Slattsnews

Looks like Scrafton’s goose is cooked. About time, too. Seems he’s well into his second bottle of vino and ready to hose down Howard on the phone. Oops, bad move.
Uncle ABC has the full catastrophe.

Scrafton volunteered that the private dinner at which he took the PM’s calls, involving one other person, a woman, was a two-bottle affair. He estimated the time between the first and second calls at 15-20 minutes, when it was in fact an hour and a half. Give Uncle a bottle of wine to polish off in an hour and you can still rely totally on the intelligence of my conversation and the accuracy of my memory. Not every duffer of my age is so fortunate, and so, charitably, let us assume that Mike Scrafton was a little the worse for wear by 10.00pm on the night of November 7th, 2001. His righteous pursuit of the PM is certainly in the gutter with the broken glass this afternoon.

Al Bundy, with the help of Crikey, has demolished the credentials of the latest ex-government lacky to grind an axe against Howard because a career went belly-up.

OOPS!
I could blame it on the fact that I’m on a week’s leave from my afternoon shift caper and therefore not used to watching the box before midnight.
Or I could be honest and admit to enjoying a bottle of Scotchman’s Hill shiraz, leaving a fuzzy recollection this morning. I feel your pain, Mike Scrafton.
It was while draining the last of the rosy nectar that I witnessed the dodgy claims of one Russell Galt that Liberal Senator George Brandis had branded PM Howard “a lying rodent” and that he (Brandis) had been forced to cover the PM’s arse.
Brandis denied, Galt’s hoped-for corroborrator denied and the ABC was left with dead fish on its hands.
But I must stress that this all come to pass on the Lateline program, not the 7.30 Report to which I attributed the airing earlier in this post.
So full apologies to Red Kerry and his crew. I’ve removed my snarky reference to him and his program and acknowledge that the Galt claims were in fact broadcast on Lateline.
But the challenge is the same. Now that Galt’s been left flapping his gums in the breeze will Tony Jones tell us how his program got conned by a load of tripe?
Brandis, it appears, has also done a slick job this afternoon on Scrafton’s questionable allegations.

JANET ALBRECHTSEN today adroitly applies the blowtorch to a mob of tax-grubbing unionists.
In white coats.
It’s such a brutal workover that La Alba should pray to Allah she doesn’t need a scrip filled in the near future.

Blair’s hanging with a razor-sharp bunch of bloggers at the Republicans’ knees-up.
Some immensely insightful and funny commentary and links to great photos and posters.

Lots of clever material at ProtestWarrior.com

NewsMax exposes USA Today’s hypocrisy in giving conservative commentator Ann Coulter the boot from covering the Democrats convention, while giving press credentials to Michael Moore so he could aggravate participants of the Republican National Convention.
Like most fat, ugly bastards Moore craves love, so according to 3AW’s US correspondent this morning he was mightily pissed off when conventioneers roundly booed him.
I mean, WTF did he expect?
The idiot turned up for a speech by John McCain, who gave the festering heap of humus both barrels:
“Not our political opponents. And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.”
The conference hall at Madison Square Gardens was filled with sustained boos as the 5000 Republican delegates showed their anger at Mr Moore, whose film accuses President George W Bush of lying about the reasons for the Iraq war.

It can’t be helped. Every now and then fragments of thought flash through the consciousness like a meteorite glimpsed for a millisecond. Thoughts like: bomb. bloodthirsty maniacs. into the state of mortality. they so dearly applaud.

Thousands of supporters of the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, have spilled onto the streets of Gaza to celebrate a twin suicide bombing in southern Israel that killed 16 people. The Palestinians, estimated to number about 20,000, threw sweets in the air and sang songs.
The dead and more than 80 wounded in the bombings were in or near two buses in the southern Israeli town of Beersheva.
The attack came hours after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled an accelerated timetable for his plan to pull settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip as part of a larger project to separate Israel from the Palestinians.

The last paragraph demonstrates these barbarians don’t want peace. So I hope the Israelis give them hell.