Monday, August 15, 2016

Mon Aug 15th Todays News

I'm caught in a vice, so I'll just put this out there because I see no alternative. People that have followed this column for years might know of my antipathy to the ADL but not why. When I first took on responsibility for administering the page I was approached by the leader of the ADL to see if I was of like mind. I did not know of their connection to the EDL, but recognised it when told, and I disliked the oily presentation and the idea of using the "Australian Tea Party" as a name to attract funds from US politics. I was also warned off the couple who ran a single FB account Steve N Jan. I didn't see why I had been warned off Steve N Jan. I invited them onto the chat site and engaged with them in discussion. They had said there was some political blowback from organising rallies when people wanted credit. Lots of people. The organised attacks by the ADL on Steve N Jan were abysmal and at one stage I even kept files of screen shots of what people had said that I booted. I invited Steve N Jan to participate as an admin. We formed a team with others. It was a petty, minor issue that led me to walk away as admin of this page. I did not have support of the admin team when Steve N Jan had done something wrong, burning Daniel Katz for no reason, and then using the admin facility to delete the references that showed what had happened. I broke all contact with Steve N Jan at that point. A year passed when loyal members of the team invited me back. I refused to communicate with Steve N Jan but it was their decision to leave as admin of this page and seize the page of others on the admin team. They said they would 'tell the truth about me' and so on and so on. But I have had nothing to do with them. Until now. They claim to be connected to many in the Liberal Party in Victoria, in senior positions. I'm trying to join the Liberal Party in Victoria, but there are wrinkles holding up my application. I have a history, and it is understandable  if the Liberal Party don't want the risk of having me as a member. I'm loyal, conservative and not a fan of Malcolm Turnbull. But also, Steve N Jan might cruel the pitch too. My fault for helping them?

 For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility.  
=== from 2015 ===
Australian Wallabies had an opportunity tonight to defeat the All Blacks at Eden Park and warn the world Australia was serious in contention for the World Cup. Instead, despite most of the possession for the first ten minutes, Wallabies passed backwards without running forwards. Following the match where they were outplayed 41-13, it was said the Wallabies played without imagination, which is unfair. They lost the centre field and were driven back by pack weight. Quade Cooper had a particularly bad game, killing promising moves with errors as well as one high tackle which conceded a penalty try. 

Worth comparing Agriculture Ministers Barnaby Joyce (Nationals member) with Joe Ludwig (ALP). Joe Ludwig nearly destroyed the cattle industry and wrecked relations with Indonesia. He sent thousands of farmers broke. After 18 months in office, Joyce has seen record prices for sheep and cattle. If you are a farmer and you vote for ALP you are not competent. 
From 2014
NASA doesn't show state secrets. A live feed showing a disc was cut when it was noticed. Some really strange people are claiming that NASA is covering up UFOs instead of the more reasonable and likely explanation .. the Antarcticans have reached space. Good research on genetic memory does not disprove Darwin's theory of Evolution, but a newspaper article journalist feels that that is an acceptable line. Joe Hockey apologises profusely for being right about a throw away line that the media are enlarging. ABC Fact Check misleadingly claim that poor people pay more, because they have less, for their cars. ABC Fact Check forgets to mention that poor people pay more for their iPhones and extravagant clothing. Following ABC logic, poor people are poor because they spend more while having less. Tostee charged with murder as he remains silent about what he did the morning his Tinder contact fell from a 17th story balcony. Kellie Lane, child killer and former water polo player has failed in her last appeal against her conviction. Kellie approached the latest appeal saying she should have been charged with manslaughter, not killing. The High Court disagreed, ruling on the law. However, it is absurd that Lane claim she is guilty of manslaughter when the evidence points to the death of her baby was not an accident. Her defence had been she gave her baby away to someone she did not know, not that it had died from an accident. She can now tell us what she did with the body. Russia sends aid to Ukraine in 20 white trucks. The Iranian backed Iraqi PM is stepping aside, too late for those victims of the regime's oppression and incompetence. Sir Cliff Richard is being investigated for an incident involving a young boy in 1985. There is evidence Richard had performed with Rolf Harris and Michael Jackson, but nothing regarding the allegation. A breakthrough in a twenty four year old murder case sees the victim's brother in law arrested. 

On this day in History, in 778, Roland was killed at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. In later years the battle would be described as Muslim vs Christian, but was in fact Christian vs Christian. It is part of major poetry, the French have the Song of Roland which is their oldest work, and the Italians have Orlando Furioso, which is one of their most celebrated works. In 1018, a Byzantine General employed a ruse to capture and blind their Bulgarian opponent. In 1057, seventeen years after killing King Duncan, King Macbeth dies in Battle of Lumphanan. In 1248, the foundation stone to the Cathedral of Cologne was laid. The Cathedral was completed in 1880. Apparently the building contract was not water tight. It was built to house relics of the three wise men. In 1281, Mongols attempted to invade Japan. They were held back by what was called a divine wind. Had they been successful, history would have been different. In 1430, Francessco Sforza, Lord of Milan, conquered Lucca. In 1483, the Sistine Chapel was consecrated. In 1534, Ignatius of Loyola took initial vows, leading to the creation of the Society of Jesus in 1540. In 1549, Francis Xavier went ashore at Kagoshima.  In 1812, the Battle of Fort Dearborn was fought in what is now Chicago. In 1824, Lafayette toured the US, touchingly two years before Adams and Jefferson passed. Lafayette had been the last surviving French General from the conflict of the US Revolution.  In 1843, Tivoli Gardens was established in Copenhagen. It is the oldest surviving amusement park in continuous operation in the world. In 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home was set fire to by one of his servants who killed several people there. In 1920, Poland spanked the Soviet Union at the Battle of Warsaw. In 1935, Will Rogers was killed in an air accident. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz premiered, and in Germany thirteen Stuka Bombers failed, killing all the crew in air practice. In 1941, Nazi spy Corporal Joseph Jakobs was shot in the Tower of London. He hadn't stood a chance. He had been expected after being betrayed, broke an ankle after a parachute landing, was caught with false papers and money. The firing squad aimed for a small silk patch over his heart, but one shot when through the head. German spies weren't very popular in London. In 1947, India gained independence a day after Pakistan. In 1961, an East German border guard fled to the West. In 1962, US soldier James Dresnok defected to North Korea. Dresnok has married one woman apparently abducted to order by North Korea. When she died he married another. In 1977, SETI received a deep space signal called the Wow! Signal. In 1969, they celebrated that signal at Woodstock. 
Historical perspective on this day
Not done
=== Publishing News ===
This column welcomes feedback and criticism. The column is not made up but based on the days events and articles which are then placed in the feed. So they may not have an apparent cohesion they would have had were they made up.
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Thanks to Warren for this advice on watching Bolt
Warren Catton Get this for your PC or MAC https://www.foxtel.com.au/foxtelplay/how-it-works/pc-mac.html Once you have installed it start it up and press Live TV you don't need a login to watch Sky News!
===
I am publishing a book called Bread of Life: January. 

Bread of Life is a daily bible quote with a layman's understanding of the meaning. I give one quote for each day, and also a series of personal stories illustrating key concepts eg Who is God? What is a miracle? Why is there tragedy?

January is the first of the anticipated year-long work of thirteen books. One for each month and the whole year. It costs to publish. It (Kindle version) should retail at about $2US online, but the paperback version would cost more, according to production cost.If you have a heart for giving, I fundraise at gofund.me/27tkwuc
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Editorials will appear in the "History in a Year by the Conservative Voice" series, starting with August, September, October, or at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482020262/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_dVHPub0MQKDZ4  The kindle version is cheaper, but the soft back version allows a free kindle version.

List of available items at Create Space
Happy birthday and many happy returns Sylvia Wong and Xiaowei Lord. Born on the same day, across the years, along with Blind Jack (1717), Napoleon (1769), Walter Scott (1771), Florence Harding (1860), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875), Oscar Peterson (1925), Tony Robinson (1946), Melinda Gates (1964) and Natasha Henstridge (1974). On your day, Victory over Japan Day; Feast of the Assumption (Christianity); Independence Day in the Congo (1960) and India (1947); Liberation Day in North and South Korea (1945)
295 BC – The oldest known temple to Venus (Venus Anadyomene by Titian), the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, was dedicated.
1534 – In Montmartre, near Paris, Ignatius of Loyola and six others took the vows that led to the establishment of the Society of Jesus.
1907 – Jamaican American Raphael Morgan was ordained as the first Black Orthodox clergyman in America.
1945 – The Gyokuon-hōsō was broadcast in Japan, announcing the unconditional surrender of the Japanese army and naval forces.
1963 – President Fulbert Youlou was overthrown in the Republic of Congo, after a three-day uprising in the capital. You have made your temple to love and established society. People are spreading the word. The broadcast has been made and the old order overthrown. Party on.
Deaths
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FAIRFAX PRIORITIES

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (3:47pm)

Forget collapsed circulation, mass retrenchments and the looming termination of print editions. The Melbourne Age‘s biggest problem is the lack of a dedicated vegan sandwich press in the staff kitchen.
===

TEN NEWS WEBSITE INVADED BY ILLITERATE CHILD

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (2:32pm)

Network Ten’s work experience kid reports on Sunday’s antics at Fr Tilty McJesus’s Gosford church: 
A group of right-wing bigots, dressed in an interpretation of traditional Arabic dress stormed a Sunday church service on the New South Wales Central Coast yesterday, as part of a vile protest against Islam.
The protestors, who claim to be members of an extreme-right hate group that call themselves, the “Party for Freedom” entered the Gosford Anglican Church during its Sunday service, blaring Islamic prayers through a loudspeaker.
Footage the group uploaded on Social Media, shows the protestors entering multiple entrances of the Church, blocking them off, loudly ranting and understandably as a result, terrifying parishioners. 
Commas everywhere except where they’re needed. 
The ring leader of the group then is heard yelling sarcastically and taunting the congregation saying they are there to “share Islam with you, this is the future.”
The hate-fuelled group has previously attacked the Church’s Priest Father Rod Bower on Social Media, for his tireless work campaigning and supporting multiculturalism, however this disrespectful protest, invading the Church is taken their hatred to a whole new level. 
Ten is taking hatred of clear English to a whole new level. 
Speaking out about the invasion this morning, Father Rod Bower told media how the incident “traumatised and terrorised” the congregation, who had come to the Church for prayer, not to be frightened by the actions of a hate filled group.
Fortunately, a canny Father Bower was quick to identify the group and their intentions- Calming down parishioners by reassuring them it was a harmless, albeit, tasteless prank. 
So the parishioners were terrified because they thought the invaders were actual Muslims. Interesting. 
The right wing hate group, who claim to be stanch supporters of Pauline Hanson, have even posted a tribute to the Queensland Senator online, stealing the famous style of Jim Fitzpatrick’s 1968 Che Guevara artwork, that was also the basis of Barack Obama’s famous 2008 campaign poster- “Hope”. 
Wrong. The Hope poster was based on an Associated Press photograph. Great work, Ten.
===

ANCIENT ADVICE

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (3:54am)

If you’ve ever participated in a marketing focus group, you know the drill. While you offer opinions on various products or ideas, researchers behind a one-way mirror take careful note of what you say and make fun of your terrible clothes.
One-way mirrors hadn’t been invented back in ancient Greece, however, so when painter Apelles wanted some feedback on his artworks he’d simply hang them out the front of his house and secretly listen in from around the corner.
Some of that advice was extremely helpful. When a shoemaker noted Apelles had gotten the detail of a sandal wrong, the artist was able to correct his error.
But the next day, when the shoemaker returned and noted with pride that his criticism had been acted upon, he presumed to offer further views. Apelles, he said, had also blundered in his depiction of a leg.
This was too much for old Apelles, who at that moment established a tradition continuing to this day of artists berating their critics. Emerging from his hiding place, Apelles confronted the shoemaker.
“Listen, mate,” he said, in Ancient Greek, “you might know about footwear but you know stuff-all about art.
“So bugger off and make some damn clogs or something before I drop you like a sack of spuds, or whatever it is we carry around in sacks during the 4th century BC. Olives, probably.”
Over the centuries Apelles’ comment has been refined down to “shoemaker, stick to your last” – a last being the foot-shaped device a cobbler uses to construct shoes. It means, obviously, that one should restrict commentary to one’s particular area of expertise.

Apelles – impressive sideburns – paints some tilty topless sheila as Alexander the Great offers unwelcome artistic advice.

Quite a few shoemakers around the place currently need an Apelles-style talking to. We’ve got, for example, Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane now slamming The Australian‘s cartoonist Bill Leak. We’ve got any number of Greens politicians proclaiming about matters to do with Australia’s asylum-seeker policies, despite their favoured policies in this area being a proven cause of mass death by drowning.
(Continue reading Ancient Advice.)
===

MONDAY NOTICEBOARD

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (3:00am)

Gillian Triggs’s ridiculous Human Rights Commission cops a colour-based complaint: 
In the first complaint of its kind for the HRC under the controversial section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, NSW Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm has taken action against a journalist for what he claimed were remarks insulting to white men.
Under Section 18C, it is unlawful to commit an act which would reasonably offend or insult someone because of their race, colour, national or ethnic origin.
The Daily Telegraph has learned the complaint was submitted last week following an article published by Fairfax media in which Mr Leyonhjelm was described as “boorish and gormless as a result of being an angry white male”. 
Over to you, Triggs and friends.
UPDATE. Today’s Daily Telegraph editorial: 
To highlight the iniquities of 18C, Leyonhjelm is pursuing a case of alleged race hate. The senator has lodged a formal complaint before the Human Rights Commission under race hate laws for being publicly abused as an “angry white male”. Leyonhjelm told The Daily Telegraph that he wasn’t personally offended by the article but said under Section 18C he didn’t have to be. The law as it stands means that the offence be given rather than taken.
On the face of it, Leyonhjelm has a strong case. This is an important test for 18C advocates. 
===

SWIMMING INVITATION MISUNDERSTOOD

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (2:52am)

Jason P. Steed’s no-jokes theory wins support in the UK: 
A student at the University of Bristol has faced disciplinary procedures after telling Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire to “get in the sea” on Twitter.
Ms Debbonaire responded to the tweet sent by student Verity Phillips on 15 July, saying: “This person has just told me to drown – I believe that is a threat to kill.”
“I expect Bristol Uni to deal with this,” she added in another tweet. 
(Via Andrew R.)
===

SMILE ON THE RUN

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (2:30am)

The Prime Minister’s smile is missing. Federal police today announced that the foot-wide gleaming apparition was last seen in public two months ago at a multi-faith dinner and hasn’t been spotted since.
“We hold grave fears for the safety of Mr Turnbull’s smile,” a police statement said. “Close examination of the Prime Minister and his great big head show no sign of a smile whatsoever.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his smile in happier times. (File photograph.)

Some believe the smile has been kidnapped while others speculate that it fled of its own accord following Turnbull’s hopeless handling of the election campaign, the election result, Kevin Rudd’s UN bid, the census and everything else this PM touches.
“If you were a smile, why would you hang around?” said an officer familiar with the case. “It’s not as though you’d have anything to do …”
The current resident of Turnbull’s lower facial area, a tight-lipped bitter scowl, declined to comment.
(Continue reading Smile On The Run.)
===

BURN, BABY, BURN

Tim Blair – Monday, August 15, 2016 (1:37am)

If Western feminists genuinely supported the liberation of Middle Eastern women, they wouldn’t celebrate burqas, niqabs or hijabs. Instead, they’d burn them: 
For the first time in over two-and-a-half years, the women of Manbij, Syria walked with their faces uncovered Saturday, some of them even setting their niqabs on fire. Men shaved or trimmed their beards. Smokers of both sexes lit up and puffed away.


U.S.-backed fighters seized the key northern Syria city late Friday after two months of heavy fighting that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced thousands more. The fighters also freed hundreds of civilians the extremists had used as human shields, Syrian Kurdish officials and an opposition activist group said.
Amateur videos showed civilians hugging fighters from the predominantly Kurdish Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) after being evacuated from the final ISIS-held neighborhood. 
Dance, everybody! It’s a niqab inferno.
===

DANGER UNRECOGNISED

Tim Blair – Sunday, August 14, 2016 (8:08pm)

The Spectator‘s Douglas Murray considers the gay community’s terrorism denial: 
It is almost two months since Omar Mateen walked around the  Pulse nightclub in Florida, gunning people down while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. During the assault Mateen spoke to American law enforcement and swore allegiance to Isis. Frustratingly Omar Mateen failed to call the group ‘so-called Islamic State’, thus betraying a woeful lack of linguistic sensitivity among his other crimes.
A few days later, very much in the shadow of these events, there was a ‘gay pride’ parade in New York.  The huge banner leading the parade at the front read ‘Republican hate kills’. 
In fact, Mateen was a registered Democrat. Please read on. It’s a fine piece.
UPDATE. The motive that dare not speak its name:



(Via Brian.)
===

ARTIST GETS A REAL JOB

Tim Blair – Sunday, August 14, 2016 (6:20pm)

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Elizabeth Farrelly investigates the crucial issue of vocational training: 
I knew an unemployed artist who found work with a registered training organisation. Not teaching art. Teaching forklift drivers. “You ever drive a forklift?” I asked in surprise. He said no, unnecessary. He’d done a short course (not in forklift driving). He’d ticked the VET boxes for the TAE certificate from the RTO. All good. To me it made no sense, even sans the alphabet soup. Still doesn’t. But this is what we have now instead of an education system: a market. Caveat emptor.
It has to end. 
Damn right it does. We can’t have artist-trained forklift drivers. They’ll be crashing and stuffing tines into goods, products and people in warehouses across the nation. They’d be a deadly menace to themselves and others, which is presumably why this fellow is referred to in the past tense. Also from Farrelly: 
This is not lefty claptrap. 
Well, if you actually have to tell us, Elizabeth …
UPDATE. The greatest threat to artist and actor incomes:

===

On The Bolt Report and radio tonight

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (4:27pm)

On The Bolt Report on Sky News Live at 7pm tonight:
Editorial: The new censorship. Australians are as mad as hell and can’t take any more.
My guests:
Senator David Leyonhjelm on complaining to the Human Rights Commission for being called an “angry white man”.
Nick Folkes, spokesman of the anti-Muslim group that invaded the Anglican church at Gosford.
In Our Nation, Peta Credlin returns! So does a Malcolm Turnbull thought-bubble. And was Tony Abbott right to say he was too partisan on border policy?
The panel: Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman and former NSW Labor Treasurer Michael Costa The Turnbull Government says no to China. And the latest GST plan: arguing about dividing the cake, not making another?
Podcasts of the show here. Facebook page here. 
On 2GB, 3AW and 4BC with Steve Price from 8pm.
Listen live here. Talkback:  131 873.  Listen to all past shows here.
===

Gay groups refuse to condemn the creed that kills them

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (2:04pm)

Last year:
In January, the Islamic State threw two men off a tall building in Iraq for the “crime” of being gay.
In February, they threw another gay man off a building, this time in Syria and, when he somehow survived, had a crowd stone him to death.
IS is in a war against gays — not just against Jews, Christians and any Muslim thought insufficiently devout.
But what have our main gay representatives — largely Left-leaning — said in response to such savagery against gays?
The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Silent.
Victoria’s Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Not one press release.
Labor frontbencher Penny Wong, openly lesbian? Nothing.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown, our first openly gay senator?
Also nothing.
Current Greens leader Christine Milne? Not a tweet.
Indeed, not one of the 150 floats in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian mardi gras on Saturday flew a banner of protest against this deadly persecution or the brand of faith which inspired it.
Now:
It is almost two months since Omar Mateen walked around the Pulse nightclub in Florida, gunning people down while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. During the assault Mateen spoke to American law enforcement and swore allegiance to Isis. Frustratingly Omar Mateen failed to call the group ‘so-called Islamic State’, thus betraying a woeful lack of linguistic sensitivity among his other crimes.
A few days later, very much in the shadow of these events, there was a ‘gay pride’ parade in New York.  The huge banner leading the parade at the front read ‘Republican hate kills’. 
===

The real racists aren’t the cops

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (1:49pm)

Protesters grab another excuse to be violent - and racist:

A Milwaukee policeman whose fatal shooting of a suspect sparked overnight rioting in the U.S. Midwestern city appeared to have acted lawfully after the man turned toward him with a gun in his hand, Police Chief Edward Flynn said on Sunday.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker activated the state’s National Guard in case of more violence in response to the death of Sylville K. Smith, 23, who was shot while trying to flee from an officer who had stopped his car on Saturday.
In a scene Mayor Tom Barrett described as “unlike anything I have seen in my adult life in this city,” crowds gathered after the shooting and then turned violent during the night in the city’s Sherman Park neighborhood.
Gunshots were fired, six businesses were destroyed by fire and police cars damaged before calm was restored in the neighborhood, which has a reputation for poverty and crime.
Seventeen people were arrested in the disturbances, Flynn said. Four police officers were treated for injuries and released from hospitals.
The protesters are even more racist than what they claim to denounce:
Video footage shows violent mobs of ‘Black Lives Matter’ rioters targeting white people for brutal beat downs during last night’s unrest in Milwaukee.
The clip shows angry rioters chanting “black power!” before asking “is they white?” as cars slowly drive past.
“Yeah they white!” states someone else, prompting the mob to run towards the vehicle.
“Yeah they white, get their ass!” screams another.
“Hey they beatin’ up every white person!” exclaims another rioter.
“He white – beat his head – bitch!” he adds.
The footage appears to show the mob attacking cars and trying to drag out the drivers.
The footage then cuts to an upper floor window before the person shooting the video states, “I think they just beat some white bitch ass for no reason – they bust open the window.”
Local reporters were also targeted for violent assaults, including a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter, who was “thrown to the ground and punched”.
Small problem with the excuse for these racists:
[Police Chief Edward Flynn said].the officer who fired the fatal shot was black and media reports also identified Smith as black.
He said a silent video of the incident appeared to show the officer acting within lawful bounds in shooting Smith. Flynn said the video from the officer’s body camera showed Smith turning toward the officer with a gun in his hand.
Yet more evidence that the Black Lives Matter movement is actually a cover for racists. 
===

Can we all just let each other get on with our own business?

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (10:14am)

Idiots. As bad as the far-Left:
A far-right nationalist group that links itself to Pauline Hanson stormed a church service on Sunday dressed in mock Muslim attire and chanting anti-Islamic slogans, leaving some members of the congregation “deeply traumatised”.
But “deeply traumatised” and the dragging in of Pauline Hanson is over the top.
We have here simply extremely rude people who should leave others alone.
UPDATE
Will the media take the same forgiving line that they took with this protest in a church?
The Catholic Archbishop, the Most Rev George Pell, yesterday refused Holy Communion to openly gay and lesbian parishioners, coupling his first Sydney confrontation over the issue with an attack on homosexuality…
Dr Pell’s rejection of about 20 parishioners marked the first time members of the Rainbow Sash movement had sought communion from the archbishop since he moved to Sydney a year ago. As archbishop of Melbourne, he refused Sash members communion at least 10 times…
Earlier, Rainbow Sash members had stood in quiet defiance as Dr Pell made an unprecedented address before the final prayer. “I deeply regret that such people, who profess the Catholic faith, would choose to mount an ideological demonstration during Mass,” he said. “This is inappropriate.” 
===

We’re as mad as hell and speaking out

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (9:21am)

Free speech, three

AT last! Australians are finally refusing to be treated like scum, too stupid and vicious to be free to speak.
True, I might be kidding myself. Looking for dawn in deepest night. These are terrible days for free speech, after all.

How could we have let ourselves be so muzzled? How could we have so lost our pride and our freedom?
Consider: right now we have three Queensland University of Technology students being sued by an Aboriginal staffer for racism — though they complained against racism.
Yes, their crime was to write social media messages protesting at being kicked off computers that the university insisted were only for Aboriginal students. This was “segregation”, they said.
And they’re right. So we now have laws — the Racial Discrimination Act — that silence students for protesting against discrimination.
Are we crazy?
And who would have dreamt that a Liberal government would be too gutless to change these wicked laws for fear of seeming “racist” too?
Did you know that Attorney-General George Brandis even refused to indemnify these students to spare them horrendous legal bills?
But in many other ways, we have let ourselves be stopped from saying what we think or reading what we’d like. We have let others decide for us what is fit to say and believe.
(Read full column here.) 
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Turnbull tosses around yet another GST thought bubble

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (8:52am)

There is some merit somewhere in this idea, but it is being sold like snake oil and risks being yet another Turnbull thought bubble. No consultation and no detail, with a big financial problem left unaddressed - where’s the money coming from?:
Malcolm Turnbull has picked another GST fight with premiers by promising Western Australia’s Liberal leader Colin Barnett that he would fix the formula so that each state was guaranteed a minimum share of their biggest source of tax revenue…
Tasmania’s Liberal Premier Will Hodgman responded angrily, saying “we don’t support any changes to the GST, full stop”, while Queensland Treasurer Curtis Pitt complained that “once again, we have the Prime Minister floating a major tax change as a thought bubble with no detail or consultation”.
Western Australia ...  has been receiving only 30 per cent of the funds it would get if GST were distributed on a per-capita basis. Because the state has such a rich flow of resource royalties, the Commonwealth Grants Commission has distributed 70 per cent of Western Australia’s GST share to weaker states.
The distribution of GST is intended to ensure all states and territories can provide their citizens with services of equal quality. However the formula is slow to adjust to changing fortunes, and with mineral prices having crashed, the shortfall has left Western Australia’s budget deep in deficit.
The West Australian Treasury has calculated that the GST distribution formula will cost it $17.8bn between now and 2019-20 and Mr Barnett has pushed for the formula to be changed so that no state can receive less than 75 per cent of its per-capita share…
Mr Turnbull said Western Australia’s share of the GST pool would rise over the next few years as its budget difficulties were recognised. Once its share rose to a “much higher level”, that would be set as a minimum for all ­distributions....
He said no other state would be disadvantaged…
Mr Pitt noted that Mr Turnbull had not mentioned the idea of changing the GST formula before last month’s federal election and said there had not been any consultation with the states.
Excuse me, but how can Turnbull say no other state would be disadvantaged?  The change means that when WA gets more than it would under the present arrangement, then other states of course get less.  Why pretend otherwise?
Note also the not-yet clause. Turnbull is not promising to make the change now, when WA badly needs the money.
David Uren:
Turnbull’s suggested fix to Western Australia’s problem with the GST formula is sensible enough and should impose no perceptible pain on anyone else, but the manner of his proposing it displays what former prime minister John Howard describes as a political “tin ear"…
Turnbull’s simple, no-cost idea has a lot to recommend it. Quietly floated behind closed doors at a Council of Australian Governments meeting and he may have won support for it.
Launching such an idea at a West Australian Liberal Party conference was asking for trouble. It blindsided premiers who see their job as defending their state’s share of the GST…
Turnbull has form when it comes to floating, and then abandoning, ideas for fixing state taxes.
Andrew O’Connor notes Turnbull’s team already adding big qualifiers:
(T)here was no explicit “commitment” in the carefully chosen words used by the Prime Minister in addressing the GST issue at the state conference. And there was no mention by Mr Turnbull of “imposing” a GST floor on the states for the benefit of all.
In fact, within hours of that address, the Prime Minister’s office had offered clarifying statements, with a spokesman telling the ABC’s Canberra bureau the GST issue was an “idea” the PM wanted to “pursue”.
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Turnbull hiding in his Wentworth fortress

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (8:43am)

Yes, Malcolm Turnbull has shredded the Coalition’s authority with his election pratfall. But he could still lead a credible government, even with a one-seat majority.
The real problem now is that he actually has no agenda and no judgement. That’s what has turned a challenge into a crisis.
Phil Hudson:
Left with a majority of one seat, the government is shell-shocked. It is just one heart attack or disgruntled backbencher away from being forced to become a minority government and the mood inside the Coalition smells of defeat....
Turnbull ... needs big victories and it will be tough considering the six weeks since the election have been bumpy with controversies about knocking Kevin Rudd back for the UN’s top job, rushing to announce a royal commissioner into the treatment of children in the Northern Territory who had to be replaced within days, the shambles surrounding the census and the banks rejecting his call to fully pass on the Reserve Bank rate cut.
I believe Turnbull now lacks the confidence to go out and do his job, which includes meeting people who aren’t going to shower him with love.
Sam Maiden:
Turnbull has gone missing in action since the federal election, visiting just seven electorates across Australia and setting foot in Western Sydney only once in 41 days.
The PM has not visited a single electorate in Sydney apart from his own, Wentworth, where he lives at Point Piper… He has not set foot in South Australia, Tasmania or the Northern Territory, and his visit to Perth [on Saturday] was his first since the July 2 poll.
The travel records of the Prime Minister will provide chilling reading for Liberal and National MPs because they confirm Mr Turnbull has rarely left his blue-ribbon electorate since the night he nearly lost the election. By contrast, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has visited 24 electorates, ­including six in Sydney.
And now Turnbull is even losing control of what should be one of his most potent policies. Fran Kelly, the Leftist activist hosting Radio National Breakfast, and commentator Michelle Grattan agreed this morning that Turnbull is under pressure now over his border policies and faces a “tipping point” on detaining people in Nauru.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Leyonhjelm lodges complaint over “anry white male” abuse

Andrew Bolt August 15 2016 (8:25am)

Leyonhjelm is perfectly correct to point out the double standards, but he will lose because as a “white male” he will be expected to just suck it up. Which, by the way, is good advice for many others.
Simon Benson:
A FEDERAL politician has lodged a formal complaint before the Human Rights Commission under race hate laws for being publicly abused as an “angry white male”.
In the first complaint of its kind for the HRC under the controversial section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, NSW Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm has taken action against a journalist for what he claimed were remarks insulting to white men.
Under Section 18C, it is unlawful to commit an act which would reasonably offend or insult someone because of their race, colour, national or ­ethnic origin.
The Daily Telegraph has learned the complaint was submitted last week following an article published by Fairfax media in which Mr Leyonhjelm was described as “boorish and gormless as a result of being an angry white male’’. The article was critical of the senator for his purist views on free speech and his campaign to repeal Section 18C.
Mr Leyonhjelm is using the provisions he wants to abolish to launch the action in a bid to prove what he said was the absurdity of the law…
Mr Leyonhjelm said he wasn’t personally offended by the article but said under Section 18C he didn’t have to be because the law as it stood meant that the offence be given rather than taken…
The West Australian branch of the Liberal Party passed a motion at the weekend supporting reform of the law to remove the words “insult” and “offend.
The Fairfax journalist responsible for the boorish racist insult is angry white male Mark Kenny.
UPDATE
The Human Rights Commissions faces another challenge - as does the oppressive Race Discrimination Act that is being used to censor debate on attempts to divide us by “race”.
Rowan Dean :
The most significant event of last week occurred on Friday in Adelaide, with potential ramifications for all of us. At his address to the Samuel Griffith Society ...  Tony Abbott made one of the most significant admissions of his career : that he was wrong, as PM, not to have amended Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Had he done so, there is every chance that a group of young Queensland students would not now be enduring official persecution at the hands of our government..
18C has been repeatedly used to attack Australians for exercising their right to free expression and to falsely accuse them of “racism”. Yet how can it be anything other than modern apartheid when white students are barred from using “indigenous” computers? And how can it be anything less than sinister totalitarianism when those individuals are hounded by bureaucrats for complaining about this racial segregation?
Human rights commissioners such as Professor Gillian Triggs and Dr Tim Soutphommasane are using our taxes to attack and investigate everyday Australians.
Triggs and her outfit conducted two years of secret investigations into the QUT students, while Soutphommasane has spent the past week urging people to lodge complaints against Bill Leak’s cartoon of an indigenous father and his wayward son. In both instances, this amounts to nothing short of state-sponsored persecution; your taxes being used to attack and to try to silence free speech…
Add that to the willingness of government bodies like the Human Rights Commission to investigate individuals in secrecy, and you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to realise how critical it is to protect our freedoms of expression.
If Malcolm Turnbull wishes to make up for last week’s Census farce, now is his chance. Section 18C must be amended to remove “offend” and “insult”. Now.
Jennifer Oriel:
The coming battle over free speech and the Racial Discrimination Act will test the Liberal coalition’s commitment to freedom. This time, however, the tactic of using race as a political tool to browbeat dissenters into submission is well known.
We need a more muscular liberalism to defeat PC censors, their culture of codified bigotry and their determination to destroy the hard-won freedoms that distinguish the West from the rest. We will not let another freethinker fall while 18c stands.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

French-speaking, Raspail-loving handwritng sleuth wanted

Andrew Bolt August 14 2016 (9:49pm)

American journalist Sasha Polakow-Suransky very kindly got Jean Raspail, now aged 91, to autograph for me a copy of his prophetic and brave Camp of the Saints, which 43 years ago predicted the existential threat that mass immigration from the Third World would pose to Europe.
(I also recommend his equally penetrating Who Will Remember the People..., set in Patagonia but with hard lessons for us in Australia, too, faced with another culture inevitably dying from contact with the outside world.)
Anyway, there is a problem. I can’t speak French and can’t make out some of the writing, but am very eager to know what Raspail has written in my book. Can any readers help?
UPDATE
Thank you so much to all the very kind readers who have made good this shameful deficit in my education:
Dear Andrew, while hoping - without believing - that the book will remain fiction… Final part in 2045 - 2055. Good luck and friendship
Readers Marie, Jean-Marc and other native French speakers translate it more grimly:
For Andrew, Hoping - without believing it - that the book will remain fictional… Game over in 2045 - 2055. Good luck and with my friendly thoughts.
===

Book confronts China. And Bolt Bulletin released

Andrew Bolt August 14 2016 (9:47pm)

My book is on an odyssey, visiting the skulls of Montpellier, Croatia, Ho Chi Minh City, Santorini, London, Lake Como, Ithaca, Scotland, the Bay of Naples, Dubrovnik, Fiji, Aileron, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, the Andes, a christening in Newcastle, the Northern Territory, the Whitsundays, Kalgoorlie and Condabri, Queensland, before invading Australia’s most Left-wing Parliament - an experience which convinced one reader at the Katharine River Mango Farm to try teaching even a donkey to understand what’s in it.
Now reader A. takes it to Shanghai:
To reward the Sinophile in your life, order the book here.
BOLT BULLETIN
The fourth edition of the Bolt Bulletin, available to on-line buyers, is written and should be out today. It includes a prediction of a big culture war, the loudest lesson learned on my book tour and a must-visit recommendation for Australia’s least-known arts jewel. I also include a scathing column I somehow forgot to put in my book - one I was reminded of while reading a terrific memoir of a genius who rescued two of the greatest opera houses in the world before dying in 1940. 
===

Fruity news from the global warming front

Andrew Bolt August 14 2016 (7:37pm)

Good news from the field of global warming science! A happy South Australian grower is cleaning up:

No artificial gases are used to redden or ripen the tomatoes. But in another hi-tech innovation, carbon dioxide levels are elevated in the glasshouses to boost crop production by about 30 per cent.
Imagine how good that would be if replicated with the planet.
OMG! It has been!:
Satellite data gathered over 33 years has shown there has been a ‘persistent and widespread increase’ in the growing season of plants.


The Earth is getting greener with rising carbon dioxide levels, researchers have revealed. They found over the past 33 years, leaf cover around more than half of the vegetated area of the world has increased. They say the extra greenery is equivalent to covering the USA twice with plants
Scientists say up to half of the world’s vegetated areas are now showing signs of increased leaf cover, with the majority caused by extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
(Thanks to reader Brian.) 
===

You are funding a state media which promotes Islamism. UPDATE: Another Lyons’ claim denied

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (2:49pm)

Normalising the deviant and the radical Islamist. Treating the Australian nationalist as the person most in need of “educating”:
SBS is considering a television program starring convicted criminal Zaky Mallah, a move that could place it on a collision course with the Abbott government. 
A proposal for the SBS show The Feed has been drawn up and filming is scheduled to begin as early as this Wednesday…
Mallah, who was imprisoned for threatening to kill ASIO officers, caused a controversy when he appeared in the live studio audience on the ABC’s Q&A in June and was given the opportunity to question an Abbott government minister during a discussion about citizenship laws… Filming of Mallah and his co-star Kim Vuga — who recently starred in SBS’s Go Back to Where You Came From — was due to begin next week. Under the proposal, the two would have been taken to a mosque, Mallah’s parents’ house, the courthouse in Sydney’s west where a female genital mutilation trial is due to be held and — in the words of producer John MacFarlane — “a restaurant in the eastern suburbs (of Sydney) or inner west, home turf of Green party lefties.”
But it seems Vuga has higher standards than the taxpayer-funded SBS and a great deal more sense:
Ms Vuga yesterday told SBS she was shocked when the proposal to appear alongside Mallah was put to her and would not be part of the program.... 
“This is taxpayers’ money and to give someone like Zaky Mallah another platform is wrong.” She said that, apart from Mallah’s conviction, she had been ­appalled by his tweets saying two female journalists should be “gang banged”.
Is SBS boss Michael Ebeid fully in control of his network?
When Ms Vuga asked whether Mr Ebeid knew of the proposal to use ­Mallah, [producer John] MacFarlane replied: “The only thing I should say, Kim, is keep this under wraps because we want to make it happen — we’d rather just get it on TV without him (Mr Ebeid) finding out."… 
A freelance producer, MacFarlane said of the program’s executive producer, Nick Hayden: “He’s willing to kind of like put his neck on the line and just approve it now, so it’s all kind of ready to go, which is amazing.”
UPDATE
Finance Minister Mathias Corman has spoken to SBS boss Ebeid and says this John Lyons story is false. He says he’s been assured this proposal for a Zaky Mallah show came from a freelance producer and in no way had been approved by the SBS, and would not be, either.
UPDATE
I should have been more sceptical, given the byline.  Ebeid denies:
John Lyons isn’t batting well at the moment. His story claiming Tony Abbott had suggested a “unilateral invasion” of Iraq was a bigger crock.
UPDATE
Lyons defends himself:
After two hours of discussion within SBS, Ms Harris, on behalf of Mr Ebeid, telephoned me. Despite the plan to begin filming as early as next Wednesday, Ms Harris wanted to make sure that The Weekend Australian was not saying the program with Mallah had been given final approval by SBS. 
I asked her if “considering” was the accurate word.
“Considering is accurate,” she replied.
I asked Ms Harris one final question: So the plan to use Zaky Mallah is still a live option? “We’ve not ruled it out,” she said.
It seems it was more the headline (which Lyons didn’t write) than Lyon’s copy which really went too far. 
===

The benefits of Chavez socialism

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (9:59am)

Then:
[Seven] years ago a collective of our snowfield socialists - including the ABC’s Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, the Greens’ Kerry Nettle and Kevin Rudd’s nephew Van Thanh Rudd - begged Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come teach Australians a lesson: 
Every country has its own traditions and culture and has to find its own solutions, but what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.
Now:
The daughter of Hugo Chavez, the former president who once declared ‘being rich is bad,’ may be the wealthiest woman in Venezuela, according to evidence reportedly in the hands of Venezuelan media outlets. 
Maria Gabriela Chavez, 35, the late president’s second-oldest daughter, holds assets in American and Andorran banks totaling almost $4.2billion, Diario las Americas reports.
Venezuela itself isn’t so blessed by the Chavez legacy:
As dawn breaks over the scorching Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, smugglers, young mothers, and a handful of kids stir outside a supermarket where they spent the night, hoping to be first in line for scarce rice, milk, or whatever may be available. 
Some of the people in line are half-asleep on flattened cardboard boxes; others are drinking coffee. Almost all are bemoaning their situation. With shortages of basic goods and looting on the rise, more Venezuelans say they are resorting to nighttime waits in front of closed stores. 
===

Not the principle but the side - the Mia Freedman example

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (9:41am)

The Australian’s Sharri Markson makes her point twice over - the second time through Freedman’s silence on the abuse occurring on her own Twitter conversation:
Will Freedman ever stand with Markson, or is she the “wrong” type of woman?
UPDATE
What never fails to astonish me - although no longer surprise - is how many people of the Left both congratulate themselves on their greater virtue yet express themselves with greater abuse.
True, Carlton is a particularly vile example, but he nevertheless conforms to a type whose malignant idealism Bertrand Russell memorably described: “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”
(Thanks to reader Chris F.) 
===

On The Bolt Report tomorrow, August 16

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (9:12am)

On Channel 10 on Sunday at 10am. NOTE: the 3pm repeat this week is on ONE everywhere except Perth, where it will screen after the netball.
Editorial:  Abbott’s week of chaos was actually preparation for battle.
My guest: Justice Minister Michael Keenan.
The panel: Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger and Sean Kelly, former advisor to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

NewsWatch: Miranda Devine, Daily Telegraph columnist and 2GB host.
We’ll tackle Labor’s most dangerous smear yet. Plus getting tough on ice, taking on the Islamic State and exposing the media that’s pushing same sex marriage with a campaign of hate.
Also on the schedule: Bill Shorten promotes an apartheid in Parliament.
The videos of the shows appear here.
===

Why Labor and its media mates are sliming a good judge

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (9:08am)

Roger Franklin on the real reason Labor is smearing the royal commissioner - and why the media Left joins in:
(Y)ou just knew what was coming: the revelations emerging from the Trade Unions Royal Commission have been damning, so the investigation and the man conducting it, ex-High Court judge Dyson Heydon, need to be smeared 
Opposition leader Bill Shorten… in the witness box: Netballers signed up without their knowledge as members of the AWU. Sweetheart payments. Curious deals that worked to favoured employers’ advantage while simultaneously burdening commercial rivals with more costly labour contracts.
Understandably, perhaps, former AWU chieftain Shorten preferred to serve waffle rather than the red meat of direct answers sought by Counsel Assisting. It was a policy that drew some gentle but pointed advice from Commissioner Dyson Heydon… Translated from its gentle legalese, the Commissioner’s admonition amounted to this: For God’s sake, not to mention your own, enough with the ducking and weaving! ....
Liberated temporarily from the stand — he has another appearance looming – Shorten gathered the stenographers of the press about him to deliver the party line: “He has got a job to do,” he said of Heydon. “I get that. It’s Tony Abbott’s royal commission.”
The press gang dutifully took down his words....
Now, [Heydon’s] transgression, as defined by Labor and amplified by its friends in the press, is to have agreed to deliver the annual Sir Garfield Barwick Address ... Upon learning the event was billed in the fine print as a Liberal Party fund-raiser Heydon withdrew rather than see his credibility brought into question.
Too late!
Suddenly, all those revelations the press had found it expedient to ignore could be swept aside for good. What point would there be in mentioning standover men, cash in brown paper bags, phantom members and contracts negotiated at less than arm’s length? The better story — ... the only story — is the implied corruption of the commissioner himself, not the parade of sleazy sorts who have testified before him.
Indeed, the story is so appealing that Radio National’s Fran Kelly [on Friday] morning all but handed the microphone to Shorten, who besmirched Haydon… And just to make sure that the Labor leader’s cocktail of slurs and self-promotion received maximum exposure, Kelly punctuated the remainder of her broadcast with edited excerpts of his better zingers… Abbott & Co ... [should] fight back, nominate at every turn the reason why Shorten et al are so keen to knock the wheels off the royal commission, to help their union mates and financial backers hobble largely undamaged out of the spotlight and back into the smoke-filled rooms of sweetheart deals and trousered cash.
And it should quietly resolve to ensure that one fine day the ABC be brought to account for its manifest bias and dangerous size.

UPDATE
The Liberals must one day find a means of uphold the law that the ABC breaks in plain sight - the law that says the ABC must be impartial.
Gerard Henderson on another ABC “debate”  where a gathering of rabid Leftists agree with each other:
(O)n RN Breakfast [Friday] morning ... (t)he panel consisted of ... Bernard Keane (from the left-wing Crikey newsletter), Lenore Taylor (from the left-wing Guardian Online) and Malcolm ... Farr (national political editor, news.com.au). 
Needless to say, all three Canberra residents, with the support of the Sydney-based inner-city [host Fran] Kelly, were in furious agreement that the Prime Minister had totally mishandled the same sex marriage issue. But nobody suggested how Tony Abbott could have gone along with their position in support of same sex marriage ­– in view of the fact that this is opposed by a ... majority in the Liberal Party Room and ... in the Liberal Party National Party Joint Party Room.
Soon after the Friday Panel had concluded, Mr Keane headed off to ABC Radio 702 Mornings with Linda Mottram where he said much the same thing in response to much the same questions. It was a bit like [Thursday] where Paul Bongiorno bagged the Prime Minister on Radio National Breakfast before proceeding on to ABC Radio 702 Mornings with Linda Mottram where – wait for it – he bagged the Prime Minister again...
This is just astonishingly shameless. Can you imagine the uproar if we substituted for the names above a team of wall-to-wall conservatives instead - me, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Paul Murray, Rowan Dean and Dennis Shanahan agreeing with each other at taxpayers’ expense? So why is this acceptable from the Left?
But on it goes:
What a stunning “debate” on ABC1’s The Drum last [Tuesday] .. Richard Denniss (of the left wing Australia Institute) criticised Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s opposition to legislating for Same Sex Marriage in the term of the current Parliament. 
Ian Hickie (of the University of Sydney) essentially agreed with Dr Denniss ... Then the ABC’s very own Ticky Fullerton essentially agreed with Dr Hickie ... who, in turn essentially agreed with Richard Denniss, who, in turn, essentially agreed with Ticky Fullerton who, in turn, essentially agreed with Ian Hickie who, with the encouragement of [host] Steve Cannane, agreed with himself....
Dr Denniss described the Abbott government as “barking mad”. < Meanwhile Ticky Fullerton put the blame for opposition to Same Sex Marriage on believers in "Christianity". She seemed unaware that there are many opponents of Same Sex Marriage in the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities – along with some atheists… Steve Cannane drew viewers' attention to an article on The Drum website .... a piece by Sydney University academic Dr Peter Chen ... which was very critical of Tony Abbott and, wait for it, declared: "If Nixon could go to China, Abbott can come to Oxford Street." Enough said.

(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.)
UPDATE
Reader Nathan wonders why another law is not enforced:
With talk about Commissioner Dyson Heydon, Labor should take note of the Royal Commission Act of 1902:
ROYAL COMMISSIONS ACT 1902 - SECT 6O Contempt of Royal Commission (1) Any person who intentionally insults or disturbs a Royal Commission, or interrupts the proceedings of a Royal Commission, or uses any insulting language towards a Royal Commission, or by writing or speech uses words false and defamatory of a Royal Commission, or is in any manner guilty of any intentional contempt of a Royal Commission, shall be guilty of an offence.Penalty: Two hundred dollars, or imprisonment for three months.
===

If Fairfax were fair, it might admit there’s no real clash. It might also embrace a referendum

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (8:48am)

More Fairfax anti-Abbott spin:
The Abbott government’s divide over same-sex marriage deepened on Thursday, as Attorney-General George Brandis slapped down a proposal by cabinet colleague Scott Morrison to decide the issue at a referendum… 
Senator Brandis said a referendum would be “entirely unnecessary” and that there was “no doubt whatsoever” that a plebiscite was the appropriate way to test public opinion on legalising same-sex marriage.
Mr Morrison said on Wednesday that same-sex marriage was “the type of issue that could be canvassed under section 51 of the constitution”.
“Simply at the moment, in clause 21, it just says ‘marriage’,” Mr Morrison told the ABC’s 7.30. “You could equally put in there ‘opposite and same-sex marriage’ and clarify very clearly what the meaning of the constitution is on this question, and to reflect [what] some would argue has been a societal change since the constitution was first written.”
A constitutional law expert says Brandis and Morrison need not be clashing at all:
University of Sydney constitutional law expert, Professor Anne Twomey ... said a debate about the parameters of marriage was resolved by a High Court challenge to the ACT’s same-sex marriage legislation in 2013… 
“So it’s not necessary to have a referendum to change that to allow the Commonwealth to legislate about same-sex marriage.”
But she said there were two reasons why a referendum could be chosen to make it clear whether marriage also included same-sex marriage.
One reason was to make sure no future High Court interpretations could change the definition back to exclude same-sex marriage. “Or the other reason for doing it might be to give that public support for same-sex marriage that we saw in Ireland which is a very, very powerful political and moral force,” she said.
So a referendum is not necessary to decide the issue, but could be desirable - and by both sides.
But I also offer a compromise here - a plebiscite to coincide with the recognition referendum.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Labour falls for socialism all over again

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (7:57am)

 Greg Sheridan on a dangerous sign of the radicalisation of the middle-class Left - Jeremy Corbyn looks set to be British Labour’s new leader:
Corbyn’s positions are at once antique, bizarre, ideological, extreme left-wing and absurd. He wants to renationalise energy and trains at a conservatively estim­ated cost of £185 billion. He wants to reverse cuts to social spending. He is four square against austerity, although this austerity still leaves Britain with a substantial budget deficit and has delivered it the fastest economic growth in the developed world. He favours a discussion to restore the socialist objective to Labour policy. 
He is against Britain’s nuclear capabilities and would unilaterally break NATO. He has described the terrorist supporting groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends and has refused in interviews to explicitly criticise specific terrorist acts by Hamas, or indeed the Irish Republican Army.
The conventional wisdom, most powerfully put by former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, is that Corbyn would lead Labour to annihilation.
My own concern is that Corbyn as leader would legitimise far Left positions that are suicidal for the West and encouragement for totalitarians. God knows, he’d have enough people in the BBC and academia to cheer him on and normalise the abnormal. And note: the same processes are occurring in Australia, too, as Labor falls increasingly into the hands of the Left. 
===

I repeat: Abbott’s same-sex marriage “disaster” is actually a triumph. Two tips to seal that deal

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (7:32am)

I said at the time that Tony Abbott’s compromise on same-sex marriage - no to a free vote by MPs now, but yes to a vote of the public after the election - was a political  triumph:
- it shows Abbott read the mood of the Coalition better than his chief rivals, and, indeed, many journalists. 
- the vote was overwhelming, which should put the issue to bed until the election, giving the Coalition clear air at last.
- the idea of a referendum or plebiscite on gay marriage after the election shows the Coalition is not resisting the public will but giving the public true ownership of the issue, and the means to decisively resolve it…
- Abbott kept faith with voters and especially most Liberal supporters.
- Shorten will seem to not trust the public will by preferring a vote instead by the political class. 
I should now add two suggestions.

Make Shorten accept the public’s verdict:
The Liberals should demand Shorten commit to accepting the verdict of the people in any plebiscite. If there’s a yes vote, of course he will. But would Shorten accept a no vote?
Hold a plebiscite on the same day as the referendum on recognition:
Here is a compromise for the Liberals arguing over whether the vote should be a plebiscite (where voting is not compulsory) or a referendum (where it is). Defenders of traditional marriage are worried about getting an Irish-type result, where only the committed vote, while traditionalists stay at home. Supporters of same-sex marriage complain that a referendum looks tricky, because of the “double majority” rule - that it is won not only if most people vote yes, but if most states vote yes, too.
So why not hold a plebiscite on gay marriage on the same day as the promised referendum of constitutional recognition of Aborigines? That way every voters is obliged to turn up for the referendum anyway, and will almost certainly agree to vote in the plebiscite at the same time. Both sides happy. All fair.
UPDATE
Triumph or disaster?
I said it was a triumph, yet Fairfax and ABC journalists have been almost united in calling Abbott’s compromise a disaster and another reason he should go.
But in the cold light of day, it is becoming even clearer that the Fairfax and ABC journalists have been blinded again by their hatred of Abbott.
Paul Kelly today:
On same-sex marriage this week, four of the top five senior Abbott government ministers — Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison — rejected a free vote in parliament this term but backed a free vote by the entire population next term.

Given the depth of feeling within Coalition ranks, the strong partyroom sentiment in favour of traditional marriage and the imperative to take a proactive policy to the next election, the idea of a national vote seems the best outcome for the Abbott government. 
Bill Shorten wanted to define the next election in terms of same-sex marriage as Labor yes and Coalition no. The Prime Minister, regardless of his personal views, could not allow the government to be trapped into such electoral suicide. The upshot is that Abbott has redefined the contest as Labor backs a politicians’ vote and the Coalition backs a people’s vote…
Labor’s pledge to legislate same-sex marriage in the first 100 days means it rejects a national vote and individual Labor candidates will need to explain to ethnic, religious, Christian and conservative voters why they are denying them that choice…
Only Malcolm Turnbull among the top five figures wanted a free vote now. Turnbull’s view was passionate and cogent. He believes the same-sex train and its money power will steamroll the government at the election…
The media’s conventional wisdom that Abbott should have decided this week on a conscience vote to settle the same-sex marriage issue is unpersuasive.. It would have required Abbott to overrule the clear majority of Liberal MPs, overrule the 2:1 majority in the Coalition partyroom, reverse his own position, alienate the conservative partyroom bloc on which his leadership depends and betray the majority of the Coalition rank and file that expects him to support traditional marriage… There was, finally, no guarantee that a conscience vote would have seen a bill passing the parliament, raising the risk that Abbott would have betrayed his values without having the issue off the table. 
UPDATE
Or put it this way. If Abbott just said no to same-sex marriage, almost a third of Coalition MPs would have opposed the party’s position. If he’d just said yes to same-sex marriage two thirds of his MPs would have opposed the party’s position. By saying yes instead to a public vote, all MPs can support the party’s position. I cannot see what there is to criticise here. In fact, all MPs should be full-throated in promoting the decision. 
===

The Age chokes on its hatred of Abbott

Andrew Bolt August 15 2015 (6:39am)

The Age has become absolutely unhinged by Abbott hatred. Abuse becomes analysis. No alternative views are permitted. Even Labor’s vicious smearing of a good judge to protect rotten union deals is seen as evidence of Abbott’s failures.
Conservative buyers of The Age should realise they are subsidising the most extreme and misleading propaganda.
UPDATE
Sydney Morning Herald writer Peter Hartcher, who has not yet apologised forfalsely claiming on false information that Abbott could be homophobic, now repeats another falsehood seized upon by Abbott haters wanting to discredit a royal commission into union corruption:
The astonishing misjudgment that led the royal commissioner into trade union corruption, Dyson Heydon, to agree to speak at a Liberal Party fundraiser was the most unexpected blow to a punchdrunk party. 
False. Heydon did not agree to speak at a Liberal fundraiser. In fact, he did the very opposite..
Heydon actually agreed to give a memorial lecture on law to a group of lawyers. He made clear he would not speak at any event that could even be perceived as a fundraiser, and pulled out when he learned that it was.
If Hartcher knowingly repeats his falsehood you will be able to judge his commitment to truth.
UPDATE
The Age once circulated primarily in Liberal-voting suburbs and covered politics even-handedly. Now in crippling decline, it covers politics from an increasingly hysterical Greens perspective. Take this astonishing diet of anti-Liberal stories today:
There are, unfortunately, Liberals who from family habit still take their political bearings from The Age and ABC, which in Melbourne is perhaps the ABC’s most Left-leaning branch. Those Liberals are the ones who don’t speak out in defence of traditional Liberal positions, having either no understanding of them or no faith in them, given the Leftist abuse they keep hearing in the media. This, I suspect, is one reason so very few Victorian Liberals are prominent in national politics, and why the Victorian Opposition is doing so poorly against such a terrible state Labor government, which has closed more projects than it’s started. Indeed, the biggest run in the media Opposition leader Matthew Guy has got this year came this week, when he stupidly and unfairly abused Tony Abbott’s position on gay marriage - one actually supported by most federal Liberal MPs. 
===

Hockey apologises for being misquoted by media pack

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (7:52pm)

How ludicrous, to be forced to apologise for having been framed over comments which were at worse clumsy, but nevertheless true:
JOE Hockey has comprehensively apologised for his “obviously insensitive” comments about poorer Australians, insisting he bears no “evil intent” toward the disadvantaged. 
The Treasurer, besieged over his claim on Wednesday that the poorest Australians were least vulnerable to the fuel excise because they “either don’t have cars or don’t drive very far”, issued the apology today after Tony Abbott refused to support the remark.
What Hockey actually said was that poorer Australians “either don’t have cars or don’t drive very far in many cases” - the last three words making clear this was a generalisation. Needless to say, that qualification was omitted in virtually every reference the ABC made to the remarks in one of the worst stitch-ups I’ve seen. The media reporting of this has been generally disgraceful.
And so:
Mr Hockey, speaking on Sydney radio 2GB, repeatedly said sorry for the remark and his subsequent refusals to back down, saying: “I don’t want to hurt people.
“I am really genuinely sorry that there is any suggestion ... that I or the government does not care for the most disadvantaged.
“As everyone who knows me knows, all of my life I have fought for and tried to help the most disadvantaged people in the community. “And for there to be some suggestion that I have evil in my heart when it comes to the most disadvantaged people in the community is upsetting,” Mr Hockey said.
What chance reform in this country, where incomes are already falling in real terms? 
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Bernardi backs free speech reforms. Other Liberals will, too

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (7:45pm)

I cannot see how Liberals could not vote for the most minimal changes to an act they were actually insisting had to be gutted - until the Government caved to Jewish and Muslim lobbyists:
Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi is set to defy Prime Minister Tony Abbott and co-sponsor a bill aimed at changing the Racial Discrimination Act, which the government abandoned just over a week ago. 
Family First Senator Bob Day is planning to introduce a compromise bill, which will simply strike out the words “offend and insult” from the legislation rather than entirely overhaul the section as the government has proposed. 
I know of at least two more Liberal senators who feel honor-bound to vote for this, and I suspect up to half a dozen more could join them. A principle must be defended.  
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The Bolt Report on Sunday, August 17

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (4:35pm)

On Sunday on Channel 10 at 10am and 4pm…
Editorial:  No, not everyone was horrified at all by that picture, Mr Shorten. Let’s now be honest.
My guest:  Alex Douglas, who quit in protest as Queensland leader of the Palmer United Party.
The panel:  IPA boss John Roskam and former Gillard Government minister Craig Emerson. Is Joe Hockey finished as Treasurer? Are Liberals finished with this Government?  And why is Qantas playing race politics?
NewsWatch:  Spectator editor Rowan Dean.  How the ABC started by criticising the Sydney Morning Herald for anti-Semitism but wound up attacking the Jewish lobby instead.
Plus bonus laughs at ABC presenter Jonathan Green.

The videos of the shows appear here.
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Making the Medicare co-payment useless and racist

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (10:06am)

The AMA guts the co-payment - and makes it racist for good measure:
VERY few patients will pay the $7 GP fee and the government will make almost no savings under the Australian Medical Association proposal being considered “seriously” by the government. 
The AMA wants Federal Government to exempt large groups of people including pensioners, nursing home patients, indigenous Australians and the chronically ill. The government would also have to back track on plans to cut the Medicare rebate by $5 under the plan, wiping out most of the $3.5 billion in savings.
So desperate is this Government now, and so ready to enslave itself to the New Racism, that I suspect it will adopt each one of those ideas. 
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A party shamed

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (9:35am)


And the inquiries continue...
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When will Labor stop wrecking?

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (9:31am)

Another business chief wants Labor to stop sabotaging the economy for cheap votes:
AUSTRALIAN politics is in a “scary’’ and unprecedented new paradigm that has seen it ­become an “embarrassment on the world stage’’ over the past six years, says the man considered to be one of the most successful Australian businessmen in the world. 
Dow Chemical Company chairman and chief executive Andrew Liveris yesterday also echoed the recent call by NAB and Woodside chairman Michael Chaney for the Coalition and Labor to adopt a bipartisan approach to stop minor parties in the Senate derailing the government’s legislative agenda.
“I have never seen (the like of) the last six years of Australian politics before,’’ Mr Liveris said during a lunch in Brisbane yesterday hosted by the Australian Institute of Company ­Directors.
“We are in a complete new paradigm. The past five years before this last one were an absolute embarrassment on the world stage… “Instead of working together you just throw things at each other and yell at each other. That is really scary. I have never seen an Australia like that.
“Now to see it move into this other paradigm where there is more yelling but of a different kind — we should have got ­beyond that in terms of both sides of the aisle being for Australia instead of for being re-elected.’’
Last month Mr Chaney urged both major parties to work together to achieve necessary micro-economic reform across the economy.
“The Labor opposition has a lot more votes than Palmer,’’ Mr Chaney told The Australian and Deutsche Bank Business Leaders Forum in Perth. 
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You didn’t believe them?

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (9:13am)


And they thought these guys at the Sydney protest against an anti-Islamic film clip in 2012 were just kidding.
UPDATE
A frightening disconnect with reality, a pathological blame-shifting - and that astonishing Jew-hatred:
A senior employee of the Dutch Justice Ministry said the jihadist group ISIS was created by Zionists seeking to give Islam a bad reputation. 
Yasmina Haifi, a project leader at the ministry’s National Cyber Security Center, made the assertion Wednesday on Twitter… “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It’s part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam’s name,” wrote Haifi, who described herself on the social network LinkedIn as an activist for the Dutch Labor Party, or PvdA.
And look how mass immigration from northern Africa and the Middle East has imported a clash of civilisations into the streets of Holland:
A series of rallies supporting ISIS, which is considered a terrorist organization in many Western countries, were held in the Hague in July and earlier this month. Some demonstrators called for violence. The demonstrations on July 2 and 24 featured calls to kill Jews. 
When anti-ISIS demonstrators tried to march through the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Schilderswijk on Aug. 10 to express their disapproval, a crowd of approximately 200 men barricaded the main street and staged an illegal counterdemonstration in support of ISIS. Some of the protesters hurled stones at police who tried to remove the obstacles. Six people were arrested.
Jews in Britain also under siege:
A cosmetics store in Manchester, England, that sells Israeli cosmetics has been victimized by callers threatening to kill the staff and burn down the store…
The store, called Kedem, has been the scene of daily anti-Israel protests since the start of Israel’s operation in Gaza.  Six anti-Israel protesters have been arrested. 
Pro-Palestinian protesters also have posted threatening messages on the store’s Facebook page. Meanwhile, also in Manchester, two 13-year-olds were charged this week with criminal damaging for vandalizing gravestones last month at a Jewish cemetery. 
Also in Britain, a man atempts to photograph what seems the flag of the Islamic State, flying over the entrance to a housing estate:
I WAS told this morning by a community activist in east London to be kind in this article to the Bengali Muslim youths who threatened violence last night…and who told me to “F*** off Jew, you’re not welcome here.”
In Ireland:
Irish trade union Mandate has released a petition calling on Irish food retailers to cease selling Israeli produce. 
The Mandate petition, entitled ‘Stop Selling Israeli Produce’, has already attracted over 6,300 signatures since it was launched last Friday.
The Left is now fanning the worst wave of anti-Semitism we’ve seen in the West since World War II. And our culture is degrading so fast that I can’t see this being checked for a long, long time.
(Thanks to readers Jenny, Craig and Alan RM Jones.) 
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Middle East burns, but at least Obama beats Tiger

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (8:54am)

 Remember when the Left - and much of the media - decided it was a crime for a president to play an occasional round of golf?
Recall that Bush was loudly criticized when he didn’t hold press conferences frequently enough to satiate a badgering press, though he averaged one about every two months. Over the course of his presidency, he held 45. 
Bush was also constantly ridiculed and criticized for playing golf, most memorably by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. In August 2003, Bush gave up the game, believing it sent the wrong message to grieving parents of soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, he was ridiculed for that as well.
Why is the Left no longer worried about golfing presidents, even when  Barack Obama is about to beat even Tiger Woods?:
As Barack “Eldrick” Obama approaches his 200th round of golf since his election as president, here’s a fact to put that into perspective: Since January 2009, Tiger Woods has played 269 rounds of golf. And Tiger, beleaguered by injury, is almost certainly done for the year. 
So that means the president, if he keeps up with his pace of play during his 15-day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard (a round a day) and his normal weekly round, will pass Tiger sometime next spring. Think about that for a minute. The president of the U.S., juggling the American economy and the entire world’s problems — Iraq is in full meltdown, the Middle East is a powder keg, Russia is moving on Ukraine — has played golf nearly as much as a guy whose day job is playing golf.
After nearly six years of this remarkably disengaged presidency the media is finally, cautiously, yes-but catching on:
(Thanks to reader Gab.) 
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Hockey needs a goal

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (8:22am)

Joe Hockey badly needs a win:
JOE Hockey has fuelled internal criticism of his performance as chief salesman of the budget, prompting colleagues to question his ability to lock in support for the Abbott government’s economic narrative. 
As some backbenchers privately warn the Treasurer needs to steer off the politics of fairness, frontbencher Jamie Briggs dismissed as “a bit of hyperbole’’ the criticism unleashed by Mr Hockey’s comments that the poor wouldn’t be hit as hard as the rich by a proposed fuel excise increase because they didn’t have cars or didn’t drive far. The government’s most senior economic minister has got Senate crossbenchers offside as well as facing renewed criticism from his partyroom over his handling of the government’s first budget. “It’s like walking into dog poo, ignoring everyone and insisting on walking into every room,’’ said one of his colleagues.
David Crowe can’t believe Hockey is fighting on Labor’s preferred territory - the lurid “fairness” front - to defend a lousy 1 cent a litre rise:
The Treasurer has driven his budget sales caravan into another ditch by trying to turn a simple but unpopular idea into something it’s not — a Robin Hood tax…  
Given there is no easy way to tell voters to pay more tax, the ­government’s challenge is to find the best number to estimate the damage. A starting point would be 1 cent, the amount the budget adds to the excise per litre this year.
But putting things that way would be too easy. Trying to justify his remark about poor people not driving as much as rich people, the Treasurer came up with numbers like $53.87, the amount a wealthy family spends each week on petrol…
It is amazing, hilarious and disheartening that the national debate on the budget has turned into a fight over 1 cent — in a country where the smallest coin is 5c… Given Australian motorists drive 15,000 kilometres a year on average (according to Roy Morgan) and 10 litres per 100km is a reasonable yardstick for fuel efficiency, it is not hard to figure out the annual impact: $15 a year…

The malaise goes beyond the budget. If the government cannot sell a 1 cent policy at a time of $30 billion deficits, what hope is there for bigger plans?
All this takes the heat off the real wrecker:
Every minister’s stumble vindicates Shorten’s decision to fight each budget measure… The cost is yet to be tallied. Labor now rejects $40bn in budget savings including $5bn of its own ideas from the last government. It must eventually offer an election policy that explains how this will not hurt the budget bottom line.
UPDATE
It is astonishing and grim for Hockey to already need this deep-sigh defence from Dennis Shanahan:
IT could already be said “it’s time for Joe to go” but, before there’s an avalanche of calls to replace the Treasurer, it should be recognised it won’t happen — for the simple fact it can’t. 
Just like the idea of holding a mini-budget, the merest hint from Tony Abbott that Hockey’s job is not secure would destroy the Coalition’s first budget, its first year in office and any hope of revival…

The Prime Minister has no choice but to forge ahead with the budget and the treasurer that he has.
Oh dear:
Education Minister Christopher Pyne has declined six times to back Treasurer Joe Hockey’s comments that the poor “don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far’’.
Just to add to the woes:
A key fund-raiser for federal Treasurer Joe Hockey’s electorate conference has been called to give evidence at the Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry into alleged illegal political donations John Hart is chairman of the North Sydney Forum, a controversial fund-raising body attached to the Liberal Party federal electoral conference in Mr Hockey’s seat of North Sydney.
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Carlton to the reluctant rescue of the “Bolt laws”

Andrew Bolt August 15 2014 (7:43am)

Free speech

Chris Merritt says Mike Carlton could be a very reluctant crusader for the free speech I was denied:
AFTER Tony Abbott’s backdown on reform of section 18C of the ­Racial Discrimination Act, all might have seemed to be lost. 
Then along came Mike Carlton and his anti-Semitic mates at The Sydney Morning Herald. With any luck, the proceedings launched against them this week might turn Carlton into the reluctant vehicle for ­reform of this odious provision.
Carlton and the SMH now find themselves in a very strange position. If they surrender and settle, they will be affirming what their critics have been saying about the nature of their coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But if they fight hard — and let’s hope they do — they will be making it possible for the courts to undertake the reform process that has just been squibbed by Abbott.
The case against Carlton offers the tantalising possibility of undoing the damage done by ­Mordecai Bromberg’s 2011 judgment against Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt… If they succeed, Australian legal history will remember Carlton as the man who took up the fight that was started by Bolt. They will be locked together forever as the catalysts for reform — a prospect unlikely to bring either much joy.
Oh, no. I’ve always thought your commitment to free speech was best measured by your defence of the freedom of those with whom you disagree most strongly. On that score, most in the Left have failed, choosing a side above a principle.
For instance, the Left has badly wanted to characterise the Abbott Government’s proposed reforms to 18C as “Bolt’s law” - to make it seem just a favor for a mate and of no benefit to anyone.  The most spiteful and childish iteration of this was probably that of Bruce Haigh in the Guardian:
The [Government’s] highest profile disaster came from a favour to a supporter, Andrew Bolt. The amendment of section 18C of the racial discrimination act was sold as a positive gain for freedom of speech, which fooled no one. 
Should the Carlton case go ahead, this false construct will no longer be tenable. That is the only reason I hope this dangerous and offensive law is used against Carlton - not because I want him silenced, but because I want this law exposed as a crime against free speech.
But all is not lost for the Left. Carlton is of the Left, too, and the institutions will therefore seek to give him a pass, as the Race Discrimination Commissioner has already done, declaring:
Commentators you would hope would be cantankerous or controversial… Obviously Fairfax decided to take some action against him. Look, I’m agnostic on this.
How can the Human Rights Commission fairly conciliate the complaints against Carlton when the Race Discrimination Commissioner has already cleared him?
More evidence that the HRC has hopelessly confused its twin roles of advocacy and judgment.
UPDATE
Former Howard Government Minister David Kemp says the Abbott Government has offended its base by dropping the fight for freedom:
A core tenet of the Liberal Party is that freedom of speech is an essential foundation of democracy. Tony Abbott himself has said that. That the defence of freedom of speech and the press (as 18C has led to the censorship of a journalist’s articles) should be abandoned to buy the support of special interests — however strategically positioned in marginal seats they may be — has shocked many Liberals… 
Our liberal political culture — based around fundamental freedoms of speech, press, religion and association — exists because, historically, leaders have defended it…
To describe reforms to restore freedom of speech as a “needless complication” in the effort to appease certain interests is to seriously misunderstand, and to affront, many Liberals, and I suspect a good number in the communities concerned. To suggest that national unity requires a legal prohibition on offending certain select groups is unbelievable and demeaning to all… Today a journalist’s articles are still banned, and the Liberal Party government accepts that. This is unacceptable to many Liberals.  
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Pastor Rick Warren
God didn't bring you this far just to abandon you.
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Growth is nurtured by humility and strangled by pride. I can't learn from others until I admit what I don't know.
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Pastor Rick Warren
The way you win a fight with God is by surrendering. He knows what's best for you. You don't.
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Israel seems alone in acting with honor. - ed

Doctors at Ziv Hospital in the Galilee town of Safed (Tsfat) were shocked when the girl got up and walked around just one day after having her leg amputated as a result of massive shrapnel injuries.
The young girl had been hit by shrapnel all over her body. The Israelis worked hard to save her left leg, but were certain she would not be mobile for some time.
The doctors were taken aback when just 24 hours later, the girl stood up, and with the help of crutches began to move around the hospital with little trouble. Dr. Alexander Lerner, head of orthopedic department at Ziv Hospital, told Israeli media that his entire staff was filled with an amazing joy to see this girl smiling and walking around.
The hospital has treated dozens of Syrians hurt in indiscriminate attacks by both government and rebel forces.
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Congratulations to Andrew Rohan, Liberal for Smithfield on raising more than $22,000 for Cancer Research by walking 60km around the State Electorate for Smithfield. I don't think too many politicians would manage that, certainly not the other local Labor MP's.
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The mistreatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Lebanese authorities always reminds one of those university professors and political commentators living in the U.S. who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian." They focus their attacks on Israel, and ignore the real suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of Arab countries.

As Israeli authorities issued permits last week to hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians to visit Israel, the Lebanese government decided to ban Palestinian refugees fleeing the war in Syria from entering Lebanon.

So while Palestinians are being slaughtered and forced out of their homes in Syria, the Lebanese government is preventing them from entering Lebanon.

The Israeli permits, which were issued on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, enabled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to visit shopping malls, restaurants and beaches in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem and Acre.

But as the West Bank Palestinians were celebrating the feast in Israel, thousands of their brethren found themselves stranded along the border between Syria and Lebanon.
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Greetings! I've created this page because I want to make a difference. I'm a great animal lover! Whether big or small, they are such amazing creatures. I have a dog and four cats at the moment, but I used to have fish and ducks too! I lost Lemon (my duck) a couple of years ago due to a broken leg. She was attacked by the neighbor's dog. I hope the money I raise will help to subsidize the me...
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C. H. Spurgeon
God has so made man's heart that nothing can ever fill it but God himself.
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Larry Pickering
DOPING IS HERE TO STAY... and there’s not a damned thing they can do about it!

The greatest problem government agencies or sports administrations have is that drugs are becoming available quicker than they can be identified, and they can’t ban something they don’t know about yet.

“Oh”, many say, “but if something is performance-enhancing it should automatically be made illegal.”

Well, if you have a headache, an Aspirin will enhance your performance, so will vitamins. If a bowler polishes one side of a cricket ball, performance is enhanced. Gloves will assist you to mark a ball. Spikes on shoes. Oil on wheels... it’s endless.

Many a time I’ve had cortisone legally injected into a sore joint at half-time and that was certainly performance enhancing.

The whole idea of competitive sport is to enhance your performance, so that cannot be the benchmark for illegality.

A "drug" is identified only as a "substance” and can be anything from fruits and nuts to household products and flowers... and everything in between.

Blood doping is nothing more than preserving (for later use) your own red cells with no foreign substance involved. There are many natural foods and vitamins that will ostensibly increase your red cell count.

Blood and urine tests are not calibrated to identify natural foods or supplements that our bodies have varying degrees of anyway, only a surfeit of that natural substance.

A test cannot be calibrated to detect an unknown Mexican “drug”.

Unless a synthetic agent is used to administer a substance it will not raise an alarm. And drug detection agencies have been trying to detect synthetic agents exclusively for decades simply because they can’t detect the “drug”, only the method of administration.

Using an aqueous solution takes care of that problem.

The legal nightmare begins with Essendon and will end nowhere.

A dozen new “drugs” are stumbled upon and developed daily.

ASADA is nothing more than a feminist-dominated Government Agency with no clue what to do except run around in circles calling Press conferences to claim everyone is possibly a cheat or a crook.

The latest crazy edict is that a certain “drug” becomes a banned substance only when administered intravenously yet a subcutaneous (under the skin) administration via injection renders it legal.

Crumbs, so the “drug” finds its way to the blood stream anyway but via a different method?

Competitors in all sports are light years ahead of any detection test, always have been.

All sporting bodies pay increasingly higher rewards for success and hand out career-ending penalties for failure. Loyalty is lost in mountains of money, and that’s the reason unknown, undetectable “drugs” are here to stay.

There is no answer because every drug in history that has been prohibited has found its way on to the black market.

Demonised, illegal recreational drugs damage humans in the same way as legal drugs do.

Prohibition of anything that people want simply attracts the criminal element and, without any form of quality control, ends in a far worse result.

Worse still, when a banned substance is driven underground it becomes impossible to protect those worst affected by it.

I cannot see a solution, can you?
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Holly Sarah Nguyen
Today last year was very special, my youngest son was conceived and he is 3 months old today, what's more special is because it's the day his parents took a train ride up to the marriages place to get married. It's our 1 yr anniversary, i feel really amazed that I'm actually married to my teenage sweetheart crush PhiLip Smi-Le Nguyen the one i really really liked but cause of my pride i ran to hide and he was shy, we only found out 15 yrs later lol even though i lived my life the sinful way around before i knew God yet He still blesses me by leading me right on track. And after our engagement a year before that we've postponed 3 times just to hear the definite confirmation from God and today the answer is very clearly that we belong together. So I feel truly blessed and thank the Lord for blessing our marriage with His Power of Love and Strength that we've made it thru..And I Pray that Lord you continue to be in the center of our lives so that we will live according to your will and be with you in heaven ~ Amen!
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Roma Downey
Give us your spirit today, oh Lord. Help us live out what You have placed on our hearts.We choose to represent You faithfully today.Amen.
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In quite an eerie feat, physicists have floated microscopic diamonds in midair using laser beams. http://oak.ctx.ly/r/9uf9

Researchers have used lasers to levitate extremely small particles in the past, such as individual atoms, but this is the first time that anyone has ever levitated a nanodiamond.
I think Jessica Alba has done something similar to real diamonds, eh, Daniel Katz? ed

That's how they built the pyramids lol. I remember I read somewhere that a guy claimed to posses this type of technology back in the early 1900's using sound waves.

David Daniel Ball Sound waves can suspend things in air .. bigger things with more surface area .. like a feather Pyramids are still a bit beyond us .. even with rap music.
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Pastor Rick Warren
The more unselfish you are, the more attractive you become.
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Roma Downey
It is not joy that makes us grateful. It is gratitude that makes us joyful. - David Rast ‪#‎gratitude‬
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Is this the WORST wedding cake you've ever seen? It sure doesn't look like the picture! |http://bit.ly/15GhoZK
Maybe they meant 'tiered' ? - ed
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.. a step .. and the subsequent decision to shoot them dead in future encounters is another step forward for peace.
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Christians being slaughtered in Egypt
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Holly Sarah Nguyen
The moment you start getting too intellectual about love, you start creating issues in your relationships... love was never meant to be for the wise... its for fools like me! 
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Jones said Ahmed had recently traveled to California and Yemen, returning two or three weeks ago. Jones said at some point he'd been receiving treatment for mental issues.
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August 15: Victory over Japan Day; Feast of the Assumption(Christianity); Independence Day in the Congo (1960) and India(1947); Liberation Day in North and South Korea (1945)
Construction of the Panama Canal
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“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” Revelation 3:14,20 NIV
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

Morning


"Thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work."
Psalm 92:4
Do you believe that your sins are forgiven, and that Christ has made a full atonement for them? Then what a joyful Christian you ought to be! How you should live above the common trials and troubles of the world! Since sin is forgiven, can it matter what happens to you now? Luther said, "Smite, Lord, smite, for my sin is forgiven; if thou hast but forgiven me, smite as hard as thou wilt;" and in a similar spirit you may say, "Send sickness, poverty, losses, crosses, persecution, what thou wilt, thou hast forgiven me, and my soul is glad." Christian, if thou art thus saved, whilst thou art glad, be grateful and loving. Cling to that cross which took thy sin away; serve thou him who served thee. "I beseech you therefore, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." Let not your zeal evaporate in some little ebullition of song. Show your love in expressive tokens. Love the brethren of him who loved you. If there be a Mephibosheth anywhere who is lame or halt, help him for Jonathan's sake. If there be a poor tried believer, weep with him, and bear his cross for the sake of him who wept for thee and carried thy sins. Since thou art thus forgiven freely for Christ's sake, go and tell to others the joyful news of pardoning mercy. Be not contented with this unspeakable blessing for thyself alone, but publish abroad the story of the cross. Holy gladness and holy boldness will make you a good preacher, and all the world will be a pulpit for you to preach in. Cheerful holiness is the most forcible of sermons, but the Lord must give it you. Seek it this morning before you go into the world. When it is the Lord's work in which we rejoice, we need not be afraid of being too glad.

Evening

"I know their sorrows."
Exodus 3:7

The child is cheered as he sings, "This my father knows;" and shall not we be comforted as we discern that our dear Friend and tender soul-husband knows all about us?

1. He is the Physician, and if he knows all, there is no need that the patient should know. Hush, thou silly, fluttering heart, prying, peeping, and suspecting! What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter, and meanwhile Jesus, the beloved Physician, knows thy soul in adversities. Why need the patient analyze all the medicine, or estimate all the symptoms? This is the Physician's work, not mine; it is my business to trust, and his to prescribe. If he shall write his prescription in uncouth characters which I cannot read, I will not be uneasy on that account, but rely upon his unfailing skill to make all plain in the result, however mysterious in the working.

2. He is the Master, and his knowledge is to serve us instead of our own; we are to obey, not to judge: "The servant knoweth not what his lord doeth." Shall the architect explain his plans to every hodman on the works? If he knows his own intent, is it not enough? The vessel on the wheel cannot guess to what pattern it shall be conformed, but if the potter understands his art, what matters the ignorance of the clay? My Lord must not be cross-questioned any more by one so ignorant as I am.

3. He is the Head. All understanding centres there. What judgment has the arm? What comprehension has the foot? All the power to know lies in the head. Why should the member have a brain of its own when the head fulfils for it every intellectual office? Here, then, must the believer rest his comfort in sickness, not that he himself can see the end, but that Jesus knows all. Sweet Lord, be thou forever eye, and soul, and head for us, and let us be content to know only what thou choosest to reveal.
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Today's reading: Psalm 89-90, Romans 14 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Psalm 89-90

A maskil of Ethan the Ezrahite.
1 I will sing of the LORD's great love forever;
with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known
through all generations.
2 I will declare that your love stands firm forever,
that you have established your faithfulness in heaven itself.
3 You said, "I have made a covenant with my chosen one,
I have sworn to David my servant,
4 'I will establish your line forever
and make your throne firm through all generations.'"
5 The heavens praise your wonders, LORD,
your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones.
6 For who in the skies above can compare with the LORD?
Who is like the LORD among the heavenly beings?
7 In the council of the holy ones God is greatly feared;
he is more awesome than all who surround him.
8 Who is like you, LORD God Almighty?
You, LORD, are mighty, and your faithfulness surrounds you....


Today's New Testament reading: Romans 14


The Weak and the Strong

1 Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. 2 One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. 4 Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand....



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