Right here.

BC NDP leader is a condescending, sexist creep to BC's Premier. Because she's a woman. from Warren Kinsella on Vimeo.

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Who’d ever say that to a woman?

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If you guessed John Horgan, BC NDP leader, you’d guess right. He said it today to BC Premier Christy Clark. Link here.

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This is Kim Campbell Week One level self-immolation, folks. Holy shit.

BREAKING: #BCNDP leader reveals self to be sexist, insulting, condescending creep. Wow. #BCpoli #BCelxn2017 https://t.co/5YlVrlSVXJ

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 20, 2017

"I'll watch you for a while, I know you like that…" Horgan to Clark. #bcelxn17

— Gregor Craigie (@GregorCraigie) April 20, 2017

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Here’s the dope on dope, from an old Straight Edge punk, in a handy bulleted, bolded list.

• It’s a drug.  When prescribed, it should be only available from pharmacists.
• It’s an intoxicant.  Unlike booze, it isn’t hardly linked to violence, which is good.  And, unlike booze, it’s still hard to figure out its intoxicating effects on someone behind the wheel.  Not good.
• It’s a weed.  I don’t drink or take drugs or have ever smoked.  The idea of setting fire to a weed and inhaling the resulting smoke doesn’t seem like a super good idea, whether the weed is tobacco or marijuana.
• It’s a trade barrier.  Or it will be.  Donald Trump is the most anti-trade occupant of the Oval Office, ever.  He’s already bashing Canada.  He will use dope as pretext to slow down/stop cross-border trade.  Just watch.
• It’s boring.  It is is, it is.  In a world buffeted by war and terrorism and misery, like ours is, it’s fair to posit that cannabis has occupied way, way too much bandwidth.  It’s a good thing for sick people, so make sure they can get it at their drug store, and stop yammering about it all the time.

What do you think, O Smart Readers? Got a 420 take on toke?  Comment away.

 

 

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…because it’s really paying off:

“We are also going to stand up for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin. And I’ve been reading about it, I’ve been talking about it for a long time, and that demands, really, immediately, fair trade, with all of our trading partners. And that includes Canada,” [Trump] said Tuesday, raising his voice to emphasize the country.

“Because in Canada, some very unfair things have happened to our dairy farmers and others.”

As I’ve been writing for months, a Neville Chamberlain strategy doesn’t work. All that strong men understand is strength.

Sucking up to the likes of Donald Trump strengthens his hand, and weakens ours. And it makes us look weak, too.

My radical advice: try acting like a strong, sovereign nation for a few days. And, if you don’t like it, you can go back to being a supplicant, who lets the bully steal your lunch, day after day.

 

 

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Check out this New York Times chart:

This special election was for a vacated seat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District.  It was a solid, long-time Republican fortress, formerly held by Tom Rice and Newt Gingrich.  It hasn’t sent a Democrat to the House of Representatives since the Carter administration, forty years ago.

Had 30-year-old newcomer Jon Ossoff won just a few more votes, he would have been elected outright last night.  He now faces a run-off against his nearest GOP challenger – a Trump supporter who got 55,000 fewer votes.

Donald Trump, that combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, sausage-fingered groper-in-chief, is an albatross around the jowly necks of every Republican, now.  And he is hurting conservative causes everywhere, even in far-away Europe (see here and here).

The mid-terms, if Agent Orange makes it that far, will be a historic disaster for the Republicans.  And Donald Trump will be the reason.

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Now in HuffPo, here.  Per the old saw, it’s the cover-up, and seldom the break-in:

Such mistakes can have profound consequences, if you don’t deal with them quickly. Personally, I am always a big fan of Bible-thumping Republican/Conservative politicians who regularly denounce gays/abortion/infidelity — and then, subsequently and inevitably, get caught having gay sex/procuring abortions/working with sex workers. Without fail, they end up exposed as sweaty, creepy, debauched nut bars, not self-professed men of God. And regular folks — as United, Pepsi and the White House certainly discovered in recent days — punish them not for the sin, but for the hypocrisy.

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So, there’s a Toronto Star story this morning about Kathleen Wynne’s political future. By my count, it has five sources in it who are quoted directly, but not named. There are three other people quoted in it: Wynne, her Finance Minister, and a guy who doesn’t want to be quoted.

A snippet:

Sources told the Star that more than a dozen MPPs are looking at not running again in the 2018 election over fears they will lose their seats due to her unpopularity.

No MPPs will yet speak publicly about the potential exodus — more out of their personal regard for Wynne than‎ due to a fear of retribution.

But some are known to be considering an appeal to her en masse‎ to share their worries about the future.

Quite apart from whether this kind of story is fair to Kathleen Wynne or not – she’s in politics, and she has likely authorized many people to speak anonymously on her behalf over the years – this kind of story is possibly unfair to readers. Among other things, these sorts of tales require the reader to trust the paper, trust the reporter, and – most importantly – trust the anonymous source.

Should we? I mean, if these folks feel so passionately about the need for Kathleen Wynne to step down, shouldn’t they say so, publicly?  Shouldn’t they attach their name to their conviction?

I like what the International Journalists’ Network has to say about the issue:

Media professionals everywhere in the world grapple with the thorny issue of anonymity. It can be a double-edged sword.

According to the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), “Anonymous sources are sometimes the only key to unlocking a big story, throwing back the curtain on corruption, fulfilling the journalistic missions of watchdog on the government and informant to citizens. But sometimes, anonymous sources are the road to the ethical swamp.”

The SPJ code of ethics makes two important points on anonymity:

1. Identity sources whenever possible. The public is entitled to as much information as can be provided on sources’ reliability.

2. Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.

The problem surfaced recently in The New York Times’ newsroom. In March, the newspaper’s top management cracked down on anonymity, sparked by readers’ complaints about “persistent” use of unnamed sources. The new guidelines require editors to approve the use of anonymity in stories.

“Direct quotes from anonymous sources should be used rarely, and only when such quotes are pivotal to the story,” according to the July 15 article explaining the crackdown. “At least one editor must know the specific identity of any anonymous source before publication.”

The Toronto Star is one of the best newspapers in the world. It is. The reporter in question has been on the Queen’s Park beat for many years, and is considered to really know his stuff. And, as noted, Kathleen Wynne is a grown-up politician, and she knows how the game is played.

But, if you were to ask the public about important public issues – say, who their Premier is, and is going to be – they would probably indicate a preference for knowing who a source is, and what that person’s agenda is, so they can decide whether he or she is credible or not.

It’s not that reputable reporters or newspapers lie: in my experience, that almost never happens outside of Russia and dictatorships.  It’s that anonymous sources do.

So, at the end of this windy exposition, does anyone have a clear sense of what is happening with Kathleen Wynne?

No, not really.  And that’s the problem with the false god of anonymous sources: you just don’t know, you know?

 

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…and the other is the Easter Bunny. 

Caption of Holy Week, folks, right here. 

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer standing at the door to a United Airlines plane, sipping a Pepsi. 

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, and it assuredly is, then that would be the picture for the past few days. To wit:

 · United Airlines forcibly “re-accommodated” a Vietnamese-American physician out of the seat he had paid for on an oversold flight in Chicago, smashed his face against an arm rest, broke his nose and some teeth, then blamed him for being “disruptive.” When that turned out to be a bald-faced lie – and when a global backlash resulted in United losing $1 billion in value in just 24 hours – the airline did a whiplash-inducing about-face, and apologized, and said it would never happen again, blah blah blah.

· Pepsi’s in-house “creative team” put together a commercial featuring one of the Kardashian Cretin Crew modelling, then rushing outside to join a passing protest, with lots of knowing nods and fist-bumps ensuing. The Kardsahian Cretin – famous-for-nothing Kendall Jenner, who later insisted she was “traumatized” by the ensuing mean tweets – hands a grateful cop a can of Pepsi, and all is well in the world. Take that, Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, et al.: you wouldn’t have so many darn problems if you bought the right soft drink! Global backlash, withdrawal of ad, groveling apologies, blah blah blah.

· Sean Spicer, the groper-in-chief’s liar-in-chief, (a) calls the Nazi gas chambers “Holocaust centres,” quote unquote; (b) repeatedly mispronounces the name of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who his boss had just, you know, bombed; and (c) says Hitler didn’t use “chemical weapons” on millions of Jews, gays, gypsies and dissidents when, in fact, he had. Standing before the assembled White House –all of them agog and agape – Spicer said: “You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” Immediately, the Anne Frank Centre and many others demanded Spicer be fired. Spicer retracted, apologized, blah blah blah.

Quite a week, eh? It all reminded me of a long-ago Canadian equivalent. During the year 2000 federal election campaign, former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day – who, it should be noted, this writer always thought bore more than a passing resemblance to Dan Quayle, of potato/potatoe infamy – decided to use Niagara Falls as a backdrop to a campaign announcement.

Standing at the falls’ edge, Day attempted to draw an analogy between the flow of Lake Erie from “north to south” and the “brain drain” from Canada to the United States. A reporter from the area pointed out to Day that, in fact, the relevant body of water drained from “south to north.” Oops!

Missing a golden opportunity to poke fun at himself, and thereby seem as human, Day darkly warned that he would “check the record, and if someone has wrongly informed me about the flow of this particular water, I’ll be having a pretty interesting discussion with them.” So, not only did Day succeed in making himself look like a dummy, he also came across sounding like a dummy who couldn’t take responsibility for his own mistakes.

Such mistakes can have profound consequences, if you don’t deal with them quickly. Personally, I am always a big fan of Bible-thumping Republican/Conservative politicians who regularly denounce gays/abortion/infidelity – and then, subsequently and inevitably, get caught having gay sex/procuring abortions/working with sex workers. Without fail, they end up exposed as sweaty, creepy, debauched nut bars, not self-professed men of God. And regular folks – as United, Pepsi and the White House certainly discovered in recent days – punish them not for the sin, but for the hypocrisy.

The lesson, naturally, is that candidates/companies/communicators should, if the circumstances warrant, ’fess up, laugh at themselves, then move on. Periodically falling on one’s sword is an excellent strategy. Always.

In this writer’s experience, voters and consumers are forgiving. They are profoundly aware of the tendency of humans to have human failings, being human beings themselves. And, as long as mistakes are not being made all the time – cf. Messrs. Day, Quayle and Spicer, above – they will forgive and forget and move on.

Apologies cost nothing. Retractions are free. Once given – unequivocally, sincerely, directly, and without condition – they have magical healing powers.

But the best approach, of course, is to avoid making the dumb mistake in the first place.

Sean Spicer, sipping a Pepsi on that United flight to ignominy, would certainly agree.

 

 

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