ELECTIONS - Labor or Liberal

A few lines about the choice of electoral terms - 3? 4? maybe less?

How interesting! electoral year is when it all occurred,
The surplus got distributed, the whole thing goes absurd,
And even Hicks is sudden tried, and teachers are reviewed
And carbon trading's up for grabs, (the subtlety is crude);

Or whether water policy is suddenly full on,
Or whether global warming is a few steps up from "con"
I just wish all this action happened every year bar none
Ahhh...
.... praps electoral cycles should be shortened to just ... one?

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wayneL said:

It actually says more about the commenter than the commentee

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2020hindsight said:

same words, same electoral cycles, only the names of the speakers changed to protect the innocent / ignorant / etc. (well they hope we're ignorant - why else would they be so blatant)

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2020hindsight said:

I'm sure Wilson Tuckey etc quotes would be comparable - might search em out later .

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Tuckey's offence, as outlined in Parliament, was to write several letters on his ministerial letterhead to the South Australian Police Minister. He was asking for leniency on his son's $193 expiation notice, incurred for driving a truckload of seedlings for long distances without a logbook.

Prime Minister John Howard has not used his ministerial code of conduct to sack a minister since 1997. He said that, while Tuckey was "foolish" to use the letterhead, he would not be sacked.

Leader of the House Tony Abbott went further. "He is a man who quite rightly fights for the things he believes in and if, from time to time, this minister goes over the top in a cause in which he believes, that is his nature, that is the nature of the man, that is the way this fine Australian operates," Abbott told Parliament.

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Flathead Flick said:

You might find this article interesting, on the finance news site CompareShares.com.au:

Are swinging voters more democratic?

It talk about if you never change your vote throughout your life, are you going against the whole premise of democracy.

I reckon that if you always vote for one party, your vote almost doesn't count, because you're not considering matters fully. What do you guys think?

FF

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wayneL said:

You think this is democracy? LOL

It's a choice of which faces to head up the Oz branch of the NWO.

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kennas said:

Have you seen a more democratic country Wayne?

Curious in the sence that I think we can be hypercritical of our system. We may have holes, of course. But it's all a balance, and we can never satisfy everyone. There are always winners and losers in any political system. Can anything ever be 'perfect', for everybody?

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If enemies of the United States had gotten together a few years ago to devise a plan to damage America and undermine its global position–diminish its power and credibility, drag it into a stubborn war, harm its relations with allies, create international financial disarray, run up huge deficits, create political openings for the Europeans and China to exploit and become equals in global economic matters, motivate terrorists, bring the U.S. image in the Middle East to its nadir, restrict civil liberties at home, and so forth–they would have been hard-pressed to create a program that would be more effective than the Bush administration’s policies on these issues of war, terrorism, and global economics have.

Indeed, if one is an “enemy” of the U.S., then he/she would have to be heartened that Bush has pursued this agenda and would have to be elated that the war in Iraq continues today. Given enough rope, Bush may hang not only himself, but American influence and credibility, and the global economy. Like a “sleeper” agent, or Laurence Harvey’s famed character, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hassan Nasrallah, the Syrians, the Iranians, or any other enemy du jour, ever could.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the United States had the sympathy and respect of much of the world. The outpouring of goodwill was unprecedented in the post-Vietnam period, and the United States stood alone as a military and economic power. When Bush responded to the September attacks a month later with the invasion of Afghanistan, where al Qaeda leaders were hiding out, the world community and U.S. populace supported him.

But, beginning in mid-2002, when he returned to his obsession with Iraq, the worm began to turn. Using politicized intelligence and outright lies, the Bush administration, congress and the media all went along with the invasion of Iraq, beginning in March 2003. Consequently, in what we can now see was a remarkably short time, the amity and power accrued after 9/11 melted away.

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The U.S. standing in the world has probably never been lower than it is now in the wake of the dismal war in Iraq. Not only is anti-Americanism rampant in the Middle East, but U.S. enemies like Bin Laden and Nasrallah now dominate the political discourse of the region with great credibility on the so-called Arab Street. Even in Europe, the American image and influence is fading, and travelers may feel uncomfortable abroad, or, more seriously, American tourists and businesses fear boycotts or actual violence, as in Madrid or London in the past few years, and that seriously dampens the U.S. ability to influence other nations.

Ironically, Bush claimed to have launched the war in Iraq to protect American security, but it has had the opposite effect. American troops are stretched thin and lack adequate supplies, and the U.S. is facing its worst manpower crisis since the Vietnam era. Meanwhile, the number of military officials publicly speaking out against this administration’s war in Iraq is staggering, discomfiting and unprecedented.

Even more frightening, Bush has actually increased the global threat of terrorism. In October 2002, well before the invasion of Iraq, the Central Intelligence Agency warned that military action in the Middle East would foment serious resistance and actually recruit more terrorists. By going after Iraq, the Agency warned, the U.S. would be ignoring the “root causes” of terror–such as continued crisis in Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and internal dissent in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries–while getting tied down in a peripheral area.

By 2004, that prediction had come true, with even the CIA Director Porter Goss admitting that Iraq had become a “cause for extremists” as daily attacks in Iraq had already more than doubled over the previous year. Just this past Spring, the State Department was more bleak, identifying over 11,000 terrorist incidents in 2005 which killed almost 15,000 people, a four-fold rise over 2004 and were mostly the work not of al-Qaeda but new, smaller and “difficult to detect” groups, which were able to exploit the war to entice new members.

While Bush’s policies in Iraq daily bring reports of Iraqis and Americans killed and abducted, some of the worst consequences are yet to be fully felt, namely the potentially devastating economic effects of the war. Bush and Rumsfeld promised a war on the cheap, somewhere in the area of 100 but no more than 200 billion dollars. Already, those figures have been surpassed and economists are now estimating that the costs of operations in Iraq, along with costs for rehabilitating wounded American soldiers and reconstruction, could easily reach the one trillion, or more, mark.

Despite these huge appropriations, Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker charged this past September the army did not have enough money to fight the war in Iraq. More ominously, as the war in Iraq drags on, the U.S. position in the global economy has become more precarious. To pay for the war in a period of massive tax cuts for the rich, Bush has borrowed more than any president in history and run up record deficits, a strange approach for an alleged conservative. The U.S. debt ceiling has risen to a stunning $9 trillion, the current accounts deficits rose above $200 billion, and trade deficits jumped to record highs, as have gas prices at home.

Much of the U.S. debt is held by China, whose own economy has erupted and now presents a serious challenge to U.S. influence in markets all over the world. In fact, China has just reached $1 trillion in currency reserves, more than one-fifth of all global reserves. While the U.S. is spending about $8 million per hour in Iraq and its foreign reserves are being depleted by about $80 million per hour, the Chinese are hourly adding $30 million. China could now purchase all the gold sitting in the vaults of the world’s central banks, twice over, according to the Economist.

Obviously, the U.S. is in a much more delicate and dangerous position today–politically, militarily, and economically–than it was prior to the Iraq invasion. National prestige and national security have suffered, and the economic impact will be felt for years. At home, the emphasis on Homeland Security and the Orwellian-titled Patriot Act have restricted our freedoms and liberties. The United States, its soldiers, and its people have suffered because of this war, because of Bush’s entire program. Meanwhile, American enemies and rivals–in the Middle East, in China, and elsewhere–have more power, prestige, and wealth than any of us could have imagined just a few years ago.

Given these conditions, there is now great reason for all Americans, including, if not especially, Republicans and conservatives, to demand an end to these policies in Iraq and at home that are making life more dangerous and costly. Some years ago, during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon said that “Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” It seems like George Bush has accomplished precisely that all these years later.

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the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.

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wayneL said:

Switzerland

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the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.

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kennas said:

Never been there, or studied them. I hear they provide a good service to one of the most democractic countries in the world. The Vatican, something or other. Lots of voting going on there. Hmmmmm. Well, at least they're not the hand maidens to the new Nazi regime in Bushland. As I said, no one's perfect.

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Flathead Flick said:

Are swinging voters more democratic?

It talk about if you never change your vote throughout your life, are you going against the whole premise of democracy.

I reckon that if you always vote for one party, your vote almost doesn't count, because you're not considering matters fully.

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Swinging voters, despite the power they wield, haven’t exercised it to a great extent. In the 14 years since 1983 election of the Hawke Labor government, the political party that has assumed power in Canberra has changed only once. Labor was in power for 13 years in that cycle, the Coalition has sat on the government benches for 11 years.

While noting that there is no firm data, the ABC’s election analyst Anthony Green believes that the proportion of swinging voters in the electorate is about 30 per cent of the total, but Green adds “Many of these people will in the end stay with their traditional party, but parties still have to spend plenty of time making sure that they do.”

Green says the majority of Australians vote the same way their entire adult lives. So the millions of dollars spent in an election campaign on political advertising, revealing new policies and preening party leaders, is aimed squarely at less than a third of all voters– and after all that effort, most swinging voters will stick with the same crowd.

In the coming months the political equation to be determined at the federal election is a relatively simple one: Labor needs to seize 16 lower house seats from the Coalition to form the government.

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kennas said:

Never been there, or studied them. I hear they provide a good service to one of the most democractic countries in the world. The Vatican, something or other. Lots of voting going on there. Hmmmmm. Well, at least they're not the hand maidens to the new Nazi regime in Bushland. As I said, no one's perfect.

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