Monday, April 01, 2013

Mon 1st Apr Todays News


Happy birthday and many happy returns Raffaella D'Annunzio and Eva Leong. Born on the same day, across the years. Or so they told you.
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Gillard flees chorus of discontent

Piers Akerman – Monday, April 01, 2013 (1:11am)

SACKED Cabinet Minister Simon Crean has stepped up his argument against any Gillard government attempt to raise taxes on superannuation.
He voiced his outrage just hours after Trade Minister Craig Emerson said there needed to be a discussion on lifting taxes on super accounts of the “fabulously wealthy”.
“I will oppose anything that seeks retrospectively to tax people’s accumulated earnings in superannuation,” Crean said yesterday.
“That’s tantamount to taxing people’s retirement surpluses to fund our surplus. But if the question is the need to ensure the sustainability of the system in the future, then frame the debate properly about what is sought to be achieved and let’s have that debate.
“One of the big criticisms I have of this government is that it has failed to frame the debate in its terms. And you are always behind if you fail to frame the debate in your terms.”
While he refused to commit to crossing the floor to vote against any super changes, he did call on the government to explicitly rule out changes that retrospectively taxed earnings generated by super accounts.
Crean told The Australian the government needed to “recreate the brand” that made it a successful long-term government during the Hawke and Keating years, saying it was about “inclusiveness” and “governing for all Australia”.
The Gillard government has failed its promise to deliver a surplus and will bring down another Budget deficit next month.
It has again over-promised with policies including the national disability insurance scheme and school funding it cannot pay for.
Its attack on super is being cloaked in the rhetoric of class warfare – which it has accelerated in recent weeks.
Crean, and former ministers Martin Ferguson and Kim Carr, along with former Whip Joel Fitzgibbon and former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and former ACTU boss Bill Kelty have all been vocal in their criticism of the Gillard government’s class warfare tactics in the past week.
There has been speculation that the government will increase the tax rate on superannuation earnings for everyone earning more than $180,000, which is the threshold for the top 45 per cent income tax rate.
Crean’s attack came as Business Council of Australia President Tony Shepherd expressed the “extreme concern” of the overwhelming majority of businesses under his watch.
“The great national economic backbone we, along with thousands of other business people - small, medium and large - and the people who work within our businesses, have gradually forged for this country is being compromised,” Shepherd said, speaking on behalf of Australia’s 180 biggest firms.
“It’s being compromised by appalling process and a total lack of regard for the role of business in the Australian economy. We are experiencing a purposeful provocation through deliberate attacks on the business community and, in effect, everyone who works within it.”
As the chairman of construction giant, Transfield, Shepherd was joined by former Future Fund board member and UGL Chairman Trevor Rowe in attacking recent policies adopted by Canberra.
“Businesses are now genuinely concerned about how competitive we are,” Rowe said.
“We have an enormously high cost structure and recent initiatives this government have taken in the area of workplace reform only add to additional costs and inflexibilities in the labour market. We need a flexible workforce to meet the challenges.”
The criticism of the Gillard government continued with former Treasury secretary Bernie Fraser admitting he shared “the same concern and frustration as to how Labor has lost its way over recent years compared to the Hawke-Keating years, which were devoted to making the whole country and the whole community better off.”
The last time so many Labor figures thought Labor had lost its way, Kevin Rudd was sacked.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard is in China this week.
The growing chorus of discontent will destroy anything she hopes to achieve abroad.

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JULIA’S BRAIN

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (3:17pm)

The thoughts of John McTernan, as revealed in his 2010/2011 columns for the UK Daily Telegraph. Julia Gillard’s communications director is sometimes sensible, sometimes surprising … and sometimes seems to be writing about the current Australian government: 
The mass suicide of the followers of ‘Jim’ Jones in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 has gone into the language. To ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ (the liquid Jones laced with the poison that killed his 909 followers) is to show blind and undeviating loyalty to the point of self-destruction. Often used of those who deludedly follow a political leader who is driving their party at full speed into a brick wall … 
Welcome to Guyana, John. 

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PREPARE THE BROOMS

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (1:46pm)

Every year several concerned Australians participate in Earth Hour, a brief exercise that calls upon its followers to turn a few lights off while they consider the damage humankind wreaks upon the planet.
I spent this year’s Earth Hour at a friend’s place, where the only participant was the house itself. For some reason several outdoor lights simply refused to work. Oddly, in much the same way that job-shy Greens voters may be coaxed into seeking employment, this was solved by belting them with a broom. 

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GET USED TO IT

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (12:35pm)

A couple of weeks ago, following the official apology to Australia’s victims of forced adoption, we were given a preview of how the left-leaning media might deal with a potential Tony Abbott government.

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GUIDELINES SOUGHT

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (12:03pm)

Media reform in the Middle East: 
Egypt’s most popular television satirist, who every week skewers the Islamist president and hard-line clerics on his Jon Stewart-style “Daily Show,” was released on bail Sunday but could face charges of insulting the country’s leader and Islam.
Bassem Youssef is the most prominent critic of President Mohammed Morsi to be called in for questioning in recent weeks, in what the opposition says is a campaign to intimidate critics ...
Deputy chief prosecutor Hassan Yassin denied the nearly five-hour interrogation was part of an intimidation campaign and said his department was enforcing the law and seeking to establish some guidelines on freedom of expression. 
No one shall pass Hassan!
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)

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NOT A BAD FIRST ROUND

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (11:47am)

Carlton smashed, St Kilda humiliated, Melbourne on the bottom of the ladder … and Collingwood victorious, despite an injury list measured in metres: 


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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Tim Blair – Monday, April 01, 2013 (5:30am)

Due to excessive Random Capital Letters and other violations, no comments will be published this month.
UPDATE. It’s midday, so the April Foolery is over.
In an elaborate April Fool’s prank, YouTube announced it was going dark for a decade, and that the site was merely an eight-year contest to find the best video. 
UPDATE III. Google wins.

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McTernan isn’t an idiot. Those he works for, however…

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (6:23pm)

The past columns of John McTernan suggest he knows perfectly well he’s now working for a woman making all the wrong calls. 

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Abbott to be more Newman than Baillieu

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (10:27am)

JULIA Gillard last year begged Queenslanders to tell the rest of us what they thought of Premier Campbell Newman, then slashing 14,000 government jobs.
“Tony Abbott and Campbell Newman are following the same game plan,” the Prime Minister told a Labor conference in Brisbane.
“You are the sentries who can tell Australians what’s at risk . . . You’ve seen it. Tell your story. Make sure they know.”
But today, Gillard will hope Queenslanders shut up. 

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Bred to fail

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (10:25am)

The new morality
NO wonder Ewan Crawford is scared. He’s seen up close the rise of the new underclass, bred to fail.
Yes, sometimes the media briefly lifts a rock to show the rest of us wriggling life forms we barely recognise as human.
It usually takes some bizarre crime: the Snowtown bodies-in-the-barrel killings, the Jaidyn Leskie murder, the Anita Cobby murder, the rape and murder of two terrified schoolgirls at Bega.
But even then the sheer savagery distracts us from the most important story: how such evil is bred.
With Bega killer Leslie Alfred Camilleri, we got only dot-points: No father at home. Dysfunctional mother. On the streets of Kings Cross at 10. Add drugs, and what did you expect from him? Kindness?
And what do we expect from so many children now similarly betrayed?
That’s what Crawford last week warned of as he retired as Tasmania’s Chief Justice after almost 25 years on the bench, dealing with the cruel. 

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Less ice, more ice, whatever. It’s global warming

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (10:11am)

Global warming - dud predictions
2007 - global warming means less ice around Antarctica:
Global warming is threatening one of the most endearing symbols of Antarctica - the penguin… The environmental conservation group WWF is warning that rising temperatures and the resulting loss of sea ice is robbing the emblematic birds of the nesting grounds they need to breed successfully.
2013: global warming means more ice around Antarctica:

GLOBAL warming has led to more ice in the sea around Antarctica and could help insulate the southern hemisphere from atmospheric warming…
Published online in Nature Geoscience, the article suggests cool freshwater from melt beneath the Antarctic ice shelves has insulated offshore sea ice from the warming ocean beneath. 

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Melbourne refuses to warm as it twice did

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (9:49am)

The warmist Bureau of Meteorology rushes out a special statement mid-March to hype a heat wave as evidence of global warming:

The frequency of extreme high temperatures, and lack of extreme low temperatures, in Australia in recent months is consistent with long-term trends towards more extreme high temperatures and fewer extreme low temperatures, which in turn is consistent with an overall warming in Australian mean temperatures of about 0.9°C since 1910.
But damn. March ended up cool, and the records for the warmest March recorded for Melbourne stubbornly remain two set more than 70 years ago:
Weather bureau senior forecaster Richard Carlyon said Melbourne recorded an average maximum daily temperature of 27.6C for March, short of the 28.9C record set in 1940 and 1934’s 27.8C.
Meanwhile, no warming in Britain:

Britain is on track for the coldest March since 1962, according to national weather service the Met Office...
In fact:

Britain had its coldest Easter day on record this weekend, with temperatures dropping as low as -12.5C to round off a freezing month.
No warming in Germany:

...meteorologists are telling us this could end up being the coldest March in Berlin and its surroundings since records began in the 1880s.
(Thanks to readers Jeff and John.) 

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Use an emu to look like Cate

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (9:19am)

imageimage
Cate Blanchett is a green preacher:
Cate Blanchett, luminous superstar and environmental wonk, on how she deploys her celebrity to change the world
Here’s one way Blanchett, luminous superstar and environmental wonk, uses her celebrity to change the world - by recommending women take their beauty regime from dead emus:

The 43-year-old actress, a long-time ambassador for SK-II, attributed her skin to a cream containing emu oil.
”When I’m in duty free, I always stock up on Emu Oil Well Emu Skin Cream,” Blanchett told the British edition of Elle.
(Thanks to reader fulchrum.) 

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Sydney students walk out on headmates and enemies of logic

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (8:59am)

Honi Soit, the student newspaper of Sydney University, says students have had enough of lunacy of the far Left:

The Sydney University Branch of National Labor Students (NLS) has voted to ... disaffiliate from the NLS national network…
NLS is the student wing of Young Labor Left, the socialist and social democratic youth faction of the ALP. They are the faction associated with politicians like Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek…
Honi Soit has been given an exclusive and extraordinary list of grievances ... detailing [the Sydney branch’s] reasons for splitting from NLS. They include...:
- The refusal of the National Caucus to speak out against forced female genital mutilation, due to cultural relativism.
- A prominent member of the caucus, now a National Office Bearer, who believes in ‘headmates’ – other identities that occupy your body, and can claim different ethnicities or sexualities, thus allowing you to join an autonomous caucus (for instance queer or women’s) you were not otherwise entitled to join.
- A prominent member denouncing “logic,” “rationality,” and economics as tools used by males to subjugate women.
- A debate in National Caucus about dating preferences: some members stated that racial dating preferences is entirely racist, another criticised those who dated based on attractiveness, and one person even stated that dating based on the sex of the other is discriminatory.
- The judgment that the term ‘cut’ – as in, ‘cut me from the speaking list’ – was a word likely to trigger traumatic flashbacks and could not be used at all.
(Thanks to reader David.) 

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How Labor shorted it circuits and turned inside out

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (8:27am)

Cut & Paste on all those circuit breakers hailed by the media, leaving Labor with all its circuits shorted:
Lyndal Curtis on ABC online’s The Drum, July 2, 2010: 
OVERTHROWING a prime minister is a hell of a way to get a circuit-breaker, but that’s what the ALP has done.
Katharine Murphy in Melbourne’s The Age, July 2, 2010:

LIKE, lump or loathe this (mining tax) deal, it will be Gillard’s circuit-breaker, not Kevin Rudd’s.
The Sydney Morning Herald editorial, July 3, 2010:

THE circuit-breaker needed at this point is a general election.

The Australian Financial Review, February 1, 2011:

A SHAKE-UP in the Prime Minister’s office may be the circuit-breaker Julia Gillard needs, writes Laura Tingle. 
Laurie Oakes in The Daily Telegraph, August 7, 2011:
IF Rudd overshadows Gillard and the election continues to be about him, Labor will be no better off. In the immediate sense, though, the former PM’s intervention was a plus. Gillard needed a circuit-breaker, allowing attention to be focused on the Coalition and what an Abbott prime ministership might mean.
Dennis Atkins in Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail, January 28, 2011:
IF she can convince voters the package is sound and responsible and win the support needed to get it through parliament, this flood response could give her the circuit-breaker her leadership needed after months of doubt and criticism.
Oakes on Nine News, January 30:

SUPPORTERS of Kevin Rudd believe the dramatic gesture is intended as insurance against any leadership challenge. The main motivation is that the Prime Minister wants to demonstrate that she’s in charge. She also wants a circuit-breaker - a way, if you like, to effectively restart her leadership.

Bernard Keane, Crikey, March 8:

JULIA Gillard needed a circuit-breaker ... So, first she switched to campaign mode ... Then she switched topics: ... 457 visas and gun crime ...
Paul Bongiorno, Ten News, March 21:
WE’VE got the May budget coming up, and I know ... Julia Gillard’s people ... see this as a circuit-breaker.
Bongiorno, Ten News, March 26:

THEY are looking to the May budget now as a circuit-breaker but already what the Treasurer is planning to do or not to do to people’s ... superannuation is shaping as a political minefield.
If the Canberra press pack wasn’t hailing circuit breakers it was announcing turning points:
Laurie Oakes [in November 2011] detects another turning point, this time thanks to Labor’s signing up of Slippery Peter as Speaker:
That gives Gillard a chance to try to build respect, notch up some achievements and claw back support…
On November 12 [2011], Laurie Oakes thought Obama’s visit could help rescue Gillard:

She has started, at long last, to look prime ministerial, and having her close relationship with the US president on show should burnish that improving image at least a little.
In August [2011], Laurie Oakes thought Gillard’s strategy of not talking about her carbon dioxide tax could at last be a winner:

But another factor was Gillard’s switch from campaigning on carbon to delivering outcomes and unveiling policy in other areas - disability pensions, health reform, national broadband and aged care among them. It was a good week for Gillard. A bit more of this and she might start to look prime ministerial.
Laurie Oakes in July [2011] thought Gillard’s talk of a carbon dioxide tax could at last be a winner:

IT should be possible to sell Julia Gillard’s climate change package to voters. Despite Tony Abbott’s alarmist claims, it can be portrayed as a good news story… I can reveal that work done by Treasury in final preparations for Sunday’s big announcement shows that over a million more households will benefit from over-compensation via tax cuts and extra payments than was first thought.
Laurie Oakes in March [2011] thought Gillard’s talk of a carbon dioxide tax could at last be a winner:

So last Monday - again in dire trouble and desperate to turn things around in the carbon tax battle - Gillard faced the Q&A audience again. And again it paid off… The performance at last gave some direction to the Government’s botched campaign to sell the policy…
Laurie Oakes in November 2009 thought Kevin Rudd’s talk of carbon dioxide cuts could be a winner:

Kevin Rudd and Company can hardly believe their luck… Unless (Opposition Leader Malcolm) Turnbull can bring the climate change dissidents to heel, the Liberals will face humiliation at the polls…

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Save Labor. Amp up the global warming scare

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (8:24am)

Henry Ergas on Mark Latham’s great idea for saving Labor:

Latham proposes a solution: climate change, which he casts as the rock on which social democracy’s renewal will be built. But that is implausible to the point of being incomprehensible. It collapses the socialist promise of a world to win into an apocalyptic vision of a world to save, with Labor as its unlikely saviour. An ALP that endorsed that approach would not merely have lost its way but lost its mind.

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Is Kim going to war to kill his generals?

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (8:10am)

Greg Sheridan suggests North Korea’s leader could be both weaker and more dangerous than we’re presuming:

Pyongyang has threatened to launch nuclear strikes against the US, to attack US and South Korean targets in South Korea, declared that it is “at war” with South Korea…
But in their reluctance to reward the brinkmanship of North Korea’s bizarre dictator, Kim Jong-un, too many are playing down the real danger of his recent threats…
Each of his provocations was seen as further solidifying his position with the North Korean military and perhaps being a precursor to negotiations and more reasonable behaviour in the future…
The extreme nature of Kim’s threats, and the damage he does to his own regime by provoking tougher UN sanctions and now possibly the loss of billions of dollars through the Kaesong project, suggest something else…
There is every chance that Kim’s extreme actions are the external manifestation of instability, if not conflict, within the North’s leadership.

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That “no ifs no buts” surplus is another huge deficit

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (7:55am)

A wastrel government is headed for another massive deficit, with nothing to show for it:

THE budget is heading for a deficit of at least $20 billion this year, with government finances failing to improve since last August thanks to stalling revenue growth…
In the year to January, the budget ran a cumulative deficit of $42.7bn. Excluding one-off payments made last June for carbon tax compensation and early payment of the Schoolkids Bonus brings the underlying deficit down to $24.5bn, which is virtually unchanged since last August.
Gillard hasn’t simply spent our future. She’s spent her credibility:

August 2010, election campaign:

JULIA GILLARD: Well the better economic plan for the future is about bringing the budget to surplus in 2013. We’ll do that....  I’m going to get the budget to surplus.... I’ll get the budget back to surplus in 2013.
August 2010:

JOURNALIST:  If you don’t make a, get the Budget back in to surplus in 2012-2013, this is a question to both of you, the cameras are on – will you resign?
PM:  (laughs) The Budget is coming back to surplus, no ifs no buts it will happen.
August 2010, election debate:
Moderator David Speers: I think, Prime Minister, that Peter is seeking some sort of guarantee if you don’t get the budget back into surplus in three years, what happens? Do you sack the Treasurer, do you take personal responsibility?
Julia Gillard: It’s happening, David. Failure is not an option.
Speers: If it doesn’t? If it doesn’t?
Gillard: Well, failure is not an option here and we won’t fail.
August 2010, Gillard again:
That Mr Abbott couldn’t tell you when the Budget would come back to surplus. Well I can:  the Budget will be back in surplus in 20113 if I’m re-elected, if my Government is re-elected on Saturday.
August 2011, Gillard says its incredible to think she won’t give us the surplus:

...the Budget’s coming back to surplus.  There’s no credible analysis on our economic plan that it won’t come back to surplus.
July 2011:

PM: The budget will be back in surplus in 2013 as promised
May 2012, Budget papers:

The Government is returning the budget to surplus in 2012–13, on time and as promised, with surpluses growing over the forward estimates.
May 2012, Gillard treats the surplus as delivered already:
JULIA GILLARD, PRIME MINISTER: What we’ve done instead is swum strongly against the tide and delivered a budget surplus.
UPDATE
What kind of government would have wasted so much money with such little regard for the national interest? David Uren claims:

At least one wavering backbencher in the lead-up to last month’s leadership spill won a commitment to a capital project in his electorate in the tens of millions of dollars. 

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Crean leads a new opposition

Andrew Bolt April 01 2013 (7:45am)

Is Labor heading for another DLP-style split, with the pragmatics divorcing the “progressives”?:
SIMON Crean has reportedly pledged to oppose any move by the federal government to tax earnings on superannuation accounts.
The Australian reports the Labor backbencher has called on his government to explicitly rule out changes that would retrospectively tax earnings generated by super accounts.
Mr Crean said doing so would be “tantamount to taxing people’s retirement surpluses to fund our surplus”.
He would not comment on whether he was prepared to cross the floor on the issue if necessary.
There are plenty of Labor MPs and allies sick to death of Gillard-style Labor of the authoritarian New Class:

But former Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser yesterday backed the criticism that Labor had lost the “governing for everybody” mentality adopted during the Hawke and Keating years…
Mr Fraser, Treasury secretary in the 1980s under the Hawke government and a former voice of the industry super movement, said yesterday the government’s rhetoric on class warfare and on foreign workers was divisive and desperate but argued that a “good case” could be made for re-examining super concessions for high-income earners.
“It’s very true,” Mr Fraser said of the criticism. “I share the same concern and frustration as to how Labor has lost its way over recent years compared to the Hawke-Keating years, which were devoted to making the whole country and the whole community better off.”
Super will mark the new battleline of what we can call the “Rudd camp”, but which now strikes me as something more:

Other Labor MPs, including Joel Fitzgibbon and Kim Carr, and as many as five of the seven crossbenchers have expressed concerns about possible changes to super, raising the prospect of a tough battle for the government to legislate changes.
Troy Bramston says Gillard is the puppet of faceless men who have wrecked Labor:

For Gillard, who ascended to the prime ministership and remains there because of the support of union and faction bosses, the notion that the party is again dominated by “faceless men” could not be more accurate or more damaging.

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4 her
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Why science teachers should not be given playground duty.
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Happy Assyrian New Year 6763 from the Fairfield Showground, Sydney Australia. My best wishes for the coming year, for those enough to be living in Australia, dont forget the suffering Assyrian community of Syria Support Syrian Christians.
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Zaya Toma and Charbel Saliba at the Assyrian New Year celebration.
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Mission accomplished to my mate Tony. She said "YES". It will be on Channel 10 tonight! #eastershow
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A funnel cloud seen at 11:30 am from the town of Nicholas, in Sutter County. Taken by Nick Bishop, forwarded courtesy of Ian Schwartz with KOVR TV.
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521 years ago TODAY, on March 31, 1492, the Spanish monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion of the country's Jews. Many left, while others were forcibly converted to Catholicism. At Shavei Israel, we are assisting their descendants to return to the Jewish people, so please help us to help them by going to www.shavei.org/support-us/ today. Thanks!
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They were confident. They had faced the worst (they thought) and had proven their resilience and worth. Nobody anticipates insanity that is shared. I am told serial killers have bragged they get their victims compliant by giving them hope "put on these bonds and I will set you free." It would come out in the nuremberg trials, and those that followed, but has been shielded from the community by antiseptic bureaucracy, that insanity was shared. Inhuman abuse got worse. And a resilient, beautiful people were slaughtered in a way that it would become illegal to butcher meat.
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Books from slavers - ed

Timbuktu's Desert Scrolls: Re-writing the History of Africa

You may have witnessed a moment, an event or a discovery that would change the future of a community. This event or discovery would have to be something exceptional and dramatic to write a new chapter in the books of history.

But imagine witnessing a moment or discovery that would re-write the history of an entire nation! That has got to be something spectacular to erase and replace the pages of history.

This is precisely what has happened in Timbuktu, Mali in the last five years. Over a million manuscripts have been re-discovered and about 20 million more in West Africa overall. These manuscripts date back to 12th to 16th century period.
read more:
http://www.soundvision.com/info/history/black/timbuktu.asp
also:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/11/uk-mali-timbuktu-manuscripts-idUSLNE83A00U20120411
 
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Beloved, step into a greater measure of Jesus’ grace and peace when you see Him as your loving Savior who has forgiven all your sins through His finished work at the cross!

Click below to watch a short clip of this uplifting message. Be sure to click 'Like' and share this with your friends! Amen!
http://bit.ly/10jI5T6
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Don’t focus on the imperfections in your life. He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6)!
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Have a blessed Resurrection Sunday!

May you experience the resurrection life and power of our Lord Jesus, and walk in a greater measure of redemption’s blessings—divine health, restoration, peace and provision.
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3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

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