Sunday, February 20, 2005
LUBBERS NOT A FIGHTER
UN refugee boss Ruud Lubbers has quit over sexual harrassment allegations, even though he denies them:
In a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mr Lubbers denied the allegations and said he was quitting because of a lack of confidence in him.
Mr Annan accepted the resignation, thanked Mr Lubbers for his work, and said a new page had to be turned.
The allegations against Mr Lubbers were contained in a confidential UN report leaked by the press on Friday.
It said that the former Dutch prime minister had engaged in unwanted physical contact with a female employee at his agency in Geneva.
The report added that claims made by other employees indicated a pattern of sexual harassment - although these women had not made official complaints.
An anxious world awaits the London Sun’s headline.
AUSTRALIA, HOME OF THE HOPPER
Stephen Hopper, lawyer to tortured depressive Islamic entrepreneur Mamdouh Habib, continues his charm offensive with the Australian media:
ANDREW BOLT: Mr Hopper, Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun. Before I get to my question can I just ask you, just in passing, I saw a newspaper reference that you’d been - you’re a convert to Islam, is that true?
STEPHEN HOPPER: Oh look people are trying to turn a lot of things around on to me privately. My private life is really no-one’s business.
ANDREW BOLT: I ask only because you seem to be, you represent quite a number of Islamist extremists, it seems to me. And it also seems to me that you take, you seem to take their case very personally and make quite wild accusations against the government. I’m just wondering what the personal agenda behind this is, are you a convert to Islam or not?
STEPHEN HOPPER: Look, mind your own business Andrew. That’s my answer to you.
ANDREW BOLT: Mr Hopper if he’s going around the world chasing lucrative deals, sealing deals and negotiating, what’s he doing on a disability pension?
STEPHEN HOPPER: Well, he was on a disability pension because he had severe depression.
ANDREW BOLT: Not to do depressed to go around sealing international deals?
STEPHEN HOPPER: Well, you know people who have depression try and escape from their situation. It’s a very complex condition.
BARRIE CASSIDY: What was the nature of that business deal, without going into detail?
STEPHEN HOPPER: It involved a cleaning business.
Habib’s To-Your-Door Purification Service. Let the cleansing begin! Meanwhile, Labor leader Kim Beazley is unconvinced by Habib’s story:
Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley says if Mamdouh Habib is entitled to any compensation for his detention and alleged torture it cannot come from the Australian Government.
Mr Beazley says he did not have much sympathy for the former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who ASIO continues to label a security risk.
STATEMENTS WITHOUT FEAR
Britain’s ITV News reports the latest triumph of English tolerance:
ITV News has been given exclusive access to a tape recording in which a radical Muslim cleric talks about flying a plane into Downing Street.
Shiekh Omar Bakri Mohammed - who is based in Britain - talks of suicide bombings and says that an attack on No 10 would be reconcilable with the Muslim faith.
He also claims that missions of “self sacrifice” and “martyrdom” would be welcomed by Allah.
It is a statement that will horrify and disgust people across Britain, but he made these statements without any fear of prosecution.
The fearless shiekh’s extended comments: “Somebody he fly aeroplane and he decide to fly the aeroplane over 10 Downing Street ... It’s another self-sacrifice operation ... What people call suicide operations they mean somebody he wear explosives or he carries explosives and he go and he blow it in the building with the people ... Martyrdom is what you want. Make sure you have nothing left behind you to think about or cry for and fight in the name of Allah.”
“Nothing to think about�. As a summary of fundamentalist Islam, that’s pretty good.
NATIONALITY DENIED
The Age’s Brian Courtis whines about American cultural imperialism:
Well, we’ve known the rules. We’ve known them since Errol Flynn liberated Burma without any help from British, Australian or New Zealand forces. Churchill and a few Diggers may have been upset, but the fact is when it comes to Hollywood only the good guys win and, since we’re playing with their toys, those good guys must inevitably be Americans.
Errol Flynn was, of course, Australian. (And a Bulletin columnist, for that matter.) The solution to Courtis’s problem: don’t play in Hollywood, and make Australian films that people actually want to watch.
BLIND TERROR! HOT RODS! BLONDE BLONDES!
“It seems to be some sort of pure unedited energy, and any attack only makes it stronger!”
Follow the wild teen adventures of Biff Baxley, Chip Biffler, Kick Chopley, Chuck Huckler, and sweet Eastvale coed Darla Von Kleinstein (“Darla, start throwing your clothes at it!”) as they battle ... The Blog.
FATHER-SON REUNION
Health minister Tony Abbott fathered a child out of wedlock in 1977; the boy was subsequently adopted out. In this week’s Bulletin, Julie-Anne Davies has the extraordinary story of their reunion:
Abbott spent some brief moments with his son after the birth but has only vague, half-recalled memories of the experience. “In retrospect I am appalled at how callow I was,� he says, with calm honesty. “But you know, that’s the way it was.
“I went to the hospital, the nurses gave me Daniel and I held him for a while. I was psychologically unready for parenthood – that is the sad truth about me at that time. I just wasn’t ready for it.â€?
Twenty-seven years later, on Boxing Day 2004, Abbott is ready. He dials Daniel’s number.
“Hi, is that Daniel? This is Tony Abbott.�
Daniel answers with four words that take Abbott’s breath away.
“Thanks for having me.�
Also in The Bulletin this week: more old-timey pictures. They’ll be on the site Tuesday.
BUSH ON TAPE
An alleged friend of George W. Bush who recorded Bush in private conversations several years ago has played some of those tapes to the New York Times. Bush emerges extremely well; to the Times’ surprise, the private George is wholly consistent with public George. And his opinions on the UN and the media are fascinating ...
UPDATE. Tolerant San Francisco chefs reject a White House cooking role:
The idea of going to the White House drew guffaws from many local chefs, staunch Democrats who say they would not serve even if asked.
(Via Andrew T. Lloyd)
Saturday, February 19, 2005
THE HUMAN FUND
If you live anywhere near the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, please feel free to wander into his home at any time and watch television, make a few phone calls, or grab a snack. John won’t mind!
UPDATE. In local blogging news, Mark Bahnisch takes the Moral Politics Test and discovers that he’s history’s greatest monster.
REVOLUTION GOOD FOR SOME
Former British conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith on blogging:
Mainstream TV can no longer say what it wants without fear of correction. Online diaries, written by teachers, soldiers and numerous other people with real knowledge of subjects, are fact-checking ill-informed broadcasters ...
You would also expect this electronic revolution to be good for the Democrats, but the American left’s relationship with the internet has been disastrous. The internet has sunk a knife into Bill Clinton’s moderate Democratic party ... The dailykos.com site of a Democratic consultant gets 500,000 hits a day. That site’s memorial to four American contractors murdered in Iraq was “screw them”. Hatefulness also pours out of the popular websites of Michael Moore and MoveOn.org.
Hatefulness ... and madness! A DailyKos operative believes he has located the connection between Jeff Gannon and the bogus CBS memos:
It now appears that Jeff Gannon could be the thread that unravels the real story behind the TANG/CBS forgeries. I have put together a case here that if looked at carefully by the blogosphere would show that the TANG forgeries were made by the White House, probably Dan Bartlett, and then given to Bill Burkett by a former associate of Karl Rove, Roger Stone.
It’s so obvious! Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that journalists at Gannon’s relatively unknown level aren’t unusual at White House press conferences:
Mr. Guckert’s nom de plume, Jeff Gannon, and the Talon News service he worked for did not set off any alarm bells in a room that also includes a representative from The Corporate Crime Reporter, The India Globe and Les Kinsolving, the host of a provocative radio talk show.
“This is an irritant that we deal with, people who try to hijack the briefing for ideological reasons,” said Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “A few people are in there just to get across their points of view. But it’s the kind of thing we put up with, because nobody can quite figure out how to deal with it.”
Tip to DailyKos: that India Globe guy was the second gunman. Think about it. Wheels within wheels, my friends.
(Via J.F. Beck)
UPDATE. Senior “Political” “Editor” for CBS “News” Dotty Lynch: “When Jeff Gannon, White House ‘reporter’ for Talon ‘News,’ was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable.”
(Via LGF)
UPDATE II. Dotty’s article, now under the headline “Rove-Gannon Connection?”, was originally titled “Karl Rove’s Warning to GOP”. Who ordered that it be changed? Who? And where is my toast? Where?
HARIRI PLOT CLAIM
The Jerusalem Post reports:
Officials at the highest levels in Syria and Lebanon organized the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper a-Siasa.
The report revealed that two high-ranking Syrian generals – including Syrian president Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law, Brig. Gen. Asef Shawkat, whom he appointed Friday to head military intelligence – and a Lebanese general.
Via Menorahblog. No idea at this stage if the report is accurate. If it is, Robert Fisk will be shocked: “Would the Syrians dream of doing anything so crude and vicious as this?�
UPDATE. In other hmmm news, Franco Aleman has an update on last week’s Madrid skyscraper fire. Turns out a torch-wielding mob may have been involved.
Bloggers, probably. You know what we’re like.
UPDATE II. The Telegraph reports:
Assassins who killed Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, travelled from Iraq through Syria to carry out the attack, according to the Beirut judge leading the inquiry into the bombing.
Rachid Mezher, the senior investigator for the Lebanese military tribunal, said that the organisers had been recruited from Islamist groups linked to Syria and operating against the US-led coalition in Iraq.
PSEUDO-JOURNALIST LYNCH MOB PERSON
“The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,â€? howled Steve Lovelady in the wake of Eason Jordan’s resignation. Bloggers were denounced as “scalp hunters”, “moon howlers”, “trophy hunters”, “sons of Sen. McCarthy”, “rabid”, and “pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.” The New York Times noted widespread concern: “Some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.â€?
Margo Kingston is part of the traditional media; a former head of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra bureau, her views now appear semi-daily at the SMH’s website. The Times might be interested in Kingston’s recent attempts to destroy immigration minister Amanda Vanstone’s career over the incarceration of Cornelia Rau. The mentally-ill 39-year-old (Rau, that is, not Kingston; Margo is older) ended up in an immigrant detention centre after repeatedly telling authorities she was German. As Queensland police commissioner Bob Atkinson (Rau also spent some time in a Queensland jail) explained:
I’d have to say that, when on the face of what we know at the moment, this is an extraordinarily unusual situation and I just can’t see how this could’ve been handled any differently.
The only way I can see how it could’ve been handled any differently would’ve been in a sent of circumstances that has already been demonstrated, as I understand it, to be unacceptable in Australia today, and that would be that everyone in Australia had an Australia card and their fingerprints and/or DNA recorded.
Now, apart from that, there was no way to identify this woman.
Seems fair enough. Kingston’s response to all of this is, well, pure salivating moronism:
Please resign, Senator Vanstone. You’re a disgrace to Australia.
Margo’s even organising a lynch mob:
First thing though is to get everyone you know to email and phone their federal MP and State Senators. I reckon local is the way to go, especially when we enter the post July Zone. That means rallies outside local Coaltion MP’s offices, letters to local papers and maybe ads in local papers demnding a public judicial inquiry.
“Coaltion�? “Demnding�? Talk about your rampant, unedited dialogue. And here’s more:
Unless the government now orders a public judicial inquiry, every single Coalition MP is guilty of the crime perpetrated in the Australian people’s name on Cornelia Rau ...
Citizens have fought and died over hundreds of years for protection against State incarceration without charge or trial.
Do Govenrment MPs support the right of Australians not to be incarcerated by the State without charge and without recourse to the Courts? Bloody hell, citizens have died to get, then keep, that right for hundreds of years. We lost it and we didn’t even know we had until Cornelia Rau brought our loss into public view.
Enough from Margo. Let’s hear from Rau’s sister and brother-in-law, who wrote the following after Rau’s release (which Rau opposed; apparently she preferred the Baxter detention centre to her new lodgings at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s psychiatric wing):
Amanda Vanstone is right. Authorities are in a difficult position when someone refuses to identify themselves and even gives false aliases. Luckily, we still live in a country where we are not held down while information is beaten or drugged out of us.
No one is immune from mistakes. With hindsight, our greatest mistake was not registering her with the police until August. There were several reasons for this, one of which was that my parents had already reported her as missing several months before her stay in the Manly psychiatric unit, after which she was found within two days. We did not want to be alarmist this time. The police are overburdened with mental health cases, which they are often untrained to handle, and we thought Cornelia would contact us as she had in the past.
There are no simple answers, just as there is no simplistic question of blame or a scapegoat.
Blame and scapegoating; that’s all you’ll ever see over at Margo’s Berzerker Webdiary Psycho-Hutch. Just as well she’s not as influential as a common blogger.
NEWSPAPER ADMONISHES SLEEPY READERS
Andrew Bolt resists joining the Cult of Green:
Even during these latest warnings that the Great Barrier Reef would die in 20 years and polar bears soon after – wild warnings to coincide with the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol – I couldn’t find faith.
So I thanked The Age, Australia’s most Left-wing daily paper, for launching a crusade to convert sinners like me – pages and pages on global warming, starting on Saturday with a huge graphic: “10 Reasons to Start Worrying Now.” And a headline screaming: “WAKE UP. THIS IS SERIOUS.”
Thereafter follows an entertaining debunking of The Age’s frightmongering; read the whole thing. (Melanie Phillips has more on the global warming scam here.) You know, if The Age is so worried about global warming, what the hell is it doing converting tons and tons of trees into paper, rolling them through massive presses driven by coal-generated electricity, then distributing the end product all over the country in fossil-fuel eating earth-killers? The Age is systematically destroying the planet. I urge protesters to stop them. No profit for eco-rape!
NEWS BRIEFLETS
* Don’t miss Mark Steyn on Rodney Bingenheimer, the Mayor of Sunset Strip. Bingenwhomer, you ask? Here’s a primer from teenage baseball sensation Matt Welch.
* Phillippe assumes the insolence and braggadocio of a Rap person.
* Hugh Hewitt: “This week MSNBC’s ‘Connected Coast to Coast’ and CNN’s ‘Inside Politics’ began to monitor the blogs as part of their daily broadcasts. That is the most obvious proof that the news cycle has been permanently impacted by the independent journalists and commentators of the blogosphere. If the cable networks are finding it necessary to report on what is being said on the blogs, then we can only assume that newspapers are doing the same thing, at least the ones that want to survive.â€?
* Dare you look upon the MOST EVIL DOG IN THE WORLD?
* Jim Treacher defends Napoleon Dynamite, target of a negative review by Roger Ebert: “How many animals have you created, Ebert? Well, Napoleon created the liger. It’s probably not edible, though, so no wonder you don’t care.â€?
* Tim was a popular name in the sixties. All downhill since. (Via The Corner).
* Colby Cosh looks at Canada’s Great Hockey Outage.
* It is disgusting what they are doing to Bugs Bunny.
* John Quiggin’s cash for comments appeal continues. Go post some happy words.
* Investigate yourself, Liz Jackson!
Friday, February 18, 2005
LANCET STUDY FINALLY MENTIONED
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey gets it wrong, as usual:
On October 29 - just four days before polling in the US election - The Lancet published, on the internet, the result of a study carried out by a research team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in association with researchers at Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University. The study was based on a door-to-door survey in September of 8000 people in 33 randomly selected locations across Iraq and it concluded that a minimum 98,000 civilians had died in the violence, and its aftermath, since the US-led invasion 18 months earlier, in March 2003.
Here in John Howard’s Australia, as in official Washington, the study cut no ice whatever. Our newspapers have barely mentioned it.
He crazy. Meanwhile, reader Steve writes of Ramsey’s fellow plastic turkey conspiracist Phillip Adams:
Superb column by Adams in the Oz mag today. Not only does he build on the visionary content of Martin Luther King’s famous speech, but surpasses its oratorical elegance with his graceful and evocative writing.
King: “I have a dream ...”
Adams: “Then, bugger it, the alarm clock went off.”
Ho, ho! Former Perth blogger turned big-media sellout (and WAFL umpire) Gareth Parker was in town last week for a conference, after which we went for a drive around Sydney. He was impressed enough by the Harbour Bridge and other standard sights, but these were mere preludes to the grandest landmark of them all. “And here, next to this hotel,“ I said, driving slowly along a Paddington street, “is the home of ...�
“No!â€? Parker yelled. “Not the Dunny Lane Imperialist!”
NEW NEW NEW
One of this site’s most valued contributors, J.F. Beck, has finally launched a site of his own: behold RWDB, the blog!
Great name. In other new-blog news, T-shirts inspired by the International Petroleum Exchange Uprising will soon be available from Mr Bingley. Beautiful.