The First Casualty

From the beginning of his tenure, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has gone to war with the media. He took his cue from his predecessor, Andrew Scheer. Max Fawcett writes:

Former Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer hinted at this in his 2020 resignation speech. “Challenge the mainstream media,” he said. “Don’t take the left-wing media narrative as fact. Please check out smart, independent, objective organizations like the Post Millennial or True North. There are other places to get news. Let’s stop being the silent majority.”

In his war, Poilievre has allied himself with Elon Musk who has labeled the CBC as "government-funded media:"

To be clear, there is nothing in the new label — one that, so far, has only been applied to CBC’s corporate account — that actually says that. It’s no secret that the CBC is funded by taxpayers, and it remains editorially independent of the government of the day, just as it was when Poilievre and prime minister Stephen Harper were in power for almost a decade. More to the point, government funding is not tantamount to the dissemination of propaganda, and if it is, then someone should tell the good folks at Postmedia, which collects many millions in government handouts every year.

Poilievre's motive is as clear as crystal:

Poilievre’s provocative use of the term “propaganda” speaks to his real mission: not informing Canadians but confusing them. Former Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer hinted at this in his 2020 resignation speech. “Challenge the mainstream media,” he said. “Don’t take the left-wing media narrative as fact. Please check out smart, independent, objective organizations like the Post Millennial or True North. There are other places to get news. Let’s stop being the silent majority.”

Poilievre has taken that argument to a whole different level. In addition to his now-familiar broadsides against the CBC, he took a run during a recent press conference at the independence and integrity of The Canadian Press, an organization that has always remained steadfastly apolitical and nonpartisan. “The CBC, frankly, is a biased propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, and negatively affects all media. For example, CP is negatively affected by the fact that you have to report favourably on the CBC if you want to keep your number 1, taxpayer-funded client happy.”

Unfortunately, the stunt is having its desired effect:

That torrent of turds, and Poilievre’s willingness to open the sluice gates here in Canada, is already having an impact on our democracy. EKOS Research founder Frank Graves created a “disinformation index,” a 15-point scale that “measures how strongly respondents have bought into four pieces of disinformation and how strongly they reject one piece of correct information: vaccine-related deaths are being concealed from the public, COVID-19 vaccines can cause infertility, COVID-19 vaccines can alter a patient’s DNA, inflation is much higher in Canada than in the United States, and climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions.”

The first casualty of war, they say, is the truth. In Mr. Poilievre's war, that most certainly is the case.

Image: The National Observer

Trump In The Great White North

When Trump flags showed up as part of the Truckers' Convoy in Ottawa, it was clear that the American Disease had drifted across our border. Michael Harris writes that Donald Trump has become part of our political conversation:

Not that the political arena was ever a monastery. There have always been politicians who couldn’t keep their zippers up, who telephoned judges on active cases, who told the occasional whopper, who drove their cars while over-refreshed, who did favours for friends, and who accepted favours in return.  

But there has never been a time when misogyny was effectively a platform in a major party’s policy playbook, as it is now in the GOP in the United States.  

There has never been a time when a United States president lied reflexively on everything from his tawdry dalliances, to his sleazy fundraising—also based on barefaced falsehoods. The 2020 U.S. election wasn’t stolen. But the money sent in by naive Trump supporters to fight the electoral results in court—all $200-million worth—apparently was. One can only wonder why wire fraud charges haven’t yet been laid.  

And who ever heard of an indicted defendant in a criminal case vowing to continue his bid for the presidency, even if he is convicted of felonies? That is exactly what Trump told fellow serial liar Tucker Carlson of Fox News in a recent interview. Spoken like a man who wants to dump the U.S. Constitution and defund the FBI and the Department of Justice. Trump has driven tribalism and iconoclasm in politics to such extremes that his supporters in Congress have even subpoenaed Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.  

The problem is that Trump's middle finger to the world approach to things is showing up here:

Canadians have supported progressive parties at the polls federally. But there is growing evidence that some of the elements of Trumpian politics are creeping into our national conversation.  

For starters, the critiques of the current federal government have more to do with swiftboating than sober analysis. Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada have put the crosshairs on Justin Trudeau, highlighting his alleged unfitness to run the country in highly personal terms, as opposed to offering a counter vision of what a Conservative government would do differently.

The examples abound. Trudeau’s blackface of yesteryear is proof he is a racist. Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act to end the “Freedom Convoy” and its chaotic occupation of Ottawa is proof he is a dictator. Trudeau’s handling of alleged Chinese interference in the last federal election shows he is covering up for the Chinese and is perhaps a traitor. This from the party that sold a Canadian energy company to the Chinese communists for $15.1-billion, and bartered away Canadian sovereignty in the Canada-China Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement.  

That is tawdry politics. The invitation to voters is to personally dislike and reject Trudeau, rather than embrace a better candidate with better policies and a better vision. The public dialogue is not so much a contest of ideas between political parties, as it has traditionally been, but a kind of cage fight of the Texas death-match variety. Apart from being distressingly Trumpian, the approach taken by the official opposition is totally unnecessary.  

It's not that the Liberals are above criticism:

The Liberals are open to legitimate criticism on a number of policy fronts. Did the government get the balance right between prudent public health measures and civil liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic?  

Did the government react to the crisis of inflation quickly enough and with the right measures?  

Given the desperate problems facing many Canadians on the health-care front, did the government go far enough in its recent rescue package with hard pressed provincial governments?

But “Fuck Trudeau” signs, like “Fuck Biden” signs and “Fuck Ford” signs, put up by fanatical supporters incited by relentless personal attacks on political leaders, are not the way to conduct a democracy.  

And, for Trump and his supporters, it's democracy that is the enemy.

Image: The Hill Times

Affordable Housing

Affordable housing is a problem right across the country. In Toronto, one of the candidates for mayor has suggested a solution. Edward Keenan writes:

When mayoral candidate Josh Matlow unveiled his “Public Build Toronto” proposal Wednesday — part of a larger affordable housing and rental program he’s been releasing in stages — it would be easy to say at best it looks like a good start. A $300-million “seed funding” kick-start to a program to build 15,000 units of rental housing on city land is modest — such a build-out would likely cost billions, whereas Matlow’s proposed seed funding turns out to be the cost of hosting five World Cup Games, give or take.

But it was noteworthy to me because it proposed the city government tackle the housing crisis in part by building new affordable housing on land it already owns. Not give the land to someone to build on. Not sell it to someone to build on. But build on it ourselves, with the city acting as a developer. That’s the kind of proposal we haven’t heard a lot of in recent decades from governments around here.

Sometime around the 1990s, the prevailing wisdom moved away from direct government construction of housing — and direct government construction and operation of virtually anything. Looking at actual evidence of cumbersome or inadequate public infrastructure projects, we all rode the pendulum to the other extreme, enamoured suddenly of the idea that the private sector was the best and only purveyor of such work, and where the public couldn’t privatize a whole area of service entirely, it should hire companies to do the work for it in “public-private partnerships.”

The results are everywhere around Troonto -- huge homes that only a fraction of us can afford -- and no new public housing:

The city’s open data portal offers information on Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) units by the date their construction was completed: you see hundreds and often thousands of units per year constructed from the 1960s through the early 1990s, and then virtually nothing for more than a decade, and then only a handful of units over the past 10 years or so. We used to build lots of public housing as the city grew, and then, while the city continued growing, we just stopped.

This is a crisis of our own making:

As with so many things, much of the blame for this can be placed at doorsteps other than the city’s own — Mike Harris at Queen’s Park and then Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien in Ottawa pulled the funding and made the regulatory changes that virtually ceased the construction of public housing and co-op housing in Toronto. But virtually cease it did.

And meanwhile, a few decades later, how are those public-private partnerships looking in general? Well, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT may open someday, maybe. If we’re lucky. It’s hard to tell, because no one in the provincial government is saying much about it at all, after years of budget increases and years of delays. This follows a model of provincial project management jobbed out to the private sector that has become the stuff of horror-story legend in the city of Ottawa after that city’s own still-unfolding LRT construction nightmare.

It's clear that neo-liberalism has been an ugly failure -- and that government, when properly supervised -- can do good work.

Image: Point2 Homes

Just Another Lie

The United States is ruled by a crumbling gerontocracy. Maureen Dowd writes:

Carl Hulse and Annie Karni wrote in The New York Times about Washington’s actual gerontocracy and the challenges of governing with “an old and frail group of lawmakers.” The advanced age of many senators — with their ailments and chronic absences — has diluted the power of the Democratic majority. Now everyone in D.C. is also wondering how long Mitch McConnell will stay as the head of the Senate Republicans.

The 81-year-old minority leader is recovering from a fall at a fund-raiser that resulted in a concussion and a broken rib. Dianne Feinstein, 89 and suffering from shingles, has barely been in the Senate this year. The Judiciary Committee she is supposed to sit on can’t advance judicial nominations to keep pace with the way Donald Trump and McConnell reshaped the federal courts; their handiwork is visible in the horrible abortion rulings being handed down. Chuck Grassley, 89, had a fall and a hip replacement this winter and has already filed to run in 2028; at the end of that term, he’d be 101.

Next week, an American rendition of King Lear opens with an Australian in the lead role:

The $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes on trial in Delaware Monday. At long last, after a shameless career built on spreading poisonous lies about everything from climate to Covid to Trump’s stolen election blather, King Rupert, as Vanity Fair calls him, may be losing dominion over his dominion because of Dominion.

The Australian immigrant who ran anti-immigrant news organizations and let Fox News thrive on the racist “birther” lie about Barack Obama reaped billions by putting Americans at one another’s throat.

It’s hard for a journalist to argue that a news organization should be penalized, but Fox News isn’t a news organization. It’s a greedy business that freaked out when some Fox News reporters actually told the truth about Trump’s lies, and then it proceeded to broadcast the lies.

It would be swell to see someone held accountable for the grotesque deceptions that corroded our democracy and sparked the Jan. 6 insurrection. Just as social media companies torqued their algorithms to spin up conflict and profits, Murdoch torqued the news, giving viewers what they wanted to hear and blinding them to the truth.

Thanks to the despicable likes of Murdoch and Trump, America is now “this great stage of fools,” in Lear’s phrase, howling at the storm.

Murdoch and Trump may claim that they are "more sinned against than sinning," but that's just another lie.

Image: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Time To Go?

Lawrence Martin thinks that it's time for Justin Trudeau to plan his exit:

It’s getting near crunch time. If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is to leave an opportunity for a successor to prepare for their fight in an election, he should announce he is departing by the fall and call a leadership convention for the spring of next year.

All indications from Mr. Trudeau suggest that despite his sagging popularity, he will seek a new mandate. That means he will be trying to extend his time in office to 13 or 14 years.

No PM since Mackenzie King in the 1940s has ruled that many years in succession. Pierre Trudeau was beaten in his 11th year before returning to power later.

And he had a paramount long-term policy goal for which to fight – his Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Justin has no life-consuming political project. He might want to rival his father's record. But ten years is about the end of any prime minister's shelf life. Justin has accomplished a number of things:

Along with his electoral record he has put in place an impressive package of progressive legislation that has expanded the social safety net.

Conservatives, of course, loathe Mr. Trudeau and his house of handouts. They have good reason. A decade ago, they had the Liberals down and almost out, languishing in third place. But Mr. Trudeau revived the party, winning a majority, then two minorities, running up the count of election victories by the Trudeau family to a remarkable seven out of eight campaigns.

But power itself can be life-consuming:

Justin Trudeau wants more. No matter that he’s skating on ice that is getting thinner and thinner. No matter that in this era of anger politics fuelled by internet polemicists and haters, he is the target of constant abuse. No matter that to run again when so much of the population is already tired of him would be an enormous gamble for him and his party.

He should be content with what he has been able to do. On social policy, there’s his progress on strengthening the Canada Pension Plan, on a national subsidized daycare program, on getting dental care started, on transgender rights.

There’s his work on equality for women, on abortion rights, on legalizing marijuana, on the rights of minorities. Some progress has been made in addressing the plight of Indigenous peoples. The number of immigrants has almost doubled. He’s done well on trade agreements (the USMCA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, completing the EU deal). He’s taking on climate change with a controversial carbon tax. And all the while he has kept an often divided party unified.

The Trudeau government faced three unique crises and challenges. In managing the coronavirus pandemic it did better than Britain, the United States and many other jurisdictions. It performed ably in handling the pugilistic presidency of Donald Trump. Its use of the Emergencies Act to stop the truckers’ occupation of the country’s capital was deemed appropriate by an inquiry.

There have been notable failures:

He is not about to repair fractured relations with the West. It’s been the fate of every Liberal prime minister for the past 60 years to be totally rejected on the Prairies. That’s not about to change. His leaving would lower the temperature.

On the ethics file, Mr. Trudeau has been damaged by scandals and semi-scandals. One could easily make the case that most every government going way back has had a similar number of ethical travesties. But Mr. Trudeau promised to do better and did not. His sticking around won’t change that verdict.

On the economy, the course has been set by his spending bonanza and time will tell whether it was affordable – he argues that the debt-to-GDP ratio is low compared to other G7 countries – or whether it will lead to deficit and debt anguish.

All said, Mr. Trudeau’s progressive mission has been for the most part accomplished. But the leadership style of the Prime Minister and his leftish thrust has alienated great numbers. He’s an overexposed lightning-rod PM, an acoustically irritating source of tension whose welcome seems to have just about worn out.

Perhaps he will -- like his father -- take a walk in the snow and decide to return to Montreal.

Image: 

Megaphones and Intelligence

Elon Musk and Pierre Poilievre have labelled the CBC the enemy. Bruce Arthur writes:

In a reasonable world, the CBC makes for an odd enemy. You can argue about how it is run, sure: ask the opinion of just about any employee of the CBC, then sit back and crack a beer. You can have an adult conversation about the CBC’s value and impact as a catch-all competitor to media across Canada, and the parameters of its mission, and all that. Debating the CBC is a shared Canadian pastime, and we don’t have enough of those left.

But labelling the CBC as an enemy is something else entirely, no matter how much you miss Don Cherry. Labelling Canada’s public broadcaster as an enemy of Canadians is a different kettle of fish, indeed.

Which brings us, regrettably, to the leader of Canada’s Official Opposition. Last week Twitter owner Elon Musk slapped new labels on the BBC and NPR accounts, calling them “government media”; it was Musk’s own version of the labels the previous Twitter regime had applied to places such as Tass, the Russian-controlled news service, or China’s People’s Daily, or Iran’s IRNA News Agency, which are called “state-affiliated media.”

The comparison between public broadcasters and Tass is ludicrous:

Tass, People’s Daily and IRNA are literal organs of the state, under full government control. The BBC and NPR — and the CBC — are independent entities that receive government funding, but have editorial independence. If you can’t see the difference, please consult an optometrist.

It’s predictable, though. Since buying Twitter, Musk has leaned heavily into easily disprovable right-wing conspiracy theories — for instance, he promulgated the repellent lie that the home invasion attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of prominent Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, was a gay tryst gone wrong. Equating the BBC and NPR to state propaganda was in keeping with Musk’s fart-cushion childishness of late, and his habits.

Pierre Poilievre has habits of his own, and an audience to court. So he posted an open letter to Musk.

“We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media,” wrote Poilievre. “That is why I’m asking @Twitter @elonmusk to accurately label CBC as ‘government-funded media.’ It is a fact. And Canadians deserve the facts.”

It's pretty clear: There is an inverse relationship between the size of the megaphone and the intelligence of he or she who holds it. Empty barrels have always made the most noise.

Image: WNYC

Justin Pearson And The Future

In the United States, Justin Pearson has become a national figure. He writes in this morning's New York Times:

Last week, the people of Tennessee and the nation witnessed an assault against democracy when my colleague Justin Jones and I, both young Black Democratic men, were expelled from office for allegedly breaching decorum on the House floor. My former colleague, a 60-year-old white female Democratic representative, Gloria Johnson, had also joined our peaceful protest against gun violence but narrowly survived expulsion. Mr. Jones has since returned to the House after a vote by the Nashville Metropolitan Council. I’m hoping the Shelby County Board of Commissioners similarly puts me back in the House on Wednesday.

There is something amiss in the decorum of the State House when G.O.P. leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from “hanging by a tree” as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr. Sherrell later apologized for his comment) feel comfortable berating Mr. Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience. This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.

I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced. We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans — Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer — are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight.

In such a hostile environment for democracy, I’m inspired by the late civil rights fighter and congressman John Lewis, who in 1965, when demonstrating for voting rights in Selma, Ala., endured a police beating that almost took his life. In 2016, after the tragic Pulse Nightclub massacre that killed 49 people, he led a sit-in on the U.S. House floor for 25 hours to protest the inaction of lawmakers in the pockets of the National Rifle Association.

My mother, a schoolteacher, and my father, a pastor, instilled in me the hope that justice is possible for all. When I was 15, I attended a Memphis City School Board meeting with my parents to give a speech demanding access to quality textbooks and classes that white peers in their school districts had. These were resources that increased their opportunities for a good college education — chances that Black students, too, deserved.

A few years ago, I helped lead a coalition of community activists in the fight against the construction of the Byhalia Connection crude oil pipeline project in my late grandmothers’ community in southwest Memphis, where, according to a 2013 study, the risk of cancer is four times higher than the national average. Both of my grandmothers died from cancer. Our coalition killed the project before it killed more of us. We fought and we won.

This is a man who believes, like John Lewis, that sometimes you have to get into "good trouble." A lot of Americans won't like it. But Mr. Pearson -- and his generation -- are the future.

Image: The New York Times

The Same Polluted Source

Once again, the debate over gun violence is roiling in the United States. The latest example has consumed the state legislature in Tennessee. Gary Wills writes:

We are the disgrace of nations because we can’t stop killing our children—along, of course, with their teachers, relatives, and innocent bystanders. We don’t even seem to want to stop doing it, not effectively, at any rate. We say we should, but we don’t. We just can’t. We are worse than the drunk who says he should stop drinking but doesn’t. At least drinking is (or was) pleasant in its early stages. But how can killing be pleasant at first?

Our children can’t fight back as they watch their classmates and teachers being mowed down. Why do we let it go on, case after case? Are we just more evil than all the other countries that do not have our murder rate—not only in schools but in churches, synagogues, and mosques? Are we just killers by breeding or tradition?

Some say we kill innocent people in large numbers because we have so many guns. Well, we do have them, more than any other country. But guns do not force themselves into our hands and fire themselves. We have to use them for them to work. Why do we want to keep doing that?

The answer to that question is stark -- because the courts have greenlighted unregulated gun ownership:

No other nation has a Supreme Court that claims its Founding Fathers wanted to make it possible for any individual to get military-grade weapons and kill like a combat soldier, spewing bullets from high-capacity magazines at split-second rapidity, racking up the tiny corpses before the police can possibly arrive. These murder machines cannot be controlled as we control other dangerous things, from cars to planes to drugs, because these are guns, and guns are sacrosanct. What makes them so? The Second Amendment. Because of it, guns and their use are beyond criticism or control. That makes it possible for a presidential candidate to suggest with impunity that a rival should be murdered if he just calls her killers “Second Amendment people.”

The Second Amendment is invoked like a blessing over each of our recurrent Columbines. But there is nothing about that constitutional text that absolves these classroom slaughters. Their perpetrators are not “well regulated.” They are not “bearing arms,” a military term (one does not bear arms against a rabbit), nor are they “keeping arms” if they have a gun at home (they are called armories, not gunneries). It was only our modern Court that thought you could decide “original intent” by reading the wrong dictionaries. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century defined “arms” as “war,” citing Dryden—“Arms and the man I sing”—and he defined “armed men” as “army.”

Previous Courts read history, not simply the dictionary, and knew that Madison added the Bill of Rights not because there was any threat to individual ownership of guns, which had always existed unchallenged and would continue to do so before, under, and after the draft Constitution. If personal weapons of self-defense or attack were the issue Madison was dealing with, the Second Amendment could have been written about a right to “bear knives” or “bear swords” or “bear clubs.”

In the end, it's all about that old excuse for so many American ills -- states' rights:

No, Madison added the Second Amendment to placate “states’ rights” advocates like Patrick Henry, who argued state militias had to be guaranteed for three reasons:

1. Short of war, states could not be shielded by a Federal standing army, which the Founders opposed. (How has that gone, Joint Chiefs?)

2. Residents of the states wanted to be able to respond to clashes on their borders with Native Americans or local opposition before a Federal authority could respond.

3. Slaveholders like Henry (and this was the main reason) feared slave uprisings in the South, anticipating rebellions like Nat Turner’s in 1831. They wanted to “keep arms” in guarded armories where the “well regulated” militias could get them out quickly and irregular slave mobs could not.       

Gun violence, Slavery, Jim Crow. They all stem from the same polluted source.

Image: The Philidelphia Inquirer

Like A Pitbull With Rabies

Donald Trump has been indicted. But, Michael Harris writes, one indictment isn't enough to stop him:

Simply because Donald Trump never submits to any authority or set of rules that get in the way of his impulsive ego-liberation and terminal narcissism. Instead, he attacks his accusers and opponents like a pit bull with rabies. Facts and decorum have nothing to do with his modus operandi. Consider Trump’s unhinged public remarks about Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing his trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

For good measure, Trump also attacked the judge’s family. He accused Judge Merchan of treating his company “VICIOUSLY” in the recent trial of Trump Organization, which Merchan also presided over. That trial ended with tax fraud findings against Trump’s company, and a hefty fine. For his role in the tax frauds, long-time Trump executive Allen Weisselberg was sent to jail for five months.

Trump the bloviating bully has behaved even more outrageously toward Alvin Bragg, the first Black person to hold the post of district attorney for the southern district of Manhattan. He has called Bragg a “criminal” an “animal” a “psychopath” and a “racist.” Trump also posted a photo on Truth Social showing himself wielding a baseball bat next to an image of Bragg’s head. Subtlety has never been Trump’s forte.

Proof that what happens on the internet doesn’t stay on the internet? Both Judge Merchan and District Attorney Alvin Bragg have now received multiple death threats. Trump actually mentioned Merchan by name in one of his Truth Social posts. The upshot? The judge now has extra personal security at the court he presides over. 

So let's be clear-eyed about who and what Trump is:

It is now crystal clear why Trump announced his third presidential run so early. He knew that a flurry of possible indictments was coming his way, and he also knew that as a past president and presidential candidate, the courts would be under great pressure to treat him differently from your garden-variety criminal defendant. 

Trump was also aware that with his death grip on the Republican base, his potential rivals for the GOP nomination would have no choice but to rally to his cause, even if he were to be indicted. Proof that he had that part right? Even Mitt Romney, one of the few Republicans to see the dangers presented by Trump, is parroting the baseless claim that Bragg’s prosecution against the former president is political.  

If Trump is allowed to heap abuse on officers of the court for seven or eight more months, if he is permitted to stir up a hornet’s nest of rage in his political base, there will be little to no stopping him. Officers of the court will be needlessly endangered, and the GOP will be further emboldened to interfere in a criminal case to push the lie that this is somehow all political. 

The time to act is now. If anyone else but Trump were involved in this case, that is exactly what would have already happened. If anyone else were spouting the inflammatory rhetoric Trump employs, they would be admonished, held in criminal contempt, or subjected to a gag order to protect the integrity of the case. Judicial authorities have got to stop being in thrall over the job Trump once had, and start dealing with his deeds, or rather, misdeeds.  

I'm betting that before Trump is convicted for several crimes, he'll be spending time in jail for contempt of court.

Image: You Tube

The Better Analog

On this Good Friday, some are comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ. Pontius Pilate -- a man who believed that cruelty was the point -- is a better analog. I'll be back on Monday.

Image: The Sacred In The Secular

Hot Air Isn't A Defense

Several commentators have suggested that Alvin Bragg's case against Donald Trump is weak. Jennifer Rubin isn't so sure. She writes:

Any pundits who speculated ahead that the case was weak, misreported the “intent” requirement under New York law or ignored obvious “tolling” arguments putting the charges in compliance with the statute of limitations may have been premature in denigrating the case. Once more they’d be wise to hold their fire given some strategic ambiguities apparent in the indictment.

Bragg sets out the allegations: Trump was part of a scheme to pay off three individuals (a doorman, Daniels and a second woman, Karen McDougal) as part of an effort to “catch and kill” allegations of extramarital affairs (which Trump has denied). The indictment alleges that Trump directed Cohen (who already pleaded guilty to federal crimes based on these same facts) to make the payments through shell companies and invoices falsely labeled “legal retainer.” A plethora of check stubs, invoices and general ledger entries form the foundation of the case.

Importantly, the indictment ties Trump’s actions to the election in two key ways: First, evidence of his desire to drag out payments to Daniels beyond the election so he might not have to pay up in full. Second, as soon as he was sworn in, the doorman and “Woman 1” were released from their deals. Once the election was over, Trump didn’t care what they said.

And then there is Michael Cohen's indictment:

Bragg quotes from the plea entered by Cohen in federal court:

[O]n or about October of 2016, in coordination with, and at the direction of ... candidate [Trump], I arranged to make a payment to a second individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign to keep the individual from disclosing the information. To accomplish this, I used a company that was under my control to make a payment in the sum of $130,000. The monies I advanced through my company were later repaid to me by the candidate. I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election.

The core of the indictment alleges that Trump violated New York books and records law, a crime that is regularly prosecuted, according to research compiled by former prosecutors. In this case, those violations arguably impacted an extremely close presidential election. False statements in furtherance of a scheme to pull the wool over the eyes of voters is hardly inconsequential.

Bragg alleges that records were falsified in furtherance of a scheme to contravene state and federal election laws. He also says Trump took steps to mischaracterize the true nature of the payments for tax purposes. Tax law provides another sound basis for bumping the charges up to felonies.

Bragg has two paths to elevate Trump's false bookkeeping to the level of a felony. If one path doesn't work, he has another path open to him:

While the indictment does not set out precisely which crimes elevate books and records violations to felonies, Bragg at his news conference pointed specifically to misstatements to tax authorities, to federal election law and to N.Y. Election Law § 17-152, which makes it illegal for “two or more persons [to] conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” With the testimony of Cohen and others, plus the documents, this may not be hard to prove.

Trump's lawyers speak in Trumpian bravado. But hot air isn't a defense.

Image: YouTube

Riding With The Truckers

When the Truckers Convoy arrived in  Ottawa, the Conservative Party of Canada hopped on its bandwagon. Michael Harris writes:

The Conservative party lurched to the populist right in the very first days of dysfunction in Ottawa. It abruptly changed leaders, championed the truckers, and came after Justin Trudeau personally. They were betting that with the help of evangelicals, angry blue collar workers and the usual fatigue with any three-term government, the truckers would chauffeur them back into power.

Pierre Poilievre took his inspiration from  Donald Trump:

He’s employed many Trumpian tactics, including attacking the media and a nebulous class of “gatekeepers,” exploiting social media’s honeycomb of echo chambers, darkly characterizing the nation as “broken” and demonizing Trudeau the way the MAGA wing of the GOP villainized Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

A year later, the hazards of MAGA emulation daily become more manifest, as a wildly unhinged Trump threatens “death and destruction” for being indicted and lionizes the seditionists who invaded the U.S. Capitol building. As the MAGA faithful feed on crazy conspiracies and big lies, Republican leaders afraid to draw their wrath genuflect to Trump’s cult of personality.

It’s an extremely dangerous game, but Canada’s Conservatives were tempted to believe they could manage the risks for a simple reason: desperation. The Liberals had won a minority government in September 2021, their third consecutive victory under Trudeau’s leadership. Although the Conservatives won the popular vote, they took just 119 seats, compared to 160 for the Liberals and 25 for the NDP. The Conservative party lost seats in key regions despite leading in the early polls, and they ended up with fewer seats than ousted leader Andrew Scheer had won.

The Convoy brought out the crazies:

On Feb. 3, 2022, far-right Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski travelled to Coutts to address the blockade: “They have waged a war against our way of life, against freedoms that were given to us by our God.” While hinting ominously that bloodshed might be required, Pawlowski urged the protesters to not lose their momentum and not give up their power.

Arrested five days later at his home and charged with mischief for inciting people to commit criminal acts, the preacher awaits a May verdict in what he somewhat grandly referred to as “the trial of the century.” In the meantime Pawlowski has managed to be the story of the moment in Alberta for recording his startling conversation with Premier Danielle Smith in which she pledged sympathy and admiration and said she’d been regularly checking on his case with the province’s justice officials.

There was an unmistakable evangelical Christian undercurrent to the protests across Canada. Biblical references were visible everywhere, and there were curbside sermons from preachers in Ottawa. One sign read, “We must obey God rather than men.”

These were -- and are -- Pierre Poilievre's people. Canadians should treat what happened yesterday in Manhattan as an early warning.

Image: Cole Burston

The Republican Death Wish

Paul Krugman has been crunching some numbers. And he's made a grisly discovery. He writes:

America’s dismal Covid performance was part of a larger story. I don’t know how many Americans are aware that over the past four decades, our life expectancy has been lagging ever further that of other advanced nations — even nations whose economic performance has been poor by conventional measures. Italy, for example, has experienced a generation of economic stagnation, with basically no growth in real G.D.P. per capita since 2000, compared with a 29 percent rise here. Yet Italians can expect to live about five years longer than Americans, a gap that has widened even as the Italian economy flounders.

What explains the American way of death? A large part of the answer seems to be political.

One important clue is that the problem of premature death isn’t evenly distributed across the country. Life expectancy is hugely unequal across U.S. regions, with major coastal cities not looking much worse than Europe but the South and the eastern heartland doing far worse.

But wasn’t it always thus? No. Geographic health disparities have surged in recent decades. According to the U.S. mortality database, as recently as 1990, Ohio had slightly higher life expectancy than New York. Since then, New York’s life expectancy has risen rapidly, nearly converging with that of other rich countries, while Ohio’s has hardly risen at all and is now four years less than New York’s.

The data is pretty stark:

A 2021 paper published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives examined various possible causes, like the increasing concentration of highly educated Americans (who tend to be healthier than those with less education) in states that are already highly educated and the widening per capita income gaps among states. The authors found that these factors can’t explain more than a small fraction of the growing mortality gap.

Instead, they argued, the best explanation lay in policy: “The most promising explanation for our findings involve efforts by high-income states to adopt specific health-improving policies and behaviors since at least the early 1990s. Over time, these efforts reduced mortality in high-income states more rapidly than in low-income states, leading to widening spatial disparities in health.”

There is, in fact, a strong correlation between how much a state’s life expectancy rose from 1990 to 2019 and its political lean, as measured by Joe Biden’s margin over Donald Trump in the 2020 election — a correlation slightly stronger, by my estimates, than the correlation with income.

There are several reasons to believe that America’s death trip is largely political rather than economic. One is the comparison with European nations, which have had much better health trends even when, as in Italy, their economies have performed badly.

Another is the fact that some of the poorest states in America, with the lowest life expectancy, are still refusing to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would cover the bulk of the cost (and the failure to expand Medicaid is killing many hospitals). This suggests that they’re failing to improve health because they don’t want to, not because they can’t afford to.

Finally, since Covid struck, residents of Republican-leaning counties have been far less likely to get vaccinated and far more likely to die of it than residents of Democratic-leaning counties — even though vaccines are free.

Republicans have a death wish. And those who buy what they sell are like lemmings, marching over a cliff.

Image: Encyclopedia Britannica

What Goes Around

Pierre Poilievre practices the politics of personal destruction. Michael Harris writes that practitioners of that dark art have a limited appeal:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre set the bar low when he effectively called the prime minister a traitor who was covering up alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections, instead of calling a public inquiry. Two parliamentary bodies and a special rapporteur are looking into these serious allegations. Anonymous allegations.

Leslyn Lewis got into the act when she was asked in Parliament why she and two other Conservative MPs, Colin Carrie and Dean Allison, had lunch with a dubious political figure visiting Canada. Christine Anderson represents the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) as an MP in the European Parliament.   

That party is under surveillance in Germany as an “extremist” group. No wonder. The AfD party downplays Nazi war crimes, opposes immigration and is anti-Muslim. Even though Poilievre called Anderson’s views “vile,” he did nothing to discipline his MPs who lunched with her, and then posed for a group photo.  

Poilievre tried to defend his MPs by claiming that they didn’t know much about Anderson’s views before their meeting. But the organizers who set up the luncheon, Stacey Kauder and Bethan Nodwell, disputed that claim.

Now departed leader Erin O' Toole handled a similar situation quite differently:

The CPC leader’s slackness on this file stands in sharp contrast to what happened to former Conservative MP Derek Sloan. Then-leader Erin O’Toole turfed Sloan from the caucus, in part for taking a campaign contribution from a known white nationalist. Instead of disciplining his MPs for their jaw-dropping lack of judgment in lunching with Anderson, Poilievre said he was more concerned about “the vile and racist views of the prime minister.”  

Yet another personal attack was levelled at the PM over his handling of the so-called Freedom Convoy. Poilievre accused Trudeau of dictatorial overreach, and painted the truckers as regular Canadians just exercising their right to protest. Internal CPC communications at the time showed that the party’s goal was to make Trudeau wear the chaos that overwhelmed the national capital and several border crossings. That effort flopped when the inquiry looking into the fiasco in Ottawa and across the country found that the government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act. The dictator suddenly turned into a justified and competent crisis manager.

In the first three months of his leadership, Poilievre posted the worst favourability rating of recent CPC leaders, at just 33 per cent. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, and O’Toole all posted better numbers in their first three months. Poilievre also sat on the wrong side of a gender divide when it came to female voters. Just 22 per cent of them had a favourable view of the new CPC leader, while Justin Trudeau stood at 50 per cent approval.  

The problem with Poilievre's approach is that it eventually backfires. What goes around comes around.

Image: The Hill Times

The Beginning

Some people believe that the Manhattan D.A.'s case against Donald Trump is small potatoes. Michelle Goldberg disagrees:

It is a mistake to treat this indictment — which, according to The New York Times, includes more than two dozen counts — as tangential to Trump’s other misdeeds. The conduct at issue in this case is directly tied to the 2016 election and the question of whether Trump cheated to win it.

Most of the legal trouble that Trump has faced since entering politics has stemmed from his willingness to skirt the law and, at times, betray the country in his drive to get and keep power. Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation didn’t prove that he engaged in a criminal conspiracy, but it did show that his campaign both “welcomed” and received Russian help in his first bid for president. Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019, was about his attempt to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Joe Biden, the rival he most feared.

Trump is under criminal investigation in Georgia and Washington, D.C., for his attempts to subvert the outcome in the 2020 race. Each time he failed to face consequences for breaching rules meant to safeguard America’s electoral system, he escalated his behavior, to the point of attempting a coup. Escaping conviction in his second impeachment, for trying to overthrow the democratic system he was sworn to protect, he now treats Jan. 6 as something heroic, honoring rioters at his most recent campaign rally.

The Manhattan case is part of a pattern of anti-democratic behaviour:

As The Wall Street Journal reported, in addition to hearing about the payoff to the porn film star Stormy Daniels, the grand jury in New York heard extensive questioning about the payoff to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal. Both women were going to tell their stories before the 2016 election. Unlawful means were used to silence them, which is why Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, went to prison.

As Cohen told a judge while pleading guilty to campaign finance crimes, tax evasion and bank fraud in 2018, his payments to Daniels and McDougal were made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” David Pecker, the former C.E.O. of American Media, onetime parent company of the National Enquirer, said in a non-prosecution agreement with the Southern District of New York that he’d paid $150,000 to McDougal to “suppress the model’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

It should matter whether Trump broke the law in the service of securing his minority victory. Especially given all the evidence that he continued to defy the law in order to hold on to it.

All the other indictments which will drop are all about that pattern. The Manhattan case is only the first in a long tale of electoral crimes.

Image: MSNBC

Extinct

Erin O'Toole has resigned from Parliament and from the Conservative Party -- proof that the party is still Stephen Harper's party. Harper has been offering advice to the Conservatives. Susan Delacourt writes: 

Harper, on the other hand, offered this advice when he appeared on stage last week at a big conference in Ottawa:

“What I say to Conservative opposition leaders is: your job today, yeah, broadly speaking, indicate a direction you’re going to go, but it’s not to talk about how you would run the country.”

This, Harper said, is the road map to power for current Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — say as little as possible on the hope-and-ideas front.

Mr. Harper is a master of political bait and switch:

What made Harper’s do-nothing advice stand out in this discussion, though, is that it was at direct odds with their recollections of how they led their parties to prominence and, in Harper’s case, power.

Reform almost single-handedly put deficit reduction and constitutional weariness on the political radar in the 1990s and forced the Liberals to adopt those policies. That is absolutely true. Reform’s pressure created the public-opinion conditions for the Liberals’ budget-balancing measures under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

Harper, meanwhile, seems to have developed a case of amnesia about how the Conservatives rode to power in 2006 on the strength of five big priorities, which they hammered home with incredible message discipline and clever marketing in the 2005-06 election campaign. They were, for those who have forgotten: a cut to the GST, $100 cheques for child care, the “accountability act,” cracking down on crime and ending health-care wait times.

What Harper has also forgotten — as many have observed — is that he came into office as one of the most media-friendly politicians of his era. He was a regular on TV political panels. He frequently held long, answer-filled scrums as Opposition leader. He spoke often to journalists like me, on and off the record.

It was only after he became prime minister that he became overtly hostile to the media — an approach that Poilievre has clearly adopted in opposition.

Harper, showing that old paranoid-PM streak, warned Poilievre last week that to talk openly about hopes and ideas would be to fall into a trap with the “liberal media.”

There were two Stephen Harpers. We shouldn't forget who the real one was. I suspect that there are also two Pierre Poilievres. What the two Harpers and Poilievres are telling us is that there is no such species as a Progressive Conservative anymore. They are all extinct.

Image: The Toronto Star

It's On

Yesterday, a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Donald Trump. Trump called the indictment "unthinkable." Apparently not. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made history on Thursday, indicting a former U.S. president for the first time. The indictment is under seal. From all indications, however, former president Donald Trump was indicted for falsification of business records (a crime regularly prosecuted under New York law), beginning before the 2016 election. (The hush-money payments continued during his presidency.) If news reports are correct that Trump was indicted for a felony, Bragg will have cited another crime that Trump allegedly furthered through bookkeeping shenanigans.

Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump, told me, “This is the first step in true legal accountability. But it will be important to remember that the rule of law requires us to presume him innocent now that he is a criminal defendant.”

Contrary to some commentators’ argument that New York law might be preempted by federal law, a Just Security report makes clear that plenty of state laws are not preempted, including “a limitation on corporate contributions to federal campaigns; a violation of consumer protection laws … and fraudulent transfers of donations from PACs ostensibly founded to support presidential campaigns.” Bragg has a strong case that Trump’s attempt to conceal hush money is precisely the sort of skulduggery that states can pursue.

No one knows what is contained in the indictment. Rumour has it that Trump faces indictment on over thirty counts. Republican reaction has been predictable. They have fallen behind Trump and aped his outrage.

Rubin writes that justice has been served. We'll have to wait to see if it is done.

Image:

The Right To Repair

Susan Delacourt writes that buried in the Trudeau government's budget is something called "the right to repair." What does that mean?

It is intended to give Canadians another alternative when faced with broken appliances, electronics or machinery. Too often, the government says, people “are pushed to buy new products rather than repairing the ones they have.”

This new right to repair, to be launched after the usual round of consultations and establishment of frameworks and so on, is far from a marquee item in the 2023 budget unveiled on Tuesday.

But it is a tiny, fitting symbol of a larger message that Justin Trudeau’s government is keen to underline in its eighth year in power and definitely in this year’s budget: Canada is not broken. There’s no need to buy something new.

The Right To Repair is Trudeau's counter to Pierre Polievre's claim that "everything is broken" in Canada:

Trudeau’s government will never concede that the nation is broken or breaking, but it could not deliver a budget in 2023 without at least offering some large reassurances that the nation can still function for its citizens.

So amid all of the heady talk of optimism for the future — fully intended to match U.S. President Joe Biden’s rhetoric in Parliament last week — this is a budget aimed at connecting, or maybe reconnecting, with a jaded citizenry, and open to the idea that things feel broken.

Health-care spending is obviously the biggest-ticket item on this front, with billions headed to the provinces and the establishment of a new dental-care program. Everyone has a right to repair, and that includes bodies and teeth.

But that right extends beyond big-ticket items:

There is $7 million sprinkled over five years to improve service at airports and collect data on what’s going right and wrong. There is $156 million to improve services for veterans. Faster service is promised on passports and immigration backlogs; money will be spent to investigate overpayments of COVID-19 relief. More than $17 million will be spent to up the game of 1-800 government information lines.

All of it speaks to a government that feels the need to tell Canadians that the system still works for ordinary people, despite what Poilievre or those so-called “Freedom Convoy” people have been talking about. The Conservative leader was still saying after Tuesday’s budget release that the Liberals are keeping Canada divided into “have-nots and have yachts.”

Conservatives these days are trying to sell the notion that it's better to burn it down and start all over again. Progressives think they have a better idea.

Image: The Toronto Star

A Vast Empty Space

Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that Canada is helping Mexicans invade the United States. Alex Panetta reports:

Here's an attention-grabbing charge: the idea that Canada might be assisting an invasion of the United States by the other country on the continent.

Even more surprising? The comment came from a member of the United States Congress during a congressional hearing in Washington.

That member was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversy-courting Republican best known as a gleeful flinger of partisan bombs.

It came during a hearing organized by Republicans titled: "Biden's Growing Border Crisis: Death, Drugs, and Disorder on the Northern Border."

Ms. Greene pointed to the number of apprehensions at the Canada-U.S. border:

She alluded to an increase in Mexicans being stopped trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reporting 1,604 such incidents at the northern border in the first four months of this fiscal year compared with 882 for all of last year.

"It's extremely concerning, and dangerous to the United States of America's national security, that Canada's immigration policy allows Mexicans to travel, to Canada, without a visa," Taylor Greene said. 

"It seems that Canada wants to participate in Mexico's invasion of the United States.... They end up coming into the United States."

Those numbers should be placed in context:

The number of apprehensions is indeed up significantly from the last few years. But even at the current pace, Border Patrol Agents would stop fewer than 9,000 people coming from Canada this year; that's less than in the early 2000s, and a rounding error compared to the more than two million on the Mexican border. 

Several Republicans, other than Taylor Greene, went out of their way to point out that their issue wasn't with Canada. The chair of the hearing, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, said: "They're friends — not anything other than that." 

The problem, several Republicans said, was that the northern border is severely understaffed. Barely 10 per cent of U.S. Border Patrol Agents are stationed along the vast Canadian frontier, and even among that limited pool many are seconded for stints at the busier Mexican border.

The head of the U.S. Border Patrol Agents' union, Brandon Judd, said: "It's impossible to patrol the [northern] border." He said there's only one agent every 30 miles (48 kilometres).

Those kinds of details escape Ms. Greene. Americans are proud of their vast empty spaces. One of those spaces sits on Ms. Greene's shoulders.

Image: NY1

A Society That ignores Its Young

Today is budget day. Lots of people have tried to capture Chrystia Freeland's ear. But the young don't have any representation in the budget process. Max Fawcett writes:

They are, after all, getting hosed on any number of fronts right now. That begins with housing, where massively overpriced markets in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver have recently been joined by increasingly unaffordable rental options across the country. And while rising interest rates have taken a bit of froth out of house prices, they’ve also made it far more difficult for new buyers to afford them in the first place.

This has any number of negative knock-on effects, from smaller family sizes and delayed saving for retirement to people being forced to leave places like Toronto and Vancouver for more affordable markets. As the recent net migration data shows, that’s already happening. And while there’s nothing wrong with living somewhere like Edmonton or Regina, there’s a certain unfairness in Canada’s biggest cities effectively pricing out an entire generation.

Then, of course, there’s climate change, where the federal government has simultaneously done more than any before it and not nearly enough for the governments that will come after. As the IPCC’s recent report showed, we’re not moving nearly fast enough to head off the worst potential outcomes from a rapidly warming planet that will be visited almost exclusively on young people and their children. Their anger over our collective indifference to the threat of climate change is both inevitable and understandable, and it’s only going to build with the passage of time.

Folks like me have fared pretty well:

Seniors, on the other hand — and yes, that means you now, baby boomers — continue to get help they probably don’t need. Old Age Security benefits are generous to a fault, with the full amount available to those with incomes as high as $81,000 and partial payouts still made to people making $130,000 a year. In the last budget, the federal government threw in a one-time $500 bonus for anyone over 75 who’s eligible for OAS because … well, why not?

Unlike the Canada Pension Plan, which is funded by both past and present contributions, Old Age Security is paid for by today’s taxpayers. “That means today’s retirees, when they were working, supported a much lower level of elderly benefits compared with today’s workers,” the Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote in a recent op-ed. “And today’s retirees enjoyed much lower costs for education and housing compared with today’s younger people.”

Today's young people could use that kind of help. A society that ignores its young has no future.

Image: AZ Quotes

Beware Netanyahu

The United States is not the only democracy where the rule of law is under attack. Michael Harris writes:

In Israel, the government is run by a prime minister under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, offences that could carry a sentence of more than a decade in prison if they are proven.  

Benjamin Netanyahu became the first PM in Israeli history to be indicted while in office. But it is not his alleged crimes that have recently put him on the front pages of newspapers around the world. After all, he has pled not guilty to all the charges brought against him in 2019, and remains cloaked in the presumption of innocence unless a court finds otherwise.

And Israelis have taken to the streets:

Why have hundreds of thousands of Israelis taken to the streets for weeks to protest against their prime minister and his extreme, right-wing coalition government? Why have some women shown up at these rallies dressed in long, red gowns, like handmaidens from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel?  Why have Israeli opposition members draped themselves in Israel flags during debates in the Knesset?  

It is because their worst fear of what might happen if an indicted person became prime minister has been realized. Netanyahu, himself before the courts, has introduced legislation that would destroy the balance of power between the legislative and judicial branches of government. If Netanyahu gets his way, politicians may soon hold the whip hand over judges in Israel, as they do in autocracies.

That’s because under Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, a simple majority vote in the Knesset would be all that is needed to overturn rulings by Israel’s Supreme Court; so much for the independence of the judiciary. It’s not a bad card to hold if you happen to be under indictment. Perhaps that’s why former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader Yair Lapid has called Netanyahu’s proposed legislation a “corrupt, personalized law,” in which the current PM is “looking out for himself.”

American Republicans have their eyes on Netanyahu:

While Netanyahu has triggered mass civil disobedience in the streets of Jerusalem, with his frontal assault on the independence of the judiciary, the GOP in the United States is veering toward the same outcome. The implications of what Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans are doing is every bit as drastic, extreme, and wildly undemocratic as what the Likud party is doing in Israel.

Consider the stunning developments in U.S. politics in reaction to the multiple criminal investigations into former president—and now presidential candidate—Donald Trump. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is as hopelessly captive to Team Crazy within his own caucus as Netanyahu is to the raging right-wing extremists who made him PM. They want to “investigate” the investigators looking into the Stormy Daniels Affair. Sorry, alleged affair.

Think about that. What McCarthy has ordered, and what has been supported by three GOP committee chairpeople, is dragging the district attorney of the southern district of Manhattan before Congress to answer questions about an ongoing criminal investigation! Think of it as a kind of official obstruction of justice. 

Netanyahu lived and was educated in the United States. You have to wonder if there's something in the water there.

Image: The Hill Times

Poor Donald

Yesterday, we got a preview of what Donald Trump will be talking about for the next year. The New York Times reports that:

Former President Donald J. Trump spent much of his first major political rally of the 2024 campaign portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him, arguing wildly that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”

As a crowd in Waco, Texas, waved red-and-white signs with the words “Witch Hunt” behind him, Mr. Trump devoted long stretches of his speech to his own legal jeopardy rather than his vision for a second term, casting himself as a victim of “weaponization” of the justice system.

“The abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history,” he said.

The speech underscored how Mr. Trump tends to frame the nation’s broader political stakes heavily around whatever issues personally affect him the most. Last year, he sought to make his lies about fraud in his 2020 election defeat the most pressing issue of the midterms. On Saturday, he called the “weaponization of our justice system” the “central issue of our time.” 

Trump insists -- always has insisted -- that he is the central issue of our times. And he intends to keep himself at the centre of his nation's consciousness proclaiming that he is a victim:

Lamenting all the investigations he has faced in the last eight years that have — to date — not resulted in charges, Mr. Trump claimed that his legal predicament “probably makes me the most innocent man in the history of our country.”

We haven't heard the last of Donald. What we will hear is a repeat of what he's been saying for almost a decade. And that looped message simply emphasizes how loopy -- and dangerous -- he is. 

 Image: The New York Times

Biden's Visit

Joe Biden's visit to Ottawa gave Justin Trudeau a boost -- precisely when he needed one. Susan Delacourt writes:

The entire Biden visit, awash in cross-border warmth, doesn’t rescue the prime minister from his domestic political troubles — the ongoing furor over foreign election meddling, for instance. But it is a reminder that Trudeau, more so than many other prime ministers, will have a legacy forged by his relationship with three presidents: Obama, Trump and now Biden. The ways in which those relationships have changed are a reflection of bigger changes in the world, and in the leaders’ own jobs.

It isn’t just Trudeau’s future that hinges on his relationship with the United States either — it’s Canada’s. In a world roiling with war in Ukraine, climate change and the spread of authoritarianism, nationalism and disinformation, Canada and the U.S. will probably have to cling even closer to each other.

Biden has known three generations of Trudeaus:

Fifty-one years ago, when Biden’s daughter and his first wife tragically died in a car accident, he received a call of condolence from then prime minister Pierre Trudeau — a gesture he’s never forgotten, the president told Justin Trudeau in one of their early meetings.

Biden definitely is a politician more of the elder Trudeau’s vintage, and there is a temptation to see their relationship in terms of father and son, or “mentor to mentee,” as former U.S. ambassador Gordon Giffin said in a television interview on Friday.

But the tumultuous events of the past few years have often turned that dynamic upside down, with Trudeau finding himself in the role of explainer to the chief — specifically, filling in Biden on how much the world changed during the four years he was out of the White House.

One of Biden’s last trips as vice-president, the one that has been much recalled this week, was his December 2016 visit to Ottawa, when he famously asked Trudeau to carry the torch of progressive values into the world as the Obama era was ending and the Trump years were just beginning.

Trudeau made specific reference to that visit at his news conference on Friday and to the “sometimes challenging times” the two men have faced since then.

New polling from Abacus Data, out this week, show that Trudeau still can boast that things are going mostly right on this big thing. In a poll of nearly 2,000 Canadians conducted last weekend, a full 61 per cent responded that Trudeau had managed the U.S. relationship as well or better than could be expected.

That’s certainly a more positive poll result than many others the PM has faced in recent days and may even surprise his most staunch critics. But that’s become a defining feature of Trudeau’s years in power — presidents, whether foes like Trump or friends like Biden and Obama — have given him a boost.

Sometimes people are in the right place at the right time.

Image: The Toronto Star

Beware The Madness

In Ottawa, politicians are working themselves into a lather over China. It's the kind of thing that's been going on in the United States for almost a decade. Glen Pearson writes:

There are those occasions when scandals appeal to citizens and institutions alike. The clearest example has been occurring 24/7 south of the border.  Fixation with Donald Trump’s activities is the stuff of water coolers, coffee shops, board rooms, law offices, and political hallways.  And in Canada, there is an increasing likelihood that the scandal swirling around China’s election interference will dominate the political agenda for the foreseeable future.

The circus atmosphere around Trump is akin to a feeding frenzy across the country – polls show it, and media empires bank on it.  Yet north of the border, coverage of Chinese political intrigue is landing with a thud.  While the Trump story has been unfolding for years, reaching every part of the country, Canadians view the election meddling by the Chinese government with a “meh” mentality.  It’s fairly recent.  It’s beyond much of our understanding.  And it’s not getting the purchase in this country that media and political elites had hoped.

Why the difference?

This week, a cross-party grouping of Ontario MPPs gathered at Queen’s Park to hear stories of how the province’s food banks are at the breaking point.  Politicians of all stripes sat in silence as they heard moving stories of long-term disability clients considering ending their lives following a decade of having their support payments frozen.  Food bank leaders spoke of being close to going under and that if the political class didn’t act urgently, the bottom would fall out on hunger and homelessness.  But how will that happen when partisanship runs so strong?  In my city of London, Ontario, all three provincial members are NDP, while the provincial government is Conservative and its federal cousin Liberal.  What are the chances they will collaborate to stave off what will be a crisis?

Broaden that reality a little further and you hear of millions of Canadians experiencing difficulty facing accommodation costs.  Concerns over high food prices are now endemic.  Lack of access to institutional healthcare continues to be near the top of polling about what Canadians are most worried about.

These are the daily realities and hurdles faced by average Canadian families.  In their struggle to overcome these economic challenges, they have little time to dedicate to an electoral scandal perpetuated from the other side of the world.  Are they concerned?  Yes.  But is it a priority, given all the economic pressures just listed?  No.  They just aren’t that into China, especially following years of growing disinterest in elections and political shenanigans.

Politicians are disconnected from their voters. We should beware of China. But, more than that, we should beware of the madness that would have us eat our own.

Image: Lightbringers

Profiting From Experience

Joe Biden will arrive in Ottawa this afternoon. He and Justin Trudeau will have a lot to talk about during his short visit. Linda McQuaig hopes that Biden will offer Justin some good advice on how to tax the wealthy:

Joe Biden is proposing a number of measures, including an ambitious minimum tax on the wealthiest Americans — in the first big tax grab on the wealthy since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

A fierce fight over taxing the wealthy looms in the U.S. The Democrats came close to passing a version of Biden’s minimum tax last year and could succeed if they regain control of Congress in 2024.

This trail-blazing by Biden, a centrist Democrat, should stiffen the spine of Canada’s strikingly timid “progressive” politicians. (While polls show more than 80 per cent of Canadians support a wealth tax, support is particularly strong among progressives.)

A wealth tax, aimed exclusively at Canadians with net assets above $10 million, could raise $28 billion a year — enough to seriously enhance key social welfare programs, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Those trying to avoid it would face a steep exit tax.

Yet, among major parties, the NDP alone advocates a wealth tax and leader Jagmeet Singh doesn’t talk much about it. Why didn’t he insist it be part of the NDP accord with the Liberals?

The central problem is that the super-rich tie up their wealth in legal tax shelters:

That’s because their wealth is largely held in corporate stock and, unless they sell stock and trigger a capital gain, no income tax applies.

So, rather than sell stock, the superrich can finance their lavish lifestyles by borrowing from banks, which happily lend them ample funds at very low rates — an option not available to those without a fortune to serve as collateral.

Biden's solution is to impose a minimum tax:

Biden’s minimum tax would close this gaping loophole by taxing the superrich on how much their shares appreciate in value, whether cashed in or not. This could add millions — even billions — of dollars a year to the tax bill of an ultra-wealthy American. (By comparison, Canada’s luxury tax might add thousands of dollars to the tax bill of an ultra-wealthy Canadian.)

Our prime minister lacks the boldness of mild-mannered Biden, so does nothing to grab a share of the immense wealth going straight to the top as Canada’s billionaires — and there are dozens of them, including some mega-billionaires — have seen their wealth grow by an astonishing 51 per cent since the pandemic began.

Biden will have a tough time getting his plan through Congress. But he spent decades there. He knows how things work. Justin could profit from Biden's experience.

Image: CTV News