Friday 29th of March 2024

all in good fun, for some...

 

tony porkies

Annabel gives us a piss-weak condemnation of Tony (in italics)... Here is a short version (with Gus annotations in brackets):

...

And in the past year, we have established many things about Tony Abbott, Prime Minister. Some of them are surprising. Some are not. First, the unsurprising things:


Already in a fight with Putin: 

(Gus: Abbott does not understand anything much else but biffo. Putin is much smarter than Abbott, though he has less friends, because this is the nature of Russia being Russia surrounded by neo-fascist capitalists)

 

Can't balance a budget without inflicting pain: 

(Gus: Abbott lied about what he was going to do)

 

Not enough ladies: 

(Gus: Tony is a closet misogynist).

 

Still not a tech-head: 

(Gus: Tony's education was in the art of bullshit, not sciences)

 

No sign of panic: 

(Gus: "Sociopath" never panic, they just change tactics to get what they want)

 

No sign of Captain Catholic: 

(Gus: wrong — Tony's push for chaplains in public school plus other actions has shown some of his colours on this subject)

 

No sign of war with Indonesia: 

(Gus: The leaders of Indonesia are far more level headed than our little Turd-head.)

 

Weird money thing: 

(Gus: Abbott should never have got away with making the government pay for his expenses for his private charities — the purpose of which were primarily to get exposure for Tony but the media is very forgiving for some people, while hounding others — all because of favours and power)

 

The Truth Parrot Lives: 

(Gus: Tony Abbott lies with impunity and has no remorse, only back-pedalling or joking about when exposed. The truth parrot on his stint at a hospital visit to charge the government for a private function was an exercise in testing what he could still get away with in the media, while robbing the public purse... The piss-weak media did not take him on)


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/inconvenient-truths-about-tony-abbott-20140905-10csqp.html#ixzz3Cbx4BupM

Meanwhile many families are hurting, education is being savage and health has become sicker than a body buried six month ago at the Rookwood cemetery... As well he has made silly deals with Palmer about superannuation and the environment, destroying the future with it...

 

correct to choose labor...

 

Former independent MP Rob Oakeshott has panned the federal government's handling of the budget and says he's glad he backed Labor to power in 2010.

On the first anniversary of the Abbott government, Mr Oakeshott told a Brisbane Writers Festival audience he's now seeing what would have happened if he and fellow independents Tony Windsor and Bob Katter had struck a deal with the coalition instead of Labor.

The retired politician said the trio had faced a blunt choice between former prime minister Julia Gillard's "transactional" leadership style versus the "crash or crash through" adversarial style of Tony Abbott following 2010's hung parliament.

"I think it's too early to call on many fronts as to whether it [the coalition] can be a functioning government but I've got to say one year in, and particularly the way the budget process is being handled, I'm very comfortable with the decision I made in 2010," Mr Oakeshott told a sold-out crowd of about 250 people on Sunday.

Some budget measures are still yet to clear parliament, and critics say it disproportionately targets those on lower incomes.

Mr Oakeshott who resigned in 2013, said a functioning government needed to compromise to get results and Mr Abbott would need to negotiate with foes in the Senate, lower house and his own party.

The former Member for Lyne in NSW, who's now concentrating on raising his four young children, appeared at the festival alongside former federal Labor treasurer Wayne Swan and retired Greens leader Bob Brown.

All three men have released books recently.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/im-glad-i-chose-labor-rob-oakeshott-20140907-10dl63.html#ixzz3CcH8pWdM

 

365 days of crap...

Bob Ellis considers Tony Abbott’s first year ruling Australia.

He said those who wanted an independent Scotland were enemies of ‘freedom’ and ‘honour’. He said Putin had personally ordered the shooting down of MH17. He said there was a cover-up, and proposed to “bring to justice”, presumably in shackles, Putin and his co-conspirators. He promised to ‘bring them home’, and after spending fifty million dollars, failed to do so. He spent half a billion failing to find, in three oceans, one skerrick of MH370. He failed to investigate what was obviously true, that Americans in Diego Garcia shot it down.  He uttered no word of criticism of the mass murderers of Joe Hockey’s relatives in Gaza.

He promised no cuts to health, education, Gonski, NDIS, SBS and the ABC — and broke all these promises. He let Pyne, who paid nothing for his degree and $80,000 for his house, charge the next generation $2 million dollars for these advantages. He defended Brandis when he said:

 “We all have a right to be bigots.”

He proposed legislation which, if enacted, would have put Mark Regev in gaol for 25 years. He proposed legislation that would have put in gaol for twenty-five years all Australians who, in Syria, opposed Assad. He redefined ‘disability’, demanding disabled people get a job, or else. He effectively told teenage girls who did not accept not accept available employment as whores they would get no money for six months.

He proposed to take away schoolkids’ money that would give some families $2,400 in a year, and most $800. He denied all money to the car industry, and destroyed it. This caused the ending, in the next three years, of 100,000 jobs and the distortion or destruction of half a million lives.

He opposed gay marriage and would not let the Liberals, some of whom are gay, vote their conscience on it. He believes his sister will fry in hell for it.

He let Scott Morrison’s cyberbullying cause two young men to burn themselves to death, and one to try to. He approved the unhygienic conditions which caused the death of Hamid Kehazaei, and the brutish regime which injured with violence 60 young men in one night, killed one, shot one, and slashed another’s throat. He approved Morrison’s proposal to sell into slavery, and probably sexual slavery, 50 children in Cambodia. He approved Morrison’s bizarre idea that children now infants should serve a hundred years on Nauru, not leaving it to marry or seek a university education, for the crime of having got here last September, not the previous June.

He proposed to go back to war in Iraq and fight those crucifying savages the previous war had created. He did not apologise for his hero, Howard, having fuelled a war that killed, wounded, or exiled six million people, including all the dentists, and engendered by its brutalities ISIS, the nastiest mob of cutthroats since the Spanish Inquisition. He called ISIS a “death cult”, though his own fierce faith, with its crucified hero, burnt martyrs, torturing inquisitors, beheaded Apostles, auctioned saints’ fingers, Holy Crusades against the Infidel, and weekly eaten Christ, is a death-driven madness also.

He defied the world on global warming and got an unimaginative capitalist to propose the end of solar power and the embellishment of coal. Though the carbon tax had brought down emissions, he abolished it. Though he said he would keep the carbon reduction 2020 target, he did not contradict those who wanted, now, to abandon it.

He said he would get the Budget back into surplus, then spent $12 billion this year on a pregnancy bonus, a useless jet fighter and a pointless search for a drowned plane, and refused to readminister super deductions that would bring to the government $4 billion (per year) its coffers needed.

He said ‘It’s all about trust’ and became the least trusted leader in Australian, or British, history. He became, as well, the least popular Prime Minister, in his first six months, in world history.

It is thought his proposal to provoke World War 3 in the Ukraine, and Armageddon in Iraq, will gain him votes and show him to be a world statesman. He may wrong about this. The electorate may be tired of expending billions on doomed incompetent wars.  He thinks that selling uranium to a country likely to use it, in atomic bombs, on a Taliban Pakistan, which will respond with atomic bombs of its own, is wise policy.

He is as stupid as that. He thinks that a fresh crisis a day will distract attention from his incompetence and cruelty. He may be right about that, thus far.

But the Ashby interview last night, and Morrison’s assistance to escaping murderers, and his own confessed and proven misuse of travel funds (twenty times Peter Slipper’s mere nine hundred dollars) will do for him eventually.

And so it goes.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/one-hundred-things-abbott-got-wrong-in-his-first-year-in-power,6874

another fence-sitting exercise on a soft pair of buns...

 

Great waves of disclosure have weakened many a previously-unshakeable edifice, be they of profound pastoral failures within the church, or the mega-dumps of compromising information from WikiLeaks confirming our timeless suspicions that our leaders spy on us and sometimes say foolish things in private.


'Beyond public arrests, how would I possibly know what sort of job ASIO is doing?'

 Freedom of information is an irreproachable general tenet of a democratic state. But it isn't without incidental cost. Our notion of – and respect for – expertise, for instance, is undergoing a seismic rearrangement.

Experts once lived safely in the towers of our ignorance. Their years of study, or hard-won field experience, gave them an unanswerable sway over the rest of us; a buffer of trust that it wasn't in our interests to breach.

Nowadays, any goons with an internet connection can fancy themselves as experts.

....

Funnily enough, climate science and counter-terrorism have a few things in common. Both involve endeavours to identify, assess and deflect a worst-case scenario that would be disastrous for human life. Both involve a fiendish degree of complexity, and require courageous and well-judged leadership. Both lend themselves rather readily to religious levels of fervour, whether it's Kevin Rudd's invocation of great moral challenge, or the deranged excesses of the Islamic State, or Abbott's denunciation of that organisation as "against God".

It's easy to see how each could – in time – become a battleground for entrenched ideology, new Cold Wars of tribalism and contempt. And that would be an enduring tragedy.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/its-the-age-of-experts-and-theyre-everywhere-20140919-10j8li.html#ixzz3DubK7lMU

Hell, Annabel!... The internet and Mr Google does not make anything different from the past... All it might do is help us, the plebs, see where the experts are talking bullshit as they have been pointed out by previous pamphleteers and bards. All it has done is basically increased the speed at which one can react to bullshit. 
Sorry about the "goons" though... We keep elected them to power. Don't we. Don't denigrate the "any goons" — especially those who have done their homework, well, may I say like me, here. I am more an old kook, than a goon, mostly because I have seen shit being promoted as rose petals by governments before. 
Entrenched ideology? There is no ideology ABOUT THE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING for example. Only idiots like some of your mates in the spruiking industry are fighting tooth and nail to make sure it is an ideology battle. The Janet, the Bolt and other rabid spruikers are relentless and they have other platforms to peddle their wares than the internet, I can tell you... 
Yes, the idea of knowing more quickly about stuff is necessary. In the past I used to have to refer to my old sets of encyclopaedias and books — of which I have plenty... But some of these books are now old and out of date. Only the web is bringing me up to speed, despite my bad knees... 
Grow up Annabel. You still are stuck in dreamland where you fantasise about a past that never existed, not even in your own mind.

 

The battles are old — even if the battleground has shifted... and made more accessible to detect bullshit.