Getting ready for tonight’s SFH session, and dug up this old Hot Nasties tune for us to try – Getawayfromme.

Boy, I was an angry young man.  (Who has become an angry old man.)

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As I have done for years – and as I have remembered since that day, when I was a boy in Dallas – today I remember the death of Martin Luther King.  As before, this segment from his most-remembered speech.

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Yaffe’s right – Trudeau has basically erased the Mulcair Dippers’ public profile.

But the process was underway well before Justin Trudeau became a leadership candidate. Bob Rae, and his caucus, have been punching above their weight for two years. The result – contrary to what I, and others, predicted – has been the Liberals soundly beating the NDP in media coverage.

And, now, the polls.

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I wrote a couple weeks ago that I was fed up, to the teeth, with the incessant nattering in Toronto about transit. “Two things that drive me nuts about Toronto, ” I wrote.  “One, the manic focus on transit issues, 24/7, to the total exclusion of all other issues, like poverty, health, crime, environment, etc.  Two, the fact that, despite the continual yammering about transit, nothing ever friggin’ gets done about transit.”

Some of you were surprised, however, when I suggested yesterday that the historically-huge Metrolinx/Big Move price tag was a career-ender for most politicians.  Some of you reacted with astonishment that Warren – A progressive! A liberal! – could have the gall to decline to swallow the Metrolinx stuff hook, line and sinker.  How dare he!  Such effrontery!

Well, too friggin’ bad.  My take on these things is pretty simple.  Here it is, in six digestible nuggets, none of which come with a multi-billion-dollar price tag, and on which no experts were consulted.

•  When a city – any city – gets bigger, it becomes harder to get around.  If you want a two-minute commute, move to Bancroft.  Duh.
• Polls show urban folks consider transportation issues to be numero uno, I know.  Polls also show they don’t want to pay for it.  Also, they favour unicorns.
• The so-called experts don’t have a single, understandable solution.  They fight about everything.  And they couldn’t organize a two-house paper route, let alone intelligently design an entire transportation system for a big city.
• Citizens might’ve gone along with paying more for a better commute – if they hadn’t seen successive governments, at all levels, for decades, promise transportation bliss and deliver yet more gridlock and empty treasuries.  Oh, and stuff like Ornge and the 407 sure don’t help, either.  Nope.
• The political pay-off is too removed from the pay-up: that is, those of us paying now won’t see a meaningful improvement in our lifetimes.  We’ll be residents of the dirt farm, by then.  In politics, that’s called the Get Defeated Quick Scheme.
• Again, I am SICK – as a progressive, as a liberal – of this goddamn issue eating up the entire political landscape, every single bloody day.  Can we not focus on some other issues, for once – say, a dramatically-aging population, and an increasingly-expensive health care system?  The fact that violent crimes are claiming the lives of too many young men? That our mayor is a certifiable lunatic?

Anyway, thus concludes my rant.  Any politician who wants to stake their political future on getting voters to pay yet more for what they feel their tax dollars should already be funding is hurtling towards ignominious defeat, full stop (cf. The Green Shift, RIP).  And I don’t care if they’re red, blue or orange.  They’re, ahem, roadkill if they think the Metrolinx price tag is comprehensible, let alone saleable.

So, after all that, I can see the transit Philistines angrily demanding that I, Warren, come up with a solution to our transit woes.

My answer?  There isn’t one.  And, again, if you don’t like how hard it is getting around where you live?

Move to the country.

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Yep.

Good thing.

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Perhaps that silly sally at Sun News, and the “explosive” media tour, wasn’t such a hot idea after all.

Meanwhile, somewhere, one of Canada’s most principled journalists is frantically trying to figure out how to scrub stuff from the Internet.

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He’s been denied his ridiculous demand for compensation in the conflict of interest case, as expected.

What’s fascinating, however, is that the Divisional Court seems to be suggesting that he shouldn’t expect the coming Supreme Court hearing to go his way, either:

• They take pains to note that he lost on three of the four grounds he argued on appeal – ie., don’t get cocky, sonny.
• They characterize the case as a “significant” matter of “public interest” – which is effectively the threshold you need to meet to get the high court to hear your case.

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I have more than 5,000 Facebook “friends.” Except, as you might expect, they’re not all friends.  Some are Facebook fiends.

Because Facebook comments are unmoderated, stupid things sometimes happen on my Facebook profile. When I am over there, I will whack the stupid comments, or (sometimes) block the stupid people.  I do my best, but I can’t be there all the time.

Last night, two guys named Bruce and Robin got into a fight about something. What it was is irrelevant. Bruce called Robin a “retard,” however, and I think there were comments made about medication.

Anyhow, Son One – who is a night owl, who has won awards for helping out the less-fortunate, and who has been having a tough time with his broken hip from a hockey tournament in London – got involved in Bruce and Robin’s fight.

Again, I’m not totally clear on the context. But I read Son One’s comment, early this morning, with a mixture of sadness and pride. Pride because there he was again, defending others. And sadness because his vocabularly suggests to me that he is not a little boy anymore. When he was, just yesterday.

Anyway. Just thought I would share it with you.

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If you impose tolls and yet more taxes to pay for this Metrolinx thing, you’re all dead men (and women) walking. Make better use of the tax dollars we already entrust you to manage. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Warren and four million friends

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