The white supremacist who is running the Disunited States of America wants to abolish affirmative action.  No surprise there.

It is a surprise, however, when I sometimes hear this from otherwise-intelligent white people: “Why do we need affirmative action, anyway?  It isn’t fair.”

And I always provide them with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s address at Howard University on June 4, 1965:

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.

To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in–by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.

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Full disclosure: I hadn’t watched The National in a long time. It was just, well, boring. Sorry, Peter et al. 

These changes at The National are therefore smart – and needed.
I like that these people are mostly experienced journalists. I like that they will be working out of the regions. I like that CBC has abandoned the boring-old-fart approach to news that drove away lots of viewers like me. 

I am naturally biased, of course, by the fact that one of my closest friends is the managing editor of this budding journalistic enterprise.  I have a high regard for his news sense and his common sense. 

But I’d like this even if he wasn’t involved. It was time for some big changes at CBCs flagship televised news program. Not radical changes-for-change sake, mind you, but ones that reflect the way Canadian journalism needs to be delivered now.

This does that.

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So, there’s this quote in the Rolling Stone paean to Justin Trudeau:

“I wanted someone who would be a good foil, and we stumbled upon the scrappy tough-guy senator from an Indigenous community. He fit the bill, and it was a very nice counterpoint,” Mr. Trudeau says in the article. “I saw it as the right kind of narrative, the right story to tell.”

That’s the Prime Minister talking in the American magazine about his 2012 charity boxing match against Patrick Brazeau, a Conservative Senator who is part of the Kitigan Zibi First Nation in Quebec.

Lots of indigenous leaders are upset about that quote, and you can (hopefully) see why.  Stories here and here and here.

Indigenous leaders are quite capable of speaking for themselves, on this one.  They don’t need me. But there was something else about that quote that was kind of off-putting.

It sounded calculated.  It sounded like he was admitting to a manipulation.  It felt cynical.

Now, politicians do calculated, manipulative, cynical things all the time – Hell, some would say that’s all they do.

But Trudeau’s big mistake, here – along with sounding like he was singling out an indigenous leader for a literal beating, his soaring rhetoric about indigenous issues notwithstanding – was talking about strategy in the media.  He was talking about how sausages are made, in effect.

Kinsella’s Political Axiom, No. 142: don’t talk about how you make sausages.  Also: about sausage-making, do not talk.

Anyway.  Nanos tells us this morning he’s got nothing to worry about, and perhaps he doesn’t.  I would simply remind my Liberal friends that our greatest occupational hazard is – always, always – arrogance.

Arrogance is what gets us beaten in elections – although not, apparently, in the boxing ring.

UPDATE: He has expressed regret for the words he used. Here. Good. 

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Holy shit la merde.

Roughly half of voters in Toronto — a traditional Liberal stronghold – would cast ballots for the Tories with less than a year to go before Ontarians head to the polls, according to a new public-opinion survey.

Among decided and leaning voters, 49 per cent said they would vote for the Progressive Conservatives if the next election – scheduled for June 7, 2018 – were held today, while 31 per cent would support the Grits. Fifteen per cent said they would opt for the New Democrats and 5 per cent would pick the Green Party.

That’s the upshot from a Mainstreet Research poll provided exclusively to QP Briefing Monday. Pollsters surveyed 2,000 Torontonians on July 9 and July 10 via landlines and cellphones, and the poll is considered accurate within 2.19 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

That’s The Board, for you: not merely content with wrecking the federal Liberal Party, they’ve now selflessly wrecked the provincial Liberal Party, too! Way to go, Wizard!

More than a decade in the wilderness. That’s what this means. 

Get ready. 

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I love #USpolitics. pic.twitter.com/uRWpLHayYK

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 31, 2017

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Glen Murray, the Ontario minister of the environment, is gone. Some may interpret this as a loss for Kathleen Wynne. It isn’t.

It’s awesome.

One, I know Glen Murray. I’ve briefly worked with Glen Murray. I don’t like Glen Murray. Neither do a lot of people who are obliged to deal with him.  He doesn’t listen, and he considers himself the centre of the Universe.

Two, he is the loosest of loose cannons.  Hell, he’s rolling all around the deck, crashing into innocent bystanders, 24/7.  He was a migraine for successive Premiers.  He won’t be recalled fondly by a lot of the people who run the show, believe me.

Three, as the Star smartly points out, Kathleen Wynne doesn’t have to have a by-election to replace him – but, even if she does, she’ll easily win again in Toronto Centre.  That’s the safest Liberal seat in the province after Ottawa Vanier.

Glen Murray didn’t even have the grace to announce his departure in Toronto, in the seat he had the privilege to represent.  He did it with a statement issued out of Calgary.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Glen.  You won’t be missed.

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By a former speechwriter to a Republican president. It’s deadly. 

The president’s primary problem as a leader is not that he is impetuous, brash or naive. It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider. It is that he is weak and sniveling. It is that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity.

He’s not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He’s a drama queen. It was once said, sarcastically, of George H.W. Bush that he reminded everyone of her first husband. Trump must remind people of their first wife. Actually his wife, Melania, is tougher than he is with her stoicism and grace, her self-discipline and desire to show the world respect by presenting herself with dignity.

Half the president’s tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little cries, usually just after dawn. 

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On the porch. Sunday New York Times read (and you must, must read Dowd). Lala asleep. Dogs mauling each other. 

Sleep was elusive, so I got up and a thought occurred (they do, infrequently): I have these years where I get more “creative.”  It’s true. (“Creative” is in flying quotes because I lack another word.) 

The year done, I lapse back into somnolence. 

So, 2005 saw the first SFH record and Fury’s Hour.  

In 2007, the second SFH waxing, Wheel of Wow, and The War Room.

In 2011-2, the third SFH record, WDYHM (now purged of sexism on iTunes, long story) came out, and so did Fight the Right.

And, this annum, the fourth (and indisputably best) SFH long-play, SFH KINDA SUCK, and the newest door-stopper (that’s what Pete Donolo called my books, once, and I am sometimes reminded of that when scanning bookstore shelves for Pete’s own contributions), Recipe for Hate.

Could be a coincidence, but I am starting to wonder. Could something else be at work here, amateur shrinks out there in the dark?

Anyway. Going to keep going. Each day like it’s your last, etc. 

The year the tenth book comes out, however, I will drop dead. You can take that to the bank. 

Punk rock will be played at the wake. You’re invited. 

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Hey, look what was waiting for me upon my return from the West!

Book eight – out this Fall on Dundurn!

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Coming to iTunes next month!

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