Slattsnews

Alan Jones called a press conference a few minutes ago to apologise for his appalling remark to students that Julia Gillard’s father died of shame because of her repeated lies.
Taking chutzpah to Olympian levels Jones managed in his explanation to revisit the no-carbon-tax lie, the pink batts fatalities, the Gillard-AWU scandal and the boat people failures. He also referred to the trashing by Labor leaders of Kevin Rudd earlier this year.
Don’t think the press pack wanted to hear those matters getting another airing.
Jones also claimed a cabinet minister’s wife had Twittered a death wish aimed at him.
It will be interesting to see whether the media will get as excited about that.

UPDATE:
The ever-watchful BoltA reveals an far more hurtful declaration about Gillard’s father’s death, one that unlike Jones’ disgraceful jibe, was intended for widespread public consumption. And unlike Jones woeful crack, was totally ignored by the outraged commentariat.

Go, Granny, go:
ONE of the oldest women in the UK has celebrated her 110th birthday – and believes her long life is due to giving up smoking – SIX YEARS AGO.
Dorothy Peel, from Hull, East Yorks, turned 110 last week – but says she believes she’s reached the milestone thanks to her quitting smoking when she was 104.
The pensioner, who lives in a care home, still enjoys a mid-afternoon sherry and a glass of whiskey every day – but insists her good health is down to her not drinking whiskey until after 7pm.

Own goal to the smarmy bastards at Media Watch. I’ll break my own rule and watch on Monday.

The ABC’s Media Watch program has been found to have breached the public broadcaster’s code of practice over a segment criticising a news report by The Daily Telegraph’s state political editor Andrew Clennell.

Going on recent fanatical violence, this should trigger riots. But it won’t.

Today the blaspheming continues at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery on 57th Street, where the state-sponsored “artwork” Piss Christ goes on display for a month. The work, in case you missed the controversy that swirled around its debut in 1987, consists of a photograph of a crucifix floating in the artist’s urine.

Mario Loyola lays down the gauntlet to hypocrites:

But if you really want him to condemn the Piss Christ, this is what you have to do: Find an enterprising young artist willing to create a “Piss Mohammed” version of Serrano’s work, and ask the museum to hang it right next to the Piss Christ. It could be part of a “Piss Religion” exhibit. If the gallery declines (as it surely would), then perhaps one could gather together a small group of Manhattan atheists to march “piss portraits” of Mohammed and his fellow deities / prophets right up 1st Avenue past the United Nations, in homage to the First Amendment.
Every last person who complains will have to explain why they said nothing during the 20-plus years that the revolting Piss Christ has been touring art galleries around the world. They will be forced either to treat Islam and Christianity the same (i.e., stop trashing the latter) or finally admit the cowardly truth, which is that their degree of respect for any given religion is proportional to its proponents’s propensity for violence.

In a hard-hitting critique of the Gillard government’s draft history curriculum, John Howard pops up to remind us we were once governed by intelligent adults who aspired for every generation to leave school with more knowledge than their parents’ graduating classes.

The curriculum is repeatedly unbalanced in the choice of subjects that have an obvious political context.
For instance, in Year 9, students are given the option of learning about the “progressive ideas and movements” of the 19th century. The ideas that feature are socialism, imperialism, nationalism, egalitarianism, Darwinism, capitalism and Chartism. Not one mention of conservatism. Not one mention of liberalism, which is extraordinary given that the Western liberal tradition is pervasive in Australia and similar countries.

Cranky magpies have drawn Slatts’ blood on consecutive days.
Yesterday, out of the blue on the Barwon’s southern bank: ”whack!!” in the lughole. No squawk, no flutter of wings, just a solid hit so hard it caused a rick in the neck. Of course, he got me in the lobe and blood splashed over the hi-viz jacket, where it will remain as a sort of battle scar.
Today, feathered fury followed me the length of an East Geelong street. I managed to duck and weave until he drew back-of-the-neck blood on his last sortie at the end of the street. Just a scratch really, but boy do they take the pleasure out of a bike ride on a sunny day.
A wet winter and spring and animal-loving idiots who feed them have ensured they’re in plague proportions in urban areas. As expected, the Sus Dept won’t do anything about them, merely issuing stupid ”avoid them” notices. How do you avoid them if you don’t know where they are? Inevitably, a kid will lose their hearing or sight and there’ll be much hand-wringing about protected species (in unnatural numbers) and prices to pay for intruding on their habitat.
I’d just like to harken back to my late dad’s recall of dealing with swooping magpies during his 1930s boyhood. Every country property had a shotgun, a rifle and a slug gun. Swoopers didn’t last.

This says more about recent government of Australia than all the speeches, editorials, gabfests and ABC talk shows combined.

Lifted from Bolta’s blog.

Little fella loves his mum and the outdoors.

Australian literature has lost a giant.

THE bestselling Australian novelist Robert G. Barrett died peacefully at his Terrigal home on Thursday at 7.30pm after a long battle with cancer, “the old Bengal Lancer” as he called it.

OK, big Bob may not have soared to philosophical heights, but boy he could entertain and his detestation of wowsers, pseuds and luvvies was cathartic.
My favourite story about Barrett has him turning up at some navel-gazing goatee-strokers literary soiree with a hooker on each arm. It was as if he was saying: ”You’re gunna look down your nose at me anyway, so cop this.”

In a touching tribute, actor and fine journalist Graeme Blundell describes the Barrett home brew:

. . . a concoction of urban myths, shaggy dog stories, the street wit of the socially marginalised and the corrugated irony of traditional Australian humour.

While Barrett had his hero solving the weirdest of problems all over the place, you could always rely on a Les Norton yarn to feature three essentials: a furious fight, a singlet-stretching feed and a window-rattling fuck root.
They broke the mould.
Apology for overlooking link implant earlier.

THE SOCIALIST MIND

Time for a feel-good story:
At 102, she changes oil, spark plugs on her 82-year-old car
Margaret Dunning still dotes on her 1930 Packard and loves ‘the smell of gasoline’

Western politicians have for decades wasted taxpayers’ money giving us things we neither want nor need and certainly can’t afford.
The upshot is the collapsing economies of Europe and the US’s insurmountable debts, growing at $1.3 trillion a year.
Australia is heading down the same road as recently elected state governments are confronted with massive budgetary blowouts due to the mindless extravagance of preceding administrations. At the same time, hardly a day passes without the Gillard federal government announcing yet another unaffordable, ill-considered multi-billion dollar scheme; projects and services that are remarkable for the lack of public clamour for their introduction.
What this country urgently needs is a political leader to cry ”enough”. To tell the nation we can no longer erode the economy and sentence our grandchildren to penjury just because political strategists see temporary electoral gains in hugely expensive molly-coddling programs.
So it was some consolation today, to have a respected journalist – usually identified with the Left – using his new platform to urge governments to consult the public about what we all want and how much it will really cost.
Shaun Carney, formerly of The Age, writes in the Herald Sun:

It used to be that the most important segment of the electorate was the so-called aspirational voter, who dreamed of and worked towards a better life.
Those voters looked to governments to help them get there.
In the new politics, governments, rather than voters, are the ones who aspire to something better and share their policy dreams with us – even though they’re not really sure how they can make it all happen.

What should one make of the astonishing turnaround in Labor’s fortunes in some opinion polls, particularly Newspoll, which now has the Government and Opposition neck and neck?
If you are in the business of selling news, as is the parent company of Newspoll, there is nothing less interesting, therefore less profitable, than a predictable result. So, somehow or other some facts surface to fit a certain story and before you know it, the coat-tail tuggers are telling you that the rank outsider is a definite chance.
Seasoned speculators, however, know the real knowledge is where the hard heads knock, not where the oats-feeders tout for business with wishful thinkers.
Centrebet has a Coalition win returning $1.28 for a $1 investment and Labor $3.60. The amalgam odds offerer, IASbet, squeezes the Libs into $1.25 and Labor $3.50.
As always, follow the money.

Leftie mindsets will wriggle like Houdini at the online publication by respected literary and commentary magazine Quadrant of a cartoon lampooning The Prophet.
On the one hand, Quadrant is assuming what is normally the Left’s role in mocking an aspect of the opium of the masses; on the other, the Australian mainstream will applaud the magazine’s courage, taking any socialists who oppose the gesture further down the road to irrelevance.
Meanwhile, another online magazine reminds lefty luvvies what constitutes real tolerance.

The image of the Hebrew prophet Moses high-fiving Jesus Christ as both are having their erect penises vigorously masturbated by Ganesha, all while the Hindu deity anally penetrates Buddha with his fist, reportedly went online at 6:45 p.m. EDT, after which not a single bomb threat was made against the organization responsible, nor did the person who created the cartoon go home fearing for his life in any way.

The pursuit of excellence is back in the British curriculum:

Michael Gove is to herald an end to a quarter of a century of ‘dumbed-down’ exams this week when he abolishes GCSEs and brings back a tough new O-level style system.

Gove has met opposition from those who still think you can advance via the lowest common denominator.

Mr Clegg’s main objection was that this system would be ‘elitist’ and would ‘stigmatise’ children considered not bright enough.

These anti-elitists never suggest that Woop Woop North’s twelfth man should be able to play for Australia. They would be laughed off the map. Yet they believe that striving for mediocrity is perfectly acceptable in one of life’s most important experiences – education.

Gee, multi-culti has been a resounding success, hasn’t it?

Tim Blair has a solution:

If Western resentment is the problem, a solution might be available that avoids any need for mass head removal. Simply pack up your scimitars, wrap all of your womenfolk in their favourite freedom sacks, and get the hell out of Australia.

The Bunyip’s back and waxing amusingly about flicks for the faithful.

RELIGION has inspired some memorable films over the years, and if there is any wisdom to be drawn from the oeuvre it is that resulting eruptions of devotion may run in inverse proportion to those flicks’ quality. Take Ben Hur, for example, a fine film which probably did more for rowing, chariot racing and little leather centurion outfits at the Mardi Gras parade than Christianity, despite the neat plot device that sees the hero’s leprous mother and sister restored in the final scenes to full health by the alleged Messiah.

The working title to The Beatles’ Yesterday was Scrambled Eggs. Someone’s taken it a bit further.

Any individual who ignored Supreme Court orders would end up in extremely hot water, quite possibly in the slot. Likewise those in charge of a corporation or statutory body who thumbed their noses at the state’s highest bench. So what gives here?

VICTORIA has joined fresh contempt proceedings against the CFMEU after the union again ignored a scheduled court appearance.
Victorian Supreme Court judge Anthony Cavanough today granted the Attorney-General’s application to join Grocon’s contempt claim against the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.
The application was unopposed after the CFMEU again failed to send any legal representation to the court, despite being notified about the hearing.
“They have had their chance here today,” Justice Cavanough said.
“They haven’t taken it.”

Grocon and the Baillieu government seek to have the CFMEU punished for breaching last month’s court orders, which banned blockades at Grocon’s Myer Emporium and Footscray projects.

A long-term Fairfax redundancy acceptor today shared interesting, informed in-house wisdom: that within two years The Age in print form will be reduced to a weekend edition only.
This sort of garbage will only hasten that event:

TONY Abbott will face a test of taste and tactics when Julia Gillard returns to Parliament next week, still mourning the death of her father.

Taste and tactics were certainly tested tonight with Kevin Rudd on 7.30 again exposing his naked leadership ambition while his leader buried her father.