A little Ginger Meggs grafitti

Opened up the local rag to what's become the most important page since Chapman turned it into an ersatz Tele and there lurked the background grafitti within Ginger Meggs:

Why experiment on animals when there's so many politicians around?

Ah Ginge, when all else fails you remind me that everything has its funny side.

So you think you can run a council.....(5)

ABC TV Media Watch alerted us all to an amusing scenario last night.

It seems that National Party stalwart, Neil Marks, may have to face the possibility of an obviously unplanned loss of income if he is elected as a Lismore City councillor and mayor.

Neil Marks presents the breakfast show on Radio 2LM which is owned by Richmond River Broadcasters.

On this show he informed all and sundry of his registration as a candidate in the forthcoming local government elections and granted himself a bit of free air time to broadly outline his ticket.

Neil Marks: National Party is nothing to do with this. The people I am involved with in the, in the ticket have nothing to do with the National Party whatsoever. We are people who are just concerned, who want to see what we call sensible growth for the area... It will be pretty exciting I think and you know, I'll give it my best shot. — 2LM Breakfast, 13th August, 2008

Mr. Marks then came a cropper.

...should Mr Marks be elected to Council his future tenure at the station will be reviewed by 2LM management.— Email statement from Bill Caralis (Chairman, Richard River Broadcasters) to Media Watch, 1st September, 2008

Statement from Richmond River Broadcasters here.

One may remember that Neil Marks stood for National Party preselection in the seat of Page prior to last year's federal election campaign.

Here is Mr. Marks with his Nationals hat barely disguised when interviewing Joe Hockey during that campaign.
Uncle Joe liked it so much he posted it on his own website.

U.S. intelligence wants our cute cat pictures!

A thought from My Heart's in Accra which started this ramble:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

The Cute Cat Theory with notes on political activism and censorship found here.

Meanwhile according to CNet the U.S. intelligence community is not happy with the direction the Internet is taking.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

It seems that the mighty American security agencies would be bereft if they couldn't keep peeking at all those cute animal pictures (which are such an obvious front for urban terrorists and Taliban supporters) as they are being published on the Net.

Which begs the question of how subversive does the CIA or Homeland Security find the pic below?

Apologies to the dog's owner for making fun of such a sweet pic found at MSNBC News .

Smiling through the greenhouse gas.......

Someone at The Daily Telegraph obviously has a sense of humour.

Tim Blair (a renown climate change sceptic and purveyor of dubious 'coldening' facts) has a blog at this News Limited paper.

Yesterday his webpage featured the above advertisement.

* Click on graphic if Flashplayer freezes

Ch-ching! Rudd's grocery watch list for September

Well the first of the month slipped by without me remembering to click on to that oh so forgettable website, Rudders' Grocery Choice.

Breathless with anticipation, I logged on yesterdee arvo and found the same vacuous information as before - ie., a Basic Staples Basket along with other basket types from unspecified stores somewhere in North-East New South Wales.

Go directly to the national Woolworths site and you can find out the weekly specials in their stores nearest you.

Coles has a similar specials link, as well as Shop Online.

Even Franklins allows you to look up specials.

While Aldi lists its grocery selection.

All have more usable practical information than Grocery Choice, but make no mistake, none of this allows our regional mob any real purchasing choice.

A 100kms round trip to the nearest competitor to your local supermarket makes the whole thing laughable - the fuel costs involved in chasing these 'cheaper' groceries mean that there would be no actual savings.

So, Ch-ching!, once a month Rudders is going to offer us all a slap in the face because his website seemed like a good idea for that day's media sound bite a couple of months back.

In the lands of the seriously weird

• Rumour hits the blogosphere that Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, faked her last pregnancy to give 'birth' to her own grandson. Over 1,000 people comment on DailyKos post since Saturday.

• Obama for America camp contact the Huffington Post and try to make it a federal crime that the Republican camp didn't search the archives of Palin's hometown newspaper before announcing her as McCain running mate. At the same time, Obama campaign doesn't appear to think that sending a Democrat supporter up to Alaska to go through the same archives last weekend was just a little bit excessive.

• Obama and Biden flog a 5 inch "first edition" car magnet:
  

• The world is due to end in 8 days as it is eaten from the inside out according to boffin quoted in The Sun.


• Bloggers finally pointed out the visual and aural irony of the pairing of Obama and Biden. Here, there and everywhere. OBAMA-AND-BIDEN...SAY IT FAST..SOUNDS LIKE OSAMA BIN LADEN....MAYBE ITS JUST ME?

• Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that publicly threatening to suspend welfare payments made to a family, if one or more of their children is chronically truant, shows no punative intention.

• Advice on looking out for terrorists in the U.K. - if a neighbour can't tell you his exact travel plans he's in trouble:
  

• It has been reported that the Rev. fred Nile has been made national president for life of the Christian Democratic Party, which would make it the least democratic party since One Nation incorporated to keep out Chinese-Australian activists.

Coo-ee to the Big Easy mob

When Clarencegirl sends around those blog snapshots, it's easy to see that North Coast Voices has quite a few American readers.

So as Hurricane Gustav blows its way towards the people of New Orleans and the Gulf coast, those of us on Australian coastal floodplains and estuaries wish all 1.9 million residents at risk all the very best.

Map from BBC News

And we think that politics can get dirty in Australia...

From the Los Angeles Times on the weekend:

Casual Web surfers who click on Obama-Biden.org or Obama-Biden.com might assume they'd find information about the Democratic presidential ticket.They'd be wrong.
Both addresses divert people to a website that is harshly anti-Obama, the website of the American Issues Project.That's the newly formed nonprofit group that flooded cable television in the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania with ads decrying the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.It wasn't clear who is behind the trick. Christian Pinkston, spokesman for the American Issues Project, said his group had nothing to do with it.

Now American Issues Project may not have arranged this, but I do wonder about >bt: Brain-Terminal which carries this rather roughly made stationery in a pdf which purports to contain a legal letter on behalf of Barack Obama.

That letter is rather at odds with another on the American Issues Project website here.

The whole matter appears to be destined for the courts if The Wall Street Journal article is any indication:

The Obama campaign has run a response ad linking the charges to Sen. McCain and has mounted a campaign to combat the advertisement by encouraging supporters to make phone calls and write emails to TV stations airing the commercial, alleging it is both false and illegal. The campaign says its supporters have sent about 93,000 emails to the Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns many of the stations running the spot.
The Obama campaign's general counsel, Bob Bauer, has sent two letters to the Justice Department asking for an investigation of the group and the $3 million contribution by Mr. Simmons, the only funder who has been disclosed.

Australian GMO crop sites: Bayer joins Monsanto while DuPont gears up

First map: GMO Canola.
Second map: GMO Canola & Indian Mustard.
Third map: GMO Wheat.
Possible that CSIRO wheat research is indirectly funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

All maps found at the Australian Office of Gene Technology Regulator.
Sites depicted by yellow dot are post harvest. Red dots denote current trial plots.

DuPont has recently announced a partnership with Hexima to undertake trials of GMO Corn, Soya Bean and other crops in Australia.

Iemma & Costa: Here're your hats, what's your hurry...

So NSW Treasurer Michael Costa is threatening to quit within 10 weeks if he doesn't get his way over the partial sale of the state's electricity assets and other as yet unnamed measures.
And little Morrie Iemma is bleating about the fact that not undertaking complete power privatisation has wrecked the NSW credit rating.

Ignoring the fact that it would take more than the loss of a projected $10 billion in sale funds to bring down a credit rating which Standard & Poors had at AAA less than a year ago.
The fact of the matter is that these two political drongoes had continued on where Bob Carr left off and run the state's infrastructure into the ground before facing harsh realities.

And now Iemma has the hide to sool his nasty little Pomeranian, Health Minister Reba Meagher, onto the NSW North Coast and threaten to withhold future hospital infrastructure upgrades at Lismore Base Hospital because he didn't get his own way over electricity.

Well, the answer to that from many on the North Coast would be the same as the one from Maud up the street:

Sit on it and rotate, fellas!

Pic from Jupiter Images

So you think you can run a council.....(4)

Oh dear, the 2008 Clarence Valley local government election is shaping up to be wall-to-wall heartburn for North Coast Voices.

In a field of predominately first-time or previously unsuccessful candidates, Liza Bloomer of Grafton stands out as almost as bad as it gets with a 2 out of 10 on my ballot meter.

Not only did she burble out nothing but buzz words during the Yamba Chamber of Commerce Meet the Candidates night last week - now I discover two linked election campaign websites maintained by Ms. Bloomer which have the hide to not only contain very limited contact details, but also attempt to prohibit contact if we were to have our own telephone numbers (silent or otherwise) legitimately withheld.

Here is what Liza says:
Contact Liza via email: liza.bloomer@gmail.com or call her on: 0407 29 77 64 (withheld numbers will not be answered).

As Ms. Bloomer has seen fit to give out the mobile number attached to her business, here is the address published on her business website: 6 Queen St, Grafton, NSW, 2460, Australia.

Now if anyone has concerns about any printed election material derived from the two campaign websites and feel that this breaches the advertising rules (clauses 5 & 10 ) set out at by the NSW Electoral Commission, they will at least have one physical address to which they can refer.

It's all about political accountability, Elizabeth Anne.