One of these people is the PM of Australia

Joke of the Day:

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway. Nothing is moving.

Suddenly a man knocks on the window. The driver rolls down his window and asks, “What’s going on?”

“Terrorists have kidnapped Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan,Anna Bligh and Julia Gillard. They’re asking for a $310 million ransom.  Otherwise they’re going to douse them with petrol and set them on fire. We’re going from car to car, taking up a collection.”

The driver asks, “How much is everyone giving, on average?”

“About a litre.”

Andrew Bolt:

THREE million Australians have changed their mind about Kevin Rudd in just two years.

The question is: why did they and so many journalists ever rate such a bungling impostor in the first place?

Column – Fall of a weightless man

Here we dodge the “bigot” slur by talking only about resources and global warming, and not about anything to do with culture, values and institutions:

AUSTRALIANS are adopting a “keep them out” attitude toward immigration and population growth not seen since Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party inflamed debate in the late 1990s.

Experts say the outlook is the response to growing concern about key population issues and protection of scarce resources – such as water, housing and electricity – rather than the result of growing racism.

AustraliaScan research asked 2000 people if they believed population growth and immigration levels should be expanded or restricted.

It found that for the first time in more than a decade, attitudes were on par with those when Ms Hanson was at the height of her popularity.

Social analyst David Chalke said the driving force behind this was not “old fashioned xenophobia”, but fears about a lack of resources.

“There’s a massive contradiction between what politicians have told us for the past five years – that we need to use less water, reduce our carbon footprint … we’re now saying, ‘how can we do that if we’re adding people?’

And so the Left and Right join hands.

“Bigot”: the last shut-up of the cultural vandal

Melanie Phillips finds Americans are fascinated that British PM Gordon Brown callied Gillian Duffy a “bigot” for questioning out-of-control immigration:

In the US, feelings are still inflamed over the way in which Obama waded into the uproar over Arizona’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration and slammed it as unfair and un-American and likely to usher in a police state. Or something like that. People feel doubly outraged – not just that immigration is out of control, but that those who applaud the attempt to enforce the law and police the boundaries of the nation should be vilified – at least by implication – by the President, no less, for doing so.

It seems to me that the issue of immigration is as toxic as it is because it stands proxy fir a profound disdain for the very idea of the nation as a discrete entity bound by a shared culture and set of values and contained within policeable borders. The absurdly utopian and anti-democratic view that, since the nation is the cause of nationalism, and nationalism is the cause of horrible things like bigotry and wars, if the nation gives way to supra-national entities (like continents) there would be no more wars or bigotry and the Brotherhood of Man would finally materialise. Thus the ‘transnational progressivism’ now so in vogue in high-minded circles.

That’s why those who object to mass immigration are doubly demonised, not just as racists but as xenophobes standing in the way of the Brotherhood of Man. And that’s why Mrs Gillian Duffy of Rochdale lit a beacon whose flame has been noticed all the way across the pond. More>>

KRudd’s  ”Super Profits” Tax, straight from Karl Marx, ‘Das Kapital’

Reader Chris:

I’ve been offline for a while but has anyone else noticed the timing of the Governments resource profit tax with the DVD release of Avatar?

It all clicks into place when you read the speech of the man who proposed this “super profits tax”.