The great waste of time, effort and words. I think I need to devise a new warning system to accompany any future comment I make about every promise a politician makes.
Something like: Certain lie; Probable lie; Potential lie; Probably true; Almost Certainly true. We have now gone from the core and non-core promises of a John Howard to the straight out ignoring promises of a Julia Gillard.
It makes you laugh to consider all the thousands of words that journalists and other pundits use every election campaign to analyse political party policies. Meaningless, the lot of them.
The stupidity of opinion polls. I mean, how can anyone take them seriously? The same day and Morgan gives us two different versions of public opinion — one from interviews conducted face to face and the other from interviews over the telephone.
One says Labor is leading 51% to 49% on a two party preferred basis while the other says it is Labor 47% to the Coalition’s 53%. Forget the lot of them until election day approaches.
Assange should now cop it sweet. Whatever you might think about Sweden, it is a democratic country with an established and well functioning rule of law. With a British court now having determined that the Swedish request for the extradition of Julian Assange was lawful then the time has come to let that law take its course. The fact that we might not like that law or that it is different to what would apply in some other country is surely irrelevant.
When we choose to visit another country we accept that the hose country’s laws will apply to us. And as for thinking that Sweden would allow Julia Assange to be shipped out to Guantanamo — or that Barack Obama would allow his government to even try to do so — that is just ridiculous.
Oscars indicators. The Oscar ballot boxes will be opened on Sunday and the general expectation is that The King’s Speech will be voted best film. The Crikey Indicator gives it a 76% chance of success with The Social Network the second pick.
Surprisingly the director of The King’s Speech, Tom Hooper, is not favourite to win the best director award.
Indicators for other other Oscar elections are on Crikey’s The Stump blog.
Legal defeats for a government better news than victories. Only just over half of Americans, US opinion polls indicate, realise that the changes to health care that were passed through Congress last year are still the law. Some 22% told the pollster that it has been repealed and is no longer the law with another 26% being in the don’t know category.
In an attempt to explain the confusion, the Washington Monthly analysed how five recent court judgments — three that found the Barack Obama supported health law legal and two that said it was unconstitutional.
Those upholding the constitutionality of the health care law get very little attention, while conservative rulings against the law are literally treated as front-page news.
Assange should now cop it sweet. Thank you Richard, for your insightful summary into the jurisprudence of public international law. Next time an Australian faces capital punishment in a country where it is legal, or are imprisoned for acts which do not constitute crimes in Australia, we can all take a Bex, lie down, and tell the baying mob of human rights activists that the perpetrator (victim?) ought to “cop it sweet”.
Of course, to put it another way, “what do most of us really know about Sweden – and its justice system?”
How many men, journalists and politicians, have been guilty of similar “Assange crimes”, there? Of what we’re told he did? How many of them are in gaol – for what seems “pretty mild” (post coitus “play”), as many seem to see it?
The stupidity of opinion polls: we would get a better government if these trite polls were not taken. The biggest problem with the Rudd, and now Gillard, governments is that they take notice of the polls. Imagine if they had the balls to ignore surveys – then we’d have leadership.
Zut Alors, if you know they are “trite” polls then you must read them like everyone else who buys a newspaper or watches a TV news program. A politician cannot prevent the general public seeing and believing stuff in the news, no matter how fabricated and irrelevant it is. As to whether politicians should respond and engage with the public on the subjects chosen by the media to make into ‘news’, well, what would you do? Probably the swings and roundabouts come out about even but you still have to ride them.
Anyway, if you took a poll on whether “…we would get a better government if these trite polls were not taken…” you’d probably find that 58% disagree and 27% are undecided. The rest would be rusted to the notion that there is no such thing as better government.
Hugh Charlie McColl,
Actually, I never read poll results but it’s impossible to avoid hearing the results when news services regularly spout them as their lead story. Also, having been surveyed in the past years, I’m cognisant of the poor quality of the 0ften ambiguous or leading questions.