Several points need debate, Ludwig, never will I agree with your views on Rudd.
Nore will most voters, I truly think you want a privately owned personal Prime Minister, one that does your bidding.
No such beast exists, for any of us, look at the other side, understand in areas that concern you no difference exists, both sides are uninterested in population control.
Yes Rudd is home, he always was, but the election of Abbott has lifted the rights mood in his party, and frightened the rest, internal war may yet destroy conservatives for a while.
America, money, yes greed lack of laws to police banks bought us close to horror.
We are on the road to recovery but house prices WILL explode then bottom out one day, trouble ahead.
America will not default, will not change its currency, will survive much as Britain did after ww11.
Rest arjay, grab reality with both hands, the sky is not falling, oh expert on Abbott's clowns, what a shame Costello went.

Barnaby Joyce may have spoken the unspeakable but that is what worries me.
It has an unsettling similarity to what is not said by our pollies
about our future oil supplies.
Wayne Swanne also has said nothing about the US financial position.
Minister Ferguson also has said nothing about our future energy supplies.
Tony Abbot did not even know what peak oil meant. He was asked about
his policy on it and he waffled about petrol competition.
He had to refer the question to someone else.

Do as I have, and ask three politicians about peak oil and you get
either a blank look or a shuffling of their feet. Those that are
aware are most uncomfortable about the question and divert their
reply to reducing hydrocarbons for global warming.

So at least Barnaby is telling it as he sees it.

Bit of a shock isn't it ?

Belly, you know why I call the Krudd government catastrophic. But for other readers, I’ll reiterate:

He raised immigration to a new record high, well above Howard’s level which was a record rate. He did this as soon as he got into power and without giving any hint of it in the election campaign and consequently having absolutely no mandate to do it. This was grossly antidemocratic. There is a great deal of concern in the general community about the massive immigration rate.

He also boosted the baby bonus and prattled on about a big Australia.

This is so totally the opposite of what we need in Australia. We need to head towards a stable population and a regime of sustainability.

He’s making it absolutely impossible for Australia to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by facilitating a very rapid increase in the number of polluters. He is being utterly duplicitous in his apparent concern about climate change.

Even if everything else that Krudd was doing was really good, his massive growth policy direction would still be bad enough for me to call him catastrophic. It will be catastrophic if it is allowed to continue.

Cracks are appearing. Concerns about population stabilisation and sustainability are emerging. Labor MP Kelvin Thomson is right onto this. Liberal frontbencher Kevin Andrews has just expressed real concerns about high immigration. The Greens have come out of thier complacency about it, to some extent. The media are interested. There is a lot of debate happening.

I think and dearly hope that there is a real possibility of Abbott and the Opposition realising their huge opportunity here – to embrace genuine sustainability in their political philosophy and to set themselves up as a very different and very attractive alternative to rapid never-ending continuous-growth antisustainability Rudd madness.

How can you possibly support Rudd, Belly? What is he doing that’s got you so hooked?

Thanks Arjay. Yeah the whole caboodle is about as robust as house of cards. Except that it probably won’t just collapse one day, it will be steadily whittled away, card by card, at least for a while yet.

The value of money in the US will just continue to be diluted. For the ordinary person, their buying power will just diminish and diminish to the point that confidence drops right out of the system.

There’s no way that the US can pay back its debts, so it is virtually hooked in to just creating more and more money and hence devaluing it.

Very scary stuff.

Wow, that’s some video you referred us to. 2 hours 24 minutes long. I only watched a minute or so and was already feeling as though my week was ruined, by 7.30 on a Monday morning (:>(

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<< Barnaby Joyce may have spoken the unspeakable but that is what worries me. >>

Yes Bazz, it is not what he said, but the reaction that is the most concern. Just about everyone who deigned to comment was boring it up him for simply daring to say something about the magnitude of debt.

This is very sinister. The blindness or fear of saying unpalatable things in the ranks of our pollies is of much more concern than free-speaking Barnaby, as is the intolerance in the media of pollies who speak outside of the square.

In fact, the likes of Swan, Abbott and just about every other politician, are virtually tied into the madness of continuous rapid growth economics because they are sh!t-scared of saying anything outside of that paradigm. And if they can’t say anything, why would they even think it? They tie themselves into a narrowly defined course of action. They are a million miles away from taking a holistic approach or from embracing the vital changes that our society has got to have.

Thank goodness for people like Barnaby Joyce, Kelvin Thomson and even Wilson Tuckey, for saying things that get on peoples’ goat, and consequently broaden our horizons a little.

Ludwig my Friend.
Yes you seem to be a good bloke I like good blokes.
Do you understand thoughts and ideas, claims and statements we each make are forever?
That one of us is quite wrong.
And having set our ideas in print we must face facts, they having been put out there are not disposable.
We if proven wrong should understand that, fully, we got it wrong, no going back we got it wrong.
Is it you? in a post above who says Abbott may win an election?
You got that wrong mate.
In fact one day , say 3 years, looking back one of us got quite a lot wrong.
Polls currently point to you being that one, I know it is you who eat the humble pie , but take this on board.
Rudd has not conned those who vote for him, so very many are refugees from a lost Liberal party, and Abbott will never win them back.
No government, ever can please us all, no opposition has ever pleased so few on the conservative side.
Why Ludwig are you so different than most? few dislike Rudd with such Passion, most look at the polls love the bloke warts and all, he has them but he has something Abbott will never have.
Watch conservatives self destruct in these three years hope mate for all our sakes they can rebuild after the election, no easy task but Australia needs a lost far right leader like a hole in the head.

With respect Belly, you haven’t answered my question – you haven’t said what it is about Rudd that appeals to you so much. That is; what is so good about him that you think it is more important than the negative aspects that I mentioned. And you haven’t tried to counter my criticisms of him.

<< Rudd has not conned those who vote for him >>

Yes he has inasmuch as he has imposed a policy of very high population growth upon us with absolutely no mandate to do so. That’s a con Belly. He’s supposed to democratically represent the people, but polls have shown that the majority want immigration to be reduced. He didn’t mention this in the election campaign but then he implemented it as soon as he won power. That’s extremely suspicious. Such an important policy decision and he didn’t talk about it before the election. In my opinion, that makes him a very disingenuous and quite sinister person, who absolutely doesn’t deserve to be our PM.

This policy of extremely high immigration, along with a boosted birthrate, is of the utmost importance. We’re not talking about some minor policy area here.


<< …most look at the polls love the bloke warts and all… >>

The polls indicate which out of Mad Monk and Krudd people prefer. They don’t indicate whether people actually like Rudd. And unfortunately most people don’t realise that they don’t have to choose either – that it is perfectly legitimate to say that they don’t like either of them or their dinosaur pro-expansionist parties and won’t vote for either.

Of course Rudd is well ahead in the polls, directly because of the Libs’ hopeless performance, with chronic high-publicity in-fighting, leadership spills and the rest. But this doesn’t mean that those who put him first when polled on their preference, actually support his policies to any significant extent or would support him if there was a meaningful choice.