Reince Priebus isn't Very Bright

You what a good sign that the Republican party has finally gotten it's shit together would be? When they stop running against the media.

Too many of my fellow conservatives embrace the conflicting positions that the mainstream media is dead and ignored by everybody, yet still powerful and nefarious enough to foil the GOP at every turn. You can believe one or the other, but not both.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true. You can argue both positions if you're appealing solely to inbred yokels and the recently head injured. They loves them as much anti-intellectual populist fuckheadery as they can stuff inside their little pin heads.

And that brings me to Reince Priebus, the singularly ineffective chairman of the Republican National Committee. I thought that anyone would have been an improvement after Michael Steele's reign of error at the RNC. I thought wrong.

Priebus was supposed to be the Godhead brought to earth. Under his stewardship, the GOP was supposed to expand its margin in the House, win control of the Senate and banish forever the vulnerable Barack Obama from 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard.

None of which actually happened. Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Senate, eight in the House and Obama put Mitt Romney down like a rabid cur. Oh, and the party came out of last November looking more like wild-eyed dipshits coming out of the election than they did going in. Not a spectacular result, to say the least.

So Republicans did what they always do: Blame the media for their own bad performance.

Now Priebus is getting pre-emptive with his retatded nonsense, declaring the RNC won't partner with NBC or CNN for the 2016 primary debates if the networks go forward with planned Hillary Clinton-centric projects. 

The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.

On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.

NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.

Oh, fucking spare me.

I'll ignore for a moment CNN, which no one watches. But it should be pointed out that young Reince wasn't bitching too hard when CNN ran a Mitt Romney documentary last year.

The NBC mini-series (starring the always hot as fuck Diane Lane as Dame Clinton) is being produced by NBC's entertainment, which is a largely separate entity from the news division. You know how I know that? The entertainment division is located in Hollywood and news is run out of New York.

Moreover, who gives a shit if the RNC doesn't play with the networks? I can almost assure you that the networks don't.

The freakshow primary debates are expensive to produce, a nightmare to coordinate and don't do much in the way of ratings. There's a reason the broadcast networks stopped running them years ago. They can make more money with re-runs of a snuff movie or Saved By the Bell.   The only reason that they run the hour a night of the convention coverage that they do is because their FCC licenses demand it.

The presidential debates between the nominees are vapid and pointless enough. The primary debates are little more than an excuse for the candidates to show off how dumb and psychotic they are. And there are literally dozens of the fucking things now.

From there, Priebus just starts lying outright.

I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.

The networks didn't turn the 2012 debates into a "traveling circus." The candidates did more than an adequate job of that all on their own. 

The fact is that all of the halfway smart Republicans stayed as far the fuck away from the 2012 nomination as they possibly could. The '12 primaries were so sad that at various times the main challengers to Mitt Romney were Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, some pizza lobbyist who likes pussy, and the stupid and stoned governor of Texas. How can that be anything but a travelling circus?

Furthermore, the shithead base of the GOP, as exemplified by blogs like RedState, has served only to force the candidates to marginalize themselves - and their party - to the point that they're almost incapable of winning a presidential election. People watch the Republican primaries for the same reason they stop to gawk at car accidents; Because blood has a certain glimmer to it when it's mixed with gasoline.

The fact is that you can't put a dozen third-tier mutants like Michele Bachmann together on stage and not expect people - including even the media - to not point out that they're third-tier mutants.

Were it up to me, the primaries would be abolished in their entirety and the nomination would be decided in the "smoke filled rooms" of yore, by people who at least have some idea of how government and politics work. No party that considers people like Erick Erickson power brokers can be taken seriously by anyone else.

But I think we all know that I'm not going to get my way, don't we? I rarely do.

However, there is a way to make the primary debates at least a little less self-destructive

1. Have fewer of them: Look, whoever decided that having upwards of two dozen debates that no one watches should be committed.

Dozens of debates serve only to provide dozens of opportunities for the eventual nominee to make mistakes that will kill him or her in the fall. Or the losing candidates will launch attacks that will cripple the nominee later.

As much as Republicans like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats didn't make Romney's ties to Bain Capital an issue, Newt Gingrich did. And Rick Perry, not Barack Obama, coined the phrase "Vulture Capitalism." They set Obama up for the layup that destroyed Mitt Romney forever.

2. Have no more than five: Primary debates are no being held upwards of seven months because the first primary, which is insane. All that does is take unelectable misfits like Bachmann and Herman Cain and make them national figures with access to the money they need to cause irreparable harm to the party. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they've never run a collection of monsters like the Republicans did last year.

If you deny the real freaks national TV time, you deny them the money to keep their campaigns going. And if they're out, you allow yourself to present what passes for your party's best face right from the get-go. That wouldn't have stopped Gingrich and Santorum from clearing that bar last year, but I suspect that 2016 will be different.

Since there are only five primaries that matter, there should only be five debates. Those would be within two weeks of voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Super Tuesday. If the nominee isn't decided on Super Tuesday, the party has problems that will only be amplified by more debates.

3. Have the most antagonistic moderator you can find, or none at all: Political swine and their shithead consultant-lobbyist enablers aren't really interested in debates, they want an infomercial. That's why Priebus wants them turned into ball-washing exercises conducted by idiots like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

But that doesn't prepare you for a general election. Sure, it'll thrill the practically retarded primary base of the party, but it doesn't get the nominee ready for the attacks that they'll face from increasingly disciplined Democratic nominees.

If it were up to me, I'd find the smartest, most viciously liberal Harvard professor in all of Christendom to moderate the Republican debates. Or I'd have no moderator at all, and just let the candidates beat each other to death with their podiums.

The Conventions became infomercials after 1976, and the broadcast networks carry the minimal amount they can get away with, and the cable networks only carry them because they're starved for content. That will happen to the debates if fuckheads like Reince Piebus get their way.

Things Fall Apart: Rob Ford's Continuing Crack-Up

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Sun News Network & the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't support public subsidies of most things, particularly in the cultural arena. As a practical sort of fellow, I recognize that when you pay for something, you get a vote in how it's done. For obvious reasons, government should be kept well away from culture, which I would include news as a part of.

I also don't believe that running a television network is an essential function of government, and it's almost impossible to argue that otherwise. You may have been able to make a case for the existence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early years of radio and television, when it simply wasn't profitable for private industry to service large parts of a huge and sparsely populated country. But that hasn't be true for decades now. The federal government's sponsorship of the network has long outlived its usefulness and the CBC should be either sold or abolished.

I also oppose the government regulating the cable industry, especially as it pertains to programming. Cable does not utilize "the public airwaves," at least not as traditionally understood. The market, rather than the CRTC, can and should determine the fate of individual broadcasters.The CRTC retains jurisdiction over cable simply because it can.

As things currently stand, the government mandates the carriage of certain channels by the cable companies, who are then forced to pay the broadcasters for the privilege. Worse, individual households are forced to pay for the channels, whether they want them or not. I could probably list off dozens of channels that being artificially kept alive by CRTC policies in an age where it's getting harder and harder to justify the CRTC's very existence.

And that's where the Sun News Network comes in. The Sun started off as a newspaper chain for people who can't read. In 2011, it started a television news network for people who don't enjoy thinking very much.That network is losing money hand over fist and it's owner, Quebecor, appears to be gutting the newspaper business to keep it alive.

To say that Sun News is bad television is unfair. It's actually spectacularly bad television. It took all the worst aspects of Fox News and MSNBC and made them look like they were produced by a high school AV club. The on-air personalities, such as they are, are exclusively people who are genetically incapable of getting a job outside of Canada. The chances of a Peter Jennings or John Roberts emerging from the mess of Sun News are somewhere between slim and none.

One of the mantras of cable news is that all perspectives should be treated equally, which is nonsense and they know it. There are any number of opinions that are just stupid. But cable news thrives on what they call they call "diversity of opinion" because it allows them to put freaks on the air, and freaks are good for ratings.

Cable news - both liberal and conservative - isn't news. It's political propaganda, which is fine, but it shouldn't be treated as anything other than that, and certainly not by government regulators. But Sun News has spent the last few weeks agitating for mandatory carriage from the CRTC. These champions of the free market are demanding the same government cheese that everybody else gets.

SNN is unique, at least in Canada. The other broadcast networks at least pretend to maintain the pretense of professional neutrality. Sun News doesn't bother presenting itself as anything other than the house organ of the Conservative, Republican and Likud parties.

Like MSNBC and Fox, there's almost no wall between their "news" and "opinion" programming at Sun News. And like Fox, Sun devotes an incredible amount of time bitching about its competition and how unfairly it's treated by the world. In that, it is a perfect representation of what the conservative movement has become. Like modern conservatives everywhere, Sun News has embraced the cult of it's own victimhood and hilariously does so under the banner of "personal responsibility." .

Initially, I opposed granting Sun News mandatory carriage because I'm against the involuntary subsidization of political activity. Not only do I think that political parties shouldn't receive public money, I would eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to them, which is an indirect subsidy to both the parties and their contributors. If I don't believe in the involuntary subsidization of the parties, it stands to reason that I would oppose it for their broadcast mouthpieces.

That shouldn't suggest that I agree with Sun's liberal critics. They've been wildly dishonest in this debate. They oppose carriage for Sun simply because they're conservative. I can guarantee you that if there were a network blatantly supportive of the NDP or Liberals, they'd reverse their position in a heartbeat. They also don't seem to mind mandatory carriage for CTV or CBC, which I do. Were there a Canadian version of MSNBC, they'd be making exactly the same noises Sun's supporters are.

Denying SNN carriage does little more than play into their pathetic sense of victimhood and reinforces their argument that they're being unfairly treated because of their politics.

Look, Sun News is going to fail, and probably within two years. Not only are its ratings pathetic, its core demographic - old people - is one that advertisers don't care about. Mainstream advertisers are also awfully reluctant to support a network that goes out of its way to piss off so many of their potential customers. Advertising on SNN makes businesses boycott bait, and it's hard to see how that fits into any sane business plan.

Carriage is going to keep Sun News on life support, but not for as long as people tend to think it will.

I'm not signing any petitions for those hypocritical monsters, and I'm not asking any of you to, but I've very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Sun News should be granted mandatory carriage.

However, that should be accompanied by rescinding the CRTC's jurisdiction and a wholesale deregulation of the cable industry in this country. If a cable provider decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want to carry Sun News (or any other channel) or pay them what they want, they can drop them without the federal government getting involved. Cable companies would also be required to compete, and I would drop the ban on foreign ownership. If Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Sun News and make it profitable, like he has with his anti-Semitic and anti-American Rotana network in Saudi Arabia, he should be free to.

Will anyone at Sun News support my ideas for deregulation? Of course they won't. Once they get mandatory carriage, they'll take the money and find new ways to pretend that the world is out to get them.

But they won't be able to pretend that they've been forced off of the air for any reason other than they produce an unwatchable and hackish product.

Thoughts on Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes, and the Lonesome Death of Political Journalism

Just over two years ago, I wrote about What it Takes: The Way to the White House and what it meant to political writing, especially campaign books. I was of the opinion then that it was the high water mark of such books and with its commercial failure, it marked the death of proper political journalism.

If anything, I feel even more strongly than I did on New Year's Day of 2011. Moreover, I think the consequences of it are infinitely worse than I did then. For a democracy to be worthwhile, it has to be informed. Otherwise we're a land of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king.

That's more or less where we already are. Imagine just about any modern politician running fifty years ago, armed with little more than their silly platitudes and absurd talking points. Do you seriously think that any of them would last more than five minutes before they were shamed into committing suicide?

We have access to more information more affordably than at any other time in human history. Virtually anything you want to know is at your fingertips. Yet people manage to know even less than they did just a generation ago. It's remarkable when you think about it. Our grandparents knew more about the basic functioning of their democracy from reading a daily newspaper than we do with literal encyclopedias on our telephones. As literacy rates skyrocket, actual knowledge is declining.

Politics used to be about persuasion; convincing people that disagree with you that your platform is best for society. That hasn't been true in some time. politicians now pander to our predetermined beliefs, which are often breathtakingly ignorant. Political consultants and lobbyists (who are, with shocking regularity, the same people with different titles depending on whether it's an even or odd numbered year) will tell you that this is democracy in its purest form, which is a lie.

Modern communications and microtargeting don't persuade anybody of anything as much as they tend to reinforce existing positions and drive turnout. It's all very scientific, to be sure, but it exists only to play to stupidity. It doesn't educate or elucidate and it isn't supposed to.

The same is increasingly true of journalism, which is now thoroughly targeted to existing biases and only barely pretends otherwise. Why else do Fox News and MSNBC even exist?

Virtually every political campaign book in the last twenty-five years have been little more than opportunities for insiders to badmouth one another and deflect blame from themselves. Expand the tabloid format by 300 pages and that's your book.

What it Takes was very different. It was almost a series of mini-biographies of the major candidates that went into great detail about what shaped them and why. In some cases, Cramer interviewed the candidate's grade school teachers. Yes, the book was a thousand pages long, but you learned more than that consultants are human garbage, which everybody already knew.

I believe that the commercial failure of What It Takes sent a powerful message just as the information revolution was beginning. Detail and depth are the surest way to the remainder bin. Nobody wants to read something that they don't already know or doesn't confirm to what they already believe. Nothing succeeds quite like intellectual laziness and underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Nobody wants to be challenged about anything, especially their system of government.

What It Takes is considered by political journalists to be the most influential book ever written, but that doesn't change the market and it sure as hell doesn't change the attitudes of editors and publishers. And in the end, it doesn't change us.

Prior to 1992, people were complaining that no one was writing books like What It Takes. But Richard Ben Cramer did, and no one bought it. As I noted two years ago, Cramer still owed his publisher $200,000 back from his initial advance and he never wrote about American politics again.

Cramer died Monday evening of complications of lung cancer. He was 62 years old. Of course, every political writer in America has published tributes to his ability and the majesty of What It Takes. But none of them are doing what would be the most fitting tribute to Richard Ben Cramer of all: Doing their jobs the way he did his.

If you want to know how much poorer we are for his loss, you should buy a copy of What It Takes, read it, and imagine how much different things might be if more people wrote and read books like it.

The Revenge of Dana Loesch: The Final Nail in Breitbart's Coffin

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Who is Rick Santelli and Why is He Saying These Stupid Things?

I knew that the Tea Party movement was doomed to long-term irrelevance, brutal stupidity and almost cosmic hypocrisy the second it was formed around the now infamous "Santelli rant" of February 19, 2009.

Rick Santelli is a former hedge fund cocksucker who later migrated to the equally devious, unethical and wrong profession of financial journalism. He really is the worst of both possible worlds.

For my right-wing friends that love disseminating conspiracy theories about George Soros and his profiteering from the collapse of world currencies, you should know that Soros Fund Management is also a hedge fund. Long-Term Capital Management was also a hedge fund that required a massive Federal Reserve-supervised bailout in 1998, after it put all of it's eggs in the east Asian and Russian currency basket, which subsequently crashed. Because of the nature of their trading, hedge funds are largely unregulated, despite the enormous potential for destruction that they cause.

Even in the wildly overrated journalism, financial reporters are among the very worst, at about the level of gossip columnists and fucking astrologers. That anyone believes anything these assholes have to say tells you everything you need to know about why capitalism is the mess that it is today.

If you want to take a walk down memory lane, I highly recommend that you read back through what those fucking people had to say about the banking and real estate sectors from 2002 through the middle of 2007. You'll look long and hard before you find them saying anything negative. This is because financial reporters are the most cronyistic motherfuckers on God's green earth. Shit, even political reporters are embarrassed by them.

But the Santelli rant of Ought-Nine was unique onto itself for it's balls-out ignorance and hubristic hypocrisy. If you never saw it, here it is. If you haven't seen it in awhile, you should watch it again.



Remember, that was Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, not quite five months after all of those dumb fuckers were bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP.) There were no populist rants from those people in September of 2008 because they were too scared to fucking speak without shitting themselves to death.

This guy says that Santelli was against TARP, which isn't exactly true if you watch the clip he provides. Santelli acknowledged that the government had to do something, but that it should wait a few days.



And that would have been fucking crazy. Not only was the financial service industry rapidly melting down, it was beginning to take the stock market with it. The consequences of that for the larger public were catastrophic and most people still haven't recovered from them.

Back in the 80's, employers moved from Defined Benefit Packages (which you know as pensions) to investing contributions in 401K plans, which were almost all in stocks. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the market lost over half of its value in a single day. When the GOP started fucking around with passing TARP - and it failed to pass the House the first time - the market bled out even more.

Those 401K lost over half of their value. Some lost closer to two-thirds. If you were anywhere near retirement in the fall of 2008, you were basically fucked.

Because of the interconnectedness of the debt, most through derivatives like credit default swaps, all of the investment banks would have gone down. The ones that weren't directly taken out by the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have had anyone to borrow from to meet their overnight margin requirements. And because the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act allowed them to become bank holding companies, the commercial banks would have started toppling like dominoes very shortly thereafter.

No one who knows anything about anything has ever suggested otherwise. After four years of my asking, people like Santelli have never told me how you maintain a modern civilization without a banking industry. Like it or not (and I hated it) TARP was the least bad available option out there. No sensible person thought there was a guarantee that the markets would have survived another week.

But when the government rather timidly suggested that the banks (which caused the problem in the first fucking place and had just been given tens of trillions of dollars in loans and guarantees) renegotiate the mortgages of the actual victims of the crisis, shitheads like Santelli and his cocksucker friends with their bailout bonuses burning a hole in their fucking pockets had the incredible temerity to get indignant about it on the CBOT floor.

Fuck them. No wonder the Tea Party is so goddamned dumb. They're based on a fundamentally stupid premise. If Rick Santelli was capable of shame, he would've ended his rant by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Yet Santelli can't stop bringing the stupid. Just this morning he was bringing it hard.



Jesus God, the stupid just doesn't stop with this guy, does it?

We're not even talking about ancient history here, folks. We're talking about 1990-'93. The first President Bush increased marginal rates and President Clinton moved them slightly further northward. and you know what? The world didn't end. Innovation didn't stop and capital didn't flee the market anymore than it already had because of globalization.

Look, I know that the tech buble was responsible for the economy of the 90's and the balancing of the budgets (to the extent that they were, which was not at all,) but the modestly increased rates certainly helped

But look at what happened subsequently. The second Bush gutted the rates, fought two wars and dramatically expanded entitlement spending without paying for any of it.

From time to time, you'll see incredibly misleading nonsense like this (which you know is partisan horseshit because it labels the 2000-'01 downturn as "The Clinton Recession," while the 2007-'09 near-depression is called "The Mortgage Crisis" instead of "The Bush Calamity."

The main reason those charts are misleading is because they focus only on the deficits and not the consistently growing debt. Bush and the GOP Congress engaged in a really neat accounting trick during much of that administration. Specifically, the funded much of their crap - and the wars almost exclusively - through continuing resolutions, which bypassed the budget process entirely. That spending went directly to the debt and wasn't reflected in the annual deficits.

To the right, you'll see a chart of the gross federal debt, as opposed to the deficits, that you'll see consistently went up throughout the Bush years.

Here's something else you need to know about George W. Bush: He's the only person I'm aware of in human history who actually cut taxes while waging not one, but two land wars in Asia. That was so fucking crazy that even Hitler knew better than to try it.

One of the reasons that the deficit exploded under Obama is because he put all of that spending back on the books. Once you do that, of course the annual numbers will be unskewed against previous years. But dishonest hacks will continue to try to throw that hack trick at you because they think you're retarded.

Even with the massive 2001 and '03 tax cuts, combined with hack accounting tricks that would send you directly to fucking prison of you tried them in the private sector, American GDP only grew by an average of 1.6% during the second Bush administration. Growth under George H.W Bush and Clinton was 2.1% and 3.8% respectively. Even after inheriting a catastrophe, Obama's average growth numbers are likely going to be better than Bush 43's were.

The great Jay Batman said something this week that I've been saying for years and I couldn't be happier that someone finally is joining me in saying it.

Social issues and their alienating power are but one problem the Republican Party must overcome; in order to address the utter lack of credibility it has on fiscal issues, Republicans must realize some very hard truths indeed.

When you have to finance an initiative with the issuance of debt, you are spending money. When you cut taxes and create deficits, the deficit and the tax cut that created it will be financed with the issuance of debt. The tax cut thereby becomes a spending item.

No one seriously argues that financing the purchase of a television or a car with debt in the form of a loan or credit isn't spending; however, Republicans will argue until the sun goes down that a tax cut is not spending no matter how much debt it creates. No tax cut that is unaccompanied by a commensurate cut in spending items should ever be passed into law. You can have whatever you damn well wish to pay for, but as it relates to government spending, it is better to pay as you go than to pay with interest because the government has the unique ability to print money in order to lessen its debt obligations. The net result of such practices is that Americans pay higher prices over time and lose purchasing power in the process.

Santelli knows that you can raise taxes without raising the rates, but he won't tell you that because he and his asshole friends love the virtual welfare that the tax code gives them. And no, I'm not talking about capital gains, dividends, or the corporate rates, which are fine where they are or could even come down some.

The carried interest rate, for example, should be a prime target for raising to regular income rates. Contrary to popular opinion, carried interest isn't capital gains or dividend income. It's essentially a "management fee" paid to the hedge funds and private equity firms by companies that are the targets of leveraged buyouts (LBOs.) It's regular income that was given a cute name that suggests that it's something different by lobbyist bloodsuckers.

If you want to know why Mitt Romney paid only 13% in the years that he released returns from, it's because his income was primarily carried interest from Bain Capital, which he resigned from "retroactively" in either 1999 or 2002, depending on who you believe.

There are other neat tricks in the tax code that can be fixed, too. Did you know that people in Santelli's (presumed) income bracket can claim the home mortgage deduction on second, third and maybe even forth properties?

Pretty much everyone agrees that the real time bombs are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What you probably don't know is that those programs aren't financed with general revenue from the income tax. That money comes from the payroll tax, which for whatever bonehead reason, is capped at $100,000. Get rid of that artificial cap and you can lower rates, thereby creating more disposable income from the middle class and the working poor, while helping the solvency of the programs.

Granted, you'll still need to raise the retirement age, limit benefits and means test both Medicare and Social Security to guarantee their long-term survival, but eliminating the payroll tax cap gives you some breathing room in how you go about doing that.

Santelli started this morning's rant off with a brutally fucking dumb premise. He said “The only people who bring tax revenues to the party are people who work, and the discussion is mainly about the people that are working, that are way at the top.”

No shit, Rick. People who don't have an income are actually pretty famous for not paying the income tax. Go figure.

While I think that taxing the rich is as good a place as any to start, I also know that the numbers don't work if you end there. Barack Obama is being singularly irresponsible in suggesting that they can, just as the Republicans are being overpoweringly stupid in thinking that you can fix this exclusively with cuts.

The middle class are going to have to take it in the nuts, too. Firstly, that's where the real fucking money is. Secondly, those are the assholes that voted America directly into the hole it's in.

Remember the fake budget wars of the 1990s? Back then, the GOP wasn't fighting for cuts. They just wanted to limit the rate of growth. It's well past time for that now. These days, shit - including and especially defence, which is the largest ticket item in discretionary spending - is going to have to be pared down dramatically. And if that has to go, it becomes harder to justify all the goodies in the tax code for the middle class.

Supposed conservatives, just like liberals, have fallen down on explaining the responsibilities that accompany rights. Just as much as liberals have, conservatives have encouraged people - mostly the middle class - into believing that they can vote themselves stuff without any cost to them.

They always assured you that economic growth would pick up the difference, despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary. But not only did those fucking people vote for tax cuts, they voted for higher program spending, too. Remember, George W. Bush didn't lie to anyone about his plans. He was upfront about doubling federal education spending giving hard-on pills to grandpa. And that spending disproportionately befitted the middle class.

Well, as you now know, there is no fucking free lunch, and the waiter is standing by your table with the bill. I'd suggest that you keep your credit card in your wallet because it's maxed out.

As I've said before many times, the U.S debt bomb is more dire a threat than even World War II was. Propaganda aside, there was never a real threat that the Nazi war machine was ever going to occupy western Pennsylvania. But nothing will destroy the American way of like quite like a national default.

That means shared sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to take a hit. It would be nice if the poor and the working poor could be spared, but I'm not sure that's even possible. $16 trillion is, after all, a shitload of money.

If you parse through the tax code and the budget, you very quickly find that the overwhelming majority of it is geared to the wealthy and, especially, the middle class. It's welfare that has been called anything but for far too long now.

Rick Santelli and his well-heeled asshole friends think that if you can get away with not paying the piper, they won't have to, either. But as a nation, you called the fucking tune and one way or another, that piper's getting paid.

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.

Bill Kristol's Fairy Tale - Updated

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

You probably can't, but I can.

Jason Kenney's Unintended Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happens to them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

(...)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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