Category: Politics (Page 31 of 43)

President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, I’ll be stuffed, as Phar Lap said.

Obama was nominated after twelve days as president. He must have done something pretty darned impressive in those twelve days, right? Check his schedule for yourself. It includes skipping church, releasing funds for abortions in developing coutries, partying, and taking the day off.

The Nobel peace Prize has no credibility at all. Some people said this after Yasser Arafat won. But at least then the committee had some reason to believe, or at least, it might have thought so at the time, that Arafat had renounced the use of terror, agreed to Israel’s right to exist, and committed to helping Israel to establish secure borders.

Of course that was all nonsense. The terrorism continued, and Arafat continued to get rich off aid money.

Perhaps the selection process was something like this (Via Hyscience) :

Obama Wins!

The Saturday Night Live skit mocking the award has Obama say ‘I won the award for not being George Bush.’ An interesting change of pace for SNL. What makes this funny (or tragic) is that it is probably true.

Gateway Pundit lists some geniune achievements by GW, including liberating millions from one of the most vile and violent regimes in modern history.

Only business can. While the government may seem to create jobs when it hires people or buys things, it destroys at least as many jobs as it creates when it does so.

Via Hyscience, which links to this article from the Wall St Journal about the lessons to be learned from government economic policy in Texas and Ohio.

When governments try to create jobs, or stimulate the economy, or support industry or ‘good causes’, they can only do so by taking money from business. Which means fewer people employed, less reason to take the risk of investing in business, reduced production of saleable commodities, lower profits from which to pay taxes, less income to government, less capacity to care for the poor.

Ohio has an economy burdened by high taxes and work rules that impose heavy costs on employers. Texas embraces free trade, keeps taxes low, doesn’t impose unions on business and has tooled itself for 21st century global competition. Ohioans may not like to hear this, but for any company considering where to locate a new plant or move an existing one, the choice between Ohio and Texas isn’t even a close call.

Texas has lower unemployment, higher average personal income, and creates more jobs and more exports.

The lesson is, the less government tries to do, the better off everyone is.

Government cannot create jobs, only business can.

Are you listening Mr Rudd? Mr Obama?

From the always insightful Kate at Small Dead Animals:

In a failed attempt to sway the the IOC’s selection committee into awarding Chicago the 2016 Summer Olympics, which went instead to Rio de Janeiro, the ever-grinning Barack Obama landed in Copenhagen yesterday to deliver a four-“I” plea.

Michelle Obama plied the “wife of I” gambit:

“I was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, not far from where the Games would open and close,” she said.
(….)
Michelle Obama talked about her late dad who suffered from multiple sclerosis.

Alas, someone in Brazil’s delegation once lived in Rio, and had a great-uncle with angina.

That is a quote from Titus 1:9 – the name of the blog of the Reverend Canon Dr Kendall Harmon. Dr Harmon is a traditionalist Anglican (ie, he is one of the few who persists in believing the things the whole church believed until about twenty years ago). He has good political sense and writes well.

A few recent stories linked to from his blog:

A brief and interesting interview on the reason for the war in Afghanistan, and what needs to be done to make a long-lasting positive outcome more likely. From PBS’ s Religion and Ethics segment.

An editorial from The Tablet (UK), about the recent conviction of four young Britsh Muslims who had been plotting to blow up planes over the Atlantic. The editorial asks sensible questions about what the Islamic community could do to reduce the growth of radicalism and hatred of the West amongst its members, and about what the wider British community, and especially schools, can do to be more successful in teaching Western values.

And finally, from The Times, an article about a ‘secret annexe’ to this year’s International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran. The annexe claims that Iran already has the information, materials and technology to build an atomic bomb.

The only thing that is in doubt, apparently, is whether they have the will to do it. Given Imanutjob’s rantings about how blasting the Zionist entity from the face of the Earth would be doing the world a favour, and big chief Ayatollah Ali Khomeni’s claim that an Iranian nuclear arsenal would ‘serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers,’  I do not find that doubt very encouraging.

More on this from John Robson, concluding with:

So let me translate those newspaper stories into real world language. The Iranian government is building nuclear weapons so it can blow the Jews off the face of the earth, and our leaders have neither the spine to act nor the wit to perceive their own shameful paralysis. It’s that bad.

The title of this post is a quote, not about Australia’s Liberal and National party leadership (though it could be – more about that later), but from an article about China’s official 60th birthday celebrations.

David Burchell, writing in The Australian, points out that there is something obscene about the massive self-congratulation going on in China.

A society that can only survive with the repression of minority religious and ethnic groups, constant and severe censorship of news and internet access, and the control of every part of its citizens’ lives, has no business congratulating itself on anything.

And then, 36 million Chinese died in the famine of 1959-61. This was not a natural disaster, but the result of deliberate and violently enforced policy to coerce millions out of traditional farming and small scale village industry into collective farms and factories. There is no acknowledgement of this man made disaster in official Chinese literature, or of other lives lost in similarly destructive and similarly enforced policies. Well, of course not. That would spoil the party.

What makes David Burchell’s article worth reading is not that he points these things out – they have been pointed out many times before – but this:

Imagining ourselves to be polite, we Westerners avert our eyes from it all. Yet this peculiar, tasteless spectacle of official China locked in joyless self-communion suits us fine. For in truth we’re no more inclined to be confronted with China’s dirty historical laundry than is the Chinese Communist Party itself.

We’re co-dependents, as the psychoanalysts might say. We belong on the same couch.

It is worth the wait through the annoying ads (and the slow download speed) for this interview between a swish CNN interviewer and a rural US car dealer.

Free AK47 with every truck.

Mr Muller, the dealer, is asked whether giving away AK47s is irresponsible. He talks about a family recently murdered by home invaders.

The interviewer talks about growing up as a teenager in rural America. Mr Muller points out that things have changed in the last 30 years (ouch) and his county has a major problem with meth addicts.

She asks why people cannot just rely on the police. He says the police are great, but the response time to his home is 15 minutes. His family could be dead by the time they got there.

She asks why Mr Muller mentions God in his company motto, and asks whether Jesus would wear a gun. He points out they didn’t have guns then.

The whole interview is brilliant. A clash of cleverness with common sense.

I cannot help wonder whether things might have turned out differently for this Australian family, three adults and two children, bludgeoned to death in their home yesterday, if they had been customers of Mr Muller.

Not in Iran, obviously, even though that election was almost certainly rigged, hundreds of protestors have been killed, arrested or simply ‘disappeared,’ and British embassy staff are to be tried on trumped up charges of stirring up revolt against the government, because the government of Iran is made up of nutjobs who simply refuse to believe that their own people would protest on their own intiative.

Well, why would you meddle ? Everything’s cool there. These are new times. We are speaking a new language of co-operation.  This is change you can believe in.

But get your meddling shoes on and head down to Honduras, baby, cause somethin’s going on down there.

Yes. What went on down there was that the process of law stopped a would be dictator from bending the rules to extend his power and time in office.

In other words, the processes of democracy and law worked.

It can’t be allowed. Something should be done. Or that’s what BO seems to think.

Numbers can prove lots of things. But not in the case of supposed election fraud in Iran.

Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco’s  Washington Post story of statistical anomalies seems at first read to prove the Iranian election was a fraud. I would have been happy to have been convinced. Sadly (because having that proof would have made complaints of a lack of concern for democracy against the government of Iran much stronger) the numbers prove nothing of the sort.

John Graham-Cumming explains (from a statistician’s point of view) why the Washington Post’s analysis is faulty. I found his article hard going in places (I did stats at university when I studied psychology, but only one semester).

Hannah Devlin’s article on Times Online is a bit easier to follow.

This doesn’t mean the election was OK. I still think it probably was not. It just means statistics based on oddities in the count are not going to give us a definitive answer.