Defections and other problems probably mean the opposition will lose its ability to block legislation requiring a two-thirds vote
It is beginning to appear that the two-year experiment with a viable opposition in Malaysia is just about over. Malaysian Insider, a Kuala Lumpur-based online news site, reported that as many as 10 members of Pakatan Rakyat, the unwieldy coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim, could be about to defect.
Even if they don't, the opposition is flailing. Anwar's own trial for consensual sex with a former male aide continues and, given Malaysia's malleable court system, is expected to result in his conviction although appeals could take as long as two years before he is sent to prison. In the latest development, High Court Judge Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah said he could decide by himself whether he was sufficiently neutral to continue to hear the sodomy case. He dismissed Anwar's appeal against his hearing on the matter Wednesday afternoon.
The question is where the opposition goes from here. Anwar has been unable to groom any successors, partly because the disparate nature of the three parties in the opposition makes it difficult for anybody to bridge the ideological gap. If he is jailed, it is questionable how long his martyrdom might last. When he was arrested on similar charges in 1998 – which were beyond a doubt trumped up to get rid of him – he led massive rallies in Kuala Lumpur against the government. But once he was imprisoned, the protests ultimately died away.
The major effect of the two-year opposition run appears to be a historic realignment of political parties, with Parti Islam se-Malaysia, with its roots in the rural, poor, fundamentalist northeast of the country. PAS has moved to consolidate its growing power in urban areas, particularly the area surrounding Kuala Lumpur as ethnic Malays are turned off by the continuing money politics and corruption in the United Malays National Organisation. And, say political observers in Kuala Lumpur, ethnic Chinese and Indians are turning to the party as well because of the corruption in their own coalition components.
In addition, too many of the opposition members were simply not prepared to hold office or to govern once they got there, analysts say. Some were disgruntled UMNO members who crossed to the opposition before the March 2008 elections on the opportunistic belief that Anwar, a charismatic leader, could actually gain control of the parliament. Now, the insiders say, since Anwar failed in his attempt to lure enough UMNO members to defect to the opposition, and with Anwar in the middle of a debilitating trial he seems sure to lose, they are looking for ways to cross back.
Problems within the Pakatan coalition, said a senior aide to Anwar, "have been simmering and with the case now in full force, it makes sense for the dissidents to add pressure on all fronts to create as much disunity and instability as possible.”
Whether 10 MPs will defect is uncertain. "I think it's possible,"said the aide. "But I'm sure there is a lot of horse trading going on."
Anwar returned to Penang on Feb. 16 to seek to shore up the coalition, the aide said. Anwar acknowledged in interviews with the local press that he had picked some of the wrong candidates in the 2008 elections.
"I selected the candidates for the parliamentary seats. PKR was new then. We had to field them,"he told reporters.
There has been a steady leakage from the coalition, made up of Anwar's Parti Keadilan Rakyat of urban Malays, the largely Chinese Democratic Action Party, and PAS for months. Last week, Zahrain Mohd Hashim, an MP from Penang state, quit with a blast at Lim Guan Eng, the DAP head of the Penang state government. Malaysia Insider reported that others are to hold a press conference this week to announce their departure from the opposition. Read more.
Read also:Malaysia's Brain Drain
It's Not Just Politics and Racial Discrimination.
Malaysia's brain drain appears to be picking up speed. According to a recent parliamentary report, 140,000 left the country, probably for good, in 2007. Between March 2008 and August 2009, that figure more than doubled to 305,000 as talented people pulled up stakes, apparently disillusioned by rising crime, a tainted judiciary, human rights abuses, an outmoded education system and other concerns. Read here.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Gay Australian MP "I Want To Get Married"
A SOUTH Australian Labor MP has made an impassioned plea to marry the man he loves, accusing the Rudd Government of standing in his way.
Labor MLC Ian Hunter today told parliament it was wrong for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to continue to impose his personal beliefs on the rest of the community and disallow gay marriage.
Mr Hunter has been openly gay since he was elected to parliament and been in a relationship with his partner Leith for almost 20 years.
Gay marriage is not allowed in Australia but permitted in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden and Spain.
SHOULD MARRIAGE BE RESTRICTED TO HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES? Have your say in the poll to the right of this page and in the comment box below.
Some states in the U.S. including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Maine have also allowed the union.
Mr Rudd has previously stated the Federal Government will look at partnership registration.
Mr Hunter however said he was no longer willing to "accept the crumbs from the table" and this view was out of step.
"I want to get married," he said.
"But I can't - I can't marry the person I love, not in my own country."
Mr Hunter said no one had ever been able to provide him with a reason why marriage should be confined to a man and a woman and he would not accept the argument that he may soon be able to register his partnership in future.
"I want to get married ... Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of my not being married to my partner Leith," he said.
"Yes I could travel to Massachusetts or South Africa and get married.
"But I want to share my marriage with my family and my friends - like we all do.
"I want to get married and you, Mr Rudd, are stopping me.
SUCKS!
Here's good old luscious Mrs Robinson who loves sex the old-fashioned way and says all gays are mentally sick.
Anti-gay MP stands down from politics
| Written by Richard Clarendon |
| Monday, 04 January 2010 15:21 |
|
The UK’s Pink News reported that Robinson, the Democratic Unionist MP for Strangford and wife of Northern Ireland's first minister, Peter Robinson, released a statement yesterday saying she could no longer meet the demands of her job The 60-year-old was labelled a bigot for a series of outbursts last year in which she made offensive comments about homosexuality. In 2008, she told the Belfast Telegraph that homosexuality was "comparable" to paedophilia. She also told a radio show that homosexuality was a mental illness and could be "cured". Robinson escaped a police prosecution for the comments. In the statement, she said: "Over the years, I have undergone a long series of operations and, though I have never talked about it publicly, I have also battled against serious bouts of depression. "Only those who have faced similar challenges in life will know the ordeal faced by those who are profoundly depressed, and the distress caused to those around them as they grapple with personality-changing illness. One in four of the population struggle with mental illnesses at one level or another, yet few talk about it openly.” |
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know (Wo, wo, wo)
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
(Hey, hey, hey...hey, hey, hey)
Read more.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Singapore Solution
How did a sleepy little island transform into a high-tech powerhouse in one generation? It was all in the plan.
By Mark Jacobson
Photograph by David McLai
If you want to get a Singaporean to look up from a beloved dish of fish-head curry—or make a harried cabdriver slam on his brakes—say you are going to interview the country's "minister mentor," Lee Kuan Yew, and would like an opinion about what to ask him. "The MM?Wah lau! You're going to see the MM? Real?" You might as well have told a resident of the Emerald City that you're late for an appointment with the Wizard of Oz. After all, LKY, as he is known in acronym-mad Singapore, is more than the "father of the country." He is its inventor, as surely as if he had scientifically formulated the place with precise portions of Plato's Republic, Anglophile elitism, unwavering economic pragmatism, and old-fashioned strong-arm repression.
People like to call Singapore the Switzerland of Southeast Asia, and who can argue? Out of a malarial swamp, the tiny island at the southernmost tip of the Malay Peninsula gained independence from Britain in 1963 and, in one generation, transformed itself into a legendarily efficient place, where the per capita income for its 3.7 million citizens exceeds that of many European countries, the education and health systems rival anything in the West, government officials are largely corruption free, 90 percent of households own their own homes, taxes are relatively low and sidewalks are clean, and there are no visible homeless people or slums.
If all that, plus a typical unemployment rate of about 3 percent and a nice stash of money in the bank thanks to the government's enforced savings plan, doesn't sound sweet to you, just travel 600 miles south and try getting by in a Jakarta shantytown.
Achieving all this has required a delicate balancing act, an often paradoxical interplay between what some Singaporeans refer to as "the big stick and the big carrot." What strikes you first is the carrot: giddy financial growth fueling never ending construction and consumerism. Against this is the stick, most often symbolized by the infamous ban on chewing gum and the caning of people for spray-painting cars. Disruptive things like racial and religious disharmony? They're simply not allowed, and no one steals anyone else's wallet.
Singapore, maybe more than anywhere else, crystallizes an elemental question: What price prosperity and security? Are they worth living in a place that many contend is a socially engineered, nose-to-the-grindstone, workaholic rat race, where the self-perpetuating ruling party enforces draconian laws (your airport entry card informs you, in red letters, that the penalty for drug trafficking is "DEATH"), squashes press freedom, and offers a debatable level of financial transparency? Some people joke that the government micromanages the details of life right down to how well Singapore Airlines flight attendants fill out their batik-patterned dresses.
They say Lee Kuan Yew has mellowed over the years, but when he walks into the interview wearing a zippered blue jacket, looking like a flint-eyed Asian Clint Eastwood circa Gran Torino, you know you'd better get on with it. While it is not exactly clear what a minister mentor does, good luck finding many Singaporeans who don't believe that the Old Man is still top dog, the ultimate string puller behind the curtain. Told most of my questions have come from Singaporeans, the MM, now 86 but as sharp and unsentimental as a barbed tack, offers a bring-it-on smile: "At my age I've had many eggs thrown at me."
Few living leaders—Fidel Castro in Cuba, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe come to mind—have dominated their homeland's national narrative the way Lee Kuan Yew has. Born into a well-to-do Chinese family in 1923, deeply influenced by both British colonial society and the brutal Japanese occupation that killed as many as 50,000 people on the island in the mid-1940s, the erstwhile "Harry Lee," Cambridge law degree in hand, first came to prominence as a leader of a left-leaning anticolonial movement in the 1950s. Firming up his personal power within the ascendant People's Action Party, Lee became Singapore's first prime minister, filling the post for 26 years. He was senior minister for another 15; his current minister mentor title was established when his son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister in 2004.
Lee masterminded the celebrated "Singapore Model," converting a country one-eighth the size of Delaware, with no natural resources and a fractured mix of ethnicities, into "Singapore, Inc." He attracted foreign investment by building communications and transportation infrastructure, made English the official language, created a superefficient government by paying top administrators salaries equal to those in private companies, and cracked down on corruption until it disappeared. The model—a unique mix of economic empowerment and tightly controlled personal liberties—has inspired imitators in China, Russia, and eastern Europe.
To lead a society, the MM says in his precise Victorian English, "one must understand human nature. I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained, he can be disciplined." In Singapore that has meant lots of rules—prohibiting littering, spitting on sidewalks, failing to flush public toilets—with fines and occasional outing in the newspaper for those who break them. It also meant educating his people—industrious by nature—and converting them from shopkeepers to high-tech workers in a few decades.
Over time, the MM says, Singaporeans have become "less hard-driving and hard-striving." This is why it is a good thing, the MM says, that the nation has welcomed so many Chinese immigrants (25 percent of the population is now foreign-born). He is aware that many Singaporeans are unhappy with the influx of immigrants, especially those educated newcomers prepared to fight for higher paying jobs. But taking a typically Darwinian stance, the MM describes the country's new subjects as "hungry," with parents who "pushed the children very hard." If native Singaporeans are falling behind because "the spurs are not stuck into the hide," that is their problem.Read more.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Those Awful Aussies
Hantu Laut
After reading Pasquale's take on the bunch of nosey Aussie lawmakers demanding Malaysia to drop the sodomy case against Anwar Ibrahim, it kind of intrigues me as to the reason for such interference. If the proverbial "birds of a feather flock together" is any true than among the 50 or so Australian lawmakers there must be faggots and homophile who wanted to impose their will on another sovereign nation where such sexual anomaly is a criminal offence.
Homosexuality, sodomy and zoophilia may be accepted in Australia but it is not in Malaysia and is considered a criminal act.
Michael Danby the spokesman of the group said "A lot of people know Anwar Ibrahim, a lot of people have been to Malaysia, and a lot of Australian parliamentarians think it's a shame that this is happening for the second time to the leader of the opposition in what is a developing democracy,"
Wonder whether Mr Danby and his colleagues knew what Anwar does behind closed doors and on what basis they made their own judgement of his innocent?
According to Pasquale here the Australians must first stop the mass murder of Aboriginal people and foreign students before interfering in other people's business.
Are they still killing Aborigines?
I am not sure of that but killing Indian students seem to be a new past time for Australian new bush rangers.A few Indian students have been bludgeoned to death in apparent racist attack.Some Indians could have been mistaken for Abos.
These rich Indian kids came to Australia to study and being rich they also brought with them some bad habits, their affluent lifestyle the Indian way.Expensive clothes,posh cars and extravagance lifestyle which the low-life Aussie couldn't understand and tolerate.
Black people are supposed to be poor and lead the low-life.The low-life Aussies have no clue where those goddam black asses came from (because low-life Aussies have no concept of the outside world), thought those Indians had made it good robbing and stealing from white men.
This reminded me of the early days when Britain exported its convicts to Australia hoping to make it the biggest penal colony on the face of the earth.It didn't turned out that way.The country is just too beautiful to give it to the scums of the earth.Today, Australia is an extension of the British Empire.
In 1788 six shiploads of convicts arrived Port Jackson in Australia.The Abos were not pleased to see the British convicts land on their soil.They thought they are bad news....and they were right!
It's the beginning of terrifying times for the Abos.
In 1802 when the Brits landed in Tasmania there were 20,000 Abos living on the island for almost 12000 years,undisturbed,unperturbed and completely cut off from the mainland.Eighty years later there were none.They were wiped out by the great British past time......sport hunting and white man's diseases.
Those hardened criminals dumped on Tasmania took care of the Abos.They see the Abos as wild game and to be hunted down.Tied them to trees and used them for target practice.They shot more Abos than the Tasmanian tigers then.One brutal bush ranger (what they called this wandering criminals those days) said "I shoot an Abos as easily as I shoot a sparrow and I get a lot of fun from this sort of sport"
Another even more brutal bush ranger killed an Abo man, seized the dead man's wife, cut off his head and fastened it round the wife's neck and drove the weeping woman to his farm to be his slave.
Wherever the Brits and other Europeans landed the first thing they do is to enslave the natives, if they resisted, decimate them, it's a good holistic approach.It happened in Africa, America and almost in India but there were too many Indians and the Brits didn't have enough bullets to shoot them all.
Malaysians and Singaporeans were lucky, they didn't have to cut our heads or penises to get compliance, they have begun to be civilised.We were spared the terror that befell the Red Indians,African and the Abos.
The 50 Aussie lawmakers must have forgotten to read the Bible, the impenitent sins of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and divine retribution.
Today, God's mill have come to a grinding halt, we need human laws to take care of such indiscretion and Malaysia is doing exactly that.
Is Anwar Ibrahim innocent?
It is for the Malaysian court to decide not you 50 bumptious Aussie lawmakers.
So, shut up and mind your own business.
After reading Pasquale's take on the bunch of nosey Aussie lawmakers demanding Malaysia to drop the sodomy case against Anwar Ibrahim, it kind of intrigues me as to the reason for such interference. If the proverbial "birds of a feather flock together" is any true than among the 50 or so Australian lawmakers there must be faggots and homophile who wanted to impose their will on another sovereign nation where such sexual anomaly is a criminal offence.
Homosexuality, sodomy and zoophilia may be accepted in Australia but it is not in Malaysia and is considered a criminal act.
Michael Danby the spokesman of the group said "A lot of people know Anwar Ibrahim, a lot of people have been to Malaysia, and a lot of Australian parliamentarians think it's a shame that this is happening for the second time to the leader of the opposition in what is a developing democracy,"
Wonder whether Mr Danby and his colleagues knew what Anwar does behind closed doors and on what basis they made their own judgement of his innocent?
According to Pasquale here the Australians must first stop the mass murder of Aboriginal people and foreign students before interfering in other people's business.
Are they still killing Aborigines?
I am not sure of that but killing Indian students seem to be a new past time for Australian new bush rangers.A few Indian students have been bludgeoned to death in apparent racist attack.Some Indians could have been mistaken for Abos.
These rich Indian kids came to Australia to study and being rich they also brought with them some bad habits, their affluent lifestyle the Indian way.Expensive clothes,posh cars and extravagance lifestyle which the low-life Aussie couldn't understand and tolerate.
Black people are supposed to be poor and lead the low-life.The low-life Aussies have no clue where those goddam black asses came from (because low-life Aussies have no concept of the outside world), thought those Indians had made it good robbing and stealing from white men.
This reminded me of the early days when Britain exported its convicts to Australia hoping to make it the biggest penal colony on the face of the earth.It didn't turned out that way.The country is just too beautiful to give it to the scums of the earth.Today, Australia is an extension of the British Empire.
In 1788 six shiploads of convicts arrived Port Jackson in Australia.The Abos were not pleased to see the British convicts land on their soil.They thought they are bad news....and they were right!
It's the beginning of terrifying times for the Abos.
In 1802 when the Brits landed in Tasmania there were 20,000 Abos living on the island for almost 12000 years,undisturbed,unperturbed and completely cut off from the mainland.Eighty years later there were none.They were wiped out by the great British past time......sport hunting and white man's diseases.
Those hardened criminals dumped on Tasmania took care of the Abos.They see the Abos as wild game and to be hunted down.Tied them to trees and used them for target practice.They shot more Abos than the Tasmanian tigers then.One brutal bush ranger (what they called this wandering criminals those days) said "I shoot an Abos as easily as I shoot a sparrow and I get a lot of fun from this sort of sport"
Another even more brutal bush ranger killed an Abo man, seized the dead man's wife, cut off his head and fastened it round the wife's neck and drove the weeping woman to his farm to be his slave.
Wherever the Brits and other Europeans landed the first thing they do is to enslave the natives, if they resisted, decimate them, it's a good holistic approach.It happened in Africa, America and almost in India but there were too many Indians and the Brits didn't have enough bullets to shoot them all.
Malaysians and Singaporeans were lucky, they didn't have to cut our heads or penises to get compliance, they have begun to be civilised.We were spared the terror that befell the Red Indians,African and the Abos.
The 50 Aussie lawmakers must have forgotten to read the Bible, the impenitent sins of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and divine retribution.
Today, God's mill have come to a grinding halt, we need human laws to take care of such indiscretion and Malaysia is doing exactly that.
Is Anwar Ibrahim innocent?
It is for the Malaysian court to decide not you 50 bumptious Aussie lawmakers.
So, shut up and mind your own business.
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