Canada’s long gun registry now hangs by a thread,
NDPs getting in on the kill is Jack Layton’s dread.
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Comment for today.
September 3rd, 2010Comment for today.
September 2nd, 2010Harper’s F-35 deal is becoming clear,
The deal is to cause the Liberals fear.
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#77 – You jilt Ma Bell at your peril.
September 1st, 2010It is getting ridiculous. It has been suggested that we be more proactive about this matter. It is like using hot compresses to draw a boil. There is a definite similarity to that analogy. We really need to let the bad out. The foolishness with Ma Bell has festered long enough.
In blog entry number 67 of July 31, the situation was described in detail. We had been seduced by Ma Bell again. We went back to Bell Canada for telephone, Internet and television services. That was a gutsy move and we knew better but we wanted to believe. We had demanded a written quote, which we got, but Ma Bell does not believe in keeping any kind of promise. The system does not allow it. And you, you fool, even while she is abusing you, you make excuses for her.
Bell executives must live in a very strange world. They have been dumping employees for a long time. Today, the company has many thousands of retirees yet seems to have few, if any, real employees. The executives must sit in a darkened, climate conditioned, sound-proofed room somewhere and write their own rules on how to do business. They must pass these rules out under the door to workers provided by a temp firm who then distribute them to the various out-sourced workers in call centres, sweat shops or contracted to drive a Bell (leased) van. These contract people read these rules to customers and then try to enforce them.
If this approach to doing business gets the call centre people shouted at by angry customers, what do Bell executives care. The company wins back a few new customers every week or so to keep a reasonable cash flow going. The Bell executives know that the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission will keep the regulated services safe and profitable for them and Bell’s millions of miles of copper wires will always bring them revenue.
They also have advertising agencies that will entice new customers for them. They do not call it lying. They prefer to call their advertised offers hyperbole and cover their asses with small print. A recent letter from Bell, signed by a ‘Steve Bickley, senior vice-president, residential services,’ is a good example of the enticement. It promises consumers Bell TV for $30 per month. It sounds like one hell of an offer until you read the small print the says “from” $30 per month “in the Bell Bundle.” There are another eight lines of tiny type on the back of the letter that few people would understand.
But nowhere in that tiny type does it tell you that further rules will be written as needed by the Bell executives at their pleasure. And you may be quite sure that none of their rules will be of assistance to the consumer.
To-date, there have been eight telephone conversations (number eight came in as I entered this blog) with people with a range of accents and one frustrating argument with a clerk at the Bell store in the Barrie Power Centre. The clerk refused to refund a bill of $99 plus HST of $12.87 for a receiver box that did not work as we had cancelled the service two weeks after connecting the box. It appears that Bell Canada does not have a money back warrantee for suckers.
Of all the communication with Bell Canada in regards to our recent foray into Bell services, we have not had the opportunity to speak to anyone who could understand that we had a contract and that we had no intention of paying three times the contracted price for Bell services. Contracted-out call centres hardly care.
The big surprise is that Bell Canada also seems to have contracted out its collection services. That used to be one of the better jobs at Bell. The last three calls have informed us that we owe amounts of either $192, $332 and $700 and something. Each caller has been politely informed that Bell Canada is more than welcome to take the claim to small claims court. That might just be the one place in Canada where contracts are still being honoured.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me
Comment for today.
August 31st, 2010Oh, what a wonderful summer it has been,
The sun, the water, the whole damn scene.
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#76 – You cannot go home again Sarah Palin.
August 30th, 2010It is interesting how right wing speakers in the United States such as Sarah Palin try to invoke an image of a ‘kinder, gentler America.’ Big-lie advocate Joseph Goebbels would have been so proud of her. The America that Palin pictures is such an outrageous lie that it tears deeply at your viscera. What she is invoking, in reality, is an America of guns and lawlessness, of war and retribution without justice, of hatreds and intolerance, of capitalism built on exploitation and thievery, of a white-bread America where nobody dares to be different.
Palin would have been a big fan of Doris Day/Gordon MacRae movies in the 1950s. They were the pure schmaltz that she would have loved if she had not been born in 1964, too late to believe Doris was still a virgin and her male friends in her films all respected her. John McCain could have explained that to Palin if he had not been busy trying to become President at the time they were running mates.
Palin has become the pit bull for the National Rifle Association, the poster girl for the blatantly right-wing Fox News and the darling of the Tea Party. Like Wonder Woman in her disguise, she is ever ready to take off the glasses, shake the bun out of her hair and strip to her magic bracelets that can bounce off the shots from thinking voters.
It amazes people that this woman could have her sights set on the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. What is even more horrifying is that it is there for her to take. The ‘thinking republican’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one) has already written off the nomination situation for that year. And, while people are not taking her seriously, there is unlikely to be any serious competition. You can count on the Republican convention that year to be a very colourful zoo.
And speaking of color, her presidential campaign will be a holy war against having a black in the White House. Despite the fact he has accomplished more than any other president in the first half of his term, she and the rest of the pack of mad dogs will ravage him, using his middle name “Hussein” to feed on the dual bigotries against Islam and blacks. He will have to use all his powers of persuasion to save the presidency from her.
He can hardly count on his accomplishments alone. He was the guy who, in face of one of the most serious recessions in history, took over General Motors, brought Wall Street to heel, brought medical services to another 27 million Americans, brought the combat troops home from Iraq and took a message of hope to the American people. These are meaningless accomplishments to Tea Party advocates.
To really understand the ‘kinder, gentler America’ of Sarah Palin, you only need to imagine if she had been President for the past two years instead of Barack Obama. What would be the condition of America today? It is something for a Stephen King novel.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me
Comment for today.
August 29th, 2010How many years ago, did Reverend King have a dream?
Now the Tea Party usurps the Mall. You want to scream.
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Comment for today.
August 28th, 2010Watched a red ball of sun rise from the lake this morning,
Then also saw it change to a golden orb without warning.
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Comment for today.
August 27th, 2010Michael Ignatieff spent the summer riding on a bus,
Harper goes to the Arctic and the media make a fuss.
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#75 – Politicians pooh-pooh the P-O factor at their peril.
August 26th, 2010Politicians and political scientists have been puzzling over the P-O factor in politics for many years. Many see the P-O voter as self destructive. P-O voters are certainly alienated. They defy logic. They re-elected George W. Bush as President of the United States in 2004 when all sensible voters knew the man was a liar, a fool and incompetent.
Many are now realizing that it is the P-O factor that is boosting the chances of Rob Ford to become the next mayor of Toronto. It is the P-O factor that enables a person such as Rob Ford to survive in politics. The man is walking excess. If he has a heart, you would need a very large weighted meat cleaver to find it. He does not talk, he blusters. He does not reason, he goes postal. He has little to say but says it anyway. He suits the P-O voter to a ‘T.’
What few realize is that the P-O voter can also do good. They just do it for the wrong reasons. They could vote for Barack Obama as President of the United States, for example, as a way of giving the finger to their fellow P-O voters. Go figure!
In Canada, we watched the historical journey of Pierre Trudeau through the late 60s to the early 80s in a chaotic love-hate relationship with voters. He was the right person, in the right place, to be elected for the wrong reasons. He had won his first election before the votes were cast with the bottle throwing incident at the St. Jean Baptiste parade in Montreal. When party strategy guru Keith Davey was once—facetiously—accused of being among the bottle throwers, he laughed and said he wished he had thought of it. The incident brought an anti-francophone vote to Mr. Trudeau that embarrassed him. After one of the most stunning one-sided victories in Canadian history, the P-O voters reduced his Liberals to a minority government four years later.
It is the populist politician who preys most effectively on the P-O voter. Populists can be of any political stripe. They are the type of politician who can hear the P-O voter and understand the plaint. They simply reflect back the noise that they hear. If the politician is one who does not bother to listen, they just feed the system with the standard mantra of the P-O. This can include ‘we are over taxed,’ ‘our streets are not safe’ and ‘there are too many civil servants.’ After all, there are darn few of us who really want to pay taxes, so saying that any amount is too much strikes an easy chord. The same voter wants to hire more police and build more prisons and damn the expense. And who among us has not wanted to fire a bureaucratic civil servant?
It is not that the P-O voter is stupid. They are just a people who want to get even. They want the opportunity to vent their spleen. It has been suggested that there should be shouting rooms at each polling place on election day. These are soundproof rooms that you can go into and rant and scream and shout until you have it all out of your system. Then you can go and vote sensibly. Would it work? It’s doubtful.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me
Comment for today.
August 25th, 2010This fall the Supreme Court will rule on our paying for local TV,
PM Harper wants to use our money to bribe the greedy at CTV.
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