Saturday, June 01, 2013

Sat June 1st Todays News


Happy birthday and many happy returns Victor Ta and Sefong Win. The first day of winter in Australia is the first day, in 1495 that Exchequer Rolls of Scotland list Scotch Whisky. In 1831, James Clark Ross led an expedition to reach the magnetic North Pole. 1943, Actor Leslie Howard was shot down by eight German Junker Ju 88s film critics. If you see James, offer him a whisky .. he will be cold. Thank you for letting us celebrate.
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The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor (Judges 6:12, NKJV)
My Question Is.What Can God Do Through You?

Many people feel inadequate to do anything for God. But God doesn’t see you as inadequate, He sees you as complete, lacking nothing in Him!
In the scripture, Gideon was hiding out from his enemies. He was afraid and didn’t feel equipped to do what God called him to do. Gideon was focused on his circumstances and his limitations, but God focused on what He could do through Gideon. Gideon felt weak, but God saw him as strong. Gideon felt unqualified, but God saw him as ready to do the job. Gideon felt insecure, but God saw him as full of boldness. Sure enough, when Gideon obeyed God, against all odds, he ended in victory.
It isn’t about how qualified you feel. It isn’t about how talented you are; it’s really about how yielded you are. When you obey God, when you trust Him beyond trusting your circumstances, that’s when His power becomes available to you. God bless you.

Madu Odiokwu Pastorvin

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Bolt Report tomorrow

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (8:24pm)

On Network 10 at 10am:
- When grown men vilify a 13-year-old girl as the “face of racism”, who are the real bullies? Defying the New Racism.
- Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison on the boat people fiasco
- former Labor president Warren Mundine and former Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger
- a fact check on the abusive Mr Windsor.
The twitter feed.
The place the videos appear. 

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Fukushima reality check: no health effects

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (11:10am)

After all that reckless hype and hysteria:

RADIATION leaked after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 is unlikely to cause any ill health effects in the future, says a UN scientific committee drawing up a major new report. 

“Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi… did not cause any immediate health effects,” the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) said.
“It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers for which dose histories have been assessed.”
When will we hear a sorry from the fear-mongers?
First, let’s ask Crikey writer Guy Rundle to show us his dead Fukushima pilots, stripped of flesh.
Rundle is the alarmist who wrote: “As I write, the Japanese are conducting direct overflies to try and control the continuing damage most likely a suicide mission for the pilots and crew…
“The Japanese crews will slough their skin and muscles, and bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media.”
Then let’s have veteran nuclear hysteric Helen Caldicott, who warned on 3AW that the Fukushima reactor could blow (a scenario ruled out by nuclear experts).
This, she wailed, meant “hundreds of thousands of Japanese will be dying within two weeks of acute radiation illness”, with countless more later suffering an “epidemic” of cancers.
Explain yourself, Helen.
Next let’s have Dr Tilman Ruff, actually a Nossal Institute infectious diseases expert and long-time anti-nuclear activist, who wildly claimed “we might be looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster or worse” and hungrily described the many ways people could get sick from the fallout that never really came.
Such alarmists and more were given a red carpet entree into the news rooms of almost every big news organisation in the land back when fear sold.
(Thanks to readers flameho, Rocky, Chrisso and Prankster.) 

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It’s how you teach that counts: the Innisfail example

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:59am)

Inspiring:

WHEN young primary school principal Nathaniel Train arrived at Innisfail East State School in far north Queensland two years ago, he had a tough message to deliver to teachers and parents: lift your game.
As one of the nation’s most disadvantaged schools, where half the students are indigenous, it was not unusual for students at Innisfail East to refuse to take their feet off the desk… Attendance was low and academic results were worse.
Today, Innisfail East - like neighbouring Goondi State School - is one of a handful of Australia’s most disadvantaged schools whose students are scoring in the top half of the nation’s results in literacy and numeracy…
Rather, the secrets to their success are encouraging passionate teachers not to waste a moment of classroom time on needless “busy work”; regular and rigorous statistical analysis of results; spending the equivalent of two days a week as principal in the classroom; and, above all, a relentless drive for excellence…
For Mr Train, the disadvantage is meaningless. When he arrived at the school in 2011, he was dismayed to find poor academic results, but even more disappointed to find some teachers believed their students would never be more than average....
Mr Train replaced half the teachers… Mr Train appointed his Year 7 teacher as the school’s “coach”, responsible for overhauling the curriculum and training teachers in an explicit instruction teaching method.
Rather than a hodge-podge of lessons, each teacher now has a tight, daily schedule to follow, with an overwhelming focus on literacy and numeracy. Each class begins with a “warm-up”, a recited chant used to commit crucial information from short- to long-term memory.
(Thanks to reader elinjaa.)
So .. the kids aren't doing 'meaningless busywork' they are being kept occupied with class activity. - ed

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Haven’t Labor MPs helped themselves to enough of our money?

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:53am)

Peter Hartcher describes the astonished reaction in Caucus of John Faulkner and Daryl Melham to Labor’s plans to make taxpayers hand over $60 million to the big parties for expenses:
They couldn’t believe that the party on trial in ICAC for corruption, the party of Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, the party whose former national president Michael Williamson has been charged with fraud, the party led by a prime minister whose biggest liability is public trust, could propose a bill that would help itself to tens of millions of public funds yet preserve many of the opacities and loopholes of funding system. Melham told the caucus: “You don’t need $10 million a year to do administration work, and the punters won’t wear it.”
UPDATE
Laurie Oakes:

Gillard and her team have clearly abandoned all hope of surviving in office. They are preparing for defeat. The grubby cash-for-votes deal with the Coalition, which fell apart under the weight of public anger on Thursday, was evidence of that.
Donations to Labor are drying up as its hold on power weakens, and things will get a lot tougher after the election. The dollar-per-vote proposal was about getting access to taxpayer funds to keep a desperate party afloat financially in opposition.
Further indication the government has thrown in the towel is the behind-the-scenes talk about who will lead Labor after Gillard is dispatched by the voters. This entered the public domain on Thursday with reports that Bill Shorten as opposition leader would not allow a Tony Abbott government to abolish the carbon tax without a fight.
Does Shorten seriously want to take Labor to a double dissolution election defending the carbon tax? And risk losing possible Senate seats in defence of such a worthless and doomed cause?
Wow.
(Thanks to readers Jonathan and Peter.) 

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The worst minister of the Gillard Government

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:45am)

Professor Judith Sloan on Communications Minister Stephen Conroy:

The senator’s performance removes any doubt about Conroy being a witless, unintelligent, immature and boorish grub who is completely unfit to be a Minister of the Crown.
And to think he is overseeing the largest government funded boondoggle without a cost-benefit analysis.  And to think that this is the man who came within a whisker of clamping down on freedom of speech.
Sloan is referring to Conroy’s astonishing performance in defending the ABC from Coalition charges that it leans to the Labor side of politics.
Talk about own goal.
Sloan is so fired up that she reviews the contenders for worst Labor minister:
- The Treasurer (Swan), for his failure to achieve a budget surplus plus other assorted misdemeanors;
- Workplace Relations Minister(Shorten), for pushing a brazenly pro-union piece of legislation to greater heights and overseeing some egregious appointments for mates;
- Immigration Minister (O’Connor), for completely failing to deal with the uncontrolled arrival of boats and the implications;
- Foreign Minister (Carr), for pouncing around the world with his wife concentrating on the unimportant issues;
- Climate change minister (Combet), for keeping faith when everyone else is retreating, wasting billions in green schemes and to agreeing to the most ridiculous predictions on carbon prices in the forward estimates;
- Former AG (Roxy), arguably the worse AG we have ever had until the new one was appointed;
- Childcare Minister (Ellis), for overseeing a disaster in the childcare space with ridiculously burdensome regulations and skyrocketing fees;
- School education minister (Garrett), for promoting something he doesn’t understand and spending money we cannot afford which is actually just a sop to the Australian Education Union.
Sloan has deliberately excluded the worst. 

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NBN looking like the home insulation disaster, with added billions

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:37am)

The NBN may become another Labor pink batts disaster:

THE government has escalated its intervention into the safety threats dogging its National Broadband Network, calling a crisis meeting for Monday that has sparked fresh calls for a compensation fund and standardised training for all workers dealing with asbestos.
Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten revealed the government has convened a high-level meeting on Monday between Telstra, the NBN Co, the federal workplace regulator, the national Office of Asbestos Safety, unions and victims groups to manage concerns around the exposure of contractors and the community to asbestos hazards during the fibre network’s rollout.
Add it to the bill:
The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union’s national NBN construction and project officer David Mier, who will be at the meeting, has raised concerns contractors in Tasmania were working on sites with potential asbestos exposure, after completing only online training courses…
Further highlighting the potential for cost blow-outs, National Electrical and Communications Association chief executive James Tinslay said he was concerned that “bigger contractors just can’t do it [clean up the asbestos], their labour rates are so high, they couldn’t possibly undertake the work”.
He said that asbestos “has the potential to blow out a job"…
Referring to photographs of clean-up work on Telstra pits in Penrith in western Sydney, Mr Tinslay said that kind of thing would be “dreadfully expensive”.

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When peer review becomes mates’ rates

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:13am)

We’ve already been warned by an inquiry into the infamous hockey-stick of warmist Michael Mann that peer-review in climate science was controlled by a tight cabal:
In addition to debunking the hockey stick, Mr. Wegman goes a step further in his report, attempting to answer why Mr. Mann’s mistakes were not exposed by his fellow climatologists. Instead, it fell to two outsiders, Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick, to uncover the errors.
Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. “As analyzed in our social network,” Mr. Wegman writes, “there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.” He continues: “However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”
As Professor Edward Wegman, who led the Wegman Report into the discredited “hockey stick”, explained:
One of the interesting questions associated with the ‚"hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published…
However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts with every one else in the clique.
The report added:
One of the interesting questions associated with the ‘hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published. Indeed, a common practice among associate editors for scholarly journals is to look in the list of references for a submitted paper to see who else is writing in a given area and thus who might legitimately be called on to provide knowledgeable peer review. Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author’s other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced.
In the case of the “hockey stick”, Wegman and his team found the “clique” of gatekeepers to be no more than just 43 warmist scientists.
Now comes more evidence that peer-review can be just mates’-rates, with an inner circle favouring the familiar.  A new study strongly suggests peer reviewers are much more likely to reject papers of people they don’t know, even when the same material was waved through when the authors sounded familiar:
As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.
With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.”
Our own Climate Commission has already demonstrated how quickly even an “expert” will believe a fallacy if it fits their pet theory.
(Thanks to reader Bob.) 

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Global warming gives us a greener planet

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (10:07am)

Global warming - general
The Greens should be pleased with global warming. By pumping out more plant food, we’ve given the planet more shrubs and trees:
Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.
Focusing on the southwestern corner of North America, Australia’s outback, the Middle East, and some parts of Africa, Randall Donohue of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia and his colleagues developed and applied a mathematical model to predict the extent of the carbon-dioxide (CO2) fertilization effect…
The team’s model predicted that foliage would increase by some 5 to 10 percent given the 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the study period. The satellite data agreed, showing an 11 percent increase in foliage after adjusting the data for precipitation, yielding “strong support for our hypothesis,” the team reports.
(Thanks to readers Timdot and Aard Knox.) 

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Richard Hinds and the “virtue” of those who secretly hate

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (8:49am)

The new morality
I completely agree with this sentence from Sydney Morning Herald sportswriter Richard Hinds, referring to the 13-year-old girl publicly identified and branded “the face of racism”:
The hatemongers pounced like seagulls on a chip, mischievously martyring the young girl.
He is right. Fashionable hatemongers, not least in Fairfax newspapers, have indeed martyred this poor girl to promote their own superior virtue. By publicly crucifying someone they themselves admit may be innocent they have demonstrated the truth of Bertrand Russell’s maxim:
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Hinds cites some of the hate-words used by the persecutors of a very young girl who was, yes, very rude but nowhere near as rude as the adults burning her at the stake and chanting their hatred of anyone who sought to protect her:

vile ... ignorant ...  bigots ...  trolls ... ... sad, self-loathing agenda…

In an earlier column, Hinds mentioned even worse abuse of those who simply thought a 13-year-old should not be so vilified and publicly humiliated:
...lunatic fringe ... putrid agenda ...  prism of hate and insecurity ... sinister ... vicious ... smug intolerance ... historical contortions ... bitter ... self-loathing ... bigotry…
Wow. Such hatred.
Hinds may also be right about what “they” have unleashed - if by “they” he indeed means these punishers, unable to see that their Great White Racist is in fact just an apologetic 13-year-old girl who was possibly misunderstood, given that the bearded Goodes is hirsute and the girl said she did not know “ape” can have a racist connotation:

They unleashed their battalion of bigots and trolls who can’t - or refuse to - understand the difference between racist vilification and mere schoolyard taunts.
(In fact, I think a schoolyard taunt can still be racist. The real issue is, of course, the age of the girl in determining culpability and punishment - which in this case was a national naming and shaming.)
But, yes, the persecutors of this 13-year-old have whipped up hatred of her and anyone who sought to save her from the mob. Here, for instance, are just some of the comments of bigots and trolls unleashed by one columnist:
...nutters ... fear mongering ... buffoon… fruitloops on the edge of decency ... seriously intellectually challenged… closet racist ... redneck bogans ...bigotry of her family ... beneath my contempt ... lunatic racist fringe ... loser fringe ...  resented low place in the pecking order ... a nobody ...
Hinds has convincingly demonstrated that anti-racism, in principle a noble cause, has been twisted into an intoxicating excuse for unleashing hatred and punishing the powerless. Worse, it has become a weapon by fashionable New Racists, demanding we see each other as ”spokesmen” for our race rather than individuals with a common race, a common humanity.
I am thankful Hinds has helped to shine a light on this deeply troubling development, so like the hysteria of Salem, with the “good” feeling licensed to be cruel to the weak in order to better advertise their own pitiless virtue.
But warning. Unless you click the links above, you might really believe Hinds has written sense, rather demonstrate a dangerous lack of it. He has in fact confused victim with villains.
Sadly, another man without a mirror or any sense of proportion. 

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Mark Dreyfus, an Attorney-General without a mirror

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (8:19am)

Mark Dreyfus has struck me for some time as dangerously sanctimonious - a caricature modern Leftist prone to preach standards he does not meet himself, since rules are only for the wicked. He is also prone to preach collectivist myths without a regard for evidence proper in a QC.  The man simply does not own a mirror:
Just another appointment. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, May 16:

IT is with great pleasure that I announce the appointment of Mr Nicholas Manousaridis and Ms Suzanne Jones as judges of the Federal Circuit Court of Australia ... An advisory panel selected Mr Manousaridis and Ms Jones from a strong field of over 100 candidates, finding them highly suitable. 
Hang on. That name rings a bell. Chris Merritt, The Weekend Australian, May 18-19:
THE federal government has appointed the wife of ACTU secretary Dave Oliver to a $314,000 job as a judge of the Federal Circuit Court. Suzanne Jones, who is a former ACTU advocate, is joining the judiciary just 19 months after the government made her a commissioner of the Fair Work Commission. Her appointment was announced by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who denied it could be seen as preferential treatment because of her union background and marriage to Mr Oliver.
The opposition legal affairs spokesman questions Louise Glanville, first assistant secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, during this week’s Senate estimates hearings:

GEORGE Brandis: Was Ms Suzanne Jones on the initial short list?
Glanville: She was on the second short list.
Brandis: She was not on the first short list?
Glanville: No…
Brandis: If it is similar to the process that Mr Fredericks described, then the Attorney-General’s office would have been made aware of who was on the short list. Did that happen?
Glanville: Yes.
Brandis: And presumably they were also made aware of who was on the second short list?
Glanville: I will need to check that because in the intervening period there was a change of attorney-general.
Brandis: I do not doubt that Ms Jones was an experienced industrial law specialist ... What strikes me as surprising about this appointment is that I know from conversations I have had with many senior figures in the court is that the court was looking in this particular case for a family law specialist to handle the family law list, which comprises 80 per cent of its work, and instead, from the large number of applicants for the position received, it ended up with an industrial law specialist with no background in family law matters at all.
Previous examples:

THE country’s top lawmaker has been forced into an embarrassing apology after his refusal to abide by aviation rules and turn off his mobile phone during a flight resulted in police being called to meet him when the plane touched down.
And:

Here is the sunny picture he painted of [his electorate, taking in much of Dandenong] two months ago: “Our community is a wonderful example to others of a modern, diverse and harmonious society.”
Mind you, it is easy to rhapsodise about mass immigration, especially from poor and Muslim lands, when you live not in your fabulously diverse electorate but 20km away, in the very affluent and very white suburb of Malvern.
That may explain why this “harmonious society” of “150 different nationalities” turns out to be not quite the “wonderful example” Dreyfus claims.
Last month, The Age reported: “Around Dandenong, young men stalk parks in gangs and rob anyone who walks through...”
And:

Christopher Pyne
This government is starting to resemble a scene from Downfall. … This government appears to be unravelling on a daily basis. If this is what it’s like after three days of election campaign, what would another three years of a Labor government do?
Mark Dreyfus on Pyne’s comments above
These immature and offensive comments have no place in Australian political debate. There is no place in Australian political debate for a comparison of any Australian government with Hitler’s Third Reich. These comments are deeply hurtful to holocaust survivors, they are deeply hurtful to any right thinking Australian…
Mark Dreyfus in his SMH opinion piece on 11 March 2011 titled Shades of Goebbels in ‘truth campaign’:

Abbott’s wildest claim is that he is running a “truth campaign”. Leaving aside the Goebbellian cynicism of labelling a scare campaign a “truth campaign”, I think it shows Abbott’s contempt for the Australian electorate.
When asked about his own comments comparing Tony Abbott’s campaign to Goebbels, Dreyfus says
That’s a quite different thing, it’s a very, very specific and targeted comment about the propaganda techniques.
A man so sanctimonious, so aloof and so tribal cannot be trusted with power to stifle the speech of others:

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has called on Tony Abbott to back away from a pledge to repeal a section of the Racial Discrimination Act that journalist Andrew Bolt was found guilty of breaching.

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Clive Palmer, political menace

Andrew Bolt June 01 2013 (8:08am)

Clive Palmer is not just a buffoon, but a lazy buffoon:
ASPIRING prime minister Clive Palmer is ripping off part of a Liberal Party policy platform word for word and presenting a near-identical manifesto for his Palmer United Party. 

The billionaire’s new political party has lifted about 17 of the 22 pages of text in its new “National Policy’’ from a Liberal federal platform document publicly championed for more than a decade…
“It’s not copy and pasting,” Professor Palmer said.
“… I probably wrote it originally. For forty years, I have helped establish the policy of the Liberal National Party...”
He is also a lazy buffoon making nasty appeals to xenophobia, with these cracks at Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott:
“You wonder how two people, both born outside Australia, in foreign countries, cannot relate to the people that live in this country,” he said.
“They don’t think about what it means to live in this country, to live and to die, and to stand for what it means to be Australian.”
Mr Palmer then rattled off a list of his relatives who fought and died in war for Australia.
Ms Gillard was born in Wales and came to Australia aged five while Mr Abbott was born in London to expatriate parents who returned home when he was three.
I’m surprised so few in the ABC have called out Palmer, whose bid for political power is a sinister blend of vanity, money, bluster and populism. Andrew Landeryou:

The other notable Palmer policy, that he’d confiscate privatised Queensland state government assets without compensating the buyer of them, is also ill-considered, would not survive legal challenge and is utterly inconsistent with the conservative values Palmer purports to have and probably does have when he’s not trying to get attention as the nation’s class clown.
These thought-bubbles are like the loud, certain policy pronouncements you can hear in most pubs if you hang around long enough. They are not credible and make Palmer look foolish.
They don’t merely make Palmer look foolish. They reveal him as foolish.  

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Labor agrees with ABC that Liberals are wrong about ABC bias

Andrew Bolt May 31 2013 (8:15pm)

The facts: not one of the ABC’s main current affairs shows is hosted by a conservative. Every host of Media Watch in its 24 years has been of the Left. A survey by the University of the Sunshine Coast calculated that more than 40 per cent of ABC journalists vote Greens. And it all shows, as former ABC chairman Maurice Newman says.
Now the ABC has hired as the head of its new fact checking (of non-ABC journalists) the Leftist Russell Skelton, husband of far-Left ABC TV host Virginia Trioli.
ABC managing diector Mark Scott tried to defend this astonishing ideological monoculture - this rigging of public debate through the hijacking of a taxpayer- funded broadcaster - to a Senate committee this week. He specifically defended the hiring of Skelton.
But observe from the transcript. In defending the ABC from Coalitilion charges of bias, Scott has the enthusiastic support of Labor’s Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister. Here is Labor joining with the ABC to claim only a conservative could say the ABC is biased. My case closed:
…..Senator ABETZ: Mr Scott, we could be here all night. I have here more than a dozen examples of Mr Skelton’s tweets denigrating Liberals such as Senator Brandis, Scott Morrison, Joe Hockey and other current and former Liberal leaders.
Senator Conroy: He knows his facts, doesn’t he!
Senator ABETZ: So how can you credibly maintain that Mr Skelton is impartial and a suitable choice to be the ABC’s fact-checker? I will give you a few examples: ‘Gordon nails Brandis’; ‘Morrison, the LP’s one-trick pony’ —
Senator Conroy: Absolutely factually accurate at all points! What is your problem?
Senator ABETZ: ‘The Liberal bird -brained backbencher slams Gestapo data retention’ —
Senator Conroy: There are many different definitions!
Senator ABETZ: that was about Mr Ciobo. ‘Joe’s not the sharpest pencil in the box when it comes to numbers’; ‘Rudd wept and Julia triumphant’; ‘The honeymoon will be too long for the monk’ — all these from Mr Skelton.
Are you still saying you will not comment on individual tweets? There are dozens and dozens of them showing a partiality against the coalition.
Senator Conroy: In your biased view.
Senator ABETZ: Mr Scott, do you understand that we in the Coalition do not accept that this man will go about his task with impartiality given his past track record of complete and utter partiality, including some quite offensive tweets?
What I would invite you to do is take all of these tweets on notice and come back to the committee and explain how this builds confidence in the community’s mind that Mr Skelton will go about his task with impartiality. I will table those for the committee.
Mr Scott: I will take that on notice. Let me simply say in response to the broad thrust of that that Mr Skelton is a very experienced and award-winning journalist. We thought, on the criteria that were spelt out, on his ability to provide and lead a team that is testing statements, coming to conclusions and providing the evidence behind that, that Mr Skelton is an appropriate person to lead that division…
Senator ABETZ: Now let me compare all those opinions about coalition members by your independent, impartial fact-finder with his views on the Prime Minister. What would you say about this tweet: ‘Extraordinary times. JG at last behaving like a PM. ALP vote up, not down. Beware the pundits’? Isn’t this shameless barracking, pure and simple?
Senator Conroy: You just have a biased view on it, Senator Abetz.
Mr Scott: Senator Abetz, I really think there is little point in going through a whole series of tweets —
Senator ABETZ: What about this tweet: ‘Another take on Julia Gillard PM: grace under pressure’?
Senator Conroy: A factually accurate statement!…
Senator ABETZ: Do you have any concern about bias at the ABC?
Mr Scott: I would draw your attention to a much bigger survey commissioned by The Australian in February this year.
Senator ABETZ: I am asking about you. Do you have any concerns?
Senator Conroy: Malcolm Turnbull gets on far too often, doesn’t he, Senator Abetz? You would agree with that!
Senator ABETZ: Do you mind, Minister! Mr Scott, do you have any sense that the recent survey which found that 41 per cent of ABC journalists said they would vote for the Greens, 32 per cent for Labor and 15 per cent for the coalition generally reflects ABC journalists’ political leanings?
Senator Conroy: He could not possibly know.
Mr Scott: No. There are about 1,000 journalists who work across the ABC in news, radio, rural divisions and others. ...
Senator ABETZ: Can we believe that Mr Skelton will be impartial when checking the public statements of politicians when just last July he tweeted ‘Abbott’s extremism on display’? Are we to assume this is a display of impartiality by Mr Skelton?
Senator Conroy: It could have been factually accurate!
Mr Scott: I am happy to talk about the fact-checking unit if you would like to talk about that.
Senator ABETZ: No, I am asking you about a specific tweet.
Senator Conroy: It could have been very factually accurate, Senator Abetz!....
Senator ABETZ: Thank you. Can I ask about this tweet from your fact-checker, which is also about Mr Abbott: ‘No statesman, with no style’. Is this also indicative of an objective mindset?
Senator Conroy: No, an accurate one. A factually accurate one. That would check against the facts!
Senator ABETZ: The way the minister says it I think tells the whole story for us. What about last August, when Mr Skelton tweeted ‘Mr Abbott was revealed to be the shameless opportunist that he is and he was red faced. Windsor nailed him to the floor’? Is that another clear exhibition of the absence of bias by Mr Skelton?
Senator Conroy: I am confident that that was a factually accurate statement!  

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Quote of the Century.

"The budget should be balanced, 
the Treasury should be refilled, 
public debt should be reduced, 
the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, 
and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed,
lest Rome becomes bankrupt. 
People must again learn to work 
instead of living on public assistance." 

Cicero , 55 BC 

Evidently we've learnt bugger all over the past 2,068 years.
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God is so awesome that He will restore the time that's been wasted and stolen from you. Start believing that the Lord is multiplying back everything that you've lost. The greater the loss, the greater the restoration.... Holly
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He runs with it .. (warning rude language) - ed
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Video: John Wayne and Ronald Reagan talk about America

http://independentfilmnewsandmedia.com/video-john-wayne-and-ronald-reagan-talk-about-america/

John Wayne talks about the film industry and the real blacklist. Ronald Reagan talks about Communism and those who "gather against White people."
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Overnight I discovered my left ankle soreness was actually gout. I didn't know what had caused this gout .. it isn't usually my left ankle. It is usually alcohol which causes it, but I've not drunk any .. then I realised that I'd been ketone-ing for months .. and ketone is related to alcohol .. a remarkable personal discovery. - ed
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4 her
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Paul's Valley, Oklahoma.
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4 her
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Another industry the ALP scupper - ed
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Heavenly Father,I thank You for the seed of the Word that will not return void in my life. I choose to open my heart to You and say, “Have Your way in me.” I choose love, I choose forgiveness, and I choose to surrender every part of my life to You in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Madu Odiokwu Pastorvin

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Actually, when pretty girls air kiss each other, it is like two boxers touching gloves ..
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Goodmorning sweet people! Makena Monk's Morning Session for The Sun Radio Station starts in about 30 min. Tune in and leave your mainstream radio for two hours to discover great independent artist from all over the world.. you can press the play button here: http://thesunradio.listen2myradio.com/ Enjoy! 
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Tonight, Tony Abbott and our candidate Fiona Scott used a telephone town hall to speak with around 10,000 local Lindsay residents about Our Plan for a Stronger Australia.

To read Our Plan, click here:www.realsolutions.org.au
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Come here, My child,
I have much now to tell
For your love to deepen,
Your fears to quell:

More than you know
Is how much I love you,
Higher than the heavens,
Yes, this is true.

More than you imagine
Is what is in store
For you in eternity
Behind Heaven’s door.

More than you long for
Is the joy I will give
When My Will you love,
When for Me you live.

More than you desire
Are the riches I share,
Eternal, beautiful,
All beyond compare.

More than you hope
Is the beauty of the song
I place in your heart
All the day long.

More than you reason
Is My pain on Calvary,
Torment beyond words
That you may know eternity.

So stay here, My child,
Listen to all I say;
More than you wish
Is what you find on My way.

For if I did not flinch
In pouring My all for you,
What else will I not give?
What else will I not do?

Yes, more than you know
I love you, child of Mine;
So stay here in My arms,
In My Presence divine.
 
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THE BILLY GRAHAM OF THE 19TH CENTURY Phillip Jensen
Dwight L. Moody was to the 19th century what Billy Graham was to the 20thcentury.  Both spent the better part of their life as itinerant evangelists, travelling the world preaching Christ and calling upon people to repent and put their trust in him.  There were differences between the two men and differences between the two centuries in which they preached, but it is unlikely that anybody preached Christ to more people in the last two centuries than these two men.
This week the Men’s Collegiate Choir of the Moody Bible Institute is visiting us.  The Moody Bible Institute was one of the many spin offs of Mr Moody’s evangelistic ministries.
Dwight Lyman Moody, 1837-1899 was raised in poverty.  He was one of nine children.  His father died when Dwight was 4.  He left school at 13 with only a fifth grade education.  At 17 he left home to work in his uncle’s shoe shop in Boston.  His uncle insisted he attend Sunday school classes.  His Sunday School teacher testified: “I have seen fewer persons whose minds were spiritually darker than when he came into my Sunday school class.”  At the age of 18, he became a Christian through the ministry of this Sunday School teacher, challenging him with the gospel in his uncle’s shoe store.
Shortly after he moved from Boston to Chicago to start his own shoe business, aiming to make his fortune. However, God had other plans for Moody’s enormous energies, drive and passions.  Within three years of living in Chicago, he was moved from pursuing his own wealth to helping the poor.  He started a Sunday School in a slum, which grew into a church.  By 1861 he had given up the shoe business to concentrate on his social and evangelistic work.
One of the key parts of Moody’s life was the Young Men’s Christian Association.  In those days the ‘C’ in the name was still prominent and its aims were evangelistic.  He had joined it when he first went to Boston and continued in its membership in Chicago, even becoming its Chairman for four years.  This non-denominational ministry was one of the bases of all Moody’s work, for he preached evangelistically in fellowship with people of any and no denominational background.
Two key turning points in his life were the Civil War and the Chicago fire.  He spent the war working with the YMCA, evangelising the troops of the Northern army.  While the war years may have shaped the urgency and compassion of his ministry it was the fire that changed the direction of his life.  D.L. Moody was preaching in Chicago the night of the great fire in 1871.  He and his family were protected but he lost everything.  The great fire destroyed his church and home as well as the YMCA.  He did not rebuild in Chicago but back in his home in Northfield, Massachusetts, for in the aftermath of the fire his ministry moved from Chicago to the world and more significantly from social work and evangelism to simply evangelism.
Evangelism is never ‘simply’; and Moody’s evangelism was no exception.  It involved music and travel, fund raising and organisation, and spawned a whole range of other activities.  Moody’s own experience of poverty and working with the poor, remained part of his great appeal to the masses as well as his concern for the lost in every class of people.  His entrepreneurial energies invented new ways of presenting the gospel, that today we would take for granted.
He teamed up with a singer, composer and organist Ira Sankey.  Together they published famous hymn books, but more importantly they travelled on evangelistic tours: Sankey singing solos, and leading the crowds in singing their hymns and D.L. Moody preaching.  It seemed a winning combination as people flocked to hear them and were, by God’s grace, won to the Kingdom.  Travelling frequently through North America and across the Atlantic, it is estimated that over 100 million people heard this gifted evangelist call them to the Saviour.
Coming out of all this evangelistic activity, he created several institutions.  He founded schools in his home state of Massachusetts.  Sadly, they have become prestigious and even famous but have not continued in his Christian ideals.  He started a ministry of distributing gospel books and pamphlets, which in turn became the publishing house named Moody Press.
His ministry had a great effect on students.  From a famous mission in Cambridge University a group of 7 students travelled around Britain arousing great interest in Overseas Missions.  He ran Summer Bible conferences near his home – at one such conference the Student Volunteer Movement was founded, with its, soon to be adopted, motto of “the evangelization of the world in this generation”.  Again sadly, following generations within this movement did not hold to his clear gospel presentation, but from it have come many other movements such as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.
In 1886 D.L. Moody established the Chicago Evangelization Society.  The aim was clearly stated as the “education and training of Christian workers, including teachers, ministers, missionaries, and musicians who may completely and effectively proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  The aim was to train people to do city mission work, reaching people with the gospel.  Shortly after his death the institute changed its name to “The Moody Bible Institute”.
Which brings us to our visitors in Sydney this week.  For these students of Moody’s Bible Institute come “striving for musical excellence with the goal of encouraging believers and sharing the good news of Jesus Christ.”  In that goal they are continuing Moody’s great aim of saving the lost and we pray that God blesses their endeavours.
Great piece. Speaking of Moody, I'm reminded of something that puzzled me for a long time. The Battle of Copenhagen had Nelson defying orders to shell the city defences. Copenhagen surrendered in a close battle. Nelson was greeted with fanfare. I couldn't work out why, but decided it was because the blockade of protestant Britain by Orthodox Russia and Catholic France was unpopular among protestant Danes. Reminded of this by Sweden's embrace of Moody. - ed
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Tonight, Tony Abbott and Fiona Scott are speaking to a telephone conference of over 8,000 local Lindsay residents about Our Plan for a Stronger Australia.

Read more at www.realsolutions.org.au
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Hi everyone! Here's the MichelleMalkin.com newsletter for May 31st. Enjoy!

From the Blog

Who’s tracking your children?

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Nice. Very nice.

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Old Smuggler brand Scotch whisky

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