Tony Abbott has won the Liberal Leadership spill and is the new leader of the opposition.
Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey contested the ballot after the leadership spill was approved by a margin of 48 to 34. Joe Hockey was eliminated in the first round, and then Tony Abbott defeated Malcolm Turnbull by one vote, 42 to 41, according to the party whip at a press conference moments ago.
Julie Bishop remains as deputy leader.
Tony Abbott is expected to hold a press conference at 10:45.
It’s truly amazing how much can happen when I take a hiatus, and I’m pleased to see something positive happening.
In large part thanks to Climategate (which I’ll discuss separately as it really needs its own article), a large number of truly conservative politicians in the Liberal Party have found the courage to stand by the convictions and announce their (accurate) belief that man-made global warming is a crock, and that the Emission Trading Scheme (or Carbon Pollution [sic] Reduction Scheme, or whatever you want to call it) is a giant tax which will only lead to a massive redistribution of wealth, something which the Rudd government have effectively admitted.
From one day to the next we hear a different figure about how much the Everything Taxed Substantially (OK, sorry, couldn’t help myself) will cost per household per year, but we keep being assured that it’s all OK, because there will be subsidies for low-income households. In other words, we’ll tax everyone, but we’ll cancel out the tax for people who we declare to not be “rich”. We will redistribute wealth…we won’t fix the climate.
In fact, the ETS has nothing to do with the climate any more. Even the Greens, the great purveyors of climate doom, are not supporting the ETS in its current form. If the Greens won’t support it, how can it possibly have anything to do with the climate?
We are being fed lies by Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong et al about the climate and about the ETS. They want to have their ETS in place before the cHOPEnCHANGEn climate conference (Barack Obama is visiting the conference on his way to receiving his Nobel Hope And Change Peace Prize) because they know that, with all of the publicity that the proposed climate treaty’s bizarre “one world government” junk has been getting, along with the Climategate emails, there is no chance of a treaty being signed, and that will kill off their attempts to pass an ETS once and for all.
The conservatives inside the Liberal Party know this. They know that man-made global warming is a fraud. They know that the ETS is a giant tax, and above all they know that agreeing to pass the ETS will result in them simply being a watered-down version of the Labor Party which will never attract enough Labor voters to form government. As strange as it may be, Malcolm Turnbull’s leftist reign over the Liberal party has done more for the conservative movement than it could ever have done for the left-wing movement if he had joined the Labor party.
So, the Liberal Party are faced with a choice on Tuesday morning. Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott or some other as yet unknown challenger. If Malcolm’s rhetoric this weekend is anything to by, he is not going to leave of his own accord, which effectively rules out Joe “I want to be anointed, not voted for” Hockey as leader. I have mixed feelings about this.
Joe Hockey is photogenic, for lack of a better word. To the majority of the electorate who are more interested in Tiger Woods’ marital problems than the state of the nation, Joe is a large, jolly, Santa Clause-esque figure who could easily attract the personality vote in the way Kevin Rudd (Kevin ’07) and Barack Obama (hope and change) did in their respective elections. To the same extent though, Joe believes that humans are causing global warming and is yet to rule out supporting the ETS. There is a huge risk that, with Joe as leader, the Liberal Party may remain fractured and the ETS may go through.
I thought that Julia Gillard made one good point during her excruciating ramble on ABC TV’s Insiders this morning, and that was that Joe Hockey visited John Howard for advice this weekend…John Howard, a man who, as much as I think he was a great Prime Minister, did jump on the global warming bandwagon towards the end of his tenure in an effort to regain the support of the electorate.
Joe is being referred to as a “consensus candidate” which is a description that I’m pretty sure the media have invented. Nobody can work out where this consensus comes from, and that’s because it doesn’t exist. The word that the media were actually looking for is “moderate”, the same word that we would use to describe 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Not a conservative, but a moderate. A sort of “none of us quite agree with everything he says, but we can tolerate him more than a bloke from the other side of the political spectrum” internal Party mediator. The trouble with moderates is that they can never attract enough voters away from the other party, and ultimately fail because they don’t stand for anything.
I responded to Joe’s cry for help on Facebook the other day, informing him that if he opposes the ETS, he can regain my support. That support though, on reflection, can only go so far as a front bench position. Joe Hockey as leader is untenable, and would be slaughtered by Labor attack ads at the next election. I can see the ads already:
“This man said he believed the IPCC’s report in to climate change, now he says he doesn’t believe it. A vote for Joe Hockey is a vote for uncertainty. Vote 1 Kevin Rudd”.
In fact, with Joe Hockey as leader, I fear that we will see a mass exodus from the Liberal Party over to the National Party. The coalition will dissolve. The Liberal party will become a truly “liberal” party, vying with Labor and the Greens for the left-wing vote, whilst the Nationals will expand their existing role as the true conservative party of the country and run candidate everywhere. It would be short-term turmoil and it would make for a very unpredictable election next year. In the long-run though, it could be precisely what the country needs, and even if the Nationals didn’t win the next election, they would probably hold enough seats, along with the Climate Sceptics party who must surely be in a stronger position thanks to Climategate, to kill off the ETS.
But that is long-term, and I am yet to find a politician who thinks far enough in to the future to risk running as a candidate for a different party in the next election…and besides, as I mentioned earlier, Joe doesn’t want to challenge, he wants the leadership handed to him in the same way that Peter Costello wanted the leadership handed to him.
That leaves Tony Abbott. What can I say? Tony’s a conservative through-and-through and (thankfully) opposes the ETS. I like Tony, but I’d much rather have Barnaby Joyce (I know, wrong party) simply because Barnaby, apart from being a conservative, actually has a noticeable personality. There are times when I wonder if Tony Abbott has left a cardboard cut-out of himself and a voice actor in Canberra and gone on a holiday. Tony would make a great Prime Minister, but I’m not convinced that he will be able to attract voters to the Liberal party…at least, not on his personality…but that might not be such a problem this time around.
Kevin Rudd can’t go to the next election of his personality again, because people know that he doesn’t have one. He has to go to the next election on policies, and with the ETS very likely to be delayed, the main point of the next election will be climate change. Unlike the global financial crisis, Kevin Rudd can’t bribe everyone with $900 and hope that they don’t notice that he has no idea what’s going on. This time he is proposing a massive new tax on everyone and everything. All that Tony Abbot and the Liberal party need to do in order to defeat that, is seize on the Climategate emails and the real data which shows that Australia and the planet have not warmed in the last decade, and show the ETS for what it is: a giant tax, and an instrument of socialism.
The polls already show that 60% of Australians oppose the ETS, so a “no ETS” stance backed up by the facts (or lack thereof) of global warming, plus information about how damaging the ETS is, should be enough to get a conservative party across the line, regardless of their leader’s lack of personality.
A quick side-note. Please don’t get me wrong here. I think Tony Abbott has a great sense of humour, I just don’t think he knows how to show it outside of the parliamentary chamber…and the majority of the country ignore the chamber.
There are two things which must be done in the coming two days. Firstly, people must continue (and start if you haven’t already) contact your Senators and urge them to oppose the ETS. I have contacted Gary Humphries’ office about this which, given Gary’s stance may have been a waste of my time, but also may help to make him oppose an ETS in any form, and I will contact Kate Lundy’s office, although I’m sure that contacting her Senatorialism will be a waste of time given her stance on the ETS, and the fact that I have previously written her a letter offering her an ancient Chinese curse. None-the-less, it must be done.
Secondly, the Liberal Party must appoint Tony Abbott or another true conservative as leader on Tuesday morning. If they fail to do this, then the conservatives must maintain their opposition to the ETS, block it, and break away to the National Party immediately. Failure to do so will result in the imposition of “the great green tax” (as Andrew Bolt put it on Insiders this morning) on the nation, and our utter collapse.
This is not a time for compromises, consensuses, moderation, or whatever you want to call it. This is a time for action based on what one knows to be true and just. This is a time for all politicians, not just conservatives, to stand up for the future of the country and oppose the ETS, and it is beholden on all of us out here in the public to ensure that our elected representatives know that we do not want, nor do we need, a huge climate tax that will not achieve a darn thing, except the collapse of our great nation.
Remember the plane that went AWOL last week? The one where the pilots couldn’t get their story straight as to whether or not they had been having an argument or been sleeping when they flew past their destination and ignored calls from air traffic controllers?
Yes? You do? Great. Well, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it has since come to light that, not only were the pilots breaking company policy by using laptops in the cockpit and having a rather passionate training session with the company’s new crew-scheduling program (I would have thought that missing the airport and not noticing it for an hour was a big enough breach of company policy), but that the Federal Aviation Administration also broke their own procedures relating to unresponsive aircraft.
The Federal Aviation Administration violated its own rules by taking more than 40 minutes to alert the military after losing communication with a Northwest Airlines flight last week, according to officials familiar with internal reviews under way at several federal agencies.
[..]
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal Wednesday evening, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said air-traffic controllers “should have notified [the military] more quickly that the plane was not responding.” Local controllers apparently became so focused on trying to re-establish contact that they failed to alert higher-level FAA managers about the problem in a timely manner.
Sorry, but I don’t buy that. If you’re on the phone and the line becomes silent, you don’t sit there saying “hello? hello? hello?” for 40 minutes; you hang up and, if necessary, attempt to re-establish communication by actively dialling the other person’s number. I don’t believe for one moment that “local controllers” (note the plural) would put their collective jobs on the line by deciding to not inform their superiors to an unresponsive plane for 40 minutes. It seems much more likely that the FAA simply didn’t notify the military in a timely manner.
This story has already gone well beyond bizarre with its escalating revelations. If it keeps going at this rate, we’ll probably find out on Monday that the FAA did actually notify the military on time, but the reason the air force planes were kept on “stand by” rather than taking to the skies is that it was a national holiday for air force pilots, and the janitor couldn’t work out how to start the plane.
In a way though, I am glad that all of this has happened. Nobody was hurt, and the many flaws in the current implementation of the procedure for dealing with unresponsive aircraft are coming to light. In theory, this should all lead to safer air travel.
And with that, I’m back. The whole catching up on sleep and getting my energy back thing has been a limited success, but I am now back to being able to put my thoughts in to writing without having to spend a week working out how to word it, so we’ll call it a success.
I’ve got a lot to get through, and seeing as blog posts with multiple short stories in them seem to be the flavour of the trimester on about half the blogs I read, and it’s convenient in this case, I’ll bite and run such a post here.
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Sleep? Hmmm, well it’s 3:32am as I type this and I last finished sleeping at 8am yesterday. You do the math. That said, in the last few nights I have had dreams where I:
1. Was in a repeat episode of Third Watch. Nobody could be bothered attending to the emergencies as they all knew that the people survived the episode, so why bother risking injury doing the stunts again?
2. I plunged to my death in a taxi, on a wet night where the left half of the road had been washed away. A very vivid and disturbing dream.
3. KXNT’s Alan Stock was elected as Chairman of the Nevada Action Committee, although what this actually achieved is beyond me, because the only thing he was required to do as part of this job was take five minutes out of his show each morning to read the KXNT phone number over and over and over and over and over (we’ll come back to this in five minutes when he’s done with the phone number)
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Speaking of KXNT, their traffic bed (the music they play under their traffic reports) is one of the bits of music which I managed to get stuck in my head this week. I also managed to get the First Option Mortgage jingle stuck in my head for three excruciating hours, and get it stuck in somebody else’s head simply by mentioning it on Facebook. Apparently it’s called “ear worm”. I also had another song stuck in my head, but I dare not try to remember what it was lest it happen again.
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Frasier and Seinfeld repeats at 7:30pm and 8pm weeknights respectively on Go! Channel Nine receive my perpetual thanks for this.
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There was some Bollywood movie on SBS Two the other night. I watched ten minutes of it near the beginning during which time the married couple managed to patch up their differences, and the wife declared that she didn’t really care about her husband’s flaws anyway. How they could drag that about the next three hours is beyond me, and I’m glad that I didn’t stick around to find out. The ten minutes was good for a laugh though.
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Cisco have calculated (which is probably code for “guessed”) that the average broadband Internet user downloads 11.4 gigabytes per month. I average 20-25GB per month and will probably start doubling that in the not-to-distant future if one of my household projects gets off the ground.
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Facebook have decided to preserve the accounts of deceased members, minus status updates and other “sensitive data”. This intrigues me as I have often thought about what would happen to this site and my other online data if I were to cease existing for whatever reason. I would like to keep it all online permanently, but am yet to find a viable solution. The National Library’s PANDORA project archives the essence of this site, but seems to have a lot of broken links and missing data, which is hardly surprising given the sheer size of this site (6.97GB and growing). Preserving this site is a work in progress…I suppose I’ll just have to stick around for long enough to ensure that it happens.
Anyway, if and when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m happy for my Facebook account to be preserved as some sort of shrine, but I don’t want anything to be removed from it. How does one go about sharing this wish with Facebook. One’s will?
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Speaking of the dead, Yahoo have finally killed off Geocities. I’m glad that I was reminded of this imminent death the other day, as I had one page on there which I needed to save. I’ll republish it on here at some stage.
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Monash Drive has been removed the ACT “National Capital Plan”. The proposed road had been slated to run along the foot of Mount Ainslie behind Hackett, Ainslie and Campbell, roughly in-line with the already cleared sections which the high voltage power lines use. Politically, the road was never going to happen, which is a pity because it could have reduced a lot of congestion, especially in the years ahead.
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We’ve been following Barack Obama’s approval ratings here for some months now using the figures from Rasmussen, who had the polling figures closest to the outcome of last year’s election. That said, the other polls are interesting as well, especially when you consider that in the Gallup poll, Obama has recorded the worst third quarter of an elected president in recorded history. A nine point drop in his approval rating in the space of three months.
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The White House have declared war on FOX News, claiming that they’re not a news organisation. The White House clearly can’t tell the difference between news programming and opinion programming, even when it’s pointed out to them. Funnily enough though, the other networks have defended FOX. Late last week, White House officials tried to ban FOX from a White House Press Pool interview session, but the other networks wouldn’t have a bar of it, quite clearly telling the White House that “if Fox can’t be a part of this, then none of us will interview your chap”. It worked, and the White House backed down, for now.
Here’s the point. FOX out-rate every other cable news network consistently, partially because of their news programming, and partially because of their opinion programming. People want to watch it. The White House don’t like the opinion programming as it is often critical of the Obama administration, unlike others such as MSNBC whose opinion programming often favours the Obama administration. The other networks know that if they let the White House exclude FOX, then they are all trapped in an unwritten “do as we say, or we cut your access” agreement. It is an attack not only on FOX, but on every other network, on freedom of the press, and on freedom of speech.
Glenn Beck, on one of FOX’s opinion shows, put together a rather amusing piece on the War On FOX which had me in hysterics when I first watched it.
One wonders if people would have voted for Obama’s “new era of bi-partisanship” if they had known that “bi-partisan” is defined as “the other side will do as we say, therefore we all agree”.
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The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
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Channel Seven have announced their new digital channel, to be called “7TWO”, on (you guessed it) channel 72. I’m not in the least bit surprised that regional affiliate Prime aren’t putting it to air straight away, I mean Prime own the “6” channels in digital TV land, and it would look rather silly have 7TWO on channel 62. I suspect that Prime are working on their own branding of the new station…PRIMExtra perhaps?
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RIP Don Lane, one of the great entertainers, who passed away at the age of 75.
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Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be turned on for the first time and people were afraid the world was going to end? It amazed me how many people who believed that, were subsequently placated when it was turned on, broke down, and the world didn’t end. The whole cause for concern was for when it would finally reach the actual colliding stage, which it never did.
733-KXNT, 733-5968, 733-KXNT, 733-5968 (Alan’s still going…)
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Clive Robertson filled in for Tim Webster on 2UE and 2CC’s afternoon show yesterday. What a relief! Tim Webster, as much as like him personally, has bored me to death of late…I can not listen to his show any more, I just can’t. Tim is much better suited to a news-based show than the lifestyle-amalgam show that he is now presenting. Clive, however, suits the format perfectly, and is brilliant afternoon entertainment.
Memo to 2UE for next year’s lineup: Breakfast with Mike Jeffreys, Mornings with Stuart Bocking, Afternoons with Clive Robertson, Drive with John Stanley, Nights with The Two Murrays, Overnights with Jim Ball.
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And now at 6:18 it’s time for KXNT’s traffic and weather together on the eights, here’s Tate South (finally, Alan’s morning Chairman task is finished, which means that I can wrap up this blog post).
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There was an ad on TV last night for that boat from Victoria to Tasmania and back, in which they advertised the rate for taking your car with you as being an “each way” rate (eg. “x dollars each way”). Sorry, but does that mean it’s the return rate (you can travel each way for this amount) or the one way rate (each way costs x dollars)?
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Congratulations to Chris Matlock, KXNT’s Radiostar competition winner for this year. I listened to the entries of the 20 finalists when I was last in Deniliquin, and Chris was my favourite from the start, so I was very pleased to see him win. Chris will have his own show soon, apparently, and will start off co-hosting with Ciara Turns on “Sundays with Ciara” on Sunday, November 8 between 10am and 1pm. That will either be 4am-7am or 5am-8am Monday, November 9 in Canberra, depending on whether daylight saving has ended in the US by then.
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And finally, Lord Christopher Monckton spent much of the latter part of last week and the start of this week outlining the issues with the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty which, don’t forget, is designed to stop a warming which hasn’t happened in about the last decade. The main points:
1. The setting up of a world government, with binding power over all countries.
2. Some peculiar scheme to send all the money from the western countries to the developing countries, to pay for some supposed “climate debt”.
Glenn Beck interviewed his lordship last week, which makes for very interesting and enlightening listening.
Part one:
If you ever needed proof that the whole global warming thing has everything to do with social change, and nothing to do with climate change, you now have it.
I awoke to the bizarre news this morning that US President Barack Obama has solidified his position as King Of The World by being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the even more bizarre news that I agree with him about something.
“I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” he said.
This isn’t to say that he won’t be worthy of the award in a few years, as he may very well be worthy of it then, but right now, he hasn’t done anything to bring peace to the world. Yes, he has promised a lot, and yes he has talked about peace a lot, but he hasn’t actually brought about any changes which have resulted, or will soon result, in peace.
Obama is the third sitting US President to receive the award, behind Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919, however there is a large difference between them and Obama. They had actually done something momentous.
Roosevelt was honored largely for brokering an agreement between Russia and China, and Wilson took the award for his role in ending World War I and creating the League of Nations.
It’s far too early to compare Obama to either of his predecessors, said Allan Lichtman, professor of history at American University.
“They’re not comparable,” Lichtman said. “[Roosevelt and Wilson] were six or seven years into two-term presidencies, and Obama has not completed a single year of his presidency, so it makes very little sense.”
Obama possesses a great deal of “promise,” but the jury is still out, Lichtman said.
“It remains to be seen what his foreign policy legacy will be,” he said. “It is premature. This was to encourage rather than to recognize an accomplished fact.”
Update: As Clayton Northcutt has pointed out in the comments below, journalist Joshua Rhett Miller made a mistake. Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel prize for brokering an agreement between Russian and Japan, not Russia and China. End Update
And that’s the problem. The Nobel Peace Prize exists to reward achievement, not to recognise that somebody might achieve something. Anybody might achieve something, and there is no doubt that back when nominations closed on February 1, less than two weeks in to Obama’s term as President, he had the potential to achieve something, but to give the award to somebody who might achieve something, rather than somebody who has achieved something, is ludicrous, and cheapens the prize considerably.
Sima Samar, women’s rights activist in Afghanistan: “With dogged persistence and at great personal risk, she kept her schools and clinics open in Afghanistan even during the most repressive days of the Taliban regime, whose laws prohibited the education of girls past the age of eight. When the Taliban fell, Samar returned to Kabul and accepted the post of Minister for Women’s Affairs.”
Ingrid Betancourt: French-Colombian ex-hostage held for six years.
“Dr. Denis Mukwege: Doctor, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has dedicated his life to helping Congolese women and girls who are victims of gang rape and brutal sexual violence.”
Handicap International and Cluster Munition Coalition: “These organizations are recognized for their consistently serious efforts to clean up cluster bombs, also known as land mines. Innocent civilians are regularly killed worldwide because the unseen bombs explode when stepped upon.”
“Hu Jia, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, who was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison term for ‘inciting subversion of state power.'”
“Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China’s communist system. He now lives in the United States.”
Surely these people are more worthy of recognition and a $1.4 million award than Barack Obama.
But that’s not the worst part. As with anything which involves Barack Obama and the international stage, the whole thing has to be muddied by Obama’s apparent need to be seen as the busiest man of Earth, tha man who has to juggle running the world with being a father…a job that no man has ever had to do before.
Obama said his daughters, Sasha, 8, and Malia, 10, helped keep him in check this morning after he heard the news, reminding him about their dog’s birthday and Monday’s school holiday.
“Malia walked in and said, ‘Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday.’ And then Sasha added, ‘Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up’,” Obama said. “It’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.”
It’s just a tad ironic that if anybody else paraded their family life in front of the world like this, they’d be accused of robbing their children of the childhood, or their privacy, or any number of other things…but when Barack Obama decides to combine the story of his Nobel Peace Prize, with his daughter celebrating the dog’s birthday, the media fall in to line.
It was up to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to make the wake-up call about 6 a.m. and deliver the news to Obama, whose reaction mirrored that of other administration officials, lawmakers and political leaders.
“I think it’s safe to say he was very surprised,” Gibbs said later at his daily briefing.
There is one upside to all of this. Except for the Nobel Peace Prize people, it’s very hard to find anybody who is not surprised by the award. It looks like the shine of Barack Obama is finally starting to wear off globally, and people are actually starting to scrutinise his work rather than be blinded by his “hopey changey” aura.
Apple’s shareholders might want to go and buy shares in law firms, because the lawyers are the only likely winners in a bizarre case like this.
WOOLWORTHS insists its new logo is a stylised W, or a piece of fresh produce; Apple thinks it is an apple, and the California-based technology company wants to stop Australia’s largest retailer from using it.
Apple has mounted a legal challenge to prevent Woolworths from using the logo that now adorns its trucks, stores and products, arguing it is too close to its own.
Apple will have to convince IP Australia, the federal government agency that governs trademarks, to knock back Woolworths’s application – first filed in August last year – to trademark its logo.
Now, even if Woolworths do decide to go in to selling their own computers, do you really think anybody will confuse the Woolworths logo (left) for the Apple logo (right)?
Didn’t think so.
Personally I can’t stand the new Woolworths logo as I was a fan of the old logo:
However the new logo is similar to their really old logo which I’m having trouble tracking down at the moment, and that alone should give Woolworths enough of an historical precedent to knock Apple’s challenge on the head.
FORT WORTH — Tarrant County Public Health (TCPH) received limited doses of the H1N1 nasal spray vaccine on Oct. 5. Plans to distribute this initial shipment of the vaccine are being finalized.
The nasal vaccine is intended for healthy, non-pregnant people between the ages of 2 and 49 who do not live or work with an immunocompromised person.
[..]
The injectible form of the vaccine has not been received and it is not known when it will be received.
I hate nasal sprays, but this is an interesting use of one.
And so it begins again, Daylight Saving starts at 2am and will be with us until the other end of April…a whole seven months of adjusted clocks. Personally I don’t see why we can’t just have Daylight Saving for the whole year rather than slowly increasing the number of months we have it for.
Amusingly the ABC have managed to push their digital television electronic programme guides in to daylight saving time early, although it’s not amusing for me as I relied on their programme guide to schedule a recording of The Bill. My recording started an hour late at 9:30pm (10:30am GMT +11) instead of 8:30pm (10:30am GMT +10), meaning that I will have to wait for somebody at the ABC to upload The Bill to iView.
This may interest you, but it’s more for my reference. The updated KXNT schedule for programs of interest in Canberra’s daylight saving time.
Sunday
4am-7am: Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd weekend edition
Monday
4am-7am: Sundays with Ciara
11pm-Midnight: The Morning Source with Alan Stock
Tuesday to Saturday
Midnight-3am: The Morning Source with Alan Stock
3am-6am: Rush Limbaugh
6am-9am: Sean Hannity
9am-11am: Mark Levin
11am-1pm: Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd (includes Jerk Of The Week at 12:09pm Friday)
During the night I will have the fun job of setting all of the clocks in my house to daylight saving time, which doubles as my twice-yearly “make sure every clock is in sync” session. I can’t stand having clocks that have the wrong time, especially when they’re out by a minute or two. It drives me nuts.
So happy daylight saving to you. If your sleep cycle is similar to mine, you will welcome the extra hour of darkness in the morning. It will make getting to sleep at 5:30am much easier.
Despite Obama’s plea to the International Olympic Committee, Chicago is the first city to be eliminated from the running to be the 2016 Olympic host city, due to receiving the least number of votes…proving once and for all that Barack Obama is not the King Of The World.
Tokyo was eliminated moments later, leaving Rio and and Madrid in the running.
Update 2:55am: Rio wins! The 2016 Olympics will be in Rio.
The latest trick in the Obama Administration’s playbook appears to be a legalised version of blackmail.
New York based Democrat Senator Charles Schumer is blackmailing the states with an “adopt my text-driving reforms, or lose your highway funding” approach.
Other speakers at the two-day conference in Washington, D.C., included Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who called upon the administration and auto and phone industry associations to endorse his ALERT driving bill — Avoiding Life Endangering and Reckless Texting — which he introduced in July along with colleagues.
Schumer said Ford Motors and Verizon are backing the bill, which asks for states to ban texting while driving or risk losing a quarter of their annual federal highway funding.
But it’s not just the states who are being blackmailed, it’s Republican Senators too. Jim DeMint, Republican Senator from South Carolina, and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was due to fly out in a few hours, leading a delegation on a fact-finding mission to Honduras, to find out the details of their political unrest ahead of their November election. Democrat Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blocked the trip at the last moment.
Mr. DeMint spoke to Mark Levin a short time after the news of Mr. Kerry’s decision broke, and made the startling revelation that he was blackmailed. A revelation which the media has ignored.
Mark Levin: Now Senator, if you had wanted to go to Copenhagen uh to lobby for the Olympics, would there have been any objection, yes or no?
Jim DeMint: Apparently not um, although I guess the President wants all the credit on that one but uh, no this Honduras thing has been something they’ve been trying to keep under wraps and, they’re telling me if I will just uh let a couple of their nominations go through without debate or vote, then they’ll let me go on the trip. But I have not…
Mark Levin: Wait a minute! Wait a minute, they’re blackmailing you!
Jim DeMint: Sure, I, I, uh…
Mark Levin: They’re insisting that you either vote for a couple more libs to go in to the state department or you can’t go. Is that what they’re saying?
Jim DeMint: That’s pretty much it. There are nominations for Latin America, deputy secretary there, as well ambassador to Bril…to Brazil. The both of these uh diplomats are, are on record agreeing with the Obama administration that this [the Honduras situation] is a military coup and we need to reinstate the President who was trying to overthrow the Constitution. I wish people in our country were as serious about the Constitution as the people of Honduras have tried to be.
Interview download:
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/LevinDeMintInterview20091001.mp3] Download MP3 Audio courtesy Mark Levin Show and Citadel Radio Network.
Both cases are blackmail, pure and simple. In the former case, many states will cave either because they like the legislation or they want the money, while other states (and a smaller number) will resist, just like a handful of states rejected the stimulus money. As for the latter, good on Jim DeMint for not only not bowing to the pressure, but for having the guts to expose it on national radio. It’s good to see that some people in politics still have principles.
As for the Obama administration…can we really be surprised by any of their tactics any more?
Barack Obama’s promised closure of Guantanamo Bay by January has been getting less and less likely ever since he promised to do it, and it has now hit a brick wall which might just have concrete reinforcement.
The House went on record Thursday against allowing detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba to be transferred to the United States, even to face trial or to be jailed in maximum-security prisons.
The 258-163 vote on a nonbinding recommendation put Democrats controlling the House in a difficult spot and prompted senior lawmakers to postpone unveiling a House-Senate agreement on a homeland security funding bill.
If such a ban were to become law, the Obama administration would be hard-pressed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison by January as Obama has promised.
Eighty-eight Democrats broke with Obama and House leaders on the nonbinding recommendation, an ominous sign for future votes. It would be difficult for lawmakers to change their positions without drawing withering criticism from political adversaries.
The administration has yet to reveal its plan for closing the prison. Supporters of the transfer ban say an overwhelming number of their constituents want to keep Guantanamo prisoners where they are.
“There is no reason these terrorists, who pose a serious and documented threat to our nation, cannot be brought to justice right where they are in Cuba,” said Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky. “I certainly think that is where the American people stand on this issue — they don’t want these terrorists in their hometowns.”
So, how long will it be until Obama stands up and announces his “great plan to bring justice to the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, right where they are, saving them the psychological terror of being moved to another location…for too long, our inmates have suffered from the knowledge that they will move before being tried…where previous administrations have failed them, we will give them fairness [..]” etc etc etc?
I didn’t produce one of the updates at the end of August because I was in Deniliquin and didn’t find the time in the first week or so, and then couldn’t really see the point in producing one in the middle of the month. I know that I have produced these reports mid-month before, but it’s a fairly futile exercise…none of this stopped me from receiving an email from somebody who claimed that I was being “more biased than usual” by not producing the August report. They might have had a point if it weren’t for the fact that Obama suffered his lowest raw approval rating to that point on the last day of August.
Anyway, as I didn’t produce one of these reports at the end of last month, I’m consolidating the August and September reports in to this update.
August saw the numbers stay roughly where they left off in July, with almost two thirds of the month being spent with a lower than 50% approval rating. There weren’t any noticeably good periods in there, but there was a period of about a week in the middle of the month where Obama’s approval fell in a hole, but recovered, only to suffer its worst drop ever at the end of the month, finishing on a record low of 46%
The Rasmussen Approval Index which measures the “strongly approve” vote against the “strongly disapprove” is often regarded as an indicator of where the raw approval and disapproval numbers will go, as people with strong views are likely to try to influence the views of others. In August, it did just this, hitting a record low of -14 on the 23rd, before recovering and echoing the raw approval dive at the end of the month.
September is one day shorter than August and saw Obama’s approval sit under 50% for one more day (20) than it did in August, starting at a new record low of 45%. It did have a good recovery though, spending much of the month around the 50% mark.
The Rasmussen Approval Index mirrored the recovery in the first half of September, getting up to -3, but then quickly fell back to around the -8 and -9 mark. It finished the month with a dive to -11, but if the recent pattern is anything to go by, that’s probably the low end of the cycle. It will most likely come up again in the next few days before going down again. It’s the trend of the numbers in the middle of the cycle that count.
The approval numbers seem to have stopped their dive for now, sitting just under 50% most of the time, but the interesting thing is that it looks like the Rasmussen Approval Index is starting to go down again. It will take another week or so to see a clear trend on that, but it’s worth watching, as it tends to be a bit ahead of the raw approval numbers when it comes to the overall trend.
Just two days after HarperCollins announced that Palin’s “Going Rogue” had been moved up from the spring to Nov. 17, preorders Wednesday night for the former Alaska governor’s memoir made it No. 1 on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
Among the books “Going Rogue” is outselling: Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “True Compass,” Mitch Albom’s “Have a Little Faith” and Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” his first novel since “The Da Vinci Code” and, perhaps until now, the year’s most anticipated release.
Palin, in collaboration with author Lynn Vincent, completed her 400-page book just four months after agreeing to terms with HarperCollins, which plans a first printing of 1.5 million copies. It’s the first book by Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor until suddenly resigning last summer.
She is regarded as a possible 2012 contender for the presidency. Past candidates, notably Barack Obama, have been helped by writing best-selling books, invaluable platforms for politicians to tell their story.
There is clearly a strong interest in conservative books at the moment, despite them receiving minimal-if-any mainstream media coverage for the most part, and with Barack Obama’s approval rating sitting under 50% for most of the last two months (the poll update will be online later today), one wonders if this is the start of Sarah Palin preparing herself for a run for president in 2012?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…I certainly hope it is.
The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
