"The Smell of Death's Around You" : Rob Ford & That Poll

Note to my non-Toronto readers: Look, I know that there a lot more of you here than my fellow denizens of Hogtown. over half of you aren't even Canadian.

I never thought that I'd writing a blog primarily focused on local politics, and for years you wouldn't have known where I lived at all. That changed with the rise, spectacular fall and possible resurrection of Mayor Rob Ford.

It's a pretty compelling story, and one I can't easily ignore. Everything about the man perfectly fits into this blog's narrative of what's happening to conservatism. I'm horrified by it and in love with it, all at once.

I'm getting quite the reaction from my musings here, but I understand how it can be a little "inside baseball" if you don't actually live here. As always, I appreciate your continued patience.

Thanks,

skippy

They say that the numbers don't lie, and I generally believe that. I spent the better part of two months pointing out that Republicans were kidding themselves with "skewed polls" in this month's presidential election. Polling, for the most part, is generally right and a useful tool. Were it not, nobody would use it. And political and journalistic types pay obscene amounts of money for polling.

Having said that, I do take issue with hypothetical political polling.  Politics is far too fluid a game to reasonably make judgements on hypotheticals. In Toronto's last mayoral campaign, for example, Adam Giambrone was supposed to clear the liberal field early, take on either John Tory or Rob Ford and save the day for David Miller's strange legacy. Then we learned of his love of hot. strange pussy and his campaign folded within days of it beginning. But, for about ten minutes, he was the Golden Child, at least on paper.

We don't know that there's going to be a by-election to fill the judicially created vacancy in the mayor's office. I prefer that there isn't, and every right-leaning member councillor that isn't named Ford seems to agree with me.

As is true with most things, it depends on what the liberal plurality on City Council chooses to do. If Ford isn't granted a stay, they can either force a by-election, which is clearly in their interest, or they can bypass Doug Holyday and create open warfare.

As indicated by this morning's Angus Reid poll, Mayor Ford's numbers are nightmarish. Contrary to everything I've heard since Monday, both here and elsewhere, there is overwhelming support for getting rid of Etobicoke Slim once and for all. Not having poked around the internals of the poll, the numbers look even worse than I ever expected them to be.

In an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll conducted after Ford was kicked out of office on Monday — he is now appealing — 69 per cent of respondents said they supported Justice Charles Hackland’s decision, 49 per cent of them strongly. That’s compared to 27 per cent who opposed the ruling, 16 per cent of them strongly.

Ford may not be permitted to run in a byelection. If he is, he will have to face an electorate that has solidified in its antipathy to him. Fifty-seven per cent of poll respondents said they would “definitely” not vote for Ford in a byelection. Another 11 said they would “probably” not vote for him.

Though Ford is renowned for his “nation” of devotees, the poll suggests that his opponents are now more enthusiastic than his supporters. A mere 16 per cent of respondents said they would definitely vote for him, 11 per cent said they would probably vote for him.

Ford’s favourability rating was also dismal. Only 28 per cent said they had a positive impression of him, 67 per cent a negative impression. NDP MP and potential candidate Olivia Chow’s numbers were nearly the opposite: 60 per cent had a positive impression of her, 24 per cent negative.

(Since this poll was published, Mr. Justice Hackland struck "the current term" language from his ruling, therefore qualifying the Mayor to run in a by-election.)

Ouch.

For two years now, I've been making the case that the supposed "Ford Nation" doesn't exist. His election was based entirely based on a heavily divided field opposing him and his ability to (falsely) portray himself as a conservative.

This poll should divided into two parts: The removal of Ford (along with his personal numbers,) and the hypothetical horserace.

Nearly three-quarters of those polled (69%,) to one degree or another, supports removing him from office. His re-elect numbers are better by a single point.

Here's the dirty little secret of populism: you need to actually be popular for it to work. Absent a strong personality cult, populism - on either the left or the right - is a hodgepodge of nonsensical policies that actually work against one another.

Ford's 2010 campaign was a perfect example of that. He ran on the idea that you could build a $100 billion subway system and pay for it by cutting $75, 000 of gardening at Nathan Philips Square. Not only did he promise during his campaign that he wouldn't cut city services, he said that he might actually increase them.

That was horseshit, and all but the most delusional Sun Media mavens now know it. And Ford's numbers haven't exactly been great for over a year now.

I'm not going to pretend that 69% of the city supports the points of law on Hizzoner's removal, or even knows what the facts of the case even are. I'd guess that half of them have no understanding whatsoever about either. Nor does it matter. Ignorant assholes decide elections all the time.

They just want Robbie gone.  And in the big, bad world out there, that's all that matters.

I'll grant you that there is a path to victory for the mayor, but that relies almost entirely on the kindness of his enemies.

Rob Ford begins any hypothetical race with the support of the 20% of people who also believe that supermodels will blow them if they only get to know them. They will buy anything the Ford family has to say. You don't get more rock-solid than that vote. If it was found that the Mayor was butchering prostitutes and burying them in the park he wanted to buy, they'd applaud him for "cleaning up the streets."

These people really do think that taking TTC buses out of service for his dopey football team or demanding to fix the road in front of the family business was perfectly justifiable. That's the personality cult of populism talking. (See also Long, Huey.) Who needs a "gravy train," when you can comandeer a couple of city buses?

If the left acts like the left and runs a half dozen "bitter-ender" candidates, it's at least conceivable that Etobicoke Slim runs up the middle and wins. That's basically what happened the last time. Former provincial health minister George Smitherman was also a less than ideal main opposition candidate, even though he was backed by the brains and the money of the institutional Conservative parties of both Ontario and Canada.

And that, my friends, is where Olivia Chow comes in.

Chow isn't going to run as herself. That'll never work. Instead, she's going to run as the anointed spiritual successor to the recented sainted Jack Layton. I can't imagine her giving a speech where her late husband's name isn't invoked at least a dozen times. If you think that's not going to carry some serious weight, you're kidding yourselves.

That begs the question; how do liberal candidates run against the ghost of Jack while remaining committed to liberal orthodoxy. Olivia also benefits from the fact that liberals hate Ford far more than they hate one another, the exact opposite phenomenon from what have saved Stephen Harper over and over again.

Then there's what Richard Nixon called the "nut-cutting" of politics.

Rob Ford got beaten in the Old City of Toronto and won with concentrated support in the suburbs. But the northern and eastern rings of the city are heavily Asian. Off of the top of m head, there are probably a half-dozen wards that Chow could win with the support of the Chinese community alone, mine included.

In a clean head-to-head race, I can't see how Ford beats Chow. And after 2010, I don't see a bitter ender like Joe Pantalone staying in the race through election day.

So here's the question for conservatives: Do you love Rob Ford more than you fear Olivia Chow?

If she runs, (which is a significant if,) my guess is that she'll probably win on the basis on her name, who her husband was and the demographics of the city.

The only way to plausibly stop her is by "bigfooting" Ford out of the race.

That means John Tory. If you combine Tory's vote with Ford's, you have 44%, which is more than enough to win under almost any scenario. And given how the right feels about Olivia Chow,  I can't imagine that they wouldn't vote for Tory.

But given the Angus-Reid numbers, I can see a whole lot of Tory's voters going to Chow, if only to get rid of Ford.

That being the case, I think that if Tory indicated his willingness to run, Ford's money and support would evaporate overnight. I for one wouldn't vote for a Ford, except in a recall. I very much would vote for John Tory, especially if that meant stopping Olivia Chow.

But would I be more comfortable with Chow than Ford? Probably. I wouldn't vote for her, but at least I know that her administration wouldn't be best with personal embarrassment, personal entitlement and constant court appearances.

The fact is that I don't see Olivia Chow being any better than Rob Ford on mt priorities, but I don't see her being any worse, either. The difference is that I can see conservative governance coming back after Chow, and that's a fool's errand with Ford.

Again, I will go absolutely apeshit if a monstrously expensive and essentially meaningless election is forced on the city that puts in a mayor that basically has six months to do nothing at all. Not only will I refuse to support any candidate that does that, I will never vote for them again and agitate against them to the fullest extent of my ability.

But, as of this morning, the Ford brothers should start being awfully careful what they wish for. They just might get it, and I suspect it won't end the way they think it will.

It Keeps Growing and Growing: The Ballad of Stu Stevens and Demographic Death

It was pretty clear by 11:00 pm on November 6 that the Republican Party was having a bad night. That shouldn't have been a huge surprise to anyone, but GOP true believers had been living in an alternate reality for months and had thoroughly convinced themselves that faith mattered more than math, which tells you everything you need to know about the party. It was actually really funny to watch.

Everybody pretty much stopped paying attention after Mitt Romney conceded Florida two days after the election, but something odd was still happening. Barack Obama's vote kept growing.

This is important because Republicans everywhere are continuing to insist that Obama has no mandate, despite winning more popular and electoral votes than George W. Bush and a greater share of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did.

The margins are getting hard to argue with though.

 Obama’s victory was more decisive than Bush’s in ’04: And here’s one final observation about the 2012 race. Per the excellent work by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, Obama’s national lead over Romney continues to expand as votes keep on coming in. It’s now Obama 50.9%, Romney 47.4%. That’s a bigger (and more decisive) margin than Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 (which was Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.2%). What’s more, the president’s lead has grown to close to 3 points in Ohio, 4 points in Virginia and 6 points in Colorado. One doesn’t win Colorado by six points without winning swing voters; there isn’t a big-enough Democratic base to make that argument.

When I made my prediction on November 2, I was upfront about giving Colorado to Obama based solely on a gut feeling I had. I awarded New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado out of a sense of caution and pity, but I also said that I wouldn't be at all surprised if all three went to Obama.

I was privately telling friends, just as I was telling you, that this race would be between 3 and 5 points for the President, and he wound up winning by 3.5%. But the shocker is Colorado, where I never would have predicted a six point margin of victory. That's a huge margin for a swing state that every poll aggregator listed as too close to call right up until election day.

By all rights, the GOP should have gone into this year expecting to pick up a net of three or four Senate seats. Indeed, I only downgraded my prediction over the summer. But they underperformed even beyond my expectations, losing a net of two seats.

Then there's the House, where Nancy Pelosi was hallucinating when she said that they would win 25 seats and control. Redistricting after 2010 was never going to allow for that. But I figured that the Tea Party, which is concentrated in the House of Representatives, was unpopular enough that the Democrats could pick up between two and five seats. Instead, the won eight, taking out Tea Party heroes Allen West and Joe Walsh in the process and coming awfully close to beating Michele Bachmann. Up-and-coming Tea Party star Mia Love, who was supposed to be anointed rather than elected, lost her race in Utah.

As those House races are being finalized, I find myself reminded of 1998, when the GOP was supposed to pick up something like 20 or 30 House seats in the wake of the Clinton fellatio scandal. When the Republicans wound up only winning five, Newt Gingrich was forced to resign by the end of the week.

Having said all of that, I don't blame Mitt Romney for this. Did he make a number of unforced errors? Absolutely, although it is hilarious that he wound with 47% of the vote. As I've said over and over again, Romney was probably the best candidate running that wasn't Jon Hunstman, who was never going to be nominated. To this day, no one has been able to tell me which declared candidate was going to do better than Romney did.

Presidential nominees also don't historically have "reverse coattails" in Congress. George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis all lost by much wider margins than Romney did, but the Democrats held on the House. Even as George H.W Bush was losing the presidency, the GOP managed to pick up congressional seats.

This is different, but don't try telling Romney's chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, that.

There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?

Yes, the Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day. 

While I'll grant you that Mr. Stevens does an awesome job of self-justification, the numbers suggest something different.

Having an African-American at the top of the ticket does not cause a disaster like the GOP faced in the Senate, nor does it cause the party to lose more House seats than it should have. The spread in Ohio shouldn't have been three points and Colorado most definitely shouldn't have been six.

I've been saying for years now that the strongest thing Barack Obama had going for him was the lack of a primary or a third-party challenge from the left. Without those two things, an incumbent president would have had to be Herbert Hoover to lose. Everybody sing it with me, "Incumbent presidents don't often lose."

As for Obama's money, the abandonment of federally funded presidential races pretty much guarantees that every major party nominee is going to have at least a billion dollars. With Citizens United as the law of the land, the starting cost for a presidential election is going to be about $6 billion. So what?

To be fair, Stevens isn't wrong, at least not historically. But the changing demographics of America are making the history irrelevant. Since 1964, Republicans have relied on the white vote more than they should. But as James Carville explains, that's no longer tenable.

Even Democrats thought the Republicans would have more success in turning out people who hate Obama. But according to the numbers, Romney's vote may not even match McCain's. Why weren't people fired up and ready to go on the right-wing side?

It looks like the turnout was a little down. What was surprising to me is the model they used for the white vote. The white vote in '08 was 74 percent of the vote, and that's what they were counting on this time. But according to population trends, the white vote should be 72 percent – and it actually came in at 72. And it will be under 70 in 2016. What the Republicans have is some form of a progressive disease, like diabetes – it's just going to keep getting worse until they address it.

The demographics are a creeping cancer for them, in other words.

Yes. Every four years, the white vote goes to minus two – and it's picking up steam. From 1948 to 1992, it went from 91 to 87 percent. From '92 to 2016, it's going to go from 87 to 70.

Combine that with the youth vote. It was 54 percent for Kerry, and it was 66 for Obama in '08. This year it was 60 for Obama. Remember, the greatest predictor of how you're going to vote when you're 54 is how you voted when you're 24.

The Republicans don't have any choice but to deal with this. The question is how they deal with it. Older whites are like bloody marys when you have a hangover – you just have to go back to them, but eventually they're going to catch up with you. You go down to the hotel lobby and say, "I'm shaking – I have to have a bloody mary." The Republicans keep drinking them, and they're very productive in off years, like 2010.

I'm not even sure that the white vote is going to create tsunamis like 2010 for very much longer. Redistricting and gerrymandering has pretty much locked in the House for the next decade, give or take maybe ten seats. And it should be remembered that suicidal Tea Party primaries were causational in the GOP under performing in a wave year, like 2010.

The trend in Republican primaries isn't as likely to reverse as it to accelerate. As older and whiter voters become even more powerful in primaries, the candidates they nominate are likely to be less and less electable in general elections. In the last two cycles, the party has thrown away perfectly good Senate seats for no reason at all. My prediction is that you'll see more lunatic Republican general election candidates like Todd Aikin, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller, not fewer of them. 

Look no further than what the activist wing of the party is proposing. They now want to take out Senator Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia primary. And Georgia is getting a lot closer than it has any business being. John McCain only won it by 8 points four years ago, and Mitt Romney did marginally worse. George W. Bush won Georgia by twelve points in 2000 and seventeen four years later. If dragging the party further to the populist right is showing diminishing returns in Georgia, imagine how well it'll work everywhere else.  If they succeed in beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, I now predict that seat will go to a Democrat.

Scott Brown was pushed by the Tea Party to the point that Elizabeth Warren was elected. Olympia Snowe was so frustrated with the idiot wing of the party that she quit altogether and essentially gave her seat to Angus King. That's six seats, enough for the majority. If Lisa Murkowski didn't choose to caucus with the GOP out of the goodness of her heart, it would have been seven. And Republicans were lucky that Arlen Specter lost the Democratic primary after he was forced out of the GOP because he might have held that seat, too, bringing the total to eight.

Conservatives are no making the same stupid mistake that liberals used to. They're subtracting from the electorate and thinking they can win, while the other side is adding to it. If you want to know why the Democrats lost seven out ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, look no further than that. But the Republicans won the popular vote in only one of the last six, which is an even more worrying trend.

Instead of looking at what I've just written seriously, Stu Stevens writes an op-ed for the Washington Post that basically says, "Don't worry. We just lost to a colored with bank. It happens." That sounds a lot like "The fundamentals remain strong." But they aren't, as anyone with a passing familiarity with math can tell you.

Yes, Romney won the middle class. Yippie! But the middle class in America has been diminishing for twenty years now, largely evaporating with the manufacturing base that created it in the first place. Bringing the middle class back to the level of the electorate that they were in just 1996 is going to require levels of economic growth so unrealistic that it looks more like wishful thinking than political strategy.

Not only did Romney hit a historic low with non-Cuban Hispanics, the GOP lost Cubans for the first time that I'm aware of. And not only are they continuing to lose blacks (by 93%), Jews (by 31) and Catholics (by 7), they're losing Asians, too (by 26).

All of those groups are growing as a percentage of the population, and several are concentrated in key swing states, like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado.  Ignore all the nonsense of national polls showing a "50-50 country." The Electoral College and the composition of the Senate make that meaningless.

You're starting to hear the right noises from some factions of the GOP, but I fully expect them to be drowned out or threatened into silence within about a month, maybe two.

If you think "We don't have to change anything" is a sound political strategy, I look forward to seeing what the future has in store for you.

The Ford Follies Redux: So What's Next?

In the days since Mayor Rob Ford was ordered removed from office for having violated the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, the outrage from conservative quarters has been selective, ironic and more than a little enlightening.

I agree with those that suggest that "the punishment doesn't fit the crime," although they're silly on the facts, the law, and everything they've said about politicians who aren't Rob Ford.

Outright removal does seem rather drastic but those that are morally affronted by this are the very people who usually loathe judicial discretion and want it limited by legislation to the maximum possible extent. Indeed, virtually all of Ford's supporters in this case also support Stephen Harper's criminal justice reforms that impose mandatory minimum sentences. 

Well, once Ford was found in breach of the MCIA, Justice Hackland had no discretion. The Act itself doesn't allow for anything less than removal. The Court showed as much leniency as it could in not disqualifying Hizzoner from running past the expiration of his current term.

The MCIA was passed in 1990 and all three provincial parties have subsequently had majority governments and ample opportunity to amend or rescind it. None did, and that at least implies consensus. Indeed, the MCIA could have been revisited by Queen's Park when the Stronger City of Toronto for a Stronger Ontario Act was passed in 2005, but it wasn't. Mike Harris could have changed it under the 1998 amalgamation, but he didn't.

I also have grave doubts that Ford supporters would have the same level of disgust if a liberal politician found themselves in their guy's position. Mayor Ford's supporters are all about "law and order," except when they aren't.

The outrage is therefore more than a little selective and a lot hypocritical.

As I mentioned after the Court's ruling Monday, I see little prospect for success in Ford's promised appeal. The facts of the case and the law couldn't be clearer. I'm not an attorney, but I see no realistic chance that the verdict will be overturned. For that reason, a stay on removal should not be granted during the process.

I'm also of the qualified opinion that there should be no by-election to replace Ford. By the time such an election is finally held, there will be less than 18 months of the term remaining. It will be a titanic waste of $7 million that Ford himself has spent years saying that the city doesn't have.

My qualification on a by-election is based on what City Council chooses to do. Ideally, Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday - a solid, respected member of Council, a Ford ally and a conservative - will be appointed to replace Ford. If Holyday is named acting mayor, "the will of the people" isn't fundamentally altered and another city-wide is unnecessary. But for the fact that Holyday can actually get along with others and maybe accomplish something without turning the city upside down, nothing fundamentally changes. It also stands to reason that the post of deputy mayor exists only for circumstances such as this.

And if Rob Ford is so beloved, there should be nothing stopping him from winning another term in 2014.

Furthermore, on the outside chance that Ford's appeal is successful, Holyday can step aside with no muss or fuss. That might not be true of a mayor elevated in a by-election. Then you would have two elected mayors. It should also be noted that the consensus of opinion - including the city's own lawyer - is that Justice Hackland has ruled that Ford is disqualified from any by-election.  The removal of an elected executive by the judiciary is bad enough, irrespective of where the fault lies. The resulting turmoil should be minimized as much as possible.

However, if Council chooses to attempt a sort of coup and fundamentally change the governance of the city by naming someone other than Holyday, I would probably very reluctantly support a by-election. From most of the reports I've read, the activist left on Council gets that and won't try it. But they will try to go to the polls.

In yesterday's Toronto Star, Royson James (perhaps unknowingly) makes the case against a by-election.

A city-wide by-election would be an incredibly expensive and unnecessary freak-show. The fact that the Ford brothers both support one undermines their "respect for the taxpayer." If Rob can't run, the thinking goes, his even dumber and more abrasive brother, Doug, can. And the cost be damned, which tells you more about the Ford brothers than any platform ever could. They're "champing at the bits. They are ready to go" to waste enormous amounts of public money on something as meaningless as a family restoration to the throne.

Forget about the Mayor's supposed apology yesterday. Those two feel no shame at all. They want a campaign because they think they can win it.

This, contrary to the insipid Ford party line, isn't about "democracy." The MCIA was passed by the duly elected government of Ontario over 20 years ago. The law, while imperfectly written (and even Justice Hackland acknowledged that in his ruling,) worked exactly as it is was designed to. The law may well be an ass, but that's for Queen's Park to address.

Nor is this a recall effort. If that were the case, I would vote to retain Ford, simply because I dislike recalls more than I do the mayor. Principle means more to me that silly and transitory political figures do. I initially opposed Ford and Rocco Rossi for the sole reason that they proposed or supported the idea of recalls.

Whoever wins a by-election won't have much of a mandate or the time to do very much at all. A Toronto campaign lasts 300 days, meaning that the newly elected mayor would have as little as six months to enact his or her agenda before everything effectively stops for the 2014 election. The incumbent wouldn't have a record to run on, just an institutional advantage in the next campaign.

I'm not naive. I get why the politicians desperately want a by-election. A by-election is 45 days instead of 300, therefore much less expensive. There's also a much lesser chance of being politically immolated by personal revelations in such a short campaign. That's thought to be the reason that Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to run in the 2002 California governor's race, but chose to go for it in the much shorter recall campaign the following year, which had the added luxury of not having a Republican primary.

In a short campaign, the person with the highest name recognition wins, which in this case means John Tory, Olivia Chow, George Smitherman or Doug Ford, depending on whether any or all of them run. I doubt Tory would, since a stunt like that would diminish him and he knows it.

Even the "losers" win for having run, since in doing so, they automatically raise their name recognition and establish a campaign team and donor base for the big show a year later. Barring a complete Adam Giambrone- style disaster, it's the smartest money a politician could spend.

Ford's allies on Council (who, with the exception of Doug, have made quite the show of distancing themselves from him) are saying exactly the same thing I am: Unless the left decides to usurp the results of the last election in their entirety, there should be no by-election.

Not only is that a principled, fundamentally conservative position, it shows real "respect for the taxpayer." Of the conservatives on Council, only the Ford brothers want a publicly funded, prohibitively expensive freakshow of an election that accomplishes absolutely nothing.

If they get their way, fine. Let that be the legacy of our freakshow mayor and his even more half-witted brother. Through their unbelievable arrogance, as reflected through their own actions, the people who won promising a subway system that we can't afford forced an unnecessary election that we can't afford and moreover accomplishes nothing.

In what should be the most disgraceful moment of their lives, the Ford family is still insisting on clown time. Enough!

Doug Holyday should be named acting mayor. Period.

I will oppose in the most forceful way possible any councillor that agitates for such a foolish and godawfuly expensive election, regardless of whatever other qualities they bring to the table. I've voted for my (conservative) councillor throughout his entire career, but I will let him know that I will never vote for him again if he supports a by-election while a Holyday caretaker administration is still on the table.

I will have sent him an e-mail stating that before this is scheduled to post. It will be my first letter to an elected politician.


Picture courtesy of a very special friend.

"They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab ..."

Folks like to think that they understand tragedy, but they really don't. Sure, they know it when they see it, but sometimes the greatest tragedies of our time slip right past us.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda is as good an example as any. Sure, we knew it was happening. We just didn't care until Don Cheadle made us cry several years after it was all over. Of course, that's not to say that I supported a military intervention. I can't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi, and neither can you. That being the case, expecting a 22-year-old from Nebraska to is only likely to get him dead and further complicate foreign policy more than it already was.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Randy Travis' decision to quit drinking is as bad as the slaughter in Rwanda. I'm suggesting that it's even worse. There was absolutely nothing funny about Rwanda, but Randy's adventures over the last twelve months are among the very greatest things I've ever seen.

The "Look Heart, No Hands" singer was arrested Feb. 6 for public intoxication while sitting in his car at a Baptist church in Sanger, Texas. Travis paid a fine and was put on probation for 90 days.

Five months later, the musician was arrested for driving while intoxicated. When cops arrived on the scene, he was completely nude, with his Pontiac Trans Am crashed into several barricades off the side of the road. TMZ reported that threatened to "shoot and kill the Troopers working the case."

The early August arrest was utter nonsense, especially the "threats to shoot and kill the troopers working the case " part. I don't know how worldly you are, but those kind of threats from a naked drunk are the least serious in all of Christendom. After all, where would he hide a gun?

Seventeen days later, on Aug. 24, Travis was cited for simple assault after getting into an argument with another man outside a church in Plano, Texas. The "Diggin' Up Bones" was said to be "extremely intoxicated" when he arrived at the local hospital.

You know, it's just like the Goddamn Liberal Media to only tell half the story about the August 24 altercation. Randy says that he stepped in to protect a woman that he saw fighting with her estranged husband. Was he supposed to just ignore the situation, simply because he was falling-down drunk? According to the cops, he was.

I guess gallantry really is dead.

Most of you come here because I know how life really works. And I'm here to tell you that if you've never been found drunk and naked in the middle of the road and subsequently charged with threatening law enforcement, not only have you not had a good time, you probably don't know what a good time is!

I spent much of this summer on Twitter saying that not only is Randy Travis a hero, he might be the greatest hero of our time. He's certainly more than willing to tell the friggin' government what time it is, which I think should make him the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. I like Rand Paul just fine, but I like Randy Travis a whole lot better.

But the unholy power of the state has been employed to break Travis' spirit, and it looks like it succeeded.

That's all well and good, if you're some kind of asshole. But rehab certainly doesn't look like everything it's cracked up to be. How do I know that? Glad you asked!

The convertible hit Phillip Moreno so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes and lodged him in the windshield.

As he lay dying on the hood, police said, Sherri Lynn Wilkins kept going another two miles until other motorists swarmed her car at a traffic light and grabbed her keys.

Wilkins, who was charged Tuesday with murder and driving drunk, told police she struck the man after leaving work and panicked. Police said her blood alcohol level was more than double the legal limit.

Her arrest on a street corner between home and her job as a drug and alcohol counselor seemed to be a return to a dark past that Wilkins once celebrated leaving behind. The convict and recovering addict had recently gone back to school, gotten a job and was reuniting with her family, including a new grandchild. (emphasis added)

That's all you really need to know. Drinking is fun and leads to all kinds of magical - and not infrequently, naked - harmless adventures. Sure, it annoys The Man, but it's just good, clean Texas fun!

On the other hand, if you give up the sauce, and especially if you get all evangelical and annoying about it, there's a really good chance that you'll knock a dude out his shoes and lodge him in your windshield while you keep going. That's just common sense, people.

I get that telling people the dangers of sobriety is an unpopular mission, but if I don't do it, who will? You? No, you don't have the balls! It's pretty much just me and Lindsay Lohan (and sometimes Amanda Bynes) on the frontlines of the battle between good and evil.

There are days when it seems that I'm the only one out there for people like Randy Travis. It's lonely, but it couldn't be more worthwhile.

Scientifically Proven: Porn Stars are Better Than You Are!

I believe in the power of science to resolve almost all of life's little controversies. It really is rather remarkable and tends to confirm things that I already believe, anyway. Like anyone else, I'm given to putting more weight to things that confirm my existing biases. And if you assert that you don't do that, you're probably proving that you do.

The only difference between me and most of humanity is that I generally don't believe crazy or unprovable things, hence my aversion to religion. If you ever wondered what made me so friggin' sexy, now you know. Of course, I also have enormous genitals and the tongue of an anteater, but I don't like talking about that very much. I'm pretty shy, when you get right down to it.

For the better part of my life, I've been arguing on behalf of porn stars. One instance of this stands out more than others.

I used to work with a really cute girl who had a cousin visiting from Italy. Not only was the cousin super-hot and had among the most bangin' bodies I've ever seen, she didn't speak a word of English! If you have a penis, or love someone that does, you know that's pretty hard to beat.

So I did what I usually do when confronted with such beauty; I talked about my love of porn for upwards of an hour. It wasn't as difficult as you would think, since my co-worker was translating.

The cousin disagreed with me when I said that not only were porn stars not damaged as humans, they were actually better than everybody else, and that as we evolve as a species, we'll probably be more like them, rather than less.

"They're sluts! Whores!" came the translation.

Of course, this wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all.

"No," I replied as forcefully as I could without getting violent. "They are beautiful women! No, fuck that. They're angels - secular saints, even -  doing the work of the Lord! They're out there on a bed, doing the hard work of taking all that cock so you don't have to! Just as Jesus died for your sins, they fuck for mine and I won't tolerate this kind of superstitious blasphemy!"

For whatever reason, this wasn't translated and the rest of the evening was sort of awkward. But I still knew that I had made my point in way that everyone understood.

That was a decade ago, but as it usually does, science has again proven me right!

A new study has put to bed the perception that female porn stars have low self-esteem and are less psychologically healthy compared with other women.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Sex Research, said it found no evidence to support the "damaged goods hypothesis" that actresses involved in the porn industry come from desperate backgrounds. Rather, the researchers found the women have higher self-esteem, a better quality of life and body image, and are more positive, with greater levels of spirituality.

The study was conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania's Shippensburg University, Texas Woman’s University and the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation 

See? I fucking told you so!

It just stands to reason that if you're getting paid tons of money to be seen naked and fucking that you would "have higher self-esteem, a better quality of life and body image, and are more positive." I can't see how any rational person could argue to the contrary, but shitheads argue all many of silly things.

And "spirituality" is something that I think that science should steer as clear from as possible, but this isn't my study, now is it?

The way I see it, you judge how spiritual someone is by how demonstrative they are. By almost any measure, the most spiritual folks are southern black Baptists, who scream, sing and call out to both Jesus and God with little or no prompting. They also tend to have the coolest music, but that isn't really relevant here.

When do white Evangelicals cry out to Jesus? When the snake bites them, at which point, it's usually too late.

I've watched any number of the great and good Bree Olson's fine fuck films (before Charlie Sheen ruined it for the rest of us) and found that she cried out to God and Jesus with some frequency and forcefulness. Now it might be that having your rectum impaled with a huge honker does that, but it's equally possible that the Artist Formerly Known as Rachel Marie Oberlin is just closer to Him than the rest of us.

Having said that, I know that a giant wang will make a girl cry out to her Deity but, as I said before, I'm sorta shy.

But what about the negative stereotypes of the women that that smoking hot Italian girl dismissively referred to as "sluts" and "whores" a decade ago? Aren't they impoverished junkies with "Daddy complexes" and famous penchant for self-destruction?

Not really, as it happens.

"Some descriptions of actresses in pornography have included attributes such as drug addiction, homelessness, poverty, desperation and being victims of sexual abuse," the report said. "Some have made extreme assertions, such as claiming that all women in pornography were sexually abused as children.

"Stereotypes of those involved in adult entertainment have been used to support or condemn the industry and to justify political views on pornography, although the actual characteristics of actresses are unknown because no study on this group of women has been conducted."

Long story short, we don't know if the shit-talking of these Golden Creatures is true because nobody has ever bothered to study it in a meaningful way. Is it true in some cases? Almost certainly. The anecdotal evidence bears that out.

What we don't know is whether it's just as true of any other sample of professional females. For all anyone knows, women in accounting or architecture could be equally (or more) likely to have been sexually victimized or prone to substance abuse.

The fact of the matter is that we just don't know. Absent demonstrable harm, it is the duty of every good capitalist to support and sustain the power of the market. And I'm nothing if not a good capitalist.

Not only is that good economics, it's just good science, people!

Guilty and Out: The Final Humiliation of Rob Ford

[57] On my review of the record in this proceeding, the respondent has never acknowledged a key point addressed in the Integrity Commissioner’s report; that is, that it was not appropriate for the respondent to use his status as Councillor (or Mayor) for private fundraising, notwithstanding that the purpose was to benefit a good cause. The rationale for this is explained by the Integrity Commissioner in the following excerpt, on p. 14, from her excellent report, dated January 30, 2012, which I respectfully endorse:
In fairness to Councillor Ford, it is common for a person who has blurred their roles to have difficulty “seeing” the problem at the beginning. It often takes others to point out the problem, especially in a case where the goal (fundraising for football programs for youth) is laudable. The validity of the charitable cause is not the point. The more attractive the cause or charity, the greater the danger that other important questions will be overlooked, including who is being asked to donate, how are they being asked, who is doing the asking, and is it reasonable to conclude that a person being asked for money will take into account the position of the person asking for the donation. Where there is an element of personal advantage (in this case, the publication of the Councillor’s good works, even beyond what they had actually achieved), it is important not to let the fact that it is “all for a good cause” justify using improper methods for financing that cause. People who are in positions of power and influence must make sure their private fundraising does not rely on the metaphorical “muscle” of perceived or actual influence in obtaining donations

[58] In assessing errors in judgment, just as it may be relevant to consider the position of a novice elected councillor with limited experience with conflict of interest issues, it is also appropriate to consider the responsibilities of the respondent as a long-serving councillor and Mayor. In my opinion, a high standard must be expected from an elected official in a position of leadership and responsibility. Toronto’s current Code of Conduct is modelled on the recommendations of The Honourable Denise Bellamy, who conducted the Toronto Computer Leasing Inquiry, in 2005, when the respondent was a member of City Council. At pp. 65-66 of her report, Commissioner Bellamy had this important observation as to the role of the Mayor:

71. For the Mayor, integrity in government should be a top priority.

The Mayor of Toronto has many responsibilities, pressures, and functions, but perhaps the greatest is providing leadership for integrity in government. The Mayor is the face of City government, both internally and externally. Maintaining the integrity of government is the Mayor’s most important job.

In view of the respondent’s leadership role in ensuring integrity in municipal government, it is difficult to accept an error in judgment defence based essentially on a stubborn sense of entitlement (concerning his football foundation) and a dismissive and confrontational attitude to the Integrity Commissioner and the Code of Conduct. In my opinion, the respondent’s actions were characterized by ignorance of the law and a lack of diligence in securing professional advice, amounting to wilful blindness. As such, I find his actions are incompatible with an error in judgment.

[59] In summary, I find that the respondent has failed in his burden to show that his contraventions of the MCIA were the result of a good faith error in judgment.
Disposition

[60] For the reasons set out above, I have concluded that the respondent contravened s. 5 of the MCIA when he spoke and voted on a matter in which he had a pecuniary interest at the meeting of Toronto City Council on February 7, 2012, and that his actions were not done by reason of inadvertence or a good faith error in judgment. I am, therefore, required by s. 10(1)(a) of the MCIA to declare the respondent’s seat vacant. In view of the significant mitigating circumstances surrounding the respondent’s actions, as set out in paragraph 48 of these reasons, I decline to impose any further disqualification from holding office beyond the current term.

[61] Accordingly, I declare the seat of the respondent, Robert Ford, on Toronto City Council, vacant.

[62] Recognizing that this decision will necessitate administrative changes in the City of Toronto, the operation of this declaration shall be suspended for a period of 14 days from the release of these reasons.

[63] The applicant is to provide the court with his written costs submissions within four weeks of the release of these reasons, with the respondent providing his written submissions within four weeks of receipt of the applicant’s submissions. The applicant will then have a further two weeks to reply.

“Hackland R.S.J.”
 

From the ruling in Madger v. Ford

Um, wow. I certainly didn't see that coming.

A couple of points. I may have more later as I think about this morning's developments more fully. I will update this post if and when I have more to add.

First, there was never any real question that Mayor Ford was guilty on both the facts and the law. His defence, such as it was, was silly almost beyond words. Hizzoner and his counsel actually seemed to invent a brand new definition of conflict of interest that I'm not aware of ever having been invoked before. It was as ridiculous as it was desperate and it was rightly slapped down from the Bench.

Second, this decision makes it clear beyond any doubt whatsoever that Ford brought this upon himself.  Indeed, Justice Hackland's choice off words like "a stubborn sense of entitlement," " a dismissive and confrontational attitude" and "the respondent’s actions were characterized by ignorance of the law and a lack of diligence in securing professional advice, amounting to wilful blindness." are all basically reflections of what I have said about Ford here.

Third, there remains a serious question as to the meaning of Justice Hackland's phrase "I decline to impose any further disqualification from holding office beyond the current term." Does "current term" mean the fall of 2014, or the moment Ford is removed, which could be as soon as two weeks from now?

Fourth, Mayor Ford has indicated that he'll appeal the ruling, but I don't see his chances of success as being all that great. Again, there's no arguing the facts and the law in this case, and Ford's conduct and attitude throughout made a bad situation even worse. I'm not a lawyer, but I haven't seen any reversible error on Harkland's part that an appeal could be successfully fought on.

Rob Ford, being Rob Ford, compounded that further after the ruling, telling the press “This comes down to left-wing politics. The left wing wants me out of here and they’ll do anything in their power." Judges really don't like that kind of talk, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it hurts him before the appeals court.

Fifth, the appeals court should deny the Mayor's request for a stay past the fourteen days in Harkland's order. Running through the appeal courts could easily take two years and allow Ford to "run the clock" until the 2014 election. If this order is to have any teeth at all, Ford should be forced to appeal from outside City Hall. Remember, the Mayor no longer has the presumption of innocence through the process. He is, for all intents and purposes, convicted as of this morning.

Furthermore, the city shouldn't be paying anything for the mayor's appeal. I don't know if his costs were being covered during the trial phase or not, but if they were, it should immediate stop upon his being found in breach of the MCIA.

If Rob Ford was smart and wanted to garner public sympathy, he would immediately resign and announce his intention to run in 2014.

Sixth, if "respect for the taxpayer" is the mantra of the day, there should be no by-election to fill the vacancy. Rob Ford's sense of entitlement should not cost this city $7 million to replace him, whether he runs or not, and he has indicated that he will.

Granted, that depends on a clarification of Justice Harkland's language in what constitutes "the current term." It stands to reason that Ford is disqualified from running in a by-election. It should be remembered that the MCIA is provincial legislation, therefore the province's standards for "term" should be controlling.

When Dalton McGuinty's resignation takes effect at the end of January, his successor will not be starting a term of his or her own. He or she will be completing McGuinty's minority mandate of last year until such a time as the Legislature is dissolved and a new election called. It therefore follows that Ford's "current term" ends in the fall of 2014.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday is more than capable of filling the vacancy, and is widely liked and respected on Council. If he is named acting mayor, a by-election to fill his Council seat could be called. That is far preferable to an unnecessary city-wide election.

As a conservative and a Ford ally, naming Holyday acting mayor would not fundamentally change the composition of Council or "overturn an election." If he chooses to do so, Holyday would very probably be better at advancing Ford's agenda than Ford himself.

Having said that, if the left wing of Council decides to stage a coup and name one of their own to the mayor's chair, I would strongly reconsider my position on holding a city-wide by-election. That would fundamentally change Council and overturn the clear will of the people.

Finally, as much as I dislike the man, this has little to do with Rob Ford himself. Were recalls legal in Toronto, I would have voted to keep him in office, which says something, since I voted against Ford in 2010 and spoke out against him loudly and often. I also opposed the recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker this year and California governor Gray Davis in 2003. I despise the concept of recall elections more than I do any single politician.

But I don't oppose the judicial removal of an officeholder on the grounds of lawbreaking. I think unelected judges should exercise an abundance of caution before taking that step, but I don't oppose it on principle. It seems clear from the language of Justice Harkland's ruling that Ford's arrogance at trial was his ultimate undoing.

Furthermore, the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act and the City of Toronto Act, as well as the Council Code of Conduct all predate Ford's tenure as a politician. None of them were established to "get" him.

Throughout this mess - as throughout his entire career - Rob Ford refuses to accept any responsibility for his predicament, nor has he apologized for putting the city through this. He is singularly incapable of recognizing that his own conduct is at the heart of each and every controversy that he finds himself in. It's always a conspiracy and it's never his fault.

Their Own Worst Enemies

When the Liberal Party of Canada was stomped almost to death in May of last year, the smarter of their partisans started making noises that indicated that they were at least self-aware enough to know what their continued survival would require. At the top of their list were two self-evident items: "stop the civil war" and "no more stunt leaders."

It is my considered opinion that the Grits made a fatal mistake when they essentially browbeat Bob Rae from seeking the permanent leadership. He is easily the most formidable figure in the party today. He has more and more varied political experience than all of the other federal leaders combined.  Not only has he run two political parties, he's been an opposition leader, he's headed a majority government and, most importantly, he negotiated an accord to unseat a minority Conservative government, which is something that could come in handy at some point in the near future.

Most Tory partisans around the country suggested that Rae would be the easiest Liberal to beat. This is because most Tory partisans never think things through and always think that their guy is going to win. This is utterly academic at this point, but I think that if Rae won the permanent leadership (and it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have,) Stephen Harper would have declined to run for another term. And Harper is the Conservative Party of Canada. There is no groomed or natural successor, just a machine hack, like Jason Kenney.

As I've said before, Rae's perceived greatest weakness - his term as the NDP premier of Ontario - is actually his greatest strength. Yes, Rae ran staggeringly high deficits at Queen's Park, but they barely compare to the deficits that Harper himself created after blowing his way through a $13 billion dollar surplus with political stunts.

Imagine Harper bringing Rae's deficits in a televised debate. All Rae would have to do is turn to Harper and say, "I was a socialist back then, and socialism tends to create deficits. What's your excuse?" I've gamed such an exchange out for years now, and I can't think of a way that Harper could reply to that without looking foolish.

Stephen Harper is not an idiot. If I can envision that exchange, chances are that he can, too. And it would be the most devastating moment in a debate since the "You had an option, sir" debacle in the 1984 debates.

After Rae was effectively forced out of contention, the LPC immediately did what they always do, and what is partially responsible for putting them where they are now, they started looking for a stunt leader-messiah figure. Luckily, they didn't have to look very far. After all, they have Justin Trudeau.

If I were a Conservative strategist (and it's important to remember that Harper was a strategist before he was a candidate,) I'd be licking my chops for the opportunity to run against Trudeau the Younger.

Trudeau has run nothing larger than a classroom, teaching teenagers the one thing they require absolutely no help with, drama. Even though he has served in Parliament longer than his late father did when he won the leadership, Pierre was also a high-level Cabinet minister when he won the prize. So far as I know, young Justin hasn't sponsored or introduced any legislation. His father introduced revolutionary changes to the Criminal Code of Canada before assuming the leadership.

More importantly, Pierre was cool where Justin is hot. The elder Trudeau was unflappable, especially on television, whereas the son is a hothead with a pretty formidable temper. When Justin gets angry, he says and does remarkably stupid things.

Aside from being pretty, his genealogy and his ability to beat the tits off of an Indian senator that smokes more than even I do, Justin is known for exactly two things; an interview where he suggested that Stephen Harper might force him to become a Quebec separatist, and screaming that Environment Minister Peter Kent is a "piece of shit" in the House of Commons.

We're only now learning the depth of the opposition research that the Tories have on Trudeau and their skill in deploying it.

The riding of Calgary Centre is the, well, center of the Conservative universe. There's a surprisingly close by-election there tomorrow. Last week, Trudeau supporter (and the brother of Ontario's disgraced soon-to-be ex-premier) David McGuinty said that Alberta Conservatives should "go back to Alberta," causing an immediate appearance problem in a riding that the Grits might actually win for the first time in nearly 40 years.

The very next day, remarks by Trudeau from a 2010 interview were put out by Sun Media, almost certainly leaked to them by the Tory war room.

“Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work,” Trudeau said.

When Lagace asked whether Trudeau believed Canada was better off “when there are more Quebecers in charge than Albertans,” Trudeau replied in the affirmative.

“I’m a Liberal, so of course I think so, yes. Certainly when we look at the great prime ministers of the 20th century, those that really stood the test of time, they were MPs from Quebec ... This country — Canada — it belongs to us.”

Oh. That can't be good for the party's prospects in Alberta, and therefore the country, can it?

Look, I don't know why any right-thinking person would run for the Liberal leadership. The party is broke, demoralized and without their traditional place in Canadian politics. Anyone that has read Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada knows that rebuilding the party is going to be a near impossible task. The next Liberal leader is very probably going to be the last.

Please don't tell me about polls that show a Trudeau majority government restoration for the Grits. Polling about hypothetical elections with hypothetical leaders are nothing more than, well, hypothetical. And that's doubly true when you're talking about a candidate that the public knows little more about than that's hawt and has a cool last name.

As I mentioned earlier, whenever Justin opens his mouth, there's a really good chance that something crazy and stupid is going to pop out. The odds of it happening grow exponentially when he's pissed off.

Yet even with a party whose wheels have fallen off to the point that they've lost over a 100 seats in three elections, some of their more flamboyant commentators are trying to impose a litmus test. Specifically, contenders are being told that if you've lost a previous election or even your seat in Parliament, you needn't apply for the leadership. Unsurprisingly, that excludes every candidate but Trudeau and the still undeclared Marc Garneau.

That thinking goes beyond stupid and veers into the insane.

I should note that I'm not a Liberal supporter. I'm on the record as saying that the party's physical existence sickens me and that the world will finally be a better place when they're finally buried.

But, as you would assume by his nom de plume, Calgary Grit doesn't share my views. In fact, he's on the record as saying that this "only sitting members need apply" standard is wildly silly.

John Diefenbaker: This guy could put together losing campaigns more consistently than the Toronto Maple Leafs. Before being elected, he lost twice federally, twice provincially, and once for Mayor. Despite being a five-time loser, the Tories went with Dief in ’56, and he rewarded them with the largest majority in Canadian history.

Mackenzie King: Even though he lost his seat in both the 1911 and 1917 elections, the Liberals put their faith in King at Canada’s first leadership convention in 1919. King would go on to become the longest serving PM in Commonwealth history…losing his own seat twice more along the way.

Jack Layton: Jack beat out three candidates with seats at the 2003 NDP leadership convention, even though he’d never been elected to any position higher than Councillor. He’d lost in his bid for Mayor, finished fourth in the 1993 federal election, and lost by over 7,000 votes in the 1997 federal election. Despite this track record of defeat, the Dippers went with Jack and he rewarded them by becoming the NDP’s most successful leader ever.

Brian Mulroney: Brian hadn’t even won a City Council election when he became PC leader, and had lost in his previous leadership bid. In his first ever election, he won over 200 seats.

Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, John Turner: Although they had perfect records in their own ridings, all three lost a leadership race before becoming Liberal leader. Losers.

Stephen Harper: Harper did not hold a seat when he ran for Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002. At that time, he had a rather uninspiring “1 win and 1 loss” record when it came to local elections – and remember, that’s a .500 record from a Calgary conservative. 

If you love history the way I do, you might start to see a pattern developing here.

The fact is that Liberals, being Liberals, haven't asked themselves what happens if Trudeau doesn't win the leadership, which is entirely possible. We're still a long way from April 14, 2013. And who can say what landmine statements are in Trudeau's past and future, waiting to go off? If Justin manages to blow his own legs off, who takes over? If he assumes the leadership mortally wounded, what happens to the party before the 2015 election puts it out of Canada's misery forever?

All things being equal, it would probably be better if the next leader wasn't a sitting MP. The biggest tasks that the next leader is going to have are raising a boatload of money and recruiting candidates that aren't laughingstocks, which often happens to third parties. Just ask the NDP.

The single most devastating attack on Micheal Ignatieff didn't come from Stephen Harper. It was launched by then-NDP leader Jack Layton, who tagged Iggy for almost never being in the House. Do they really want to face that in the next leader's debate?

Moreover, who exactly going to pay attention to the third party leader in Parliament? It's not like the NDP's Audrey McLaughlin and Alexa McDonough set the world on fire with their parliamentary performances. Progressive Conservative Joe Clark was a former prime minister who managed to remain "Joe Who?" and Peter MacKay abolished the party entirely without anyone noticing. Ed Broadbent and the aforementioned Mr. Layton were only paid attention when they were significant risks to displace the Liberals.

The LPC is so damaged that the new leader can't be in the House of Commons if he or she wants a halfway credible election machine. But a leader who is also an MP will be savaged for not being there.

Any reasonable analysis suggests that it's better for them to not have a leader sitting in the House, who everyone will ignore, anyway. If nothing else, a sitting Liberal leader will get all kinds of local news coverage when he or she visits, which is the kind that an upstart should want! When exactly was the last time the Parliamentary Press Gallery elected a prime minister, anyway? Oh, right ...

There's an (albeit outside) chance that Teenage Jesus won't win his stunt leadership bid. And if he wins, I don't see a scenario where a murderous cyborg like Stephen Harper doesn't annihilate him in an election. And who builds the party if Trudeau wins and is chained to Parliament Hill?

The LPC's guru-making consultant class is not just wrong, but stunningly so. And that shouldn't surprise anyone. They've been the driving forces behind the Grit's Forty Years Civil War and the party's steadily diminishing electoral returns over the last decade.

Keep listening to them, and you won't exist at all in 2016.

Christie Blatchford, Rob Ford & How Conservatism Destroyed Itself

For the record, I think that Rob Ford should ideally be removed from office in an election. However, if Justice Charles Harkland decides Monday that the mayor's violation of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (and no one now seriously argues that he didn't violate it) was so egregious as to warrant removal from office, I'll take it.

I don't think that's going to happen, and neither do most of the lawyers who have been asked about it.

First, the dollar amount was so small, especially given Ford's personal wealth. I can just as easily see Justice Harkland concluding that this violation is more a reflection of Hizzoner's fantastic hubris and remarkable stupidity than actual corruption, at least as corruption is traditionally defined.

Second, appointed judges are properly highly reluctant to remove elected officials from office. The optics of that are horrible. In a perfect world,  the removal of an elected politician would be accompanied with a criminal conviction and possible jail time. And it should be rare. I oppose recalls, in every instance, for the same reason. If you're dumb enough to vote somebody into office, you should suffer the consequences of it until the next election. Not only should politicians take some responsibility, so too should voters.

If I were to bet actual money on what happens Monday afternoon, it would be on Ford surviving in office. But I'm just as sure that he'll take a bad situation and make it infinitely worse, further tarnishing himself.

Etobicoke Slim is singularly incapable of humility. I guarantee you that he'll be on the courthouse steps declare some kind of bizarre "victory," despite his having just been found to have broken the law. I'm pretty confident that he'll include in his remarks moronic references to an "activist judiciary."

In short, Rob Ford will do everything in his power to arrogantly make himself as unelectable as he possibly can.

If it seemed as if Ford was capable of actually understanding that he has brought all of his troubles on himself and modifying the way he deals with people and carries out his duties, it might be possible to rehabilitate himself. But he isn't. He's every bit as haughty and self-entitled as he says his opponents are.

How do I know this? Well, I've been following his testimony in his current libel trial, for one. Just as in his MCIA trial, his testimony in the Madger libel action is evasive, mealy-mouthed and an almost Clintonian exercise in parsing words. If nothing else, it undercuts his self-proclaimed "No bull" style to the point of silliness.

Even after his humiliating court experiences, the mayor took two city buses out of service to drive his dopey football team home from a game. And I should add that it was a game that he left a City Council meeting to coach in the middle of a business day.

Everyday people who couldn't bail on their jobs for a child's sport were left standing around at bus stops for no other reason than their mayor's breathtaking sense of entitlement.

Ford sees some kind of victory in his own repeated disgraces and the demeaning of his own office. The idea of amending the City of Toronto Act to give the mayor greater executive powers is a dead letter so long as people like Rob Ford occupy the office. He can barely get through the day without abusing the little power he has in the most embarrassing way. Why would the province respond to that by granting him more power?

Ever since he declared himself a candidate for the mayor's chair, I wondered why any self-respecting conservative would support an oaf like Ford. It's not as though his incredibly damaged and self-aggrandizing personality was a secret during the campaign.

In today's National Post, Christie Blatchford gives the most predictable and disappointing answer of all.

That week in court refreshed my memory, as the lawyers say. It was never that I loved Mr. Ford, either the detail of his politics or who he is particularly.
Rather, I liked who he wasn’t.

He wasn’t David Miller, his pretty-boy predecessor. He wasn’t the late Jack Layton. He wasn’t Sandra Bussin, the former councillor. He wasn’t Olivia Chow, another former councillor, Mr. Layton’s widow, who may yet return to run for the mayoralty (but only, of course, if “the people” demand it).

Mr. Ford wasn’t a part of that soft-left ruling class which, during my time at City Hall in the mid-1990s, ran the show, and appears to still. He wasn’t an earnest subscriber to the conventions of downtown city politics, with its sure convictions about What We Believe In.

I remember that so vividly, the smugness, the preening disdain for outsiders, even if, sometimes especially if, they were actual citizens.

As Mr. Ford’s lawyer at the libel trial, Gavin Tighe, said rather forcefully in his closing argument, institutional corruption “isn’t done with packets of cash anymore,” but through lobbying, campaign donations, the crass horse-trading of votes and backroom deals, and, Mr. Tighe didn’t mention this, a collective sort of moral superiority.

Mr. Ford is surely deeply flawed. Well, so are most of us, me anyway. But, to use a modern term, he is also authentic.

Watching him being cross-examined by Messrs. Shiller and Caplan – who once used the word “lacuna” in his closing submission, then, for the rest of us not so smart as he is, added helpfully, “that gap” — was a brilliant reminder of why once upon a time, I marked an X by Rob Ford’s name.

I'd love to believe that Ms. Blatchford is kidding. But given her widely known stands - cops, hockey players and the Conservative parties of Ontario and Canada good, everything else bad - I doubt that she is.

This something that warned about repeatedly during the campaign two years ago. I said at the time, and subsequent events has demonstrated, that Rob Ford is a menace to conservatism in this city.

The Harper Tories didn't win the federal seats that they in 416 because of Ford's support, or even because Harper himself is supposedly so awesome. Those seats went to them because the Liberal Party was in a state of national collapse. No fewer than four former Grit leadership candidates (Ken Dryden, Martha Hall Findley, Joe Volpe and Gerard Kennedy) and the leader himself lost their Toronto seats last year. Who else was realistically going to pick up those seats?

Ford's close association with the Hudak Ontario Tories was probably a factor in the party failing to win a single seat in Toronto last fall against an immensely unpopular McGuinty government. Not one. I'll grant you that Tim Hudak might be the only person alive more intellectually challenged than Ford himself, but if the people of Toronto so love the supposed "Ford Nation," it stands to reason that they'd want more of it at the provincial level. They chose otherwise.  Hudak's one saving grace was that he didn't have Toronto seats to lose because he almost certainly would have.

Blatchford's column is a representation of what supposedly intellectual conservatives think, which is truly horrifying.

There was a time when conservatives could proudly stand on what we are and what we believe. We honestly thought that we had ideas that could make people's lives better. Conservative intellectuals for decades insisted that we were more than capable of standing on our own in the forum of ideas and argument. We were right and the left was, well, "misguided." We might not win the battle of elections all the time, but we would win the battle of ideas.

And you know what? We did! Look how far the left has moved to the right in the last three decades. Even when we lose, our ideas are largely adopted and legislated. No honest adult that knows anything at all about the issues can say that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien were traditionally leftist leaders. The history doesn't support it. Looking at his pre-2006 positions on almost everything, Michael Ignatieff likely would have been a pretty sucessful Conservative leader.

If Christie Blatchford's opinion is widespread among the movement - and everything I've read in the last twenty years tells me it is - that's no longer true. We're surrending in the battle of ideas in not pointing out that the left has moved right.

According to Blatchford, the standard by which conservatives are to be judged is by what we aren't, which is the other guys. That school of thinking suggests that we exist only to win when the other side makes such a godawful mess of everything that they can't possibly continue in office. It suggests that we can't win on our own.

The fact is that we moved the needle. We moved the left to the center. It's what happened afterward that doomed us.

Yes, we can occasionally win by pointing out that we aren't paleolithic cartoon liberals like David Miller, Jack Layton, Olivia Chow or Sandra Bussin, but so what? What does that gives us other than a populist retard that promises to spend untold billions on subways to everywhere with no plausible way of paying for it?

What do you suppose Ford's supporters would say if Mayor Miller disappeared from Council in the middle of the day to teach advanced crotchet to disadvantaged trans-gender youth and, better still, re-routed TTC buses to move them about without creasing their pretty new tube-tops? I can't imagine that it would be anything good. But we're spposed to forgive Ford for taking the afternoon off to coach football? Is there really a paucity of football coaches with less important jobs out there?

Ford differs from Miller, Layton, Chow and Bussin only in his rhetoric. His sense of entitlement is arguably worse than theirs because it's personal, rather than political. Ford can hit lobbyists up for money because it's for his stupid football team, rather than for him personally. Ford can libel business owners out of some idiotic idea that he's "protecting the taxpayer." And conservatives never call him on it.

Perhaps the worst thing about modern movement conservatism is the trait that Rob Ford personally embodies. The idea that nothing is ever our fault. No matter how grievous the sin, no matter how outlandish and contrary to common sense the conduct, it's always somebody else's fault. Always!

When was the last time you heard a conservative say "Boy, that was stupid! I wish I hadn't done that?" No, the first instinct is to attack a malign the press (which we hilariously say is also impotent) and play the victim. Not only has blaming the press replaced the liberal defense of "racism and sexism!," we all too frequently combine racism and sexism with attacks on the press to defend our own monstrous self-entitlement, stupidity and hubris.

Worse still, this is from a moveent who's entire raison d'etre is supposed to be personal responsibility. We're our own bete noire and virtually no one out there is willing to point it out. If we're not better than liberals in our conduct, we're worse, if only because we're supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Rob Ford is hardly the only example of conservatism destroying itself, but he's easily the most cartoonish and self-destructive. The Harper Conservatives made a conscious political decision in becoming the Trudeau Liberals, but Ford is stupid for stupid's sake. And no one should spend an ounce of their energy or a minute of their time defending him.

If Rob Ford is still mayor by this time Monday, he has exactly one way of surviving the next election. There's always going to a core vote of about 20% that supports him no matter what he does. But the left is so utterly undisciplined and given to hating one another than us that it's hard to imagine them putting up one candidate that would easily beat him. That means that Ford would go through a campaign with a 20 point advantage over anyone else, maybe even 30%.

The only way that we can take him out ourselves is by convincing John Tory into declaring at the earliest possible date and hoping it forces the mayor into retirement. Otherwise, we're done.

Rob Ford is our Nixon figure. Even with a huge mandate, he can't win all of the conservatives on Council, let alone the moderates. And that's not going to get better in a second term, it's going to get worse. There's a very possibility that the Ford allies who rode his coattails in 2010 are going to lose their seats, and a mayor that didn't have a serious agenda in the first place is going to wind up with even less support at City Hall.

Ford's freshman allies are in a predicament. They can either abandon him and maybe survive, or stick with him and lose. Either way, Council is almost certain to be more left wing that it is today. And there's nothing in Ford's biography that suggests that he'll be in a compromising mood, even though his second term will be the result of the left's inability to do anything right.

Hoping that he changes his attitude is a fool's errand. Rob Ford's entire life is a textbook exercise in entitlement. Since he inherited his money and his political career, there's no reason to believe that he's going to re-evaluate his character at this late date. After his near-constant, self-inflicted humiliations, he still blames everyone but himself. We're even seeing that in his libel trial, where he's throwing his most steadfast (and only) media allies under the bus.

In the summer of 1974, defending Richard Nixon had finally become a bridge too far for all but a minuscule number of Republicans. Yes, they lost the '74 congressional and '76 presidential elections. But the losses likely would've been much worse if Nixon barely survived and still controlled the agenda and the party machinery. Had a disgraced and thoroughly discredited Nixon handed off the nomination to a successor, the stench of Watergate might have stuck to the party - and the movement - for a generation. And it may never have gone away.

But just six years after the GOP repudiated Nixon themselves, they made impressive gains in Congress in '78 and began 12 years in the White House in 1980. The same is true of Rob Ford.

The longer Ford stays in office, the more damaging he is to conservatism in this city. In the long run, it's far better for conservatives that Toronto have a Trotskyite mayor than Rob Ford slowly destroying everything that we're supposed to believe in, thereby making it impossible for us to elect another, more sensible conservative for a generation.

He has to be beaten. Although I think that it would be wrong to judicially remove him from office for what he's done, the longer he stays, the harder it's going to be to further our agenda for decades to come.

Although I don't think that removing him from office is legally justified, it might just be the greatest political favour the Court can do for us.



Link ruthlessly stolen from Dawg's Blawg. Gif ruthlessly stolen from Lisa Kirbie.

Republicans Without Texas, Texas Without Republicans

So it's Thanksgiving in America and President Obama and the Democratic Party have a great deal to be thankful for. If any incumbent was primed to defy history and lose despite the lack of a primary challenge or a third-party general election candidate, it was Obama. Going into this year, it was virtually impossible to look at the number of Senate seats the Democrats had to defend and not conclude that the Republicans would win a number of seats and maybe even outright control.

Thankfully for the Democrats, the Republican Party is current powered by stupid and crazy. Blaming Mitt Romney for what happened earlier this month might be every bit as much fun as it looks, but it doesn't answer the question of which of their declared candidates would have done better. I'm on the record (along with the Obama White House) that Jon Huntsman would have, but this simply wasn't the year for a sane person in your Republican Party. I have a feeling that, unless the GOP gets its shit together soonest, it's going to get a lot worse in the years ahead.

For roughly forty years, the Republicans has a virtual lock on the former Confederacy, the southwest, the Plains and Mountain states and won California pretty regularly. Unless a southern moderate, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, the Republicans were more or less invincible. Even after the GOP lost California outright in the mid-90s, they were still capable of winning without it, although it made the races much closer. As we've seen in the last couple of presidential cycles, demographics are rapidly making that map obsolete.

The southwest is pretty much gone, with Arizona being the lone holdout and I expect that to start getting much closer in 2016 if the Democrats don't actually win it. New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are probably gone forever. So is Virginia, and I expect North Carolina to remain a swing state as it gradually turns bluer.

Even Florida doesn't look promising in the medium to long term. Republicans are never going to carry Jews, blacks and non-Cuban Latinos. But they could still build a winning electoral coalition with a majority of (non-college graduate )whites, seniors and sweeping Cuban-Americans.

The federal government has a "wet foot / dry foot" immigration policy for Cubans that doesn't apply to other Hispanics and made them more likely to support the GOP on other issues. However, Romney lost Cuban-Americans on November 6 and with them, Florida's 29 Electoral College votes.

The fact that the Sunshine State is singularly incapable of holding elections or counting votes means that we may never know what happened. Rick Scott, the Republican governor, is unimaginably unpopular and spent the entire campaign touting the miracles he's performing with the state economy, which may have damaged the presidential ticket. But it stands to reason that narrowly losing the Cuban vote cost Romney the state.

Cuban-Americans are now in their third generation. As the generation of initial refugees from the revolution die, policies toward Cuba (particularly in the ineffective embargo) become less important to the community and it seems to be voting more in lockstep with other Latinos.

Florida was already a swing state. Bill Clinton won it in 1996 and George W. Bush lost the statewide popular vote there in 2000 (although he did win the contested counties in the recount by the famous 537 votes.) John McCain and Mitt Romney both lost the state to Obama. Just as is true nationally, the GOP has only clearly won the popular vote in Florida once since 1992. This is a trend that should scare the hell out of any rational Republican. And it's not the only one.

But even losing Florida, as bad as that is,  isn't the nightmare scenario. Texas is. It isn't easy, but you can build a winning Republican map without Florida (although that means winning improbable states like Pennsylvania while continuing to hold Ohio, which the GOP has lost in four of the last six elections.

That's just not true of Texas. Without the Lone Star State, it becomes mathematically impossible for a Republican to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If Texas goes, Florida and Arizona will have already been long gone. It would also be difficult to see how North Carolina and Missouri would stay red in that scenario.

Here's what I imagine this year's map would look like if that happened.

 

Obama would have won 406 electoral votes to Romney's paltry 132. Out of the goodness of my heart and a conservative sense of caution, I didn't throw other potential wild-cards, such as Louisiana and Georgia into the mix, but they could fade away, too.

Since at least 2007, I've been warning about the coming apocalypse in Texas. Now serious journalists and political types are talking about it, too.

Nate Cohn poo-pooed the idea in this week's New Republic, saying that it'll be at least 2028 until the day of reckoning arrives. Still, that's only four cycles away.

Ryan Lizza has a fascinating article in the November 19 New Yorker which I think is far more realistic and scarier. In it, he interviews the Chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Steve Munisteri, who is in a full panic.

He was suffering from an allergy attack, and while fighting back a fit of coughing he searched through heaps of papers strewn behind his desk and handed me some charts that foretold the demise of the Republican Party, first in Texas and then nationally. One graph showed four lines falling from left to right, measuring Republican voting trends in Texas. “Look at that; it’ll show you the decline of the Republican Party over ten years,” he said. Actually, there was a significant bump up in 2010, a gift from President Obama, who helped reverse the slide by energizing the Tea Party movement, but what frightened him was the downward slope of the lines from 2000 to 2008. There were fewer and fewer white voters as a percentage of the electorate.

“If I say to you, your life depends on picking whether the following state is Democrat or Republican, what would you pick?” Munisteri asked. “The state is fifty-five per cent traditional minority. Thirty-eight per cent is Hispanic, eleven per cent is African-American, and the rest is Asian-American, and two-thirds of all births are in a traditional minority family. And if I was to tell you that, nationwide, last time, Republicans got only roughly four per cent of the African-American vote and about a third of the Hispanic vote, would you say that state is Democrat or Republican? Well, that’s Texas. We are the only majority-minority state in the union that people consider Republican.”

Immigration from Mexico only partly accounts for the change. More than a million Americans have moved to Texas in the past decade, many from traditionally Democratic states. More than three hundred and fifty thousand Californians have arrived in the past five years; since 2005, over a hundred thousand Louisianans permanently relocated to Texas, mostly in Houston, after Hurricane Katrina. The population is also skewing younger, which means more Democratic. But Munisteri is more preoccupied by the racial and ethnic changes. He turned to a chart showing Texas’s population by ethnic group over the next few decades. A red line, representing the white population, plunged from almost fifty-five per cent, in 2000, to almost twenty-five per cent, in 2040; a blue line, the Hispanic population, climbed from thirty-two per cent to almost sixty per cent during the same period. He pointed to the spot where the two lines crossed, as if it augured a potential apocalypse. “This shows when Hispanics will become the largest group in the state,” he said. “That’s somewhere in 2014. We’re almost at 2013!” He added, “You cannot have a situation with the Hispanic community that we’ve had for forty years with the African-American community, where it’s a bloc of votes that you almost write off. You can’t do that with a group of citizens that are going to compose a majority of this state by 2020, and which will be a plurality of this state in about a year and a half.”
He told me that he had a slide that he wouldn’t show me, because he didn’t want Democrats to know about his calculations. He said that it depicted the percentage of the white vote that Republicans would have to attract if they continued to do as poorly as they have among Hispanics.

“By 2040, you’d have to get over a hundred per cent of the Anglo vote,” he said.

“Over a hundred per cent is not possible,” I offered.

“That’s my point!”

Munisteri travels around the country with his slide show, urgently arguing that Republicans will wither away if they don’t adapt. In the spring, he briefed Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation. After half an hour, a congressman rose to summarize the material.

“What you’re saying is that if the Republican Party is not doing its job attracting Hispanics to the Party, the Party in a very short time nationally and in Texas will be toast?” Munisteri replied, “That’s it, Congressman.”

Ted Cruz, the state's senator-elect and current Tea Party hero, doesn't think that any serious immigration reform effort is necessary to save the GOP with Latinos. To his mind,  Hispanics will just naturally be drawn to the party's " appeals to traditional values of hard work. "

Good luck with that. That's been the extent of Republican Hispanic outreach for years now, and the Latino vote for Republicans has been cut in half in the last two cycles.

President George W. Bush was on to something, as unpalatable as that is to the alleged conservatives in the party. It doesn't matter if 100% of evangelical Christians support Republicans if they don't also get Bush's roughly 43% of the Latino vote.

There are possible end-runs around that, to be sure. If future presidential nominees become much more libertarian on social issues, they could theoretically pick up enough voters under 30 to make up the diminishing share of the Hispanic vote. And that'll be absolutely necessary, especially in Texas and Florida. I can see someone like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky replicating his father's success with young voters.

The problem is that I can't see a scenario where Paul wins presidential primaries. You see, Republican primary voters - very few of whom are intellectually consistent on much of anything - like the idea of "small government" and "devolving federal powers to the states" much more than they do it's actuality.

Because primary voters are older, whiter, more religious and, yes, dumber than the general electorate, it's hard to see them embracing Senator Paul's views on social issues, the national security state and foreign policy.

Then there's the more pressing problem of entitlements. The GOP has pretty much embraced the various Ryan plans, which call for young voters to pay full benefits to not only current retirees, but those a decade away from retirement a decade upon enactment, while knowing that they're going to get drastically less themselves. And this will be happening as the first generation in American history to be financially worse than their parents starts voting in large numbers. They'll be the only ones asked to sacrifice anything at all, which isn't exactly a palatable political message.

Evangelical Christians - who can't stop reminding everybody that there is now federal role in education in the Constitution, but somehow think that "protecting family (and/or 'Judeo-Christian')  values" is - and old people, who the Republican Party has thoroughly convinced are entitled to their entitlements, are over two-thirds of the Republican base in primaries. But you can't win young voters without potentially alienating the religious and the elderly.

And on the economic front, the same people who oppose ObamaCare support federal "right to work" laws, which also aren't supported by any sane reading of the Commerce Clause. It's tough for smart, principled conservatives to continue supporting the GOP, let alone intelligent independents and swing voters. "Reagan Democrats," you ask? Well, they've all been been Republicans for twenty years, so forget about them.

I think a nominee like Rand Paul could represent that party's future. It's too bad that the party's present is going to kill him before he gets a chance.

That leaves Hispanics as the last, best growth area for the party, certainly in terms of the Electoral College map.

It's almost impossible to look at the last two presidential elections and not conclude that the GOP didn't destroy itself with that demographic when they killed McCain-Kennedy in 2006-07. Because of the stupid goddamned base and the stupider conservative blogosphere, John McCain and Mitt Romney lost over half the Latino support that Bush the Younger had, and with it Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and very probably Florida.

I predict that Arizona's next. And after that, Texas.

Keep in mind, Democrats don't even have to win states like Arizona and Texas for the immediate future.  They just have to make them competitive. When that happens, Republican time and resources will be divided between holding once reliable states and winning back swing states, such as Virginia and Ohio.

There are too many conservatives out there who think that McCain and Romney hit the basement of Republican support. Not true. The party can very easily drop further, possibly to the point where the idea of winning presidential elections defies basic arithmetic.

Regardless of how you feel about illegal immigration, there are certain realities attendant to it that can't be ignored.

• There are between 11 and 13 million of them there that aren't going to be deported. The last time mass deportations of that size occurred was under Nazi Germany, which not only didn't end well for the deportees, it didn't end well for Germany.
• I would imagine that a majority of those illegals have children that were born in the United States, which makes the children citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Red state conservatives like to play intellectual games with what the language of the amendment means, but they're exactly the same people who opposed the ratification of it in the first fucking place.
• It's a difficult to portray yourself as the "party of family values" while using federal police powers to tear apart as many as four million families. Furthermore, that'll play much worse with moderate swing voters than you think it will once they start seeing the reality of it on TV. Also remember, the United States wet the collective bed over Elian Gonzalez not that long ago.
• Big business, specifically in the agricultural, hospitality and service industries love illegal immigration because they keep costs down. If you think that the leadership of either party is going to long defy the interests of business in a significant way, you're kidding yourselves.
• The idea that people will "self-deport: is ludicrous when there are still jobs for them. And if illegal immigration is as serious a problem as illegal drugs, why is no one proposing extended jail time for the businessmen that knowingly hire illegals?
• Basic political wisdom suggests that you don't run on a platform of threatening to forcibly deport somebody's family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, to say nothing of their nannies, gardeners and home renovation workers, while expecting them to still vote for you.  

I get that there are any number of Republican bloggers out there saying that immigration isn't the party's problem with Latinos. I'd suggest that those bloggers are ignoring reality just as forcefully as they were with the polling data this fall.

The numbers tell the story. George W. Bush won almost half of the Hispanic vote (44%) in 2000 and 2004, after doing exactly the same thing in Texas. With John McCain, it went down to 31%, and Romney drove it down to 27%. And that's as Latinos are becoming a larger share of the vote, mostly in natural Republican states.

Losing 17% of a given vote in just eight years should set off the loudest alarm bells imaginable, if you're even halfway smart. That's even more true when that vote is concentrated in states that you have to win to remain a viable political party.

And it's not like there isn't a clear timeline of what happened and when. Bush proposed an eminently sensible bill, and Republicans not only killed it, they killed it in the loudest and most graphic way possible. Reading blogs and reading floor speeches at the time wasn't unlike watching a snuff movie.

So McCain, who actually wrote Bush's bill, subsequently lost 13% of the Latino vote. Romney, who stupidly thought that going to he right of everybody else in the lunatic primaries, unsurprisingly wound up winning even less of that vote than McCain did.

To think that adding a Spanish face to Mitt Romney's policies, like Ted Cruz's or Marco Rubio's is only going to add insult to injury. After all, Sarah Palin didn't exactly help the GOP with women, did she?

Smart Republicans are finally coming around to what I've been saying for over five years.

Unfortunately, smart Republicans aren't the problem. Since at least 1992, smart Republicans are becoming an endangered species. When they haven't been wiped out entirely in ridiculous, self-defeating primaries, they've been marginalized by self-interested talk-radio hosts and craven asshole bloggers. And those fuckheads don't know their history. They remember the victories of 1946, '94 and 2010, but shoot the defeats that came just two years later down the goddamned memory hole.

Let's stop counting on the idea that Democrats are stupid, okay? They are no longer the party that nominated George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. This is now the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Jesus, John Kerry only came within 180,000 votes of winning and you can factually argue that Al Gore actually did win the country, if not the election.

These people know messaging and demographics, which means that they know how to win elections.

The GOP is in a bad, bad place right now.

Winning single women and voters under 30 would certainly be nice, but they're so demographically spread out that it's hard to pinpoint specific states that they bring with them. Maybe Wisconsin. Besides which, proposed Republican electoral reforms make it difficult for them to vote even if they would support the GOP. But to win single women and young people, the party would have to basically abandon evangelicals and old people, without whom the nomination can't be won.

There was a time when Republicans could run to their base in the primaries and swing to the middle for the general, while tagging Democrats as monsters. Now the opposite is true. Clinton and Obama proved that rather convincingly, and Gore and Kerry came closer than they had any business doing to pulling it off.

Just look at the maps, people. Look at where previously natural Republican states are going. Are they going your way or their way?

Those maps represent something more important than demographics. More than anything else, they represent the triumph of "conservative" ideology over reality. They represent the idea that subtraction is a more powerful political tool than addition.

Those maps represent that Republicans learned exactly the wrong lessons from Ronald Reagan. The modern GOP paid too much attention to Reagan's rhetoric than they studied his presidency or the political times that he governed in. But they fail to recognize that Reagan's presidency only rarely ever reflected his rhetoric. Reagan was a pragmatist who spoke the base's language.

They also fail to recognize that the nature of both the country and the Democratic Party have radically changed in the last 32 years. It's been an awfully long time since the Democrats fought ideological civil wars and marginalized itself to it's activist base. Can you remember the last time a Democratic presidential nominee was held hostage by his base?

Republicans are now in exactly the same position that Democrats were twenty-five years ago, but they haven't learned the lessons that the Democrats did.

After Dukakis was humiliated, they disentangled themselves from FDR, LBJ and more importantly, McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. They gambled that they could move away from their activist base and still win. After all, where else was that base going to go? Remember, Ralph Nader didn't cost Al Gore the presidency, Gore's refusal to broaden the Florida recount did.

The GOP today has effectively become what the Democrats were in the 1970s and '80s; a bitter, activist base that's pissed not only with the country, but with simple mathematics.

I hated George W. Bush as both a war president and an economic manager, but at least he was smart enough to understand the demography of politics. If nothing else, he didn't rabidly insist on being a modern George McGovern. He, like Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan before him, knew that he had to convince a certain number of soft Democrats to trust him not to be crazy.

Today's GOP doesn't. And their map is shrinking in ways that that the demographics don't suggest that they can recover from.

History's a funny thing. I'm not discounting the idea that there could be a Watergate-style event that throws the presidency to the Republicans in the next decade, but I don't see Barack Obama or his likely Democratic successor taping themselves committing felonies. I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't seem likely.

Instead of focusing on improbabilities, they should focus on holding Texas. If they lose that, they cease to exist immediately.