2UE needs help with programming - replaces one Steve with another

I was elated and deflated this week. Elated that Steve Price had announced he was quitting his role as morning host at 2UE (a role he should never have been given); and deflated at the announcement of his successor in Steve Leibmann. If 2UE are aiming at soldering on the 65 - 80 demographic, then they might be onto something. As for me - the only thing I'll be onto as a result of this announcement is Prozac.

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I'm looking forward to more press releases from Barnaby

The following is the full text of the first press release from Senator Barnaby Joyce since he was appointed Opposition Finance Minister.

It's well worth a read.

HELLO WAYNE

December 08, 2009 15:49

I must admit that after the appointment to Shadow Finance Minister my comic relief came from Treasurer Swan’s media release stating that I must follow Labor’s strict rules on fiscal discipline.

It’s like Captain Calamity’s instructions on yoga. There’s one thing that is absolutely certain, I will not be taking any lead, whatsoever, from a crowd who have taken us from having tens of billions of dollars in the bank, to debt up to our eyeballs, with more dogs tied up around town than Bernie Madoff.

Labor has gone on a spending bender and is now waiting for the fairy godmother to come and rub the red ink from the books.

Let’s get this right from the start. The Labor Party have not got a clue what money is worth. They have no respect for debt.

Currently, so the Australian people know, the debt they owe, to a range of countries such as China, the good people of Japan and the Middle East and everyone in between, amounts to $115.71 billion dollars.

I will bet you London to a brick that this debt is only going to go in one direction under the Labor Government and that is up.

Why is there no exit strategy to pay off the debt that they have lumbered Australia with?

A long range forecast for the Labor Party is a cacophony of confusion, with a range of excuses that it might be bad but it is not as bad as some countries. 

Over time, the countries they are comparing us with will get worse and worse and worse, until we end up once more with the Labor Party saying that our financial position is preferable to that of certain South American dictatorships and collapsed Eastern European economies.

The good news is, if they wanted to, there is the capacity now to discontinue on the path they have us on.

That opportunity will disappear if they keep spending borrowed money the way they are spending it at the moment.

Please Wayne, stop the media releases. Your last one brought the house down.

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Slight change to blog colours - no need for alarm

I have decided to embark upon a small, personal, yet totally meaningless protest at all the "green talk" going on in Copenhagen (or 'Dopenhagen' as Lord Monckton delightfully calls it.) Lately, the mere sight of and oral reference to anything 'green' has me feeling nauseated, so I have removed said colour from this blog - at least until Jokenhagen is over.

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Lord Monckton's latest video on the fraud that is Anthropogenic Global Warming

There are four videos in the series, the links to which can be found following the first video or by watching them on You Tube.

Please watch them all and forward the links to your warmist friends (most of whom are probably at home right now relaxing in air-conditioned comfort to escape the Australian afternoon heat.) 

The final video mentions the victims of Climategate, including someone very close to home.

Monckton is, as usual, riveting.

Found: another op-ed writer awake to Climategate

George F. Will, writing for The Washington Post:

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Meanwhile, more evidence of global warming here, and here.

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Let the Conservative Party in Australia be just that

Malcolm Turnbull floats the same idea I had about establishing a third major political party.

I admit that I wrote about such an idea from the perpective of a bad outcome for the conservatives in the Liberal partyroom last week, not a win.

But the idea has merit. Would it split the conservative vote? Well, if a centre-right party got going, the conservatives would know where their true home lies and would vote accordingly; the tree-hugging republican warmists would vote for Turnbull, and the rest would go with Rudd.

Should a third major political force eventuate, a split in the conservative vote is the main consequence the commentariat will come up with, so brace for it. Of course, it will be spun as a bad thing - you will hear 'divisive', 'inharmonious', 'rebellion in the ranks', 'Labor will be in power for the next 30 years'. All predictable. All BS.

Just remember that there is already a major split in the vote in this country - but between The Greens and Labor.

Don't expect to hear much about that, though.

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So-called 'election anaylists' are completely wrong - again

Veteran analyst Malcolm Mackerras has warned that Greens candidate Clive Hamilton will win Higgins, in Melbourne's well-heeled inner east, in a backlash against Mr Abbott's election.

Newspoll chief executive Martin O'Shannessy said he believed the Liberals would hold both seats, neither of which Labor is contesting, but Ms O'Dwyer would be forced to preferences.

ABC election analyst Antony Green agreed. "If it went to preferences, the Liberal Party could live with that," Green told The Weekend Australian. "If they lost the seat it would be an uproar."

And what actually happened in the by-elections:

The Liberal Party will hold both Higgins and Bradfield without needing to go to preferences in either - a vindication of Tony Abbott's ascension to the party leadership and his stand on Labor's disastrous Emissions Tax.

With the exception of Mr O'Shannessy (who only gets half a point, incidentally), it seems the election analysts quoted above are either hopelessly out of tune with the sentiment of the electorate, or else their predictions are totally subjective and based on their own political ideology.

Either way, I am sure there are some budding psephologists out there who get it right more often than not. They should send their CVs to The Australian and Auntie, posthaste, and let the current crop, especially Mr Mackerras, get on with other things - like retirement.

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