A fire in the cockpit of a Jetstar plane had forced the flight to make an emergency landing in Guam.
Three young children from NSW missing
Police are seeking public help to find three young children taken by a man from NSW's Central Coast and believed to be in Sydney.
Unemployment rises, Queensland hit hardest
The unemployment rate has risen to 5.7 per cent, as the number of people in work fell by a total of...
Outrage as Latham brands ADF 'meatheads'
There is outrage at comments branding Australian soldiers and military personnel "meatheads".
Elderly Neo-Nazi James von Brunn opens fire in Washington Holocaust museum
The elderly man suspected of opening fire at Washington's Holocaust museum on Wednesday is a committed white supremacist and hardened Holocaust denier.
ABC Head of TV Comedy Amanda Duthie dropped over Chaser skit
The ABC has dumped its head of TV comedy over the approval of a controversial Chaser skit about terminally ill children.
Understrength Socceroos beat Bahrain 2-0 at ANZ Stadium
An understrength Socceroos side kicked off Australia's World Cup qualification celebrations with a 2-0 win over Bahrain at ANZ Stadium on Wednesday night.
NRL to face more swine flu woes
Rugby league players could face months of being in and out of quarantine with leading swine flu authorities on Wednesday warning they risked contracting the virus every time they travel to play games.
Confidence surges... now for unemployment
Now for today's unemployment figures for May. Will they spoil the party?
Leonardo DiCaprio dumps supermodel girlfriend Bar Refaeli
Leonardo DiCaprio has split from his supermodel girlfriend Bar Refaeli, deciding he needs some space from the Israeli-born beauty.
=== Journalist Corner ===
Who's on 'On the Record' Tonight?
We are still working on tonight's ON THE RECORD at 10pm, but right now the plan includes Karl Rove and Reverend Franklin Graham and many others....as you know, cable news programming is very fluid
===
FOX Fan Exclusive!
Laura Bush answers YOUR questions!
What she dreamt of being when she grew up - Life at the White House - And what the Bushes are doing now!
The former first lady sits down with Greta to answer your questions!
=== Comments ===
BBQ led recovery and PM provides the pork
Piers Akerman
THE ABC covered Deputy PM Julia Gillard’s visit yesterday to a Sydney school with its usual jolly approach. With all of its stars firmly marching to Labor’s tune, why would anyone expect otherwise?
Yet questions do exist and one was raised on the ABC’s The Insiders last weekend by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.
===
HE CAN SEE BRISTOL FROM HIS STUDIO
Tim Blair
David Letterman’s bizarre clarification of his recent “knocked up” routine:
Letterman insisted today that the real target was [Sarah Palin’s] 18-year-old daughter Bristol.
But she wasn’t at the baseball game. Willow Palin, 14, was.
“We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter [Bristol]… and now they’re upset with me…” Letterman says on tonight’s show. “These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl.... Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was okay for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.”
So Sarah Palin went to a baseball game with her 14-year-old daughter, Letterman cracked wise about Palin’s daughter being knocked up by a baseball player during the game, but he was really talking about another daughter who … wasn’t at the game. Makes sense.
Saying he hopes he’s “cleared part of this up,” Letterman extended an invitation to Palin to come on the show as a guest.
And if Palin refuses, Letterman can invite someone else and insist that he’s really interviewing Palin.
UPDATE. Letterman’s bosses knew that the joke was wrong:
The remark was aired live, but CBS removed it from the transcript it makes available to media, including the New York Times, which publishes Letterman’s opening monologue on its blog site.
Further on this debacle, from the LA Times.
UPDATE II. Newsday: Letterman’s explanation “extraordinary”.
UPDATE III. From the top ten possible Letterman reactions to fallout over his Willow Palin rape ‘joke’:
Listen, I didn’t know Willow Palin was 14. She was born in 1995. I thought she was still 13.
UPDATE IV. The NY Daily News:
[Palin’s]14-year-old daughter, Willow, was the only Palin child with her for a trip to New York last weekend that included a Yankees game …
But Letterman insisted on his show Wednesday night that he was referring to 18-year-old Bristol Palin.
That sounds like the sort of thing a stupid person might do. Yet Letterman doesn’t even concede that he got the daughters mixed up.
UPDATE V. The UK Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden: “So Dave has apologised. Kind of. Sort of. Well, hardly at all really.” Link includes video of the non-apology, “buried, I’m afraid, in a Keith Olbermann segment.”
===
GLOBALONEY
Tim Blair
The Burger King warming heresy reaches Slovakia:
Hamburgery: Globálne otepl’ovanie je blbos’
And France:
Le réchauffement climatique, des “balivernes” pour Burger King
From Memphis to the world.
===
QUALITY CONTROL
Tim Blair
Classy headline from the ABC:
Five-star Dick gets Rising reward
Later changed to:
Pies young gun gets Rising reward
Brad Dick receives better treatment from Collingwood TV.
===
Equal opportunity hater
Andrew Bolt
A despicable attack:
A security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has died after being shot by a gunman identified by US media as a neo-Nazi.
And also an illustration of the essentially meaningless distinction often drawn between the far-Left and far-Right, as in this very report:
The blogosphere lit up after the shooting, with some decrying the violence while right-wing and neo-Nazi websites were full of praise and adoration for von Brunn.
“Right wing?” (Note: reporter Anne Davies, a Sydney Morning Herald Lefitst, doesn’t even say far-Right. Or give the full name of the National Socialists.)
In fact, from his writings, the murderer seems equally at home with the “Right” and the “Left”, however Davies tries to spin it:
Lying is what JEWS do best. It’s how JEWS earn a living.... The biggest sleight-of-hand trick ever, was the establishment of ROTHSCHILD central-banks… Nations pay JEWS for the use of their own (Nation’s) money… NEOCONS-BILL O’REILLY you pay the tax - or else you don’t eat. Hillary, Obama, McCain, Ruppert Murdoch don’t mind paying the Kosher tax, why should you care ...
‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.’ — George W. Bush
‘Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushs have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.’ George Bush Sr. 1992
‘Kill the Best Gentiles!’
James von Brunn
And, of course, he thought the 9-11 attacks were an inside job.
There are, in fact, people who are rational individualists, and people who are collectivist, and therefore more prey to us-against-them mythology. Von Brunn - a Zionist-hating, Bush-loathing, O’Reilly-despising, anti-Christian 9-11 truther - is without doubt a collectivist, with views that could find a home both with the far Left and Right. To which precisely he belongs is a distinction without a difference.
===
A 62-year-old talks dirty about a 14-year-old
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin gives David Letterman an almighty whack for “joking” (above) about her daughter getting “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” during a visit to a baseball game in New York:
Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter):
‘Laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands - that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’
But, but, but, flusters Letterman - the daughter I meant to so crudely mock as a slut or rape-bait was the other one ... you know, the 18 year old.
Who was, in fact, back in Alaska and not with her mum and 14-year-old sister in New York. And who likewise does not deserve this trashing.
===
Prejean sacked. Not gay at all now
Andrew Bolt
The reason may be genuine, but I doubt she’d have been sacked so soon if she didn’t also hold an inconvenient opinion:
Miss California USA Carrie Prejean has been stripped of her title, officials said on Wednesday, ending a turbulent reign marked by racy photos and controversy over her stance on gay marriage. Officials for the pageant - owned by tycoon Donald Trump - said Prejean was being dethroned for contract violations over “unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA organisation’’.
===
Why not our own Fox News, Rupert?
Andrew Bolt
Charles Krauthammer, on receiving the 2009 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, praises the greatest hammer-blow against media group-think in the US:
AT a time when awards in the humanities are a near-monopoly of the left—Nobel peace prizes awarded to those, from Yasir Arafat to Jimmy Carter, who give the most succor to the forces of terror and tyranny; Pulitzers given to whichever newspaper can expose the more damaging national-security secrets—it is important for there to be an award to recognize and encourage journalism and, more generally, political thinking of a different kind.
That’s why Fox News is so resented. It altered the intellectual and ideological landscape of America. It gave not only voice but also legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media.
I’m proud to be part of this televised apostasy. And particularly proud to be part of the single best news program on American television, the six-o’clock news—first with Brit Hume, now with Bret Baier. How good is “Special Report”? So good that even if I weren’t on it, my mother would watch it—and she spent 50 years as a Democrat.
Great show, that. And Krauthammer is a great talent:
===
On the smearing of Steve Fielding
Andrew Bolt
How the Sydney Morning Herald reports - fairly and with balance - Senator Steve Fielding’s desire to know why the world isn’t warming, even though our emissions are increasing:
THE Family First senator Steve Fielding has challenged the work of thousands of the world’s top scientists, saying he is not convinced by the work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.... Senator Fielding’s newfound scepticism is a result of his trip to the US to listen to the Heartland Institute of Chicago, an organisation that is funded by the fossil-fuel industry. The organisation also believes public health campaigns against smoking are based on “junk science”.
All smear, no science. And note the casual insertion by reporter Stephanie Peatling of falsehoods - such as the claim that the IPCC reports are the work of “thousands” of like-minded scientists, and her implication that there aren’t also ”thousands” of scientists who’d actually support Fielding, too.
Note also the sneaky insinuation that Fielding’s opinion is based not on scientific facts, whose meaning must be debated, but on lies peddled by a bribe-taking organisation that denies even that smoking kills.
Peatling here is either repeating a smear she hasn’t even bothered to check out, or deliberately deceiving her readers with a particularly rotten red herring. The Heartland Institute is not denying at all that smoking kills, but is challenging claims that smokers, despite indeed dying much earlier, don’t already pay for the extra health costs they incur through existing high cigarette taxes. It’s also not convinced by some of the extreme claims about the health risks of second-hand smoke.
This, too, is a debate that should be settled by a discussion of evidence, not buckets of slime - and is, in any event, utterly irrelevant to Fielding’s point about the climate, which Peatling could have learned is well-based had she bothered only to consult any measure of the world’s temperature, such as this:
It hardly needs pointing out that Peatling also misleads readers by implying that all the Heartland Institute’s funding comes from the “fossil-fuel industry” (and that the Institute is so corrupt that it will therefore say what is not true, as if it were Greenpeace). The fact is that prime villain ExxonMobil has not funded it for three years, and 95 per cent of the Institute’s funding comes from sources other than oil and coal interests. None of those interests funded the conference Fielding attended, using his own cash. But, once again, this is a red herring: what’s at issue is the science, not the funding, or else Peatling should never again believe a word said by Al Gore, who has become a multi-millionaire through peddling “green” investments, or by Tim Flannery, who charges as much as $50,000 a speech to beat the doomsday drum, or by Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, whose reef-is-doomed research has attracted millions of dollars of funding.
Conclusion: it seems to me that Peatling and her kind are more interesting in preaching than in reporting. And thus are their readers misled. But as long as Fielding’s question - why is the world not warming, when our gases are increasing? - is met by smears, not science, we must conclude that such warming alarmists actually have no answer to give.
===
They are our children, too
Andrew Bolt
How much are we subsidising a foreign lifestyle - and “foreign” in several ways - that is prone to let down children, as well as the community in which they will move?
THEY were eight children living in a three-bedroom house with mice and rubbish in every room. Four had disabilities: some couldn’t hear properly; some couldn’t walk properly; all were malnourished and had head lice. Several had broken bones, and none could use a knife and fork.
Their mother, a young Sunni Muslim woman, veiled from head to toe, found caring for the children impossible, especially as the older ones grew wilder, and then violent. Her husband, an Iraqi, is believed to have at least two other women he refers to as his “wives” and they, too, have children.
He moves between their different houses. None had paid work.
The NSW Department of Community Services has known of the situation for years; and has surely also known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Last October - that is, more than eight months ago - the crisis came.
===
Latham on Rudd, soldiers and other “meatheads”
Andrew Bolt
Mark Latham takes himself off the leash again in today’s Financial Review (no link).
On Gough Whitlam:
When I worked for Gough Whitlam in the 1980s, he explained to me that one of the purposes of his office was to “milk the system” - that is, to make the most of his publicly funded entitlements as a former prime minister...
On former friend and former Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon:
He was living a lie in accepting a cabinet position under Kevin Rudd’s leadership. For most of his time in opposition, Fitzgibbon despised Rudd, remosely ridiculing every detail of the man’s existence, from his gawky ways and peculiar haristyle to his wife’s less-than-glamorous looks.
On the Australian Defence Force:
Anything, even the most tedious and loathsome of public duties, would be better than knocking around with the meatheads of the Australian Defence Force… One of the habits of our nationaI life is to glorify all aspects of the military. I have always assumed this gushing, out-of-proportion praise could come only from those who have never met our soldiers and experienced first-hand their limited intelligence and primeval interests in life.
This man was once chosen by Labor to be our next prime minister. What does that say of the Labor culture? How much does Latham represent Labor’s real attitude to our military? And how many others of Rudd’s ministry secretly despise their leader?
===
Gordon should have stayed mum
Andrew Bolt
Grodon Ramsay explains why he’s now said sorry to Tracy Grimshaw:
The foul-mouthed chef revealed that he received a heated ‘please explain’ call from his mother Helen in the UK this morning.
“She was disgusted and she wanted to know what actually happened,’’ Ramsay said. “When your mum rings you and starts giving you a bollocking down the telephone then of course you start to get the picture.’’
Gordon Ramsay’s mother explains why Ramsay can’t be trusted to tell a truth:
“I haven’t spoken to Gordon since the weekend,” she told News Ltd. “He calls me every Saturday for a chat. But I certainly didn’t tell him off about what he did in Australia.”
===
Gillard spending attacked
Andrew Bolt
I knew this titanic spending splurge couldn’t go without challenge:
ONE of Kevin Rudd’s hand-picked Infrastructure Australia board members has slammed the federal government’s $14.7 billion education revolution program, claiming it has missed a generational opportunity to...
To what? To build something of true educational worth, rather than school halls? To invest in better teaching, rather than better meeting places? To build the boarding schools and provide the scholarships that were the last best chance for brighter Aboriginal students out bush?
Alas, no…
...to build environmentally sustainable schools across the nation.
Sigh. That the government has such experts, demanding education dollars be spent to benefit not children but Gaia.
===
She’s baaack
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin’s “we told ya so” interview - on the stimulus and the role of government. Her clarity makes VP Joe Biden seem a bumbler and a fumbler. And do you get any sense at all that the Governor feels she has no future in federal politics?
===
Black violence has black roots
Andrew Bolt
Stephanie Jarrett says Aborigines must be integrated if they are to escape the high levels of violence that are rooted in Aboriginal culture. But in this age of the Noble Savage myth, policy makers foolishly insist on preserving what kills so many women and the weak:
Strategies to ensure that Aborigines no longer endure cultural contexts where violence is normal just have to be implemented. But the nation’s thinkers and policy-makers have been baulking at the task.
In her book A Fatal Conjunction, Kimm laments in her concluding chapter that “the continuing public denial that violence is part of traditional culture remains a large part of the ‘root of the problem“‘. Kimm also urges the need to place women’s rights above cultural rights in law and sentencing.
However, the powerful implications of Kimm’s book - that addressing Aboriginal violence requires strategies that tackle its traditional, cultural roots - are circumvented in her last chapter by her insistence that policy stay within the tenets of self-determination and community control of programs.
Kimm emphasises the need to ensure that Aboriginal women themselves determine their own responses, and points to the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council of Central Australia, in a positive light.
Australian Crime Commission figures compiled by Jane Lloyd, an expert in remote indigenous domestic violence, show that 28 years after the establishment of the NPYWC, the violence on the NPY lands remains catastrophic, clearly indicating that women’s initiatives and other responses are not working. Women from the NPY regions are “67 times more likely to be a domestic violence related homicide victim”. ..
Adjustment to the mainstream is not about taking anything from Aborigines. It is about implementing policies and programs that reverse Aboriginal exclusion from mainstream culture, because this is the only effective broad-scale strategy for the acquisition of strong norms against violence.
Jarrett sounds like a student of Professor Peter Sutton.
===
What Happened to the War on Terror?
By Bill O'Reilly
As you may know, last week in Cairo, President Obama did not mention the word terrorism in his speech to the Muslim world. In fact, some inside the Democratic Party no longer refer to the War on Terror at all. It is now an overseas contingency operation or some dopey thing.
Actually, this debate has been going on ever since the attack on 9/11. You may remember Phil Donahue and I debating how to handle the Taliban, who harbor the Al Qaeda killers.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: I believe that you have to go to a war mode in the sense that you have to tell these people, look, you've attacked us. It's not a crime. It's an attack. It's war. That's what you have done to the United States. We are going to leave all our options open to defeat you.
PHIL DONAHUE: Please don't make America the great big Satan coming in with the big feet stomping on innocent people in the name of those who died randomly by messianic people who talk to God everyday and God talks back. Don't let them do this to you. Behave in a rational way.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Now, Mr. Donahue's opinion that worldwide terrorism should be handled by international consensus and the police is a long-held liberal belief, and now it's coming to fruition. The Obama administration has transferred accused terrorist Ahmed Ghailani, who the government says helped kill more than 200 people in the African U.S. Embassy bombings, from Guantanamo Bay to New York City, where he will be tried in civilian court. That will cost millions and take years. Mr. Ghailani should have been tried years ago by a military tribunal, but the Bush administration did not make that happen. Now there's a good chance Mr. Ghailani will use the trial to spout ridiculous propaganda. That's what these guys usually do, and here's a good example.
Speaking to Dan Rather, former Gitmo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, who was recently sent to France, said this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE: They lie, lie, lie. They lied. Nothing change in Guantanamo. Nothing. The same rules. They torture me in the Obama time more than Bush. More than him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
All right. Well I'm sure the president's not going to be happy to hear that. I mean, give me a break.
For some reason, many Americans want the propaganda fiesta when dealing with foreign terrorists. That is just stupid. Again, the military should be handling all of this. If you attack the United States, our Constitution allows the military to defend the country. That's not hard. But apparently the Obama administration agrees with Phil Donahue, so let the circus begin.
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