AlphaTwo00
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a few were banned.
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Rob Ford: Still smoking crack. On video. Taking leave of absence.
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valkillmore
Member
I am still hearing people defending him on CFRB which is pretty stunning. Though most agree that the drinking and driving bullshit is inexcusable, and it is.
"Ford is a good mayor while on crack, imagine if he was sober!" - Willectro
:lol
A little low to pick on him while he's banned.
I laughed.
The family business his father started (Deco Labels) has made him a millionaire.
Yes. But on the other hand, that was a direct quote.
Seriously? I missed that one. :lol
Onion_Relish
Member
StopMakingSense
Member
I still can't get over this pussy comment. It just never gets old.
I think that one was a joke, though.
2. Mayored.
IISANDERII
Member
I was watching the debate about the waterfront affordable housing and it was a fascinating session and then it was Ford's turn to speak who comes in with this grandiose plan to sell the property for hundreds of millions of dollars and use that money to repair existing housing. That it was illegal to re-appropriate the money in this way didn't bother Ford, no matter how many councillors told him so.
Another awesome part was one of his reasons for needing repairs was that families need larger homes. So he's going to repair them...so they become...larger.
Another awesome part was one of his reasons for needing repairs was that families need larger homes. So he's going to repair them...so they become...larger.
Awwww
speculawyer
Member
Thanks. That's hilarious . . . he just starts to shove it in his mouth but then looks up and stops.
And looping makes it look like it happens over and over again.
Unlikely. I can't believe she's been part of that family for this long and not known about all his fuck ups. If she up and left now, we'd never hear the end of it, just endless ammo for he and Doug.
killer rin
Member
That's not milk
Ford joining in on movember with his milk mustache today!
Supermanisdead
Member
Ford joining in on movember with his milk mustache today!
omg he's just a giant fucking baby. what the fuck.
I think he actually has to use two hands given his girth.
how the hell do you know how big his dick is
huehuehuehuehue
Doesn't seem like that anymore. Initially he got a bump but he's been falling since. He'd lose an election to any other high profile politician who's rumored to be running.
It's funny to watch him respond to the questions by reporters though. The answers are just so absurd.
I did feel sorry for his wife having to come with him especially when the prostitution allegations came up.
ThoughtsOfSpeaking
Banned
No offence guys, but it says a bit about your bureaucratic process that its impossible to get an alcoholic crackhead out of office.
And I wouldn't worry about his future employment. Dude has reality tv written all over his forehead. He is actually going get even richer when he is finally dragged from office.
And I wouldn't worry about his future employment. Dude has reality tv written all over his forehead. He is actually going get even richer when he is finally dragged from office.
And absolutely no one is surprised.
If he gets kicked out of office, he could easily become mayor in thousands of small towns in the US.
PalaceBrother
Member
Quite honestly, the fact that we're making fun of how he drinks milk is really, really sad.
I cannot stand the guy but let's stick to the myriad issues at hand and not add on to the media pile on. Dude needs to go, he is a disaster. No need to pick apart every photo and call his wife ugly.
I cannot stand the guy but let's stick to the myriad issues at hand and not add on to the media pile on. Dude needs to go, he is a disaster. No need to pick apart every photo and call his wife ugly.
I agree with not taking shots at his wife. But picking apart Ford photos was a thing years before the "media pile on" for these latest events. He does make it painfully easy, after all. Don't like it? Ignore it.
He acts like a child when arguing, and now it's shown that he drinks milk like a child.
That's the significance.
Ford would never kill himself. He might drink himself into a coma, but he's entirely too stubborn to take his own life.
D
Deleted member 284
Unconfirmed Member
HOOOOOOLY SHIT I just heard what happened and STEWART is going in.
EDIT: I;m sorry, I'm just dead. A CLOSER!!!
EDIT: I;m sorry, I'm just dead. A CLOSER!!!
now that is the damned truth. In fact, 'mayor' is an unofficial title for the harmless town drunk in some areas.
gutter_trash
Banned
Truth. My town had a "mayor" back in the day.
Parallax
best seen in the classic "Shadow of the Beast"
Small towns? He could be mayor of DC
Supermanisdead
Member
what's wrong with making fun of how he drinks milk. he's a grown ass man who holds a blue plastic cup with two hands and has a milk mustache. it's funny.
Amazing article written before Ford was elected.
By Edward Keenan
Date: Thursday, September 16, 2010 - 00:01
Mayor Rob Ford. Are you used to that idea yet? Can you even fathom it? Or how about this: His Worship, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto.
These phrases represent a kind of unthinkable Armageddon scenario for the downtown lefties who’ve been Toronto’s ruling political and media class for the past seven years or more. And yet Armageddon is indeed at hand. This year’s mayoral race has made a politically incorrect, bureaucrat-hating, car-loving, cost-cutting, foot-in-mouth-inserting Ford administration not just thinkable but likely. Unless one or more of his opponents drop out of the race and one of the others goes through some kind of SHAZAAM!-like transformation to become the consensus alternative, Rob Ford will be the mayor of Toronto.
What’s more, his opponents from all points on the political spectrum will have no one but themselves to blame. After all, what democrat is going to blame voters? And what thinking person can blame Ford?
More than four years ago, I wrote a cover story for EYE WEEKLY entitled “The Rob Ford Problem,” in which I profiled city council’s most annoying member. “What does it say about Toronto city council that it can be home to such a blustering embarrassment?” I asked, echoing the criticism of Councillor Kyle Rae and the barstool conversations of the Toronto progressive establishment. The 2010 election has turned into The Revenge of the Rob Ford Problem, as the Etobicoke embarrassment has defined the election from the time he registered to run and set the terms of the debate at every turn, growing stronger with each apparently deadly controversy (mugshot on cover of paper, insensitive racial comments repeated, weird drug-related recordings — see the sidebar following this story).
So here’s the updated list of questions: How the hell did we get here? Who can we blame? And what is the city going to look like when this man is actually in charge?
IN DEFENCE OF ROB FORD
_____________________
Let me get a few things out of the way: having observed Rob Ford’s career for a decade and having actually spoken to him and tried to understand him, I believe him to be phenomenally simple-minded. He has the temperament of a child, with the corresponding tendency to deny any wrongdoing until evidence emerges that he is lying. The number of friends he has made on city council during a decade there is disturbingly close to zero.
This would seem to be a pretty backhanded way to begin defending him, but then I never wanted to be his defender. However, as the campaign has progressed, I’ve found myself having to stop conversations with people I generally agree with to advocate for Ford. Here’s the real defence: Rob Ford is full of passionate intensity.
The ridiculously facile interpretation of city spending he proposes is his genuine understanding of the situation — he is viscerally angered when he perceives money being wasted and actually thinks the budget could be balanced by cutting waste. He does what he says he’ll do when it comes to serving constituents, having spent most of his time as a councillor returning phone calls and personally visiting Torontonians to help them navigate bureaucracy and solve their problems. He believes streetcars and bikes should get off the roads because he thinks like a suburban driver, and is simply incapable of imagining the experience of those hundreds of thousands who commute in other ways. He is no one’s puppet, since he has no friends who are operators of any kind at city hall, and he accepts advice from no one outside his immediate family. Except when childishly denying personal-life indiscretions or poorly thought-out comments, he speaks his simple truth as plainly as he can.
In short, he is incapable of spin and his branding — such as it is — of himself as a plain-spoken, unapologetic truth teller is an honest representation.
Ford has not been playing dirty in this campaign, nor has he wavered or pandered or changed his message one iota. In fact, his message has not changed in a decade. Nothing at all has been surprising about his campaign. Nothing, that is, except his popularity.
In response to that popularity, the main lines of attack are misguided: yes, he is fat, and how is that at all relevant? (Pantalone is short, Rossi is bald, Smitherman is gay — are these things the anti-Ford contingent really wants to consider negatives?) We have no reason to believe he is violent towards women, as the aftermath of his arrest showed. His US pot possession situation over a decade ago: so what? Did you think it disqualifying that Clinton smoked pot? That Belinda Stronach did? That Trudeau did?
Most of all, I think accusations that he is mean-spirited are untrue, and the idea that he’s some kind of malevolent Machiavellian schemer is a feeble and baseless excuse for the incompetence of his opponents.
A CITY ON THE RISE
___________________
Ford’s great triumph in this campaign has been to make himself the ballot question. He has set the terms of the debate largely because no one else has presented an alternate vision of the city or a compelling argument to rebut his misrepresentation of Toronto’s fortunes. Instead, his opponents have either failed to show up for the fight (David Miller, John Tory, Shelly Carroll), proved unequal to the task of running a big-league campaign (Adam Giambrone, Joe Pantalone, Sarah Thomson, in very different ways) or spent the campaign trying to be Ford-lite or Ford-plus (Rocco Rossi, George Smitherman and, to a lesser degree, Thomson).
The crime here is that Ford defined the premise of the debate in a way that contradicts reality. Despite his assertions to the contratry, we are not a city in decline.
During an epic worldwide recession, the banks headquartered in Toronto stayed strong and our housing market held its value. The city is densifying and growing vertically every year (just look at the skyline). We’re an innovation hub that’s helping lead the world in pharmaceutical, medical and mobile technology development. We have arts institutions that are stronger than at any point in our history, a growing body of compelling architecture and a slowly growing transit system. Toronto’s property taxes are the lowest in the GTA, yet the operating budget is balanced (if precariously), while services have actually expanded in recent years. We have a population as ethnically diverse as any city in the world and yet we suffer little racial discord. Our crime rate is, by Canadian and international standards, exceedingly low.
By virtually anyone’s standards, we are among the best cities in the world in which to live and do business. We have problems, real ones, with the way the inner suburbs have evolved and failed to evolve, with the way the budgeting is done, with a persistent revenue gap, with labour relations at City Hall. Yes, we have problems. But they are the growing pains of a thriving city in the process of maturing.
And yet from the beginning, Rob Ford’s opponents — especially presumed front-runner George Smitherman — have accepted the Toronto-is-broken trope as the basic premise of the campaign. And yet in contrast to Ford, one senses that Smitherman and Rossi, at least, concede this point not because they believe it to be true, but because they think it will sell.
In fairness, they were thrown for a loop because no one really thought Ford would be a legitimate contender. As recently as this spring, the biggest cheerleaders for Ford’s entry into the race were the leftists who wanted him off council. They thought he’d simply be comic relief in the race.
But then Miller announced he wouldn’t run, Giambrone imploded and Pantalone, the progressive stand-in, consistently polled at only 10 to 12 per cent, which is what a labour-endorsed candidate gets just for showing up. Meanwhile, Ford has spent the past 10 years visiting suburban voters personally, talking with them and hearing what the view looks like dozens of kilo-metres from City Hall. He’s personally tested the message about council expenses and buffets and funding for the Pride parade and the arts. He has experienced suburban (often low-income and “at-risk”
Those messages resonate with a big chunk of voters, as Ford knew they would. And rather than taking the points as legitimate and steering the conversation to how to address them inside a much more hopeful and positive big picture, his opponents have dismissed his small grievances as unsophisticated and unworthy of discussion, allowing his big-picture view of things to become mainstream and accepted.
___________
WHEN ROB FORD IS MAYOR
So, deep breath. What will Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto look like? It’s safe to say the entire plant-watering staff at City Hall will be laid off. And city councillors will be brown-bagging lunches to meetings rather than having them catered. One expects that council would accept the fact that he has a mandate to cut on those two fronts, at least (achieving savings well into the five figures on a $7-billion budget!).
Aside from that, we know what Rob Ford says his Toronto would look like: the mayor would personally return every phone call; streetcars would be decommissioned and subways would be built in the suburbs; council would lose half its members and each councillor lose half his or her office budget; arts and culture spending would be slashed or outright eliminated; more police would be hired and a law-and-order chief would be given carte blanche to be tough on suspects and neighbourhoods; taxes would be cut, the union would be busted or humbled and garbage service would be contracted out.
One could spend a lot of time analyzing the implications of all this. For starters: fewer councillors with fewer resources could not provide the “excellent customer service” Ford promises; eliminating streetcars would increase gridlock rather than alleviating it while suburban subways would doom the TTC to ever larger operating deficits; and tax cuts coupled with an increase in the police budget would destroy the city’s finances.
But here’s the most disturbing truth of all: it’s not worth going into detail about the city Rob Ford promises because it’s pure fantasy. Mayor Rob Ford has absolutely no chance of enacting his agenda and will, as a result, grind the city to a halt, undoing seven or more years of progress and creating a situation much like the one he claims he’s addressing now.
Reality one: basic math
Ford’s numbers simply do not add up. The cuts he proposes to “waste” at City Hall are almost purely symbolic — a footnote to the budget — and are dwarfed by the $250 million a year in revenue that would be lost from his elimination of the vehicle-registration tax and land-transfer tax. That scenario alone would make his expansion of customer service, police service and subway building impossible. Meanwhile, cancelling new streetcar orders and discarding the ones we have while buying fleets of new buses would create hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs and vastly increase the operating shortfall of the TTC. We simply could not afford it.
Reality two: he can’t boss the province around
Much of what Ford wants to do — notably cutting the size of council — would depend on provincial legislation McGuinty or any other premier would never approve. And his great transit scheme? At the moment, the province is paying for $3.7 billion worth of the Transit City plan Ford wants to scrap. Do you think they’ll continue giving him the money to use for his own devices?
Reality three: He can’t really boss anyone around
Finally, even before things get to the provincial level, Ford wouldn’t have the authority to get his ideas past the council level. He could set the agenda and make appointments to committees, but he — as outgoing Councillor Howard Moscoe put it — “could not pass wind” without winning a vote at council.
This is a problem for Ford more than any other candidate because he has shown no history of being able to work with anyone on anything. He proudly told me in 2006 that even council’s right wing hated him (“I don’t want to eat lunch with those guys anyway,” he said). It’s easy to forget now that even Mel Lastman considered Ford an enemy.
So who would accept the kamikaze mission of being his budget chief, charged with making his magical numbers add up? Who would sit on his transit commission, trying to keep the trains running while negotiating the stiff penalties and absurd demands of his platform? No one who knows anything about finance or transit, that’s for sure.
____________
A CITY IN DECLINE
What we’re actually facing is gridlock and regression. Why? Because we’re looking at four years of angry shouting and a loud, probably unproductive argument between Ford and council (and between Ford and the province and between Ford and the city’s labour unions and between Ford and city staff…
He might well succeed in stopping progress altogether in a few areas: grinding Transit City to a halt, cutting some taxes and slashing spending on arts and cultural programs. The city’s years-in-progress bike plan might be scrapped or halted, environmental progress rolled back. But Ford would replace those with nothing.
The opportunity cost — what we’ll miss out on by taking no action — will be huge. Development will slow as the planning department becomes paralyzed by political deadlock. Transit growth will stop and basic maintenance and service will be cut as the commission endlessly debates how to square financial and contractual circles. Basic infrastructure will be neglected. In short, the city will start to rot.
And, most distressingly for a penny-pincher like Ford, our financial hole will just keep getting bigger following tax cuts while pressing budget and revenue problems go unaddressed, forcing steep tax hikes or drastic service cuts or, most likely, both.
Then by the time the next election rolls around, everyone will be even angrier and perhaps we really will be a city in decline.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIDESHOW ROB: THE TEFLON MAYOR
Rob Ford has been strangely, almost magically impervious to controversy. The secret, of course, is that being a gruff, unpolished everyman with everyday problems is a big part of his brand. Here’s a partial list of the lowlights that have so far failed to pierce his armor:
INTEMPERATE NAME-CALLING: In 2002, called Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti “gino boy.” In 2005, called Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby a “low-life” and a “waste of skin.”
RACIAL INSENSITIVITY: In 2003, suggested Toronto should be declared a “refugee-free zone.” Doubled down during the election campaign, stating that immigration to Toronto should be halted. In 2008, said that “Orientals” were good role models because they “work like dogs” and were “taking over.”
MEDICAL INACCURACY: In 2006, told council, “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you won’t get AIDS probably.”
DRUNKEN BELLIGERENCE: At a Leafs’ game in 2006, subjected bystanders to a tirade, calling them “right-wing communist bastards.” Asked a man if he wanted his “little wife [to] go over to Iran and get raped and shot?”
MUGSHOT ON FRONT PAGE: Happened in connection with being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and possession of marijuana in Florida in 1999. Pleaded no contest to the DUI; drug charge was dropped.
I'm trying to think up a good way to dub Rob Ford clips over Wolverine's fight here. May I please get some suggestions of good quips to use?
The fight in question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmCpXA21P-I
Nope. We would never elect a conservative crackhead. We're very liberal here.
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