I'm not much of a Rob Ford fan, and since I don't live in his city, I suppose at some level my opinion is moot.
But no mooter than when I wax wise about politics anywhere else in the world. I don't live in Israel, but I have no compunction about calling Netanyahu an opportunistic moron.
I don't live in England but it is impossible to escape the fact that Cameron and Hague and Osborne are insufferable twats.
But back to Ford. He's not a twat and he's not a moron. Unfortunately, he has that rare gift of coming off as both twatish and moronic.
How much money will the City of Toronto actually save by privatizing trash pick-up? That sort of thing never fails to look good on paper, and five years later that sort of thing generally looks like utter twattery.
A few well-groomed consultants convinced everybody that private garbage trucks with an eleven dollar an hour crew would bring big savings over the public trash collectors who make twenty-two
But they neglected to factor in that private contractor's other overhead.
Like paying consultants.
At the end of the day, we end up paying more or less the same amount for garbage pick-up, but the guys picking up the trash make minimum wage instead of a living wage.
The "savings" go to the entrepreneur who was clever enough to get the out-sourced collection contract.
So part of the Rob Ford schtick is to lift public money out of the public arena and into the private sector.
That's despicable, but that's not the sort of thing the Toronto Star runs with on their anti-Ford crusade.
Instead, they're all about putting out unflattering front page pictures of the mayor.
And unverifiable stories about the mayor having grabbed somebody's ass.
This is what "serious journalism" has become in the 21st century.
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