Category: Politics

Governor Ratf%$# Just Got Served

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Yesterday, he Maryland legislature overrode 5 of Governor Hogan’s vetoes:

The Maryland General Assembly on Thursday overturned five of Gov. Larry Hogan’s 2015 vetoes, turning the bills into law and proving that the Democratic-controlled legislature can enforce its will despite opposition from a popular Republican chief executive.

The resurrected measures dealt with public marijuana smoking and pot paraphernalia; police seizures of criminal assets; taxation of online hotel-booking services; and funding to renovate an arts center in Annapolis.

Overturning a veto requires the approval of three-fifths of the 141-member House of Delegates and the 47-member Senate. Both chambers completed the process for the five measures Thursday.

………

The Senate postponed action on Hogan’s veto of a bill that would grant voting rights to felons who are on parole or probation, pushing the vote to Feb. 5 so that a vacant seat can be filled.

Miller said this week that the vote of the new senator could be critical. The voting-rights bill passed the Senate last year with 29 votes, exactly the number needed to override Hogan’s veto.

I really hope that they expand voting rights.

Removing voting rights from felons is an evil relic of Jim Crow.

Lose

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At the last kiddie table debate, Rick “A Frothy Mixture” Santorum suggested that debate watchers Google him:

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum encouraged viewers to Google him in Thursday’s undercard Republican presidential debate, an unfortunate choice of words that reminded many of his search engine woes fueled by sex columnist Dan Savage.

“Go and Google Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton you’ll see a five-minute debate. I’ll let you decide who won the debate,” he said during his closing statement. “I’ll tell you who won, I know I’m out of time, I’m going to take some of Rand Paul’s time here for a second.”

The prompt recalled sex columnist Dan Savage’s retribution campaign against Santorum for his anti-gay remarks, when Savage asked readers to come up with an alternate definition for “santorum.” A highly NSFW entry rose to the top and has for years plagued top search engine results for Santorum’s name across sites.

If you Google “Santorum”, you will find multiple references to, “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex,” a neologism coined by Dan Savage in the late 2003.

If you are Rick Santorum, you should NEVER ask people to Google you.

I have a New Endorsement

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Timothy Canova, who is running against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the Democratic primary.

It appears that dissatisfaction with DWS, both in her district and inside the DC Beltway that The Hill, a bastion of inside the Beltway thinking has taken notice:

For Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the problems with the left just keep coming.

 The Democratic National Committee (DNC) chief has infuriated many Democrats with her handling of the party’s presidential primary debates. She drew further howls from liberals for deeming a whole generation of young women “complacent” about their abortion freedoms.

And now she’s facing a primary challenge from a liberal Wall Street reformer who says she’s a corporate shill detached from her district.

 The challenge highlights the difficulty facing Wasserman Schultz as she juggles her dual roles as Florida representative and head of the DNC — duties that sometimes come into conflict.

 Timothy Canova, a professor at the Shepard Broad College of Law in Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, says Wasserman Schultz’s positions on trade, criminal justice, consumer protection and drug policy reform — among others — are evidence that she’s sold out to corporate interests at the expense of her constituents.

 It marks the first primary challenge to Wasserman Schultz since her arrival on Capitol Hill in 2005.

 Canova launched his bid last week on a platform that pulls more than a few pages from that of populist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Democratic presidential hopeful who’s waged a surprisingly strong challenge to front-runner Hillary Clinton by attacking from the left.

In that mold, Canova is vowing to fight President Obama’s trade agenda, reform the criminal justice system, rein in big banks and curtail the influence of money in politics — all issues where he sees Wasserman Schultz as vulnerable.

 “People here on the ground — I hear left and right, you name it — are just dissatisfied that she’s not responsive, she takes people for granted, and it’s becoming evident in the way she votes on an awful lot of issues,” Canova said Friday by phone.

“She takes a lot of corporate money, and she votes for corporate interests contrary to the interest of her own constituents.”

Canova, a former aide to the late Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), is pointing to a host of votes that, he says, make Wasserman Schultz a bad fit for the district.

 He says she fought against new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidelines governing car loans and pay-day lenders.

He’s quick to note that she opposed a 2014 Florida referendum to legalize medical marijuana, calling her “a drug warrior” in the pockets of a private prison industry that promotes incarcerations.

And he’s highlighting the fact that she was one of just 28 House Democrats to support the fast-track trade bill that’s greased the skids for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a huge international accord that’s a top priority of Obama but remains anathema to liberals in his own party.

 Canova said the TPP would be an environmental catastrophe for South Florida, which “is really facing, in the long-term, an existential problem with climate change and rising oceans.”

 “In a democracy, you have to hold your officials accountable,” Canova said. “I was hoping somebody would step forward and challenge her. Nobody else would, and that’s really the basis of the challenge.”

 Canova has a tough road ahead. Wasserman Schultz, as head of the DNC, is the most prominent Democrat in Florida; she’s a prodigious fundraiser for the party; and she glided to a sixth term in 2014 with 63 percent of the vote.

 Still, in an environment when political non-conformers like Sanders and Donald Trump have attracted support by simple virtue of their outsider status, Canova sees an opening.

 “There’s a perception … that she’s bullet-proof here at home because she wins by big majorities,” he said. “But she’s never been challenged in a primary.”

Washerman Schultz has faced some difficulty representing her district while also serving as a figurehead role for her party.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz isn’t having difficulties because she has duties as head of the DNC.

She is facing a backlash because she is a careerist political climber with no underlying beliefs beyond that, she is as dumb as a post, and she refuses to listen to people she needs for implementation of her agenda.

I am so hoping that she gets the boot in the primary.

In any case, I have added Dr. Canova to Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page.

This Is Some Class A Trolling

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Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has invited Donald Trump to visit a London Mosque with him:

Britain’s opposition leader invited U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who sparked an outcry by calling for a ban on Muslims from entering the United States, to join him on a visit to a London mosque.

The comments from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who represents a multi-ethnic district of north London, come a day before the British parliament debates a motion calling for a ban on half-Scottish Trump from visiting the country.

“I decided to invite Donald Trump on his visit to Britain to come with me to my constituency because he has problems with Mexicans and he has problems with Muslims,” Corbyn told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

“As you know my wife is Mexican and my constituency is very, very multi-cultural so what I was going to do was go down to the mosque with him and let him talk to people there,” he said.

This is some truly epic trolling.

Labour made the right choice when they elected him party leader.

My Take on the Democratic Debates

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I missed the first 20 minutes, so this effects my review of the debate.

My two big take-aways are that but this debate was far more combative than any of the prior encounters, and that the debate moderators were trying very hard to completely ignore Martin O’Malley.

In terms of performance, I think that Clinton is a more accomplished debater, but that Sanders challenged her honesty, which is, and remains a weak point with the voters.

I’m not sure how this is going to pay out.

My guess is that the press will declare it a Cinton victory.

but I do want to say that the decision by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to schedule this debate opposite the NFL playoffs, much like her decision to schedule an earlier debate on the Saturday before Christmas.

DWS really needs to be fired.

Well, This is Getting Interesting

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David Brock, a proxy for Hillary Clinton has been demanding that the 74 year old Bernie Sanders release his complete medical records.

Interestingly, the Clinton campaign has done its level best to get him to STFU:

A top surrogate for Hillary Clinton is prepping a new attack in an intensifying and increasingly personal war against rival Bernie Sanders — calling on the 74-year-old to release his medical records before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

Clinton defender David Brock — founder of the Correct the Record PAC, which coordinates directly with Clinton’s campaign — is expected to hit the airwaves this weekend from Charleston, the scene of the third Democratic debate on Sunday night, and challenge Sanders to cough up a clean bill of health and doctor’s note in the next 16 days, according to a Democrat familiar with his thinking who was not authorized to preview any strategy.

Clinton released her medical records, showing she is “fit to serve as President,” last July. A spokeswoman for the Clinton campaign declined to comment on the strategy.

But hours later, after this report was published and Brock’s planned tactics were widely criticized on Twitter, campaign chairman John Podesta distanced himself from the surrogate’s attack.

“@DavidBrockDC chill out,” Podesta tweeted Saturday night. “We’re fighting on who would make a better President, not on who has a better Physical Fitness Test.”

Podesta’s belated comment also came after the Sanders campaign issued its own fundraising plea off of this report, calling it “a new, vile super PAC attack on Bernie.”

I don’t think that it was a fundraising plea.

I think that the Clinton campaign does not want a detailed investigation of her health records.  (She is 68)

Here is the analysis from Naked Capitalism: (note that Coumadin is a brand name for the generic Wafarin)

……… People in glass houses should not throw stones! Hillary’s medical report reads as if it was written by lawyer, and it’s from an MD in the town next to Chappaqua, when you have to think her and Bill’s main doctors are big ticket MDs in Manhattan, and the local just part of the team. But most important, she’s on Coumadin, which is an anti-clotting drug used often in post stroke patients to reduce the risk of recurrence. Coumadin has to be tightly managed. And read this analysis….be sure to get as far as the discussion of the cumulative odds of death were she to be a 2 term president on Coumadin. Are there any doctors in the house who can weigh in on the article? Update: This came in by e-mail from a doctor who treats in this area that I asked to opine:

Clinton apparently had a rare type of stroke, cerebral venous thrombosis. For what it’s worth, I had never seen a patient with that kind of stroke in my career. In the blog post, Dr Cundiff analyzed the fairly minimal data available on that kind of stroke. One study showed a surprisingly high bleeding risk for patients on long-term Coumadin. But the study was apparently funded by the manufacturer of a drug that was brought out to be a supposedly safer alternative to Coumadin, the COIs affecting the study were not properly disclosed, and the design of the study was such that the likelihood it was biased is high.

And of course it’s actually very difficult to accurately predict what will happen to any patient, much less at a distance using limited information for a patient who had a relatively rare problem.

All patients on Coumadin (and other kinds of anticoagulants) have elevated bleeding risks. How elevated it may be difficult to say for many. Really good medical care and monitoring ought to decrease this risk. Falling and hitting one’s head, or having major trauma surely increase it. So I would advise Ms Clinton, from a distance, to avoid contact sports and activities with high risks of trauma (sky-diving, race car driving, working for the police, fire departments, going into military combat, etc). But that’s probably not so useful in this context.

All of this is significant because I guarantee that the Republican opposition researchers are looking to use all of this against the eventual Democratic nominee.

Whether it’s Clinton or Sanders (O’Malley is really not in the game), we are going to see health issues raised by Republican operatives.

Populism Done Right, UK Edition

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By being the first Labour leader in a generation to actually take that whole “labo(u)r” bit seriously, Jeremy Corbyn has presided over an explosion in interest and members:

Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.

 The Guardian has interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.

 100 Labour officials from across Britain tell of the new members surging to join the party, some young idealists, some returning prodigals – and one who was last a member when Harold Wilson was prime minister

 Reflecting increased interest among the young, university cities and towns recorded some of the biggest rises, with Bath jumping from 300 to 1,322 members (911 full members, 120 affiliated supporters and 291 registered supporters) and Colchester from 200-250 to almost 1,000. Neither are traditional Labour seats.

 The survey findings are borne out by Labour’s national figures, released to the Guardian in a break with party tradition of keeping them secret. Membership jumped from 201,293 on 6 May last year, the day before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January.

The Blairites, of course, of course are apoplectic, because they think that the “Wrong Sort” are joining, even at a 10:1 ratio of joiners to leavers.

But if the strikingly good membership numbers have the Blairites freaking out, then Corbyn’s proposals to limit excessive executive pay has their heads exploding:

Companies would be banned from paying senior executives vastly higher wages than junior employees, and would not be allowed to hand out dividends until all staff were earning the Living Wage, under plans signalled today by Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour leader, who is setting out proposals to close the gap between top earners and low-paid staff, will commit the party to act to “institutionalise fairness”.

He also repeated his support for bringing the railways back into public ownership and for “democratic control” of the energy giants.

Mr Corbyn’s critics, both inside and outside the party, will seize on his plans as evidence that he is trying to drive its platform to the left. Any move to intervene in company pay is also bound to face fierce criticism from business.

But the Labour leader’s allies insist his commitment to tackling inequality will strike a chord with the public who are dismayed by the excesses of company bosses.

Mr Corbyn told a Fabian conference in London: “Too much of the proceeds of growth have accumulated to those at the top.”

He argued: “Everyone benefits when companies succeed. One proposal is pay ratios between top and bottom, so that the rewards don’t just accrue to those at the top.

………

Mr Corbyn also floated a plan to ban or restrict firms from distributing dividends to shareholders if they are not paying the Living Wage to all staff. “Only profitable employers will be paying dividends. If they depend on cheap labour for those profits, then I think there is a question over whether that is a business model to which we should be turning a blind eye.”

He pointed to research by the OECD which concluded that failure to distribute wealth more evenly hinders economic growth. “A more equal society is not only fairer, it does better in terms of economic stability and wealth creation,” he said.

The Labour leader argued that train fares would fall and investment increase if the railways were returned to public ownership. “It would be governed not remotely from Whitehall, but by passengers, rail workers and politicians, local and national,” he added.

Bringing gas and electricity companies under “democratic control” would also help to reduce costs and ease the transition to carbon-free energy supplies, he claimed.

Without excessive executive compensation, how will Blairites cash in when they retire from politics?

We’ve had about 40 years of so-called liberal politicians buying into conservative framing, and the only beneficiaries are the top 1% of the top 1%.

It’s time for a change.

Headline of the Day

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Ted Cruz Accidentally Proves Donald Trump Is Human

I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, but his response to Cruz’ “New York values” jibe is a thing of beauty:

First, he corrected Cruz—Manhattan produces conservatives, he said, “including William F. Buckley and others” (and what kind of Democrat would name-drop William F. Buckley?), and then he seemed to stand up taller.

“He insulted a lot of people,” Trump said of Cruz. “New York is a great place. It’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York.”

The crowd applauded and, as if to admit defeat, so did Cruz.

“Everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

“You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down, thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there,” Trump said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death and even the smell of death—nobody understood it, and it was with us for months. The smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Cruz just looked at the camera with a nervous smile. Suddenly his suit seemed too tight.

I really think that we saw some honest emotion from the Donald here.

Even if it was a preplanned comeback, he just force fed Ted Cruz his own shit.

It was brilliant.

F$#@ Me, I Agree with Peter King

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You know Peter King, the Congressman from New York.

This is the guy who raised funds for the terrorist organization the IRA, called for the assassination of Snowden, Greenwals, and Poitras, and pretty much accused every Muslim in America of being a part of a 5th column.

But credit where credit is due, he just told Ted Cruz to go back under the rock he crawled out of:

New York Republican Rep. Peter King has some harsh advice for Ted Cruz: “Go back under a rock.”

“Memo to Ted Cruz: New York Values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock,” King said in a statement mailed to POLITICO Thursday regarding Cruz’s comments about “New York values.”

The Texas senator, who had been avoiding going after Donald Trump for much of the campaign cycle, finally hit back after Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility for the White House. Cruz suggested in an interview with “The Howie Carr Show” Tuesday that Trump “may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York, New York,’ because you know Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values.”

I really hate agreeing with him, but he’s right, though incomplete.

When Ted Cruz talks about “New York values”, he’s really accusing Donald Trump of being in the thrall of the secret Jewish cabal that runs the world.

It’s how Cruz is trying to appeal to the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party.

I miss the Republican Party of Richard Milhous Nixon.

This is Some Seriously Sick Sh%$

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A left wing Israeli activist, Ezra Nawi, was caught on tape boasting that he turned information about Arabs who were looking to sell land to Jews over to the Palestinian security services, and boasted that these people were tortured and killed:

A prominent Israeli campaigner for Palestinian rights was recorded saying that he helps Palestinian authorities find and kill Palestinians who sell land to Jews.

 The recording was aired Thursday by the television program Uvda of Israel’s Channel 2. In it, Ezra Nawi, a Jewish far-left activist from the Ta’ayush group, is heard speaking about four Palestinian real-estate sellers, whom Nawi said mistook him for a Jew interested in buying their property.

 “Straight away I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force,” Nawi is heard saying in reference to the Palestinian Authority’s counterintelligence arm. “The Palestinian Authority catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”

 In the Palestinian Authority, the penal code reserves capital punishment for anyone convicted of selling land to Jews. This law, which Palestinian officials defended as designed to prevent takeovers by settlers, has not been implemented in Palestinian courts, where sellers of land to Jews are usually sentenced to several years in prison. However, in recent years several Palestinian have been murdered for selling land. Their murders have remained unsolved.

He has since been arrested on evidence that he was attempting to lure an Israeli Arab realtor to a village near Hebrone where he would be taken into custody by PA state security forces:

Many in Israel’s left have been trying to disassociate themselves from Ezra Nawi, the activist who was secretly taped on a Channel 2 news program Uvda bragging about sending Arab land brokers to certain torture if not death in the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security service (selling land to Jews is an act of treason under PA law). Those who defended him quickly became the new pariahs of Israel’s mass and social media. Then came a follow-up report Monday night showing Nawi was on the payroll of Breaking the Silence and Rabbis for Human Rights.

 ………

 Meanwhile, right-wing journalist Shai Glick, who filed a police complaint regarding Ezra Nawi’s activities, reported a conversation with an investigating police officer who told him the Arab land broker Nawi was conspiring to hand over to the PA is an Israeli citizen. Nawi and several other activists were attempting to invite this Israeli citizen to the Arab village of Yatta, south of Hebron, where PA police would be waiting to arrest him.

 This last revelation probably explains why Nawi hightailed it to Ben Gurion International, to catch a flight to anywhere else, when police caught him and took him in for questioning. It’s starting to sound like conspiracy to commit murder, which Israel frowns on, regardless of one’s political conviction.

Nawi’s lawyer is claiming that he was leaving the country to visit friends in Europe,  and that he had checked with law enforcement before booking the flight, and given the sh%$ storm that has blown up around him, I could see he wants to get out.

I understand that Ezra Nawi he feels passionately about Palestinians and their demands for a homeland, but this is a classic case for quoting Freidrich Nietsche, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

If you want to lead a consistently ethical life, it’s generally a good idea to avoid behavior that might invoke a Nietsche quote.

It’s pretty much an indicator that you have lost your way.

The Taste of Blairite Tears Is So Sweet

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Following weeks of backbiting and sabotage from his front benchers, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is cleaning house, and the whining has reached a crescendo:

Jeremy Corbyn has launched a strong defence of his controversial frontbench reshuffle, saying it has made Labour “stronger, more diverse and more coherent” as he insists he can lead the party to general election victory.

Writing in the Observer after a turbulent week, Corbyn says his election as leader in September reflected a “deep-seated desire for change and a new direction in our politics” which, unsurprisingly, some in the party are finding difficult to adjust to. In terms that may alarm some of his MPs, who fear he is trying to bypass the parliamentary party over issues such as the renewal of Trident, he makes it clear that he will shape new policies through the “democratic participation of our own hugely expanded party and supporters”.

In a call for loyalty, Corbyn says the Tories under David Cameron are engaged in a systematic attempt to undermine democracy and that this must be challenged by Labour. He argues that new rules on voter registration, attempts to cut the number of parliamentary seats and slash funding for Labour amount to an unprecedented attack on democratic rights and freedoms.

However, his attempts to impose unity will come under further strain on Sunday when an MP appointed to head a key policy review on tax credits and child poverty will resign on BBC TV, in protest at being branded by the leadership as part of a “rightwing clique”.

After three frontbenchers quit in protest at Corbyn’s reshuffle, Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South, will launch a bitter attack on John McDonnell, Corbyn’s close ally and shadow chancellor, who said last week that the pressure group Progress, which she chairs, is full of people with “hard-right” conservative views.

Her appearance on the BBC’s Sunday Politics will also fuel a row that has erupted between Labour and the BBC over its coverage of the reshuffle, and comes as tensions over Corbyn’s attempts to change party policy on Trident reach new heights.

Oh you poor delicate flowers.

Corbyn fired back in The Guardian, noting just that Cameron is attempting to systematically dismantle all opposition in the UK, both on a political and a policy level.

It won’t matter for New Labour.

They honestly think that the Conservatives running the country is better than having a Labour Party that actually gives a sh%$ about ordinary people.

After all, they have to think about their post politics career working for the City of London, Britain’s financial industry.

TransCanada, Calm Down and Have a Piping Hot Cup of Shut the F%$# Up

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Everyone’s favorite oil spill pipeline company is suing the United States for stopping the pipeline:

TransCanada said on Wednesday that it would seek $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.

The company is taking the unusual step of suing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling the decision “arbitrary and unjustified.” The Canadian business also filed a lawsuit in Houston asking that the decision be overturned.

“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” the company said in a statement. “Rather, the denial was a symbolic gesture based on speculation about the (false) perceptions of the international community regarding the administration’s leadership on climate change.”

Seriously, just stop whining.

What a Complete Prat

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It appears that the head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schults, is casting about for the a scapegoat to excuse her lack of success.

Her latest choice is to blame those millennial and generation X women for being too “complacent”:

Q: Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide?
DWS: Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.

Needless to say, she has pissed a lot of activists who the Democrats are going to need this November.

I would also note that in this same interview, she doubled down on opposing medical marijuana, and repeated the canard that it is a gateway drug, while denying the actual role of pharmaceutical opiates, further demonstrating her complete cluelessness on the issues.

In any case, We’ve also had repeated calls for her to be fired. (See here, here, and here)

Given her history, particularly when she refused to support Democratic candidates when they were opposing Cuban American Republicans, and was at best tepid at supporting the Walker recall in Wisconsin, I’m not sure why she ended up in charge of the DCCC.

She is and remains a useless careerist who leaves a trail of carnage wherever she goes.

She shouldn’t be dog catcher.

Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah Just Experienced the Comedy Rapture

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Kind of like Norman Rockwell ……… On Acid

Because the crack smoking, peeing in public, murder threatening, formerMayor of Toronto, Chris Farley wannabee Rob Ford has announced his candidacy for Mayor of Toronto:

Smoking crack, urinating in public and threatening murder might each be the kind of behaviour you’d expect to put an end to any politician’s career.

But Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, seems to be the exception to the rule. And if he has his way, he might once again represent Canada’s largest city.

During a Twitter exchange on Wednesday, Ford was asked if he planned to return to office.

“I’ll be on the ballot running for Mayor in 2018,” Ford replied.

………

But after months of speculation, Toronto police found the recording, and Ford was forced to admit that he had smoked crack – probably during a “drunken stupor”. Yet he refused to resign.

Over the following months, Ford’s behavior only grew more erratic, and stories of his previous behavior started to emerge.

In 2003, he called a colleague at a city council meeting a “slithering snake” who “should be back in his cage where he comes from”. A year earlier, while discussing a public meeting on the possibility of a homeless shelter in his district, he asked: “why don’t we have a public lynching?” and he was thrown out of a Maple Leafs hockey game after getting in a fight with fans while drunk.

In October 2013, he was spotted urinating in public behind an Etobicoke public school. The following month, during a raucous debate, Ford barreled over an elderly politician, Pam McConnell, knocking her to the ground. Also during that month, a video was released of the politician in a dining room raging about killing someone while apparently high, staggering and slurring.

This guy is comedy gold, and if he is elected, the people of Toronto are stupid beyond belief.

And Now, Even the Rich People are Throwing Rahm Emanuel Under the Bus

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Since emails came out revealing the Rahm Emanuel administrations aggressive efforts to manage and suppress information on the Laquan McDonald shooting, Rahm’s old friends, basically rich corrupt people from whom he has raised money from over the years, have been avoiding him like the plague.

One of his very good friends, they have vacationed together and Rauner was a former client of Emanuel’s, was wingnut, gazillionaire, and now Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner how has announced that he would sign a bill allowing for a recall vote for the Chicago Mayor:

Fresh from a Saharan Desert holiday where he says he and his family rode camels and slept in tents, Gov. Bruce Rauner did nothing Monday to quell the shifting sands beneath Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

 Rauner told reporters he would sign a bill allowing Chicago voters to recall their mayor from office if it reaches his desk.

 The governor also said he was “very disappointed” in Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez over their handling of Chicago police misconduct cases.

 ………

 Asked about state Rep. La Shawn Ford’s legislation that would allow Chicago voters to attempt recall the mayor, Rauner said he hasn’t studied the bill but based on what he’s been told about it, “I would sign that bill.”

 The governor went on to say that he would also be “broadly supportive of the recall concept in general for all elected officials in the state. … That would be the best bill to pass.”

6 months ago, I would not have predicted the degree to which his power base, once thought to be unassailable, to have collapsed like this.

It’s gone from a crazy guy on the street corner rant to an implosion in a very short time.

Additionally, it appears that people appointed after the sh%$ hit the fan have absolutely no interest whatsoever in having his back:

The new chief of the agency that looks into shootings by Chicago police officers says she wants to hear out an investigator who was fired by her predecessor last July after refusing orders to change findings that the cops were at fault in several cases.

Sharon Fairley, acting chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority, last month reached out to the investigator, Lorenzo Davis, a former Chicago police commander.

“I’d like to hear about his side of what happened,” Fairley said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “I look forward to that conversation and I think that that will be happening soon.”

Davis’s lawyer, Torreya Hamilton, said an attorney with the city’s Law Department called two weeks ago to set up the meeting. Hamilton said Davis, who is suing the city for wrongful termination, is eager to meet with Fairley. The sides have not yet set a time and place.

Fairley, a former federal prosecutor appointed a month ago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said she also wants to examine the work that got Davis fired.


………



WBEZ revealed Davis’s termination and his resistance to orders by IPRA superiors that he change findings about at least a dozen incidents, all shootings or alleged excessive-force cases.

Davis said Monday evening he would welcome Fairley’s review of his findings. “I’d like to be present when she does it,” he said. “It’s better to review a report with the person who wrote it.”

………

Fairley’s predecessor, Scott M. Ando, was forced out as IPRA’s chief administrator after heading the agency since 2013. Ando, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, filled several key IPRA posts with former sworn law-enforcement officers, including two other former DEA agents, a WBEZ investigation found.

Fairley did not directly criticize Ando’s hiring but said the agency needs “stronger independence.”

“I was a prosecutor for eight years, where my job was to collect evidence and then make the call,” said Fairley, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. “That’s what I’m planning on doing here.”

Fairley also insisted she is independent from Emanuel despite a pile of email messages that show coordination between his aides and IPRA in recent years.

“Yes, I’m in communication with the mayor’s office,” Fairley said. “They’ve been very helpful in helping me get situated here but they have not tried to direct my activities or tell me what to do. I don’t have any pressure on me from the mayor to conduct an investigation any particular way.”

Fairley serves at the pleasure of Rahm Emanuel.

The fact that she is subtly dismissive of the Mayor’s office is significant.

I’m hoping that Rahm ends up recalled, and in jail, and it actually looks like these outcomes are no longer outside of the range of possibility.

Our Man in Ankara

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, when discussing the advantage of a stronger Presidency for Turkey invoked the alleged efficiencies of the government of Adolph Hitler, and now he is trying to walk it back:

The Turkish presidency said on Friday comments by President Tayyip Erdogan about the system of governance in Hitler’s Germany had been misinterpreted and that he had not suggested it was an example of an effective presidential system.

Asked on his return from a visit to Saudi Arabia late on Thursday whether an executive presidency was possible in Turkey while maintaining the unitary structure of the state, Erdogan said: “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.

“There are later examples in various other countries,” he told reporters, according to a recording broadcast by the Dogan news agency.

I’m not particularly surprised.

There seems to be an awful lot of admiration of Hitler baked into Islamist politics in the Middle East, and Erdoğan is very much an Islamist.

Unfortunately, our state security apparatus cannot look at anything beyond the fact that he’s good to foreign capital, so we set ourselves up for another foreign policy clusterf%$#.

The Truth, from John Erlichman, of All People

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Over at Esquire, the inimitable Charlie Pierce found this gem from Dan Baum’s book Smoke and Mirrors, in an interview of John Ehrlichman:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

While the Nixon administration is not generally considered to be a font of unvarnished truth, sometimes, after a career is over, the truth will slip out, and in retrospect, Ehrlichman always seemed the most self aware of that scurvy lot.

Awww ……… Bernie is Picking on Donald

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When Bernie Sanders speaks, Donald Trump listens:

Donald Trump, billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner, has changed his mind about wages: Americans aren’t earning enough. He’s also not keen on Wall Street. The shift has Trump on a collision course with Democrat Bernie Sanders – while oddly agreeing with many of his points.

“Wages in are [sic] country are too low, good jobs are too few, and people have lost faith in our leaders. We need smart and strong leadership now!” Trump tweeted on Monday.

The opinion appeared to reverse what the Republican frontrunner said in November during the fourth Republican debate. Asked if he was sympathetic to the protesters demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Trump said: “I can’t be.”


“[T]axes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave [the minimum wage] the way it is,” Trump said at the time. “People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”

Sanders, a senator from Vermont and self-described socialist, used those comments to criticize Trump while appearing on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday.

………

In his Monday morning tweets, Trump touched on these topics – noting that wages had barely grown in the past few years.

“The middle-class has worked so hard, are not getting the kind of jobs that they have long dreamed of – and no effective raise in years. BAD,” Trump tweeted. “Many of the great jobs that the people of our country want are long gone, shipped to other countries. We now are part time, sad! I WILL FIX!”

………

Trump’s recent comments on wages come as he has also stepped up his disparagement of Wall Street – characterizing hedge funds as “getting away with murder”. His comments have drawn puzzlement from bankers familiar with the financing of the presidential candidate’s business empire.

Well, now we know who, and what, scares Donald Trump.

Spain is Going Pear Shaped

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In response to the election result the representatives of the center-left Socialist Party met with the Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Peoples Party, but only to tell him to piss off:

The arduous task of assembling a new government for Spain got off to a bad start on Wednesday after the leader of the Socialist party flatly ruled out any deal with the Popular party of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.

Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Socialists, held a brief meeting with Mr Rajoy in the prime ministerial compound outside Madrid — but apparently only to reiterate his opposition to any accord.

“We will vote against the Popular party and against Mariano Rajoy as prime minister. Voters have asked for change,” he told a news conference after the meeting.

The meeting was the first encounter between two party leaders since the inconclusive general election last Sunday. Spanish voters delivered a deeply fragmented parliament in which the two mainstream parties — the centre-right PP and the centre-left Socialists (PSOE) — will have a much-reduced presence.

The PP will be the strongest bloc in parliament once again, but it remains 53 seats shy of an absolute majority in the 350-seat chamber. The Socialists will be a distant second, followed by the upstart anti-austerity Podemos movement.

A second new entrant is the centrist Ciudadanos party, whose 40 deputies will make a useful addition to any alliance but are not enough to hand a majority to the PP on their own.

Much like in Greece, and Portugal, the two mainstream parties have been following a consensus that is opposed what appears to be a majority of the electorate, which has the electorate moving far right and far left.

Unfortunately, the response of Brussels to this trend is to become even more opaque and undemocratic.

It is a recipe for disaster.