Headlines Saturday 19th July

How The Media Manipulated the public for the ALP
Andrew Bolt

No kidding, Sherlock?

SECRET ALP polling of swinging voters showed the Coalition’s best chance of winning the last federal election was to switch to Peter Costello in 2006…

Liberal Party sources said yesterday the Coalition’s own research was similar to the ALP findings, but Liberal strategists did not want them canvassed among MPs for fear of destabilising Mr Howard. -I think most of the evidence points to the Libs not losing the election so much as the ALP winning it. The reasons for the ALP win are different to those of the Lib loss. The Libs went to the election with a coherent policy on all issues. They had a tried and respected management team. There were suggestions that that team were not tight which were denied by the team and the denials were ignored by the press. One media team broke long standing agreements to inflate the perception of disunity. Add to which the clumsy moves of Turnbull, who is not a natural politician, but who is still valuable.
On the other hand you had Rudd and his team. No policy. No press scrutiny and a team of disuniteds working to an anti liberal goal. The headlines in Sydney of The Telegraph, long lauded as fair and balanced simply weren’t.
At the end of the day, it was close.
But there will be many who oppose the Liberals who will wish to paint the exercise in more flattering terms for themselves. They will wish to show that they were somehow right to inflate the leadership concerns of the Libs and promote what ultimately was a policy free ALP platform.- ed.
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Being green means you can’t build a Prius
Andrew Bolt
California’s green policies make the state too expensive to build green cars:

Last week Toyota announced it was cancelling plans to build its new Prius hybrid at its plant in the San Francisco Bay area because of the high tax and regulatory costs.
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Tracee’s fishy visions of the apocalypse
Andrew Bolt
A few dead fish on a beach has Age hysteric Tracee Hutchison having yet more apocalyptic visions:

A COUPLE of weeks ago some dead fish washed up on rocks near a popular Williamstown fishing spot… (T)he EPA said that warm water discharged from the nearby power station and — you guessed it — the content of sediment dredged during channel deepening in the area would be investigated as possible culprits…
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The 1950s - from Howard hell to Rudd nirvana
Andrew Bolt
Once it was cool in the Left to mock John Howard as the man who’d drive us back to the 1950s, as Julia Gillard has noted:

It was hoped if we derided John Howard as a 1950s throw back, Australia would reject him.

But now it’s cool in the Left to urge Kevin Rudd to drive us back to the 1950s, as climate change alarmist Adele Horin demonstrates:

It may mean that middle-class Australians eventually revert to the lifestyle of the 1950s, when people turned off lights religiously, walked more, grew vegetables, shopped locally and owned one car. (Poor Australians already live simply by necessity). The 1950s were ghastly in many ways - women’s oppression, gays in the closet - but the lifestyle was hardly Dickensian.
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Olympic fever fries totalitarian brains
Andrew Bolt
Yours is not to reason why…

Beijing police have been visiting bar owners in the popular Sanlitun area and asking them to sign pledges agreeing to not serve black people or Mongolians...
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Abraham Rudd
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd is likened to Abraham Lincoln:

There are a few similarities between Mr Rudd and Mr Lincoln. Both had humble beginnings.. .

Lincoln was in fact so poor that his entire education consisted of not even a year of formal schooling, yet he became one of the most gifted orators and great statesmen of history. Rudd, despite his lurid tales of sleeping in cars, had relatives who helped to send him to a wealthy private school for a while, and despite his university degree.... But that’s when we really start to note not similarities, but grave differences.
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Arguments rebutted
Andrew Bolt
Environmental Health Australia has carefully considered the scientific data I presented yesterday that suggested global warming had stopped - or at least paused. And its Victorian president, Geoff Fraser, has emailed this closely reasoned critique in response:

Environmental Health Australia struggles to determine how any reader from age 4 up could support and credit your article. It was lazy and represents the opinions of no-one. It may have had some place in journalism about 20 years ago. 10,000 farmers out there call for your resignation or hope your air conditioner breaks down when it reaches 50 degrees in your modest urban environment.-EHA is not working hard enough, apparently, for it to be able to produce trash such as this. Bolt's article did not represent my opinion, but did produce the science I endorse. My opinion is that Bolt is too conciliatory in explaining the lies of AGW believers. - ed.
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Al Gore’s inconvenient transport
Andrew Bolt
Americans for Prosperity attend an Al Gore rally to check how many there obeyed Gore’s appeal to come on bikes or public transport. Guess who once more failed to follow his own hairshirt philosophy?

Of course, we saw plenty of hypocrisy—especially the fact that Gore didn’t ride his bike or take public transporation to the event. He didn’t even take his Prius! Instead, he brought a fleet of two Lincoln Town Cars and a Chevy Suburban SUV! Even worse, the driver of the Town Car that eventually whisked away Gore’s wife and daughter left the engine idling and the AC cranking for 20 minutes before they finally left!

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Freak over Rudd if you’re a farmer
Andrew Bolt
Farmers don’t yet know how Kevin Rudd’s emissions scheme will hit them, too, once he figures how to tax the belches and farts of cattle, pigs and sheep. Consider, for a start, how hard those taxes - sorry, permits - must hit to cut our total emissions:

Methane from sheep and cattle is estimated to account for over 12pc of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions and 70pc of agricultural emissions. (National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, 2006)
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What hail, Professor Garnaut?
Andrew Bolt
Ross Garnaut, Kevin Rudd’s climate change guru, said he had to have a steel roof because global warming would bring great hailstones:

Defending what objectors call an ugly curving steel roof set to dominate the streetscape at the rear of the property, Professor Garnaut says he has consulted the insurance industry in the course of his climate change work and adds: “Australia will experience variable, but dramatic changes in climate with increasing storms, particularly along the eastern coastline. Severe and more frequent hailstorms will be a feature of this change...”

Does the bloke know anything at all about the science? We already know that even the alarmist IPCC doesn’t predict more hail in Melbourne:

But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report, Climate Change 2007 - Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability - says in chapter 11: ”Decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne and Mt Gambier.”
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Peter Lloyd was just weeks away from coming home for good
ABC journalist Peter Lloyd had intended to return home to work before being caught for drug possession.
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US and Iraq agrees to "time horizon" for troop withdrawals
The United States and Iraq have agreed to seek "a general time horizon" for deeper reductions in American combat troops in Iraq.
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Holy smokescreen can't last for Rudd
THE release of its Green Paper on emissions trading while the Pope visited Australia was no coincidence, says Laurie Oakes.
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Alien vs predator as cane toad eats snake
A CANE toad has shocked experts by eating the only known snake that is able to prey on them and survive.
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Green is what you are, not your power
Andrew Bolt
If you’re surprised, you’re so naive you’d believe man is causing the seas to drown whole islands:

ELECTRICITY customers who signed up for green power with two of South Australia’s major energy retailers are being delivered power predominantly sourced from coal and gas.

Good to see the ACCC starting to crack down on green spin-merchants.