@marcusbgee calls Ford on his bullshit, but who helped put him there? | #TOpoli

So a few people – Thor and Nancy for starters – are linking to this piece from the Globe's ideologically reliable urban affairs curmudgeon, who's arguing, not without reason, that Mayor Stupid should have known all along that he couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be any service cuts or layoffs.

One hesitates to accuse Mayor Stupid of lying, chiefly because it's obvious that he can't tell the difference between true and false. You know those people who are so out of touch that they don't even know what the facts are? The kind who pull facts and numbers out of their asses and know they'll never really have to account for it? The kind who just dispense with facts entirely and go with their gut because ... well ... just because. Shut up and fuck off.

@cityslikr on Team Ford's bullshit, and our complicity therein | #TOpoli

Which Lie Do You Buy? « All Fired Up In The Big Smoke

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

– Winston Churchill

So over at his place, @cityslikr's on about the fact that politicians have an uneasy relationship with the truth, and the cynicism and disengagement that breeds.

Some necessary truths about parliamentary convention

Really, it's not fair that pogge does most of the heavy lifting while I just swoop in, package his hard work with some off-the-cuff snark and then sit back and watch, but then who ever said life was fair?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a government to defeat

(With a nod to Val Sears.)

Our task is clear, dear friends. Story in the National Newspaper suggests that the non-stop monkey chatter about coalitions is getting some traction, and crowding out discussion of everything else.

As long as we're asking quis custodiet ipsos custodes ...

I know, I know, it's Sunday night and people just want to wind down the weekend and fall asleep in front of the Golden Globes and for chrissakes, can't you just give it a rest already?

Yeah, well. Michael Geist flagged this last week, and pogge and Jymn have picked up on it, but it bears more than a little emphasis. The Star and the Globe seem to think it's important too.

Having a hard time arguing with this

This piece from Now's Enzo de Matteo's been on my mind for several days. Distilled down to a few words, he's urging Toronto's progressive councillors not to make nicey-nicey with the Ford regime, but to dig in and fight and play dirty every step of the way.

This really doesn't have anything to do with Allen Funt, does it

Hi there. I'm cuddly and harmless.

Well, looky here. The cops want to keep the surveillance cameras they brought in for the G20. And the sound cannons.

Why the liars are winning

Couple of days ago, Rick Perlstein published an essay on The Daily Beast that sets out, in succinct and convincing terms, one of the most important reasons that our friends to the south are in such trouble.

I'm not alone in lamenting the debasement and vulgarization of civil discourse and the attendant coarsening of political culture, but Perlstein's got one of the most influential and worrisome dynamics down pat: the far-right crazies, teabaggers and Palinbots lie their asses off, and no one – not the Obama administration, the Democratic establishment, the Villagers nor the "lamestream media" – will call them on it.

Could someone please change Ezra's diaper?

Honestly, he's starting to smell. Dear Lord, who told this little pisher that kacking into cyberspace is the same thing as a contribution to intellectual discourse?  ("Hey, look at me, I'm a Stockaholic!  Look at me! Look at me!")

Another smear job, another steaming pile of crap, lies and hysterical accusations. And for kicks, he ties Margaret Atwood to Al-Jazeera with a lurid story about some dirty Muslim terrorist who smashed a 4-year-old kid's head with a rock. Just in case it isn't clear that this is a Clash of Civilizations^TM, and the brown folks with the funny names are eeeeeevul.

But that's just setting the table. The main point, it seems, is to carry on with the lies, the anguished posturing as aggrieved victim, and whine about censorship and suppression. Margaret Atwood is demanding that Sun TV be banned, he says.

Of course, there's no evidence for that, and of course, that's not what she said. And again, he's displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of both freedom of expression and censorship. But then that's par for the course, isn't it. The rest of the piece is just more of the same: left-wing mainstream media consensus, the only opinions allowed on TV are anti-American, anti-Christian big-government mush, yargle bargle blegh, drool.

Yawn.

He's like a kid who never mastered toilet training, craps his pants regularly and then demands that someone change him. I suppose we can't hold him responsible for someone else's bad parenting, but he can't have it both ways by demanding to be treated like an adult either.

Update: Tip of the yarmulka to Sabina and thwap.