I’m recovering from a cold so this week is shorter than average. Sorry.

LECCE IT GO

The Ontario government has been handling the forthcoming teachers’ strike about as adeptly as you would expect a Tory government to handle a teachers’ strike, which is: badly. The provincial Conservatives have a staunch tradition of opposition to whatever teachers want, which is a large part of the reason they spent so long in the political wilderness in Ontario - voters were really, really tired of the constant wars with the teachers’ union, because teachers are genuinely pretty popular here, not least because the province has an excellent education system for the most part. Of course, when you spend a long, long time in the political wilderness voters tend to assume that you’ve learned your lesson, but the ineptness displayed by the Tories on the teachers’ union file over the past couple of months is really impressive.

To sum up: the teachers want two major things. They want a cost-of-living increase, and they want to keep class sizes small. Most of Ontario supports these things: cost-of-living increases aren’t unreasonable asks and small class size benefits kids, who are the entire point of the schools in the first place. The union has made it clear they’re willing to negotiate on pretty much everything else, which is a major give considering one of the government’s demands is to implement mandatory e-learning in high schools, which the teachers’ union opposes virulently. This is not surprising because most expert evidence suggests that e-learning is somewhere in between moderately ineffective and totally useless for adolescents when it comes to formal subject study.

Education Minister Stephen Leece, for the government’s part, has reacted to the union - who have been running brief rotating small-scale strikes since December - by promising to pay parents of kids whose childcare has been disrupted by school strikes small amounts of money (in between $25 and $60 per day). This is an action which the government itself believes could cost $48 million per day if the teachers’ union was to go entirely on strike (IE, a province-wide shutdown). This figure is important to remember considering that the difference between the two-percent cost of living increase the teachers’ union wants and the one-percent raise the government is willing to offer is only estimated to be about $200 million - or less than a week’s worth of the cost to the government if they had to offer these payoffs every day.

In short, this isn’t about the money: the union has even suggested they’d be willing to further negotiate the cost of living increase so long as class sizes are preserved. It’s rather blatantly about the government pursuing an agenda that is designed to lessen the number of teachers and dilute their negotiating power in future. A more popular government might be able to take the hit on this, but the Doug Ford government is the most unpopular government in Canada by an enormous margin right now and it’s honestly baffling that they’re choosing to sink themselves even further.

LEV IT GO

Lev Parnas went on The Rachel Maddow Show last week to talk about his role in the Donald Trump Ukraine scandal. At this point, the sheer number of bagmen, fixers, swindlers and general dickheads up to their eyebrows in the Ukraine scandal probably makes you lose track of who is who - it certainly does for me - so it is worth briefly recapping why he particularly matters.

Parnas is an American businessman of Ukrainian descent who has a track record of working with shady characters, notably the Ukrainian oligarch Dymtro Firtash, who has a long track record of pro-Russian political organization in Ukraine and also very likely has extensive Russian mob ties. In 2018, Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman (the heir to the Fruman Shoe Shine fortune) were hired by Rudy Guiliani to serve as “consultants,” which in actuality seems to have meant “go to Ukraine and try to find dirt on prominent Democrats.” (There is also a lot of shady money movement involving Parnas’ company, Fraud Guarantee, which apparently shut down in 2014 but was still being paid for things in 2018. And yes, it is actually called that.)

Anyway, Parnas and Fruman (the Sausage King of Chicago) were both arrested in October by the FBI for campaign finance violations, both actual and intended. At the time they appeared to be fleeing to Austria. Since then, they had mostly been silent, other than being mentioned whenever someone wanted to recite a laundry list of Trump associates arrested for various crimes related to the campaign and whenever Trump claimed he didn’t know these guys, he knows plenty of people, he takes pictures with plenty of people, that doesn’t mean he knew them, et cetera.

All of that changed this week for two reasons. The first was his attorney turning over thousands of pages of documents to the House investigatory committee, which demonstrate pretty conclusively that everybody involved knew what was happening and that it was illegal, as well as suggesting that the individuals involved were discussing “removing” the then-current Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in a context where it makes the “removal” seem like, well, a hit. Parnas then went on Maddow’s show (and on CNN with Anderson Cooper the following day) and stated that Donald Trump was aware of everything that was going on, implicated Attorney General Bob Barr, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence as being involved in the matter, and suggested that his life had been threatened and that this, combined with his feeling abandoned by Guiliani and Fruman (Fruman’s Fine Tailoring, three locations across Pittsburgh), were why he had come forward.

Basically this is equivalent to one of the Watergate burglars sitting down with Walter Cronkite on national TV to explain why Nixon asked them to break into the hotel, and at this point any doubts about the Trump administration’s complicity in wildly illegal campaign tactics should be put to rest.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Underwater (2020, William Eubank, theatre) - 3/5

Midway (2019, Roland Emmerich, theatre) - 1/5

I’ve been hooked lately by a series of “Korean Street Food” videos which are just narrator-free visual depictions of street vendors cooking food - mostly breakfast food, so a lot of egg and cheese because egg and cheese is popular as a breakfast base pretty much worldwide. They’re both relaxing to watch but also terribly fascinating in a “wait, you’re doing what with the egg?” sort of way, and make you realize the incredible permutations of how a simple egg sandwich can be so varied. The channel is “ETTV,” so a YouTube search for “ETTV korean street food” will give you a long, long playlist. Start with the “tornado omelet” and go on from there.

See you in seven.