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Live
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18-12-02
Telling
lies for "the poor"
Samizdata has a great
series of posts going on right now about the "rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer!" squealers. Excellent reading.
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South African politicians puff too
much of the good stuff
From The
Guardian today;
South Africa
cannot afford drugs to fight HIV/Aids partly because it needs submarines
to deter attacks from nations such as the US, its health minister said.
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told the Guardian that budgetary priorities
meant her department could not provide anti-retrovirals to the estimated
4.5m South Africans with HIV. "We don't have the money for that.
Where would it come from?"
Asked if it could
come from defence savings from leaving out the submarines which formed
part of a £4bn arms deal, the minister said that South Africa
needed to deter aggressors: "Look at what Bush is doing. He could
invade."
File this one under
sure...everything in Africa is the fault of white people.
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Oh God, not her
The Australian has
a wonderful
opinion piece by Janet Albrechtsen on Kate Carnell - former Chief
Minister of the ACT and raving loon: A woman with an extraordinary talent
to create financial, human and political disasters from nothing. Now she
wants a senate seat. God help us.
There are two
reasons why the former ACT chief minister's bid for the Senate next
Saturday should be dead in the water. The first is history. Her sorry
record says it all. Carnell should be hiding in a dark corner ashamed
of her political failures rather than looking for a promotion to the
upper house on the hill.
The second reason
is one of principle. Carnell represents everything that a conservative
party should not be.
Amen. Let's hope
we've seen the last of this nut-job.
Thanks to Alex
Robson for the heads-up.
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Fascist-lovings celebrities
MCJ has some
thoughts on Hollywood's Castro admirers.
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Alex Robson vs. paid maternity leave
Fellow ANU blogger
Alex Robson has
written a solid critique of the current plan for mandatory paid maternity
leave. Sadly, something tells me this stupid scheme is inevitable.
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Why socialists hate rich people
Oooooh, this
will piss a few people off.
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Yeah,
man, it's all about justice for the Palestinians...or something
Charming
people;
On Monday, the
Hamas website showed a picture of an eagle pecking at the severed head
of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The caption read, "We will
use the skulls of Zion's sons to build a bridge to heaven," according
to press reports.
The banner praised
the murder of Jews as part of jihad (holy war).
An earlier banner
headline on the site, commemorating the ninth anniversary of the death
of a senior Hamas official in Gaza, vowed: "We will knock on the
doors of heaven with the skulls of Jews."
The accompanying
pictures showed an axe smashing the word "Jews" and the skulls
of Jews.
Nah, no anti-semitism
here folks. Don't you all read Robert Fisk? It's all the Americans' fault.
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One great thing happened today
Justice Dyson Heydon
has
been appointed to the High Court of Australia. Naturally, the
ABC are horrified. The man could have no better endorsement.
Heydon himself has
some important things to say about judicial activism;
The judiciary
has a different character from that of a generation ago. There is within
its increased ranks a large segment of ambitious, vigorous, energetic
and proud judges. Ambition, vigour, energy and pride can each be virtues.
But together they can be an explosive compound. Rightly or wrongly,
many modern judges think that they can not only right every social wrong
but achieve some form of immortality in doing so.
The duty of a
judge is to decide the case. It entails a duty to say what is necessary
to explain why it was decided as it was, and a duty to say no more than
what is necessary. To breach the latter duty is a form of activism capable
of causing insidious harm to the rule of law.
A danger for
judicial probity arises where the court deliberately sets out to alter
the law.
Amen. Welcome to
the bench sir. The highest court in the land will benefit from your presence.
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