=== Todays Toon ===
A painting depicting the assassination of Perceval. Perceval is lying on the ground while his assassin, John Bellingham, is surrendering to officials (far right)
Spencer Perceval, KC (1 November 1762 – 11 May 1812) was a British statesman and Prime Minister. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. He is the only Solicitor General or Attorney General, and one of very few lawyers, to have been Prime Minister. The younger son of a minor nobleman, Perceval was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, practised as a barrister on the Midland Circuit and became a King’s Counsel, before entering politics at the age of 33 as a Member of Parliament for Northampton. A follower of William Pitt, Perceval always described himself as a ‘friend of Mr Pitt’ rather than a Tory. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation and reform of Parliament; he supported the war against Napoleon and the abolition of the slave trade. His private life was without blemish; a devout Christian, he was opposed to hunting, gambling and adultery, did not drink as much as most Members of Parliament, gave generously to charity, and enjoyed spending time with his twelve children.=== Bible Quote ===
“It is written: " 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord, 'every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.”- Romans 14:11=== Headlines ===
Military judge clears the second Navy SEAL charged in the beating of an Iraqi terror suspect in wake of the grisly killings of four American contractors.Ariz. Immigration Bill Signed
Law makes it a crime to be in U.S. illegally, requires police to ask suspected illegals about immigration status
The Radical Next Door
Man behind 'South Park' threats seemed like the typical boy next door — but he also had a dark side
11-Year-Old Rape Victim Wants Baby
Pregnant 11-year-old girl allegedly raped by stepdad now wants to have his baby — despite pressure from women's groups who want her to have an abortion
Automaker could be in trouble with FTC after ads claim it repaid bailout, omits that it paid with more bailout fundsAriz. Immigration Bill Signed
Law makes it a crime to be in U.S. illegally, requires police to ask suspected illegals about immigration status
Justin Bieber fever hits Australia today - even if most music fans over the age of 15 have never heard of him.Secret file at Storm chief's home
THE NRL last night seized a secret dossier hidden at the home of acting CEO Matt Hanson.
Give homes back, foreigners told on exit
FOREIGN students and temporary residents are set to face tough new rules when buying a house.
Carl Williams beaten beyond recognition
SLAIN gangland killer beaten so badly that paramedics were unable to recognise who he was.
Boy, 11, ages five times faster than mates
HARRY Crowther is the only person in the world with baffling Atypical Progeria Syndrome.
Council bans church's joy and dancing
CHURCH choir hit with $3000 fine for singing too loudly, while some members were caught dancing.
Party ends with five officers attacked
POLICE officers have been attacked by revellers while trying to quell an out-of-control party.
Staff the missing link in health
AFTER a week of political debate over health reform, staff at the coalface at one of Sydney's busiest hospitals are bracing for the benefits they hope will come.
Government staff paid $11.8 million to not work
THE State Government is paying staff a staggering $11.8 million every year to sit around and do nothing. It can be revealed that 164 Government workers remain on the payroll although their jobs are redundant. The struggling Transport and Infrastructure Department accounts for almost a quarter with 40 workers paid to do nothing, including three who have been on the payroll for seven years. A Freedom of Information document reveals there were 164 excess employees across the government agencies in December. But a former HR manager still employed with a government department said the the real figure was much higher. Under the FOI, the Service Technology and Administration Department has eight excess employees listed. "I know for a fact they have in excess of 30 staff, however they fudge the figures by saying they are doing meaningful work inside or outside their department," the woman said.
Rudd last night announced the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World, costing an initial $53 million.
This will be built at the Australian National University, where he graduated with first-class honours in Chinese language and history.
22 die after drinking poisonous liquor
AT least 22 dead, hundreds poisoned after drinking bootleg liquor laced with methanol.
Detroit strip club manager accused of employing 14-year-old topless dancer
The Detroit Free Press said police scheduled a press conference this afternoon to outline the case against the management of the "All Stars Topless Bar", an adult strip club in Detroit. The manager, who has not been identified, faces child sexual abusive activity charges, officials said in a press release.
=== Comments ===
President Obama and Your MoneyBy Bill O'Reilly
Speaking in New York City Thursday, the president told the world that the U.S. financial system is still largely unaccountable and needs new rules to cut down on corruption and speculation.
And that will happen, as Republicans, as well as Democrats, understand that the financial system is far too easy to game. Conmen often run wild.
But the president has to be careful here because the feds cannot run Wall Street. In fact, the feds right now may be leading the country into bankruptcy.
But let's get back to the basic problem. Maybe you are like me and work hard for your money. Maybe you invest, like I do, trusting the system is fair. And maybe you got burned, like I did, when the financial system collapsed in 2008. I had no idea that my brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, was trading bad paper, and apparently the CEO of Merrill, Stanley O'Neal, didn't know either:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STANLEY O'NEAL, FORMER MERRILL LYNCH CEO: Merrill Lynch held mortgage-backed securities, like many other financial institutions and the rating agencies as well as others, we believed carried low risks. Unfortunately, due to a number of unforeseen factors, that turned out not to be the case.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Now, I don't believe Mr. O'Neal. I have no proof he's a charlatan. I simply don't believe the man, and we sent Jesse Watters out to talk with him.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JESSE WATTERS, "FACTOR" PRODUCER: Millions of people lost millions of dollars at Merrill Lynch. You pulled a lot of money out of there and didn't do a very good job. How do you feel about that?
You know, a lot of people trusted you. Mr. O'Neal, you don't have anything to say? You had a $161.5 million golden parachute. You don't have anything to say to any of the shareholders or any of the investors, any of the employees?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
No, he doesn't have anything to say, and here's how bad O'Neal is.
After running Merrill Lynch to the ground, as you heard Jesse say, they had to get rid of him, and he took out more than $160 million bucks. Now that's got to stop. That's got to stop, and that did it for me. I closed all my accounts at Merrill.
Now, I use the illustration because it's so blatant. I trusted Merrill Lynch. You probably trusted financial institutions as well. We were conned, so something has to be done.
But as "Talking Points" has said, relying on the federal government is downright scary. For example, a USA Today investigation found that the banks receiving the most federal bailout money are among those lending the least to you right now. And they pay bigger salaries to their employees and banks that didn't get the bailout money.
So why is the Obama administration permitting that? We get no answer. Reluctantly, I have to support new laws to reform the financial industry. But I have to pray, pray somebody in Washington will finally look out for the folks.
===
Christian Censorship and the Army
By Cal Thomas
Christians in the military with a strong and unapologetic faith in Jesus Christ seem to wind up mistreated in the name of "inclusivity."
At least two things need to be said about the Army's decision to withdraw an invitation to evangelist Franklin Graham to pray at an "inclusive" religious event because Muslim lobbyists inside and outside the Army managed to have their way. First, when will invitations to Muslim speakers be withdrawn? Self-styled spokesmen (and they are always men) for their religion have demonized Christians, Jews and other "infidels" for years. Many of their imams regularly preach sermons throughout the world referring to Jews as "pigs" and the cause of AIDS. They label Christians "cross-worshippers." Many Muslim countries -- most notably Saudi Arabia -- ban the importation of Bibles and even forbid an individual from bringing a Bible for personal use. No synagogues or churches may be built in most of those countries and the few Jews and Christians who are there are persecuted and discriminated against. Some Muslims with those attitudes and/or affiliations with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood organization, are teaching and preaching in America and have engaged in public prayers, sometimes at events organized by a government entity.
The second point to be made is that Christians with a strong and unapologetic faith in Jesus Christ ought to exempt themselves from these "inclusive" events. It is they who are almost always required not to pray in the name of Jesus and to make other acommodations to other faiths with no reciprocity expected from those other faiths.
The Gospel of Christ is not inclusive, but exclusive. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me."
If the Army wants to submit itself to the censorship efforts of Islam, that's the business of the Army. Christians are members of a very different army and don't need to be participating in these dubious ceremonies organized by government for purposes that have little to do with the Kingdom of God. They would be better holding their own prayer services where they can pray for the military in the name of the One Whom they worship.
Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated newspaper columnist and a Fox News contributor.
===
REBELLION FOMENTED
Tim Blair
“The needle on the nation’s psychic barometer has swung to threatening,” reports the Age‘s US correspondent Simon Mann, “attuned to intensifying signs of unrest in a political climate that is drawing gun-toting protesters on to the streets, has sent regard for government to new lows and prompted a dire warning from a former president that someone could get hurt – possibly even the present White House incumbent.” Apparently the deadly Tea Party movement’s “public dissent has resonated with a more extreme fringe – racist and white supremacist groups, anarchists and the like – eager to foment rebellion, and with their number rising across the landscape.”
Imagine how much more frightened Mann would be if these Party-inspired extremists actually did something violent – like, say, firebombing houses and cars or destroying businesses, attacking university buildings and otherwise causing $43 million worth of damage. Why, such incidents might even qualify as “signs of unrest.”
Mark Steyn presents an unmissable response to the current fake panic.
(Via Andrew R.)
UPDATE. James Lileks:
If anyone wanted to make some money, they’d come up with a new bumper sticker for people who have QUESTION AUTHORITY plastered on their car. It would read HOW DARE YOU, and would go right in front of the old one.Read on.
The left’s amnesia over eight years of anti-Bush rhetoric is one thing; their willful contortion of tea party ideas is quite another.
===
RUDD CLUB
Tim Blair
He loves China. He loves Obama. He loves nightclubs. So now Kevin Rudd has his perfect venue:
A nightclub named after the American president, the Obama Entertainment Club, opens Monday in Shanghai, China.Party on, Prime Minister.
===
Rudd turns the greatest challenge into just one more
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd claims he’s still a global warming crusader, but note how a crucial “the” has been downgraded into an “a”.
In 2008:
The biggest challenge the world faces in the decades ahead is climate change. It is the great moral and economic challenge of our time.Now:
It’s very clear cut that whether climate change is topical or not, whether it is popular or not, the reality of it does not disappear. This remains a fundamental economic, environmental and moral challenge… We haven’t changed our view of this.
===
Beecher, Flannery and Melbourne’s climate of conformity
Andrew Bolt
Here’s a fine example of how governments now spend your money to stifle debate, while fellow travellers praise the resulting baas as a clash of ideas.
Victoria’s Labor Government last year appointed ”quality journalism” campaigner Eric Beecher to head its new Wheeler Centre for books, writing and ideas, ostensibly to fix the problem that the state’s books, writing and ideas are in fact increasingly weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. His brief was to make Melbourne once more a “City of Literature”.
I warned at the time that creating a government body to make our writers more interesting and less group-thinky could only make things worse - even without a hopelessly go-with-the-flow Leftist such as Beecher in charge. Correspondence with Beecher simply confirmed he did not even understand the problem, let alone have the will or wit to fix it.
And so it’s proved.
Exhibit A: The Wheeler Centre’s new lecture series, backed by State Government dollars to promote a pet Labor issue:
Thirty of the best minds on the climate change issue, in the one place, at the one time. The Deakin 2010.Beecher, completely blind to the contradictions, deceit and hypocrisy of this boast, simply seconds it:
Addressing the climate problem requires change, innovation and new ways of thinking… Are we brave enough to make the changes – in thought and deed – that are required of us? Are we able to shape this new world, or will it shape us?
In 2010, the Alfred Deakin Lecture Series will be one week of unparalleled debate.... Curated by Professor Tim Flannery, we’ve gathered 30 of the best people addressing the climate problem now. These aren’t the usual suspects spouting fixed positions.
We are ... underpinned by similar objectives: to be innovative, fertile hubs of discussion and debate.Let’s check these astonishing claims.
“Unparalleled debate” with no “fixed positions”?
In fact, not a single one of the speakers is a sceptic. And the organisers are already fixed in the position that global warming is such a threat that “changes ... are required of us”.
Not the “usual suspects”?
In fact, there is no suspect is more usual in such a group-think than the man who “curated” the event, serial exaggerater and false prophet Tim Flannery . And here’s some of the usual suspects he’s gathered to back him up: Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Singer and Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim. Are you in the slightest doubt of the positions of these men on global warming?
But wait. Those names… Are these truly among “the best minds on the climate change issue”?
In fact, those 30 “best minds” also include a British High Commissioner, Kevin Rudd’s head of the Climate Change Department, investment managers, strategy consultants, green advisors, marketing experts and assorted other green carpetbaggers from the vast and terrible industry that’s making a fortune from the greatest public scare campaign of our lives. Of these 30 “best minds”, only one does any original research into global warming science - young enthusiast Ben McNeil.
This is, then, merely a collection of fellow travellers and mainchancers who agree with each other on a colossal scare based on controversial climate models that almost none have studied. And they are brought together not because they have something new to say, but because what they’re guaranteed to say suits the agenda of the Government and its ideological collaborators.
And this, we’re told, is “unparalleled debate”. This will help us to become a “City of Literature”.
Do we laugh or throw up?
===
Rudd abandons yet another stupid policy
Andrew Bolt
Free insulation. FuelWatch. Grocery watch. More “compassionate” boat people policies. Another 260 child care centres. Now the Rudd Government dumps yet another policy that went badly wrong:
COMPLAINTS about foreigners driving up Australian house prices have forced the Rudd government to reinstate a rule it scrapped in 2008 requiring temporary residents to sell their houses when they leave the country…Another junior minister is sent out to reverse what Rudd put in place.
There have been several complaints in recent months about foreign investment in the residential sector, mainly focused on Asian investors outbidding locals at auctions to buy homes for their children studying in Australia…
But last night Assistant Treasurer Nick Sherry issued a statement saying he would reimpose the old conditions and create new measures to further tighten the system and improve compliance.
UPDATE
Laurie Oakes concedes Rudd is ”gutless”, yet seems surprised by what should strike him as not an aberration but Rudd’s defining and utterly characteristic failing:
The rushed planning, lack of oversight, alarming fraud - all the things that made the program such a disastrous failure are laid out. But they should have been evident to people inside the Government all along.
It is astonishing that Rudd failed to realise how bad the mess was until it was far too late, just as he ignored early warning signs about waste and mismanagement in the school building program.
Something seems to have gone wrong with the PM’s political antenna...
===
Teenagers attack police, yet again
Andrew Bolt
From where comes this disrespect for the police? And were the officers of this deliberately feminised force up to the physical challenge:
POLICE officers have been attacked by revellers while trying to quell an out-of-control party in Victoria’s east. The officers were called to the Sale home in Gippsland at about 10.30pm where several fights had broken out at a party…I’ve shown before how little respect police get in the streets, and how some female officers aren’t in the front line when responding:
The event was shut down and the crowd spilled onto the street, where several revellers began punching and kicking police.
One officer was hit in the head with a bottle, another was punched to the right ear and a third was head-butted. In all, five police members sustained minor cuts and bruising in the melee.
The officers used capsicum spray to subdue a 14- and 16-year-old.
===
No niqab behind the wheel
Andrew Bolt
It is a metaphor - a fine against a niqab that cuts a woman’s interaction with the rest of her community:
A FRENCH Muslim woman has been fined for driving while wearing a full-face veil, as the government pushes to ban the garment.The woman’s lawyer has accused police of abusing her human rights, after officers stopped the 31-year-old in the western city of Nantes and fined her 22 euros ($31.50) on the grounds that her niqab - an Islamic veil with a slit for the eyes - restricted her view so she could not drive safely.
===
Has Garrett now turned on Rudd?
Andrew Bolt
I have long argued that Peter Garrett has been made a scapegoat for a monumental failure by Kevin Rudd - the disastrous free insulation giveaway.
Peter van Onselen now explains just why the fault is Rudd’s rather than Garrett’s. But what’s most telling about his account is that it seems Garrett has had enough and is briefing journalists against his disastrous PM, who will cost more of his Ministers their reputation before he’s through:
ENVIRONMENT Minister Peter Garrett has become a scapegoat of the Prime Minister and his Assisting Minister for Government Service Delivery, Mark Arbib…I think Garrett has had enough of Rudd.
The review of the program’s administration, conducted by retired senior public servant Allan Hawke and released during the week, makes clear findings that Garrett’s responses to the problems with the program were appropriate and timely....
Garrett was handed a program he had raised serious concerns about to his Prime Minister for the rushed nature of its implementation. He was not alone. I have been told by a very senior Labor source that Julia Gillard did the same at the special-purpose budget committee…
Hawke also points out that Garrett’s department was not suited to rolling out such a scheme… Garrett knew this and again warned others about the risks… (W)hen Garrett and his department jointly warned the Office of the Co-ordinator-General about concerns attached to the scheme, no action was taken to alleviate the pressure… (T)he OCG, responsible for oversight of all the government’s $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan (which includes the Building the Education Revolution), needed to do more.
Hawke in his review is scathing about the failure of the OCG to get involved… That office is located in none other than Rudd’s own department, with Arbib assigned direct responsibility for watching over its operations..
However, the most serious area to which people’s attention should be drawn is the rush to get the program up and running in the wake of the global financial crisis. It was ... Rudd and his economic inner circle who forced Garrett to rush out the scheme against his better judgment...
===
A mother writes of waste and filling forms
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd is spending up to $1 billion to fix the disaster he caused by spending $1.5 billion on often useless, unnecessary or dangerous insulation.
Meanwhile reader Elizabeth wonders how many more forms she must fill in for the Rudd Government - and how very often - to keep getting a carer’s pension of just over $100 a fortnight for looking after her autistic son:
Dear Andrew,
My name is Elizabeth and I am a 39yo married mother of three boys aged 17, 13 & 7. My husband is an accountant who works full time for and although I am a university qualified accountant, I work as a Family Day Carer, currently working a 36 hour week. I enjoy working with and caring for the children that I have and get great support from my Family Day Care scheme, however the primary reason that I began working as a Family Day Carer was so that I was able to work and at the same time care, for our youngest son Nicholas, who has autism, an intellectual disability and epilepsy. We are very lucky in that his developmental issues were picked up early and although his autism was not officially diagnosed until last year (meaning that we missed out on the Federal Government’s Autism package for those under 7), we received early intervention services for him since he was three years old.
He is a delightful child in his own way – he enjoys playing sport more than anything else in the world. He is not yet able to join in teams as he cannot understand the rules, the need to do follow the rules or even why he has to share the ball around. However we do the best that we can to expose him to as much of it as possible. As much as Nicholas is delightful, he is also not easy to care for. As with most children with autism, he has little concern or understanding of the feelings of others. He repeatedly tells us that he hates us, or doesn’t love us, or will tell either my husband or myself to find a new place to live. He told me that God shouldn’t have made me his mum, because he didn’t want me, and that when he wakes up in the morning I should be gone. I know that he doesn’t really understand, but is still heartbreaking. He finds reading particularly difficult and is in the reading recovery program at school, but each night he ‘melts down’ when it is time to read the reader and get some homework done. Most days are one big argument with him refusing to get out of bed, eat breakfast, get dressed or showered, put shoes on, clean his teeth, eat his lunch, drink his drink, hold hands while crossing roads, do homework, eat dinner, put a jumper on, take a jumper off, listen to a story, go to bed, go out, get in the car, get out of the car, say hello to people who say hello to him or give his parents a hug (let alone a kiss). And this is tiring. Very, very tiring.
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