=== Todays Toon ===
English Liberal satesman Spencer Compton Cavendish
Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington KG, KB, PC (18 March 1673[1] – 2 July 1743) was a British Whig statesman who served continuously in government from 1715 until his death. He served as the nominal head of government from 1742 until his death in 1743, but was merely a figurehead for the true leader of the government, Lord Carteret, the Secretary of State for the Northern Department. He is considered to have been Britain's second Prime Minister, after Sir Robert Walpole.=== Bible Quote ===
“For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”- 2 Corinthians 5:14-15=== Headlines ===
A gritty war video circulating on the internet showing soldiers opening fire on a group of men is real, says a military official. WARNING: Video contains graphic scenesReserve Bank hikes interest rates
HOME-OWNERS to pay more on their mortgages after the RBA hikes its rate to 4.25 per cent.
Good luck Abbott, but I'm gone
MALCOLM Turnbull says he will quit politics, Tony Abbott says he hopes they'll still be friends.
Toyota Faces $16M Fine
Transportation Dept. seeks record penalty against Toyota for failing to promptly notify gov't of defective gas pedals
'Troubling' Tirade for Obama
White House spokesman blasts Afghan president's rant in which he accused U.S. of meddling in his country's affairs
Not Over: Aftershocks Rattle California
Scientists warn that aftershocks could continue for days as Southern California recovers from Easter Sunday quake
Gay Activist Found Dead in Oklahoma Apartment
A prominent gay activist was found dead in his Okla. apartment just two days after he filed a brutality complaint against the Tulsa Police Department, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported. - police have been smeared, but there is nothing to suggest they were responsible - ed.
Distressed Apple fans have vented their anger at a group of teenagers who bought an iPad just so they could be the first to smash it with a baseball bat / Picture news.com.auBanks refuse to cap rate rise
BANKS refuse to match NAB promise not to raise interest rates beyond any official increase today.
Jesus would understand if we turn refugees away - Abbott
TONY Abbott says Jesus would understand if he turned asylum-seekers away from our shores.
Paedophile granted access to daughters
COURT says paedophile dad can see daughters as long as gran "never takes her eyes off them".
Reef-wrecker 'may have tried shortcut'
FISHERMAN say bulk carriers taking illegal "rat run" through Great Barrier Reef to save money.
Online lies worth jail time, says senator
PROPOSED law could see you in jail for lying to Facebook friends about age, police warn.
It's no fun being a Royal, says princess
PRINCE Andrew's eldest daughter, Beatrice, claims her job isn't as much of a fairytale as it might look.
Sydney suburbs ready to go boom as population soars
SOME Sydney suburbs will have their populations double or even quadruple in just 25 years, official Government documents reveal, as the city hurtles towards a population of six million people by 2036.
=== Journalists Corner ===
His health care bill passed, but could it cost him his seat?The senator reveals his strategy as he faces down his toughest election year yet!
Springing for More Spending!Will the government's rising debt cause the economy to crumble? We ask how much is too much!
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Inside the Beltway!
Host Bret Baier and Fox New Channel's Team Washington investigate the politics that matter!
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Popularity Free Fall!
We examine the president's plummeting poll numbers! Brit Hume has the analysis!
=== Comments ===
President Obama's Approval Rating Drops to All-Time LowBy Bill O'Reilly
According to a new CBS News poll, just 44 percent of Americans believe the president is doing a good job; 41 percent say he is not; the rest don't know.
That is Mr. Obama's lowest approval rating ever. So what's driving this?
The president responded on CBS:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that when you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it's...
HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: It's beyond that.
OBAMA: It's pretty apparent, and it's troublesome. But, you know, keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out. It happens often when you have got an economy that is making people more anxious and people are feeling as if there is a lot of change that needs to take place. But that's not the vast majority of Americans. I think the vast majority of Americans know that we are trying hard, that I want what's best for the country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
That could be true, but there's no question many Americans are now skeptical of Mr. Obama.
One of the big reasons is health care. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal echoed "The Factor" and said that Obamacare may indeed be unconstitutional because the federal government cannot force Americans to buy a product: health insurance. We said that back in August.
One footnote: The car insurance mandate is driven by public safety. It is also a state issue.
Now, the president sincerely believes that conservatives are hurting his image, but his outrage is selective. The left attacks the president's critics with even more vitriol than the right uses. But Mr. Obama never mentions that. He must not watch NBC News.
"Talking Points" believes it is unemployment, the bitterness surrounding health care, the massive debt and the huge expansion of federal government that is driving Mr. Obama's poll numbers down. It's not about conservative commentators.
Also, the president has lost almost every right-leaning independent voter because he has governed almost exclusively from the left. There is little center in his presentation.
This week's announcement about drilling for oil is an attempt to stop that bleeding. So the president is definitely aware of where he is in the court of public opinion.
"Talking Points" expects that Mr. Obama will use his rhetorical skills to try to calm the waters. We also expect him to take a tougher posture against Iran.
No question there is a hearts and minds battle in America right now, with the election next November the endgame.
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Diverting attention from the big issues
Piers Akerman
LAST year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced his bold vision for a “big Australia”. Over the Easter break he took a revisionist step backward and named Tony Burke as our first Population Minister. - I would add that it is possible for Australia to house many times its current population .. the cost being that infrastructure has to be developed including dams. Dams are flood mitigating. I like the idea of aquifers, but not at the cost of building more dams. It is technically feasible to flood inland Australia and make Australia a vastly larger breadbasket, but I think greenies just want to remove people from the planet instead. - ed.
Wazza replied- Wazza, you are wrong. I’m so disappointed with ALP adherents who don’t like people. But I’m more disappointed when conservatives express similar views. Wazza, immigration has been happening in earnest for many thousands of years. It is by no means certain that Aborigines are from only one migration. Even the first settlers were of diverse ethnicities. The debt we are experiencing is directly related to bad ALP governance .. not migration. It is just as well we don’t live in an Athenian democracy. Their voters were all male, and over thirty. They didn’t accept anyone not born in Athens. And they lost, which is why Romans built roads to other places, not Athenians. I’ve not got much Italian blood, but I recognize their strengths. - ed.
Migrants are the single biggest cause of our debt burden.
Since immigration started with earnest and I might add, without a popular vote,Australia’s debt has soared.
700 billion private debt and 132 billion public,it is now out of control.Infrastrucure spending,housing and credit card debt will increase it to over 2000 billion of debt if we reach the undemocratically set population target of 35 million.
This sort of debt levels is what sent countries like the US and UK bankrupt.
We are well on the way.
Wazza replied- Wazza, I am sure you have had the best education NSW ALP can provide, but you are wrong. My great great great great Grandfather came to Australia from Canton province in China where he was born in 1796, arriving in Sydney in 1818. He owned land and ran a pub which he built. He also provided specialised services like funerals for Chinese peoples .. well before the gold rush. Get this, he had a publican license when lots of white folk missed out .. maybe it was because there was a need to service that community too? When your history is wrong on so many small points, when does it become wrong on the larger ones?
DD Ball.I am not wrong.
This topic is about Australian Immigration.
Not some philanthropic theory on the immigration patterns of Cro Mangnon Man in the last two million years.
Australia’s immigration exploded expotentially from the the 1970s along with our debt.That fact is irrefutible.
I am dissappointed that Conservatives here push their own one sided agendas and then attempt to justify it by seeking the moral high ground with unsubstantiated falsifications.
“Even the first settlers were of diverse ethnicities”
The first settlers were subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Their gene pool was that of Anglo Saxon,Anglo Celtic origins.
Asians came here later during the Gold Rush but their numbers were of no consequence to alter the Social impact of the wider community nor alter Australia’s debt burden.
This was not an all come society like today,so please,do not engage in Retro History from the Black Arm brigade or perhaps you would be better served by joining the Labor Party. - Wazza replied
Debt and Immigration.
“Will Rudd Government’s high immigration program turn Australia into Argentina?”
“According to the Former Minister for Finance, Senator Peter Walsh, Australia’s immigration program during the late 1980s was dramatically expanded - primarily because of pressure on the Federal Government by ethnic leaders. By the late 1980s, immigration had imposed massive economic costs on Australia. High levels of immigration increased annual population growth to over 1.5 per cent, the highest in the developed world. According to Mr. Stephen Joske, an economist with the Australian Parliamentary Library, immigration increased demand for basic infrastructure - such as housing, hospitals, roads, and schooling. Because of Australia’s low levels of domestic savings, investment capital for such infrastructure had to be imported from overseas, adding up to A$8.0 billion each year to Australia’s current account deficit.
By the early 1990s, Australia - with a population of only 17 million - had accumulated a foreign debt of over A$140 billion, equal to 40 percent of GDP and exceeding other major ‘debtor’ countries such as the former Soviet Union. A key cause of this debt ‘blowout’ was the high and unsustainable levels of immigration during the late 1980s.”
http://candobetter.org/node/666#comment-1019
The debt has exploded past 140 billion.It is now over 650 billion(private) plus the Rudd spendothon 132 billion and rising fast.
Next stop Argentina?
The anti chinese feeling began to express itself during the gold rush. I would point out that my ancestor married an illiterate Irish girl who came to Oz in 1816 as a daughter of a convict (they had reunions then too). Also, in subsequent generations his offspring males married more illiterate irish girls too .. and possibly some mixed blood aborigines. His grand son fought for NSW in the Soudan.
My point being Australia has been ethnically diverse for longer than you give her credit. - ed.David replied
I agree with you DD Ball. Immigration is a good thing. All you have to do is get a coffee in a country town and you will see why. There was comments made by a blogger on an earlier Piers article commenting on the amount of Asians on the train between Eastwood and Epping. I had a look the other day and found that there was about 50% asians. I also realised that the rest of the train was filled with immigrants - there was a not an aborigine amongst any of us. Really this great nation was built on immigration.
What I believe is that we need is to be selective with our intake as we have been in the past. A lot of immigration is governed by the money in the bank not the talent nor the work ethic. As our friend Tim has said we should chase the brightest and the best. I couldnt agree more.
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AGREED
Tim Blair
“Australia’s prime minister deserves more scorn.” (Via Instapundit). Meanwhile, one of Australia’s more unusual political careers may finally be over.
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AUSTERITY FOR LIFE
Tim Blair
Understandably distraught over the death ten years ago of his sister, British author Martin Amis imagines a better outcome:
Amis said he wished his sister had converted to Islam. “To this day I have this wish – she was always religious and she converted to Catholicism. I wish she had converted to Islam. She might still be alive because of the continence of Islam, the austerity, the demands it makes on you. I just sort of helplessly think it every now and then. She would only be 56 now and she’d still be here,” said Amis …Inasmuch as Islam would have barricaded Amis’s sister from the temptations that killed her, he’s probably right. But she’d also have been saved by being hospitalised or imprisoned, or by joining an extremely austere Christian faith. She could have lived as Western women lived in the 18th century. There are options.
Sally Amis, whom the author has described as “pathologically promiscuous”, died aged 46 after periods of depression and alcoholism. Her brother believes that the structure of Islam might have saved her life.
(Via Harry Hutton)
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IRON TERRIER
Tim Blair
James Morrow takes issue with recent pet-naming criticism:
There’s nothing wrong with naming pets after admired figures in history or politics. Here in the Morrow household, the resident Jack Russell is named Maggie, in honour of the pioneering woman politician, Margaret Thatcher.
Criticism withdrawn.===
THEY WALK
Tim Blair
Back in the old home town, citizens thrive on our own local version of Obamacare:
Hundreds of disgruntled patients fed up with waiting too long for treatment walked from Werribee Mercy Hospital’s emergency department last year, according to new figures.They arrived sick then walked out without any medical intervention at all. It’s the miracle of state healthcare, people! Kentucky walked as well, after road-testing an Obamic system for ten years.
Data obtained by the state opposition under Freedom of Information reveals that between July and September, 474 people left without being seen by a doctor.
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IF THEY HAD THEIR TIME AGAIN
Tim Blair
Bad decision #1:
A car-jacking suspect messed with the wrong vehicle Friday night in a Kirkland parking lot.Bad decision #2:
A pit bull rescued earlier from an illegal dog-fighting ring was sitting inside in the car – and that dog wasn’t taking any more passengers.
The small gang of Somali pirates fired on an approaching ship, hoping their midnight attack would bring them millions in ransom. The ragtag bandits, though, had taken on far more than they could handle: a U.S. warship …Bad decision #3:
It was not the first attack against a Navy ship, but it underscored the fact that most pirates aren’t terribly sophisticated, said Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the British think tank Chatham House.
Dozens of women have walked topless through downtown Portland, in the US state of Maine, in order to bring attention to what they claim is a double standard when it comes to the public display of upper torsos …
Event organiser, Ty MacDowell … said she was surprised by the number of men who showed up with cameras.
“We should be able to walk down the street and not have this many men taking pictures of us,” a participant shouted.
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Dear Mr Adams: here’s your inspiration
Andrew Bolt
Two years ago a collective of our snowfield socialists - including the ABC’s Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, the Greens’ Kerry Nettle and Kevin Rudd’s nephew Van Thanh Rudd - begged Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come teach Australians a lesson:Every country has its own traditions and culture and has to find its own solutions, but what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in AustraliaSince then this “source of inspiration and ideas” been teaching our closet totalitarians lots of lessons, such as how to shoot students, close down critical TV stations and create shortages.
Here’s Chavez’s latest lesson:
When Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni issued a ruling in December that irked President Hugo Chavez, he did little to contain his outrage. The president, contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret intelligence police to arrest her.(Thanks to reader Mark.)
Then the agents took her to the overcrowded women’s prison in this city of slums near Caracas. They put her in a cell near more than 20 inmates whom Afiuni had sentenced. “I’m in this hell because I had the temerity to do my job as a judge in a way that didn’t please Chavez,” said Afiuni, 46.
Since Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Chavez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions. The arrests have taken aim at some of Chavez’s most prominent critics ahead of legislative elections in September, and they illustrate Chavez’s attempts to tighten control over institutions like the judiciary.
Senior officials in Chavez’s government, including Attorney General Luisa Ortega, say the most recent arrests were necessary to suppress conspiracies or to prosecute people whose comments were deemed offensive. In Afiuni’s case, Ortega said the judge had illegally freed the businessman Eligio Cedeno, who had been jailed on charges of circumventing currency controls.
The imprisonment of Cedeno, who had previously financed opposition politicians, was explicitly criticized last year by a panel of United Nations legal experts after his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law.
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Today’s boat
Andrew Bolt
The more we let in, the more we invite:
Another boat carrying 22 asylum seekers has been intercepted off Australia’s north-west coast.
Intercepted?
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France debates the warming faith
Andrew Bolt
At last a debate - but sadly not in the country most likely to do something stupid about global warming:
France’s National Academy of Sciences will hold an official debate on climate change to try to defuse this newly explosive issue.(Thanks to reader Neville.)
The Academy of Sciences debate, expected to be held by October of this year, follows two months of heated debate on radio and television, during which France’s two most prominent sceptics, Claude Allegre and Vincent Courtillot [a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council], have sown great doubt in the minds of a once unskeptical French public. Allegre’s new book, L’imposture climatique (The Climate Fraud), has especially caused the French public to reconsider the conventional wisdom about global warming. In this runaway best-seller (110,000 copies sold to date), Allegre, France’s most celebrated scientist and a former Science Minister in a socialist government, calls the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a “mafia-like system” that promotes a “baseless myth” about climate change.
In an attempt to stop the erosion of their public support, some 410 establishment scientists petitioned the current science minster, asking her to rebuke the skeptics and to express confidence in the climate research community. Her response was to turn to France’s National Academy with a request for a debate on the subject. The Academy’s president, Jean Salençon, readily agreed in the hopes that an airing of the issues would calm some of the fury on the subject.
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It might be called a genocide if the farmers were black
Andrew Bolt
The murder of so many farmers would be huge news if it wasn’t for their colour…
Death has stalked South Africa’s white farmers for years. The number murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994 has passed 3,000…
The vulnerability felt by South Africa’s 40,000 remaining white farmers intensified earlier this month when Julius Malema, head of the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) youth league, opened a public rally by singing Dubula Ibhunu, or Shoot the Boer [see video below], an apartheid-era anthem, that was banned by the high court last week.
Malema’s timing could hardly have been worse. Last weekend in the remote farming community of Colenso, in KwaZulu-Natal, Nigel Ralfe, 71, a dairy farmer, and his wife Lynette, 64, were gunned down as they milked their cows.
(Thanks to readers Spencer and Terry. WARNING: FIRST VIDEO CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES.)
UPDATE
A list and pictures of some of the dead here.===
Save the planet! Kill a vulture
Andrew Bolt
(Thanks to reader Grant.)
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Going feral
Andrew Bolt
Scenes from my feral city. On the buses (above - WARNING, bad language), and on the street:
There were three blokes in an old Toyota LandCruiser… All three seemed to be sucking on stubbies or bourbon and cokes.But how else can a feral make their mark in this world, when we’ve left them inarticulate and unlettered - doomed to the underclass:
As a young female cyclist came up alongside, the braveheart in the back did something that only a lunatic or someone on drugs or drunk could do. He deliberately opened the door and she hit it, smashed into the road and fell screaming as her head hit the gutter… Do you know what the three inside the car did? They laughed, slammed the door shut and tried to drive away. I was on the footpath not two metres away and felt useless and just a little frightened to act.
AN astonishing four million Australian workers have poor language, literacy and numeracy skills and cannot understand the meaning of some everyday words…The feral culture is a black joke to the harassed authorities who must struggle with the consequences:
Among the terms that are too difficult for some workers are “hearing protection” and “personal protective equipment is required”, according to a report by Skills Australia for the Rudd Government. The words that many do not understand include: immediately, authorised, procedure, deliberate, isolation, mandatory, recommended, experience, required and optional.
A POLICEMAN who mistakenly sent an email labelling Frankston North people “fat, smelly F wits” to a member of the public is being investigated by the Ethical Standards Department…No surprise, then, that this is not just necessary but popular:
“Stop parking at McDonald’s!” the email reads. “Your (sic) taking up the parking space of some fat, smelly lower class F wit from Frankston North who needs to survive on 20,000 calories a day to maintain their disability support payments from Centrelink ... so STOP IT.”
VICTORIA would get an extra 1600 frontline police officers under a Liberal state election promise to make our streets safe.
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Catastrophic slick of hype detected on Barrier Reef
Andrew Bolt
It’s the great slick of hype that’s the real threat:Andrew Jeremijenko on ABC2 News Breakfast yesterday on the threat from grounded coal carrier Shen Neng 1And just how great an environmental disaster was the huge oil spill of the Exxon Valdez really? No spill has been more demonised and exploited, but here’s the findings of a study into the true damage:
WE’VE seen in the Exxon Valdez that there have been long-ranging effects and we shouldn’t be allowing these things to happen.
Andrew Wight on Fairfax’s Brisbane Times on March 25 2009 plays the Exxon Valdez card:
QUEENSLAND authorities had failed to heed the lessons of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and have responded inadequately to the massive catastrophe unfolding on Moreton Bay, experts said yesterday. Occupational and environmental medical specialist, Andrew Jeremijenko said history was repeating itself off the southeast Queensland coast. “Moreton Bay is just as vulnerable as Prince William Sound. As more of the oil gets to shore, we are going to see the same effects occur [as in Alaska],” he said.
Oil leak from Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in March 1989:
38,500 tonnes
Oil on board the Shen Neng 1 on Saturday:
975 tonnes.
Oil leak from the Pacific Adventurer in Moreton Bay in March 2009:
270 tonnes
Anna Bligh on ABC, March 13, 2009:
MY priority is to have teams of people out there cleaning this mess up to protect wildlife in what may well be the worst environmental disaster that Queensland has faced.
Reporter James Kelly on ABC’s Lateline on March 12, 2009:
KELLY: This green turtle is one of the innocent victims.
Zeb Felmingham, resort worker: We had a couple of pelicans that sort of got covered in oil a fair bit.
Official report into Pacific Adventurer disaster by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, February 2010:
OVERALL, 16 oiled wildlife were treated..The total oil related mortalities were three dead animals, comprising one sea snake, one little tern and one petrel species.
We review studies of four taxa—pink salmon, sea otters, harbor seals, and several species of seabirds—widely believed to have suffered severe impacts from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. These studies were conducted over a 10-year postspill period and included prespill information where possible. They demonstrated that earlier suggestions of negative impacts may have been unfounded (harbor seals) or that the species either exhibited no obvious detrimental effects of the spill (pink salmon population runs, population density and habitat occupancy of half of the 23 seabird species examined) or indicated impacts followed by clear evidence of subsequent recovery (sea otters, the remaining seabird species).That study includes a warning to activists - and to the journalists now, alas, among them:
The results of such studies must also be interpreted objectively, free of preconceptions about spill effects and divorced from advocacy positions.
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Labor dines at the trough with its rich mates
Andrew Bolt
How sweet, seeing so many businessmen hand over $5000 a head with not the slightest thought of getting anything in return:
THE well-manicured streets of Toorak are the new battlefront in the row over political donations and election-year fund-raising, with the family of trucking tycoon Lindsay Fox set to host an exclusive $5000-a head soiree for Premier John Brumby and senior ministers.Of course he hasn’t:
Business sources have confirmed that Melbourne’s corporate elite - including members of the wealthy cardboard, retail and property empires run by the Pratt, Gandel and Lieberman families - are to dine with Mr Brumby at a Labor Party fund-raiser at the Toorak mansion of Andrew Fox next Tuesday.
Mr Fox is the head of the property and development arm of his father Lindsay’s transport and logistics empire, Linfox....
Yesterday, Andrew Fox would only say: ‘’I have never asked a politician for anything in my life.’’
Trucking company Linfox has considered constructing a new $200 million track at Avalon near the airport, where night racing would be catered for. Andrew Fox, director of Linfox, told the Herald Sun that the new venture will help to save a large amount of money in the long term. Fox’s plan involves a partnership with the state government ...UPDATE
And this sort of thing is pure coincidence:
QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh has defended the handing of lucrative school building contracts to a top Labor Party donor.Not criticising, Ms Bligh, just noticing:
Education Queensland, which awarded construction contracts worth $490 million without calling tenders in the first round of the federally funded Building the Education Revolution program, has handed just over a third of the $847m in second-round contracts to companies owned by the Leighton group.
The same companies donated $316,000 to the ALP in 2008-09.
But Ms Bligh yesterday declared it a “cheap shot” to criticise the contractors.
Leighton and its subsidiaries Thiess and John Holland are managing BER contracts worth $310m in Queensland. With management fees of 6 per cent, the companies will get $18.6m for the work.UPDATE 2
Another political donor, Baulderstone, has been awarded construction contracts worth $107m, earning $6.5m in fees.
Australian Electoral Commission documents show Leighton, Thiess and John Holland collectively donated $316,000 to the ALP and $186,000 to the Coalition in 2008-09.
Baulderstone donated $25,000 to the Labor Party and $2775 to the Coalition parties.
The other construction managers—Abigroup, Hansen Yuncken, Laing O’Rourke and Watpac—which each got just over $100m in contracts to manage—do not have any record of donating to political parties in 2008-09.
Speaking of mates rates corruption rorting an extraordinary coincidence:
THE federal government’s $3.2 billion in nation-building health and hospital investments overwhelmingly favour Labor electorates and marginal Coalition-held seats that could tumble at the coming election. ..According to figures from the federal Department of Health and Ageing, Labor electorates have been allocated $1.83bn, or 72.6 per cent, of the $2.52bn in health fund investments designated for a specific location.
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One of these men is informed
Andrew Bolt
Guess which one is informed, and which trades in images?
Former NSW Premier and amateur historian Bob Carr:
Alabama is gun-toting, Palin-embracing and church-going, but it contains a surprise. It now celebrates the turbulent struggle for civil rights in a trail of extraordinary museums. Moreover it has done this without any white backlash, as if the heirs of Governor George Wallace — ‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’ — have embraced black struggle as part of the state’s official history.Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
Robin Williams should go and spend a bit of time in Alabama before he frames comments about anyone being particularly redneck.The judges aren’t kind of Rudd.
(Thanks to reader D.)
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Obama pitches as he governs
Andrew Bolt
Obama to the Left and overinflated. Bush, however....
UPDATE
Makes Kevin Rudd seem succinct:
Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.(Thanks to reader Watty.)
“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.
Obama ,,, then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer - more than 2,500 words long -- wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map").
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March warm
Andrew Bolt
Continuing warm, thanks to an el Nino.
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