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

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Plowing Through More Republican Horseshit, IRS and NSA Edition

Most of you remember my old blog, dont'cha? I spent shitloads of time there from 2005-2008 bitching endlessly about the power of the US federal government and the potential abuse thereof.

And you know what I got for my fucking trouble? A endless amount of nonsense about the Unitary Executive Theory and the righteousness of George W. Bush. Most of those people would describe themselves as Tea Partiers today, and not readily admitting to knowing who Bush even was, let alone ever having supported him so throatily.

Then there's the Citizens United decision, which I've always had a mighty bug up my ass about.

I'm on the record as having said that political activity should get no preferential treatment under the tax code, from deducting lobbying costs right on down to deducting political contributions from your taxes. Shit, I don't even support the charitable deductions for charities that actually accomplish something other than shitty commercials.

If you're interested in knowing why, I'll tell you.

The more deductions you allow in the tax code, the higher the rates have to be to generate the revenue the government needs to operate. And if you want a government with the capability of both providing accessable health care to everyone and being prepared to bomb everyone from Jakarta to Winnipeg, we're talking about a fair bit of revenue.

Advocates of a flat tax have never been able to answer that basic fact. The more you deduct for yourself, the more everyone pays in higher rates. And this is what made the Ryan-Romney tax proposals last year such a bad fucking joke to anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic.

My personal hero, Velociman, has one of the most misguided things I've ever seen up here.

A Redress of Grievances
That was, and is, the crime of the Tea Party groups. They are loose, and unaffiliated. When anyone attempts to wrest control of the Tea Parties at any level above the community they are whipsawed, and lashed.
That was the fearful thing. That is what keeps Obama awake at night. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and the right to redress grievances not as a sop of government, but as a natural right of man. From God, if you will. The Tea Parties were actually fomenting during the Bush bailout leading up to the 2008 election. They have never been specifically anti-Obama. Merely anti-spending. And yet they have been targeted and reviled as mutants, and racists.

There are any number of factual errors in those paragraphs, not least of which is that the Tea Party isn't almost wholly constituted by mutants.

Firstly, nothing calling itself the "Party Party" existed before Rick Santelli's retarded rant of February 2009, and that addressed relief to underwater homeowners under the thumb of the cocksucker banks, who themselves were just bailed out. And that Santelli said this from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went almost completed unnoticed by everyone that isn't me.

Second, it's almost impossible to know if Tea Party groups are "loose, and unaffiliated" in light of Citizens United, which restricted disclosure of their donor base.

Thirdly, this isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that. This isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment. The Obama administration never shut down the right of Tea Party groups to speak and, if they tried, they did a godawful job of it, since I couldn't escape those mutants last year.

It's actually about administrative tax law.

The Tea Parties weren't asserting a right, they were seeking a favour from the government in the form of non-profit tax status. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the right to tax-exempt status for anyone but Indians in the Constitution. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant of lying.

My ultimate problem with these shithead Republicans is that they want other taxpayers to subsidize the cost of their bitching about how taxes are so high. Their right to free speech isn't inhibited as much their ability to get other people to pay for it is, so fuck them.

Now, do I think that that the administration specifically targeted conservative groups through the IRS? Sure I do.

Is that "Watergate," like so many idiots suggest it is? No, it is not.

President Nixon specifically targeted individuals for IRS harassment,  just as Johnson and Kennedy did before him. The difference is that they weren't organized groups seeking deductions in a post-Citizens United world, which begs such scrutiny. Nixon went after individual members of groups, journalists and sundry political enemies, which is a clear abuse of power and something no one has accused Obama of.

Then there's the recent NSA scandal, to which I ask ...... What did you think was going to happen? 

Most of you will remember that I went apeshit when I first heard about the Bush NSA program that was implemented in secret, without congressional authorization, after 9/11. I went on about it for years, actually.

But the people who were fine with it then - and in some cases demanded the prosecution of journalists that reported on it - are out of their tiny pinheads about it now. Of course, these are almost universally the same twats that want a secret war in Syria, so go figure.

However there are a couple of important distinctions.

First, Obama sought a FISA warrant for the records, which Bush never did, and Republicans insisted that he didn't have to under Unitary Executive Theory, the Authorization to Use Military Force Resolution of 2001 and the "Because ....Lincoln!" argument that they deploy whenever it fucking suits them.

Second, the GOP voted to change the law to to allow for exactly what Obama is doing today. Something I would advocate impeaching Obama for, Republicans legitimized way back when.

And that goes back to the tax case. Do you want to pay higher tax rates just because shiityy people with dishonest thinking don't wantto pay any at all?

The Slow Suicide of Rob Ford

Look, I don't especially give a shit if Mayor Rob Ford injects himself with horse tranquillizer, Ibogaine and erectile medication every morning, let alone smokes a little crack. As I'm sure you recall, Whitney Houston's ruminations on crack were well known, for all the good they did her.

I'm on the record as supporting recreational drug use, and I further think that cocaine should be reclassified as a food group. And all things being equal, it could very well be that drugs make Rob Ford a better person. God knows that he could hardly be any dumber.

It isn't the drugs that bother me so much about the latest of la Ford follies. It's the hypocrisy and the arrogance. If there's one thing that's almost certain to set me off, it's the combination of arrogance and stupidity in a single person. I'd say that it's almost a chemical reaction, but that might be the blow talking.

More importantly, this entire clusterfuck reinforces an already well-established narrative of what a balls-out disaster this mayor has been. He can't do anything right, not even something as innocuous as handling the fallout of smoking crack with a gang of Somali narcotic peddlers.

Ford wasn't even bothering to deny this one for an entire week, which is unusual. Whenever he creates a giant mess of things, which happens about every other week, he gets out front and denies it, even though he's always lying. He did call the reporting of Gawker and the Toronto Star ridiculous, but that's not exactly a denial. There very probably are things in the story that are ridiculous, but Ford didn't actually address the core allegations in them.

When he finally did make a public statement last Friday, he went directly to the Clinton playbook, saying, "I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I am I an addict of crack cocaine." The use of the present tense is notable. And in fairness, a glass pipe was seen nowhere near the podium.

The only reason I think this story is important at all - outside of the obvious factor of Hizzoner's inability to deal with it prudently - is because this is the same stupid bastard who once demanded that convicted criminals be subjected to a Stalinist regime of internal exile for convicted criminals. And given that he can now be fairly classified as a one-man crime spree himself, Rob Ford has got to go.

Do I think that he will? Short answer? No, I don't.

Etobicoke Slim has too much pride and too few brains. He insists that he's willing to put himself up for election, but he isn't willing to do the one thing that could force one: resigning and declaring his candidacy in a by-election.

I howled like a retard at the prospect of a by-election last fall when it looked as if Ford's other contraventions of the law would force his removal, and I oppose one now. The idea of wasting seven to ten million dollars to feed Ford's demented hubris is anathema to me, and it should be to any fiscal conservative.

In the last seven days, no fewer than five of Etobicoke Slim's senior staff have quit or been fired. That the people closest to him have lost faith in the mayor should send a strong message to the public and, more importantly, Council.

Hizzoner hasn't accomplished much of anything after his first six months in office, two years ago. He's routinely humiliated by Council. The only person there who'll regularly side with the Brothers Ford is a brain-damaged Gino Boy like Georgio Mammolitti.

It doesn't matter if Rob Ford stays in office or not. In fact, it doesn't matter if he wins the next election, which is a distinct possibility. Oh, he'll destroy conservatism in this city for a fucking generation by way of his continuing and increasingly lunatic shenanigans.

The guy is a chronic fuck-up, a congenital liar and his only claim to conservatism is that he can pay for a massive subway expansion with nothing more than unicorn farts. The fact that he's doing crack might be the least objectionable thing about Rob Ford.

This is where modern conservatives always fall down. They love the rhetoric of their mongoloid figureheads more than they pay attention to their actions. You see that happening over and over again, and that's why winnable elections are being routinely lost.

By instinctively defending the shitheads on our side, we marginalize not only ourselves, but our ideas. By making heroes out people like Rob Ford and Sarah Palin, we pretty much make our agenda unelectable. In doing that, we guarantee that our base isn't broadened enough to win elections.

Sure, you can point to the 2010 U.S congressional elections and Ford's own victory, but that only proves that you aren't paying attention. Those victories came only because the governing Left overreached, not because of the merits of any argument put forward by the Right.

And no sooner than the Right was elected, they began overreaching. Look at the classically ignorant Tea Party. They presented themselves as libertarians, but as soon as they took office they started trying to legislate shit like birth control and effectively destroyed themselves. Most of the Tea Party governors elected in 2010 are on a trajectory to get annihilated next year.

Liberals aren't stupid. They learned important lessons from the way that conservatives marginalized them in the 1970s and '80s. And they've pretty much been on a winning streak ever since. When George W. Bush, Stephen Harper and even Rob Ford were elected, it was partly because they promised to preserve or even expand social spending. All three campaigned on that idea.

Mitt Romney and John McCain ran to the Republican base and suffered the worst defeats of any GOP presidential candidate where there wasn't a third-party candidate since 1964. The Wildrose Party in Alberta threw away a sure thing in Alberta by doing the same thing last year.

Now, if you listen to Mayor Ford and his impossibly dumb brother, you get the idea that they're just dying to fight an election over this scandal.

Well, here's the good news. They can. Any time they want. They'd just have to resign and declare their candidacies in a by-election. In Doug's case, the by-election would be automatic. In the case of the mayor, Council could appoint an interim mayor to fill out Ford's term, but if the demand was there, there'd almost certainly be an election.

But they're lying. That's why they haven't resigned yet.

Toronto is a very liberal city, I may not like it, but that's a fact. Ford won for two reasons; he was unopposed on the right (if you don't count the joke candidacy of Rocco Rossi) and roughly a dozen people ran to his left.

If a snap election were called tomorrow, the field would be narrowed down to about three candidates: Ford, John Tory and Oliva Chow. Chow would be alone on the Left in her ability to raise money and build an organization in a short period of time, say 60 days. And it's safe to say that "the Orientals" would "work like dogs" to elect her, in an effort to "take over." 

As I write this, Etobicoke Slim's approval rating is at about 37%. The only way to win under those circumstances is to run against a divided left. And if Tory runs, that cuts down on  Ford's support from conservatives who aren't abject idiots.

Rob Ford can't win a snap election, which is further proof of their bluster and abject fucking lying.

The Big Crack Up

Hey, can we all stop pretending that Toronto mayor Rob Ford isn't the most spectacular fuck-up in human history? Because that'd be great.

I'm addressing that question to braying mob of liberal shitheads out there, who seemingly aren't smart enough to just stand back and let their enemies die on their own. There's just no talking to those assholes.

No, I'm asking this of my fellow conservatives, who almost to a man are determined to be repeatedly humiliated with Ford and his unending follies, both personal and professional.

Not only is Ford a repellent and disastrously ignorant human being, he's endlessly damaging to conservatism. At this point, it's hard not to see how how Etobicoke Slim's only lasting legacy will be inflicting Olivia Chow on the City of Toronto as mayor next year because of his chronic inability to keep his mouth shut and his shit together. And you know what? Conservatives will have no one to blame but themselves.

Look, I don't know for a fact that this morning's allegations of Ford smoking crack in the last six months are true or not. But I'm inclined to believe that they are.

After all, this isn't Hizzoner's first time at the pharmaceutical rodeo.

Ford was actually arrested in Miami 14 years ago for drunk driving and marijuana possession. Any foreigner carrying pot in a jurisdiction as savage as fucking Florida can only be described as hubris-crazed retard. That's ballsy to the point of stupidity. Hadn't that motherfucker ever seen Midnight Express? Florida's a little more merciful than Turkey toward drug offenders, but not much.

Of course, Ford lied about it. 

Then there was the story of Ford promising to get OxyContin for some HIV positive lunatic.

In case you were worried, there are multiple stories about Ford's booze-fuelled craziness, too.

Given the record, it's hard not to believe the crack story. There's just too much history out there now to write it off a fantasy driven by the Goddamned Liberal Media. And as much as my friends on the Right like to pretend otherwise, the Toronto Star isn't in the business of committing professional suicide or setting themselves up to get get sued out of existence.

Yes, the story started with Gawker. And yes, Gawker has a ... dodgy history. But, at this point, Ford can't just rail against the media if these stories are false, he needs to sue. And he needs to sue Gawker in an American court, under the Sullivan v. New York Times Co. standard. As I and my conservative friends have said over and over again, Canadian libel laws are entirely too friendly to the plaintiff.

I can almost guarantee you that by 9 am, Team Ford and their sycophantic bloggers are going to be playing this as another instance of "The media is out to get us." Know up front that that's horseshit.

The fact is that Hizzoner keeps putting himself in the middle of the scandals. When he's not having his picture taken with obvious gangbangers, he's posing with Latvian Nazis.  He keeps doing this to himself. There has yet to be a Rob Ford scandal that hasn't started with Rob Ford's conduct. Not one. Its well past time that conservatives start admitting that.

The "Ford Nation" comprises about the thirty percent of the city that has suffered a grievous head injury. They'll support him if he campaigns in a loincloth made entirely of dead babies. It's become clear that they'll excuse anything from him.

That's enough for Ford to win, assuming that the Left insists on being the Left and runs a dozen candidates.

But what if they don't? What if they decide that Etobicoke Slim is entirely too much of a menace to stay in office, and clear the field for Olivia Chow?

I can see a scenario where she wins pretty big in a head to head race. She'd sweep the downtown core, and pick up more than enough heavily Chinese suburban wards to put her over the top.

Conservatives are playing a dangerous game in a left-wing city, assuming that liberals are just going to let Ford get re-elected in a cakewalk

I'm not. I'm assuming the worst - the the Left will get behind Chow and beat the shit out of Hizzoner, possibly in an asshole blowout. Conservatives that continue to support Ford are potentially voting for the Widow Layton.

Let's see how well that works out for us.

We need someone like John Tory or Doug Holyday to push Ford out of the race, soonest.

Rob Ford Made a Sexy Time

I'm not sure I've been clear enough enough about this. If given the choice between voting my incumbent mayor, Rob Ford, and Phil Spector, I'd have to go with Spector. Even with the goofy fucking wigs and demonstrated ability to blow a b-movie actresses' goddamed noggin off, Phil still causes less embarrassment to himself and everyone around him than Ford does in the first 20 minutes of a given day. The only advantage Ford has over Spector is a slightly better track record in court.

Look, everyone knows that nothing raises the pheromones quite like an evening with the Canadian Jewish Public Affairs Committee. There can be no denying the almost palpable sexual tension that overwhelms any and all of their functions. I personally blame them for the teen pregnancy crisis of the 1980s.

Thursday was an exciting day for everybody. The weather started not sucking so bad and it was the great and good Dr. Reverend's birthday. It was CJPAC. Former mayoral rival Sarah Thomson was there in her newly dreadlocked and fine-assed glory and, y'know, things happen.

She joined people queuing to meet and have photos taken with Ford, whom she frequently debated as rival candidate during the 2010 civic election, and then chided him for not attending her recent transit forum.

“He told me he was in Florida and I should have been with him because his wife wasn’t there,” Thomson told the Star on Friday. “I didn’t expect that. Rob doesn’t normally act that way towards women, so I was a little bit shocked, and then we posed to get our picture taken and he grabbed my ass during the pose.”

As I said, these things happen. There are times in our lives when passion rules and when it causes us to dare, we dare greatly. It might not always play out the way we'd prefer, but when passion rewards us, it rewards us greatly. That's just the way love works, people.

Far be it from me to criminalize romance, like the Goddamned Liberal Media continually insists on doing, but hasn't Etobicoke Slim caused himself enough trouble?

That's not to say that the oafish shithead is admitting anything. That's fucking crazy talk. Nope, within hours of the story breaking, Boy Rob reached deep into his Nixonian soul and denied everything.

“Last night I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful event to support the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee.

“This is an event that is attended by numerous political leaders and where I have been a guest in the past.

“Early this morning, false allegations were made regarding a number of disgusting actions. I am shocked, dismayed and surprised. I can say without hesitation that they are absolutely, completely false.

“What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.

“This is a day we should all take the time to reflect upon the women in our lives and in our society. It is a day when we can envision the changes we want to make in our communities to ensure that all people are equal and that violence and discrimination against women comes to an end.”

In my opinion, everyone would've been better off if he just said something like this ...

Lookee, bitches, don't you know who I am? I have a literal shit-ton of money and a cool job. Those are the kind of things that broads go for. Oh sure, they'll say they don't, but they're just as shallow as the fucking voters. Talk sternly and promise them enough cool shit, and both are yours.

By the way, just look at me, will ya? What skirt in her right mind could say no to a doughy, entitled dope that sweats from the sternum? Dykes, that's fucking who! Did I mention that I coach football for would-be thugs and serial rapists? I'm not saying that I'm a great guy, I'm saying that I'm the best guy ever!

Listen to the socialists moan about how I tried to get my pecker wet the night before International Women's Day, fer chrissakes! Well, I was celebrating, too. Just a few hours early. More importantly, I'm of the considered opinion that every day is a day worth celebrating poontang! Especially when my crazy fucking wife isn't around.

Goddamn, I need a drink! And can we get some R. Kelly up in this motherfucker? Mayor Daddy needs to dance!

Anyone who peruses my archives knows that I endorsed Sarah Thomson in 2010 and voted for her, even when she dropped out and endorsed George Smitherman. My loathing for Hizzoner is also nothing short of legendary. Some of my best recent writing has detailed that hatred at length. Not only am I better writer for hating Rob Ford, I'm a better man.

But neither of things colour my opinion all that much. The real question is: "Why would Sarah Thomson lie?"

Thomson is enough of a big shot in this town that she can get media attention pretty much whenever she wants it. And even though I voted for her, I'm not exactly hearing a Moby Dick-like drum chorus for a repeat performance.

Even if she is laying the groundwork for another run, this is the kind of allegation you drop two days before an election, not two years. Who's even going to remember this story in the fall of 2014, especially given Hizzoner's legion of other fuck-ups; past, present and future?

On the other hand, she might be nuts. This is, after all, a woman in mid-40s with dreadlocks and isn't known to have sired children with Bob Marley, or even Peter Tosh. It seems unlikely, but the possibility can't be entirely ruled out.

But what does Ford have going for him? Even the Mayor's staunchest defenders aren't stupid enough to seriously suggest that he's actually innocent of anything anymore. Instead, they just argue that he isn't scuzzy enough to be thrown out of office because of it.

I'm personally inclined to believe Thomson's story, if only because it perfectly fits a narrative that Ford's own conduct over twelve years has assiduously built. It's almost impossible to imagine a level of assholerly that this idiot won't stoop to. If you told me that he wanted to buy that park next to his house because he had run out burial space for freshly murdered whores on his own property, I wouldn't dismiss it as quickly as you might think I would.

That's the problem with Ford. Each and every negative story about him has been true enough to make the next one at least plausible. The only question that arises now is, "Is this worth forcing a new election over?"

And you know what? It's well past time that conservatives stop defending this asshole. While it helps him mightily, it only destroys conservatism in this city.

There's pretty much no saving Ontario Provincial Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, who is going to face his second almost fetishized humiliation this spring. But Stephen Harper faces the very real possibility of having his Toronto seats divided up between the NDP and Liberals in 2015, a possibility that's more likely if a self-destructive Rob Ford is still in office.

The Ford phenomenon isn't unlike what's happening with the Republicans in the United States. Their loonier candidates discourses on the merits of rape babies makes it difficult for well-meaning voters to elect rational conservatives who could give a shit about such nonsense. So the left wins by default.

Because of the way that the left works, I'd say that Ford is still the favourite to win in 2014. But that isn't going to help Tim Hudak, who has maybe a dozen chromosomes too many, and it will almost certainly hurt Harper in area code 416, and possibly 905.

Don't forget, Toronto is still a fundamentally liberal city. We only elect conservatives when the left implodes on itself. But we're still, far and away, the biggest and most important city in the country. We carried Jean Chretien to victory three times in a row. Harper only won his majority when he started carrying seats in the Greater Toronto Area.

Want an even more liberal Harper government? Keep Ford in office and let the Liberals and the NDP run against him, instead of Harper. If you think that Harper won the GTA seats that he did last time for any reason other than the Liberals were in a state of national collapse, you're fucking kidding yourselves.

Even if he's re-elected, Ford will be the last "conservative" mayor of Toronto in a good long time. At some point, you have to count on the left getting their all their shit in one sock. If Olivia Chow loses in 2014, she'll have a virtually lock on 2018. And who will we have?

Ford has to be stopped from running again, and only conservatives can do that. His amen choir in the media and the stupid fucking blogosphere has to understanding that this is about something bigger than Rob Ford. I understand the urge to protect him from removal during his elective term, but anything after that is an act of self-mutilation.

When Ford becomes shorthand for conservative in this city, conservatives are fucked, both municipally and provincially. And we're going to be handicapped more than we have to be federally.

Worse than that, we destroy ourselves on the one thing that's supposed to matter - principle. It's bad enough that Conservatives have rallied around Harper's spending spree and pretended that it's something other than what it is. Defending Ford's continued self-destructive behaviour instead of calling him on it is an open invitation for no self-respecting person to take our calls for personal responsibility seriously ever again.

If nothing is ever Ford's fault, why is anything anyone else's fault?

At that point, what conservatism even mean?


The worst part of the Sarah Tompson allegations is that they buried this story, which should horrify anyone that knows anything about anything. If you want to truly estroy the conceptof good government, turn they keys over to the fucking lobbyists. I can't think of a faster way to do it.

Rob Ford Has Got to be Fucking Kidding

Ever notice how O.J Simpson never remarried? I wish my mayor was as bright as the erstwhile Juice

I spent a good chunk of last fall writing about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's latest - and most egregious- fuck up, the conflict of interest beef that very nearly had his tubby ass shoved out of office with a frontloader.

Long story short; As a city councillor, Etobicoke Slim used city letterhead to hit up scumbag lobbyists for donations to his silly fucking football foundation. The city's integrity commissioner agreed and ordered Ford to return the money. City council later voted to so order the same.

After Ford became mayor, Council voted on the stupid fucking mess again. This time, Ford spoke and voted on the matter, prompting a guy named Paul Magder to sue Hizzoner under the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. Madger won at trial and Ford was ordered removed from office. That decision was reversed on appeal in January.

As I said throughout this stupid nightmare, I didn't think that Hizzoner's speech and vote constituted enough of a conflict to warrant removal, but that I would take it. Nor was I expect Justice Hackland to rule the way that he did. However, when the initial ruling came down, I did expect it to be upheld by the Superior Court.

The worst and most unforgivable sin was the solicitation from lobbyists. Were I writing the laws, that would have resulted in immediate expulsion and lifetime disqualification from holding higher office.

I've said this dozens of times in this space: Lobbyists are the root of all evil in modern democracy. Both conservatives and liberals should feel this way because lobbies fuck up all of their dream policies. Conservatives can't get rational tax reform because of special interest loopholes, and liberals can't get much of anything without those same interests finding a way to pervert it into a means of self-enrichment.

I've spent years listening to assholes moan about the corrosive effect of money in politics, which is unmitigated bullshit. Don't believe me? Ask Karl Rove, who spent north of $200 million in the last U.S election and sending exactly no one to Washington. Or Sheldon Adelson, who did pretty much the same thing with the same result. Even with an awesomely stupid electorate, money didn't accomplish anything close to what it was supposed to.

The truly corrupting thing in politics is politicians or their staffers decamping to lucrative lobbying gigs. And it's shocking how often lobbyists wind up running campaigns, supposed because they're just that civic-minded.

Ford's a guy who made his name railing against the "gravy train." Lobbyists exist only to ensure that that train stops at their stations, and those of their well-heeled clients, as frequently as possible.

The fact that the solicitation of favors from lobbyists by elected officials in this province isn't a crime in this province is nothing less than stunning to me. And remember, l'affaire Ford began with solicitations to lobbyists.

So what's Etobicoke Slim been doing with his time lately?

Mayor Rob Ford is still asking registered lobbyists to donate to his football foundation — a practice that violates the city’s code of conduct and led to the court case that nearly forced him out of office.

Two lobbyists showed the Star fundraising letters Ford sent them within the past two months on behalf of the foundation. Ford hand-signed both letters.

Of course he is. Of fucking course he is.

Oh, it gets better, too.

Andy Manahan, executive director of the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario, said he received a letter on Jan. 28 — only three days after Ford won his appeal in the conflict of interest saga that began with his decision to solicit donations from lobbyists in 2009. (Ed: emphasis mine)

(...)

Manahan said he has not met with Ford but has met with a member of his staff.

The second registered lobbyist asked not to be named for fear of alienating the Ford administration. He said, “I think it’s kind of suspicious. The only interactions I’ve had with him were on city business or as a lobbyist registrant.”

He added: “It goes back to: are you allowed to use names and contact information from business dealings to raise funds? Is that permitted? It sure seems strange.”

(...)

Ford also sent a fundraising letter in the past two months to a non-lobbyist who does business with the city and whose fortunes he could directly influence: Brian Ashton, president of the Canadian National Exhibition Association, which stages the annual fair.

Ashton received a letter from Ford on Jan. 10 — three days after Ford’s lawyer argued his appeal in court but before the judges released their decision.

As mayor, Ford is automatically a member of the association board; if Ashton seeks re-election, Ford could vote for or against him. Under its new governance model, the association will pay rent of more than $3 million to the city in 2013.

“It’s awkward because if you’re doing business with the city in any fashion, do you feel a sense of obligation?” said Ashton, a former centrist councillor who retired from politics in 2010. “If you don’t (donate), will that influence his impression or support of your organization?”

Ashton is currently urging council members not to put a casino at Exhibition Place. He said the fundraising letters are “unnerving” because “the Fords are very powerful in Toronto.”

“I just hope that (Rob Ford) separates the two and doesn’t allow fundraising efforts to influence decisions with respect to the casino or any other CNE business,” Ashton said

Ford's defenders, several of whom have been friendly to me and this blog, have suggested that what Ford's doing is okay because it's for charity and not for him. This is misguided on several counts.

First, the Rob Ford Football Foundation is something that he's repeatedly cited in his campaigns. Therefore, regardless of its intention or the work it does, it is a political tool of the mayor's.

Second, it's clearly very important to Ford personally. That being the case, what's the difference between his asking lobbyists for foundation donations or asking for them to buy him a car?

Third, the appearance of and potential for corruption remain. What if a lobbyist who gives receives decisions from the city favourable to his clients? What if a lobbyist who refuses doesn't?

Fourth, he's still using city time and resources to work for the Ford Foundation. Despite everything, he continues to insist on doing exactly what started all the chaos the city went through in the first place.

The mayor's hubris is undeniable, but it's hardly unbelievable. He's a guy who celebrates a near-death experience by standing on his roof in a lightning storm with a fucking golf club. It's amazing to watch, but it isn't especially surprising.

As much as his defenders like to suggest otherwise, the constant controversies surrounding Etobicoke Slim aren't inventions of the media or some dubious leftist cabal. Almost without exception, he's brought them on himself by his own conduct. His enemies haven't done themselves any favors by congregating around a certain law firm whose clients include a lobbyist who worked on the campaign of one of Ford's 2010 opponents, but almost everything that has happened to Ford in office is something that he's done to himself.

I'm something of a prophet, which I don't get recognized for enough. So I'll remind you of something I said in November.

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.

It took Hizzoner three days after only barely surviving in office to return to the behaviour that nearly cost him his job in the first place. Three days. Christ, Toronto doesn't have a respected statesman running our affairs, we elected Lindsay Lohan.

And you know what? We're almost certainly going to get another six years of this.

Because liberals insist on being liberals, they'll do what the did last time, which is run a dozen different candidates against Ford. Ford's political polling floor seems to be about 25%. If a dead child prostitute is found in Rob's bed, a quarter of the electorate will believe that George Smitherman put her there and vote accordingly. He could lose half of his 2010 vote and still conceivably have a path to victory.

The only way that Rob Ford is going anywhere in 2014 is if a solid, adult conservative challenges him. But conservatives tend to be disciplined and the fear that challenging Ford would only elect Olivia Chow would stop most of them from doing it.

You think Ford is going to grow the fuck up after he's re-elected? I don't. He's already busy laying the groundwork for the next half-dozen scandals that will prevent him from doing anything at all as mayor.

And when conservatism is wiped out once and for all in this city, conservatives will have no one to blame but themselves for having supported that dickhead in the first place.

More likely, he'll create a Watergate-sized scandal that the courts and Council simply can't ignore.

Things Fall Apart: Ben Shapiro, Chuck Hagel and Friends of Hamas

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I don't watch Fox News. The fact is that I do. A lot. What's important is why I watch it.

First, I'm love with my own anger, and few things make me as angry as what the ridiculous talking head culture has done to conservatism as an intellectual movement. Not only do liberals deride conservatives as mouth-breathing fuckheads, so does everybody else. And all you have to do is look at the "skewed polls" debacle leading up to last year's presidential election and any reasonable person will understand that that they're not wrong.

Then there's Benghazi, where four Americans were tragically killed. The same people who spent a year resisting any investigation into 9/11 - where three thousand Americans were murdered in the streets of their own country - want to derail Cabinet confirmations of national security officials until they find out who edited Sunday show talking points.

Second, I like to masturbate while watching Megyn Kelly get pointlessly, stupidly angry about her right to maternity leave. She seems to think that it's okay for the government to dictate that employers give paid leave to new mothers but not for, y'know, health care. You can argue for both or neither, but advocating one over the other is amazingly stupid. And stupidity in pretty packages makes me hard.  I'm pretty kinky, I know.

But I can't take Fox seriously as a "news" source simply because they get so many of their stories from Brietbart. com.

Whenever someone cites a Brietbart story to me to support an argument, I generally stay silent. I do this because I know as a matter of absolute certainty that it's always a matter of minutes, if not seconds, before the Brietbart material is exposed as a deliberate fraud. No one has ever gotten rich betting on the accuracy of a Brietbart story. The people who work there are stupid or lying, and very often both.

Brietbart is one of the primary reasons that I distrust bloggers who portray themselves as journalists. Bloggers, and especially conservative ones, have spent years bitching about journalism's lack of objectivity, so they built an entire model out of the very thing that they were bitching about in the first fucking place.

The difference between bloggers and the mainstream media is accountability. Mainstream media companies are, as a general rule, publicly traded entities. They are also answerable to advertisers. Those two things are not usually true of bloggers, who can always resort to begging their gullible readers for money when shit goes sideways. Bad journalists get fired, whereas shitty bloggers get jobs at Brietbart.com.

I took a special interest in Brietbart's Ben Shapiro when he was Adam Carolla's podcast a couple of weeks ago. Shapiro was plugging his silly book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

The central premise of Bullies, that liberals shut down debate by panting anyone who opposes them as racists or worse, is factually sound. But Shapiro's solution is equally destructive to the public discourse and borderline retarded, besides. Basically, he advocates retaliating in kind.

Again, this is another example of building a model from the very thing that you were bitching about in the first place, which is hypocrisy.

Second, it cedes the moral high ground. By retaliating in kind to demonic liberal tactics, you essentially allow that your underlying ideas are equal to those of your opponents, when they should be better. If you can't argue your way through those charges, the chances are that your ideas are worthless, anyway.

Third, It undermines any condemnation of actual racism. This is why I've always despised liberals for playing the race card so loosely. When everybody's a racist, how bad can racism actually be? With very few exceptions, I've always thought that liberal anti-racist crusaders are far more interested in money, power or self-glorification than they actually are with confronting racism.

As conservatives increasingly associate themselves with that tactic, I increasingly disassociate myself with conservatism.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to Chuck Hagel.

Hagel presents a perfect opportunity for debate amongst conservative foreign policy thinkers, of which there are basically two schools: Taft-Eisenhower-Reagan non-interventionists and the neocon Bush 43 thinkers.

That's a debate very much worth having. But the neocons want to avoid it all costs. While whining that America is going broke, they also want to argue that the United States needs to have a wildly interventionist and expensive foreign policy. They know that this makes no sense in any economic way, so they resort to charges of racism.

Because he has questioned the way that America is involved in the Middle East, Senator Hagel's enemies have decided to paint him as an anti-Semite. That's where stories like this come from;

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.

Small problem: "Friends of Hamas" doesn't actually exist. Here's how the clusterfuck came to be.

The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”

Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.

In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

Or so I thought.

Basically, what happened is that a Hill staffer repeated a reporter's question as fact to Shapiro and Shapiro published it as fact.

Not only did Ben Shapiro not bother to get multiple sources, he didn't even google "Friends of Hamas," which would have pretty conclusively proved that they don't exist.

I get that there are honest disagreements about Hagel's views on foreign policy, and I'm not against an honest about them. But selective reporting - if Shapiro's "Friends of Hamas" story can even be called that - is something else altogether.