Good Friday news reveals bad politics [Tom Steyer and Keystone Pipeline] – by Lorne Gunter (Toronto Sun – April 23, 2014)

http://www.torontosun.com/home

It’s an old public relations strategy in politics that the best time to announce bad news is late on a Friday. That way, the news hits when most of the public (and much of the media) isn’t paying attention. It takes a couple of days for the bad news to trickle down.

Really bad news should be announced on the Friday before a long weekend. So what kind of news gets announced on a Good Friday? Good Friday isn’t just the start of a long weekend, it’s one day into a four-day long weekend.

On top of that, Good Friday is the most solemn day in the Christian calendar. Even nominal Christians who never darken a church door the rest of the year somehow make it to service on GF.

So the attempt by the Obama White House to bury deeply its newest delay on the Keystone XL pipeline by announcing it late last Friday – Good Friday — was not merely tactical, it was cowardly. The time for diplomatic niceties is over. Let’s call a coward, a coward. And Barack Obama is a coward.

He can’t stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin as Putin prepares to gobble up the old Eastern European client states of the Soviet empire.

He can’t stand up to the mad mullahs who run Iran and who are intent on building a nuclear arsenal, or to the tin pot little demagogues who run tiny fiefdoms such as Venezuela and North Korea.

And now it’s obvious he can’t stand up to the environmentalists in his own Democratic party, particularly a San Francisco billionaire named Tom Steyer.

Steyer is the ultimate one-percenter. He went to an exclusive, private high school. He graduated from Yale, was a hedge fund trader on Wall Street and later founded his own fund, Farallon Capital, which specializes in making money for “high-worth individuals” from movement in the market. So whether the markets are rising or falling, Farallon gains.

And he is the top contributor to political campaigns in the United States, out-giving even the libertarian and conservative Koch brothers.

For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.torontosun.com/2014/04/22/good-friday-news-reveals-bad-politics