... and the dogs responded accordingly. Marjorie Taylor Greene has her "peach tree dishes," also guaranteed to get the MAGA dogs salivating, even baying.
Marjorie Taylor Greene says the government is planning to “zap” people inside their bodies if they try to eat a real cheeseburger.
I have nothing to add to this depiction by Michael de Adder of a diseased America we would all be well-advised to steer clear of.
In these latter days of our life as a species, there is little that shocks or dismays me. Instead, I find my predominant emotion now is one of disappointment:
Disappointment that we never realized our potential as a species.
Disappointment that our headlong plunge into oblivion is done with eyes wide open, getting and spending, using and abusing, directed mostly by our petty and shortsighted impulses and preoccupations.
Just a brief post.
As a parent of two and a grandfather of one (our granddaughter was born last August), I do not have the stomach, the heart or the psychic strength to really contemplate the ongoing horror that is the United States. Nor can I read or watch the protracted coverage in the media of the self-induced, oh so predictable, massacres that have become a regular part of that blighted landscape.
Although we in Canada have had our share of terrible shootings, the fact that they are rare is largely attributable to the sanity that undergirds our gun laws. It really is as simple as that. Contrast that with all of the misdirected comments about mental illness in the U.S. when the inevitable happens again and again there, with nary a mention of the real underlying cause, the American love of the gun and the the weak laws that fuel that love.
One final note: despite the dimensions of the tragedies, I don't see why Canadian media are spending so much time and so many resources covering what has happened in that alien country. It will not bring back the victims, and, I believe, it blurs the distinctions between us and them.
Note to the U.S. It is time you changed your national motto to one more reflective of your befouled character.
The same, of course, can be said of the other two major contenders in the June 2 election.
Given the dearth of plausible ideas put forth during this campaign slog, I nominate the following as 2022's unofficial anthem for those seeking office:
What is a voter to do other than revert to an 'it's all about me" approach to the world? Voting with principle and integrity seems not within the cribbed philosophy of many. At the very least, they should have the courage to admit their selfish shortsightedness.
The following letter, taken from the print edition of today's Toronto Star, neatly encapsulates the political prostitution a sizable segment of the electorate is willing to engage in:
In which Rudy Giuliani amply illustrates the old adage that it takes one to know one. May the farce be with him.
Marching behind Mayor Adams is
who gets into a shouting match with a Democrat. “You are a jackass… You are a brainwashed asshole… you are probably as demented as Biden,” Giuliani told the guy
As the provincial election campaign continues, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives continue to sustain their lead, with a seemingly good chance at a majority government, as we get closer to June 2.
According to a poll from Research Co., conducted online with 700 Ontario adults from May 15 to May 17, 34 per cent of decided voters indicated they support the Ontario PC, 29 per cent support the Liberal, 23 per cent for NDP and seven per cent support the Green Party.
Oh well. I guess the man who, when he was a Toronto city councillor, advocated for a giant Ferris wheel and a monorail on the waterfront knows his alleged P.T. Barnum truisms.
In the following, George Bush offers an opinion that reveals more than he perhaps intended. Was it just one of his usual gaffes, his advancing years, or a subconsciously motivated expression of atonement?
The other, of course, is the love of the gun that indelibly stains America and which few are talking about in the aftermath of the Buffalo massacre.
I have to admit to being somewhat puzzled as to how the recent increases in interest rates will combat inflation, given that it is mostly caused by external factors over which we have little control. While some have suggested it will bring a much-needed cooling to a housing market that has soared nationwide to absurd heights, it is only Heather Scoffield who has put it into a different, some would say sinister, context.
She starts off by observing that Joe Biden seems to be directing his attention toward profiteers in the corporate sector.
He issued an executive order, set up a high-profile antitrust unit, told it to crack down on profiteering, and pinpointed exactly where he wanted to see action.
Airlines, telecommunications, prescription drugs, the web giants — the executive order called them out.
Such boldness and focus are absent in Canada.
Here, the focus is on making sure workers hit by higher consumer prices don’t push for higher wages. The fear is they’ll set off a wage-price spiral that would launch already-high inflation into the stratosphere.
Wages have been creeping up at a much slower pace than inflation. In February, average hourly earnings rose 2.7 per cent from a year earlier, while consumer prices rose 5.7 per cent. Of course, the numbers bounce around month to month, and wages are picking up a bit of steam. But they’re not on fire like the prices workers face when they go to buy their groceries or fill their cars with gas.
Just to make sure wages don’t surge, the federal government is easing the way for a huge influx of temporary foreign workers in low-wage industries.
While the Bank of Canada is putting its foot on the necks of workers, corporations seem to be enjoying a free and fast rise to record profits.
Net income for corporations across all industries was up 5.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the three months earlier. On an annual basis, non-financial industries were seeing profits 52.2 per cent higher, while financial industries were up 14.2 per cent on the year.
And while the government has made mewling mention of improper corporate behaviour, our country
has fallen far behind its global counterparts in cracking down on anti-competitive behaviour.
And I have yet to see any sweat forming on the collective brow of Corporate Canada, no doubt reassured that it is pulling the strings on a federal government it knows identifies with and fears it far more than it does the working person.
Perhaps Allan Baker of Scarborough, writing in The Star's Sunday print edition, sums it up best and demonstrates that corporate fealty is not limited to the feds:
Politicians help corporations as people go hungry
Our friends and neighbours, who are working in low-wage industries, are already suffering from higher housing costs, increased food prices and gouging at the gas pumps.
Scoffield also reports on the increases in corporate profits over the past year: “Non-financial industries were seeing profit 52.2 per cent higher.” At Loblaws, Canada’s largest grocery chain, profits were up nearly 40 per cent over 2021, which was also a profit-making year for the company. Loblaws eliminated a temporary increase in pay for front-line workers long before the pandemic ended.
For those in Ontario who care about the environment, this editorial cartoon from Graeme MacKay requires no explanation, but serves as yet another apt warning of the perils entailed in giving Doug Ford another majority on June 2.
It would seem that the leading contender for the helm of the federal Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, brings neither credit nor credibility to his party.
Bruce Arthur writes about the divisive tactics of this strange man, tactics that seem in many ways reminiscent of the nonsense that goes on in the U.S., where Joe Biden is blamed for inflation, ignoring the fact that it is a worldwide problem caused by a variety of external factors.
The Bank of Canada is a target thanks to the rise of inflation, which is largely due to the war in Ukraine and oil prices, house prices, China and COVID, and maybe some profiteering. People notice pocketbook economics.
In response to this thorny global financial challenge, Poilievre blames domestic spending and Bank bond-buying to support government deficit spending — he has always been against the pandemic financial supports to Canadians — and pitches … Bitcoin?
That would be the same Bitcoin that is down 50 per cent since November.
His attacks on the Bank of Canada are similarly reckless. He wants the Bank to focus on keeping inflation as low as possible, while knowingly pushing lines of attack that could undermine its ability to do so. Expectations of inflation affect wage expectations, which affect prices, and if the market doesn’t think the Bank of Canada is serious about bringing down inflation, inflation doesn’t slow.
Maybe Poilievre truly doesn’t understand that. More likely, he just doesn’t care.
And his seemingly nonsensical advocacy for crytocurrencies has a sinister implication.
Jessica Marin Davis is the president of Insight Threat Intelligence, a former senior strategist in Canadian intelligence, and the author of a book on international terrorist financing. She points out that of the money sent to the Ottawa convoy, the vast majority of the million or so via crowdfunding sites was frozen, leaving approximately $30,000. But over $830,000 came in via cryptocurrency.
Davis says, “it's super useful for money laundering, and it's super useful for other forms of illicit financing, and it's somewhat useful for terrorist financing. And I would say it's somewhat useful for other forms, like financing criminal mischief, as we saw in the convoy.”
Really, the simplest throughline to Poilievre’s bit is that if your goal is to hammer freedom to an audience that found wearing masks was an imposition, that vaccines were a conspiracy rather than a collective victory, and that are angry or confused by what’s happening with the world, then Bitcoin is just another aspirational buzzword that signifies the world doesn’t have to work the way you’re told it does. Poilievre has been pumping conspiratorial theories about gatekeepers for much of the pandemic; He’s still doing it. He’ll say just about anything, and that opens the door to all kinds of conspiracies, all kinds of anger, all kinds of extremism.
Such is the sad state of politics today, powered by people who gleefully exploit and exacerbate societal divisions to feed their own power-seeking venality.
Definitely not the Canada I grew up in, and not the Canada I want to exist after I am gone.
P.S. For a primer on the real nature and risks of crytocurrencies, click here.
I will readily admit to holding a long-time smugness about Canada and its citizens; a deep feeling of superiority seemed inevitable when comparing us with the United States, a country that has been unravelling before our eyes for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, some Canadians' response to the pandemic, and the truck convoy's illegal occupation of Ottawa, went a long way toward humbling my hubris. We are not as special as I thought we were.
That fact was much on full display last week when the aspirants for the Conservative Party's leadership had their first debate. Bruce Arthur writes about how the participants spoke of the convoy:
The truckers were heroes. The truckers were misrepresented. The CBC is Pravda, or worse.
And perhaps worst of all, there was a brief competition over who was more loyal to the convoy. It was like watching two fans of the same band argue over who went to the earliest concerts and bought the first albums, before the band made it big. First, former Ontario MPP Roman Baber seemed to argue that public health restrictions were an attack on democracy and freedom, which taken to its logical policy conclusion would have meant a lot of Canadians dying in hospital parking lots. Then came the squabble.
The squabble was over who showed the most fealty to the insurrectionists' notion of freedom:
“Well, I did stand up for freedom during the pandemic from the very beginning,” said MP and leadership favourite Pierre Poilievre.
“That’s not true. You were not one of the loudest voices, Mr. Poilievre,” said MP Leslyn Lewis, who later took a reference from fellow leadership candidate Scott Aitchison about conspiracy theories to be a statement about her. “You did not even speak up until it was convenient for you. You did not even go to the trucker protests, you actually went and you took a picture in your neighbourhood at a local stop.”
“That’s not true,” said Poilievre. “I was there at the trucker protests. I was on the street. I was supporting those who are fighting for their freedoms.”
The implications of such stout defences are chilling.
And despite their previous support of the movement, even before it hit Ottawa, it was striking to see that the Conservative party could consider support of a lawless insurrection a purity test of sorts. Yes, Jean Charest called the convoy an illegal occupation — and was booed, as part of a rough ride — and the absent Patrick Brown has previously stated he didn’t support it. And Aitchison, too, appears to be an actual adult.
We all know, as Bruce Arthur writes, that the convoy consisted of an array of unsavoury elements, ranging from racists to homophobes to conspiracy theorists and anarchists, all fueled by 'dark money,' a Trumpian dream writ large.
And even if you remove all that and examine the ostensible motivations for the convoy as Poilievre describes them, it is a fundamental rejection of public health measures by a man who also rejected the very idea of government-delivered financial supports.
This is where the Conservative party appears to be going, unless someone can derail Poilievre. There was no talk of the nearly 40,000 Canadians who have died of COVID, which is just short of how many Canadians died in the Second World War. There was barely talk of the human toll of the virus at all. There was just a party whose dominant wing traffics in right-wing buzzwords and reflexive rejection of public health as a measure of partisan affiliation.
I am old enough to remember a time when there was no stigma attached to being a supporter of the Progressive Conservative Party. Those days are long gone, and that party, of course, no longer exists, either in name or spirit.
All of us are the poorer for it.
As the Ontario election campaign continues on with inane promises, I continue to rely on the cartoonists to present the real picture.
One of Doug Ford's early friends:
I suppose that all political campaigns, to one extent or another, require some willful ignorance or selective memory. If they didn't, how could so many voters support so many obviously unsuitable candidates?
I started thinking about this topic recently as I read about the rise of J.D. Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, a book I very much enjoyed and whose author I respected for both his depiction of his family and culture and his triumph over his humble beginnings through hard work and education.
That respect, I see now, was gravely misplaced.
The winner of the recent Ohio Republican primary, Vance displayed such a depth of moral vacuity and abdication of integrity that even I, a seasoned cynic, found breathtaking. And it was all in the service of getting the nod from disgraced former president Donald Trump, a man Vance once repudiated. even comparing him to Hitler, but now embraces.
Edward Keenan writes:
In 2016, Vance rose to fame on the strength of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which detailed the troubles of his family and, through them, those of Red State rural America. At the time, he was unequivocal, saying Trump was selling snake oil to people desperate for solutions to real problems.
“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” Vance wrote in The Atlantic shortly after his book’s publication.
Well, if you can’t beat him, join him: in this race, Vance was the most enthusiastic peddler of what appeared to be exactly the same snake oil. He said the nation needed a “de-woke-ification program,” suggested Trump should defy Supreme Court rulings, and tweeted, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” He accused President Joe Biden of flooding the “heartland” with fentanyl to “kill a bunch of MAGA voters,” and ran ads saying if the media calls you racist and says you hate Mexicans, Vance was your guy. He drew endorsements from the QAnon-leaning wing of Republicans in Congress, and campaigned with Donald Trump Jr. at his side. He talked up the Trump border wall — a concept he once explicitly mocked — as a cure for what ailed Ohio. (If you don’t have a map handy, Ohio lies on the northern U.S. border, more than 2,100 kilometres from where that Trump wall was being built.)
Vance doubled down on his newfound allegiance by surrounding himself with other Trump sycophants, as Lloyd Green writes:
In the run-up to the primary, Vance hung out with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Pressed on Greene’s recent attendance at a white nationalist conference, Vance offered his full-throated support. She is “my friend and did nothing wrong”, he declared. Being “in” with the Republican party’s extremes helps more than it hurts.
We are judged by the company we keep, and in addition to the aforementioned Gaetz and Taylor Greene, he is bankrolled by Paypal founder and Trump fawner Peter Thiel.
Thiel donated at least $13.5m to a Super Pac that had Vance’s back. Thiel also served as a conduit to Trump world.
In 2009, the German-born Thiel questioned the wisdom of expanding the right to vote to women and minorities. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he wrote.
I started this post by wondering about voter behaviour and their capacity to embrace willful ignorance. It would be simple enough to explain Vance's support by attributing it to the fanaticism that seems to follow Trump like a bad odour. But is that a sufficient explanation for supporting a candidate who displays none of the qualities we would hope for in a high-office aspirant? To endorse someone whose venal grasping for office should be obvious to all, whose ultimate allegiance is only to power and its acquisition, surely requires not only ignorance but massive forgetfulness.
Of course, I could be wrong. The older I get, the more I realize how little I really understand about our species.
I can't remember a time when I have been less inspired about an election. Here in Ontario, where we go to the polls on June 2, we have Conservative Doug Ford leading in the polls, counting on a credulous and forgetful electorate. Then we have the seatless Liberal leader, Lex Luther lookalike David Del Duca, promising a buck-a-ride, inexplicably unembarrassed by how it recalls Doug's preposterous buck-a-beer promise in the last election. Such policy vacuity, he assumes, will go unnoticed by the electorate. Then there is Andrea Horwath, so heedless as to how her NDP leadership hubris has hobbled the party for too long now.
I refuse to lump Green leader Mike Shriner into this morass; his policies may be sound, but his party has no chance of making a difference.
One anticipates a post-election reckoning by those who care about their parties' futures.
Meanwhile, since I have nothing but my contempt to offer, I am posting some editorial cartoons that bespeak the sad state of affairs in this province.
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