Month: September 2008

Palin vs Obama, Channel Ten style

Posted by Chief Blogger – 30 September, 2008

Reading over at Tim Blair’s blog about the maddening bias of channel ten against Sarah Palin:

Blair: The political heavyweights at 9am With David & Kim turned their attention this morning to Sarah Palin’s candidacy (quotes are approximate):

Airhead #1: “I’ve got a feeling that it’s all about to implode.”

Airhead #2: “HEE HEE HEE!”

Airhead #1: “She’s got no international business experience.”

Airhead #3: “They did elect Ronald Reagan, for God’s sake.”

Airhead #2: “HEE HEE HEE!”

Airhead #1: (attempting an American accent) “A soccer mom – boss of the world.”

Airhead #2: “HEEEEEEEEEE! HEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Airhead #3: “A gun-totin’, moose-shootin’ soccer mom.”

Blair: She’s a hockey mom, geniuses.”

A reader made an obvious yet insightful retort:

Gunzhed #1: “I’ve got a feeling that it’s all about to implode.”

Gunzhed #2: “HEE HEE HEE!”

Gunzhed #1: “He’s got no international business experience.”

Gunzhed #3: “They did elect Jimmy Carter, for God’s sake.”

Gunzhed #2: “HEE HEE HEE!”

Gunzhed #1: (attempting an American accent) “A community organizer – boss of the world.”

Gunzhed #2: “HEEEEEEEEEE! HEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Gunzhed #3: “A 57-state-campaignin’, America-dissin’ community organizer.”

(by Dave S,. proud Gunzhed.)

More bail out ammunition

Posted by Chief Blogger – 30 September, 2008

A little more ammunition to take on your leftist friends, from Harvard economics professor Jeffrey A. Miron on the US bail out plan:

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk….

The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government….

…a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources….

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

Scary if true for $700 billion

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 September, 2008

Forbes reported the following from the US on the formulation of the $700 billion financial bail out figure widely reported around the world through the media:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

And this just appeared on YouTube, a shocking 2004 video which outlines the complicit nature of government interference in the mortgage securitisation market, which caused the financial meltdown.

Arguments that free markets have failed are bogus because it is based on the assumption that the market was free to begin with, when it never was. There are over 160 government bodies responsible for regulating US financial markets. The main problem area, the mortgage securitisation market, is not a free market, but backed by implicit and now overt government guarantees as well as Democrat pushed regulations that forced lenders to provide loans to lower income people at interest rates well below what the market would have normally allowed, with little prospect that the money could be repaid. As people inevitably would struggle to repay the loans, both the Democrats and Mac and Mae tried to cover up the situation. Remember that Mae is a major donor to the Democrats and Frank Raines, CEO of Mae, is one of Obama’s chief economic advisers, while former Mae CEO Jim Johnson was (until he was sacked for improriety, the same should happen to Raines but hasn’t).

While Mac and Mae were instituted to improve housing affordability in the US, they did so, just not in the way that was intended. The market was distorted by government guarantees that resulted in better risk ratings for mortgage securities than would have otherwise been the case. If the securities for these sub-prime loans had been rated absent of a government guarantee, it is unlikely these securities would have ever been popular because they would have been priced higher in a free market that would have recognised the real risks behind them. Instead US taxpayers are now stuck with a $5 trillion liability from the collapse of Mae and Mac, while Obama’s mate Raines cooked the Mae financial books and took away a cool $25 million. And you thought Obama was looking after the little guy on main street.

USA: more divided than ever?

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 September, 2008

Really? And is this really such an important election? Well as the saying goes, don’t believe the hype… From Canadian blogger, John Robson:

Compare today with 1800, when the election of Thomas Jefferson prompted a leading member of George Washington’s Federalist party, Fisher Ames, to expect “the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice.” The Jeffersonian Republicans in return accused the Federalists of being closet monarchists possibly plotting to hand the U.S. back to Britain, and in 1814 the remnants of the Federalist party did make a politically lethal though otherwise feeble effort to take New England out of the Union. But after a short-lived “Era of Good Feelings,” by 1832 president Andrew Jackson was threatening to hang his own former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, over tariff policy linked to states’ rights and slavery.

Speaking of slavery, in 1856 Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, to general Southern approval, in the lead-up to a civil war that would kill over 600,000 Americans, nearly as many as all America’s other wars combined. And the man who saved the Union, President Lincoln, was himself subjected to extraordinary abuse in his day, including unflattering comparison to a baboon by a member of his own cabinet.

The Civil War was obviously the nadir. But how do today’s divisions compare with Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman’s campaign promise to stab president Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, over bank policy? From a resurgent Klan in the 1920s to Republicans washing their children’s mouths out with soap in the 1930s for saying “Roosevelt” to McCarthy-era accusations of treason in high places to “Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” and “Burn Baby Burn”, persistent urban rumours that Nixon would put blacks in concentration camps and ridicule of Ronald Reagan as a senile warmonger, American politics is consistently rambunctious, with a dash of venomous paranoia at least as evident on the left as the right. Even the relatively placid Clinton era saw the president impeached as a wretched cad then acquitted on a bitter partisan vote.

By comparision, this US election is fairly boring.

Illegal Immigrants and the Media MIA

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 September, 2008

Illegal immigrants have turned up off the coast of WA amd this is the response from the government:

They are being taken to Christmas Island for processing.

Senator Evans says the group of people will be held in detention while they undergo health, security, identity and other checks.

He says it is not yet known what will happen to them after they are processed.

“There’s no suggestion at the moment that they were illegal fishers, but we don’t know much more about them at this stage,” he said.

“Until they’re properly interviewed on Christmas Island, we won’t know and I won’t be able to make public comment about that.

“If they are seeking asylum, then they will be assessed and have their claims tested before proceeding any further … it’s a bit early to be speculating about what may follow.”

So essentially the same response as the Howard government, but where is the media lambasting the government for being cruel and barbaric for holding illegals in detention? MIA, the hypocrisy is astounding.

Abortion attack on religious freedom

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 September, 2008

The Victoria government is using new abortion laws to attack religious freedom. Under proposed laws before the Victorian Legislative Council, medical practitioners could not object on religious grounds to assisting a patient in having an abortion. It has become such an issue, that the Catholic church has said it would have to withdraw medical services for its fifteen Victorian hospitals, on the grounds that the abortion laws would impinge on their religious sensibilities. As reported in the Australian:

A disparate group of more than 100 Victorian medical practitioners of many religious faiths, and also doctors with no religious affiliations, have formed a coalition called Doctors in Conscience Against Abortion Bill.

A letter signed by the coalition members being sent to upper house MPs today, and obtained by The Australian, warns that if the bill is passed doctors with an objection to abortion may stop practising in Victoria, or risk breaking the law by refusing to refer women to a doctor willing to perform a termination.

The Australian Medical Association is opposed to mandating doctors’ clinical practice.

Eminent doctor Graeme Clark, the inventor of the bionic ear, is a signatory to the letter. “The bill coerces doctors to act against their conscience, and … this must not be forced upon us,” he said yesterday.

More ABC Bias

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 September, 2008

From the Australian Conservative, regarding the bias make-up of the ABC programme Q&A:

The information provided by the ABC shows that on some editions of the show, of those who confirmed their intention to attend, as few as 10 per cent of the audience were Coalition voters. The high point for the Coalition occurred when its supporters made up 25 per cent of the audience on one edition of the program. On the same show, Labor Party and Greens voters comprised 47 per cent.

The ABC also revealed that, overall, Coalition voters represented 18 per cent of those who registered for the program, compared with 40 per cent ALP and 26 per cent Greens.

No surprise really.

Paul Kelly, in the tank for Rudd

Posted by Chief Blogger – 26 September, 2008

Editor at large, Paul Kelly, showed his true colours , and a lack of understanding of basic economics, with the following editorial regarding the US financial crisis and how Rudd is supposedly responding:

The difference between the Australian and American systems of capitalism has rarely been so stark. Kevin Rudd in New York at this time of crisis – a fortuitous accident – deserves two cheers for his response.

Rudd has done diddly squat to respond to the crisis. Standing up at the UN Assembly and droning on with gobbledgook is not a policy response. Kelly even admits it as much with the following paragraph in his article:

In contrast to many banking sectors across the world, the Australian banking sector continues to be highly profitable. The system is soundly capitalised and the banks have high credit ratings and relatively little exposure to the US sub-prime related assets or to market risk from trading activity.” Rudd is a lucky PM, having this inheritance. Our governments, regulatory agencies and banks declined to follow the American model.

So is Rudd lucky or has he responded effectively? If he is lucky then what response can he make other than business as normal, if he is not lucky then what response has he made? Well by the latest development, Rudd has decided to follow the American model of government involvement in the mortgage securitisation market, by agreeing to invest $4bn to primarly fund non-bank mortgages:

…chief executive of the Australian Banking Association David Bell says it has a mixed view of the plan.

“On one hand the Government intervention has the benefit of boosting liquidity in the market, but it does pose potential costs,” he said.

“For example, the initiative will expose taxpayers to the housing market although this exposure should be small if properly managed.”

And guess who will be managing the risks, none other than former Queensland ALP secretary and now Treasurer Wayne Swan. The same man who wrote a book called Postcode: The Splintering of a Nation, which essentially bemoans ‘social’ inequality. As Swan wrote about the cost of housing:

This kind of dislocation between the political leadership and the stretch of society which is being dispossessed by globalisation is a serious threat to Australia’s social cohesiveness. We need to restore some balance.

And Swan is going to restore some balance by following the American model of government involvement in the mortgage securitisation market. Why is it that the main stream media don’t pick up on this?

Rudderless at the UN

Posted by Chief Blogger – 26 September, 2008

The PM is starting to become a national embarrassment. His recent trip to the UN, in which he gave up a weeks sitting of parliament, was to deliver a 15 minute lecture to a 3/4 empty General Assembly – but he’ll be back in time for the AFL Grand Final:

Ambitiously laying out a five-point plan for adoption by the forthcoming meeting of the 20 most important economies, known as the G20, the Prime Minister said there needed to be recognition and special regulation of what he termed systemically important financial institutions.

That’s just the beginning. No doubt this new plan will go the way of his other ‘great’ international idea, an Asian union, into obscurity.

In Singapore, Rudd also tripped over the carcass of AsiaWatch – his airy plan for a new Asia Pacific Community.

So doomed was AsiaWatch from the minute Rudd dreamed it up, failing to attract support from a single Asian leader, that Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, didn’t refer to it once in his speech at Tuesday’s official lunch in Rudd’s honour. He’s too kind to mention the dead.

I think Rudd also had an idea for a nuclear disarmament group, which is strange given that one has already been in existence for the past 40 years, called the NPT. And you thought diplomacy was Rudd’s strong point. Of course no one has heard anything since on Rudd’s nuclear group idea.

A hippie civil war

Posted by Chief Blogger – 26 September, 2008

This is funny, regarding the Green Party’s opposition to clean coal technology:

CFMEU mining division president Tony Maher said his union had done polling that showed roughly 5 per cent of the population supported the Greens’ position of opposition to clean coal.

“A few years ago there was some scepticism about clean coal, but now you even have environmentalists … like Tim Flannery who say ‘we’ve got to fix coal’,” Mr Maher said.

“I don’t think their position has any environmental credibility or any economic credibility. On the environmental front, while coal is a big industry for Australia, we still only produce 4 per cent of the world’s coal. We could shut down the industry tomorrow and other countries would just pick up the slack. And economically it would throw a huge amount of people out of work.”

Unions and environmentalists are natural enemies, about time someone in the union community faced up to it. And now the enviro hippies are going at each other over the technology:

The Climate Institute backed Mr Rudd’s emphasis on clean coal technology, pointing to the importance of coal to baseload power generation.

“We can do it without CCS, but it’s going to be more expensive relying a lot more on geothermal and solar,” chief executive John Connor said.

But other environmental groups and the Greens slammed the proposals.

“We don’t need to see clean coal at the forefront of climate change; we need to see renewable energy,” the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Owen Pascoe said.

Greenpeace spokesman Steve Campbell slammed CCS as unproven technology. “If it is to emerge at a commercial scale it could well do so far too late in the game to have any real impact.

“We need to reduce CO2 emissions now.”

Yeah damn it, now!!! Turn off the lights, stop driving, stop having children, stop eating meat and just go kill yourself!!!!