Headlines Saturday 20th December

Green bans mean brown lawns and red ink
Andrew Bolt
Green ideologues have vandalised not just our finances but our culture:

THE cost of water restrictions for Australian towns and cities could be as high as $6 billion a year, and the failure to irrigate parks and gardens is damaging the health and social well-being of the nation.

We could build four new dams a year for that price.
===
Fools defrauded
Andrew Bolt
Here was Age columnist Tracee Hutchison on election night:

I knew Australia was experiencing a seismic shift in identity and direction.. I felt my body jolt upright with exultant anticipation and gushing love of country...

Here is Tracee today:

As the year wraps up it seems timely to wonder what happened to the momentum that was supposed to be kick-started by the symbols and rhetoric that were meant to herald a new dawn in Australian life.
===
No end of daze
Andrew Bolt
Adele Horin scoffs at those who predict we face an imminent fiery end:

It’s times like Christmas I’m glad to live in a secular country where federal Labor MP James Bidgood is a startling aberration. The colourful backbencher says the Book of Revelations predicted our current economic woes and he claims “we are at the end of times”. Such mumbo-jumbo from a mainstream politician would be unremarkable in the United States but in Australia it’s regarded as an embarrassment.

It is?

Then why is Tim Flannery a media hero for warning we are at the end of our warming times:

This round of negotiations (on emissions) is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.
===
A guide for terrorists
Andrew Bolt
The ABC’s Phillip Adams is on the advisory board of a Leftist group which has published classified details of how US troops use radio-frequency jammers to stop Iraqi terrorists from exploding remotely detonated explosives. Those details were classified to protect the lives of Coalition troops, including Australians. The group’s co-founder is another Australian, Julian Assange.
===
Ramsey’s biggest mistake was his last
Andrew Bolt
Among the many things Alan Ramsey got wrong:

On the night of his farewell dinner he was coping with a late final version of an elegant speech of thanks to most of the people in the room. Ramsey was always a generous acknowledger of his debts. Perhaps it was the scribble over the typing read in dim light that led him to call Laura Tingle his “lovely wife Lorrie”.
===
Don’t steal them, dump them
Andrew Bolt
Thanks to the “stolen generations” myth, even the Aboriginal children now removed from danger can’t expect the level of care a white child would get:

Retired judge James Wood QC conducted his inquiry after the shocking deaths of two children, one an Aboriginal boy whose body was found in a suitcase in a lake.

The report notes that Aboriginal children are vastly over-represented in foster care. Almost everyone agrees that if these children can’t be at home, they should be with other Aborigines, a community that has little capacity to absorb them.

It is common for elderly aunts and grandmothers to be asked to take four or five neglected and abused children, lest they end up in white homes.
===
Rudd’s no-pain plan could bust his Budget
Andrew Bolt
Lenore Taylor, a warming believer, examines the Rudd Government’s bribery of business and rightly concludes the emissions trading scheme is a con - and a Budget buster:

It is a political deal cut with big industries that are also big employers…

Ongoing qualitative polling and old-fashioned political common sense convinced the Government that while swinging voters in the mortgage belt cared about climate change, they weren’t prepared to make big sacrifices in terms of their standard of living. So the Government was generous with its industry compensation, giving away in free industry permits a full $2.9 billion worth of the $11.5billion it expects to raise in the first year of the scheme. That represents 25 per cent of available permits, but the proportion could rise to 45 per cent by 2020, depending on how fast these industries grow.

The Government had already made the political compromise of offsetting any increase in petrol prices - blowing another $2.4 billion in the first year - and it allocated $700 million in the first year to ease the shock for the dirtiest brown-coal power generators…

Taken together, these political deals and compromises with industry had a fateful effect on the Government’s ability to push ahead with the thing the whole exercise was supposed to achieve: actually reducing Australia’s carbon emissions.

But this deal making may not merely wreck any plan to cut emissions. It may also wreck future Budgets, not least because governments find it easier to give compensation than to later withdraw it:


The Government has overcompensated low and middle-income households in the first year - at a total cost of $3.9 billion, assuming it gets $25 for each pollution permit it auctions - but if more and more of the auction revenue is eaten up by free permits to industry, there will be less money available for the increasing burden on the rest of the economy.

Officials have conceded household compensation may need to be funded from the budget in the future, rather than from the revenue the scheme generates from the auction of pollution permits....The Government cannot afford to go much harder, no matter what is decided in Copenhagen.
===
Apartheid banned by Macklin
Andrew Bolt
Small mercy:

(Indigenous Affairs Minister) Jenny Macklin has slapped down ambitions for a new indigenous representative body to have legislative powers, declaring the Rudd Government has no intention of creating “another ATSIC”.

Expectations that the new indigenous representative body - promised at the last election by Labor - could be granted powers to legislate on behalf of Aboriginal people and provide program funding were fanned by the appointment of Mick Dodson to a key advisory panel.
===
Send more troops or we’ll be defeated
Andrew Bolt
Major-General (Ret.) Jim Molan, the Australian who served as the Coalition’s head of operations in Iraq, says Afghanistan - not Iraq - threatens to be our Vietnam:

AUSTRALIA should prepare to deploy up to 6000 troops to Afghanistan and lobby for greater commitment to a war that the US-led forces are on track to lose, says a retired Australian general, Jim Molan.
===
CNN falls to the sceptics
Andrew Bolt
Scepticism is going mainstream when even CNN has a weatherman prepared to attack man-made global warming as a con - and when CNN gives him air time to do it:

You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant.
===
The fatal weakness of greenhouse theory
Andrew Bolt
A lucid summary by Dr David Evans of the case against man-made global warming - and why the theory still has its fierce propagandists:

From 1975 to 2001 the global temperature trended up. How do you empirically determine the cause of this global warming? ...

The signature of an increased greenhouse effect consists of two features: a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics, and a combination of broad stratospheric cooling and broad tropospheric warming…

We have been observing temperatures in the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes - weather balloons with thermometers… The radiosonde measurements for 1979-1999 show broad stratospheric cooling and broad tropospheric warming, but they show no tropical hotspot. Not even a small one. ..

Human carbon emissions were occurring at the time but the greenhouse effect did not increase. Therefore human carbon emissions did not increase the greenhouse effect, and did not cause global warming…

The only supporting evidence for AGW was the old ice core data. The old ice core data, gathered from 1985, showed that in the past half million years, through several global warmings and coolings, the earth’s temperature and atmospheric carbon levels rose and fell in lockstep. AGW was coming into vogue in the 1980s, so it was widely assumed that it was the carbon changes causing the temperature changes....

(But) by 2003 it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that temperature changes preceded corresponding carbon changes by an average of 800 years: so temperature changes caused carbon changes… So the ice core data no longer supported AGW.

So if there is no evidence to support AGW, and the missing hotspot shows that AGW is wrong, why does most of the world still believe in AGW?

Part of the answer is that science changed direction after a large constituency of vested interests had invested in AGW… (S)cientists were being paid by governments to research the effects of human-caused global warming… AGW grabbed control of climate funding in key western countries… The alarmists are full time, well funded, and hog the megaphone.
===
Films watched
Andrew Bolt
The New Zealand Film Commission denies it makes films New Zealanders don’t want to see, and attacks inaccuracies in the knocking claims of a report linked to here last month.
===
Insight shown
Andrew Bolt
Mercy is shown to a serial rapist being sentenced for indecently assaulting an eight year old:

Victorian County Court Judge Carolyn Douglas ... told Avci that he had shown some insight into his behaviour.
===
Rudd’s plan too hot for Garnaut
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government’s climate guru damns the Rudd Government for paying too much to compensate business for the costs of its $11.5 billion a year tax on carbon emissions:

THE Federal Government’s own climate adviser has savaged parts of its climate change plan, describing the assistance to big business as “over the top”.
===
Where will they all live?
Andrew Bolt
Former Hawke Government minister Barry Cohen asks questions on immigration that governments won’t answer:

(G)overnments never connect the dots between increasing population numbers and the ‘crises’ that daily beset our citizens — congested roads, air and water pollution, prohibitive land prices, housing shortages, overcrowded hospitals and schools and so on. And that’s before the impact of climate change.

Why am I so obsessed? I was born in 1935 when Australia’s population was around five and a half million… It is now 21 million. In my lifetime the population has almost quadrupled…
===
Cash for Clinton
Andrew Bolt
What on earth did those governments expect in return for their cash?

Former President Bill Clinton laid out a list of big-ticket donors to his foundation Thursday that is heavy with foreign governments and business interests sure to have a stake in the policies that Hillary Rodham Clinton carries out as secretary of state…
===
What’s their word for “precious”?
Andrew Bolt
Professor Philip Parker had no idea Australia was so loopy:

He had never known anyone to claim intellectual property over a language…
===
Let rip
Andrew Bolt
The Australia Institute thinks it’s simply making a complaint about Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme:

The only effective way for households to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions will be to buy emissions permits and rip them up.
===
Couldn’t they cheer Rudd like he was Bush?
Andrew Bolt
Reader Byron has watched the video of the reception our troops in Afghanistan gave to Kevin Rudd, and contrasts it to the one the US troops in Iraq gave last week to George Bush:

Reader Sherro, a former army captain, wonders whose idea it was to paint “PM” in big letters on Rudd’s body armor in a country filled with snipers. Was it:

a. Rudd’s media consultants’ decision

b. Rudd’s personal decision

c. Rudd’s security detail’s decision

or.

d. A couple of the soldiers finding a uniquely Digger way of politely letting their true feelings be known in the same vein as saluting unpopular officers in dangerous areas...
===
No sell out
Andrew Bolt
George Bush on his lousy polls:

What do you expect? We’ve got a major economic problem and I’m the president during the major economic problem. I mean, do people approve of the economy? No. I don’t approve of the economy. ... I’ve been a wartime president. I’ve dealt with two economic recessions now. I’ve had, hell, a lot of serious challenges. What matters to me is I didn’t compromise my soul to be a popular guy.