No Quick Moves

Chantal Hebert writes that Justin Trudeau will not be calling a snap election:

Provided the Liberal/NDP pact holds, Canada will not be going to the polls this fall and perhaps not until 2025. Even if Trudeau wanted to call a snap election to try to get an edge on a rookie leader, his own party is anything but on a solid electoral footing.

By rushing the country to the polls for the second time in as many years, the prime minister would only risk putting the Liberals on the fast lane to an exit from government.

But Trudeau says  he'll be there for the next election:

When that happens, expect a no-holds-barred fight to the finish. Trudeau kicked off his tenure in power as a sunny ways politician, but the next election is promising to be anything but that.

The scorched-earth approach that led to Poilievre’s decisive leadership victory this weekend suggests as much.

His team kept its sharp elbows up long after it must have become evident that the prize was in the bag. A strategy designed to convince one’s supporters that their preferred outcome could still be up in the air almost always leads to rewards on the turnout front.

Poilievre did not just beat Jean Charest, he crushed him, including on the former premier’s Quebec turf.

It is not a coincidence that this upset was scored at a time when the dormant provincial Conservative party is undergoing an awakening under Poilievre’s libertarian pal Éric Duhaime. The federal Conservative brain trust may come to think that working with Duhaime could deliver more Quebec votes to the party than securing premier François Legault’s blessing.

Winning the next campaign will not be easy for Trudeau:

The next campaign will almost certainly be Trudeau’s last. History suggests it will be an uphill battle. Sir Wilfrid Laurier was the last incumbent prime minister to secure a fourth consecutive term.

But those long odds did not prevent Pierre Trudeau or Stephen Harper from trying to match Laurier’s record. And if Jean Chrétien had not been beset by internal challenges, he might have been tempted to stick around to take on the newly reunited Conservative party in 2004.

However, with Poilievre in the Conservative leader's chair, there is more than hubris behind Justin's decision:

In Trudeau’s case, it is likely not just that he thinks he can prevail in a battle against Poilievre but almost certainly that he believes he must.

It is not certain the prime minister would have felt as strongly about potentially leaving Canada in Charest’s hands as he clearly does in Poilievre’s case.

It's clear that the Conservatives want Poilievre as their leader. It's not at all clear that most Canadians want him as theirs.

Image: cultmtl.com

The Rules Of The Game

Last night, Pierre Poilievre -- the man who allied himself with the Truckers Convoy -- was elected leader of the Conservative Party by a landslide. Poilievre's ascension means that the threat of political violence in this country has become very real. Robin Sears writes:

Every democracy that has fought back successfully against political violence has discovered the same three core principles: education, accountability and severe penalties. Few students today learn in school about the thread that connects social media threats and political murder. Having finally adopted diversity education with some seriousness, schools need now to begin conversations on acceptable and unacceptable political debate, the risk to democracy that political violence always poses, and how to recognize dangerous language and behaviour.

Politicians need to stop pointing fingers at each other and agree on the common standards, regulations and laws required to prevent citizens and officials from having to fear for their lives. A clear declaration from Pierre Poilievre about his views on deadly threats and violence would be refreshing.

The penalties for verbal threats need to be made more severe. Social media platforms must be required to open and clean up their algorithms that help spread hateful speech around the world. Employers, schools, public agencies and others need to declare “tough consequences” policies for threatening speech.

The future looks dark:

We should expect more mass attacks on our major cities by armed protesters. Given the rising number of death threats received by high-profile politicians, it seems almost inevitable that one of them will be acted on. Verbal confrontations like the one Freeland was subjected to can easily slide into physical attacks.

So, yes, we need to beef up our protection systems, from physical and electronic fencing to greater surveillance and prosecutions of known violence mongers. But as we saw only weeks ago when Salman Rushdie was almost murdered on stage, even if he still had heavily armed guardians they could not prevent violent attacks by those willing to die in their assault.

We need to develop a broad consensus on the boundaries of acceptable discourse and behaviour in this country — and then enforce those rules at the first signs of trouble.

So let's start thinking about the rules of the game. It's a sure bet that Mr. Poilievre won't like them.

Image: The Hill Times

How Good The Country Is

Justin Trudeau recently announced that he will be around to fight the next election. Michael Harris is betting that it will occur in the spring. And it will be an ugly fight. Trudeau is facing strong headwinds:

Grocery bills look more like car payments thanks to inflation. To get runaway prices under control, the Bank of Canada keeps raising interest rates, as it did again this week. In time, that may help. But for the moment, it merely turns the screws on people seeking or renewing mortgages.

The price of gas is a daily reminder of how much poorer everyone seems to be, drawing attention to Ottawa’s carbon tax of 11.1 cents per litre. Critics say the policy doesn’t work. Some provinces like Nova Scotia want out of the federal system — even though the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Ottawa’s carbon tax is constitutional.

The health-care system is sputtering like an old lawnmower. After two years of COVID, doctors and especially nurses, the forgotten people of the system, are beyond unhappy. Although the provinces run health care, Ottawa is taking heat for not paying its fair share of the costs.

What was once a 50/50 split has turned into the provinces footing the bill for 70 per cent of health-care costs. If we get another wave of COVID this fall in tandem with a bad flu season, as they have had in Australia, the system could collapse. Even Trudeau admitted that Ontario Premier Doug Ford was right when he claimed that the status quo isn’t working anymore.

Ditto for the teaching profession, where there are shortages across the country. As of May, British Columbia had 500 vacant positions across multiple school districts. Several other provinces are having trouble attracting and keeping educators.

The queue of immigration applicants hoping to come to Canada is longer than the lineup at a Tim Hortons drive-thru on a rainy day. There are now more than 2.7 million people waiting to have their applications processed, up 300,000 from June.

Canada’s biggest airport, Toronto Pearson International, is an exercise in travel masochism. Once viewed as the best airport in the world, Toronto’s air hub is now seen as one of the worst. Now when you head out to catch a flight, you have to bring survival rations and an overnight bag. 

Trudeau's opponent will be Pierre Poilievre:

Poilievre hopes that he can ride the anger train to power, the way another unqualified candidate became president of the United States for one term. Trump demonized Hillary Clinton, and Poilievre will try to do the same thing to Trudeau using similar techniques. Tom Mulcair recently told me that Canada is “too good a country” for that to happen here.

What Canadians will see in the new Conservative leader is pure Pierre — fangs, venom and the smirk. The fact is Poilievre is a dyed-in-the-wool acolyte of Stephen Harper, proud of his far-right populist views and unapologetic for his dismal record as a member of a government that ignored the environment, abandoned Indigenous peoples, undercut democracy and despised the press.

And oh yes, a government that added $150 billion to the national debt during its time in office.

Poilievre’s fossilized views on vaccine mandates, and his chummy relationship with that mob in trucks that took over Ottawa for three weeks, make the point. Pierre Poilievre is a one-trick pony.

It won't be pleasant. We'll see how good the country is. 

Image: YouTube

Elizabeth II

Just a few words about the queen. She was of that generation who came of age during World War II. Perhaps that helps explain who she was. In an age when so many try to make a virtue of selfishness, she so obviously was not in it for herself. She will be missed. But we should not forget her.

Image: DW

Pure Folly

Andrew Nikiforuk is furious. Our political leaders continue to live in a state of denial. He writes:

A biological transformative event, which may have killed nearly 20 million people by revised estimates and has burdened millions more with chronic illness, continues to burn through the world’s population.

Yet, although the authorities know that masking, ventilation, air filtration and isolating when sick can dampen this fire and protect the public health, they have inexplicably abandoned these tools.

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, for instance, even banished an inadequate five-day protocol for isolating while sick and infectious. How’s that for “laissez-faire epidemiology”?

The chief medical officer made this bad decision at a time when, as the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant recently explained in Wired magazine, the BA.5 variant has vastly increased its viral reach “by being able to infect people who’ve had three doses of the vaccine or people who had COVID a month ago.”

Having surrendered all other public health options, the authorities now count on vaccines, whose effectiveness in the face of immune busting variants is steadily waning, to serve as our absolute defense against the disease. Expecting vaccines, already one step behind an evolving virus, to end the pandemic makes about as much sense as expecting bitcoin to end poverty in El Salvador.

Consider the numbers:

COVID has killed more than 14,317 Canadians since December 2021, a month dominated by the first Omicron wave. Or 24,230 if you include estimates of underreporting of COVID deaths — a chronic problem.

By the end of the year the number of dead will likely surpass the totals of the two previous years. Total Canadian COVID deaths calculated solely by year look like this: 13,791 in 2022 up till Sept. 5; 14,711 in 2021 and 15,606 in 2020.

Daily deaths from COVID (500 in the last two weeks) remain five times higher than average Canadian flu mortality.

Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Toronto, with associates, publishes an important COVID hazard index as a public health service. In August, Moriarty told us that more than half of Canada’s 190,585 COVID hospitalizations during the pandemic to date have occurred since last December.

Incredibly, one in every 402 people living in Canada has been hospitalized with a variant of Omicron since December 2021.

And we have decided to abandon COVID protocols? This is pure folly.

Image: follytheatre.org

Testing Our Common Courtesy

Andrea Mandel-Campbell wonders if Pierre Poilievre will be devoured by the tiger he has unleashed:

Like the dwarves who dug too deep for riches in the mines of Moria, Poilievre has plumbed the depths of social media for conspiracy theories and grievance rhetoric, coming up with campaign gold by embracing the freedom convoy and anti-vaxxers. It has earned him a ton cash for party coffers and a record number of new memberships.

The question now is whether Poilievre can contain the populist beast he has unleashed by channelling his inner Stephen Harper, or whether he’d rather hop on its back, ring firmly embedded, and burn the place down.

Poilievre is the political offspring of former prime minister Harper and has copped shamelessly from his playbook, demanding the ouster of the Bank of Canada governor — much like Harper launched an all-out assault on the Parliamentary Budget Officer and canned the head of Statistics Canada.

But Harper, while keen to anti-establishment grievance, was surprisingly moderate. He leaned into the bread and butter Conservative brand of lower taxes and balanced budgets. He had no big, bold endeavour or signature achievement, so much as he avoided the pitfalls of national unity crises or political scandal.

Indeed, there was no so-called “secret agenda,” just the skewering of the odd sacred cow. He went to Davos and partnered with the Gates Foundation to vaccinate children in developing countries — all QAnon code words now.

It appears, though, that the word "moderate" is not in Poilievre's dictionary:

Poilievre will need to decide who his constituents are; that is, if he still has a choice. As one long-time Conservative MP recently told me, “he’s caught a tiger by the tail and he may not be able to control what he has created.”

If he can’t, Canada will be the worse for it. While we are far from perfect, we have managed to retain a degree of common courtesy, civility and respect in our public discourse that is in increasingly short supply these days.

Most certainly, Poilievre is testing our sense of common courtesy.

Image: YouTube

No Place

Traditional conservatives no longer have a place in the world -- because conservatives can no longer get along with each other. Glen Pearson writes:

Ronald Brownstein, senior editor of The Atlantic, made a prescient observation in an interview this past week.  Speaking not only of American Republicans but conservatives across the globe, Brownstein noted that right-of-centre conservatives are increasingly running out of room in the political world.  The rise of extremist ideologies on the Right has taken on more influence, leaving traditional conservatives “with no place to coalesce.”

In such a light, he could just as easily have been describing Canada, India, Australia, Japan, or Germany.  Everywhere, it seems, the rise of the angry Right has produced democratic upheaval and an erosion of global partnerships.

In yesterday’s election of a new leader to replace disgraced Boris Johnson, we perhaps have our newest example of conservatism ignoring its historical boundaries.  While experienced observers point out that four years of consistent tax increases is hardly a Conservative trait, they also note that Britain’s Conservative government has gone off in directions few would have thought possible after former PMs David Cameron and Theresa May resigned from office.

In a party election that ended up being tighter than predicted, Liz Truss was able to capture only 57% of the vote in the leadership contest –  the lowest vote share among members since the current system of electing Tory leaders was first introduced.  Truss was disappointed, hoping for “more support,” but nevertheless gave a rousing victory speech.

Following Johnson’s tumultuous rule, traditional Conservatives are finding themselves exactly where Brownstein described: with no place to land.  How else to explain the almost 20% of card-carrying party members who didn’t vote?  Having endured a bad run with Johnson, they just couldn’t take a liking to Truss or her main rival, Rishi Sunak.  Truss’s praise of her “friend” Boris during her acceptance speech likely didn’t help.  Her claim that Johnson was “admired from Kyiv to Carlisle” seemed odd, considering that he had lost Carlisle in the most recent election.  That she completely ignored Sunak on the way to the podium likely doesn’t bode well for cooperation in the coming months.  Today, Truss visits Queen Elizabeth and then she will assume office.

As the UK reels from one escapade to another, the Conservative party is facing the unthinkable conclusion that it might be incapable of governing itself.   The Guardian had already concluded that the country was no longer manageable under Tory rule.  The New Statesman had previously published an article with the revealing title, The Closing of the Conservative Mind: Politics and the Art of War.

Not just in the UK, but in all places where modern conservatism has taken hold, politics has returned to Hobbes' state of nature. Conservatives live in a world where there is a perpetual war of all against all.

Image: Middle East Eye

With The Passage Of Time

Thirty years ago, Brian Mulroney was looking at the worst defeat in political history. His chosen successor, Kim Campbell, had won just two seats in the House of Commons. Anthony Wilson Smith writes:

So, when an invitation to lunch came from his friend, the Quebec Inc. titan Paul Desmarais, Mulroney was especially appreciative. Over several hours in the elegant private dining room in the headquarters of Power Corporation on Victoria Square, he listened as Desmarais – the founder of the company and an extraordinarily cultured man with a deep knowledge of history – talked about the need for the former prime minister to allow time and perspective for his achievements to be evaluated in their historical context. What he needed to do, Mulroney vividly recalls Desmarais saying, was to “let the garden grow”; the famous moral of Voltaire’s Candide — “cultiver son jardin” — on the value of narrowing one’s focus to immediate problems that can be resolved constructively.

Mulroney has taken Desmarais's and Voltaire's advice:

Twenty-nine years after leaving office, the key elements of Mulroney’s legacy – including free trade with the United States; the introduction of a federal goods and services tax; early, visionary steps on environmental issues and human rights initiatives – are so entrenched that they’re largely taken for granted. In Quebec, Mulroney is revered even by nationalists (for instance, he has been chair of Québecor Media, owned by the sovereigntist Péladeau family, for many years). Far from being attacked by the federal Liberals, they now, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, seek his advice on key issues — including the time he briefed the federal cabinet during the highly sensitive NAFTA renegotiation with the Trump administration.

I was never a fan of Mulroney's. I never voted for him. But with the passage of time, some legacies begin to look pretty good.

Image: Adam Scotti 

Poilievre And The Young

It appears that young voters are attracted to Pierre Poilievre. Sam Routley writes:

The voting behaviour of young voters is highly volatile when it comes to both turnout and party preference. Since 2015, Trudeau’s Liberals have lost most of their support among young voters as younger Canadians either supported other parties, become undecided or stopped voting entirely.

Currently, most voters under 34 are, as with most other Canadians, likely to express a lack of confidence in the performance of Trudeau as prime minister.

Most youth support between 2015 and 2021 has instead gone to the NDP and its leader, Jagmeet Singh. By deliberately targeting the demographic through its policy and social media campaigns, the party was the clear favourite of young voters in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

Recently, however, much of this youth support for the Liberals and NDP now appears to be shifting again. For the first time since the 1980s, recent polls show that a plurality, although not a majority, of young voters now support the Conservative Party.

What's behind the shift?

Poilievre’s growing popularity among young voters is likely due to how he’s seized upon an opening by providing coherent messaging that addresses both the general state of dissatisfaction and economic anxieties that are weighing on young Canadians.

That includes continuing frustrations about the inaccessibility of home ownership, income instability and inflation.

The continuing detrimental economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have also affected this demographic the most, contributing to perceptions of a growing divide between older, economically established generations and younger adults.

This has also created a popular feeling among many young voters that the Trudeau government needs to be replaced.

In addition to a series of missteps and scandals that have eroded Trudeau’s personal popularity, the government is also perceived as being unable to deal with these growing economic concerns.

Because the NDP entered into an agreement with the Liberals allowing them to deliver on beneficial policies like dental care coverage, the party is now limited in its ability to craft and convey a coherent alternative to the Liberal government.

This is even though New Democrats have, along with Poilievre, been engaging in populist attacks about economic elites for not “paying their fair share.” The NDP’s ongoing support for the Liberals has come at the cost of credibly tapping into a growing anti-Liberal sentiment by compromising their position as a principled adversary — giving Poilievre yet another opening to electoral success.

Canadians say they want their parties to work together. But they punish them when they do. We are our own worst enemies.

Image: Facebook

We Know Who He Is

The date is fast approaching for the Conservatives to choose the next leader of their party. Nick Seebruch writes:

In less than two weeks the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) will elect a new leader, and it is likely that person will be Pierre Poilievre. A poll taken in early August found that Poilievre had the support of 44 per cent of his party to be their next leader, while his closest rival Jean Charest polled at a mere 17 per cent.

Poilievre’s style as a politician over the course of his career has been one of a conservative attack dog. His campaign to become the next leader of the CPC has been particularly toxic due to his attempts to use disgraced former U.S. president Donald Trump as an example to follow.

During the course of his leadership campaign, Poilievre has stepped up his personal attacks on not only his political opponents, but like Trump, has chosen the media as a fertile field from which he can farm the outrage of his supporters.

We know who Poilievre is and we know what he wants to do:

He has made efforts to connect his campaign with far-right extremists. Most recently, he had been photographed with Jeremy MacKenzie, the de facto leader of the Diagolon cult. MacKenzie has gone on social media calling for the execution of Canadian Armed Forces personnel. He has encouraged his followers to harass health care professionals, and is facing assault and weapons charges in Sask., and weapons charges in N.S. in an unrelated case as well.

After the photo of MacKenzie shaking hands with Poilievre began circulating on social media, he refused to denounce MacKenzie or Diagolon by name instead stating: “As I always have, I denounce racism and anyone who spreads it,” then deflecting by pointing to what he called “. . .Justin Trudeau’s many racist outbursts . . .”

Republicans knew who Donald Trump was six years ago. But instead of shutting him down -- and scared of their own voters -- they decided to raise his flag and march behind it. The results are currently being played out in the American legal system. Poilievre has chosen Trump as a role model. A lot of people are sounding alarms. One of them is Bernie Farber:

“We try not to get into critiques on politics per se, but on issues and policy of hate,” Faber said in an interview with rabble.ca. “I’m taking a bit of a different track with Mr. Poilievre. Only because of his clear associations with the hard right, that I find a really clear and present danger to the country right now. That’s why we’re having a discussion.”

Farber pointed to Poilievre’s refusal to outright reject and denounce MacKenzie as dangerous and damning.

If Poilievre is the choice of the Conservatives, the party should be roundly rejected by Canadians.

Image: The Rabble

Alarm Bells Should Go Off

Millions of Americans claim to be Christians. But what they profess bears little resemblance to the teachings of Christ. Michael Gerson writes:

They fear their values are under assault by an inexorable modernity, in the form of government, big business, media and academia.

Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions.

And they preach that the Apocalypse is just around the corner:

Some religious leaders have fueled the urgency of this agenda with apocalyptic rhetoric, in which the Christian church is under Neronian persecution by elites displaying Caligulan values. But the credibility of religious conservatives is undermined by the friends they have chosen to keep. Their political alignment with MAGA activists has given exposure and greater legitimacy to once-fringe ideas, including Confederate nostalgia, white nationalism, antisemitism, replacement theory and QAnon accusations of satanic child sacrifice by liberal politicians.

Surveying the transgressive malevolence of the radical right, one is forced to conclude: If this is not moral ruin, then there are no moral rules.

This religious divide divides the nation:

For decades, population density has been increasingly associated with partisan identification — the more dense, the more Democratic; the less dense, the more Republican. America might be united by its highways, but it is politically split along its beltways. Islands of urban, liberal blue dot a vast sea of rural, conservative red. And because the mechanisms that produce U.S. senators and electoral college electors skew in favor of geography over population, rural and small-town America starts with a distinct political advantage — the ability to transform fewer votes into better outcomes.

All this leaves portions of the nation boiling with righteous resentment. Many progressives feel cheated by a political system rigged by the Founders against them. Many religious conservatives feel despised by the broader culture and in need of political protection. In the United States, grievance is structural and is becoming supreme.

Anxious evangelicals have taken to voting for right-wing authoritarians who promise to fight their fights — not only Donald Trump, but increasingly, his many imitators. It has been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character. Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry.

This is inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.

Conservative Christians’ beliefs on the nature of politics, and the content of their cultural nightmares, are directly relevant to the future of our whole society, for a simple reason: The destinies of rural and urban America are inextricably connected. It matters greatly if evangelicals in the wide, scarlet spaces are desensitized to extremism, diminished in decency and badly distorting the meaning of Christianity itself — as I believe many are.

When people do ugly things in the name of God, alarm bells should go off.

Image: AZ Quotes

Poilievre Is A Character Out of Orwell

The National Post reports that Pierre Poilievre wants to control political language:

Pierre Poilievre plans to force the federal government to stop using overly complex bureaucratic wording by passing a law that will require the use of “plain language” if he is elected prime minister.

The Conservative leadership candidate is making this promise — his last policy announcement of the campaign — mere days before he might be confirmed leader of the Conservative party.

According to a press release obtained by the National Post ahead of release, Conservative leadership front-runner would pass the law to require government publications use the “fewest and simplest words needed” to state information but also require legal drafters to write laws as simply as possible.

“The Plain Language Act will make government writing and thinking simpler and clearer. The new rule will be that ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,'” said Poilievre, adding that the rule still leaves room for technical or specialized terms.

The law would only apply to new publications or existing publications that are being revised, in order to avoid the cost of “rewriting everything the government has already published.”

It would also make plain language skills a job requirement for new hires who are expected to write for the government and make sure bilingual language training for public servants teaches “language that ordinary people speak, not academic or bureaucratic jargon.”

Orwell knew that if you could reduce the number of words and their meanings, you could corrupt thought. And corrupted thought opened a Pandora's Box:

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

Folly hatred and schizophrenia are what Poilievre is selling.

Image: Facebook

Burning The House Down

Donald Trump has been mentally ill for a long time. But, Jennifer Rubin writes, he's getting loonier:

One does not need a medical degree or a therapist’s license to conclude that defeated former president Donald Trump’s nutty rant insisting that he be made president immediately or the 2020 election be rerun is the sign of an unhinged personality. Under pressure from the increasingly potent espionage investigation, he might be losing his grip. For a change, you don’t hear Republicans rushing forth to support his latest insane demand.

Trump’s posting of QAnon messages and implicit threats (in increasingly unintelligible syntax) suggests that he is losing the ability or desire to control his impulsive outbursts. This is the guy whom millions of Republicans want to nominate for president.

But Republicans have run out of defenses for Trump:

Since the redacted affidavit was released last week, the only two defenses from Republicans are no defenses at all. The first, courtesy of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), amounts to extortion: Prosecute Trump and there’ll be blood in the streets. The second is the laughable inquiry: Is that all? It’s not “all,” because the affidavit was heavily redacted. Moreover, the notion that we are talking “just” about documents ignores that most espionage cases are about documents (or equivalent material). That’s where the secrets are.

Trump defenders ignore at their own risk ample indications in the affidavit and news reports that documents were withheld even after a Trump lawyer represented that all confidential material had been returned, that the documents were in an unlocked storage area and that documents were moved. Any rational adult should be aware that evidence might show that Trump violated statutes the Justice Department cited in the affidavit (concerning obstruction and concealment/mutilation/removal). If so, aggravating crimes in addition to violation of the Espionage Act may be at issue.

Still, there is little to no sign that Republicans are ready to distance themselves from someone who risks an indictment in state and federal court and resorts regularly to incoherent rants that not even right-wing media dare repeat (lest they scare their viewers and listeners). Instead, they mutely march along, taking his advice on nominees and reiterating their support for another presidential run.

Their refusal to confront Trump’s current mental and legal status takes procrastination to a whole new level. Are they hoping that he’ll be indicted well in advance of 2024? Well, if past is prologue, then we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they would still nominate him. (Martyr! Deep state!). Hoping that another candidate comes along to point out that Trump is unelectable is peculiar given their own insistence, amplified by the right-wing media, that he’s the only one to lead the party.

If they are counting on the good sense of GOP primary voters to dump him, they might take a look at the MAGA loonies voters picked in primaries ahead of the midterms (e.g., Jan. 6 attendee and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano; MAGA provocateur and election-denier Kari Lake in Arizona).

Just how they expect to rid themselves of someone like Trump is unclear. They have delegitimized law enforcement, the media and the few sane Republicans (e.g., Rep. Liz Cheney). So, figuring out who exactly is supposed to now convince the base that Trump is, after all this, too toxic and deranged to be the nominee may be a challenge.

When insanity goes viral, the whole house burns down.

Image: Change.org

The Real Doug

Doug Ford is once again showing us who he really is. Bruce Arthur writes:

Ontario’s independent volunteer science table, an invaluable source of information and direction throughout the pandemic, has been told it will be dissolved.

It would be an abrupt and shocking move from Public Health Ontario, which had agreed to take the table of more than 40 scientists from its previous home at the University of Toronto, and negotiated terms of reference with then-co-chair Steini Brown over the summer.

The Ministry of Health denies the table will be shut down, saying “the work of the (science advisory table) would continue,” and when pressed, “the SAT is not being shut down.”

But according to a summary circulated among the science table and obtained by the Star, new PHO head Michael Sherar told the table on Aug. 18 that he would shut it down Sept. 6. The science table’s peerless pandemic dashboard would be eliminated, its access to data gone, its projects stranded. In its place, PHO would establish a hand-picked 15-person advisory group with no formal scientific director, limited independence from PHO or the chief medical officer of health — no ability to unilaterally choose topics of study, for instance — and far less clinical expertise.

Conversations with both PHO and table sources confirmed the contents of the letter, which painstakingly charts the past month’s negotiations.

Even if dissolution were a negotiating tactic, there does not seem to be a path here.

Ford is currently ramming a bill through the provincial legislature which would move patients from hospital beds to long-term beds up to three hundred kilometers from their homes without their consent. The bill will not go to committee and it will not be debated. 

For Ford, this is democracy in action.

Image: socialist.ca

Political Arsonists

These days, some politicians -- like Pierre Poilievre -- have declared war on journalists. Michael Harris writes:

Populist politicians like Poilievre either don’t understand, or don’t care about, is that their own abusive actions against a journalist encourage the idiot fringe to take it a step further. One day a political leader attacks the media, and the next day journalists are not merely getting critiques, they’re getting death threats. A disproportionate number of those threats are aimed at women.

According to a UNESCO report from 2021, journalists from around the world are under “unprecedented” attack. The Guardian reported that of the massive number of hate comments left on their website in 2016, the top ten targets broke down like this: eight were women, two were Black men, and one of those men was gay.

And get this. As reported by The Guardian, just two female journalists—Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and Carole Cadwalladr in the United Kingdom—accounted for an astronomical number of threats. Ressa received 90 hate messages an hour on Facebook alone. Another female journalist, Ghana Oueiss, who works for Al Jazeera television, gets one death threat every day she is on air.

This kind of behaviour can't be tolerated:

Law enforcement needs to step into the picture in a big way when anyone’s life or safety is threatened. Social media platforms talk a good game about moderating hate messages, but the fact is a lot of women keep on getting them. The block button is no substitute for shutting the haters down. Twitter needs to give its head a shake and wake up.

It has been widely reported that Rodrigo Duterte, the former leader of the Philippines, publicly suggested that journalists are not immune from assassination. Former U.S. president Donald Trump routinely attacked specific journalists, including female media members, and told his followers that the press was the “enemy of the people.” He taught his followers to hate not only factual information, but the people who bring it to America’s television screens and newspapers.

And who can forget Trump’s stupefying attacks on Greta Thunberg as a know-nothing teenager? Or his comment about female presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as being too ugly for the job? “Look at that face,” he said in his inimitable, cringeworthy style.

His lies have been equally incendiary. He publicly presented the recent search of his Mar-a-Lago residence as a “raid,” and says authorities “broke into” his safe. His party magnified the hate. The FBI were goons or the Gestapo. Just words? Not on your life. 

They tell you who they are. They are political arsonists. Caveat Emptor.

Image: firerescue1.com

They're Still With Us

On Friday, residents of the Wild Rose Province gave Chrystia Freeland a hard time. CTV reports that:

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has responded to an incident of verbal harassment in Alberta after video of the encounter was widely circulated on social media.

The video, which was shared on Twitter, shows a man and two women waiting at the lobby of Grande Prairie, Alta.'s city hall when Freeland and her staffers enter the building and approach the elevator.

"Chrystia!" the man yells.

"Yes!" Freeland responds.

What follows is a barrage of insults and swearing from the man, calling Freeland a "traitor" and a "f---ing b----" as she steps into the elevator.

"Get the f--- out of this province!" the man can be heard yelling, while another woman tells her, "You don't belong here."

Freeland was born in Peace River and she went to high school in Edmonton. On Saturday, she responded on Twitter:

"What happened yesterday was wrong," she said in a statement posted to Twitter. "Nobody, anywhere, should have to put up with threats and intimidation."

"I'm proud to be from Alberta," she said. "I'm going to keep coming back because Alberta is home."

The morons are still with us.

A Legal Firing Squad

Andrew Weissman -- a former prosecutor with the American Department of Justice writes in this morning's New York Times:

We always knew that whatever the information about the Mar-a-Lago search that would be released by a federal court, it would not help Donald Trump.

We know that not just because Judge Bruce Reinhart already concluded, based on seeing the unredacted affidavit used to obtain the search warrant, that there was probable cause to believe three federal crimes had been committed and that evidence of those crimes was at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club-residence.

Mr. Trump knows the answers to the most important unanswered questions: What material did he take from the White House, why did he take it, what had he done with it, and what was he planning to do with it? There is nothing that prevented him for over a year from publicly answering those questions; he surely has not remained silent because the answers are exculpatory.

Above all, the redacted affidavit (and an accompanying brief explaining the redactions), which was released on Friday, reveals more evidence of a righteous criminal case related to protecting information vital to our nation’s security.

There are still lots of unanswered questions:

The key questions that remain include what precisely is the full scope of what Mr. Trump took from the White House, why he took the documents and did not return them all and what he was doing with them all this time.

The redacted affidavit does not answer those questions, and the usually loquacious Mr. Trump has not addressed them. But we do now know that the Justice Department is one step closer to being able to hold Mr. Trump to account for his actions, if it so chooses.

Under Mr. Garland’s leadership, only the facts, law and precedent will matter. Mr. Trump’s penchant for hyperbole and spin to his base will be ineffective in a forum where the rule of law governs.

Mr. Trump -- who weaponized the U.S. Justice Department against his enemies -- now faces a legal firing squad. And they know how to shoot straight.

Image: researchgate.net

Reducing Student Debt

A few days ago, Joe Biden announced a plan to reduce student debt. The Right went bonkers. It'll fuel inflation, they howled. Paul Krugman writes:

 What you need to have is a sense of scale. If you’re worried about inflation, the relevant number here isn’t the eventual cost to taxpayers, which might be several hundred billion dollars. It is, rather, the effect on private spending. And I just don’t see any way to claim that this effect will be large.

Consider the fact that before the Covid pandemic — that is, before the government paused required payments on federally held student debt payments — total receipts from the federal loan program were about $70 billion a year. Since most student debt is in the form of large loans, much more than $10,000, these payments will be reduced by much less than that total. At most, then, we’re talking about tens of billions a year in a $25 trillion economy. That’s basically a rounding error.

Unable to convince people with the math, they then made a moral argument. Free money corrupts people. Krugman takes on that argument, too:

The right is inveighing against debt relief on moral grounds. “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period,” tweeted the House Judiciary G.O.P. On which planet? America has had regularized bankruptcy procedures, which take debt off the books, since the 19th century; the idea has been to give individuals and businesses with crippling debts a second chance.

And many people have taken advantage of those procedures. For example, businesses owned by a real estate mogul named Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy on six occasions. During the pandemic, many business owners received government loans that were subsequently forgiven.

Will this debt relief give many of these victims a second chance? To some extent, at least. There’s solid evidence that freeing former students from overhanging debt makes it easier for them to move to better jobs and increases their income. And since higher income will mean more future tax revenue, the true fiscal cost of debt relief will probably be less than the numbers you’re hearing.

But is this the best way to solve the problem?

As I said, the question is: Compared with what? Given the choice, I’d spend money on children rather than adults — and aid to families with children was, in fact, a big part of Biden’s original spending plans. But he couldn’t get those plans through Congress, while debt relief is something he can probably do through executive action.

And to Republicans whining that this plan does nothing for blue-collar Americans who didn’t go to college, a question: What are you proposing to do for such people — other than cut taxes on the rich and claim that the benefits will trickle down?

Once again, the Right has shown that it knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Image:Current Affairs

Dougie In Paradise

Doug Ford is in the cat bird's seat. Linda McQuaig writes:

With our health-care system reeling, Ford is charging ahead with plans for further privatization — Ontario health care is already 40 per cent private — and selling this as a way to save the system through “innovation.”

This is just silly corporate-speak. The system’s problems have been thoroughly studied by countless commissions and the solutions do not involve privatization.

Certainly Ford’s plan to allow private medical companies to perform surgeries, paid for by government, isn’t the way to solve the medical backlog.

Ford's key maxim is that the private system works better than the public one. But that maxim doesn't apply to healthcare:

Ontario has lots of unused hospital operating rooms, idled after years of cutbacks. Instead of bringing them back into use, Ford plans to divert public dollars to private facilities. But these private companies will take 10 to 15 per cent in profits and pay high management fees, so they’ll cut corners to the detriment of patients.

That’s what corporations do — they devise ways to maximize profit for their shareholders. That’s their mandate, their reason for existing.

And when they’re allowed access to the public trough — where payment is assured and they don’t have to worry about competition — they’ve hit the corporate sweetspot. For all the hoopla about the rigour of the private sector, what businesses actually seek is a comfortable niche in a competition-free zone with a reliable source of revenue. Thank you, medicare!

It's called Disaster Capitalism. Milton Friedman proclaimed that situations  such as the ones we currently face are precisely the time to implement "market solutions."

And Dougie is just the man to do it.

Image: Twitter

He's Heading For Lots of Pain

It's been a tough couple of weeks for Donald Trump. After the FBI retrieved government documents from his home, things got steadily worse for Trump. The New York Times reports that Trump was keeping over 300 documents in his basement. Jennifer Rubin writes:

The sheer number of documents previously recovered and their sources (from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency) raise the stakes considerably for Trump, undercutting his followers’ frivolous excuses and ludicrous accusations of an FBI plot to persecute him.

Even more incriminating, the Times reports, “Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021,” meaning he was clearly aware of the contents and could view the classification markings. If the FBI and Justice Department are looking for evidence of Trump’s direct knowledge of the materials and willful refusal to return all of them, this would fit the bill.

If, contrary to what Trump’s counsel said, the government did not previously get back all sensitive materials, the only logical conclusion would be that Trump refused to part with documents he falsely told aides were “mine." This might be the rare case when Trump lacks even a hint of plausible deniability (e.g., the ability to shift blame to his attorney).

If the facts are as damning as they appear, Trump’s risk of indictment is quite high. After the evidence is gathered, Attorney General Merrick Garland will need to decide whether to pursue an indictment from the grand jury. With a discrete set of facts that a jury can easily comprehend, powerful evidence of Trump’s willfulness and the clear interest in protecting the nation’s secrets, Garland will have every incentive to proceed — and surely not wait until the exponentially more complicated Jan. 6 investigation concludes.

And there are other indictments pending -- in New York, Georgia, and DC. There are consequences for fervently believing that you're the smartest guy in the room, particularly when you so obviously aren't.

Image: Vanity Fair

Not A Recipe For Success

When it comes to climate change, the Conservatives just don't get it. Chantal Hebert writes:

There’s no lack of significant policy differences between the two leading contenders for the leadership of the federal Conservative party. But on the need for a radical shift in Canada’s climate change policy, they are on the same page.

The party — whether it is led by Pierre Poilievre or Jean Charest after Sept. 10 — would seek to dismantle the climate change infrastructure put in place by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals over the past seven years.

It would start by repealing signature pieces of legislation pertaining to the environmental assessment process of major energy-related projects.

Under a Conservative government led by Poilievre or Charest, the federal carbon levy would also be scrapped.

The problem is that, for the Conservative base, climate change is a non-issue:

The low profile of climate change as an issue in the leadership campaign reflects a long-standing disconnect between the conservative base that will be selecting the party’s next leader and Canadians in general.

While there is a wide consensus within the electorate that reducing the country’s carbon footprint is a priority, the Conservative party is the home of choice for the minority of voters who do not see mitigating climate change as urgent or even necessary.

Little more than a year ago, a majority of the delegates to the party’s last national convention refused to endorse a resolution to affirm that the issue of climate change needed to be addressed.

One can pinpoint the beginning of Erin O’Toole’s eventual demise as party leader to the day he pivoted on carbon pricing in the lead-up to last summer’s federal campaign.

Whoever leads the party will lead it backward -- not a recipe for success.

Image: YouTube

A Clear And Present Danger

No less than The Globe And Mail has warned us. Michael Harris writes:

In this country, The Globe and Mail did not refer to Poilievre by name in a long piece by its editorial board, but it warned that a “highly contagious” political virus is flooding over the border from the United States. Poilievre is the perfect carrier of that virus, based on what he has shown so far in the leadership contest, and more importantly, in his political career.

But Poilievre has no time for the Globe:

Like Stephen Harper and Donald Trump, Poilievre hasn’t got much use for the media. The trouble with preaching to the converted full-time is that you start to see questions of any kind as somehow illegitimate, the way dictators come to see journalists as enemies of the people. Poilievre’s crude treatment of Global News journalist Rachel Gilmore looked an awful lot like Donald Trump trashing reporters from CNN, something he regularly did in his effort to avoid accountability, and to turn the American people against a free press.

Gilmore’s questions were perfectly normal, but simply for asking them, Poilievre referred to her as a “so-called” reporter. That bit of nastiness earned him a rebuke from the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists. If he does that now, while running for his party’s top job, what will he do if he gets it?

Poilievre is a thug who allies himself with thugs:

When a gang of thugs in 18-wheelers took over the nation’s capital for three weeks, Poilievre took selfies with them and blamed the whole thing on Justin Trudeau. He also marched with anti-vaccine conspiracist James Topp, just as leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier did. Can you picture either of those two calling the shots during a pandemic? Poilievre’s political opportunism was stunning—and scary.

During the leadership race itself, Poilievre launched personal attacks against his centrist rivals Jean Charest and Patrick Brown (while he was still around), two men who could potentially tap into the two richest voter markets in the country: Quebec and Ontario.

Again, it was reminiscent of how Trump went after his opponents when running for his party’s presidential nomination. Senator Ted Cruz became “Lyin’ Ted,” and Senator Marco Rubio was “Little Marco.” Poilievre accused Brown of being a serial liar, and Charest of being a fake Conservative who made a bundle consulting for the Chinese. So much for the days when politics was the civil mediation of differences of opinion and policy, no matter how substantial.

And what kind of a candidate looking for the top job walks away from an official party debate, preferring to pay a $50,000 fine, rather than give party members a last chance to assess the leadership aspirants?

Come to think of it, Donald Trump skipped the second national debate in the 2020 presidential election. See a pattern here?

But, most importantly, Poilevre has a record:

The best gauge for assessing how Poilievre would behave in power is to look at how he acted when he had it. Apart from his tiresome role as a partisan hit-man under then-prime minister Stephen Harper, Poilievre almost never got close to real authority, other than during his stint as parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport.

But there was one big exception. In 2014, Poilievre was handed the cabinet-level job of reforming Canada’s election law, a particularly important task after the debacle of the robocalls affair back in 2011. Instead of strengthening the electoral process, the risibly named Fair Elections Act did the opposite.

Poilievre wanted to do away with the practice of vouching, which allowed a person without proper identification to vote, if someone who knew them, and held the proper ID, vouched for them.

While it was obvious that Elections Canada needed new powers to investigate electoral infractions, Poilievre did not give the Commissioner of Elections the authority to compel witness testimony. It was that lack of subpoena powers that prevented Elections Canada from getting to the bottom of the robocalls scandal.

Poilievre also denied Election Canada’s request to require political parties to provide receipts and other documentation about their spending. Without those records, it was impossible for Elections Canada to ensure compliance with spending limits.

We know who Poilievre is -- a clear and present danger.

Image: The Toronto Star

Taking A Break

In the past, I've had problems with my back. They've returned, so I'll be taking a break from blogging. But I hope to be back soon.

Make Lying Expensive

Alex Jones has built a career on lying. This week, in a courtroom in Texas, he has met with a reckoning. Eugene Robinson writes:

The far-right radio host’s trial in an Austin courtroom has been almost enough to restore my faith in truth, justice and the American way. Jurors have been determining how much of his likely nine-figure fortune he must pay to the parents of a victim of the Sandy Hook school massacre for defaming them and their late son. Jones’s wildly successful business model has been based on concocting outrageous lies and shouting them at the top of his lungs to millions of listeners. But that does not work so well, it turns out, in a court of law.

“You are already under oath to tell the truth,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble admonished him. “You’ve already violated that oath twice today. ... Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true. It does not protect you. It is not allowed. You’re under oath. That means things must actually be true when you say them.”

Like Donald Trump, Jones has made a fortune from a Big Lie:

What Jones did was unspeakably vile: He claimed repeatedly — and falsely, with absolutely no factual basis, since none exists — that the 2012 Sandy Hook killings never happened at all, that they were some kind of “false flag” operation that was “a giant hoax,” and that the 20 dead children ripped to pieces by rounds from an assault rifle were nothing but “crisis actors.”

Yesterday, the jury fined Jones $4.1 million. But that's just the beginning. They will now determine how much Jones owes in punitive damages.

The way to shut up people like Jones is to make lying very expensive. By the time the legal system is finished with him, Jones literally won't have a pot to piss in.

Image: PBS

Wisdom And Common Sense

Jean Charest tried to make the case last night that he is the best person to lead the Conservative Party. Althia Raj writes:

The former Quebec premier and current Conservative leadership candidate hoped Wednesday’s third official debate would introduce him to more members and boost his chances of winning the party’s Sept. 10 contest, but his relatively calm performance may have failed to make the case that the perceived front-runner Pierre Poilievre, would be a disaster for the party and the country. It wasn’t until the final closing arguments — 25 minutes after a French exchange — that Charest got to the point.

He lambasted Poilievre — without naming him — for failing to show up and be accountable to members. He contrasted his values and numerous policy proposals — supporting law and order, introducing more private health care delivery and replacing the consumer carbon tax with a tax on large emitters — to his opponent’s offering.

“Anger is not a political program,” Charest noted. “A slogan isn’t going to do the job for us.”

Charest pointed to recent polls:

In a scrum following the roundtable exchange, Charest pointed to recent public opinion surveys by Ipsos and Angus Reid which suggest he has a better chance than Poilievre of winning across the country.

“There is a boulevard out there of Canadians who want a fiscally conservative government that’s going to have a real economic plan for the country,” Charest stated.

But what Charest failed to mention is that those polls also suggest the majority of Conservatives want Poilievre to lead them.

Charest finds himself in the same position that Donald Trump's challengers faced back in 2015. When a political party is taken over by the crazies, wisdom and common sense are locked away in the closet.

Image: The Toronto Star

The Last Debate

The format for tonight's Conservative leadership debate is somewhat novel. Stephanie Taylor reports that:

No audience, no podiums and appearances from only three out of the five candidates running to lead the federal Conservatives. 

These are the circumstances under which the party's last official debate of the race will take place tonight in Ottawa, before a winner is announced Sept. 10.

Those participating will be ex-Quebec premier Jean Charest, rural Ontario MP Scott Aitchison and Roman Baber, a former provincial legislator who Doug Ford booted from caucus over his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns. 

Rather than standing at individual podiums, the three will be placed around a table for the event, which is being billed as part debate, part roundtable.

Moderated by the party's president, the event will be split into two 45-minute rounds. Candidates will answer questions in English during the first section and then switch to French for the second half. 

While Charest applauded the party's decision to make the event bilingual, doing so no doubt poses a challenge to Aitchison and Baber, who are not fluent French speakers. 

But even more significant than the format is the fact that neither Leslyn Lewis nor Pierre Poilievre will be there:

The party's decision to organize a third debate after two official ones were held in May drew sharp criticism from some in the party, including the two candidates who have decided not to show: Pierre Poilievre and Leslyn Lewis. 

Poilievre's campaign issued a sharply worded statement after the party made the call.

It said the longtime MP and perceived front-runner of the race was going to stay focused on getting members to fill out their ballots, and slammed the earlier official English debate as an "embarrassment" for asking candidates personal questions about their favourite streaming shows and music. 

Lewis's campaign informed the party last week she wouldn't attend, saying despite trying to find out more details it lacked details around format or questions.

All this indicates that the Conservatives still haven't got their act together -- and they still haven't figured out why they lost the last two elections. 

Image: globalnews.ca

The Endgame

It's time, climate scientists warn, to consider the endgame -- human extinction. Damien Carrington writes:

The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis.

They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said.

“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.

The warning isn't new:

Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease.

 The speed of climate change  and other factors are causing scientists to recalculate:

“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history.

“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.”

The analysis is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said.

A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added.

Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could trigger others in a cascade and some remained little studied, they said, such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming.

The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon.

“There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.”

There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.”

It's worth repeating that old saw: The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we have a hard time concentrating.

Image: Goodreads

Is This It?

Donald Trump has almost always escaped the consequences of what he has said and done. Michael Harris writes:

Donald Trump has always been too rich, too powerful, and too lawyered up to ever get the comeuppance he richly deserves for a lifetime of lying and cheating.

The most recent example was the decision by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office not to prosecute him for alleged tax fraud, even though Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, laid out exactly how it had been done.

As a result of putting the investigation on ice, two top prosecutors involved in the investigation of the Trump organization resigned. It’s hard to work in a place where you can smell a rat, especially when you are supposed to be in the truth business.

This time around, the evidence of Trump's crimes would seem to be insurmountable:

Americans now know that Trump knew about the deadly threat to hang Mike Pence. Did he step in? Did he call his own vice-president, who came within 40 feet of the rioters out for his blood? Did he call in the National Guard, the Defense Departent, or his attorney general? Did he make a public appeal for the rioters to go home?

Another thing Americans now know is that Donald Trump was well aware that he had lost the election, but refused to listen to anyone, including his own White House counsel, who told him that. He also refused to make any public statement until it became clear that his coup was not going to work.  Even his own daughter begged him to stop the violence. He kept watching television, taking time out to send out a tweet calling Mike Pence a coward.  That put a target on the VP’s back in the middle of a riot.

Most importantly, people died as a result of the riot that Trump fomented. So, is this it? Will Trump finally be held accountable?

Don’t bet the farm on it. For one thing, Americans tend to mythologize the presidency, and hence the person holding the office. Call it the divine right of commanders-in-chief, or presidential infallibility. Richard Nixon put it best when he said that if your president does it, it isn’t a crime. Trump is still, to some extent, clothed in the same aura of office that persuaded Nixon he was above the law.

Trump also has the advantage of the clock. With criminal investigations underway both by the Department of Justice and at the state level in Georgia, it is doubtful if any of these investigations would be concluded before the mid-term elections, let alone any legal proceedings.

If the Republicans win back the House of Representatives on Nov. 8, as most pundits are predicting, not only will the Jan. 6 Committee be disbanded, some of its members may find themselves under investigation by vengeful members of the GOP.

The last thing in Trump’s favour is pure politics. Remember, this is a one-term president who survived two impeachment trials because of partisan support in the Senate. Should Trump officially announce his bid for a presidential run in 2024, it could have a chilling affect on those who might otherwise be willing to indict a former president.

Tennessee Williams' Blanche Dubois claimed that she relied on the kindness of strangers. Trump relies on the cowardice of many. This is an existential moment for the United States. If Trump is not convicted for what he has said and done, the Americans will lose their republic.

Image: Chicago Sun Times