Anyone seen "Withnail and I?"

Well people are now selling fake penises that dispense fake urine with which to fool the authorities if you get busted for substance abuse. Or rather they were, until they got sent down.

I dont condone substance abuse but I felt i had to include a good dick joke.

Ruddstuff

Rudd's Godson's dad (editor of the OZ) chooses to blow smoke up the rectum from whence daylight comes, but the rest of us can smell the foul stench that emanates from within Rudd's socialist bowels.

Once such patriot has set up shop: http://www.ruddshop.com/

Check it out an have a bit of a giggle at Rudd's expense. Better than GM/Holden having a giggle a the taxpayer's (that is your) expense.

Aftermath: Obsessed Obama supporters' lives no longer have meaning

Genius from the Onion:

Looking on the bright side

Obama won. There are some good points to take from this.

Firstly, from now on when people say that the US is fundamentally racist, we will all know it's bullshit.

I am glad that when you tell a little black boy that he can be president one day, he will believe you. Unfortunately if you still tell a little girl of any colour that same thing, they wont quite.

Perversely, for all this talk of redistribution of wealth from Obama, the very fact that he is president might make Black people and Americans in general go more self-reliant. If minorities really believe that "yes we can" achieve status and wealth and power then they might be less despondent about their future and less dependent on welfare as a group.

Obviously this is a historic moment, just like Thatcher becoming the UK's first woman PM. The next test becomes whether that person fights for the narrow interest of their group within society, or really does govern for all. But the guy deserves props just for getting elected.

Or as we say in Australia, "Good on ya, mate".


Secondly, it looks at this point that the Democrats will not achieve a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate. That means that their most drastic agenda for change can be delayed and stopped though rigorous debate. The Dems control the white house and both houses of congress, but they will have to explain what they do and bring others with them. Rather than "crash through or crash" in the Whitlam-style.

I think Obama will be like Rudd. He will be cautious about implementing his change, aka income redistribution and proto-socialism. There are still close to 50% of Americans who disagree with it, and most of American history disagrees.

Obama is already watering down is rhetoric and managing expectations. Talking about a hard road or whatever in his acceptance speech, and how we all need to make sacrifices etc. It sounds like he's going to leave them in a bit of a rut for while yet. He's not going be be anyone's saviour in a hurry.

Obama will be loathe to tinker with, let alone pull apart, a system that fundamentally works. After all, it worked well enough to put him where he is.

On foreign policy, it's one thing to bash Bush for taking action, but when you are commander-in-chief and you risk something going very wrong if you dont take action, like Israel getting nuked, then you change your mind pretty fast. I think,like Blair, Obama is driven by ambition (not to say vanity) and he will be very worried about his legacy. He does not want it to read "they guy who sounded cool but allowed America to become weak in the eyes of the world." Blair was a left-winger swept to power by wets who became a stauch ally of the US in the war in Iraq. When Obama says he'll invade Pakistan, i believe him.

"Yes we can" change American foreign and domestic policy, but do we really want to?


Thirdly, and i think most importantly for the long term future of America and the world, the American conservatives have been electorally punished so badly that they must now reform.

The Republicans conceded this election when they nominated McCain. McCain was too much of a maverick to have a direction, see Ace on that. I was rooting for Giulianni 18 months ago. He still might have lost against Obama but this race was not a walkover, and if the Reps had hit Obama hard over the economy, which McCain never could because he hates Wall St too, they could have had a chance.

BUT Giulliani was a deal-breaker for the religious right in the US because he was not socially conservative enough. They stopped him getting the nomination. I dont like those guys. They freak me out. They freak alot of people out both in the US and abroad. I also think they are part of the reason why the GOP lost.

I supported Bush because i thought he was a strong leader and a defier of conventional weakened wisdom of the hippies in suits and no ties who run the media. i did it because i am a conservative. I am not religious. I dont think you have to be religious to be conservative. It's about pride, patriotism, hard-work, honesty, self-reliance and a fundamental distrust and distaste for the politics of pity. It should have nothing, or very little, to do with religion.

I do not begrudge people their religion and I dont think anyone should be excluded from a political party on the basis of religion, but when the whole identity of a party is bundled up with a religion I don't like it. The Christian right have too much control over the US Republican party. They should be a part of it, but not the dominant part.

The other conservatives, the economic and foreign policy conservatives, need to form a values platform that can compete with the Christian right, so that they can then compete with the values-talk of the left, of which Obama is the master. They need to create a form of Social conservatism that is not based on religion. To talk about real-world rational reasons why we need to take responsibility for ourselves in our personal lives, as well as defend basic personal rights in the same rational way. If you have religious reason too, fine, but that should not be seen a sufficient justification on it's own from now on.

I feel a bit apprehensive in saying this, because i'm not an American and i dont really know that much and it's not really any of my business. But i think it's true. I hope these will be the last words I say on the topic of US politics for some time. I got a country of my own to worry about. Good luck y'all, and if there is a God, may he/she bless America.

Obama Toast?

This article by Malstrom, a guy i had never heard of till today, has got some seriously juicy bits on why the polls are so far off. He is predicting a crazy upheaval on election night. Saying all the pundits have it wrong. It's long but I recommend the whole thing. He focuses on Pennslyvania, where the candidates are appearing on the stump. It's a big blue state about to turn red, he says. Here is one paragraph that jumped out at me as directly relevant to Aussie politics:

Lying to pollsters is frequent and a necessity in Pennslyvania due to the unions. Many union bosses will call their members, posing as a ‘pollster’, and if the member gives the wrong asnwer, a thug is sent to the house. The Teacher’s Union there has sent strict orders to vote for Obama “or else”.

I just watched Insiders on-line and am saddened to see Alexander Downer predicting an Obama victory. I guess that's why he was never PM. He's not suspicious enough of other's motives. Too much of a gentleman I suppose you could say.


So what are my feelings at this late hour? I'm exhausted. It seems like only last week, it was last November, that we fought our own election here and i had to ignore polls for a year prior to that to keep from going insane. I'm not game to make a prediction to the contrary of the polls now. I've been burned.

I will say however that the legacy media bias in this election for Obama has been unprecedented. A few years ago I, like Downer probably, would had dismissed it a quarter-arsed conspiracy theory. No longer. It's a deliberate attempt to "break the spirit" of the conservative voters. My guts fell out last year when the OZ started pulling for Rudd. I've seen the media line up candidates before. I've seen it in Britain with David Cameron's bid for the conservative leadership. I've seen it with Rudd. Now i'm seeing it with Obama. I desperately want to believe that the unelected ideologues in the MSM can be kept in check by the people. I hope tomorrow this is shown to be so.

Maybe i should not be so melodramatic. My girlfriend is more upbeat. She said something yesterday that had not occurred to me because I was living in Britain for the 2004 campaign here. She said "This whole Obama thing is just like what happened with Latham." I didn't realize the media had lined up Latham in the same way as Rudd, and been denied. Nice.

I guess the difference between the 2004 and the 2007 Federal elections was the sustained poll advantage Rudd had in the lead up. But the article at the link above debunks all the current US polling, and towards the end says stuff that can easily be compared to the Latham case:

America is right of center. While Carter and LBJ were the last Democrats to win over 50% of the vote, LBJ didn’t bother to run for a second term due to how despised he had become over Vietnam, and Carter was flushed out during the election of 1980. The point is that there is an acceptable level of leftness the electorate will accept. Clinton campaigned and acted a little left which was acceptable to the electorate. But LBJ and Carter went way too far and the electorate sank them. Obama has likely gone too far left which is why the ’socialism’ charge is sticking to him.

The Aussies ditched Latham for being too far Left. He freaked everybody out. The ALP had to put the (false) safe face of Rudd on their lefty agenda. Are the American political and media establishment about to learn a lesson in political reality they they could have got from watching us Aussies? For the US equiv of the ALP, the Democrats, the moderate candidate is Hillary. She won the primaries in the rust belt states like PA that Obama now stands to lose.

If Obama does lose it will be the end of the far Left for another generation. It will also be the end of the legacy media's special status as truth providers. They have staked so much on predicting an Obama victory that no-one will ever believe them again. I mean that here in Australia too. The falsity and bias will be exposed, but that is too much to hope for.

Still, if I were religious i'd be praying for it. I am not religious but i love hymns. So maybe i'll sing instead of pray. These lines are from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which became an anthem for the Union (Northerners) during the American Civil War. I may not be in the mood to quote it tomorrow, so in the hope of a McCain victory, i'll do it now. For "the Lord", read "The People".

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

Bit too passionate for ya? Is so, feel free to get lost.

I just upgraded my Joe the Plumber to Tito the Builder

Dead.Set.Legend.



Attempted transcript of the last and best bit, with omissions:
"I'm gonna tell you why i dont want it (socialism). Because they throw you a few crumbs just to keep you down there. Here you go little poor man. And that keeps you happy so you dont question their connections and their philosophy. So they can keep the power."

But you have to listen to it in his hispanic accept to have to beauty of his latin metaphors. These guys know corruption when they see it

Plus those shades. Awesome!

Recession + Govt Intervention = The Great Depression

Well i'll be. It looks like the New Deal, the government intervention that US Pres FDR introduced to lift lift the US economy out of the great depression in the 1930s actually prolonged the depression. So say respected economists from UCLA

Read the whole article at UCLA newsroom because, despite being about economics, it is really easy to understand. Here's some key quotes.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
...

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."
...

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

"High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns," Ohanian said. "As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

...

"The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened."

Does this remind you of anything, or anyone. Maybe todays financial crisis here in Aus, and Rudd's completely screwing up his "solution" to it? All that has hapenned is we've gone from bad to worse, and we have less chance of getting better soon. Funds are frozen. Go figure.

To boot Rudd has lead the union movement to it's strongest political position ever in Australia. They will push for wage increases at the expense of the unemployed and the same inflated wages, prices and interest rates scenario mentioned above will keep us in a Rudd rut for a decade.

And then there's the ETS. It just keeps getting better, sorry worse. The possibilities for price inflation, failure of key industries and job losses multiplies many times over.

But i'm not alarmist. I'm not undermining trust in our institutions. I'm undermining trust in one man. Kevin Rudd. If he doesn't touch anything we'll be fine.