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Kevin Rudd has discovered the evil force that has brought the world economy to its knees. No it’s not the policies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton’s hapless socialist governments that forced banks to loan to losers. Nor is it the philosophy of promoting individual responsibility above state interference as espoused by the widely-condemned neo-conservatives.
No, to Rudd, the blame lies with a new beast – the neo-liberals.
The what??!! The last time there was a tag like that it belonged to fringe parties in the 1970s led by Don Chipp and Gordon Barton.
It’s straight from the spin factory. With their contempt for the average Joe, Rudd and his advisers reckon the stupid electorate will associate “neo-liberal” with the Liberal Party. “Neo-liberal” is evil, therefore Liberal must also be wicked.
Er, but isn’t a liberal attitude to the human condition an essential plank of the Labor platform? Is it now wrong to demand Labor endorse a liberal approach to race, sexual proclivity, religion and gender?
Anyway, Rudd reckons the sins of the “neo-liberals” can be rectified by a new era of – wait for it – socialism.

In a sweeping 7000-word essay, Mr Rudd argues strongly for new government intervention in banking and financial markets, not only in Australia but worldwide, and says the 30-year era of neo-liberal free marketeering is over.

Can’t you just see it: committees of bureaucrats, bludgers, party hacks and minority tokens telling the sharpest minds in society how to run their businesses. Talk about herding cats.
It’s nothing new. What Rudd advances is a return to a regulated, protected economy. Like back in the 1950s, you know the era of white picket fences and boring Sundays. John Howard country.

Of course, Rudd has in his own back yard fine examples of the capabilities of socialist government to draw on.
Like here:
THE city’s train network descended into chaos last night as a blackout crashed the system.
It capped one of Victoria’s worst days for public transport with more than 500 trains cancelled.
Blackouts threw signals out of order on the city fringe near North Melbourne and Richmond stations.

And here:

UPDATE 11.40am: VICTORIANS reeling from one of the state’s worst blackouts may face more power cuts this weekend.
Power outages continue to leave thousands of Victorians without electricity as the state’s heatwave drags on.

It’s not just the People’s Republic of Brumbystan that is floundering under fools:
It couldn’t afford a fan to keep the room at the right temperature and the machine cool to make readable prints. I had to send the guy away to get X-rays. Another hospital I worked in, they had run out of the children’s painkiller Pain Stop.
I have worked in a number of hospitals where there aren’t any antibiotics or they are almost out of supply because they haven’t paid the chemist the bill

The worry is that emerging scholars will not learn about high-level administrative incompetence. In fact, they’ll be lucky to learn anything.
PARENTS deserted Queensland’s state schools last year, with independent primary schools growing at a much higher rate than government schools.
Catholic primary schools also experienced massive growth compared to their state counterparts.

And how’s it going in a country that has had more than a decade of the type of national socialism that Rudd fancies?
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.
Large-scale layoffs in the northeast will mean a rise in benefit payments. Newcastle-based Northern Rock was nationalised last year and has shed 1,500 jobs. Nissan announced three weeks ago that it was to cut its workforce in Sunderland by 1,200.

Could it be possible that Rudd is a more dangerous fool than Whitlam?

It’s come to this: from Great Britain to Soviet Britain. Ain’t socialism wonderful?

PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.
The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

Good Lord, it seems some Merikuns don’t know the meaning of embarrassment.
This is a tiny, pocket-sized book filled with “quotations borrowed from Barack Obama’s speeches and writings.”
According to its creators, “It is an unofficial requirement for every citizen to own, to read, and to carry this book at all times.”

Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book lives on.

Finally, some reassuring news for the warming faithful:
Antarctica is warming, despite the recent scientific consensus that the southernmost continent was not being impacted by global warming, a study published in the journal Nature said.

Sorry, this latest evidence seems about as flaky as ice shavings.
The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit.

Oh well, back to the crystal ball.

Exquisite gotcha by Tim Blair on The Age writer Geoff Strong. It’s been an embarrassing week at the Spencer Street Pravda.

This gracious effort has won an Irishman the 2008 Husband of the Year award.

But surely this Polish gent has put in a superior performance.

And this Englishman has his priorities established.

This picture from yesterday’s Hamas rally in Melbourne and appearing at Tim Blair’s blog disgusts on so many fronts.

I wonder if anyone has made a formal religious and racial vilification complaint to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. It would be interesting to see how those lefty nanny-staters try and wriggle out of that.

Horrible obese liar Michael Moore demonstrates his idiocy by stealing acclaimed battleground journalist Michael Yon’s photograph to use as propaganda. He’s getting his monstrous arse sued.
Yon elaborates:
Now here’s Michael Moore, the latest infringer, using my work for his own crude political purposes. I recall some years ago watching one of his movies in Paris, and thinking how sad it was that an American would make propaganda so flagrant that it seemed pornographic. It was sad but at the same time uplifting, because Mr. Moore was able to exercise his right to free speech, rights that should never be infringed upon.

As the world marvels at today’s freak aircraft crash landing on the Hudson River, Andy Levy begs us to give geese a chance.

In the wake of the events of 1-15, in which a wedge of Geese brought down a US Airways aircraft, here’s what you won’t be hearing about from the so-called “Mainstream Media”: We brought this on ourselves.
After an event such as this one, it’s important to look at the root causes: Why did the Geese attack us? Well, the truth is, for years we have been oppressing the Geese, using them for the fuel they provide for our bodies.

Powerful evidence suggests that with media help Obama stitched up the votes of the dumb and the duped.

Can he solve the homeless problem? Yes he can.
But Mearns isn’t making a quick buck by renting out his pied-a-terre, as some Washington residents are. Nor did he head out of town on an inauguration escape holiday, as some locals did.
He’s one of Washington’s army of homeless cleared from the center of the U.S. capital ahead of the historic inauguration of Barack Obama.

Sometimes we need a reminder that we’re not invincible. A 5.5 metre man-eating monster generally does the trick.
“We went straight home. I know that croc. He’s been there since last year. Last year, as more people were fishing that creek, he got cheekier and cheekier, but this is the first time he’s ever done that. It scared the crap out of us. It makes you realise you’re not the top of the food chain.

Just what we need with the economy rapidly disappearing down the gurgler.

“The Marxists are now running Victoria at a time of economic uncertainty,” one said. “You’ve got (Senator) Kim Carr, (union boss) Dean Mighell, the Maritime Union of Australia — these are the guys who were responsible for the Cain-Kirner years.”

And of course they’ve got their extreme lefty, Gillard, temporarily running the shop in Canberra. Gawdelpus!

Wallowing wallaby watch.

HOLIDAY-MAKERS watched in amazement as a struggling wallaby had to be saved on two separate occasions while attempting to cross the Barwon Heads river.

Guess you’d say he’s a shithouse shot.
The public toilet at Centerville’s Carl’s Jr. restaurant never knew what hit it. But police say it was a .40-caliber slug fired from a patron’s handgun, which went off as he was hitching up his pants.

If only it were so. The funniest scribe in Blogistan, Iowahawk, gives the rundown at Big Hollywood on movies he hopes to see in 2009. Excerpt:
Sex And The City II: Hot Flashes. America’s favorite quartet of pre-menopausal Gotham divas return for more breezy mimicking of gay men.
Fearful Silence: Courageous ‘What’s My Line?’ contestant (Leonardo DiCaprio) refuses to answer panelist questions in this game show drama set against the McCarthy-blacklist era. With Ralph Fiennes as Bennett Cerf and Keith Olbermann as Kitty Carlisle.
High School Musical 5: Donner Pass Prom Party. Music, love, and cannibalism are in the air as the Wildcat gang gets stranded in the High Sierras. Featuring the hit Zach Cody – Melissa Vanessa duet, “I Never Thought It Could Taste So Good.”
Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Traci Lords) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Chris Cooper) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.

Now the cleverest people in arguably the cleverest country are rejecting the manmade global warming theory.
The Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) published a new study on the causes of Global Warming. Entitled, “Global warming: What is the scientific truth?”, the report highlights the differing views of five prominent Japanese scientists.
All but one of the scientists disagreed that global warming is the result of human activity.

UPDATE:
And here’s this week’s silliest piece on global warming:

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia’s outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more disease and spur distress about the changing landscape, a new report shows.

If nothing else, it’s patronising malarky. They coped with the rising seas that made Tasmania an island a few thousand years ago. Wonder what caused that global warming – giant marsupial farts?

The despicable Nazis were responsible for the genocide of 20 million between 1933 and 1945 and quite rightly no one remotely connected to that brand of socialist tyranny would be considered for a position of political prominence in Australia today.
The even more hateful communists have a genocide count of 100 million and rising and quite rightly no one remotely connected to that brand of socialist tyranny should be considered for a position of political prominence in Australia today.
Yet Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was a management committee member of Socialist Forum, the immediate descendant of the Communist Party of Australia which disbanded when the genocidal Soviet Union collapsed. In Socialist Forum, Gillard collaborated with former CPA members and other leftwing extremists to advance revolutionary policies in Australian government.
Forum archives reveal that policies Gillard advocated included: scrapping the ANZUS treaty, twinning Melbourne with Leningrad and introducing a super-tax on the rich.
Now, it can be argued that this all occurred two decades ago when Gillard was a student activist and plenty of responsible adults in the community travelled similar paths. Therefore her youthful flirtation with neo-communism can be forgiven.
But if any Australian politician was found to have belonged to a neo-Nazi party in his/her youth, they would be dumped immediately from position and party.
Why do academia, the political class and the media treat communism more favourably than its socialist cousin, nazism? Particularly when communists have slaughtered at least five times as many innocents as nazis.
Why is it so?

Wassamatta, the steak too tough?
GREENFIELD, Calif.—Police have arrested a Greenfield man for allegedly arranging to sell his 14-year-old daughter into marriage in exchange for $16,000, 100 cases of beer and several cases of meat.
Police say they only learned of the deal after 36-year-old Marcelino de Jesus Martinez went to them to get his daughter back because payment wasn’t made as promised.

Finally, a Federal politician is prepared to declare the bleedin’ obvious. It’s ironic that he’s the one conservative the luvvies half warm to.

Senator Joyce said he was disturbed at how climate change sceptics were being treated. “This has become a form of religious fanaticism and these environmental goose-steppers are pretty scary. You’re branded a denier. The last time that word was in vogue, it related to the Holocaust.”
He said it was meaningless that most climate experts believed global warming was induced by human activity. “History is replete with examples of experts getting it wrong,” he said. “Look at Y2K, look at what the doomsayers predicted about population explosions, food shortages, fuel running out, communism taking over the world. None of it happened.”

Fair enough, but Joyce knows that all major political actions are driven by one major factor: the public’s hip pocket nerve.
Senator Joyce predicted that public support for an ETS would quickly wane. “As soon as people work out how the dollars and cents are going to affect them, they’ll walk away from it.”

Hopefully, this overdue outburst will embolden a few other rationalists in the coalition to find their voice.