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75-Day Countdown to 13GE – Will UMNO/BN leaders who really believe that BN will regain two-thirds majority in 13GE stand up?

“BN parties say will regain two-thirds majority in Election 2013” is the lead story of The Malaysian Insider yesterday, reporting that BN leaders are confident BN will win with a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 13GE.

However, only one UMNO leader, its propaganda chief, Datuk Ahmad Maslan, has gone on public record to declare that “BN will win two-thirds majority, better than 2008”.

No other UMNO/BN leader is quoted as having such confidence, including MCA vice-president Datuk Seri Chor Chee Heung, the MCA leader cited in the report.
Reason for Ahmad’s confidence?

Strangely enough, it is Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s record to battle corruption and reduce crime, among other things.

It is no surprise that as the UMNO propaganda chief, Ahmad tried to decry the latest opinion poll survey by the University of Malaya Centre of Democracy and Election (Umcedel) which showed that 78 per cent of those polled said that integrity and abuse of power by BN leaders would affect voters’ support in the 13GE.

But what beggars imagination is that the UMNO/BN leadership could feel proud and cocky about the Najib administration’s four-year record on combating corruption and reducing crime, when these two agendas are among the biggest failures of Najib’s Government Transformation Programme (GTP) and the National Key Result Areas (NKRA) in the past four years, raising the question whether the Najib administration is rooted in reality or living in a make-believe world of its own. Continue reading “75-Day Countdown to 13GE – Will UMNO/BN leaders who really believe that BN will regain two-thirds majority in 13GE stand up?”

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An Inconsolable Sorrow

by Goh Keat Peng

My mind and heart is so weighed down by that tragic end of a life merely beginning and so harshly and cruelly snuffed out by wicked grown-ups. How can this be allowed to happen?

The sudden loss of life in unexpected circumstances is always tragic. Especially when it happens to a precious child. In this case a mere six-year old boy. His only crime was to have left the relative safety of the family car to seek parental help for a younger crying sibling. JUST LIKE THAT.

Once more we as part of the human race is plunged into regrets, self-doubts, anguish, a gnawing inconsolable sorrow. Probably the most terrible of human feelings.

This is a time for SOUL-SEARCHING. For each of us. Where each of us is reminded of our own fears, our own sense of guilt, our own lapses, our own anxieties, our own self-examination… Continue reading “An Inconsolable Sorrow”

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Our Malaysia of the 70s

by Azly Rahman
Malaysiakini
Jan 25, 2013

With the state of racial and religious things entire in our beloved Malaysia today – rumours of a festival of Bible-burning, continuing humiliation of the Malaysian Indians especially, the death of critical sensibility in our public universities, the devastating revelations of the ‘Sabah IC-gate’ plot, the issue of ‘stateless Indians’ and the criminalisation of children not able to be schooled because they were born ‘stateless’ and a host of other issues Malaysian-ly unbecoming.

I have decided to travel down the path of nostalgia. I am quite sure many of you reading this column would agree that the late sixties and early seventies presented a good frame of reference of what it means to be Malaysian and what ‘national identity’ could be about. Names upon names came back to me as I conjure fond memories.

There was a certain kind of magic, innocence, and sincerity to foster a Malaysian identity, back then. It didn’t matter what race you were one could love to one’s heart’s content folks like these: P Ramlee, AR Tompel, Aziz Sattar, Saloma, Siput Sarawak, Ayappan, Lim Goh Poh, Andre Goh, Kartina Dahari, Orchid Abdullah, soccer players like V Arumugam the ‘Spider Man’, Soh Chin Aun ‘The Towkay’, Shaharuddin Abdullah the cool guy, Mokhtar Dahari ‘Super Mokh’, Santokh Singh, and many other great names that helped make Malaysian Malaysia proud.

One could laugh at the comedian-ventriloquist Jamali Shadat’s jokes, remember names such a V Sambanthan, Khir Johari, the great statesman Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, Tan Siew Sin, Temenggung Jugah (the man with a really cool haircut I so wanted one… ), Aishah Ghani, and of course the reluctant but down-to-earth and benevolent multiculturalist-statesman Tunku Abdul Rahman (right) with his famous uncontrollable blurting of Malay curse words and his philosophy of “oil and water can never mix”. A simple, yet profound life was back then…

Those were the days before today… when hell is breaking loose. What happened to the ethos of that genre, I wonder.

Growing up in the early 70s, different words to describe reality, practices, and possibilities were dancing happily around me. Continue reading “Our Malaysia of the 70s”