Saturday, September 06, 2008

Headlines Saturday 6th September

Victory must have been a sheer fluke, then
Andrew Bolt
Finally Barack Obama admits (kind of) the truth about the victory in Iraq:

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,” Obama said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. “I’ve already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
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Ratty study
Andrew Bolt
More green untruths detected in the WA election:

An anti-GM advertisement urging West Australians to vote against the pro-GM Liberal party in this weekend’s state election was misleading and based on a scientific study which had been disproven, a leading WA academic said yesterday.

Professor Michael Jones, director of the State Agriculture Biotechnology Centre at Murdoch University, claimed the study by Russian Scientist Irina Ermakova cited in the advertisement had been debunked by experts in UK based scientific journal, Nature Biotechnology, in 2007.

He said Dr Ermakova’s findings, that 55 per cent of rats fed GM soy died within three weeks, were unproven. Prof Jones said West Australians had been eating imported GM soy for ten years with no affect.

“The study has been completely debunked, the whole report was false. There was an article in Nature biotechnology where a series of experts explained why those finding were untrue..."…

The advertisement, which recommends West Australians concerned for their health and safety vote for parties which are committed to upholding the current moratorium on GM crops, Labour and the Greens, was commissioned by Scott Kinnear, Director of the Biological Farmers of Australia organisation.
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The First Dude
Andrew Bolt
Todd Palin speaks. No polish, but some great lines.
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Maybe he feels he lacks class
Andrew Bolt
What exactly is John Coates’ problem with the British?

AUSTRALIA can ”beat the Brits at home” with a huge medal haul at the London Games, Australian Olympic Committee chief John Coates says.
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Green rules deadlier than dredging
Andrew Bolt
It’s not the dredging of a shipping lane in Port Phillip Bay that kills the waterlife, after all. It’s the paranoid environmental “safeguards” that turn out to be far deadlier:

A SEAL was killed and another accidentally captured after they were caught in underwater nets used to monitor the Port Phillip Bay dredging project...
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Garnaut now admits: maybe the cuts aren’t worth it
Andrew Bolt
Tim Colebatch defends Kevin Rudd’s chief alarmist, Ross Garnaut:

AT FIRST sight, Ross Garnaut’s proposal that Australia should cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 10% from 2000 levels by 2020 looks soft. The scientists tell us the world needs to go on a war footing to avoid catastrophic climate change. Is this war?…

Why don’t we aim higher?

Maybe it’s because Professor Garnaut is an economist, and keenly aware of what things cost in the real world. Maybe it’s because he knows that, even with all the new policies, Australia’s emissions are still on track to increase 20% from 2000 to 2020.
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Palin not in Oprah’s race
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Oprah Winfrey won’t give Sarah Palin the coverage she gave Barack Obama, even though she knows her viewers are enthralled by this woman’s story:

I agree that Sarah Palin would be a fantastic interview, and I would love to have her on after the campaign is over.
Beautiful Sunset
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The West stirs
Andrew Bolt
If true, today could be devastating for Kevin Rudd:

THE West Australian government is in danger of becoming the first Labor administration to fall in more than a decade in today’s state election, according to the latest Newspoll…

The poll indicates Labor could lose at least nine seats - and office - if a four per cent swing detected in a number of marginal Labor seats becomes uniform across the state…

On a two-party-preferred basis, Labor and the combined Liberal-Nationals are both on 50 per cent of the vote. In last month’s Newspoll, that figure was 51-49 in favour of Labor. Most worryingly for Mr Carpenter, Newspoll’s additional analysis in the 10 most marginal Labor seats reveals an average two-party Labor vote of 48 per cent.

Why devastating? First, because Rudd has already lost his first by-election - in Gippsland - with a big anti-Government swing. Second, because this would be a highly unusual state Labor loss, suggesting a narrative, rightly or wrongly, of Labor decline. Third, because finally the Liberals will gain not just inspiration and heart, but a political base for a fightback. And fourth, because a lot of people, including Labor politicians and journalists, oddly enough, would like to take this opportunity to give Rudd the kicking he deserves. Fifth, because Rudd is a nervous control freak.
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Beware of more cuts like this
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann warns that interest rates were cut even though inflation hasn’t fallen:

Consider first that the Reserve Bank raised its official rate 12 successive times to very specifically attack inflation, which wasn’t after all that far above its 2-3 per cent target range. In short, it felt that inflation, while relatively low, was deadly dangerous…

Yet the Reserve Bank has now cut, inevitably signalling a sharp shift in policy. And it has done so even though inflation has not only not fallen from those levels but the RBA actually expects it will stay at or near them all the way through 2009.

So the inflation is no longer deadly dangerous. The reason is, of course, because the overall economy has slowed.
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Not the speech of a true Governor General
Andrew Bolt
Not the promise I was hoping for from the new Governor General, former activist Quentin Bryce, at her swearing in - but certainly the one I feared:

I promise to be open, responsive and faithful to the contemporary thinking and working of Australian society.

Actually, the only promise Bryce is called upon to make as Governor General is to be faithful to the Consititution, of which he or she is the ultimate guardian. What this particular promise means, God only knows. But it seems to involve Bryce deciding for herself what “contemporary thinking” is, and pushing it.

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