From ‘Pretty Girls’ on Miami by Against Me! Watch. 

  

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My friend of several decades, Bob, is recognized this morning in The New York Times, no less:

“The bid, mounted in 2009, was largely the work of Bob Richardson, a public relations executive and high-level Liberal Party strategist. Mr. Richardson was a driving force in an unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games…”

The story itself is needlessly bitchy, but it was at least nice to see Bob’s efforts on behalf of amateur sport – which go back two decades – being recognized. He’s not a politician or a political staffer or a millionaire with a private jet – he’s a regular private citizen, who brought the Pan Am Games to Toronto. Think about that.

Why aren’t all the Pan Am events sold out? It has nothing to do with the Games themselves, I think, and more to do with a Toronto-centric phenomenon I have written about before: the Maple Leafs Syndrome. To wit: “…the source of the Rob Ford problem isn’t, in fact, Rob Ford. It’s the people who put him in office. It’s Torontonians themselves, afflicted as they are by Maple Leafs Syndrome. In Toronto, you can put crap on the ice, year after year — you can put trailer park trash in charge of the city — and Torontonians will keep doing what they always do about things that are a joke, a farce, a source of bottomless shame. Which is, mostly, nothing.”

In the 18 years I have been temporarily resident here, I have observed that the good people in Toronto can’t get excited about anything, ever. In all my time here, I have not once see Torontonians get worked up anything. Hell, even when Toronto had unrest at the G20, they had to import the rioters from Vancouver and Montreal.

So, don’t blame my friend Rob, or the three levels of government, for the stuff the New York Times whinges about. Blame Torontonians.

If being listless, limp and languorous were Olympic events, they’d win all the medals.

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Dippers will be over the moon about this, naturally. And who can blame them? No less than Canada’s National Newspaper™, has declared that they will win! To the barricades. 

Um, except:

• John Turner

• Kim Campbell

• Michael Ignatieff

All of those good folks were ahead in the polls the Summer before a federal general election. Hell, in Kim’s case, she was the most popular Prime Minister in the history of polling at this point in July. 

Didn’t quite work out, did it?

Don’t start measuring for drapes in Langevin just yet, Team Orange. A lot can happen between now and E Day. And likely will. 

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…and I even get to cite Gene Simmons of KISS as a source of wisdom! Right here.

He also says I am “one of the most interesting commentators on Earth,” with which I agree.

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…so they go for both possibilities. That’s a newsroom that covers all the angles!

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#NDP on top in three biggest provinces. #CPC and #LPC close behind. Election night’ll be late!

  

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Making the rounds after the collapse of Chinese markets. Here. May not be legit, but after the rout of recent days, may well be!

  

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Read this. 

In this sense, the Greek referendum delivered an insult to 18 countries, including some that are in situations no less difficult than Greece’s and yet have made considerable sacrifices to grant the country, in 2012 alone, €105-billion ($116-billion U.S.) in debt relief while remaining accountable to their own populations. What twist of the mind enables one to call that an “act of resistance” or the “defence of democracy”? Yet many have. 

Indeed, since Sunday’s referendum, many have acted as if Mr. Tsipras were the last euro zone democrat, as if he had faced a “totalitarian” clique (as described by far-right French politician Marine Le Pen) against which he valiantly “stood firm” (in the words of far-left French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon). I will not dwell on Mr. Tsipras’s parliamentary alliance with the conspiracy-minded, right-wing Independent Greeks, whose leaders do not shy away from diatribes against homosexuals, Buddhists, Jews and Muslims. Nor will I dwell on the fact that Mr. Tsipras did not refrain, when assembling parliamentary support for his referendum, from soliciting the support of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, whose help any other European leader would have rejected.

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