There is a lot to learn from this Joe Nocera column so I thought I’d go through it in detail. It is full of dishonest polemics.
Here is the opening:
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
That’s a bit strong, wouldn’t you say? In a democracy, people disagree. It’s kind of against the rules to call your intellectual opponents terrorists unless they are killing innocent bystanders. But I guess Nocera is competing with Mr. Krugman.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.
Huh? See previous comment.
Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise.
A softening of tone. They’re only ideologues. That beats terrorists or Jihadists.
When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.
All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.
Here is where it gets a little more interesting. He’s right. What matters is how it affects the economy and the human beings who comprise it. Let’s start with the terrible toll of $2.4 trillion in cuts on the poor and the middle class.
According to the CBO baseline spending (go here, page 18), which I understand is the baseline for the cuts of $2.4 trillion, the Federal government will spend $46.1 trillion over the next ten years. So we’re going to go from 46.1 trillion over the next ten years to a mere $43.7 trillion? I know Mr. Krugman claimed the debt deal “slashed government spending.” This year we’re going to spend about $3.8 trillion. For further perspective, in the ten years between 2002 and 2011, the Federal government spent $28.1 trillion dollars. (This includes estimated outlays for 2011 but it will be close. Source for the numbers is here. It does not include inflation which would bump these numbers up a bit if we wanted to compare them to today’s dollars. But inflation hasn’t been big enough. We’re spending a lot more than we did ten years ago.) Do you think that if the “cuts” actually happen that it’s going to take a big toll on the poor and the middle class? Throw in the other $1.5 trillion that might happen later and that gets you all the way down to $42.5 trillion over the next ten years, an average of a mere $4.25 trillion per year. Yes, those are draconian slashes in government spending. George Orwell, please call your office.
America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis.
This is sort of true. If we don’t get our debt under control, the current unemployment level is going to look like a picnic.
Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.
That’s one theory. As I have said before, there isn’t a lot of evidence that spending cuts reduce growth.
Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved.
Because they want smaller government? Which they didn’t achieve. They just slowed the growth from the baseline. But let’s look at the analysis: those of us who think the government spends too much money–we’re sadists? We want to inflict pain our countrymen?
What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.
There was a recession in 1938. Some blame it on tax increases. Some on cuts in spending. Some on monetary policy. And some on animal spirits. What is clear is that the economy did get worse. And as Robert Higgs has argued, the economy struggled through the way until the war ended.
One thing Roosevelt did right during the Depression was legislate into being a social safety net to soften the blows that a free-market economy can mete out in tough times. During this recession, it’s as if the government is going out of its way to make sure the blows are even more severe than they have to be. The debt-ceiling debate reflects a harsher, less empathetic America. It’s sad to see.
This is grotesque. The government has made sure the blows are more severe? Unemployment insurance has been extended many times. What is he talking about?
This is how the piece ends:
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
Suicide vests? Shame on you, Joe Nocera. Shame on you for demonizing people who disagree with you. Shame on you for comparing people who want smaller government to people who blow up innocent bystanders eating a pizza or riding on a bus.
Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
Paul Krugman’s frequently made case for more government spending rests unapologetically on Keynesian economics. So what are we to make of Mr. Krugman’s advice – offered to counter those who insist that the regulatory, fiscal, and monetary policies of the past few years are diminishing investors’ confidence in the economy – to “Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy” (“The President Surrenders,” Aug. 1)?
A key component of Keynesian theory is what Lord Keynes himself famously called “animal spirits” – mysterious phantoms that, although invisible and non-quantifiable, dramatically affect the level of economic activity by messing with investors’ minds.
By advocating a theory that relies heavily on disembodied imps called “animal spirits,” Mr. Krugman has no business denying the existence of “the confidence fairy.”
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
In fact, I do believe that animal spirits play some role – just as I believe in the “confidence fairy.” (If anything, the “confidence fairy” is a tad more plausible given that she/he/it is alleged to cause responses in predictable and rational ways to regime uncertainty, while animal spirits are just plain irrational.)
Jonah Goldberg loses it. It’s a rant. But he’s right. Most of the media has a double standard. It’s weird to have to point it out. But they don’t see it so it doesn’t hurt from time to time.
… is from an 1876 lecture in New York City, delivered to the International Free-Trade Alliance, by William Graham Sumner; the lecture is entitled “The Establishment of Protection in this Country.” With this quotation Sumner argues against those who advocate protectionism as a means of strengthening a nation’s ability to militarily defend itself against foreign aggressors:
In fact, however, the independence which we seek must be sought another direction. Independent men are those who have wealth, not those whose houses are stored for a siege. Independent nations are those which are wealthy, because they can command what they want when want it. Those will be wealthiest which give industry its freest course in time of peace.
Sumner’s point reminds me of an argument made by my teacher Leland Yeager inthis 1954 monograph:
The moral is that the United States should not partially freeze its industry by Protectionist policies into a pattern that might well prove, if war finally came, to be out of date—and all at the cost of a sure loss in real national income. Even from considerations of national defense, it would probably be wiser to adopt Free Trade and other policies contributing to general economic strength and to rely, if war cut off foreign supplies, on the conversion of peacetime industry to wartime purposes that would in any case be necessary.
Here’s a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Todd Gitlin classifies the “Laffer curve” as a “crackpot idea,” thereby implying that only crackpots deny that raising tax rates always increases – or at least never decreases – government’s tax receipts (“Expertise, Dogma, and the Journalism of Crackpot Ideas,” July 31).
Contrary to Mr. Gitlin’s apparent misconception, the Laffer curve does not demonstrate that all cuts in tax rates increase tax receipts. It demonstrates, rather, that tax rates can be so high that the resulting tax receipts are lower than they’d be if tax rates were lower. The Laffer curve, to be a bit technical, is simply an application of what economists call “elasticity” – a concept denied only by genuine crackpots.
Just as the revenue McDonald’s would earn on Big Macs would fall if it hikes the price of each Big Mac to $100 (How many people would buy Big Macs at that high price?), so, too, would tax receipts fall if government hikes income-tax rates to very high levels. If it’s not crackpot to see that, in response to higher Big Mac prices, fast-food diners change their activities in ways that can cause Big Mac revenues to fall, it’s not crackpot to see that, in response to higher tax rates, income earners change their activities in ways that can cause tax receipts to fall.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
(HT to Nathaniel Clarkson for alerting me to Gitlin’s essay)
111 years ago today my paternal grandfather, Adrian J. Boudreaux, was born in the swamps of south Louisiana, in a town called Franklin (although I don’t believe that it was called “Franklin” when “Paw” – as I called him – was born). It’s southeast of New Iberia, LA, about halfway from there to Houma, LA.
He was the youngest son of Alcide Boudreaux (1864-1962) and (omigosh! I’ve forgotten my great-grandmother’s name). Paw dropped out of school in fourth grade. He ran away from home at the age of 15 to New Orleans – where he polished his English (as cajun French was his native language). At the age of 19 he married Teresa Flanagan. They had two children: Donald (1924-2008) and Adrian Jr. (my father, 1935-2009). After working a few odd jobs, Paw drove a street car in New Orleans and, later, a bus. He retired in 1965. “Maw” died in 1967 and Paw and died in 1975. Paw smoked three packs of unfiltered Camels daily. When he drank (which wasn’t often) he drank Dixie beer or Schwegmann’s beer. His skin was leathery. He never traveled farther west than east Texas, never farther north than north Louisiana, and never farther east than Mobile, Alabama.
I remember sitting many hours with him watching his favorite t.v. show, Gunsmoke.
When Paw was born, life expectancy at birth in America was 47 years. He beat that by 28 years.
How immensely and wondrously the world has changed since Paw was born! (And even since he died!)
To get a sense of just how poor life was just 111 years ago even for middle-class Londoners, you can’t do better than to watch the 1999 BBC program “1900 House.“ (I believe that pretty much all of this series is available on YouTube.) One of my favorite scenes from “1900 House” is when the hired maid reveals her sudden realization that women were liberated not so much by political activitism as by appliances such as the vacuum cleaner.
SANDILANDS TORCHED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (02:58 pm)
Indian fury at Sydney radio clown Kyle Sandilands:
Programme host Kyle Sandilands had reportedly made anti-India comments terming India as a shit hole and Ganga as a junkyard …
Volunteers of a social organisation, Vishal Bharat Sansthan, staged a demonstration and burnt the effigy of Sandilands to express their protest.
If it was built anywhere near to scale, that effigy is probably still burning. Sandilands is also accused by environmentalist B.D. Tripathi of insufficient oxygen awareness:
“The remarks of the Australian radio host clearly indicate that he does not know anything about the scientific and cultural importance of Ganga, which is not only the symbol of religious faith for Hindus but also a stream of water with maximum oxygen content,” Tripathi told TOI on Tuesday.
Another Indian commentator, however, takes Kyle’s side.
BRITISH BACK
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (02:31 pm)
Whiplash claims soar in the UK:
“Seventy-six per cent is twice the average for other European countries,” says a spokesman for the Association of British Insurers. “It’s unlikely we’ve got some of the weakest necks in Europe.”
Hmmm.
TERM SHORTENED, HAIR LENGTHENED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (05:30 am)
Kristina Keneally becomes the first former state Labor leader – well, the first we know of – to wear hair extensions:
The ex-premier’s new ‘do is proving quite the distraction. There’s a hint of Joe about it.
UNUSUAL MINUTES
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (05:27 am)
Media Watch‘s Jonathan Holmes:
News Ltd columnist and blogger Tim Blair, who keeps unusual hours …
A big call, that, from someone who presents 15 minutes of television once per week and then takes three months off. In fact, Holmes may have taken a little time off last week as well.
RACE CHANGED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (05:25 am)
North Queensland rugby league player Cory Paterson has become a Scientologist who writes “Hubbard” on his wrist-guard for inspiration.
Well, no. Cory has actually converted to some other faith, but mentioning it would be racist.
OUT ON THEIR ARTS
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (04:31 am)
A bunch of ABC arts-type shows get the chop, sparking arts rage:
Quentin Dempster, an ABC journalist for 27 years, said the axing of New Inventors, Art Nation and The Collectors was part of the “intentional destruction of the ABC’s creative independence” …
“Public broadcasting is founded on the idea that you cannot have creative independence unless you have a capacity to make programs yourself, unencumbered by the commercial imperative,” said the Walkley Award-winner and the last staff-elected ABC board member.
Fine. Keep making shows that nobody wants to watch. Just do it with your own money instead of ours. That way everybody is happy. Either that, or combine the three dumped programs into one brilliant ABC powerhouse: New Art Collectors? The Nation Inventors? Art Collector Nation?
Why is he still taken so seriously?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (05:12 pm)
James Paterson on the dud predictions and religious fervor of global warming alarmist Tim Flannery, our chief climate commissioner.
The new green Apocalypse of the Anglicans
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (03:40 pm)
What really hurts children around the world right now are things like being poor, being in a war zone, having no school and having parents who give little love. The usual things.
But World Vision boss Tim Costello has seized on a new menace - or, rather, a cause that wins his outfit lots of funding and lovely overseas conferences:
(The Melbourne Anglican, July 2011)
What?
It’s exactly this kind of absurd exaggeration, loss of focus and fashionable cause-mongering that has persuaded me to disengage from World Vision sponsorship. In fact, global warming policies are a greater threat to children’s “rights” than any global warming itself, as trillions of dollars are diverted from human development into “stopping” global warming. Farm land is converted into biofuels and carbon “sinks”, driving up food prices. Aid is diverted into low-emissions production that makes goods dearer. Energy costs are ramped up by the switch to inefficient green technologies. And the insane joke is that it’s actually a warmer climate that is kinder to human health anything.
But what a blessing global warming is to churches in which faith in the Christian God has grown anaemic, and the soul yearns for something new and trendy to take its place. Here Bishop George Browning, of the Anglican Communion Environment Network, preach the gospel of Armageddon, this time reimagined in green tones:
The telling thing about Browning’s gospel of a green Armageddon, where none shall survive, is that there wouldn’t be a credible scientist to support his vision. What underpins it is a fervent wish to believe.
Does Baillieu really think this undemocratic law protects anyone?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (03:04 pm)
This is becoming a huge test of the Baillieu Government’s credentials as a conservative or even liberal party:
THE Baillieu government is under extreme pressure to overhaul or dump the nation’s most extensive charter of human rights as senior legal figures and institutions highlight weaknesses in the law.
Former Victorian governor James Gobbo has joined a chorus of criticism in submissions to a parliamentary inquiry.Sir James, a former Supreme Court judge, submitted to the inquiry that in health cases the law added nothing to say a patient had a right to proper care when the sick were already protected by family, the health sector and charities…
Sir James is opposed to any push towards a national human rights charter, arguing it undermines democracy.
The Victorian charter was introduced by the Bracks Labor government in 2006 to ensure human rights were considered when law and policy was enacted and services provided.
It was condemned at the time by Victoria’s now Liberal attorney-general Robert Clark but the government has agreed to submit to a review process.
State parliament’s scrutiny of acts and regulations committee is charged with reviewing the charter and chairman Edward O’Donohue has previously dismissed the charter as “undemocratic” and “nebulous and ill-defined”.
The Australian believes there is support in cabinet to force through sweeping changes to the law, with some sympathy to dump it.
New research: warmth produces these carbon dioxide concentrations
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (02:19 pm)
Professor Murry Salby, chair of climate at Macquarie University, has unleashed on global warming alarmism in a lecture this week to the Sydney Institute.
Salby has worked at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, and is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, andPhysics of the Atmosphere and Climate, due out in 2011.
Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.
But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are - the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa - which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.
I’ve summarised this from just a rushed hearing of his lecture, not having access to his notes or the charts he produced on the evening. His findings, he says, have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, so more will follow.
Some other highlights of his talk:
He said he had an “involuntary gag reflex” whenever someone said the “science was settled”.
“Anyone who thinks the science of this complex thing is settled is in Fantasia.” The climate models used by global warmists suggest we should have twice the warming we’ve actually seen recently.
Listen here.
Dr Roy Spencer has suspected something similar.
(If anyone has a better summary of the argument, please post below and I shall modify this post accordingly.)
Cameron sees a green plot in the icing
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (10:22 am)
The ABC’s Deborah Cameron smells a rat in Nigel Scullion’s cake:
I’m also interested in the way that the Greens are being used as a kind of Trojan Horse for so much of the tabloid media’s attention, which is, sort of, a way to try and get at Labor… And what’s subtle about it – like one the, um. There’s a funny old story in one of the papers today about an MP in the Northern Territory, winning some sort of a cake-icing contest, by having a cake made out of – it’s got Julia – it looks like a crocodile, and it’s taking the arm off Julia Gillard. Right, now he thinks that’s all terribly witty. Obviously it’s gone over a treat in the Northern Territory – they gave him the prize. But the sort of little subtle message in there is – Julia Gillard is wearing a green dress.
And it’s very interesting how, when you actually see the way that Julia Gillard is portrayed in some of the tabloid press, the cartoonists will always put her in a green dress. Because of the little bit of spin that you get. Even though the woman hardly ever wears green as far as I know. But it’s all got to do with this sort of unsubtle messaging about the fact that she’s a stalking horse for the Greens.
Three things.
First, the cake Gillard is wearing a green shirt, not a green dress.
Second, Cameron’s claim that this is unfair because “the woman hardly ever wears green” is false:
Third, Cameron is surely delusional to think it’s illegitimate to link Gillard to the Greens.
A summit without friends or agenda is even more useless
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (07:09 am)
Peter Costello is tipping a charade of a tax summit:
WHEN Kevin Rudd gathered delegates at Parliament House for his Australia 2020 Summit it was regarded as a hot ticket. Rudd said they were ‘’1000 of Australia’s best and brightest’’. Cate Blanchett came with baby Ignatius, only six days old. Jewish delegates got a special preview since the date clashed with Passover. Worthies like then Victoria Police chief Christine Nixon were invited. So was Fairfax journalist David Marr. The head of News Limited, John Hartigan, was co-chairman of the session on mapping out ‘’The Future of Australian Governance’’.
People forget how chummy things were in the afterglow of Labor’s 2007 election. The only people excluded were those associated with the Ancient Regime - people like me. But these days I find a lot of those who attended do not like to be reminded of it. The ones that are getting respect nowadays are the few who were invited but declined the invitation.
We could ask just how that summit shaped the nation’s future? Or perhaps we should ask an easier question. Can anyone remember any new ideas that came out of the assembly of Australia’s 1000 brightest people?
All this springs to mind as the government gathers its hand-picked audience for the tax summit on October 4-5.
Literary critic shocked as he finally meets conservatives
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (06:58 am)
I’m surprised that literary critic Peter Craven talks to so few conservatives that he’s shocked by their sense when he finally meets them. What does this say about the group-think of the arts scene that Craven finds this interaction so noteworthy and the stereotypes so false?
It made me think it’s worth having some respect for the supposedly other side. It’s not so long since the Chinese were lecturing us on how to run our economy and castigating the President of the United States for meeting the Dalai Lama.
Meanwhile, in America the Tea Party has held the nation to ransom out of nothing but right-wing partisanship. But what about the left liberal opportunism in trying to link the News Corp phone hacking to the criticism of the Gillard government by the Murdoch press? Or the way the left liberals have been trying to tar every right-winger who has ever criticised multiculturalism with the same brush as the mass murderer Anders Breivik in Norway.
It is the duty of the press to interrogate government and, whenever appropriate, to criticise it. It is the right of the anti-immigration lobby to put their case. How often do we have to remind ourselves that we must defend as sacred the right to speak of people we happen to disagree with?
But give Craven some credit for those final paragraphs, even if he does again slip into the reflexive stereotyping of the Tea Party movement.
The great carbon cutting con
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (06:31 am)
TREASURY’S modelling of the carbon tax-emission trading scheme proposed by the government is based on the assumption that the world is taking collective action sufficient to stabilise greenhouse gas concentration levels at about either 550 parts per million or 450ppm by about 2100 in order to meet the Copenhagen objective of limiting global warming to below 2C above preindustrial levels.
That’s clearly false. Promises are not the same as delivery, and many of those promises are conditional or merely “aspirational”. But let’s play let’s pretend…
… the American public interest charity, Climate Interactive (http://www.climateinteractive.org). ... simulations (like Treasury’s simulations) of the likely impact on greenhouse gas concentrations (and global temperatures) in 2100 if all the global pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were put into effect. Confirmed proposals up to the present (excepting the new Australian proposal to move our 2050 target to an 80 per cent cut in emissions) produce an atmospheric concentration measured in CO2 equivalents (CO2e) of 1105ppm and a resulting increase in temperature above pre-industrial levels of 4.1C. Even when potential proposals are included, CO2e in 2100 reaches 670ppm and an increase in temperature of 2.7C.
So if everyone did exactly as they so lightly promise now, they would reduce the world’s temperature by 1.4 degrees over 90 years at the cost of trillions.
First observation: has anyone convincingly demonstrate that we’d be better off without that warmth and those trillions?
And if measures can indeed be made of the consequences on world temperature of cuts of emissions, that surely the Gillard Government can tell us by how much its own plans to cut our emissions will affect that temperature. Why does it refuse to tell us?
But wait. Blandy spots a gigantic problem in the assumptions on how these cuts in emissions will be made:
But let us suppose Treasury’s allocation of emissions reductions among countries were to be put in place. Permits to emit tonnes of CO2e would be issued to countries (by some authority or other) on the basis of their projected baseline emissions less their assigned emission reductions targets. In Treasury’s model (but not necessarily the eventual, globally agreed, model), the volume of permits issued is a uniform percentage of each country’s baseline emissions. These permits can be traded, including internationally....
Australia is assumed by Treasury to be a net buyer of permits. Far from meeting our emission reduction targets… off our own bat, Australia meets its targets mainly by buying reductions in emissions from other countries. In Treasury’s core policy scenario, our emissions rise from 556 tonnes of CO2e in 2000 to 621 tonnes in 2020 and fall to only 545 tonnes in 2050. Hence, our 80 per cent cut in emissions in 2050 is met by a 2 per cent cut in our own emissions together with a 78 per cent cut bought from the rest of the world (meaning that other countries must be able to cut their emissions by more than their target reductions). But how are other countries able to do this if Australia cannot? And what happens to Australia’s GDP if Australia can only buy permits internationally at a high price?
Already Europe is finding it can meet its own targets only by buying offsets overseas. It’s total emissions, including those from production shipped overseas, is increasing.
So if everyone is basing their plans on someone else making the real cuts to emissions, then clearly none will be made at all.
No need now for Keneally to extend herself
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (06:21 am)
Kristina Keneally maintains appearances as NSW Premier.
Letting her hair down in Opposition. Well, letting someone’s hair down.
Looking after their overheated own
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (06:03 am)
Professor Bunyip discovers Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, a fervent warmist, seems much more eager to to mock sceptics than to correct the smears and errors of fellow warmists on the ABC.
Apart from overlooking the sins of Wendy Carlisle of Background Briefing, the program was notable also forquoting this disparagement of someone who’d commented on global warming:
My colleagues and I were concerned to see XXX referred to as “a climate change researcher at Macquarie University” in The Australian’s article, as he is a retired paleontologist.
Now fill in the XXX. Was that an attack on the qualifications of alarmist Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery of Macquarie University or sceptic Howard Brady of Macquarie University?
(Via Tim Blair, who has more.)
Too rude to discuss
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (05:51 am)
Q&A: smear and the politics of fear
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (12:03 am)
Is ABC Q&A host Tony Jones really so moronic, or just suffering from a severe attack of cattiness?
BRENDAN O’NEILL:
... the idea that certain word and certain images give rise to violence in the real world and there’s a real censorious impulse behind that ideological hijacking of the Norway massacre, where effectively what these people are saying is that if we have too much heated commentary, particularly from the right, people will die. You know, if Andrew Bolt continues publishing articles, people will die. This is the moral…
TONY JONES:
Only if they read them.
And what kind of shameless and unprincipled fear-monger is Human Services Minister Tanya Plibersek?
TANYA PLIBERSEK: ... and the average payment is around $10.10 a week. You said there’s no help for small business. In fact, we’re raising the instant write-off to six and a half thousand dollars and there’s a number of programs in there that help small businesses, particularly energy inefficient ones, change the way they do business to help them become more energy efficient. The thing that we need to remember about the reason for doing this is that there is a serious threat to our economy and a serious threat to our environment of not acting. In environmental terms we’re looking at losing the Great Barrier Reef, losing Kakadu National Park, losing the ability to feed ourselves because our…
PETER DUTTON: To feed ourselves?
TANYA PLIBERSEK: ...our - our fruit and vegetable growing areas…
BRENDAN O’NEILL: This is the politics of fear. This is the politics of fear.
PETER DUTTON: Taking it - taking it to a new level.
BRENDAN O’NEILL: If you don’t support our policies, we will die and starve and the Barrier reef will disappear? It’s the politics of fear.
TANYA PLIBERSEK: Actually, it’s called…
BRENDAN O’NEILL: It’s the politics of fear.
TANYA PLIBERSEK: It’s called scientific consensus…
BRENDAN O’NEILL: Right. Okay, yeah.
TANYA PLIBERSEK: ...that there are effects of global warming that affect our environment and affect our fruit and vegetable growing areas. But there’s also…
PETER DUTTON: See, you do your cause - you do your cause a disservice with this extreme view. That’s the problem, Tanya.
TANYA PLIBERSEK: That’s not extreme view. That’s a scientific view…
PETER DUTTON: What that we’re not going to be able to feed ourselves?
TANYA PLIBERSEK: ...that if we lose our productive farmland it gets harder to feed ourselves, Peter, and there is also a very good economic reason for doing this.
The Left makes itself more ridiculous by the day.
UPDATE
IT’S not part of federal MP Tanya Plibersek’s ministerial portfolio but she is fast emerging as the ALP’s official Prophet of Doom.
(Thanks to reader Bob.)
Then rescue the party, Simon
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 03, 11 (12:01 am)
Labor has truly disgraced itself when even Simon Crean no longer wants to mention its name.
(Thanks to reader Terry.)
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