Headlines Wednesday 23rd July

Blogging for dummies
Andrew Bolt

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UPGRADE!
Tim Blair
The SMH, July 4:
The rising demand for flat-screen televisions may have a greater impact on global warming than the world’s largest coal-fired power station ...
The SMH, July 22:
There has probably never been a better time to upgrade to a larger flat-panel television.
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NANCHONG MOWDOWN
Tim Blair
The BBC reports:
Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot ...
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PAPER JUMPS FURTHER LEFT
Tim Blair
Andrew Bolt reports:
But there is one other thing about Roskam, the head of the Institute for Public Affairs, that may have featured in The Age’s thinking. Roskam was, in fact, the only regular columnist on The Age who was a conservative.
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NEW AGER CAPTURED
Tim Blair
If he’d chosen a better disguise—say, a Che Guevara T-shirt—Radovan Karadzic might still be on the loose.
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WORD FROM THE FRONT
Tim Blair
Michael Yon, who claimed three years ago that Iraq was in a state of civil war, now writes:
The war in Iraq is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
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IT BURNS
Tim Blair
Perfect Adelaide story:
A pregnant teenager has been doused in pool cleaning acid in a fight outside an Adelaide Centrelink office.
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OBAMA HELPED
Tim Blair
A poll boost for Barack Obama:
The idea that reporters are trying to help Obama win in November has grown by five percentage points ... 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help the Democrat with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.
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Politicians 'suffer mental health problems'
By Carrie Berdon
MANY politicians suffer mental health problems but are reluctant to seek help, New South Wales Treasurer Michael Costa says.

Mr Costa said a number of state parliamentary colleagues approached him about their mental health problems after he publicly revealed his battle with bipolar disorder in 2001.

Bipolar is defined as a mental condition involving extreme mood swings.

"Once the article (on his disorder) was written, I had people come up to me, independent politicians, and I won't name them, and they said: 'I read that article and I've got such and such a problem. What do you think?'," he told a Black Dog Institute function at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital today.

Mr Costa, who manages his disorder with medication, said he gave them advice and told them to seek professional help about their problems.

He said many politicians with mental disorders were often unwilling to reveal them. -This problem is well known, but does not excuse the NSW or Federal ALP- ed.
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Inflation up, but rates likely to stay on hold
TREASURER Wayne Swan has warned banks to think twice before hiking home loans again, after figures out today showed inflation is at a near 17-year high.

Despite the growth in inflation, economists do not expect the Reserve Bank to raise official interest rates when it meets on August 5.

With the RBA likely to keep rates on hold, Mr Swan said banks "need to take great care" when looking at whether to lift home loan rates.

"They (the banks) have a choice between their shareholders on the one hand and their customers on the other.

"They need to take great care in taking decisions on passing on rate rises outside the official cycle.'' -Inflation and interest rates are always higher under the ALP. -ed.
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Morris Iemma's department dragged into Iguanas scandal
By Simon Benson
PREMIER Morris Iemma's department has been dragged into the Iguanas nightclub affair with the activities of a senior public servant referred to the ICAC after he confessed to "party political" involvement in the scandal.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal that the Department of Premier and Cabinet has alerted the ICAC to phone calls made by government official Paul Lister after allegations he was instructed to build a dirt file on witnesses and link them to the Liberal Party. It is a breach of the Public Service Code of Conduct for public servants to engage in party political conduct.

The Premier told Parliament on June 19 that the allegations were "nonsense". -As The Weasel predicted. - ed.
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Great Global Warming Swindle cleared
Andrew Bolt
Steve McIntyre reviews at length the findings of Ofcom, Britain’s television regulator, which was asked by 39 global warming scientists and activists to punish The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary for mentioning there was another side to the scary story:

Among the complainants claiming misrepresentations were Bob Ward and the 37 professors (Myles Allen, Phil Jones et al) who alleged a wide variety of error here and David Rado of the 175-page complaint profiled by BBC here. Ofcom did not uphold any of the misrepresentation complaints against Swindle. Not one.
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Living off the American soldier
Andrew Bolt
The most senior Australian officer to serve in Iraq says we’re too scared to fight hard for a cause:

Putting it bluntly, (Major-General Jim) Molan, who retired a fortnight ago, says Australia is not prepared “to fight a war involving sustained combat”. As a professional, he is embarrassed. The conclusion from his book is that Australia has been too successful in winning political dividends from extremely limited military commitments. Sooner or later, he believes, our luck will expire.

Molan argues that Australia’s political and military mindset has a view of the ADF “skewed too far towards humanitarian operations, peacekeeping and peacemaking, and away from war-fighting”. For Molan, this is the central lesson for Australia from the Iraq war...
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Warming believer blown away by evidence
Andrew Bolt
Another Al Gore scare turns out to be as baseless as so many others:

In Al Gore’s Nobel-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, hurricanes became symbols of the danger of global warming… Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric science, was named by Time magazine in 2006 as one of “100 people who shape our world.” The reason? Just before Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans in 2005, he published a scientific paper in the journal Nature saying ... that hurricane power had increased, probably because of man-made global warming.

“While many researchers had been predicting an explosion of more powerful storms, Emanuel, 51, offered evidence that it was actually happening,” Time wrote.

To test the theory, Emanuel and other scientists recently loaded tons of data into computer models, hoping to learn how bad it could get if global warming keeps pushing up sea temperatures.

The results were surprising: Hurricanes didn’t increase dramatically in the projections, even after decades of simulated global warming.

Emanuel was not disappointed that the research seemed to undercut his old results. “One gets used to being mistaken...”
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Naturopath arrested for crimes against humanity
Andrew Bolt
Call that a disguise?

Wanted as war criminal, Karadzic hid out as alternative medicine expert

A nationalist, collectivist, romanticist, spriritualist, irrationalist, anti-humanist ... but of course the war criminal is into alternative medicine as well. So were Hitler and Himmler, after all.
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Stop global warming: ban immigrants
Andrew Bolt
The logic is impeccable, of course - especially for a global warming believer:

Monash University social scientist Bob Birrell says Australia has little hope of meeting its emissions target - a 60% cut by 2050 - unless it halts predicted population growth of about 10 million over the next four decades.
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Not all that much of a father. Or mother
Andrew Bolt
Not quite as reassuring as it may sound:

SUSPICIOUS blokes who request paternity tests are mostly wrong and about 80 per cent are found to be the real father, new Queensland research suggests… (I)n Queensland, as many as 1500 paternity tests are carried out each year.
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Immigration: even at its best, prepare for the worst
Andrew Bolt
If this is happening among the best-educated teens in a privileged Leftist environment saturated with tolerance messages, what would be happening out in the harder suburbs as immigration quickens?

A WIDENING gulf between local and foreign university students is creating segregated classes, cultural cliques and religious ghettos, raising fears of a backlash on campuses....

While the atmosphere on campuses generally supported foreign students, Professor (Simon) Marginson said: “...The international student industry runs off the back of a reasonably strong local system which presumes a healthy relationship with the local students … all of that has become the marketing pitch. That’s the flashpoint that worries me more than any other - that it could spring back into resentment.”
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Nelson already changes tack - for the better
Andrew Bolt
Brendan Nelson is getting much tougher already:

KEVIN Rudd faces a delay in the introduction of his carbon emissions trading system until after the next election, with Brendan Nelson vowing last night that the Coalition will not accept a start-up date before “2011 at the earliest”.
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The great victim hunt
Andrew Bolt
HERE’S just the latest example of how our victim industry works, feeding on problems and starving on solutions.

Flying to Sydney for World Youth Day, the Pope told reporters he wanted to express regret to victims of priests who abused them.

But Broken Rites, the victims’ group, said this was not enough, and he must “formally apologise”. Said spokesman Bernard Barrett: “He made some general remarks about regret to reporters and that’s not good enough.”

All right: in Sydney, the Pope gave a formal apology.

But Broken Rites said this was now not enough, and he must apologise directly to a few representative victims. Said another spokeswoman, Chris MacIsaac: “It really needs to be delivered directly to the people who suffered that abuse. They could have looked some victims who represented all victims in the eye and said, the Pope could have said ‘I am truly sorry’.”

All right: the Pope then looked four representative victims directly in the eye, and said: “I am truly sorry.”
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Why Jackson hates Obama
Andrew Bolt
Shelby Steele on why Jesse Jackson wanted to castrate Barack Obama:

Mr. Jackson was always a challenger. He confronted American institutions (especially wealthy corporations) with the shame of America’s racist past and demanded redress…

Mr. Obama’s great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.
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Hating change, and the US which changes most
Andrew Bolt
David Aaronovitch on why even President Obama will wind up hated in Europe:
In part I think that anti-Americanism is linked to a view of change as decline. The imagination is that dynamic capitalism, associated with the US, is destroying our authentic lives, with our own partly willing connivance. It is a continuing and - at the moment - constant narrative, uniting left and right conservatives…

So Barack Obama, en fête around the world, will one day learn that there is no magical cure for the envy of others. What makes America the indispensable power (and even more indispensable in the era of the new China), is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable.