Be a man, Ford. For once.

Alan Redway, popular mayor of East York (since amalgamated into Toronto), is a Red Tory who has made a career of fighting for affordable housing, a key element - some would say the key factor - in lifting the poor from a cycle of misery.

In 1991, Redway promptly resigned the federal cabinet after joking about weapons at Pearson not long after a new government prohibition against doing so.

 
Rob Ford, in the running as Toronto's worst-ever mayor. (Toronto Star)

Rob Ford doesn't deny he was using a mobile telecom device while driving his van a few days ago. But the Toronto mayor has shown no contrition over breaking a widely enforced law. Instead, he has joked about his illegal activity on talk radio.

Into the bargain, Ford gave the finger and mouthed obscenities at a woman and her six-year-old daughter in a nearby vehicle who attempted to alert the mayor that he was breaking the law.

Not that it should matter, but Ford is no Alan Redway, who brought a dignity to public service we have yet to see from our current mayor.

Metro Police have not brought charges against Ford, and there can be ony one reason: Our police chief is cowering at bring Ford to justice. Ford's power is strictly limited - he is but one vote of 44 on City Council. Yet Ford who could wage a bully-boy campaign against the cop shop, or so the chief imagines.

Between the insolence of Ford and the cowardice of police who choose only selectively to uphold the law, it is difficult to assess which party is the greater embarrassment to our city.

If he was a man, Ford would accept a suspension from office for two weeks to a month. He would apologize to the City and the two upstanding citizens he abused. And Ford would present himself to the precinct where his illegal act occurred and accept the same fine and loss of demerit points that other violators of this overdue law must endure.

Just to be clear about this, use of a mobile device while driving has been found in every scientific study to debilitate one's driving abilities to a degree equivalent to intoxication. Indeed, University of Utah researchers have found that drunk driving is less dangerous than driving while using a cellphone or other mobile telecom device.

Especially in N.A.'s seventh-largest city, with its multitude of delivery vehicles, private cars, taxis, cyclists and pedestrians all vying for use of the same roads, this law is needed. It needs to be rigorously enforced with no exceptions, and especially against the mayor given his role-model status.

A negative one, so far.

 

Don't blame Murdoch, blame his audience.

What held our notice in Rupert Murdoch's killing of his own News of the World was that it was Britain's largest paper and immensely profitable. A very few commentators excepted, little was said of just why more than 2 million Britons would turn each Sunday to a rag trading in sexism (the first half-dozen pages featured near-naked women), nativism, Europhobia, sensationalism in all its forms, invasions of privacy of people of all stations of life, and, as we've known since the first NOTW spying scandal, in 2007, material obtained by illegal means and stories with even less veracity than Hearst's invention of a Spanish attack on a U.S. warship in Havana harbor. "Remember the Maine!" was the Hearst's cry for rallying a nation in a Spanish American War to which he helped set the match. "Remember death panels!" is Murdoch's.

  
      

    


"Just writing to say I saw your ad in one of the above and will never purchase that product or watch that movie at your theater."

I've never had a brief against mass-market peddlers of smut, lies and character assassination. My issue has been with those who keep them in business. Which is us. No one had a gun pointed to their heads as they passed British newsstands, just as no one need show up for Michele Bachmann rallies or listen devotedly to Rush Limbaugh.

It is this underside of the Murdoch saga that Anthony Lane dwells on expertly in the New Yorker:

Murdoch knows something that his assailants will seldom concede, and that renders their call for radical change, in the rapport between governance and the media, both tardy and redundant. The change has already happened: culture, media and sport are not in Murdoch's pocket, but the British, not least in their yen to watch soccer and cricket on [Murdoch's] Sky [satellite broadcaster], have reached into their pockets and paid for his feast of wares. The country is in an uproar just now, but outrage en masse functions like outrage in private: we reserve our deepest wrath not for the threat from without, which we fail to comprehend, but for forces with which we have been complicit. The British press has long revelled in the raucous and the irresponsible; that was part of its verve, and it was Murdoch's genius, and also the cause of his current woes, to recognize those tendencies, bring the revelry to a head, and give the people what they asked for. He reminded them of themselves.  

And when you cringe at bile-spewing Bill O'Reilly or the sexual objectification of the Toronto Sun's "SUNshine Girl" or the distortionary agenda of Faux News, do you write Roger Ailes to tell him he's a moral cripple, do you boycott products advertised on Faux News or in Murdoch's New York Post? Do you write to talking heads on Faux News to say you've advised your friends not to vote for them or otherwise pay them heed? Do you contact elected representatives demanding a return of the Fairness Doctrine of equal time? 

Purveyors of this crap are pushing on an open door when it comes to a backlash that never materializes. There merely is head-shaking among some of us that this garbage is polluting the country, no less than billowing phosphates that once clogged our rivers and ravines. Except we got rid of the phosphates, through activism. We even got billboard moratoriums ("visual pollution"). Procter & Gamble got the message. Murdoch has never received one.

Murdoch, truth be told, is a paper tiger who almost lost his empire from overexpansion in the 1990s and even now runs one of the least profitable of the big media conglomerates. He shakes in his boots if No. 10 or Beijing threatens to thwart his ambitions, and kow-tows accordingly. He is a transplanted Aussie affecting U.S. citizenship for business purposes, and is a part-time Briton dismissed by the powers that be in that class-ridden society as a colonial upstart, and by China's Communist Party as a lackey. He is, in short, a bundle of insecurities by which he and his properties' influence could easily be diminished.

Murdoch represents a certain type of pestilence, to be sure. But we seem sanguine in continuing to absorb it second-hand. Which makes us onlookers complicit in his works.

 

Norway: the evil lives among us.

Mark Singer, a writer I've admired for decades, struggles in the New Yorker to make some kind of sense of Anders Behring Breivik and the tragedy of Oslo and Utoya. And doesn't, because so far there is none, and even in time there may be very little. 

 
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. (Reuters)

What we do know from Tucson earlier this year, from the Montreal Massacre, Oklahoma City, Waco, Virginia Tech, Columbine - is that we're not dealing with terrorism or Islamofascism. Terrorists are comparative weaklings seeking to frighten more powerful agents, even nations, to do their bidding. That's not these case here. And Breivik is an Islamophobe.

These are homegrown mass murderers whose agendas are all over the place. Marc Lepine was resentful of women engineering students who qualified for studies and he didn't. The Columbine murderers were kids, fellow students who claim to have been ostracized by classmates. Timothy McVeigh, the Branch Davidians and the Tuscon assailant were anti-government conspiracy theorists. Jeffrey Dahmer, Robert Pickton, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo were sado-sexual deviants. Breivik is a white supremist who wrote a 1,500-page anti-Islamic tract for fellow "crusaders" he hoped to recruit. Yet what has anti-Muslim sentiment to do with slaughtering scores of children at a Norwegian summer camp?

The answer, I'm afraid, is that the camp was a target close to hand for a deranged individual of limited resources. True, McVeigh shlepped from upstate New York to Oklahoma. But most of the above perpetrators committed their atrocities, of necessity, close to home. Which means we're simply going to have to pay more attention to the nutters among us, because they're most likely to strike in our own neighborhoods.

It should be obvious by now that we're fighting the enemy within.

Singer, who has written extensively on McVeigh and Oklahoma City, has a marvelous sifting of similarities and differences of the motives of these dangerously disturbed individuals. What this latest tragedy points to is a need for greater public awareness of mentally disturbed folks among us, whose odd behavior we must now take more seriously and carefully monitor. And there's no getting around the role that guns play in these tragedies. Oklahoma City was a bombing, of course, and we can thank God that the explosives the Columbine perpetrators set for lunchtime in the school cafeteria failed to go off.

But most of these tragedies - including Breivik, who used both bombs, in Oslo, and a firearm in killing, again, 68 people, mostly children, in a casual 90-minute killing spree - were amplified by access to firearms. Indeed, what the slaughter Breivik perpetrated at the island holiday camp at Utoya would have been impossible without a firearm. The same applies at Fort Hood, Virginia Tech and l'Ecole Polytechnique. It is extremely difficult to argue for open-ended firearm-ownership rights when the greater good of public safety is increasingly imperiled by a particular individual freedom.  

Singer:

Breivik, disguised as a policeman and armed with weapons loaded with expanding bullets, spent a leisurely 90 minutes stalking and killing 68 people, tells us that he knew precisely what he was doing to his victims. And he took a considerably longer view of history than McVeigh did. He had evidently planned his attack for a decade, and his 1,500-page manifesto envisioned an ethnically cleansed European Christian civilization in 2083. Regardless of the quality of the end product, he was nothing if not a deliberate thinker.

Like McVeigh, Breivik sees himself as a warrior, and what the two have most in common is that they each accomplished something special.

Lack of self-esteem and self-fulfilment is, we're learning, a root cause of widespread social maladies. It looms large in spouses who put up with chronic partner abuse, the turning to substance abuse, the turning in extreme cases to accomplishing something "special" by killing others.

Psychologists and sociologists can tell us which comes first, the desire to kill or the desire to be important. At some point they come together in monstrous sins against humanity. We need to get on this case now.

 

Enjoy your day.

 
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. (Reuters)

 

Twin Freaks.

Much as we could use a boost in tourism, being morally straight now requires us to dissuade would-be visitors to Toronto. At least for now, until our double-headed mayoralty, the Twin Freaks of Doug and Rob Ford, slide or stumble into the dustbin of history.

 
Toronto mayors Doug and Rob Ford. (Toronto Star)

It has been the misfortune of Toronto the Good to have had just one terrific mayor in modern times, one sure not to embarrass us by giving public expression to his fear of being cooked and eaten by natives if he set out on an African summit to which Toronto's mayor had been elected; one who wouldn't ban the Barenaked Ladies from a Nathan Phillips Square event, taking the popular band's name literally during one of her few moments of not being AWOL; who wouldn't put us to sleep by transference of his own deeply embedded ennui.

We didn't so much vote for Doug and Rob Ford as vote against the aforementioned rare good mayor, David Miller. The retiring Miller was not on the ballot, but we voted against him anyway. He had scooped up for Toronto, on repeated trips to Ottawa, a goodly chunk of the federal stimulus funds, which is why the GTA this summer has been humming with work crews repairing the streets. He tried to shame both Grit and Tory feds to commit a tiny portion of the federal gas tax to Canada's spectacular - and spectacularly disastrous - infrastructure deficit of $123 billion just to replace ageing bridges, hospitals, water and power systems alone, never mind getting a leap on the 21st century. 

Miller, it was casually said, was in the pocket of the municipal unions, with whom he negotiated, in truth, no differently than previous administrations. He tried to ram bicycle lanes down our throats - the kind they've had in Amsterdam and Beijing for most of the previous century - thus launching a "war on cars." His city imposed all manner of user fees - including a 5 cent charge on grocery bags - to push us toward a truly green city. Actually, Miller was a non-radical common-sensical and hard-working leader, finally one for Canada's principal city to be proud of. So of course we could not wait to see the last of him, and get back to the mediocrity that is the norm in the mayor's chair of our burgh. 

In George Smitherman, we had a mayoralty candidate who was a bit of a hot-head but was a demonstrable success in getting things done as provincial health minister - that ministry being one of the biggest enterprises, public or private, in the nation. But Smitherman ran a lousy, complacent campaign. Worse, he seemed to many voters to be a progressive, an extension of the dreaded Miller who'd come before - someone who made us eat our oatmeal, forsaking Doritos for breakfast.

So we opted for the Ford brothers, not realizing we were electing two mayors sharing one brain, and that transplanted from a chicken. No one elected Doug Ford mayor, yet he now de facto shares that post with sibling Rob. Having done no homework on these thugs, we didn't realize, for starters, that they are thugs. Their operating style, if one must dignify it in those words, is to label as stupid and worse anyone who dares disagree with them. A comparison to schoolyard bullies is to insult schoolyard bullies.  

One cringes in looking at each day's front page. What pre-adolescent thing have the Twin Freaks done in the past 24 hours?

On the weekend, Rob apparently gave the finger to a mom and her six-year-old daughter who signalled to him he shouldn't be using his cellphone while driving. (Never a cop around when you need one.) Sigh. Yesterday, Doug did the same, metaphorically speaking, to some local notable, Margaret Atwood by name, who has dared speak out over Doug's hopeless ignorance about Toronto's supposed over-abundance of libraries. For Doug, our beloved library system should go on the chopping block along with everything else as the city struggles to close a $4-billion budget gap.

Doug Ford says he's never heard of this Atwood woman. Which, again, makes you wonder why we don't screen candidates for public office for basic knowledge and life skills. ("Does water run up- or down-hill?" "On which Great Lake is Toronto located?" And, of course, "How many fingers?") You've met the Doug Ford type, wearing his "I'm with stupid" T-shirt. His winning argument is that he has never heard of the source of contrary opinion cited, be it Copernicus, Tennyson, Mandela or Atwood, whose novels have been on the curriculum of European universities for three decades now. You've met Doug Ford's ilk, proud of their imbecility, possibly while making your way past a bar fight outside a sports bar from which you are attempting to retreive your daughter. At this point, I'd take losing contestants from "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?" as passable replacements for the Fords.

But we elected these morons. Which means we deserve them. Really. A cursory look at Rob Ford's track record on council, such as it was, prior to the latest municipal election would show he occupied himself mostly with accusing his fellow councillors of pretty much every venial crime under the sun. He was a stuntman disguised as an officeholder, his hijinks stopping just short of the McCarthyesque gimmick of pulling a list of names of malefactors from his pocket but not letting us see it. A contributor he was not. An "energy drainer," as consultants say of noisome brats passing themselves off as adults who need to be excised from the office or classroom, the Fords were and continue to be.

As it happens, TPL, the Toronto Public Library system, is one of Hogtown's crown jewels, the largest library system on the continent as measured by books in circulation. The three libraries located in Doug Ford's Etobicoke riding - which do not outnumber Tim Horton outlets in his ward, as he claims (don't expect the Twin Freaks ever to do homework before making a bizarre assertion) - include a branch in an industrial area which Doug Ford regards as superfluous. Why, within a two mile drive either way, another library is to be found, he brays.

If you have a car, that is. In the Twin Freaks' worldview, everyone has a car, or should. (Or a gas-guzzling van, in Rob's case.) Which, alas, leaves out maybe half of us who can't afford one, or for a dozen different reasons choose not to own or use one.

This, sad to say, will be the norm until these deep-sea creatures are flushed from office. They will mock, vilify and reveal oceanic ignorance of one easy target for cutting after another - children's wading pools, walk-in medical clinics, and anything and everything to do with the arts, which as Richard Florida reminds us, tend to be the spark of urban renewal in distressed neighborhoods.

Gawd, to find myself missing Mel Lastman so soon...

 

Layton.

I've known Jack Layton as a friend for 22 years, so I can't offer anything clear-headed at this time about a diagnosis of a second cancer in addition to the virulent form of prostate cancer he already is fighting. As they say, first, you cry.

 
Olivia and Jack Layton. (Toronto Star)

I wish the speculation hadn't started so soon on the implications for the NDP. That can wait. But it is human nature to ponder what's next, and a necessary exercise. As an enterprise, the NDP now is the government-in-waiting, so it does matter what an alternative to the Tories not headed by Layton would look like.

Family and friends don't care about that now. Canadians have been impressed, through several Layton-led NDP general election campaigns, of Jack's obvious humanity and compassion. That he's not a knee-jerk socialist (or "ist" of any kind), has enough interest in making Parliament work to prop up minority governments of both the Grits and Conservatives that have served the Canadians in distress or victimized by injustice that have occupied most of his thoughts in public life, and that if he has "pet" issues there is a sufficient multitude of them to make him a genuinely holistic PM and his party a realistic alternative to that which now forms the government - for the first time in the 79-year-history of the CCF/NDP.

That Layton has an evident pattern over the years since he became NDP leader of coming to problems with well-thought-out solutions, and not a useless string of cheap shots, has made him a role model of problem-solvers. It's also how he took a party barely registering a pulse when he became NDP leader a short eight years ago to Official Opposition status today, with 103 seats. That caucus includes 57% of the ridings in Quebec, a province where previous CCF/NDP leaders had dreamed in vain of winning a "breakthrough" of perhaps half a dozen seats. Overall, the May 2 results shattered the NDP's previous, 1988, record of a total 43 seats.  

Layton has his shortcomings, or rather, the things where we part company - on his initial misgivings about the Clarity Act, for instance. But that balance-sheet exercise is, as I say, for others. This, for me, is a day of remembering Layton e-mails on bridging various factions - labour and business, small business and Big Business, Far North aboriginals and reliably insensitive fed bureaucrats, Ottawa and the provinces, and municipalities - home to more than 80% of us - with senior levels of government.

He has sought widely for input, mastered the all-important, easily overlooked niceties. Helping get leadership rival Bill Blaikie, a party stalwart, the Commons deputy speakership was both politically astute and a personal kindness saluting Blaikie's long service to party and country - he would retire as the first CCF/NDP member to serve in that post, and his loyal Manitoba constituents would never forget the gesture. Demoting his wife and fellow MP to a junior shadow-cabinet post at the outset was a message about how Peronism would never emerge in this caucus - even if Olivia Chow is among the most capable of parliamentarians, as she has shown in her subsequent, earned promotions.

For now, I fret I will not get the chance to even our snooker record, currently 247:3 in Jack's favor. (Layton, in fairness to me, spent an hour or two most days during his ill-spent youth as junior commodore of his father's suburban Montreal yacht club becoming ever more acquainted with the felt.)

I will be praying of course, for Jack and Olivia, Jack's beloved mother-in-law, his children. From the moment of the first diagnosis, they have been invaluable in helping Jack adjust to a new fitness and dietary regime, and the drugs and the discomfort, each magnified by the rigors of the May 2 campaign. Political junkies that we all are - execpting perhaps Olivia's mom - public life is very much out of our minds for now and I expect that will be the case for months to come.

Much has been written of Monday's announcement. I believe my own Star colleague Tim Harper, a national affairs columnist who not long ago completed a lengthy bureau-chief assignment in Washington, best captured our feelings Jack at this difficult time:

[On the campaign trail there] was genuine concern over a man already battling prostate cancer, a man who didn’t look well, but a man who appeared unable to slow down. But we didn’t write about it. We didn’t know. He was doing his job and doing it well and there are some private matters that need not be poked at.

The worry remained, however. That’s what makes Monday’s news that a new cancer had infiltrated the 61-year-old’s frail body such a tragic personal story. You somehow knew you might hear that news one day, but you dreaded it...

At its historic pinnacle, it would be a tragedy for the party to be left leaderless, if that is ultimately the end of this story. It would be a greater tragedy if Layton could not reap the rewards of his hard work, facing off against Stephen Harper from across the benches of the House of Commons.

But for now, the political story must wait...

The transformation of Jack Layton from the man who won his party leadership in 2003 to the man who became opposition leader in 2011 was something to behold. [By] 2011, he had matured into a polished political leader with the longest coattails in the country, responsible for one of the great Canadian political stories in recent years...

When Layton and I last sat down to break bread, he was on the verge of making history, having just stunned the nation with his Quebec surge. He was frighteningly thin, dressed that day in track pants. But he was downright giddy.

Long after the tape recorder was turned off, we talked about his days on Toronto city council, his run for mayor, the days in the wilderness in Quebec for his party, even the days years ago when I was a journalism student and he was my political science professor at Ryerson. His enthusiasm was infectious.

He ended lunch suggesting we make this a semi-regular event, sitting down in Ottawa from time to time, to discuss the political waterfront.

Layton is bravely in the fight of his life. He has vowed to be back when the House returns Sept. 19.

Here’s hoping. That dinner would be nice.

 

Obama smear: An oldie but a goodie.

This just in, to my Toronto Star e-mail box, which has, like seven firewalls that this slimer managed to slither through:

Dear Sir;

 

Republican has said to me that OBAMA has spent more  money in these few year

than any of the previous govts.  Could you research this for me?  Would greatly

appreciate it.

 

mslu@cogeco.ca

 

I'm sure there's a war-room name for this type of smear. It's a robo-smear, but by e-mail rather than the phone calls to South Carolina voters in that state's infamous 2000 GOP primary: "Would you vote for John McCain if you knew he was the father of a black love child?"

 

As with the Obama smear, no response, in fact, is requested. The smear is to plant an idea in the voter's mind. Mission accomplished.

 

I hope David Plouffe & Co. are geared up for this. Because (a) it's starting awfully early, and (b) I don't even live in the U.S. and I'm getting this stuff. And the reply e-mail is also a Canadian address. That's how indiscriminate this effort - by the RNC? the Koch fronts? - is.

 

 

Enjoy your day.

 
Remember snow? (AP)

 

Invest wisely. Vote Democratic.

Charles Stein offers a throughly convincing explanation of why Main Street investors finally are giving up on mutual funds and other money managers, whose performance seldom suspasses even the S&P 500 and other indexes. Stein's analysis, appearing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, is a good read for investors. But there's also a gem for us political junkies, buried in the piece:

Domestic stock funds captivated the American public in the 1990s, thanks to a market that rose at an annual pace of 18% a year...

[But] In the past 10 years the S&P 500 returned 2.7% annually, including reinvested dividends. In three calendar years during that period, investors suffered double-digit losses. Some fare even worse, as 56% of all actively managed diversified U.S. stock funds trailed their benchmarks over the past decade.

Let's see, who was president during most of the 1990s? And during most of the 2000s? Man, even a Republican who was the first president with an MBA (from Harvard, no less) couldn't come close to matching the stock-market gains under a Dem president with bright ambitions and not much else from Hope, Ark.

 

Big Phama = big, chronic law violators.

Face it, when you're dealing with Big Pharma, you're sitting across from chronic violators of the law. Why they do this, and get away with it - regarding even the biggest fines imposed on them as mere parking tickets - is for another post. For now, just a reminder that Big Pharma, a key player in spirialling U.S. healthcare costs, is a chronic lawbreaker in its purusit of profits.

        

Here's a partial list of recent "financial settlements" betweeen Uncle Sam and some of Big Pharma's biggest global players, published by that commie anti-capitalism rag Bloomberg BusinessWeek. These particular settlements relate to infractions including Big Pharma's practice of marketing drugs for uses not approved by the FDA. These so-called "off-label" prescriptions are a chief means by which Big Pharma inflate revenues from existing products:

2007: Bristol-Myers Squibb, fine: $515 million (product: Abilify)

2008: Cephalon, fine: $425 million (products: Gabitril, Actiq, Provigil)

2009: Pfizer Inc., fine $2.3 billion (products: Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox, Lyrica)

2009: Eli Lilly, fine: $1.4 billion (product: Zyprexa)

2010: Allergan, fine: %600 million. (product: Botox)

2010: Astra-Zeneca, fine: $520 million (product: Seroquel)

2010: Novartis, fine: $422.5 million (products: Trileptal, Diovan, Sandostatin, Zelnorm, Exforge, Tekturna)

2010: Forest Laboratories: $313 million (products: Celexa, Lexapro, Levothroid)

Some of these companies are making so much money from these sales that there's no amount of punishment that we can heap on the corporation, because it's not personal', says Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a non-profit advocacy group...'Burns's argument echoes public outrage that banks and their CEOs have faced few legal repercussions for the financial crisis their risk-taking helped create.

'If you make Forest [Laboratories] pay $313 million, then who pays that?' asks Burns. 'The answer is the stockholders. But the people who design these frauds, who ignored these frauds after repeated warnings, as is the case here - they get increased end-of-year bonuses, better stock options, and they get to parachute out.'