Canadian Cincinnatus

It’s good that Dalton McGuinty won the last Ontario election

Sometimes you win by losing.

And I think Progressive Conservative party leader Tim Hudak won by losing the last provincial election, but not losing by enough to give Premier McGuinty’s Liberals a majority.

If you don’t believe me, look at all the labour disputes that the McGuinty government has become embroiled in since then: first by effectively banning public teachers’ strikes and now with the public sector wage freeze. With Ontario’s deficit of $13.3 billion (for comparison, the next highest provincial deficit is Quebec’s, at $3 billion), something had to be done, by somebody; it was inevitable. But don’t think that the teachers and the civil servants won’t be remembering this during the next provincial election campaign.

Alternately, if Tim Hudak’s conservatives had won, they would also have had to clean house, and in short order. As a result, once again the Conservatives would have assumed the role of the skinflint, buzz-kills in contrast to the ‘good-times’ Liberals. Buzz-kill vs. good times: how many Ontario voters would prefer the latter to the former?

But it was not to be. Now McGuinty has to stew in problems of his own making. As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once said, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” And make no mistake about it, going after the teachers and the civil servants will hurt McGuinty a lot more electorally than it would ever have hurt the Conservatives. The teachers were McGuinty’s shock troops when he first defeated the Ernie Eves’ Conservatives back in 2003. Now he’s stabbed them in the back.

If McGuinty loses the next provincial election to Tim Hudak, he will have lost because he will have done Hudak’s heavy lifting for him. And since Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives have a reputation for thrift (a holdover from the Mike Harris days) and the Liberals have a reputation for out-of-control spending (a holdover from the Dalton McGuinty present), Hudak will be credited for the savings resulting from all the tough decisions McGuinty has been forced by circumstances to make.

Life isn’t fair. That’s why when it is unfair in your direction, you got to make the most of it. 

How to fight Political Correctness, and how not to fight it

A good quote from Theodore Dalrymple on political correctness:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

In the past, conservatives lashed out against political correctness. Recently right-wing tactics have changed. We have taken to calling left-wing opponents racist whenever they have mis-stepped in the increasingly hazardous minefield of racial politics, basically applying Alinsky’s Rule #4:

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

On the face of it, this is a good tactic. Watching liberals hoisted up on their own petard is good, clean fun. Bad rules don’t change if there is a large interest group who doesn’t feel their pain.

Still, there is a great danger in this tactic, the danger that conservatives get comfortable with the PC truncheon. Instead of,

“[Liberal X] is a racist because he said [phrase that can be interpreted by paranoid PC antiracist hunters to sort-of mean something racist],”

how about:

“What [liberal X] said is not racist. In the past several decades we have allowed the rule of Political Correctness to twist innocent comments into career-ending outbursts of racism. [Liberal X] is not a member of the KKK and he is not a National Socialist [notice I said National Socialist, not Nazi]. Therefore he is not a racist. I think it is time to give people the benefit of the doubt, and also to begin respecting freedom of speech again.”

Isn’t this line better? It is at the same time both more overtly high-minded, in that you are rallying to the defence of your opponent, while being more subversive, in that you are directly attacking the principles of the PC-head. 

And you still get too see liberal X twist in the wind as he tries to simultaneously explain how a) he is not racist, and b) there is nothing wrong with today’s PC-based anti-racism standards.

Mitt Romney must go on the offensive over his 47% remark

In a recent fundraiser, Mitt Romney served the following red meat to the party faithful:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

The surreptitiously recorded video was unveiled at the website of the far-left magazine, Mother Jones.

The mainstream media has predictably pounced on these comments. Many mainstream, moderate conservatives are worried that Romney blew it, with David Brooks of the New York Times comparing him to Thurston Howell III. I believe they are on to something. It is something that Thurston Howell III might say. And it won’t play well in many blue collar neighbourhoods that Romney needs to win. 

But here’s the thing, Romney shouldn’t take it back. If he does, all it will do is to make him look weak… and also a liar. This is partly because his statement – that the bottom 47% of American taxpayers don’t pay income tax - is true, as the Wall Street Journal helpfully pointed out. But also because his reputation as a flip-flopper – over Romneycare – was only recently overcome, and after much effort on his part.

But the most important reason is that this fact goes to the core message that Mitt Romney needs to get across in order to win: that work and savings are the key to prosperity, that everybody has to pull his own weight, that government handouts create perverse incentives, that demonizing job creators is un-American and that when government picks winners and losers, everybody loses. You simply cannot get this message across while denying the truth that the bottom 47% of Americans don’t pay income tax.

One way to move forward, while promoting this message, is to shine a light on President Obama’s principles and how his deepest beliefs deviate from the ideals of equality of opportunity, liberty and personal responsibility. This recording of Obama saying, “I actually believe in redistribution,” which appeared on drudgereport.com is a good start. I would be a good sign if it was Romney’s campaign that got that link up on Drudge. 

Always remember: apologizing doesn’t win votes, and neither does repudiating your core message; but attacking your enemy does help.

 

UPDATE: Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's former rainmaker, agrees with me on this point.

Political Correctness and the Toronto Blue Jays’ Yunel Escobar

How many of you are old enough to remember when people actually did not lose their jobs for speaking their mind?

It may be argued that we should be able to be live in a climate free of hate and harassment. I would argue that we should be able to live in an environment free from the constant fear that a slip of the tongue will cost us dearly, perhaps even end our careers.

Some might argue that most people were offended by Toronto Blue Jays’ shortstop Yunel Escobar’s comment in eye black. I would reply, how do you know? How do you know that a significant portion of the people who say they are offended by Escobar do not fall into one these two groups:

A) people who enjoy exercising their self-righteousness, are pushing an agenda or like experiencing the thrill that comes with being a petty tyrant; or

B) people who are intimidated by group A.

Some might say that what Escobar did was stupid and that it was therefore well within the rights of the Toronto Blue Jays to punish him because he represents their organization but besmirched their name. I would counter that, yeah, while it was a stupid thing to do, it wasn’t that stupid; and that by listening to PC bullies and escalating this trivial matter out of all proportion, the Toronto Blue Jays made themselves look like hysterical PC prudes, besmirching themselves much more than Escobar ever did.

Some might even argue that by donating a portion of Escobar’s three day salary that he won’t earn to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the Toronto Blue Gays are only encouraging this gang of self-appointed PC enforcers to behave more oppressively in the future. 

If you said that, I would argue that you are correct.

Three years ago today, the man responsible for saving a billion lives died

Here is a link about The Greatest Man You’ve Never Heard Of. Here is one of his quotes:

 “(Most Western environmentalists) have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

And here is my obituary of him that I posted at the time of his death:

Around 11 PM on Saturday night, Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95 at his home in Dallas.

Norman who? The greatest man of the twentieth century? What? I’ve never heard of him. What are you talking about?

If this is the first time you have ever heard Norman Borlaug’s name, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t know who he is. And that’s not right.

Norman Borlaug was an agronomist who taught at Texas A & M University from 1984 until his death. However, it was his research on wheat production in Mexico prior to that where he earned his greatness. By improving strains of wheat and making them more resistant to disease, Borlaug became the father of the Green Revolution - the transformation of agriculture, principally in the third world, that ended starvation over much of the planet. In 1968 the celebrated biologist and doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich predicted, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. … I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971," and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Thanks to agricultural advances Borlaug devised, Ehrlich was proven wrong and India is today a net exporter of food, even though it has more people than ever. In gratitude, the Government of India awarded him (that is Borlaug, not Ehrlich) the Padma Vibhushan, its second highest civilian honour. The Times of London stated that his advances have saved the lives of 245 million people, however other estimates range as high as one or two billion people. Personally, considering the effect his innovations have had on world food production, I am inclined towards the higher estimates. In other words, a direct result of the deliberate actions he took, a billion or more souls are alive today whose fate otherwise would have been slow starvation.

To put it yet a third way, Norman Borlaug probably saved more human lives than anybody else in man’s history.

For this glorious feat he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, and unlike some of the cutthroats who have also won that prize (cf Yassir Arafat and Le Duc Tho), he actually deserved it.

One reason I am writing an obituary of him on this blog - something I am not usually in the habit of doing - is that it has long bothered me how unjustly our culture remembers its dead. The truly great depart from our midst with barely a mention while maudlin orgies of grief are orchestrated for people who are, at best, inconsequential shallow celebrities - or worse. A life-serving senator who deliberately allowed a friend to suffocate to her death because he felt that calling the police in time to save her life could be inconvenient for his career is given a near state funeral and is proclaimed the “lion of the senate”. A few weeks earlier, the world came to a screeching halt when a twisted pedophile died of a drug overdose simply because he made some OK music 20 years ago. These people don’t deserve to be remembered (and in a hundred years won’t be). In a century where the greatest statesmen were rated by how many tens of millions of their own people they deliberately murdered, we find Norman Borlaug, a selfless, humble but capable man patiently toiling away and doing so much good in the process that he was able to counteract all the evil that all those tyrants did put together.

In fairness, at the height of his powers, in the late sixties and early seventies, he was much better known that he is today, but by the eighties his celebrity star began to fall because the rising environmental movement became increasingly uncomfortable with many of the techniques he had pioneered – genetically engineered crops and high yield farming at the expense of subsistence farming, something the environmentalists have a romantic fixation about. All his stuff just isn’t ‘organic’. Of course, the fact that it can be held against somebody that he saved a billion lives only illustrates that some of the core foundations of the philosophy of environmentalism are evil.

Because of trendy environmentalism, entomologist Paul Ehrlich – the man whose gloomy predictions Borlaug foiled - is an academic celebrity name and a household word, while Borlaug is a comparatively anonymous. However this speaks poorly of us, not Norman Borlaug. His great work lives on, in the form of the countless people who are alive and breathing today because, for 95 years, so was he.

Norman Borlaug, rest in peace.

So, what is Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s conflict-of-interest anyway?

In an attempt to get to the heart of the matter I looked up the definition of conflict-of-interest on duhaime.org legal resource. According to them, a conflict-of-interest is defined as:

“A personal interest that conflicts with a public or fiduciary interest.” 

In other words, if then-Councilor Rob Ford had a conflict-of-interest, Rob Ford had to have had a personal interest that would have interfered with the public responsibilities he was sworn to uphold, to the City of Toronto and the constituents of Ward 2. 

With this definition in mind, let’s examine this case step-by-step from the beginning. It all started when Ford solicited donations on official letterhead for the Rob Ford Football Charity, which resulted in $3,100 being received by the charity. The first problem for his accusers is that the money solicited came from private not government sources. Second, the money flowed to a charity, not to him. It’s hard to see what personal interest, besides the benign one of charity, this benefited. Third, it is hard to see how the interests of the Rob Ford Football Charity would conflict with the interests of the City or Ford’s voters.

Then there is the matter of him soliciting funds using his official Council stationary. The problem, of course, is not the cost of the stationary, which is trivial. The problem with using the stationary is presumably that he might have been using the powers of his office to ‘bully’ individuals into giving donations that they otherwise would have foregone. Given that he was a high-profile councilor and that the charity was named after him, it is hard to see how the deciding factor in the mind of the donor was the letterhead flagging Rob Ford as a councilor. Does the Integrity Commissioner believe that those donors would have been oblivious to Ford’s elected position without seeing the letterhead?

I agree that as a general principle elected officials shouldn’t use official letterhead for personal matters, but I don’t see what harm this caused the City’s interest in this particular case.

Keep in mind we are talking about the councilor who regularly refused to charge his office expenses to the city (costing him roughly $30K or more per year) and reportedly gave over $50K of his own money to the same charity.

Second, we have the Integrity Commissioner’s ruling. Given:

a) the benign nature of Rob Ford’s transgression, and

b) the fact that the ‘payback’ really constituted a fine, given that the donations never flowed to him in the first place,

I think an impartial observer might be forgiven for believing that the Integrity Commissioner over-reached in this decision. 

Third, we have the vote in the council where he voted on the matter of overturning the Integrity Commissioner’s ruling. Again, on general principles, I agree that councilors should not be allowed vote on matters that affect them personally, but given the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any harm done by the originating act, I don’t see what harm this particular vote of his did. An interesting question I have not found an answer to in any newspaper account is, did Rob Ford’s vote affect the outcome of the motion? In other words, would the outcome of the motion have been a tie without Ford’s vote? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that if it had, the papers would have highlighted this significant fact. Therefore, it is highly likely that the motion would have passed without Ford’s personal vote, perhaps because most councilors had come to the same opinion on the Integrity Commissioner’s verdict as I have.

In summary, Rob Ford may be guilty of several procedural offences designed to prevent conflicts-of-interest. However, given that no private interests can be found that are in conflict with Ford’s public interest, who cares?

I am a strong believer that laws should be interpreted through the filter of common sense. For instance, when the  MPP’s in Queen’s park voted to pass into law the “automatic removal from office” clause in the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, what did they have in mind? people selling favours such as zoning exemptions for campaign contributions, or people raising money for charity using city stationary?

When we prosecute people for procedural matters when the crimes the procedures are designed to prevent never occurred in the first place, the justice system is engaging in tyrannical behaviour.

Another attack on our most basic right: the right to self-defence

So just because Toronto Chinatown grocer David Chen is now a folk hero for inspiring the Citizen’s Arrest and Defence Act, it doesn’t mean that our right to defend ourselves is secure.

Take the recent case of Moses Mahilal. Peter Worthington explains the case:

Mahilal ... grabbed a knife from the kitchen and raced upstairs where he caught the guy, hiding and loaded with stolen property. Mahilal didn’t waste any time in attacking and stabbing the guy. The thief, Kino Johnson, 33, ran away with Mahilal after him. Johnson landed in hospital, and at his trial was sentenced to 20 months in jail and two years probation.

His record includes convictions for assault, robbery and theft, so clearly he’s a potentially dangerous guy. I doubt there’s a reasonable citizen in this country who doesn’t identify with Moses Mahilal’s reaction, and feels that anyone burglarizing a home takes his chances, and no tears wept if he’s caught and and manhandled.

Oh, Johnson is quoted in the Toronto Star that, with a knife wound in his chest he could’ve died. Few tears if this had been the case.

The problem is, Mahilal has now been charged with aggravated assault. 

I suppose the defenders of our criminal justice system would say that this is different. Mahilal attacked Johnson with a dangerous weapon (a knife). So are we only allowed to defend ourselves with our bare hands? To make it fair for the criminals who stalk law-abiding citizens?

And yes, he apparently knifed Johnson while Johnson was in the act of fleeing? OK, so it wasn’t strictly necessary, but as the police like to say in these cases, Mahilal was in ‘hot pursuit’. And as Worthington points out, Mahilal didn’t know if Johnson is packing a knife or a gun. He also doesn’t know what his criminal record is like. And by stopping Johnson, he took this dangerous predator off the streets. What about all the home invasions that Mahilal prevented with his act of ‘recklessness’?

It is obvious that our criminal justice system is biased against citizen’s defending themselves. Normally, I sympathize with crown prosecutors and cops because they are our first line of defense against criminals. Except that they aren’t really the first line of defence, we are.

And in cases like this, by enforcing the police’s use-of-force monopoly, they show where their true allegiance lies, with ‘the system’ and not with the citizenry.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s political trial

Yesterday, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford testified in his conflict-of-interest trial that was instigated by noted left-wing lawyer Clayton Ruby.

When Ford claimed the trial was ‘politically motivated’, he was absolutely right. Not only because it is on the thinnest of charges – that he participated in a city council meeting where his children’s football foundation was up for a $3,000 grant (how did this grant even affect him personally?), but also because of the trial’s intended goal: to overturn the municipal election where the voters of Toronto indicated their overwhelming preference for him over George Smitherman. Removal from office for promoting a children’s charity! My God, what an assault on democracy.

Of course, this trial has nothing to do with a miniscule grant to a worthy cause. It is obvious that the real goal of Ruby and his claque of City Hall special interest groups is to overturn the will of the people because they don’t like the decision they made.

I have read in places that our courts are extremely reluctant to overturn democratic results and are likely to not remove Ford from office, but I am not so sure. Some pretty left-wing ‘judicial activists’ have been appointed to the court.

I only note two things in the event that they succeed in subverting democracy:

1. This end-run around the will of the people will have serious unintended consequences. Ford’s replacement mayor will be elected by city council, but at the next municipal election, Mayor Illegitimate will face a firestorm of voter anger for benefiting from this usurpation of democracy. And so will the left-wing schemers on city council who orchestrated this.

 

2. We should plan on doing the same thing to every single left-wing elected official we can. If they want to use legal warfare to overturn legitimate election results, then we should teach the left that this weapon is a two-edged sword.

Health and safety at a government-owned oil refinery

As reported by the Wall Street Journal:

“A raging fire at Venezuela's largest oil refinery spread to a third storage tank Monday as the death toll from the initial explosion rose to 48.”

“Oil Minister Rafael Ramírez, who earlier in the day had said the fire was contained to two large tanks holding crude oil, confirmed later that the roof of a third unit had caught fire. … 

He also rejected claims of underinvestment into upkeep, saying state oil monopoly Petróleos de Venezuela, or PdVSA, has invested $4.8 billion into Amuay in the last six years.The number of people killed in the explosion that rocked the refinery early Saturday rose to 48.”

Good thing that oil refinery is owned by the Venezuelan government, headed by that champion of the poor, Hugo Chavez, rather than one of those rich millionaires and billionaires that keep President Obama up at night.