MUELLER? MUELLER?

Okay, I’ve been putting off talking about the Mueller Report for a long time now so here we go.

I am first working under the assumption that, if you are reading this, you at least understand what the Mueller Report is. If you don’t, the quick quick version is “a legal memo prepared by a special prosecutor whose job was to figure out if there was an intent by the Trump 2016 presidential campaign to conspire with Russia against the Clinton campaign (which is illegal).” It got a lot more involved than that, of course, but those are the absolute basics.

So, was there such intent? It’s complex to answer, but the general answer is that Mueller and his investigatory team, so far as we know, could not find evidence of such intent that would meet the bar of an actual criminal charge. Various Trump supporters have been cheering this for weeks (ever since Attorney General Bob Barr released a “summary” of the report last week which falsely claimed the report exonerated Trump entirely), talking about “no collusion” like “collusion” is a legally definable thing (which it isn’t in this context). But there is ample evidence throughout the investigation and summarized by the Report that Trump and his administration repeatedly attempted to obstruct the investigation, and although the Report declines to accuse Trump of criminal acts, it does so in a way that very clearly states that they believe he did commit them.

So what now? Well, therein lies the rub. The Democrats are often spineless, but to pin all the blame for their failure to immediately impeach Trump for obstruction of justice (and, to be clear: Nixon and Clinton were both guilty of much, much less than Trump obviously is) is to play that old con game where you pretend that only Democrats have agency and that the Republicans in Congress simply don’t have any choice except to defend Trump to the death. Personally, I tend to believe that commencing impeachment investigations is the right play - Trump’s approval rating dropped noticeably after the Report was released, and other polling shows that the drop is much sharper when you poll only people who have actually read the (400-page-long) Report, and impeachment hearings are a way to communicate the contents of the Report to all the people not inclined to actually read such things or who only want their news in short, digestible video clips. Plus - and I appreciate that this is going outside the realm of political pluses and minuses - it is definitely the right thing to do, and that does matter.

But, then again, I’m not a professional political operative. Unless someone wants to pay me to be one!

BUDGET CUTS, VOLUME TWO

The thing about budget cuts is this: if you simply announce “we’re going to chop the Ministry of Important Stuff in half,” everybody who doesn’t know anything about government cheers, because they think government is inherently wasteful. But the problem is that government really isn’t wasteful, for the most part. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t civil servants who are lazy and entitled (of course there are) or that government agencies can’t be slow and hidebound (they sure can), but the notion that most of government is like that is just wrong. If you’ve ever looked at line-item budgets for most governments (and I have looked at my share) you quickly come to realize that most first world governments expend most of their money on three things: redistributing money back to the populace, labour, and infrastructure and maintenance expenses. And that last one is always the least. (Redistribution of money and labour expenses are going to be one and two or two and one, depending mostly on whether or not the government in question covers public pensions.)

Because of all that, if you announce that you’re going to find government savings by cutting the sub-budgets of various departments/ministries/programs/et cetera and letting them find “efficiencies,” what you’ll actually get is all the pain and anger of budget cuts except over a slightly longer time-frame, because people start to actually realize that unspecified budget cuts to Ministries mean cuts to services they actually value. Most people are willing to consider budget cuts in the abstract, because budget cuts in the abstract always happen to somebody else. When it starts to affect you, though…?

In the case of Ontario, we started to see the first few stirrings of anger. The “we’ll save money by consolidating local public health units” plan they announced last week was this week revealed to mean $1 billion less towards Toronto Public Health over the next decade, because you don’t save a billion dollars by making two groups of health officials share a photocopier: you do it by cutting programs and jobs. In this case, that means cutting school breakfast and lunch programs for poor kids. It means cutting a lot of other things that are important too, of course - food and water inspection, early infectious epidemic detection, that sort of thing. But those programs aren’t going to make anybody as mad as the school nutrition programs do, because they’re mostly about making sure bad things don’t happen rather than proactively doing something good, and nobody will get mad until the bad stuff happens. (This is the “Walkerton theory” of preventative policy.) And the cuts did make a lot of Toronto politicians very angry - even John Tory, who has all the spirited resistance and stiff backbone of a comatose squid, called out Doug Ford for targeting the city. When John Tory bothers to get mad (and it’s not because someone he perceives as less important than him questions him), you know it’s serious.

I’ve also been paying attention to regional public library Facebook pages, because there are a lot - and I mean a lot - of very, very angry people upset that the cuts to Ontario Library Services mean that inter-library lending programs are finished as of the end of the month. Inter-library lending is one of those things that’s vitally important for rural communities, because if you live in a rural county, your local public library will not really have a lot of money to buy books, so if you want to read something they don’t have, inter-library lending gave rural Ontarians a way to access the library collection of, say, the Toronto Public Library and its more than twelve million items. This was particularly important for seniors who want to read a larger variety of large-print books (since most libraries can’t stock as many of those as they would like) or Ontarians who speak limited English and wanted to read books in their native languages, or honestly anybody who wants to read more than their local library has.

This has barely gotten started. There’s going to be more of this, much more, over the next few months.

OH HEY UKRAINE ELECTED AN ACTUAL COMEDIAN TO HIGH OFFICE COOL COOL

Ukraine’s election was yesterday, and they voted in a comedian to be their next President. (Hey, before I go any further with this, can I just say how goddamn sick I am of people all treating politics as a despicable profession and then deciding to vote in unqualified goobers because “at least they’re not politicians”? Can we, as a species, get the fuck over that already? Please?) Volodymyr Zelensky is a Ukrainian comic actor who stars in a sitcom about a guy who accidentally becomes President, and now he is the President, because we need people to use the word “ironic” a lot, I guess.

The guy Zelensky beat, Petro Poroshenko - and to be clear, Zelensky absolutely crushed Poroshenko, getting 70% or so of the vote and winning in a massive landslide - got elected in 2014 as a Ukraine nationalist, which means basically that he was anti-Russia, because “what do you think of Russia” is literally the most important aspect of any political career in Ukraine, not least because the Russians keep hinting that they don’t think Ukraine should be an independent country and wouldn’t it be better if they just rejoined Russia? But - and this is important - Zelensky doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be a pro-Russian candidate. (His personal politics have trended pro-EU and anti-Putin; he’s also Jewish.) He didn’t really campaign on any issues at all other than being anti-corruption (like every other “outsider” candidate in political history) and on reducing the political power of the Ukrainian oligarchs who dominate the entire economy. (Poroshenko is one of Ukraine’s oligarchs, but really post-Communism just about everybody in politics is either an oligarch themselves or has the backing of one of them.) Of course, Zelensky ran with the support of at least one oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is the second-richest person in Ukraine (and fervently anti-Putin) so, while it would be nice to be surprised? Yeah, not holding my breath for real reforms any time soon.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Unicorn Store (2017, Brie Larson, Netflix) - 2.5/5

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, Charles Crichton, Kanopy) - 3/5

Not a lot else to report? We’re watching a few shows, of course, but we haven’t finished anything recently. Sometimes that’s how we roll!

See you in seven.