Headlines Thursday 4th September

Iguanagate ‘dead and buried’: No charges for Neal and Della Bosca
The NSW DPP will not lay charges against suspended Education minister John Della Bosca and his MP wife Belinda Neal, over the Iguana gate affair.- As a voter I think this stinks and I will get pleasure in reminding others of it when I urge people to not support the ALP. I want Della Bosca to answer for what he has done regarding the death of Sydney school boy Hamidur Rahman in 2001. Della Bosca was Minister for Education when he was given new information regarding the death which calls into question the coronial finding of accident. His reply to the messenger might be thought of as a threat.- ed.
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Rewarding rhetoric and applauding lies
Piers Akerman
TRUTH has suffered a major setback with the awarding of a 2008 John Curtin Prize for Journalism to Tasmanian polemicist Richard Flanagan.
The prize, one of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, went to Flanagan for a factually inaccurate ideological diatribe titled Gunns: Out of Control published in the left-wing Melbourne journal The Monthly.
If the title rings a bell, it may be because it was mentioned in this space in June and August last year, first when then Federal Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation Minister Eric Abetz critiqued it in a speech at the biennial conference of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and the New Zealand Institute of Forestry at Coffs Harbour on the NSW North Coast and noted it “tells more untruths than Pinocchio on a bad day“‘.
It made a second appearance when multi-millionaire Telstra director Geoffrey Cousins organised a mass letterbox drop in Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate of Wentworth in a particularly fruitless attempt to unseat the former Howard junior minister. Turnbull was re-elected with an increased majority.
In his criticism of the article, Abetz listed some 70 “deliberate or inexcusably negligent errors of fact, selective citing of fact, or twisting of facts’’.
He said the writer made outrageous claims such as “the great majority of Tasmanians appear to be overwhelmingly opposed to old-growth logging’’, and asked, if this was so, why had the Greens, the only party with a policy to end old-growth forestry in Tasmania, polled just 17 per cent of the vote at the 2006 state election, a decline on the previous election.
He also cited the 2004 federal election, noting Labor, supported by the Greens, lost two House of Representative seats and a Senate seat, and the Greens’ vote went backward, with policies aimed at shutting the Tasmanian forest industry.
Indeed, it could now be added that Turnbull’s opposition to elements of the pulp mill proposed by timber giant Gunns cost the Liberals its two Tasmanian seats, Bass and Braddon, in last November’s election.
Flanagan made a number of other claims that just don’t stand up in any light, but that didn’t matter to the judges of this “journalism’’ prize because they found: “This is a wonderful piece of advocacy journalism with no pretence at ‘balance’. It is very clear where Richard Flanagan stands on the issue of logging Tasmania’s forests. But it is a fact-rich piece [they must be joking], very well written and argued, full of great anecdotes and telling details.
“Flanagan writes with controlled passion - even rage - but the reader does not feel in any way bullied by the writing. It is a great example of excellent magazine journalism.’’
No, it is a great example of untruths, half-truths and misstatements put forward in a politically correct polemic that the judges, former Age editor Michael Gawenda, former Fairfax editorial executive Greg Hywood, and Richard Watts, the editor of Melbourne’s weekly newspaper for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, apparently felt quite comfortable with.
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Former principal turns himself in over Bathurst sex scandal
A fourth man has been charged over the alleged sexual abuse of students at two exclusive colleges.
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Iemma to 'freshen up' government after Watkins walks
NSW Premier Morris Iemma says he will use the shock exit of his deputy as a means to "freshen up" his government via a major cabinet reshuffle later this week. - ALP governments Australia wide have avoided going to the voter. All the state ALP leaders were parachuted into position after their predecessor stood down without facing a backlash. Maybe the shifting of these deck chairs will allow the fickle imagination of the NSW public to forgive Iemma.- ed.
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Teen shot dead on NSW mid-north coast
Police are questioning a youth over the shooting death of a 15-year-old boy on the NSW mid-north coast.
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Pakistan PM escapes assassination bid
Pakistan's prime minister has escaped an apparent assassination attempt when his car was struck by two bullets fired by unknown assailants, officials say.
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Sarah Palin on the attack at the Republican convention
Sarah Palin has launched a slashing counterattack on her critics telling the Republican convention that she had accepted the No.2 slot on the ticket to serve the American people, not to win "the good opinion" of her detractors.
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Neal needs more counselling: Nelson
Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has spoken out about his clash with Belinda Neal, claiming the Labor MP needs to go back to anger management counselling.
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Letting China control our uranium is a bad plan
Our government has authorised China to start mining Australian uranium and shipping it back home. According to Chris Smith this is dangerously myopic.
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Liveblogging Palin’s speech
Andrew Bolt
12.30pm: Sarah Palin steps forward at the Republican convention to give the speech that could make her - or destroy John McCain. Her reception is overwhelming, ecstatic. The crowd can’t stop cheering.

12.32pm: First line: she accepts the nomination as vice president. She looks confident. And is in demure pink, rather than the attack red of her last appearance. More big cheers.

12.33pm: She starts by talking not about herself, but McCain. As it should be, but not yet what the world is waiting to hear.

12.35pm: “As the mother of one of those troops that is exactly the kind of man I want as Commander in Chief.” Ding! Hit the bell.
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Palin bites back
Andrew Bolt
From Sarah Palin’s notes for her speech at 12.30pm AEST at the Republican convention:

I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too. Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.
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The threat of Palin
Andrew Bolt
Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing—who is really one of them and who is not—and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
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Green lies
Andrew Bolt
Perth to drown to the top of its skyscrapers? Vote these shysters into Armageddon this Saturday.
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Rehabilitating Stalin
Andrew Bolt
The Daily Mail reports:

Stalin acted ‘entirely rationally’ in executing and imprisoning millions of people in the Gulags, a controversial new Russian teaching manual claims....

The manual, titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, will form the basis of a new state-approved text book for use in schools next year…
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Victoria rises
Andrew Bolt
Written off as the rust-bucket state under Premier Joan Kirner 15 years ago:

VICTORIA has emerged as a surprise engine room of the Australian economy, with new figures suggesting that it was responsible for almost half of the nation’s economic growth in the June quarter. - with all the state governments ALP led, this observation of economic success is only relative, much as a paralympic race. - ed.
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Living the feminist dream, not preaching it
Andrew Bolt
As I suggested on Wednesday, Sarah Palin is the female politician that most feminists hate - one who exudes strength, not victimhood, and presents as an individual, not a symbolic petitioner for a tribe with a grievance:
She’s just a token woman, cry the critics, who assume that female politicians succeed best by appealing to female voters, when the very reverse tends to be true.... Palin - a huntin’, fishin’, fundamentalist Christian pro-lifer - isn’t at all a magnet for feminist votes. She’s more a man’s woman whose strongest support - like that of Margaret Thatcher and even Pauline Hanson - will come from blue-collar white males and small-town conservatives. - it is grossly unfair to compare Thatcher with Hanson. A bit like comparing a rolls royce with a turd. - ed.
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Howard’s gloat
Andrew Bolt
John Howard uses a line about the economy that you’ll hear a lot from Peter Costello:

It was doing a lot better under the former government. A lot better. - that is right, Mr Bolt. He was that good. - ed.