The disease that is Anti-Americanism

The Arab world blames its lack of progress over the last century on the West and Africa blames it on its imperial predecessors. The norm is to blame those more powerful than themselves.

For the Europeans the only people they can blame for their decline into moral decadence are the Americans, as this CBN report on European Anti-Americanism shows

Part 1


Part 2

Australia's aboriginies expose the destruction of leftist post-modernism

Two days ago, Director of the Cape York Institute Noel Pearson spoke on the ABC's Lateline program with Leigh Sales about the issues facing remote Indigenous communities. The interview followed Prime Minister John Howard's decision to intervene most strongly in remote Aboriginal communities in order to deal with child abuse, assaults on women and a general societal deprivation in which many Aboriginal men spend their welfare payments on drugs and alcohol and neglect completely their families.

In a remarkable interview featuring the frankness for which he has become known, Pearson really laid the boot into those who were calling the policy 'racist' and 'paternalistic' but who have supported the catastrophic policies inflicted upon the Aboriginal people over the last 30 years in which they were given money to live on without having any requirement to behave responsibly and appropriately.

LEIGH SALES: There might be some out there who would have expected that the majority of Aboriginal leaders would say, "look, thank goodness, we've been calling for action on this for so long, now something's going to happen". Why have we seen this negative reaction?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, you would think so. You would think so. This is almost a form of madness. I can't understand it myself. But I suppose it is an explanation, it gives you some kind of explanation as to why we have not done anything effective to prevent this abuse hitherto. It does provide some kind of explanation as to why we have never done anything effective up to now. We haven't come up with the ideas to prevent the abuse. Did we - we're in fact saying, I hear people saying in the commentary, that this abuse has been known about for a long time. People say in defence of, in objection to what the Government is doing. people say, "oh, the Government should have known, we've known about this problem for 20 years." Geez, if we've known about it for that long, why is it not that we've come up with any kind of effective solution to the problem?

LEIGH SALES: So it's not just the Government's fault, it's the people's fault as well?

NOEL PEARSON: Absolutely. I mean, you know, the first and best defenders of an Aboriginal child has got to be Aboriginal people. You know, these are our children at stake here. You know, it's quite, it's quite to be expected that the first people who should have regard for our children are ourselves, and, you know, it's just an absolutely miserable show that we see people who have never come up with any solution to prevent this suffering in 20 years of knowledge about the problem, but the minute somebody suggests trying to do something decisive about it, you've got all of them finding every excuse under the sun not to do anything.

LEIGH SALES: We heard accusations today that rumours are being spread in Mutitjulu that the police and army are going to be coming in to take children away. Who would be spreading such disinformation, and why?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, you know, I think that - I mean, I've been taking the stick quite a bit to progressives in relation to Aboriginal policy. People on the - people who have always professed a regard for Aboriginal people, and you know, there's something mad going on from in the midst of many of our traditional supporters because they're putting quibbling about politics and putting all kinds of objections in the road. For example, the suggestion that this is about land rights. You know, I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse. This is what this is about. It's an absolute alibi to try and characterise this debate as being about land grabs and so on. Who wants a land grab in main street Hopevale, for goodness sake?

The problems facing Aborigines in, especially, remote communities have been a blight on Australia for more than 20 years. The usual crowd of do-gooders have spent that time criticising successive governments for their failure to address the issue effectively. When a government finally summons up the political will to take the tough action required then these same people, seemingly affronted by the fact that the solution doesn't involve simply throwing good money after bad, come out of the woodwork to denigrate it.

NOEL PEARSON:...There is within every community good people, and it's an absolutely shameful thing that those good people are misled by people whose children sleep safely at night. You know, that's the horrendous thing here. That the people who are nay saying any kind of intervention are people whose children, like my own, sleep safely at night. And I think that's a terrible indulgence.

When our children sleep safely at night, we seek to put road blocks in the way and we wish failure, we wish failure upon any decisive action that's going to deliver some relief of suffering to vulnerable children.

Those are powerful words. 'Good people are misled by people...' is exactly right but the situation is made worse by '...we seek to put roadblocks in the way and we wish failure...' Those who are opposed to this plan have no legitimate role to play in the repairing the damage done.

LEIGH SALES: With the Federal Government now seizing control, what will it take from here on to persuade the Prime Minister, whether John Howard or Kevin Rudd in the future, to devolve power to the Aboriginal people, or has the moment for self-determination now passed with this move?

NOEL PEARSON: Listen, self-determination - in the proper meaning of the world, if self-determination means that we should be put in artificial office, we should be given titles, we should be given travel allowances and all of the trappings of office, but we don't care about the suffering of the children and we don't do anything about the disintegration of social circumstances in our own communities, if that's the meaning of self-determination, then I don't want any part of it. But if self-determination is about taking real responsibility for your people's solutions and for your people's problems, if that's what self-determination means, if it means hard work and responsibility, and accountability, not just saying, "well listen, our children are miserable, they're malnutritioned and somebody else is to blame for that", that's not self-determination in my view. But real self-determination is about Indigenous people taking responsibility for the results, and I can tell you the results that are out there at the moment are very, very miserable and shameful. And, you know, it is a measure of our performance that - it's a measure of our performance in fulfilment of what we have called self-determination, that the results are so miserable.

Successive government departments focused on Aborigines - from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission - have been wracked by high levels of incompetence, corruption and self-interest that has seen billions of dollars poured into finding solutions to problems but that, in fact, simply made matter worse.

LEIGH SALES: Long term - when this immediate crisis is hopefully stabilised - do you think there's a role for another body, similar to ATSIC, perhaps on a better model, to be developed to help Aboriginal people take greater control over their own futures?

NOEL PEARSON: Absolutely. We've got the take charge. We've got to be given back responsibility. Might I say the collapse of responsibility that we see, the wasteland of responsibility in Indigenous Australia is the consequence of government and bureaucracies and welfare organisations, including NGOs, who have intervened in Aboriginal affairs and said, "listen, you don't have to take responsibility. You have a whole suite of rights, including the right to welfare, the right to drink, the right to party all night, the right to have the trappings of office without being accountable for any return on your role."

You know, it's been the intervention of government and bureaucracies in this way that has really crumbled what were strong and proud people. You know, when - in Aboriginal families that are functional, there's no greater love of children than Aboriginal people who nurture and look after their own children, and you witness that time and time again. But, you know, in recent decades, this very precious thing of the Aboriginal love for their own people has come under severe assault and has severely unravelled because responsibility has been taken away from us and we've abandoned it. We've been quite happy to abandon it, and ultimately the solution to our problems will require us to pick up the mantle of responsibility and take it up because nobody can save us as surely as we can save ourselves.

The reason that Pearson has attracted so much criticism by 'progressives' is that he is rejecting outright their platform that Aboriginal people cannot look after themselves and be masters of their own future.

NOEL PEARSON:...You know, I hear people bleat uphill and down about self-determination and in my view self-determination is about people taking responsibility for themselves, for their own families and for their communities and, you know, it's an absolutely shameful hour that has descended on us, absolutely shameful hour where even an emergency intervention to protect the safety of our children is hindered, is hindered by people who supposedly have good will for Aboriginal people and in fact, those people are willing, they are willing the protection and succour to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraq.

And having nailed the issue at every stage of the interview he ends up kicking yet another goal when he points out that it's the same schadenfreude crowd barracking for failure in Iraq who want to see the government's intervention fail in Aboriginal communities. It tells you something about the lack of moral fibre of Pearson's opponents that they are defined by their criticisms and not by their track record of success.

There is an aspect to the immiserisation of Australia's Aboriginal population over the last 30 years that has not been mentioned, for fairly obvious reasons. The plight that Aborigines find themselves in is exactly the result you'd expect of the leftist post-modern 'solutions' that have been implemented in that time.

There are no examples of any society benefiting from giving money to specific groups and not attaching any responsibility to the payments. There are no examples of any society benefiting from giving special access to education or employment to any specific groups. There are no examples of society benefiting from favouring minority groups over the majority.

None. Nil. Nada.

These ideas come from the immature minds of social sciences professors, left-wing do-gooders and those with the deliberate intention of undermining society such as union officials.

From Affirmative Action to Multiculturalism, no society has benefited from leftist post-modernism.

There's a simple explanation why they haven't - their ideas fail to take into account what motivates people. Not only that but throughout history the improvement in standards of living has been as a result of the success and failures of all manner of ideas. Those that are good are woven into the fabric of society while those that are bad are discarded. One stark feature of leftist thinking is denial - the denial of reality, the denial of the spectacular failure of socialism wherever it's been tried, the denial that people really are motivated by their own selfish interest and the denial that a free market is the best way for society to improve.

Make no mistake. What has happened to Australia's Aborigines is a microcosm of what awaits any nation that embraces, or has inflicted upon it, the misery of socialism.

Don't believe me? How is what's happened to Aborigines different to what Robert Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe in the same period? If the price of oil were to return to $20/barrel then what do you think would be the result for Venezuela?

The fact that Noel Pearson's statements, and the government's intervention, have been received so positively by the Australian public, as demonstrated by ninemsn's poll showing a 3:1 result in favour, may be a signal that the public is getting sick of leftist elites talking the talk, putting their hand in that taxpayers' pockets and delivering no positive result. Let's hope so.

Jews supply military equipment to Muslims

No. It's not what you think. Israel is not supplying arms to Fatah. At least not as far as I know.

Israel is, though, supplying an unmanned aerial vehicle to Turkey in order to help that country deal with PKK terrorists in its south.

From the Turkish Daily News:

The Turkish military has leased an Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mainly to combat increasing terror attacks in the country's southeast. The lease period is one year.The UAV, manufactured by Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) will be delivered to Ankara next week. It will be stationed in Batman and operated by an Israeli squad, defense officials in Ankara said. Turkish military personnel will only perform the sensor operation duty for the UAV.

Turkish military officials have gone for the lease option to meet their urgent operational requirements in the southeast. PKK attacks have killed nearly 50 Turkish troops this year."This is a non-standard aircraft and to operate it we would have to spend a lot of time for training," a military official said. "The Israelis will operate the aircraft to meet our urgent operational requirements in the southeast." The Turkish military has been operating one UAV in the southeast for the past 15 years. That one, delivered by U.S. General Atomics, fails to meet the increasing operational need in the face of the latest wave of PKK attacks against Turkish targets.

In 2005, IAI won a separate Turkish contract for the supply of three UAV systems and 10 aircraft in a $180 million deal. But the deliveries of these critical systems, originally scheduled for April 2007, are now facing delays for about one year.

How does it come about that Turkey would even consider involving the 'Little Satan' in its military affairs? Isn't Israel the main cause of instability in the Middle East? Aren't the Jews the enemies of all Muslims.

Once again, Turkey demonstrates that it's actually possible to be a Muslim country and be civilised. In doing so, they make a mockery of the thuggish regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

Undermining the West

When you watch these videos from 1984 of Soviet KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov you will understand how the Soviet Union worked hard to undermine the West through psychological means.

It's fascinating to compare today's Useful Idiots with those of a quarter century ago to find that there really is no difference. Morally confused, factually barren - the postmodern leftist Useful Idiot is impervious to reason and reality.

When will this ahistorical social phenomenon end? Probably never but the time will come when totalitarian ideologues, mainly from the Baby Boomer generation, that shape public opinion from their positions in the mass media or education institutions will retire from the system and then, maybe, there will be a period of greater balance. We're still around ten years away from this point.

Marxism and Useful Idiots



Demoralisation



Demoralisation continued



Mass Media



The Soviet System



Yoga and brainwashing



Fascinating stuff.

(h/t - Jack from Montreal)

Rudd backs himself into an Iraq War corner

Having backed himself into a corner on climate change, Labor leader Kevin Rudd has now done the same thing with the Iraq war by demanding the Prime Minister John Howard announce an exit date.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd has described Australia's involvement in the war in Iraq as the country's greatest error on national security in more than 35 years.

He called for Prime Minister John Howard to announce an exit strategy for Australian troops before this year's federal election.

"I think it's high time we had from the prime minister a clear-cut statement of his exit strategy for Iraq," Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.

"Are we going to go into the next election with him saying 'just trust me'.

"He did that last time and he said he wouldn't increase troop numbers, then he increased them by another 500 after the election."

Mr Howard on Sunday again declined to fix a timetable for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq but Mr Rudd said he should.

"I fear this on national security, this has been the greatest single misfire and miscalculation of Australia's national security interests since Vietnam," he said.

"Mr Howard always seems to say 'trust me, I'm safe hands'.

"If Iraq is a barometer of the future on national security, I get really concerned about the lack of balance if we go forward with Mr Howard if he wins the next election."

Rudd is either not as smart as he likes to think, has a view that Australians are not that smart and won't work out what he's saying is bollocks or is getting really bad advice.

How, exactly, was Vietnam a great threat to our national security interests?

We didn't expect the Viet Cong to follow us home. We didn't expect them to target Australian interests around the world.

Australia did understand that the threat of communism to peace in the region, which was quite correct, as the three million subsequent victims prove.

Rudd also fails to mention the war in Afghanistan, which preceded Iraq by about 18 months. Isn't this war also a threat to our national security interests? Isn't the goal to fight Al Qaeda wherever they are? Isn't that why we're now fighting in Iraq and the US has made strikes in Somalia?

The war may not be popular but one thing that Australians know and that is that it must be prosecuted until Al Qaeda is utterly destroyed in an meaningful sense.

It would be nice if we could get that done by Christmas but if not then we must continue the fight.

Sunday night Aussie rock

From Wikipedia: Rose Tattoo is an Australian blues/hard rock band, led by Angry Anderson and slide guitarist Peter Wells. Among their best known songs are "We Can't Be Beaten", "Scarred for Life" and "Bad Boy for Love" (co-written by Ian Rilen.) Their first four albums were produced by Harry Vanda and George Young who also worked with AC/DC. Along with AC/DC and The Angels, Rose Tattoo helped establish an Australian rock sound in the 1970s that was copied around the world.

Lead singer Angry Anderson has spent many years helping charities for kids, which led to him being awarded a well deserved Order Of Australia.

Bad Boy For Love




We Can't Be Beaten

The fallacy that education drives economic success

One of the great fallacies of the last 30 years or so is that by educating the population economic success is guaranteed.

In Australia, Opposition leader Kevin Rudd has been pushing this wheelbarrow for all it's worth. In a recent speech he revisits the failed Labor Knowledge Nation policy:

Labor leader Kevin Rudd says his party has a "galvanising vision" to make Australia the best-educated nation in the world.

"For us education has always been the engine room of equity as well as being the engine room of the economy," he told the annual Mick Young Scholarship Trust race day at Royal Randwick in Sydney.

Here just a few nations over the last 50 years that had a strong focus on educating all of the population to a high standard.

Soviet Union
China
Cuba
North Korea

In spite of their undeniably high education levels, which saw the Soviet Union churn out heaps of talented engineers and scientists they were economic pygmies with an immiserised population. The fault, of course, was that socialism is not an economic system in which creativity and innovation have much room to flourish and so all of that good education is for nought.

Equally, in China the people's education generally went to waste until the economic shackles were released and its educated workforce was able to take advantage of the new opportunities presented to it. A very similar thing happened in India, which threw off the shackles of socialism, embraced free market economics and is now a global IT powerhouse.

Former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke were among several Labor figures who attended the event, which is a major fundraiser for the trust.

Mr Hawke made a speech that criticised Prime Minister John Howard's government for failing to invest in education, saying is was the sole reason for the current skills shortage.

He said it was not industrial relations, but a lack of education funding that was standing in the way of economic growth.

And he said Mr Rudd understood that.

Australia has had its share of post-War economic ups and downs with the nadir being during the turbulent Whitlam period and again during the Keating era with the 'recession we had to have'.

In each of those periods the education levels of Australians didn't change from the prosperous years preceding the decline through to the recovery afterwards.

Clearly, if Australia is going to maintain its position in the top bracket of nations in the medium to long term then its population needs to be highly educated to deal with an increasingly knowledge based world economy. If education were all that mattered then wouldn't North Korea's future be assured?

"Let's take the talent and enthusiasm and the initiative of this great Australian people and turbocharge it into the future by making sure we are the best educated country and economy and society in the world," Mr Rudd said.

I don't know anybody who would disagree with the sentiment he expresses. Given that the education unions and bureaucracies have turned Australia's education system into an international embarrassment is Kevin Rudd saying that he intends to solve the issue by breaking the power of the education establishment and introduce, for example, school vouchers?

An educated workforce is like an engine in a motor car. If you don't have a sound chassis to run it in then you're not going to get the results you seek. It seems that many on the left are yet to grasp this concept.

How are Radical Islamists different to the Ku Klu Klan?

Why do Radical Islamist terrorists - aka 'freedom fighters' and 'militants' - cover themselves up?



Aren't they proud to be fighting in the name of Allah?



Are they protecting the 'right' of their women to be completely covered up and not be allowed out in public alone or only with other women or their male relatives?



The fact is that you cover your face because you know what you're doing is wrong.

Covering their faces proves what cowards these people really are.

How are Radical Islamists different to the Ku Klux Klan?

• The Klan believes that God is on their side
  
• The Klan cover their faces and, in fact, wear fully body suits not unlike the niqabs above
• The Klan does not allow women to hold formal positions in the organisation
  
• The Klan hates Jews and is anti-Zionist
  
• The Klan hates homosexuals
  
• The Klan used terror tactics of burning and bombing churches and the homes of its opponents
• The Klan lynched innocent blacks (Islamists behead innocents)
  

So how, exactly, is Radical Islam different to the Ku Klux Klan?

Answer. It's not.

Radical Islam and the Ku Klux Klan inhabit the same moral vacuum.

If you can't recognise that Radical Islam and the Ku Klux Klan are kindred spirits and this is the type of evil we're fighting against then you really are a moral idiot.

Ron Paul supporters seem just a little bit loopy

Ron Paul is to the Republican candidates' field what Dennis Kucinich is to the Democrats - a parody of the stereotypical member.

His supporters have spent the last half a dozen months spamming online Republican opinion polls, as demonstrated clearly by Charles Johnson at LGF. When they're called on their activities they don't back down and actually increase their invective against those who disagree with them.

Even in this little backwater of the Internet my tongue in cheek post linking the states' debate about letting the insane vote to Ron Paul supporters resulted in a small swarm of activity.

Ron Paul is 50/1 with bookmakers to be next US President, which is about 950/1 under his true odds if you ask me, and is in a different polling galaxy in any of the major opinion polls yet his supporters insist that he is a serious candidate.

So what is it with the Ron Paul crowd?

Here are some of my theories.

1. Ron Paul only exists on the Internet. Has anyone ever seen Ron Paul? Was that him at the debates? Sure, you can watch him on YouTube but with the quality of computer generated graphics these days are we really sure it's a real person? The fact that he gets so many votes in Internet polls and none when conducted over the phone or face to face lends weight to this theory.
2. Ron Paul has tapped into a rich vein of hitherto unknown right wing/libertarian nutroots in the same way that John Edwards has the nutroots supporting him for the Democratic nomination.
   
3. Ron Paul supporters are actually from the normal left wing nutrootery and are pretending to be on Paul's side in order to destabilise the Republican field. The fact that they use such foul, hateful language so often, in the style of the nutroots, makes this a very distinct possibility.
4. John Edwards supporters, realising that the only way he can win is to be up against Ron Paul, are spamming the polls.
5. A large number of Internet connected Americans whose major concern is that the US return to the Gold Standard in order to prevent an economic meltdown have pinned their hopes on the Ron Paul campaign.

Who knows what's going on with Ron Paul supporters. It sure seems like they've let a few bees out of the old intellectual apiary, though.

Ron Paul is a non-serious candidate who has one of those 'strange uncle' personalities. Like Paul, his supporters also seem to be just a little bit loopy.

Jack Osbourne shagged Paris Hilton?

All I have to say to this story is that my turn can't be too far away...

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne's son Jack has lost 22 kilos, beaten his drug habit, and penned an autobiography — but that's nothing compared to his most astonishing conquest.

Jack's parents have revealed he and Paris Hilton had an intimate relationship.

"Paris was always hanging around our house," Ozzy told The Sun. "I’m not sure if she was a friend of Kelly or Amy — which one was it, Sharon?"

Sharon awkwardly replied: "She was Jack’s, erm, friend."

A thrilled Ozzy exclaimed: "He didn’t shag her, did he? Well done, my son!"

For once, the incarcerated heiress is probably happy she doesn't have to face the public.

...I hope my ticket is still in my wallet when she calls.

Ron Paul supporters will be terrified if this goes through

Ron Paul supporters are shuddering in fear at the thought they might be considered too insane to vote by legislators debating the issue in various states.

From the New York Times comes this article, which if it wasn't true you'd think was a parody from The Onion.

CRANSTON, R.I. — Behind the barbed wire and thick walls of the state mental hospital here are two patients who have not been allowed to live in the outside world for 20 years. Both were found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

Still, they have voted in elections nearly every two years, casting ballots by mail. Now, however, election officials are taking steps that could ban them from voting, arguing that state law denies the vote to people with such serious psychiatric impairments.

“I just think if you are declared insane you should not be allowed to vote, period,” said Joseph DeLorenzo, chairman of the Cranston Board of Canvassers. “Some people are taking these two clowns and calling them disabled persons. Is insanity a disability? I have an answer to that: no. You’re insane; you’re nuts.”

Rhode Island is among a growing number of states grappling with the question of who is too mentally impaired to vote.

As I said, Ron Paul supporters are shaking in their boots at losing the right to vote.

The issue is drawing attention for two major reasons: increasing efforts by the mentally ill and their advocates to secure voting rights, and mounting concern by psychiatrists and others who work with the elderly about the rights and risks of voting by people with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

This summer, recommendations for national standards will be released by a group of psychiatrists, lawyers and others led by the American Bar Association, suggesting that people be prevented from voting only if they cannot indicate, with or without help, “a specific desire to participate in the voting process.”

The fact that the American Bar Association, representative of the Democratic Party's largest contributor base - trial lawyers, is in favour of the move should immediately raise suspicion levels though there is an argument that given Democratic electoral rolls are filled with the names of dead people and that Democrats don't want people to have to show driver's licences when voting that they'd naturally see the insane as potentially their demographic.

Some state skirmishes involve efforts to ease restrictions, while others involve specific cases that compel officials to clarify old laws.

And with research showing that many people with dementia or other impairments vote or want to, there is also a desire to ensure they are not pressured to vote certain ways.

“There’s a lot of people out there who either don’t have adequate access to the ballot and should, or could be vulnerable to overreaching political types who want to take advantage of their votes to swing an election,” said Charles Sabatino, director of the commission on law and aging at the bar association.

In Missouri, advocates for the mentally ill have sued the state, trying to make it easier for people under guardianship for mental incapacity to vote.

Are things so good for the mentally ill now that all they have left is to lobby for their right to vote? It makes you wonder whether the advocates aren't suffering from some derangement themselves.

New Jersey may put on the November ballot an amendment to the state’s Constitution to replace language forbidding an “idiot or insane person” to vote. Advocates for the disabled want those words removed but worry that replacement language is so vague it could be unfairly restrictive. They want to allow people to vote if they can supply information for a voter registration form.

An 8 year old can supply that information. If someone has a car accident, is mentally retarded from birth or has dementia that results in them having a mental age of 8 then if they're allowed to vote why can't an 8 year old?

In Maine, a federal ruling a few years ago said a constitutional provision, twice affirmed by referendum, was discriminatory because it barred voting by people under guardianship for mental illness.

And you know that the discrimination lobby has run off the end of the reality runway when they want to take action on the grounds of discrimination against the mentally impaired. Last time I checked, the mentally impaired suffered from...mental impairment.

Recent local elections in Alabama, South Carolina and elsewhere have included accusations of ballots cast on behalf of nursing home residents who were incompetent to vote. In New Jersey, a nursing home employee who won a 2004 election to a county Democratic committee stepped down because her victory resulted from absentee ballots cast by the nursing home residents.

Seriously. The amount of vote rigging that the Democratic Party gets up to is amazing. It makes the result of the 2000 election all the more ironic, especially given Al Gore tried to have the postal votes from those serving in the armed forces not counted.

State laws vary and are inconsistently applied, said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group in Washington. Ms. Mathis said most states fell into one of two categories. About 18 bar voting by people under guardianship or who are “non compos mentis” (“not master of one’s own mind”), a determination that is often not clearly defined. Another 18 prevent voting if there is a specific determination that people lack voting competence.

Rhode Island’s case concerns William Sarmento, institutionalized after he claimed Satan had ordered him to kill two boys, ages 6 and 9, and John A. Sarro, charged in the throat-slashing of a man in a bar restroom, and later with killing another psychiatric patient.

You gotta watch that Satan. You never know which way he's going to vote.

If the men had been convicted and imprisoned, they would be unable to vote; only Maine and Vermont allow jailed felons to vote.

Last October, Edward Desautel, a restaurant manager running for the Rhode Island House of Representatives, learned that Mr. Sarro and Mr. Sarmento were on the voting rolls. He wrote the three-member Board of Canvassers, arguing “we don’t need the additional burden of worrying whether an incompetent child murderer’s vote might affect the outcome of a close School Committee or other local race.”

In an interview, Mr. Desautel said, “If you’re criminally insane, even if you’re found not guilty, you still shouldn’t be able to vote.”

Mr. DeLorenzo said he was “ready to remove them from the voting list,” but because the House election had been so close, the American Civil Liberties Union intervened, saying more notice was required for a hearing. (Mr. Desautel lost by 1,700 votes.)

In March, the canvassers notified Mr. Sarro and Mr. Sarmento that their voting rights were being reviewed, and a hearing is expected soon. The canvassers cite a state constitutional provision that a person “lawfully adjudicated to be non compos mentis” cannot vote.

Better not give that 'compos mentis' test to Ron Paul supporters...

Kate Sherlock and Kate Bowden, lawyers from the Rhode Island Disability Law Center, representing the hospitalized men, say “non compos mentis” is different from “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

The latter “means they were not found to form the specific intent required for the crime,” Ms. Sherlock said. “It does not address an individual’s capacity to vote in any way.”

Mr. DeLorenzo cited semiannual doctors’ evaluations saying the men should remain hospitalized. Ms. Bowden said the evaluations considered “dangerousness, not capacity to vote.”

Dr. Barry Wall, director of the forensic service at the mental hospital, said the hospital encouraged voting when possible. “We think of it as part of their treatment, to try to move them closer to society,” Dr. Wall said.

Through lawyers, Mr. Sarro, 52, said, “I’ve been voting a long time now, and it’s important to me.” Mr. Sarmento, 40, said: “I read the paper just about every day. I’m aware of what is going on in the world. I care about voting.”

Well if it's so important then maybe they should have thought about that before committing their evil atrocities.

The Missouri lawsuit seeks to end what it calls a state voting ban for people under full guardianship because of mental illness. Missouri’s attorney general’s office says the law lets judges allow voting in individual cases. A court ruled for the state, but the case is being appealed.

David C., 26, of Fayette, Mo., who asked that his last name be withheld, said he had been prevented from voting because he was under guardianship, although he had distributed campaign fliers and lobbied a state senator about issues like Medicaid.

Sebastian Go of St. Peters, Mo., under guardianship because of bipolar disorder, Asperger’s syndrome and brain injury, registered to vote and researched races when he turned 18 last September, said his guardian and grandmother, Linda Clarke. But the day Mr. Go received his voting card he also got a letter saying he could not vote because he had been declared mentally incapacitated.

“He has to have someone manage his money for him and make his medical decisions,” Ms. Clarke said. “But Sebastian is able to make a political decision.”

This person is clearly a Democrat, as he has political opinions but doesn't worry about money.

Mr. Go said he considered voting “my duty as an American citizen,” adding “I have an opinion on the outside world, on who’s governor, who’s senator, who’s president. And that one vote could count.”

The 2001 ruling in Maine, allowing people to vote if they understood the nature and effect of voting and could make a choice, was considered a model. How to assess such qualifications, however, is controversial.

“To fail to have any standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about would degrade the voting process,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatry professor who was a leader of a study that asked Alzheimer’s patients to choose between hypothetical candidates and describe how elections work.

Some advocates for the mentally ill object to such questions, however, saying they exceed what most prospective voters are asked.

“The question asked of you when you go to vote is, Have you registered,” said Sally Hurme, a senior project manager for AARP, an association for older Americans. “Why should your next-door neighbor be given a greater barrier to voting than you just because they have a medical diagnosis?”

So far, in Maine “basically now there is no restriction,” said Melissa Packard, the state’s director of elections. “We don’t require local registrars to determine if they think the person understands the voting process.”

If these people don't understand the voting process then they're not going to understand what's going on at election time and simply not vote at all, regardless of their legal right to do so. The fact that there are advocates to allow them to vote demonstrates that Ron Paul supporters and at least one side of politics realise that they can affect the outcome of elections by taking bus loads of mentally ill people to the polling stations. You already see the support from the mentally ill in online polls for Ron Paul. Who's to say that won't translate come election time?

Jimmy Carter's Terrorist Legacy

Michael D Evans is a New York Times best-selling author. His newest book is The Final Move Beyond Iraq (www.beyondiraq.com).

His article in the Jerusalem Post provides a stark reminder of the major role Jimmy Carter played in the rise of Islamic terrorism. That he could do so much damage in just four years proves that he was, without doubt, the worst President in United States' history.

We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.

Truth has been optional since at least the days of the Vietnam War for the 'Left in America'.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Now that is what's called an Inconvenient Truth. I bet they don't teach this reality in any Middle Eastern Studies courses at university.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint." Carter's Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure." Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."

Carter viewed himself as some sort of 'religious holy man', as well, and thinks that he should also be 'hailed as a saint' given he won a Nobel Peace Prize (ironically, for continuing the misery of Palestinians). When you think you're doing things in the name of religion you can excuse all sorts of misdeeds. When you think that Khomeini was a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty" then you can see why Carter trusted Arafat and the Russians.

The shah was terrified of Carter. He told his personal confidant, "Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?"

Khomeini may have been evil but he clearly wasn't stupid.

Let's look at the results of Carter's misguided liberal policies: the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Carter's response was to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics); the birth of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization; the Iran-Iraq War, which cost the lives of millions dead and wounded; and yes, the present war on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When Carter entered the political fray in 1976, America was still riding the liberal wave of anti-Vietnam War emotion. Carter asked for an in-depth report on Iran even before he assumed the reins of government and was persuaded that the shah was not fit to rule Iran. 1976 was a banner year for pacifism: Carter was elected president, Bill Clinton became attorney-general of Arkansas, and Albert Gore won a place in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

In his anti-war pacifism, Carter never got it that Khomeini, a cleric exiled to Najaf in Iraq from 1965-1978, was preparing Iran for revolution. Proclaiming "the West killed God and wants us to bury him," Khomeini's weapon of choice was not the sword but the media. Using tape cassettes smuggled by Iranian pilgrims returning from the holy city of Najaf, he fueled disdain for what he called gharbzadegi ("the plague of Western culture").

Carter pressured the shah to make what he termed human rights concessions by releasing political prisoners and relaxing press censorship. Khomeini could never have succeeded without Carter. The Islamic Revolution would have been stillborn.

It's a big call but undoubtedly true. If Khomeini is the Father of the Islamic Revolution then Carter is its Uncle. The proof that Carter has never understood Islam is demonstrated by his continuing support of thugs and dictators in the Middle East and his execrable, racist tome Peace Not Apartheid.

Gen. Robert Huyser, Carter's military liaison to Iran, once told me in tears: "The president could have publicly condemned Khomeini and even kidnapped him and then bartered for an exchange with the [American Embassy] hostages, but the president was indignant. 'One cannot do that to a holy man,' he said."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has donned the mantle of Ayatollah Khomeini, taken up bin Laden's call, and is fostering an Islamic apocalyptic revolution in Iraq with the intent of taking over the Middle East and the world.

We'd noticed. That the institutional Left takes the three monkeys approach to this fact has made the world a much more dangerous place for the common folk.

Jimmy Carter became the poster boy for the ideological revolution of the 1960s in the West, hell bent on killing the soul of America. The bottom line: Carter believed then and still does now is that evil really does not exist; people are basically good; America should embrace the perpetrators and castigate the victims.

That's the Left's standard position and is a triumph for the Frankfurt School of thought.

In the '60S it was mass rebellion after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When humanity confronts eternity, the response is always rebellion or repentance. The same ideologues who fought to destroy the soul of America with the "God is dead" movement in the 1960s are now running the arts, the universities, the media, the State Department, Congress, and Senate, determined more then ever to kill the soul of America while the East attempts to kill the body. Carter's world view defines the core ideology of the Democratic Party.

Which explains why the loopy Left at DailyKos, Huffington Post et al venerate the guy.

What is going on in Iraq is no mystery to those of us who have had our fingers on the pulse of both Iran and Iraq for decades. The Iran-Iraq war was a war of ideologies. Saddam Hussein saw himself as an Arab leader who would defeat the non-Arab Persians. Khomeini saw it as an opportunity to export his Islamic Revolution across the borders to the Shi'ites in Iraq and then beyond to the Arab countries.

Throughout the war both leaders did everything possible to incite the inhabitants of each country to rebel - precisely what Iran is doing in Iraq today. Khomeini encouraged the Shi'ites across the border to remove Saddam from power and establish an Islamic republic like in Iran.

Carter's belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy - and nothing but diplomacy - now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Carter is wrong.

There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.

I don't actually know of any times that evil should not be openly confronted and defeated.

Khomeini had the help of the PLO in Iran. They supplied weapons and terrorists to murder Iranians and incite mobs in the streets. No wonder Yasser Arafat was hailed as a friend of Khomeini after he seized control of Iran and was given the Israeli Embassy in Teheran with the PLO flag flying overhead.

The Carter administration scrambled to assure the new regime that the United States would maintain diplomatic ties with Iran. But on April 1, 1979 the greatest April Fools' joke of all time was played, as Khomeini proclaimed it the first day of the government of God.

In February 1979 Khomeini had boarded an Air France flight to return to Teheran with the blessing of Jimmy Carter. The moment he arrived, he proclaimed: "I will kick his teeth in" - referring to then prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar, who was left in power with a US pledge of support. He was assassinated in Paris by Iranian agents in 1991.

Well done, Jimmy Carter, and the dunderheads in his administration! Bravo! The lives of the ordinary Iranian have been on a downward spiral ever since. The irony is that Carter was appalled at the Shah's human rights record yet still ignores the fact that Khomeini killed more people in his first year than in the entire reign of the Shah.

I sat in the home of Gen. Huyser, who told me the shah feared he would lose the country if he implemented Carter's polices. Carter had no desire to see the shah remain in power. He really believed that a cleric - whose Islamist fanaticism he did not understand in the least - would be better for human rights and Iran.

He could have changed history by condemning Khomeini and getting the support of our allies to keep him out of Iran.

One thing that Carter can certainly lay claim to is changing history. Unfortunately, his ineptitude and lack of moral clarity led to millions of people living much worse lives than they otherwise could have.

Father of climate science calls global warming 'hooey'

From The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin comes this article about the man acknowledged as the Father of Climate Science, Reid Bryson, who calls global warming 'a bunch of hooey'.

The Capital Times describes itself as "Your Progressive News Source" so you know that it has a significantly leftist bent to it. They just have to finish this article by finding someone that disagrees with Bryson.

Apparently, the fact that so many prominent scientists disagree with the anthropogenic origins of global warming doesn't at all mean there's anything other than a consensus on the science.

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week.

"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.

The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.

Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.

"It's like there is an elephant charging in and you worry about the fact that there is a fly sitting on its head. It's just a total misplacement of emphasis," he said. "It really isn't science because there's no really good scientific evidence."

Just because almost all of the scientific community believes in man-made global warming proves absolutely nothing, Bryson said. "Consensus doesn't prove anything, in science or anywhere else, except in democracy, maybe."

Bryson, 87, was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute for Environmental Studies, now known as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired in 1985, but has gone into the office almost every day since. He does it without pay.

"I have now worked for zero dollars since I retired, long enough that I have paid back the people of Wisconsin every cent they paid me to give me a wonderful, wonderful career. So we are even now. And I feel good about that," said Bryson.

So, if global warming isn't such a burning issue, why are thousands of scientists so concerned about it?

"Why are so many thousands not concerned about it?" Bryson shot back.

"There is a lot of money to be made in this," he added. "If you want to be an eminent scientist you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"

Speaking out against global warming is like being a heretic, Bryson noted.

And it's not something that he does regularly.

"I can't waste my time on that, I have too many other things to do," he said.

But if somebody asks him for his opinion on global warming, he'll give it. "And I think I know about as much about it as anybody does."

Up against his students' students: Reporters will often call the meteorology building seeking the opinion of a scientist and some beginning graduate student will pick up the phone and say he or she is a meteorologist, Bryson said. "And that goes in the paper as 'scientists say.'"

The word of this young graduate student then trumps the views of someone like Bryson, who has been working in the field for more than 50 years, he said. "It is sort of a smear."

Bryson said he recently wrote something on the subject and two graduate students told him he was wrong, citing research done by one of their professors. That professor, Bryson noted, is probably the student of one of his students.

"Well, that professor happened to be wrong," he said.

"There is very little truth to what is being said and an awful lot of religion. It's almost a religion. Where you have to believe in anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming or else you are nuts."

While Bryson doesn't think that global warming is man-made, he said there is some evidence of an effect from mankind, but not an effect of carbon dioxide.

For example, in Wisconsin in the last 100 years the biggest heating has been around Madison, Milwaukee and in the Southeast, where the cities are. There was a slight change in the Green Bay area, he said. The rest of the state shows no warming at all.

"The growth of cities makes it hotter, but that was true back in the 1930s, too," Bryson said. "Big cities were hotter than the surrounding countryside because you concentrate the traffic and you concentrate the home heating. And you modify the surface, you pave a lot of it."

Bryson didn't see Al Gore's movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Don't make me throw up," he said. "It is not science. It is not true."

Not so fast, say scientists: Galen McKinley, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison disagrees with Bryson, whom she notes is a respected researcher and professor with a long history at the university.

"There are innumerable studies that show that the shoe fits for global warming, I guess you could say, and the human causation for it," McKinley said.

"We understand very well the basic process of the greenhouse effect, which is that we know that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the heat trapped by the atmosphere. You put one dollar more in the bank and you have one dollar more there tomorrow. It's a very clear feedback," she said.

Carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing over the industrial period, about 200 years, and can be observed very clearly through about 100 monitoring stations worldwide, McKinley said.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing consistently with the amount that humans are putting into the atmosphere, she said.

"We know humans are putting it there, we understand the basic mechanism and we know that the temperatures are warming. Many, many, many studies illustrate that both at the global scale and at the regional scale."

She cited the work of John Magnuson, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of limnology who is internationally known for his lake studies. Magnuson records the number of days of ice on the lakes in southern Wisconsin, including Mendota and Monona.

His research shows that over the course of the last 150 years, the average has gone from about four months of ice cover to more like 2.5 months, McKinley said.

Bryson would say that it is due to coming out of an Ice Age, McKinley notes, "but the rate of change that we are seeing on the planet is inconsistent with changes in the past that have been due to an Ice Age."

The huge changes in temperature that scientists are seeing are happening much faster than have ever been observed in the past due to the change from an Ice Age phase to a non-Ice Age phase, she said.

"We know that humans are putting CO2 into the atmosphere at an incredibly fast rate, much, much faster than any natural process has done it in the last at least 400,000 years and probably more like millions of years."

The rate of change is consistent with human activity, she said. That is why so many major scientific societies are concerned about global warming, she added.

The release in February of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put the likelihood that human beings are the cause of global warming at 90 percent. It noted that temperatures will continue to climb for decades, that heat waves and floods will become more frequent and that the last time the Arctic and the Antarctic were warmer than they are today for an extended period -- before the start of the last Ice Age -- global sea levels were at least thirteen feet higher.

IPCC, founded in 1988, is the joint venture of the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization. Every four or five years, it conducts an exhaustive survey of the available data and issues a multivolume assessment of the state of the climate. IPCC's reports are vetted by thousands of scientists and the organization's 190-plus participating governments.

"My views are very similar to those expressed by IPCC," said Steve Vavrus, an associate scientist at the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research.

"Reid Bryson maintains his long-standing opinions on anthropogenic climate change, and he's certainly entitled to them," Vavrus said.

"The scientific process is never 100 percent sure and it could be proven wrong," McKinley added.

"But I would say that the chances of that based on all of the best information at this current time are incredibly slim. And even though that possibility is out there, it would be irresponsible of us as a society not to act based on the best scientific information we have at the moment, which is that humans are causing the warming of the planet," she said.

"If you saw smoke in your house, it would be irresponsible not to get your family out, right?"

The work that Anthony Watts is doing to uncover the truth about the temperature devices that churned out the data being used to determine that mankind is 100% responsible for global warming is yet another nail in the coffin of an industry that has sucked tens of billions of dollars out of the public purse.

The non-miracle of socialised health care

Anyone that lives in a country with socialised health care knows that they had better not get sick if they're not prepared to wait a long time for treatment. Milton Friedman got it absolutely right when he said that whenever the government funds something the cost goes up. Unfortunately, in the case of health care the cost not only goes up but the lack of competition drives service levels massively down, as this short (7 mins) video shows.

Religion of Peace: "Don't call him Sir!"

I was wondering how to respond to the ridiculous ranting from the Islamic world about Salman Rushdie's recent knighthood and the media's pathetic, cowering non-response when I wandered over to Dr Sanity to get my daily dose.

I can't do better than what Dr Sanity has written on the issue.

How dare these uncivilized, barbaric psychopaths threaten us because Salman Rushdie was given a knighthood?

Aren't you sick of this sort of outrage? How has it come to be that these Muslim leaders/thugs can say things like this:

"This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

... and have them reported in Western newspapers without one word of outrage by our so-called Western "intellectuals" and our pathetically appeasing political leaders?

How is it possible that so many people have de-evolved and become so obsessed with the worship of their evil, blood-thirsty god. Like the dark and violent cult of Kali in Hinduism, the Allah-cult demands death, death, death and more death. Those who believe in this horrible creation lose all sense of human decency, tolerance, and reason. How is it humanly possible that the members of this death cult could actually believe they are on the moral high ground as they scream out their ridiculous demands and threats?

These people are human evolutionary throwbacks; a mindless simulation of homo sapiens--though I doubt that even cavemen were as psychotic and delusional since they were at least concerned with survival. These morons are only concerned with death and are willing to kill themselves in order to kill you.

I don't know about you, but I don't even want to share the same species classification with them. The title of Homo sapiens is completely inappropriate.

Homo homicidum fits these sick cultists much better.

How do cultural relativists respond to this barbarous position? Silence? Apparently so.

Phillip Adams pines for the leftist fjords

Phillip Adams is one of the pompous brigade of self-righteous lefties (is there any other kind?) bemoaning the fact that right wing columnists seem to be doing well lately.

In his piece in The Australian he demonstrates that he's let a few parrots out of the old intellectual aviary.

APART from their physical beauty, profound spirituality and extraordinary grace, what do these people have in common: Piers Akerman, Janet Albrechtsen, Frank Devine, Andrew Bolt, Michael Duffy, Paddy McGuinness, Miranda Devine, Christopher Pearson, Tim Blair and Gerard Henderson?

Do they share the same blood group? Religion? Astrological sign? No, they don't. And I doubt they went to the same school, although it's remotely possible they came from the same laboratory, products of a catastrophic experiment in genetic engineering.

Dear reader, the link (and they're all linked, like charms on a bracelet) is their political proclivities as pundits. These towering intellects recall that famous tower in Pisa in that they have a perilous tilt and all in the same direction.

Were they boats, they'd list alarmingly to starboard. If aircraft, their lack of left wings would have them plummeting to earth. Indeed, some people of my political proclivities think many of them have crashed and burned. Repeatedly.

Alert. Alert. They are conservatives!

We - that is, lefties such as Robert Manne, David Marr and me - have been greatly outnumbered by the right-minded for many a year. Not just an endangered species, our population in the press is so small as to constitute extinction.

Here is where Adams really demonstrates his delusion. The media in Australia is majority leftist, as are its political commentators. In listing nearly all of the media conservatives above he then restricts himself to just three lefties, one of which is the eternally loopy David Marr. He misses umpteen other lefties including such luminaries as Terry Lane. How does Marr get a gig when the equally intellectually barren Lane misses out? Like the USA and UK, Australia's media is dominated by leftists though, The Age aside, we're lucky not to be inflicted with the heavily left wing claptrap of the New York Times and The Guardian.

We are dead parrots, pining for the Fabian fjords, giving the illusion of life because we are nailed to our perches. Yet not so long ago the vice was versa. After years of being nurtured by The Australian, young Adams was suddenly personally sacked by Rupert Murdoch. (For the details, read John Menadue's autobiography Things You Learn Along the Way. At the time, Menadue was Murdoch's second-in-command and he insists my marching orders represented one of only two direct proprietorial interventions in his era.) The same day I was proffered political asylum at Melbourne's The Age, known both affectionately and pejoratively as the Spencer Street Soviet. The term could equally be applied to the paper's list to port, and to a degree the place was congenial to lefties.

'Congenial to lefties' is an understatement. If you're not part of the soviet and have a desire to send all conservatives to the gulags then you don't get a job there these days.

The editor at the time was the legendary Graham Perkin, regarded as the antipodean counterpart to The Washington Post's Ben Bradlee, and I write of a time when newspapers were undergoing profound change. As I said to Perkin, "We're changing from newspaper to viewspaper." Unable to compete with the instantaneousness of electronic news, the papers, particularly the broadsheets, were opening their pages to more interpretation and opinion. While investigative journalism was enjoying its heyday, punditry was on the march. The era of the columnist had arrived.

However, you couldn't help but notice something odd. Almost all my columnist and cartoonist colleagues at The Age shared the same views. Thus the paper couldn't have been more congenial. And the readers seemed just as agreeable. Circulation was booming.

But our food for thought lacked condiments, the salt and pepper of dissent. Perkin and I often discussed it. "What The Age needs," I said, "is a conservative columnist." Though himself conservative on some social issues, the editor gave a little shudder.

What sort of writer did I have in mind? "A local William F. Buckley Jr," I suggested, a reference to the doyen of US conservatives, a veteran 25 years ago, still soldiering on. I always enjoyed being annoyed by Buckley's stuff. The old duffer wrote right-wing rot with remarkable elegance.

It's completely ironic that it's the 'right-wing rot' of the free market that has allowed Adams to express his socialist views. If vice were versa, to use his phrase, then the media would be one, big BBC-like leftist nirvana.

(Is it too late, incidentally, to recommend the aristocratic Buckley as a role model to Akerman or Henderson? The antithesis of the neo-cons, he has been known to make a lot of sense. Indeed, he and I often agree, as when he declared the war on drugs totally and utterly lost. This was more than 15 years ago and Buckley called for a complete rethink on the policies of prohibition and criminalisation. Lately he hasn't hesitated to read George W. Bush the riot act.)

Perkin considered the proposition and agreed, but only "if you can find a conservative with a sense of humour". As this proved impossible, the matter lapsed.

I recall these halcyon days, this golden era of progressive-leftie domination of punditry, with mixed feelings, among them affection and despair. But I also hope my present crop of colleagues, those conservative choristers, will turn down the triumphalism. Perhaps they'll realise that things change. Tides, winds, minds, eras.

Let's go back to Pisa. In that glorious domed building beside the tilting tower, young Galileo conducted his classic experiments with pendulums, on the timing of their swings. As you know, Piers, Andrew, Miranda, Janet and co, political pendulums swing as well. And perhaps, just perhaps, a big swing is under way now that the era of Bush and John Howard appears to be over. If so, the free-market forces, which apply as much to ideas and opinions as anything else, will lead to a time when editors will want, once again, to recruit a few lefties.

But only, one hopes, if they've got a sense of humour.

The once reasonable The Age is now a hopeless, completely biased, left wing paper and its circulation is plummeting. In the US the same is happening to the NYT, the LA Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and a myriad of other single-view papers.

The proprietors blame the decline on the rise of new media but that doesn't explain the rise in circulation of the Wall Street Journal and other more conservative or libertarian publications.

The fact is that the public is bored of reading the same old biased blather from non-serious people like Adams and Marr. Global warming is a greater threat than Islamic terrorism? The public knows this is rubbish. Readers are lost. Australia is a racist society for not supporting cultural relativism? People know the difference between good values and bad. More readers are lost. The list of agenda-driven topics that are out of touch with the views of the man in the street at places like The Age and ABC simply turn people away.

And where do they go? To places where there's a fair balance such as The Australian, which explains why conservative punditry is on the rise.

Conservatives such as Akerman, Blair and Henderson base their arguments on reality and do a much better job at providing fair and balanced views than do Adams and his clique who resort to preaching leftist topics du jour in complete absence of any understanding, or desire to understand, the other side let alone even discuss the catastrophic human and environmental impact socialism has had on the world over the last hundred or so years.

Australia's ABC demonstrates how far out of touch it is with community attitudes and reality in general

Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC, last night demonstrated exactly how far out of touch it is with community attitudes in its Media Watch program.

Presented by the remarkably over rated Monica Attard (how did she win those Walkley Awards and OAM?), Media Watch is a program that is meant to take a fair and balanced view to exposing media transgressions from the previous week. Of course, the ABC is like the BBC and PBS, all of whom don't actually know where the political centre is so 'fair and balanced' has a definite left wing tilt to it, as exampled by its rush to defend anything that is at odds with the socialist institution of political correctness. In its defence it has taken aim at the ABC itself when it has made a glaring mistake.

Media Watch started in 1989 with the acerbic and entertaining Stuart Littlemore (a Sydney QC) that gave the program a strong following in his 7-8 years as presenter. After his departure, Richard Ackland and Paul Barry did acceptable jobs hosting the show before the ABC really hit rock bottom by putting socialist hack David Marr and then perennially bitchy Liz Jackson (what is that woman's problem?) out front. Under Marr and Jackson the show lost any remaining lustre and became an irrelevance for most people. Monica Attard took over last year and has failed to provide the spark required to propel the show back to anything resembling mandatory viewing, as it was in days of yore.

Last night was the first time I'd caught any of the program for a while (and only because shows on other stations were behind schedule) and I was struck by the bias shown, especially in regards to the segment on readers' comments posted on online, media run blogs.

Specifically, Media Watch took aim at its long time enemy, The Daily Telegraph, whose policy of letting nearly anything be posted on its blogs was used to demonstrate that it supports racism and bigotry. On the way through, Attard also had a swipe at popular Australian blogger Tim Blair (disclosure: I am a member of that site and have posted heaps of comments).

In order to make their point, Media Watch used stories about a pub wanting to ban Arab and Aboriginal patrons because they made too much trouble, Anthony Mundine's assertion that the Australian Rugby League is racist and Muslim cabbies not picking up passengers with guide dogs.

The fact that most people agree that pubs should be able to ban troublemakers on the grounds of ethnicity (after all, the Peel Hotel in Melbourne recently won the right to ban straights due to the fact that they caused too much trouble for their gay patrons) and that even the ninemsn online poll was 2:1 against Anthony Mundine's position that the Australian Rugby League is racist until some poll stuffing went on to even up the numbers demonstrate how out of touch with the ordinary folk the ABC has become, which is ironic as it's the ordinary bloke that has to pay for the place.

Let's have a look at the Tim Blair segment, sourced from the online transcript:

Story:

It's not just newspaper and online editors who're prepared to tolerate cyber-racism in the name of free speech.

There are the bloggers.

Tim Blair, who edits The Daily Telegraph's opinion pages, also runs a blog.

He allowed this vicious discussion about Muslim taxi drivers supposedly knocking back passengers with guide dogs.

Highlighted responses:











The ABC is being deliberately dishonest in its introduction here by using the word 'supposedly'. There is no supposedly about it, as has been widely reported. Muslim taxi drivers don't pick up passengers with guide dogs (I seem to remember one of the current affairs shows doing a story that demonstrated the fact), driving off when they see the dog or telling passengers they can't get in.

The situation follows on from Muslim taxi drivers at Minnesota airport after they repeatedly (hundreds of times per month) refused fares because passengers were carrying alcohol, a position that led to authorities forcing them to do so.

Furthermore, the ABC's assertion that this is a 'vicious discussion' proves they're away with the political correctness fairies. If they really wanted to report on blogs' vicious discussions then they'd wander over to some of the left wing variety and have a look at any posts about Israel, or John Howard.

But that's not the ABC's agenda.

El Cid's (an American) original point is correct. If they won't do the job then get rid of them. Society can't function if people impose their views on others. If Muslim cabbies won't pick up people with guide dogs or alcohol then what's next? Catholic cabbies won't take you to an abortion clinic? Carlton supporting cabbies won't pick up anyone wearing a Collingwood jumper? Devout Christian postal workers won't deliver Playboy? Catholic pharmacists won't dispense the pill or condoms?

If the ABC had spent any time at Tim Blair's blog then they would know that it's made up predominately of fair-minded people with strong pluralistic attitudes. That this is the worst Media Watch could find (given how old the story is) on Blair's blog supports this fact. The posts about compost above are what is generally referred to as a joke and the line about dressing up dogs as goats or donkeys is no different to making jokes about New Zealanders and sheep (though nowhere near as funny).

What the ABC doesn't understand is that a group of people from outside of Australia's cultural norm are unilaterally imposing their totalitarian, backwards ideology on the rest of us.

Fair minded Australians reject this fact. We are a fair minded society and we know when we're being taken for a ride at which point we call a spade a bloody shovel and fight back. Such was the case with illegal boat people and it's no different for Muslim cabbies.

The ABC clearly wants to stifle any debate about problems caused by Australia's now failing multicultural policy by defining those that have an opinion, let alone actually do anything about it, as racist.

By choosing this particular subject and taking aim at its political enemies the ABC provides moral support to wrongdoers and those with totalitarian agendas, and demonstrates how out of touch with the common folk they really are.

Update:

It seems that Media Watch itself is prone to letting racist comments through (thanks Dan Lewis). Here's one, ironically, commenting on the Media Watch segment from last night.

The only understanding I can make is that MediaWatch carries the torch for Globalism and maybe even Zionist groups as they are known to push Hate Speech laws so they can't be questioned themselves in crime. ABC is starting to show a disproportionate number of Jews in the places of power in the ABC.