...

Beck's visit coincides with – though is not linked to – a visit by 26 Republican members of Congress. This is part of a much larger push by pro-Israel lobbyists in the US to bring 81 American legislators of both parties, including half the freshmen Republican Congress members, to Israel and the West Bank. Although such trips happen every year, this one, organised by an educational charity affiliated to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has an added edge because of Palestinian plans to seek UN recognition of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The move is strongly opposed by Israel and will be vetoed by the US if it goes ahead. Congressional leaders have already threatened to withhold funding of the Palestinian Authority if it pushes ahead with the plan.

The groups have been scheduled to meet the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, as well Israeli leaders. But their visit is likely to be overshadowed by Beck, who opposes not just the approach to the UN, but the idea of a Palestinian state. Prominent Haaretz blogger Bradley Burston said the irony was that the two-state solution Beck demonises "is probably farther from reality now than it has been at any time in the last 18 years", adding: "But what is irony to a man... for whom most Israelis are not hardline enough and therefore not Israeli enough... a man who knows better than the Jews what Auschwitz means, who Nazis are, what Israel needs, and how Jews figure in the greater plan of God and His Apostle Glenn?"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-strange-crusade-glenn-becks-holy-land-mission-2342763.html

Australians should be "as happy as pigs in shit" with low unemployment and a resources boom, but instead they're scared to spend money, retail king Gerry Harvey says.

The chief executive of retailer Harvey Norman says he can't find a path through the fog of bad news as it continues to weigh on consumers.

"I don't see a way at the moment. I don't see how anything's going to change," Mr Harvey said. "You've got too many things out there affecting the minds of humans and it's just an avalanche of media activity and government activity that's making people unhappy and not wanting to spend their money."

http://media.smh.com.au/sport/sports-hq/alan-jones-knows-how-the-wallabies-can-win-2690706.html

Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones says his remark that Prime Minister Julia Gillard should be thrown out to sea in a chaff bag may have been better left unsaid.

After an address to the National Press Club, Jones was asked by a journalist whether such comments diminish respect for the office of the Prime Minister and if he regrets them.

Jones says chucking something in a chaff bag is an old-fashioned farming analogy.

"If that is misunderstood and if that in any way diminished the respect that people have for the office, then certainly it was a comment better left unsaid," he said.

"Sometimes in the heat of what you're doing - you're going at a 100 miles per hour - these things are said. We don't always say things that are right, we don't always say things that are fair, [but] we should try to," he said.

Jones also apologised for making allegations that police stopped anti-carbon tax protesters at the NSW-ACT border from attending a rally in August.

He made the allegations at the so-called convoy of no confidence rally in Canberra.

ACT police rejected the claim, saying officers did not stop any vehicles.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-19/alan-jones-says-gillard-remark-best-left-unsaid/3579658

Typical of sociopath... When their game is uncovered, they APOLOGiISE while still blaming someone or something in the same breath. Listen you mutt Jones, THE POLICE DID NOT STOP ANYONE COMING AT YOUR STUPID RALLY... despite ranting at the press club:

"It would do me no harm whatever to apologise to anyone who might have been offended by the inference that the police weren't doing their job," he said.

"I think the police were doing their job, but these people were stopped - now, what was the point of that, I don't know."

Alan, you can't stop lying can you?... See toon at top..,. and if anyone else in history had done to their country what Jones has done to this country, they'd be in the gulag for life — or in the Tower of London or guillotined or shot by firing squad or stone to death or pricked with a lethal injection in Texas — unless it's the electric chair in down town Florida.

But in this lucky country, Jones, you should just vanish to your country estate and shut up...

And stop blaming "the heat of the moment"... As a professional blabber, you know better than lay blame there...

ALAN JONES arrived in Canberra yesterday and found himself in furious agreement with the Greens in admitting he had overstepped the mark with some of the things he had said about the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

Jones has taken up the cudgels against the rapacious expansion and effect of coal seam gas and coal mining on food-producing land in NSW and Queensland and took it to the National Press Club.

Nothing much scares miners, certainly not this federal government, but Jones's campaign, driven by his own upbringing on a farm on the Darling Downs, had several nervous coal seam gas lobbyists ringing around before and after.

Jones's pitch goes straight to the fundamental injustice, perceived or otherwise, of a mining company entering someone's property, potentially destroying the water table and leaving the land unable to produce food. Not to mention the loss of icons.

''When you start turning Dorothea Mackellar and RM Williams's properties into slag heaps, surely it's time for the nation to wake up?'' he implored.

''It's war,'' he declared.