Who us? A short blog review too good not to share

North Coast Voices has been chuckling about this excerpt from a letter to the editor in The Daily Examiner ever since it was published on Saturday 17 January 2009.

I don't think the author thought for a moment that we would find this characterization hilarious enough to share, but we just couldn't resist.

Personally I'm a little disappointed that we missed out on the classic "dragging their knuckles in the dust" line!

We're all in this (recession) together and other fractured fairy tales

The Prime Minister is back from his annual hols and has jumped up before the cameras with the cry We're all in this together! in his Australia Day reception speech.

"This is a difficult time, and in the short term there is no quick fix.
Things will get worse before they get better.That is where all of us – not just government – have a role in lessening the effects of the crisis.
We are all in this together: business, unions, governments, the community sector – and every nation in the world.In these times, employers must do their utmost to protect their workers from dismissal, knowing that these workers will serve them well when times turn good again.
Workers, too, must restrain any wage claims."

No, Rudders, we are not all in this together.
The Aussie banks and their boards, mines and their multinational owners, top CEOs across the country, big national businesses, kings of the racing world, those with inherited wealth, and many more citizens with large salary packages, are not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone. Unless it's with a pollie or two they think may send a cash injection or tax cut their way (look at who's complaining about your fiscal stimulus package and getting ready to close an outlet if you don't believe me).
So don't give me that guff about wage restraint being a strategy to lessen the effect of the global financial crisis.
It's only a strategy which will be used to increase the personal profits of many of the big employers.
Why? Because the bottom line is that most employers still secretly feel that they are paying workers money for jam and that no unskilled or semi-skilled worker deserves more that a pittance wage.
As for small business owners (especially in some parts of the NSW North Coast) they seem to believe that workers should pay their employers for the privilege of having a job.
And I'm not the only one saying so. Get the picture, mate?

Poll results for Tuesday 20 January 2009 in the mid-afternoon.

Update later in the morning:

The Australian reports that Kevin Rudd has given pay rises to two of his top advisors through bonus payments. "With superannuation and overtime added to salaries, principal advisers earn close to $250,000 in annual income." and therefore are already well paid. It seems Kev thinks that there is one rule for his 'friends' and another for the checkout chicks of this world. The former get to live life as usual, the latter get to fund the national recession fightback.

Obama inauguration live feeds and links for Tuesday 20 January 2009 ceremony

Commencing between 7am and 10 am Tuesday 20 January 2009 on the American east coast and around 3am Wednesday Australian EST, many sites will be covering the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America.


The Presidential Inaugural Committee will live feed the inauguration (using Silver Light 2) at its own website here.

C-Span has an inaugural hub using Mogulus to webcast here.

CBS will be online with latest here, here and at CNet webcast here.

Hulu will be live streaming here for members.

CNN Facebook will follow the inauguration day here.

CNN has its inauguration watch here and streaming live here.

MSNBC is covering the inauguration here and here.

Fox News will being reporting live at The Strategy Room webcast found here.

The Washington Post online coverage here.

The New York Times reporting online here and live streaming on it home page here.

ABC News (America) will be providing online coverage here embedded in its homepage.

ABC (Australia) coverage on ABC 1 and ABC Radio starts at 3.24am on Wednesday 21 January AEST.

Possum explains those Australian unemployment figures

It is always a joy to see Possum Comitatus breakdown the gobbledegook surrounding government agency statistics.

The Statistical Reality of the Unemployment Figures post was no exception and, although a job lost involves real pain (something we know well in the NSW Northern Rivers), it was enlightening to see how the statistical margin of error played out in the latest numbers:

The actual Labor Force Survey results can be easily downloaded, and toward the end of the document – pages 28 and 29 to be exact – the ABS has gone to the trouble of providing the standard errors of not only the point estimates of all the unemployment metrics, but also the standard errors of the monthly change in those metrics. It's quite nice of them to do that since the press doesn't seem to pay any bloody attention to them whatsoever. But their incompetence aside, what these standard errors allow us to do is create a maximum margin or error for the unemployment figures using a 95% Confidence Interval – just as we do with the polling, and more particularly, Pollytrack.....

First up, the change in Full Time job numbers. The seasonally adjusted point estimate suggested that 43,900 full time jobs were lost between November and December of 08. We can be nearly 100% confident that the 43,900 figure that is getting so much attention isn't actually true.

What we can say is that there is a 95% probability that the true change in full time job numbers was somewhere between a gain of 6300 full time jobs and a loss of 94100 jobs, for the margin or error attached to the 43900 full time job loss figure is a whopping 50200. .....

On the trend figures, the unemployment rate remained steady at 4.4%, full time employment dropped by 11,200 nationally and total employment increased by 2000.

Far from this being a terrible result requiring widespread bouts of wrist slashing – in the broader scheme of things and considering the state of the international economy, it's probably a remarkably good result. I say 'probably' because we must acknowledge the large uncertainty involved in the figures - the point estimates really aren't the gospel they are too often made out to be.

What happens in the future is unknowable, things might tank, things might not - but what we should all be aware of is just how much uncertainty is actually contained in these figures.

Of course it would be too optimistic to hope that Malcolm Turnbull and friends would approach these figures with a degree of calm.

Over at Liberal Party headquarters they were shouting out that there will be More Than Half A Million Australians Out Of Work and waxing lyrical about the Howard years.

While Access Economics (in attention getting language aimed at front page media coverage) is predicting 300,000 jobs will be lost in the next twelve months, but also appears to be predicting modest national growth by 2009-10.

By late last night Channel 10 News had hysterically taken the figure higher to a million unemployed

Think I'll place my trust in Poss and wait for more concrete figures to come in over the next year. Access Economics director Chris Richardson now cries Wolf! so often that I no longer find his media announcments all that credible.

Monsanto, I presume........

Cartoon found at Red, Green and Blue

environmental politics from across the spectrum

* This post is part of North Coast Voices' effort to keep Monsanto's blog monitor (affectionately known as Mr. Monsanto) in long-term employment.

Change might be in the air, but America is also in a retrospective mood

Think Progress gives a run down on the outgoing Bush Administration in The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever:

1. Dick Cheney — The worst Dick since Nixon. The man who shot his friend while in office. The “most powerful and controversial vice president.” Until he got the job, people used to actually think it was a bad thing that the vice presidency has historically been a do-nothing position. Asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer about why people hate him, Cheney rejected the premise, saying, “I don’t buy that.” His top placement in our survey says otherwise.

2. Karl Rove — There wasn’t a scandal in the Bush administration that Rove didn’t have his fingerprints all over — see Plame, Iraq war deception, Gov. Don Siegelman, U.S. Attorney firings, missing e-mails, and more. As senior political adviser and later as deputy chief of staff, “The Architect” was responsible for politicizing nearly every agency of the federal government.

3. Alberto Gonzales — Fundamentally dishonest and woefully incompetent, Gonzales was involved in a series of scandals, first as White House counsel and then as Attorney General. Some of the most notable: pressuring a “feeble” and “barely articulate” Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.

4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled its aftermath. Rumsfeld is also responsible for authorizing the use of torture against terror detainees in U.S. custody; according to a bipartisan Senate report, Rumsfeld “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

5. Michael Brown — This former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was appointed by Bush to head FEMA in 2003. After Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Brownie promptly did a “heck of a job” bungling the government’s relief efforts, and was sent back to Washington a few days later. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

6. Paul Wolfowitz — As Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, Wolfowitz was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war, arguing for the invasion as early as Sept. 15, 2001. Testifying before Congress in February 2003, Wolfowitz said that it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Wolfowitz eventually admitted that “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” as a justification for war, “because it was the one reason everyone [in the administration] could agree on.”

7. David Addington — “Cheney’s Cheney” was the “most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” As the leader of Bush’s legal team and Cheney’s chief of staff, Addington was the biggest proponent of some of Bush’s most notorious legal abuses, such as torture and warrantless surveillance, and is a loyal follower of the so-called unitary executive theory.

8. Stephen Johnson — The “Alberto Gonzales of the environment,” EPA Administrator Johnson subverted the agency’s mission at the behest of the White House and corporate interests, suppressing staff recommendations on pesticides, mercury, lead paint, smog, and global warming.

9. Douglas Feith — Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005, Feith headed up the notorious Office of Special Plans, an in-house Pentagon intelligence shop devised by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to produce intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. A subsequent investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found the OSP’s work produced “conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

10. John Bolton — As Undersecretary of State, Bolton offered a strong voice in favor of invading Iraq and pushed for the U.S. to disengage from the International Criminal Court and key international arms control agreements. A recess appointment landed Bolton the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, despite his stringent animosity toward the world body. Today, he spends his time calling for war with Iran.

11. John Yoo — As a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo authored a series of legal memosdetainee to be buried alive.

12. Ari Fleischer — Bush’s first press secretary helped redefine the role as that of liar-in-chief rather than informer of the public, earning a reputation as “the world’s most dishonest flack.” Whereas his successors sometimes looked uncomfortable lying, Fleischer was having fun, spinning a cowed and gullible press corps through two massive tax cuts and the initiation of a war undertaken on false pretenses.

13. John Ashcroft — In 2003, as Bush’s first Attorney General, Ashcroft approved waterboarding and other torture techniques on detainees. Ashcroft’s nomination was controversial, as he had a history of opposing school desegregation. The chief architect of the invasive Patriot Act, Ashcroft maintains to this day that Bush is “among the most respectful of all leaders ever” of civil liberties.

14. Henry Paulson — Even as the financial system was crashing down around him, Treasury Secretary Paulson insisted for months that the banking system was “safe and sound.” Once he decided that the economy needed saving, Paulson requested nearly unfettered authority to send billions of taxpayer dollars to banks with no oversight.

15. L. Paul Bremer — This Presidential Medal of Freedom winner took over the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. Under his mismanagement, the insurgency exploded in Iraq. Bremer claimed he had all the troops he needed to secure the country, overestimated the strength of the new U.S.-trained Iraqi army, disbanded the Iraqi army leaving thousands of Iraqi soldiers with no income and no occupation, and enacted a de-Baathification law that barred many experienced Iraqis from government positions.

Numbers 16 to 43 here.

This urge to evaluate the Bush presidency will not last long however - President-elect Obama is already placing such a heavy gloss on those years that it almost amounts to an initial re-write.

I mean, I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country," Obama said in an exclusive interview with CNN's John King....
Obama also said he thought Bush made "the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances."

Google signs amicus brief in support of gay rights

Google Inc is determined to give off-again, on-again gay rights supporter Governor Arnold The Terminator Schwarzenegger a run for his money and pro-actively support both its own diverse workforce and the gay citizens of California.

It is doing this by aligning itself with a constitutional challenge to Proposition 8 (voted into being in November 2008) which legally restricts the definition of marriage and therefore makes unlawful same-sex marriage in that state.

Well done, Google!

Here is the notice posted on the Google Blog:

1/15/2009 05:00:00 PM

In September of last year, Google announced its opposition to California's Proposition 8. While the campaign was emotionally charged and difficult for both sides, in the wake of the election many were concerned with the impact Proposition 8 could have on the personal lives of people they work with every day, and on California's ability to attract and retain a diverse mix of employees from around the world.

That's why we've signed an amicus brief (PDF file) in support of several cases currently challenging Proposition 8 in the California Supreme Court. Denying employees basic rights isn't right, and it isn't good for businesses. We are committed to preserving fundamental rights for every one of the people who work hard to make Google a success.

Please join us in continuing to fight for equality for all Californians.

Posted by Kent Walker, General Counsel

Wikipedia history of Proposition 8