Humorless Politics Thread

[fonpr]

This entire post went right over under my head.

These kids, right Freddyrriixxxxxxx?

Quite right. Weird references, funny names and crude humor. No problem.

[Bryan]

Oh man. Where to start? This story has been consuming me...
[...] Thank god I'm unemployed, so I can give it the attention it deserves.

You should call The Best Show with this.

Yeah... it does seem to have a similar trajectory to many of JW's calls. It starts with a slightly seedy, buffoonish character, then all of a sudden the other shoe drops and it just gets progressively crazier and crazier.

[Steve of Bloomington]

Oh man. Where to start? This story has been consuming me...
[...] Thank god I'm unemployed, so I can give it the attention it deserves.

You should call The Best Show with this.

It is fascinating. I've only been following it peripherally but it's a very entertaining story.

[Greggulator]

Oh man. Where to start? This story has been consuming me...

After the story broke initially, Mayor Ford went into hiding for about a week. Then the Globe and Mail (Canada's major national daily) wrote a long story about the Ford family's long history with drugs: apparently his brother and current city councillor Doug Ford was a medium-level (pounds, not ounces) hash dealer in the 80s. Also another brother kidnapped someone over a drug debt and their sister was involved with drug dealers and the white power movement.


Councillor Doug Ford today - who would believe this guy was a drug dealer?

Suddenly, Rob Ford re-entered the public eye with a new spring in his step, making bold declarations that no video existed. It was business as usual at Toronto City Hall! And over the next week, six of his senior staffers were fired (for telling him to go to rehab) or resigned (because he refuses to go to rehab). Meanwhile, the media was camped out in front of the Mayor's office, and Ford just kept saying "Everything's great!" and refusing to address any questions about smoking crack.

Gawker met its goal, but the guys with the video had gone underground. Then it came out that people in the Mayor's office had gone to the police because they knew where the video was and they were worried that it was connected to a murder that had occurred. (Two of the guys that are in the widely-circulated photo of Ford were shot in March, one of them died.) Ford continued to deny that such a video existed, but there are reports that he himself was interviewed by the police about the whereabouts of the video...



Then, the address of the apartment that had at one time housed the video became public knowledge. It's a rundown apartment in a highrise that has a lot of drug trade. The National Post (a Ford-friendly paper, in principle) reported that the current resident had seen the video, confirmed its authenticity, and discussed his involvement in a plan to shoot a FAKE Ford/crack video with a lookalike named Slurpy in order to discredit the ACTUAL video. Slurpy, who hasn't been publicly identified, eventually backed out of this plan because he was afraid.

The original owners of the video eventually communicated to Gawker that the video is gone, and they don't want to be involved anymore. Ford is extremely popular in the Somali community, and there apparently has been a ton of pressure on the video owners from their neighbours.

Ford continues to publicly deny that there is a video of him smoking crack, and most people assume that he purchased it himself right around the time that he got his mojo back.

Recently the house in the background of that photo above was identified as belonging to old friends of Ford. And, oh yeah, it's also a crack house, more or less.

His approval ratings (which, to be fair are only so-so) haven't budged during the whole thing. But there are new revelations and wrinkles coming out every day. Thank god I'm unemployed, so I can give it the attention it deserves.

You forgot the part where masked goons with pipes went into the apartment in question and beat the hell out of the current resident.

One of the Toronto papers also had a big piece about Doug Ford (the mayor's brother and councilman) being a hashish dealer of relative repute in the 70s.

We visited Toronto a few summers ago. If you told me that this story were to happen, Toronto would probably be the last place I would ever guess. Every city of note in New Jersey would be one, with Atlantic City or Paterson leading the charge.

[Kormodd]

Yeah, this Mayor Ford guy is hilarious. Thank you for turning me on to him, Bryan. I am forever in your debt. I especially love this:

"Having missed several previous weigh-ins and endured both ridicule from his brother Doug and a viral video showing him being heckled while coming out of a Kentucky Fried Chicket outlet, Ford falls short of his stated goal in his “Cut the Waist” challenge, losing no additional weight in his final weigh-in and then stumbling off the scale and twisting his ankle."

[cavorting with nudists]

[Bryan]

Yeah, this Mayor Ford guy is hilarious. Thank you for turning me on to him, Bryan. I am forever in your debt. I especially love this:

"Having missed several previous weigh-ins and endured both ridicule from his brother Doug and a viral video showing him being heckled while coming out of a Kentucky Fried Chicket outlet, Ford falls short of his stated goal in his “Cut the Waist” challenge, losing no additional weight in his final weigh-in and then stumbling off the scale and twisting his ankle."

Glad to be spreading the joy.

There's video of his tumble off the scale. It's not quite as great as the football incident, but as the humiliating conclusion to a failed public weight loss campaign, it's still pretty great:

Rob Ford trips up at his final "Cut the Waist" weigh-in

[Bryan]

You forgot the part where masked goons with pipes went into the apartment in question and beat the hell out of the current resident.

Oh yeah, I left out a lot of stuff. There's almost no end to it. I was obsessed with him even before the whole crack story hit the front pages. If anything, the whole drug angle increases my sympathy for the guy. He likes to complain that there's a left-wing conspiracy against him, but it's worth looking back at his record long before he was even mayor to see what a full-blown buffoon he is, and always has been.

This is a longish clip, but it's pretty damn revealing of the guy's maturity and suitability for public office. The payoff is at the end:

Rob Ford Clip from 'Hogtown: the Politics of Policing'

[Flood]

Is this guy's entertainment value the main reason he keeps getting elected to public office? People just enjoy the gross spectacle? Or are the forces of good so weak in Toronto none of them could have won against this character?

From Wikipedia:

For the inauguration ceremony at the first meeting of the new council, Ford had television commentator Don Cherry introduce him and put the chain of office on him. Cherry, known for his audacious suits, wore a pink suit and garnered some controversy with his remarks. Cherry described how Ford had reversed a mistake of city staff cutting down a tree of a Toronto property owner for no good reason and then billing the property owner, who suffered from Alzheimer's. Cherry added "Put that in your pipe you left-wing kooks" and "I’m wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything, I thought I’d get it in."[53]

This guy needs help. Not control over other people.

[Flood]

This is an actual Wikipedia article:

Timeline of Rob Ford video scandal

...

[buffcoat]

This guy needs help. Not control over other people.

Don Cherry? Couldn't agree more.

[Flood]

So, uh:

Don't Free Pussy Riot

Last night I saw Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, and now I’m convinced that Pussy Riot should be in jail, which I think was not the filmmakers’ intent.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2013/06/dont-free-pussy-riot.html

Almost as edgy as http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/10/the-libertarian.html

[Flood]

So... any FOTs from Newark here?

Cory Booker: the inexorable rise of Newark's neoliberal egomaniac

Eyeing the Senate, the New Jersey mayor turns self-promotion into an art form. His corporate-friendly policies are not so pretty

He may be esteemed by Wall Street tycoons and Hollywood titans, and worshipped by an unserious internet brigade that prefers its politics in GIF form, but Booker has not had a good run of it lately in New Jersey's benighted largest city. Carjackings – the signature Newark crime; they used to call it "the carjack capital" – have gone up for four years in a row. Violent crime, which had been declining in Booker's first years, has spiked again; in summer, things will get worse. Police have been laid off, firefighters too, as Booker has slashed city budgets. And when the mayor recently tried to get an ally of his on the city council, the meeting devolved into a ruckus, with police officers resorting to pepper spray.

[…]

He sleeps in tents. He shovels snow. He brings diapers to stranded mothers. He runs into a burning building, then holds a press conference to celebrate his own heroism. He tried to live on food stamps for a week, which I almost admired – but then he told his story to Face the Nation, and then the Today show, and then the Daily Show, and then Piers Morgan on CNN.

No one other than Vladimir Putin could pull off these bathetic, 360-degree political theatrics – though even Putin would have blanched at Booker's made-for-TV rescue one cold Newark night of a freezing mutt named Cha Cha, bearing the dog in his arms like the Lamb of God. "This dog is shaking really bad," he told an airhead local news reporter – who had earlier arranged the entire pseudo-rescue with him via Twitter. Had she really been concerned, she could have just called the cops or, you know, rescued the dog herself. Instead, she told Booker to meet her at the scene with her camera crew and, when it was all over, even got her picture taken with the man of the hour.

It'd be one thing if the Soviet-style personality cult and let's-come-together Twitter banalities – recent days have seen him post self-help quotations from Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama – were just marketing for a progressive political program. But Booker is a far more conservative figure than the Cult of Cory, which is too busy making Superman or Chuck Norris jokes, may actually realize. He is a long-time advocate of charter schools and, more quietly, of voucher programs: a favorite hobbyhorse of the men of high finance. George Will, the paleoconservative columnist of the Washington Post, is a big fan. Michelle Rhee, the fallen DC schools chancellor whose union-busting, corporatist education reforms resulted in a citywide cheating scandal, is someone Booker calls "a friend of mine" – and we should add that Newark's charter schools were embroiled in a cheating scandal of their own last year.

And of course, Booker has the unwavering support of the big bad industry just across the river from Newark. Since his days as a city councilor, he has hoovered up cash from the financial services sector – but unlike many other tri-state Democrats who seduce the Street in a marriage of a convenience, Booker legitimately thinks that big money knows best and the public sector should do its bidding. When, in May 2012, Booker confessed that he found it "nauseating" for the Obama campaign to impugn Mitt Romney's career in private equity, Democrats were shocked. They shouldn't have been.

Booker's whole career has been a testament to a poisonous financial-corporatist consensus, which dresses up the interests of big money in post-ideological garb. (That helped him win the support this weekend of the most powerful man in New Jersey: George Norcross III, the feared political boss and owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who said he liked Booker because he was "a Democrat that's fiscally conservative yet socially progressive.")

Remember that $100m donation to the Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, promoted with its very own Oprah episode? The cash didn't go into the Newark school system; it's controlled by a non-governmental fund, with Booker on the board, and has been so unaccountable that the ACLU had to sue the city to learn what was going on. (Booker's office first denied that the emails the ACLU sought existed; when a judge ordered the emails to be made public, the Booker team released them on Christmas Eve.)

Add to this Booker's privatization of the Newark sanitation department, and his repeated attempts to do the same to the water supply, and the picture becomes clearer. In the world Booker and his cohort inhabit, there are no systemic problems and no class interests. There are only pesky inefficiencies, to be fixed with better data and more money from smart, happy, rich people who can spend their cash far more sensibly than the public sector.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/cory-booker-newark-neoliberal-egomaniac?CMP=twt_gu

[cavorting with nudists]

Rob Ford must be laughing his ass off today:

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/montreal-mayor-arrested-on-corruption-charges?ref=fpblg

[Bryan]

Yeah, Toronto politics is more of a spectacle, but Montreal is way dirtier.