Headlines Saturday 7th June

How the ALP is killing our economy
Alan Jones takes another look at interest rates and comes to the conclusion that the Reserve Bank is clueless when it comes to helping the Australian economy.
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Will Miranda Devine apologise to Bill Henson?
Tim Brunero reckons it's funny how the usual rightwingers from the Australian press have gone all quiet now that the DPP has cleared Bill Henson's "sick" work. -Tim is just being provocative. Miranda said nothing she need apologize for, but Bill had some explaining to do. -ed.
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Abbott takes the long handle to Shorten
Andrew Bolt
I think the reason Tony Abbott carved up Bill Shorten on Lateline this week isn’t because Shorten is an idiot but the very reverse - he’s too bright to to know the case he had to argue for Rudd was a stinker.-and because the lateline hosts would have accepted the dumb arguments of Shorten without question. -ed.
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Like father, like genius son
Andrew Bolt
I wasn’t the only to marvel
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Carrying Hitler’s last genes
Andrew Bolt
David Gardner tracks down Hitler’s relatives:

I was to discover that the Hitler bloodline was carried on through William Patrick’s four sons - one of whom died in a road accident in 1989 - and that the brothers had decided in a remarkable pact not to have children themselves in order that Adolf Hitler’s genes would die with them.

Hell of a burden.
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French army falls apart
Andrew Bolt
Being a Eurowimp leads to flabby muscles:

According to confidential defence documents leaked to the French press, less than half of France’s Leclerc tanks – 142 out of 346 – are operational and even these regularly break down.
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I admire Michael Leunig
Andrew Bolt
I am surprised and impressed by Michael Leunig’s column today - and not just by the position he takes, in defiance of a herd, but the lucidity and plain sense with which he argues:
The art photographer Bill Henson is in trouble with the law for taking pictures of naked young people who are below the age of consent. Making such images seems to be his enduring preoccupation and I don’t understand how a mature man would want to do such a thing or even how he could, but I am equally perplexed by the huge endorsement and honour bestowed upon him by the art establishment for producing this work....
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Killing London’s children
Andrew Bolt
Gangs, ethnic tribalism and cultural grunge are making London lethal for children:

Violent killings of teenagers by their peers have spiked dramatically in London since the start of the year, claiming 16 lives and prompting urgent action to prevent the spread of “knife culture"…
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Kiss your children
Andrew Bolt
The hardest thing I read today, but the still somehow the sweetest. Paul Field and brother Anthony, the blue Wiggle, talk of the death of Paul’s daughter Bernadette.
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Lightheaded sees Lightworker
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama has unleashed the salvation seekers in the media, whose hagiographies of their new Messiah make the Gospel According to Mark seem unduly negative. Here’s the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Mark Morford in full ommm:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
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Why are conservative writers funnier?
Andrew Bolt
Leftist Melbourne blogger Sebastian Strangio, now doing an internship at the Phnom Penh Post, is puzzled by an undeniable truth:

Why are conservative writers funnier?… (W)hy are conservative intellectuals often so supple with the pen? And why are left-wing writers so po-faced and uninteresting?

This bit helps to explain some of it:

(I)t’s not entirely inaccurate to argue that left-wingers are bad writers because they are so often peddling bad ideas...
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Holland’s new gay-bashers
Andrew Bolt
A bashing in Amsterdam’s Rembrandt Square, on a public holiday in honor of the late Queen Juliana:

Model Mike Du Pree was taking part in a fashion show to promote tolerance towards gay people when a gang of ten Muslim youths dragged him from the catwalk and beat him… Mr Du Pree’s nose was broken in the attack, which was motivated by homophobia.
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Hair of the dog
Andrew Bolt
First Muslim extremists force the censoring of the Mohammed cartoons. Now the Muslim extremist who masterminded the September 11 attacks forces the censoring of yet another cartoon:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed has complained that the artist who sketched him on the first day of his arraignment made his nose look too big… Asked if Mohammed had a point, (AP artist Janet) Hamlin said: “I agree totally”, before returning to the courtroom to downsize his nose.
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Sexist slur
Andrew Bolt
Tracee Hutchison gets rude:

Every time Clinton pushed Obama’s buttons his response was just like a woman’s...
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Strike us pink for panic-proof
Andrew Bolt
Yesterday I noted that the Chaser had a map of Australia with a single pink dot to indicate the last global warming sceptic in Australia.
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Cooling fast on warming
Andrew Bolt
Fears that we may be entering a period of global cooling - far more dangerous than warming - are growing. William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the US National Solar Observatory now warn:

A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.... The number of sunspots visible on the Sun normally shows an 11-year periodicity, and the current sunspot cycle (cycle 23) had a maximum in 2001, and is entering a minimum phase with few sunspots currently visible. Our data show that there are additional changes occurring in sunspots, independent of the sunspot cycle, and these trends suggest that sunspots will disappear completely. Such an event would not be unprecedented, since during a famous episode from 1645-1715, known as the Maunder Minimum, the normal 11-year periodicity vanished and there were virtually no sunspots visible on the solar surface.
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Rudd wags the dog
Andrew Bolt
So now our foreign policy is just a way to distract attention from the Rudd Government’s latest embarrassment:

It emerged yesterday that the plan unveiled by Mr Rudd on Wednesday for the creation by 2020 of an Asia-Pacific community was hatched at the last minute, triggering hasty drafting work in Canberra and a flurry of diplomacy in key Asian capitals in recent days.
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Why does Rudd support a war he damns?
Andrew Bolt
Alexander Downer makes the same point I did this morning:

What is encouraging about the new Australian Government is that for all its bluster about the evils of getting rid of Saddam, it is at least leaving a warship in the Gulf to protect Iraq’s oil terminals (the central source of Iraqi prosperity), and it will also keep an RAAF air bridge into and out of Iraq to maintain supplies to our allies.
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Worse off means ticked off
Andrew Bolt
The latest Roy Morgan poll detects a mood that will hurt the Rudd Government if it lasts much longer, and if voters start blaming not the Liberal legacy but a Labor let-down:

Now 45% of Australians Believe they are Worse Off than 12 Months Ago
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Sick of spinning, and vice versa
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd needs his spin-masters even to tell him what he last ate
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Hawke, Keating object
Andrew Bolt
No surprise there at all:

TWO former Labor prime ministers have raised concerns about Kevin Rudd’s plans for an Asia-Pacific community, warning that a European Union-style body may not work in the region.
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