Wednesday 9 May 2012

So much to say, so little time in which to say it.

Well, not really, but there are a lot of competing interests.

First: Barack Obama's "Historic" support for gay marriage. Coming after three years in which he said the exact opposite, his announcement as the campaign for his re-election swings into gear can surely only be seen as a cynical move at best. It  by  no  means  makes  all  gays  jump  for  joy. (Extra spaces inserted to separate the links better.)

Second: The 2012-13 Australian Budget appears to have crept over the line for a single-digit surplus after four fiscal years of average $43bn deficits. This by the skin of their teeth, after bringing forward every expenditure, pushing back every saving, and generally doing such a fiddle of the books that it's patently obvious they were not engaging in a fiscally responsible budget but merely bending all their efforts to generating a positive number to save face, much as was the case with the useless and wasteful "stimulus" spending in reaction to the Global Financial Crisis - where at a horrendous monetary cost, two successive quarters of negative growth were (barely) avoided in order to claim avoidance of a "technical" recession. A Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

Meanwhile the Speaker of the House is still not cleared of sexual harassment allegations, nor of expenses-account misuse claims, and a Labor MP who was dismissed to the cross-benches (but still conveniently elects to vote Labor and keep this worthless travesty of a government in office) continues to sit there after four years of "official" investigations into his rorting of union funds for a dalliance or three with ladies of the night. Honestly I couldn't give a damn whether he went to the brothels or not - the point is that he should have paid for what he did there with his own salary, not with the moneys entrusted to him by honest, hard-working men and women, some of whom would have been horrified if they knew what their money was going towards.

Third: there is a problem with certain ethnic subgroups who emigrate to the West.  This sort of thing has happened before, and the same underlying culture and mode of thought appears to be responsible.