Senor Citizen: Dan's Unlikely Journey

Blaming the debacle in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority is far from fair. Because Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and President Bush all decided that the State Department was going to be frozen out of the post-war occupation and because there never was any planning for the occupation at the Department of Defense, the whole adventure was doomed from the very start.

The history now pretty clearly shows that the White House and DoD didn't seem to think that a long-term occupation was necessary. Rumsfeld and Cheney seemed to think that they could hand the entire country over to Ahmed Chalibi and everything would be fine, despite a decade's worth of warnings from State and the CIA that Chalabi was as dishonest and corrupt as an Iraqi could be without being a blood relative of Saddam's.

Granted, that didn't stop everyone in the Bush Administration from blaming their proconsul, L. Paul Bremmer for everything that went wrong. Read any of their memoirs. The one recurring theme is "Our ridiculous lack of any planning whatsoever had nothing to do with it. It was all Bremmer's fault!"

If you've read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's magnificent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - and if you haven't, you really should - you know that the CPA was its own, completely separate disaster. It was staffed from top to bottom with Republican political hacks that were determined to engage in weird social experiments directly out of the American Enterprise Institute. For example, Bremmer saw to it that the Iraqi people had a flat tax before they had reliable electricity. It was the single most unserious occupation operation in American history.

Of course, that's not why some 4,500 American soldiers and innumerable Iraqi civilians died after Saddam was driven from power. That was directly caused by CPA Orders Number 1 and 2, which de-Baathified the Iraqi civil service and disbanded both the military and police. As a consequence an insurgency that was estimated to be about 3,000 immediately ballooned to 300,000, or roughly twice as large as the U.S military presence in Iraq. Because the Americans were devoting their resources to finding weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist instead of providing security until it was too late, anarchy prevailed for the next four years.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's spokesman was Dan Senor. During his time in Iraq, he gave Rajiv Chandrasekaran one of the greatest quotes I've ever read.  "Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."

With a record like that, how could he not become a senior foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney? If you've been following Governor Romney's international travels this past week, you'll see that it's going swimmingly.

Mr. Senor, 41, is an unusual hybrid: He is a policy wonk, media maven, successful author and financier. He made headlines last weekend when he told reporters that if Israel launched a pre-emptive unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Romney “would respect” that decision, a claim Mr. Senor softened somewhat in a later statement.

For his part, Mr. Romney said in an address on Sunday that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons “must be our highest national-security priority,” but made no mention of an Israeli attack.

If in fact Mr. Senor used the word "pre-emptive" strike in regards to Iran, that's a cause for concern because it indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating. An attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would not, as a matter of both international law and common sense, be pre-emptive. Pre-emption rests entirely on the imminence of a threat. Since there wouldn't be a deployable weapon, let alone a stated threat that one would be used forthwith, the Iranian program does not pose an imminent threat.

Such a strike by Israel, the United States, or anyone else would meet the definition of a preventative war, and those are illegal under any reading of international law and tradition. President Eisenhower spoke eloquently when he said "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

The point is that pre-emption and prevention, despite what most Americans currently choose to believe, are not interchangeable. They are separate and distinct from one another. One is legal and righteous, the other is criminal. Someone who can reasonably be expected to hold a senior national security post in a potential Romney Administration should know the difference.

Then it got worse.

The trip has attracted its share of controversy. Mr. Romney departed from official U.S. policy and described Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel,” “culture.” Such a comment is “racist” and “shows a lack of knowledge,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

From time to time,  conservative politicians will ward-heel their way over to Israel and promise that they'll move their embassies to Jerusalem when they get themselves elected. Canada's Joe Clark did this in 1979.

But, like Clark, they never actually do it, mostly because they get a good look at reality as soon as they take office. There isn't a Muslim country in the world that will accept foreign embassies in Jerusalem so long as that city's status remains unresolved. And we still have to deal with Muslim countries, mostly because there are so many of them and they have so much oil. You might not like that, but it remains a fact.

The Israelis never really expect said politicians to follow through on this stupid promise, but those politicians have their credibility damaged in Israel's eyes for having made it in the first place, as I'm sure the aforementioned Joe Clark will tell you. In making such a colossally stupid promise, you manage to pull off the impressive feat of enraging Muslims and Jews. And for what?

As for the "Palestinian culture" remark, not only was that an enormous foreign policy gaffe, it was incredibly idiotic as a domestic political matter. Romney's home state of Michigan is much closer than it has any business being. Because it has more Arabs per square foot than anywhere else in America, I'm pretty sure it won't be for much longer.

Not only was Romney himself born and raised in Michigan, Dan Senor himself was the communications director for the first and only Arab-American United States senator, Spencer Abraham ... of Michigan. If Mitt were to win the Wolverine State, his path to the White House become immeasurably easier, since he'd also probably pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota with it.

The Governor then went on to praise Israel's health care system, citing all kinds of spending to GDP numbers and health outcomes, while ignoring that a central facet of it is, you guessed it, an individual mandate. As I said at the great and good Velociman's place this morning "If one created an individual mandate in the state one governed, suggested that his party campaign on Wyden-Bennett (which contained an individual mandate,) and then went on to praise a foreign health care system with an individual mandate without being asked ... Well, reasonable people might begin to suspect that one doesn't have a huge problem with individual mandates."

Everyone is still focusing on Romney's Olympic disaster in England, which was more funny than anything else. But what he did in Israel was worse by several degrees. They were not only entirely self-inflicted wounds, they were wounds of some consequence.

Look, I don't know if either of those gaffes were Senor's idea, but I do know that it's his job to stop Romney from making them. When his candidate is overseas (which I think is a brutally stupid thing to do in a modern campaign, anyway. The deepest wound John McCain inflicted on Obama four years ago was the "Celebrity" ad that used footage from the The One's Berlin visit.) Dan Senor's single biggest responsibility is to keep his fucking mouth shut! The single easiest way for a candidate to get himself in trouble is to make with the goddamned talkee-talk, especially when he's anyplace more foreign than Wayne County.

I don't take any pleasure in writing this. Whenever I've seen him on TV, Senor has struck me as a decent breed of cat. We're roughly the same age, we grew up in the same hometown (although I only learned that this morning,) we both have a deep interest in foreign policy, and we both have bad hair. The only difference between Dan Senor and I is that he has a great education, a cool job, a ton of money and a hot wife. Oh, and I never took part in destroying the Middle East.

Other than that, it's like we're connected at the soul.

But if you were still wondering why I think Mitt Romney's going to lose this election, the Israel trip is instructive.

Best Message Ever! Now About that Messenger ...

If there's one thing that you folks out there need to know about me, it's that I love tits. I love big tits, small tits and every size in between. There's just something about a good set of jugs that puts a smile on my face and a spring in my step. One of my favorite ways to pass the time is take a lady's aroused nipple betwixt my teeth and gently pull until her loins explode with delight.

When an awkward doofus spray paints his hair orange and does something unspeakably shitty, people call it a tragedy. But if, say, Lindsay Lohan does it, no one thinks it's that bad.

Why is that, you might ask? Well, Lindsay Lohan has unbelievably nice tits and science tells us that the owner of unbelievably nice tits can do whatever the fuck they want. That's just God's Law, people!

I know that humanity just isn't serious about civil rights and won't be until we recognize the under appreciated heroism of the Topfreedom movement. The fact that the Rosa Parks of swinging funbags, Guelph, Ontario's Gwen Jacob doesn't have statues built in her honor is an insult to everything that mankind is supposed to stand for.

Moira Johnston is fighting for freedom, too. Well, okay, not really. Women have been able to go topless in New York State without fear of police molestation since 1992. Ms. Johnston feels that the Big Apples broads aren't exercising their freedom enough and wants to raise awareness. And that's more than a valid point. Topfreedom was legally recognized in Ontario in 1991, and you know how many bare titties I've seen on the streets of Toronto since then? None is how many.

Obviously that isn't as it should be. Freedoms only exist when they're exercised. When they're ignored, they atrophy and die. Don't believe me? Look at the Fourth Amendment. And the First.

I admire Moira's heroic work, and wouldn't want anyone thinking otherwise. But women are generally uptight, particularly about breaking out their titties in public, which I blame on bad parenting. There's centuries of social conditioning at work here that need to be broken, and I humbly submit that this might be a touch beyond Ms. Johnston's meagre .. abilities.

No, there comes a time when the really big guns need to be broken out if you're in the revolution game. Moira Johnson took the important baby-steps, and she should be forever recognized for that. But there's one giant leap for mankind  her sisters out there that's waiting to be taken.

Yes, I'm saying that it's time for Kat Dennings and her formidable funbags to take up the fight! Or Christina Hendricks! Or even Kate Upton! Or all three! On a trampoline! For freedom!

Some things just can't be done halfway.



Famous porn star April O'Neil knows how to do it in a gif that I couldn't possibly embed here, lest you all get fired. Follow her example, preferably when I'm shopping.

Bill Kristol's Fairy Tale - Updated

I hadn't heard of The Washington Free Beacon until about ten minutes ago, when The Drudge Report linked to this article. And I had mostly forgotten about the Emergency Committee for Israel. But when I looked into both, one name connected the two: Bill Kristol's.

Mr. Kristol is among the dumbest motherfuckers on earth, which shouldn't surprise anyone, since he became famous as the guy whose only government job was making Dan Quayle look smart. Notice how well that worked out?

After being kicked out of government in 1992, Kristol established The Weekly Standard, mostly as a forum for demanding that the United States go to war with everyone and insisting that it would go just fine. You can see him being similarly (and smugly) wrong every week on Fox News Sunday. Oh, and he was also the first person to bring Sarah Palin to national prominence, so we can thank him for that, too.

Matthew Continetti was an associate editor at the Standard until he established the Free Beacon this past February.

Kristol is also on the board of, and appears to be the main spokesman for, the Emergency Committee for Israel, a 501(c)(4) that seems to exist for the sole purpose of flacking for Israel's Likud Party and it's policies in the United States. It is only because of massive loopholes in the law that the Emergency Committee and groups like it manage to avoid having to register as agents of foreign governments under American lobbying laws. If Mike Deaver was that smart when he was illegally lobbying for Canada, he could've made his life a lot easier.

Anyhow, the Emergency Committee created this ad, which the Free Beacon dutifully posted and the Drudge Report linked to it under the headline "OBAMA BLASTED FOR FAILURE TO VISIT ISRAEL."

 

ECI also ran this print ad in a bunch of Jewish newspapers.

At this point, some recent history necessary to explain what's going on. And that history shows that Barack Obama is far more tolerant of Israel than other presidents with actual balls have been.

In March  of 2010, Vice President Biden visited Jerusalem and reaffirmed America's "unyielding support" for Israel's security, which was sort of important, given the question of Iran's nuclear program. Within hours - and with Biden still in the country - the Israeli Interior Ministry announced an expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem.

That's been sort of a thing with the U.S since the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Building settlements on occupied territory is kind of illegal under international law. And everyone recognizes East Jerusalem as occupied territory. Worse still for the Americans, they provide loan guarantees to Israel for the settlements, which itself is of questionable legality when Israel actually brings in immigrants to populate them.

If any other country - and especially an ally dependent on U.S foreign aid -  did something like this, I have no doubt that the United States would use every diplomatic resource at its disposal to retaliate. It's difficult to underscore what an insult that announcement by the Interior Ministry was, let alone how it complicated American relations with Israel's Arab neighbors, who rely on the United States to be an "honest broker."

Actually, no it isn't. That's because something similar happened during the first Bush administration in the fall of 1990.  Former secretary of state James Baker told the story in his 1995 memoir, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War & Peace, 1989-1992 on pages 543-44.

In the months leading up to the first Gulf War, Israel's then-foreign minister, David Levy, assured Baker that his country wouldn't move recent Soviet immigrants into planned East Jerusalem settlements for which American loan guarantees had been extended. Five weeks later, Yitzak Shamir's government reneged on that pledge.

Secretary Baker then very publicly cancelled the loan guarantees and told the world why. After the war, when the Bush administration was trying to bring the Arabs to the Madrid Peace Conference (one of the diplomatic promises Baker and Bush made to ensure Arab participation in the war on Iraq,) Shamir yet again made the settlements an issue. Baker yet again publicly slapped Israel down.

Oh, cute fact. You know who was a fairly prominent member of the Bush administration in 1990-'91?

Bill Kristol, that's who! Did Kristol have anything negative to say about that at the same or thereafter? Certainly not that I'm aware of.

If anything, Israel's current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been an even greater thorn in the side of American foreign policy than even Shamir was. And, by the way, it is the duly elected president of the United States that decides U.S foreign policy, not the prime minister of Israel.

Compared to the reaction of Secretary Baker and the first President Bush to Israeli intransigence, President Obama has been downright tepid, given the humiliation that Netanyahu brought upon the administration when Biden was visiting. In fact, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have  given Israel a de facto nuclear guarantee against an Iranian attack.

If the worst thing that Obama has done is simply not visit Israel, where God knows what else Netanyahu will do to embarrass him or further complicate American policy, Israel has done well, indeed.

And you know who knows that? Bill Kristol. Just don't expect him to tell you the truth about that. It isn't his strong suit.


Extra Special Update: The good folks at Mediate were kind enough to compile a listing of the travels to Israel of recent presidents. As it turns out, Democrats fare pretty well in their sojourns to the  Holy Land. Republicans, not so much.

As it happens, no Republican president went to Israel at all between June of 1974 and January of 2008. That means that Presidents Gerald R, Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush never made an official state visit there over the course of some thirty-three years and six months.

After I published this post, I remembered the rather hostile relationship that President Reagan had with Israel, which I intially wrote about here.

During Israel's 1982 siege of Beriut, Reagan twice described the military offensive to Menachem Begin as a "Holocaust" and said that if it continued "our entire future relationship (meaning America and Israel's) was endangered (see The Reagan Diaries, page 98.) It was perhaps the most controversial and confrontational communication between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. It was also one that Reagan was deeply proud of, highlighting it in his memoir, An American Life. 

Can you imagine how people like Kristol or Liz Cheney would react if Barack Obama used rhetoric toward Israel that came anywhere close to Reagan's?

You probably can't, but I can.

Why People Frighten Me, Volume 9,736

Please note that my offer of marriage earlier this morning does not extend to this broad. Just thought I'd clear that up.



Video ruthlessly stolen from The Superficial. 

Jason Kenney's Unintended Consequences

One of the most beautiful things you'll ever see is idiots demonstrating what good people they are. It's usually a source of constant amusement for me. Then they get elected to something and it's no longer quite as funny.

For the longest time, this was the domain of liberals. But conservatives increasingly have decided that they can be just as empty-headed, largely because they've seen how effectively liberals have been at ward-heeling like that.

Politicking this way is effective because voters are simpletons and singularly incapable of independent thinking. As everything goes to shit in the world, I can't really blame the politicians all that much. After all, in a democracy, we're supposed to be calling the shots and we couldn't be more obstinate in our refusal to use our fucking heads once in awhile.

A good example of this is the issue of "sex trafficking." As properly defined - the employment of women as prostitutes by force or coercion - is something that all right-thinking people are against. The law, the conventional thinking goes, should absolutely do more to stop it.

It's only when you start thinking about it that a very different picture starts to emerge. Here's how.

Ask yourself what the most common elements of sex trafficking are. You'll answer that they are assault, kidnapping, forcible confinement, uttering death threats, rape, sometimes blackmail and extortion and, because more than one person is usually involved, conspiracy. You'll also notice something else. Those things are all already against the law. As a matter of fact, they're among the most serious charges a defendant can face. And they get more serious still when the victim is a minor.

The laws that have been on the books for well over a century are more than adequate to combat sex trafficking. But cops are lazy, politicians want to be seen as "doing something," and the public is too fucking dumb to know the difference. The friggin' media is certainly no help because all too often their determination to be a populist "voice of the underdog" serves to actually enable and reinforce the stupidity of its audience.

This is true of both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants you to know that they "care" and the right wants to demonstrate that they're "tough on crime." The police, off on the sidelines, always want new and ever more intrusive powers. So despite the fact that every single element of sex trafficking is already addressed by multiple criminal statutes, we wind up with new laws.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his slack-jawed ward-heeler of an immigration minister, Jason Kenney, decided that they were going to use Canada's immigration laws to pretend that they're attacking the problem. They did this by refusing to renew the visas of foreign strippers in Canada.

Despite the fact that stripping is not only legal in Canada, but a constitutionally protected form of speech, and despite the fact that there's no evidence that legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, Harper and Kenney are doing something, by God!

Of course, I have a theory why the Tories are doing this. On top of their moronic "tough on crime" image, they're playing to their retard base. The Harper Conservatives are altogether too smart to go after abortion and same-sex marriage, which their social conservative base is enormously pissed at them about. So they'll give them the next best thing, an assault on the legal "sex trade."

There's no evidence that the legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, and even if they were, that a violation of existing immigration law and the other sections of the Criminal Code that I cited earlier. And let's say that they are being trafficked. How is deporting the victims the answer?

What the bill does do is create a giant hole in the perfectly legal adult entertainment industry, which that industry is going to fill one way or another. And this is where the Law of Unintended Consequences takes over in a breathtakingly hilarious way.

Recruiters of teenage strippers may soon be scouring Toronto high schools in search of female students who can be groomed into disrobing part-time as exotic dancers to earn college tuition.

A flyer praising the benefits of the burlesque trade has been put together to target students in high schools, colleges and universities in the Toronto-area, says a group representing dancers and club owners.

The brochure claims working as a dancer pays well, offers flexible hours and makes a “great part-time job to raise college tuition.”

A scramble is underway by the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada to fill a demand for dancers after Ottawa this month stopped issuing visas or extensions for foreign strippers to work here. There are up to 800 foreign strippers in Canada and most vow to go underground and work in the sex trade if they can’t dance legally.

Of course, like almost everything you'll ever see in Sun Media, this is written in a highly misleading way.

Strip joints are holders of Ontario liquor licenses and the drinking age here is 19. The law pretty clearly says that no one under the age of 18 can work in an establishment whose primary product is booze. The Sun makes it sound like you're going to wind up with ninth and tenth graders getting twenties shoved in their cooters, and that just ain't the case.

But nobody does shithead outrage quite like Sun Media. If you've never read their newspapers or watched their version of the Fox News Channel, you really should. Don't get me wrong, you won't learn anything, but I can guarantee that you'll get mad at something. If you're halfway smart, you'll get mad at yourself.

The Tories managed to pass an ineffective law that does nothing to address a serious issue (if you assume that new laws are even needed, which I don't) to what end? Well, younger and younger Canadian girls are going to be drawn into stripping and there isn't a goddamned thing the government can do about it. And this is going to get Harper's social conservative based even more pissed at him if that base chooses to be even halfway honest. Remember, none of this would have happened were it not for Kenney's genius decision not to renew the visas.

This might be the most perfect storm of stupidity out of this government yet. This is fucking brilliant!

Although I've only been to a peeler joint twice in the last ten years, I have very fond memories of foreign strippers. And not just the obvious ones. They do tend to be much nicer people than their native born co-workers, who can be a spectacular pain in the ass. Canadian girls in the business often think that they're above what they're doing for a living, but the immigrants seem to be genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be here.

So what happens to them?

Caroline, 28, and Nicola, 25, have been dancing in a downtown Toronto club for more than a year and have tasted the good life and now don’t want to return to their native Hungary.

“We are not happy that visas are no longer being issued to us,” Caroline said. “I am very disappointed and afraid of what may happen to me in the future.”

The women say they work long hours and send most of their earnings back home to their families.

“We did not do anything wrong in Canada,” she said. “They should not be sending us back home.”

Nicola said she’s stressed out and hasn’t been able to eat since hearing news of the visa revocation.

“My visa is almost expired and I am very scared,” she said. “I am very shattered that I may no longer be able to work and help my family back home.”

(...)

Foreign dancers say they’re willing to get married to a Canadian citizen or file refugee claims to stay here.

Plans are in place to seek Canadian men to marry some of the strippers whose visas are on the verge of expiry, which will force them to go underground and into the hands of organized crime to work in the sex trade.

Did I mention the unintended consequences? Some of them aren't so funny.  Jason Kenney, in his peculiarly Jason Kenney way, may have managed to create a new wave of sex trafficking victims because he's such a magnificent shithead.

Fortunately, the government knows enough about irony to keep Vic Towes as far away from this issue as they can possibly can.

But you know what? I'm a helpful cat and I love nothing more than beautiful girls with cute accents. Those just happen to be a couple of my favorite things.

Perhaps, like a more celebrated Foreigner, you want to know what love is. And maybe, just maybe, you want me to show you.

If you happen to be a foreign dancer in Toronto with an expiring visa, get in touch with me at skippystalinATgmail.com. There's a better than even chance that I'll immediately fall in love with you and propose. I'm really romantic and tend to propose marriage 36 times a day, as my long-time readers will confirm. All you have to do is say yes!

I'm so in love with love that it's actually infectious! You won't be able to help yourself from wanting to join me in holy matrimony. People like Minister Kenney might be skeptical about love at first sight, but I think we can prove them wrong.

Rise of the Chicken Hawks

In the course of human events, people strive to get upset about stupid shit that affects them not in the least. There's no shortage of examples of that, and if I started listing them, I'd likely never be able to stop.

That's especially true of social issues. For the most part, you can see an inverse proportion of how pissed somebody gets over a given issue and how little it impacts their day-to-day life. And that's true of conservatives and liberals.

I came out in support of gay marriage all the way back in 2004 and there was no end to the stupid arguments I had with "small-government" conservatives about it. They seemed to like that the government approved of their lifestyle choices and decidedly didn't want to share in the goodies the government loaded down the tax code to favour them with.

My position is that the goddamned tax code should have nothing at all to do with how you live your life. Ideally, it would raise revenue to fund the fucking government and that's it. Conservatives, as a general rule, are lying out their asses when they decry "social engineering" by the government. In actual fact, they're pissed about social engineering contrary to their personal beliefs. They ignore the fundamental fact that a government that endorses your lifestyle today can just as easily oppose it tomorrow.

If nothing else, liberals are at least honest about wanting the government to get all up in your shit. I despise almost everything they believe, but I at least respect their honesty about it. Social conservatives tend to talk out of both sides of their mouths about the role of government.

Of course, liberals are also lifestyle hypocrites, as I learned when I publicly endorsed polygamy in the Bountiful case in British Columbia. Then I got to read all about how polygamy "goes too far." "involves coercsion" (ignoring entirely that almost all of the elements of said coercsion are already against the law,) and is generally icky. Those assholes actually sounded exactly like Rick Santorum. So fuck them.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to the latest clusterfuck surrounding Chick-fil-A and gay marriage. Even though I hadn't even heard of Chick-fil-A before last week, everybody seems to have an opinion about this, so I guess I should too. All things being equal, I'd rather not. But I know that you teenagers expect me to as timely as last week's headlines.

From calls for a boycott to pledges of support, Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy’s recent comments supporting traditional marriage have prompted strong reactions from groups on both sides of the issue.

Cathy’s remarks earlier this week to a Baptist website, in which he affirmed the Atlanta-based company’s belief in “the biblical definition of the family unit,” went viral Wednesday. Supporters and opponents of gay unions immediately weighed in.

“We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles,” Cathy told the Baptist Press.

You know what annoys me more than anything else about religious types? The fact that they don't seem to understand what the "biblical principles" they support actually are.

What those people support are Leave it Beaver principles on marriage, not biblical ones. Marriage in biblical times (and in many societies even today) are little more than property transfers. You'd give some dude something, usually livestock, and you'd get his daughter. And if you croaked, your brother got her. Under "biblical principles," if you get caught raping a virgin, you're stuck with her because no other man will have her.

Chick-fil-A's president, Don Cathy made a great to-do about their being "married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that." I'm sure that no one gives more thanks to God for that than Mrs. Cathy, since "biblical principles" about divorce are quite a bit like what you see in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same books of the Bible that "define marriage" also have some fascinating things to say about eating shellfish and working on the Sabbath, which is actually Saturday, not Sunday. Don't believe me? Look at a calender. Notice where the seventh day falls?

Folks, I could give a shit about your biblical principles. All I ask is that you be consistent about living them yourselves before you bother anyone else with them. If you believe that your Book is the unchallengeable Word of God, don't be so selective about which parts of it define you as a person.

Mr. Cathy, along with most social conservatives, would be a whole lot more honest if they just said that they don't like queers very much. I'd respect them a lot more if they did that, instead of hiding behind a Bible that they clearly don't understand or follow in it's totality.

Lookee, I'm as unequivocal about free speech as you can get. You can say the craziest shit imaginable, and I'll at least support your right to say it. That decidedly doesn't mean that I won't call you a fucking moron, but I won't call for the goddamned government to step in and shut you up.

On the other hand, gays and mouthy liberals do have the right to be offended and not patronize your establishment once you get overly uppity about things that don't involve your corporate mission statement. Let's be clear about one thing, the only reason for Dan Cathy to create this public shitstorm was to play to the "Come to Jesus" crowd. It's a marketing move, pure and simple. There's simply no other reason for Mr. Cathy to have issued the statement he did.

I don't know how I'd react to this if Chick-fil-A operated in Canada. From what the great Jay Batman tells me, the food is delicious. But their message is offensive precisely because it's so moronic and transparently commercialized to appeal to a segment of the market. I'd prefer that my money not support that horseshit, but everybody loves them some fried chicken!

Here's an idea. Let's stop pretending that Don made a moral decision - which he didn't have to dedicate corporate funds and resources toward - rather than a calculated political and business one instead. The evidence does seem to support that.

As a general rule, I don't like organized boycotts. They tend to be every bit as annoying as the thing being protested in the first place, and the leaders of them tend to be hysterical assholes. Protesters of all political stripes tend to overwhelm their own message (and the one that they're protesting in the first fucking place) with their own ignorant assholery.

If gays, and people like me who support their marriage rights, quietly decided to stay away from Chick-fil-A, I couldn't help but support them. They too have speech and commercial rights. But I know that they won't be grating dickheads about it. That's the nature of politically-driven protests. They just can't help themselves, which is too bad.

But don't think you'll accomplish all that much. Chick-fil-A is a franchise operation, so you'll be hurting independent business people who could very well sympathize with you (and me.) Put them out of business and Chick-fil-A just resells the location to someone more inclined to their viewpoint. Trust me, you won't like the way that turns out. And I'm guessing that Mr. Cathy knows that if Chick-fil-A was an owned and operated business, he would've shut the fuck up. He's not gambling his money in this, which is why I think he's a coward.

Here's where I do have a problem, and one much greater than than the one I have with a restaurant that I hadn't heard of before last week.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino told the Boston Herald he would work to block Chick-fil-A from opening a restaurant in the city. “You can’t have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against a population,” Menino said.

Bullshit!

There's no evidence whatsoever that Chick-fil-A is "discriminating" against anyone in their business practices, at least not in a way that is applicable under current law. Even though they pretend that they're not, the Cathy family and Chick-fil-A are engaging in political speech.

I can independently choose where I eat fried chicken. I cannot choose to boycott the fucking government. So, when given the choice between supporting the right to engage in speech that I find repugnant and the overwhelming power of the state to suppress said speech, I'll always support the individual right to speech. Each and every time.

In this case, the people of Boston aren't even being given the chance boycott Chick-fil-A because cunts like Menino presume to make it  for them. And that's far more egregious than anything that Don Cathy or Dan Savage can ever do.

My personal opinion is that religion is superstitious, silly and unsupported by empirical evidence, which faith is supposed to be. But the government has the power to compel in ways that religion just doesn't in modern Western societies. I've shown that the Cathy family doesn't know their own fucking Bible half as well as they think they do. But it isn't the government's job to police that.

I'm not going to pretend that social conservatives wouldn't be every bit as hot and bothered if if Chick-fil-A supported gay marriage against their personal beliefs because I know that they would. That, however, is a matter of personal hypocrisy that I never tire of pointing out.

One way or another, the market will deal Chick-fil-A. It is not the function of the government, under Tom Menino or any other shithead, to do so unless they've clearly violated an existing law.

This is why people hate liberals. Whenever there's an issue that reasonable people are dying to get together with them on, they find a way to fuck it up. They make a noisy, stupid fucking spectacle of themselves and, within 72 hours, they insert the government where it doesn't belong.

The very people who are the loudest about stopping bullying are those who would use the unmatchable power of the state to bully dissent into submission.


Special thanks to Popehat and Screed of Momus.

Two solitudes: Why Canadians will stay richer than Americans

I'm constantly amused by people who have no idea what they're talking about getting on TV, which you see a lot of on Fox News. The obvious pride that Fox stuffs into its ignorance, combined with great production values and hot chicks, is what makes the network essentially viewing for me.

Just this morning, I was watching something called Cashin' In, a business affairs show with M*A*S*H's Wayne Rogers as a panelist. Rogers used be Trapper John and is now a Republican mouthpiece who pretends to be a financial analyst.

This week's report that Canadians are wealthier than Americans for the very first time in history was the main point of discussion.

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

As U.S News points out, this isn't the old Canadian dollar, which was only worth about 60 American cents, either. Due to a spectacular free fall of the greenback that began in 2002-'03, the two currencies are at about par and have been for about three years.

By the way, a high Canadian dollar actually hurts our economy. Given that we're an export economy, a higher dollar increases the price of said exports. We're doing better than the Americans in spite of a high dollar, not because of it.

Trapper John was able to hijack the debate by issuing a ton of GOP talking points about corporate taxes that are sort of true, but only sort of. The Cashin' In folks that passed for liberals, and pretty much everyone in the Canadian media, decided that they were only going to tell half the story, as well.

For that reason, Canada is very probably going to stay richer than the United States, which I figure is about five years from the point of no return.

Yes, the Canadian government has cut corporate taxes fairly significantly in recent years, and there's a lot to be said about the competitive edge that those cuts give an economy. On this, Trapper John is actually right, while telling not quite a third of the story. I'm seeing this talking point throughout the American media and blogosphere, so I thought that I'd address it. But I warn you now, it's gonna take a while to explain.

One of the major differences between the United States and Canada is that we could afford to cut corporate taxes. We weren't crazy enough to think that they would spur enough growth that they would they would pay for themselves, which tax cuts by themselves almost never do. Even classical supply-siders will tell you that but modern Republicans won't.

Canada got where it is today over the course of nearly thirty years. It caused a lot of hurt, unspeakable amounts of political upheaval, and intelligent decision making from both of the major parties at the time.

When the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in 1984, our debt problem was as bad or worse than America's is today. The outgoing Liberal Minister of Everything (and future prime minister) Jean Chretien said in public that "we left the cupboard bare." Consecutive Liberal governments between 1963 and 1984 vastly expanded the role - and therefore the cost - of the federal government. They just couldn't be bothered actually paying for it.

Mulroney tried cutting spending, but the opposition Liberal Party made that politically toxic. He instead focused on the revenue side of deficit reduction. First he signed the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which grew the economy and therefore the tax base. Then he instituted a national 7% sales tax, the Goods and Services Tax.

While the constant dollar size of the debt and deficits grew, they began shrinking as a percentage of GDP. They were still unacceptably high, but trending in the right direction.

Of course, the idea of a national sales tax was about as popular as you'd think it would be, and Mulroney's government was reduced to two seats - a drop of 154 out of the then-295 seat Parliament - a few months after his 1993 retirement.

When Chretien took office that year, the international markets forced his hand on the spending side. The Economist was calling for Spain to replace Canada in the G7 and there was a very real fear of a confidence crisis in the market. That would have driven interest rates up and made the situation impossible to correct without a major devaluation of the dollar.And Canada's credit rating actually was downgraded during Chretien's first term.

Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, took an axe to everything, cutting ministries by roughly 25% each. Between those cuts and the Mulroney revenue, not only was the budget balanced by the turn of the century, the government was running surpluses.

And those were real surpluses, not the imaginary ones that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress created out of whole cloth in the late 1990s. Those were the product of the tech bubble and accounting fraud. Even if Bush hadn't passed stunningly large tax cuts and gone to war with everybody, the U.S government still would have gone back into deficit because Clinton and the Republicans hadn't factored unfunded liabilities into their budgets. Plus, they raided the Social Security trust fund to create the mirage of a balanced budget, thereby increasing the unfunded liabilities.

It was only after dramatic revenue enhancements under Mulroney and draconian spending cuts under Chretien that subsequent prime ministers Paul Martin and Stephen Harper even thought of cutting corporate taxes. Had it been done during the Mulroney or early Chretien years, it would have only ballooned our crippling deficits and shaken market confidence to the point that we couldn't service our debt anymore.

Then there's the more recent history to consider. Unlike the United States, the Canadian government didn't allow the banking and housing markets to become huge under-funded and over-leveraged casinos that were born to fail.

Like most conservatives, I supported the push for Canadian banking deregulation a decade ago. I was wrong and Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were right. Canadian banks are temperamentally more conservative than their foreign counterparts, so I doubt that they would have over-leveraged themselves in a whirlwind of idiotic derivatives trading that even they didn't understand. But the proposed mega-mergers at the time would have created Too Big To Fail institutions that would have dwarfed even America's as a percentage of our economy.

What the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act did wasn't so much "unleash the economy" as it let the banks become really fat guys who had to be taken out of their apartments by a crane because they were stuck to the couch.

Nor did Canada ever get the insane idea that absolutely everybody in the country had to own their own home, regardless of their ability to actually pay for it. I was raised by a banker, so I can tell you that things like NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assests) loans would have been unthinkable here, even if they were magically legal. And remember, NINJA loans were a creation of the lenders, not the borrowers. Despite what Republican talking points tell you, there was proportionally very little borrower fraud in the housing crisis.

Canadian law also didn't allow for what amounts to "no money down" mortgages, and those rules have only gotten tighter since the Great Collapse of Ought-Eight. Canadian homeowners can't even deduct their mortgage interest from their taxes. Granted, no other sane country on Earth allows that, either.

We didn't reap the benefits of the housing and banking bubbles, but we didn't lose our shirts when those bubbles burst.

Exactly no one in the United States is proposing anything close to what the Canadian experience demonstrably proved can work. Even the most liberal of Democrats are suggesting minuscule revenue increases by the letting the Bush tax cuts expire only on the wealthy, when they should all expire, including those for the middle class. And Republicans are demanding huge, unaffordable tax cuts up front and not cutting real program or entitlement spending for more than a decade.

When proposed spending cuts and entitlement reform are that far in the future, one can safely assume that they'll never happen at all. The idea of trusting a kid to eat his broccoli after he has his ice cream is so idiotic that even those most negligent parent knows it. And yes, I do understand that I just compared the American government to a spoiled child.

Worse still, the short term (ten-year) cost of entitlement reform would be so high that it would negate the possible (and incredibly optimistic) benefits of the tax cuts. Remember that George W. Bush's Social Security reform plan would have cost a trillion dollars over ten years, and there's no reason to believe that Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms would cost less.

Former President Bush's institute this week put out a laughable book that suggests that America can just grow it's way out of the problem. The only problem is that it assumes a significantly higher average annual rate of growth (4-5%) than the United States has enjoyed since the end of World War II (3.2%.) And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of wishful thinking that put America where it is today.

Unlike what Republican politicians tell you, this isn't 1980. The problem then was unsustainable inflation, which was only broken by dramatically high interest rates that caused a brutal recession. The Reagan tax cuts might have spurred growth after the 1982-'84 recession, but they did so at the cost of tripling the deficit.

For my liberal friends, it isn't 1932, either. Revenue generation alone, as we saw during the Mulroney era in Canada, isn't going to do the trick. Things on your end of the ledger are going to have to change in a big, bad way.

Unless you want them to disappear entirely, entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security are going to have to be means-tested immediately, accompanied with an increase in the retirement age to at least 70. Both are going to have to treated like the middle-class welfare that they are, since the contributions being made to current retirees only barely match the costs. If you want to avoid outright privatization, costs are going to have to dramatically cut.

Oh, and don't look to everybody else for sympathy. Their 401(k) plans got annihilated in the market meltdown four years ago, including those right on the threshold of retirement.

In the very near future, public employee contracts regarding pensions and health care - which are rapidly bankrupting the states - are going to have to be renegotiated in good faith. Public workers going to have to pay dramatically more into their benefit plans. If they don't, current retirees, who really can't fend for themselves, are going to take it in the neck soon.The fact that mid-size American municipalities and counties are already going into bankruptcy is a bad sign. It's just a matter of time before enire states follow them into the rathole. And stop pretending that you can make more in the private sector. That hasn't been true in quite a while now.

You know what? Unlike what most politicians will tell you, now is precisely the time to do it. No politician is going to attack the free lunch mentality when times are good. Any time reform is mentioned in a time of prosperity, that reform s said to threaten an economic downturn. The way I see it, consumer demand isn't going to rebound the the U.S economy for probably a decade, so now might be an ideal time to go with austerity.

But that's never going to happen. As opposed to the Canadian experience in the 1980s and 90s, no one party is going to have the political majority needed to enact a holistic reform of the taxation and entitlement system. The reforms then necessarily have to be bipartisan, and that just isn't going to happen.

Canada gave its governing parties the electoral mandates to carry out the reforms that it did, and it had fifteen years in which to do them. Even then it was painful and politically unpopular. It wasn't easy for the Progressive Conservatives to create a national sales tax, and it lead to to the biggest political debacle in history that I'm aware of. The only reason the Chretien Liberals survived making the cuts that they did was the absence of a unified opposition at the time. God knows that Harper spent enough money once the Liberals fell apart.

No one in the United States, of either party, has the time or the will to do what's necessary before it's too late.

Trapper John won't tell you that. I just did.

The last victim of a shooting: Logic

Pictured to the left are Joshua Yassay, 23, and Shyanne Charles, 14. They were shot to death on Monday night on Danzig Street, in the east end of Toronto. I wrote about the incident here.

If a shooting is gang-related, you can bet that it's drug-related in some way.

On Tuesday I looked at the situation and offered what I believe to be the most conservative and cost-effective solution possible: End the drug war, which only increases the profitability of the trade, draws more people into it, and makes violence inevitable.

Drug use in and of itself is a victimless crime. It's the criminalization of drugs that creates victims like Joshua Yassay and Shyanne Charles. The problem isn't guns, it's the creation of a black market where guns are the tools to resolve "business disputes." Pharmacists, liqour store owners and people that sell cigarettes don't have a history of shooting at one another and killing innocent children in the crossfire. Any objective study of the issue will tell you that drugs don't hurt anywhere near as many people as drug laws do.

Social conservatives don't like my ideas because anything that doesn't dramatically expand the reach of government (and in Canada, the federal government) through the criminal law. For people who proclaim themselves champions of individual freedom, they sure do like having a lot of things criminalized.

As I expected, pretty much everyone has piped up with moronic ideas of how to address the problem of gang violence. I don't expect that any of them will work, and some of them are ineffective while being incredibly expensive.

In The Toronto Star yesterday, columnist Joe Fiorto (who I happen to think is a good writer and a well-meaning guy) wrote that the problem is that the city isn't spending enough on youth employment and daycare.

The mayor says a job is the best social program of all. He is right. There, I said it.

Trouble is, he says one thing and does another.

The City of Toronto is the biggest employer of youth in the province, at least during the summer, and yet the mayor has blithely overseen cuts to city spending on recreation and other services.

The mayor should put my tax money where his mouth is — summer jobs are a form of crime prevention.

Here’s another example of soft money stopping crime: kids need daycare, especially kids from priority neighbourhoods. Why?

Because kids who are not nurtured at home do not easily let themselves be nurtured; kids who are not nurtured will have learning problems and will never learn unless they get remedial help; kids who are not read to at home tend not to cherish reading, which also limits learning; kids who don’t learn as well as others will tend towards behavioural problems; and yes, kids who learn less, earn less.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you want to stop crime, do two things: stop cutting social programs, and start building daycare centres.

The mayor is an idiot - dangerously ignorant, in fact. But I'll get to that later.

Jobs are great, but they're an ineffective crime prevention program so long as crime pays better than an honest day's work does, especially if you have limited opportunities in the legitimate job market.

As for reading and daycare, I'm inclined to agree that they're desirable. However, there's absolutely no evidence that gangbangers are stupid. The evidence shows that drug dealers, which most gang members are, are actually pretty adept at things like accounting. Their biggest issue seems to be conflict resolution, and that's a problem that the market the law created is responsible for.

Then my dipshit mayor, Etobicoke Slim, popped off and managed to demonstrate that he's even dumber than I thought he was, which is plenty.

He started by demanding harsher sentences from gun crimes, which is fine. As I said on Monday, I'm for that, too.

But he goes so much further than that, to the point that even the layman can easily recognize what a ridiculous little turd of a thinker Hizzoner is.

“I want meetings, I want something to be done. I want these people out of the city and I’m not going to stop. Not put them in jail and then come back and you can live in the city. No, I want them out of the city. Go somewhere else, I don’t want them living in the city anymore,” said Mr. Ford, who toured the scene of the Danzig Street shooting Tuesday. “It looked like a war zone,” he said. “There was blood on the concrete, there was paramedic gloves. It just tore my heart apart, and I just thought this is not the city we live in.” (emphasis mine.)

Good luck with that, Rob.

It's a very Soviet idea, internal exile. I'll give him that. But I can't imagine that any other community in the country is going to appreciate winding up with our scumbags. And it's not like Toronto isn't already unpopular enough in the rest of the country.

Oh, and it's unconstitutional. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically grants mobility rights for Canadian citizens.

6. (1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.

Rights to move and gain livelihood

(2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right

(a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and

(b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

It stands to reason that if citizens, which include convicted criminals, have the right to live and work in any province, it follows that they can do so in any city therein. Mayor Ford might not like that, but nobody's asking him to. On the other hand, if he knows so little about constitution, which hasn't exactly been hidden from him since 1982, maybe he shouldn't be mayor at all.

Then he mused that our immigration laws can somehow be used to address the problem, which unequivocally proves that he has no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

This is because Canadian immigration law already works that way. As a matter of fact, the federal government has recently made it significantly harder for criminal aliens to even appeal deportation orders.

It gets even better. Or worse, depending entirely on how much you like laughing at Rob Ford.

Ford was the lone member of council to vote against $16 million in community grants last week. He told Bynon that such social spending is not effective as a solution to youth violence.
“It’s a proven fact that when we had the most murders in the city, it was the same time that we had the most grants. I think we handed out over $50 million that year in grants. Throwing money at the problem, and having these, I call ‘hug-a-thug programs,’ they just do not work,” he said.

Ford’s stated “fact” is incorrect. Homicides peaked in post-amalgamation Toronto in 2007, with 86. The Community Partnership and Investment Program, which handles grants, had a budget of about $42 million that year. CPIP’s budget rose in future years as homicides dropped steadily; it gave out a high of $47 million in grants in 2011, when the city recorded 48 homicides, the fewest since amalgamation.

There's even more about Ford's Council votes, even when "free money" is on the table.

Mayor Rob Ford was the only member of council to vote against accepting $350,000 from the federal government for a year-long gang intervention project that will not cost the city anything.

Council voted 33-1 on Thursday to accept the funding from Ottawa’s National Crime Prevention Centre. Ford’s vote, which he did not explain, baffled even conservative allies like Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday.

“It’s free money,” Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, another conservative, said when asked why he voted in favour. “Why would you turn down $350,000?”

(...)

Ford made his name as a principled, penny-pinching council contrarian who regularly found himself voting alone or with few others. He has occasionally cast solo votes as mayor, such as when he voted last year against $7.2 million in grants to community groups — some of which work to prevent violence — and against accepting $100,000 from the province for HIV and syphilis screening.

He said then: “Everyone says it's provincial money. No. It's taxpayers' money. So, you know what? In the big picture, they say it doesn't cost the city a dime. Well, it costs people money.”

He also voted against accepting a provincial offer of no-cost public health nurses, saying he didn’t want the city to eventually be stuck paying their salaries — though the health minister said the provincial funding was ongoing. He changed his mind after council guaranteed the nurses would be laid off if the funding ever expired.

Of course, Ford isn't all that "principled"  about asking the province for "taxpayer's money" this week. He wants the province to fund more cops for the city because he won't pay for it out of his own budget.

That raises and interesting question. If Ford's so concerned about the taxpayers of, say, Sudbury (which is well outside of his mandate) when it comes to public health screening, why shouldn't he be just as vigilant about gang violence? After all, the Danzig Street shootings aren't Sudbury's problem, are they?

The fact is that Ford isn't at all "principled." If the spending goes toward something that he doesn't like, he's more than willing to demagogue the issue of provincial spending. But if it fits his priorities, then he not only demands the subsidy from other taxpayers, he threatens to unleash his retarded and nonexistent "Ford Nation" on the provincial government. Notice how that didn't make Tim Hudak premier? I did.

I resent that he's described as a "conservative" because he isn't. He's an opportunistic showboat who isn't above spending billions of dollars of other people's money, but only when it benefits him politically.

I would describe Rob Ford as cynical, but that would imply that I think he's smart enough for cynicism.

Bain damage: Can the GOP really be this sad?

Remember when Mitt Romney was romping around the country, stomping his enemies without mercy and repeating Conan the Barbarian's moto about what is best in life? It was only about four months ago but, Christ, it feels much longer.

The fact that it took Romney as long as it did to put away the seven dwarves - easily the single greatest collection of misfits ever to run for the Republican nomination -convinced me that he was in serious trouble in the general election.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he's a pro. He won't be put to sleep halfway as easy as retards like Michele Bachmann, psychopathic idiots like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum, stoned morons like Rick Perry and syphllitic monsters like Newt Gingrich were. Three quarters of them - including Cain - sounded as though they were running for the presidency of the Confederate States of America. And it still took Romney four months to take them down.

If there's one thing that the Governor's primary season competitors from 2008 and this year have in common, it's that they all think that he's a skunk. A few of them have even said so in public, none more so than Newt Gingrich, who has a natural instinct to find a like-minded skull-fucking sleazebag. It's the kind of thing you can read about in National Geographic, if you're so inclined.

Romney's response at the time was "Stop whining." And you know what? He was right. To quote the late Finley Peter Dunne, "politics ain't beanbag."

Of course, Mitt's a much more rugged individual when he's dishing it out. He's not nearing as good at taking it. Ultimately, that's going to kill him. You can ignore Rick Perry and bury him in money because Rick Perry is a joke. A sitting president of the United States? Not so much.

On January 5, 2008 - five and half years ago - I wrote that Mitt Romney was virtually unelectable. One of his chief problems, I said at the time, would be Bain Capital.

Romney has a serious problem with his business record that I'm surprised that other Republican candidates haven't exploited yet.

You see, when a successful businessman runs for office, he does so by pointing out all of the wonderful jobs he created. As the CEO of a private equity firm called Bain Capital, Mitt Romney can't exactly do that. One of the things that private equity firms do is buy a company, sell off the pieces individually, and throw all of the employees out of work. One of the main functions of a private equity firm is to create unemployment as a means to maximize shareholder dividends.

While that might be a perfectly acceptable way to run a business in a capitalist system, it poses political issues that are nothing less than enormous. And Mitt has already learned that the hard way. In the '94 Senate race, Ted Kennedy ran an ad featuring the fired employees of an Indiana company that Bain Capital liquidated.

The problem is that Mitt is, on top of being the most unnatural politician since Richard Nixon, he's an unnaturally slow learner.

Not only did I predict that Bain would be serious issue five and half years ago, Ted Kennedy clobbered him over the fucking head with it eighteen years ago.

As recently as February, Gingrich and Rick Perry were describing Romney and Bain as "vulture capitalism." The subsequent Obama and Democratic attacks on that front have been relatively mild compared to what other Republicans said as recently as six months ago.

Romney, unlike most similarly situated politicians, has had two decades to to prepare for the attack that he's facing today. And he just couldn't be bothered to do it. Despite it being used against him in a Senate election and two presidential primaries, he just couldn't be bothered to craft an effective defense against it. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in politics.

If you're a worried Republican out there, don't worry. Pillhead DJs are out there inventing conspiracy theories to save the day!


 

“Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time. The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bain? ...

You may think it’s ridiculous, I’m just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to.”

That's right, fucking Batman is out to get Mitt Romney.

Actually, it gets even better than that.

Conservative commentator Jed Babbin told Secrets, "Now we have the new Batman movie with super-villain Bane, the comic book bad guy who broke the Bat's back. How long will it take for the Obama campaign to link the two, making Romney the man who will break the back of the economy? Romney can't win if he's constantly on the defensive," he said.

Even GOP advisor Frank Luntz jumped into the fray. "Hollywood does it again," he told Secrets. "[Romney] had to know all this was coming and he should have done a lot more to prepare for it."

For the better part of four years, I was almost alone in thinking that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee this year. As recently as January, there was no shortage of Republicans out there convinced that Gingrich, Santorum or a Republican to be named later would kick the shit out of Romney.

Of course it's Hollywood! Hollywood and the homosexual Jews that control it are all-knowing! Omnipotent even! And because they know the Republican nominating process even better than Republicans do, they got together three years ago and threw between $250 and $300 million dollars into a comic book movie project to defeat a guy that was far from a sure thing for winning the nomination.

The GOP should have seen this coming. After all, didn't arch-conservatives Barry Levinson, Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman force President Clinton's penis into a young girl's mouth and his air force into Eastern Europe? It's happened before, and it'll happen again, people! Start paying attention.

For those of you who aren't as politically astute as I am, these aren't just paranoid ravings. I mean, sure, they mostly are.  Limbaugh is a cynical hack who will say anythng to keep his mouth-breathing audience tuned in. This wouldn't be the first instance of his saying something something unbelievanly crazy to keep his morons listening, and it won't be the last.

But when you have serious people like Luntz getting in on the act, it's because they know that their guy is not only losing, but losing badly.

And they're right.

Guns, gangs and the stupidity of everybody

When bad things happen, people get scared and you'd be surprised how quickly scared people transform themselves into stupid people. It's almost like magic!

As my Canadian readers probably already know, there was another shooting incident in Toronto last night. It was a particularly bad one, leaving two dead, nineteen wounded and two injured. It comes just six weeks after the dramatic June 2 shooting at the Eaton Centre that killed two, wounded six and injured one.

Since everybody is currently freaking out and losing all sense of perspective, one thing jumped out at me from the CBC report of the Scarborough shooting last night. "Prior to the shooting on Monday evening, 16 people had been killed in gun-related homicides on the streets of Toronto since January 1, compared to 14 people at the same time last year."

Simply put, we're at about the same place we were last year so far as gun deaths go. It's also noteworthy just how few people are killed by guns in a city of this size. Toronto still has a remarkably low homicide rate. The events are undeniably becoming more spectacular and brazen, but they're also comparatively rare.

Let's compare and contrast for a moment. Toronto, a city of 2,615,060 people, has seen 28 meet a violent end so far this year.  Chicago, home of 2,695,598 souls, has had 228 murdered as of June 16. 27 people in Chicago have been stabbed to death this year, equal to Toronto's entire homicide rate. The North American city closest to Toronto in size has a murder rate nearly ten times ours.

Here's an even better perspective.

For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6).

Aside from a spike in 2005, Toronto's murder rate has been falling since 1991, when it was still only 89 deaths. I'm not sure that Toronto could possibly be safer than it already is.

I addressed this all after the Boxing Day, 2005 murder of poor Jane Creba, but it does bear repeating. God knows that you won't hear it anywhere else.

You would think that those statistics would chill everybody the fuck out. However, we have a media that makes money out of fear, a political class that exploits that fear, and a population that just likes being scared.

I can't really blame journalism - and especially the local news - for it's sleazy "If it bleeds, it leads" ethos. They wouldn't do it if we didn't buy it. That's how capitalism works. People want their own stupidity reinforced as often and as powerfully as possible. It's self-defeating and sad, but what are you going to do?

The political class, however, is something else entirely. They're supposed to know better than the rest of us, and they do. But they consciously exploit our own scared stupidity to further their own retarded agendas. And the agendas on both the Left and the Right are nothing short of monumentally retarded.

Let's start with the Left. We have this guy on City Council named Adam Vaughan. After the Eaton Centre shooting, young Adam got it into his head that banning guns and ammunition would solve all of our social ills, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence to sustain his assertion.

First, the city doesn't have jurisdiction. Gun laws fall under the Criminal Code of Canada. Even if Vaughan's silly "ban" were to pass, who would police it? Who would prosecute infractions? Where would you jail offenders? And who in the fuck would pay for all of the above?

Second, the "hunters" that everybody on both sides of the argument refer to aren't the issue either way. Nobody who knows what they're doing goes hunting with a handgun. And the use of rifles and shotguns in Toronto crimes is incredibly rare. It happens, but not a lot.

Handguns are already tightly regulated in Canada. The most anti-gun jurisdictions in the United States look like they're giving guns away, compared to Canada.

Third, even if you were able to institute a Western European-style ban on handguns, our proximity to the United States would make it meaningless. The Second Amendment to the U.S Constitution, combined with the open border, guarantees that those guns will wind up in our cities. Period.

Mexico has even stronger gun control laws than Canada does. Ask how it's working out for them. Partisan Republican shitheads like to harp about the 600-odd Fast and Furious guns that killed two U.S agents and about 300 Mexicans. But they don't like talking about where the guns that killed the other 47,000 Mexicans since 2006 came from.

As long as the United States - which has as many guns as it does people - continues to exist, gun control laws in Canada and Mexico will be effectively meaningless. The U.S itself has all kinds of laws barring felons from being armed. Notice how well they've worked?

Finally, liberals simply aren't serious. As much as they scream about banning guns, they don't seem all that excited about punishing those who use them in crimes. Most Canadian liberals couldn't be more opposed to the Harper government's recent crime bill that imposed mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes.

I'm of the mind that the Conservative gun sentences aren't tough enough. Were it up to me, if you use a gun in the commission of a crime, you go away for life with no possibility of parole for twenty years, regardless of whether anyone gets hurt or if the gun isn't even fired. If you pull a piece on somebody, I can only conclude that you intend to kill them and figure that you should be treated accordingly. The fact that you're either a bad shot or a pussy shouldn't work in your favour. I would also amend the Criminal Code to prosecute attempted murder under the same sentencing guidelines as murder itself.

The conservative side of the debate is every bit as ridiculous and stoically unserious as the liberals are.

In one of the few things that he's ever been even half-right about, my dipshit of a mayor said “It’s not the hunters, these are gangs. I wish we could get the guns out of the city with respect to these gangs. It is going to be very difficult, but you don’t take it out on hunters and the sportsman show.” Federal Public Safety Minister and celebrated babysitter fetishist Vic Toews backed Ford up, remarking that “The issue isn’t the legality or illegality of bullets or guns. The issue is these guns in the hands of criminals. That needs to be stopped. Our focus has been on focusing on those individuals who in fact are breaking the law.”

They're right. Guns aren't the problem, gangs are. What they ignore is that, short of implementing the police state that Toronto Councillor (and world-class fuckhead) Giorgio Mammolitti has wet dreams about creating, you aren't going to break gangs by law enforcement means.

Law enforcement and academics alike often refer to gangs as "criminal enterprises," which makes sense since they aren't the singing social clubs that West Side Story would have you believe. Anyone who knows anything will tell you that the point of an enterprise, criminal or otherwise, is to make money.

The single economic biggest driver of street gangs (and other criminal enterprises that aren't the fucking banks) is drugs.

This is something that I addressed a couple of years ago. The more the government presses on drug criminalization, the greater the risk to those involved in it. The greater the risk is, the higher the profits are when demand doesn't shrink, which it isn't often known to do. When you combine high profits with illegal demand, insane levels of violence are unavoidable. That's especially true when economic downturns actually do create a shrinking market. In a shrinking market, a gang (like any other enterprise) will fight to maintain its share of the market, or increase it at the expense of competitors.

For people that pride themselves on being champions of the capitalism, right-wingers these days don't know very much about it.

The other side of the Harper Tories' crime bill created mandatory minimums for drug offenses. Coupled with the firearms side of the law, that makes drug trafficking more risky, thereby increasing price and profits. Assuming that the Great Recession drove down consumer demand for drugs (which is fair, since it drove down demand for everything else), that redoubles the determination with which gangs will fight for the remaining profits.

Again, the experience of the banks leading up to the financial crisis is instructive. When a market, like the housing bubble, creates irresistible profit opportunities, people will create opportunities to exploit them to maximum effect even when they defy common sense. The Mafia famously stayed away from drugs because they feared the response from law enforcement, but only until the potential profit from the drug trade became too great for them to ignore.

Gun violence in the drug trade creates a government response that punishes both guns and drugs, but naturally drives the profitability of both and thereby increases the incentive to engage in them. This increases the potential for violence as the stupidity spirals upwards. If you expect gangs to act more responsibly than banks to the lure of guaranteed profit, you might just be too fucking dumb to debate..

Gang gun violence is driven almost exclusively by the profitability of the drug market. Deny the gangs that profit, and I can almost assure you that the gun violence will gradually diminish. There is now forty years of Drug War experience that shows that law enforcement can't solve the problem. Simple logic instructs us that the free market can.

Of course, mere decriminalization can't accomplish that, since it would leave the market in the hands of the criminals. Selective legalization won't do it, either. Marijuana legalization will just increase the efforts of criminals to expand the market of drugs that we already know are the most dangerous because of criminalization. You need to go all the way, including cocaine and heroin.

On the other hand, if you legalize cocaine and heroin, the meth epidemic pretty much evaporates. I'm willing to wager that folks won't be willing snort battery acid when given a safer, afforable alternative. But the methamphetamine experience should also teach us all something. When people can figure out how to get high from a wildly combustible combination of Sudafed and battery acid in response to existing drug laws, those drug laws will never work.

When federal control over pseudoephedrine at your local pharmacy has to be established under an anti-terrorism law, all hope of rationally defeating recreational drug use is forever lost. And even those draconian measures haven't stopped gang violence, or even significantly decreased it. They've just created a failed prison industry and forever ruined millions of lives. The law is now more dangerous to the individual than even drugs are.

Finally, the last three presidents of the United States have either admitted to using marijuana or cocaine, or specifically refused to deny it. That being the case, what's a parent supposed to tell his or her fucking kid - "Don't do that or you might wind up being president someday?" The question is even more complicated by the fact that the majority of parents have used recreational drugs, and many continue to do so.

When three admitted or suspected drug users in a row are elected Leader of the Free World, I think that you can rather safely argue that we've crossed the Rubicon of the social acceptability of drug use.

We couldn't build a more perfectly retarded construct around the drug issue if we tried. The situation is such that now the only people who benefit from it are politicians, cops and gangbangers. You sure as fuck don't, and neither did the people on Danzig Street last night. Or the thousands of people in the Eaton Centre last month. Or anyone in Chicago at any given time.

People (and especially conservatives) are going to have to sit down and start thinking about what they prefer: statist, puritanical government regulation of what free people do to their own bodies, or finally doing something to stop innocent people from being shot at neighborhood barbecues.