In the Age/SMH today Paul Sheehan has a ridiculous piece attacking the Greens. His starting point is that the Greens are a fraud because Adam Bandt’s first bill is about same sex marriage, not the environment. Nevermind that this has always been an issue for the Greens, Sheehan chooses to pretend that the Greens actually never talk about anything apart from the environment (despite the fact that he points out various other issues where he disagrees with the Greens in the rest of the piece). The Greens have a wide range of policies available on their website, advertised in printed materials they produce, written into their charter , and various Greens MPs around the country have worked on a wide variety of issues. Sheehan’s piece only goes downhill after starting with this preposterous straw-man. He continues with an A-Z of why the Greens are a fraud.

Continue reading →

There was recently a story on Adelaide Now titled “State MPs chasing $40,000 pay rise”. The headline is a little misleading, but clearly did the job in attracting lots of outraged commenters. The gist of it, and the full story below is quite accurate though. The misleading part is “chasing” since the whole point is that they don’t actually have to anything! The pay of SA MPs is indexed to that of federal backbenchers, so there is no need for SA politicians do the ever unpopular “voting themselves a payrise”, they just get it without doing anything. This has been the case for some time, but there’s an extra ingredient now. There’s a plan at the federal level (which is not necessarily certain to be implemented at this stage) to incorporate various allowances directly into the pay for MPs. This means they get a one off, large pay increase, but traded off against the loss of various perks. The problem is that the result for SA would be the big increase but with no corresponding trade off (and none really possible since State MPs don’t have comparable allowances). Now to be fair to the parliament, this has not happened at the federal level, so they may well have decided to do something about this, or they may have kept quiet and taken the pay rise – we don’t know – but I am glad that the local press is onto it. What is disappointing (but not so surprising for the Murdoch press) is that  while they talk about “independents” being against it, and quote Bob Such in particular, they completely fail to acknowledge that Greens MLC Mark Parnell has been trying to do away with the automatic pay rises for years, but his bills have never been supported by the major parties. You can see the bills, and various press on the issue at his website here. The last time it came up, about a year ago, it was reported on the ABC.

This opinion piece on the ABC website is a blatant attempt to recruit people to the Greens, and to discredit the Liberals.

The readers’ comments are well worth a read.

Woke up this morning to hear ABC radio playing an interview John Howard did on Fox News. Can’t find a link for it right now (Update: footage and commentary at Larvatus Prodeo), but the gist of it was that we shouldn’t respond to the current financial crisis by putting constraints on capitalism because it was caused by government regulation in the first place. Sounds like he’s pushing the CRA talking-point – i.e. the attempt by market fundamentalists to cope with current events by blaiming it all on the Community Reinvestment Act. There is a great analysis of why this is a load of rubbish by Daniel Gross at Slate, who sums it up with

Lending money to poor people doesn’t make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.

He also links to this post about it by Barry L. Ritholtz at The Big Picture which is well worth reading

There are too many people who are trying to duck responsibility for the current mess, and seeking to place blame elsewhere. I find this to be terribly important, as we seek to repair the damage amidst an economic crisis. Rather than objectively evaluate the present crisis in an attempt to craft an appropriate response, the partisan hacks are trying to obscure the causes of the current situation. Like burglars trying to destroy the surveillance tape, they are all too aware of their role in the present debacle.

Shame on them for their foolishness or cowardice.

So where is John Howard getting these ideas from? Perhaps this quote from the Slate article can tell us

These arguments are generally made by people who read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and ignore the rest of the paper—economic know-nothings whose opinions are informed mostly by ideology and, occasionally, by prejudice.

Not the first time I’ve heard something like this about the WSJ. This is what Tim Lambert at Deltoid had to say about them after knocking down one of their regular pieces of stupidity on global warming

Why does the Wall Street Journal combine superb news coverage with absurd nonsense on its editorial pages? My theory is that the editorial pages are just p0rn for right wingers. The readers need accurate information on the news pages for business decisions, but the editorial pages aren’t used that way, so are filled with fantasies to make the readers feel good.

They’re also into the DDT myth and denialism over the “Lancet Study”.