Love Howard. He has that old can-do spirit we used to have before the priss-pots in the PC movement took over the Republicans/country.

God bless him. I really like reading what he has to say.

About bloody time! When I was down there, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs bent over willingly if you were from certain countries - and the US was most emphatically NOT on that list. (However, if your passport was red....).

We should adopt the Aussie immigration policy: you have the right to a lawyer, but not the right to access to a lawyer. And, Permanent Residents (the Aussie version of the mythic Green Card) can be deported at any time, for any crime of sufficient gravity. Migration Detention was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, even more farther out than Ayers Rock, so if you were picked up, good luck having someone find you before that last plane trip out of there.

And for the record, no, I wasn't learning that stuff first hand. ;)

To any Aussies out there; wanna trade?

You had to know that department wasn't going to go over well in its current format...

Hell, the acronym for it was also a homonym for "Dhimmi", which is probably an apt discription of its purpose and attitudes under that particular configuration.

Even better news for you guys: Quantas is prohibiting passengers from saying anything against Bush.

I'd have supported Quantas if they banned the t-shirt that had Monica with a white "milk mustache" with the caption "Got Bill?". Or Metallica's "Here's Metal Up Your Ass" concert shirts. They are a private sector business, and they get to set some ground rules on decorum, just like a restaraunt can require a tie or a bar forbid steel toe boots.
Censorship is a government function and sin, junior.

Multi-culturalism is a great thing. As is liberalism. Unfortunately, both of these terms have become corrupted in ways such that today they are taken to refer to ideologies which are almost completely opposite to the naive meanings of the words. Liberalism today is short-hand for support for a suffocating socialist nanny-state populated by disempowered citizens. While multi-culturalism has become a tag to describe a society where racial divisions are enshrined in law for eternity and where separate-but-equal lives in full force but has had a few of the most obnoxious elements sanded off (like separate bathrooms and voter discrimination), while adding a few new ones for good measure (like separate justice for Muslims, who might be forced to live under sharia-lite locally, and non-Muslims).

Racism is equality. Socialism is liberty. Etc.

Perhaps, but at the Australia Day concert in Sydney, the Australian flag is banned, for fear of sparking similar "race" riots that occurred in 2005. In 2005 on Christmas Day, a bunch of Muslims bashed an Australian icon (a surf life saver). The Australian's who retaliated waved the Australian flag.

The Australian's appologised for their actions, but the Muslims never did.