Category: American Politics

With their damn holier than thou attitude about anyone getting any, it is a wonder that the United States manages the birth rate that it does. Are most pregnancies limited to adolescents in the back seat of their parents’ cars? Are you expected to do all your sexual experimentation before you are 16?

For your information President Obama, there are lots of women in America who want to get it on with an alpha male like General Petraeus. And the truth be known, Mr. President, there are lots of women who would like to polish your particulars if they could just figure their way around the Secret Service and your wife.

Do only the French understand this? Heck, even the Brits laugh off the hordes of women throwing their panties at Prince Harry. Was Jack Kennedy’s string of conquests supposed to be an aberration? Is Bill Clinton supposed to be the only President to get a blow job while in office?

And it is not just that these people are normal, with normal sexual interests. Power, in itself, secretes powerful sex pheromones that can get the ugliest guy laid. Face it guys, it is the football captain, the big man on campus, the fellow with the fanciest car, the richest guy in town who gets laid first and most often.

Now, why can the Federal Bureau of Investigation not recognize this and accept it? To worry about the guy’s vulnerability to blackmail is only of concern to his wife.  Back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, that pervert kept records on all the politicians in office who got laid by their secretaries and in the long term, nobody cared. Back in those days, you wondered why if a senior person did not take advantage of the opportunity. It led you to question his masculinity.

Maybe we have made a mistake here. Should the President of the United States make it a rule that his senior advisors, cabinet ministers and direct appointees wear chastity belts? Would that satisfy the silly prudes among us? Look at the Roman Church. The clerics of that church are not allowed to marry, nor allowed to keep mistresses, nor to dally with the church organist. That seems to leave open buggering little boys and we find society is just as disgusted with that.

Well, you can try to deny the nature of men and women all you like, this guy, for one, is going to continue to enjoy it.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

There is much to be said for the end result of America’s corrupt, expensive, tedious and hard fought election of 2012. Much can be written about it and much will be. The fact that it is over enables us to turn our attention to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s much touted fiscal cliff. If you did not hear about this during the election it was not Bernanke’s fault. It was that neither candidate had an answer. And that also sums the election.

Bernanke’s fiscal cliff is the American budget that Congress and the President have to approve before January 1—less than two months from now. Without a new budget that enables the U.S. Government to function and allows a more reasonable tax balance, the U.S.could spiral rapidly into a recession that will impact the world’s economies. We would all be caught in the domino effect.

While most observers consider the Republican members of the House of Representatives to be committed to cooperating with newly re-elected Barack Obama, the markets are already expressing doubt. There is little trust.

It is like the Canadian government needs to fast-track getting the new Windsor-Detroit bridge underway before billionaire Matty Maroun comes up with new ways to try to block it. His expensive proposition on the Michigan ballot last Tuesday to block the bridge was defeated by about three to two but he is unlikely to give up the fight. Canadian business wants that new bridge to move things across the border faster. Maroun just wants to make more money.

Speaking of making money, many believe that President Obama will now move quickly on approving the TransCanada XL Pipeline to the Texas coast now that he is re-elected. If the environmentalists fighting this pipeline understood the real purpose of it, they might have a better chance to prevent it. Everyone assumes that the Texas refineries will process this bitumen into oil products. That is unlikely as long as there is enough North Dakota and Texas crude to keep the refineries going and the Canadian tar sands version of crude can be shipped to other markets.

It is like the con job that has been done on NDP leader Thomas Mulcair to convince him that by shipping the tar sands product east, it will provide cheaper gas in Eastern Canada. Reality is that it will remain cheaper to use U.S. refineries to provide us with gas while the bitumen product is piped further east to where it can be loaded on tankers at Saint John, New Brunswick. Mind you, the tar sands people are whistling if they think anything will ever come of their Enbridge pipeline to the west coast.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Canadians can only watch in horror. The late writer Paul Erdman wrote years ago that it would be a financial crisis that would destroy America. It appears he was wrong. He seemed to little understand the rot this great country has suffered from within. In a nation of so much vitality, there are people who are born again to destroy rather than build. Who would have believed that the grim reaper of the commonwealth carried a bible and believed he was doing the work of the Lord?

From their Books of Damnation, the hypocrites of America can read to us the words of Holy Unction, the Internment of the Dead, sing a final psalm of absolution and expect us to find comfort in their Heaven, in their purgatory, in their Hell or in their eternity. And next week, on their day of judgment, the cretin will emerge from their churches and prayer palaces and temples and mosques and synagogues to go to places of voting to denounce liberalism and justice and fairness. They will vote to enslave themselves. For, in that, is their comfort zone.

It is strange that a follower of Joseph Smith shall lead them. Mitt Romney, aspiring to be President of the United States, will tell you what you want to hear if only you vote for him. His money won the acceptance of the Grand Old Party. His coded promises won the support of the Tea Party. His pampered wife seeks to win over women to his cause. His Vice President running mate seeks to keep the born again enflamed. What truths can they trample for you today?

And the bear baiting is back at the White House. Barack Obama, formerly of the Harvard Law Review, Chicago ward healer, Senator and then President, awaits his fate. His legacy hangs by a thread, depending on so few Electoral College votes. He has protected women so the wives of the rich can revile him. His noble cause of health care for all is a target for his enemies to destroy. He brought home the troops and provided the bombs to free Libya. His solutions for Palestine, Iran and Syria are almost as vague and unformed as are Mitt Romney’s.

And yet Romney succours those of simplistic ideology. Revile same sex marriage they say. Stop abortion, they demand. Honour their God of wrath. Tax the middle class. Let business run rampant. Leave the rich alone. They will be safe in Fortress America.

Next week, Americans go to the polls. In a corrupted voting system, after a campaign of slander and slurs, Americans will choose. They will not always have rational reasons for their vote. All we can hope is that the Obama campaign wins the day.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The doomsday clock is ticking. America stands ready to destroy itself from within. In a corrupted election, under laissez-faire rules, in a deeply divided country, chaos awaits. In obstinacy and in an overwhelming field of lies, few can discern the truth.

This must be Osama bin Laden’s revenge. He united America against him and, with his death, Americans are free to attack each other.

And they are. It is a political schism between the left and the right. And it is surprisingly equal. Polls show the presidential race is within four points for each of the two major contenders. And as the GOP opened up funding to one and all (mainly the rich), the advertising airwaves are loaded with slander and defamation in both directions. There is no shame. There is only scepticism and desperation.

If every vote counted, President Obama would feel more comfortable but the Electoral College that chooses the President is based on so many votes per state. The race is now being decided in five of the states that could go either way on election day. Whether Obama or Romney proved himself more capable in the presidential debates is really immaterial. People decide according to their church, synagogue, mosque or temple. They will listen to their own greed. They will listen to those who want more guns available. They will succumb to lies. They will believe what they want to believe. Some will recognize the truth. Most will ignore the truth as inconvenient to their bias.

More than ever before, more Americans will vote against their self interest in this election than ever have in the past. For most of them, the problem is they are single issue voters. Take the farmer who likes the idea of medicare but is a member of the National Rifle Association. This voter has a clear choice between issues. Which wins his vote? What about the immigrant who likes Obama’s approach to foreign affairs and knows Romney is lost on this subject? If all his friends in America are urging him to vote for Romney, what does he do? Or what are the choices for the Catholic listening to a priest rant against abortion and the Democrats.

What American needs politically—besides decency and spending controls—are some legitimate third parties to give the voters alternatives and other options. The dominant two party system in America is thwarting democracy.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The quality of American election debates for the presidency has deteriorated. Watching the first hour of the Obama versus Romney debate last night was like watching kids in the school yard argue with each other. Whoever helped prepare these two men should be ashamed. The candidates argued, smirked, ranted and, much of the time, were incomprehensible to the audience.

The only time that anyone made any sense was when Romney complained that a gallon of gas that cost $1.86 just over four years ago, now cost over $4. The comment was gold. All Obama needed to do was to handle it properly. Mitt Romney, true to form, blamed it all on Barrack Obama. And then Obama bumbled it. He had the perfect opportunity to build a scenario starting with Hurricane Katrina (on George W. Bush’s watch) disabling much of America’s refining capacity and how the oil companies have taken advantage of the situation every since.

As in most of their childish arguing, you realized that they were arguing from different sets of facts. Romney, for example, always included Canadian tar sands oil in his U.S. energy efficiency statistics. This must be because he wants to make sure that the Trans-Canada Keystone XL Pipeline will be built. Obama never includes this bitumen crude in his figures because whomever gave him his statistics knows that the Alberta oil people want to use the East Texas oil ports to ship that crude around the world.

We hear that the second half of the show was no better than the first. And wherever they got that moderator from, they should return her for a refund. She crapped all over the candidates as though she had never seen a Yankee town hall meeting. Any resemblance to a properly run meeting by a neutral chairperson was purely coincidental.

At least Obama did not laugh and mug for the cameras like his running mate. Yet despite how poorly he performed, Romney must have been worse. We hear that Obama won the debate. Why is that do you think? Was it his turn?

Maybe Obama was not as reticent to mix it up with Romney this time.

But, good grief, somebody has to tell him not to try to explain costs in trillions of dollars. He has enough trouble explaining the inflationary impact on the cost of a gallon of gas caused by the world economic crisis. Even when you consider that an American trillion is only a thousand billion, it is no help whatsoever in trying to understand today’s price of a loaf of bread.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

It is brilliant. We have figured out President Barack Obama’s strategy for defeating challenger Mitt Romney. It is a classic. It will be talked about for many years. It is a strategy based on making Romney look good at this time.

And the strategy is succeeding. Since the first presidential debate, Romney has been on a roll. Republicans are revelling in the misconception that Romney seemed to have won the opening presidential debate. That sly coterie of apparatchiks running Obama must be chortling with glee.

But the key to a winning strategy is that the Obama team know that there are three debates. It was a very smart move to look like a bit of an underdog after that first debate. They know that this opera has three acts and the fat lady does not sing until the last act.

And do not forget there is a mini opera during one of the intermissions. That is when they let the Vice President candidates play as though they were big boys. Joe Biden will enjoy his time in the sun to rip apart Romney’s appalling running mate. That will be this coming Thursday that Paul Ryan will find that you need more than long pants to play with the big kids. That will be a feel-good session for Democrats.

But then we have the next two presidential debates. A more confident Romney will now face a different opponent from his last debate. Obama will be lying in wait for more confident Romney. He will be able to call him on some of the more outrageous lies Republicans are spreading. Romney will either have to refute the slander, for example, against the U.S. Department of Labor that says the department is being partisan or add the slander to his day of reckoning.

But the strategy is to even things out between the two candidates in this second debate. There is no sense in Obama going for the kill shot at this time. They still need a warm body available for the third and decisive debate. There has to be some anticipation and concerns about the third debate to bring an audience. And the third debate will give Obama a chance to shine in the area where Romney is weakest. When considering America’s world role, it will be Obama’s chance to show what a fool Romney could be in role of world statesman.

The only problem with that part of the strategy is that being a fool never seemed to hold back George W. Bush. And we should always remember that Emperor Nero ruled Rome at the time when Rome ruled the world.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

If anything explains the current American malaise, it is the often heard mantra: It is not my responsibility. It defines America in the 21^st Century. It causes the woeful state of American politics. It explains the economic meltdown of 2008.

The total lack of responsibility in the sub-prime mortgages that caused the economic collapse was not by the janitors in the banks but by the banks’ boards and operating officers. Canadian banks missed out on that gravy train on its way to the train wreck because of the conservatism of their rules and rulers. It will still take  America more than a few years to rebuild world confidence and to restore trust at home.

But what kind of America will emerge from this present abyss? The split in political direction is wide and far reaching. The battle is bitter. It sets the haves against the have-nots. It pits the intellectual against the ignorant. It invokes a holy crusade against the secular infidels within. And nobody expects to win at the ballot boxes. This is a house divided. It is an armed homeland of distrust, inured to bloodshed.

Give President Obama his due. He steered the ship of state through the first four years. He saved General Motors, he stabilized the banks, he fought and won the battle to bring Medicare to millions of Americans. If the sheer weight of his rhetoric could win, he could sleep easy in the White House.

But Americans are afraid.  They cannot see the truth through the lies of the politicians. They are the mightiest country in the world and they feel they are losing ground. They fear the rot of their cities as the war on drugs is lost.

And what choice are they offered. GOP candidate Mitt Romney is a millionaire and only his wife knows him as a person. He lacks any grasp of what is beyond America and yet he aspires to lead the world. His running mate, the man chosen to be a heart-beat from a Romney presidency, is a right-wing evangelical who knows even less about the real world and shows little interest in learning. Their candidacy is not an alternative to the Obama presidency but a sad commentary on how far the country has wandered from the ideals of America’s founding fathers.

French historian Alexis de Toqueville wrote of the States in the early 1800s that “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” And it seems there has been little improvement since.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Mitt Romney is a politician. He is also an enigma. And that does not auger well for Mitt Romney, the Republican. It cannot help him become President of the United States. His basic problem is that it is taking too long to sell himself to his own political party.

This is not his father’s Republican Party. What used to be a staid Grand Old Party (GOP) made up of the comfortably off and some rednecks is now made up of crazies with everyone from the Tea Party extremists to gun nuts to anti-abortionists to anti-vivisectionists to white supremacists. What is a polite Mormon boy supposed to do with that bunch? When he was governor of Massachusetts, he only had to deal with the moneyed class. They were much more civilized.

Now poor Mitt has to carry along baggage like Paul Ryan. Mitt’s Vice Presidential running mate is one of the crazies. This guy, supposedly backing him up, has never met a fact he could not ignore. Mitt was known as a straight shooter when governor of Massachusetts and now he is forced to work to an unfamiliar script, just to please the extremists of the Republican Party.

Something has got to give in this relationship. Poor Mitt has already made enough gaffs. His trip to Europe and the Middle East over the summer was like a golf game where all you get to see is a long series of sand traps. It was a misspoke disaster from beginning to end. He hopes people forget about it.

But Paul Ryan has no trouble talking about things he seems to know nothing about. International relations is the farthest subject from Ryan’s experience and if he gets into it, he will make Mitt look like a genius by comparison.

And the bad news for the GOP is that neither of their candidates can handle their opponents, Obama and Biden. Obama is not only as intelligent as Romney but has far more political smarts. And Paul Ryan is not even in the same wheelhouse as Joe Biden, Ryan is only slightly smarter than George W. Bush—which moves him into the group that includes 90 per cent of Americans.

The GOP is trying to pussy-foot around Obama by trying to suggest that his is a failed presidency. We should try to remember that Obama managed to get the first black family into the White House only to find the nation had gone into the financial dumper. When you figure, he got in a Medicare plan for millions of Americans, saved General Motors and got the country back on the road to recovery, he bloody well deserves some credit and respect

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Okay, it’s probably a couple months too early. That hardly prevents the American fourth estate from prognosticating about Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. The American media were bound to go after his Vice Presidential choice like vultures to fresh road kill. Just think of what they did to Sarah Palin four years ago.

Representative Paul Ryan from Wisconsin might be a few degrees smarter than Mrs. Palin but he is also a poster boy for America’s extremist right wing Tea Party Republicans. Romney was supposed to be concerned that the Tea Party nuts did not trust him. The choice of Paul Ryan is Romney’s way of showing them that he will toe the line.

From the first flub when Romney introduced him as the next President, Ryan was on the attack against Obama Care. He is promising the right wing that he has the fix for Medicare—denying it funding seems to be his solution. That is the economic solution he has relied on for the past eleven years in the House of Representatives.

Ryan draws his economic smarts from Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and his character from her novel Atlas Shrugged. His favourite economist was Milton Friedman of the Chicago School. Ryan is one of those young political idealists who steep themselves in right-wing radicalism and then never grow up.

Romney and Ryan share one crucial characteristic and that is a serious lack of foreign affairs experience. Since Romney’s gaffs in London and Poland this summer, it has been obvious that he needed a running mate with some foreign experience. Ryan is not the answer to that weakness.

This all adds up to Obama being the odds-on favourite in the early betting. He is the incumbent, he is at ease with heads of state, he has successfully negotiated more than one budget with an obdurate congress, he is trusted as commander-in-chief and he has got Medicare off the ground even if it is not really flying.

Romney and Ryan have a hill to climb. Romney has to count on Ryan to keep the crazies of the right wing in line while he works to convince Americans capable of thinking that he just might have something concrete to offer. Just what he has to offer is a good question. There are only a few months left for surprises.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]