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Special thanks to Steve Hunter for permission to reproduce his cartoons exclusively on Andy’s RANT!
Steve Hunter is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and lives in Buderim Queensland.
Andy is on holidays in a country that will probably never ever introduce a Carbon Dioxide Tax. He returns in early October 2012.
I need a break and have decided to leave Gillardstan for a more peaceful setting.
I’m tipping the Canterbury Bulldogs to win the NRL and the Sydney Swans to with the AFL premierships.
I’ll be back ranting in early October.
God Bless and take care.
Our PM admitted, that she failed to open a file for the work she did in setting up the AWU Workplace Reform Association for her then boyfriend Bruce Wilson and his pal Ralph Blewitt.
Julia Gillard also admitted that the AWU Workplace Reform Association would be used as a union slush fund despite its stated articles of association to the contrary.
There are three consequences for failing to open a client file.
1) The AWU did not know about it, despite the AWU being Slater & Gordon's client.
2) Because of her failure to open a client file, the Slater & Gordon partnership did not know of its existence for three years.
3) Wilson and Blewitt, it would seem, received free legal work.
If these matters do not call into question Gillard's integrity, what will?
Now some people are claiming Gillard’s press conference performance yesterday as brilliant, strong and that the “scandal” surrounding her is now finished. It isn’t finished for the reasons I have mentioned above. In fact, the Australian’s Hedley Thomas makes the point I’ve raised.
The "slush fund" that Gillard had created three years earlier was a legal entity, an incorporated body, for the purpose of raising and holding funds for the re-election of union officials. It was designed to assist the personal advancement in the union of Gillard's then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson, who was then the leader of the West Australian branch of the Australian Workers Union. Wilson needed "slush", or money, to fund a forthcoming election that he expected to contest.
Gillard's boyfriend, and his friend, union sidekick and bagman Ralph Blewitt, needed a name for this legal entity. They could have called it the AWU re-election fund. Or the AWU vote-for-a-new-leader fund.
Instead, it was called the AWU Workplace Reform Association, a title completely at odds with its actual purpose. The written objects, or rules, for the association do not disclose the true purpose is to fund elections for union officials.
On the contrary, the rules stress purposes including the promotion of safer workplaces and skills training. In the formal application for the association, Gillard advised that it was formed for the purpose of "development of changes to work to achieve safe workplaces".
In this way, its purported purpose had nothing to do with its actual purpose - as a "slush fund" for the re-election of Gillard's then boyfriend. This is Gillard's Achilles heel.
Yesterday, Gillard said she had not signed the document to set up the association and had only provided legal advice. Further, she said if the fund supported "trade union officials who would stand on a platform about reform and improvements in workplaces", then it had fulfilled its stated role. But this later explanation, at her hour-long media conference, remains difficult to reconcile with the facts.
But in true slippery Gillard fashion, she played the sexism, misogyny, nut-job blogger (me and plenty of others), American Tea Party politics and Murdoch hate media cards. More bullshit than a cow paddock.
And why does Gillard use her gender as an issue? You never hear a male politician claiming his gender is an issue. So much for equality.
I can recall former UK PM Margaret Thatcher being called every sick name you can think of and never did she or her supporters ever suggest it was because she was a woman.
Only a piss weak leader relies on such excuses.
American Thinker’s Stella Paul suggests Obama will cling to power “by any means necessary.”
(Emphasis added by me)
Let's go there: if Obama thinks he's losing, will he allow safe and fair elections on November 6? And if he does lose, will he peacefully turn over power to Mitt Romney on January 20, 2013? Or will he cling to power "by any means necessary," as a highly placed insider alleges?
Now, I'm truly sorry to raise such disgusting, un-American, crazy-sounding questions, but, alas, they're not crazy, and I've got a disquieting amount of evidence. The Democrats have already accused Romney of murdering a woman with cancer, financial felonies, and not filing taxes for ten years -- the last charge delivered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor, on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
By Democrat standards, I've got enough proof to put away Obama, et al. for life without parole.
Whatever chicanery Obama and his investors may be contemplating, it will probably unfold against some gargantuan crisis, manufactured or otherwise. So cast your mind back to September 11, 2001, the day of the New York mayoral primary.
In the chaos after the attacks, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was term-limited from running, pleaded that his leadership was essential and that he should be granted an extra three months in office after his term ran out on January 1. Giuliani's unprecedented power-grab was rightfully scorned by his eventual successor, Michael Bloomberg. So what did Bloomberg do when he ran into term limits? He deployed his multi-billion-dollar fortune to manipulate the law and buy himself a quasi-legal third term, claiming that only he had the expertise to handle the 2008 financial crisis.
My point? Politicians a great deal more conventional than Obama have loathed giving up power, and they have used crises and unethical machinations to try to keep it.
Now, let's look at just some of the disturbing evidence that indicates that Obama and his investors are plotting something big:
Super-High-Level Trial Balloons
USA Today reported that on September 27, 2011, Governor Beverly Perdue, Democrat of North Carolina, told a Rotary Club audience, "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover[.] ... You want people who don't worry about the next election." When outrage greeted her suggestion, she retreated to the standard defense: she was just joking. What a kidder!
Meanwhile, that same month, Peter Orszag, Obama's former director of the Office of Management and Budget, published an article in The New Republic titled "Too Much of A Good Thing: Why We Need Less Democracy." In it, he posited that the country was too polarized; hence, "radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic."
Please note that these suggestions to suspend elections and radically reduce democratic control did not come from basement-dwelling bloggers. They came from the governor of the very state in which the Democrats are holding their national convention and from one of Obama's most prominent Cabinet members. Their close timing suggests that these ideas were circulating at the highest levels of the Democrat power elite.
Make sure you continue to read Stella’s damning post.
This is nuts. Can someone please tell the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Muppet that the Military is not a Tupperware party?
Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, wants the ADF to fundamentally rethink the way it selects its leaders. She wants to temper the warrior culture that traditionally sees the most senior officers in army, navy and airforce come from backgrounds in combat or command. And she wants to open up more ''gateways'' to the top Defence jobs from other areas within the military such as logistics, human services and health, where the 14 per cent of the ADF who are female tend to be clustered.
''Senior leadership positions in all three services are traditionally appointed from categories in which women have been precluded, or in which they are under-represented,'' she says.
So the ADF will have to create ''pathways [for leadership] through non-war fighting categories''. To this end, she has raised the idea of positive discrimination for women in a few key areas, such as entry to the senior defence colleges, which is one well-trodden path for promotion to the most senior roles.
The Australian Military’s role is to kill those who threaten our freedom.
War is hell and politically correct Muppet’s like Ms. Broderick should stick to civilian issues and bud out of the Military.
So it’s cool for Labor to dig for “political dirt” on the opposition but it’s not so cool when the PM’s past is scrutinised.
The latest from the Australian’s Hedley Thomas just gets worse for our now highly scrutinised PM.
Julia Gillard wrote in a formal application to establish an entity for her then client and boyfriend, union boss Bruce Wilson, that it was being formed for the purpose of achieving safe workplaces.
But during an internal investigation three years later by the partners of her law firm, following serious allegations that the entity had been used by Mr Wilson to misappropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ms Gillard admitted it was a "slush fund" to raise cash for the re-election of union officials.
The discrepancy in the genuine purpose of the entity, the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association, at the time that it was established was not known to the West Australian government agency that had registered it in 1992.
Ms Gillard was questioned about it in a recorded and transcribed interview by the firm of Slater & Gordon, where she was a salaried partner, on September 11, 1995. She left her job soon after amid the partnership's "very serious view" of her conduct.
Special thanks to Stuart for the video. If you like, you can follow him on twitter @stuwd
The Burmese government says it is ending the longstanding practice of media censorship.
The announcement is one of the most dramatic moves yet towards allowing freedom of expression in the long-repressed nation.
Officials from the government's Press Scrutiny and Registration Department told reporters in Rangoon on Monday they no longer have to submit their work to state censors before publication.
All reporters employed in local print media were previously obligated to send their stories to censors who had the final say in whether or not they could be published.
President Thein Sein's reformist government has already dramatically eased media censorship, allowing local media outlets to print articles that would have been unthinkable during the era of absolute military rule that ended last year.
Meanwhile, Muppets like the Labor MP for Bendigo, Steve Gibbons, suggests media firms should face “commercially significant” fines for publishing blatant untruths or misleading news reports, or temporary suspensions of the right to publish or broadcast. I wonder if the recent Gillard AWU scandal has got anything to do with Gibbons demands?
Remember, Gillard’s print media inquiry has recommended a News Media Council be formed to set journalistic standards and handle complaints for all news and current affairs coverage in print, online, on radio and on television.
And before you know it, under Labor, we’ll have our very own Press Scrutiny and Registration Department.
You don’t often see this type of cover from Newsweek.
You can read Niall Ferguson’s op-ed here.
Obama and the Democrats are shit scared of Paul Ryan’s path to prosperity because they know its America’s only hope.
You can watch Paul Ryan explain his “Path to Prosperity” below. His videos are well worth watching.
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