On Brandis and encryption

Roy Ramage writes: Re. “George Brandis’ encryption claims show just how ignorant he is” (Tuesday)

Some years ago, another Liberal Senator, Dick Alston was awarded “Luddite of the Decade,” by the IT magazine, The Register. Brandis now stands to win…Luddite of the Millennium. Both pollies have achieved such distinction, effortlessly.

On Corbyn and the media

James Burke writes: Re.  “Corbyn-bashing ‘centrist’ media like the Guardian can jog right on” (Tuesday)

It looks as if Helen Razer is suffering some form of amnesia, maybe similar to that afflicting Guy Pearce in Memento. Could someone show her the Post-it about her Trump cheerleading last year? She may have felt the Bern, but she scorned Sanders’ view — shared by those other notorious neoliberal stooges Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore — that Americans should vote for the candidate who wasn’t a fascist.

I’m not expecting her to eat humble pie, as several Guardian columnists have about Corbyn. (Not forgetting the various pro-Corbyn Guardian writers she pretends never existed.) Just some acknowledgement would be reassuring. The closest she came was in a recent column celebrating that Clinton isn’t President, in part because as an establishment hawk she would have cosied up to the Saudi regime. Two whole days later came #ORB and Trump’s full-throated endorsement of Saudi Arabia’s jihad against all Muslim countries which dare disagree with it. If Razer thinks Clinton would have done that, she’s been hitting the fake news too hard. Could explain the amnesia.

On Foreign donations 

Ignaz Amrein writes: Re. “The government wants to ban foreign donations — except the significant ones, of course” (Tuesday)

“Toyota for example, that for many years as we know manufactured vehicles in South Australia but didn’t have any Australian shareholding, it was a foreign company.”
Sorry George…..I’ve worked in the automotive industry for twenty years  and while the company I worked for never directly supplied Toyota with components, as far as I know, Toyota manufactures (at least until October 2017) their cars in Altona, which just happens to be in Victoria.