Joey Rocks Final CP24 Debate

This is just absurd and hysterical. Ford: "Today Toronto... tomorrow the world". Give me a break. And you are doing nothing at all productive by trying to kneecap the movement that has done the heavy lifting outside the gay community to establish gay rights in this city.

I am not "defending him". I am pointing out various lies and distortion that are being used to vilify Ford in order to propel the Smitherman vote. Distortions you are repeating. For example, what Ford has said about streetcars. It is false. Ford would like to phase out streetcars, but his main point is that there should be no more expansion of the system.

And I couldn't think of any better example how wrong headed this thinking is. Indeed, when the votes are counted, no one will remember the carefully phrased and "caustious" half endoresements, such as vaughan's "I can work with Smitherman", and Sewell's "so be it". Instead each and every vote will be counted as a ringing endorsement of Smitherman's plan, which in almost every single aspect is the Ford plan, as has been outlined above.

Even now, these half hearted endorsements have lost any patina of being "strategic", and are taking on the charachter of landslide of support for Smitherman's views. Worse still, in such a scenario, with Smitherman as victor, and Ford substantive vote included this mandate will be considered to be totally sweeping, when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

How strategic is that? It isn't.

You are sad. 

On Pantalone you are absolutely fucked. Before the whole Smitherman strategic vote thing was put into action, and the Star started putting out its insidiuous push polls, and trying to frieghten the public with totally misrepresentation of what Ford was saying, Pantalone was only a couple of points behind the asshole you like so much.... well except in polls commissioned by the Star.

Whatever deficit's Joe may have, they certainly do not outweigh the deficit's of the other candidate. Ford can hardly articulate a sentence, and Smitherman's career is wracked with controversy. whereas Pantalone can be very charming, if not forceful, speaks in proper sentences, and has a remarkably scandal free career for someone who has been in office as long as he has. But you of course can't miss an opportunity to find fault, where there is greatness.

Indeed, the real problem with Joe's campaign, have little to do with Joe, and more to do with people such as yourself who never lifted a finger to support him then dissed him at every last opportunity. I certainly hope you spent as much time analyszing your own deficit's of character as you do the people you say you support.

Even today, Ekos published yet another poll that indicates that Pantalone's vote is firm at 15%. We know that at least half of Smitherman's vote is strategic. Now if you and a handful of people like you who like to have your deicisions made by the main stream media had quit with the "Woe is me! If Joe was only better I would support him" crap like Mihvc, then he might have built some friggin momentum and grabbed the strategic vote, instead of Smitherman.

But you and Mihvc don't stand for much, and as Malcolm said: "a man who stands for nothing will fall for anything

You can pitch the Toronto Star line all you want. But what is blindingly obvious is that almost any polls that were not commissioned through Ipsos-Reid using larger respondents samples, and different polling methodologies, showed that Pantalone's support was far higher than the numbers being used by the Star.

The recent Ekos poll used robocalls that also phones cell phones and digitized questions and responses showed that Pantalone still holds 15% of the vote. Back when Pantalone was nipping at Smitherman's 21% and Pantalone was polling at 17%, there was still enough undecided voters around to give Pantalone some momentum.

That was about the time that the coalition around Joe started to defect, and helped give the strategic voting momentum to Smitherman. Indeed, it Pantalone had hit 20% around that time he still would have been in contention, and anything could have happened as we see by the recent Calgary example.

City politics is dull Stockholm. The only way you can do it and be honest at the same time is to propose dull things.

These are some of the NEW ideas that Nenshi was pushing:

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Calgary will be a City where its citizens are enriched by outstanding libraries, recreation amenities, and a vibrant cultural scene

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Calgary will be a city where every neighbourhood is a safe neighbourhood

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Calgary will reduce the number of people living in poverty and ensure opportunity for all

I am just shocked that Pantalone never thought of putting out these unique and exciting NEW ideas.

Perhaps Pantalone should have proposed something really new like restructuring the tax base by getting rid of the land transfer tax so that businessess and developers would have reduced taxes so there would be more liquid capital around and more jobs would be created in the market?

Seems to me rather that you are the sort who sees the word NEW a package of Kellogs Cornflakes and buys a whole crate.

As far as I can tell Nenshi didn't have any of his "supporters" using the NEW social media to go on and on about how they wished someone else more attractive was running, how dull the candidate was, and how little he had done in his thirty year career, and how therefore he had no chance whatsoever. Nor did he have any "reliable" long time allies suddenly pulling out and supporting his opposition, when he was within spitting distance of catching up in the polls.

takeitslowly wrote:

If Joe and some of the downtown leftist crowds have been more empathetic and in tune with  the emotional lives of suburban families, they would have done better in the poll and probably on election day.

Next time you wonder why someone like Rob Ford is having such success, consider going out of your comfort zone and try to talk in the languages of those you preceive to be unfriendly to your policies. I found that Joe didn't do that. He didnt acknowledge the fear of many who are just one paycheck away from living in a priority neighborhood. Its sad that politics is so poloarized.

I am not at all surprised that Rob Ford is having such success. There are a lot of people looking in from the outside.

But the people who are trying to pin that on the "downtown leftist" like Joe, are the really downtwon elitist yuppie developers who want lower taxes, and they have made a concerted effort to drown out the positives in the Miller adminstration -- that is what Smitherman is selling. A lot of people like to talk up Kyle Rae's retirement party, but when was the last time you read an article reflecting on the Lastman years when concillors were get fat envelopes filled $40,000 dollars in order so that they would smooth over a 50,000,000 dollar untendered contract?

Yeah. Those were the Lastman years. At least what Rae did was within the rules. It may have been excessive, but it was not bribery or influence pedalling. Miller and Pantalone have cleared up that kind of real corruption at city hall, apparently.

What they also wont tell you is that the great majority of the Transit City plan is entirely geared to building better transportation for people in the suburbs. It's a great thing to talk about jobs, but its another thing to provide a more efficient transit system to make more jobs, more accessible to more people regardless of where they live.

My wife commutes to Scarborough to work every day. In order to do so it tacks on 3 hours to her daily travel routing. Basically this adds 21 hours a week to her 40 hour a week schedule. This is crazy. Even taking off half an hour of a trip from the downtown core to the burbs. That is a loss in time that amounts to serious loss in per hour wage. Taking off even 15 minutes off that trip amounts to real rewards for ordniary working people.

In other words there is a real effort going in the media on to keep people ignorant of the facts, focus on the bad, so that people with the real "elitist" downtown yuppie agenda can fuck over working people even more. Of course that is why they want a campaign free of facts and statistics and filled with emotional talking point invective, if people were actually told the facts, they would know that Miller and Pantalone did a lot of things to reduce the stress of the people in the suburbs.

Transit City is entirely about that.

It's far easier to get elected if you exploit the emotions of those outside looking in.

Actually. He has said many of these things in various forums all over Toronto. What happens with that is that it is never reported. You guys seem really intent on trying to fool yourself into believing that the media don't have a stake in this game.

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It's a great thing to talk about jobs, but its another thing to provide a more efficient transit system to make more jobs, more accessible to more people regardless of where they live.

That is definitely the sense of what I remember Joe saying at the "Good Jobs for All Debate".

In related news, have you seen that Smitherman is now trying to mislead people into believing that the existing streetcar routes are part of his "transit city" plan:

Thanks for the compliments though Stockholm. Maybe one day you could take on the challenge of explaining rather than complaining that Joe isn't doing all the work for you.