Consequently, the matter has become a shitshow and is all but impossible to discuss frankly in the public arena. But I’m concerned that if we don’t try, we’ll leave a vacuum that rash people might feel the need to fill.
It’s undoubtedly been made worse by media outlets like The Herald Sun. Journalist Brianna Travers will not be collecting Walkleys for her article: ‘The Irish Times pub fires workers for spitting in neo-Nazi’s beer’. Her article begins with ‘A neo-Nazi has revealed what allegedly prompted an Irish pub’s bartender to spit in his beer’, making it sound like Brianna bravely gave voice to a neo-Nazi about what the extremist bartender did to him.
Globally, the earth is changing in violent, displacing fashion. Climate change will cause displacements in the order of tens of millions, if not more. Whole territories are vanishing, while other tracts of land are being exposed. Nature is not just being reordered but doing much of the reordering. What will humanity’s response be?
Can a nation survive as a democratic republic without an honest and trusted news ecosystem? Is it an actual fact that truthful and reliable news — combined with the kind of cultural trust people have in both government and each other as the result of a shared reality — are both historic and necessary preconditions for a democracy to work at all?
Trump puts a target on the FBI: Cincinnati gunman shows danger posed by an endless supply of dupes | Salon.com
The main reason that Donald Trump is forever turning Republican campaign events and conservative conferences into fascistic rallies featuring two-hour stemwinders is that he’s a champion narcissist with a vampiric need to feed off the adulation of blockheads. But a major secondary reason is what happened on Thursday, when a deranged Trump supporter named Ricky Shiffer fired a nail gun at the FBI offices in Cincinnati, Ohio, before getting killed in an hours-long standoff with the police.
As reporters covering right-wing extremism swiftly documented, before much of it was taken down, Shiffer was all wound up by Trump’s lies about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Monday, lies that have been amplified and validated by right-wing media outlets like Fox News and much of the GOP establishment.
“Kill the FBI on sight, and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people,” Shiffer apparently posted on Truth Social, a Trump-owned social media site, according to Andy Campbell of HuffPost.
But the most absurd feature of Trump’s excuse could be its ham-fisted attempt to relate to the everyday person working from home. “Everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time,” the statement via Solomon read. “American presidents are no different.” Add that to the even more unbelievable assertion that Donald Trump works at all—and you’ll be left wondering, once again, how did things get this stupid.
Plenty of us dirty fucking hippy bloggers railed for years about how not holding Bush and Cheney accountable for the laws they broke was going to come back to bite us all the next time a Republican became president. Yeah, we told you so.
But back in 2009, no one imagined this. How much worse could it be in 2024? We can’t even imagine. Which is why holding Trump accountable now is absolutely essential.
The former government froze the Medicare rebate for six years, ripping billions of dollars out of primary care and causing gap fees to skyrocket,” Butler said.
This week, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews pledged to make N95 masks free for Victorians to reduce COVID transmission, continuing his determination to save lives in the community.
In this article from 2020, John Wren examined how Andrews did his best to combat the virus amid scathing criticism from conservatives.
People of Indian ancestry in Australia number more than 780,000 – an increase of almost 165,000 since 2016. As migrant groups go, Indians have leapfrogged the Chinese and now sit second only to the British.Credit:Josh Robenstone
Australia is now the first English-speaking country in the world to be a “migrant majority” nation – where 50 per cent of the population were born overseas or have an immigrant parent. And the biggest story within those numbers? India.
Most powerfully, a changemaking mindset doesn’t just diagnose a problem – it opens a door to say that public institutions can change. If problems are public and shared, then they aren’t just your problem, they are “our” problem. Collective problems are not just something we need to privately grin and bear, they are things we can change. Our collective mental health might be fucked – but we can unfuck it if we turn our thinking on its head and change the institutions that keep triggering the problem.
Imagine Australian Conservatives think our Constitution is Sacred and Untouchable
In 1980, the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet replaced Chile’s constitution with a new charter employing the principles of famed American free-market economist Milton Friedman. Forty years later the dictatorship is gone, but the constitution — and a key provision called the National Water Code that privatized Chile’s vast natural water supply — is still in effect.
Following an uprising in 2019 that drew millions to protest across the country, and against the backdrop of a 15-year drought that has left over half of the country in an official water emergency, a popularly elected body has been tasked with rewriting the constitution from scratch.
With only a year to draw up the document, they must attempt to rectify the consequences of the lingering dictatorship policies and the devastating water code in their new draft.
However it’s no longer good enough when BP is the biggest controler of solar energy in the country.
“Personally, as the new Labor Government backed by the Greens and Teal Independents proceeds with the 43% climate target laws and invests heavily in renewables. I hold out hope that the new Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek who has just rejected a new mega coal mine proposal for Clive Palmer in North Qld that horrendous developments like the Toondah Harbour PDA will also be rejected as well. I for see a better horizon forward on environmental policy making.”
In response to recent reporting that former President Donald Trump was illegally in possession of classified material – including nuclear secrets – at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Fox News hosts and Trump himself lied that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had also kept millions of government documents in his possession. After Trump and his right-wing media allies promoted these lies, the National Archives and Records Administration released a statement refuting them.
His defence “ACCIDENT”. He didn’t pack the boxes or know he had them. Besides he doesn’t read. The best the FBI secretly planted the boxes an documents he’d “Declassified”.
The FBI recovered documents labeled “top secret” from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to court papers released after a federal judge unsealed the warrant that authorised the unprecedented search this week.
A property receipt unsealed by the court on Friday shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the former president’s estate during a search on Monday.
The property receipt is a document prepared by federal agents to specify what was taken during a search.
Search warrant reveals ‘top secret’ documents found at Trump’s home
Michael Pascoe: The federal Liberal Party doesn’t care about Australia
So the rabble that is the federal Opposition will remain aloof from the jobs and skills summit, declining the opportunity to contribute to policy formation – if they have anything to contribute – preferring to remain remote to whinge, playing to their rusted-on base instead of the nation’s benefit.
And thus the Dutton opposition perforce marks itself as unfit for consideration as alternative government. It doesn’t care about the country, about our future.
It lacks any sense of integrity. It’s only in it for the mates, for the vested interests, for the lust for power, for the keys to The Lodge.
And that is a bad thing for us all. We get better government when there is good opposition, challenging, improving.
The Dutton opposition has left the building. It has nothing to offer.
Because what he can’t admit is that inflation won’t fall back to the target range of 2 to 3 per cent until the nation’s businesses decide to moderate their price rises. And they’re not likely to do that until those rises reach the point where they’re driving away customers.
Tim Smith and Matthew Guy were once mates, buddies who believed they were smarter than everybody else, and were going to inherit the keys to the kingdom. We saw what Matthew Guy did after Smith got drunk and thought he was untouchable. Matthew Guy turned his back on him. Now Guy thinks he’s made of teflon too but having shot himself in the foot he has discovered the bullet really hurts. He isn’t the magician he believed himself to be. After more than a week his blunder hasn’t disappeared. He has tried every “agracadabra” to convince us it was just an illusion but the fact has remained in plain sight. So Guy like Trump, by hiding, is pleading the 5th Amendment but convincing us even more of his guilt. Having his staff speak for him has amplified it even they are in shambles. 3 have jumped ship an gone for “personal reasons”.
Everybody other than the Andrew’s government are now looking into fast shrinking Matt Guy who once thought he was a giant but never grew. Even the AEC are now investigating the circumstances and the crowd are shouting for blood. To do what Tim Smith did resign because what Matthew Guy has done wasn’t a drunken accident it was intentional. Maybe Tim Smith might be allowed to have a say?
In Wodonga on Friday, though, far away from the Melbourne press pack, he had no choice but to raise the issue himself. He announced that the Victorian Electoral Commission had requested copies of documents discussing a proposed payment to his chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, who was forced to resign after the plan leaked.
What this seems to indicate is back to the Rudd/Gillard future and that comprehensive Carbon Trading Scheme that Tony Abbott’s LNP set out to destroy by calling it a tax. The report echoes the fact that our Nation has lost 10 years of possible progress towards becoming a global leader rather than the number one laggard when tackling carbon emissions.
Climate Change Authority Media ReleaseReleased today, the Climate Change Authority’s Review of International Offsets finds the international carbon market is still evolving in response to the Paris Agreement and calls for publication of a National Carbon Market Strategy that makes the most of this opportunity for Australia to accelerate ambition on emissions reduction.The review finds that while carbon is priced and traded in Australia, the market is fragmented, inefficient and complicated.
Did Australia leap ahead and stop this process by ridding itself of the Morrison/ LNP? Or because we are generally regarded as being 20 years behind are we merely witnessing a delay in this forward movement? If the Dutton/ LNP continues it’s Abbottesque nope nope nope opposition it doesn’t bide well for our once two party bipartisan Democracy but rather indicates what might be seen as the continued Monkey Pod room push for a future coup. In a true Democracy a loss must be accepted as much as is a win. Is that what Dutton is doing?
Candidates who amplified false claims about Donald Trump winning in 2020 did very well in this month’s primaries. Their victories are one more step in the direction of authoritarianism.
The Justice Department is asking a federal court to unseal the warrant the FBI used to search the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday, acknowledging extraordinary public interest in the case about classified records.
The request is striking because such documents traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the Justice Department appeared to recognise that its silence since the search had created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks by Trump and his allies, and that the public was entitled to the FBI’s side about what prompted action at the former president’s home.
“The public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing,” said a motion filed in federal court in Florida.
Should the warrant be released — the request is now with the judge, and Trump can object — it could disclose unflattering information about the former president and about FBI scrutiny of his handling of sensitive government documents right as he prepares for another run for the White House. During his successful 2016 campaign, he pointed frequently to an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information.
Attorney General asks court to unseal warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate search – NZ Herald
Idiots abroad. An Australian who once shamed us and is still regarded as one of us- News Corp the Goebbellian Murdoch PR Corporation
Fox News personalities have repeatedly denounced Monday’s FBI execution of a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence by claiming that the agency should instead have subpoenaed the documents the former president illegally took from the White House, which the bureau was reportedly seeking. In their telling, Trump is a naif who may have accidentally taken some documents he should not have, but sending federal agents to seize the documents is a massive escalation which revealed that President Joe Biden’s administration is targeting a political opponent for partisan gain.
According to the Washington Post, former president Donald Trump is suspected of having kept classified nuclear secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort, provoking the dramatic FBI execution of a search warrant on Monday. So report the intrepid Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein, and Shane Harris.
Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis shows.
Tess Davis, director of the Antiquities Coalition, is blunt about the implications of this. “If I were a museum curator, I would check every Cambodian piece acquired after 1965 just to be safe; that’s how prolific [Latchford] was.” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one institution that has admitted to doing so, “reviewing the pieces that came [into its] collection via Latchford and his associates.”
While Australia watches the U.S. deal with its flawed democracy, it’s important to remember that we have a history of partisan chest-beating with violent consequences, writes Dr Alex Vickery-Howe.
As former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney Ken White noted in a lengthy Twitter thread following the raid, the “feds do not seek search warrants lightly.” As White explained, such warrants generally require “probable cause to believe that the specified location has the specified evidence of a specified federal crime.” This one, in particular, would have been combed over by multiple high-ranking authorities, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. Crucially, while we the public do not know the details of what is almost certainly one of the most careful and detailed warrants imaginable, Trump himself does, because the subject of the search is given the warrant.
Covid and the Flu are nothing compared to the Right-Wing Media fury backing Trump and their effort to take control of America.
The baseless claim that the FBI may have planted evidence while carrying out a court-approved search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday has surged through right-wing media, as the former president’s allies continue their effort to turn their audiences against the probe and shield Trump from accountability.
Meanwhile Putin is doing to the Ukraine what Trump wished he could have done to America.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern suggested that TrumpWorld is trotting out the claim because the FBI may have found damaging evidence at his home.”I have written hundreds of search warrants. Lawyers and people whose homes are being searched are routinely not present during the search,” he wrote. “That Trump is now talking about ‘planted’ evidence means he knows there is something damning they found.”
Republican Elise Stefanik to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have issued statements brimming with outrage and accusation. Last night, the RNC sent out a fundraising text: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL: UNPRECEDENTED move Biden’s FBI RAIDS Pres. Trump’s home. Time to take back Congress.
”Rubbish. There’s no evidence that the FBI search was motivated by anything other than concerns (and, under a court order, probable cause) that Trump made off with documents rightfully belonging to the United States. That’s a criminal offense. If anyone has been undermining the rule of law, it’s Trump. Recall that Trump himself appointed the current director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, after firing former director James Comey for investigating the ties of Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russia.
It has been almost two years since Kevin Rudd uploaded a video to his social media channels calling Rupert Murdoch an “arrogant cancer on our democracy” and invited Australians to sign his petition for a royal commission into media dive
rsity.It gathered half a million signatures, including that of former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and triggered a year-long Senate committee inquiry that concentrated its focus on the influence of Murdoch’s News Corp empire.
People like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, who write and comment outrageously based on payment for controversy, will eventually pass on as Gough Whitlam did. They will be quickly forgotten, but he will go down in the annals of Australian history as a decent, optimistic, passionate and sagacious Prime Minister who made an enormous contribution to Australian society. Something they could never aspire to do.(John Lord)
You can hear the Nope Nope Nope apporoach to opposition that began with Abbott will continue. If the ALP handed them government they’d be yelling Nope Nope Nope and only on Sky News of course.
Dutton to skip govt’s jobs summit ‘stunt’
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will skip the Albanese government’s jobs and skills summit, which has been branded a “stunt” and a “talkfest” by the Coalition.
The summit – a Labor election promise – will aim to address Australia’s economic challenges and will bring together about 100 representatives from the business, union, and community sectors.
Liberal Deputy Leader Sussan Ley said no one from the Coalition, including Mr Dutton who was invited by the government, will go.
“It’s just a stunt,” she told Sky News on Wednesday.
It probably won’t surprise you that the Productivity Commission is always writing reports about … productivity. Its latest is a glittering advertisement for the manifold benefits of capitalism which, we’re told, holds The Key to Prosperity.
The ESB has proposed that the so-called “capacity mechanism” be technology neutral, allowing plants powered by coal, gas or renewables to receive the payments. This has sparked concerns from some major power companies that incumbent fossil fuel generators would be propped up at the expense of investment in clean energy, or that consumers would pay higher bills than necessary.
If charges were laid Trump could take it all the way to “his chosen and private Supreme Court”. Al Capone it appears was easier to nail than this Don. But then he didn’t have Steve Bannon as his close advisor.
In less than 24 hours, the agency’s actions have galvanised his political opponents and supporters alike, fuelling rumours he could soon announce a run for president in 2024.
olddogthoughts 
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