A Canadian Ford Recall

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who can generously be called "controversial" given the country's own growing Tea Party style backlash against social programs and health care (yet another instance where I feel the need to apologize to our northern neighbors) has run into a bit of a problem:  Canada actually gives a damn about things like conflict of interest, and it's cost Ford his job.

A court ordered the mayor of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, to be removed from office for violating conflict of interest rules when soliciting donations for his football charity.

Mayor Rob Ford got into legal trouble when he spoke out at a city council vote in February against a $3,150 fine he was ordered to pay over the ethics breach.

A Toronto resident took him to court for violating the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, which at trial Ford said he had not read.

Ford said he will appeal the ruling, and if he fails to have the decision overturned will run again for mayor in a by-election.

“I will fight tooth and nail to hold onto my job,” he told reporters, blaming “leftwing politics” for the court action that led to the ruling.

Compare Ford to say, Mike Bloomberg in New York City.  If Bloomberg was held to the same legal standard as Ford, he'd have been out on his ass within a year instead of on his third term as Mayor (itself in violation of the city's laws until he changed them.)  Ford vows to be back however, and he's counting on winning his appeal and running again for Mayor on the "Evil liberals stole my job" ticket.

How Ford ended up mayor of Toronto in the first place?  Well, I've got no room to complain considering Michele Bachmann still has a job in Congress that doesn't involve emptying trash cans.

Benghazi Been-Gotcha

FOX News should really just stop talking to actual journalists and experts, because whenever they try to force their propaganda past sane people, stuff like this invariably happens.

Thomas E. Ricks, the veteran defense reporter and author, said he expected his Monday morning appearance on Fox News to last about three minutes. It ended, in fact, after 90 seconds — his last sentence was a description of the network as “a wing of the Republican Party.”

After the interview, a Fox News staffer told Mr. Ricks that he had been rude.

The strange and unusually short interview segment quickly gained the attention of media critics, because criticism of Fox News is rarely aired on Fox News. Mr. Ricks said in an e-mail message afterward that he did not think he was being rude. “I thought I was being honest,” he said. “They asked my opinion, and I gave it.”

The topic was the attack on the United States’s diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Before being thanked and sent on his way, Mr. Ricks said he thought the controversy around the attack was “hyped, by this network especially.”

So, Tom Ricks won't be back on FOX ever again.  Which is sad, because tens of millions of FOX viewers desperately need to see the view outside the network's anti-Obama propaganda bubble.  That won't happen anytime soon either.

StupidiNews!

• NATO military officials are working with Turkey to possibly deploy Patriot anti-missile batteries along that country's border with Syria.
• The US Supreme Court has let stand a lower court ruling blocking an Illinois law that would have made recording police officers a crime.
• Lawmakers stand ready to back any "fiscal cliff slope" deal but budget cuts are making all sides nervous.
• A deal with Greece and its creditor nations has finally been reached as the EU turns to deal with growing problems in Cyprus and Spain.
• Nintendo of America says the new Wii U console has sold 400,000 units, well behind the first week sales of the original Wii, but ahead of PS3 and Xbox 360.

Last Call

What a surprise!  Adam Davidson's article on the so-called "skills gap", that employers are unable to find enough people to fill highly skilled manufacturing positions, has found a very definite reason behind it:  near minimum-wage pay rates.

Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour. 

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages. 

To recap, manufacturing jobs in 2012 consist of people with engineering and computer programming skills with 2-year college degrees who end up making about thirty, thirty-five grand a year.  McDonald's pays more and you don't need a degree.  Think about that.

Now tell yourself the problem is unions and that manufacturing jobs pay too much, and if only those awful unions were gone, America could be more "competitive" by paying workers even less.  And indeed, as a result, wages for manufacturing jobs are going down, not up.

College or trade school educated workers are making $15 an hour, and that's too much money in 2012.  But let's cut taxes on the rich.  That'll solve the problem, right?

One Barak Who Won't Be Back

Former Israeli PM and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak is calling it quits, saying he won't seek another ministerial position after January's elections.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced his resignation Monday, saying he will quit politics in January to spend more time with his family.

His resignation comes at a highly delicate time for Israel, which is observing a fragile cease-fire with the militant Palestinian group Hamas after an eight-day conflict that killed more than 160 people -- the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians in Gaza.

The Palestinians are not exactly sad to see the guy go, either.  And speculation that Barak would try to revive the center-left Kadima coalition, well that's right out too.

Some Israeli political commentators had speculated ahead of the announcement that Barak was planning to quit the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new center-left party.

But Barak told reporters that new faces in leadership roles would benefit Israel.

"I feel it is important that other people should take leading positions in Israel. Changes in the position of power are a good thing. There are many ways to contribute to the society and the country, and not necessarily through politics," he said.

Barak served as defense minister under former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert between 2007 and 2009, and retained the post under Netanyahu from 2009 until the present. He also held the title of deputy prime minister for both administrations.

I'm thinking anyone who ends up in the post after Barak at this point is most likely not going to be less militant or less "blow up Palestinians every couple of years to make a point".  We'll see where this goes.  Barak will stay on through January, but he's out after that.  Considering we're back into "Iran is only months away from a nuke" mode, whoever does replace him will have a pretty full plate, especially if Netanyahu retains his office as I expect he will.

The Exchange Of Makers And Takers

When the conversation next turns to "makers versus takers" again, keep track of the states who have simply refused to implement health insurance exchanges, keeping their own citizens uninsured longer and forcing the federal government to set up the exchanges for them at federal taxpayer expense.

Since different states have different insurance markets and different eligibility requirements for Medicaid, Obama’s Health and Human Services Department can’t simply take a system off the shelf as a one-size-fits all failsafe.

"You can't simply deploy one federal exchange across the board," said Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

"Each state is different — their eligibility systems are different, their insurance markets are different. [HHS is] going to have to build these exchanges to fit into the context of each state."

Every state must have an exchange by Jan. 1, 2014, meaning HHS doesn’t have a lot of time to do a massive amount of work. The department could quickly run through a $1 billion fund designated for implementing the exchanges.

Experts have predicted that the department will soon have to tap budgets from its other programs to cover exchange costs. Other have said it might charge fees on the insurance purchased in its exchanges once they are launched. 

So yes, Republican governors (and even a couple Democrats, looking at you, Missouri's Jay Nixon) are trying to do everything they can to break the system.  The same people saying "Give us control of Medicaid because states can do things more efficiently" are trying to make state insurance exchanges as inefficient as possible in order to harm as many people as possible, believing they will then rise up and demand an end to Obamacare.

Sure worked for Mitt Romney, huh guys.  And let's not forget there are actual lives at stake here, too.  It doesn't seem to bother these governors much, either...and with blue states where federal taxpayers foot the bill like California, New York, and Illinois, it's interesting to note that it's the poorer red states who are expecting federal handouts here to build their exchanges for them.

Which side has a problem with "takers" now?

StupidiNews!

• Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will meet today with members of Egypt's judiciary to work out concerns over Morsi's power grab last week, amid rising protests.
• The Obama administration will keep some 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after the end of combat operations in 2014.
• President Obama's reelection has once again triggered a rush in firearm and ammunition sales as gun owners expect strong second term gun control laws.
• Europe's answer to North America's shale oil and gas boom could lie under the Sahara desert, and Algeria could be the industry's new center.
• Scientists are looking to turn vaccines into "permanent viral infections" that provide single-shot lifetime protection against diseases.

Last Call

Texas wanting to secede from the United States may be a running joke, but in Spain, nobody's laughing as that country's Catalonia region seems quite serious about declaring independence from the Spanish government.

Separatists in Spain's Catalonia won regional elections on Sunday but failed to get the resounding mandate they need to push convincingly for a referendum on independence.

Catalan President Artur Mas, who has implemented unpopular spending cuts in an economic crisis, had called an early election to test support for his new drive for independence for Catalonia, a wealthy region in northeastern Spain.

Voters handed almost two thirds of the 135-seat local parliament to four different Catalan separatist parties that all want to hold a referendum on secession from Spain.

But they punished the main separatist group, Mas's Convergence and Union alliance, or CiU, cutting back its seats to 50 from 62. That will make it difficult for Mas to lead a united drive to hold a referendum in defiance of the constitution and the central government in Madrid.

"Mas clearly made a mistake. He promoted a separatist agenda and the people have told him they want other people to carry out his agenda," said Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations' Madrid office.

For now, much like Quebec and Canada, the only thing keeping Catalonia in Spain is the fact the separatist parties have yet to unite the region under one party and leader.  Should that change, it would be the economic equivalent of not Texas, but California leaving the union here, a massive blow to Spain's already moribund economy.

We'll see how Spain reacts now that Mas and the separatists are, well, still separate.

They Still Have Learned Nothing

Nearly three weeks after the election, and it's still Benghazi, all the time, with the right.  No better example of this than Col. Mustard, who knows all about racism and will tell you exactly how it works.

I know I sound like a broken record.

Everytime I think the Democratic race card players could not get more vile, more deranged, more patronizingly demeaning to blacks, someone manages to defy even my vivid imagination.

This time, it is the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, which issued a truly amazing screed (h/t Gabriel Malor) claiming that critics of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are motivated by race and sex, as demonstrated by the facts that most are male and a significant percentage come from former confederate states.

Let me clue you in, Bill.  Nothing is more patronizing or demeaning to minorities like myself, particularly African-Americans like myself, than a middle-aged white guy deciding what should be patronizing and demeaning to blacks because you have decided that people like me are simply too ignorant to see your shining truth.

And yes, when a group of white GOP men in Congress, from mostly former Confederate states, decide that a high school valedictorian who is Rhodes Scholar with degrees in International Relations, a Phi Beta Kappa member, a National Security Council member under Clinton, and UN Ambassador under Obama is somehow both incompetent and unqualified to serve as Secretary of State, one has to ask the same questions as the Washington Post's editorial board as to why this is.

You might actually learn something if you choose to truly explore why you're in the wrong, but that level of soul searching is far too difficult.  It's better then to insult anyone asking those questions as "vile and deranged" and somehow pretend that Susan Rice's nomination to the office of Secretary of State is a personal grievance that must be rectified by no less than the President himself, because after all, you're just that important.

You keep on believe that, and we'll keep winning elections.  That seems fair.

Not Too Wild About Harry

The GOP campaign to somehow appeal to Village Centrists and nervous Dems to dump Harry Reid as Senate majority leader is now underway in earnest.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) infuriated Republicans during the campaign with his harsh partisan attacks and now faces the delicate task of mending his relationship with the GOP.

Some Republicans say Reid poisoned his relationship with their party by waging controversial attacks against GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. They were most angered by Reid’s charge that Romney had not paid taxes in ten years, attributing the information to an anonymous source.

"I do think he lost more credibility with Republicans because of his aggressive comments during the campaign,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former leadership aide who served in the Senate and House.

“The make-up of the Senate is almost the same and I think Sen. Reid is likely to produce the same type of gridlock he did before because of his unusually partisan stance," Bonjean added.

Well if a GOP strategist says Harry Reid is causing too many bad feelings, then surely Senate Democrats should drive him out of office in shame.  While they're at it, I'm sure Bonjean is upset that Democrats haven't all jumped party and become 98 Republicans and 2 independents, too.

Somewhere, Harry Reid is laughing his ass off.

Last Call

Jonah Goldberg has some whitesplaning to do dammit, and no holiday weekend will stay him from his appointed rounds.

If the GOP wants to win more black votes, it will need to get a lot more “racist.”

The scare quotes are necessary because I don’t think the Republican Party is racist now (and, historically, has a lot less to answer for than the Democratic Party does).

But that hasn’t stopped people from slandering Republicans as racist for one reason or another.

Wow, that’s a pitch roughly the size of Utah over the plate.  I’m going to step out of the batter’s box for a second so that I can get a running start at this thing, it’s not moving that fast.  Clearly Jonah here is full, nay, gravid with excellent advice.  Besides, GOP can’t be racist because Colin Powell!

Just consider some recent examples from over the summer. When Mitt Romney visited Michigan, he joked about not needing a birth certificate to prove he was from there. 

Not very funny? OK, sure. Poor taste? Eh, maybe, I guess. “The basest and the most despicable bigotry we might be able to imagine”? Errr, no. And yet that’s what one respected “expert” on race, Michael Eric Dyson, called it on MSNBC.

I have to admit “noted race relations expert Jonah Goldberg” does have a nice ring to it, it’s a little much to fit on the business card along with the multi-cultural and multicolored stick figures, but you know, that privilege ain’t gonna assume itself.  Sometimes a white guy just has to lay out what racism is to us black folk:

Now, the cynical motivations behind this relentless slander are too numerous to count. Such moral bullying makes white liberals feel better about themselves. It scares moderates and centrists away from the Republican Party, and it no doubt helps dissuade wavering blacks from even thinking about giving the GOP an honest look. 

It also does wonders to stifle journalists terrified of having their racial bona fides questioned in any way. And it helps a feckless left-wing black political class explain away its own failures. Racial slander is like duct tape: There’s no limit to what you can do with it.

Wow.  I had no idea being a black person was so simple.  All this time if I ever wanted to get ahead in life, I could just use “racial slander” to put white America in its place.  Truly we live in an age of post-racial America where I had no idea being white was so bloody difficult, laced with traps and pitfalls whenever you tried to explain to the brown horde that your policies were necessary medicine they needed.  Somebody always comes along and racial slanders it.  You guys, Jonah’s trying really hard here!

But can you imagine how much worse it will get if Republicans actually do reach out to black community (as they should)?

One of the points of racial slander is to signal that only liberal policies are guaranteed to be non-racist (even when such policies were forged with racist intent, like the Davis-Bacon Act). This is why the Congressional Black Caucus insists on calling itself the “conscience of the Congress.”

That’s why policies like school choice are routinely denounced as racist, even though they’re largely aimed at improving the lives of inner-city blacks trapped in bad schools. Teachers unions don’t like school choice, ergo, it’s racist.

It’s hard out there for a white guy, dedicated to trying to explain to the stupid, largely ignorant black masses that your policy is good for them dammit and they need to shut up and accept it.  Why don’t they listen to Jonah?  He’s got the business card and everything!

Any serious attempt by the GOP to win black votes won’t involve Republicans copycatting liberal policies. It will require going over the heads of black and white liberal slanderers to offer a sincere alternative to failed liberal policies on schools, poverty, crime, etc. The more effective that effort, the more the GOP will be called racist. 

When Romney, whose father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to the NAACP, Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast dubbed him a “race-mongering pyromaniac,” primarily for using the term “ObamaCare” — a term Barack Obama used himself.
Just imagine the attacks in store for a more effective Republican.

If only black people like myself were smart enough to see through the racial slander…gosh they just might have that outreach they need here.  Surely somebody should appoint Jonah in charge of it.  Immediately.

How To Secede At Business Without Really Trying

Texas?  You have another Lone Star State-sized problem on your hands over this "secede from the union" nonsense.

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat. 

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter. 

The official in East Texas, Peter Morrison, the treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, said in a statement that he had received overwhelming support from conservative Texans and overwhelming opposition from liberals outside the state in response to his comments in his newsletter. He said that it may take time for “people to appreciate that the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable divorce, a peaceful separation.” 

The online petitions — created on the We the People platform at petitions.whitehouse.gov — are required to receive 25,000 signatures in 30 days for the White House to respond. The Texas petition, created Nov. 9 by a man identified as Micah H. of Arlington, had received more than 116,000 signatures by Friday. It asks the Obama administration to “peacefully grant” the withdrawal of Texas, and describes doing so as “practically feasible,” given the state’s large economy. 

Last I checked this problem was settled about 1865 or so, and frankly this whole thing is getting silly.  Republicans lost an election, not a war.  If 116,000 Texans want to be shown the door over losing an election, well good luck to you.

Which side hates America now, huh?

Treat The Disease, Not The Symptoms

As I mentioned earlier this week, Sen. Marco Rubio's mealy-mouthed dodge on the age of the Earth is indicitive of a much, much larger problem among the anti-science, anti-fact, anti-reality GOP.  Paul Krugman agrees.

By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks. 

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence. 

And this is the crux of the problem.  It's because of this awful rejection of anything they don't want to believe, to the point of forcing the rest of the country to go along, that is doing irreparable harm to America and the planet.

The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts. 

But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold. 

What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true. 

Or as Stephen Colbert famously said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."   As long as the unreality party continues to hold power, America will never be allowed to do more than token action on climate change, education, and science.

And that's a shame, because by most measures, it's already too late:  the time for action was 20 years ago.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Protests across Cairo and Egypt continue as opposition grown to President Mohammed Morsi's dictatorial power grab.
• British lawmakers have delayed any decision to cut power plant emissions until at least 2016, sparking anger from environmental groups.
• Both Turkey and Iraq are blaming each other for the growing Syrian civil war, with violence spilling over the borders into each country.
• Mongolia's "Ghost Cities" show China's weakness in banking and build or die attitude in keeping hundreds of millions employed.
• A Texas teen is suing her school over RFID badges used to track students' daily attendance, claiming they violate her religious freedom.

Last Call

The 2012-13 NHL season is rapidly falling apart, as the All-Star Game and a third of the season is now in the garbage.

The National Hockey League lost another showcase event to its ongoing lockout on Friday, announcing the cancellation of the 2013 All-Star game along with another fortnight of regular-season contests.

With games now cancelled through December 14, the lockout has now cost the NHL 422 regular-season games, 34.3 percent of the scheduled season.

The All-Star Game, which was to have been in Columbus, Ohio, on January 27, is the second marquee event to go, after the January 1 Winter Classic outdoor game.

“The reality of losing more regular-season games as well as the 2013 NHL All-Star Weekend in Columbus is extremely disappointing,” said NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly.

“We feel badly for NHL fans and particularly those in Columbus, and we intend to work closely with the Blue Jackets organization to return the NHL All-Star events to Columbus and their fans as quickly as possible.”

Would have been nice to see the All-Star Game here in Ohio too.  But at this rate there may not be any hockey for a long, long time.  The fans don't seem to be particularly bothered by a lockout they way they were baseball 18 years ago, hell, there's less concern than there was with the NBA lockout last year.  I think the NHL might be in serious and permanent trouble here, which is a damn shame.  And speaking of the MLB lockout...

NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr came out of Wednesday’s talks sounding similarly pesssimistic.

“On the big things there was as of today no reciprocity in any meaningful sense, no movement on the players’ share, no movement on salary-arbitration eligibility, no movement on free agency eligibility, no agreement on a pension plan,” Fehr said.

And I'll be damned if Don Fehr isn't involved again in a lockout.  What is it with this guy and destroying professional sports seasons?