Headlines Friday 28th November

Death in Mumbai
Andrew Bolt
The news for us gets even worse:

Police brought some hostages out of the Oberoi late Thursday night. However, the Indian state department said that at least four Australians and one Japanese national were killed.

I cannot verify that report. And:

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the Government was also working to confirm the possibility that at least 26 Australians were being held hostage.
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Assimilation makes you healthier
Andrew Bolt
Helen Hughes says figures are being fudged, hiding the difference that counts - and it’s not the difference between Aborigines and the rest:

NEWS that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has found the gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians has been reduced from 17 years to 11 years would be welcome if it were believable.

But longer lives for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have not been achieved by better health or reductions in violence in dysfunctional indigenous communities, but by including in average indigenous mortality rates a larger proportion of indigenous people who work and live in mainstream society like other Australians… As indigenous people move more deeply into the mainstream, the gulf between the living standards of those in the mainstream and those who remain welfare dependent appears to be widening rather than narrowing.
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Start shovelling, Mr Brumby
Andrew Bolt
JOHN Brumby’s arguments against a new dam are now so bizarre, it’s clear he’s dry of excuses.

As I said on Wednesday, the case for a new dam on, say, the regularly flooding Mitchell River is compelling.

Too little water in Melbourne; too much in the Mitchell - just join the dots.

You’d get three times the water for less than half the price of the $3.1 billion power-hungry desalination plant planned by the Premier.

So what is Brumby’s counter-argument, after years of studying how to stop his capital from going dry? On Neil Mitchell’s 3AW morning show this week, he gave it his best shot.
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Baz steals a president
Andrew Bolt
IT WAS mad enough that Tourism Australia spent $40 million to promote Australia as racist.

Which tourists was it trying to lure? Members of the KKK?

But even madder are the latest claims of fact-fuddled Baz Luhrmann, who directed the two commercials on which Tourism Australia did our dough, and who now says even Barack Obama could have been “stolen” if he’d been born here.

“The President-elect of the United States is 47,” burbled Baz.

“If he was living in Australia, it is absolutely credible that the government, because he had one white parent and one black parent, could have taken him forcibly from his family . . .

“They would have put him in an institution, probably lied to him that his parents were dead, changed his name and reprogrammed him to be European . . .”

So come visit Australia! A country so racist they’d have stolen Obama!

Luhrmann’s ads themselves aren’t the real problem, even though they promote exactly the deserted bits of the country few tourists want to visit.
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All you changed was the shirt
Andrew Bolt
You mean you really believe in the ”change you can believe in”?

Barack Obama’s campaign credo: Change is good. President-elect Barack Obama’s credo: When it comes to war and peace, maybe wisdom is better.

Obama has assembled a national security brain trust populated by graybeard establishment figures with decades of combined experience and even a few medals. He is entrusting critical wartime management to people with unassailable credentials and low buzz factor....

(Robert) Gates, who has served as President George W. Bush’s defense secretary for two years, will remain in the Cabinet for some time, probably a year, according to an official familiar with discussions between him and the president-elect.
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The deadlier war
Andrew Bolt
The “good” war is in fact deadlier for us than the “bad” one, which is won:

A ROADSIDE bomb has killed another Australian soldier in Afghanistan during a push against Taliban insurgents. The commando - the seventh Aussie soldier to die in Afghanistan - was on a night operation.
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I hope Roxon checks medicines better
Andrew Bolt
Health Minister Nicola Roxon’s latest appointments are giving her all the wrong publicity:

DEPUTY Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s partner, Tim Mathieson, chucked a sickie yesterday, missing his first public appearance as a health ambassador…

Mr Mathieson’s credentials to fill an ambassador’s role are unclear, given he has no medical or health expertise.

Staff for Ms Gillard further confused the situation yesterday when they told The Australian Mr Mathieson had not been able to attend the event in Melbourne because he was busy selling hair care products in country Victoria. However, further inquires revealed Mr Mathieson no longer worked for the hair care product company.

Meanwhile:
HEALTH Minister Nicola Roxon has been asked to explain her ignorance of sacked men’s health ambassador Warwick Marsh’s attitudes to homosexuality after it was revealed she shared a podium with him four years ago at a forum where anti-gay views were aired.

Ms Roxon yesterday announced she had dumped the Fatherhood Foundation founder from the list of honorary men’s health ambassadors named on Tuesday after Mr Marsh failed to repudiate “extremely offensive comments” about gay people.
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An attack on us all
Andrew Bolt
THE slaughter in Mumbai was a barbaric attack not just on India, but on us. On the West.

For the first time in India, Muslim terrorists have singled out Westerners and Jews, and the places they are most likely to visit.

And that makes al-Qaida a prime suspect—either as a partner with local terrorists or prime mover.

From the gunmen’s targets, it seems that al-Qaida or associated Islamist groups may have chosen a new, easier, battleground for their war against the West.
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Ruin will make us nicer to Mackay
Andrew Bolt
Occasional Fairfax agony aunt Hugh Mackay thinks losing job, house and savings may be just the moral uplift the middle classes need:

In the upper middle class where house prices will be falling, where the threat of retrenchment will be hovering and where the value of investment, particularly stock market investments will be falling, I suspect what is going to happen is as much of a shock as in other parts of society and in particular a shock which won’t be bad probably in the cosmic sense for this stratum of society.

That is, rethinking some of their priorities, and deciding that perhaps the mad materialist binge of the last ten years was a bit lopsided and maybe there’s more to life than all the material things that we were pursuing so relentlessly.
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The pedophile an artist would love
Andrew Bolt
Donald Friend is yet another artist who could count on the support of fellow artists for behavior that would not have been forgiven had he been instead a plumber, policeman or shopkeeper. As an artist, he enjoyed from his peers a licence to sin.