Slattsnews

The erudite Peggy Noonan knows why ordinary folk react favourably to Dubya.

He isn’t smooth. He actually has some of the roughness and the resentments of the self-made man. I think the reason for this is Texas. He grew up in a white T-shirt and jeans playing ball in the street with the other kids in the subdivision. Barbara Bush wasn’t exactly fancy. They lived like everyone else. She spoke to me once with great nostalgia of her early days in Texas, when she and her husband and young George slept in the same bed in an apartment in Midland. A prostitute lived in the complex. Barbara Bush just thought she was popular. Then they lived in a series of suburban houses.

And this is one of those suburban houses in Midland where the Prez grew up.

The pic comes from Midland oilman Wallace Craig who says young George did indeed lead a pretty ordinary life…..far from what people might think. All of the Bush homes here were right out of suburbia. When I had dealings with him….about the same time Julie worked for him [we wonder if we ever met 20+ years ago] he had a small office with used chairs. Julie sez he pretty much wore the same clothes every day! And I know he never struck it rich, personally, in the oil business.
Here’s one of the homes of Senior Bush and Barbara……where little George lived when he was in grade school. Some “mansion” of the elite eh?

Steve H provides several damn sound reasons why the world’s a better place without Skanks in the City.
Here’s one:
One big benefit of the show’s cancellation is that we won’t have to see Kim Cattrall naked any more. It was getting to the point where they almost had to turn the camera sideways to get her face and her breasts in the same picture.

Holy shit, I’m Chick Lit!
Just took this What Book Am I quiz.
Courtesy of Tony the Teacher, who’s a much better read.

Bloody hell! Who left the porch light on?

This public official enjoys 85 per cent support. He gives luvvies the horrors.

Arpaio wants his charges to hate every minute of their lives in jail. Smoking, coffee, pornographic magazines and television are all banned.
In winter, both women and men shiver in canvas tents, probably wishing they were dogs.
After his election in 1992, Arpaio closed a climate-controlled jail and converted it into a shelter for abused animals.

Why is it so hard for politicians to give law-abiding people what they want?

Suspect these are urban myths, but they triggered a giggle anyway.

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were being released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, a killer whale ate them both.

Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn, Germany. Suddenly, all two thousand pigs broke loose and escaped through a broken fence, stampeding madly. The two helpless protesters were trampled to death.

Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet didn’t pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with “return to sender” stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.

If any proof was needed that the ABC’s bias is habitual, today’s online report of Peter Costello’s initiative on superannuation and ageing workers removes any doubt.
It should be a straight news report and begins that way with a response from Opposition Leader Mark Latham. Fine.
From thereon it’s the usual suspects: The ACTU and the Australian Consumers Association. They’re agin it, of course. Seems they want the super companies to operate for nothing.
No one from business groups, the aged community, the super industry or the share market; all would have a far more relevant and informed opinion than rhetoric spouters such as Sharan Burrow from the unions.

Wogs can do anything.
How do I know?
Because a smart wog told me.

Interstate travel has just become a lot more realistic for Geelongites.
Avalon Airport, just outside of town, is to become the base for Qantas’ new domestic budget fleet Jetstar.
Established to compete with Virgin, Jetstar is expected to offer deals like $89 one-way fares to Sydney.
Avalon presently services Qantas’ fleet and is only 40 minutes drive down the Princes Freeway from Melbourne. The service is expected to begin in May.
The deal was hatched by transport mogul Lindsay Fox and Geelong fruit and veg king Frank Costa.
Rev up that cab, Man of Lettuce, we’re on the way.

Australia’s own little “sexing-up” timebomb is ticking away nicely.
It was planted last week when The Age journalist Mark Forbes claimed that at a Defence Intelligence seminar in Canberra a senior intel officer suggested that the Bush administration’s claims justifying an invasion of Iraq were exaggerated and that the Australian government was told that WMD did not pose an immediate threat.
Turns out that Forbes was attending the seminar as a student, not a journalist, and several days later the director of the Defence Intelligence Organisation Frank Lewincamp outed himself in The Age as the expert quoted. And he denied what Forbes attributed to him.
In a first for any journalist, The Age published Forbes’ response to this twice. Firstly in Saturday’s strike-battered edition which many regular readers missed. The response was given another burl yesterday.
Today, the head of Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University Ross Babbage has upped the ante by writing to The Australian blasting Forbes actions, threatening a ban on journalists attending such briefings and demanding an apology from The Age.
Crikey has bought into the ruckus, too, with a letter pointing out that the Herald Sun has been oddly quiet about the embarrassment to its main competitor. The Correspondent says Forbes’ father is a News Ltd scribbler and suggests the corp is going easy on his feelings.
Here is Professor Babbage’s letter to The Australian:

Journalist’s unethical conduct
24 February 2004
DURING the last week there has been extensive public comment arising from remarks that are reputed to have been made by Frank Lewincamp, the Director of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, to an ANU course last September. The primary stimulus for this comment has been two articles written by Mark Forbes and published by The Age.
Mr Forbes attended the ANU class because he was enrolled as a student — he did not attend as a journalist. All teaching sessions within the Master Degree Program in Strategy and Defence at ANU are conducted under the Chatham House Rule. This states: when a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. Despite the fact the students were reminded of the rule both before and after Mr Lewincamp’s presentation, Mr Forbes wrote his first article in a way that led informed readers to believe that it referred to Mr Lewincamp. In the second article, written after Mr Lewincamp advised that he was the likely source, Mr Forbes included what he asserted to be quotations from Mr Lewincamp’s address.
Universities, professional associations and institutions such as the Australian Institute of International Affairs routinely conduct policy-sensitive discussions under the Chatham House Rule. This permits senior politicians, officials, diplomats, servicemen and others to speak freely without fear of being reported. Mr Forbes’s serious breach of this rule now threatens this long-standing practice — an important convention of our working democracy. Ironically, some of those most severely affected are likely to be Mr Forbes’s journalist colleagues. There must now be great doubt about whether journalists will be permitted to enrol in policy-related university courses or to join professional associations.
It is time for The Age to apologise for Mr Forbes’s highly unethical conduct to Mr Lewincamp, to the Australian National University and to his student colleagues.
Professor Ross Babbage
Head, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Guess you could have some fun with the Mr Magoos in the supermarket carpark.

Last week an angry father called 3AW to complain that Coles Myer (to non-Australians, our biggest retailer) had sacked his son from his manager’s job at the retail giant’s Pakenham supermarket.
Apparently his son, I think his name was Wright, had witnessed a youth shoplifting and followed the thief from the store. (Although subsequent reports have appeared in the Melbourne press, I can’t find any links. C-M’s a big advertiser).
Outside, young Wright was confronted by a gang of about 12 of the thief’s cohorts and took the best defensive action — offence: He belted one of the hoods, causing the rest to shoot through like projectile vomit.
Anyway, Coles Myer would not comment on the matter other than to say that Wright breached company policy by assaulting the criminal and had been given the khyber.
Wright plans to sue for wrongful dismissal.
Well, as a Coles Myer shareholder I won’t begrudge a cent of the million bucks I hope he gets.
The gutsy young bloke puts his safety on the line to protect MY property and all that the miserable frigging bum sniffers and sociology graduates who no doubt staff Coles Human Resources department can do is chuck him onto the scrap heap.
Imagine what George Coles and Sid Myer would make of it. As if they grew their vast retail empires from 2 bob variety stores in Geelong and Bendigo respectively by allowing scum to wander off with the merchandise.
In fact, this outrage brings to mind an incident in the 70s. An anarcho-hippy of my acquaintance used to regularly shoplift from Rubenstein’s supermarket in Chapel Street, Windsor, claiming it was his duty to liberate capital. Yeah, seeding the revolution by knocking off packets of Redheads and tins of Nugget.
Anyway, he was strolling down Chapel Street one day after successfully pilfering some canned food from Rubie’s. He was feeling pretty chuffed with himself when WHACK, the spirit of indignant entrepreneurship sent him cartwheeling into the gutter.
Old Mr Rubenstein, who would have been 70 not out, had tracked him three blocks down the street and when the thief’s gait had slowed to a relaxed saunter, let him have it with a baseball bat just below the left ear.
Old Rubie wasn’t completely without compassion. He bent over and checked the hippy’s pulse and declared he would live. Of course, while he was down there he ferreted out the four cans of spaghetti from the would-be Che Guevera’s overcoat.
Anyway, the plight of young Wright prompted me to contact my servants at Coles Myer in a not altogether satisfied fashion. I can’t help thinking that the moral relativists and their toolhead underlings that have ruined academia, public service and a fair hunk of the media are creeping into the corporations.
My missive to the company included this quote from British libertarian, Sean Gabb on meddling socialists:
But we can have no doubt of their immediate end. This is the destruction of the old social and political order – the overturning of its traditions and norms, its standards and laws, its history and heroes. Every autonomous institution, every set of historical associations, every pattern of loyalty that they cannot control – these they want to destroy or neutralise.

As of close of business Friday, Coles Myer had not deigned to reply.

I missed this first time round, but it’s worth repeating. Particularly as the grizzling classes are, to use one of their favourite phrases, more marginalised than ever under rationalist leadership in both major parties.

Just three per cent of migrants believe Australia is racist, according to a new report commissioned by the immigration department.
The Settlement Experiences of New Migrants report found that most people came to Australia because of its inviting attributes such as the climate rather than economic factors or misery in their home country.

Lip dip to John Ray

It just gets worse for the tyrant-loving Left. When it is pointed out that socialist experiments like Nazi Germany, the Soviet, China, North Korea and Cuba are basically failures that succeed only at oppression, lefties have always had the “but” out, of “but what about the social democracies of Europe and Scandinavia?”
Well, they won’t like the commonsense initiatives coming out of socialist Netherlands and Denmark this week.

The Danish Bill bill calls for applications from imams unable to satisfy government officers as to their “dignity” to be rejected and for imams already in Denmark and who are found to have incited to racism or other forms of illegal acts to lose their permits.
The bill says those who make statements which are a threat to others, who attack other religious persuasions, incite to violence or make derogatory statements on the base of colour, religion, race, beliefs or sexual persuasion, will be extradited.
The new laws are expected to curtail seriously the activities of some imams, who have been at the centre of controversy for making statements alleged to be anti-Semitic, or against current legislation. One imam in Jutland recently caused outrage by suggesting that female genital mutilation was good for women. Another made statements considered blatantly anti-Semitic.

This indicates we could well need something similar in Australia.

Man of Lettuce has a delightful story about young Redfern tearaways that suggests the suburb is not entirely riven by irreconcilable conflict between cops and residents.
Adrian’s sketches of Sydney’s urban flotsam and jetsam should be picked up by one of the dailies.

Hard-hitting London tabloid The Sun is not going to let a source get off scot-free with a sudden, surprising change of heart.
At the weekend the biggest selling Pommy blat quoted the father of rumoured John Kerry plaything Alex Polier calling Kerry a “sleazeball” and “He’s not the sort of guy I’d choose to be with my daughter.”
But yesterday Terry Polier had changed his tune: “We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation, and intend to vote for him for president of the United States.”
So today The Sun’s reporter has gone back to the weekend entries in his notebook to have Polier senior paint Kerry not unlike a shooting star in the Australian political sky.
He said: “I know my wife will not be voting for Mr Kerry, let’s put it that way.
“Two years ago he was all for gay marriage, now he’s against it. Not that I care one way or the other, it’s just there have been so many things where I have seen him reverse. Whatever audience he is talking to, he will tell them what they want to hear.”
Whatever arrangement Kerry and the Poliers have come to, it better be watertight.

Editorial placement in The Australian today is peculiar. News Ltd subs are too busy for conspiracies, so I’ll put it down to timing, ie, the arrival of copy.
The Oz runs a big piece on the op-ed page by Aden Ridgeway which blames the Redfern riots on racism, poverty, unemployment, blah, blah, but fails to criticise the organised, hate-inspiring violence and the crime that saturates the area.
Yet buried at the bottom of page 4 (no link that I can find) is a tough call by Labor federal vice-president Warren Mundine, an Aborigine, who urged Aborigines to accept responsibility for the “criminal act” and praised police for their “restraint”.
“…we have to face up to our own responsibilities to end the violence, the substance abuse. We as a community have to take a hard look at ourselves and how can we improve ourselves,” Mundine says.
He called on Aboriginal parents to exert more control over what was rapidly becoming a “lost generation” of children abusing substances, committing crimes and being jailed.
These are the most courageous and honest words spoken by an Aboriginal leader and should lead every bulletin across the country.

The BBC’s censorship of a libertarian while defending a racist point of view deserves the strongest condemnation.

A Florida TV production company is hoping to sell piles of product with its latest ad campaign.
The Tennesseean (link gone) reports that the firm plans to pitch Preparation H
and other hemorrhoid-relief products with a commercial that features the
country classic Ring of Fire.
The idea is hilarious to the song’s co-writer, Merle Kilgore, who penned
the Johnny Cash hit with Cash’s late wife, June Carter Cash.
You see, Kilgore, an ex-country artist and 20-year veteran of the road,
used to use a hemorrhoid joke onstage whenever he’d introduce Ring of
Fire.
”I’d say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want to give credit where credit is
due. I dedicate this song to the makers of Preparation H,’ ” Kilgore
said yesterday. ”And they would just fall out. So when the song
publisher called and told me about it, I said, ‘I can’t believe it!’ ”
UPDATE (SO TO SPEAK)
Rosanne Cash says she and her siblings were livid when she heard her
father’s hit Ring of Fire might be used for a Preparation H commercial.
”There is no way we will ever let that happen,” Rosanne said during a
phone call Friday. ”We would never allow the song to be demeaned like
that.”

The forces of democracy and decency must hit back eventually. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Prominent Jews in Britain are being targeted in a wave of anti-Semitic harassment by far-right and Islamic fundamentalist organizations.
The home of Lord Triesman, the former general secretary of the Labor Party, has been attacked by Combat 18, the neo-Nazi group. Uri Geller, the Israeli television personality, and Barbara Roche, the former Labor minister, have been the victims of graffiti and hate mail.
The incidents have emerged as police prepare to release figures this week showing that Britain saw a significant rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2003.

And still not a whimper from the tyrant-sucking Left.