[Gforce]

new site

http://www.johnhowardlies.com/

[bobali]

good site

[Sakinah]

The federal government has asked the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate a website called www.johnhowardlies.com

See... http://smh.com.au/ar...9694467621.html

This is just typical of this Government. They SAY that their actions are in the name of freedom yet their efforts to silence their critics are akin to the sort of censorship that we see only with extreme right wing Dictatorships.

[Mowlana Vector]

Quote

new site
http://www.johnhowardlies.com/

copycats ...

We @ Islamicsyd.com already deconstructed his Honorable's "honesty" when it comes to his customery dog-whistle politics.

[Mowlana Vector]

Quote

The federal government has asked the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate a website called www.johnhowardlies.com

See... http://smh.com.au/ar...9694467621.html

This is just typical of this Government. They SAY that their actions are in the name of freedom yet their efforts to silence their critics are akin to the sort of censorship that we see only with extreme right wing Dictatorships.

Very well said!!

It's the Orwellean nightmare Johnny-style ... this is hyp(dem)ocrisy 4 U

[Jaydee]

Ooh! a politician telling a lie! That's a first!

Quote

They SAY that their actions are in the name of freedom yet their efforts to silence their critics are akin to the sort of censorship that we see only with extreme right wing Dictatorships.

Only right wing? I know of a lot of left wing dictatorships that make such and even more extreme efforts to silence their critics.

[Mowlana Vector]

Source: Crikey Newsletter (Friday, 16 July 2004)

The operator of the johnhowardlies.com website has been revealed as former Labor staffer Tim Grau through his political consultancy company Springboard Australia. The site now carries the line "Authorised by Springboard Australia Pty Ltd, 11-25 Wentworth Street, Manly NSW 2095" and they have also corrected the details of their domain name registration.

And Erica Betz's brilliant marketing effort is really kicking goals. This afternoon the site is boasting: "We may have started Australia's first and fastest growing grassroots internet movement."

The government has really played into the hands of their online critics giving enormous mainstream publicity to a what would otherwise have been little more than a joke for lefties and political insiders.

Web analysts www.hitwise.com.au report today that johnhowardlies.com is now the No. 1 Australian political website - a category which includes all sites which belong to particular political parties or organisations, plus sites that are devoted to expressing views on local or international political issues.

The rise of the site's ranking over the last week perfectly illustrates the impact the mainstream media attention has had on the sites traffic:

Monday 12th July, 2004 - 32nd position
Tuesday 13th July, 2004 - 9th position
Wednesday 14th July, 2004 - 2nd position
Thursday 15th July, 2004 - 1st position

And the site itself claims to have had 18,000 visitors to the site between 6am and 1pm today alone and more than 670,000 hits since the start of July. Those are huge numbers - Crikey has only had 367,000 page views since the start of July.

The next question is who compiled all the evidence on Howard's alleged "lies". Grau told the ABC today that he took on the project "for a group of people who approached him to set it up". Who are these people?

And anyway, what is wrong with a Labor supporter creating a website which highlights the inconsistencies of Howard's policies. Are the Liberals disputing any of the "lies" or "facts" presented on the site? All the "lies" seem to be quotes directly attributed to Howard or his ministers. If Erica Betz has a problem with the site he should sue for defamation.

Grau was a senior advisor to Wayne Goss while he was Queensland Premier before joining the Federal Labor government as senior political and communications adviser to Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch - you can find his full bio here.

And given the fiery debate between Graham Young, the editor and the publisher of the web forum On Line Opinion, and the team from johnhowardlies.com we hosted a couple of weeks ago - refresh your memory here - it is now interesting to see this mention on Young's site about his On Line Focus service:

"We have enlisted retired players from opposing sides to direct the angles and perform the analysis. In the NSW election campaign it is me and Tim Grau from Springboard Australia."
===========================

RELEATED READING


(Image Courtesy of ABC News Online)

Mystery of 'Howard lies' Website

JohnHowardlies.com v Graham Young

Howard 'Lies' Website Denies Labor Ties

[Sam]

I don't remember them jumping up and down at www.muslimterrorists.com that quickly???

[Mowlana Vector]

Quote

I don't remember them jumping up and down at www.muslimterrorists.com that quickly???

C’mon ppl, lets go easy on our honorable PM Sometimes, he is a bit slow to act, and sometimes he doesn't even seem to wait for the call HOWEVER, how could we overlook his (un)compromising ideals of "mateship" and ( Aussie ) “fair go” for this country's virtual bigots ... sorry I mean his elite "battlers"

This is right, It’s the Hansonite cultural agenda that makes him for what he really is!!

Background Info

Action Alert: David Oldfield Vs Muslim Immigration

Barking (One) Nation's Anti- Islamic Leaflet

David Oldfield Responds

One Nation Website Bid Fails

Aussie Politician Sued Over Website

David Oldfield Sued Over Terrorism Website

Anti-Muslim Website Lives On

www.muslimterrorists.com (cached)

[Hanan Oum Medina]

SAWAWB

Hey! Johnnie looks great as a redhead! But only Pauline, with orange hair, wear red... sooo wrong for sooo many reasons.....

Wasalaam
Hanan

[Mowlana Vector]

Quote

We've got a direct action section on the nothappyjohn website now, so from now on please send your stands for democracy over there. (If you really want to participate in the dirt debate, have a look at Mungo's column in the Byron Bay Echo at Time for a reciprocal look at Howard. The rules appear to have changed dramatically since Howard got to the top in politics. I wonder why.)



Continue Reading ... here

SEE ALSO:
Howard's Flood of Lies

[Wolf]

Quote

No questions asked when the sheriff called
July 26, 2004

The PM did not have to be convinced of Iraq's threat. If the US was in, so were we, writes Robert Manne.
When the Flood report into the performance of Australian intelligence services was released last Thursday, the Prime Minister, John Howard, found in it the definitive proof that in leading Australia into war against Iraq he had not lied. Howard says Philip Flood had found that Australia's intelligence services generally accepted that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was real.  
In claiming that Iraq possessed a stockpile of WMD and that it posed a threat to its neighbours and the world, Howard assured us that he had not deceived the people but told them what he truly believed. I do not doubt this.
The question of lying in politics is, unfortunately, considerably more complicated than is generally understood. To grasp the complexity imagine, if you will, a political leader who has convinced himself for ideological reasons that Israel was responsible for the crimes of September 11, 2001.  
Even if the belief was held with complete sincerity this would not absolve our imagined political leader from the accusation that he had lied. It is not only the sincerity of a political conviction but also the integrity of the process by which the conviction has been reached which counts. In politics nothing is more common than the true believer whose lies are perfectly sincere.  

How, then, is the emergence of the "sincere lie" on which the invasion of Iraq was based to be explained? Its origins are not found in Australia or Britain but in the United States, where in the mid-1990s a group of out-of-power Republican hawks - which included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - decided to support a policy of regime change in Iraq.
With the election of George Bush in November 2000 this group moved into positions of power, dominating both the Pentagon and the office of the vice-presidency. Whether they could have found a way of removing Saddam Hussein in the absence of September 11 is unclear. What is clear, however, is that it was September 11 that provided them with their historic opportunity.
Within hours of the attacks the question of an invasion of Iraq was discussed at the highest level of the Bush Administration. A decision was postponed. By November 21, 2001, Bush commissioned a new war plan for Iraq. By the middle of 2002 the invasion of Iraq had already become a near-inevitability.  
On the face of things, even after September 11, a plausible case for war with Iraq was not easy to mount. After the Gulf War Iraq's armed forces had been degraded. Its economy had been crippled by sanctions. Iraq was contained by US and British air power. It had lost control of its Kurdish lands. It took considerable ingenuity to conjure from a state so weakened a clear and present danger to the US and the world.
The hawks settled upon a two-pronged threat. They claimed, first, that since the Gulf War Iraq had illegally manufactured a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and was within months of producing a nuclear bomb, too. They also said that solid evidence existed to show a secret alliance between al-Qaeda and Iraq.  
As the brilliant first volume of the recently published US Senate inquiry into intelligence failure in Iraq reveals, during the mounting build-up to the war the US intelligence community helped to create a case about Iraq's WMD stockpile which, in almost every particular, either misconstrued or grossly exaggerated what the available evidence showed.
As the report also documents, ferocious pressure was placed on the intelligence community by the Pentagon to accede to the case being mounted by the hawks about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but on this question the intelligence community would not budge.  
Nothing is more common in ideologically driven politics than the triumph of conviction over evidence and reason. I have no reason to doubt that the Washington war party, in the grip of ideological self-intoxication, had come sincerely to believe in the seriousness of the supposed Iraqi threat. Within weeks of September 11 they had convinced the President; within months they had convinced the governments of Britain and Australia.
How? I cannot pretend to understand the process by which Tony Blair and his cabinet were converted to the reality of an Iraqi threat. On the other hand, the conversion of the Howard Government seems almost embarrassingly easy to explain.
On September 11 Howard took personal control of Australian foreign policy. He followed from this moment one exceedingly simple idea, namely the importance of absolute loyalty to the US. As in the Old Testament Book of Ruth, from this time wherever the US would go so would we; its policies would be our policies; its triumphs and disasters would be ours.
No one appears to have noticed a curious passage in the Flood report. It says the two main Australian intelligence bodies dealing with Iraq - the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation - expressed scepticism about many fundamental elements of the Anglo-US claims about Iraq: the uranium purchase from Niger, the acquisition of aluminium tubes for a nuclear weapons program; the mobile biological weapons labs; the unmanned aircraft delivery system for WMD, and the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.  
Even more startlingly, Flood reveals in passing that on the eve of the war, the DIO doubted that Iraq had a WMD stockpile. Yet it was because of the existence of this stockpile that Australia went to war.  
These local intelligence doubts were clearly of no consequence for the Government. It was taking Australia to war not because of any indigenous intelligence assessment but out of loyalty to the alliance with the US. It was not just that its interests had become our interests; its arguments had become our arguments as well.
If in the US the sincere lie on which the invasion was based was grounded in neoconservative ideology, in Australia it was grounded in something rather different - an unflinching and unthinking fidelity to a great and powerful friend.

http://www.smh.com.a...0693831342.html