Labor revival a Ruddy hopeless case
Piers Akerman – Saturday, October 01, 11 (09:54 pm)
IF Kevin Rudd is seen as the only hope to restore the federal Labor government’s fortunes, then there really is no hope for the Labor Party.
Gillard is a joke, her example and industry is one of waste. Witness her “Building the detention centre revolution” which is wastefully ongoing, and similar to the BER.
Even the Financial Revue gets strong feedback showing a picture of Gillard which resembles a death mask.
People recognise Gillard is finished. But it is how she will be despatched that counts to the ALP. They are already destabilising her, and all that she has done will be shovelled over her political corpse when it is done. Even things from Rudd, will thrown on top of her. I heard that Rudd will probably be made leader come February when there will be a rush election. The intention being to attract votes for Rudd in a sugar rush, before people remember who he is.
Every single one of the other possible contenders have wimped out. The ALP are really grooming Jason Clare to take the reigns in the future. Only he keeps failing too, with his defence spending falling short, while our troops are dying, or his work for the BER.
Sat 01 Oct 11 (10:11pm)
Sat 01 Oct 11 (11:51pm)
When electors’ first preference intentions for Labor bottoms out, the Greens are likely pull out of the alliance. Rob Oakeshott is already hedging on that eventuality and has been “talking turkey” with the Opposition Leader.
But Tony Abbott can now afford to wait for the option that allows him a half-senate election.
Labor’s only chance may be in dumping the carbon tax and ETS and the alliance with the Greens and grovelling to the Coalition to permit the minority government to limp through its full term.
Sun 02 Oct 11 (10:41am)
Leo the nation can’t afford for Labor to continue to limp through
a full term or should that be continue its manic squandering
gallop through a full term.
In the national intenrest Labor should be dragged kicking
‘and screaming to an election as soon as possible.
Abbott book drawn with a poisoned pen
Miranda Devine – Saturday, October 01, 11 (09:50 pm)
FRUSTRATED Abbott haters have been slavering in anticipation of a new book by Susan Mitchell which attempts a vicious hatchet job on him.
That book is one of many such which, combined with the criticism from mainstream media commentators will innoculate Abbott against the abuse. People will vote for Abbott and he will be the next PM following the next election. The ALP may have several more as PM before then.
Also, that abuse will bring down the Abbott administration some time in the future too. Much as the lies coalesced around Howard to bring down his administration in favour of the current jokes.
That is the way the media functions in our democratic society. It was said around the time of Nixon that conservatives (worldwide) needed an extra 5% of the votes to win a neutral election. That is what they have to fight in terms of media manipulation of stories endorsing the left. I see no reason to believe that resistance isn’t present today. The book Mitchell has written is evidence of it. It would not be possible to write something similar of Gillard.
Sat 01 Oct 11 (10:22pm)
Sun 02 Oct 11 (08:25am)
You are right DD Ball, they wouldn’t allow anything to be written like this about Julia Gillard. It seems to be 2 sets of rules today. One for the left (who can say anything) and another for the right ( who are stifled at every turn). It seems to be getting worse the more we hear. I don’t know if I could call it a true democratic society anymore we seem to be losing that. Democracy only seems to apply to some. We only have to look at Julia Gillard as far as Glen Milne goes and now with Andrew Wilkie because someone has dared to have a say about his Poker machine reform. I don’t play the pokies so it doesn’t really worry me and I don’t spend much time in the local club. It just seems that all our freedoms are going.
Sun 02 Oct 11 (10:11am)
You are correct in stating they could not write about Gillard like that because there is no strength of character, faith, morals..so it would be a washout! Who would read it when we don’t even KNOW THE REAL JULIA! If she wrote it herself, it would be FICTION and LIES! Susan Mitchell, apparently ,has a problem with strong minded men! She probably prefers the Burnside twits!
Sun 02 Oct 11 (10:17am)
Spot on David, I wonder what happened to the book that Gillard wanted to hide.
Sun 02 Oct 11 (10:37am)
Media stories endorsing the left??? Where?? News Ltd have about 6 anti Labor diatribes per week. Bolt will go on 7 days a week just before the election! Their own editorials are biased!
The Age gets stuck into all sides of politics while the Australian is OWNED by the Coalition.
I do not hate Abbott but like many others do not see him as PM material. He still has a poor rating with high dissatisfaction rating.
I do see Malcoul as PM material. He has a brain!
Why is this image so compelling?
Miranda Devine – Saturday, October 01, 11 (11:00 am)
THIS extraordinary photograph of the Prime Minister by Nic Walker, on the cover of the AFR magazine’s Power Issue yesterday, has attracted a lot of comment.
The pictures are very artistic. It reminds me of the photos Nicole Kidman finds of The Others.
In a very political sense, it shows what Gillard is. She has lost government, but keeps the position of PM until probably late february when the ALP will probably try to go to election on the sugar rush of Rudd as Leader.
Sat 01 Oct 11 (12:10pm)
Sat 01 Oct 11 (04:02pm)
I so want to vote Rudd out.
SPECTACULAR DAVE
Tim Blair – Sunday, October 02, 11 (02:46 pm)
David Marr rejoices in the Federal Court’s decision against Andrew Bolt:
Bolt was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
Perhaps not quite so wrong as Marr believes. I’ll have more about the Bolt case in tomorrow’sDaily Telegraph, but for now let’s look at Marr’s earlier views on anti-vilification laws and the people they target:
Anti-vilification laws aren’t the answer. In Victoria, two hellfire Christian preachers, Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot, are facing jail after preaching against Islam in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Ever since, they’ve been fighting an action brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria under the state’s new Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.
That’s the pesky thing about these laws that show almost zero tolerance for religious and racial intolerance: they can be turned against decent white folk.
That was in 2005. Note Marr’s assumption that “hellfire Christians” must be “white folk”. As it turns out, Nalliah and Scot are black.
At the time, Media Watch described this as a mere “stumble”. Interesting. Also interesting: six years ago, Media Watch shared Marr’s opposition to vilification laws ("they intrude too far on free speech").
GODDAMNED HIPPIES
Tim Blair – Sunday, October 02, 11 (02:30 pm)
They’ve been stinking up Wall Street for weeks, and now NYC’s anti-capitalist campers haveblocked Brooklyn Bridge:
About 100 cars were left stranded as the loud, angry crowd covered the crossing from end to end in an inflamed day of demonstrations against high unemployment, bank bailouts and financial pain for the masses.
One irate driver, a Ground Zero construction worker, blasted the pedestrians.
“I work my ass off all day, and these goddamned hippies close down the Brooklyn Bridge so I can’t get home?” he said. “This ain’t right!”
Chill, oppressor! You must comply with hippie life directions:
Some of these leftoids are quite literally rent-seekers:
Erin Larkins, a Columbia University graduate student at who says she and her boyfriend have significant student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she’s glad she did.
“I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again,” Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “No one is expecting immediate change. I think everyone is just hopeful that people will wake up a bit and realize that the more we speak up, the more the people that do have the authority to make changes in this world listen.”
The change that Erin wants: someone to give her more money. The traditional way of achieving this is to get a job, but marching might work. Organisers of the Wall Street Commie Camp don’t seem very bright:
#occupywallstreet would like to apologize to the members of the press and public who came out today to see Radiohead and left disappointed. We would also like to apologize to the band directly, and appreciate their kind words of support in the face of this confusion. They had nothing to do with what happened today.
Over the last twenty-four hours #occupywallstreet received several emails purportedly from Radiohead’s manager detailing a show for Friday, September 30th at four in the afternoon. Due to miscommunication within our rapidly expanding and adjusting group, we were unable to determine that this was a hoax in time; it can be difficult to seperate rumor from fact in an open source movement.
They think they’re living in a cartoon. Incidentally, how are these anti-capitalists coping without the usual amenities?
They go to the bathroom at the local McDonald’s.
LOSIN’ SUSAN
Tim Blair – Sunday, October 02, 11 (11:09 am)
Author Susan Mitchell exposes the real Tony Abbott:
It is important to remind ourselves that Tony Abbott is a 53-year-old former trainee Catholic priest, a former right-wing student activist, a former Liberal Party staffer, and an MP parachuted by John Howard into a safe Liberal seat. From an early age, he was mentored and trained by older men to become the man he is today …
Terrifying! By the way, Mitchell managed to stretch this into an entire book. Further chilling revelations:
Abbott is currently at war with his opponents - not just for the votes but, more importantly, for the hearts and minds of the Australian people.
In other words, he’s a politician who is trying to become Prime Minister. This isn’t exactly new information. It’s Abbott’s job description.
His weapon of choice is relentless verbal attack.
They’re called “arguments”. Would Mitchell prefer that he employ another form of weapon? Nerve gas, maybe?
He will not cease this attack until either he or the enemy is defeated.
That’s the whole idea. Refer to the history of politics, from the beginning of time until forever.
Abbott, a man of drive, cunning, ambition, and incorrigible determination, is now in a position where he could be leading our country come an election.
Thanks for the scoop, Suze. Previously, most of us thought that the leader of the opposition party was competing for a cheese wheel.
We are essentially a middle-of-the-road, moderate people with an ingrained suspicion of zealots or any leaders who believe that their role is to change the world to suit their own views and not those of the majority.
So much for the carbon tax, then. Mitchell doesn’t realise it, but in this paragraph she’s actually hit on the reason why Julia Gillard is so unpopular.
Tomorrow’s (Oct. 2nd’s) New York Times Book Review published this letter of mine:
Reviewing “American Dreamers,” Michael Kazin’s paean to the country’s radical left, Beverly Gage echoes Kazin by including the abolition of slavery among the great achievements of leftists — an example of their “utopian spirit” (Sept. 18). Such radicals did call for abolition, but radicals of a very different sort — thinkers who offered a new understanding of how societies hang together and prosper without the centralized commands that Kazin’s leftists so extol — also lent their influential voices to the cause of abolition. These radicals were classical economists.
It was economists’ prominence in the abolition movement that led Thomas Carlyle, in an 1849 essay, to defend slavery and ridicule economists as “rueful” thinkers, each of whom “finds the secret of this universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone.” Economists’ advocacy of freedom, even for slaves, so incensed Carlyle that he gave it, in the same essay, a nickname that — considering its provenance — economists should forever wear proudly: the “dismal science.”
DONALD J. BOUDREAUX
Fairfax, Va.
The writer is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Of course, the pioneering research from which I learned the above fact about Carlyle was done by my GMU Econ colleague David Levy and his long-time co-author Sandy Peart. See also this book.
… is from page 4 of Keith Whittington’s 1999 book Constitutional Interpretation:
Judicial restraint is an inadequate basis for justifying an originalist jurisprudence. The incidence of judicial review is highly contingent on political circumstances. An originalist Court may well find itself quite active in striking down legislation at odds with the clear requirements of the inherited text. Originalism requires deference only to the Constitution and to the limits of human knowledge. The Constitution makes substantive commitments to countermajoritarian principles. If the Court is to enforce the requirements of the Constitution, it must be willing to act in a countermajoritarian fashion…. American constitutionalism cannot be adequately described through a reliance on majoritarianism and judicial deference to elected officials.
This post from September 2006 offers merely one example of the wisdom of the warning found in Harold Demsetz’s line that I ran as yesterday’s Quotation of the Day.
Alex, Arnold, Greg, and Megan each mention solid reasons for questioning the wisdom of reducing envy by taxing the rich and giving the proceeds to the poor. (Brad DeLong recently offered such a proposal.)
It bears repeating that monetary wealth is certainly not the only dimension of our lives that matter to us and that we use as a basis for comparing ourselves to others. Indeed, I suspect that it is not as important as many who champion “redistriution” believe it to be.
Back in April the New Yorker magazine ran this interesting article by John Cassidy in which Cassidy used evidence of social hierarchies in some animal species to suggest that we humans should “redistribute” income. The specific evidence was that animals low on the totem pole were more likely to get sick and die than were animals in the same group but higher up the social pecking order.
A few weeks later the New Yorker published this letter of mine in response:
John Cassidy bolsters the hypothesis that people’s health is harmed by relative (rather than absolute) deprivation by citing evidence from the animal kingdom (“Relatively Deprived,” April 3). For example, “dominant rhesus monkeys have lower rates of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) than monkeys further down the social hierarchy.”
Contrary to Cassidy’s suggestion, however, such findings do not support policies to redistribute income. After all, animals with social hierarchies have no monetary income. Because status among humans is determined not only by income but also by traits such as political power, athletic prowess, military heroics, intellectual success, and good looks, equalizing incomes will intensify the importance of these non-pecuniary traits as sources of status. And there’s no reason why persons with low status in these non-pecuniary categories will not suffer all the stress and envy now allegedly suffered by people with low incomes.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
The Bolt Report today
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, October 02, 11 (09:34 am)
Lindsay Fox says he’d sack Kevin Rudd. Catch the repeat at 4.30pm.
UPDATE
UPDATE
UPDATE
Abbott barbecued
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, October 02, 11 (06:09 am)
Here’s the most damning picture of Tony Abbott that Susan Mitchell’s publisher could find to brand him as a dangerous misogyist. Who knew that barbecues were such a statement of an ideological position?
Miranda Devine on one the silliest and spiteful attacks on Abbott yet published by the Left:
Female Abbott-haters are a particular type. Like Mitchell, they cling to a 1970s view of feminism, still resent the patriarchy, and sneer at red-blooded blokes. The photograph on the cover of Mitchell’s book, of Abbott barbecuing sausages, encapsulates what they loathe.
A muscular, sweaty meat-eater wielding tongs. Ugh. Her book is the first shot by the progressive Left to stop Abbott taking office.
They fear that his confident conservatism, mellowed by time in office, is beginning to resonate with an electorate that thinks much like he does, and is fed up with political correctness.They fear that his combination of good-natured, unpretentious authenticity and ferocious intellect will have wide appeal as soon as it gets clear air.
In the end, all they have left is the anti-Catholic dog whistle.
But if Mitchell and Burnside think Catholics shouldn’t aspire to high office, they should say so, openly.
To appeal against racial division is now racist
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, October 02, 11 (05:24 am)
There must be some force in my argument that makes my critics invent the wildest and most offensive hidden messages and motivations in what I actually said in order to attack me. Professor Marcia Langton, for instance, imagines I believe in a Master Race (wink, wink) and disapprove of miscegenation (more wink wink) - which puts me somewhere between a Nazi and a KKK member:
Moreover, it seems to me Bolt is saying that only people of the ‘’races’’ he approves of are entitled to such protections. In my view, his claim to the right of unlimited free speech only works if the presumption is that ‘’white people’’ like him are not members of a race, but normal.
In his way of thinking (and this is a common belief in Australia) only undesirable ‘’others’’ are members of a race, and hence, being a member of a race as he believes such to be constituted is inherently a bad thing.
These trails of his thinking are not so much spoken out loud but the silent assumptions of a code of racial hygiene that is older than this nation itself. It was ideas about racial purity, racial hygiene, the master race, the inferior races, a perverted idea about the survival of the fittest and other such nonsense that led to the incarceration of Aboriginal people in reserves in the 19th century to prevent ‘’mixing’’ of the ‘’races’’ and later, the segregation laws that specified where and how ‘’half-castes’’ and other ‘’castes’’ could live.
Both those insinuations against me are, of course, false and grossly offensive.
It is incredible to me that my appeal to stop harping on about differences of “race”, to acknowlege all the ethnic or cultural elements of our background and to stop institutionalising trivial “racial” divisions is seen as the most racist thing some people have ever heard. How did arguing against racial categorising become racist itself?
Moreover, it is not just an abuse of me but of the truth to claim that I’ve ever argued anywhere, in public or in private, that Aborigines are an “inferior race”.
That what I’ve said could be so wilfully misrepresented as its very opposite and published in a major metropolitan daily is absolutely extraordinary. That a robust reply, perhaps referencing Langton herself and quoting at length from my articles, risks being declared unlawful is an outrage against our free speech.
Langton is free to misrepresent, invent and vilify, but I am not free to fully respond, and in part because is seems to me that it’s people on Langton’s side of the argument who actually believe what she imputes to me - that “the presumption is that ‘white people’ like him are not members of a race” and therefore the protections in the Racial Discrimination Act against being offended like this, in part on the grounds of my “race”, are not available to me.
It’s a nightmare. A world in which things are the deemed the opposite of what they are, and we must choke on our dissent, is what we have come to.
(Once again, no comments, because it has become too dangerous to print many. And so your free speech has effecitvely been limited, too, by this attack on my own.)
UPDATE
There are many serious issues raised by this case - particularly about free speech and the right to debate racial identity, and even whether race means much at all. Here is a contribution to that debate in The Advertiser from the Greens, who want more controls on the meida:
DIDDUMS, Andrew Bolt, diddums.
SARAH HANSON-YOUNG
[The Greens] Adelaide.
Your freedoms in their hands.
(Thaks to reader Konrad.)
Beautifully done…
The serenity shows contentment and depicts a leader confident that she has put Austalia on the right path, which matters more then her head being on the chopping block....
Unlike the squeals from the Abbott, who lusts for power, tool in hand, he could taste the lodge but will never be PM....
Sat 01 Oct 11 (11:53am)
Sat 01 Oct 11 (12:13pm)
I think the pictures of living people look better. This has all the allure and charm of Ned Kelly’s or Agamemnon’s death masks.
Sat 01 Oct 11 (12:35pm)
I reckon it looks about as fake as ‘Real Julia’
Sat 01 Oct 11 (03:56pm)
That is a very powerful photo.
Take away the politics..it is very peaceful and calming..actually she does look vulnerable..!
You must admit, like her or hate her she is pretty tuff.
Sat 01 Oct 11 (03:59pm)
DD Ball: Can’t go past the politics can you…
If it was an unusual picture of Tony Abbott I would keep the politics out of it..
At leat Miranda sort of left it alone to her good will.