Shinan’s dispatch from the front in Tee Dot. Fun writing here.

John Tory, a placid, Bloombergian figure who hails from one of Canada’s establishment clans, eventually grabbed the prize, but not without one perennial gum stuck to his shoe—Rob Ford ran for, and hung on to, his former council seat! 

“John Tory won, but he still acts like he is still running against Rob Ford. And it makes John Tory look like a sore winner.” That’s how pundit Warren Kinsella, a ceaseless critic of the current mayor, characterizes the psycho-dynamics at City Hall to me. 

 In classically good-natured Toronto—the aw-shucks city where Joni Mitchell once busked on the streets, Mike Myers honed his yuk-yuks, and Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village”—there remain remnants of a downtown-suburban class-divide that Ford embodied, leveraged, and exploited. And it’s true enough that the metropolis is still wrapping its head around the legacy of the last four years. 

 “They don’t speak,” a close aide to Tory mentioned recently, speaking to the frost between the mayors, current and present. (A relationship complicated, no doubt, by the fact that Tory was an un-shy booster of Ford, during the 2010 civic elections.) 

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Unlike the Ferguson, Missouri cold-blooded murder of Michael Brown, this cold-blooded murder has been entirely caught on video – and it shows a black man, Walter Scott, running from a white cop, Michael Slager.  Who shoots the unarmed Scott in the back multiple times. And kills him.

This was murder, and that is what the charge is.  If the video didn’t exist, I have no doubt that it would have been Ferguson all over again.

Warning: this is unedited video, and it shows it all.

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You were the first political party I joined, back in 1980. I did so because you were the only sane political party around.

Thirty-five years later, you still are.

• Wildrose will sell itself for a few trinkets, and think government shouldn’t do anything.
• The NDP hate Alberta’s main job-creator, and think government should do everything.
• And the Prentice PCs? They’ve lost their way. They don’t have any values.  And they couldn’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag.

I’ll be with you this weekend in Edmonton, pitching for change – not radical change, like Wildrose and the NDP favour.  Smart, sensible change – change away from a governing PC party that has become cynical and corrupt and complacent.

More details are here.  There’ll be a talk on Saturday night, and a private seminar on running the best possible war room on Sunday morning.  I look forward to meeting each and every one of you!

Sincerely,

Warren

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Recorded on this day in 1963, a veritable gift from God Herself. Listen, know, and heed The Word: G, C, D.

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Since I was a kid – since this day in 1972, in fact, when I started writing a daily journal – I have always taken note of April 4, and said to myself:  “April 4.  Dr. King.”

Today, 47 years ago, Martin Luther King was murdered by a racist in Memphis.  Dr. King was a giant of a man, the one who – as I write in Fight The Right – anticipated the message at the core of the Occupy movement, among other things.  While his message continues to resonate across the decades, the violence of racial hatred continues unabated, too.

It’s April 4, and so I give you some of his most remarkable speech.  Surveying the pygmies who now crowd the public stage, I don’t think we will see the likes of him again.

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I’ll say.

Canadians think we’re in a recession – but the overall trend favours the Conservatives. Canadians don’t like the direction in which the country is going – but the overall trend does not favour the Liberals or their leader. And so on.

Peer at this chart. What it says to me is (a) NDP up; (b) Liberals down; and (c) Harper, not dramatically up, but super happy because the NDP and the Liberals are splitting the progressive share of the vote again. AGAIN.

Watch, tonight, for more numbers on the leaders. It will shock.

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But, boy oh boy, are some people going to be experiencing serious indigestion in Ottawa this weekend.

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Quote:

PHILLIPS, Calif. — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered mandatory water use reductions for the first time in California’s history, saying the state’s four-year drought had reached near-crisis proportions after a winter of record-low snowfalls.

Mr. Brown, in an executive order, directed the State Water Resources Control Board to impose a 25 percent reduction on the state’s 400 local water supply agencies, which serve 90 percent of California residents, over the coming year. The agencies will be responsible for coming up with restrictions to cut back on water use and for monitoring compliance. State officials said the order would impose varying degrees of cutbacks on water use across the board — affecting homeowners, farms and other businesses, as well as the maintenance of cemeteries and golf courses.

Watch this clip if you’re in the mood to feel even worse.

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