Headlines Tuesday 30th March 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974. As the first person appointed to the vice-presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment, when he became President upon Richard Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, he also became the only President of the United States who was elected neither President nor Vice-President.

=== Bible Quote ===

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”- 2 Corinthians 5:21

=== Headlines ===

Obama seems to have reclaimed mojo with big wins in health care, a nuke arms deal and recess appointments, but what happened to 'jobs are the No. 1 focus'?

Militia's Mission: Kill Cops?
Militia group in elaborate plot to kill police officers before they were nabbed in raid, FBI says

RNC Fit to be Tied (Up) Over Night Out
Republican National Committee investigating after a member was reimbursed $2G for a night at L.A. hotspot

9 Charged in 'Unrelenting' Bully Case
Students indicted in harsh bullying of Massachusetts teen Phoebe Prince that led to her eventual suicide

Searchers: Remains of Errol Flynn's Son Found
Forensic tests will be conducted on what two searchers believe are the remains of photographer Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn, who disappeared during the Cambodian War 40 years ago.

Achtung! Germans Giving Up on Global Warming
Germans citizens are rapidly losing faith in global warming following the Climate-gate scandals, according to a new report in Der Spiegel.

Banned web list to stay secret
GOVERNMENT doesn't plan on telling the public where to find banned websites, says Minister.

Rugby game focus of teen murder mystery
A PLAYER or spectator at a major tournament may have murdered Michelle Morrissey, police say.

Casino says $42m win was 'malfunction'
LADY Luck played a cruel trick on a gambler after she thought she'd won millions on the pokies.

Winslet keen to flee 'house of horrors'
ACTRESS desperate to escape the apartment in which she fought with Sam Mendes, source says.

'No apology' as speed cams go undercover
POLICE say first use of hidden speed cameras is all about saving lives at Easter.

Confusing traffic sign leads to chaos
DRIVERS turning left at a new intersection are finding themselves facing three lanes of oncoming traffic, and others are wrongly driving into a carpark ramp.

We will destroy terrorists, Putin vows
RUSSIAN PM Vladimir Putin sends chilling warning to terrorists who killed 38 people in suicide attack.

'Door to Afterlife' found in Thebes
A LARGE red granite false door from the tomb of an ancient queen's powerful vizier has been discovered in Luxor, the site of the former ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes.

One dead, one missing in Mount Macedon house fire
ONE person remains unaccounted for after a fatal house fire in central Victoria. - insulation? -ed.

=== Journalists Corner ===

Getting Back to Work!
The economy needs new jobs! So, what's Obama working on now? Neil gets answers!
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Guests: Brit Hume & Al Sharpton
What sparked highly charged rhetoric and accusations during the "Obama care" debate?
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Tea Partiers Take Nevada!
They are fighting against big debt and big government! Can they make Americans take a stand in November?

=== Comments ===

Is Nickelodeon Getting Political?
This is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," March 26, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET!

LAURA INGRAHAM, GUEST HOST: In the "Culture War" segment tonight: Nickelodeon gets political now.

First lady Michelle Obama is being honored by the kids' network for her campaign against childhood obesity. I don't remember Laura Bush getting an honor like that from the Nick folks for her eight years of service to the cause of literacy.

And joining us now from Los Angeles, James Hirsen, the author of the book, great book, "Hollywood Nation." James, great to see you.

JAMES HIRSEN, AUTHOR, "HOLLYWOOD NATION": Good to see you, Laura.

INGRAHAM: So are we making a big deal? I mean, Nickelodeon, how bad can it be? And I know they did all those pro-Obama things leading up to the election, after the election. But is this really a big deal? The first lady is doing all this great work on obesity. Shouldn't she be honored?

HIRSEN: No, it's a big deal. Here's why. Because there's millions of parents that trust this No. 1 children's brand. They trust their kids to watch it. And there's one thing where we should protect childhood innocence, it's in children's programming. Yet Nickelodeon, time after time, throws in political indoctrination. They have an agenda. They have proven it — they have proven in very controversial areas like global warming science. Or maybe not science. Like in the area of immigration. And in the area of homosexual parenting. They got Linda Ellerbee on there doing a news program.

INGRAHAM: That was a disaster.

HIRSEN: They are a disaster. They've shown illegal aliens as victims. They've shown homosexual parenting as this...

(CROSSTALK)

HIRSEN: ...those don't even belong on there.

INGRAHAM: One of the things I love from a few years ago was when Linda Ellerbee was doing one of her features, and they had actually some kids in Berkeley dressed up as prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I think it was at Abu Ghraib. It was at some military black site or something, some prison. And it was basically that these people are being degraded. This was on Nickelodeon. My daughter likes "Dora the Explorer." But now I feel like I just have to lock up the television and don't let them see any of this stuff because it always tends toward the PC, political. Meanwhile, the kids just want to watch cartoons that are kind of fun. And this is why I like the Bugs Bunny, didn't get into any of this stuff.

HIRSEN: Yes. You know, it makes me think of Pink Floyd: "Leave the kids alone." Can you imagine, Laura? You know, this is called the Kids' Choice Award. What if Nickelodeon had a program to enlist kids for school choice, to encourage school choice?

INGRAHAM: Forget it.

HIRSEN: Imagine the uproar. I mean, the green slime would flow. By the way, the first lady is — she's avoiding the green slime. That's a traditional part of this award. She's 3,000 miles away. But it would be demeaning. But also, the president and the first lady are up for an award for the cutest couple.

INGRAHAM: That was adorable. James, are you saying — no, no, no, wait a second. I'm playing devil's advocate here. Are you saying that MTV-owned Nickelodeon wouldn't bestow the same award on a cute conservative couple? I mean, honestly, let's say a show on gun rights? Come on, the Second Amendment or something like that? Come on. I mean, now this big campaign by Nickelodeon is to enlist kids in a form of community organizing for the environment.

HIRSEN: That's right.

INGRAHAM: So kids are going to turn into these little green-iacs crying about the polar bears.

HIRSEN: Yes. This is part of their program called the Big Green Help. The first Kids' Choice Award went to Leo DiCaprio for his work in promoting the Al Gore worldview. And they have a multiplayer online game, which has like nine levels. It's like World of Warcraft. It teaches global warming.

INGRAHAM: Oh yes, it's all indoctrination.

HIRSEN: It's — it's indoctrination. It doesn't belong in children's programming.

INGRAHAM: And guess what, James? James, it's not — it's also not entertaining, OK? Kids want to be entertained and learn.
===
Just the place for a lover of Nazi gear
Andrew Bolt
Yes, anti-"Zionism" need not be the same as anti-Semitism, but, gee, it does sometimes seem like Jew-hatred is being mainstreamed:

Human Rights Watch is one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups… So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.

By day, Marc Garlasco was HRW’s only military expert, the person that its Emergencies Division would send to conflict zones to investigate alleged war crimes. He wrote reports condemning the dropping of cluster bombs in the Russia-Georgia war, the alleged illegal use of white phosphorus by the Israeli army in Gaza and coalition tactics that he said “unnecessarily” put Iraqi or Afghan civilians at risk…

But by night, Garlasco was “Flak88”, an obsessive contributor to internet forums on Third Reich memorabilia and an avid collector of badges and medals emblazoned with swastikas and eagles.

A lavishly illustrated $100 book he compiled and self-published is dedicated to his grandfather, who served in the Luftwaffe. On members-only sites such as Wehrmachtawards.com he was writing comments like “VERY nice Hitler signature selection”; “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”

An interest in Nazi memorabilia does not necessarily suggest Nazi sympathies — but it is hardly likely to play well in the salons where Garlasco’s employer might solicit donations…

His dilemma did not last long. In September a blogger noted that Marc Garlasco had long been reviewing books on Third Reich memorabilia on Amazon — and that he was the same Marc Garlasco who had written controversial HRW reports about alleged Israeli violations in Gaza and Lebanon. The blogger did not accuse him of being a Nazi, but wondered if Garlasco’s “obsession with anti-Semitic Nazi genocidal lunatics” was in any way related to his “apologism for anti-Semitic genocidal Hamas lunatics”.

So how did Garlasco not stand out from the crowd at HRW? Well, maybe because his own views about wicked Israel and the rest of the wicked West had found a good home:

Initially HRW offered Garlasco unequivocal support… Its programmes director, Iain Levine, later went so far as to directly accuse the Israeli government of being behind it…

Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports.. Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event…

Since the Garlasco affair blew up, critics of Human Rights Watch have raised questions about other appointments. An Israeli newspaper revealed that Joe Stork, the deputy head of HRW’s Middle East department, was a radical leftist who put out a magazine in the 1970s that praised the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1976 he attended an anti-Zionist conference in Baghdad hosted by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein… (W)hen Stork was hired by HRW in 1996 he had never worked for a human-rights group, had never held an academic position, and had a history of anti-Israel activism.

Stork’s boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, and most of his colleagues in the Middle East department of Human Rights Watch, also have activist backgrounds — it was typical that one newly hired researcher came to HRW from the extremist anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada..

While HRW was dealing with the fallout from the Garlasco affair, it was already on the defensive as a result of criticism of a fundraising effort in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. This involved two dinners for members of the Saudi elite in Riyadh, at which Sarah Leah Whitson curried favour with her hosts by boasting about HRW’s “battles” with pro-Israel pressure groups, such as NGO Monitor.

(Thanks to reader Nathan.)
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Redefining gender
Andrew Bolt
Associate Professor Barbara Baird, head of Flinders University’s Women’s Studies Department, appears from her profile page to have taken her studies to heart:

From 2005 - 2007 Barbara held an Australian Research Council Discovery grant titled ‘Reconfiguring intimate life: Gender and sexuality as sites of national redefinition in Australian since 1996’.

(No personally abusive comments. She herself has made an issue of her appearance, but only in the context of a discussion on constructs of gender and femininity. You may discuss, seriously for preference, but not abuse.)

UPDATE

Baird is the very model of modern academic:

Barbara Baird lives and works on the land of the Kaurna people, the Indigenous owners of much of the country occupied by the city of Adelaide. She heads the Dept of Women’s Studies at Flinders University. Her research has considered the history and cultural politics of reproduction and sexuality. Her concern is to place the categories of race and nation at the centre of such research via the use of theories of critical race and whiteness studies alongside feminist and queer theories.

UPDATE 2

I’m happy to be confronted as part of some ‘left’ ...

UPDATE 3

Reader Arden notes that Baird has shared a conference stage with Dr Alison Moore of the University of Queensland, author of:

Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the excretory imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.

No, not kidding. (UPDATE: Her essay here.) Her other academic works include:

Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris. Australian Feminist Studies (forthcoming 2009)

Rethinking Gendered Perversion in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886-1930.

Recovering Difference in the Deleuzian Dichotomy of Masochism-without-Sadism.

Colonial Visions of ‘Third World’ Toilets: A nineteenth-century discourse that haunts contemporary tourism

Fin de Siècle Sexuality and Excretion.

Cultures of the Abdomen: Dietetics, Digestion and Obesity in the Modern World.

Just when you think you can satirise modern academia, along comes an academic, laughing…

UPDATE

From Moore’s Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the excretory imagination in nineteenth-century Europe:

This article will show that throughout the late modern era chocolate has been repeatedly associated, both explicitly and symbolically, with excrement…

Chocolate then was the symbolic byproduct of the process by which the European consumer classes domesticated the appropriation of wealth from colonial endeavors and controlled excretory processes in construction of the urban sanitary order… Through this analysis I argue that chocolate has consistently appeared as a symbol of the primitive within the civilized, as the child-like, the sexual, the fetishized, the excremental, which European societies have harnessed, channeled, and transmuted throughout the process of urban sanitization.

Oral contact with excrement represents one of the most charged taboos in modern societies… However, this article will argue that solid eating chocolate has throughout its history been fashioned and marketed in forms visually, sensually and symbolically alike to excrement and that it hence represents a simulacrum of the waste matter that Europeans of the nineteenth century saw as so essential to cast out in the name of a clean, odorless and ordered civilization.
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$800 million to fix what Rudd spent $1.5 billion breaking
Andrew Bolt
The bill for the Rudd Government’s stupidity just went up again:

THE Government’s suspended home insulation program faces the scrap amid new concerns the number of homes requiring remedial work could reach 250,000, soaking up all the money left in the scheme…

That suspension, which was followed by the removal of the high-profile minister in charge of it, Peter Garrett, came after the program encountered severe problems, including four deaths, 120 house fires and more than 1000 electrified houses.

More than $1.5 billion has been spent already and there are now concerns the repair bill for roof inspections and the replacement of botched insulation will consume what money is left in the scheme - an estimated $800 million.
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If Hockey hit the track instead, would Labor stop complaining?
Andrew Bolt
Niki Savva is shocked, shocked, by the double standards:

(In) all the years Kim Beazley was Labor leader, did anyone ever see an opposing politician, senior political correspondent or panel question whether he spent too much time eating to be prime minister? Yet we have had a glutinous debate about whether Abbott spends too much time exercising to be prime minister.

If Abbott is too fit, was Beazley too fat? Of course not.

Yet Labor ministers, who can’t even meow without clearance from the PM, have been out there on the one hand making snide references to the opposition Treasury spokesman as “sloppy” Joe Hockey, then lining up to get stuck into Abbott over his fitness regime.

(Thanks to reader CA.)
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What does “intercepted” mean?
Andrew Bolt
How Kevin Rudd’s navy “intercepts” boat people:

A media release issued by Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor yesterday announced: “HMAS Broome. . . operating under the control of Border Protection Command, today intercepted a suspected irregular entry vessel in the vicinity of Christmas Island.”

In fact, the opposite was closer to the truth: the boat’s 41 passengers and three crew effectively intercepted HMAS Broome.

Sources on the island said the boat sailed under the nose of the patrol boat as it lay at anchor before arriving at Flying Fish Cove, the island’s harbour.

The Australian has been told authorities became aware of the vessel only after Australian Federal Police duty officers on the island received two phone calls from a heavily accented person, apparently an asylum-seeker using a mobile phone.

The Australian has been told that, in one of the calls, a male caller told the officer: “You need to come, you need to come.”

When asked where the caller was, the voice replied: “At Christmas Island. We arrived today.”

(Thanks to reader Pira.)

UPDATE

The costs mount:

The 100th boat ... brings the number of asylum seeker arrivals under the Rudd Government to 4386. At $80,000 each, according to official figures, boat people have already cost taxpayers an estimated $350 million to process on Christmas Island.
The cost of running Christmas Island has already blown out by $132 million this year, according to revised Budget estimates.
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Beware the abuse of the church
Andrew Bolt
Brendan O’Neill on how child abuse allegations are being used to damn Catholicism itself:

Someone has to point out that for all the problems with the Catholic Church’s doctrines and style of organisation – and I experienced some of those problems, having been raised a Catholic before becoming an atheist at 17 – the fact is that sexual abuse by priests is a relatively rare phenomenon....

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which was launched by the Irish government in 1999 and delivered its report last year, intensively invited Irish-born people around the world to report on incidents of abuse in Irish religious-educational reform schools, where the majority of clerical abuse is said to have occurred, between the period 1914 to 1999. For that 85-year period, 253 claims of sexual abuse were made by males and 128 by females. It is important – surely? – to note that these are claims of sexual abuse rather than proven incidents, since the vast majority of them did not go to trial.

The number of sexual abuse claims in these institutions fell for the more recent period: for males, there were 88 claims from the pre-1960s, 119 from 1960 to 1969, 37 from 1970 to 1979, and nine from 1980 to 1989. The alleged sexual-abuse incidents ranged in seriousness from boys being ‘questioned and interrogated about their sexual activity’ to being raped: there were 68 claims of anal rape in reform institutions for boys from 1914 to 1999. Not all of the sexual abuse was carried out by priests. Around 65 per cent of the claims pertain to religious workers, and 35 per cent to lay staff, care workers, and fellow pupils.

Of course, one incident of child sexual abuse by a priest is one too many. But given the findings of Ireland’s investigation into abuse in religious-educational institutions, is there really a justification for talking about a ‘clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel’? ... (It) might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless: very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.

(Thanks to reader TGordon.)
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Our nation of (warring) tribes
Andrew Bolt
Our new Australians keep their ethnic identities and traditions in the approved multicultural manner:

Police are investigating the bashing of a Lebanese teenager outside the Assyrian New Year celebrations in Sydney.

Mohamed Muslmani, 16, was knocked to the ground by a man wearing a ring with the initial J after being told to get out of the festival last night, according to his father Mr Michael Muslmani…

“He’s also got two fractures in his nose, a black eye and bruises on his head where he was kicked when he was on the ground…

Mr Muslmani said there was a traditional enmity between Lebanese and Assyrians but his son had an Assyrian mate who had invited him to the alcohol-free festival at Fairfield Showgrounds. But a group inside the festival told him to leave.

“They then followed him out and 15 to 20 of them got stuck in. It wasn’t provoked at all and as far as I am concerned it was nothing short of racist.”..

Fairfield police confirmed this afternoon they are investigating the attack, which they said earlier had involved up to 40 people in the showground car park, watched by a crowd of up to 300. Police called for backup, including the Riot Squad, when six smaller fights broke out.

Forty fighting as 300 watched?

UPDATE

It’s not just the Lebanese who get on the Assyrian goat:

MORE than 200 members of Sydney’s Turkish and Assyrian communities were separated by police outside the Fairfield Council offices last night after the council approved plans for a monument commemorating what was called the Assyrian genocide. At least 40 police stood between the two groups as the council considered plans for the first ever Australian memorial to Assyrians killed by Turkish forces during World War I and subsequent conflicts…

At 7.30pm the council voted to approve the monument, producing a spontaneous outburst by the Assyrians. ‘’Winner, winner, winner - thank you Australia,’’ one jubilant Assyrian said

(Thanks to reader Jarrod Brady.)