Headlines Friday 12th September

Rudd’s drought claims hold no water
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd loves claim that the drought in the Murray-Darling basin is proof of global warming:
BRENDAN Nelson was yesterday accused of being “blissfully immune” to the effects of climate change after he said the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin was not linked to global warming… ”You need to get with the science on this,” the Prime Minister said. “Look at the technical report put together by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.”

I’ve already pointed out how dodgy is the report on which Rudd relies.

Now Associate Professor Stewart Franks, a hydroclimatologist, explains very carefully to Rudd and others what the science in fact does say:

IS the ongoing drought in the Murray-Darling Basin affected by climate change? The simple answer is that there is no evidence that CO2 has had any significant role…
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RuddWatch alert
Andrew Bolt
Call it BankWatch - another grand plan that’s all spin and no traction:

A FEDERAL Government plan to make housing more affordable by offering first-home buyers beefed-up savings accounts looks set to be a huge fizzer… Of almost 200 banks, credit unions and building societies, just 14 lesser-known outlets have expressed any interest to the banking regulator…

Fiona Reynolds, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees, said many super funds had put the first-home saver accounts in the “too hard basket"…

Infochoice spokesman Steven Anderson said there had not been a peep out of any major banks about the new accounts, because they had been deemed too expensive and complex…

But Mr Swan’s spokesman was adamant “a few banks and various other institutions are going to offer the accounts” from October 1.” He refused to name any.
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NSW Labor is a national pain
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann finds the jobless figures confirm that Labor’s bungling rule in NSW is hurting the country:


(O)ur biggest state - one-third of the national economy - is in recession… In only two states has trend unemployment turned up. Slightly in Victoria - although that in itself is interesting and ominous.

But sharply, and over some months, in NSW....

NSW going seriously south while the rest of Australia is, if not rolling along, at worst - for the moment - paddling.
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One seemed in charge and at home
Andrew Bolt
Fascinating footage from the September 11 memorial service at Ground Zero. Yes, the prime focus is and should be with the victims, but the presence of both Barack Obama and John McCain inevitably invite comparisons ... and here’s what many will have noticed.

McCain appeared with his wife. Obama didn’t.

McCain led in walking down the line of emergency services representatives, shaking hands and talking. Obama followed.

McCain kept stopping for extra time with the men and women in uniform, chatting warmly. Obama was fast done, meaning he often stood just behind McCain, waiting for him to move on.

Cindy McCain was given a pin by one heavily medalled officer. Obama stopped to hug one other officer, the black woman.

McCain again led in going down another line, shaking hands with the crowd. Obama again followed.
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Palin messes with Obama’s mind
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama is fumbling his lines badly since Sarah Palin’s nomination.

Daniel Finkelstein says Obama’s disastrous “lipstick” jibe was clearly no accident, and concludes:

The character question it raises is not that he is a sexist or that he lacks courtesy. It is that he folds under pressure. Obama has looked amazingly uncomfortable under the pressure that Palin has put him under. He relies on his cool - it is a core part of his appeal. So he looks bad when he loses it. During the Hillary contest he rarely came under any pressure from the media. When he did he reacted badly.

Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate, seems rattled, too, confessing:

Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight. She’s a truly close personal friend, she is qualified to be president of the United States of America, she’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me.

Ditto for the far Left. Here’s the frantic title of Juan Cole’s most recent piece for Salon:

What’s the Difference Between Palin and Muslim Fundamentalists? Lipstick.

UPDATE

The media has speculated hungrily about the gaffes that inexperienced Palin will make on the stump. In fact, it’s Obama who is struggling there, but even he can’t beat this effort by veteran Joe Biden, introducing the Missouri Senator Chuck Graham, a paraplegic:

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Neal blames Howard
Andrew Bolt
Labor MP Belinda Neal, fresh from anger management counselling, describes the real villains of the Iguanagate scandal in a piece she starts as follows::

The right to silence is under threat in Australia. The Howard government attempted to legislate the right to silence out of existence.
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Doing nothing really is cheaper
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann is just as puzzled by Kevin Rudd’s global warming guru - and his refusal to face up to his own logic:

Ross Garnaut’s Targets and Trajectories draft report, launched by our national ‘climate reviewer’ last Friday, gains that veneer of Kissingerian realpolitik from its range of policy scenarios tied to international agreements.
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The kind of animal on which Palin feeds
Andrew Bolt
Vicious, depraved blow-hards like Russell Brand, the former crack-addict, are precisely the kind of Obama supporters who are costing him votes. (See from two minutes in.)

And if you wondered how low this barbarian could sink (and how much the Video Music Awards owned what he did in fact say), consider this:

I had John McCain gags pulled. And they asked me to tone down the gags about Sarah Palin. I wanted to say she was forcing her teenage daughter to have a baby because she is so anti-abortion.

But also, as a Republican she is pro-execution so she is going to give her the electric chair for being a little slut.

They weren’t keen on that one.

Pity he didn’t tell it. Tens more thousands of people would have voted for McCain just to wipe the leer off this animal’s face.
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Fresh start, fresh scandal
Andrew Bolt
You know a party is dying on its feet when a fresh start turns stale after just three days:

NSW Police Minister Matt Brown resigned in disgrace last night after it was revealed he had danced semi-naked on a couch and simulated a sex act on a female Labor MP during a drunken party in Parliament House…
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More ABC booga-booga
Andrew Bolt
Here’s how the ABC’s 7.30 Report last night started yet another alarmist report on global warming, this time hypeing up the threat to our coastal towns:
As Hurricane Ike bears down on Cuba and New Orleans recovers from the devastation caused by its second hurricane in three years, the serenity of South Gippsland on Victoria’s east coast seems a world away. But the issue of climate change, rising sea levels and the increasing frequency and severity of storms, is blowing an ill wind here as well.

Note the blithe link to the hurricanes off the US, as if they were evidence of global warming and “the increasing frequency and severity of storms”.
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Does Bill Henson now work for Seven?
Andrew Bolt
Pray that the viewers have more sense than Channel Seven:

A YOUNG model has risked being kicked off reality TV show Make Me A Supermodel by refusing to model semi-naked. Sara Longman, 17, said she would not model in just her underwear and bodypaint in Melbourne’s Federation Square.
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Some cultures just keep you poor
Andrew Bolt
Professor Emeritus Wolfgang Kasper (rightly) argues that changing cultures is key if you want to make poor people rich:

All those Australians engaged in devising policies to better the material lot of Aborigines and part-Aborigines should study Clark’s book. Moving from Paleolithic bands of foragers into a modern world within a few generations is unimaginably difficult. It requires that they jettison internal institutions and life attitudes that have been successful for survival over a thousand generations. This goes beyond shunning violence, learning basic numeracy and literacy, becoming self-responsible, and acquiring new work and saving practices—all of which are nevertheless a useful start. It also requires that affluent Australia abstains from subsidising counterproductive and untenable cultural attitudes or condoning practices which are patently unacceptable, even illegal, in other segments of our nation.
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9/11 conspiracy : Hate fries brains
Andrew Bolt
Here’s a measure of not just stupidity, but blind malice against the US and Jews. WorldPublicOpinion asks 16,000 people in 17 countries who was responsible for the September 11 attacks.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator…

The U.S. government was to blame, according to 23 percent of Germans and 15 percent of Italians… Israel was behind the attacks, said 43 percent of people in Egypt, 31 percent in Jordan and 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories. The U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians. In Mexico, 30 percent cited the U.S. government and 33 percent named al Qaeda.
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McCain turns Brown into a joke
Andrew Bolt
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, already a laughing stock at home, now turns into a punchline in the US election. His pratfall started with a piece he wrote for a magazine, proudly endorsing Barack Obama:

Gordon Brown has broken with British convention and made clear that he favours Barack Obama as the next US President.

In a departure from the usual self-denying ordinance of Prime Ministers past, Brown has written an article for The Monitor magazine in which he praises Obama’s plans to get the US out of the housing slump… There is not a single mention of McCain or his own plans to help tackle the impact of the slowdown. As this is an article written by the PM himself, no one can claim he is being quoted out of context or misrepresented.

Brown specifically praised one of Obama’s policies with these words:

To help prevent people from losing their home, Barack Obama has proposed a Foreclosure Prevention Fund to increase emergency pre-foreclosure counselling, and help families facing repossession.”

And the humiliating payback from the McCain camp was swift, coming in a press release mockingly entitled:

The Coveted Gordon Brown Endorsement

The first paragraph dripped with the sarcasm that strips flesh:

Far be it from this campaign to underestimate the value of an endorsement from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown....

But, it added, the one policy of Obama’s that Brown chose to praise was one policy he’d since erased:

Obama had championed a Foreclosure Prevention Fund, but sometime late last month he seems to have...changed his position. According to Versionista, a program that allows us to track changes to the Obama website, Senator Obama quietly erased any mention of a Foreclosure Prevention Fund in late August. No new program was offered in its stead. Whether this will cause Prime Minister Brown to rethink his support for Senator Obama remains unclear...