CBC: Doug Ford sails to another majority, CBC News projects
- Ford projected to cement political legacy with a rare third-straight majority.
- NDP Leader Marit Stiles and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner will win re-election, CBC News projects.
- Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie is projected to lose her seat, though her party will win back official status.
Ford spent millions on an early election saying he needed a mandate, although he didn’t fulfil any of the mandates he asked for in the last election: healthcare and hallway medicine, education, housing.
Oh yeah, he also shut the Ontario Science Centre planning to sell the land off to buddies, got caught shifting green space land to developer friends, and is proposing a huge, multi-decade project to put a tunnel under the 401, a project that will never be completed but will suck up a ton of money in the meantime. Good call, Ontario.
CBC: Hundreds of weather forecasters fired in U.S. federal cuts
Hundreds of weather forecasters and other U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired on Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said.
Federal workers who were not let go said the afternoon layoffs included meteorologists who do crucial local forecasts in National Weather Service offices across the country.
Cuts at NOAA appeared to be happening in two rounds, one of 500 and one of 800, said Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist who said he got the information from someone with first-hand knowledge. That’s about 10 per cent of NOAA’s workforce.
Sherrilyn (Substack): Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything?
09.Feb.2025
Yes. And You Can Too.
NYT: Thomas L Friedman: This Never Happened With an American President Before
What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.
PBS: What Trump and Zelenskyy said during their heated argument in the Oval Office
Here is a transcript of the key moments of the exchange.
PBS: Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy
Jonathan Capehart:
I thought the low point for America on the world stage was the Trump-Putin press conference in Helsinki in 2017, when the president of the United States sided with the president of Russia against his own national intelligence apparatus.
What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia.
And, look, I give President Zelenskyy major points for standing up for himself, for standing up for his nation and standing up for his people. He is in there fighting for America’s backing, which, I’m sorry, it should not even be in doubt, given the stakes that are involved and who he is trying to protect his people from.
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David Brooks:
I was nauseated, just nauseated. All my life, I have had a certain idea of about America, that we’re a flawed country, but we’re fundamentally a force for good in the world, that we defeated Soviet Union, we defeated fascism, we did the Marshall Plan, we did PEPFAR to help people live in Africa. And we make mistakes, Iraq, Vietnam, but they’re usually mistakes out of stupidity, naivete and arrogance.
They’re not because we’re ill-intentioned. What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen.
NYT: European Leaders Rally Around Zelensky After Explosive Meeting With Trump
Leaders lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders added their voices to the Europeans’.
Among current democracies, the US now stands alone.
Last Updated: 28.Feb.2025 23:58 EST
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