Archives 26-31 July 2004
Saturday, 30 July 2004
Chicken Hawks Called To Account by Deegan, Vietnam Vets Former Adelaide Magistrate Brian Deegan has accused two senior Government ministers of avoiding military service in Vietnam, but then sending Australians to an "unjustified" war. He singled out Foreign Minister Downer and Defence Minister Robert Hill for not serving in Vietnam.
• Deegan claims Downer, Hill dodged Vietnam
"I am saying that people who so easily set about a war should really have experienced it themselves," Mr Deegan said. "Maybe they would think twice."
• Where were you during the war?
Mr [Zev] Ben-avi said politicians who avoided the call-up and went on to send Australians off to war were "hypocrites". "They turn into latter-day warriors with someone else's children and grandchildren," Mr Ben-avi said. "They are beating ploughshares into swords and rabbiting on about cut and running. To me it's just the sheer hypocrisy of it all."
• Hill, Beazley top list of MP draft avoiders |
Friday, 30 July 2004
Democrat Convention Security: Welcome to Osama's Insane Asylum A row of half empty coffee cups and water bottles line the route into the security tent, as people realize just what they're not allowed to bring in.
The sign lists everything that's banned ... from the usual - scissors and razors - to items like umbrellas.
That rule has caused great grief this week as the skies opened over Boston and hundreds of brollies were dumped by guards, who piled them next to X-ray machines never to be seen by their owners again.
The rules keep changing. On my third day, security confiscated two small bottles of make-up, in case I smashed them and used the glass to inflict injury. I cried foul and explained as a television reporter I needed that make-up, and the bottles were rescued from the rubbish bin.
I could hear other women trying to save their expensive perfumes, hairsprays, and nail polish from being destroyed.
The World Today: Correspondent gets caught up in tight security |
Andrew Bolt's Zero Tolerance for Truth versus Michael Moore's Zero Tolerance for Lies
by Bolt Watcher
30 July 2004
Fahrenheit 911 does not reference Moore's facts during the film. To be fair, audiences would become very bored if Moore stopped to reference every one of his facts. Instead Moore has referenced his material on Michael Moore.com. Most of Moore's material comes from mainstream newspapers and official documents.
Bolt rarely references his columns and routinely uses un-named or dubious sources. In Fahrenheit Zero, Bolt asks listeners to go to Dave Kopel's Home Page for an in depth and referenced critique of Fahrenheit 911. Kopel is a researcher at the pro-gun Independence Institute. Kopel, like Moore and Bolt, is one of those researchers who only looks for what he wants to find. Kopel's facts on 9/11 come from the American Enterprise Institute, The GOP-founded Committee for Honest Politics, the Cato Institute, and a laughable collection of bloggers and unknown contributors. More... |
More on Little Johnny's FTA handover of sovereignty The overwhelming vote in the US Congress for the FTA was a vote for protection and extension of US interests, not free trade. The arguments in favour of the agreement advanced by the Australian Government are as dodgy as the so-called intelligence the public was fed to justify the Iraq invasion.
Ken Davidson: From superpower to dinosaur: America's destiny |
Thursday, 29 July 2004
Lest We Forget: The Contretemps of President Twit President Bush is recovering from a near fatal fall off his mountain bike that came close to killing Bill O'Reilly, the host of the "O'Reilly Factor" broadcast on FOX TV News.
Witnesses to the event say President Bush lost control of his bike when Bill O'Reilly poked his head out of the President's ass to get some air. Dan Davidson said the president made a "heroic" attempt to keep control of his bike, but the force of O'Reilly's head exiting the President's anal cavity proved to much for even a trained jet fighter pilot to handle.
• Bush Falls Off Bike, Bill O'Reilly Suffers Facial Abrasions
• Now, Bush falls off his bike
George W Bush has fallen off a Segway - a new stand-on scooter designed to make motorised travel user-friendly.
• Bush fails the Segway test
US President George W Bush said he felt "great" on Monday, despite having fainted and fallen from a couch after choking on a pretzel over the weekend.
• Bush makes light of pretzel scare
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Intelligence: Can Umeruhcans Handle It? You can bet that Bush supporters will not take kindly to Teresa Heinz Kerry. She knows a thing or twenty while their boy, Georgie, doesn't know anything, just like them.
You can hear them seething with resentment. Conservatives and other dumb shits feel stupid in the presence of nonconforming intelligence. You can't blame them. If you can't see beyond the point or the line, Madame Heinz must be just as terrifying as Osama bin Laden.
But that's Umeruhca for you.
LINKS:
• Heinz means business, in 5 tongues
• A defiant Teresa Heinz Kerry woos the women |
James Hardie: Eternal Burns The Flame Of Contemptuous Greed "Building products company James Hardie Industries treated the plight of asbestos victims with disdain and did all it could to avoid paying more compensation, a submission to a special commission of inquiry into the company alleged yesterday."
Year after decade after century after millennium, companies like James Hardie have wilfully exploited their workers. It's as if the denial of the rights of the employee were written into the contract, and this disconnect between employer and employee is a root cause for this planet's woes.
We don't need an "ism" to teach us this salient fact. It is the business of business to secure profit at the expense of those who toil for it. It is also the business of business to secure profit by engaging in continuous war, again at the expense of those who sacrifice their lives.
Religion and business have joined forces throughout history to inform governments to exhort their citizens to die in the name of patrie. Nationalism is good for business.
And still the sacrificial lambs toil for inadequate wages or die meaninglessly while the Boss Tweed elite snort cocaine on their yachts.
Whether as soldiers or employees, the wretched of earth will continue to eat lead or breath asbestos. Unions have helped, but apathy remains the greatest enemy of humanity.
As Red Harrison quoted in his article on journalists in war ("Addicted to armed conflict," The Weekend Australian, 3-4 June 2004): "The war correspondent Christopher Morris finds no hope for humanity and can no longer bear to watch the news: 'There is no hope for the Palestinians, no hope for Africa ... there will always be war. It is human nature.'"
There is no hope for the workers of the world, either.
LINKS:
• Asbestos firm 'lied to save money'
• Asbestos giant acted 'illegally'
• James Hardie shares drop sharply
• James Hardie denies all |
Bush Reads While America Burns You wouldn't read about it ... George Bush continued reading My Pet Goat with an elementary class in Florida for almost seven minutes after he had been told America was under attack.
The job of an intelligence service, as we have been told a lot recently, is to speak truth unto power. At times, this is also the job of the documentary film maker, but Michael Moore inverts the role - he's an intelligence service for the rest of us. That is why he is a hero for the young.
Journalists are supposed to do this too, but I think one reason that his films are so successful is that journalists are failing in that task. The public no longer sees journalists as independent of the powerful, if they ever did.
Let me put it another way: when journalism becomes so degraded that Fox News can get away with the slogan "We report, you decide", then Michael Moore is what you get in opposition.
• Paul Byrnes: Fahrenheit 9/11 Review |
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
Joseph Goebbels and Andrew Bolt:
Championing the state's betrayal of its citizens |
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Andrew Bolt, chief spokes-Nazi for Australia's right wing commentariat, has excelled in his ability to reverse reality. Unable to comprehend the truth were it to hit him in the face, he did a total hatchet job on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Not just partial, total. To Bolt, Moore is simply an anti-American liar.
Where Tim Blair pens propaganda for the Howard Government as a sort of quasi jocular Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, Andrew Bolt outdoes Joseph Goebbels himself. Were Jesus, Mohammed or Gautama Buddha to knock on Bolt's door, they would be greeted with a truncheon to the guts and a taxpayer funded Black Maria to the nearest American owned concentration camp.
Last night the SBS showed the second part of William Karel's French documentary, The World According to Bush, in which any remaining credibility for the ventriloquist's dummy in the oval office is finally laid to rest. Information on the Internet for years is compiled here with comment by various historians, former members of the CIA and journalists. One example is Granpappy Bush's close ties with Adolph Hitler and the total absence of this little tidbit from the mainstream press. The documentary shows extensively that the Bush Dynasty is part of a Multinational Mafia whose world control will be complete if they can just steal the upcoming election.
However, if you watched this documentary from the Bolt-cum-Goebbels point of view, it's all a pack of lying bullshit. Defying reality as if he were a full on schizophrenic, Bolt is a paid up member of the Charles Atlas survival of the fittest, might is right club, in which the brain is little more than a piece of meat to be yoinked from a butcher's display window. The folks that actually use these mysterious units to help this sad sack species to evolve are seen as whining little sissies to be kicked and shat upon. The world Bolt lives in is a world that predates the epiphanic ape in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a world of corporate psychopaths doing battle for the usual short-term gain beloved of the Right.
Andrew Bolt: SBS: TV for liars |
Brian Deegan v Wind-up Kewpie Doll From Hell The best news since Gloria Arroyo (not a Y chromosome) saved the life of a truck driver instead of Dubya's arse, and Spanish voters gave the boot to John Howard's clone, Jose Maria Aznar, is Brian Deegan's decision to run against Alexander Downer in the seat of Mayo, SA.
• Bali victim's father to run against Downer |
Mark Latham: Will This Fullblown Tory Bury Labor For All Time?
by Harold Hark
27 July 2004Forgive my keening despair, but July 2004 is beginning to feel the same as July 2001. Instead of Kim Beazley's humiliating "Principles Overboard" failure of nerve during the Tampa tragedy, Mark Latham is about to deliver term four to John Howard by giving in on the FTA, which could very well be this election's equivalent to the Tampa for Labor voters. More... |
Monday, 26 July 2004
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