Tuesday 2 September 2008

Coo-ee to the Big Easy mob

When Clarencegirl sends around those blog snapshots, it's easy to see that North Coast Voices has quite a few American readers.

So as Hurricane Gustav blows its way towards the people of New Orleans and the Gulf coast, those of us on Australian coastal floodplains and estuaries wish all 1.9 million residents at risk all the very best.

Map from BBC News

Monday 1 September 2008

And we think that politics can get dirty in Australia...

From the Los Angeles Times on the weekend:

Casual Web surfers who click on Obama-Biden.org or Obama-Biden.com might assume they'd find information about the Democratic presidential ticket.They'd be wrong.
Both addresses divert people to a website that is harshly anti-Obama, the website of the American Issues Project.That's the newly formed nonprofit group that flooded cable television in the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania with ads decrying the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.It wasn't clear who is behind the trick. Christian Pinkston, spokesman for the American Issues Project, said his group had nothing to do with it.

Now American Issues Project may not have arranged this, but I do wonder about >bt: Brain-Terminal which carries this rather roughly made stationery in a pdf which purports to contain a legal letter on behalf of Barack Obama.

That letter is rather at odds with another on the American Issues Project website here.

The whole matter appears to be destined for the courts if The Wall Street Journal article is any indication:

The Obama campaign has run a response ad linking the charges to Sen. McCain and has mounted a campaign to combat the advertisement by encouraging supporters to make phone calls and write emails to TV stations airing the commercial, alleging it is both false and illegal. The campaign says its supporters have sent about 93,000 emails to the Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns many of the stations running the spot.
The Obama campaign's general counsel, Bob Bauer, has sent two letters to the Justice Department asking for an investigation of the group and the $3 million contribution by Mr. Simmons, the only funder who has been disclosed.

Australian GMO crop sites: Bayer joins Monsanto while DuPont gears up








First map: GMO Canola.
Second map: GMO Canola & Indian Mustard.
Third map: GMO Wheat.
Possible that CSIRO wheat research is indirectly funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

All maps found at the Australian Office of Gene Technology Regulator.
Sites depicted by yellow dot are post harvest. Red dots denote current trial plots.

DuPont has recently announced a partnership with Hexima to undertake trials of GMO Corn, Soya Bean and other crops in Australia.

Iemma & Costa: Here're your hats, what's your hurry...

So NSW Treasurer Michael Costa is threatening to quit within 10 weeks if he doesn't get his way over the partial sale of the state's electricity assets and other as yet unnamed measures.
And little Morrie Iemma is bleating about the fact that not undertaking complete power privatisation has wrecked the
NSW credit rating.

Ignoring the fact that it would take more than the loss of a projected $10 billion in sale funds to bring down a credit rating which Standard & Poors had at AAA less than a year ago.
The fact of the matter is that these two political drongoes had continued on where Bob Carr left off and run the state's infrastructure into the ground before facing harsh realities.

And now Iemma has the hide to sool his nasty little Pomeranian, Health Minister Reba Meagher, onto the NSW North Coast and
threaten to withhold future hospital infrastructure upgrades at Lismore Base Hospital because he didn't get his own way over electricity.

Well, the answer to that from many on the North Coast would be the same as the one from Maud up the street:




Sit on it and rotate, fellas!