It just gets worse and worse

This is the third disgracefully dishonest headline I've seen today.

Bob Brown has written today to Julia Gillard saying how appalled he was by the placards being waved by Tony Abbott's posse of bussed-in flat-earth clowns, and saying that he knows she has 'broad shoulders' but he also knows that this kind of stuff can be hurtful.

How has The Australian reported this online? Under the headline Anti-tax banners 'hurtful' to Gillard.

The clear implication is that Gillard found them hurtful, and said so, and is therefore a wimp, all of which is complete crapola.

Furthemore, they are not in any way 'anti-tax banners'; they are banners saying, and I quote, 'Ditch the witch' and 'Juliar .... Bob Browns [sic] bitch'. This one is written over a crude background sketch of what I presume are supposed to be the flames of hell, in which they presumably want to burn her. I mean, it wouldn't be a picture of the planet going up in flames, would it.

I've got a headline for them: how about Genetic link suspected between the inability to place an apostrophe correctly and the belief that the sun revolves around the earth.

Lustre comes from within, Mr Rabbit

It's okay, apparently, to compare the Prime Minister to Colonel Gaddafi, a name synonymous with derangement since my youth. But I must say I'm enjoying the way that hate speech in public life, so clearly an import from the worst and craziest of US public life and, alas, rocked in the cradle of Christianity both there and here, is being countered in Australia by an increasingly public awareness that this vile stuff is being encouraged if not orchestrated by people with money and/or power who want to hang onto both and are perfectly prepared to exploit the mean-spirited, the short-sighted, the ignorant and the unbalanced in order to do so.

I really would like to know what the motives were of the man who rang up Tony Windsor and threatened him with death. I'd like to sit him down and talk him through what he thinks and believes, and why. I'd like to ask him exactly where he got the idea that this sort of behaviour was acceptable. And I'd like to ask him whether he understands that 'tax' isn't just something 'the Guvmint' (have you noticed how Tony Abbott's pronunciation of this word becomes more strident and nasal with every passing day?) rips off you because they can; to find out whether he actually understands that the point of taxation is to make stuff, manage stuff, buy stuff and build stuff about whose absence he would be the first to complain.