Headlines Saturday 1st November

Marr defends a racist “jape”
Andrew Bolt
Serkan Ozturk sends Sydney talkback host Chris Smith 15 abusive emails, posing as an angry Lebanese man. Brent Balinski, his colleague at Media Monitors, likewise sends Smith a string of similarly harrassing emails under fake names, some targeting his children and signed with the name of a famous murderer, Sef Gonzales.

Then there was this emailed threat to Smith from Balinski, writing this time as a Pacific Islander called Sione Howard:

Hey bitch,

You didnt mention in ur bio that ur a racist shit against us islanderz. Hatemonger. Ur goin down.

David Marr, fresh from defending the right of artist Bill Henson to comb a primary school looking for nude models, takes up the case of the two men. By Marr’s account of this “jape”, the two merely sent “light hearted nonsense” to give “ginger” to a “shock jock”, and only one email was “rough” - the one in which an Islander told Smith he was “going down”.

Somehow Marr manages to turn Smith, the victim, into the villain, mocking the concern he must have felt and portraying him as a coward and a fool for not getting the “jape”:

The fearless 2GB broadcaster wouldn’t talk to the Herald about any of this. He reckons Balinski threatened his family, but where’s the proof? And was he really afraid of “Sione”? Or was he just sick of it all? Didn’t he have an inkling these emails were spoofs? Smith won’t help.

I’m actually in awe of Marr’s intelligence, and would love to learn from him how he can detect a fake emailed threat from a real one. Or, indeed, how he can feel anything but disgust even for one sent as a “jape”.
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Palin burned for Obama’s petty cash
Andrew Bolt
Tracee Hutchison is firmly of the far-Left, and has bought the lines that Sarah Palin isn’t smart and that $150,000 really was spent on her clothes. (Fact check here.)

But even she can smell a witch-burning and has the integrity to protest:

Palin is not the first ill-experienced or ill-equipped person to run for high political office. The big difference is that these people are usually men and they are never — repeat never — subjected to the same scrutiny or reduced to the same kind of personal attacks as women.
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This may hurt
Andrew Bolt
It’s about to get nasty:

DEVELOPMENT in Melbourne is expected to come to a virtual standstill over the next few years, with commercial building projects worth billions of dollars frozen by the financial meltdown. Building industry figures say a lack of credit and shattered business confidence are bringing the city’s longest building boom to an abrupt end.
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Vote Obama or face war
Andrew Bolt
As the polls tighten, deranged novellist Erica Jong tells an Italian newspaper that America must vote Barack Obama - or else:

If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets.

In fact, Jong and her friends are already in suffering, paralysed with fear that Obama will lose:

The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged…

My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves…

My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium…
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Obama worries Murdoch
Andrew Bolt
Rupert Murdoch is cooling towards the most Left-wing US presidential candidate since ... well, whenever:

NEWS Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has warned that Barack Obama could worsen the world financial crisis if he is elected US president next week and implements protectionist policies.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian before delivering the first of six Boyer lectures on ABC radio tomorrow afternoon, Mr Murdoch said the Democrats’ policies would result in “a real setback for globalisation” if implemented…

With the US election five days away, Mr Murdoch criticised Senator Obama’s tax policies as “crazy”, particularly his plan to hand out tax rebates to most Americans and to increase taxes for people earning more than $250,000. He said Senator Obama’s promises to give tax rebates to 95per cent of Americans was “rubbish”.
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Howard ruled, OK
Andrew Bolt
Big surprise:

A new television documentary, which is based on more than 20 hours of interviews with John Howard and 180 hours of interviews with key players in Australia and overseas, confirms how dominant the former prime minister was in running the affairs of the nation for almost 12 years…
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What crashed were our morals
Andrew Bolt
Paul Johnson says it’s a moral, not financial, crisis:

The financial crisis, detonated by greed and recklessness on Wall Street and in the City of London, is for the West a deep, self-inflicted wound. The beneficiary won’t be Russia, which, with its fragile, energy-based economy, is likely to suffer more than we shall; it will be India and China. They will move into any power vacuum left by the collapse of Western self-confidence.
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Thank those Christians for your freedom
Andrew Bolt
Father Robert Sirico beautifully argues that Christianity is the source of much of our liberty

Liberty, then, is an essential precondition for the proper fulfilment of the mission of the gospel. By insisting on the separation of realms, on the infinite value of the human person, on the inviolability of the human conscience, and on the need to make progress in the world toward material improvement and the protection of human rights, religious faith of a particular Christian variety serves as the roots of what we know today as authentic liberalism.

Religion, rightly understood, rightly identified, is the friend of authentic liberty, rightly understood and identified, not a threat to it.
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Luhrmann’s new ‘stolen’ victim: our Nicole
Andrew Bolt
No one can yet name even 10 children stolen from their Aboriginal parents just because they were black. Yet Baz Luhrmann in his new film Australia tells an even more far-fetched story to support the “stolen generations” myth: he has racist officials steal even an orphan Aboriginal boy who has been given a home by an Englishwoman, Lady Sarah Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman).

As The Australian Magazine puts it in a generous profile of the director (not on line):

Of course, in reality the Stolen Generation was not comprised of half-caste children snatched from aristocratic Englishwomen.

Indeed. Name even one.