Quotulatiousness

May 24, 2013

“Ford Nation” was a reaction to the elites of Toronto

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In the Toronto Star, Rick Salutin writes a column that might get him drummed out of the corps d’elite of Toronto society:

If there’s any truism I cling to, it’s that: people don’t get the leaders they deserve. Why not? Because of all the haughty intervenors between the citizens and those who govern — they generally get the leaders they select, either sooner or later. Here I come to urban guru and U of T prof Richard Florida, who I do find embarrassing in this context, but also instructive. He wrote this week in the Globe and Mail: “It is time to convene a blue-ribbon commission on Toronto’s future … the top leaders of all of our key institutions must step up — our banks and corporations, schools and universities, labour unions, the city, the province, and more. No one can stand on the sidelines if we are going to forge the model of private-public partnership that is needed … ”

Does he really not get it — that this is exactly the mentality that led to the Ford mayoralty, out of widespread popular disgust for an unelected elect who think they have the right to gather in blue ribbon bodies and decide on behalf of everyone else? The goal, Florida says, is that Toronto’s “future mayors will look less like Rob Ford and more like New York’s Mike Bloomberg, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel” — leaders who’ve aimed to decimate the core of their communities: their public school systems; and have met huge popular resistance. Besides, the sole concrete thing Mayor Ford has done is to public-privatize garbage collection here, if that’s your cuppa. Talk about confusing the problem with the solution.

So, at the moment, the city is divided between anti-Forders who often view Ford Nation as irredeemably “stupid” (and I quote), versus stubborn Forders who resent that contempt and are desperately hoping Rob finds a way not to be starring in that crack video. But it’s been ever thus, if in less stark terms: Mel Lastman followed by David Miller. Rob Ford against Olivia Chow or John Tory.

H/T to the Phantom Observer for the link.

Is this Stephen Harper’s tipping point?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Paul Wells talks about the terrible week Stephen Harper has had:

A government is like a shark. If it stops swimming, it drowns. Harper has lasted 11 years as a party leader for two reasons: He was never alone and he had a plan. Indeed, it’s the plan that has often helped keep him from being alone, because his are a loner’s instincts. He reached out to the Progressive Conservatives in 2003 after battling them for 16 years because he knew his Canadian Alliance was too slim a platform for a man who aspired to govern. He made serious concessions to Quebec nationalism after mistrusting it all his life. After he united the Conservative party, he reached outside its bounds to attract Liberal MPs — David Emerson, Wajid Khan — and then, through Jason Kenney’s ethnic-outreach efforts, he took away an ever-growing bite of the Liberal voter base.

At every moment, he could afford such bold moves because he was secure in his leadership of the Canadian conservative movement. Harper’s critics tend to describe him as a loner, a brain in a jar created by mad scientists toiling in underground laboratories at the University of Calgary. But in fact he has expressed a broad cultural conservatism in the land. Millions of Canadians have been happy he is their Prime Minister. Knowing he had a base, he could build beyond it through decisive action.

And now? He is increasingly alone and isolated. Look across the country, across the border, around the world, and even within his own caucus.

[. . .]

In private conversations with reporters, Conservatives were calling for Harper to provide far more detail about the Duffy-Wright deal than he did on Tuesday. He let them down, as he has often done in this drama. Duffy was Harper’s choice for Senate. Wright was Harper’s chief of staff, working under Harper’s nose. When their plot was revealed, Harper’s response was to make a great show of reminding his MPs to keep their own noses clean. It’s like a neighbourhood kid who sends a baseball through your living-room window and then comes over to lecture you on your clumsiness.

All of this would matter less — to Conservatives, to the country — if it felt like a distraction from an “active and important agenda.” Of course, some of this government’s activity is well-known and broadly popular among Conservatives. Since the 2011 election, Harper has shut down the Health Council of Canada, the National Council of Welfare, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Rights and Democracy, the First Nations Statistical Institute and the National Council of Visible Minorities. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Council for Canadian Unity and the Canadian Council on Learning were shut down a little earlier. The end of the mandatory long-form census was only the beginning of sharp cuts at Statistics Canada.

May 17, 2013

Rob Ford already immortalized in Taiwanese news animation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

Reason.tv’s West Wing Weak: Your Guide to Obama’s Scandal-Filled Week

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

The Obama White House has released the latest installment of its ongoing and self-congratulatory video series, West Wing Week. But despite touting itself as “your guide to all things 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” the new episode seems to be missing some of the key stories that have hit the headlines over the past few days.

There’s no mention, for instance, of Benghazi or the AP phone tapping — and the IRS scandal is barely mentioned in passing.

Perhaps the White House is just too busy completely redacting documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act to fully document its recent highlights.

In a surge of civic pride, Reason TV is happy to offer “West Wing Weak,” our look back at the administration’s past seven days.

“West Wing Weak” is written and produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie, who also narrates.

May 14, 2013

Is this week’s Scandalpalooza actually a “big bath” move?

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Megan McArdle explains what a “big bath” is and how the current rash of scandals might be a political version of this financial accounting trick:

I confess, when I woke up this morning, I half expected to find that Obama had confessed to being one of our lizard overlords, or made an offhand mention of the time he’d had the CIA price out a drone attack on Mitt Romney’s headquarters. Between Benghazi, the discovery that Kathleen Sebelius has been leaning on insurers to finance their Obamacare PR, uncovery of a freelance political inquisition by the IRS, and last night’s revelation that the Department of Justice had been trolling through the phone records of AP reporters, this has been the most scandalicious week in living memory. I mean, sure, none of it rises to the level of Watergate. But while the gravity may pale in comparison, the volume is breathtaking. So breathtaking that it’s tempting to think that the administration is doing this deliberately.

In finance, there’s an art known as “Big Bath Accounting” which is used to manage earnings expectations. Here’s how it works: if you know you’re going to have a bad quarter, you look around for anything else that might go wrong in the future, and you decide to “recognize” that bad news now. Inventory looking a little stale? Write it down, man! Customers getting a little slow to pay? Now would be a good time to write off their accounts as bad debt. Is there some uncertainty in the projections about depletable assets like oil stores? For heaven’s sake, why not use the low end of the projections rather than the medium or high end? And we should really book some sort of charge to account for the risk that the Yellowstone supervolcano will explode, killing hundreds of thousands and covering the entire western half of the United States in volcanic ash, and in the process severely dampening demand for our premium line of Wyoming-themed memorabilia.

Corporations call this “cleaning up the balance sheet”. Accounting professors call it things I can’t print because this is a family blog.

QotD: Litmus testing political scandals

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did–Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

Jim Geraghty, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change'”, National Review, 2013-05-14

May 8, 2013

Mark Sanford is back in politics, despite his past mistakes

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

I really didn’t expect former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to win his bid for a seat in congress, but he not only won, he won convincingly:

‘Excuse me, do you know what’s going on here that it’s so crowded?”

I’m walking through a Publix parking lot in Mount Pleasant, S.C., to the Liberty Tap Room, and it’s 7:55 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7 — Election Day in the state’s first congressional district. A middle-aged woman is leaning out of her Suburban, frowning in the direction of the bar, trying to ascertain the reason for the plethora of TV news trucks and camera equipment.

“It’s Mark Sanford’s victory party,” I tell her.

She gapes at me, confused.

“Did he win?”

Less than an hour later, the AP declares that the answer to that question is yes — and not just a yes, but a definite yes, by nine points, despite being outspent 4–1 and abandoned for all practical purposes by the national fundraising arm of his party. There will be lots of analysis in the days to come about what this election means, but one thing isn’t up for debate: Mark Sanford knows how to campaign, and his win here is due at least in part to his tireless canvassing and cheerful willingness to ask for the vote of anyone who would listen to him.

March 20, 2013

The Profumo affair in context

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

In History Today, Richard Weight reviews An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines which is being published on the 50th anniversary of the Profumo affair:

Meticulous though he is in separating historical fact from tabloid fiction, Davenport-Hines does not unearth any new secrets about the Profumo Affair. The originality of the book lies in the way he places it in the context of mid-20th century social attitudes. This, as the author says, is ‘a study of milieux’. An accomplished biographer, he puts colour on the cheeks and sparkle in the eyes of the main protagonists in a series of beautifully written portraits. We get to know fully Stephen Ward, for example – the high society osteopath who became the scapegoat of the affair – as a closet homosexual and vain Walter Mitty character, whose social climbing stemmed partly from the fact that osteopathy was dismissed by the medical establishment as ‘a modish form of cosseting’. Ward helped introduce the 46-year-old secretary of state for war, Jack Profumo, to the 19-year-old showgirl, Christine Keeler, at a pool party in the grounds of Cliveden on a July weekend in 1961. Soon after they began the fateful affair that linked him, via pillow talk and paranoia, to a Soviet military attaché that Keeler knew.

[. . .]

Jack Profumo typified British male attitudes: he had forced his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, to give up her career for the sake of his image, before taking the lover who was raised in a converted railway carriage near Staines. The author describes Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies as ‘good-time girls who refused to be doormats’ – a new breed of ambitious women less willing to shut up once they had served their purpose. In a sense, Keeler anticipated the glamorous defiance of ‘the People’s Princess’ in the 1990s. And, like Diana Spencer’s, this is a story about the vacuity of the British people as much as it is a story about the hypocrisy of their leaders.

Davenport-Hines also confronts race, the subject usually ignored by historians of the affair. It was the jealous fight between two of Keeler’s black boyfriends outside the Flamingo Club in 1962 that led to a shooting through which the press got hold of the Profumo story. Then a taboo in a predominantly racist country, inter-racial sex gave the cocktail of cross-class transgression an extra shot of liqueur for the public to enjoy. Yet, as the author observes, the Flamingo Club was a multiracial Soho jazz venue then favoured by the ‘hip white Mods’ of Britain’s first youth culture. In other words the Profumo Affair didn’t so much change Britain as reveal how much it was already changing underneath the cracked surface of prudery and prejudice.

February 17, 2013

Whinnygate is just a useful distraction from the real scandal in the NHS

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

The British media is doing a great job of distracting the public with the horsemeat story, and the politicians and National Health Service bureaucrats are delighted that nobody is paying attention to the real scandal:

At any given moment, there exists at least one delicate subject that all mainstream political parties would much rather not discuss. For many years the abuse of MPs’ expenses fell into this category. After this was exposed by a Telegraph investigation, everyone joined a tacit agreement to keep quiet about the criminality inside the Murdoch newspaper empire.

Now the subject which nobody wants to talk about is the National Health Service. It is just over a week since the publication of the Francis report into Stafford hospital, where some 1,200 patients died in appalling circumstances. Had any other institution been involved in a scandal on this scale, the consequences would have been momentous: sackings, arrests and prosecutions. Had it involved a private hospital, that hospital would have been closed down already, and those in charge publicly shamed and facing jail.

Astonishing to relate, nothing has happened. Politicians have made perfunctory expressions of concern, while agreeing that there must be “no scapegoats”, and that Sir David Nicholson (the senior figure responsible) must remain in his job.

Then, almost at once, the political class turned its attention to a far more lively subject: horse meat. Few “scandals” in living memory have carried less significance. And yet few stories have dominated the press quite as comprehensively since rival teams of crack reporters from The Sun and The Star pursued Blackie the Donkey across Southern Spain in 1987, in the wake of some dubious allegations of mistreatment by his Spanish owners.

Misdirection is a vital tool in the arsenal of the magician — and it can be even more valuable in the political arena. If they can fool you into watching the hand that isn’t hiding the coin, they can get away with a great trick (magicians) … or a great evil (politicians).

November 27, 2012

Toronto’s once (and future?) mayor

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In Maclean’s, Ivor Tossell recounts the story of Rob Ford’s brief tenure as mayor of Toronto:

At Toronto’s City Hall, surely the most ambiently lunatic building in Canada, a stage was set up to launch the Mayor’s Christmas Toy Drive. Eight small children had been procured to act as “honourary elves,” sitting cross-legged on a carpet at the foot of a Christmas tree, flanked by boxes of mini-trikes and construction cranes. A boxed CFL football sat ominously to one side. The mayor was scheduled to launch the drive at 1 p.m. An enormous crowd of reporters buzzed about. Interest in the mayor’s event had amplified to unusual levels by news that the mayor had just gotten himself fired.

For everyone who’s ever bemoaned the fact that our democracy doesn’t offer a way to recall politicians, witness Rob Ford: the man who couldn’t stay mayor. In a ruling released this morning, a Superior Court justice declared Ford’s seat vacant — a weirdly existential way of putting it — after finding the mayor violated the municipal conflict-of-interest act in a small-stakes, but entirely willful, transgression.

Ford has been in office for two tumultuous years, in which his cost-cutting mandate quickly gave way to a scorched-earth war on the media, a succession of botched policies and a never-ending series of altercations, each more bizarre than the last. Giving the finger to a six-year old; chasing a reporter around a park near his home; helping eject a bus of TTC riders into the rain to get his football team a ride home. Finally, today, the mayor of Toronto was sent back to the voters to ask for his job back. In the end, Rob Ford recalled himself.

Update: Speaking for the defence, here’s Ezra Levant in his trademarked over-the-top style, comparing the Ford case to some other recent political scandals in Canada.

November 12, 2012

Kelly McParland: US and French attitudes to affairs differ markedly

Filed under: Europe, France, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:28

In the National Post, Kelly McParland contrasts the French reaction to affairs on the part of public officials with the American reaction:

In Paris they must be busily turning the pages now, looking for the rest of the story. Yes, OK, he had an affair … and? You mean that’s it? He didn’t murder her? Have three children that he kept in a secret location away from the press? Involve her in sex games with crowds of similarly liberated-minded partners? They had an affair and he has to quit as head of the CIA? Mon dieu, these Americans. Four hundred years in the New World and they’ve barely moved on from the Puritans. Look, they’re even shocked that the other woman appeared on television “sporting bare, toned arms”. What did they expect, a chador?

France has moved on marginally from the days when President Francois Mitterrand could have a whole secret second family, and no one mentioned it in public because it wouldn’t be polite. Now the press leaps happily onto news of sexual licence in the halls of power. Unlike the U.S., they just don’t condemn it, as long as no one is physically abused. The latest instance – they don’t even use the world scandal, because in France it isn’t — relates to the former justice minister, Rachida Dati, who is suing one of the country’s wealthiest men to try and force him to admit he’s the father of her new daughter. The case is a bit complicated because, as Ms. Dati attests, she has “a complicated private life.” That would include, according to the attorney for Dominique Desseigne, the alleged father, having eight lovers in the year she fell pregnant, “including a television broadcaster, a minister, a Qatari attorney-general and a brother of the former president Mr Sarkozy,” reports the French newspaper Le Monde.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the president at the time, and Ms. Dati’s boss. He wasn’t likely to be butting into her private life, though, having given up his own wife in favour of singer/model Carla Bruni. Ms. Bruni has recently been offering marital advice – as in “get married for Cripe sakes” – to Valerie Trierweiler, current First Partner-for-a-While to President Francois Hollande, who has four children by a previous Main Partner, Ségolène Royal. (Ms. Royal is only a Main Partner rather than a First Partner because Hollande wasn’t president at the time.) Dumping the mother of your four children for an uppity newspaper columnist like Ms. Trierweiler might offend sensibilities, but M. Hollande never married Ms. Royal either, so no big deal. Nonetheless Ms. Trieweiler has become deeply unpopular since moving into the presidential palace, because she refuses to give up her day job as a columnist and because she’s been rude to Ms. Royal. The messy sex stuff has nothing to do with it.

Compared to the Bacchanalia of French politics, the Petraeus “scandal” is like a high-school tiff over who gets to wear the football captain’s pin to the Prom.

The BBC’s nightmare scenario

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Emily Bell outlines the existential crisis the BBC suddenly finds itself embroiled in:

[BBC director general George] Entwistle’s resignation on Saturday was directly linked to a report broadcast by Newsnight on November 2 that misidentified a public figure allegedly involved in a child abuse scandal. The report, connected to an already broiling scandal, did not make things any worse, theoretically, for Thompson. But the BBC he left is now facing a very serious challenge to its future and independence.

The turmoil at the BBC started with a revelation involving a now-dead TV presenter and public figure, Jimmy Savile, who is accused of molesting possibly hundreds of children. US commentators have tried to explain Savile to the domestic audience, but there really is no parallel here. […] The allegations against Savile were being investigated by Newsnight last year, but its editor, Peter Rippon, decided not to run the investigation on the grounds that the evidence was not sound enough. Subsequently, rival broadcaster ITV pulled together a documentary carrying the allegations against Savile, making the BBC’s decision not to run the original piece seem both flawed and possibly compromised. Just as Entwistle succeeded Thompson as director general, the story of how the BBC had shelved its piece broke.

[. . .]

The most preposterous and fitting denouement to the whole horrible affair happened when, in an attempt to prove itself institutionally robust, Newsnight commissioned a second piece into another child abuse scandal. The show broadcast its investigation on November 2, conducted with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Including details about an alleged pedophile, the report led to the misidentification of a former member of a Conservative government as being involved in a North Wales care-home scandal after the central witness interviewed misidentified his abuser. Failing to conduct a sufficiently thorough cross-checking of the victim’s evidence, or even to show him a picture of the former politician, were basic journalistic errors. To make matters worse, the Bureau’s editorial head, Iain Overton, had foreshadowed the “exclusive” by tweeting about it earlier in the day. So in scrambling to address the perception that it was timid in breaking stories about pedophilia, Newsnight’s overcompensation has led to a potentially ruinous situation of the BBC creating false rumors.

There are two separate issues in play with all this that have become toxically intertwined. One is the existence of an endemic culture of child abuse in a number of British institutions, and the other is about the editorial independence and journalistic future of the BBC.

October 27, 2012

An argument against further publicizing the Jimmy Savile victims

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

At the Huffington Post, Brendan O’Neill points out that with Savile dead, the hue-and-cry to round up all the alleged victims and have them pour out their stories will not actually benefit anyone except the “theraputic industry”:

The victims themselves don’t get much out of it, since they are cajoled into reliving unpleasant things that happened decades ago. Worse, they’re publicly branded as damaged, as permanently scarred, despite the fact that many of them will have led full, interesting lives since that one time a dirty old man did something bad to them.

They are immortalised as one of Jimmy’s Victims, and in the process they are dehumanised, turned from rounded, complex individuals into simply sufferers.

Justice doesn’t benefit from these revelations, either, since Savile is dead and cannot be found guilty of anything. It is virtually impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the allegations against him are true, because, in a civilised society at least, the dead cannot be put on trial. Which raises the question of why so many of the police’s resources are being pumped into gathering more and more Savile abuse stories.

And society as a whole doesn’t benefit from the open invitation to every person who had a bad encounter with Savile to reveal all. In fact, society, the big communal space we all inhabit, looks set to be the biggest loser in all this.

The Savile scandal will further dent social solidarity. The promotion of the idea that paedophiles lurk everywhere, that, in the words of the deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, “There isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”, will exacerbate today’s climate of suspicion and mistrust. The now widely accepted idea that there were “paedophile networks” at the Beeb, in the NHS, even around Parliament, will ratchet up already high levels of public cynicism towards institutions and the political sphere.

October 22, 2012

Warren Ellis on celebrity license and the price of silence

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In his weekly Vice column, Warren Ellis explains how celebrities like Jimmy Savile can set things up to get away with awful things:

My drinking companion had, I think, just finished telling me about this — unless that was someone else, some other time, because, hey, drunk — and, after another drink, said, “and then there’s Jimmy Savile.”

Jimmy Savile, later Sir Jimmy Savile, was a radio DJ, television personality and tireless charity worker, raising many millions for causes like the storied children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville hospital. He was still best known for his TV show Jim’ll Fix It, where he made dreams come true for kids all over the country.

“Jim’ll fuck it,” said this person I was with. “Jimmy Savile’s a nonce.” If you had the misfortune to grow up outside God’s Own Country, “nonce” is a term for paedophile.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Jimmy Savile’s been around forever. He would have gotten caught. Radio 1 Roadshows? Doing Top Of The Pops on TV since the dawn of fucking time?”

“What do you think the price of silence is?”

“What? How could he not get caught? He looks like a nutter. Dripping in gold chains, long silver hair, shiny tracksuits, gurning at cameras with his ‘now then, now then’ like he’s a fucking glam rock Yorkshire miner? Bollocks.”

Update:

October 17, 2012

Dalton McGuinty’s “legacy”

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

All the media chatter about Premier Dalton McGuinty running for leader of the federal Liberals must be coming from folks who want to watch a national train wreck, says Michael Den Tandt:

Set aside that, with nine years as premier of Canada’s most populous province, constituting more than one-third of the national population, McGuinty would be past his best-before date at the best of times.

And let’s ignore his long track record of broken promises, beginning shortly after he was elected on a solemn vow to run balanced budgets and hold the line on taxes. He made that promise in writing. He broke it without a shred of visible remorse, blaming the other guys.

Let’s set aside the e-Health scandal, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. scandal, the eco-tax affair, and the continuing Ornge air ambulance scandal. While we’re at it, let’s wave off the abrogation of the rule of law in Caledonia. That’s all old news.

Forget the voluminous independent study by economist Don Drummond, who found, in a nutshell, that McGuinty’s entire approach to government in the previous eight years had been wrong-headed, slipshod and ruinously wasteful. Drummond recommended a radical course correction. McGuinty nodded sagely, kindly even, and ignored him.

We could even try — come on now, let’s do this — to ignore the Green Energy Act. This was the ideologically driven plan, still in place, to create an artificial market for “green” energy and erect thousands of 50-storey industrial wind turbines across Ontario, destroying the landscape for the sake of energy that only flows when the wind blows — that is, intermittently.

[. . .]

Let’s set aside, also, the cloying, nanny-state condescension of McGuinty’s approach to leadership — never a principle too firm to be melted into formless goo, never a controversy too sharp to be smothered in a warm quilt of apple-pie hokum. Never mind that, temperamentally, McGuinty is Mitt Romney without the millions. These are intangibles.

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