Protesters storm BBC as Nick Griffin show airs
HUNDREDS of anti-facist protesters have stormed the BBC's television headquarters in west London amid outrage at a far right-wing politician's appearance on a political chat show. - one of the few things communists got right was there perception that fascists were worthless bigots. - ed.
Probe into calls for assassination of PM
PROSECUTORS in Rome have launched a probe into calls for the assassination of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi posted on the internet-based social network Facebook.
Keep the car - ditch the dog
WORLD'S most popular house pet uses more energy resources in a year than driving a car.
The 'lanky Yank' who became a TV legend
HE was only supposed to stay for six weeks, but Don Lane ended up etching his name in history.
Childcare worker 'bit baby on the face'
WOMAN who allegedly bit baby has been stood down from her position and charged by police.
Packer's polo plans upset sleepy village
JAMES Packer risks being told to get on his pony by residents who don't want his $35m polo centre.
Daughter saved Wayne Carey from suicide
FALLEN AFL star tells of four-day drug and alcohol benders and that affair in revealing new book.
Rudd fails to deliver school computers
ONLY 150,000 of the almost one million computers Kevin Rudd promised have arrived at schools.
Ethiopia demands urgent food for millions
TWENTY-five years after famine killed a million Ethiopians, more than six million are once again facing starving to death.
=== Journalists Corner ===
White House v. Fox
Here is your chance to be part of the discussion: I assume you saw the video clip where President Obama was asked about Fox News Channel and he was (or attempted to be) insulting or dismissive of the entire news organization.
What, if anything, should be done? There are many options -- including ignore it or show why [...]
===
Health Care Scare!
As Obama's "dream" plan inches closer, is your worst nightmare becoming a reality?
Sean digs deeper into "government health care" horror stories and exposes the truth about the president's reform!
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Exclusive: Bob McDonnell
It's a critical race in Virginia and the gloves are off! Now, the frontrunner reveals his campaign strategy for the homestretch of the Va. governor's race!
===
"I Don't"
A justice of the peace sued for refusing to marry an interracial couple - "The Factor" investigates!
===
Guest: Sen. Judd Gregg
No financial credibility? No domestic ownership? No economic growth? Is the U.S. on the path to becoming a 'Banana Republic'? Why Judd says yes!
=== Comments ===
Political War in America Intensifies
By Bill O'Reilly
Following the lead of the White House, the radical-left organization MoveOn is demanding that all good Democrats and liberals boycott Fox News. There's even a petition that says:
"To draw attention to its biased coverage, President Obama will not appear on Fox [News] for the rest of the year. Can you sign this petition asking Democrats to support President Obama's stance by staying off Fox as long as he does?"
How dumb. How cowardly.
The great thing about America is that we have lively debates in this country. We are free to dissent from power. How un-American it would be to punish people with whom you disagree.
MoveOn is a propaganda outfit which tries to damage those who oppose its far-left doctrine. MoveOn is not interested in opposing points of view, does not respect well thought out arguments from the right. This is simply a slash and burn operation that is trying to intimidate elected Democrats. There is something very disturbing about the Obama administration fighting harder against Fox News than the Taliban.
And now we learn that the president spent two and a half hours on Monday meeting with far-left media people. In addition to the president, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs sat down with three columnists from The New York Times and two MSNBC commentators, as well as a variety of other committed left-wingers.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but the White House kept this meeting very quiet, and it appears that President Obama has decided that he will cultivate the far left while demonizing conservative Americans.
That is a mistake. The president was elected by moderate independents. There are simply not enough left-wing loons to save him when things get tough.
In addition, Politico.com is reporting that the White House is systematically undermining prominent Republicans, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio people, as well as Fox News.
Again, why is the Obama administration bothering with this when it has to fix the economy, win the war in Afghanistan and reinvent the health care industry? President Obama is making a huge mistake in associating his office with political feuds.
And the irony is he doesn't need to do it. There are plenty of far-left media hatchet men to do the dirty work against the right. Why the president feels the need to get involved is a troubling question.
"Talking Points" often gives Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt, but there is no doubt in this case.
Concentrate on the important stuff, Mr. President. Leave the petty feuding to the barbaric media.
===
GEAR SHIFT
Tim Blair
Following earlier reports, it’s now confirmed that the local version of Top Gear will move to Nine. Hosts yet to be named.
===
OBAMA DELIVERS
Tim Blair
As a tactic, the White House’s shunning of Fox News has worked beautifully – but not for the White House:
For Fox News, its personal battle with the President and the scrutiny of its reporting has delivered it a ratings bonanza.Anyone at Fox whose bonuses are tied to ratings must be weeping with joy:
This year, the Fox News Channel will post the highest ratings in its 13-year history.Meanwhile:
Look at the numbers. Rather than hurt Fox, all this attention from the White House has actually helped the network, giving it a public relations bonanza and marketing blitz it could never have afforded to buy itself.
The decline in Barack Obama’s popularity since July has been the steepest of any president at the same stage of his first term for more than 50 years.
===
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Tim Blair
The rabbit-throwing has been cancelled.
===
KILL THE FORESTS, SAVE THE PLANET
Tim Blair
Those carbon-counting geniuses at the IPCC have given everyone an excuse to kill forests:
The accounting irregularity even gives the impression that clearing the world’s forests, which absorb and thereby diminish heat-trapping carbon dioxide, is good for the climate, the scientists write in an article published Friday in the journal Science …According to another study:
“It literally means you can chip up the world’s forests and burn them” for fuel without noting the effect on the world’s greenhouse gases, [study author Timothy] Searchinger said.
Under current accounting methods, a commonly cited global target of limiting carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million in the atmosphere could result in a vast expansion of bioenergy crops, displacing nearly all of the world’s natural forests by 2065.If the IPCC tells us so, we must act. Commence the razing.
===
CAREER ADVICE
Tim Blair
Or maybe it’s diet advice:
“You should go back to eating earwax," remarked Malcolm Turnbull pleasantly to his opponent the Prime Minister …
===
NAME THREE THINGS
Tim Blair
A smart kid interviews her warmenist mother, possibly for a school project:
Apparently snow and tsunamis are caused by global warming. As the kid says: “How so?” Meanwhile, Dad thinks that global warming might cause an ice age.
===
POLITICS OF FEAR
Tim Blair
This is fantastic. Clive Hamilton – the man who is ashamed of his coat and who wishes to ramp up the fear factor – is the Greens candidate for the seat of Higgins.
UPDATE. Some recent background on Higgins, a doctors’ wives seat where an anti-affluence candidate (with bizarre immigration views) may poll impressively.
UPDATE II. In other (potential) candidate news:
Retired rugby league star Hazem El Masri is the first target of a Liberal Party secret six-member “2011 Committee” hoping to wrest government from the struggling ALP.He’d be good.
El Masri has been approached by the Liberal Party to run in the Lakemba electorate vacated by former premier Morris Iemma for the 2011 NSW election.
===
LOOK OUT! HE’S GOT A MAP!
Tim Blair
And it’s interactive:
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has unveiled an interactive map demonstrating the impact of global warming in decades to come, to underline the looming threat.If it’s happening now, how come the map shows events that might happen in decades to come?
The map, presented at London’s Science Museum, shows graphically how climate change could lead to water and food shortages, mass migration and conflict if action is not taken at a landmark summit in Copenhagen in December.
“The reason for publishing this map is that for many people, not only in our own country but around the world, the penny hasn’t yet dropped that this climate change challenge is real, it’s happening now,” Mr Miliband said.
===
THAT’S A SOCIALIST MOP
Tim Blair
Leader mocked. Leno will be shunned:
===
Hamilton stands for Greens - and for fear and less democracy
Andrew Bolt
Clive Hamilton thinks humanity is almost certainly now doomed:
It now seems almost certain that, if it has not occurred already, within the next several years enough warming will be locked into the system to set in train positive feedback processes that will overwhelm any attempts to cut back on carbon emissions. Humans will be powerless to stop the shift to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life.Yet he feels he may as well spend our last years in politics:
Australian Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown has today announced the Greens candidate in the Higgins by-election, Dr Clive Hamilton AM.And he may even win.
It’s actually surprising that Hamilton is trying to win power the democratic way - although it may well be that he’s just advocating the principle of one man, one vote, one time:
(T)he implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of “emergency” responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.Still, Higgins is one of Australia’s wealthiest electorates, filled with the guilty rich, salvation-seekers who may well thrill to a candidate preaching not just a dictatorship and more breaking of laws, but less shopping, too:
According to Hamilton there “has been a relentless ratcheting up of desire”. As a result, we’re working harder and borrowing more. And when we’re not working, we’re shopping. Shopping has become the national past-time, he says. Many people ”would not know what to do with their lives if they could not shop.”In fact, Hamilton demands more poverty for all - an unusual stance for a politician:
We can only avoid catastrophe—including millions dying in the Third World—if we radically change the way we in the rich countries go about our daily lives. Above all, we must abandon our comfortable belief in progress. There could be no greater challenge to growth fetishism and our deepest held assumptions about progress, nor any graver threat to the power of the ‘wealth creators’.... Our profligate consumption is no longer aimed at meeting material needs but at reproducing ourselves psychologically… If, in order to solve climate change, we are asked to change the way we consume, then we are being asked to change who we are—to experience a sort of death.And preaching the economics gauranteed to cause poverty:
Australia, along with the rest of the world, must cut its emissions by at least 60% if we are to stabilise climate change and prevent dangerous disruption to our way of life.And wrapping it all up in a new, mystic faith:
So I think where we’re going is to begin to see a Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi, which will transform our attitudes to it away from an instrumentalist one, towards an attitude of greater reverence. I mean, the truth is, unless we do that, I mean we seriously are in trouble, because we know that Gaia is revolting against the impact of human beings on it.There are other aspects of Hamilton’s philosophy that will be fun to tease out. For instance, he declares he’s running in part on this policy:
With our country once again a laggard nation in response to global warming, and the government and opposition competing to vilify asylum seekers, never has a national and international standpoint been more sorely needed.Yet only three years ago he preached this:
a policy of zero net migration…Which he justified on the basis of likening immigrants to rats:
A famous experiment in the 1960s found that when too many rats are forced to live in a cage of a given size they soon display abnormal behaviour including hyper-aggression, failure to nurture young normally, increased mortality, abnormal sexual patterns and infant cannibalism.Here’s another contradition. Today he claims he’s campaigning against fear campaigns, allegedly over boat people. But only a couple of weeks ago Hamilton said he was all for fear campaigns, at least about global warming:
Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.UPDATE
Clive Hamilton demands even less balance in the ABC’s global warming reporting. What’s outraged him is that Leigh Sales, a warmer, dared to ask Al Gore a few questions about sceptics. Do not question the Messiah! Can you imagine the threat to your freedom to speak under such a man?
Note also how tiny the crowd that’s been drawn by his public discussion with Robert Manne. He may not be quite the crowd-puller the Greens assume.
===
Yeah, yeah, bad Tuckey. But Mr Rudd, about the job you’re doing…
Andrew Bolt
And yet another boat arrives, in what has become almost a daily occurrence. Think this might finally turn the topic of conversation for Labor and the media to the failures in the Rudd Government’s policies, rather than in the Opposition’s?
===
Press pool revolts against Obama
Andrew Bolt
A revolt by White House correspondents against Barack Obama’s attempts to bar Fox News from a news event for daring to be critical of him. Good to see that other journalists realise that this extraordinary attempt to punish dissent is actually an attempt to cow them.
By the way, how loud would the Left howl had Bush tried anything so petulant and against the interests of an open society? And to think that no president in memory has had such a dream run in the press, too.
Glass jaw. Messiah complex. Authoritarian streak. These and other conclusions can, I think, be drawn.
UPDATE
Obama catches flak even on NBC in this war he so stupidly started:
===
Don’t mention the wanted man in Canada, either
Andrew Bolt
A day after Kevin Rudd demanded the Liberals expell an MP for suggesting terrorists might hide among the boat people from Sri Lanka:
One of the 76 migrants who arrived off the British Columbia coast in a cargo ship last weekend is wanted in Sri Lanka for terrorism, according to two sources familiar with the investigation… The screening has so far detected one match with the Interpol database of fugitives. The man is suspected of involvement with the Tamil Tigers, separatist guerrillas outlawed by Canada for terrorism and notorious for their suicide bombings.More on Rudd’s refusal to admit the blinding obvious here.
UPDATE
What Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey actually said:
There could be the occasional terrorist in a boatload of people. If you wanted to get into Australia and you have bad intentions, what do you do? You insert yourself in a crowd of a hundred for which there is great sympathy for the other 99. You go on a system where nobody brings their papers, you have no identity, you have no address.Kevin Rudd’s reaction:
I think these are deeply divisive, disgusting remarks and they do not belong in any mainstream political party… Mr Turnbull should show some leadership and withdraw his support for Mr Tuckey’s preselection as a Liberal candidate for the next election.So will Rudd demand that Michael Danby also be expelled from the, er, Liberal Party?
Labor backbencher Michael Danby, a staunch defender of asylum seekers, said something similar in Parliament on June 18 while listing criminal elements who might exploit weak border protection.
“They include identity thieves, people smugglers, potential terrorists, drug runners and those who traffic in illegal sex workers,” he said.
===
Sexing up a persecution
Andrew Bolt
IT was May 9, in Singapore, and three sailors were being marched off HMAS Success, carrying what possessions they’d scrambled together.
One was Chief Petty Officer Jason Thomas, a family man and holder of several commendations from the Navy for his leadership and “devotion to duty”.
Why he and the two petty officers with him were now being thrown off their ship, after a cursory “equity and diversity health check”, was a mystery to him, and a savage humiliation.
The officers herding them off were yelling at the crew to “clear the passageways and do not look at this person”. Their captain later said “a rotten core” had been “removed”.
Thomas was left in Singapore without a bed or support, and the other two were whisked off to the airport.
Even worse was to follow, in an extraordinary saga that shows how some allegations are too politically loaded now for even sensible people to question, let alone laugh off.
For weeks the Navy would not tell the men their alleged crimes. But in July, and to the trio’s astonishment, Channel 7, clearly briefed by a Navy source, announced they’d run a “sex ledger”.
The allegation ran around the world. It was claimed the men had put a price on the head of every female sailor on board the Success - extra for lesbians and officers - with the money paid out to any man who could bed them.
===
Girl overboard
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s Indonesian solution grows more like John Howard’s Pacific one by the day, as Labor copies what it once demonised:
KEVIN Rudd’s boatpeople strategy will cost more than $50 million to process asylum-seekers on Indonesian soil … Australia had already spent $12m on the building and refurbishment of detention centres, including the one at Tanjung Pinang, as well as on providing medical facilities and diesel generators at detention centres.And remember how the Rudd Government pretended its new Indonesian solution was in fact just a humanitarian arrangement to rush a sick girl on the Oceanic Viking to treatment? To remind you:
Senator Evans says the deal was struck based on the welfare of a sick child. “The child is receiving attention on the ship and so that treatment is occurring, but yes the agreement was based on concern for the child, a humanitarian agreement if you like, to disembark the passengers in Indonesia,” he said.Well, more spin unspun, as the ship is now diverted to yet another port, three days away::
THE 78 asylum seekers aboard the Australian Customs vessel the Ocean Viking were condemned to another three days at sea last night after the ship was redirected to the remote Indonesian port of Tanjung Pinang.So, of course, the Rudd Government announces the child isn’t that sick, after all:
The move came after days of confusion over what to do with the 78, who were plucked from their allegedly sabotaged boat on Sunday.
The child had been suffering dehydration and a fever, but was stabilised yesterday.The spinning of this Government has tipped over into deceit. Any sign yet of the activists who so furiously damned Howard for what Rudd now repeats?
MEANWHILE
SRI LANKAN asylum-seekers have sailed to Australia in a boat donated by Catholic charities to a devastated coastal community in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.
===
A freeze on warming panic
Andrew Bolt
A few cold winters will do that:
The number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming because of pollution is at its lowest point in three years, according to a survey released Thursday.
The poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People&the Press found that only 57 percent believe there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades, and as a result, people are viewing the problem as less serious. That’s down from 77 percent in 2006.
===
Nobbling Howard
Andrew Bolt
Seems a bit petty and mean:
A PUSH to appoint John Howard to a senior position administering rugby league has been torpedoed by the federal Labor minister and South Sydney Rabbitohs diehard Anthony Albanese.Was there any doubt that the man who once ran the country could run something like this?
The Herald can reveal that Mr Albanese was instrumental behind the scenes in lobbying the NRL against giving the former prime minster a role on the code’s new independent commission.
===
Give Obama another prize
Andrew Bolt
Gallup says Barack Obama has suffered the fourth-steepest drop in a president’s approval for a first-year quarter in more than 60 years of polling:
In fact, the 9-point drop in the most recent quarter is the largest Gallup has ever measured for an elected president between the second and third quarters of his term, dating back to 1953.
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