Memo to MPs: your public wants to know
By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 21, 2010 - 27 Comments
MPs are either exploiting their staff and then paying them off, or being shaken down by the Hill’s grifters?
Getty Images
Michael Ignatieff used money from his office budget to have a stone wall rebuilt at his family estate in the south of France. Stephen Harper charged hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of musty hockey memorabilia to his expense account. And Jack Layton? Let’s just say Canadians would be shocked at how much it is costing them to keep his moustache trimmed and waxed.
Well, we don’t know for a fact that all of this is true. But at the same time, we don’t know that it isn’t true. And given the parliamentary expense scandal in Britain last year along with the one currently brewing in Nova Scotia, and given what we do know about secret accounts and their relationship to human nature, a healthy serving of cynicism is probably warranted. Which is why it is completely bizarre that the Board of Internal Economy, the body that is responsible for the finances and administration of the Canadian House of Commons, last week refused a request from Auditor General Sheila Fraser to conduct the first “performance audit” of MPs’ expenses in almost 20 years.
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In defence of Gordon Brown’s so-called gaffe
By Andrew Potter - Sunday, May 9, 2010 at 8:41 AM - 7 Comments
At one time, grumpy and misanthropic was close to a job description for British PMs: Thatcher and Churchill were cheerful?
Getty Images
“To be sincere,” said Oscar Wilde, “is such a difficult pose to keep up.” Just ask Gordon Brown.
According to the experts on these things, the turning point in the just-ended British election campaign was the moment when the Labour leader and (for the time being) prime minister sat back in his Jaguar and, with his television lapel microphone still live, berated his staff for sending him on an agonizing meet-and-greet in the northwestern English town of Rochdale. He was particularly irritated by his chat with a local widow named Gillian Duffy, a long-time Labour voter who had pressed him on his government’s policies on economics and immigration. “That bigoted woman,” he called her.The ultimate effect of the encounter on Brown’s political fortunes remains to be seen (polling at press time had the race too close to call), but what is certain is that it marked the full and final emergence of British politics into a political realm that we in North America have long known as bulls–t. Today’s successful candidate is less interested in telling the truth than in being seen as sincere, as he tries desperately to provide the best possible representation of himself to his audience.
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Our Afghan comrades speak out
By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 12 Comments
POTTER: What Afghan-Canadians think of our role in Afghanistan
Candian Press
To what extent should questions of honour, duty, and friendship enter into Canada’s foreign policy? It’s the old problem of principle versus realism, and every country needs to find its own balance between the two. It helps, though, if that balance is understood by your international partners, especially the ones you are supposedly trying to help.
The question was raised anew last weekend at the Taj Banquet Hall, a weddings/parties/everything venue attached to a Kia dealership in north Toronto where 250 or so people, most of whom were Afghan Canadians, had gathered to listen to a debate on the future of Canada’s mission to Afghanistan.
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The problem isn’t just with Toyota
By Andrew Potter - Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 9:07 AM - 26 Comments
Too much tourque? Figuring out how serious the acceleration issue is was hampered by opportunism and sensationalist journalism.
Photograph by Sandy Huffaker/ Bloomberg/ Getty
When it comes to Toyota’s problems with sudden unintended acceleration, it is starting to look like 1986 all over again. It was in November of that year that the CBS show 60 Minutes aired its infamous report on a similar problem in Audi vehicles, featuring footage of the accelerator on an Audi 5000 moving toward the floor as if by magic. It wasn’t magic, though: CBS had engineered that touch of automotive Ouija-boardery through a can of compressed air and a hose drilled into the transmission.
Eventually it was determined that unintended acceleration was caused by “pedal misapplication,” a.k.a. drivers pressing the gas when they meant to push the brake. But not before the Audi brand was so thoroughly trashed that sales didn’t recover for a full decade and a half.
There is no question something is wrong with Toyota’s cars—the company has admitted as much, though it claims the problem is not electronic but mechanical, caused by ill-fitting floor mats in some models and sticky pedals in others. But figuring out how serious the problem of sudden unintended acceleration is, and how widespread it might be, has been hampered by the workings of the unholy trinity of consumer affairs scandals: sensationalist journalism, rank opportunism, and good old-fashioned human-powered idiocy.
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The best thing to happen to the Liberals
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 10:49 AM - 83 Comments
With no one to yell at, the party has done some useful policy work
Looking for a Liberal in Ottawa last fall was like a trip into the heart of darkness. You would eventually find a crew of them, hunched over the latest polling data in some dark corner of the Centre Block, where they’d give you the 1,000-yard stare and mutter quietly about the party lacking leadership and direction. The whole miserable session culminated in the legendary Night of the Long Faces, when a group of Liberals repaired to a bar at the Chateau Laurier for a bitch session that the Toronto Star breathlessly reported as a nascent coup being mounted by Bob Rae to topple Michael Ignatieff.
Everything is relative, more so in politics, but in the early months of 2010 it is suddenly a good time to be a Liberal. It’s easy to find Liberals on the Hill these days; with the government off “recalibrating” its agenda, they are striding around like they own the place. And why not? Ever since Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament over the Christmas holidays, the polling gap between the Conservatives and the Liberals has vanished, and for the past three weeks, Ekos tracking polls have had the two parties in a dead heat.
The received wisdom is that the Tory lead (which before Christmas one pollster called “entrenched”) vanished because of public anger over the prorogation, and many pundits have suggested that Harper’s inability to pass up an opportunity to show how clever he is has backfired once again. And there certainly appears to be something to that. Most people are genuinely annoyed that Parliament is not sitting, probably for the simple reason that most people don’t get to simply decide not to go to work for two months, least of all in the dead of winter.
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The problem is bigger than Obama
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM - 32 Comments
A Canadian PM coming in on a similar landslide would have a bulletproof government
Jay Leno took some time out from his own problems last week to take a shot at Barack Obama. “It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year,” be said. “And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: the Republican party.”In Leno veritas, as they say. Obama’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and his ever-shortening coattails keep sending more and more party loyalists tumbling into the gutter. With Scott Brown’s astonishing theft of the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, it is starting to look as if the Democrats will be toast come the mid-term elections in November.
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How to respond to the "Stupid Terrorists Club"
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 10:55 AM - 13 Comments
What didn’t kill us could make us stupider
It took only a few hours after reports emerged of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt at blowing up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day for Internet wags to start making light of the incident, calling Abdulmutallab the “crotchbomber,” the “jockstrap jihadi,” and a member of the terrorist “brotherhood of the travelling pants.”
Soon after, U.S. officials hit upon what must count as one of the greatest innovations in public security in years: mockery. Would-be suicide bombers now know that if they try, but screw up, their scorched underwear will be paraded before cameras for all to laugh at. Add that to the indignity of having your sad I’m-so-lonesome-I-could-die online ramblings read aloud on air by attractive young news anchors, and it makes you wonder why anyone would sign up for this terror business in the first place.
Why, you’d have to be stupid. For aspiring terrorists though, it would appear that being remarkably stupid is something close to a job requirement. The classic case is the Fort Dix six—a group of Islamic radicals who plotted to attack the U.S. army base in New Jersey in 2007. But first they made a DVD of themselves firing weapons and yelling “Allah Akbar,” and it all went sideways when they took the DVD in to Circuit City to be copied; they were promptly ratted out to the authorities by staff.
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Now that their dinner is really ruined . . .
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 23 Comments
You’d think it’s a good time for progressives to rethink the vote-with-my-wallet notion. The planet should be so lucky.
Americans have two great loves, eating and shopping, and their Thanksgiving holiday is the occasion when they enjoy both activities in all their gluttonous splendour. But while the central concern of most Americans last week was how to avoid getting trampled in the Black Friday stampedes at the mall, a more conscientious group was stressing over the morality of the holiday menu: should the vegetables be organic, or local?It turns out that if you’re actually serious about taste, health benefits, and environmental impact, the correct answer is “neither.” The dispute between organic and local is one of those enormously high-strung civil wars that sweep through the environmental movement from time to time. And like its most notable predecessor, the paper-or-plastic conflict that raged across supermarket checkout counters in the late 1980s, this is one of those fights that is a genuine sucker’s game: the only way you can win is by not playing.
The jig has been up for organic for a while now. Originally promoted as the magic bullet of the produce aisle, with better taste, health benefits and environmental grades than regular food, organic has turned out to be none of those things. It didn’t help the organic brand that Wal-Mart started selling by the gross to the ambulatory eating machines of Middle America, but at least its defenders could cling to the idea that an organic tomato or lemon was more nutritious than its conventionally grown counterpart.
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Awful food, commie cars and the bad old days
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments
German consumers are hearkening back to a simpler time, a time before capitalism. Sound familiar to anyone?
Travelling through Eastern Europe a few years ago, my companion and I took a tour of Nova Huta, the Krakow suburb that had been designed by Stalin as the ideal proletarian city. Our guide was Mike, an excitable 30-year-old in camo pants and a flat-top who had ditched his law career when he realized the old ladies selling potatoes in the market made more than he would.
Mike drove us around Nova Huta in a rickety old Trabant, pointing out various totalitarian sites, then took us to his rented apartment, which he had tricked out with all manner of Soviet-era furnishings, artwork and appliances. It was all very authentic. It was all very crappy.
This was my first experience with Ostalgie, a neologism that is a mash-up of the German words for east and nostalgia, meaning nostalgia for life in the GDR and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Ostalgie is a phenomenon driven by the conviction that while socialism was often difficult, life was in many ways better. Fear and suspicion may have been the background radiation of daily life, this view goes, but the old Communist societies were more egalitarian and had a greater sense of solidarity and common purpose.
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Slower, weaker, wussier? Oh, really?
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 13 Comments
If there is some standard of masculinity against which prehistoric males win out over us, what’s that standard worth anyway?
From the “ongoing evidence of the emasculation of the modern male” file, it was reported last week that men who voted for John McCain saw their testosterone levels fall significantly when they learned he had lost to Barack Obama. That might help explain why wannabe alpha males, led by Brad Pitt and George Clooney, are retreating into “man caves,” playrooms packed with guitars, gym equipment and beer kegs, where they go to pretend they’re still in charge of their own lives, if not the American empire.
Things were already going badly for the male of the species, what with the he-cession and the decline of the manufacturing economy, which have combined to push men to the margins of social and economic life. Now along comes an Australian anthropologist to kick men while we are down, and tell us we are, in fact, “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.’’ Continue…
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Parties in glass houses should not throw stones
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 10 Comments
The Liberals have benefited hugely from the confusion of the ‘Liberal’ and ‘Canada’ brands, both proudly red and white
The craziest thing I learned from the coverage last month of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was that the People’s Liberation Army still belongs to the Communist party. Six decades after Mao’s victory in Beijing, the army is still under the command of the party, not the state, and the Ministry of National Defence exercises no authority over it.That’s as sure a sign as any, I figure, that China has a long way to go before it joins the civilized world. After all, here in the multi-party democracy that is Canada, we make a clear distinction between the private interests of a political party and the public interests of the state, especially when a party happens to find itself temporarily in power. Continue…
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Memorial to a very, very oppressive something
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 8 Comments
Say what you want about Stalin; he had an efficient decision process. There was that murderous
regime, though.It may seem hard to believe now, but until 1989 the museum at Auschwitz basically ignored the former concentration camp’s central role in the Holocaust; for years it was merely a monument to the struggle against fascism. Only after the victory of the Solidarity movement and the collapse of Communism was the place turned into a proper memorial to Jewish suffering.
Disgusting, yes, but hardly surprising. Plaques, monuments, museums—all are political devices aimed at serving one version of the past over the rest. But, however twisted the nature of the Auschwitz memorial under the Soviets may have been, at least you get the sense there wasn’t a lot of pussyfooting around about it. Stalin probably gave an order and it was carried out (or, given his famously opaque management style, his underlings probably just assumed that was what he wanted). Say what you want about Communism under Stalin, at least it had an efficient decision-making procedure. Continue…
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The trouble with a No Impact Planet
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 8 Comments
China is rapidly expanding, but the concern about its environmental impact is misplaced
Outdoorsy types have for ages practised no-impact camping, with its charming motto, “Take only pictures; leave only footprints.” The rationale is not complicated: the central conceit of going camping is you are entering the “wilderness,” a realm free of civilization with minimal evidence of human activity. If you vacate your campsite and leave a bunch of used flashlight batteries and empty Chef Boyardee tins lying around, it kinda spoils the effect for the next group. In short, no-impact camping is the only way to make the experience sustainable for everyone.But this idea, that what matters to sustainability is the effect our activities have on our future welfare and our descendants’, is one we often forget when it comes to thinking about the economy and the environment as a whole. Which is a bit weird, since the Brundtland commission, convened by the UN in 1983, explicitly defines a sustainable economy as one “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Continue…
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Generation gap? There really is no such thing.
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 2:41 PM - 7 Comments
Yes, kids like ‘sexting’ and are bored by how the nation runs. That isn’t complacency or a decline in values, it’s being young.
A while ago I participated in a seminar on what the private and public sector could do to keep young talent interested and engaged. My job was to listen to the discussion and offer at the end some critical reflections on what I had heard. But after a day spent listening to almost a hundred well-paid and over-indulged twentysomethings complain about how their jobs didn’t allow them to self-actualize in the manner to which they felt entitled, I was ready to strangle the lot of them.It’s with similar wariness about the youth of today that people like me greet the Beloit College “Mindset List,” an annual summary of the cultural touchstones that shape the world view of each incoming class of undergraduates. And so for the class of 2013 (born in 1991), Freddy Mercury has always been dead, text has always been hyper, and Magic Johnson has always been HIV-positive. Add to all of this “sexting” and cyberbullying and a general lack of concern for privacy, and it is hard not to conclude that kids these days espouse a seriously alien set of values. Continue…
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The true meaning of work? It’s money.
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 6 Comments
We fetishize what’s scarce. Last year’s obsession was home cooking; now we’re all enthralled with hard physical work.
For all the talk about downturns being an opportunity for society to pull together, the current recession has been marked by an ugly round of class warfare. On the one hand, the middle class is ready to lynch the insanely well-paid financial-sector workers who brought the economy to its knees and are already back to looting the till. At the same time, there is little sympathy for those who actually work for a living, with a lot of anger directed at striking blue-collar workers who are deemed unworthy of their demands for wages and benefits.What’s weirdest about this class war, though, is how the heroes of the knowledge economy, the members of the so-called creative class, have turned on themselves. In one of those odd moments of cultural synchronicity, everywhere you look these days someone is pledging their newly discovered appreciation for the virtues of skilled manual labour. In contrast with the inert “creative” work that involves moving columns of numbers around or turning one set of squiggly lines on a page into another set of squiggly lines on a page, activities that involve making and manipulating actual stuff are finding new fans. Continue…
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Fear of a Red planet is just what we need
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 16 Comments
The space race was always a creature of the Cold War. With Communism gone, there’s nothing noble about our goals up there.
The news media reported last week that NASA’s robot rover Spirit, stuck in the Martian equivalent of a ditch, is still spinning its wheels in the deep powder like some suburban doofus trying to free his SUV from a snowbank.
NASA scientists have been working hard trying to figure out some way of rocking the space buggy free, and they hope to give this a shot in a few weeks. But in the meantime, the trapped robot explorer serves as a perfect metaphor for humanity’s entire extraterrestrial ambitions. Continue…
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When ‘free’ becomes really expensive
By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 4:25 PM - 31 Comments
In the age of digital culture, it is not just access to art that has been democratized, but its production as well.
My iPod is packed with thousands of songs I’ve never listened to, by bands whose names I don’t recognize. The hard drive of my laptop contains dozens of movies I’ve downloaded and never watched, and if all goes according to the pattern, I will soon have a Kindle full of books I’ll never read by authors I don’t appreciate. I’m far from alone in this: in the age of digital reproduction, we treat art as a commodity—cheap, ubiquitous, and disrespected.There’s been a lot of talk recently about economics in the digital age, thanks to a new book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his challenging review in The New Yorker, Anderson’s book is little more than an extended riff on the old cyberlibertarian slogan, “information wants to be free.” Gladwell’s review sparked a bit of a free-for-all amongst bloggers, with everyone from branding guru Seth Godin to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban chiming in with their own opinions on the matter. Continue…
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Peak water, peak fish and the end of everything
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 31 Comments
‘Peakonomics’ forgets there is such a thing as innovation. The Stone Age didn’t end because they reached ‘peak rocks.’
What do salmon dinners, SUVs, and subprime mortgages have in common? They all depend on cheap oil, at least according to the book jacket of Jeff Rubin’s bestselling new book, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller.Rubin is a former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, and a recent convert to the economics of peak oil—the supposed point at which global oil production reaches its maximum level, after which it enters a long, slow decline. The result, Rubin argues, will be a world where demand increasingly outstrips supply—and the end of the entire global economic order.
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There's no faking a playoff beard
By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 7 Comments
It’s one of the last symbols of male solidarity
We are now well into the last round of the NHL playoffs, with the Pittsburgh Penguins once again up against the Detroit Red Wings. Sometime this week, the Stanley Cup will be held aloft and carried triumphantly around the rink by an ecstatic group of players who haven’t shaved in months, and who now look like nothing more threatening than refugees from a Sam Roberts concert.Most fans are familiar with the sporting world’s more amusing superstitious types, like the baseball player Wade Boggs, who famously ate chicken before every game, or the hockey goaltender Patrick Roy, who liked to talk to his goalposts. Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby gave hockey purists conniptions after his team beat Carolina for the Prince of Wales trophy to make it into the final round: he picked up the trophy and carried it around last week, when even touching the thing is considered bad luck.
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Tax freedom? What a lot of rubbish.
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 22 Comments
Only the Fraser Institute could see it as a bad thing that we spend less of our income on basics like food and shelter than we used to
What is it about springtime that makes anti-government types go light-headed? As millions of Canadians from coast to coast were getting ready to celebrate the Victoria Day weekend by opening the cottage, firing up the barbecue, or—er—watching hockey, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation took the opportunity to declare May 14 “Gas Tax Honesty Day.”Designed to “kick off the summer travel season for Canadian motorists” by reminding us of “the high tax component hidden in the price of gasoline,” this 11th annual holiday consisted—according to CTF propaganda—of “events” across the country. The highlight event was a jamboree down at the Ashbridges Bay Pumping Station in Toronto that featured CTF director Kevin Gaudet engaging in such summer-fun activities as . . . releasing a report on gas taxes . . . and . . . demanding that gas taxes be lowered.
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Why every day is amateur hour in the House
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 24 Comments
To call question period a zoo would be an insult to the relative civility of wild animals
Apart from sex, the only realm of human achievement where ignorance and inexperience are widely seen as virtues is politics. Sarah Palin is only the most notorious recent example of the phenomenon; the “vote for me, I have no experience” gambit succeeds with remarkable frequency, which speaks volumes about public attitudes toward the political process and politicians. Politics is seen as a profession in the same sense that prostitution is, practised only by people of highly suspect moral character.Canadian politicians are no exception, and the merits of this judgment are clearest in this country in the daily disgrace known as question period. To call question period a zoo would be an insult to the relative civility and good temperament of wild animals; one suspects that the occasional parleys between Bloods and Crips in South Central Los Angeles are less partisan and hostile affairs.
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Tamil protesters, yes. George Galloway? Keep out.
By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 3:55 PM - 61 Comments
If these protesters were, say, Palestinians in support of Hamas, we’d be far less tolerant
Canadians have free-speech bipolar disorder. On one side of our brains, we consider the right to freedom of assembly, conscience, and expression to be part of the constitutional heritage inherited from the British. On the other side, we recoil from the sort of free speech absolutism of the United States that—in an infamous case—holds that white racists burning a cross on the lawn of a black family is a protected form of speech.This national hemming and hawing about free speech finds direct expression in the Charter of Rights, which takes away in its first clause—“only to such reasonable limits”—the very freedoms it goes on to grant in the second. It also manifests itself in the behaviour of free speech tribunes like Ezra Levant, whose current crusade against Canada’s censorious human-rights tribunals is undermined by his long-standing penchant for filing suit against anyone who says something he finds even slightly defamatory.
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How did America become the new Canada?
By Andrew Potter - Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 11:45 PM - 57 Comments
You know things have gone bad for the left in Canada when even Conrad Black starts saying nice things about the place.
In a remarkable reversal of political directions, America has been transformed into a hothouse of liberal and—shhh—even socialist experimentation, while Canada seems a hotbed of reactionary conservatism. Yes, America is the new us, we’re the new America, and the Canadian left has to be wondering just where it all went wrong.The eight years of the Bush presidency allowed progressive-minded Canadians to indulge in an orgy of moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States, but in three short months that country has almost completely changed course. Acting on the premise that it would be a shame to let a good crisis go to waste, Barack Obama has put his ship of state in a hard left turn, and his countrymen have dutifully gone along with it. Huge tracts of the economy have submitted to massive state intervention even as the President pushes full-steam ahead on school reform, a national health care program, and a new energy- and climate-change initiative.
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Bipartisan he’s not, and that’s a good thing
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 12:34 PM - 3 Comments
No cult of consensus here: Obama knows the flip side of ‘I won’ is ‘hold me accountable’
It took Barack Obama just two days after he was sworn in as president to toss overboard the “bipartisan” malarkey that had been one of the dominant themes of his campaign narrative.On Jan. 22, he invited top congressional leaders from both parties to the White House to discuss his ideas for an economic stimulus plan. One of the goals of the meeting was to promote bipartisanship, but after listening to Republicans gripe about some of his proposed measures, Obama quieted them by saying, quite simply, “I won.”
The stimulus bill was subsequently passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, with the vote in both chambers breaking down almost perfectly along party lines. It’s been straight downhill since then on the hands-across-Congress front, with the sniping and potshotting escalating steadily to the point where last week Rush Limbaugh called bipartisanship “a false premise” and said that any good Republican should actually be hoping for Obama’s plan to fail.
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Sometimes a primate is just a primate, Reverend
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 6 Comments
The bigger race issue in the U.S. is a cult of black authenticity familiar from hip hop
The third week of Black History Month was not exactly a high-water mark in race relations in the United States. Last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder (who is black) caused a storm of anger when in a speech he called America a “nation of cowards” for refusing to have a frank conversation about race.
The same day, the New York Post ran a political cartoon showing two policemen standing in front of the bullet-riddled body of a chimpanzee. One of the cops is shown holding a smoking gun, while the other looks at him and says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The Post’s offices were promptly picketed by a few hundred demonstrators who denounced the paper as racist, led in a chant of “end racism now” by civil rights activist and professional race-baiter Al Sharpton.
