Queensland Liberal Andrew Laming described the decision as a “scapegoating of Goliath proportions’’. “This is just another example of the poor judgment of the Prime Minister,’’ he said.
Here, I’ll give you another, even worse example of poor judgment: to be found quoted on the front page of a major national newspaper criticising the Prime Minister and leader of your own party as he tries to find a way back to being re-elected, which if it can be done, might even include you.
As for the story itself, I’m not sure in any sense at all that it’s such a shock, since these sort of things happen all the time. Ruddock has been a brilliant Parliamentarian, he held off the boats and was an important member of the Howard Cabinet. He has been the Chief whip, and as it says in the story, part of this job is to be “the conduit between the leader and the backbench”. Maybe that’s been part of the problem, that he has not been doing his job well enough to keep the PM out of trouble from the likes of you.
But I do know this. The role of backbenchers is to support the government, not to find their way into the press to become one more problem the Prime Minister didn’t need. The problem here is not the PM. The problem here is you, and anyone else in the party who, like you, thinks such undisciplined comment does anyone other than the Labor Party any good. I would have written STFU but I’d rather be more polite. So I will only say, the next time you are worried about some decision by the PM, keep it to yourself or mention it to the new whip or in the party room perhaps. And the same goes for anyone else in the Parliamentary party who has the notion that the best way to reform the government is to spend more time in opposition.
Thousands of innocent people are being murdered around the world, Russia is advancing into Europe, Iran is developing nuclear weapons, ISIS is on a rampage. And this is how Obama deals with the duties of his office.
That this is our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. No wonder Vladimir Putin and Iranian Mullahs are having a field day at the expense of the West. The leader of the free world is clownish. They realized it years ago; maybe Americans will start getting a clue.
But so it has been for 6 years.
Count me speechless. We have a fool as president.
Is that it? That he is just a simpleton in a clown suit? Until you and others can bring yourself to saying what the reality actually is, that you have a supporter of your deepest enemy as your president, that you have a traitor as the Commander in Chief, you have not even begun to understand what ought to be obvious to anyone.
The story is about how the hosts at CNBC were stunned by having the truth told to them about the state of the American economy. The truth may not set you free, but at least it might get you to start doing what’s needed, assuming that anyone any longer knows that that is. Here is what they were told:
“There is no acceleration in underlying economic activity.”
“There’s this wrong concept that I keep on hearing about in the financial press about the acceleration in economic growth… It isn’t happening!”
“We had a horrible retail sales number, we had a horrible durable goods number, we’re likely to have a very disappointing retail sales number coming forward, this month we have a strong payroll number we say everything’s great – it’s not great….it’s been the same thing for the last five years, there’s no improvement in the economy!”
“After a string of dismal data on durable goods, retail spending, and inventories, we get a good jobs number and everyone saying the economy’s good – it’s not good!”
I read one time that difference between the first Shah of Iran and his son – the one who was thrown out by the Ayatollah Khomeini – was that to the father no one dared tell him a lie, while to the son, no one dared tell him the truth. Which leads me to this story from Nikki Savva picked up at Andrew Bolt:
The most surprising thing about Abbott’s reaction to the fact 39 of his MPs wanted him gone was that it came as such a shock to him. What it showed, among other things, was that for too long he had believed his own spin, as well as the spin spoonfed to him by those closest to him.
It’s not as if people haven’t tried to tell him what the problems are. They have, for a very long time, in very many ways. They have been dismissed as liars, or stupid, or of running vendettas…
On Sunday, May 25, last year Queensland backbencher Wyatt Roy was part of a group of about 30 marginal seat-holders invited to dine privately with the Prime Minister in the cabinet anteroom. Abbott’s practice at these dinners is to go around the room, asking each member to say their piece.
Roy, trying to be helpful, stood at the table to tell the Prime Minister that broken promises were the fundamental cause of the government’s problems. It might be a good idea, Roy suggested, to apologise to people a la Peter Beattie and move on.
Abbott was furious. He rounded on Roy, yelled at him, then directed his remarks to all of them that there were no effing broken promises and no one should concede there had been.
To the extent that this story is true, it is to that extent that Abbott has made a rod for his own back. If we are into Captain Queeg at the helm, we are in very dark waters. But the final twist in the Caine Mutiny story was that it had been the fault of the crew after all for not giving their captain more support when he needed it in the midst of the storm. You guys will either hang together, or hang separately and take the rest of us down with the ship.
A government of the modern age, specially one of a conservative inclination, must be in permanent campaign mode. They have to do things, but they also have to project themselves into the community, making sure that everyone understands what they are up to, and why what they are doing is what needs to be done. They cannot expect the media to do any of the work for them. They must expect the media instead to do everything it can to wreck their plans and see them out of government at the soonest possible date.
If you leave it to the media to set the agenda, you are at the mercy of people who will tear you to pieces if they can.
This is an article on how conservative candidates need to deal with the media. If they act like your enemy, treat them like one. Most people in the media have never done anything other than learn short-hand and attend meetings of the Marxist underground. They are experts in not a single thing they report on. This is therefore the advice, which is easily translated from American politics into the politics of every other democracy on the planet.
Today’s media has less respect for the truth than an elevator full of con artists. As bad as it is most of the time, it gets worse during national campaigns when it begins manufacturing scandals and then reporting on them and then demanding that the candidates respond to its narratives as if they were real issues. And Republicans keep falling for it.
The road to the White House is over the crushed and mangled narratives of the media. A Republican candidate who fails to take on the media will fall wrapped head to toe in lies and scandals. He will go on issuing clarifications and sensible statements while the media accuses him of murdering small children.
The media is not impartial. It is not even a forum. The national media is the political opponent of every Republican running for the White House.
It needs to be treated that way.
When CNN’s John King tried to drag Newt Gingrich through the dirt in a primary debate, Gingrich dragged the media through the dirt instead, describing it as “destructive”, “vicious” and “negative”. He turned the tables by putting the media and its motives up on the stage. He refused to treat John King as a journalist who had the right to hold him accountable. Instead he fought to hold King accountable.
And that’s something that any Republican candidate can do.
The public doesn’t like the media. Poll after poll shows that they don’t trust the media. They listen to what the media tells them because Republicans meekly play out their parts in the media’s smear campaigns the way that ISIS hostages do what they’re told even while their heads are being cut off.
When the media attacks, the issue should never be the credibility of a Republican candidate. The issue must always be the credibility of the media. It must be the credibility of the politicians being protected by the press. . . .
The media would have been unable to move forward with the story without quoting the candidates, relegating the whole thing to the backwaters of the left in places like Salon and Slate. Instead the story is everywhere. And the only people who can kill it are the Republican targets of the smear campaign. . . .
The media buried Romney’s dog story when Republicans tepidly picked on the conservative media’s response that Obama had eaten dog. But when Republicans sit and take it, then they become the victims of the media.
The media counts on Republicans playing defense. When Republicans go on the attack, when they challenge premises and the moral authority of the press, then phony scandals suddenly fizzle out. Republicans wouldn’t roll over and play dead for their opponents. Why do they do it for the media?
Obama understood that being able to control your message and your brand is the most important element of modern politics. He shut out the media by using a small clique of influential friendly journalists for heavy interviews while doing light chats with everyone from YouTube celebrities to late night talk show hosts. He has his own photographer who distributes photos for the press to use.
When there’s a controversy, the White House leaks an anonymous response. Its spokesmen divert and delay. They make fools of themselves to protect Obama. Their main goal is to deny the press a useable quote and they accomplish their real purpose of making the press briefings a waste of the press’ time.
If Obama distrusts and shuts out the press even though it licks his boots, why do Republicans play ball with it only to get a kick in the teeth? The media was Obama’s messaging machine. It is becoming Hillary’s spin system.
If Republicans passively submit to it, then the media will define them and 2016 will become a rerun of 2012. 2016 won’t just be a race against Hillary, but against the media. The media needs Republicans to tie the noose around their own necks by acknowledging the media’s credibility as investigators and reporters.
When Republicans provide the media with credibility, they lose.
I hope you guys are paying attention, and the place to start is with their ABC.
A NEIGHBOUR of two men arrested in counterterrorism raids this morning said he had become afraid of them in recent months.
Omar al-Kutoba, 24, and Mohammad Kiad, 25 are suspected of planning to carry out an attack yesterday, amid suspicions they were plotting a public beheading.
A machete, a hunting knife and a flag associated with Islamic State were among items seized in the raids on their Fairfield home, along with a video of a man talking about carrying out an attack.
Neither man appeared during a brief hearing in Fairfield court, in Sydney’s west this afternoon, where prosecutor Michael Allnutt said they are facing a “very, very serious allegation.”
Both have been charged with preparing or planning a terrorist act.
Look Tony, you just gotta stop trying to convince the other side that you’re not all the bad things they say you are. There are two sides in politics everywhere. There are the normal people of common sense who understand we do not live in a perfect world.
And then there’s the other side. These are the people who look for the outrage-du-jour, who are always dissatisfied, who are always complaining about how bad things are and it’s someone else’s fault. They are filled with discontent and envy. This is the coalition of the miserable that Labor tries to bring together. You are never going to win them over. All you can do is run the country as well as you can. But for heaven’s sake, you have nothing to prove to such people. They are a danger to you and to us. Their misery is personal. Nothing that can be done at the political level will satisfy them.
I had actually thought at the time that as much as I found her speech vile and divisive, that it had been her own true self finally exposed to the light of day. Not a bit of it. She was merely repeating the words and sentiments put there by some male, a male who saw political advantage in her saying what she said. If he did not think there was political advantage, she would not have said what she said. It’s the reverse of the politics of conviction. It is the politics of the con.
You will hand this country back to them if you do not start making your case, which I can see that you are. This is what I said about them then.
Pointing out the phoney outrage of the Labor Party has to be at the top of Coalition policy in the election to come along with an emphasis on how worthless their promises are. Their specialty is outrage and discontent. They do not have a platform so much as a plan of revenge on behalf of the bitter and envious combined with a series of plans to spend vast amounts of money they do not have.
They are the singularly incompetent. On no issue has this government been a success. Nothing they promise to do ever gets done.
They cannot stop the boats. They cannot balance the budget. They cannot maintain economic growth. They cannot build the NBN. They cannot improve our education system. They cannot maintain national defence. They cannot reduce carbon emissions. They cannot keep living costs down. They can’t even devise a tax on the mining industry that actually raises revenue.
We have started the long trek back to stability, even though the same people who caused the problem in the first place are refusing to cooperate in fixing what they acknowledged were problems when they were in government themselves. They are people who would apparently cause major and lasting damage to this country for political advantage. You are better than them morally, but in politics you also have to be better than them by getting more votes.
An article on “Why we should listen to dead economists”, which I do agree with in principle, but it all depends on who you mean and what you mean by dead. I posted this comment just because, not that anyone who has gone through the scientology-based economic-theory teaching framework of the modern day will understand:
In the long run, every economist is dead. But in the meantime, you have to know which amongst those dead economists to choose. The problem, though, with Keynes is that while he has gone to his great reward, his theories are very much alive and continue to plague us still. But if we are going to look back even at the economists of Martin Wolf’s choice, it is Bagehot we should look at. Chapter 6 of his Lombard Street – “Why Lombard Street is Often Very Dull, and Sometimes Extremely Excited” – is a straight up account of the classical theory of the cycle, and incomparably better than anything you will find in a macroeconomics text today.
Choosing Keynes as a dead economist whose views we should examine, as if he were some obscure entity from the distant past, now known only to specialists, is a particular kind of peculiar. Chapter VI of Lombard Street, however, is as modern as the GFC.
What our elites like most about Keynesian economics is that the wealthy get to plunder everyone else while the government can pretend it is trying to generate recovery. As the title says, For Most Of Us, There’s No “Recovery”, us in this case being in the US.
From 1820 through 2000, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent. Last year was the ninth consecutive year in which the economy grew less than 3 percent.
Real GDP has grown 13.6 percent since the recovery officially began in June 2009. The average rate of growth at this point in the recoveries from the four recessions since 1975 was 21.9 percent.
If it weren’t for gains made by the well off, there wouldn’t be a “recovery.” Five years after it began, the top 1 percent of earners (more than $366,623 a year) had garnered 81 percent of its fruits. The incomes of the top one-tenth of 1 percent (about $8 million a year) grew 39 percent.
The incomes of the bottom 90 percent declined, according to University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Real median household income was $54,417 in December, 5.1 percent lower than in January 2008 ($57,317).
Most of us get nearly all our income from our jobs. Only 44 percent of adults work 30 hours or more a week, according to Gallup’s survey of the work force. Ten million fewer are working now than when Barack Obama became president.
It took until last March to create as many new jobs as were lost during the Great Recession. For every person who’s found a job, two have left the labor force.
Law of Markets 