Brookes News Update

Paul Krugman's economic shortcomings: Krugman spends his time at the 'New York Times' spewing anti-Republican bile and hatred while simultaneously spinning fantastic conspiracy theories reaching back 40 years. Methinks it's straitjacket time
The Australian dollar: anti-marketeer attacks deregulation - and gets it wrong: One shouldn't be too hard on Mr Feil considering that our so-called free marketeers are no better. If they are not prepared to recognise the significance of money supply why should anti-marketeers like Feil act differently?
Lefty journalist trashes Wal-Mart and slimes President Bush: Gawenda is reason enough to despise the media. As Washington correspondent for The Age this leftwing hack can always be counted on to paint a grim picture of America
Bracks' religious tolerance laws: Bracks' anti-free speech laws that favour Muslim bigots are coming under increasing pressure as more people realise the oppressive nature of these laws and their spiteful anti-Christian character
A Rupert Murdoch journalist smears President Bush's America: The smear-mongering David Nason just cannot contain himself. Overflowing with self-righteousness he maliciously portrayed a Republican judge as an out-and-out racist, As if he were a metaphor for Bush's America
Leftwing film reviewer drools over Clooney's anti-McCarthy agitprop: Tom Ryan, film and television critic for the Sunday Age Preview, is an example of that breed of lefty who just cannot conceal his political bigotry. Hence his sneers about terrorism and his support for Clooney's lying Goodnight, and Good Luck
Alito hearings bring out the worst in the pro-abortion crowd: It is high time that NARAL, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood stop their lobbying campaigns for the Supreme Court. They are not concerned with the integrity of the Constitution

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ELSEWHERE

Several people have emailed me to suggest that the poisonous Leftist site, "Tryworks" (should that be "Tryhard"?) is in fact all written by the contemptible Ward Churchill himself under various pseudonyms. That a hate-filled Ward Churchill should write a hate-filled blog certainly sounds reasonable so if anyone is up-to-date with textual analysis techniques that could be an interesting line of enquiry. My own interest in Churchill is minimal, however. Jim Paine, John Rubery and the American Indian Movement do a pretty good job of keeping him pinned down.

An unusually sensible archbishop: "Tony Blair's Government was condemned yesterday by the Archbishop of York for passing too much legislation and risking debasement of the law as a result. The Most Rev John Sentamu, speaking after being sworn in to the House of Lords, made clear that he would be an active member of the Upper House... The Archbishop said: "What I feel very strongly about is when you make a lot of laws all the time, one has to be extremely careful they are not made in haste." He called for a study on exactly how many laws had been passed since Labour was elected in 1997. "I think there have been too many," he said. "The more laws you pass, the greater the insecurity you create in society." Dr Sentamu, who fled Uganda, his country of birth, and came to Britain when it became clear that his life was at risk from Amin's Government, continued: "Laws are good because they show us how we need to be governed. But the more laws you have got, the more the law becomes debased."

Revival for Germany? "Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, yesterday promised a free-market revolution in Europe's biggest and most troubled economy, dismantling the mass of regulations that have been built up over recent decades. She said that Germany must follow the economic policies of Britain... Using language almost identical to that used by Margaret Thatcher when she was the British Prime Minister, the centre-right leader mapped out a U-turn in her country's treasured social model, repeatedly emphasising that Germans must stop fearing the world, embrace freedom and learn to take responsibility for their own lives instead of looking to the State. She said that rules introduced by previous governments to protect workers were strangling initiative, and had led to "terrifyingly high unemployment". She declared that there would be a new type of "social market economy"."

Evil bureaucrats: ""On January 9th, 15 Cuban rafters plucked a few days earlier from the decrepit and unused Flagler Bridge in the Florida Keys were repatriated to their communist gulag homeland. The reason given by the US Government was that these migrants never achieved 'dry foot' status under the Wet Foot-Dry Foot policy. This decision was based on the fact that the bridge was no longer in use and did not connect to dry land, so it was considered 'wet.' This is just one more example of the bureaucratically sick twist of semantics going on In Washington DC. Wet Foot-Dry Foot is a presidential decree signed by former President Bill Clinton"

Another attack on the "Dark Ages" myth: "Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry and astrology into astronomy, with thinkers moving beyond mere technology into true research. Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism undergirded capitalism. Stark maintains that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians, centuries before the Reformation. He also thinks it's high time to eradicate "an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history": the claim that between the fall of ancient Rome and the secular Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe suffered through so-called Dark Ages of "ignorance, superstition and misery." That's a "hoax," he says, that was invented by 18th-century intellectuals who hated religion and especially Roman Catholicism. In reality, he says, the centuries before Protestantism and modern secularism saw huge progress in technology, education and human betterment".

Slovakia's pension reforms: "Politicians in Europe and America who remain in denial about the huge black holes at the heart of their state pension systems should take a look at the remarkable reforms pushed through by Slovakia. That tiny Eastern European country, already famed for its flat tax, launched its pension reform on 1 January last year. Under Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda's new -system, Slovakia's 2.2m workers were given a choice: they could either remain fully reliant on the pay-as-you-go pension system or take a part of their social security contributions and invest it in personal retirement accounts managed by a number of different investment funds."

Thought of the day from Les Bates: "For all of the publically communistic posturings and moanings, John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose as their place of residence the most capitalist city in the most capitalist nation on Earth".

I have just put up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE no less than THREE articles looking at the causes and effects of the recent Maryland attack on Wal-Mart over its health insurance policies.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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