Well, someone had to do it!

Another month has gone by and it is past time to have another look at Rudd's Grocery Choices website to see if it offers the consumer anything worthwhile yet.

Quite frankly, I drew the short straw.
Clarrie's away, Roo's up to the armpits, WaterDragon crossed the street, and Clarencegirl off-loaded the task and ran.

I really didn't want to click onto Kevin's baby and realise that it was just as spud-faced as before.
And, yup, there it was - the same old broad comparison across regions composed of thousands of square kilometres with little or no public transport and laughable competition levels.

Here's the bottom line poor man's basket results for the North East NSW:

Basket of Staples

Coles/BI-LOW $77.31

Woolworths $75.55

SafewayFranklins $78.66

Independents $79.99

ALDI $61.34

How much is this website costing us all again? Weren't we sorta promised that this site would get better over time? The cove who sold this idea to Rudders must have more front than Woolworths.

We turn one today!

A years ago today North Coast Voices was created (though it took another full day to figure out the nuts and bolts so that we were displayed out there in the blogosphere and a few more days after that before we were indexed).

Thankyou to everyone who has popped in to peek at this baby blog or stayed on to have a good read.

Petering Time, clarencegirl, Clarrie Rivers, K. Roo, WaterDragon, and Boy the Wonder Cat

Graphic from Google Images

He who slings mud loses ground (or a case of the battling slurs)

As the countdown to the 2008 US presidential election hots up, everyone has stopped pretending that they are higher forms of life and expose themselves as the usual mixed bag of political ambitions.

The Weekly Standard gives this take on the 6 degrees of William Ayres:

"So Obama's campaign is saying, on the one hand, that it's unfair to link their candidate to Ayers, although he served as chairman of a group Ayers founded and attended fundraisers at Ayers home. And at the same time the campaign is sending out emails attempting to link Mark Sanford to Ayers because they have honorary titles at the same 40,000-student university? That's funny.
Obama's complaints about the unfair linkage would be more convincing if they weren't citing sources attempting to do the same thing. And those complaints would be more convincing if Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who is close to Obama, hadn't offered his take on Obama and Ayers:
"They're friends. So what?"

Oliver Burkeman critiques the latest ads in The Guardian:

"Well, here's one industry sector that can't be doing too badly at the moment, despite the economic nightmare: the composers of sinister backing music for political campaign ads. Above: the McCain campaign's new TV spot, entitled Dangerous, which -- can you guess? -- quotes Barack Obama completely out of context on Afghanistan. And below, the Obama campaign's web documentary on the Keating Five scandal (in which five US senators, including McCain, were accused of improperly seeking to get special treatment for a campaign contributor whose fraud was at the heart of the savings-and-loan crisis; McCain, eventually, was officially found to have shown only 'poor judgment'). The video is a borderline hilarious compendium of thriller-movie cliches, including the well-worn "sinister vibraphone music" gambit, and the "camera shutter" sound-effect used to imply that somebody's up to something. But it's also a powerful, albeit entirely partisan, condemnation of McCain's role in the affair. As a matter of campaign tactics, though, one can't help observing that the McCain ad is 35 seconds long, whereas the Obama documentary is 13 minutes, and that one of these might be better suited to today's cable-news-driven, ultra-low-attention-span political culture than the other..."

Of course, in keeping with a better grasp of the blogosphere's desire for information, Obama at Keating Economics has a research page which is packed with 'ain't John awful' research.

His campaigners are also salting the media with items such as: Yesterday, Mr Obama's aides pointed out the past connections Mr McCain had with a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas seeking to overthrow the left-wing government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980s.

Although neither man is covering themselves with glory, it is mainly John McCain who receives negative press for his efforts.

However, the final word may yet go to the Republicans, as they wake up to the fact that Obama's email fund-raising blitz probably saw some foreigners illegally donating to campaign funds.

Fact Check.org has sent out an email which calls a plague on both their houses:

We won't attempt to assess which side is more deceitful, a task that would require subjective judgments about the degree of untruthfulness and the relative importance of each misleading statement. But, sadly, each side is correct to say the other has used false attacks.

Old Fred Daly of Currabubulla was right - he who slings mud loses ground. Both candidates are on shaky turf when they hunt for dirt.

For the latest from the candidates go to the transcript of the Second Presidential Campaign Debate held yesterday.

But I lost $134M - that makes me one of the good guys (non-quote from Richard S Fuld Jnr)

As I sit here with my trews getting a bit threadbare around the rear, wondering where my next crust is coming from and worried about the flow-on effect from that Yankee bovine madness rampaging on Wall Street, I think it is hilarious that Richie Rich Fuld appeared before the US Congress and tried to present himself as one of the losers in the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Congress saw it differently.

ABC News from America last Monday:
"In the first Congressional hearing into the financial crisis, the former CEO of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, became the poster boy for Wall Street greed today as he defended the $484 million he received in salary, bonuses and stock options since 2000.
"Is that fair?" asked committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) who pointed out Fuld owns a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, an ocean front estate on Jupiter Island, Florida, a ski chalet in Idaho and a Manhattan apartment.
"If you haven't discovered your role, you're the villain today," said Rep. John Mica (R-FL)."

But don't just think that Lehman wages and salaries were unrealistic at the top - take a keek at this two month long summer analyst job for a bi-weekly base salary of $55,000.
But don't have a heart attack just yet.
This appears to be a very badly-worded offer of employment and no lowly analyst was being offered tens of thousands per month.
Just another sloppy piece of work from a very sloppy Lehman Brothers.

According to the Business and Media Institute, at least one other Lehman's executive type tried to pass on their portion of the blame in what appears to have been an it's 'all the boss's fault' knockout:
"While former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld was testifying before the House Oversight Committee Oct. 6, CNBC reported he had been punched in the face at the Lehman Brothers gym after it was announced the firm was going bankrupt."

Americans still unamused with Bush's bailout

Cartoon from SinFest

Click to enlarge

LA Times yesterday pointed out what ordinary people have known from the start.

Hating the bailout? You won't like the next one, either

News item from Bloomberg this morning:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700-billion plan to buy troubled assets from financial firms may not work because it doesn't recapitalize banks, said Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for economics.
“There are lots of reasons to think the Paulson plan won't succeed in cleaning up banks' balance sheets any time soon,” Phelps, an economics professor at Columbia University, said at a conference today in Washington. “It may aggravate the second problem banks have, which is that they're quasi-insolvent.”
Speaking at the same conference, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agreed, saying the Paulson plan fails to recapitalize banks, and that another government intervention, to inject capital into the banking system, is probably inevitable.

Is the Rudd Government really about fair dealing or is it just posturing?

In November 2007 Indonesia was reported as again refusing to share viral material with the World Health Organisation (WHO) because of structural barriers to poorer countries sharing in the benefits of any vaccines created.

Last Sunday Science Daily reported that just because Avian Influenza has dropped off the mainstream media radar, doesn't mean that better vaccines are not being pursued.

What is less clear is the progress on producing vaccines, stockpiling and proposed distribution in times of pandemic.

In June this year the WHO prepared a draft document PANDEMIC INFLUENZA PREPAREDNESS: MULTILATERAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE SHARING OF INFLUENZA VIRUSES AND ACCESS TO VACCINES AND OTHER BENEFITS

Wikileaks source says this of the document:

On the risk of Avian Pandemic Influenza (Avian/Bird Flu) negotiations at the World Health Organisation (WHO)
There's not enough flu vaccine to go around in the event of a pandemic. If it happens, you can bet that the rich will be vaccinated, and the poor will suffer.... and that multinational drug companies will make a fortune. Remember Tamiflu?
Ever since Indonesia began withholding flu viruses from the WHO to protest the injustices of the system, governments have been trying to renegotiate the terms of international flu virus sharing. Although Indonesia, African countries, and others in Asia and Latin America have put detailed proposals on the table, wealthy countries are staunchly resisting making any major concessions to make the system more fair.
This text, drafted by the Australian chair of the WHO negotiating group, purports to be a balanced take on various countries proposals; but it's not. It's more like business as usual. Under the scheme put forward by Australia, developing countries would continue to be ripped off, and continue to submit their viruses to WHO "for global public health", only to see those viruses claimed by multinational companies and put into products too expensive for them to afford.

Reading the draft does not reveal anything to refute this claim. Indeed, on the surface it does not seem to fulfill the SAGE recommendation to WHO in April 2007.

The Rudd Government is quick to use the media to trumpet its commitment to good international relationships, but detail often points to a contrary practice.

Perhaps the Federal Minister for Health Nicola Roxon, Minister for Aging Justine Elliot, Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith and Prime Minister Rudd might like to comment on what appears to be a proposal put forward by their man which favours the large multinationals over our near neighbours and the poor and elderly.

Ladybird, ladybird............

One of the delights of childhood used to be the wonder of the existence of Ladybirds, which turned up in the garden dressed in a variety of colours and designs - black, yellow, red, orange, blue, big dots, small dots, no dots, matt-finish or highly glossy.

There are supposedly about 500 kinds of Ladybird in Australia.

When was the last time you saw a one?
Like cicadas they appear to have largely gone missing from our urban life.

Courtesy of the Australian Botanic Gardens some ladybird facts can be found here.

Also here is a CSIRO webpage if you want to find out more about these little winged gems.