Climate change isn’t really my issue, but this pathetically petty post by our friend Andrew Bolt just struck me as so absurd I couldn’t let it pass without comment. A conservative climate-skeptic who regularly contributes to Quadrant attends a Tim Flannery lecture and relates his unsurprisingly negative impressions. Andrew’s emphasis? The part he chooses to quote first? The skeptic’s objective opinion that “Flannery flops“:

Firstly, without being rude or discourteous, Professor Tim’s lecture would have to have been the worst presented, most head-bangingly-boring and uninformative address that this writer can remember.

Shock news: critical review received by ideological opponent! Hold the presses.

In tomorrow’s edition of the Andrew Bolt blog: the startling revelation that a conservative blogger thinks Kevin Rudd is “a dud”! Read more »

Here at Pure Poison we have always striven to provide a forum for meaningful discussion on the state of the Australian media, its personalities and the subjects that they cover. As a part of this we make a great deal of effort to interact with the commenters who come here and engage in the discussions, as we believe that the community who support the site bring varied and interesting perspectives. That being said, every blogger takes the time to look around the blogosphere to identify new ideas or trends that may improve their own site, and as such I’d like to share with you a new comment policy that I plan to trial.

There will be no changes to the way that comments are moderated, however when it comes to responding to them I’m planning to follow Piers Akerman’s excellent innovation from earlier today. Here’s an example of what I mean. Read more »

Aiming to follow up on his disastrous Q&A performance, Senator Steve Fielding elaborated on his views about asylum seeker policy this morning. At a doorstop interview he made an announcement about his “idea” for handling boat people. You can listen to the audio here (courtesy of 2UE’s Latika Bourke), but the essence of his reasoning seems to be:

• Boat people are jumping the queue;
• Each time we take a refugee who arrived by boat, we take one less person from overseas refugee camps;
• This is unfair to people at “the front of the queue” who have been waiting in camps for years; and
• We need to return the queue-jumpers to overseas camps and put them at “the back of the queue”.

There are all sorts of concerns one could raise with this, some of which were put to Fielding during the doorstop (e.g., cost, obligations under international law, etc.). Read more »

In this week’s open thread more than one of our commenters quite rightly gave Andrew Bolt a pat on the back for his immediate response to Tony Abbott’s bizarre admission on 60 minutes that he felt ‘threatened’ by homosexuals.

I must say that any man who feels personally threatened by homosexuals has a few issues of their own that need sorting out – not advertising on national television.

It was a refreshing statement from Bolt, not only because he took a stand against some of the ignorant nonsense that is spewed about the LGBT community, but because in doing so he was willing to take to task the leader of the opposition, who he normally seems to regard as a fellow traveller. Read more »

Classic:

Moreover, the Coalition and Labor are equal in the primary vote, with Labor leading by 53 per cent to 47 per cent after preferences. This equates with Kevin Rudd’s winning margin over John Howard in 2007.

Tony Abbott’s People Skills are demonstrated by the fact that he has raised his party to the level of popularity it enjoyed under John Howard – when they lost government and he lost his seat.

Extra classic:

It is customary for the gap between the parties to narrow close to an election.

Teh Narrowing!!1! [NB: This may be a registered trademark of Dennis Shanahan.]

Most classic of all: Read more »

It’s that time again. Enjoy your weekend, and use this thread to share anything you like.

Let’s all enjoy Sane Sunday, as the ABC has decided to invite three rational commentators onto Insiders:

Insiders Sunday ABC 1 @ 9am the panel The SMH’s Phil Coorey and the Financial Review’s Brian Toohey and Laura Tingle

Chris Uhlmann will be hosting and will interview Joe Hockey, and Talking Pictures has Jack the Insider.

Lateline’s (ABC1 at 10:40pm) Friday Night Fight Club is Julie Bishop vs Mark Arbib.

Have a good one.

Andrew Bolt is too humble to openly promote an article he wrote. Instead he highlights an article in the same magazine that he obviously agrees with:

John Styles examines the very curious notion that the ABC’s Lateline has of “balance”.

Pity that the article that he links to is all about Q&A.

Does Andrew know the difference between Lateline and Q&A? Does it matter? Oh and as well as the article that Andrew wrote, and the one that he agrees with, there’s a nice one that mentions him too. Off you go to the newsagent then, don’t let this issue sit there unloved.

It’s a convenient little loop: you relentlessly portray terrorists as muslims and vice versa, massively publicising and exaggerating the incidents when those two overlap, and ignoring or minimising the ones when they don’t – and then you suggest that the fact that your readers’ minds immediately jump to join the two proves that the link you’ve been training them to make is actually true.

Bolt:

When the deed sounds like the faith, the faith is a problem

You need no other information than the headline to guess the cause:

Thirteen terror suspects arrested

Your readers don’t, no. Congratulations, your work is complete. Read more »

Possum on the insulation scheme:

As the Senate committee into this demonstrated clearly (transcript available here soon),when this program was being developed by the Dept, they went out and collected a substantial array of information and policy advice to assist not only the Minister in the rollout of the program, but also to assist with the department’s own preparedness for implementing the policy. The department undertook internal research, they consulted widely with industry and other relevant government organisations like the ACCC and departments like DEEWR. They also engaged with third party specialists – one of which was Minter Ellison. Read more »

An interesting choice of words by Andrew Bolt yesterday [my emphasis added]:

And I’m not surprised by women turning on Rann, after his treatment of Michelle Chantelois, his former lover Read more »

Let’s kick the weekend off with our regular talk thread. Feel free to chat about anything that grabs your attention right here.

Sunday Morning will see the PM talking to Barrie on Insiders, while Lenore Taylor, Malcolm Farr and Gerard Henderson fight over who’s on the couch.

Update: Courtesy of your.sundaymorningtv.com

8.00am – 8.30am   Network Ten   Meet the Press

Alternate host Hugh Riminton is joined by News Limited’s Steve Lewis and The Age’s Misha Schubert, together they will interview:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, on a range of issues including the home insulation fiasco, and the white paper on fighting terrorism, and

Terrorism expert Professor Clive Williams from the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre

Could this be the most pointless and petty post ever published on a mainstream news site? A columnist/blogger who himself claims to study the science and make it accessible to the public derides the fact that someone else has produced an accessible, evidence-based summary of climate science. But the silliest part comes at the end where he tries to blame this on some horrible, biased bogeyman:

Oddly enough, iTunes offers no such help to the sceptic.

Here’s how it works, Andrew – iTunes is a repository for applications that run on Apple’s digital devices. Most of those applications are developed by third-party software developers – in this case, a Melbourne IT company demonstrated Aussie ingenuity to the world by developeing the Skeptical Science application. Read more »

It can be tough to keep your story straight when you’re a prolific polemicist. It’s best if you can stick to black and white – divide the world into two groups, a good one and a bad one, then hit the bad one with every attack you can muster and defend the good one. Introduce some grey and your point can get confused, or your next screed might appear to conflict with an earlier one, or your readers might just not get what you want them to believe. But sometimes in your eagerness to hit one target you really can’t stand, you might slip and introduce some complexity, some nuance, and even some irony – and then your message just might not work.

Here’s Andrew Bolt on the weekend, suggesting that although Laurie Oakes might be bias-resistant his reporting, the doyen of the Canberra press gallery doesn’t acknowledge that others might be more prone to influence: Read more »

Ever noticed how a particular piece of information can “prove” two completely contradictory things to different people, depending on what they already believe on the subject?

For example, whenever I see large commercial entities using “green” concerns to justify ripping off customers – for example, charging customers for paper bills – it’s evidence to me of corporate Australia cynically abusing the “green” name for its own profit.

Someone like Andrew Bolt or Tim Blair or their readers, on the other hand, see it as evidence of the almighty GREEN LOBBY taking over their precious corporate Australia.

So we get stuff like “Green is the color of the carpetbag”:

Green was meant to be the sign of a modern new morality. Now it’s a sign that someone’s on the make. Read more »

A few weeks ago we highlighted just how upset Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair became when The Age used an unflattering photo of Christopher Monckton on its website. However mocking Monckton was only part of the story, Bolt was also incensed that the Age had used Tony Abbott’s nickname ‘the mad monk’

In this one picture and caption, it not only mocks sceptic Lord Monckton as a monkey and ridicules a symptom of his Graves Disease, but appeals to anti-Catholic bigotry by calling Opposition Leader Tony Abbott the “mad Monk”. Only a special kind of savage, terrified by a threat to his animistic deities, could concentrate so much invective into one image.

To ram home his point, that post is titled The Age of barbarians. Read more »