=== Todays Toon ===
H.H. Asquith by Spy
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG, PC, KC (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928) served as the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. He was the longest continuously serving Prime Minister in the twentieth century until early 1988=== Bible Quote ===
“As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.”- Ecclesiastes 11:5=== Headlines ===
Death toll hits 22 in third day of bloody clashes between Thai government and Red Shirt rioters as conflict moves closer to 'civil war' in heart of BangkokNew Snag in Oil Leak Fight
BP's latest attempt to contain oil spewing into Gulf of Mexico hits new hurdle, interior secretary says
What to Cut? You Decide
GOP takes 'American Idol' approach to budget cuts, offering voters chance to decide what goes and what stays
Will Space Junk Delay Shuttle Mission?
Atlantis flight controllers monitoring debris threatening to come too close to the International Space Station
Google Says It Mistakenly Collected Data About Websites People Viewed
The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks.
Day-care centre 'locked child in garage'
A FAIRFIELD Council early learning centre is being investigated for leaving a child under five locked in a garage. The Department of Community Services and the NSW Ombudsman have launched investigations into claims the toddler was locked up for "an extended period of time". Authorities admitted the child and its family were left in "obvious distress" but refused to detail the circumstances of the incident. The council - which could face fines over the affair - said it had also appointed an external investigator. "As a father and grandfather, I was deeply concerned to hear about the incident that occurred at the Cabramatta Early Learning Centre on February 12," Fairfield mayor and Cabramatta MP Nick Lalich said. "Council has a high expectation of its childcare centres, and this incident doesn't reflect the level of service we strive to provide at all times. Council takes the responsibility as custodians of children in our care very seriously." - While Lalich is quick to claim that he is cooperating, he seems to be shifting the onus and blame to others. Maybe if he wasn't too busy to be involved in the day to day running, he might know some of the people involved. In fact, I suspect this is partly his fault. - ed.
Thailand's Prime Minister warns there is "no going back" for the military as pitched battles continue to rage across the capital. Warning: images of a disturbing nature'Millionaire' Jess to sail again
WHAT'S next for Australia's newest hero? Big sponsorship deals, Olympic gold . . . and school.
Five reasons Abbott could topple Rudd
OUR expert reveals what could take Lib Leader all the way to the Lodge - and what could stop him. - seems like another slimy invention of a Rudd supporter wanting to diss Mr Abbott with faint damns - ed.
Carl's last boast: police gave me hookers
GANGSTER claimed authorities let him out of jail for night with two Tasmanian prostitutes.
Celebrity chef roasted for unjust sacking
NEIL Perry's dismissal of pregnant employee is "nothing short of appalling", rules labour tribunal.
Revealed: Australia's most hated TV ad
NANDO'S topless, pole-dancing mum is the most complained about commercial of the decade.
Sober-up cells for public drunks
DRUNKS would be arrested and escorted by police to special "sobering up" cells under new laws the State Opposition will implement if it wins government. - meanwhile the ALP have them trawling the streets and blaming them for the poor ALP governance - ed.
Arsonists target Mohammed cartoonist Lars Vilks
THE house of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who sparked controversy by drawing the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, was targeted in an arson attack. "The damage is rather minor. Part of the front is blackened and some windows were broken," police spokeswoman Sofie Oesterheim said. "The fire went out by itself." Police found glass bottles containing gasoline inside the house, which was empty at the time of the attack. The arson attack came just days after Vilks was beaten while giving a lecture at Sweden's Uppsala University.=== Comments ===
Even Labor admit that Rudd must goPiers Akerman
IN politics, the point of difference is everything. In 2007, Kevin Rudd sold himself to the Australian people as John Howard-lite. - I wouldn’t expect the ALP to change leaders before the election. That is not their style. True ALP governance would have the leadership change after the election. The lie will be floated and people who vote ALP will vote for the lie, as has happened before. The ALP is supposed to be about Machiavellian politics and cleverness. So the ALP supporters expect them to make hard decisions that favor the ALP. Favoring the ALP does not mean supporting the Australian economy and never has. Instead it means supporting those parasites that rely on the ALP for their extra funding. The result is we get things like desalination instead of Dams. There are numerous examples of what I have just written in each state, and federally. The Libs are not going to win government by exposing this truth, but by showing that the ALP are also harming themselves and not capable of administering to even their own parasites. To change the minds of ALP supporters, the Libs don’t need to lean to the left or right, but to show that the world will continue if they achieve office. That there won’t be retribution for the ALP hangers on, but that they will govern for all. They cannot expect that the ALP flunkies will benefit from Lib power, but so long as criminals are put away, those who were blessed in office will still be able to practice as well as others. Otherwise those flunkies will have to take extreme measures to keep the ALP in office.
We can see this practise in NSW with the sudden shift to the ALP last election .. there was no confidence in the corrupt powers that they could survive under the Libs. The problem is, the Libs can’t look to be too good in office, or the opposition to them will be too large. But they can’t look to be inept like the ALP, as their constituents won’t stomache that. - ed.
Piers repliesYes Piers, spot on. I forgot the Drover's Dog won that election. I would hate for it that another dog would win this coming election. While the polls show a shift towards the Libs, it beggars belief that the ALP are so close to maintaining government. I guess it is hard to convince voters they ever made a mistake.
DD Ball has forgotten what happened to Bill Hayden weeks before an election, He was axed.
Still, the rise of Hawke doesn't change my thesis much. Hawke was still an insider who promised to maintain status quo or more directly favor the ALP mates. Also, that was opposition transition to government, for the ALP to change in government would be to acknowledge their power brokers are not in charge right now .. something their power brokers won't want to admit. Rudd is a serious liability to his own side too. - ed.
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SAID NICELY
Tim Blair
A lesson in confrontation from New Jersey governor Christopher J. Christie:
| Gov Christie calls S-L columnist thin-skinned for inquiring about his 'confrontational tone' |
If only these protests met some resistance
Andrew Bolt
There are not many signs in this scandalous persecution that free speech can survive large-scale Muslim immigration:THE house of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who sparked controversy by drawing the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, was targeted in an arson attack.UPDATE
“The damage is rather minor. Part of the front is blackened and some windows were broken,” police spokeswoman Sofie Oesterheim said…
The arson attack came just days after Vilks was beaten while giving a lecture at Sweden’s Uppsala University.
In 2007, Swedish regional daily Nerikes Allehanda published Vilks’ satirical cartoon to illustrate an editorial on the importance of freedom of expression.
The cartoon prompted protests by Muslims in the town of Oerebro, west of Stockholm, where the newspaper is based… An al-Qaeda front organisation then offered a bounty to anyone who murdered Vilks and Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief Ulf Johansson.
Four men and three women, all Muslims originally from Morocco and Yemen, were arrested in southern Ireland in March over an alleged plot to assassinate the artist.
But how reluctant is the West to even discuss this issue? Watch the astonishingly evasive US Attorney General Eric Holder refuse to even discuss the common factor behind the Fort Hood massacre, the attempted Times Square bombing and the Christmas Day “underwear bomber”.
Good God, the man cannot even say the words “radical Islam”. How can you fight what you don’t even dare name?
UPDATE 2
Mark Steyn says this fear of confrontation goes far beyond the US of Barack Obama:
Also last week, the head of Canada’s intelligence service testified to the House of Commons about hundreds of “second- or third-generation Canadians” who are “relatively well integrated” “economically and socially” but who have become so “very, very disenchanted” with “the way we want to structure our society” that they have developed “strong links to homelands” that are “in distress.” Homelands such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.UPDATE 3
Hmm. If you’re wondering what those countries might have in common, keep wondering. No words beginning with “I-” and ending with “-slam” passed the director’s lips. If the head of the Crown’s intelligence service has narrowed his concerns about “disenchanted” “second- or third-generation Canadians” to any demographic group in particular, evidently it’s classified information and can’t be disclosed in public.
And in Australia, feminist academics are trying to find excuses for not opposing even the identity-obliterating burqa:
We haven’t bothered to ask Muslim women what the burqa means to them, because we’ve fallen into an entrenched colonial habit of thinking ‘’less civilised’’ women are oppressed and need us to liberate them, this time with spectacular arrogance, by banning them from having any choice.That cringeing retreat, in which we hold ourselves to be the truely uncivilised - and thus abandon the values that showed we were not.
What if Muslim women look at Western women’s made-up faces and see gender oppression? What if they see plastic surgery as an effacement of identity? What if they see wearing the burqa as a means to deflect the behaviour of drunken drongos? Maybe showing their faces has become a display of intimacy, trust and love that means ‘’Being At Home’’?
UPDATE 4
Colonel Neville on the spread here of the intellectual poison of “anti-Zionism” - so often a barely disguised Jew-hatred:
Currently there is an Islamic Jew hatred “art display” ... being held at Chapel off Chapel right in the heart of groovy Prahran, where I live. No really.(Thanks to readers John and Paul.)
Sonja Karkar of Women For Palestine says in her booklet on display there, called “The Dark Side of Israel”, and I quote: “..their [the Jews] most powerful narrative of the Holocaust serves as a useful reminder of Jewish victimhood and Western guilt..” Quite.
And “..millions of Palestinians have been made to pay in blood and unrelenting oppression for Israel’s existence..” “..this ethnic cleansing..”
“We hear over and over again about democracy in Israel, but it is no democracy...” And “..there is little actually in Israel to compare with the more egalitarian societies of Western countries, especially Australia.”
“Israel may try every sophisticated means to extinguish the Palestinian people…
Israel was a mere idea in the minds ambitious men”.
The film night featured ‘The Zionist Story’ and ‘The Land Speaks Arabic’. I’m sure they were a delight.
Other pamphlets are ‘Israeli Apartheid’ by the discredited Jew hater Ben White, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ by the jihadist Ramzy Baroud.
And then read the BEYOND BELIEF article in The Age Insight Saturday May 15 section page 10 has an interview with Singaporean Islamist Eeqbal Hassam, who has worked with Jennet Cole-Adams, director of curriculum services at the Australian Curriculum Services, to publish a book to be used in Australian primary and states schools, titled ‘Learning from one another: Bringing Muslim Perspectives into Schools‘. No really.
The Age and I quote: “..this month he and Cole-Adams begin a series of national workshops to educate non-Muslim primary and secondary teachers about the challenges of reaching and teaching Muslim students.”
[Here’s the kicker:] “The one-day funded by the National Centre for Excellence for Islamic Studies through a grant from the Myer Foundation, will be held in every state and the ACT and will involve about 500 teachers.
The workshops are split into three sections. The first - incorporating Muslim perspectives and Islamic content into the curriculum - includes giving the Muslim perspectives on the Crusades, the Islamic contribution to mathematics and even Islamic graffiti art, of which there are two prominent examples, in Spark Lane in the CBD and Broadmeadows.” End quote.
No, really.
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Let them drink Perrier
Andrew Bolt
The head of the NSW Natural Resources Commission is against damming rivers to give Sydney drinking water:
If we dam a river, we may lose an oyster industry.
What would he have for an entree then?
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If Rudd doesn’t call Brown, he’s not sincere
Andrew Bolt
We’re now told by that Kevin Rudd showed in his temper tantrum on the 7.30 Report last week that he really does believe in his emissions trading scheme, after all.
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard appeared to differ in her view, arguing the Prime Minister’s response showed he was passionate about climate change.Oh yeah? Sunday Age warming believer Paul Daly calls him out:
(Lindsay) Tanner, the Finance Minister, wrote… “...If the Greens had voted with Labor, the Senate would have passed the government’s climate change legislation, because two Liberals crossed the floor to vote with us....”As Daly alludes to, Rudd great conviction on climate change was made hostage to nothing more than a determination to snooker the Liberals and deny the Greens any credit. Politics over principle.
is true that the Greens voted against the government’s emissions trading scheme legislation on the grounds that they believed its low greenhouse reduction targets squandered an opportunity to achieve more ambitious cuts. Yet it should be remembered that the government refused to negotiate with them at all....
It has been about a year since Rudd has had a long face-to-face meeting with Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown. Why so long? The Greens – together with one or two recalcitrant Liberal senators and perhaps independent Nick Xenophon – might have co-operated, in the right circumstances, to pass the government’s ETS bill…
“Kevin was crystal clear from the start – the Greens couldn’t be allowed any sort of ownership of the [emissions] trading scheme and the Liberals would have to support it so that they’d wear the [associated increased] costs to voters,” a Labor source said…
Towards the end of last week it appeared that the prime minister was displaying new conviction on climate change…
“ . . . there is no way you can stare in the mirror in the future and say that you have passed up the core opportunity to act on climate change. I will not do that.”
Pick up the telephone, Kevin. And call Bob Brown.
And even Daly overlooks the great caveat that should tell all Rudd apologists that it’s not Senate obstructionism that has killed the ETS ... for now. Rudd desperately needed the ETS off the books so his Budget figures could be fiddled to comply with his promise to keep real spending growth to 2 per cent. And he’s put this never-never conditionality on ever taking up the ETS again:
The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, told the Herald the government would not try to legislate the ETS even by its new delayed start year of 2013 unless there is ‘’credible action’’ by the end of 2012 from countries such as China, India and the US…Anyone claiming to still detect a fundamental policy conviction in Rudd is deceiving themselves ... and you.
‘’We will only [legislate] if there is sufficient international action,’’ Senator Wong said, declining to explain exactly what that meant.
UPDATE
Another Sunday Age warmist, Melissa Fyffe, calls out the Victorian Government, too, and breezily demands it spend billions in compensation and more expensive new sources of power to prove its own global warming cred now that Rudd has shelves his emissions trading scheme:
But the biggest issue for Brumby is Hazelwood, a 45-year-old brown-coal-fired power station in Gippsland. An effective emissions trading scheme - and it is not clear Rudd’s was - would have dealt with Hazelwood, Australia’s most polluting electricity generator. A decent price on carbon pollution would have made Hazelwood much less profitable and its owner, International Power, would have received millions in compensation to ease it through a phase-down.It’s all so easy, when the sky rains gold nuggets and dollar trees bloom in Fitzroy.
In the absence of the scheme, however, the environment movement has Brumby in its sights. Environment Victoria has called on the major parties to replace Hazelwood with renewable energy, energy efficiency and gas. A campaign on Hazelwood is to the 2010 election what old-growth forests were in 2006: the central ‘’ask’’ of the green movement....
Hazelwood does provide Victoria with up to a quarter of its electricity and the government has previously used this as an excuse for inaction - if we tamper with Hazelwood the lights may go out. But the reality is the government can actively plan for and fast-track replacement energy....
That price, however, is likely to be expensive. [To shut down] International Power is likely to want several billion dollars (to put that in perspective, it costs $1 billion to run Victoria’s police force for a year)…
... the time for Victoria’s leadership is here again.
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Truth veiled
Andrew Bolt
Tim Blair:
British MP Stephen Timms is stabbed by someone variously described as a female constituent, a woman he did not know, an Asian woman, a woman who had made an appointment to see him, a constituent and a a 21-year-old woman. Seems a lot of people missed the Muslim clothing.Tim has all the links you need.
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Could Ergas out-argue our Most Influential Intellectual?
Andrew Bolt
Andrew McIntyre has little trouble in declaring the winner in a debate on economics between Henry Ergas and Robert Manne, voted by his peers the Most Influential Public Intellectual. Damaging quotations are produced.
I won’t give away the answer here, but I think you may well guess it from this elegant response to the accusation that “neo liberal” think tanks in the pay of Big Oil are arguing against the “99 per cent of qualified climate scientists” who believe in apocalyptic man-made warming. (You’ll guess it not just from the quality of this response, but from the invented statistic and absurdly undergraduate conspiracy theorising behind the accusation which prompted it.)
Economic liberals are not good at group think. It is consequently unsurprising that (to the best of my knowledge) there is no such thing as a party line on climate science.
I expect, however, that economic liberals would share two convictions. The first is that scepticism is a virtue, not a vice. The second is that we live in a world where desirable ends invariably outstrip available means. It is therefore quite proper to question whether the case for action has been made out; and even if one believes it has, to demand that the specific actions that are proposed yield benefits that exceed their costs: for example, that we would do better to allocate resources to reducing emissions than to improving the life chances of many millions of people worldwide who suffer desperate poverty.
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The pocket Windschuttle: you’d have “stolen” these children, too
Andrew Bolt
Here’s the eighth of reader Tony Thomas’s summations of the key arguments of Keith Windschuttle‘s important new book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - Vol III: The Stolen Generations.
Today: What the missionaries damned as child “stealers” actually faced
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Go easier on the rapist. He’s Iranian
Andrew Bolt
Only two possibilities occur to me - that this excuse should be dismissed with contempt as a slur on Iran, or we should limit our intake of men from such a culture:
A taxi driver who raped a teenager after she passed out on his back seat has asked for mercy in Adelaide’s District Court.(I’m taking no chances with the courts, and am blocking comments.)
Hajy Baba Rahmanian, 60, was found guilty of rape by a jury and is awaiting sentence after losing an appeal against his conviction…
In sentencing submissions, Rahmanian’s lawyer Grant Algie urged mercy, saying the crime was odd and at the lower end of the scale.
He said the Iranian immigrant did not fully appreciate the severity of the crime under Australian law.
”There is a very reasonable possibility that given his cultural background and limited insight into laws and sexual behaviour, he didn’t realise that having intercourse with somebody who is unconscious and therefore not consenting is a very serious crime,” Mr Algie told the court.
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The tribe of the Age has spoken
Andrew Bolt
How tribal, group-thinking and introverted has The Age and its carefully nurtured readership become?
Judge from its letters page (again) yesterday. We are seeing the Prime Minister’s credibility and popularity crashing, and the Liberals under Tony Abbott reaching polling heights not seen in four years. Yet The Age letters page yesterday had:
- eight letters attacking Abbott
- no letters defending Abbott
- an editorial attacking Abbott
- Five letters defending Rudd from the criticisms of the mining industry
- One letter defending Rudd from criticisms of his dental care programs
- Two criticisms of Rudd that he should do more for the environment
- One criticism of Julian Gillard that her NAPLAN test scheme would work better if the results were issued earlier.
- One criticism of Rudd that he isn’t doing more for social workers.
- One criticism of the state Liberals.
- One criticism of state Labor for copying a Liberal policy on sentencing.
To sum up: on one page there are nine attacks on the federal Liberals, one on the state Liberals and six on those attacking Labor. On the other hand, there are just four attacks on federal Labor and one on state Labor - each from the Left or from seeming Labor supporters. Which means every single political comment on the page is wrriten from a Leftist perspective.
Every single one of 21.
Oh, and in my survey I haven’t included the letter demanding more controls on logging of forests, another attacking mining, a third attacking GM crops and a fourth bashing the banks.
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