Headlines Saturday 16th August

Rann rants
Andrew Bolt
Mike Rann confirms his sad decline into an eco-extremist:

ANYONE illegally siphoning water from the Murray-Darling river system during the current crisis is committing an act of environmental terrorism, Premier Mike Rann says.
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Medici Rudd’s new plan: BookWatch
Andrew Bolt
Frank Devine is astonished that Kevin Rudd is taking on the job of personally judging the best books in the country, and lavishing the authors with $100,000 prizes:

The advertisement ... advised of the short list for two new awards instigated by Rudd, each of $100,000, for the best fiction and best non-fiction books of the year. However, the astonishing news was that Rudd intends to choose the winners from the shortlist himself. This was not an honour sought by either Alfred Nobel or Joseph Pulitzer…
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With this handout, the cars should be free
Andrew Bolt
Labor hasn’t yet met a car maker it doesn’t want to make even richer:

CONTROVERSIAL car tariff cuts scheduled for 2010 should proceed but a generous new $2.5 billion grants scheme should be set up to help the automotive industry until 2020…
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A green trough for corporate oinkers
Andrew Bolt
Insane. We must pay car tycoons billions so richer Australians can buy a few more locally built expensive cars instead of cheaper ones built overseas:

The Bracks review wants a new assistance scheme (called the Global Automotive Transition Scheme) [to] provide $1.5 billion in assistance from 2010 to 2015…
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It’s admitted: the unborn have rights, too
Andrew Bolt
The religious will damn this as mere sophistry, and perhaps correctly, but I do believe there is a distinction to be drawn between late-term abortions and the rest. What’s interesting, and a sign of perhaps more conservative times, is that the Brumby Government apparently agrees, even when “liberalising” abortion law:

WOMEN in Victoria would have the legal right to choose an abortion under historic legislation expected to be introduced to State Parliament next week.
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Games faked
Andrew Bolt
Jacquelin Magnay says the Beijing Games are as fake as the country’s “Rolex” watches:

This is the Olympics that claims to have sold out a record 6.8 million tickets, yet there are empty seats…

There has been the fake singer, the fake fireworks, the fake minority kids (they were all Han, and not from the 55 different ethnic groups as portrayed), the fake press freedoms, fake internet access, fake promises.

There is a difficulty in ascertaining whether the cheerful welcomes by young volunteers and the over-the-top kowtowing to foreigners are mandated niceties in the national interest, or a genuine passion for the Games.

Controversies and non-controversies are airbrushed out. A fatal bus crash that kills two Chinese nationals and involves Croatian rowers is cleaned up on site within half an hour, and never mentioned or written about in the Chinese media.

A tragic ceremony rehearsal accident that left Liu Yan, the country’s best classical dancer, a paraplegic, is denied then falsely watered down to the Western media as a broken leg.

Beijing Olympic vice-president Wang Wei and other International Olympic Committee officials repeatedly claim the press is free to report on the Olympic Games, yet venue managers, under instruction from the organisers, will not allow reporters to ask topical non-sporting questions of Georgian or Russian athletes. Transcripts of the press conference questions about censorship are themselves heavily censored.
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Pretending to slash
Andrew Bolt
Only 59 per cent to go to make Kevin Rudd’s scorched-earth target:

The State Government will pursue a naming and shaming policy for big energy users it deems to be wasting power, backed up by court action if they do not make the required cuts. But the targets so far are modest. The first round, beginning in January, aim to peel back less than 1 per cent of the state’s emissions...
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Tatty Coates
Andrew Bolt
Miranda Devine is just as unimpressed by John Coates:

John Coates’s edict to Australian athletes this week to wear their uniforms at all times in Beijing so as to avoid being mistaken for Americans and stabbed by Chinese nutters, as happened to the luckless sightseeing parents-in-law of a US volleyball coach, was insensitive, to say the least.

“Australians are very popular in China,” said Coates. “I don’t know if the US are felt about the same way.” Nice.

No other country issued similar orders. New Zealand and Canada made a point of saying they hadn’t.

Why would they, when the dead American, Todd Bachman, 62, and his grievously injured wife, Barbara, 62, had been wearing nothing to indicate they were with the US Olympic team, apart from a small volleyball pin, when they were attacked by a suicidal stranger at a Beijing tourist spot?

Devine draws an interesting parallel between Coates’ useless security advice and FuelWatch.
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GORCHED
Tim Blair
Eager to grab some of Ten’s massive global warming audience, the Nine Network prepares to launch a mega warmy doomer drama:
Scorched is a major new 90-minute tele-feature and multi-platform drama for the Nine Network and ninemsn set in a climate change ravaged Sydney in 2012.
After 240 days without rain, the city has only two weeks water left.
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REPORTING FOR DUTY, AGAIN
Tim Blair
Prominent Boston cyclist John Kerry is lycra-ripping mad:
Pick up the New York Times this morning and read the headline: “Book on Obama Hopes to Repeat Anti-Kerry Feat.”
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THEY WARMED KENNY
Tim Blair
This sounds like fun:
Representatives of Greenpeace will be in South Park on Thursday afternoon to interview residents about the effects of global warming. -the bastards. - ed.
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BIGFOOT FOUND IN MOUNTAIN LAIR
Tim Blair
No, wait – it’s just Helen Clark.
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BIG AUSTRALIAN
Tim Blair
A fine Olympic moment:
“The big Australian guy, he didn’t mind, he felt for their pulse ... they didn’t have any thought for their own safety, they just wanted to look after injured people.”