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Category: American Politics

Harper’s friends form formidable phalanx.

September 27, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has interesting friends. As the Prime Minister said in New York the other day, neither he nor his friends take ‘No’ for an answer. It was bad enough when we were ridiculing him and Jim Flaherty for lionizing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. It is less than funny when you learn who Harper has lobbying in Congress for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to send Alberta bitumen to the Texas Gulf seaports. Harper’s best friend selling the tar sands pipeline is none other than Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This is the guy who recently provided a 21-hour speaking marathon in the American Senate in his Tea-Party inspired effort to destroy the American economy.

But he at least stands foursquare with Harper and TransCanada Pipelines. He seems to think that the Texas refineries want that highly polluting tar sands bitumen to refine because they will do a cleaner job of refining it than the Chinese. He also thinks that the pipeline will create lots of jobs. Just how a pipeline creates jobs, he does not know.

Senator Cruz’s message to President Obama is that the Keystone XL pipeline is not a hard decision. He told a Washington news conference the other day that “There are a lot of decisions facing this country and there are hard decisions and easy decisions. This is a no brainer. This is not a hard decision.”

Obviously the Senator does not understand the concerns. And in his ongoing role as spokesman for the Texas Tea Party, he continues to prove that he has a somewhat warped view. Canadians would also be the most surprised at his comments about the new American healthcare program now getting underway. Cruz does not like what he calls ‘Obamacare.’ Since it has already been passed into law in America, the Alberta born Senator from Texas is trying to stop the government from funding it. His strategy is to force his country into bankruptcy and let it dissolve into anarchy.

Both he and his friend Prime Minister Stephen Harper are political ideologues. They are fixated on their own agendas. Lucky for Canadians, Mr. Harper is a bit smarter than Mr. Cruz. Stephen Harper is a more up tight kind of guy. Even in a private speech, Stephen Harper would not make some of the remarks that Ted Cruz made in his recent filibuster. Even in a filibuster, you do not refer to your fellow Republicans as being like Nazi-appeasers in 1930’s Germany.

By the way, did we mention that Stephen Harper’s friend Ted Cruz hopes to run for President of the United States of America in the upcoming presidential election?

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

The environmental waiting games.

August 19, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The games are endless. Only the representatives of the people change. The current combatants are President Obama of the United States and Prime Minister Harper of Canada. Both have finite time left. Harper will have to face election in 2015 and Obama will be out of office in 2016. The American President grandiosely wants to save the planet.  The Canadian Prime Minister just wants to save the tar sands investors.

But before then, President Obama will have to give a yes or no to the Keystone XL Pipeline. What he needs, to allow the pipeline, is Canada’s introduction of stronger rules to protect the environment in the extraction and processing of the tar sands bitumen. The solution to that does not seem to be anywhere on the horizon.

Harper’s process is flawed. His government is negotiating with the tar sands industry and with the Alberta government and it is hard to say which of the parties is more obdurate in their negotiating position.

The industry has failed to do its job. Its task was to find a way to reduce the environmental damage in the Athabasca region and instead, it continues to pollute the rivers, destroy the livelihood of our aboriginal peoples and demand that others find solutions to shipping bitumen slurry. And the Alberta government remains blind to the irreparable environmental damage caused by the extraction of bitumen from the tar sands.

But the province does recognize that refining tar sands bitumen into synthetic oil in Alberta is an absolutely no-win situation. The province and its political leaders are fighting to ship unprocessed bitumen by any means possible. They want that bitumen far away from the Alberta when the highly polluting refining is done.

But Canada cannot say in its new environmental regulations that it intends to ship billions of barrels of bitumen to third-world countries that do not care about pollution. This leaves Environment Canada with egg all over its faces. With taxpayers paying for the extensive advertising that promise environmental regulations for the tar sands, it is becoming more and more obvious to Canadians that their government just might be lying to them. Those regulations were supposed to be issued last year.

Meanwhile President Obama is in no rush. He can keep TransCanada Pipelines dangling over the Keystone XL pipeline as long as he is in office if he wants. The only problem is that Canada’s tar sands exploiters get a huge chunk of the money they need from American investors. That causes a bit of pressure on the President’s decision.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

Sex and General Petraeus.

November 15, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

A bridge over a fiscal cliff.

November 8, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

The last days of America.

November 2, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

Two weeks to save America.

October 20, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

Liar, liar, pants on fire! The American election.

October 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

Obama’s stunning strategy.

October 7, 2012 by Peter Lowry

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]

An American mantra.

September 22, 2012 by Peter Lowry

If anything explains the current American malaise, it is the often heard mantra: It is not my responsibility. It defines America in the 21st 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]

In defence of civility.

September 16, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Sitting beside someone the other evening who admired Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was a bit of a trial. When he went on to laud Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s award of Statesman of the Year, there was an urge to use brute force to silence him.

But he had a right to his opinion. While he appeared (to us) to be ignorant and misled, you try desperately to understand where this person is coming from. What will it take to educate him? You try to analyze the situation. Can he convince others to think as he does? If the answer is ‘no,’ maybe you can dismiss him from your mind and go on to weightier matters. And, even if the answer is ‘yes,’ the physical  act of hitting him will feel good but will solve nothing.

A reader wrote the other day that I fear for civility and our ability to get along with one another in very basic and practical ways. He was writing about Mayor Ford’s seeming propensity for breaking laws that were inconvenient for him. The reader could not understand a man, who wants to be a leader, not realizing the impact of leading by example.

The reader goes on to say: I believe I have been witnessing a decline in civility in recent years. Our social fibre is less rigorous, certainly less responsibly social. Unthinking and selfish individualism has been on the rise. It’s part of the “Government back off, this land is my land” ignorance and selfishness. He concludes with the comment: They just haven’t been civilized. They think such behaviour is for wimps.

This thinking was in mind when trying to understand Romney and Ryan’s reaction to the death of American diplomats in Libya. These shallow, crass people used this ugly, tragic event to further their own ambitions, to attack the president of the United States of America. The president is required to speak on behalf of the nation in reaction to incidents such as this and all they are proving is that they are inadequate to the task.

Looking at the incident, the quickly assembled riots throughout the Muslim world seem to be gross over-reaction to a piece of garbage video that had no purpose other than to insult. It seems promoting racial hatred is not illegal in America when it hides behind freedom of speech. The problem is that there are elements within the Muslim communities around the world who constantly seek out supposed slights to continue their war of hatred against America.

The world is going through bad times. Civility needs to start at the top. We need leaders who can set an example.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

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

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