Slattsnews

I’m tipping 20,000 to 25,000 attended the union movement’s anti IR laws rally at the MCG this morning. But I’ll accept an average from the evening news bulletins and online reports.
The Herald Sun inferred some crowd counters had rose-coloured lenses in their sunnies: “Organisers said about 60,000 people rallied at the event, although the 100,000-capacity stadium appeared less than half-full.”
The Age’s Jane Holroyd does her own estimate, claiming “55,000 protesters rallying at Melbourne’s MCG . . .”
Even the leftie luvvies at the ABC couldn’t be that generous: “A loud and enthusiastic crowd of around 40,000 people has gathered inside the MCG.”
3AW’s reporter on the spot said organisers had predicted a crowd to compare with a Carlton-Essendon attendance. The turnout was more like that for a Fremantle-Hawthorn match, he said.
There was more irony there than at a BHP foundry.
The guest of honour was ex-millionaire and friend of battlers such as Greg Norman and James Packer, “Working Class Man” Jimmy Barnes, who performed three songs free, an ABC hack gushed.
But the “D’uh” award goes to funny-as-toothache comedienne Corinne Grant of the axed Glasshouse show who told the masses the struggle against the Federal Government’s new IR laws was “one of the biggest fights we have seen in our lives”. “And we’re going to win this,” she said. “The only person who is going to lose his job is John Howard.”
Er, that’s apart from Corinne. Is she really saying that under these draconian new IR laws, only one person, apart from herself, will lose their job?
As I said, a worthy “D’uh” award winner.

UPDATE:
According to Tony the Teacher, who not only spends many miserable afternoons at the G but lives just up the road, the crowd was in the nether regions of 35,000-40,000. Good enough for me. Tone’s got a good pic of Corinne looking strident. And stupid.

Morning glory? We have nothing to add to this report other than to note the time of day of the alleged offence.
A NSW north coast woman has been charged with bestiality and offensive conduct after allegedly being involved in an indecent act with a horse.
Police said they found the naked woman with the horse when they were called to a paddock in Wilson Street, Lismore at 9am (AEDT) on Monday.

Report of another Black Hawk accident:
AN Australian Army Black Hawk helicopter has been lost at sea near Fiji, The Australian Defence Force (ADF) said tonight.
Defence offered few details, saying only that the helicopter had been operating from aboard the landing ship HMAS Kanimbla.

UPDATE:
Defence head on ABC radio has announced the chopper went down while landing on Kanimbla. Ten army personnel were on board. One is missing and of the nine recovered, one later died and seven are injured.
ABC TV continued to broadcast Glasshouse with the usual boring Howard-bashing. Guest David Koch praised the show and its under-25 audience for having better values than their parents. Yeah, only fuddy-duddy old ABC radio would interrupt a program with details of a national tragedy. Some values.

Mainstream media, including our revered broadsheet of record, have been duped again.
I guess when you want to believe the worst, that’s what you’ll get: the worst kind of dishonesty.

The news that six Sunnis were captured by Shiites, doused with kerosene and burned alive, was too sensational to not be picked up by the mainstream media. But it turns out that the event never happened. Furthermore, the Iraqi “spokesman” relied on to give all information regarding this event is as fictional as the story itself.
Jamil Hussein, the man news reports called “police Capt. Jamil Hussein,” was the source for all information regarding the burning. Although he is mentioned by USA Today, the Associated Press, CBS News, and other outlets, Central Command says no such person exists. Centcom also asked the Associated Press to retract the story unless it has proof beyond Jamil Hussein’s word.

Gluttonous Michael Moore may have bitten off too much this time. He’s threatened war on the Democrats if they don’t cut and run. Now!
“So I don’t want to hear another word about sending more troops (wake up, America, John McCain is bonkers), or ‘redeploying’ them, or waiting four months to begin the ‘phase-out.’ There is only one solution and it is this: Leave. Now. Start tonight. Get out of there as fast as we can . . .
“The responsibility to end this war now falls upon the Democrats. Congress controls the purse strings and the Constitution says only Congress can declare war. [Sen. Harry] Reid and [Rep. Nancy] Pelosi now hold the power to put an end to this madness. Failure to do so will bring the wrath of the voters.
“We aren’t kidding around, Democrats, and if you don’t believe us, just go ahead and continue this war another month. We will fight you harder than we did the Republicans.”

Hmmm, that could well be the last word from him.

The kids might have a different take on this:
Deaf activists have claimed their ‘culture’ is under threat from hi-tech ear implants which promise to help their babies’ speech and language skills.
Cochlear implants, if inserted in a baby’s first year of life, can allow the child to develop ‘normal’ language skills at least up to the age of four.
But some deaf parents argue there is nothing wrong with a deaf child that requires surgery, and say the implants represent ‘genocide to the deaf’.

Startling revelations have surfaced in this rotten state of more tissue-light sentences for baby killers.
MORE than a dozen people charged with murdering children in the past decade have struck deals to dramatically reduce their time behind bars.
Families, police and victims’ groups are appalled by the “institutionalised injustice” that lets child killers beat murder charges in favour of manslaughter.

Fellow Observation Deck crew member Peter Faris QC knows the most likely place to find justice and common sense in the courtroom is on the jury bench.

Barrister Peter Faris, QC, said a jury should decide between murder and manslaughter in child homicide cases.
“You hear that a jury is the hallmark of democracy and it reflects the views of the man in the street . . . why wouldn’t you leave the case to them?” Mr Faris said.

Oops! That’s the huge risk with magazines: events taking a totally unexpected turn between deadline and publication.
GQ’s website at least allows the mag to wriggle inexpensively from its December feature branding Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock Newlyweds of the Year. Bet it’s a bigger worry down at the printing plant.
You can read all about the bustup at the splendid news and blog tracker Tailrank.

Another disgrace in the Mediocre People’s Republic of Brackistan:
A MINIMUM five-year jail sentence for a father who committed monstrous assaults that killed his baby daughter has been slammed by child welfare groups.
Would there be one law-abiding citizen in this state who would agree with this sentence’s leniency? I very much doubt it.

Another trail blazed in my favourite outback town, Coober Pedy — a bar mitzvah. Congratulations to young Abraham.

How embarrassing! After Saturday’s election, the ABC interviewed local MP Michael Crutchfield, who defied even his party pundits by holding his seat of South Barwon. While Crutchfield was talking to the camera at a local sports ground, a middle-aged chap behind him preened and posed like a kid in the crowd during a post-match footy interview. The “look at moi, look at moi” show-off did no favours to the dignity of his office. It was the mayor of Geelong Peter McMullin, who we hear hankers for a Labor seat down the track.

UPDATE:
In response to a query in comments, this article from today’s Geelong Advertiser outlines the latest development in a scandal at City Hall.
GEELONG councillor David Saunderson will fight charges over the alleged cash-for-council saga next February.

Things could be worse, Bracks after all heads a rightwing Labor outfit. The trains more or less run on time, although the police are pathetically led and education standards, as in most Australian school systems, are abysmal.
And seriously, who could support the policy bereft Liberals or the nutcase Greens?
But it may not be all smooth sailing for the third Bracks Government. Reports to Neil Mitchell’s program this morning suggested some extremely nasty developments during the election. A candidate in the seat of Eltham had his property invaded and vandalised by thugs, terrifying his family.
At a polling booth a violent thug took to a Family First candidate, hurting him so badly he needed hospitalisation.
More info here:
Other leftwing lawbreakers have been on air this morning boasting how Connex railway employees won’t collect fares for unionists travelling to a rally on Thursday.
Given that Connex losses are regularly shored up by us taxpayers, this is nothing more than out and out bludging by unionists on the non-demonstrating taxpayer.
They can take all the moral high ground they like, but it cannot be denied that any demonstrator who doesn’t pay full fare to attend the rally is nothing less than a bludger on his fellow worker. Bludgers are invited to defend their miserable antics here.
Groan, I’ve awakened today with an intestinal volcano about to blow. I’m off to the sack.

For just once, I wish I lived in Gippsland. Then I could vote for this bloke (scroll down to the first post) tomorrow.
It would make my day.

This, I had to pinch from Rachy’s site. A real crack-up.

Never trust anyone lacking a sense of humour. If nanny-staters possessed just a smidgeon of levity they’d see the ridiculousness, if not danger, in their politically correct dogma. And at the lower end of the intellectual scale, those who can’t recognise satire or parody would be the first to line up behind the tyrants that nanny-staters emulate.
This occurred to me on reading this comment at Andrew Bolt’s blog:
Went to see Borat last night, was pretty funny. Something really disturbed me though. 80% of the patrons of the cinema I was at were Middle Eastern. When Borat said they were driving to California instead of flying because they were scared the Jews would hijack the plane I heard at least half a dozen “thats true bro or thats true cuz”. I’ve lost hope…

Perhaps it was all those years on Sienfeld acting zany but harmless that has caused Michael Richards to get all racist angry.
He’s trying to houdini from the pickle he’s got himself in, but the latest report indicates he’s got form.
Richards allegedly lashed out at Jews during performance earlier this year, yelling at one audience member: “You’re a f***ing Jew. Your people are the cause of Jesus dying.”

UPDATE:
NewsBusters points out the LA Times has not mentioned Richards’ anti-semitic outburst and was fairly skimpy on his anti-black rant. When Mel Gibson let fly with his senseless tirade, the Times published 21 articles on the matter, including four front-pagers.
Double standard from the Left Coast daily. Say it ain’t so.

We Aussies are an inventive lot what with the stump-jump plough, the Sunshine harvester, the wine cask and Vegemite to our credit. But this Sydney invention should really make the world sit up and take notice — the bullet-proof T-shirt.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have great potential applications in making ballistic-resistance materials. The remarkable properties of CNTs makes them an ideal candidate for reinforcing polymers and other materials, and could lead to applications such as bullet-proof vests as light as a T-shirt, shields, and explosion-proof blankets. For these applications, thinner, lighter, and flexible materials with superior dynamic mechanical properties are required. A new study by researchers in Australia explores the energy absorption capacity of a single-walled carbon nanotube under a ballistic impact.
The research is headed by Professor Liangchi Zhang from the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney.

You have doubts about the manmade global warming theory — and that’s all it is, a theory — and aren’t afraid to express them? Sounds perfectly reasonable in a democratic society that values free speech.
Well, to a leader in increasingly totalitarian Great Britain, expressing such views makes you no better than a murderous terrorist.
Foreign secretary Margaret Beckett called on the media to deny terrorists and their supporters a platform because it “artificially polarises debate”.
Likewise, Beckett said, media wheeled out resident sceptics of climate change, “however unrepresentative or discredited”, to generate tension and voice provocative views in the name of editorial balance.
“It makes for more heated exchanges and louder headlines. But it is not the way to build a common consensus on the ground we share.”
As Brendan O’Neill writes in — of all places, The Guardian — Beckett explicitly compared “climate-change sceptics” to terrorists, and implied that both should be denied media air time. In one fell swoop, she demonised those who challenge the consensus on climate change by lumping them in with radicals who support the use of violence, and suggested these sceptics should be censored.
Whatever you might think of climate-change sceptics, the fact is that most of them are scientists, and many of them work in British universities. Yet here we had the secretary of state for foreign affairs putting these middle-class professionals in the same camp as terrorists who, according to the government, pose the greatest threat to life and liberty as we know it.

Hey, I thought the debate was all over: the consensus, if not the proof, is in. Yet this high-powered politician slanders her intellectually honest countrymen and advocates totalitarianism to bolster her “truth”. Perhaps there’s not as many gullibles across the population as Beckett would like.
O’Neill reveals Beckett is regrettably not alone with her repugnant views and that a Greens commentator wants Nuremberg-style trials for manmade global warming sceptics.

In the prehistory of boyhood, “You sit down to pee” was as destructive as “Your mum wears army boots” in the artillery of insults.
Now it’s a compulsory instruction in Norway’s socialist education system.
A local decision that schoolboys must sit on toilet seats when urinating has provoked political debate.

Less than 24 hours had passed before the Discovery honchos announced that Animal Planet would continue to air the Crocodile Hunter shows. But will those millions of children who adored his life-affirming presence stick with him in posthumous reruns? Or will all those years of close encounters be retrospectively darkened by the very last one? However it turns out, anyone who raised young kids in the half-decade either side of the turn of the century will retain a distant memory of a crazy bloke in shorts hugging some leathery old croc or fleeing a komodo dragon. For him not to be doing it another decade or three seems a great injustice. Or, to modify a phrase, unfair dinkum.

From Mark Steyn’s affectionate obituary for Steve Irwin.