Doug Ford -- alleged hashish kingpin and brother to the dead, racist, violent, sexist, rapey crackhead ex-Toronto-Mayor Rob Ford -- stole the nomination to lead the Ontario Conservatives in an upcoming provincial race. Read the rest

Doug Ford is the leader of the Ontario Provincial Party, a job he got through outright fraud; and it's only getting better: on Monday night, Ford -- brother of the dead, disgraced, crack-addicted, racist, sexist, rapey, violent, lying former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford -- showed up for a leadership debate in Toronto, cheered on by throngs of supporters, who turn out to have been paid actors pretending to be Conservatives. Read the rest

Robyn Doolittle was the reporter who did most of the legwork investigating Toronto's crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford. But in the movie about his downfall, a man – a hotshot cub reporter to be played by Ben Platt – gets to be in her hotseat.

"I'm glad they're rewriting the fact that it was a female reporter who investigated Rob Ford," Doolittle wrote Tuesday. "Why have a woman be a lead character when a man could do it?"

"I have the utmost respect for your accomplishments," Platt responded on Twitter. "I play a totally fictionalized character, an entitled, incapable entry-level reporter (my boss is played by Jennifer Ehle) at a fictional competing newspaper. The film alludes to the successful reporting from the Toronto Star."

The real issue?. The female reporter always has to fall in love or sleep with someone. https://t.co/go7rq4mqQn

— robyndoolittle (@robyndoolittle) April 10, 2018

It's not just that Hollywood can't read the room. It's a black hole of blind incomprehension and any appearance otherwise is just radiation emitted at its event horizon. Read the rest

The publication ban has been lifted on beloved conservative hero and former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford smoking crack and babbling incoherently. He seems familiar with the use of a crack pipe.

From The Toronto Star:

Nothing apart from that illness — not documented substance abuse, or allegations of drunk driving, racism, homophobia or a lack of political control over council — kept Ford from mounting a real challenge to return to the mayor’s chair in 2014.

He was never charged. He never testified. Those on the periphery of the whirling saga, like Lisi, who still declare loyalty to the late Ford, faced criminal charges. Ford’s former staff and friends were interviewed by police and compelled to tell their version of the story under oath.

When news of the video’s existence was first published by the Star and Gawker in May 2013, it soon reached nightly international talk show levels.

It’s a video the late Ford tried to deny was real, facing an onslaught of questions as mayor of Canada’s largest city. At first, Ford said he could not comment on a video “that I have never seen or does not exist.”

Months later, Ford would admit to smoking crack (once, in one of his “drunken stupors”).

Rob Ford, the former Toronto mayor famous for political scandals and drug abuse, is dead at 46. He was suffering from pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

In 2013, the Star revealed that Ford had attended a military ball intoxicated and then that a cellphone video apparently showed him smoking crack. That bombshell triggered months of controversy and worldwide headlines as Ford angrily denied, and then finally admitted, abusing drugs and alcohol. Council stripped him of most of his powers. …

In October 2014, following his re-election as councillor and in between chemotherapy treatments, Ford talked to reporters about his legacy. “People know that I saved a lot of money, and people are going to know that I had a few personal struggles,” he said. “So you can remember it for what you want, but they’re definitely going to remember it.”

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is out of rehab and back in the news, homophobing it up for the cameras and trying to get re-elected. Read the rest

In the Toronto Star, Kevin Donovan reports a night in the life of Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto, shortly after an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel: Ford drives drunk, says fantastically racist things, buys drugs, beats up a friend of his, and then comes home and presents his friends to his wife, offering to let them have sex with her, saying that she lets him "f--k girls in front of her all the time... It's okay, my kids are not home." Parts of this are transcribed from recordings, others appear to be taken from witnesses. Read the rest

Rob Ford has announced a "break" from his re-election campaign for mayor of Toronto, after a video of him smoking crack last weekend surfaced, being offered for sale by a drug-dealer for seven figures:

In one of the clips shown to The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, the mayor rapidly shifts his weight back and forth on the spot, talking into his cellphone and his right arm swinging at his side. When the camera pans around the room, a man that looks like Alessandro “Sandro” Lisi, the mayor’s former driver and an accused drug-dealing extortionist, can be seen in the background. Mr. Ford’s sister, Kathy, who has admitted in media interviews to being a drug addict, is sitting in front of her brother. In the last of three clips, Mr. Ford is holding the pipe and speaking to his sister.

Rob Ford takes leave as new drug video emerges [Robyn Doolittle and Greg McArthur/The Globe and Mail] Read the rest

If Rob Ford's mayoralty had been a scripted reality show, it would have strained credulity, as this trenchant Marcus Gee column reminds us. Gee rounds up some of Ford's greatest hits -- including a few I'd missed, like Ford's vote against naming a street after Nelson Mandela; his failed bid to distribute 10,000 Easter eggs at a parade where he wasn't welcome, his appointment of disgraced, drug abusing athlete Ben Johnson to his campaign team, and his profane rant against a security guard who denied him entry to a VIP lounge at a hockey game. Read the rest

When Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was caught lying about smoking crack (and after months of smearing people who accused him of doing so as liars), he busted out the most weaselly, stupid excuse anyone had ever heard. To make it clear how unsuitable this level of discourse is in office, Central Fiction's produced this video in which a child deploys the Rob Ford defense about a cracked window.

Rob Ford's Words in the Mouth of a Child (Thanks, Emily!) Read the rest

If you've shaken your head in wonder that Canadians -- gentle, sensible Canadians -- had elected a drug-addicted, violent, lying buffoon to run its largest city, this excellent account of the rise of the Canadian neoliberal right by historian Paul Cohen is required reading. Cohen draws on disparate threads from Preston Manning to Mike Harris and connects them to Stephen Harper, Rob Ford, and the rise of a nasty, ugly Made-in-Canada version of Thatcherism, Reaganism, and modern neoliberalism. Read the rest

New anti-Ford poster 3 #topoli #robford pic.twitter.com/fIxKPArGbB

— Katie Simpson (@KatieSimpson24) March 31, 2014

Rethink (an ad agency that does viral media) has teamed up with No Ford Nation to putup joke election signs in Toronto for an Anyone-But-Rob-Ford campaign. They feature photos of scruffy, disreputable fellows with captions like, "The current mayor threatens to kill people and gets publicly drunk. IF ELECTED I PROMISE I WILL JUST GET PUBLICLY DRUNK." Read the rest

Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford flew to Los Angeles for an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show. What followed was more than a little awkward. Kimmel is a great pains to hide his dislike of Ford, but he's not entirely successful. The hardest part comes at the end, when Kimmel confronts Ford with the fact that he is an out-of-control alcoholic, whose blackouts, binges, abuse and dangerous behavior are putting him, the city, and the people he loves at risk. Ford's total denial is genuinely pitiable. Joey Davilla has a very thorough writeup of the appearance, with links to the other parts of the video. Read the rest

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford -- who has steadfastly refused to attend the city's massive, economically vital and glorious Pride parade -- has pitched a tantrum over the decision to fly a rainbow flag from the auxiliary flagpole at City Hall. The flag was raised in solidarity with LGBT activists and athletes in a project led by Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam at the request of Pride House TO. Ford says he tried to get the flag removed, and has pasted Canadian flags over his office window and the doors of city hall.

Wong-Tam characterises this as evidence of Ford's long-suspected homophobia, which strikes me as extremely plausible. The article in the Globe and Mail points out that Ford recently told reporters that he would not attend Pride festivities even if he was not away with his family, this being Ford's usual excuse for missing it.

Wong-Tam hypothesizes that Ford has "let it all hang loose" and other councilors agree. I wonder if he thinks a dog-whistle for the city's bigots will win him votes come election day. Read the rest

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford declared yesterday to be "Bob Marley Day." It's hard to read the tea-leaves on this one: is it a wink-wink reach-out to the stoner vote from a mayor who admitted to smoking crack and who has been accused by his staff in sworn affidavits of both smoking weed at work and offering weed as a ransom in exchange for the return of his lost mobile phone? Is it a charm offensive aimed at Toronto's large Jamaican/West Indian population, many of whom were offended by the mayor's drunken impression of an angry, ranting patois-speaker? Is it a totally non-ironic celebration of a great musician and great political thinker (albeit one whose politics ran totally contrary to the mayor's own)? Read the rest

Kelly Manchester put together this brilliant video, suggesting designs for some of Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford's re-election posters for the next Toronto mayoral race. All are real quotes from the real mayor, who is a really, really bad person.

Video imagines nightmare Rob Ford re-election posters

(Thanks, Mom!) Read the rest

More news of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's disastrous car-wreck of a life. After swearing off drugs and alcohol (and insisting that he didn't have a problem with either), he's not only been getting so loaded that he finds himself transformed into the lead in a terrible one-man amateur production of "The Harder They Come"; he also was allegedly so drunk after a family funeral in Vancouver that a cop gave him a ticket for public drunkenness and jaywalking. You'd think a man devoted to ending the "war on cars" would be more deferential to their place in the road.

Ford claims he wasn't ticketed for public intoxication, and that all he'd drunk was a "diet Coke." Read the rest