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Another day and more revelations of breathtaking incompetence and staggering irresponsibility.

JULIA Gillard has been accused of “scandalous” disregard for national security amid revelations she sent a former bodyguard to attend highly sensitive security meetings on her behalf.

UPDATE:
Victorian MP Bernie Finn has reported on Facebook that Julia Gillard said she was praying for Kevin Rudd’s recovery from a gall bladder operation. Who does an admitted atheist pray to?

Something impressive to show for all those years of schooling. Indulge a proud dad.

Ah, you’ve got to hand it to Labor. They look after the downtrodden.
Suddenly, the value of stock in every Dodgy Brothers yard in the country has doubled.
Hey, does that mean the son and heir can now afford to trade his 20-year-old Laser for this?

I don’t think so.

I’ve included this report mainly so I could write that headline. Maybe they’ve teamed up with Jake and Elwood.

Two fugitive nuns in their 80s have gone on the run in France to escape being sent to a retirement home by their Mother Superior.

And yes, this survivor of the Sisters of No Mercy is well aware of why one nun always travels with another nun.

So, why would a council build a bike lane less than three metres long?
Let the bureaucrat responsible explain – as only a bureaucrat can. The lane, he said was to:
“highlight the interface between the eastbound carriageway and the beginning of a new contraflow facility”.
Er, exactly.

Elton should be reading up on Australian politics. Surely, this land of champagne socialists sprawled on the back of a hopeless underclass, is Orwell’s farmyard revisited.

ELTON John and Lee Hall, who wrote the hit musical Billy Elliot, are working on a new show based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The honeymoon is over for Gillard if the pundits’ response to her Citizens Assembly on climate change is any indication. And deservedly so too. If Rudd’s 2020 gabfest was an embarrassing wank that even the ex-PM wanted to forget quickly, this hare-brained thought bubble from spindoctorland will haunt Gillard for the rest of her political life.
Paul Kelly in The Australian:

The proposed Citizens Assembly to assess the case for climate change is an unconscious Labor joke — a grand focus group to conceal its leadership failure.
The Labor Party has changed leaders, but its character defects are unchanged. Gillard, in effect, says pricing carbon is imperative but she cannot act until Tony Abbott agrees with her. Can you believe this?

Laurie Oakes in the Herald Sun:

Gillard’s proposal for a 150-member citizens’ assembly to try to reach consensus on climate change and the case for a carbon price is the wackiest idea to come along in quite a while.
Kevin Rudd’s farcical 2020 Summit looks sensible by comparison.
The very reason we are going to the polls on August 21 is to elect a 150-member citizens’ assembly. It is called the House of Representatives.

The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair asserts in his blog:

We’re already spending $90 million per year running a Climate Change Department that has nothing to do. Despite those hundreds of underemployed public servants, Julia Gillard now plans to outsource climate policy:

The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss described the idea of a citizens’ assembly as “school-yard politics”.

It was “bizarre” a government would randomly select 150 people to advise it on policy, the think tank’s executive director said. “We’ll be doing it [climate policy] on Facebook next,” he told ABC Radio.

Fred Barnes on a vast left-wing media conspiracy:

What was particularly pathetic about the scheme to smear Mr. Obama’s critics was labeling them as racists. The accusation has been made so frequently in recent years, without evidence to back it up, that it has little effect. It’s now the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.

Well, they did call it a happy meal.

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. (CAP) – McDonald’s executives were left with egg (McMuffin) on their face this week, when over 5,000 Happy Meals were distributed with colored condoms instead of a plastic toy from the movie The Last Airbender.

No doubt about it, the Gillard government is convinced the population has been dumbed down sufficiently to respond positively to the most vapid and meaningless of utterances.

Moving forward was the key-note of Ms Gillard’s address in announcing the election. She used the phrase 24 times in her speech of just under 1500 words – and 18 times in the questions afterwards.

Really, if that’s the best they can do with an election announcement, is it any wonder that every policy they’ve had their mitts on has underwhelmed to the extreme?
They’re hopeless, their knowledgeable supporters know they’re hopeless and the rest of us worry about how much damage they’ll do before they’re kicked out. It’s 1974 revisited.

There’s a lot of reports like this out of the Northern Territory. Just wish someone would take pictures.

UFO spooks Show crowd
A BRIGHT light travelling slowly across the sky last night spooked a large crowd of people at a Territory Show.

Aston Villa’s duffer striker Emile Heskey has retired from international football, prompting a flood of jokes from The Sun:

Emile gets a part-time job at a zoo and the keeper, aware of the striker’s reputation for a lack of pace, tells him to take care of the tortoises.
Later the keeper pops to see how Emile is doing and finds him standing by an empty enclosure, sobbing. “Where have all the tortoises gone?” asks the keeper. Emile shrugs and says: “I just opened the door and whoooossh!!!”

It’ll be nice for Emile when he weds Chantelle Tagoe. It’ll make a change to hear “Mrs Heskey” instead of “Heskey misses”.

What a welcoming gesture:

A Minnesota town is outraged over reports that an illegal immigrant was implanted with a penis pump – paid for by taxpayers.

You know you’re on the right track when that nutcase Chuck Windsor is your opponent:

The Prince of Wales has accused climate change sceptics of using ‘pseudo science’ and ‘intimidation’ to stop the world from addressing catastrophic global warming.

Chutzpah doesn’t begin to describe it:

To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets
So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he’s grateful for the work, even though he’s not sure why he’s doing it. “I could care less,” he says. “I am being paid to march around and sound off.”

His opponents would say that while he’s out there the only harm he’s doing is to a box of Top Flites:

President Barack Obama has played a remarkable 41 rounds of golf since becoming president, easily outpacing his predecessor and possibly damaging his ability to portray himself in 2012 as a populist advocate of average folks.

Game on. I’ll be disappointed if, as seems likely at this stage, the Government is returned. They have failed across the board to deliver their policies and squandered tens of billions in taxpayers funds while handing control to a nest of backroom vipers.
Just in the past week it became clear that the mining tax deal as Swan announced it was a barefaced lie and it would not cost $1.5 billion but five times as much; the East Timor detention centre solution continued to unravel and as the Immigration Minister said was “killing this government”; and the cabinet still hasn’t a set a policy – not that one is needed – on climate change.
Then we had the revelation of Gillard’s treatment of Rudd in the dying hours of his prime ministership. Her betrayal demonstrated she was as trustworthy as a rabid cur, and more importantly, was beholden to faceless thugs interested in nothing more than hanging on to power.
Despite compelling evidence that we’re enduring quite possibly the worst Australian government ever, I suspect they’ll be re-elected.
This would be particularly disappointing on two fronts: firstly it would demonstrate that the great dumbing down of society, begun by education departments in the 1970s, succeeded; secondly a Gillard government would repeat the ploy of “changing it all when we get in” and lead this country further down the road to economic ruin.
The one optimistic note you could take from a Gillard victory is that they would do so much damage that even the dummies would cry enough and a generation would pass before a socialist government was ever again seriously considered.

UPDATE:
Wondering what Kevin Rudd’s been up to since the night of the long knives? Well, our hapless neighbouring federal member Darren Cheeseman seems to know. The MP, widely regarded as a “oncer” who has never recovered from celebrating his election victory at a function 100km outside of his seat, eschewed constituents and local media the day after his election to spend time 100km outside his electorate, reveals on his website: Kevin Rudd is helping small business meet the set-up costs of family friendly working arrangements.

UPDATE 2:
Andrew Bolt with the state of play

UPDATE 3:
Here in Geelong they’re worried that Gillard’s slogan might be a tad prescient; another term of Labor and they’ll be moving Ford . . . back to Detroit.

Absorbing piece In Quadrant by David Flint that looks at media bias in Australian political coverage. Flint concludes:

The bias is such in our media that confidence in the institution will continue to decline, as will sales. This will not of course affect the public broadcasters. If the New Zealand experience and limited Hawke government reaction are any guide, they are more likely to be corrected or punished for their excesses by a right-wing Labor government.
In the meantime, loyalty will accrue to certain journalists and outlets where trust has been established. But while much of the mainstream media refuse to subject the centre Left to the same robust scepticism which is applied to the Right, a large majority of the population will be denied the information which they are entitled to receive in a democracy.

UPDATE:
Andrew Bolt with the state of play.

Tea and toast would have spluttered across the nation’s living rooms this morning when Insiders Australian Agenda pundit Malcolm Farr gushed about the “air of competency” Julia Gillard has displayed for the past two-and-a-half years.
This is the clown that has been in charge of the $5 billion BER rorts, the computers in a few schools scheme, an industrial relations policy that stops country Victorian kids having after-school jobs and a deal with the big miners that will cost taxpayers billions in the next few years.
Oh, and there’s the East Timor detention centre fiasco.
If she had an air of competency it’s only because kiss-cuddle commentators like Farr have helped spin the illusion.
Piers Ackerman presents a far more objective assessment of La Gillardine’s hapless performances.

We should have known after the laughable Medicare Gold, the wasteful BER, the Green loan fiasco and the deaths of more Australians killed while installing dodgy insulation than there were in the Iraq war.
Rudd was a dud, Gillard is showing herself in less time to be far worse.

Update:
Miranda Devine adds “patronising” and “hypocrite” to Gillard descriptors.

Everyone knows that it was the Labor policies crafted by Julia Gillard, when she was shadow immigration minister, that turned a trickle of about three unauthorised boat arrivals a year into an escalating three boats a week, leading to more than 150 drowning deaths of asylum seekers along the way, and almost 600 children currently in detention. But after years of vilifying conservatives for supporting the Howard government policies that stopped the flow of boats, Labor thinks it can turn around within weeks of an election, without admitting they were wrong, and create their own version of a ”Pacific solution”.

Boris Johnson asks: Why is it that our national team has once again vindicated the aphorism of Gary Lineker, that football is a game in which 22 men run around for 90 minutes – and then the Germans win?
Johnson sheets part of the blame to ridiculous nobody’s-a-loser policies in modern education and busybodies who would take all the fun out of games.

I am sure the problem is partly to do with all those foreign players in the Premiership, but it’s more fundamental than that. We are still paying the price of an educational establishment that developed an aversion to competitive games and an obsession with bureaucracy and elf and safety that made it hard for the voluntary sector to fill the gap.

Christopher Booker reports that global warming alarmists have again been caught gilding the lily:

It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.
The ramifications of this discovery stretch in many directions. First, it seems to show that the IPCC – whose reports governments rely on to justify presenting mankind with the largest bill in history – has been in serious breach of its own rules.

US left wing groups, resentful of the highly successful conservative Tea Party coalition, attempted to form an amalgamated grassroots force titled the Coffee Party.
That was a fizzer so they had another go.
The RedState website reports that in an effort to replicate the tea party’s success, 170 liberal and civil rights groups are forming a coalition that they hope will match the movement’s political energy and influence. They promise to “counter the tea party narrative” and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of floundering.
Australians with an interest in politics will get a laugh out of this. The American lefties are calling their new federation . . . wait for it . . . One Nation.

I’m surprised it took them this long. And as far as I know, no one got naked.

Free Paul. That’s the message the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is sending to the owners of Paul the octopus, who has gained worldwide recognition for correctly picking the teams that would win matches during the World Cup.

Here’s one our nanny staters haven’t thought of:

The latest proposal from San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare is a ban on the sale of all pets (other than fish) throughout the city.

They’re keen on bans in the city of peace, love and tolerance. In recent times they’ve banned: Sugary soda from vending machines, alcohol ads, plastic bag use in stores, bottles, feeding of parakeets in parks, Segways on sidewalks, bike paths and weight-based discrimination