Archive for September, 2011
The Springboks Samoa Rugby world cup game, the second half was a ripper. That said, Samoa’s out. Oh yeah, hence the late posting.
Anyway, thought about starting a bit retro. Don’t blame me. Blame Gavin Atkins for his two flea links.
Never realised Flea played bass on Busta Move… makes sense but.
And the youtube uploader has a ton of oldies.
Let’s see what happens.
There’s gonna be a few…
Now an insider has reported on a recent speech President Obama gave: “President Obama finished the speech, walked off the stage, was escorted to the back corridor where he collapsed into a seat against the wall. Both hands went to each side of his head which was leaning down almost between his knees. You could see marks on the sides of his face where the stage makeup had been rubbed off by his hands. He wears that stuff everywhere these days. A staffer walked up and leaned over the president and told him it was time to go. The president looked up, gave a little smile, and got to his feet slowly. Very slowly. The only word he said was ‘Yeah.’ There was no excitement. No energy from him. The people around the president seemed to ignore his condition. They looked right through him until he started walking down the hallway toward the outside. They followed alongside him and seemed to kind of push him out the door. The president looked incredibly tired. Used up.”
There’s more there including the observation no president has won re-election without Pennsylvania and Obama is way behind in that state.
More from Dick Morris.
NB That last link isn’t working on this work computer. Will try again at home. Essentially Morris is claiming a former Clinton advisor has said Obama will bow out of the presidential race.
How times change.
H/T JM
According to reports, the Venezualan head honcho might be checking out of this mortal plane sooner rather than later.
I’ve never wished anyone dead, but Venezuala would be a whole lot better off if it discontinued its lurch to the left and let business run business again.
H/T Drudge
In the US, home owners have a constitutional right to place signs on their property.
However, a New Orlean’s home owner is causing a stir by putting up some (pretty funny and poignant) anti-Obama billboards.
Some protesters have demanded they be taken down, seemingly oblivious to the US Constitution’s First Ammendment right to free speech.
Naturally, the Democrat city council is busily searching through every by-law they have to try and come up with an excuse for denying the home owner his First Ammendment right.
Click for video.
H/T Drudge
Professor Henry Ergas confronts Australian economist and wannabe climate guru, Ross Garnaut.
ROSS Garnaut has an unusual concept of democracy. The Prime Minister goes to the country promising “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”. Once in office, she then proposes to implement one, with the added twist of making repeal by a future government prohibitively costly. Yet, according to Garnaut, rejection of the government’s proposed legislation would amount to a failure of Australian democracy on a historical scale, indeed to “a corruption of democracy” caused by “distortion of reality and abuse of truth”.
The sky is green. Water makes you thirsty.
And then intellects like Professor Robert Manne insist us little people with even smaller brains should be shut out of the debate, with only those pre-approved (by whom?) being allowed to participate.
There is an ever-growing giant foul stench in the political air as day by day, we see evermore desperate measures by the decaying Left to reconsolidate their waning toxic grip on the psyche of the nation.
That’s some kind of activist you are there, Julian.
HUMAN rights lawyer Julian Burnside has apologised to Tony Abbott after branding him a “Paedos in speedos” on Twitter.
The prominent QC said the tweet, which was seen by users of the social media service as a reference to pedophilia, was a mistake for which he unreservedly apologised.
Three times they’ve been offered by Israel and/or the international community their own state, and each time has been met with more violence.
What’s odd is they hate Irael so much, even after such offers – including the east half of Jerusalem for their capital – but former leader Yasser Arafat didn’t appear to have any problem with Jordan and Egypt occupying their territories and giving them no rights.
Makes you wonder about the true motives of people in Australia and around the world (the latest is the 6.5 million member UK Trade Unions Council) who want to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. Makes you wonder about the true motives behind such people as those who joined the Gaza flotilla a few months back; “peaceful” protestors with a sizable cache of weapons on board. Makes you wonder about the true motives of people who support the people who supported the Nazis.
H/T Gavin Atkins Via Theospark
And a number of months cooler than 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007… and all the way back to even 1988.
Yep, better do something about that global warming.
Yes, Ms Gillard. Please introduce a carbon tax that won’t cool the temperature one skerrick on a planet that hasn’t been warming anyway.
Last year we had record cold winters across the globe, from Korea to the UK, this year looks set to possibly be even colder, yet I can’t get a plastic bag at the supermarket because the planet is in peril.
Governments rather than the market deciding which businesses are successful; what could go wrong?
WSJ:
If you thought the $535 million Solyndra scandal had chastened the fearless venture capitalists of the Obama Administration, think again. The Department of Energy shovelled out $1.1 billion in new loan guarantees to solar projects in Nevada and Arizona Wednesday, and more deals are pending before the $18 billion program funded by the 2009 stimulus expires Friday.
We’ll go out on a limb and say the rush raises questions about how carefully these outlays are being vetted, especially in light of solar-panel maker Solyndra’s August bankruptcy. The FBI, Treasury Department and Congress are all investigating who approved the politically connected California company’s loan guarantee and why. The case is an embarrassment for the White House, which touted Solyndra as a model for its green jobs agenda.
Read on. A little cost/benefit analysis comparing government “green” jobs with private enterprise’s real jobs is included.
The worst thing is, if the government-approved and funded business succeeds, shareholders reap the benefits. If it fails, taxpayers foot the bill.
This is economic madness.
UPDATE
FBI investigates Solyndra for fraud.
UPDATE II (via JM)
“$737 million in green-tech loan to company connected to Pelosi family?”
Nancy Pelosi is a top Democrat.
Ed Morrissey:
This surely is just a coincidence … in the same way that the push by the Obama administration to approve a loan to a failing Solyndra backed by one of his big campaign bundlers was just a coincidence. Recall Reason TV’s excellent video yesterday on the urban-renewal movement, in which governments seized property ostensibly to improve neighborhoods but parsed out the spoils to the politically connected ? That’s exactly what’s going on with this program, and with Barack Obama’s demands for more blank checks for stimulus. The only thing Obama’s stimulating is the pockets of his cronies.
UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage, Member of the European Parliament, ponders the collective noun for all the various presidents in the European Union, European Council etc.
Of particular note, there are the unelected, including “former” communists.
Most even casual observers know Europe is headed for a major crash, and Farage questions why, if what they’re doing hasn’t been working, then why do more of it?
The definition of insanity indeed, and he likens it to former Soviet Russia, and how today we laugh at them for things like declaring bumper harvests when in fact the opposite was true.
Headed for a crash, and James Delingpole congratulates British PM David Cameron for addressing the really important issues like, er, plastic bags.
UPDATE
Remember the trader who said Goldman Sachs rules the world? Here’s a bit more on that.
UPDATE II
Now the EU is trying to stop the UK from extracting some of its own energy reserves.
What a bunch of largely unelected, anti-sovereign, former communist, green zealot ratbags.
And to think just four years ago, we had a budget surplus of $20 billion… under the previous government of course.
THE 2010-2011 federal budget deficit has come in $1.6 billion lower than expected on the back of a $3.6 billion saving in expected government outlays.
Despite a $2 billion hit to government revenues, the final budget deficit has shrunk to $47.7 billion, down from the earlier forecast of $49.4 billion.
It’d be great in my bank account, but “saving”* $1.6 billion doesn’t really count that much in the whole scheme of things.
With the deficit where it is, this government has effectively lost around $68 billion dollars in four short looooooong years, or on average about $17 billion per yer, or about $1.5 billion per month, or around $50 million per day, $2 million per hour, 35 grand a minute, 600 bucks a second.
What the average bloke makes in a year, our government loses in a minute.
What many make in a week, this government loses every second.
Yet apparently Australia has the world’s best Treasurer.
If that’s the best, pity the poor bastards who live under the “stewardship” of the worst.
*It’s not “saving” when in truth it’s money you thought you were going to lose but didn’t.
We have a triple whammy being played out these days in Australia.
1. On Wednesday, we saw free speech in Australia curtailed not necessarily because of what someone said or wrote, but that some people (who?) were deemed by a judge to have been “reasonably likely” to have been offended.
2. The government is moving in on the free press, with an inquiry imminent and the fair chance that government licences to publish will be introduced. When it’s up to the government-of-the-day to decide what the citizenry may or may not read, then that is certainly a dark day for freedom and democracy.
3. There are moves to filter the Internet. Not a voluntary filter such as parents may use for their children, but a government-mandated filter that decrees what adult citizens may or may not read and therefore (the intention being) think.
Anyone who sees this as a move “forward” in an advanced society is either naive, deluded or dangerous.
And for those calling for certain columnists or publications to be withdrawn, there’s an easy way to do that: don’t buy it. Capitalism, the market, will soon see it gone.
Putting in place gatekeepers (unelected?) sets Australia down a very slippery slope, one that has been tried before in societies with spectacular failures.
How dare someone else whom I don’t know, tell me what I can and can’t read, watch, and think.
It’s not just Leftists in Australia who don’t appear all that thrilled with nations being democratic.
The idea is being touted in the US as well, and yep, you guessed it, by a Democrat (oh, the irony).
File this in the random-things-politicians-say file. Speaking to a Cary Rotary Club today, N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue suggested suspending Congressional elections for two years so that Congress can focus on economic recovery and not the next election.
“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that,” Perdue said. “You want people who don’t worry about the next election.”
The comment — which came during a discussion of the economy — perked more than a few ears. It’s unclear whether Perdue, a Democrat, is serious — but her tone was level and she asked others to support her on the idea.
*
Hey, why stop there? Make it four years. Make it forever. Even do what Bob Brown wants and have a global world government and throw democracy out everywhere. It works so well in North Korea after all. Human rights in China are to die for… literally.
After all, what would us little people know about what’s good for us?
Oh, faceless overlords. Tell me how to live my life.
Meanwhile, a former Obama stooge, budget director Peter Orszag, rambles on in the same bent.
So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.
No. What we need is less Leftists.
H/T Drudge
*What is funny I must admit is that proposal to suspend democracy in the US Congress comes when the Republicans have the majority, even if they don’t have that in the Senate.
Let’s hope this doesn’t get too ugly.
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran raised the prospect on Tuesday of sending military ships close to the United States’ Atlantic coast, in what would be a major escalation of tensions between the long-standing adversaries.
“Like the arrogant powers that are present near our marine borders, we will also have a powerful presence close to American marine borders,” the head of the Navy, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Speaking at a ceremony marking the 31st anniversary of the start of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, Sayyari gave no details of when such a deployment could happen or the number or type of vessels to be used.
Meanwhile, the West continues to keep a close eye on them.
UNITED NATIONS — France’s UN envoy warned that Iran faces the risk of a military strike if it pursues its nuclear drive because certain countries would not accept it having an atomic weapon.
In surprisingly frank comments at a New York panel discussion, Ambassador Gerard Araud on Tuesday followed up on President Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement that there could be a “preventive strike” against the Islamic republic.
Asked what would happen if Iran reaches the threshold of a nuclear weapon, Araud said: “Personally I am convinced that some countries won’t accept this prospect.”
The envoy said the danger of conflict was why France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Russia and China were trying to negotiate with Tehran.
“If we don’t succeed today to reach a negotiation with the Iranians, there is a strong risk of military action,” according to Araud, who did not say who would be likely to carry out such action.
Well, one thing’s for sure; it won’t be France.
Our PM should hang her stubborn head in shame. How she can look in the mirror is beyond me.
A BOAT carrying 75 asylum seekers has been intercepted north of Christmas Island.
It is the third vessel to arrive in the past week, during which 250 people have been added to Australia’s immigration detention centres.
And add the government’s own estimates of a four per cent kill death rate on top of that.
How many more people are going to die before Julia Gillard reinstates the policies she and former PM Kevin Rudd so naively stripped away?
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