Lebanese Ambulance

The amazing story of the bomb-defying ambulance & its gallant crew has been engaging the attention of the blogosphere for some time. Alexander Downer has been vilified for doubting its veracity. I'm with him. No Pasaran has a nice powerpoint. Can't work out how to post a direct link to the vid, so go here & look at posts for 14 October 2006 & go to the Whack a Mole header.

http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/

Update: the No Pasaran thing has disappeared, but Zombietime has a comprehensive analysis of the incident http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/.

Bye Bye Slobbo

Great news from The Hague - Slobodan Milosevic is dead. Nature has done what the farcical UN tribunal could not do in 5 years: delivered a measure of justice. And saved the world the expense of keeping him in jail. It's a great pity, however, that his fellow Serbs didn't have the chance to mete out retribution after his insane war-mongering regime, dedicated to a glorious Greater Serbia, collapsed. Now what we need is for Mladic & Karadzic to die in a horrible car crash, preferably together.

Frivol, Frivol, Frivol

Yes, yes. I know we're celebrating the first decade of the Reign of King John, but the most startling thing on the news (apart from the usual killing & maiming in Iraq & other very hot places) was Julia Gillard's new hair. Burnt orange with black blodges. So chic. So stylish. So, so... what was she thinking?

Czechs Support Press Freedom

In heartening news from Europe, where governments are apologising left, right & centre for publication of the controversial Mohammed cartoons in national newspapers, the Czechs are refusing to knuckle under to political correctness. Muslim leaders & the Iranian embassy have demanded apologies, & assurance the offence will not be repeated, but the Czech foreign affairs minister Cyril Svoboda has said nup. In a nice twist Svoboda means free man.

There are 10,000 muslims in the Czech Republic, out of a population of 10 million plus. For this tiny minority to want to change press freedoms is presumptuous in the extreme. It's like Tongans coming to Australia & demanding that all labour should be banned on the sabbath. After decades of brutal repression of freedom of expression & opinion under the soviets, it is not surprising the Czechs want to retain the freedoms they have paid for with blood, pain and hardship.

Read the story here: http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0216/news1.php.

Ollie Off The Trolley

It's rumoured Andrew Olexander plans to go the Liberal Party for deselecting him, on the basis that he was dumped because he is gay. What a crock. He was dumped for stupidity - getting behind the wheel when over the odds makes him a bloody idiot, & no party wants bloody idiots running for office. There are plenty of gay people in the Liberal Party, & not a lot of us give a fat rat's about their sexual orientation.

Open Thread

Too lazy to think of something banal & inane to say. Comments welcome.

Political Biographies

A little while ago in Crikey (which by the way is becoming more like Margo Kingston & less entertaining every day), there was a piece by Charles Richardson posing some reasons for biographies of Labor identities outnumbering Liberal ones. He deftly bypassed a couple of obvious explanations. By and large Libs tend not to be so keen to rat on their ex-colleagues, as Mark Latham so spectacularly and entertainingly has. They are also less likely to preside over debacles that require ongoing rewriting of history - the hagiographers keep churning out Whitlam and Keating myths and legends in the vain hope that they can obscure the awful truth. And Libs move on, recognising there is life after politics and that history will judge them (or most probably forget them if they aren't Prime Minister or didn't cock up big time).