Category Archives: Politics – international

‘This is going to be outright war,’ he said

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It’s now in The Australian. I have been following this for a while (see here), but matters, it seems, have now escalated:

TORONTO’S city council has voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of most of his remaining powers, in further sanctions against him following admissions of crack smoking and binge drinking.

The move, which Ford vowed to fight, effectively makes the city’s chief magistrate a figurehead, which Ford vowed to fight. [“Vowed to fight” twice in a sentence; he must really mean it.]

Leading up to the vote, debate on the motion descended into farce as Ford taunted hecklers in the public gallery, calling them ‘punks’, and at one point accidentally bowled over a female councillor as he charged across the chamber.

The civic leaders of Canada’s largest city had already voted last week to curb Ford’s official duties and yesterday went further in order to ‘restore the confidence of the public in the government of Toronto’, according to the deputy mayor.

But Ford, who has apologised for his hell-raising lifestyle and for obscene public outbursts, has vowed to fight both in court and at the ballot box to keep his job.

‘This is going to be outright war,’ he said.

So not how it was, but then nothing is. And as James Delingpole reminds us:

In 2001 he proposed that city councillors should have their $200,000 personal budgets slashed: ‘If we wiped out the perks for council members, we’d save $100 million easy.’ True to form he paid his own expenses out of his salary. He was also one of only four councillors to vote against a hike in property taxes. As Mayor, he has continued in this tradition by slashing the city’s bloated public sector payroll in the teeth of strikes and protests from the unions.

You know what Lincoln said when told that General Grant was drinking whiskey.

Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

If you think the issue is that he was smoking crack and talking dirty you have obviously not been following politics over the last few years.

MY OWN VIEW: I probably should make it clear that my own view is that he is done for and must go as mayor. There are some lines that cannot be crossed and that is one. It is true that he was monitored perhaps smoking crack a year ago but the photographic evidence was ambiguous. Now that he has admitted it, however, he cannot stay in public life. Had he been on the other side, no one would ever have known, but he’s not on the other side so everyone now does know. These are the rules, and while they ought to be the same rules for both sides, that’s not how it is. But it is still remarkable to me that someone like him can become mayor of Toronto. It’s a very different place from how it was. Think of him as mayor of Melbourne, the Canadian version of Sir Les Patterson.

News from the old country

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ford anti ford demo

Why this molehill still seems to receive such rock star news coverage can be summed up in a couple of sentences from this story:

The mayor [the mayor of Toronto, that is], a conservative who touts his efforts to curb public spending and keep taxes low, later made it clear he intends to seek re-election next year. . . .

It has been a stunning decline for mayor who was elected three years ago with overwhelming support from Toronto’s conservative-leaning suburbs, where many voters felt angry about what they considered wasteful spending and elitist politics at City Hall.

But he did smoke that cocaine and he does rave and rant. But then on the other hand he also wants to be careful with other people’s money and cut spending on all those welfare payments that are so helpful to the helping professions, although for the poor not so much.

So will he win? Who knows? Should he win? I live on the other side of the world. Does the Toronto Daily [Red] Star (ie The Age) want him out? What a question!

I’ll just say this. When I was growing up, it was “Toronto the Good”, “The City of Churches”, “Tory Toronto”. It was the home of the United Empire Loyalists, founded in 1793 after the American Revolution by British subjects in the colonies who fled north to preserve their British way of life. And it was because the Americans burned down Toronto, then known as York, in 1813 that the British burned down Washington in 1814. I still think they got the better of the exchange.

And now, I can scarcely believe it, how far the saintly have fallen. The harlot of the Americas, sin city or worse. I can see that I got out just in time.

As for how outraged the citizenry are, the above is a picture from an anti-Ford demo just this morning at City Hall. Around fifty on current estimates. From Blazing Cat Fur.

UPDATE: James Delingpole has bought into this major international issue writing we need more crack-smoking Rob Ford politicians. From his article:

Arlene [a Canadian radio talk show host] wanted to get the overseas perspective on the Mayor of Toronto’s alleged behaviour and sounded worried that it might damage Canada’s international image.

‘No Arlene,’ I said. (Or words to this effect – though I probably put it more politely because I’m fond of Arlene, fond of Canada and Canadians too, come to that). ‘Not even if you throw into the mix the recent revelations about fellow Canadian Justin Bieber is there any danger whatsoever that Canada is about to lose its reputations as one of the least rock-n-roll nations on the planet.’ . . .

Let’s put it another way, in the great scheme of the crimes currently being committed by our political class, the Mayor of Toronto’s (alleged) whoring and crack-taking strikes me as, at worst, a venial slip and at best a badge of honour.

So let me tell you a joke only Canadians understand, but it cracks ’em up every time.

Q: How many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One.

It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Focusing on blame and liability

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climate debt

There really will be no end to this. From The Guardian of course, this story titled, US fears climate talks will focus on compensation for extreme weather:

US officials fear that international climate change talks will become focused on payouts for damage caused by extreme weather events exacerbated by global warming, such as the category 5 Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines last week killing thousands of people and causing what is expected to be billions of pounds of damage. An official US briefing document obtained by the Guardian reveals that the country is worried the UN negotiations, currently under way in Warsaw, will ‘focus increasingly on blame and liability’ and poor nations will be ‘seeking redress for climate damages from sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts’.

You think there won’t be some judge who will buy into this. The potential for mischief making is unlimited, specially with the American left so colossally stupid.

We are not alone

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From The Guardian, of all places. This is the headline:

Warsaw climate talks: nearly 3 in 10 countries not sending ministers

Australia is not alone in its failure to send a minister to the UN climate negotiations in Poland, reports RTCC

And while the previous government made a fetish about leading the way, it is actually Tony Abbott who is doing the leading. Again from this same story:

Australia recently attracted attention by its refusal to send either its environment minister Greg Hunt or foreign minister Julie Bishop to the negotiations.

Instead, Australia will send along its climate ambassador Justin Lee as its lead negotiator.

As the world’s top climate officials gather to discuss how to stem emissions and mobilise finance, Hunt will instead be based in the Australian parliament, attempting to fulfill Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s election promise to repeal the country’s carbon tax.

We are setting a precedent and others are taking notice.

This isn’t satire – it’s a real ad!

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obamacare ad 131108

I’ve seen it a few times but am finally coming round to see that the ad is not satire but is supposed to help market the Affordable Care Act (a name that is also not supposed to be satirical). Since it part of a series, and this article points out that the ad assumes that the age group this is supposed to appeal to ought to be insulted by being portrayed as such imbeciles, then maybe they really are just as clueless as the people who made these ads think they are.

The lying world championships

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This is everywhere on right-side websites and it is incredible, hilarious, stunning and a worry. Not a worry for us, of course, but if you are a citizen of the US, pay your taxes, want health insurance and are concerned about where their country is heading, then this is all of the above and more.

Navigators are the people who are supposed to guide you into Obamacare. The video was done by James O’Keefe who has done others of the same kind before. It’s ten minutes long but mesmerizing. In the lying world championships these are the quarter-finalists since Obama already has been given the gold medal.

True confessions

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This is the wildest story yet about American economic management that if you understand it will terrify you. It is from the Wall Street Journal and is titled, “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer”:

Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

You and I have, of course, never heard of this guy till now but he has quite a story to tell. If you are interested in knowing how the economic world you live in is “managed” this is one port of call you might make. This is just included as a teaser:

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

As he says:

We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

What they are doing is riding on the back of a tiger. Those idiots who voted for Obama to help the poor and the disadvantaged, what a bad joke that is. If Goldman Sachs is your favourite charity then maybe you’re onto something. Otherwise, if you are dumb enough to work you can help repay this debt while they drive off to the Hamptons.

[Picked up from Powerline.]

One-one millionth of a nanosecond or shorter

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A blog post by Pejman (picture supplied) on Obamacare who writes something I often think but haven’t gotten around to writing myself. Happily he has, which is that everyone is perfectly capable of withstanding the pain felt by others. The one-one millionth of a nanosecond is an absolutely correct estimate based on my previous life amongst the left.

pejman blogging

I am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that there are a lot of people out there who are only pretending to be utilitarians about this entire calamity, and who would drop their faux-utilitarianism in one-one millionth of a nanosecond if it were their lives and fortunes being affected by a bad policy, and if the bad policy in question were being pushed by a president and a party they disapproved of.

I am further willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the real motivation of the faux-utilitarians is to shut people up, to keep them from complaining and dissenting, to shame them into accepting a deal that is plainly against their interests, a deal that hurts them right in the pocketbook and right when they need quality healthcare the most.

It is their allegiance to the left that comes first and foremost and they could not care less about the harm it does to others if the harm has been inflicted in the name of some variant of the socialist nightmare.

Journalists are not hypocrites – they’re on the left

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Which one of the following do you suppose is getting a lot of grief from the media. First there’s this one:

Yes! Toronto’s underground hit of 2010, our exclusive Vote For Rob Ford – He’s Not A Communist shirts are back, by popular demand (thanks to a mayor who can’t stay out of the news). Unofficially issued in limited numbers during Ford’s winning election campaign, this one has been unavailable since then. Members of Ford Nation can show their support for their beleaguered Mayor by buying one and wearing it around ‘left-wing pinkos’! (as Don Cherry puts it).

And then there’s this one:

Described by CNN as the ‘unabashed liberal,’ de Blasio is actually to the left of Barack Obama, in the sense that de Blasio didn’t disavow his communist background once it came to light. At least Obama tried to cover up his ties to communist Frank Marshall Davis.

De Blasio had scrubbed the Marxist connections from his campaign website, an omission that momentarily captured the attention of The New York Times. But once these connections and controversies came to light, he embraced his sordid history. He still embraces liberation theology and his work for the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Actually, I’m not going to tell you which is which. You’ll just have to guess. But I have been following Rob Ford for quite some time with Toronto having been the city of my birth and with family and friends having voted for him in large numbers. A year ago a video surfaced in which he may or may not have been viewed as smoking crack cocaine which he now admits that he had. The result. His approval ratings went up except in the media where they have lain in state from the very start.

Meanwhile, the second is about the much loved (by the media) just-elected mayor of New York. When his communist past came up rather than stepping back he admitted to it all. He naturally won in a landslide.

All this is discussed in an article posted at Quadrant Online, which also discusses the single most shocking and disreputable act by a politician in the United States over the past twelve months, the discovery that Rand Paul’s speeches, which he no doubt wrote and researched himself since that’s the kind of thing US Senators do, contain plagiarised material. But don’t you worry, the media are right on top of it.

Obama grasps for climate legacy

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I should stop reading Drudge. The main story, “Obama grasps for climate legacy as second-term agenda crumbles”. The most momentous and most calamitous president is not actually seeing his agenda brought to a halt but the media like to pretend. Which part of his agenda is not going forward even in the teeth of massive opposition? But that’s the meme from which we find this:

But there’s one thing that’s going right for Obama: Executive action on climate change is moving full-speed ahead at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

‘He may be able to do more through climate change [rules] because the EPA has the authority,’ Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The Hill on Thursday.

The most far-reaching piece of Obama’s climate plan is carbon emission standards for the nation’s fleet of existing power plants, by far the largest single source of industrial carbon emissions. The EPA is also writing standards for new plants.

The story indicates there are still obstacles – such as common sense – but as his agenda moves forward on the Middle East, health care, unilateral arms reduction, the economy, here is one more area in which he can leave his lasting legacy.