If I were advising on-the-ropes Toronto Mayor Rob Ford I’d advise him to get ahead of this story by becoming the first major elected official to come out in favor of medical crack. Instead he’s come forward with perhaps the most painful non-denial crack denial ever.
That’s what we’re discussing right now over at TPMPrime.
A federal judge has handed Joe Arpaio a stinging defeat late today in Arizona, ruling that the sheriff’s office racially profiled Latinos during immigration sweeps.
You have no doubt heard the on-going saga of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Though the video has never been publicly shown, three reporters have allegedly seen video of Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine with a group of Somali immigrant drug dealers. They appear to be the ones who are shopping the video of Ford smoking said crack. For the last week or more he’s been dodging the press and clearly unwilling and presumably unable to deny the videos existence or authenticity. Yesterday he emerged to give a classic non-denial denial of his apparent drug use.
Looking at this from the outside, setting aside that it’s problematic to have a serving mayor caught on tape doing drugs, I’ve had to ask: how does the sitting Mayor end up carousing with Somali crack dealers and smoking crack? Well, we may have an answer. The Globe and Mail has just published a lengthy, very lengthy look at the Ford family. And basically all Ford’s siblings have substantial past ties to the drug trade. Read More
A mayor in Japan suggested that U.S. troops would be less likely to commit sex crimes if they visited more local adult biz establishments instead. He has now apologized.
Up until now every day seems to bring a new revelation of Toronto’s fun-loving politics and drug underworld family, the Fords. Yesterday, after calling the Toronto media a “bunch of maggots”, Mayor Rob Ford denied the very existence of the purported video at the center of the evolving scandal. But today, the Globe and Mail reports the story is moving to a whole new and potentially terrifying level – much more serious but no less bizarre. Read More
Here’s one of the Memorial Day stories that will challenge and perhaps slay your cynicism. A soldier who was killed by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific War had kept a diary focused in no small part on his High School sweetheart who he asked as his “last life request” to get the diary if he was killed. That didn’t happen until 70 years later when she finally saw the diary in a museum. Read.
I feel a bit of uncertainty about broaching this subject on a day set aside for unity. But I couldn’t help but mention it after reading this opinion piece by Jamie Malanowski from the Times on May 25th. The gist is that there are 10 U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. At the risk of stating the obvious, these are men who broke their allegiance to the United States, fought against the United States and either directly or indirectly were responsible for killing numerous members of the United States Army (mainly Army, though Marines and Sailors too.)
This is a complicated story, there are a lot of choices and compromises that were made to stitch the American union back together in its inner places, after it had been forced back together by military victory. Read More