Month: December 2008

Israel and Hamas

Posted by Chief Blogger – 31 December, 2008

This article from The Spectator is doing the rounds.

The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.

I think Palestine rescinded any hopes for peace after they rejected offers made to them as part of the 2000-01 Camp David-Taba peace negotiations. As part of these meetings, the Palestinians were offered $30 billion in compensation, Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital city, control over the Temple Mount (though not full sovereignty as Palestinians wanted) and the return of the entire Gaza Strip and 95 per cent of the West Bank. Is it any wonder President Clinton blamed Arafat for the breakdown in negotiations.

Hamas also remains committed to the destruction of Israel, is prepared to kill its own civilians to achieve that end and in fact uses its own civilians as human shields as a way to increase its own civilian casualties to garner western left-wing sympathy. In the mean time Hamas launches missiles into Israel with the strict purpose of killing as many Israelis as possible.  And yet we are all meant to believe that some how Israel is the bad guy because it is trying to defend itself. As Melanie Phillips from The Spectator points out:

The vast majority of Gazans who have been killed were Hamas terrorists. According to today’s UN figures, 364 have been killed of whom only 62 were civilians. Israel has been targeting only the Hamas infrastructure and its terror-masters, as detailed here. While some civilian casualties are unfortunately inevitable, Israel is clearly attempting to minimise them. It is Hamas which deliberately targets Israeli civilians when it fires its rockets and detonates its human bombs specifically at Israeli civilian targets. It is Hamas which deliberately turns its own civilians into targets by siting its rockets and other military equipment under apartment blocks and in centres of densely crowded population. Hamas tries to kill as many Israeli innocents as possible; Israel’s military operation is conducted solely to defend its people against such attack and is designed to minimise the loss of civilian life in Gaza.

24 Redemption

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 December, 2008

24 is a great series. I think it is the closest one can come to a solid right-wing drama. Series 7 is about to start up. I’ve embedded part of 24 Redemption, a TV movie that recently aired in USA. It is intended to link series 6 with the new series, though I think there are a few holes in the story. Nevertheless, the TV movie is great in its own right. Note that the video may not work with all IP addresses. The Hulu link above has the entire movie for free, and yes it’s legal.

The best lines in the movie have to be the following. Jack Bauer is hiding out in a school in Africa run by an old Army mate (to avoid arrest by US officials, see Series 6). There has been a coup in the African country and a bunch of militia are looking to grab the school age boys and use them as child solders in the conflict. Jack argues with the UN official who thinks he can use diplomacy to solve the problem, “Save ya helmet for the parade…two boys have already been shot!” says Jack. The UN official responds in a French English accent, “The United Nations remains neutral in this matter.” As the UN official sees the approaching danger, Jack says, “Why don’t you go hide in the shelter with the other children.” Which the UN official does of course.

If you’d like to watch a panel discussion on how 24 has impacted conservatives, I’ve embedded another video, from The Heritage Foundation, that took place in 2006. The discussion begins from around the 30 minute mark.

Unions get UN to take on Rudd

Posted by Chief Blogger – 26 December, 2008

I was waiting for this to happen.

Some of the most radical unions in the country are taking Rudd to the UN’s International Labour Organisation, claiming the new workplace relations bill does not go far enough in handing unions power to dictate to employees how they will work and what they will get paid:

The group of Victorian unions has gained legal advice for a complaint to the International Labour Organisation, alleging that the Government’s new workplace legislation falls short on freedom of association and collective bargaining rights.

The proposal to shame Labor in the ILO, a special agency of the UN dedicated to improving labour standards, could prove highly embarrassing to the Government’s international reputation.

Ya think? Of course these were the same people that lobbied Hawke in the 1980s to do away with appeals to the Privy Council on the grounds of national sovereignty. The main issues are as follows:

…outlawing industrial action in support of multiple-business agreements, known as pattern bargaining….continuing “prohibited content” in agreements that would ban bargaining fees for non-unionists and other things from workplace negotiations.

Freedom of association? According to this plan all employees in an industry, regardless of their workplace union association, would be forced into a union agreement. For this forced ‘privilege’, a non-union worker would be forced to pay a fee to the union. A fee for an agreement and a union they don’t want. What about freedom from association?

And a Merry Christmas to you too

Posted by Chief Blogger – 24 December, 2008

Channel 4 in Britain has decided to broadcast an address by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an alternative to HRH’s annual Christmas address. We now know were Channel 4′s loyalties are directed towards. Typical of the left, from the UK’s Daily Telegraph

Channel 4′s decision to invite Holocaust revisionist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver its “alternative Christmas message” is more than a sick seasonal prank: it’s further evidence of the Left’s schoolgirl infatuation with Islamic bigots.

Rudd: this is what I’ve become

Posted by Chief Blogger – 22 December, 2008

Rudd has discovered some new words on his recent trip to visit the troops:

Kevin Rudd swore on camera a fair bit during his day in Afghanistan last week. Two s–ts, a bugger and a bloody. He also dropped his g’s and lowered his language level generally…It was Rudd the verbal chameleon, changing his language to suit his audience. The critics soon emerged, with one former diplomat citing it as a lack of character for a prime minister to feel to need “to speak like a wharfie”. “Most people can see straight through that,” he said.

He’s one of the lads now! I think it’s a sign of his own personal insecurity. This story reminded me of Theodore Dalrymple’s many articles on the lowering of cultural standards – the cultural race to the bottom:

A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial attempts to satisfy them…Curiously enough, the revolution in British manners did not come about through any volcanic eruption from below: on the contrary, it was the intellectual wing of the elite that kicked against the traces. It is still doing so, though there are very few traces left to kick against.

Some how I can’t imagine Menzies swearing like a trooper when he visited troops in North Africa in 1941.

I wonder what type of language Rudd will also use to tell the troops that he is going to cut their budget in true left-wing style. Apparently, his razor gang his going to hand out extra dole checks, paid for by the following initiatives: Closing of various Defence sites, cutting the operational budget of the Air Combat Group, C-130/C-17 fleets, army vehicle fleet, Navy combat elements and the canceling of a range of various large Defence capital programmes.

Shadow Defence Minister David Johnston, who today criticised the reported $10 billion in additional budget cuts, said the thrust of the Pappas Review is entirely at odds with the Rudd Government’s election commitment to increase defence spending by three per cent per year until 2018.

“The Rudd Government told Australian voters they were committed to putting the defence and security of our nation as its first priority, and last week Mr Rudd reiterated this in his National Security Statement,” Senator Johnston said.

Homeless Policies

Posted by Chief Blogger – 21 December, 2008

Noble aspirations indeed:

Kevin Rudd, with Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek, yesterday launched a white paper on homelessness, The Road Home.

Labor will spend more than $1.2billion over the next four years – $800 million for support services for the homeless and $400 million on accommodation.

The objective to halve homelessness in Australia by 2020 has been described as ambitious by those in the know:

THE Salvation Army has labelled the Rudd Government’s promise to halve the number of homeless people by 2020 as “overly ambitious”, comparing it to Bob Hawke’s promise that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990.

Well to be fair, Hawke the day after corrected the record to say that he meant to say “should” not “would”. Point taken though; Hawke failed to solve poverty, so how will Rudd succeed? Despite years and billions upon billions of welfare payments, poverty will continue because it can never be solved by money – only mitigated. For instance, the USA’s infamous ‘war on poverty’ actually increased the level of poverty in the country by creating dependency, a victim hood mentality and destroying incentive, from the City Journal:

The War on Poverty, motivated by such toxic ideas, transformed welfare from temporary assistance into a lifelong stipend with few strings attached. As everyone knows, welfare rolls then skyrocketed, increasing 125 percent from 1965 to 1970 alone, and an entrenched generational underclass of poor families emerged. Typically, they lived in dysfunctional public housing projects—many of them built as another battle in the War—that radiated blight to surrounding neighborhoods. The federal government created a series of huge initiatives, from Medicaid and Head Start to food stamps and school lunch programs, that spent billions of dollars trying to fight urban poverty. And then, to attack the “root causes” of poverty (whatever they were), the feds spent billions more on local social-services agencies, which ran ill-defined programs with vague goals like “community empowerment” that did nothing to alleviate poverty.

Despite years of effort and gargantuan transfusions of money, the federal government lost its War on Poverty. “In 1968 . . . 13 percent of Americans were poor,” wrote Charles Murray in his unstinting examination of antipoverty programs, Losing Ground. “Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled. And in 1980, the percentage of poor Americans was—13 percent.”

The whole article outlines Obama’s plan to tackle poverty. It is scarily like Rudd’s. My bet is and history shows, that if Rudd’s programme is fully implemented, by 2020 homelessness will have become even worse.

ABC disapointed – Antarctica in good shape

Posted by Chief Blogger – 19 December, 2008

The following radio interview is classic ABC. Make editorial comments when asking questions to an expert and re-cut the interview to give the impression that the expert supports your position:

ELEANOR HALL: The head of Australia’s Antarctic Division says the southern continent is in relatively good shape despite concerns about the impact of global warming.

You can just hear Eleanor Hall think, “Damn! I got this guy in to give me some climate change hysteria, not fair and balanced comments.”

KAREN BARLOW: Which leaves the icy continent in the realm of science and one of the most important scientific works going on there is ice core surveys to understand climate history.

TONY PRESS: So some of the best climate records that the world has are from Antarctic ice cores. Ice cores so far have gone back to 860,000 years and some of the work Australians and others around the world are doing in Antarctica is to try and find an ice core that goes back over a million years so that we can map a very long period of climate history to understand how climate might change in the future.

In no part of the interview does Tony Press even mention human induced global warming or carbon emissions, etc… However, the ABC has recently published comments regarding ice-core data and all things climate change. I can just imagine Eleanor Hall flipping her lid when reading this section from Dr David Evans:

The only supporting evidence for AGW was the old ice core data. The old ice core data, gathered from 1985, showed that in the past half million years, through several global warmings and coolings, the earth’s temperature and atmospheric carbon levels rose and fell in lockstep. AGW was coming into vogue in the 1980s, so it was widely assumed that it was the carbon changes causing the temperature changes.

By the late 1990s ice core techniques had improved. In the old ice cores the data points were a few thousand years apart, but in the new ice core data they were only a few hundred years apart. In the early 1990s, New Scientist magazine anticipated that the higher-resolution data would seal the case for AGW.

But the opposite occurred. By 2003 it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that temperature changes preceded corresponding carbon changes by an average of 800 years: so temperature changes caused carbon changes – a warmer ocean supports more carbon in the atmosphere, after delays due to mixing. So the ice core data no longer supported AGW. The alarmists failed to effectively notify the public.

AUSAID: Your tax dollars at work

Posted by Chief Blogger – 18 December, 2008

Bill Clinton has revealed the list of donors for his charity called the Clinton Foundation. Apparently, giving anonymously is not Clinton’s strong point. Amongst the $46 million that foreign governments gave to the Foundation is a donation from none other than:

AUSAID, the Australian government’s overseas aid program…gave $10 million to $25 million.

I fail to see why this disclosure would not state the exact amount. AUSAID is meant to be accountable to Australian taxpayers – surely it shouldn’t be a secret. However, back in 2006 AUSAID and the Clinton Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding:

Under the MOU, the Australian Government will provide $25 million over four years, complemented by funding from the Clinton Foundation, to strengthen efforts to deliver HIV/AIDS treatment and care in the Asia Pacific region.

This AUSAID media release does not say the funding was given to the Clinton Foundation. It says the funding is to complement existing Clinton Foundation funding. Was taxpayer funding given to the Clinton Foundation or not? It is also not clear why AUSAID would need to give money to this foundation to support a medical cause in our near region, if that’s what really happened.

The pointlessness of it all

Posted by Chief Blogger – 17 December, 2008

Regarding Rudd’s ETS:

Professor Bob Carter, a James Cook University geologist, described it yesterday as “the worst single piece of legislation to be tabled in the Parliament since Federation”.

“It is a non-solution to a non-problem,” he said. “If ever there were a bill that justifies a conscience vote, then this must be it, for it wittingly intends to reduce the living standards of all Australians.”

A conscience vote is a great idea. That would allow voters to look back and see who was responsible for their declining standard of living. I suppose that around 30 per cent of the House of Reps would vote against it. Likely 100 per cent of the ALP would vote for it, otherwise the vote would severely damage Rudd who made the ETS an election promise. A number of lukewarm Liberals would also – we’d then know who holds to classical liberal principles and those that don’t.

USA Housing Crisis

Posted by Chief Blogger – 15 December, 2008

I’ve previously blogged  how the US Democrats were the source of the housing crisis problem which trigged the global financial crisis. I was unaware, to the same extent, that President Bush had attempted to resolve the problem years before, but the Congress controlled by the Democrats blocked attempts. From Rush’s radio programme:

RUSH:  Over the years when I’ve spoken to you, you have purposely avoided any partisanship because I know that this has been a policy of the administration. But I have to say when it comes, for example, to the housing crisis, the subprime mortgage business blowing up, I mean, Mr. Vice President, this is largely a Democrat Party scandal. Your administration tried numbers of different times early on in the early part of this decade to get new regulators in there, because the warning signs were all over the place.  And the very people whose fingerprints are on the destruction that is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now being allowed to sit here and ostensibly act like they were just innocent bystanders and they’re now the white knights running in to fix it when they broke it.

THE VICE PRESIDENT:  No, I agree, Rush. I think we did see fairly early on that there was a potential crisis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  I can remember Alan Greenspan when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve voicing concerns to us that this is a potential major problem if there was a systemic failure here. So we put together a reform package, but Congress simply wouldn’t touch it. The banking committees chaired by the Democrats on both the House and the Senate side, obviously, had not been willing until we’ve had this major crisis to talk about fundamental reform.