. But the major parties have been taking my money for my entire life, wheither I voted for them or not. But the minor parties and independents that I regularly support get shit. Under the tax code, my vote isn't equal to that of anyone who votes for the major parties.

Any Ottawa bureaucrat that cares to take an illegal peek at my tax returns over the last 25 years will see that I've never claimed a charitable deduction. That's not because I haven't given. Rather, it's because I decided as a very young man that my giving is mine, and not something that I have any right to expect the public to subsidize. Furthermore, charity is supposed to be about sacrifice, and sacrifice doesn't entail getting a third back in April. In large part, that's why I've used this blog to support foreign charities that Canadians can't claim on their taxes. If you're a halfway decent human being, you'll give anyway.

If given the chance, I'd almost certainly repeal the charititable tax deduction because it distorts the very idea of charity. That being the case, you can bet your ass that I'd do away with the political deductions, subsidies and refunds to the parties, which are considerably less benevolent.

I earlier said that Stephen Harper is a man without principle. That's not true, at least not entirely. There has been one principle that has guided him throughout his life: Destroying the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Grits were pretty much ruined in May. Never before had they been bounced out of both government and opposition. For a party that exists only to win and exercise power, that's lethal. Almost everyone that isn't me never saw the possibility that the Liberals would hold fewer than half of the NDP's seats in Parliament. The Liberals have historically been unforgiving toward losers, and now they are losers. It's nothing less than remarkable that more of them haven't committed suicide. It's also very sad, because many of them should die in humiliating ways. May I suggest auto-erotic asphyxiation?

Their civil war remains alive and well. If you read Liberal blogs, you'll see that being leaderless is inconsequential to them. They've just turned their fire on party president, Alf Apps, instead. And anyone who thinks that an endless leadership campaign is going to accomplish anything other than fan the flames knows nothing about history and even less about politics. The Grits weren't able to unify when they were in government. Why does anyone think that they'll be able to when they aren't even marginally influential?

Would you give those people money, or ruin your reputation by running for them as a candidate? As bright people, I'm guessing that you wouldn't. That will leave them with a candidate pool of social misfits, such as those that used to run for the NDP or still run for the Green Party today. The Grits are in a logistically irrevisable death spiral. They can't get good candidates without money, and they can't raise money without good candidates. Brothers and sisters, they're well and truly fucked.

In abolishing the political subsidy, Harper is not only destroying one of the Grits' significant source of money, he's taking out their only significant source of money. The Liberals weren't like the Conservatives, who always did well with individual small donations. They were traditionally a tool of Bay Street. When Jean Chretien ended that as his final "fuck you" to the party that gave him a life, they became wholly reliant on the government in a way that no other party was.

The Harper Tories effectively killed the Liberals on May 2nd. By withdrawing the subsidy, he's shovelling dirt onto the casket.

But please don't try to tell me that Harper has a deeper principle involved than that. This has everything to do with strategic political positioning and nothing to do with Harper's imaginary belief system. If it did, he would take the parties out of the tax code in one fell swoop, which his majority makes him able to do whenever he pleases. That's exactly what he would do if he really believed that "money should come from voters, not from corporations, not from unions, and not from government."

By killing the direct public subsidy, Harper wipes the Liberals off of the face of the earth as surely and as finally as the Nazis were by military means. As a political positioning statement, he gets to make a giant show out of saving a middling $27 million. But by keeping the tax code exactly the way it has been for decades, he preserves $80 million in government giveaways with fewer people to share it with.

Imagine the tax code as it relates to the parties as a pie. If there are four people sitting around a pie and two of them are butchered to death with plastic forks, the survivors get more pie, don't they? It stands to reason that the stronger of the survivors will get a great deal more pie than the weaker one does. Who do you think is stronger, Stephen Harper or an NDP Opposition leader to named later?

For the upteenth fucking time, Stephen Harper had the opportunity to do something truly conservative, and instead just jiggered the existing system just enough to benfit himself and hurt his enemies. As someone who has read about 100 books about the life and career of Richard Nixon, I can appreciate that for what it is, clever opportunism. But I'm not going to pretend that it isn't anything other than that, and neither should you.

The dream of my lifetime, the final lonely death of the Liberal Party of Canada, has been realized. But I've woken up to the very real nightmare that the Harper Conservative have become the Liberal Party of Canada.


 

Everyone's Gone to the Movies: Black Snake Moan (2007)

I try to be a good man. Honest, I do. But like most men, I know what it is to be led astray and have my very soul dominated by the little slice of heaven that lives betwixt a woman's sticks. As you move down a girl's belly and up her thigh, you'll more often than not know that you're on the road to personal damnation. And once you know that, you're almost guaranteed to have a good time. I'm pretty sure I read that in the bible once.

Now, if I've learned anything at all in my advanced years, it's that being a good man is highly overrated and that it's always easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you that the very concept of redemption is predicated on the idea that you can have your cake and eat it, too. Because you're my friends, I'm here to tell you that you can enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and still enter the Kingdom of Heaven, if'n that's your thing. And don't let another soul try to tell you different, folks. If I'm not mistaken, and I ain't, the bible also says that the Lord's going smite a motherfucker for being a smartass about such matters.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to Christina Ricci, who's always given me a deep throb in the underoos. She sends the very same thrill up my leg that Barack Obama sent up Chris Matthews'. The difference is that I'm not going to be as coy about it as ol' Christopher. When I say "leg", I really mean "cock." I just wanted to avoid any confusion about that. The stiffness in my legs is a result of my being asshole deep in middle age, whereas the iron in my Johnson is all for Christina.

As you good people probably already know, I don't have a "type" of woman because I love 'em all. But Miss Ricci is about as close to the ideal as I'm likely to find. She's about two feet tall and 36 pounds, soaking wet, which would be exactly the state that I'd be fixin' keep her in. She's got dark purty hair, giant eyes and a tiny lil' ass that speaks to me in a secret language that only I can understand. She's so goddamned cute that I'm willing to overlook the fact that she's had breast reduction surgery, a medical procedure I find toxic and unforgivable in any other woman. I'm guessing Jesus feels the same way. I also reckon that He'd want to wear Christina like a wristwatch, just as I do. Turns out that Jesus and I have a lot in common.

From everything I've heard, Black Snake Moan (which premiered on my 37th birthday) is far and away the best film in little Miss Christina's canon, and I've been fixing to see it for some time now. The only problem has been that I'm very lazy. Why, as recently as five AM this morning, I resolved that I'd never again view a film that didn't feature Sophie Dee. But my wang got sore by noon, so I relented and played the bitTorrent of Black Snake Moan that I downloaded a few months ago. Because I've been several flavors of unproductive lately, I decided that I'd write about the movie as I watched it.

That was probably a mistake. Ricci spends the first third of the movie wearing nothing more than a Confederate belly shirt and tiny white panties which outlines her beautiful little box wonderfully. About 40 minutes into the picture, a forty pound chain around her waist is added to the ensemble. As much as I'd like to avoid discouraging every woman I know from dressing the same way, it isn't doing my inflamed pecker any favors. In retrospect, watching seven Sophie Dee movies in a row here in the masturbatorium this morning probably wasn't wise. Live and learn. My constant Twitter flirtations with the unbearably hawt Joan Crawford throughout this experiment aren't helping my groin any, either.

The film centers around Rae, played by Ricci, a white trash Tennessee nymphomaniac, which the available science tells me is a serious medical condition that more women should suffer from. Rae responds to Justin Timberlake being deployed to Iraq by being stuffed with all the booze, drugs and cock she can find, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But she coughs a lot, so Timberlake's hillbilly best friend beats the shit out of Rae and dumps her on the side of the road to die, just as you'd expect from someone who hangs with Timerlake.

She's found by the great Samuel L. Jackson's character, Lazarus, a former Delta blues singer whose enthusiasm for Jesus and sharecropping prompts his wife to fuck his brother. As is often the case with Jackson's characters, Lazarus don't cotton well to that, and middling pool hall violence ensues. However, his preacher assures Lazarus that attacking his kin with a broken liquor bottle is cool with God. I'm just shocked that Lazarus had to inquire about it in the first fucking place.

Rae is delirious, unconscious and, most remarkably, still horny when Lazarus brings her back to the crib. Lazarus, being something of an pious and annoying blowhard, refuses to fuck her, which is where the giant chain comes in, and goes a long way in explaining why I abandoned religion when I was twelve.

See that? Pretty high on the list of the sexiest fucking things you've ever seen, right? You or I would see that in our yard and our penises would tear through our pants and begin beating us about the head and shoulders, whistling "Dixie" while it did it. Not ol' Lazarus, though. Like his namesake, he's dead, but only from the waist down. This is perhaps the strongest evidence yet seen that Christ makes you gay, the entire Catholic Church notwithstanding. No right-thinking heterosexualist can resist a chained girl with a teensy butt and a propensity for showing some underboob. It just isn't done in straight circles.

Rae reacts to this rejection pretty much the way you would expect any clinically slutty Southerner to: by taking a thirteen year old black kid from behind, which Lazarus breaks up because Lazarus hates everyone.

Timberlake, having been kicked out of Iraq for being a pussy, returns home to find Rae gone. When his shit-kicker buddy tells Justin that he fucked her, Justin whips his ass, which must comfort al-Qaeda in Iraq greatly.

Back at Casa Lazarus, he and Rae start drinking moonshine, as one does, and he frees her from her chains. Instead of pounding her in the dumper, which I would have done, Lazarus tells Rae about his wife's sluttery and enthusiasm for Mississippi abortions while playing a beautiful cherry Gibson ES-335. Rae responds by hallucinating and putting her head in Lazarus' lap, further proving that gay dudes have all the luck.

Things go downhill from there. Secrets are shared and pretty much everyone exposes themselves as irredeemable pussies. Worse, there's an adorable little nymphomaniac in the middle of the mess, and no one even so much thinks about fucking her. If there's a real tragedy in Black Snake Moan, that's it. Also, I can tell you from some experience that most nymphos don't look like Christina Ricci, which compounds the tragedy of the film.  There's nothing sadder than seeing a smoking little nymphomaniac that spends the better part of two hours not getting fucked, and I can assure that doesn't happen in Sophie Dee's fine films.

I think I made a terrible, terrible mistake today.

Actually,  that's not true. I'm just being bitchy because I'm still awesomely horny, even after a morning of brutal jerking off that has left me swollen, sore and dejected. The always heroic Kevin Smith called Black Smith Moan "the most beautiful love story" he'd ever seen and "the best movie of 2007." Not having seen any other movies from '07 that I remember, I'm inclined to agree.

But it is a pretty good flick, and I suggest that you all check it out. Craig Brewer makes a pretty good movie. I'm just sad that Christina Ricci wasn't naked a lot more in it.

Now I have to go pound my pud again. I'm just .... heroic that way.

I'm coming, Sophie!

The truth about Tim Hudak? He's desperately fucking stupid and useless

As I said I would on Twitter over the weekend, I voted for the Freedom Party in the sad spectacle that was Ontario's provincial election yesterday. And I had never even heard of the Freedom Party of Ontario before last week. As you can imagine, it was a pretty proud moment for me.

Like most Ontarians, I hate Premier Dalton McGuinty, who has governed for eight years with approval ratings slightly below those of the guy everybody in your neighbourhood suspects of being a pedophile. Virtually every sentient human in the province would beat McGuinty to death with a fucking shovel if given the chance.

The only thing that they wouldn't do to be rid of ol' Dalton is vote for Tim Hudak. To understand this, you need to understand that Canadians are different than Americans in that we're willing to governed by evil people if the alternative is being governed by stupid people. We collectively decided yesterday that we'd rather tolerate the stench of McGuinty's brimstone than the sight of Hudak drooling on himself and struggling to breathe with his mouth closed.

If you paid any attention to the campaign at all, you should immediately understand what I mean. This was Tim's race to lose and, well, he did it! A couple of months ago, Hudak's Progressive Conservatives were a not-at-all surprising fifteen points ahead of McGuinty's Liberals and poised to win a majority of testicle-shattering proportions. Yet I instinctively knew that he'd piss it all away. I tried explaining it to my pal, the Tiger on Politics, but he was having none of it.

I knew this was going to happen two years ago, when Hudak first won the Tory leadership, and I said so publicly. This is because I understand how populism and leadership races (or American primaries) work.

In leadership contests (or primaries), you try to appeal only to the people who actually pay attention to such useless exercises, the party's base, which is almost always unusually superstitutous, uncommonly ignorant and crazy in ways that remain uncharted by modern science. Once you win, you then "run to the middle" to win over the moderates and independents that really decide elections. It's a subtle art and, when properly performed, a beautiful thing to see.

Which brings me to populism, which is physically repulsed by subtlety; along with common sense, proportionality and history. Historically, as populism rises, politicians get dumber until that era of populism ultimately recedes back into its sea of stupidity. Populism actually punishes subtlety, which is why so few populists have ever actually been elected as chief executives of anything.

Tim Hudak's leadership campaign went beyond even populism. He was running to be the prom king of the idiot fucking blogosphere and Randy Hillier's Ontario Landowner's Association, which is more like the Branch Davidians than anyone cares to admit in public. None of this should surprise anyone, given that even Hudak's best friends wouldn't accuse him of being especially bright. He's an intellectual lot lizard, and he actually seems oddly happy that way.

As a leadership candidate, and as Leader of the Opposition, Hudak took positions that were so implausible that they couldn't survive even ten minutes of scrutiny under the harsh light of a campaign. Timmy swore up and down for a goddamned year that he'd get rid of the new Harmonized Sales Tax. When the press got around to asking "really?", his only reply was "okay, not really."

During the leadership campaign, he promised to abolish Ontario's version of Section 13 (a) of the Human Rights Code, which is intellectually laudable, but politically disastrous, since there is no way to respond to the inevitable dishonest attacks against that position in a 30 second TV spot. You might not like that tragic reality of politics, but it doesn't change the fact that it is the reality.

Hudak's long walk away from those promises infuriated even those dumb enough to love him, and doubled the resolve of everyone who already hated him. It was at that moment that his polling started to collapse and the horrid stink of desperation overtook the Tory campaign. The Tories were hoping for Toronto mayor Rob Ford to ride in and save the day for them, but Ford subsequently collapsed under his own considerable weight and lack of accounting and political skills. At the same time, Stephen Harper stopped returning Tim's calls.

At that point - which was the week the writ was dropped - Hudak went down the only path left to him, yokelism. He berated McGuinty for "giving Ontarians jobs to foreigners", thereby falling into a deeply cynical and effective trap that the Liberals planted in their platform.

The McGuinty plan called for helping new citizens that were professionals in their native lands - like, say, doctors - get accredited in Ontario, so that they wouldn't be driving fucking taxis or running 7-11s. But, as the great Andrew Coyne pointed out in Macleans, the plan was structured in such a way that almost no one would be able participate, therefore meaning that it would cost next to nothing. As an added bonus, the Grits were then able to paint the Tories as xenophobic, Nazi shitheels, which they did with relish.

And that was the first week of the campaign. The last week was downright bizarre in blatantly sexual way. Several Tory candidates started putting out pamphlets - seemingly authorized by the Provincial Progressive Conservative Party - that said that the McGuinty Liberals were forcing public schools to teach first graders how to be transvestites.

The Tory campaign had effectively become the second verse of "One in a Million" by Guns N' Roses. And, at this point, Axl Rose is hard enough to defend as a bloated rock star, let alone as a policy position. On the rare occasions that anyone cared to talk to Hudak at all, all they wanted to ask him about was "immigrants and faggots." And at that point, his Song of the Doomed had become an aria. Serious people everywhere had already abandoned him,

Sure, Timmy ultimately won 12 new seats and - with the considerable help of the NDP - reduced the inhumanly unpopular McGuinty Liberals to a minority, which is a lot like sentencing a serial rapist to an unsupervised curfew. And Conservatives everywhere seem to be fucking proud of this, ignoring entirely the fact that just 11 weeks ago, they were poised to actually drown McGuinty.

Last night and then again this morning, Hudak went before the cameras and demonstrated his almost precious brand of obliviousness, thereby reinforcing why he blew such a majestic lead in the first fucking place. He bloviated endlessly about "a tight leash" and "not allowing" this, that, or the other. It was almost as if Tim Hudak was utterly ignorant of the fact that he's now the most irrelevant person in Ontario.

McGuinty is one seat shy of a majority. If he wants to cut a deal, he can do it with the much more accomodating NDP, making Hudak about as influential in the legislative process as the pantless pervert in your local park. Nobody is Queen's Park is going to give a shit what comes out of the Tory caucus for the foreeable future.

And, bluster aside, the last thing Hudak should want is another election anytime soon. Given the fact that he threw away a perfectly good election in record time, he's lucky to still have a fucking job this morning. As a betting man, I'd wager that Tim rolls over like a good pussy for any confidence motion that McGuinty introduces that the Dippers find even mildly objectionable. Ol' Dalt is Little Timmy's Big Daddy for the next few years. Deal with it, boy.

I voted for the Freedom Party yesterday, and I couldn't be more pleased with myself. That's because I suspect everyone who voted for the Hudak Tories of fucking a kid, if only because well-adjusted adults don't devote that much time, money or energy to cross-dressing six-year-olds.