Saturday, December 22, 2012

Sat 22nd Dec Todays News

Happy birthday and many happy returns Hoa Nguyen andAmmanuel Abebe. Born on the same day, across the years. Remember, birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.

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On this day...

December 22Mother's Day in Indonesia
Anthony Clement McAuliffe

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Events

[edit]Births

[edit]Deaths

[edit]Holidays and observances


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Federal government is surplus to requirements

Piers Akerman – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (8:49pm)

There is no need to buy Christmas crackers for their corny jokes this year - we have the Gillard minority government and its assorted clowns to provide all the laughs we can handle and then some.
To say that Prime Minister Julia Gillard presides over the worst government in Australian history is repeating the obvious.
The ailing Gough Whitlam may even take some heart this yuletide that he will not be remembered as the greatest-ever Labor failure.
Small joy, however, for the long-suffering public who have had to endure the antics of a series of talentless ministers and their abysmal policies since former prime minister Kevin Rudd conned the public with his promise to be John Howard “lite” five years ago.
Rudd was lightweight, he was never John Howard.
The highlight of his brutally curtailed prime ministership was his ludicrous 2020 rear-vision Summit at which assorted adoring luvvies, largely self-selected and many from such Left-wing front organisations as GetUp!, stood enthralled as
Rudd squatted on the floor of a parliamentary hearing room doodling away on butcher’s paper, mapping his vision for the nation. After unloading their angst about fashionable causes, even the luvvies felt dudded - or Rudded - when they discovered that their ideas had largely been shelved to accommodate a range of predetermined positions.
This was second-rate leadership by any measure. Former Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating must have flinched, at the very least, as they viewed the farce.
So farcical did Rudd’s leadership become that the so-called faceless men, the union bosses who control the numbers, instructed the parliamentary party to dump the elected leader and replace him with his deputy, Julia Gillard.
While Rudd’s leadership was certainly a failed experiment the remedy has proven to be worse.
Gillard has shown herself to be no more than a second-rate student politician. She lacks gravitas, she lacks authority - particularly within her own party.
Anything more than a cursory examination of Gillard’s career and personal history should have alerted Labor’s powerbrokers to the risk they were running when they decided to give her the prime ministership but they were mesmerised, as she is, by gender issues.
Today, her remaining support base relies on the gender card.
She has failed the character test on every count and her words on almost every important policy issue are returning to haunt her.
We now have not only the infamous carbon tax promise but we have a plethora of Gillard’s now-broken pledges about the surplus.
Take your pick: “The budget will be back in surplus in 2013 if I’m re-elected, if my government is re-elected on Saturday ... the budget is coming back to surplus, no ifs no buts, it will happen.” August 17, 2010.
Or, the following day: “Failure is not an option here and we won’t fail.” Year in, year out, even when the dogs were barking and the cocks were crowing, when the likelihood of achieving a budget surplus was as likely as a unicorn winning the Melbourne Cup, both Gillard and her moronic Treasurer Wayne Swan continued to claim they were on track oblivious to the obvious.
On April 13, 2011, Gillard repeated: “My commitment to a surplus in 2012-13 was a promise made and it will be honoured.”
By July 4, 2011, it was apparently a done deal, at least in Gillard’s mind, as she said: “We saved jobs, stayed out of recession and got back to surplus.”
It was all a result of her excellent administration, apparently, she had decided by July 24, 2011: “So, we’ve got a good track record of making the hard decisions to find savings to get the budget to add up, we’ll do it again and the budget will come to surplus in 2012-13, exactly as promised.”
She was still boasting of her record on April 29 this year: “Here we are in Australia due to the careful management of the government, we have a strong economy, strong fundamentals, low unemployment. What that means is it’s unambiguously in our nation’s interest to deliver a budget surplus, and we will.”
That surplus was non-negotiable, she assured Sky News viewers as recently as August 19, 2012.
She must have been taking some advice from her Treasurer, who had been just as adamant in his protestations in discussion with his good friend Kochie on the Sunrise TV program the previous day: “Come hell or high water, but we’ve got the judgment to handle these situations. If we would have gone into recession we wouldn’t be in this position and that’s where we would have been if the Liberals had been in power.”
All absolute nonsense, spoken by two individuals completely out of touch with reality.
The warning bells were ringing at the beginning of the year, before the May budget, klaxons were whooping and wailing before Swan’s October MYEFO statement, a masterpiece in illusion and deception.
Yet, late Thursday, even after Swan had finally acknowledged what every thinking person had known there would be no surplus Treasury’s website was still carrying his words: “The budget is returning to surplus as promised, with surpluses growing over the forward estimates. A surplus is appropriate given our strong economic fundamentals and an economy returning to trend growth.
“The return to surplus, ahead of any other major advanced economy, sends a strong message to international investors on the government’s commitment to fiscal discipline and provides a buffer in uncertain economic times.”
Well, some surplus, some message, as Churchill might have pronounced.
Here’s wishing you all a very merry Christmas, keep smiling.

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All things bright and beautiful

Miranda Devine – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (8:51pm)

There is nothing better to get you into the Christmas spirit than an exuberant, over-the-top light display.
How I admire the civic-mindedness of those Clark Griswolds of Sydney who have brightened up our suburbs, from Second St in Ashbury to Prince Albert St in Mosman, from Geraldine St in Baulkham Hills to Camellia St in Greystanes - everywhere from the Cumberland Plain to the Bondi seashore.
A brightly lit Christmas house festooned with Santas is a rebuke to eco-wowserism. It is a joyful display of optimism in the future.
It’s a communal act by generous people inspired by the Christmas spirit of giving.
More often than not, owners of the biggest light displays collect money for charity from the visitors who flock to see their handiwork.
There’s a house on a busy corner in my neighbourhood on the lower north shore which is lit up, literally, like a Christmas tree.
It features a giant nativity set with a donkey and a camel, lots of Santas, reindeer, snowmen, stars and all sorts of festive baubles.
Every night, hundreds of people come to marvel at the spectacle, bringing delighted children in pyjamas, and donating money to the Cancer Council.
It puts a smile on your face as you pass by.
The display is a three-month labor of love for the Mallikopoulos family of Cremorne. But this year it almost turned tragic for matriarch Hellen Mallikopoulos, who fell off a ladder while putting lights on the roof and broke her back.
The entire neighbourhood breathed a sigh of relief when she walked out of hospital, needing a back brace, but well enough to flick the light switch on December 1.
As lighting technology becomes cheaper than ever, Christmas displays are a growing phenomenon, with neighbours in some Sydney streets waging a sort of arms race of fairy lights.
We haven’t quite reached the extremes of America, where in parts of Brooklyn displays have become so ornate that professional lighting consultants have to do the job.
It is annoying enough trying to detangle a single strand of fairy lights to dangle off the front veranda, so it’s hard to imagine the commitment required to create a North Pole extravaganza in your front yard - not to mention the hazards of shaky ladders.
Bravo to the brave Christmas lights champions of Sydney and happy Christmas to all our lovely readers. Thanks for all your feedback and support through the year.

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Worst policy of the year

Andrew BoltDECEMBER222012(6:21pm)

Australian Education Bill 2012
Supertrawler ban
Illegal Logging Act
Schoolkids Bonus
Anti-Dumping Commission
Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal 
You might quarrel with Sloan’s choice of winner, but you cannot doubt her judgment on the mournful standard set by this Government.

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This can be said, but what I wrote not

Andrew BoltDECEMBER222012(5:59pm)

Curiously, what I wrote about self-identifying Aborigine Bindi Cole was apparently more damaging and hurtful than what she volunteers about herself, and thus needed to be suppressed. More I had better not say.

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MUPPETS TRY AGAIN

Tim Blair – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (9:54pm)

A bold prediction
Global temperatures are forecast to be 0.57 degrees above the long-term average next year, making 2013 one of the warmest years on record, Britain’s Met Office said on Thursday.
“It is very likely that 2013 will be one of the warmest 10 years in the record which goes back to 1850, and it is likely to be warmer than 2012,” the Met Office said in its annual forecast for the coming year. 
Prepare to freeze, people. The Met Office – a tardocracy infested with 1,800 wealthy warmies – isfrequently wrong. As an enraged London Times reader once fumed: 
I bought a yacht earlier in the year and consequently I’ve been paying very careful attention to weather forecasts from the Met office - basically, they’re bunk!
Check the forecast for tomorrow in the morning and it will be one thing, check in the afternoon and it will be something else, and when tomorrow arrives, the weather is a third unpredicted thing entirely. This has been a consistent pattern about 2/3rds of the time since April. They just make it up! Sack the lot of them and just guess that tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s and you’ll more than likely be right.
As for this winter’s weather; it will be a surprise, won’t it? There’s certainly no way the muppets at the Met office could predict it. 
Quite so, sir.

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A LITTLE BIT OUT OF PLACE

Tim Blair – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (6:20am)

David Paris, digital communications coordinator for the Greens, proudly shares an image of hisnew apartment. Dave’s digs are slightly fancier than Bob Brown’s old hut, but that’s OK because it’s an “energy efficient building”. And besides, luxury-living David feels “a little bit out of place here”.
(Via Mike S.)

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JUST LOOK AT THEM

Tim Blair – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (6:17am)

Labor’s surplus of losers:


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HUGO KNOWS

Tim Blair – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (6:13am)

A spooky shout-out from Gaspo the Feminist:

image

Yikes! Let’s hope he doesn’t attempt to kill us. Then again, he usually only tries that withunconscious women.

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ENDING THE DAD-GUM SHOOT FEST

Tim Blair – Saturday, December 22, 2012 (6:07am)

Beginning in 2008, the superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District in Texas allowed teachers to carry arms. As David Thweatt explained one year later: 
Would you stick a sign at a school that says, ‘No guns on this property’? Why wouldn’t you? It invites nasty people to come. That’s what you’ve done to every public school in the nation. That’s why there were no shootings until Columbine. It’s turned into a dad-gum shoot fest. 
His words seem remarkably prescient following the latest in a spate of horrific US school shootings. The Harrold policy is now being being considered in at least five other US states.
UPDATE. The WSJ’s James Taranto
Every time one of these horrible shooting sprees occurs, countless voices in the media declaim that (1) we need a debate on gun control, and (2) the other side’s views are despicable, stupid and unworthy of consideration. The “debate” they say they want is a one-sided one. Of course, they are conducting just such a “debate.” What infuriates them is that the other side refuses to cooperate and disappear. 
An example of this fury may be found in Piers Morgan’s chat with Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt:


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Our cash pays for the ABC's comment


AS contemporary social media campaigns go, it was a very civilised affair. After the ABC's final Insiders program for the year, a handful of letters arrived at The Australian complaining of the program's bias. The following day the trickle turned into a torrent that, three weeks later, is yet to abate. 
The letter from Ken Schmack in North Gosford, NSW, was typical, a cry more in sorrow than anger: "I have rarely missed Insiders since its introduction, but I have finally come to the conclusion that among my new year resolutions has to be one to give the program the flick. The pro-Labor, anti-Coalition bias exhibited by its presenter and, generally, two of the three guests has become ingrained.

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BOB KERNOHAN... damaged but undiminished Larry Pickering

To the thousands who sent Xmas cards and gifts to Bob: Never, ever underestimate the good you have done.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s thugs came close to crushing Bob. All he wanted was her and her boyfriend to return the millions stolen from his AWU Members.

Bob refused to be paid off with a safe Labor seat, as others were. And he has paid an incredibly heavy price.

Bob now knows he has a groundswell of support that is manifesting itself in many ways that are soon to be disclosed.

Thanks must also go to Michael Smith, along with Rick and Harry, for their tireless forensic work. To Ralph Blewitt for thankless bravery in the face of Gillard’s vile venom.

Me? I’m just a bloody story teller.

We will all lose more blood before this is over but giving blood can be a good thing.

Happy Xmas to all you blokes and to all who send cards.

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