Headlines Monday 20th October

Voters agree: media blows Obama’s tyres
Andrew Bolt
Most voters polled rightly believe that never has the US media been so biased - and that Barack Obama is the media’s candidate:
Fifty-five percent (55%) of U.S. voters say the media coverage of this year’s presidential campaign is more biased than in previous election years, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey…
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BEYOND PARODY
Tim Blair
For the second time in five days, the same bunch of leftoid geniuses have fallen for a left-wing parody of right-wing views. Here’s the piece in question:
With just three weeks to go until Election Day, the McCain campaign has launched a nationwide talent search to find angry audience members for their increasingly hate-filled rallies, McCain aides confirmed today.
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UNLICENSED OPINION
Tim Blair
Iowahawk on Joe the Plumber:
Politicians—Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al.— obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it’s right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin’s Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.
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HEADLINE FIGHTS STORY
Tim Blair
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” according to Tom Waits. Perhaps he was talking about Melbourne’s Age, which recently ran this headline:
New Yorkers take Henson photo controversy in their stride
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Rudd profits from his war
Andrew Bolt
Governments love a good crisis that’s not their fault:

Labor’s two-party vote has risen four points to 56%, with the Coalition down four to 44% in the Age/Nielsen poll taken from Thursday to Saturday - the Government’s best two-party position since June.

But how dare anyone suggest that:

The Government yesterday jumped onto a claim by Mr Turnbull that Mr Rudd had “hyped up” the crisis “by saying it’s a rolling national security crisis”. “He has tried to present himself as a wartime prime minister with his tin hat and bayonet fixed,” Mr Turnbull told the ABC.

Treasurer Wayne Swan said this “gaffe” showed how out of touch the Opposition Leader was...

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This slump is the green dream
Andrew Bolt
The Australian reports the good news about people losing their homes and jobs:

THE slowing world economy could help to cut back global emissions as factories close and car fleets stall, in a rare piece of good news amid the financial doom and gloom.

A global warming zealot makes explicit the connection, without troubling to note that it works both ways:

Tim Hanlin, managing director of the Australian Climate Exchange, which operates a joint-venture trading platform for carbon offsets and abatement credits, said economic cycles were linked to emission trajectories.

“Generally speaking if you have less economic activity, you’re going to have lower emissions,” Mr Hanlin said.

And vice versa.
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The price of pandering
Andrew Bolt
Labor faces its own Hanson moment: does it keep pandering to dangerous, simple-minded extremism, or start fighting it?

LABOR is struggling in a rising Green tide around the nation, with the minor party now laying claim to being a mainstream player after ousting the ALP from majority government in the ACT.
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Green tourism: First, cull the tourists
Andrew Bolt
Baz Luhrmann was given $40 million by Tourism Australia to promote the bits of Australia that few tourists actually want to see. As I said, his is the new green approach:
This time we’re flogging places where few tourist buses go and no trains reach - outback places where jaded urbanites fancy they can commune with the Nature gods of tribal peoples, far from modern man and his buildings. ...(an Australia that’s) at its best without a local to be seen or endured.
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Leftist academics complain about the light
Andrew Bolt
Names are named:

ACADEMICS named as militant left-wing ideologues in a black list tabled in federal parliament claim they are victims of a Young Liberals “witch-hunt"…

The list of more than 30 academics who are described as “unashamed activists for political and ideological causes such as radical feminism, animal rights and gay rights” has been published on the Young Liberals’ website.

“Black list”? I think the reporter is wildly overegging. It’s just a list, after all, and no one on it is banned or suffering the slightest professional harm. The only issue is whether it’s accurate
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Rifleman shot
Andrew Bolt
Maybe it’s all getting a bit too incestuous at the Sydney Theatre Company to avoid disasters like this:

A STAR-STUDDED opening night audience, the Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman directing, and the Midas touch of Cate Blanchett were not enough. The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Riflemind will end its London season after barely a month.
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A model green
Andrew Bolt
The Times interviews model Helena Christensen, another celebrity with planet-saving tips for the masses:
Independent, beautiful, committed to saving the planet: this is one super-model who has finally found her voice…

The former Vogue cover girl ... has taken a series of “celebrity” photographs for a British Gas campaign to encourage people to switch to energy-efficient lighting… Christensen’s big thing is making small, personal changes in lifestyle to help save the planet.

But those changes really do have to be small ones, mind, at least when they affect her:


How does a woman who has admitted that she flies up to 15 times in three weeks reconcile her green values with what must be a supersized carbon footprint? “I take a plane to work like others take their bicycles, or the bus,” she says matter-of-factly.
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Old comrades institutionalised
Andrew Bolt
Graham Worrall, former communist, writes to The Age:

I am proud to report that members of the Melbourne University branch of the Communist Party in the 1940s went on to become university professors, academics, senior public servants and in one case - my first wife - a Victorian senator.