A sharp political divide has put Rosmah deep freeze in an election year and suarakeadilanmalaysia.wordpress. firewall will put Najib in freezer
One more thing we do not know is if the political formations will just go right ahead and change the laws of Malaysia to keep themselves out of all accountability. That may be their privilege.and certainly we do not know how they will go into appeal to the Judiciary. Which they are entitled to. Will they go together, or will they pretend to go separately, or will they really go separately.
Questions, questions, and seldom any answers.
Kedah Menteri Besar Datuk Mukhriz Tun Dr Mahathir said he would campaign for Umno president Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and his deputy, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin if both leaders are challenged in the party election this year.
He said he did not see anyone else qualified for the two top party posts and capable of competing with the two leaders.
Our political formations, across the spectrum, have no hesitation or shame in using every resource possible towards getting across a message that they are not in any way public authorities. Yes, we know that already, most of them are straightforward dynasties. Dynasries are only responsible to their kith and kin. Luckily, UMNO has a great unbroken tradition of dynasties coming apart, typically in the 3rd or maximum 4th generations.So.We use what we do not know to read between the lines and draw up strategy.What we do not know, for example, is why the all-powerful cybar troopers , which was one of the strongest supporters of the Najib has chosen this time in history to start coming apart. Di Rosmah, for example, have an inkling that this decision was about to find its way into the public domain?
Mukhriz disclosed this when asked to comment on the call that the posts of Umno president and deputy president should not be contested at the party general assembly in October to further strengthen the party in facing the 14th general election besides avoiding factionalism in the party.
Mukhriz, who is also the deputy chairman of the Kedah Umno Liaison Committee, said that personally he felt that as a party that practiced democracy, every post in the party could be contested.
“It is up to the Umno members themselves to decide. For me, whether there is a contest or not, it is the rights of the Umno members themselves. Even if there is a contest, I am confident it will not affect the position of Datuk Seri Najib and Tan Sri Muhyiddin at all,” he said.
Because, decisions like this tend to have an organic effect, they acquire weight and words as files move through the system, plodding from table to table, multiplying exponentially in triplicates and more, asking questions and leaving file notations, and along the way, bouncing off nodes and picking up momentum till they acquire a life of their own, too big to be ignored.
Paper trails are wonderful weapons which people can use.
I saw how it happened the last time. And there is a simple truth in that experience, which has not changed – that at some level or the other, at many levels, in our system, there are people who will quietly but effectively do the correct thing.
They just need that paper to land up on their table.
That is something we know.
All they need is some help from us. We just need to keep asking. In writing.
This decision from the offices of the CIC gives all of us the right to ask the Government, the many arms of our Government, President of India downwards, to give us information on what is being done to implement this decision.
Now you know? Go for it. Don’t be in awe.
The ‘no contest for the top two posts in UMNO’ bandwagon has begun to roll, but in the end whether it succeeds in heading off a fight that may well have damaging consequences is dependent on what one man feels about the whole thing. have ended with Muhyiddin becoming the main challenger.
“My definition of Malaysia is simple: ‘Malays First’. Whatever you do, wherever you work, Malays should be the top priority for all its citizens,”Muhyiddin said as”Country is above all religions and ideologies,” he argued and asked people to follow the same. ”I agree friends that as a Malay, as a citizen who loves Malaysia, you will also agree with my definition…We might do any work or take any decision, Malays should be supreme,”
“I am Malay first, but being Malay doesn’t mean I am not Malaysian,” said Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.
He was responding to DAP leader Lim Kit Siang’s challenge earlier today for him to state whether he is a Malay or a Malaysian first.
“He doesn’t understand (what) the meaning of the concept of 1Malaysia is all about,” Muhyiddin told a press conference in the Parliament lobby
He said if a government serve the people selflessly, then they would forgive its mistakes as well.
“When we get a mandate of five years, we must work on that and serve people selflessly. If we do that then people will forgive our mistakes as well,”
No Contest for the Top Posts?
No prizes for guessing the identity of the man. In fact, he has already waded in with preliminary comments that suggest he will push for a contest, but more on that later.
The ‘no contest’ ball was set rolling by Puad Zakarshi, former Deputy Education Minister and defeated UMNO candidate for the Batu Pahat parliamentary seat. There’s no point in going into the reasons Puad gave for his call because it was the usual boilerplate.
Actually, a contest for the top leadership positions in a political party is a healthy thing, especially when it is held after the party had undergone what UMNO suffered at the May 5 general election: a test of popular reaction to its stewardship of the country.
Because UMNO is the dominant party in the ruling BN coalition – it bolstered that position by raising its collection of parliamentary seats from 79 at GE12 to 88 at GE13 – how it has performed its role as national chief steward must be important to the UMNO electorate.
This is more so when the party likes to see itself as democratic. No less than the UMNO President, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, averred as much about his party and, on that score, signalled that he was open to a challenge.
UMNO running out of time
But in the indirect mode which is the standard form of Malay political discourse, form is one thing, actual intention another. That is why Malay political discourse is simultaneously fascinating and off-putting. People who camouflage intention behind complex layers of expression must think they have plenty of time on their hands.
Actually, UMNO does not have much time on its hands. It composed itself like it had a lot because after the ruling coalition it dominates suffered the loss of its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority at GE12, it dragged its feet on reform of itself and of the nation, the need for which was the clarion message Malaysian voters sent it at the watershed March 2008 polls.
There was a price to be paid for this lethargy: UMNO-BN incurred the loss of its traditional plurality in the popular vote at GE13, sliding to just over 47 percent of the overall take in comparison with the opposition Pakatan Rakyat’s 51 percent.
First the loss of its parliamentary superiority, then the downdraft in its overall popularity must mean the writing is on the wall for UMNO and its appendages in BN.
But the message of ‘no contest for the two top posts in UMNO’ bandwagon is that things are nice and peachy, so there’s no need to rock the boat with contests for the upper tier of posts that may well sunder the party.
The ‘no contest’ cabal of support is gathering pace. No sooner had Puad aired his view than Negri Sembilan UMNO backed the proposition. Even party Vice-President Zahid Hamidi joined the caravan the other day by saying he thought the call sensible.
But Zahid’s support is suspect and attributable to the Malay mode of indirect discourse.If current Deputy President Muhyiddin Yassin contests Najib for the No 1 post, Zahid, as top Vice-President, stands to benefit because he can then go for the vacant Deputy President’s post. It’s good Malay political form not to seem to overtly want what you covertly covet.
A Mahathir-created problem
If indirection is the preferred mode of Malay political discourse, projection is not far behind as a method by which to hide one’s scheming heart. The eminence grise of UMNO, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is adept at the art.
One can infer from his latest comments that he wants the UMNO leadership revamped for he believes the party was lucky to win the general election because in general Malay voters opted for the psychological security that UMNO’s patronage affords them to the uncertainties of an Anwar Ibrahim-led Pakatan in which a thrusting DAP would be difficult to contain.
Mahathir said the overweening self-interest of incumbents barred the door to the talented, rendering UMNO bereft of talent and infested with the corrupt and the mediocre.
That UMNO cannot carry on this way and keep Malay support was Mahathir’s warning to the party.
This problem with this narrative is that few these days believe that Mahathir’s 22-year (1981-2003) stewardship of UMNO and Malaysia was a period that emphasised talent over mediocrity, performance over loyalty, probity over corruption, collective interests over partisan considerations.
In fact, majority opinion is coalescing around the position that under his prolonged tenure, the country was built up physically but was emasculated morally.
So his latest posting on his blog is so much projection, attributing to others what he himself was responsible for.Thus indirection and projection combine to undermine the UMNO elector’s grasp of reality which explains the party’s continuing residence in reality-denying mode.
Raising powerful voices for the mother of all causes.Don’t get fooled by Melinda Gates, benign, American-grandma looks.and First Lady of Malaysia 5,000 delegates had gathered in Kuala Lumpur for the 3rd biennial conference of Women Deliver, a punch-packed global advocacy group for the reproductive health of women and young girls founded by Jill Sheffield.
Seven journalists at the KL conference have been invited to a round-table with Ms Gates. Her Press Officer sits beside her, but Melinda needs no prompting; she’s hands-on and knee-deep in the family planning thrust she’s given to the Gates Foundation. So i hit the right button by mentioning Sharmila.
Melinda favourite is Marianne, whom she met in a slum outside Nairobi. When asked why she used contraceptives, she had replied, “I want to bring every good thing to one child before i have another.” This has become a Melinda mantra: “I can relate to that as a mother, and it sums up why i am motivated to do what i’m doing.”
The presence of Melinda Gates is expected. She is as familiar a figure in the hamlets of Bihar and UP as she was at the London Summit on Family Planning last July. Spearheaded by the Gates Foundation, that high-powered pow-wow had led to $2.6 billion being pledged to provide contraceptive access to 120 million more women and girls by 2020. Today, 222 million want it but don’t get it. The fallout is unacceptably high rates of maternal and infant mortality, chronic ill health, unfinished education — and the estimated economic burden of $5.6 billion that all this inflicts on the developing world.
Chelsea Clinton is a surprise. She’s in a poised new avatar, her distinctive curly mane tamed into straight blonde tresses ending in soft swirls. At her plenary, she confides that her most profound influence has been her own grandmother. “There were so many siblings in that age without planned parenthood that, when she was just eight, she was put on a train from Chicago to Illinois City along with her two-year-old sister. Her grandparents weren’t exactly overjoyed, and threw her out at 13 to ‘go earn your own living’. This made my grandmother determined to create a house full of the kind of love and caring which had existed only in her imagination. I’m glad she lived to see her daughter stand for president.”
It’s gratifying to see that Chelsea Clinton is as committed as her father in using her influence for the greater good of global health — also for Gay rights. She came to KL from Myanmar, where “Proctor & Gamble has committed two billion litres of safe water to the Clinton Foundation. That`s saving one life every hour, every day. “
The two Bills, Gates and Clinton; Melinda and now Chelsea. Richard Gere in AIDS. These encounters of the close kind keep convincing me that some celebrities can, and do, bring much more to a cause than merely their name.
This Bihari villager had defied the family power structure and convinced her husband to let her space her pregnancies; Melinda has flaunted her empowerment story to the world. Did she also meet the obstructive saas? She did, and “when i asked her if she saw the difference it made to the health of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, she ungrudgingly said yes.”
This Bihari villager had defied the family power structure and convinced her husband to let her space her pregnancies; Melinda has flaunted her empowerment story to the world. Did she also meet the obstructive saas? She did, and “when i asked her if she saw the difference it made to the health of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, she ungrudgingly said yes.”
