MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Toronto’s mayor is cracking under the pressure”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, November 10 2013
What does a mayor have to do to be impeached in Canada?
Shoot a moose? Outlaw hockey? Getting caught on video sucking a crack pipe obviously isn’t enough.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Toronto Mayor Rob Ford gives crackheads a bad name!
Mayor Ford’s issues aren’t limited to cellphone cameras and rock cocaine. In earlier embarrassments, he was fired as a high-school football coach over a violent confrontation with a player. He was accused of groping a female politician at a fundraising event. He was even ejected from the stands at a Maple Leafs hockey game for being drunk and boisterous.
Yes, ejected from a hockey game! How drunk and boisterous must the mayor have been?
He’s blaming “one of my drunken stupors” for the crack-video episode — drunken stupors, plural. And just to prove how frequent they are, another mayoral video popped up by week’s end, this one teeming with vulgar threats. “No holds barred, brother,” the mayor fumes about an unseen opponent. “He dies or I die.”
“I was extremely, extremely inebriated,” he shrugged later.
Under Canadian law, Ford can’t be impeached unless he stops showing up at City Hall. But maybe there’s a deal to be made here: You keep your job, Mr. Mayor. But please, please, turn out the lights and sit in the darkness at home.
CRACKERS
1. If it’s good enough for Marion Barry.
2. At least I wasn’t selling it — that I recall.
3. Whitney had lots of other problems, too.
4. Coffee’s addictive, too.
5. I’ll just use the old “drunken stupor” excuse.
ASKED AND UNANSWERED
Would tenants at Great Neck’s Academy Gardens have been better off accepting the developer’s 2007 buyout offer? Or does the six-year delay make today’s stingier stipends a net plus? . . . With “several thousand” homeless vets in Suffolk County, when will the first 300 get homes via the Economic Opportunity Council’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families program? Twenty-one have now been screened . . . Has the Mile-a-Minute Vine (official name, persicaria perfoliata) finally met its match? Is the stem-boring black weevil its long-awaited natural predator? Overrun Shelter Island property owners are certainly hoping so . . . Those two growling pit bulls who interrupted a shoplifting interrogation at the Peconic View Trailer Park in Riverside — can they somehow be charged as accessories? . . . The 18-foot wind tunnel that Skydive Long Island has proposed for Calverton — couldn’t it help test perma-press trousers or super-hold hairspray? . . . Did you hear about the upcoming Comedy Central Internet sitcom about grown men still living at home? Gee, where could that be set? Does the name, “Strong Island,” suggest anything? . . . Who else but the Science Museum of Long Island could get away with calling its big fundraiser (Thursday at Garden City Country Club) the Big Bang Ball?
THE NEWS IN SONG
Forget the caffe latte
“Alcohol”
by
Bare Naked Ladies
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
BRIAN KILMEADE
When it comes to birthing America, Long Island never gets the credit it deserves — until now. In a gripping new book, “George Washington’s Secret Six,” Massapequa stalwart (and “Fox & Friends co-host) Brian Kilmeade shines a bright light o
n the long-hidden exploits of the so-called Culper spies. They really were, as the subtitle puts it, “The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution.” With stealthy craftiness, they delivered four years of crucial intel on British troop movements to the outgunned revolutionaries. Their identities remained secret even to General Washington. As Kilmeade (and co-author Don Yaeger) recount, several were Long Island school friends of Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge, Washington’s director of military intelligence — familiar LI names like Woodhull, Rowe, Brewster, Townsend and Rivington. Brian reads and signs Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Huntington’s Book Review.
E-mail ellis@henican.com
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