Morris Iemma demonstrates why NSW Labor will not gain government again in the next decade

Morris Iemma turned Sydney CBD into a concrete gulag for the 2007 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, lost his sense of humour when The Chaser team showed that all that expensive and intrusive so-called conference security meant nothing, went against party policy to push for the unpopular privatisation of state electricity supplies, rolled back planning laws protecting home-owners from being swamped by rapacious developers, ignored holes in the political donations policy until predictable scandal surfaced, is underwriting World Youth Day's pinch penny pilgrims to the tune of tens of millions while the public hospital system haemorrhages, and yesterday had the hide to ban the general public from dedication of the statue of a New Zealand soldier on Anzac Bridge during the Anzac Day weekend.

Little Morrie Iemma is clearly as out-of-touch with the average voter as John Howard was in his latter years.

I see the same fate awaiting him and Labor, as neither are passing the pub test and Bluey is not happy.

Morrie may be content to take his super and run when the time comes, but if he continues in this high-handed strain until the next election he is creating a gold-plated guarantee that NSW Labor will rot in the wilderness for at least the next decade after.

Babbo!

Laurie Oakes and Clarencegirl have a little something in common

In The Daily Telegraph last Thursday.

"Laurie Oakes (1942- ) is a broadcast and print journalist known for achieving political scoops," his on-screen profile reads.

"She started at the Sydney Daily Mirror and then moved to the Melbourne Sun's Canberra bureau before moving to television."

Oakes told Sydney Confidential it was a common mistake made by Americans.

"In fact, I once received an email from a strange web company congratulating me on my inclusion in an American encyclopedia of prominent women," he said, laughing.

"I guess it just goes to show I'm in touch with my feminine side. Still it's a wonderful honour."

 

Laurie Oakes obviously experiences some benign gender mistakes because of the spelling of his first name.

I may live in obscurity when compared with Mr. Oakes, but there should be no confusion as to my gender with a blogger name like clarencegirl.

 

I have long been accustomed to the northern NSW attitude that females are always supposed to be seen but not heard, however last week I was amused to see a humorous idea floated in the wider Australian blogosphere that clarencegirl might possibly be a middle-aged man in drag.

Shift along the bench Laurie, I'll join you in bemusement - but I'm d*amned if I'll get in touch with my 'masculine' side!

UN strengthens Australia's right for say over Southern Ocean whaling?

Australia has become the first country to be granted exclusive property rights in Antarctica, experts say, raising questions about the exploitation of biological resources in this sensitive and disputed territory.

The expansion of Australia's seabed borders this week by the United Nations includes the Kerguelen Plateau around Heard and McDonald Islands, which extends southwards into Antarctica.

"This is the first property rights allocation for the area south of 60 degrees south and it will be contentious, but it has been sanctioned by the United Nations, it's unprecedented," Tasmania's Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre law expert Julia Jabour said.

 

Although this extension of jurisdiction does not appear to cover ocean fisheries, it does cover part of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary seabed area.

Surely now that Australia is the only country with officially recognised territory this close to the Antarctic land and ice mass, it may be thought to have additional leverage in relation to the problematic issue of Japan's 'scientific' whaling.

Over to you, Minister for Environment and the Arts Peter Garrett.

 

Map of Australian territorial waters here.

Closer and closer it crept, until......

No matter how swift is John Howard's patter or how quickly his ghostwriter types those autobiographical pages, history is inexorably writing a thread the former PM will never escape from.

 

The Sydney Morning Herald.

 

"Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has called for Western leaders including Australia's former prime minister John Howard to be charged with war crimes over the war in Iraq.

In a speech at Imperial College in London, Mahathir called for an international tribunal to try US President George Bush plus former prime minister Tony Blair of Britain and Howard for their part in the conflict, said a spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim group that organised the event.

Spokesman Mohammed Shafiq told AFP that Mahathir, who was in office from 1981 to 2003, wanted to see the trio tried "in absence for war crimes committed in Iraq".

 

"On the war in Iraq, Mahathir spoke about "the thousands dying, the economic war, the power of oil and how we could utilise some of these tools to have a leverage against the people who commit countries to war", Shafiq said."

Barak spins Pennsylvania and starts to work the Kentucky room

The emails from Obama for America just keep coming.
Barak Obama's field director in Kentucky now tells the world that Our campaign has already generated incredible enthusiasm throughout Kentucky -- in towns from Paducah to Pikeville, thousands of people have turned out for registration drives, office openings and festivals to show their support for Barack.

While the campaign website splash screen (see picture) is so sugar-laden it should come with its own health warning.

Here is last Thursday's cheer team effort after missing out in Pennsylvania, including the usual 'show me the money'.

Last night, Senator Clinton used up her last, best chance to cut appreciably into Barack Obama's elected delegate lead.
She came up short.
In fact, she barely made a dent. At most, she picked up a net gain of 12 delegates
-- less than our gain, for example, in Colorado (where we gained 17) or Kansas (where we gained 14). Her gain in Pennsylvania was less than half of our gain in Virginia, where we added to our lead by 25 delegates.
But there is one measure by which her campaign's gains are real.
The Clinton campaign claims they've raised $3.5 million dollars since the polls closed yesterday.
We can't afford to let that go unanswered.
Please make a donation of $25 today to support this campaign:
https://donate.barackobama.com/thefacts
Grassroots support from people like you has the Democratic nomination in our sights.
Here's how it breaks out:
After Pennsylvania, we have a lead of at least 159 elected delegates earned through all of the primaries and caucuses so far. We have a total of at least 1493 pledged delegates.
Meanwhile, we've been rapidly gaining ground among the so-called superdelegates (elected leaders and party officials who get a vote to choose our nominee), cutting Senator Clinton's lead from more than 100 early this year to less than 25. We have a total of 238 publicly committed superdelegates.
The total number of delegates needed to secure the nomination is 2,024. That means we are only 293 delegates away from securing the nomination.
In less than two weeks, we'll square off in the key battleground states of North Carolina and Indiana, when there will be as many delegates at stake as there were last night in Pennsylvania.
To grow our significant lead and close out this race, we must remain competitive in these contests and the 7 others that will follow.
Barack needs your support right now to finish this contest:
https://donate.barackobama.com/thefacts
Pennsylvania was considered a state tailor-made for Senator Clinton -- she was always expected to win, and we trailed by as much as 25 points in the weeks leading up to the election.
But thanks to people like you, Barack gained support among key voters in the face of long odds and unrelenting negativity from Senator Clinton, and kept the margin close enough that her delegate gain was insignificant.
Indeed, the only surprising result from Pennsylvania is how much Barack was able to improve his standing among key voter groups since the Ohio primary.
Among white voters, Obama narrowed the gap by 6 points. Among voters over 60, he nearly cut the gap in half, from 41 points to 24 points. Meanwhile, we continued to run strong where we have all along -- for example, winning voters ages 18-24 with over 65% of the vote.
Barack campaigned hard in Pennsylvania. He talked about his plans to stand up to the special interests and bring people together so that we can change Washington to turn our economy around, make sure that every American has quality health care, and bring this misguided war to an end.
Your donation of $25 can make sure we grow our lead and finish this race in the final 9 contests:
https://donate.barackobama.com/thefacts
Thank you,
David
David Plouffe
CampaignManager
Obama for America

When is it okay to plagiarise?

Answer: When you are a university vice-chancellor.

Well, that's what Professor Ian O'Connor of Queensland's Griffith University must think.

The Weekend Australian reports that O'Connor lifted information straight from online encyclopedia Wikipedia and confused strands of Islam as he struggled to defend his institution's decision to ask the repressive Saudi Arabian Government for funding.

In September, The Australian revealed that the Queensland university had accepted a grant of $100,000 from the Saudi Government. Last week, it was revealed that Griffith had asked the Saudi embassy in Australia for a $1.37million grant for its Islamic Research Unit, telling the ambassador that certain elements of the controversial deal could be kept a secret.

Griffith - described by Professor O'Connor as the "university of choice" for Saudis - also offered the embassy a chance to "discuss" ways in which the money could be used.

Professor O'Connor denies that by lifting sentences from Wikipedia he has breached his university's guidelines on plagiarism. The Griffith University council, of which Professor O'Connor is an ex-officio member, considers plagiarism an example of academic misconduct.

It gives an example of plagiarism as "word for word copying of sentences or paragraphs from one or more sources which are the work or data of other persons (including books, articles, thesis, unpublished works, working papers, seminar and conference papers, internal reports, lecture notes or tapes) without clearly identifying their origin by appropriate referencing".

Professor O'Connor yesterday tried to distance himself from the university's standards. "It was not as a piece of academic scholarship, therefore did not follow normal citation methods used in academic publications," he said.

On Wednesday, Professor O'Connor published a full copy of his opinion piece on the Griffith website. Yesterday, the university added references to Wikipedia as footnotes.

Read The Weekend Australian article here.

Rocky Mountains see watermelons under the bed when it comes to climate change

Yesterday the US online Rocky Mountains News published the following article which reduces climate change to a pawn in that old Cold War debate.

Interestingly this news website did not inform its readers that the 500 mentioned were gathered for a conference sponsored by groups receiving fossil fuel and energy industry funding.

 

Even Jennifer Marohasy must cringe at this media distortion of her views on global warming.

Although it is possible that Tim Blair would embrace the disc jockey-style journalism of Colorado's Mike Rosen.

 

A growing contingent of scientists has been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.---

Global warming hysteria is steeped in politics and a strange collection of bedfellows. Along with sincere environmentalist true-believers are the camp followers who embrace this as a quasi-religious calling.

Then there are the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. They embrace ecological arguments to achieve ideological goals, exploiting fears of enviro-Armageddon to regulate and control evil capitalists and redistribute world income and wealth. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, recognizes the signs. "As someone who lived under communism for most of (my) life," he warned, "I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."